por ‘Issues of Dramaturgy based on the Nature of Texts within Contemporary Writing: On Stage in Catalan and English’
Good morning,
First of all, I would like to thank the event ‘Catalan Theatre in English:Past, Present & Future’ for its warm welcome inviting me to offer this speech for the opening. Above all, Dr. John London, director of The Centre of CatalanStudies inQueen Mary University of London, and all the other organizers, as the other participants and colleagues assisting at these special Congress. I felt very honoured by your invitation. I hope my speech will please you, I would like you to have agood time,butabove all, Ihope that it willilluminate you in the artistic, culturaland linguistic questions of our common interest.
About my Beginning:
Through the more than three decades working in stage creation in text-based theatre and opera, directing both in the international and national fields, I became gradually aware of the resounding significance of the artistic and social function of Stage Dramaturgy.
At the start of my directing path, in Barcelona, in the early 1990s, I intuitively recognised this added value championed here. Almost thirty-five years later, this is what I’ve just discussed in my recent thesis.
Certainly, I have subjected personal artistic experience, theatrical intuition and creative concern to observation, reflection, argumentation and debate, and I can confirm that, despite its significance, Stage Dramaturgy does not occupy the place it deserves.
On the mirroring, the visual aesthetics of the staging force us to detect who we are, how we actually think, and what direction, as society, should try to move towards in order to be wiser and more sympathetic human beings.
Some glimpses of my earlier work directing in London, will be given: during five years,between 1995 and 2000, I was at The Royal Opera House Covent Garden as an assistant of the Saff Directors, and I directed my own text-based projects: Spanish plays in English (Lorca and Cervantes, principally). Years earlier, though, and all the way through until now, I directed English plays in Catalan (Oscar Wilde, Shakespeare, mostly), although I also directed Molière’s plays and Kafka’s short stories, among others, plus major Catalan contemporary authors too.
Originally coming from a family of musicians and opera singers related to Liceu Opera House, I was involved in theatre from a young age. Instead of pursuing a more typical path as an actress, I chose to become a director, I trained and I’ve been an assistant director at Liceu Opera House for three seasons. So, before coming to London, I already directed in Barcelona professional text-based theatre projects in the early 1990s. This was extremely challenging at the time, especially as a young low-middle-class woman, trying to succeed in an upper-class male-dominated field. Despite that, I focused on staging my interpretations of both classical and contemporary works in regular theatre venues. Never losing my passion for opera, I directed several, as well, and in 2004 I was called to direct at Foyer’s Liceu Opera House, where I successfully devised a production text-based and lyrics.
From that moment on, when discussing my career in which I set my postulates, I’ll reflect on it retrospectively. According to certain philosophers starting with present-day thinking—understood as a result, variation, or interpretation of what came before— provides a more coherent and well-founded explanation.
Being a theatre director, I’ve become a playwright and in the middle of the way, I developed a Stage Dramaturgy theory. The mixture of all that is what I am today in front of you. I can’t, right now really, distinguish between all those different faces.
I see myself as an artist shaped like a matryoshka doll—layered, with each part nested within the others, yet all focused on the same goal: to understand the contemporary world in order to create a truly ambitious, yet thoughtful, theatrical experience.
That’s why, for me, it makes more sense, in order to make more coherent the following Issues of Dramaturgy based on the Nature of Texts withinContemporary Writing, to start from where I am now, rather than the other way around.
On doing so, and in that same sense of matryoshka doll, I’ll be focusing on the complexity of interculturality, hybridity and the dilution of genres on Stage in Catalan and English’.
I’ve just said earlier that it was truly challenging trying to be a woman theatre director in Barcelona (in Catalonia and in Spain) by the time. I must add that still it is. That’s way by the end of my paper, then, you’ll see how I inevitability focus on projects involving female’s gaze. It will make sense to you the projects I’ll expose being what I truly believe should be seen in now days’ scenarios, in UK or Australia, for instance, that’s to say, from spoken Catalan territories, written in Catalan, to worldwide English’s spoken communities. So, I’ll close the cercle and like Nietzsche’s Eternal Renaissance, I’ll come back to my starting point, not from zero but summarizing my particular journey that I’d specially designed for you today.
About my Writing:
Some of my new writings have been happily opened in Barcelona directed by other directors or by me.
