Jordi Casanovas (Vilafranca del Penedès, 1978) is a playwright, director and theater producer, as well as the promoter of the Flyhard theater and the Estación Alta Dramaturgy Tournament. Now it is making a double on the billboard in Barcelona: the new version of Jauría is being performed at the Romea theater, based on the case of the 2016 Sanfermines gang rape by the Manada, and on Thursday the comedy premiered at La Villarroel Conspiranoia, which he directs and which he has written together with Marc Angelet, based on conspiracy theories such as flat earthism, 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 from an acquaintance, who is a primary school teacher. One day she explained the planets and the universe to the children and the next day a mother told her that she assumed that that day she would explain the other alternative option. “And what is the other alternative option?” she asks him. “At home we don’t believe that the Earth is spherical, we think that the Earth is flat.”
A flat earther.
It seems as if the people who think these conspiracy theories must be very distant, but they are close people. So, Marc Angelet and I asked ourselves why people need to believe such bizarre theories.
And Conspiranoia is born.
The work is this investigative process of finding why someone needs to believe in conspiracy theories or almost absurd theories. Surely the answer is because you need to find a community. They are people lacking a community, and here they feel comfortable, loved and accompanied.
So, does it go further?
Yes, because above all the work revolves around friendship: what friendship means, what are the theories that each person applies and how they believe friendship should be, what deteriorates it…
On stage there are four friends who have known each other since they were children from summers in the town.
Each one has a different characteristic and, although they love each other very much, they have grown apart. Furthermore, all four of them are in crisis for various reasons.
Since Kennedy’s assassination, conspiracy theories have continued. Is flat earthism one more?
I think it’s sublimation. Flat Earthers believe that there is an entire army that ensures 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 involves imagining things differently is fun. As we have been abandoning religions, we need to have other faiths and feel within a collective. Everything comes from asking these questions and looking for answers, to flat earthers or to those who believe that birds are drones that spy on us, Birds are not real.
So what you do with theater is look for answers?
When I notice that I have a very easy opinion about something, it means that maybe it shouldn’t be so easy. And in the theater we always complicate it. The idea is that there are more questions than answers. And put yourself inside the minds of people who think differently than I think. Although I don’t understand it, in the process I try to understand it, but not necessarily share it.
When you wrote the dramaturgy of Jauría, what were you looking for?
I first 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 perhaps it wouldn’t 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 have any doubts, why am I wondering why she was left alone? Why not? He told them no? Why didn’t he call right away and leave? How am I asking myself these questions? In theory, I do not prejudge a woman, but I do it because I have it integrated, because socially I have it very accumulated, with this grounds that women cannot have a good time alone, they cannot do everything they want.
Does the function help to understand it?
Generationally, there are still some comments that are noticeable, such as the different look of someone who is 20 years old, someone who is 60, someone who is 40. I started reading for the interest of knowing, in the same way that I read black chronicles, to try to understand Why is it that 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, destroying another person’s life, but also with consequences for their own.
How does it happen in Jauría?
No matter how much you have drunk and are partying, knowing that it was planned, that they had already talked about it and they wanted to do it, why are they not aware? 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 consider that girl as an object? Why, as human beings, do we dissociate and distance ourselves from reality in these moments? These questions worry me.
Catalan version, here
