Las últimas

About the show

An ensemble marked by the relationship between Spain and the Philippines (or it was Maharlika?).  461 years of history through works of art: the unveiling of a statue of “the last ones of the Philippines” in 2020, Imelda Marcos and Carmen Polo at a cocktail party in El Pardo, a very particular exhibition at the Crystal Palace in Retiro, Sor Jerónima de la Asunción and her nuns embarking on a galleon, Magellan the conqueror (or was it Julio Iglesias?) dying at the hands of Lapu Lapu, words better left unspoken, conversations that are hard to have, and mothers who bring out the karaoke when life gets ugly.

And life does get ugly, quite often.

Note from the author and director

Three days before I took my flight to the Philippines to do the research for this piece, my mother told me she had cancer. When I landed and got into the car with J-mee Katanyag, the director of Peta, our partner company in Manila, I broke down crying: “Right now I don’t give a shit about colonialism. Right now the only thing that matters to me is my mother.”

The next day, J-mee brought me Noli Me Tangere, José Rizal’s book, a cornerstone of the Philippines’ independence from Spain. And there it was, in the prologue: cancer and the mother, the motherland. In the Philippines, nature fights to break through the asphalt, like my mother’s cancer cells fighting to reproduce.

Las últimas is my most personal work, and also the one that has required the most research (40 people interviewed). It’s a mix of documentary theatre at its purest  — the verbatim work we’ve done demands a word-for-word transcription and embodiment of the characters — and fictional speculation  at its wildest, because, as Françoise Vergès says: “A decolonial exercise consists of imagining what other forms of exhibition and representation could be.”

It speaks about the shared history of the Philippines and Spain, about inheritance, and about what we do with it. Las últimas is my personal panata: a team inviting an audience to invoke the gods of theatre, to see if, together, we can manage to heal that mother—whoever she may be for each of us.

Lucía Miranda