After a long career in theater acting with notable teachers such as Ricardo Bartís, Juan Carlos Gené and Rubén Szuchmacher, he debuted as a playwright and director in 2007 and studied under Veronese from 2005 to 2008. The next day, on the 11th, Pablo Messiez presents. In Alicante Theater Performance will to believe, It is his signature work that won the Max Award for best theatrical performance this year.
Come to the Alicante Writers Exhibition on the 11th will to believeA work for which he won the Max award for best theatrical performance and also three Godot awards.
It is a work about the functioning of faith and its relationship with will. We asked ourselves why we believe some things and not others, what place the will to believe occupies, and whether this occurs before or after a revelation or miracle. That was the first question. While watching the movie, I remembered an experience I had as a spectator. Ordet, Carlo Theodor Dreyer, because we are witnesses of a resurrection, something that is unlikely for an atheist young man like me. When I watched the film, its impact was so great that I wished for the resurrection to happen and thought about how fiction can transform us, how it can create a desire we did not have beforehand. I thought of bringing the material. Ordet it is used as dialogue material with him and has a very important presence in the fiction.
Maybe the desire to believe in something is essential right now…
Yes, the study will reveal not religious faith in general, but faith in general. And we see something interesting in this question, and that is that you need community to believe in something, not one person alone. It focuses on the social and political and the importance of having agreements that enable us to live together. I think we are here to learn to live together, to try to understand what it means to live together, how we can be together. And the matter of faith is essential. The first practice of faith is language. After all, the most difficult task is to understand the other, the enemy’s goals, and find the area where the encounter can take place. To make theater is to devote oneself to something impossible, because by definition it is to work with the present that eludes one. As Lorca said So five years passedWe won’t come, but we will go.
He started out as an actor, director and then playwright. How is this road going?
I worked as an actor in Argentina, but it’s very common there to produce self-directed work. Actually, the theater has been paying my rent for ten years, but it wasn’t until I was 40 that I started making a living from the theater. The remaining 20 years were combined with other jobs. When there was no job, one was looking for life and I came across a novel, Frankie and the wedding, and I wanted to do a stage version, but I couldn’t see myself in any of the characters. This was in 2006, I had been an actor for a long time and was learning from directors, and I decided to pursue directing and playwrighting. I had a great time and immediately wrote another script and directed it too. When I moved to Spain, I realized that acting was more complicated than putting on a work of my own production. I saw that accent was given a lot of importance when acting back then, but not so much now. I don’t understand how nice it is to mix accents when directors want to delete them. It didn’t interest me because it seemed like a fraud, and so I focused more on writing and directing than continuing to act.
So what is the function of a meeting like the Alicante Exhibition for writers?
It is basically a meeting and exchange of ideas. Any activity that encourages getting to know and listen to each other seems fundamental and necessary to me, so it’s great.
It is a very important lung for the theater world, but pedagogically it has been fundamental for the local population. ¿Why is it so important?
For connecting with theatre, which is such a powerful tool. Theater is a powerful weapon, dangerous at best, because it can move things we think are fixed. The problem is believing that we can’t move things and theater keeps them moving. It brings together a group of people who do not know each other, the public, and from there the possibility of believing something else emerges. And if things go well, what happens is unforgettable…
The collective miracle I mentioned before…
Yes, it is a rebirth of the possibility of believing that coming together is a powerful thing. If it were in our training and not considered just a professional activity, it would be something else. If you had always trained your eyes, you would have the ability to listen and the desire to understand others. Theater is a school of attention, and right now the world is all noise and inattention. It is as if we are immersed in a constant river of information that deafens rather than clarifies. That’s why going to the theater is such a strange activity; Being silent, not expressing an opinion and looking somewhere together is a very powerful poetic power. Our function arises from the desire to say that theater is strong and there is no lie in this.
“Theater cannot be forced any more than joy can be forced. It requires the will to believe.”
I read a tweet of yours in which you said that more than a summary of the job, hours of rehearsal and a budget should be put into the hand program. It would be great if people knew the process, not just the outcome…
There’s a bit of a taboo around money here, but it’s very important to see what the production is like. And I’m terrible at summaries. As if we think of theater as literature, it would be an exaggeration to attach so much importance to what is said in the work. You think of theater as a movie, you don’t think about whether it was staged for 100 people or whether it should be performed in a theater with 1000 people. But if you are invited to a party with 50 people, you go to a party with 300 people in a different mood. Theater is thought of as a movie because instead of thinking of it as the audience, it’s thought of as what’s happening on stage. It is outside the audience, if there is no audience it has no meaning. We have become so accustomed to the fiction we consume on screen that we think theater is the same. Theater needs that gaze, so halfway through the show he says, “We’ve been there for 40 minutes, anyone who isn’t interested can leave,” because we need a constant gaze. And sometimes people leave. Just as you can’t force joy, you can’t force theater any further. It requires the will to believe.
The cancellation policy has been unexpectedly extended…
You need to be very careful and report cases where any subject other than artistic matters interferes with your work. If a programmer makes a program, he should be respected no matter who manages it. There must be creative freedom. It was something that we thought was already consolidated, but it doesn’t look like that. You must be careful and not remain silent. There is also no point in creative stage work with the limitation of freedom, as there is a limitation of the work.
We are talking about censorship, but there is also a lot of self-censorship. As a writer, do you suffer from these two situations?
I don’t. And it seems to me that the person who did this has a personal problem. Actually, the opposite happens to me. I am thinking of including scenes that may not cause empathy in my new work. Theater is not the place to get into trouble, not to raise the flags we believe in, but to see things happen that we cannot understand.
“The theater is a place to get into trouble, not to raise the flags we believe in.”
Nowadays, arts in general are very intertwined, art is not just art, it has video and sound; music or dance is the same… Has theater also entered that interdisciplinary phase, or is it still struggling?
Yes, in my opinion, there is a part of theater that becomes impoverished when separated from dance and music. It would be more accurate to think of the stage or live arts in general without determining this type of aesthetics. This has more to do with what a stage actor does with a dancer than a film actor. We can learn a lot from each of the other disciplines of the performing arts. We should be able to put aside these segments that serve the market better and put labels and sell them more easily. Based on our practice, we should think that what unites us is the people, and we should share the needs of that people in order for them to exist.
I have always wondered how the cultural issue is managed in a time of conflict as serious as the current one. Does theater have a mission in this sense?
The truth is that these extremely meaningless situations make me wonder why I do theater. All these people are dying, all this madness is happening, so what do we do? But there’s also a vital impulse that tells you that you must go on, and that’s why I go on, but without any pride. I’m still skeptical.
Premiering on December 1 gestures at the National Dramatic Centre. A work that makes it very different…
It is at a full gestation stage and is a work that focuses precisely on what happens to the part of theater that cannot be written, that is, the body, the gesture. I was interested to see what would happen if the focus was on that weird thing happening to our hands and faces. Gesture always arises as a result of relating to something. It’s a joint production with the Spanish Academy in Rome, and I was lucky enough to go there and write, so the city of Rome is very important in that function.