Freedom and the Delices (2008)

On Legaleón and L’Alakran, from Irún to Geneva

When the founders of Legaleón learned the King jester techniques more than twenty years ago, they could not imagine the relevance that the art of clowns would gain in the XXIst century. Its return has to do with the increasingly obscene visibility of different modes of oppression upon the individual, against which the jester viscerally rebels. The urgent need to reinvent dispositifs to protect individual freedom encourages to follow the only path that allows an honest discourse on the freedom of all. A Voltaire, a descendant of the enlightened Baroque jesters, the path led him to Geneva, where, quoting himself, he exclaimed: "Oh what a happy century this century of iron!". Thus freedom, as two hundred and fifty years ago, is still accessible to individuals willing to step aside (although that step, sometimes requires jumping over a couple of borders) With an unwearying humor, and a growing reason, tempered by the rebels sixties, Alakran practices jesters’ indisciplininarity and invites the viewer to join the warm anarchism that from the stage (or the stalls) they proclaim.

Talk given in Festival BAD, Bilborock, Bilbao, 22 October 2008

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