The Teatro de La Abadía opens its season with a production about “Mujeres Libres,” the anarcho-syndicalist organization that championed women’s education and autonomy.
They never wavered in their purpose: “To emancipate women from the triple slavery to which they have been subjected: that of ignorance, of being a woman, and of being a producer.”
Libres!!!, the premiere that inaugurates the season at Madrid’s Teatro de La Abadía, recovers the story of Mujeres Libres (Free Women), an anarcho-syndicalist organization that, in the midst of the Spanish Civil War, set out to liberate women from every kind of hierarchy and dependency. And it does so on its own “libertarian” terms — in the form of a corrosive, shameless cabaret designed to shake off our cynicism.
Directed by Andrés Lima, with a text by Esther F. Carrodeguas, the play takes us back to 1936 but steers clear of the solemnity with which Civil War fiction usually tackles the subject, choosing instead to explore its flip side. “This was also the year of the Social Revolution, the most progressive project of proletarian power in the West,” say those at La Abadía. The piece not only puts names to the women who led those movements; in a sense, it also transports us to that Spain of drawing rooms and music halls, where the sicalípticas — the risqué cabaret singers — performed their saucy, political cuplés. “The reggaeton of our grandparents,” they would come to call it, with anthems like La bolchevique, La presidenta, or La sindicalista that gestured toward other possible worlds.
Alba Flores, Laura Galán, and Nüll Garcia — accompanied by Eva Valdelomar on piano — embody the three founders of Mujeres Libres: three pioneers from different backgrounds who crossed paths in the training courses promoted by the CNT. There is Lucía Sánchez Saornil, journalist and poet of Madrid’s avant-garde; Mercedes Comaposada, the Catalan lawyer and pedagogue committed to educating working-class women; and Amparo Poch y Gascón, from Aragón, one of the first licensed women physicians, whose focus fell on sexual education and the domestic sphere.
Mujeres Libres was born in May 1936 as a magazine, born of weariness with the paternalism of comrades who relegated gender demands — “those girly things” — to the background. “It’s fine to wait for the revolution every day, but it’s even better to go out in search of it, forging it minute by minute in our minds and hearts,” wrote Sánchez Saornil, words that became practically a manifesto. Those first publications, preserved at the Museo Reina Sofía, blossomed into a movement that gathered some 20,000 members.
Education and sovereignty over one’s own body marked their path toward emancipation. They launched pioneering literacy programs, industrial workshops, nursing courses, and even a Chauffeurs’ School, so women could get behind the wheel of ambulances, trucks, and trams on the home front. Their agenda was allergic to the prevailing puritanism: they opened “Liberatorios de Prostitución” to offer alternatives to vulnerable women, founded the Louise Michel Institute, a pioneer in contraception and family planning, and collectivized care through a network of nurseries and community kitchens. So far ahead of their time were they that they even rejected the feminist label as old-fashioned and bourgeois.
Libres!!! traces a genealogy of rebels and dissidents to celebrate their legacy in a vibrant, acidic anarcho-risqué cabaret — a true party in which the speeches of Emma Goldman, Federica Montseny, or La Pasionaria mingle with parodies of the Spanish Republic and the occasional “card-carrying anarcho-macho.” At a moment when it seems easier to administer collective disenchantment than to imagine an alternative, the play arrives to remind us that it’s never too late to believe in utopias. Or, at the very least, to switch off for a while with its songs.
Photo credit: The Teatro de La Abadía
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