The English word blank refers to the void, to the deep crack that separates the adult generation from the young, but also to the distance between people who have suffered mismatches in the judicial system with respect to others. This is the gap explored by [Blank], the work of Alice Birch, which premieres in Catalan in translation by Helena Tornero.
Birch is a playwright (Revolt) and screenwriter (Lady Macbeth, Succession), and in 2019 she wrote this work, which is made up of a hundred scenes and that, “if they were all performed, they would represent more than seven hours of play,” she details. Ferran Murillo, director of Tantarantana, a theater that, together with the Fundació Joan Brossa, presents two versions of this same work.
Birch does not expect the work to be performed in its entirety, which is why he gives absolute freedom to whoever directs it, to choose the scenes he considers, assign the sex he wants to the characters and take whatever licenses he considers, as explicit in the introduction. “The scenes make sense on their own,” says Tornero. You only have to take into account if the character is an adult or a minor, nothing more.
Honey on the flakes! Roberto Romei, from Tantarantana, must have thought when he discovered her and considered making a montage: “She declares that each director has to do their dramaturgy, and that is a fantastic game for the director.” Tornero translated it in its entirety and Marc Chornet, from the Fundació Joan Brossa, joined the project.
Since they had an open bar, they have gone a step further and have dismantled the work on two stages, exchanging directors. In the Tantarantana there are four young performers, directed by Chornet, and in the Brossa four adults, directed by Romei. They are scenes explicitly assigned only to young people (20) or only to adults (15).
But there are also ways in which they are interrelated. That, which in the productions that have been seen so far in other countries had been represented on a single stage, in the Catalan premiere it is resolved with video calls. The two works will be performed simultaneously at one end of the Ciutat Vella and the other and, in a synchronization exercise that the technical team is still finishing adjusting, which is the same in both productions, in four moments of the work the public will see the live connection.
Chornet points out that the two stages, the two productions and the fact that they communicate via video calls “remarks even more the distance” that exists between them. “There are two generations with an age difference like parents and children, but the relationships between adults and young people are diverse,” he adds.
The representations that have already been made have had female interpreters, “because it is true that depending on which characters they have to be women because of the subject matter they address,” says Chornet. In fact, “Birch wrote the play on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the Clean Break company, which works with women who have suffered problems of exclusion by the judicial system,” explains Tornero, and for this reason social workers appear in the scenes, people who have suffered school and sexual bullying, sexualized bodies…
The Fundació Joan Brossa and the Tantarantana theater are two of the creation factories that operate in Barcelona and are inaugurating an unprecedented collaboration that they hope will bear more fruit. And the British Council of Barcelona also supports the initiative, by British authorship. The two [Blank] productions will run simultaneously from February 14 to March 12.
Catalan version, here
