I. When the working class condition is not erased, ignored or, in thebest of cases, naturalized in all its daily horror, at the hands ofautocrats, democrats, citizens and patriots; then it is sublimated andheroized, at the hands of the professionals of the representation ofprogressive leftism. Two of the most common ways of trivializing theevil of the working condition, which implies the circumstance of rentingthe time of life to buy survival in the face of the cyclical shipwreckof the "end of the month... end of the world", as they made known acouple of ago years ago to correct France and to all who wanted to know,the anonymous provincial proletarians, known as the Yellow Vests.The "end of the month... end of the world" regime, work under wagedomination, has not ceased to expand unrepentantly for ten generationsand has left behind an industrial framework and an industrializedhumanity that has coexisted unpolluted with slavery endorsed by laws.(among us until just four generations ago), with illegal slave labor inthe name of the dawn of luminous communism, in the name of thepurification of the superior races, in the name of the "New Man", of"National Sovereignty" and a long etcetera... there has been no respitein this free fall of ten generations.In this period of time, working class humanity created, in theproletarian nights and against the hours of rest, new words and meaningsthat transformed simple sleeping into dreaming, expanding thepossibilities of understanding the world that had given rise to theworking class condition, and at the same time remaking a part of thechimeras erected with the poetic ingenuity of manual labor in thecommunal works of the trade guilds. But between the trade unions and theunions there was a whole world involved and a spirituality that had beenprofoundly disrupted.With an efficiency arising from the industrial spirit from which it wasborn, a will took shape, partly also working-class, to regiment, withthe intention of organizing, that rich community of experiences andlanguage. The vastness and power of the workers' world of life becamevisible not only for those who had been directly exploiting it, but alsoa vein of power became palpable for those who were willing to do the sadwork of representing it, of speaking for that community. fromcommon-ism, an ism that, like all its kind, ended up turning the samevibrant community it claimed to represent into a passive andhypertrophied abstraction.IIToday, when work under the salary regime is more widespread,naturalized, desired and oppressive, that vibrant working-classcommunity, the life world of work has disappeared or is a ghostlyreality that explodes into fragments. Many of these fragments are madeup of people, true castaways surviving among the rubble, not only offactories and industries, but also rubble of words, arguments andreasons to continue living a meaningful life.These castaways must also find and learn another language that names theexperience of their shipwreck, other forms of biomobility, anotherbiomechanics, another theatricality that transcends the meredescriptions of old realism in general and socialist realism inparticular, already prefigured by the most penetrating creators of the20th century, who were born or became aware of themselves from the worldof working-class life, of which Alexander Diego and Jonathan Formellfeel they are heirs.They have put all this learning and discovery of forms rescued from thecataclysm on the scene, starting from an operational moment in which theangelus presents itself to us with its mouth open and defiant, in theface of the expropriation of its own language that it has suffered, tomake us knowing his terrible and illuminating discovery that in theprevious ten proletarian generations "the enemy has not stoppedwinning", in a guttural communicative explosion with a very wide soundregister, as if all the layers of time and lives he had traveled throughuntil he reached us They will condense in your throat.This arduous communication becomes a leitmotif, which serves totheatrically re-create the capacity that Walter Benjamin attributed tothe angel of history to place himself, frightened but lucid, in the faceof the past, from the whirlwind of the present, which takes place in ascene of luminous void, interspersed with propitiatory shadows, whichfunction as a border between the chain of events that lead to theindustrial ruins from which the angelus comes and the contemplation ofthe public, who can contribute to the expansion of these ruins if theyconsider their own conscience part of the rubble among which they mustsurvive or a possibility for their own actions so as not to succumbundaunted to the obsolescence of humanity.IIIThe insignificance and passivity generated by the defeat and collapse ofthe working-class world of life that announces and embodies in themetaphor of the angelus, incites the managers of Angelus Novus toformulate a notion of "operatic action", as a mental space in which todo bring together in a very organic and unique way the notions ofVsevolod Meyerhold's acting work, Antonin Artaud's explorations of thecorporal possibilities of the body as a producer of concepts, of whichAlexander Diego crucially uses, and the conceptions of music as KarheinzStockhausen's instrument of expansion of the senses, which takesadvantage of Jonathan Formell to make a very substantial contribution toAngelus Novus; where music is not a simple set of sounds that areintegrated into a story, which in itself does not exist in Angelus, butmusic becomes a generator in itself of a potential story, which is notrealized only in the scene, but in the operatic disposition that isexpected to infect the people who contemplate the piece, to recover anddecolonize the notion of opera from the Eurocentric and classicisthistorical forms that have petrified it.Attentive and intuitive in the face of the unexpected and littleexplored richness of the spiritual, ritual and theological baggage thatwas synthesized, coexisted or directly produced by the working-classworld of life, also in the history of Cuba, the Íreme of the Afro-CubanAbakuá fraternity has a presence in Angelus Novus in a facet that couldgo far beyond the space assigned to it for now. The will to decolonizeand reconnect with the deep history of Cuba of the managers of AngelusNovus can be a fairly safe guarantee of new and explosive syntheses.There is no other theatrical space in Havana like El Ciervo Encantado toplace these hopes.The Angelus Novus of The Enchanted Stag is not only a theatricalrepresentation of a moment of enlightenment by a non-Zionist and formerbourgeois Jewish philosopher like Walter Bendix Schonflies Benjamin -supposedly exotic to our realities - on the historical magnitude of thecollective defeats that we inherit. "those at the bottom of thecauldron", as Tato Quiñones used to define, a spirit that haunts part ofthe conception of this piece. The Angelus Novus of El Ciervo Encantadois an awareness of the collaborative possibilities on equal termsbetween several generations of Cuban artists, without the oppressivehierarchies that usually occur in the artistic environment, a sample ofthe wise non-authoritarian teaching that Nelda has achieved. andMariela. This Angelus Novus is also an example that in the midst of thematerial catastrophe that we are experiencing in Cuba and against thescientific materialism brandished by those who held the monopoly on therepresentation of the working-class world of life, it is important to beclear that if you do not live as you think, you will end up thinking howyou live. Because this work is a victory of thoughtful spirituality,conscious not only of its rights against the authorizers of life, butalso of the duties against life itself and that can be a useful antidoteagainst other defeats. The angel of history looks at us.Mario Castillo SantanaMarcelo "Liberato" SalinasSouth of Havana, December 14 and 2023https://centrosocialabra.wordpress.com/2023/12/15/angelus-novus-del-ciervo-encantado-contra-otra-derrota/_________________________________________A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C EBy, For, and About AnarchistsSend news reports to A-infos-en mailing listA-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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