Teatro Español y Naves del Español
Living Arts International Gathering Africa Moment'21 celebrates this year its 5th edition in the cities of Madrid and Barcelona, an unprecedented edition with a double itinerary, which presents proposals of great innovation and artistic quality by leading figures on the...
20€
Tuesday to Sunday / 7:30pm
Discussing democracy, identifying its problems, has been a topic of guaranteed relevance for centuries. Nonetheless, as theatre must necessarily speak to the audience in attendance, it is not enough to assume that a topic will fit into the immediate socio-political context just because it did in other latitudes.
Some years ago I staged this work in Mexico. The social temperature there was shaped to a large extent by a dark event in recent Mexican history: the forced disappearance of 43 students (on top of hundreds of thousands more) by – presumably – the Mexican government at the time. Families were going en masse to find the bodies of their loved ones, whether alive or to give them a decent burial, and this meant that the Antígona [Antigone] project had a particular relevance from a political perspective and a subtle danger artistically, as it ran the risk of being characterised as an opportunistic choice in the context of society’s pain.
My direction of this new production is intimately linked to the desire to make the necessary adjustments to the text (from conjugations and slang to discursive accents) in the interest of communicating powerfully with the people attending the performance. Representative democracy, the transition that the political forces of the opposition have to make once they achieve the objective of getting into power, disinformation as a strategy to influence democratic processes, mass appeal as a fig leaf for hate speech; these are some of the themes that can be addressed through Antígona, in the interest of engaging in an eloquent dialogue with the members of the Spanish community that will potentially attend the performance. David Gaitán
A co-production of El Desván Producciones, Festival Internacional de Mérida and Teatro Español
Iconos de accesibilidad proporcionados por Teatro Accesible