The first theater that Claudio Tolcachir (Buenos Aires, 1975) visited when visiting Madrid for the first time was the María Guerrero. “My dream, almost an obsession, was to know Madrid,” he says, “and my discovery of Madrid was this theater, this block, this balcony…” Almost two decades have passed, and that actor-author-director who had converted his Buenos Aires apartment into a theater -Timbre 4- has become one of the most admired figures of Spanish theater, which has welcomed him. Today he returns to the first Madrid theater he set foot in with a production by the National Dramatic Center: ‘Los de ahi’, with text and direction by Tolcachir himself and a cast that includes Nourdin Batán, Fer Fraga, Malena Gutiérrez, Nuria Herrero and Gerardo Otero. It will be on display until March 9. “I haven’t written for seven years,” Tolcachir reveals to ABC. I needed to do it again, but I wanted to get rid of noises about whether something is contemporary or not, whether it will work or not. To write I need to immerse myself in a very primary need, very honest, very genuine… And the idea of community appeared. I didn’t feel like telling a story with a plot, not even a story related to me; I wanted to create a universe, a community, an ecosystem… And the image appeared to me – which I have seen here and in Buenos Aires – of very young boys waiting on the sidewalk for an order. I felt the whiplash that there was a world there. “The youthThe ‘riders’ are the protagonists of ‘Those from there’. They are young, “and that allows me to reflect on the place that a large part of youth occupies in our time, the sacrifice that occurs in them; not having a place, not having space, being almost disposable bodies. Also, he admits, he really liked, theatrically, the dynamics of bicycles. “That world of sound and energy seemed interesting to me.” Claudio Tolcachir has given a twist to history. Its characters are Spanish and work in a Nordic country – it is not revealed or mentioned in the work, but it is Finland -, with the climatic and language difficulties that it entails. There they form a community that, the author and director continues, “is not really a family but they do have points in common. Each one carries their stories, their nationality. and yet they are weaving a coexistence. I wanted the public to see what it is like to live without understanding the language, what is being talked about, without understanding if it is a holiday or not. I wanted to show them the difficulty of being far from your homeland, the abyss and excitement that not understanding what is happening produces, and much more so if you have to work with codes from a culture that is not yours; something that, of course, has to do with me. In ‘Those from there’ they talk, says Tolcachir, “about fatherhood, love, friendship, pain, illness, couples, but not with an ideological perspective… And I realized that there is nothing in the world that I want to talk about more than all this. All my vital meanings are placed here in many ways, and that was the invitation I wanted to make to the public: to look at those characters with respect, with love, with humor… »Claudio Tolcachir shows marginal characters. «Normally when one talks about a marginal world – he says – one usually imagines the characters at the extreme of marginality, like at the bottom of that swamp. And I was interested in telling that world, but at the same time providing it with humor, vitality, ideas, dreams and stories. There is, he adds, another element of lack of communication, in addition to language. «It is a machine that gives them the packages and the address to which they should go. There is no communication possible. And they go with a map, deliver the order and come back. It may seem a little futuristic, but there are many things about the system that I feel I do not control. He defines the work as realistic, “with some absurd and a little dystopian lines, but also symbolic.” ContradictionThere is a contradiction in many of the clients who use the ‘rider’ service. If they do, they are perpetuating a system that overexploits them; If they don’t, they don’t have a job. Claudio Tolcachir says that “all of us who sit down to watch the work are part of this reality; The ‘riders’ are there and they are part of this city because they serve the city… But, however, the city denies them: they have no name, they have no legislation. “There is no morality in ‘Those from there’, he says its author. «My theater is never discursive, and it is never lecturing. Which does not mean that it is not ideological. But it depresses me when I can understand what the author wanted to tell us. “I like to discover it and I like to place the viewer in that same position of discovering, connecting the dots and taking sides.” ObjectiveThere is a clear objective in the writing of the work: youth. «I am concerned about what we are doing with youth decade after decade. I think about my country: the war, the dictatorship, the crises, the exiles, not having a place. I feel that there is a circularity, very painful. And we don’t learn. «Young people seem disposable, and that is tremendous. I suppose that in all generations it has been said: how difficult it must be to be young today. The actors, he says, are very young. Some of them even make their theater debut. «Each one carried and infected his character with a lot of his own nature. And for me it was very beautiful that this theater was also taken over by characters, by actors and by people from whom I do not ask to say well or to stand well on stage; They are on stage with their bikes and things, climbing, fighting and sweating. And that for me is very exciting. «It is a work – he concludes – written to put the body into it; writing has finished with the bodies of the actors and the space they occupy. I am not an author of images; I begin to build dialogues, stories, but without imagining them. But this is a work where the conflict with the environment is total, permanent. And I had to build a lot of images. It has been difficult for me to write. “You have to see what happens with two bodies that collide, with closeness, with distance…”
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