« TO HOLD ON TO THE GROUND”: MEMORY AND IDENTITY IN NOME: BONITA (2014), BY VANESA SOTELO

Abstract

Galician actress, playwright and theater director Vanesa Sotelo (1981) carries out, through her dramatic writing, a poetic search for identity in her female characters. In texts like Nome: Bonita (2014) the same concern always beats: the scope of knowledge through the discovery of roots, the encounter with the ancestors or the understanding of deeply personal and identity issues. Along with this theater of identity, Sotelo develops a theater of memory, by recovering historical female figures from the Galician social and historical context. In this sense, its main characters are great female figures forgotten by history who carry out their own inquiry as an act of vindication. They seek their identity and, at the same time, their deserved place in the collective memory. This article will try to explore the discursive and thought keys of these concerns of the playwright and, at the same time, it will propose to analyze what are the dramaturgical tools that she uses to address them in her dramatic text Nome: Bonita. In short, this research aims to highlight the figure of a playwright who does not hesitate to use her theater to value other great women of her cultural heritage.