Unlike many playwrights that decide to stage themselves their plays for several reasons, most of them because they don’t engage with directors, I am first a trained and professionalised theatre director, and only once I’ve been published and awarded, I started focusing my theatre endeavour on staging my new writing.
I tend to say, when I’m preparing to direct a play of mine, as right now in Barcelona, once on rehearsals, that I left the author at home and only the director came. That, already used to be like this, when I directed other authors. I asked them not to come over, in a very privative and ritualistic way, until the rehearsal’s creative process could be seen by others than the closest stage creative team. And, the other way round, I also stayed at home when other directors staged a play of mine.
When I write a play I do it in my studio at home in solitude. On paper or at the computer. It is tangible handy stuff. But in order to stage my play, I do need a creative team. First of all, the actors, of course. But not only them, as the creative process develops within a collective experience. This is human interaction. It is as ethereal as the souls you’ll see playing on rehearsals.
According to Carles Batlle, we shouldn’t afford any further to be told what has to be considered proper theatre and what not. And that is the first thing to highlight about new writing kind of mine.
Strictly, I would point out Carles Batlle’s well acclaimed theorical assay: El drama intempestiu, published by The Institut del Teatre of Barcelona on 2020, as you might well know. Through some of the frames he provides, uncanonical Catalan authors like me, for instance, have been allowed a place on the shelf in truly contemporary theatre, alongside authors with more common and traditional styles.
Staging new works in Barcelona too often involves a significant struggle against traditional methods, not just in commercial theatres but also in some of the so-called avant-garde venues.
Telling a story scaping common way, like, for instance, jumping up and down throughout time, space and action; or avoiding chronological succession of events; or putting together incoherently feelings and dramatics encounters; or eluding obvious conflicts in too plain character’s, doesn’t prevent this story from being told today. However, the struggle extends to other aspects, such as the structure of the play, the way scenes and dialogues are presented, the use of captions as part of the dialogue, and the balance of poetic elements.
According to that, in creative process, I like not knowing going towards something. It’s nice to feel comfortable with some fear and if you’ve done it enough times, you really tap into a certain kind of wonder and a certain kind of process of creating something rather than when you are repeating models. Once you get in that place of not knowing, it gives you this kind of courage that you wouldn’t normally have. And because you don’t normally would have it in real life, this is full theatrical creative artistic experience, from paper to staging.
My recent thesis shows that, in Catalonia, the prosody of contemporary theatre remains vulnerable and fragile. It is often misunderstood or dismissed by traditional actors, producers, artistic directors in Catalan venues, and by audiences who may occasionally, and perhaps accidentally, attend non-traditional, text-based performances.
However,this is not new in my country. For decades, we have faced these challenges, as illustrated by major Catalan authors like Maria Aurèlia Capmany and Joan Brossa. I had the pleasure of directing some of their work and, in doing so, I became deeply immersed in their material. While staging their plays, I painfully realized how challenging they can be for the establishment. This difficulty arises not only from their content but also from the way they deliberately break conventional storytelling rules.
New writing like mine faces two major challenges: the depth of its content and the high level of language used. Interestingly, this sophisticated language in foreign contemporary plays translated into Catalan is readily accepted—likely due to the exotic appeal of these works in institutional or privately funded venues—my work doesn’t receive the same tolerance. As for the complexity of my storylines and the more thoughtful nature of my plots, it’s been frustratingly difficult to escape comparisons with simpler, lighter plays. These lighter works are often regarded as the standard for what contemporary theatre should be like, making it harder for more complex pieces to be recognized.
As for non-conventional authors it’s difficult for me to categorize my new writing, within a single genre. It’s not exactly a traditional play with full dialogue, nor is it a standard novel, and it’s far from poetry. It might be closest to a collection of short stories, but even that doesn’t fully capture it, as some of these «stories» span more than three hundred pages. When I work on each piece, I try to minimize its individual voice, opening all my senses—especially my inner ears—to the full range of harmonics I hear within. So, when you read them or see them performed on stage, what you’re really experiencing is how each story has found its own unique way to be told.
Therefore, I would describe the stories I write and stage as a seamless blend of dramaturgy, narrative, and poetry. You can read them as narratives, yet when you watch them performed on stage, you’ll feel the poetry woven throughout.
