Vidal Bola\u00f1o founded Teatro do Antroido and began the task of building a bridge between a past without conventional stages and a future yet to be imagined. For the playwright, the key to reconciling two imaginary spaces lies in the para-theatrical manifestations that popular culture preserved: among them, the carnival itself. He sought to reconnect the untrained theatregoer from the only expressions that could be familiar. He hoped that, from there, there would be a territory to conquer on stage.<\/p>
The street theatre, the interventions, the ruadas<\/em> and other types of celebrations become the first tool of a theatre that, being popular, departs from what was then understood by that same name.<\/p> It was a theatre made-to-measure for a time, for a country to be built, with an imaginary still fearful and in need that someone was doing, at the same time that seduced, a certain didactics of the theatrical fact itself. Teatro Antroido, which had as its initial core Bola\u00f1o himself, Rodrigo Roel and Laura Ponte and in which Xaqu\u00edn G. Marcos also participated, tried in that very first stage to mount shows that were linked to the festive and the popular, to gradually enter into another type of theatre more marked by the political and social conditions of the transition.<\/p> Intentionally or unintentionally, RVB was destined to be the author of the group and that initial need would become over time an almost permanent operative process. Author, director, actor, illuminator and whatever else was needed.<\/p> COMBATIVE THEATER<\/strong><\/p> Antroido had seen with the times and in Vidal Bola\u00f1o appears a more combative theatre in different senses. It happens in Laudamuco, se\u00f1or de ningures<\/em>, where in addition to the behaviour of the tyrant, Bola\u00f1o tells the resigned behaviour of his servant. Galicia changes very quickly in the middle of the seventies and the circumstances of the time make Antroido mature as a company and Roberto Vidal Bola\u00f1o is fired from the bank where he worked.<\/p> The playwright decides to take a step forward and make a living in the theatre. It is a small step for him and a big one for the country. He explained it a thousand times supported by simple facts: the company travelled through a voluntary network of performances promoted by cultural and neighbourhood associations, the spaces of savings banks or town halls. In most cases, without remuneration, but with a few dinners for the whole company. Bola\u00f1o thought that the money that the associations invested in the dinners was better spent on paying the company: “And we would eat on the way”. A practical man.<\/p> Galicia is about to turn the corner of the decade. It is going from a space under construction to an urbanized territory. It is going from things that are possible to things that simply are. As the new decade advances, RVB participates in the launching of the Galician institutional theatre. The Centro Dram\u00e1tico Galego opens in 1984 and the playwright is the first Galician author to premiere and direct his own play. Agasallo de sombras<\/em> can be read now as a more or less conventional play, but it was a radical reading of Rosal\u00eda de Castro’s life. Bola\u00f1o played the “santi\u00f1a” to make her more human. But the displeasure would not come from there. As he explained in an interview, a controversy with a councillor took him away from the theatre. He was displeased and the displeasures of RVB were always serious.<\/p> Roberto Vidal Bola\u00f1o moves away from the front line of the theatre. He neither calls nor is called much, except for occasional things. The return to the stage took about eight years. It was already the nineties and the place where the world is called Galicia had changed considerably, although not always for the better. If the country was different, the author could not be the same. RVB’s return to the stage struggle was progressive. In 1991 he won the \u00c1lvaro Cunqueiro award, the most important at that time. Saxo tenor<\/em> is a work about the Galicia that exists: almost lumpen suburbs where the chosen ones from the centre fly over. They are not tall enough to cause tragedies, they cause misfortunes.<\/p> The award and the collaboration of Bel\u00e9n Quint\u00e1ns serve for the launching of RVB’s definitive company. The name is a declaration of intentions: Teatro do Aqu\u00ed. Bola\u00f1o was very loyal to that declaration and sought a theatre that, while remaining for the majority, would offer a mirror in which to look at oneself. Without ceasing to use his own materials, the arguments at hand, organizing together a story worthy of being told that explains something about us. <\/p> MATURITY<\/strong><\/p> Vidal Bola\u00f1o enters a stage of maturity despite some displeasure with the profession because of his duty to be, in addition to everything else that is usually listed, a theatrical entrepreneur. That and the fact that he won awards for plays such as As actas oscuras<\/em>, which were not performed as stated in the terms and conditions.<\/p> Even with all these things, Teatro do Aqu\u00ed chained its shows, taking an interest in texts by Otero Pedrayo (O desengano do prioiro<\/em>) or in funny texts such as O\u00e9, o\u00e9, o\u00e9, o\u00e9<\/em>, by Maxi Rodr\u00edguez. Well into the nineties, almost on the border with another decade, RVB decides to get ironic writing three comedies about less comfortable the present. Anxeli\u00f1os<\/em>, Criaturas<\/em> and Animali\u00f1os<\/em> are made to laugh while observing the group portrait to which we belong. But at the same time, he writes and premieres one of the main dramas written in contemporary Galicia, Rastros<\/em>.<\/p> He still directs and adapts for the Centro Dram\u00e1tico Galego texts as definitive as the Rosal\u00eda with which Otero Pedrayo intended to write a scenic biography of the writer. Between one thing and another, he was able to complete the portrait of a country that, according to his work, is easier to imagine than to inhabit.<\/p> <\/p> Interview with Roberto Vidal Bola\u00f1o about Saxo Tenor, in 2002<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t\t![\"\"](\"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/C6C54FF1-E847-43CD-A365-D972BAFB89C1-800x600.jpeg\")
\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\n\t\tGalician theater is conservative with playwrights<\/h3>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t