An eviction told through the myth of Prometheus. A lavapiés building that faces two families. A young couple who buys their home in a ghost urbanization. An exhibition on the concept home in a building threatened by urban speculation. Three sisters who have to decide what they do with the country house in which the summers of their childhood passed. A dealer who takes food to the inauguration of the house that was from his grandparents, today rented by other people. An old man defending his illegal house, threatened by the demolition. Neighbors and neighbors of Popular neighborhoods of Madrid, Paris and Brussels fighting with emotional memory the Gentrification.
The theater begins to reflect one of the issues that most concern the population in many parts of the world. In Spain, housing is a first -order problem, as evidenced in the state demonstration convened for April 5 by tenant and other organizations. It is not that the scenarios have not dealt with this topic before, but now some works written in various languages in Madrid and Barcelona coincide in which, with a poetic/dramatic treatment rather than with urgent theater forms, the consequences of mass tourism are put on the table, of the policies that encourage the city brand, speculation, gentrification, construction in residential suburbs, neo-nomadism Impossible, urban planning, erase of the particularities of the neighborhoods or the relationship between the urban and the rural.
This February, the Madrid Abbey Theater and the Drift collective premiered There is nothing leftthe Spanish part of the project Interphonoa proposal promoted by the French company Nonumoï to generate a series of sound portraits of neighbors of three popular neighborhoods in three European capitals, with a double exhibition and scenic dimension. In April, the La Tricoterie Theater in Brussels will host at a small festival the three works that emerged from the project, starting with which they have elaborated themselves, Interphonofrom the mediation work with the inhabitants of the lower part of the Saint-Gilles neighborhood, in the Belgian capital. For its part, From my window It collects the reality of the Les Agnettes district of the town of Gennevilliers, north of Paris; and the aforementioned There is nothing leftfor which Inés Collado and Irene Doher, at the head of the Drift collective, approached the various realities of Tetuán, a peculiar Madrid area divided into two very different realities, socially and economically, by Bravo Murillo Street.
“Without directing any cause,” explains collado, “the causes and the political sneak when you address the emotional with these people, because not only the personal is political, but the emotional is political. We have tried to give a space for people to afford to believe in the possibility of building a life, a future. ” The popular market of wonders, the problems of gentrification, the rise in rentals and the relationship between residents of a lifetime and the new arrivals from other countries and cultures focus the scenes recreated on a scenario adorned with old luminous business that today only live in memory.
From Tetuán to Lavapiés, the neighborhood theater hosts on Saturdays a work called, precisely, Lavapiésin which the heirs of two families dispute an entire building in the midst of insurmountable historical disagreements. Argentine cast for a work led by Fernando Ferrer and where, with a certain Shakesperian back Romeo and Julietaconflicts are raised that, in addition to the anti -Franco memory and impossible loves, refer to the gentrification of this combative Madrid neighborhood. With a frantic rhythm and exacerbated tensions, there are phrases that release some characters that give an idea of what is behind the walls or hidden in old trunks: “We do not sell to Fran, it will make an entire Airbnb building” or “Revolution and culture are things of another time”, to which another character replies: “The monarchy too.”
Without leaving Lavapiés, actor Rulo Pardo has written and stars Theo chainedwhich will be on the poster in the Mirador room from March 7 to 23. Unlike the previous case, the inspiration in the classic Prometheus myth is not hidden here, turned into the history of a man chained to the basement in which he lives accompanied by a dog, to avoid his imminent eviction. Victim himself a few years ago of a forced eviction, when a company was made with the property of the building where he lived in Madrid, Rulo Pardo does not renounce comic mechanisms to face a very hard story: “It’s like Life is beautiful (The film about Roberto Benigni’s holocaust). Everything in this man is poetry and ibuprofen to cope with the liver pain, although it does not stop drinking beers that come out of a washing machine. It is a bit quixotic, but he does know that giants are mills. It is so wild what we say we have to loosen to make it bearable. ”
Also in Madrid it has premiered in slaughterhouse Nerium Park (In poster until March 23, starring Susana Abaitua and Félix Gómez), a work that Josep Maria Miró wrote in 2012 in the heat of the real estate crisis. Without specifically locating the space of the action, since it could happen in the residential suburbs of any city, it tells the arrival of a young couple to the house that has just been bought in an urbanization of the outskirts and how, in just one year, the phantasmagoric reality of a promotion that has stayed halfway and where no one has lived to live anyone else to make a dent in that relationship and in their dreams of the future. “Living is a political act and urban architectures are structures that impose models of life, generate ideology, forms of thought, production and consumption,” says Miró, which specifies in this piece the thesis of Jorge Dioni’s book The Spain of the poolswhere it is explained how neoliberal urban planning pays the individualistic tendencies of the middle classes that deactivate social movements.
Barcelona, on the other hand, is supporting as few cities the rigors of urban policies and the real estate business linked to tourism. The playwright Pau Miró already spoke 20 years ago, in the work It rains in Barcelonaof the long wake of the Olympic hangover and aggressive urban policies. Now it premieres Expulsion (Beckett Sala, from this Wednesday to April 6) and the director of the assembly, Toni Casares, who already directed the previous text two decades ago, explains that “that show reflected how the re -urbanization of Barcelona ignored certain social levels of the neighborhood. Now it is no longer that I ignore them, it has expelled them. ” An urban planner, burned by the impossibility of doing anything from the institution in favor of citizens, runs out of work and takes refuge in the Casa del Campo where the summers of childhood passed, a house that, dead the parents, must be decided whether it is sold or not. And for that two sisters and a brother and his daughter gather there, the young woman who will question all the approaches of her elders. The concepts of nest, shelter, escape and salvation go through this history of Chekhovian airs, although it seems that there is not even a Moscow with which to dream.
The Beckett also hosted, on February 25, the reading of a work by Greek author Alexandra K*: Revolutionary methods to clean your poola story that starts from several questions: where does the state end and where does the human being begin? Where the ideology and where the survival? He talks about the sale of a protected space north of Corfú, an ecosystem where those who once lifted illegal houses today fight against the speculation that aims to build 40,000 square meters of hotel facilities. It is evident that the housing problem affects everyone under accelerated capitalism (you just have to see Trump’s crazy plans and Elon Musk for the razed strip of Gaza).
There are two playwrights that, after participating in European residences sponsored by the National Dramatic Center, have written two pieces where the question of living is capital. The Valencian Eva Mir (1996) has built in A body moves (Published by the CDN itself), a puzzle around various ways of relating to houses and their memoirs, with the words and memories that support them, and how new generations live a kind of neo -nomadism forced by the circumstances of economic precariousness, which prevent them from throwing roots or preserving the intangible, sensory and sentimental heritage associated with the houses in which they have lived. For its part, the Croatian Vedrana Klepika (1986) has written On walls, empty and other vulgaritiesa project that addresses the idea of home as a philosophical concept and that brings together both fiction and documentary materials to generate, according to the words of the playwright, “a metaobra on a group of creative professionals that prepares a great immersive exhibition on the historical-political idea of ’home’. Paradoxically, that exhibition will take place in a building that is about to be a victim of a quite murky political-immobiliar agreement. ”