How to Get Lost in an Apocalyptic Garden with Xavier Sabata and Rafael R. Villalobos

The Peralada Festival finds no greater pleasure than granting artists complete creative freedom in their new productions. And in the current edition—from July 3 to 18—this takes on even greater meaning, as it seeks to embark on a “journey to paradise” and pay homage to gardening as a major art form. “We wanted to talk about the imprint of civilization on the garden and how performing artists have drawn on the image of the garden,” explained its artistic director, Oriol Aguilà, yesterday. “This year, the festival breaks away from its usual comfort zone and delves into proposals that are discoveries, risky, unconventional, and more hybrid, with different art forms in dialogue with each other.”

This is the idea that gave rise to the unclassifiable Genius Loci (day 5), a proposal by the stage director Rafael R. Villalobos and the countertenor Xavier Sabata after reading The Lost Garden (1912), a cult book by the English gardener and philosopher of Icelandic origin Jörn de Précy, who had a profound influence on the art of Anglo-Saxon gardens in the 20th century, and who here traces something unusual, halfway between a diary, essay and treatise.

Villalobos modestly confesses that he saw no other solution than to rewrite Jörn de Précy's text.

This artistic couple has already embarked on several adventures in the Empordà festival: Acis and Galatea, El Bis, Orlando. But their passionate reading of this sort of botanical biography—describing De Précy's passions and friendships, the gardens he knew and loved most—has inspired a chamber piece featuring an arch-lutenist who is also an actor, the Swedish Jonas Nordeberg (the gardener who executes the aesthetic ideas of the master, played by Sabata), and an English viola da gamba player, Liam Byrne, who combines the 17th-century instrument with contemporary electronics. There are also visual interventions by the artist Cachito Vallés.

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“No one should expect to see a garden,” Villalobos warns, as the proposal is minimal and somewhat apocalyptic. Not in vain did Précy anticipate a major pandemic and a major war, “which has parallels with the present day.”

Villalobos modestly confesses that he saw no other solution than to rewrite a text that distilled the book's essence. And the musical pieces have in common that they are vocal and English, ranging from Ralph Vaughan Williams to Purcell, including others by John Eccles and John Dowland.

“Here I don't have a score or a script; this isn't Tosca . So I worked differently. I proposed an adaptation of the text, and they proposed a series of musical pieces that would create an evolutionary arc of English music. We developed a work together, just as we work the land: observing nature, letting it embrace you. Sometimes the text invited us to alter the scene, and vice versa... It was a five-part co-creation,” Villalobos warns.

This is an invitation to not be afraid of getting lost, of not knowing or understanding, because "it's a corpo-musical digression, a contemporary eclogue that attempts to capture the essence of a work that transcends definitions," adds the Sevillian director.

For Sabata, who confesses to no longer feeling the need to be on stage just for the sake of it and who, as an opera performer, misses the opportunity to create, this is the kind of show that makes sense at this point in his career. "If I can feel like a co-creator with anyone, it's with Rafa. It creates a fruitful dialogue that connects with my theatrical tradition. There's a desire for all disciplines to intertwine. The text ends up being music, and vice versa; the visual installation ends up being part of the sound space."