“The whole world is a theater” Williams said. Shakespeare. Perhaps, that is the best definition to talk about Sebastiana López Gandulla (Jerez, 1958). Her life, as she herself acknowledges, “is an Almodóvar film” and is marked by a specific event, when she is detained, at just 26 years old, at customs in Madrid.
That fateful day completely turned her reason for existence upside down, introducing her to a universe in which “not even remotely” she would have imagined. They say that God squeezes but does not suffocate, and the darkness of prison, she found herself illuminated at one point with theater, a discipline that she clung to to regain her freedom.
Sebas, as everyone knows him, came into the world in the very flamenco neighborhood of Santiago, in a decade, the 1950s, which in terms of flamenco has been one of the most prolific (Moraíto, José Mercé, Luis de la Pica, El Torta , Capullo de Jerez, Diego Carrasco, Vicente Soto, El Gómez…). “I’m not a gypsy, but I grew up there, and I have always said that I have art”, he states with a laugh.
“I was born on New Street, in a house they called the widows’ house. I grew up with my grandmother, and she was the fifth of ten children. Because my mother had such bad pregnancies, I usually stayed with my paternal grandmother. ‘Leave it here, leave it here,’ my grandmother told my mother until I ended up living with her, first on Nueva Street and then on Marqués de Cádiz Street where they gave her a house. I have been there for 48 years.”
At that time, Santiago, although the exodus of many of its neighbors to La Asunción had already begun, still retained its essence, that festive atmosphere that flooded each of its streets day after day. “The neighborhood back then was something else. I can’t forget the zambombas that were made on Nueva Street that they gave us at noon the day after we started; and of course, Los Juncales, where there were some festivals…”
“I studied at the Asilito on La Sangre Street when that was a school. I had few friends, because there weren’t many children on the street to play at that time, and then also, since I lived at the end of the street, my grandmother didn’t let me go out too much,” she continues.
“The Yeserías prison was a center for bad girls, but when it jumped, the spark was formed”
Just before reaching the age of majority, Sebastiana decides to turn her life around and, Like many Jerez residents of that time, he went to Madrid “because here in Jerez there was nothing, you could only work to serve in a house and pay yourself a pittance, and I was not up for the work, so together with a few friends, we went to look for a better future.”
He will then begin to wander throughout Spain working in various sectors. “In Madrid I was working in bars, cafes and markets and I even had a bar in Pinto; and in Cantabria, specifically in Noja, I worked in a flamenco tablao. Later, I also worked as a chambermaid in hotels in Menorca and Ibiza, a nightclub in Burgos…In total, I toured almost all of Spain until I decided to return to Jerez.”
“Then I met here to an emerald dealer, a Colombian, who offered me to travel with him to Colombia and send some emeralds to Spain. In exchange, he gave me an amount of money. Naive, I had unknowingly put tubes of cocaine in my suitcase. They stopped me in Barajas, thank goodness, because if they stopped me in Colombia, I wouldn’t be here telling this,” he says.
Yeserías Prison
Overnight, Sebastiana found herself in prison. “I remember I spent my first night crying shuddered. Imagine, and with two children in the world, my daughter is 4 years old and my son is 10 months old.”
His destiny was Yeserías prison, in the Delicias neighborhood of Madrid, a penitentiary center where about 400 women lived together. “That was a center for bad girls, but when it happened the spark was formed and good,” she adds.
Their daily life was not easy, among other things, because “there were all types and races, cheap people and people like me, who had been foolishly deceived.” We are talking about 1986, a decade in which heroin struck families across the country like a dagger and where AIDS took its first steps.
Sebastiana says that “in Yeserías I have seen everything, I have seen people who didn’t even smoke and who got really hooked in there.. I remember seeing people pricking themselves even in the neck, they put a strap around their neck, and they pricked themselves.”
Unlike many other inmates, Sebas faced that situation with a single objective, “to get out so I could be with my children, that was what made me survive. “I couldn’t afford to fall into drugs no matter how desperate I was,” she says.
It was not easy because she had been arrested with “600 grams of cocaine, but apparently of great purity, and that meant that it sold better, so I received a sentence of 6 years, six months and one day”.
“I’ve seen women who didn’t even smoke when they went to prison and then get addicted to drugs there.”
