{"id":272726,"date":"2022-09-08T18:23:22","date_gmt":"2022-09-08T16:23:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/artigos\/2022\/09\/08\/dias-de-furgoneta-272726\/"},"modified":"2022-11-09T19:27:48","modified_gmt":"2022-11-09T18:27:48","slug":"dias-de-furgoneta","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/artigos\/2022\/09\/08\/dias-de-furgoneta-272726\/","title":{"rendered":"Van days"},"content":{"rendered":"

The dimensions of Vidal Bola\u00f1o (Santiago de Compostela 1950-2002), who was never published in Anagrama, were large in physical and literary terms. But playwrights are more concerned with the day-to-day life of their characters (and feeding the performers) than with the archive of their literary works. Thus, there is the suggestive paradox that Vidal Bola\u00f1o is one of the writers with the most work and with a more varied, more contemporary, more participatory work, and yet, despite the much he wrote, he is less taken into account than if he were a storyteller with less than four novels.<\/p>

Unlike writers, Roberto Vidal Bola\u00f1o has an image, he has scenarios, he has characters that can still be interpreted, he has marks of life in exteriors and interiors, besides his presence in films in which he did not want to fully exploit his aspect of a man-made to the harshness of history. The theatre dominated him and this is the fundamental trace of his biography. But Roberto Vidal Bola\u00f1o’s lifeline is longer and has more threads. Documenting it makes more sense if the threads of fiction and those of those who had a relationship with him are interwoven. Those who can create a portrait in which nothing is left out are his characters and those who participated in its creation. Vidal Bola\u00f1o is not a Chilean writer, but he is the most important playwright of the last 50 years in Galicia.<\/p>

Roberto Vidal Bola\u00f1o did not fit well in the vans. He was tall and vans always promise more space for cargo than for passengers. He would fit in sections, like the basketball player he had been as a young man, and sometimes he would even throw his legs out if the size of the van and the route allowed it. But they had a deal, they transported him and he was accommodated. He didn’t even protest the distances. With the distance of time, everything seems worse then than it does now. Maybe not everything, but the vans were much worse in those years when RVB started doing theatre.<\/p>

From the beginning of the seventies and in spite of the oil crisis, the binomial van and theatre became essential to save the limited possibilities of the companies not yet professionalized, the lack of transport and also the bad conditions of the spaces to make the functions that, in most of the cases, did not have conditions nor material to facilitate the scenic work in a disposition as amateur as that of the own companies. In the van travelled the sets, the costumes, the lights, the sound equipment, if any. In the same van went the members of the company, whether it was to Ribadeo or Valdeorras, and it happened that the size of the works had to be accommodated to the size of the vans because what did not fit in the transport there was no way to use it. Limitations that, however, still weigh heavily today when deciding on the volume and size of the sets.<\/p>

A van on its way to a show was a vehicle at full capacity, speed limited, with an organization similar to that of a student apartment. It was hard to find room for discomfort as space was at a premium. Any trip was a long one. Between the din of the engine and the dust of things, the cross conversations, the curves and always going against the clock, the atmosphere did not seem ideal for the hours before a performance. Or maybe it wasn’t the worst. The worst was, according to Bola\u00f1o, “arriving at a place that could not be called a theatre and putting all the things in order knowing that at the end you had to return everything to the van. Sometimes the play seemed like the least of it.<\/p>

A van, some folding sets, costumes, maybe the lights, the cast of a company that could go over the text or take a nap. Everything looked professional, but the profession cannot only go inside. In those first years of the seventies, no specific remuneration was foreseen for the companies and, therefore, it was not clear that the casts were paid for acting. It was an \u2018as-the-case-may-be\u2019 thing.<\/p>

The relativity of everything had good things and bad things. The circuits, to call it that way, in those years, were mostly made up of performances in the premises of neighbourhood associations, some spaces of the savings banks, and some institutions such as the provincial councils and the town halls. The first ones were the most active, although they also had the most problems in terms of remuneration. The custom was, as the writer told so many times, that at the end of the performance the convening association offered a dinner to the members of the companies, dinners that, as Bola\u00f1o explained, “had no doubt and could feed a regiment”. Those dinners were the starting point of a professionalization that was to mark a way of doing theatre because things never go as planned.<\/p>

