For some time now, the Valencian Institute of Culture (IVC) organizes meetings in the lobby of the Teatre Principal with people from the scene who are about to set foot in our flagship theater, they talk in front of the public, with the help of a moderator, about their professional career and about the play they are going to perform when the curtain rises. They are recorded meetings that now, in times of Coronavirus, The IVC has turned to YouTube so that we can recreate them from home and soak up theatrical wisdom. You will find, For example, the meeting with Henry Benavent, Maria Caballero y Jaume Polycarp, actors and director Faust, a piece cooked with that combination between puppets and actors so Bambalina that opens an expressive world full of possibilities. Enric Benavent explains how the actors end up establishing an absolutely intimate relationship with the puppets with which they share the stage, Policarpo talks about the ambiguity of art, of its live sets and the process of adapting a text as dense and profound as Goethe's, in which the demon Mephistopheles is played in this case by a woman (Empar Canet), why, dice, the roles are absolutely interchangeable, especially in classical texts. And María Caballero gives us the vision of an actress who is starting out and has to assume the uncertainties and ups and downs of the profession..
Another talk sits at the table Ma José Goyanes y Chema Cardena, actress and author/director of Susan and the devil. Cardeña begins by confessing that this work, —which has been very difficult to create because it portrays the darkest part of the human being— is going to be a reference in his career and Goyanes reviews his beginnings alongside Emilio Gutiérrez Caba, with whom he set up a theater company when he had 18 years, his years in Cameroon, and his problems with Franco's censorship and the Committee for the Defense of Morality (CDM) for his nakedness in the work Equus. “As creators we have the obligation not to remain silent, to shake consciences”, Cardeña says at one point, and give the public the opportunity to choose what they want, to judge and give an opinion. And he ends by saying: “A creator who is not committed to his time is not a great creator.”, the great ones have been great because they have dared, from Aristophanes to Bretch, a Sartre. Art for art's sake, it's not art, It's aesthetic, It's fashion.". They will also talk, of course, of the work Susan and the devil, which revolves around Susan Atkins, one of Sharon Tate's murderers, locked up in prison for forty years, the last, with terminal cancer. He has been denied parole once again (They have done it fourteen other times before) and his hope of being able to die at home fades, so he decides to give an interview to put pressure. That's the play, an hour of interview with a tabloid journalist who is twisting his heart and who also hides what is his. Do you want to know if you can empathize with a murderer who killed a pregnant woman?? You will have to see the play when the theaters reopen.
The third session of confidences Its protagonists are the actress Blanca Portillo and to the director Carme Portaceli, responsible for the work Mrs. Dalloway. Portaceli —who has been the first director of the Spanish Theater since 1583, and the first to be staged in the large hall of the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya in 2010—begins by laying out the discrimination that she has suffered as a woman director, which led him to practice absolute parity when he was in charge of the Spanish Theater. It's not a talent problem, says convinced, but of opportunities. The two playwrights discuss the change of roles in the scene (Portillo has played male characters such as Segismundo de life is dream o Hamlet), of the untouchability of patriarchy, of quotas to seek parity, of the paternalistic attitude of some professional colleagues, and their struggle to impose authority as directors.
