Praise of Nostalgia

Ópera Actual Magazine, Issue 77. Barcelona, January-February 2005


Since I was a child, I have been captivated by the immense life lesson encapsulated in the entire philosophy of Don Quixote: the notion that the reality of the present allows us to foresee that the future will not be as we expected, and that only nostalgia for the past can provide us with an escape which, though not necessarily forward-looking, guarantees a vital balance between our aspirations and our limitations in achieving them.
Seen in this light, Don Quixote is arguably the most sensible character in all of world literature -the only one who believes that outside of fiction, there is no escape from mediocrity, and who consequently makes nostalgia his primary banner. From his attire, made up of the most disparate objects he finds in the trash and which render him a true scarecrow, to his jargon and ideology, everything reveals a desire to live in another time, another world, and among people who vanished long ago.
For this reason, nothing could have pleased me more than when La Fura dels Baus contacted me eight years ago to propose collaborating on a new adventure for Don Quixote. Together with Justo Navarro, we sought to craft a new journey for the knight -one that could very well have taken place in the Cave of Montesinos, from which he emerges recounting visions so fantastical that they are, inevitably, deemed incredible. Indeed, Cervantes himself, in a display of ingenuity, labels these chapters of his novel as apocryphal.
During his descent into the cave, Don Quixote is in fact seized, abducted, by a time-localizing machine for ancient marvels, programmed by a Swiss auction house in the 30th century to locate the book recounting his exploits. Instead, it finds him, and by wrenching him from his era and transporting him to the future -displaying him in a cage as a sideshow oddity- it only deepens his innate nostalgia.
In this way, all of the character's interventions exude a deliberate longing to evoke the past -his world- not through quotations or 17th-century stylistic devices (our approach to Don Quixote is above all sentimental, never historicist), but through the use of a traditional tonal language irreconcilable with the contemporary one spoken by the people of the future into which he has been wrenched. Nostalgia and pain in the face of incomprehension, therefore, formed the core of the literary, musical, and theatrical philosophy behind our Don Quixote.