Our world is not a framed identity. It is our fear to be lost what makes us frame it. I always believed throughout my life that theatre should help us overcome this fear by revealing the beauty of life as a frameless. A chaos that naturally comes together in its own time and way.
All of my new writing defies convention. It’s simply a text telling a story. However, through my experience as a director, I firmly believe that any text, no matter how unconventional, can be brought to the stage and shared with audiences.
This is where my skills as a director, as any other one, come into play. When staging my stories, I advocate for using every imaginable theatrical tool. In a way is a new rewriting. I integrate the text, plot, dialogue, and character conflicts into the set design, shaping these elements during the creative process to serve the story. Everything must be allowed—every aspect of theatre, from props, elements, and techniques to technological or analogue devices, music, lighting, and costumes. Most importantly, the human element—the actors with their bodies, voices, energy, and souls—must be fully embraced. This is when true, genuine theatre emerges.
About my Thesis:
Choosing these theatrical elements defines who I am, and I am a reflection of the community in which we live. The same applies to all directors. That’s why through my thesis I went one step forward and I moved away from the recurrent label usually attached to the personal reading to speak of the reading of a play or opera by a stage director.
Stage dramaturgy offers a deeper interpretation. When reexamining a universal plot, two narratives intersect: the enduring humanistic heritage with its historical significance, and the contemporary perspective of each new production. This interaction creates a fresh interpretation, blending the original story with a modern narrative.
Foundational stories are, indeed, usually those that come from tradition; the new stories linked to them are a supranarrative. The former are the ancestral legendary stories that are revised again and again; when we propose the newly generated story, theother story, for our stage conceptualisation, it becomes the director’s gaze.
In its turn, this other story can be original, an occasional invention that the stage director creates for a specific revisionism. This other story can also simply be a story at the service of an idiosyncratic aesthetic, such as in the case of visual artists who have worked as stage directors.By contrasting stories, we develop the stage dramaturgy and ferociouslycall upon all of us as the implicit receivers.
The effect that takes place in all cases is that of a different understanding, very likely new and unexpected, from the one canonically agreed. A new bias, like a newcolour, through which to look at the environment, manipulates its meaning, perverts it, certainly; and at the same time — we cannot deny its power —,enriches it.
Stage Dramaturgy provides a suprareading that although mainly arises in revisionisms is increasingly also seen more often in brand new dramatic writing productions.
The core of my study has consisted on analysing the transposition onto the current stage of a new text. We have broken down the strategy that has been developed for a drama to reach the stage that might be labelled as untimely according to Carles Batlle.
Stage Supranarrative, then, is a conceptualisation materialised based on all the visual silent stage vestiges, including performers movement on stage and actors’ body-language. Stage Dramaturgy appears to us as a social catalysing instrument due to its mirror effect and, thus, as a valuable self-awareness tool.
Nowadays, any social or artistic analysis needs a gender-based perspective for it to be taken seriously, for it to be considered scientific. That’s why, my thesis is irremissibly done through the postulates of postmodernism, in other words, second-wave feminism.
In the analysis I have also found the mirroring of what we examine through female characters that have been worked on and transformed for the stage; in other words, the perception of the woman’s identity for each period, and which part of it is addressed to the audience of each society.
In the end a male gaze has always shaped the many womanly attributes directly taken from either this classic Hollywood constellation of a Hellenistic nature or its own patriarchal aesthetics and sense of life’s rules. It is within this frame that we ‘read’ all the women myths so far, while it is through this very recent and insistent attempt to break that, through women directors, is about time to see not only the everlasting myths but also brand-new genres, characters and roles.
When a woman director and the stage creative team she has chosen put a plot on stage and try to strip her or his main heroes a new unthinkable gaze may be allowed to appear. It’s not only that particular woman artist’s personality what we see, is what worries us all. since we all now, after very few decades, start being concerned of the lack of that gaze.
The issue of parity I analysed in my thesis in recent seasons at the Liceu Opera House reflects a broader trend across Catalan and Spanish venues. This highlights the persistence of the heteropatriarchal paradigm. Many creative team members over the past four decades have come from middle-class backgrounds. While men have historically benefited from socioeconomic advantages in artistic and social advancement, women have often been burdened with domestic responsibilities. These traditional, invisible constraints, which continue to restrict opportunities, impact women’s ability to succeed. Addressing these challenges involves confronting and overcoming the prevailing hegemonic worldview.
