INTRODUCING THE STAR

A piece by Pablo Lilienfeld & Federico Vladimir

Light design Carles Rigual & Pablo Lilienfeld

Costume design Aarón López

Artistic assistance Sonia Gómez

Narrator Simon Foxall

Music Pablo Lilienfeld

Album production Fernando Vacas

Illustration Roi Pardo

Graphic design Juan Esbert

Featuring: Heidi Smith, Astrid Gnosis, Petr Davydtchenko, Fernando Vacas, Héctor Navarrete, Janet Novás, Strate Pezdirc sisters, Mónica Lilienfeld, Domas Noreika, Egle Stirna, Agne Kolontaite, Ausra Vismantaite, Dovile Alseika, Agne Vaiciukeviciute

Production MOM EL Vivero / Marta Oliveres - SUDHUM Teatro

With the support fro Comunidad de Madrid, La Casa Encendida & CA2M, Graner, TanzHaus Zurich, RedicencYoyo Zeimiai-Lituania

Thanks to Paso a 2 & DDZ Headquarters

NEW METAPHORS 

When the AIDS virus emerged in the 1980s along with the many contradictory medical discourses that accompanied it, the queer artistic community reacted cautiously. In cinema, the first works produced were rather pedagogical and attempted to “normalize” or simply erase gay sexuality, as a reaction to the stigma that had rapidly been attached to the community. In her 1989 essay “AIDS and its Metaphors”, Susan Sontag upheld the need to create new (personal) metaphors to contrast stigma. On film, Canadian director John Greyson was the pioneer of such an approach with his Zero Patience (1993), a musical about the virus’ hypothetical “patient zero”, a theme he returned in his operatic Fig Trees (2009).

Imbued with the same principle, Spanish musician and choreographer Pablo Esbert Lilienfeld and Argentinian visual artist Federico Vladimir Strate Pezdirc began, a few years ago, an ambitious project that would result in Introducing the Star: the Choir Girls’ Diaries. The authors describe their project as something as mutable as the Human Immunodeficiency Virus itself. Introducing the Star has already taken the shape of an album of electronic music and a dance performance, premiered at Madrid en Danza 2015; and it’s now a documentary essay which incorporates all this experience, in the constant quotation of its own creation: cinema, performance, music, and the art gallery all come together from the narrative and aesthetic point of view, and become a structural part of the work.

The film is marked by an openly DIY spirit and an art direction that suggests a 1980’s aesthetic; the dominant theatricality staging, however, clearly results from the post-dramatic theatre of authors such as Laurie Anderson (altered, disembodied voices) or the Wooster Group (dematerialization with recourse to new media), thus resulting in a singular work that marks a step ahead in the construction of new -and evermore necessary- metaphors around HIV/AIDS.

Joao Ferreira, Film critic and director of Queer Lisboa