There are questions that make one uncomfortable because they are too simple. What would a town be like without art? From this idea, apparently naive, but deeply unsettling, is born Stàsis d’un horitzó, the show that the second-year Arts Escèniques de l’Institut Doctor Puigvert will premiere next April 17 at 7 PM at SAT! Sant Andreu Teatre.
Stàsis d’un horitzó is not just a work, it is a process. A process that began months ago and that, as explained by the project director, Neus Martínez, “it is about the creation of a theatrical piece with the students of the second year of scenic baccalaureate”. A creative laboratory where the students do not just interpret a text: they build it from scratch to train for their interpretive future.
Create from nothing
The project starts from a radical idea: ceding control. The students decide what they want to explain and how. “It is decided what one wants to talk about, how the piece will go, what it will have and it is among everyone that this theatrical piece ends up being built,” explains Martínez. For six months, the group has gone from intuition to the stage. First, exploring; then, giving shape. “It is a project that started in October” and that has evolved to become a creative machinery where everything fits: dramaturgy, music, body, space.
To make it possible, they have divided the process into commissions. Small teams that assume real responsibilities. “We have created commissions that are like working groups because everyone can do everything,” details the director. A system that transforms the classroom into a company.
The revolution of art
The result is a piece that defies labels. “It’s the revolution of art,” Martínez summarizes. On stage, a story: a town that decides to prohibit all artistic expression to be more efficient, more productive, happier. But what comes next is not order, but fracture. In this sense, fiction becomes a mirror and language a tool. “It’s a show where songs, text, dance are mixed,” he/she advances. A sum of disciplines that responds to an initial desire as simple as it is revealing: wanting it all. To dance, to sing, to speak... And to do it with meaning.
Beyond their debut on a large stage, the students will experience another matter; perhaps the most important one. "It's a super opportunity to truly understand how the whole process of presenting a theatrical project is articulated," states Martínez. Because here they have not only learned to act; they have learned to build. To understand that theatre is a complex mechanism: "It's a very large gear," he adds. And each of the students is an essential piece of it. The result is not just a play, but a gaze. A way of understanding art as a shared space, as a process, and as a question.
An invitation to the neighborhood
The premiere at SAT! will not only be the end of the journey, but also a beginning. “I think it’s interesting to see the concerns of young people today,” Martínez defends when inviting the neighborhood to attend the Sant Andreu venue. "To understand what worries them, what they want to say, how they look at the world." Perhaps, in the end, this is the real question the work poses: not what a town without art would be like, but what a town that doesn't listen to its young people when they create it would be like.
