The dancers Miguel Ángel Berna and Sara Calero pay tribute to the writer Ramón J. Sender in the dance show Crónica del alba, which will run until 3 September at the Teatro Bellas Artes in Madrid (Calle Marqués de Casa Riera 2).
When Ramón J. Sender, in his early forties, in Mexican exile, tackles the writing of the first of the nine volumes that will eventually make up Crónica del alba, although still young, he is someone battered by life who has experienced in his own skin the trail of traumatic events with which the first four decades of the century have marked the history of Spain.
They have included monarchy, dictatorship, republic and exile, and he has played a direct role in all of them, as a fierce opponent of Alfonso XIII and Primo de Rivera, a leading journalist in La Libertad and El Sol, an anarchist militant, a soldier in Morocco, a captain of the General Staff in the Republican army. All this gave him time to publish more than twenty books and hundreds of articles, to win the National Literature Prize, to have three children and to suffer from a distance the execution of his wife and his brother Manuel, mayor of Huesca.
This book is a quintessential memory, an idealisation of a past, full of stimuli but also of traps, and an attempt to recreate an unrecoverable time, whose keys can only be revealed by art, in his case literary art, an experience that many other authors of exile also underwent, traumatised by the loss of identity due to the loss of the people and places with whom they shared their adventures. Tickets can be purchased now at this link.
