'Sum vermis': Jacint Verdaguer from the eyes of today

PalmaAfter more than two months and more than a dozen concerts, the La Lluna en Vers festival of the Fundació Mallorca Literària comes to an end this Friday with a theatrical show that invokes one of the great names of Catalan poetry: Jacint Verdaguer. Playwright and theatre director Ferran Dordal Lalueza and actor Albert Prat have co-created this piece practically "by accident", they say; it can be seen on Friday, September 4, at 9 pm, at the Garden of the Casa Llorenç Villalonga in Binissalem.

The origin of Sum Vermis was not a great premeditated project, but a commission. Dordal explains: "A few years ago, I was commissioned to do a recital about Verdaguer at the National Theatre of Catalonia as part of a festival of literature classics. I hadn't worked with Albert for a long time and for this recital we reunited. We had a great time working together and discovering Verdaguer, so we decided to pull the thread", recalls the director, who states that the dramaturgy, in this case, belongs to both.

Both knew Verdaguer, but only superficially: like so many other figures of Catalan culture, he is one of those names turned into "cultural totems": present, but not necessarily known in depth. From that first recital, however, they began to read him, to research him and, above all, to discover the character behind the myth. And with that investigation came the "fascination". How can one connect, from today, with a man of the 19th century, a priest, deeply religious and immersed in a social and cultural environment so far removed from the current one? "Religion was one of the elements that created the most distance between us and the poet, but at the same time we were very struck by this impossibility of stopping discovering him, of knowing more about him", points out the creator.

"Verdaguer's life, with its success, its renunciations, the precariousness, the conflicts and his very unique life trajectory, offered us much more than a repertoire of poems", says Dordal. Thus, what had begun as a recital was transformed into something else and the stage space was expanded. Instead of trying to explain Verdaguer from the categories with which he has traditionally been interpreted, they decided to look at him from the emotion of reading him: "We ended up deciding that we wanted to make our own Verdaguer", states Dordal.

This perspective turns the show into a kind of journey through Verdaguer's life, but also into a journey for the creators themselves to try to understand him. They call it a “spiritual road movie”: a vital journey that functions as a kind of biopic, but in which what happened is always read from the sensitivity of those who approach it today.

A guitar on stage

The show maintains the root of the recital, but expands the stage play. A guitar also appears, which Albert Prat plays live. The incorporation of music stems from an intuition: to bring Verdaguer closer to the image of the cursed poet, the creator who falls from grace, a figure that may feel closer to the contemporary imagination.

The guitar is, therefore, a musical element, but also a way to build the sound space of the show. A decision that might seem, at first, modern or even gratuitous, but which serves them to find their own way of accompanying the texts and approaching the poet.

Sum Vermis was born as a small production, with few resources and without great expectations. Precisely for this reason, the public's response surprised its creators. “The show connected with people and we have met many fans of Verdaguer,” recalls Dordal with joy. Now, Sum Vermis arrives in Mallorca to discover if in these lands there are also fans of Verdaguer.