by The 25 people who have gathered in a small Madrid theater in the past few months to take into account identity, relationships, gender-specific violence and inclusion are not exactly the amount they normally expect to pursue a state-of-the-art drama room that is housed in a former slaughterhouse. And that is exactly the point.
The men and women between the ages of 65 and 84 are the first cohort of an initiative to present those who live in the Matadero Arts Center in the south of the Spanish capital, into the joys and challenges of contemporary theater. Last year that many of the older residents of the Barrier Von Usera and Arganguela rarely visited contemporary theater and it would be unlikely that the doors of the new layer 10 room, the Matadero and the city council have developed a plan.
“The idea of Nave 10 was to create a contemporary theater room that offers relatively young directors and authors,” said Marta Ruiz, who leads the learning public relations in Nave 10.
“But we have also found that the programming, which you receive in a very contemporary art space like Matadero, can be a bit out of the way for people over 65 who can see it as something that aims at a younger audience. Therefore we decided that it would be good to bring older people and feel that they were part of things.”
Last summer, Ruiz and the actor and director Mariana Kmaid Levy began the word in local cultural centers and day centers, in which they were looking for two dozen older people who were supposed to take part in a free project in which 10 games and participation in courses, workshops and discussions would take part.
“From there we have put together this group, which has spent the entire season two or three times a month to see the shows, to do activities and workshops, to know the theater a little more inside and to hire a little deeper on the topics of the works,” added Ruiz.
In the past nine months, those have been registered Escuela de Espectadores Sénior (The senior audience school) saw, dissected and discussed everything from the bitter tears from Petra from Kant to Jauría, a piece based on the notorious process of five men who raped a young woman in Pamplona nine years ago. The most recent piece was an auto fiction two hiker by the actors and writers Nao Albet and Marcel Borràs about two aging friends.
Some of the participants, such as Carmen Horrillo, are pleased to find out how a production is put together at a technical level, but also receive the tools to decrypt some of the forbidden codes of the modern drama.
“It is now easier for me to explain why people should see this kind of contemporary theater,” she said.
Isabel Cotado, whose membership in the program has helped her navigate the early days of her retirement.
“I learned to understand and accept people as they are,” she said. “I also learned to laugh at my own life and my own problems – it takes the sting from the nonsense that you are faced in life. Life is not just about you.”
Kmaid Levy said that the group’s “enthusiasm and life experience” had helped them interpret the works and to gave themselves into the characters, but had also proven the meetings to be instructive for the specialists involved.
“This is a group of people who talk about theater in different ways and another vision and another way of looking at things,” she said.
Albet and Borràs also said that their interaction with the group had provided a different perspective.
“They gave us really interesting perspectives about experiences they had, and it’s always great,” said Borràs. “Usually we get reviews and criticisms from friends at work or from critics or on social media.”
Luis Luque, the artistic director of Nave 10, said that the basic idea of the project, which will be resumed later this year with a new cohort, consists of establishing connections between the participants, between the residents and the event location as well as between art and a sometimes neglected sector of society.
“You saw that contemporary theater also speaks to you,” he said. “There is nothing remote; it is something that calls them as men and women and asks them questions.”
He emphasized Jauría, which is based on the jurisdiction of a process that carried out a nationwide debate about sexual violence.
“They were very honest and very passionate about Jauría and forced themselves to speak because they witnessed attacks and some were abused,” he said. “They come from a generation in which there was a very brutal sexism – especially women. When older men see this, they say: ‘What did we do about all of this?’ The questions you came with were very interesting.
Theater must not show the finger, said Luque. “But it shows them their reflection in the mirror when it comes to how they behaved.”
Marta Rivera de la Cruz, Madrid’s city council for culture, tourism and sport, strives to fight the creation of “cultural ghettos” and the idea to fight that a certain kind of art are only for certain people. The success of the school recently came in a chat with a participant. “She told me that she had come to the theater with her grandchildren and that she had explained what it was about the piece before she saw it,” said de la Cruz.
Or, as Horrillo puts it, nothing dared, nothing won. “People should see that; they can decide whether they like it or not,” she said. “After all, that’s art too.”
