When I was about six or seven, Daddy took the family to see a bullfight in Manila. Before the start of the fight, the emcee instructed the audience : When there is a kill, shout Olé! I couldn’t understand why. I thought he meant the matador getting killed. You see, my mind was focused on the matador. The focus should have been and should always be on the bull.
Yesterday at the Plaza de Toros de lasVentas in Madrid was the 21st fight in this year's San Isidro Festival series.
According to Wikipedia, David Fandila aka El Fandi is statistically one of the most successful bullfighters in the world. He is currently Spain's number one matador.
This didn't matter to his bull though on this Friday's first encounter. When a misstep felled El Fandi, the bull ran him over like a runaway truck. A half-ton truck.
A collective gasp rose from the crowd. The man seated to my right stood up briefly, sat back down, put his hands to his face and said Oh no, oh no, oh no!
Members of the star bullfighter's entourage rushed to deflect the bull's trajectory as he was helped back on his feet. Checking for injuries, an assistant dusted down the back of his gilded trousers.
This is great theater. A vast arena heaving with over-excited fans, spectacular animals, exquisite costumes, live music with bugles and trumpets. This is high drama.
But this is no mere show. This is, quite literally, a matter of life and death. It has made me giddy with excitement, made my heart pound with terror, and made me sick with horror. But it has also filled me with awe and admiration for its grandeur, its wildness, its passion.
I didn't expect to come away a fan, but that I did. Bullfighting is violent and primitive and cruel. But I find myself drawn to it.
This from somebody who has always been a bit of a cowardly mouse. Somebody who has studiously avoided any kind of encounter with death. Somebody who averts her eyes from roadkill.
Yesterday, at the Plaza de Toros, I saw death up close. And killing too.
The first kill was the worst. As I watched transfixed, this noble beast, this awesome behemoth stopped charging. Stunned, his face distorted. There was blood everywhere, slicked on his heaving back, streaming from his gaping mouth, staining the beige sand a dark crimson. His entire frame began to shudder and seize. It seemed an eternity of this horror before his kness finally buckled and he sank into the sand.
I felt ill. I wanted to go home. The crowd was suitably unimpressed. This was a mess. Could the great Fandi have been unnerved by his spill early on in his encounter with this bull?
He recovered I think on his second act. I had just realized that he was the only one of the three matadors who was sinking his own banderillas. He was graceful, if that's an appropriate term to use on this occasion. He stood so erect, his body curved back in a reverse C. And when the moment of truth came, it came swiftly. He sank the killing sword into the bull with surgical precision felling the animal decisively and cleanly.
Only, by then, I had already tuned out.
Is the two-hour long corrida designed to numb the senses? Is this orgiastic spectacle stretched through six bloody encounters, each consisting of three acts, featuring six bulls, two for each of three matadors; is all this designed to deaden the emotions, the sensibilities? Does repeated exposure to violent behavior ultimately increase one's tolerance to it?
This video has been taken down by YouTube for violating rules on violent or graphic content. I have appealed this action:
The Community Guidelines’ strike against my channel is a mistake.
The bullfight is a cultural and artistic icon. Viewing it as condoning or glorifying violence is wrong. Banning its representation in art and culture belittles and insults the cultural traditions of nations and their peoples.
I can't find anything about theater in my posts about Japan and I don't understand why.
How could I have failed to write about Kabuki or Bunraku or Noh?
I've just come from Kabukiza. The latest renovation sadly has erased all the charm and uniqueness of experience that the theater used to have. I'm being impractical I know. Just seeing it as a remnant of the past as opposed to the living part of life that it surely represents for the residents of Tokyo or of the whole of Japan for that matter.
But the wondrous experience of going up those rickety old wooden stairs! The wooden benches! All gone now.
The sacred silence belonged only to the revered ancientness of medieval Japan. It doesn't sit well with this sterile hall.
It's just a theater now. Not even a beautiful one.
