The stage reveals two David: he brownvoluntary protagonist of the story, and that of Miguel Angel, scattered in pieces throughout space. Our narrator, lost among the classic works of the National museum of fine arts and without knowing “a fart of art”, as he himself confesses, he comes across a little blond bear who is his antagonist par excellence: a lawyer, very white, arrogant, hairy and versed in Argentine art, especially in those canonical works that have forged a national imaginary so Buenos Aires, so European and stigmatizing.
Quickly the heat of the gaze becomes even more intense in the museum’s bathroom, which as a unusual teapot witnesses a handful of sexual encounters responsible for sealing the beginning and the soon decline of an intense, idyllic and quite confusing relationship during the two months of its duration.
So David, in a story that travels from comedy to grotesque, bordering on the bizarre but diving deep, analyzes its history and identity staff starting from his childhood in his Jujuy birth until the breakup of the relationship with Juan, whom he consciously or unconsciously observes as a counterpoint to compare and understand himself in a exclusive and classist nation that, every day with greater violence, returns to insist on the erasure of diverse identities such as, in this case, the brown and pink David, who has to find himself justifying his own existence over and over again before Buenos Aires society.
“The David”, symbolic operator of Western hegemonic aesthetic values par excellence, thus becomes an inverted mirror of the brown identity of the Argentine David, in an Argentina that, today more than ever, sees itself as white, classist, European, hateful, racist and with an air of “aesthetic superiority”the one that certain beings from the local underworld boast about.
“Do you want to know why I did shit to you, David?” are the words that Gudiño first utters to the most famous sculpture of the white West, destroyed in its plaster replica version.
This response is transformed into the future of the experiences narrated on stage, which despite the seriousness of the topics it crosses have a tone of hilarious comedyelusive and cuir to the core, like a song against the curse cast on the various identities by that “classical Western beauty” that resists again and again the passage of time, not by magic or the miracle of art, but because of the exclusive and conservative political operation that places itself again and again on the icons of “whiteness” and “perfection” as a model to be admired, violating with growing alarm every voice that rises outside the canon.
At this stage of the events and the words, it is not necessary to highlight the brutal relevance that “The Brown David” exhibits, creating itself as a work that questions, criticizes, ironizes and delves into the cruelest and most delirious here and now that we have to live as individuals, in a time especially demanding colonialism in the name of “freedom”, under a policy marked by the most rancid historical and criminal heteronormative whiteness of our DNA.
Performances: Fridays at 9:30 p.m. at Dumont 4040, Santos Dumont 4040.
