New themes gleaned from a 400-year-old classic

LA MANCHA, Spain -- The modern Don Quixote, the man from La Mancha, is being reimagined as a hip-hop rapper on a quest for love, a techie hooked on video games tilting at virtual windmills, and a metaphor for an America struggling against an imaginary enemy.

Four hundred years after Miguel de Cervantes published his masterpiece, those are but a few of the recent portrayals of the heroic, if errant, knight.

This summer Spain is in the midst of a host of celebrations honoring Cervantes's legendary tale of Don Quixote and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, who set out on the ''hottest day in July" for a picaresque journey through the country's rugged, barren 16th century terrain in search of adventure and a fight against injustice.

There are new theater productions, documentaries, art exhibits, readings, a dance presentation that fuses hip-hop with flamenco, and a big push in schools for students to actually read the hefty masterpiece.

All the attention being paid to the gaunt figure in armor on his lean nag suggests he still casts a long shadow across the literary world.

In 2002, editors at the Norwegian Book Club in Oslo polled a group of 100 writers, including Salman Rushdie, Nadine Gordimer, Wole Soyinka, and Norman Mailer, who voted the novel the best book of all time.

Yet the 74-chapter, 900-page book is one of those classics that is more well-known than it is well-read.

In recognition of that reality, a production that opened in June at the International Arts Festival of Castilla and Leon is appropriately titled, ''I Have Not Read Don Quixote."

The production is by the cutting-edge and irreverent Catalan theater troupe La Fura dels Baus, which has put together an elaborate interpretation of the masterpiece with an 80-member cast that features actors, dancers, circus artists, high-tech gimmickry, and even opera singers.

The stage set is an enormous hourglass that envelopes Quixote, who appears ''stuck in time as a kind of mutant," artistic director Carlos Padrissa said in an interview published in Spain's leading daily newspaper, El Pais.

The distant and ill-defined enemies that this modern Don Quixote fears are more akin to high-tech toys like Gameboy and Nintendo than the forces of darkness that Don Quixote was convinced he saw on the unforgiving, rocky plain in this southern region of Spain.

''Today's Quixotes, those who confuse reality with fiction, no longer read novels about knights. Instead they are hooked on Internet games," added Padrissa.

In the production, Don Quixote appears riding an abstract, metallic horse that looks like the creation of a child with an erector set. Sixty trapeze artists, suspended in the air and spinning in constant motion, represent the windmills that Don Quixote fears as giant, approaching enemies.

When his more sensible servant tries to explain that they are not giants, Don Quixote insists, ''They're multinational giants."

The theater group says that its contemporary depiction of Don Quixote is to show a man struggling against the demons of modern media, especially television and Internet games, that are robbing children and adults alike of the magic of a thought-provoking book.

The production ends with this line: ''A book is mystical. You set your eyes on a book, and a voice that's not your own and that comes from a different time and a different place speaks inside you."

In other tributes to the author, contemporary flamenco dancer Rafael Amargo choreographed a new production honoring Cervantes titled, ''DQ: Passenger in Transit."

The production, which premiered in Madrid in June, was also performed in July at the Granada Festival in southern Spain.

It is the story of two Japanese travelers helplessly addicted to their videogames.

That is, until they stumble upon novels about knights and fall in love with the noble, romantic character of Don Quixote and his faithful friend. The two take on the identities of the fictional characters and soon find themselves putting Cervantes's words to rap, hip-hop, rock, and flamenco.

To celebrate the author and the book, there is also a surge of tourism with buses setting out across southern Spain's landscape of windmills, castles, and villages to follow in the footsteps of Don Quixote.

Two weeks ago, a tour bus pulled into a small village known as Venta del Don Quixote, which lies just off the main highway between Madrid and Granada. The village proclaims itself the same place mentioned as La Venta in Cervantes's novel, and has built a cottage industry of tourism around it.

There are rows of little shops that sell tiny statues of Don Quixote and snow globes with the knight on his horse and books and T-shirts and coffee mugs and posters.

There is a restaurant that features a sheet-metal statue of Don Quixote and tilework that tells the tale of his journey. There are items on the menu that the fictional character ate along his journey.

A tour bus pulled up to the restaurant and a group of 20 high school students from Slinger, Wis., tumbled out into the bright sunshine.

Amy Mayer, 17, who had recently read ''Don Quixote" in her Spanish class, which was now sponsoring a journey through La Mancha, emerged from the bus with a very definite sense of how she viewed the novel.

''It's a pretty good satire on America," she said, speaking up above the group of students who were asked what Don Quixote meant to them.

''Don Quixote read all this stuff about enemies who were out there and he took it, well, like, too seriously. He had what he thought was a noble quest," she said.

''It just sort of reminds me of the way America thinks, the way America is in its own little world just like Quixote. You know, walking that fine line between reality and fantasy."

After the huge, air-conditioned bus roared away, Lola Privadi Baeza, 45, a waitress at the restaurant, was left behind clearing the tables and preparing for the next bus.

''I've had it up to here with Don Quixote," she said, gesturing to a place between the tip of her nose and her eyes.

''Not because I don't like Don Quixote. I do. I love him. I love being from the same land as him. What I am sick of is all these people who have never read the book and a tourism industry that wants to celebrate him for only this year, when I think he should be celebrated every year."