The city is a text that is read by walking  

Walter Benjamin

Almost since the beginning of my time as artistic director of the TNC, I was convinced that I would focus my last season on Barcelona. Barcelona, for me, has always been the city of my dreams. From a very early age, in Valencia, I had a close family link with it, but when my older brother came here to study architecture, I made regular visits to the city with my parents. I was just a child, and my imaginary flew to this city where people spoke Catalan (my language forbidden in Valencia) in public spaces, shops and restaurants, not only at home. It was a cosmopolitan city, full of different people, from everywhere; a city in which culture, at the end of Franco's regime, in a country where it had never been respected, forged ahead; a city where the ideologies that attracted me were then more visible, more present; a city where you could breathe freedom and light, despite the lack of freedom and all the moonless nights. Where women were more independent, freer. And I dreamt that I would spend my whole life here.

At a young age I came to study Art History at the Universidad Central and Audiovisual Languages at the Institut del Teatre located in Carrer Elisabets. I was thrilled about being in Barcelona, speaking in Catalan everywhere and, especially, seeing a committed, new, different and, for me, completely European theatre. It seemed as if living in Barcelona made you part of world culture or, at least, this is what everything I was experiencing made me feel.

Els Comediants, Els Joglars or Dagoll Dagom were innovative companies committed to their historic moment and to our culture and language.

The Teatre Lliure, which will turn fifty this very year, staged plays in a very transgressive way which did not always earn the approval of critics, although the most important thing for us were the productions themselves and the innovations that they brought about.

The Festival Grec, which will also celebrate its fiftieth anniversary, was beginning to bring innovative and breakthrough shows. The Mercat de les Flors offered us names such as Peter Brook and Peter Stein, among many others. Everything made you feel that you could do anything you wanted; and from all of this you learnt, above all, freedom.

It was a unique moment. We needed to identify with something, and theatre formed part of the identity of our city.

And later, in 1996, this theatre, the TNC, was founded. A theatre that was born with the aim of being a reference of quality and of fostering our heritage and language. 

The city does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand 

Italo Calvino

If we look at Barcelona, we see that it is replete with signs, because a city is a narrative experience. A city is a living social organism, not just a set of buildings, although Barcelona, does boast an unquestionable architectonic beauty. But the city is memory, and in our beloved, unappreciative and magical city, political discourse and theatre have always shared a path, as in all the cities of the world. The shared history, the difficult past and, at the same time, with magical leaps full of vitality and hope, has the capacity to identify ourselves with our history and with what we are and want to be.

Precisely because all of this, we want to focus this season on rambling through the history of our beloved and cantankerous Barcelona. On this path through this season, we will meet a traditional family who intend to bring up their offspring with values that no longer exist.

Or the vision of a Rodoreda who, from the hated exile, considers that, while Europe is being constructed, we are in a situation where the hands of the clock do not move, stilled by a time kept only by means of repression, ignorance and fear.

Or the young Andrea who one evening arrives in Barcelona to study at the family's home in the Eixample, in Carrer Aribau, which contains an exact replica of the fragmentation that Franco's regime put us through: hunger, false morality and fights between brothers, while the sky turns blue and culture saves future generations, like Andrea herself and her fellow university students.

Or Natàlia’s return to Barcelona after having lived in France and England a few days before Puig Antich was executed. And her research into her mother and her mother's friend in order to come to terms with the past. All the characters devised by Montserrat Roig try to look for a meaning to live in a Barcelona marked by the final years of the regime.

Or a real event of gratuitous violence on a beach in Barcelona that locks its protagonist into solitude and leads him to flirt with the extreme right.

Or the police station at 43 Vía Layetana where tortured and torturers confront each other while the city still debates whether the building should be considered a site of remembrance.

Or the doors open to Middle Eastern artists, who have managed to turn art into a need in their societies, open doors from a Barcelona that befriends Palestine.

And the welcome to artists from here, from Catalonia, who join us to make their creations…

Sharing all this makes us feel we are in a city and in a country evolving towards the right place of History.

Solitude requires being alone whereas loneliness shows itself most sharply in company with others 

Hannah Arendt

This great figure of 20th-century thinking argued that happiness is not an individual achievement but a shared experience born out of the meeting with others and active participation in shared life. She does not understand happiness as an intimate achievement or an individual personal state of mind. For her, life is only meaningful if it is shared, when it is constructed alongside others in a common space.

Isolation in more hyperconnected societies but less linked to what is truly human has rapidly increased. Social media promise connection but separate and isolate individuals. It is not enough to be surrounded by people; we need to form part of a common world.

As William Dafoe said in his speech on World Theatre Day, shared experience in real time of an act of creation, that may be scored and designed but is always different, is certainly the obvious strength of the theatre. Socially, politically, theatre has never been so important and vital to our understanding of ourselves and the world.

Our theatre is a meeting point, a tool of collective reflection, a refuge and a mirror of our own lives. Even the local economy also revolves around this activity. The city is no longer a place in which to live but a place to create. What emerges, what concerns us, what thrills us, the distress, the hopes… we take them to the stage. Through characters and metaphors, the community looks at itself. But theatre educates and unites.

Jane Jacobs points out that cities need all their residents in order to function, and Tierno Galván describes the city as a public home.

Theatre has shaped our way of understanding the world. In the theatre, people have learned to listen, to put themselves in the shoes of others, to express emotions and to value stories as a form of knowledge. At a time when many cities grow driven by business, speculation or image, ours is guided by imagination and creativity. The truth is that in Barcelona, in Catalonia, theatre is part of the essence of life.

Once again, for another year and with more energy than ever in this final season, I thank you for supporting us.

Carme Portaceli