Eliška Balabánová & Anna Císařovská

The DOÑA performance is an original amalgam of Spanish music and extracts from Federico García Lorca’s plays. Poetry and music have always belonged together, a complementary inspiration for each other, one enhancing the other’s communicativeness, timbre and atmosphere.

The blend of the two arts has resulted in a programme in which music and the spoken word are well balanced, each enriching the other by contexts which might remain unnoticed in separate renditions.

The performance creates quite an intimate atmosphere: Lorca’s poetry, visual, yet full of both tender and harsh verse, almost unbelievably interlaces with the music, resulting in a powerful message.

The Spanish word “Doña” is a respectful title for women and it is the Woman that is the leitmotif of the piece, whose subtitle could as well be “the Lyrical Pictures from a Life of a Woman”.

The first impulse was the inspiration by Spanish music, unique in its passion and lyrics. The extracts of the texts were carefully chosen with regard to the crucial stages in the life of women, who frequent Lorca’s plays.

The programme aims at showing respect not only for the Woman, but also for Spanish culture, whose openness and ecstatic timbre may seem a bit remote in the eyes of us, Central-Europeans, thanks to which perhaps it is all the more demanded.

We deeply respect the Spanish Masters. Although we took the liberty of extracting from their works and combining the extracts into a new piece, in essence, their music and words remain untouched and rendered with a deep respect for their authors.

The rendition of Doña has given a new and very contemporary life to Lorca’s verse, in which many a woman can see the story of her own life.