It is told many times, each with a different twist and, like all stories that tend the legend, without a concrete space. It could be in the van on the way to a performance, it could be in a bar or in the middle of a performance. Vidal Bola\u00f1o repeatedly explained that those dinners that compensated for his stage works were excessive and a considerable expense for the groups that paid for them. RVB thought that the comedians were more in need to be paid than to eat and began to propose through Galicia that the money used to pay for those dinners should be used to pay the companies and they would see if they would have dinner or return home “with a sandwich”. The associations were accepting the proposal and the groups were able to fix a cache that allowed them to convert an hourly activity into a full-time activity. The change was, as the author would later point out, “a change of mentality because it meant that theatre was a job that had to be paid for”. It was a starting point for a sector that still had to fight cultural, political and administrative battles for professionalism to be accepted not only as natural but as essential. These were battles in which, to a great extent, Roberto Vidal Bola\u00f1o fought. Sometimes against others, sometimes against his own. Also, against himself. Professionalism began in a simple and almost unpretentious way, but Vidal Bola\u00f1o laughed a lot telling that story of the mutation of bread and meat into caches and what seemed to amuse him the most was that, as the years went by, the proposal seemed inevitable but at the height of a time between the dictatorship and what came after, everything could be possible, and everything was quite uncertain. RVB was amused because he calculated, as much later, that the things that common sense advises are the ones that take the longest to achieve.<\/p>

Turning to professionalism was the beginning of the public career of an author with a vocation to interpret reality and, if possible, to change it somewhat. To play with it as toys are opened to know its mechanisms and then to see which ones are the pieces that must be replaced to make everything better or, if not possible, to make everything fairer. This story has two large blocks with their respective subdivisions. But it happens that living is an inexact science and perhaps the artistic stages do not always correspond to the vital ones and that professionalism, which was so decisive for him and the country’s theatre, had not left an immediate mark on the stage. What remained unalterable stage after stage was the will to make theatre, before anything else, a way of telling stories. And that telling stories was a way of adding something to the public discourse: something to know, something to understand, something that the spectator had been able to take home. “And if I also create something of beauty, so much the better,” as Roberto Vidal Bola\u00f1o wrote.<\/p>

Perhaps it was in one of the vans with which he crossed Galicia several times in which he completed characters or finalized plots, and it may be that he wrote in a hurry due to the urgency of the premieres, the needs of the casts or to set up big stories on small stages. It may be these contingencies that sometimes cause dramatic writing not to be considered<\/a> when talking about literature or plots, when talking about stories that offer an interpretation of society and its imagery.<\/p>

In the case of RVB, it is necessary to reconsider many things. One of them is to consider the novel as the genre that best analyzes a society, its behaviours and even the drifts that neither historians nor journalists can explain. There are few trajectories as focused on narrating a country as that of Vidal Bola\u00f1o. In any genre. Accustomed as we are to the RVB actor, director and playwright, we sometimes forget his skills as a writer, the narrative capacity of his texts and the way he conceived the craft of writing. For Bola\u00f1o, words were just another tool. But for whom not?<\/p>

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The writer who portrayed Galicia in the 20th century<\/h3>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t\t
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Galician theater is conservative with playwrights<\/h3>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t\t
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Roberto Vidal Bola\u00f1o is not a Chilean writer. September 2022 marks the 20th anniversary of his death, which, by all accounts, was early. He was 52 years old and had an extensive and varied career as a playwright, director, theatre and film actor, as an advanced film critic, an agitator of majorities and a definitive weight in the fact that the Galician theatre went from being a more or less eccentric dedication to a professional, demanding and enforceable exercise.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":272617,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[191],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-272726","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fatiga-ocular-en"],"acf":[],"post_template":"reportaxe","post_subscription":"no","pretitle":"","content_extract":"The dimensions of Vidal Bola\u00f1o (Santiago de Compostela 1950-2002), who was never published in Anagrama, were large in physical and literary terms. But playwrights are more concerned with the day-to-day life of their characters (and feeding the performers) than with the archive of their literary works. Thus, there is the suggestive paradox that Vidal Bola\u00f1o...","reading_data":{"word_count":"1542","reading_seconds":"370","reading_time":{"minutes":6,"hours":0,"seconds":10},"reading_string":"6'10''","reading_human":"6 minutos"},"announcement":{"finishdate":"","finishdate_text":""},"opinion":{"subject":"","subject_info":[]},"event_info":{"startdate":"","starttime":"","enddate":"","endtime":"","entertainer":null},"interview":{"interviewed":""},"phototext":{"text_author":"","text_photo":""},"video":{"video_source":""},"promotion":{"action":"default","action_data":""},"categories_list":[{"name":"Eye strain","id":191,"slug":"fatiga-ocular-en","parent":0,"template":"default"}],"visible_author":"Camilo Franco","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272726"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=272726"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272726\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":299298,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272726\/revisions\/299298"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/media\/272617"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=272726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=272726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=272726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}