“Altsasu”: This is the play about violence in the Basque Country that Vox does not want to perform in Madrid | Culture

As a teenager, María Goiricelaya remained silent for 15 minutes behind a banner in response to calls from Gesto por la Paz in the Basque Country to express her opposition to any death by violence. He did it in his schoolyard during recess. Today, the Bilbao-based playwright and director, who co-founded the independent ensemble La Dramática Errante with actress Ane Pikaza, recalls these moments as she prepares to present her work at the Teatro de la Abadía in Madrid next week. Alsace, a documentary theater show about the violence that ETA perpetrated in the Basque Country for so many years. And for this he chose what happened on October 15, 2016, in front of the doors of the Koxka bar in the city of Alsasua (Navarre), a violent confrontation in which several residents of the city were involved with two Civil Guard officers and their couples. “You can’t leave the past behind. You have to accept it in the theater in order to empathize. “Nobody has a monopoly on pain,” says the 41-year-old director, who won the Max 2023 Prize for the best cinema adaptation Barrenby Federico García Lorca.

Alsace It premiered in 2021 and has since given 70 performances throughout Spain and also abroad (Montevideo, Medellín and Bogotá). When it happened through Vitoria in November 2021, the PP municipal group in the city council of this city, governed by the PNV, tried to obtain the cancellation of the works, but did not succeed. Two seasons later, history repeats itself in Madrid, although this time it was Vox that requested withdrawal from the abbey’s program (whose main financier is the Community of Madrid). In December, the party asked two questions to the Cultural Commission and the plenary session of the Community of Madrid, chaired by the PP of Isabel Díaz Ayuso, to express its rejection of the representation of the work in the abbey because, according to the statement of the MP Ana Velasco Vidal-Abarca, “justifies the attacks and aggression that the Civil Guard and its partners are subjected to and that it is pure nationalist indoctrination.” Vox even called for the cancellation of subsidies for the abbey. Paradoxically, it was now the PP that rejected the amendment: the Madrid government will “always be on the side of the victims” but “also always on the side of freedom of expression, creative freedom and public freedom.” Vote, what you want to see,” said Culture Minister Mariano de Paco.

“Freedom of expression is an irrefutable line in democracy. Any censorship is not part of the democratic process. “Opening the door to censorship means opening the door to a direct attack on people’s rights and freedoms,” says Goiricelaya. Alsace was created within the framework of the Cicatrizar Project, an international proposal for dramaturgical creation led by José Sanchis Sinisterra and Carlos José Reyes with the aim of promoting knowledge and reflection on the recent past and promoting the values ​​of the right to memory. Goiricelaya’s choice of events in Alsasua was due to the fact that the Alsasua case was in full swing at that time, with demonstrations and various actions by citizens, politicians and institutions. “It was very present in Basque society at the time. “It was an open scar,” says the director, who in his role focuses primarily on the legal process of the case. “It is very rich material when it comes to proposing a drama that is fast, powerful, rhythmic and full of tension and emotion. It is a case that has a strong tendency to go to the theater to provoke thought and provoke encounters or disagreements,” he adds.

Alsace, which will be performed at the Abbey from January 18th to 28th, takes place in a single open space and on six benches that form the different places on the stage. Performed by Nagore González, Egoitz Sánchez, Aitor Borobia and Ane Pikaza, who embody more than 30 characters, the work combines exact transcriptions of the court proceedings with fictional dialogues about the personal relationships of the protagonists. The actors play both victims and attackers, defenders or prosecutors or judges, mothers of each other, and embody people with different and very contradictory ideologies. “I think it’s a challenge for the public. “When the person being attacked becomes the aggressor, it’s an opportunity to put yourself in the other person’s shoes,” explains Goiricelaya, who not only wrote the text but also directed it.

The playwright wants to believe that Basque society is not sleepwalking now, but that it was so in the past. “It is a society of enforced silence. I recognize myself there, in circles where it was dangerous to express or express one’s ideology. I don’t know who my father or mother will vote for, nor what my closest friends will vote for. “We’ve overcome something, but it’s clear that we’re forming a kind of queue where we’re still not done sitting down, looking each other in the eyes and talking about our pain,” he explains in one room the abbey after a hearing event on the theme of memory and justice with the Basque sociologist Imanol Zubero.

“Forgetting can never heal wounds. Human memory is selective and we must forget some pain in order to survive. There are things I don’t want to forget because they are part of my past and will shape my future. If we don’t know where we come from, we don’t know where we want to go. I am in favor of not forgetting. Everything I experienced in my youth, how the bombs sound, barely perceptible details that are stuck in my memory. Personally, I don’t feel like moving forward and forgetting some things. Some things I have probably forgotten, but there are others that I want to remember because they define who I am,” says the director, for whom theater is a space where we can heal and soothe open wounds. “I live in utopia, I’m an optimistic person, but I hope that this show will help heal wounds and that we never have to relive things that we have experienced, so that we can take our past into our hands to do that “Not to repeat what happened.” We invite the viewer to let go of certainties and put themselves in the shoes of the person in front of us.”

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