Sleepless City

Jorge Luis Morejon with the Creation Ballet ensemble in Sleepless City.

Manuel Artime Thatre. Miami. 1991

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“Out in the world, no one sleeps,” Lorca declares in his poem “Sleepless City,” “No one, no one. No one sleeps.” “Don’t sleep! Be firm! Listen, the alternative is—everlasting sleep”

Jorge Luis Morejon played The Poet in Sleepless City, a dance/theatre piece directed and choreographed by Pedro Pablo Peña, artistic director of Creation Ballet Company. Sleepless City was first played at the Manuel Artime theatre, then at the Florida Dance Festival in Tampa, the Trail Theatre in Miami and in the Carousel Theatre during the Miami International Hispanic Theatre Festival.

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Federico García Lorca (1898 - 1936)

The City That Does Not Sleep

(Nightsong of Brooklyn Bridge)

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In the sky there is nobody asleep. Nobody, nobody.

Nobody is asleep.

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The creatures of the moon sniff and prowl about their cabins.

The living iguanas will come to bite the men who do not dream,

and the man who rushes out with his spirit broken will meet on the street corner

the unbelievable alligator, quiet beneath the tender protest of the stars.

Nobody asleep on earth. Nobody, nobody.

Nobody is asleep.

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In the graveyard far off there is a corpse

who has moaned for three years

because of a dry country side on his knee

and that boy they buried this morning cried so much

it was necessary to call out the dogs to keep him quiet.

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Life is no dream. Careful! Careful! Careful!

We fall down the stairs in order to eat the moist earth

or we climb to the knife-edge of the snow with the voices

of the dead dahlias.

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But forgetfulness does not exist, dreams do not exist;

flesh exists. Kisses tie our mouths

in a thicket of new veins,

and whoever his pain pains will feel that pain forever

and whoever is afraid of death will carry it on his shoulders.

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One day

the horses will live in the saloons

and the enraged ants

will throw themselves on the yellow skies that take refuge in the eyes of cows.

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Another day

We will watch the preserved butterflies rise from the dead

and still walking through a country of gray sponges and silent

we will watch our ring flash and roses spring form our tongue.

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Careful! Be careful! Be careful!

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The men who still have marks of the claw and the thunderstorm,

and that boy who cries because he has never heard of the invention of the bridge,

or that dead man who only possesses now his head and a shoe,

we must carry them to the wall where the iguanas and the snakes are waiting,

where the bear's teeth are waiting,

where the mummified hand of the boy is waiting,

and the hair of the camel stands on end with a violent blue shudder.

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Nobody is sleeping in the sky. Nobody, nobody.

Nobody is sleeping.

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If someone does close his eyes,

a whip boys, a whip!

Let there be a landscape of open eyes

and bitter wounds of fire.

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No one is sleeping in this world. No one, no one.

I have said it before.

No one is sleeping.

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But is someone grows too much moss on his temples during the night,

open the stage trapdoors so he can see the moonlight,

the lying goblets, and the poison, and the skull of the theaters