Jordi Casanovas (Vilafranca del Penedès, 1978) is a playwright, director and theater producer, as well as promoter of the Flyhard theater and the High Season Dramaturgy Tournament. Now it’s doing a double on the Barcelona billboard: the Romea theater is playing the new version of Jauría, based on the case of the 2016 Sanfermines gang rape by the Manada, and the comedy premiered at La Villarroel on Thursday Conspiranoia, which he directs and has written together with Marc Angelet, based on conspiranoic theories such as terraplanism, which are increasingly present. On stage: Eduard Farelo, Àurea Márquez, David Vert and Mia Esteve.
Where does Conspiranoia come from?
It is a dramatic comedy that arises from an anecdote of an acquaintance, who is a primary school teacher. One day he explained the planets and the universe to the dwarfs and the next day a mother told him that she assumed that day he would explain the other alternative option. “And what is the other alternative option?”, he asks. “We at home don’t think the Earth is spherical, we think the Earth is flat”.
A flat earther.
It seems as if the people who think these conspiracy theories must be far away, but they are close people. Then, with Marc Angelet, we asked ourselves why people need to believe these wild theories.
And Conspiranoia is born.
The work is this research process of finding why someone needs to believe in conspiracy theories or almost absurd theories. The answer is probably because you need to find a community. They are people who lack a community, and here they feel comfortable, loved and supported.
So, are you going further?
Yes, because above all the play revolves around friendship: what does friendship mean, what are the theories that each person applies to it and how they think friendship should be, what deteriorates it…
On stage there are four friends who have known each other since childhood from summers in the village.
Each one has a different characteristic and, although they love each other very much, they have grown distant. Moreover, all four are in crisis for various reasons.
Since the assassination of Kennedy, conspiracy theories have followed one another. Terraplanism is one more?
I think it’s sublimation. Terraplanism believes that there is an entire army to ensure that people do not see the end of the dome that covers the flat Earth. But it is not as dangerous as believing that vaccines do not work or that we are inoculated with a microchip.
Are they good materials for fiction?
For those of us who write, anything that is a fantasy of seeing things differently is fun. As we have been abandoning religions, we need to have other faiths and feel part of a group. Everything is born from asking these questions and looking for answers, to terraplanism or to those who believe that birds are drones that spy on us, Birds are not real.
So what you’re doing with theater is looking for answers?
When I notice that I have a very easy opinion about something, it’s that maybe I shouldn’t be so opinionated. And in the theater we always complicate it. The idea is that there are more questions than answers. And to get inside the minds of people who think differently than I do. Even though I don’t understand it, in the process I try to understand it, but not necessarily share it.
When you did the dramaturgy of Jauría, what were you looking for?
First I did it for myself. I thought it wouldn’t be theatrical material, because so much has been said, so much has been spread, so much has been published that it might not make sense. But when I start reading and I start to see myself thinking things about the victim that I wouldn’t want to think… I mean, if I don’t want to be in any doubt, why am I wondering why she was left alone? , why didn’t he tell them no?, why didn’t he call right away and leave? How come I’m asking myself these questions? In theory, I don’t prejudice a woman, but I do it because I have it integrated, because socially I have a lot of accumulated, with this position that women can’t have a good time alone, they can’t do everything they want.
Does the function help you understand it?
Generationally, there are still some comments that are noticeable, like the different look of someone 20 years old, someone 60, someone 40. I started reading out of interest to know, in the same way you read black chronicle, to try to understand why someone who in theory has a more or less normal life, with their partners, jobs, etc., one day decides to commit a crime, a rape, destroy the other person’s life, but also with consequences for your
How is it going in Jauría?
No matter how much you’ve been drinking and partying, knowing that it was planned, that they had already talked about it and wanted to do it, why aren’t they aware of it? And the other question is why at no time do they think that this is not a crime, in addition to being an attack on privacy, against a person. Why do they regard that girl as an object? Why, as human beings, do we dissociate and distance ourselves from reality at these times? These questions worry me.
