The pódcast del Bufón: Theatre, new narratives and memory

Abstract

Morón de la Frontera is an already disappeared mythological animal. As every little town in the south, it does not exist. However, we live there. And it is there, where we were about to inaugurate a small theater called Teatro del Bufón, as an action of resistance and as a poetic rebellion, at the beginning of 2020, after many months of hard work. But the pandemic came out and life stopped. The hoped-for opening was not possible. And we asked ourselves: what will we do with all this work we have been doing from sunrise to sunset? Then, we decided to translate all that energy from the theater into writing. That is how Ediciones del Bufón began. It is a publisher, which is specialized in performing arts, specifically, in Andalucian and Latin American dramaturgies. But, in those days, even the books could be a focal point of infection and it was not possible to beat it with fumigations nor prophylaxis. So we had to dream of new passages through the maze: El Bufón podcasts. These podcasts (gotten out of the impediment of meeting or the possible catastrophe for contagion) have been a bridge which has reached our place until nowadays, farther than that specific situation. Therefore, El Bufón is a sound theater project. It was born in the rural Andalusia and it springs up into two directions: the sound documentary (for instance, La Zaranda: María, volamos hacia la gloria or Alfonso Jiménez, el dramaturgo que se convirtió en piedra, which will be studied in this article) and the radio play or sound fiction (as Cartografías de la memoria, also studied in these pages). Our main goal is making visible the past and the present of peripheral theater. Besides, we also aim to get a new audience, because this is the language that young people use nowadays. As any of those two lines, the podcast is considered a small creative work, where the exploration of new narratives and artistic ways of telling embrace and it is also done with a lot of care and a very poetic conception of the sound atmospheres.