Valencia, Saturday evening. The sky above the city is livid and still; it sheds leaden light on the coastal city, filters into the deep waters of its Oceanografic up to the psychopathic gaze of the sharks, outlines with a pale blade the sharp spiers of the chapiteau of the Circo de Los Horrores.
Inside, red light, as if full of blood, announces the imminent start of “Requiem, Sinfonía Final”, the show that marks the end of an era and the dawn of a new day.
Suso Silva has announced his stage suicide, his retirement from the stage. He himself, Suso Silva, the weaver of a shiny emotional web that has trapped a new generation of spectators; Suso Silva, who accompanied the Spanish circus to dizzying depths, into the emotional abysses of eros and thanatos, where no one had dared before. Suso Silva, with his terrible immortal and desecrating masks: crazy clown, Nosferatu and, finally, the cuckolded Lucifer. Suso Silva, a name that will remain imprinted like a brand in the history of traveling entertainment. This article also aims to be a tribute to a great artist.
The scene is full of wind yet suspended in time. The enormous clock, like that of a bell tower sunk into the ground, shows five minutes past five, on the right an enormous metronome, on the sides two austere buildings with rotating propellers at the top from which rays of spectral light filter.
The show begins gradually, like a slow crescendo, as spectators take their seats. The murderous doll appears, which seems to be moved by gears and stops at every obstacle, the screaming widow, the nun who brandishes the crucifix, a strange being who looks like an enormous and intrusive rat… ferocious blows of the shovel against the ground, screams, startles .
Then Suso Silva appears on stage, with a twenty-four-hour suitcase, a traveler at the end of the night, who attracts the gaze of the audience like a powerful magnet attracts specks of iron.
Twenty years of his career are retraced: the images of the past, faded by time, are as if resurrected. We see the many metamorphoses, the birth of Nosferatu, who returns to the scene from the dark depths of his coffin, the flow of an iridescent art that from ancient times reaches the present, here and now.
The clowning and cabaret parts are alternated with high technical profile numbers. Scary, suitable for the mental hospital, the double wheel of death. Estranging, dreamlike, the sleepwalker’s walk upside down on the ceiling which is reflected in the moon, and literally does a juggling act upside down. Then the capillary suspension, with the disturbing living dolls on stage; the tribal, voodoo games of strength, accompanied by the fearful magic of fire that consumes everything; the Chinese pole and hand-to-hand, where women always appear stronger than their male partners in a continuous and unpredictable reversal of roles.
Each scene is as if on its own, but composes a final picture. Suso Silva sums up his long artistic activity and I will try to provide some conclusions too.
The Circo de Los Horrores has represented and will continue to represent in the future one of the most interesting variations of the European circus.
It sublimates undeniable aspects of human beings that usually remain hidden under the worn veneer of good society. He digs with a rusty and terrible spoon into the human soul, where feral impulses should more often be dug out like rotten blood on the scene, before they explode in the terrible and real junctures of History. And just as the occult death drives are highlighted, the life drives are also exalted, eros in all its forms, which bigotry would like to be homologated, standardized, dosed with a dropper and with a well-known formulation.
In the last scene, after Suso has greeted his audience, with a naked soul, on an unforgettable throne, we find his hat on the stage, on a coat hanger. At that point, her daughter Sara, beautiful, enters and after a brief hesitation, she takes her father’s hat and puts it on. She will be the next master of ceremonies of the Circo de Los Horrores.
I wish you a brazen, free and scandalous career, because, I often like to repeat, in this era tainted by unprecedented forms of moralism, being scandalized is a right, being scandalized is a pleasure.
