Dark Man’s Gaze – Ignacio del Moral

Apo Michanis Theatre – Main Stage

First performance: Friday 17 March 2006

Last performance: Sunday 21 May 2006

Every work is a response to a kind of challenge, which serves as a trigger to activate the mysterious mechanisms that ultimately lead to the production of a text. In this case, as it has happened with other works of mine, the trigger was a photograph in a newspaper many years ago – in 1992, to be more precise. The photograph showed the body of a Black man on a beach: someone who drowned while trying to reach the Spanish shores through the Strait of Gibraltar (which, as you may know, separates the Spanish shores from those of Africa by about 15 kilometres).

Such an event was noteworthy for the press of that time because illegal immigration in Spain was still in its early stages. Spain, twenty years ago, was a country of immigrants: over a million Spaniards were working in Germany, Switzerland, Belgium… not to mention the many living in exile after the civil war.

The news accompanying the photograph mentioned that the deceased had probably attempted to cross the strait with someone else who might have escaped…

The story was there. At least that’s how I saw it. […]

Neither I nor anyone in Spain, I believe, could imagine the eventual extent of this phenomenon: Nowadays, we grieve dozens of dead under such conditions every summer. […] What was once a sad exception has become a daily tragedy — the worst kind of tragedy because we’ve become accustomed to it.

Looking at it from today’s point of view, this work alternately appears both simplistic and prophetic. I hope that viewers finds in it a reason for reflection: […] I know it is presumptuous to think that theatre has the answers. I believe, however, that it is necessary to raise questions. […]

Ignacio del Moral, Looking There Still. From the programme of the performance.