Curva España

Over the last few years, Chévere, winner of the 2014 National Theatre Award, has created a series of works that have explored the possibilities of Documentary Theatre and collective memory as triggers of theatrical fiction (Citizen, Eurozone, Eroski Paraíso). In this project they take another step forward by delving into the narrative mechanisms that emerge on the borders between what is real and what is invented, between history and legend, between screen and stage.

As on other occasions, Chévere starts from a very local story that has been passed down orally from generation to generation among the people of the region of Verín (Ourense) for the last hundred years: the story of the curve where engineer José Fernández España lost his life in 1927, while working on a stretch of the railway line that was to give access to Galicia, between Puebla de Sanabria and Ourense.

Curva España is a play about an apparently unsolved crime, a violent death that raises suspicion and questions about its perpetrators, their motives and the consequences. Working from the different versions of the case, Chévere has sewn together a play with multiple readings that talks about the conflicts of our times by looking back at the mistakes of the past. A work that draws from the genre of detective films and autofiction, it treats the documentary format with irony by combining theatre and live film, and it works as an allegory of the construction of the Spanish nation-state as if it were the promise of a train that never arrived. Because España reached this remote area in the form of a myth, and the myth talks about its death on a curve.