Spanish playwright: ‘There’s an infinity of urgent themes to be tackled by theater’

In Bucharest last month to stage the play We Were Three Sisters, based on Chekov, prolific Spanish dramatist Jose Sanchis Sinisterra told BR that a series of themes such as the visibility of women, immigration and the relationship between theater and science are not yet explored enough and still not seen as sufficiently attractive.

What are you working on right now?

My main activity is centered around a small space; it’s not a theater hall, it is a theater space where we hold workshops, do research, debate and stage dramatized readings. We have been developing it for the past four years since the Nuevo Teatro Fronterizo (the New Frontier Theater) opened in La Corseteria. Our activity can probably be considered disproportionate because we have very little economic infrastructure, we don’t have any official help, but it is the type of battle fought on many fronts. We try to support and form new playwrights, do research on the relationship between them theater and philosophy, the sciences, the representation of women in various contexts.

We also have activities with the immigrants in our neighborhood because the place is located in Madrid’s Lavapies neighborhood, which is a completely multicultural neighborhood.

Writing wise, what are your newest projects?

This year, in 2014, I have written two new texts. One is called Bartolome Encadenado (Chained Bartolome). It premiered in Barcelona this July. It is a tragedy; it has the structure of the Greek tragedy and a contemporary political theme. It was inspired by the tragedy of the Greek pensioner who committed suicide in Syntagma Square in Athens. This was a piece I had to write but it interested me a lot. And last week was the premiere of a very heterodox version that I did of Richard III by Shakespeare.

What’s your view of contemporary theater?

I started at the end of the 50s, in the university theater in Valencia. I had always written but as a regular activity of writing and stage works and forming actors I started in the 70s, during my time in Barcelona. I was witness to a very interesting renaissance of dramatic writing, of the dramatic text, of the literary dimension of theater which right in the 60s and 70s saw a moment of collective creation: the theater of the body, the beginning of the use of non-verbal audio-visual languages. In that effervescence, the text was considered a type of theatrical anachronism because theater was thought to be what was being created on stage, the body, the actors, the directors, the public space.

And then I started a systematic work, a bit stubbornly to recover theater’s literary text that is not in contradiction with the spectacular component or with the participation of the bodies of the actors.

Let’s say, between parentheses, that my professional career has always been likened to literature, having taught literature at the university. Literature is my land, my passion in life, and I couldn’t bear seeing the literary text assigned a purely subordinate role. So my research work and my creative work have been with literary material, not theatrical, simply in order to question the dominant theater. And in those years there was a type of re-emergence of dramatic writing, both in Spain and Latin America and several European countries and I think now the text is no longer considered as a secondary factor but has an equal position to innovation, experimentation and as a way to look at reality, as can be all the other languages of theater. So I’m relatively optimistic, and within this I would criticize the market, which is conditioning a certain type of theatrical texts that are excessively complacent.

There’s a series of themes that are not explored because they are not believed to be attractive enough.

What themes?

I would say, for example, that in Spain, where we have a government that is literally massacring culture with budget cuts, of course theater companies tend to perform a more entertaining type of theater, a more comical one, with themes of relationships, in general with more visible themes because they can connect with the public more easily. I think there’s an infinity of urgent themes to be tackled by theater and this is the central line of this project of the Nuevo Teatro Fronterizo: to see what is missing from Spanish theater, what are the theme-related flaws but also the formal ones, related to the poetics of the theater. And here we are doing a series of workshops, laboratories.

What is Spanish theater like? Is there something specific about it?

I don’t like generalities. I would say that it has a relative diversity, with absences that are, in between quotation marks, scandalous, themes that are not tackled because theater does not present them. It is interesting, nonetheless, that over the past three-four years a theater that is very connected with the immediate reality is emerging. It is bringing type of themes that are well connected with people’s preoccupations.

What are the new themes and instruments of the theater?

This depends a lot on individual choices. I would say that when I decided to open the space in Madrid, without any official help, I drew a series of lines of work that seemed to me were missing. For instance the theme of the woman. The woman, despite having conquered a certain position in certain sectors at the end of 20th century, has been completely forgotten in others, not to mention women’s own families. And so I developed various project that deal with the visibility of women.

In Spain, in the first third of the century there were many women who, within a traditional, catholic, patriarchal society were trying to make it in the world of sciences. We’ve done some research and selected five women from the first half of the century and made it into a text.

Another theme is immigration. Of course, in the 90s, the theme of immigration began to be more visible. Many young authors wrote on this theme, but it was a theme of denunciation, of the tragedy of the African without legal papers crossing the border. Now the theme of immigration is much more complex because there are thousands of immigrants wanting to be Spanish. We selected four immigrants, one from Senegal, one from Columbia, one from Bangladesh and one from Morocco.

To each one we assigned an author who had trained with me. They were together for several days, recording their experience, they told their stories of crossing many countries many times, of being rejected by society. Then there is a show with Spanish actors performing, under a Spaniard’s direction. When the show ends, the immigrant subject, the director and the author emerge and a debate starts with the public. It’s been very interesting because people have told me that they never thought of this mass of immigrants as individuals.

Another theme is the relationship between theater and science. The world is in the hands of science. And we believe this calls for some reflection. We formed a group of scientists and young playwrights and from here a text which is not science-fiction but which raises scientific questions emerged. Another flaw of Spanish theater is what we can call thinking. In Spain I would be able to name one, maybe two authors writing a theater of ideas, which makes one reflect on issues. Another flaw is that Latin American theater is practically unknown.

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