In the recent landscape of Alicante’s cultural scene, two distinct flavors briefly converged on the public’s radar, prompting a moment of collective reflection about taste, value, and the kind of art that earns a sustained place in the city’s cultural conversation. On a May afternoon, the expectation and the mood intertwined as the renowned actor Carlos Hipólito moved through the Teatro Principal, delivering a performance whose core rested on a biography-driven monologue about set designer Gerardo Vera. The piece, framed by Vera’s artistic world and personal history, offered more than a simple stage portrait; it became a charged exploration of the dynamics between art, memory, and family. The narrative drew its emotional power from an austere material source—a text rooted in ideologically charged history—that nonetheless revealed new layers through Hipólito’s disciplined voice acting, suggesting a nuanced portrayal of a man’s life through a sonorous, restrained articulation rather than the visceral immediacy of physicality. The result was a performance that, while intimate in its scope, resonated with a broad audience thanks to its careful construction, its quiet intensity, and the way sound alone carried the weight of the story, challenging conventional expectations about what theatre can deliver when the visual embellishments recede and the voice carries the entire emotional burden.
The following day at the Arniches Theater, the Mal Pelo company presented Bach in a staging that emphasized the bodily vocabulary of dance as a full-bodied form of dialogue. Federica Porello led the performance with a recital-like presence, translating the intricacies of musical structure into a physical dialogue that unfolded across the stage with astonishing clarity. The reinterpretation of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier in a piano arrangement became a living score for the dancers’ movements, each note mirrored by a corresponding gesture that felt both precise and liberated. The result was a moment of rare suspension, where harmony and beauty saturated the space, stretching time until the audience could almost forget the pace of ordinary life and become immersed in a ritual of movement and sound that spoke to the heart as much as to the intellect.
Across these two occasions, the attendance figures quietly underscored a recurring tension in the city’s cultural life: small audiences, even when confronted with performances of high caliber, sometimes fall shy of broader participation. The Principal’s house registered a modest turnout for Carlos Hipólito’s offering, while the Mal Pelo presentation drew a similarly limited crowd at Arniches. The discrepancy between the evident quality of the proposals and the public’s response invites a moment of collective contemplation about the city’s priorities, the climate that shapes taste, and the structures that support or hinder access to performing arts. Yet within those quiet numbers lies a potential prompt: the chance to examine how Alicante, and by extension the country, values artistic risk, how it defines its cultural identity, and what it takes to cultivate an environment where audiences are not only receptive but actively engaged. This is not merely about numbers; it is a call to examine the educational foundations necessary to cultivate discernment and appreciation. If the city is to build a thriving ecosystem for contemporary theatre and contemporary dance alike, there is a need to nurture audiences from the ground up, to train eyes, ears, and minds through exposure, discussion, and sustained dialogue with practitioners. In the crowd gathered outside the Principal on that afternoon, one could hear a mosaic of reactions and a sense that the conversation itself had begun—an invitation to reconsider the responsibilities of educators, presenters, and artists in shaping a more curious, more demanding, and more generous public.