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Cantar del amor y la muerte
Actors and puppets show. It was created by the students who took part in the Taller 07.08, the Workshops of the Aula de Teatro, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid's theatre club, also called atUAM. This play is based on John Huston's A walk with love and death. Staging is directed by Jorge Amich.

Synopsis

''Oyez everyone, listen to us: neighbours, boys and girls and grandparents, all of you refugees who have taken shelter here! Ana La Mala's Comedy Company would like to tell you a great epic poem: el Cantar del Amor y la Muerte. This is the Song of Lady Claudia and student Heron. Get nearer, come here, the play is about to start!''

Three runaway women survive in Ana La Mala's Comedy Company by telling stories to those who took shelter, just like them, from all the outrages committed by the fighting armies of the Hundred Year's War and the Peasants' Revolts during the late Middle Ages in Europe.

At the beginning of their runaway, when they started playing Lady Claudia and student Heron's Song, the only notion they had about acting came from some actresses who passed through their small village when they were little. Their performance used to be a disjointed, illogical echo of the jocular, sugary play they had then seen. But all this happened before the war entered their lives. While they go through woods and fields, death keeps an eye on every road, war is constantly rewriting their Song...

During the Middle Ages, Europe suffered a war that lasted more than a hundred years. Heron, a student bored at University who wanted to reach the sea, and Claudia, a lady whose father taught her how to read and write, were not yet born when this war broke out. And died before it was over.

One spring morning, Heron, a student from the University of Paris, decides to escape the suffocated atmosphere he was in and leaves for the sea. Between the city and the sea, the badly paid army rubble survive only by sacking peasants. In the Royal quartermaster's land (respected by barbarism until then), Heron meets Claudia, the quartermaster's daughter. And they both fall in love.

Heron continues on his trip to the sea. Nevertheless, when he is about to reach it, he is told that peasants have risen up: they are assaulting castles, Royal quartermaster's among them.

Heron would never see the sea. He comes back to his Lady, whose only purpose is to take revenge on the peasants who killed her father. Claudia's belligerency died away when her dreams come true and she finally discovers the horrors of war. She abandones her side so that they are together again, she and Heron, who never was, and never wanted to be, in any side. They decide to escape the war but the war caught them. And they are murdered.

Who were they, who were the murderes, which troop, which side? After the performance, this question is usually repeated. Ana La Mala's comediennes always answer the same: that may be important, important for some people... but it was not important for Claudia and Heron, the lovers.