La romería de los cornudos (The Pilgrimage of Cuckolds)

Alberto Sánchez designed the set and costumes for the first performance of the ballet La romería de los cornudos (The Pilgrimage of the Cuckolds) by the company of Encarnación López, La Argentinita, which took place in Madrid in 1933. The music of Gustavo Pittaluga was conceived as a choreographic divertimento and followed in the wake left by Manuel de Falla, with shades of Igor Stravinsky. The intention was to create a Spanish type of music which left behind Romantic picturesqueness. Congruous with the score, the staging followed Sánchez’s own avant-garde language, moving away from any folkloric expression, in line with his wishes and shared with Benjamín Palencia in creating a local poetic of landscape and popular culture with Surrealist and oneiric overtones. In designing the scenography, Sánchez drew from a unitary aesthetic experience integrating set, figure and text. Exhibited here is one of the surrounding backdrops that formed the background of the scene, representing the hermitage and environment in which, according to the libretto by Federico García Lorca and Cipriano Rivas Cherif, celebrated the pilgrimage of Cristo de Moclín, centred on the female search for fertility.

Lola Hinojosa Martínez