Jordi Casanovas, packing a punch

© Christian Maury
Author and theatre director Jordi Casanovas

In Catalonia, for many years now theatrical innovation, experimentation and risk have been about dressing up the characters of Hamlet in a white blazer and having them sing in front of a microphone. This, we were told, is modernity, and audiences responded with standing ovations.

But circa 2005, a certain Jordi Casanovas arrived in Barcelona from Vilafranca and with great poise announced out that the emperor had no clothes on, that creating theatre for the people of today was not just about wardrobe changes, but rather about writing and performing stories for people of today.

The smile on more than one person’s face froze, but they quickly dismissed him with a gesture of their hands, as if to say, “this young man who looks like a Mexican ballad singer is completely out of touch and has no idea what he’s talking about”, before going about their business and contemplating each other, satisfied.

Indeed, Casanovas had good reason to be surprised, as this was only happening in the theatre. If Catalan novels had merely produced rehashes of Don Quixote, if DJs had simply dropped Mozart at Sònar, if painters had chucked paint at Dalí’s pictures and the cinema had merely churned out remakes of Citizen Kane, I hardly think that everyone would have agreed that this was the new Catalan creativity. But that’s how it was with theatre; this was the mirage that many directors and entire companies had fobbed off on us – this is what contemporary Catalan theatre is all about and we are downright proud of it, they said, in unison. Well no. Jordi Casanovas arrived from Vilafranca and said that fireworks are very pretty but that creativity in the theatre was about telling new stories. He was not the first person to say that, of course, but he may have been the first with the necessary drive and talent to prove it empirically. Maybe it’s because he comes from a scientific background.

After dropping out of his telecommunications course he took to the theatre, founded the Flyhard company and, after a couple of shows, made a name for himself in Barcelona by releasing a trilogy of works based on video games, no less. He went on to premiere plays in the Beckett and Villarroel theatres, and in 2010 he turned his rehearsal room in the neighbourhood of Sants into a showroom. A place as small as your fist and with a similar impact. At the Sala Flyhard theatre he only presents contemporary works by Catalan authors, and in the meantime continues to premiere his own works at theatres including the Lliure, TNC and Poliorama. A torrent of activity, of new, down-to-earth stories which speak to us, turn our lives into a story and the theatre into a shared experience, incessantly opening doors onto new texts and new authors, finally helping to build, slowly but surely, the true Catalan theatre of today. Last february, Jordi Casanovas was awarded the 2012 Ciutat de Barcelona prize in the drama category for his play Pàtria.

Jordi Galceran

Playwright, scriptwriter and translator

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