In order to spread the female’s gaze, throughout the choices we’ve discussed related to Stage Dramaturgy, we urgently need to create opportunities in Catalonia to develop all generations’ (not only emergent) female perspective on both the everyday and the extraordinary subjects raised on stage, using its power, as both are equally significant.
About my Directing in London:
I directed under my female’ gaze Lorca’s In Five Years’ Time in a highly successful production at Southwark Playhouse in London in 1997. For this, I assembled an international company of ten actors, including musicians and dancers, with most being British and others long-term English speakers based in London. I based the production on my own adaptation, blending it with Lorca’s rich and complex text and Harry Chapman’s brilliant English translation. The show received outstanding reviews from all major London papers and was named one of the top five shows in town by Time Out’s Critics’ Choice.
This was likely the greatest success of my career, although it doesn’t diminish my other artistic achievements. The enthusiastic response from both audiences and critics was one of my most valuable lessons in theatre.
Shortly after that, I was asked to direct at The Gate Theatre at Notting Hill a production of Quixote, Under: Idiots, as it was called the season that by the time Irish director Mick Gordon designed for 98-99’ season. Irish Spanish Philologic and writer David Johnston was commissioned by The Gate Theatre to work on major’s Cervantes’s legacy and wrote the theatre adaptation of the full novel as I was commissioned to build up a new company based on my former one for Lorca’s successful show, to direct it in 1999.
Before and after directing the two main productions mentioned, I faced a common challenge in London: many people believed that an artist could only direct texts in their own language. This view often limited me to directing Spanish plays in the UK.I want to emphasize that I’ve always disagreed with that perspective. My main challenge was convincing people that theatre and art are about conveying the universal human essence of characters, regardless of the language. As we’ve been saying, not everything in theatre is about words.
About my Directing in Barcelona nowadaysmy own work as a playwriter:
After a year of work, I am now in the final rehearsals for my new text, L’eixida (Way Out). It is a story I adapted for the stage from one of the short stories in my recent collection, Dona Lletra Aigua (Woman, Letter, Water), which was awarded and published in 2022
The collection features five stories about various Spanish women living in contemporary rural settings, facing universal female struggles and injustices rooted in Western patriarchy. Each story, in its own unique and sometimes poignant way, explores their fight for empowerment. This small world reveals intricate details that, like a magnifying glass, help us understand the larger issues at play.
This new text was also chosen to reward as one of the three, amongst many, best director’s project text-based in last year’s 11th Season of Readings produced by Romea’s Theatre Foundation, AISGE and AADPC. I directed a demi-staging with the two committed actors I cast for it. It had great response from the audiences and critics. Unexpectedly, the majority emphasised my text for its power and its beauty, and, although recognising it unconventional nature, highlighted its evident potential theatricality. So, I’ve been managing the new company for the show, securing performances. We’ve scheduled a significant opening night at Teatre Joventut d’Hospitalet in Barcelona on December 8th. After that, it’s uncertain how long the run will continue. As you can see, it’s becoming increasingly challenging to sustain individual projects.
For the past four years, I’ve been working on trying to get a production, and I haven’t been successful yet. Another long story of mine is titled Palak Paneer, named after the Indian dish because the plot involves a couple traveling around India. This journey, which I did with my husband while living in London at the end of the 20th century, had a profound impact on me. I’ve written many stories about the cultural clash I experienced as a woman at that time. The fictional narrative begins in Barcelona on October 1, 2017, and traces back to 1997, the year I first visited India. This date is significant for Catalans due to, as you all know, to the controversial independence referendum known as El Procés, which is explored through a female perspective in my story.
About Catalan Projects I think should be seen in UK, EEUU, Australia…: Alicia en un món real (Alice in a Real World) and Stepping down:
In all that sense, the projects I truly believed should be seen now days from spoken Catalan territories, written in Catalan, to worldwide English’s spoken communities, are inevitably the ones like mines involving female’s gaze and uncanonical text-based melt on a truly thoughtful Stage Dramaturgy conceptualisation.
