Flores caídos
by Chayton
Pabich Danyla
FLORES CAÍDOS is the story of 20th Century, closeted Spanish poet-playwright Federico García Lorca, resurrected into the 21st Century in an unapologetic Out and Proud Queer Latinx Production.
Through extensive research in Translation, Identity, Queer History, Elegy and Decolonization, this performance stands as a monolith to what theatre can be.
FLORES CAÍDOS first premiered on October 15th 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 Pandemic. While the world held its breath, FLORES CAÍDOS proved live theatre will always endure.
This project served as Chayton's senior thesis in Theater and performance Studies in partial fulfilment for a degree from Yale University.
This world premiere was made possible through the generosity of Lorca Coffee Bar, and the Yale Departments of Theatre and Performance Studies, Classics, and Spanish and Portuguese.
Flores caídos premiered at the Whitney Theater, in New Haven, Connecticut on 15 October 2020. The show had no in-person audience due to the Covid-19 pandemic, each performance was live-streamed worldwide. The cast and crew were as follows:
Performers
Lorca, et al........................................................................Chayton Pabich Danyla
Production Team
Playwright..........................................................................Chayton Pabich Danyla Director.....................................................................................................Yeşim Çelebi Producer..................................................................................Cleopatra Mavhunga Producer....................................................................................................Kira Daniels Dramaturg............................................................................................Irene Vázquez
Set Designer.......................................................................................Avery Mitchell
Costume Designer.................................................................................Carter King
Lighting Designer.....................................................................................Eitan Acks
Sound Designer............................................................................................Ash Gold
Sound Designer....................................................................................Annie Polish Composer............................................................................................Michael Gancz
Graphic Designer......................................................................................Crystal Xu
Stage Manager..........................................................................................Sam Lopez
Associate Dramaturg............................................................................William An
Faculty Support
Thesis Advisor.....................................................................................Deb Margolin
Second Reader.............................................................................................Dan Egan
Technical Director..............................................................................Tom Delgado
Production Manager...................................................................Nathan Roberts
Director of Undergraduate Studies.....................................Shilarna Stokes
As practitioners and lovers of performance and the arts, the creative team of Flores caídos understands the power of naming. Who gets the right to name or be named? Whose stories and languages are honored? Whose are erased? Who gets funding to study their ancestral languages? We open this performance by acknowledging that both languages used in today’s performance have an ongoing colonial legacy. Further, we recognize that the land on which this performance takes place in the Whitney Theater in the place now known as New Haven, Connecticut, is and has long been the ancestral and unceded home of a number of Indigenous peoples, specifically the Quinnipiac nation. Additionally, Connecticut is home to the Narragansett, Mohegans, Wampanoag, Mohawk, Nipmuck, Pocumtuck, Abenaki, Pequot, Schaghticoke, and Paugussett tribes. We honor and respect the diverse Indigenous peoples connected to this territory and invite you to consider the legacies of violence, displacement, migration, and settlement that have brought us here. We encourage you, wherever you are, watching this performance from, to seek out and honor the stories of the people whose land you are on.
Playwrights Note
“For all men, every step they climb is at the cost of a fight with their duende.
El duende must be woken up from the deepest reaches of our blood.
There is no map to find el duende. We only know it is descended from the blithe demons of marble and salt.
It rejects all that is sweet and sacred in learning. It breaks style.
The greatest artists know emotion will never come without el duende. While all art is capable of el duende, it comes most naturally to forms that are born, live, and die. The living flesh is required to interpret it. The duende will not arrive if they cannot see the possibility of death–if they do not know if they may haunt death’s house, or if they are uncertain they will shake the heavy branches we all carry, they will not appear.
The true fight of creation is with the duende.”
--Federico García Lorca (1933), Trans. Chayton Pabich Danyla (2020)
I have found the most beautiful things in life are those we fought the hardest to realize;
I learned to recognize the beauty in a tragic history, and to see joy in sorrow;
I see love everywhere, on raven’s wings and against marble floors;
I owe everything to those who came and fought before me;
I stand in their shadows, and pray to echo their voice;
I continue to fight to keep their spirits alive.
To you who are still fighting;
To you defending your Love;
Your fight is worth it.
I am with you.
I love you.
--Chayton
Dramaturg's Note
Poet and playwright Federico García Lorca was born on June 5, 1898 in Fuente Vaqueros, a farming village in the Granada province of Spain. As a member of the Generation of ‘27––a group of artists and poets––Lorca helped introduce many new artistic elements, such as symbolism and surrealism, into Spanish literature. In a career that lasted just 19 years, Lorca had profound impacts in the theatre and literary communities in Spain and beyond. In 1936, with the turbulent climate of the breakout of the Spanish Civil War, Lorca was arrested by Nationalist forces who were threatened by his political views and homosexuality. On August 18, 1936, Lorca was executed by a Spanish Nationalist firing squad. Though taken from the world much too soon, Lorca’s work and legacy continue to inspire countless writers, performers, and artists today, including this production.
Though Lorca was a Spanish poet, this production seeks to trouble the overrepresentation of Spanish works in the study of the Spanish language. The hegemony of Spain-Spanish in the Spanish-speaking world is replicated in classrooms throughout the diaspora including the United States, where Spanish writers and thinkers are favored, colloquialisms are banished, and whole pronouns that have gone obsolete in parts of the diaspora are mandated. This philosophy and this mindset is visible in the title of this production, which takes the femininely-gendered flores and embodies it within the masculine adjective caídos.
Yet this production still finds kinship in Lorca’s works. As turbulent as the world is today, the fascism, the homophobia, the persistence of queer artists amidst it all, Lorca would find much of our world familiar. Flores caídos draws on many of the same impulses of death and love that plagued Lorca in his time. Notably, this play engages Lorca’s idea of the duende, a spirit that evokes irrationality, earthiness, and a heightened awareness of death, and in this way, helps the artist create life-changing, bone-chilling art. As former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith once wrote of why she is drawn to the concept of el duende, “we write poems in order to engage in the perilous yet necessary struggle to inhabit ourselves—our real selves, the ones we barely recognize—more completely.”
We hope that in and through this production, you will be inspired to struggle towards your truest self, in whatever gender, country, or language you may find it.
