Rewriting Cultural Codes

Elena Philipp

As an allegorical figure, Josep Caballero García’s Raimunda is something like, if one thinks on a large scale, France’s Marianne or Lady Liberty on Ellis Island. Raimunda stands for an idea – the history of marginal identities rendered invisible by power structures such as patriarchy and the joyful resistance to these mechanisms of exclusion. In “Who’s Afraid of Raimunda” Josep Caballero García takes up medieval literary and musical set pieces from the Iberian Peninsula that pursue the hedonistic desire for a religiously and sexually free life. The performers playfully move between history and fiction, fact and utopia and reconfigure traditional roles and images of our culturally coded bodies along the way. Queer practice rules!