I’ve chosen for you a new project to be seen this present season, as example of all it’s been said.
The plot is based on a Spanish-Catalan bestseller graphic novel, Alicia en un món real (Alice in a Real World), by Isabel Franc (author) and Susanna Martín (illustrator), which deals with a woman battling breast cancer. Teresa Urroz, a renowned Catalan actress, director, and art therapist, spent several years working to stage this project. With the support of a brilliant artistic team and four esteemed Catalan actresses, Urroz was lucky and the project finally received the attention it deserved from Carme Portaceli, the first female director of Teatre Nacional de Catalunya. It is now set to be co-produced there, and will be opening on May the 8th.
In this project, we will see the much-needed female perspective on subjects often overlooked due to their discomfort under patriarchal views. In ‘Alicia en un món real’, the protagonist, Alice, chooses not to undergo breast reconstruction after her mastectomy, rejecting traditional patriarchal standards of female aesthetics. Additionally, the secondary conflicts in the story involve lesbian women around fifty years old, bringing attention to their realities and encouraging audiences to focus on these important issues. This approach represents a genuine genre perspective.
Regarding the theoretical approach, referring to Carles Batlle’s article, The Comic: a mestizo dramaturgy, published by the Institut del Teatre, within the collection of Performing Studies dramaturgy can be considered as a construction of different pieces, where, again, it does not only matter the text but also the performance, as in comics, where both the letter and the drawing matter, everything forms an indissoluble whole story.
As Teresa Urroz herself says in her conceptual development of the project, she proposes an open dramaturgy, which flees from the text‐centrism, and direct link with social realities of women’s specific marginalization and stigmatization.
About my conclusions:
I’ll close now the cercle, as I said to you at the beginning, and I’ll finally come back to my starting point.
I am now in the final rehearsals for my new text, L’eixida (Way Out). It is a story I adapted for the stage from one of the short stories in my recent collection, Dona Lletra Aigua (Woman, Letter, Water), which was awarded and published in 2022. After a year of truly difficult time because it is produced by all the members of the creative team, we’ve achieved a significant opening night at Teatre Joventut d’Hospitalet in Barcelona on December 8th. You’re all most welcomed!
Also, aiming always to touch the audiences of all communities and languages, pushing them to melt into common thought by enriching them with their identity’s differences, there is this story of mine—retitled just recently Stepping down—that was inspired to me by a real episode that I experienced first-hand in London when I was living and working in the capital of the UK on my stage projects from 1995 to 2000.
I was so struck by this story, that I wrote the first version of a play about it, which was the first text I wrote for the stage. Originally in Catalan, it was translated into English soon afterwards. At that time, I had already acquired a good reputation as a director in the London theatre and I sent this first draft to the literary director of the National Theatre, Jack Bradley, who had the kindness to respond in a letter of the 9th of September 1999 which I still keep and to whom I can never be sufficiently grateful for the contents. In his letter Bradley recognises the interest of the story, makes some suggestions about how to strengthen the play and strongly encourages me to work on the first draft. Only at the start of my writing career at that point, I have now developed my creative writing over decades, so this version of the same story is the work of a mature author. Rewritten in Catalan in 2018 —its title now is Deserció d’un mestre (escenari possible)—, this final and definitive version has been translated into English asStepping downand in Spanish this year.
While I’m uncertain about the challenges or feasibility of securing productions in Catalonia, the UK or Spain, and having them performed by local actors for respective audiences, the experience itself is valuable. Harry Chapman, an Englishwriter and Spanish and French philologist from Cambridge who co-adapted the English version of Lorca’s In Five Years’ Time with me in order that I directed it at London’s Southwark Playhouse in 1997 as I said, is now my final English translator. After an insightful and innovative first draft by young translator Marta Marín, Harry and I have been working together, once more, to refine the translation, continually fascinated by how language reveals the thought processes of its speaking community.
Thank you.
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Marta Momblant Ribas, Theatre Director and Playwright.
London, September the 12th at 11am: Paper’s transcription of the 30’ talk
Catalan Theatre in English: Past, present & future
Two days of Talks, Workshops and Performances.
12-13 September 2024
Queen Mary University of London Arts Two 2.17
Centre for Catalan Studies & Institut Ramon Llull
