Since the municipal and regional elections on May 28, a conservative wave has spread across the country. The right-wing Partido Popular (PP) has taken the reins in many localities, in coalition with the far-right Vox. A trend that worries professionals in the world of culture, who denounce “the censorship that undermines freedom of expression. »
Accompanied by the hashtag “stop censura”, they demand “the protection of [their] rights, because without culture there is no democracy”. Many of them relayed the message, such as actress Alba Flores, known for having played Nairobi in La Casa de Papel or the Gran Teatre del Liceu, the prestigious Barcelona opera house.
This collective anger is explained by several decisions of the extreme right, such as the suspension of the adaptation of the work Orlando, by Virginia Woolf by the playwright Vanessa Martínez. Valdemorillo, a municipality of 12,000 inhabitants located in the autonomous community of Madrid, passed into the hands of the right in coalition with the extreme right in the last elections. The work, which featured “a man who becomes a woman”, according to the play’s producer Pablo Huetos in the daily Público, is one of the British author’s most famous. The theater company denounced “an ideological veto” as well as an “attack on freedom of expression and culture” according to Infobae. “This decision reveals, in addition to its obvious ideological and authoritarian connotations, a lamentable ignorance. It would seem that its leaders do not know who Virginia Woolf is or what her works mean for universal culture, “denounced the Association of Authors and Authors of Theater of Spain (AAT) in a statement posted on Twitter.
Disney’s Buzz Lightyear suffered the same fate in early June in Santa Cruz de Bezana, a small town in Cantabria. The PP and Vox-governed town hall decided to remove the film from its open-air cinema schedule according to Andalusian newspaper Diario de Sevilla. At issue: a kiss between two female characters. The far-right party has also created controversy in the city of Getafe, led by the left-wing PSOE party. The theatrical comedy La villana de Getafe, by Lope de Vega was to be played on Sunday June 25 on the city’s esplanade.
If it did take place, Vox denounced the €4,400 grant granted to the piece by the town hall’s cultural delegation to finance its installation on the esplanade of the Teatro Federico García Lorca. The far-right party claimed that the presence of “a phallus and a vulva of considerable size” in the script caused “embarrassment among some spectators and passers-by” according to El Plural, urging the removal of the work’s “sexual innuendo”, according to Público.
