Juan Mayorga (Madrid, 1965) is undoubtedly one of the contemporary playwrights who will transcend the classical category. In fact, it already is: his works are the subject of study for schoolchildren and are performed all over the world. Writer, director, founder of the playwriting group “El Astillero” and the company “La Loca de la Casa”, as well as the founder of the Spanish Academy of Performing Arts; He received the National Theater Award in 2007 and entered the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) in 2019; Earlier this year, he was the artistic director of the Teatro de La Abadía and the Corral de Comedias in Alcalá de Henares. Philosopher and mathematician Juan Mayorga, honorary member of the Spanish Royal Mathematical Society, is the recipient of the 2022 “Princess of Asturias” edition of the Literary Prize. Take the floor at the awards ceremony at the Campoamor Theater on October 28; Although he guesses that his agenda is full of events that excite him during the awards week, he does not want to talk nonsense.
“Silencio” premieres on October 28. White Portillo, a text based on his speech at the Palacio Valdés theater, RAE. What is the function of silence in theatre? Is silence the culmination of a job?
My talk, in a way, wants to be an answer to this question about the value of silence in theatre. At one point in the speech I say that the most important silence is the silence of the audience, and that silence can come after staging, when the audience gathers all the experience contained in the show and directs it into their own life. that a work takes the audience to silence. There are audiences who remain silent and need that silence after seeing a work.
Are there silences stronger than any word?
Again and again I am faced with the inadequacy of my words, the inability to put the experience into words. Silence is fundamental in our life and so is mine. There is a phrase that comes out of the mouth of Blanca Portillo, in particular, that the audience told me Kempis’s statement when I was little: “I regret that I spoke a thousand times and never kept quiet”, and I translate it into “me” a thousand times. I regret that you spoke and remained silent a thousand times.” Silence has many faces, and there are silences brave and cowardly, noble and vile. Neither my speech nor my work is a praise of silence, but there are hideous silences and others worthy of praise.
Silence is scary. this ArtAnd does the theater serve to fill it?
There seems to be a void of fear where everything must be filled and silence prohibited, and everything must be filled not only with words but also with noise. It is very important to demand silence, to protect it, to give yourself moments of silence, to pay attention to those quiet times, to talk to yourself.
What do we need most, speech or silence?
Both are basic, but what we need is the willingness to listen. First of all, it is urgent, necessary, before we say a word, that we make ourselves hospitable to the words and reasons of the other. Listening is an extraordinary quality when not forced or imposed by the self-talk of power. When one chooses to listen and take the word of the other, he is performing a wonderful act of humanity. Humanity is largely built on listening to the other and requires its own silence, not interrupting the other, listening sincerely to the other, not listening to defeat him, but to find the weakest position in his argument.
on one of his last visits Asturias held a wonderful meeting with the young people. Do you have a young audience in theaters? Should we write with them in mind?
I remember that morning in Avilés… I had two very joyful meetings with young people at the theaters in Avilés, one at Niemeyer and the other at Palacio Valdés. It was a very good experience for me and in both I learned a lot of things those young people found in my works. I just wrote a play for children, “The elephant has occupied the cathedral.” The theater I write is for adults, educated people, over the age of 13. I know games like “Darwin’s Tortoise” or even “Himmelweg” are read and even played by children. Just these days, when I was thinking about the Awards, I remembered that I came to the theater as a young audience and found it challenging precisely because it respected me. If we try to formally adapt and reduce content to bring theater closer to the youth, we are wrong. Young people appreciate our respectful relationship with them.
Going back to the self-talk of power, he said in his acceptance speech at RAE that the dispossession of the word by power is the main political theme of the theatre.
The political issue is the perfect language. Power wants to control language and not only because it carries out acts of censorship, but also because it constantly carries out acts of education, to guide us, to guide us to what is useful to us. As a writer and citizen, I try to ask myself every day who wrote my words, who wrote my text. It is important that we observe over and over again how, in the history of theater, the conflict of rhetoric appears as a decisive political conflict. In the RAE speech, I draw attention to “Antigona”, a work in which what can and cannot be said forms the heart of the work. Creon not only forbids Antigone to bury her outlaw brother, but also fundamentally and warns her not to publicize such an act, and Antigone not only wants to bury her brother, but publicly wants to break Creon’s monologue, prompting dissenting voices to emerge. It is about how power tries to dispossess others with words and the struggle for the word, that is, to reach a voice and make it heard.
They say that he never saw his texts as finished, constantly retouching them.
Not that I am rewriting them, but that I am writing them all the time. On the occasion of Awards Week, I will have the pleasure of performing Avilés’ “Language in Pieces” again. This work premiered at Avilés and was my first premiere as a director, because whoever witnesses this performance will see the text itself transformed and new expressions emerge. There is one thing that is very important to me: “No one can cross out a sentence,” Teresa tells her dissident Inquisitor, who wanted to limit what she wrote and allowed her to read. What Teresa says is that no censorship can pass, most importantly, it is an internal writing.
A game about Teresa of Christ.
It’s a work about an extraordinary woman, and also about language and what can and cannot be said, about the limits of language, about the unspeakable. Sufism is born as a paradoxical effort to reach the unreachable, so it always ends in silence. And it’s also about the power of words and the power over words. The Inquisitor visits Teresa to close the convent of San José and limit Teresa’s words.
She is not deprived of awards and now receives “Princess of Asturias” for Letters. Do you still care?
You should be rewarded for what you do, not for what you do, it’s a requirement. It is important for me that it comes from Asturias, the quality of the judges, the quality of the winners this year and in previous editions. And I’m excited that he’s from Asturias because I’m not from there, life has been bringing me closer to him since I premiered the first show in Avilés. Asturias has been and continues to be very generous to me. And with this award, they wanted to reward dramatic literature that often refuses the recognition it deserves.
Will you be speaking at the Campoamor ceremony?
I was invited to do this and it would be an honor to do so in such a beautiful setting and on such an important occasion.
Previously, there was a tight schedule of premieres and commitments with the Teatro de la Abadia.
I took over the artistic directorship of Teatro de la Abadía a few months ago and I am very excited. Theater directing is one of the most beautiful jobs in the world, there are few things more beautiful than imagining meeting days, and it also allows me to accompany the work of my fellow colleagues and the creations of other creators. We want to do something important there, a space where how much we do is marked by the qualities that the “Princess of Asturias” award jury would like to see in me: action, emotion, poetry and thought.
and projects?
I’m working on a play called “María Luisa” and I’m going to premiere it in the spring. Prior to this, “Amistad” directed by José Luis García Pérez will premiere at El Matadero, and “Silencio” and “La lengua en Pieces” tours “Silencio”, which continue until March. We also premiered “The Last Boy”, two productions of “Himmelweg” and my theater is abroad and is done a lot.