We’ve been watching it for a while. Perhaps it is due to the crisis and the cuts, but not only that. It is happening in most cultural events: cinema, theatre, music and, of course, visual arts. There is a return to self-management, to do it yourself, to direct and individualised dialogue with the spectator, to the small scale. This week we saw it at the Teatre Romea in Barcelona, in La nit just abans dels boscos (The night just before the woods), a monologue written by Bernard-Marie Koltès, which speaks of loneliness, incomprehension and rebellion. On this occasion, its director Roberto Romei has not let us listen to this intense monologue comfortably seated in the theatre’s stalls, but has made the spectator go out into the street and be challenged by a character (brilliant Òscar Muñoz) who could be any of those who usually hang around the Raval. Defenceless, vulnerable, demanding, desperate and dignified at the same time, the protagonist of La nit just abans dels boscos challenges the spectator and guides him through a journey through the depths of the theatre while he explains his experiences, frustrations, longings and desires, as one can only tell to a stranger who will never be seen again. There are precious moments of truth in this performance that ends in the dressing rooms, from which the actor cannot come out to greet, nor leave his character because, from the beginning, the safe separation between the performance space and the place of the spectator has been abandoned. Not far from number 51 Hospital Street, where the Romea Theatre is, is number 14 Muntaner Street. Mireia Sallarès lives there, an artist who carried out a project on “the truth” and, as Pilar Bonet wrote in an article dedicated to her in A*DESK, “has spent many years recording the lives lived, those realities that she records as true heritage of humanity.” Now Sallarès presents one of her most recent and also most personal works, Literatura de replà (Literature of landing) in the building where her grandmother used to live and where she now lives. Sallarès is a great storyteller who collects stories and sometimes finds them without looking for them. This is the case of the building on Muntaner Street, with a brothel on the main floor and two landings with boarded-up, silenced floors and on whose wall the artist wanted to tell her stories, of life lived, suffered and dreamed, in the first person of its previous tenants, directly questioning us. Literatura de replà is a project that is part of the exhibition “Jo em rebel·lo, nosaltres existim” (I rebel, we exist), organized by the Fundació Palau de Caldes d’Estrac and, as in the case of La nit just abans dels boscos, it has not left us any respite, nor an audience in which to protect ourselves from these tranches de vie or moments of authenticity.