Trying to occupy her time, “because what you couldn’t do there was stay in the courtyards, if you didn’t look for problems,” Sebastiana began to train in various disciplines. “I signed up for everything, painting workshops, ceramics, hairdressing…”.
Just a few months before, Elena Canovasa prison officer, had created in that same center, the Yeses Theater Companyseeking, as she has recognized in an interview, “for theater to be a weapon so that they, abroad, can make their own lives.”
“I started doing scenery, because I was terrified of the scene. But of course, people came and went there, and one day, the protagonist was released.”
In a rehearsal, while she was painting a curtain, tired of listening to the instructions that the group director was giving to a classmate, she dropped the brush and said: ‘She’s telling you to say it like that…’. “Then the director told me, why don’t you do it? I accepted, I got on stage for the first time and since that day I haven’t gotten off again.”
This is how Sebastiana’s connection with the theater was born, something that, as she relates, “I carried it inside me because as a girl I have always been very theatrical, I really liked giving roles to people, I have always been somewhat bossy,” she laughs.
That experience with theater “was like a drug for me”he warns, to the point that he managed to win, on the Company’s first trip abroad, in 1987, to participate in the Cultural Show of the World of Work organized by UGT, the award for best performance.
“Every three months we put on a performance for the inmates, so for every day of rehearsal, they took away two days of grief. That meant that every time we performed a play, thirty or forty days were taken away from us. That’s how I got rid of my sadness, and I only served about three years,” he says.
Appreciate freedom
After spending some time in the El Puerto prison, where “I felt more imprisoned than in Madrid, because there was more discipline and it was much tougher”, Sebastiana began a new life in Jerez after achieving freedom. “I asked for a transfer to be close to my children, and in the last few months I only went to prison to sleep,” she remembers.
From all that, “because there is no silver lining,” says Sebastiana, “I learned a lot, especially to approach life in a different way.”
“No one appreciates what freedom is until they lose it. You learn to value everything, even the most insignificant thing,” she continues.
Already in Jerez, the hardest, as he recognizes, “It was walking down the street and having everyone look at you.. It seemed like you had written on your forehead where you came from. Then you understand that it’s not that much, that it becomes like an obsession, or at least that’s what I experienced, but at first, it scared me.”
“What was most difficult for me – he adds – was looking at the sky without having walls on the sides.. Just like when several people spoke to me at the same time, I couldn’t handle that, and I don’t know why.”
When remembering that experience, his way of handling delicate situations also stands out. “Sometimes I looked like Rafael de Paula, because killing didn’t kill, but bullfighting, he bullfighted better than anyone else (laughs). She was a friend of the black women, the gypsies, the quinquilleras, the Colombians… from all over the world. The cape helped me avoid many things, because you can’t go there completely, nor can you go there stupidly., if they don’t give you all of them. So a lot of crutch and Veronica passes.”
Theater, way of life
His time at the Yeses Company, an association that currently survives after 40 years of life, made him acquire great experience at a theatrical level, an experience that he now tries to transmit to the people of his land.
His great dream is today the company ‘Timba timbero’, a project that was born after the pandemic, when thanks to the Reale Foundation he managed to launch a theater workshop for the residents of Santiago, a project that, after three years, continues to grow.
“When I talk about this, I always say that I have to thank a lot to Pilar Suarezof the Reale Foundation, because for me he is like an angel on earth and has trusted me and my work from the beginning. In addition, at the same time, following my advice, he started another painting workshop with Luis Márquez, and a highlight embroidery workshop.”
“Right now we are 13 people, there are no more because we can’t, and there are very talented people. We are growing little by little, and I hope it is a reality, because I always say that in this life you don’t have to leave scars, you have to leave a mark, and that’s what I’m working on. I also dream that my granddaughter will become an actress, because it is the dream that I would also have wanted to fulfill.”
“Now too,” he adds, “ We are having the support of María Espejo, which is helping us a lot, in fact, I think we have a connection from the first moment. Theater is magic. We started working the other day, and I think it will be a nice union.”
It is the true theatrical work of Sebastiana López, capable of overcoming all the difficulties that life has thrown her way. “I consider myself a strong woman because if I had not been strong, I would not have overcome so many things that have happened to me in my life, my life has not been easy, and from a very young age I was on the street and I have had to overcome it.”
