Trying to find a key...

Trying to find a key that no one has lost

I have always envied the clarity of the idea that the director of the library of Olot has about her team: they are the primary care facility for culture. And this could be as simple or as complex as you may wish to understand it, but it is a great example. So, what are theatres? And more specifically, municipal public theatres? Cultural dissemination facilities? Only for dissemination? Are they buildings where things happen? Or may they be an idea?
Catalonia is a country whose size is quite manageable, but it has been unable to imagine a feasible ecosystem for the living arts, by which we mean those that occupy us here and now.
For example, there was no debate over the creation of the Teatre Nacional. If there had been, perhaps the Scottish national theatre model would have been considered one of the possible ways of organising the Catalan performance ecosystem. Or other models. However, over these almost 40 years, we have gotten better at listening, and public facilities and projects are debated by different stakeholders. This does not guarantee that we are doing it better, but it does provide a plural and more kaleidoscopic views of these projects.
And even though we have gotten beyond mere programming (viewing it as a succession of shows in a calendar broken down into little pieces and sold as tickets) and the conception of a theatre as a mere container of this programming, with open, expanded or relational approaches to programming, we have not yet finished developing an ecosystem capable of welcoming consolidated yet living proposals from an R&D vantage point, especially ones that are permeable to contextual practices situated in each community. An ecosystem that processes through ideas and gets creators and citizens in touch with each other using all possible formats, and one that can welcome those that have not yet been invented.

At the same time, a mindful project has the value of somehow contributing to improving that environment, to asking it more relevant questions, sometimes penetrating ones, sometimes friendly ones. Questions that enable us to be on guard to social, relational and environmental alerts so we are not left outside them and, from the sphere of the arts, so we are part of the planet’s here and now. I think that a public theatre should primarily be a project that connects the inhabitants of a place with the living arts in a situated and mindful way.


So, why is that? Because it should be able to connect people with creation? What need might someone have to be associated with the living arts as a spectator or practitioner? And why should we guarantee this from the public sphere?
It is difficult to evaluate the degree to which the world is saved through beauty or the degree to which the platonic ideal of what is beautiful, good and true is reached by contaminating ourselves with the arts. Or to measure how we raise the citizen happiness index through performance programming. Yet I nonetheless think that all of this is what any living arts project should strive for and what the unavoidable goal of this project should be, especially if it is public.
And it should run against the grain. In a world that is depleted, where there are people who survive every day with very little to nothing, where wars and famine are endless, where there are repressive and even inhuman regimes and where we are all shackled by an unbridled capitalism that ignores our ecofeminist ideals time and time again. What does public theatre mean in this world?
And in our cities, where there is a constant stream of young people who migrate by themselves, where schools have neither the tools nor the resources to include training in the arts, where women have left their families to head to the other side of the world to care for our children, where many people work horrible shifts while their children have dinner and go to sleep alone: what does public theatre mean in these cities?
I suggest that it means a place where constructive and creative values can be shared, a place that enables us to live in society and accept it in all its dimensions. If not, how will we find points of dialogue with diverse people from diverse cultures? If not, how will we understand human complexity? How will we become excited? How will we feel close to the other? How will we imagine? We need theatre for all of this, and it should be public in order to guarantee it for everyone.
I suggest that it be a space of knowledge—creation, risk, experimentation, investigation, proposition, etc.—and at the same time a space of recognition—heritage, memory, tradition, etc.—where a critical look at the proposals is possible, along with the possibility of enjoying them by incorporating visions of the world from the space-time where they were created, building bridges that enable gazes among different poetics to be connected to allow us to dive into that complexity.
I suggest that it become a setting where immediate or mediatised consumption is avoided and experience in the environment is promoted beyond the exhibition of a product or spectacle as the sole or core element, one that encourages the construction of a shared story that springs from a consensus among the individual and collective stories.

But besides suggestions and wishes, the challenges are enormous: a global world, accelerated technological development, sociopolitical complexity and uncertainty, the climate emergency, and 75% of the population of Catalonia having no connection to any living arts project. How can we develop proposals or bring these wishes to fruition if we do not connect them to three-fourths of the people who live around us? Perhaps we have to go beyond mere programming, but we still have the other rituals: certain communication channels, a box office, timetables, chairs, a direction in which the audience and actors look, darkness, applause. The theatre (as a building and an institution) is still a space that has hardly changed in substance or form since the Renaissance. How do we subvert it? How do we go beyond the facility? How do we open up the project and make it visible? And how do we empower citizens so they appropriate this project for themselves?
We are almost there. Two very basic things are needed first; they may be obvious but nonetheless bear repeating: financing and facilities.
And financing also leads us to the structure, to that ecosystem we mentioned at the beginning. What kind of financing do we want for culture? And how should we organise this financing? Right now, the performing arts in this country suffer from the ill of distribution, that is, they operate from public funding. And this way of operating generates a host of dysfunctions, including temporal, relational, clientele-related, overproduction and detachment from the end recipient. It would be much more viable and sustainable to have a national model of nodal governance and financing that is not hierarchical or colonial, where creators and performance spaces or projects have the legal tools and economic resources they need to interact directly, based on cash[MB1] . And obviously, there should also be funds for R&D, as noted above, which should sustain and work with the efforts at trial and error, research, pulling threads which lead who knows where, the cushion in the early steps in creation. And obviously, too, economic mechanisms are needed that support the industrial part of the performing arts.
Regarding facilities, just like financing, ours are small and need to be redefined as well. Instead of people working on a performance facility in the city, we should shift to working for the performing arts in the city, with the facility viewed as yet another piece at stake in the implementation of our project. And this is where new job profiles appear that until now have had a scant presence in performance facilities, like mediators, educators and social, health or environmental workers, with whom we should begin to work if what we want, what we wish, is to put people at the core of our public performing arts project in a given territory.

And beyond schools and the local sphere, designing a professional pathway in the living arts, one that is dynamic, hybrid and innovative, is essential if we want to have a sound roster of performing arts professionals with whom to imagine artistic projects or to create them. Therefore, a far-reaching, powerful, well-organised higher education programme in the living arts, one that encompasses all the disciplines, would be ideal.
And yet with all of that, the challenge is still there. How do we bring the theatres in our cities towards this new paradigm of the open, accessible, inclusive, participative, co-created project? Towards this new common space where we can ask questions via the body and the word, through old and contemporary, familiar and alien, ways of thinking? Towards that citizen meeting point which, more than anything else, should be a place of and for education, a place where we can learn and unlearn? How can we get three out of every four people in our city to ask a question? How can we get them to think that what we agree to call public theatre has to do with them?
With humility and through the perplexity of uncertainty which I get from my job every day at the helm of a municipal performance project, my answer is that we can only do it with enthusiasm and imagination. And at the risk of seeming naïve, with love. And at the risk of seeming radical, with political intention. Finally, a programmatic proposal, with all its extensions, ramifications and expansions, is still a map that explains the geopoetics of a specific time, yet without a desire to transform but instead simply as a proposal to discuss.. Contributing to disseminating utopias where neither the places nor the bodies are territories of conquest. Exemplifying possible moments of encounter between citizens based on art and performance creation. Being present in the lives of each of the inhabitants of the city. Being necessary. Being a refuge. Being uncomfortable. Being useful.
After all, as Hillel the Elder said, if not now, when?

Tena Busquets Costa