After two years in the position, for which he was appointed by Miquel Iceta, Joan Francesc Marco will be replaced as general director of the National Institute of Performing Arts and Music (Inaem), by Paz Santa Cecilia (Madrid, 1961). Ernest Urtasun has chosen a manager who knows the organization well – she was head of its coordination department a decade ago – for the task of restructuring it and adapting it to the 21st century to which the Minister of Culture has committed himself.
Inaem has under its command the national centers of stage and musical production, from the National Dramatic Center, the National Classical Theater Company and the National Dance Company to the National Auditorium and the Zarzuela Theater, but it also takes care of subsidies to the performing arts and music sector. In both functions, they have been receiving criticism for some time for the legal limitations and the lack of agility of their structures both when it comes to producing and touring and granting aid to the sector.
“It is my will that the Inaem reform be carried out during this legislature,” Urtasun declared in December to La Vanguardia, and acknowledged that the reform had been promised repeatedly in recent years, “but it has not been done and it is important to be able to advance in more efficiency and agility. I know that in the large centers there are difficulties for tours, productions. We need to do them in a more agile way. And he pointed out the criteria to carry out the restructuring: “I want to carry out the reform with two fundamental criteria: the public nature of Inaem and that it be in full dialogue with the workers and the sector.”
In this sense, the Ministry explains that the appointment of Paz Santa Cecilia, who has been in the performing arts sector for four decades and has been director of festivals such as VEO, second to Àlex Rigola at the Venice Theater Biennale and for five years executive producer of the La Ribot company in Geneva, “aims to address a new stage in the public body, aimed both at its structural reform, and at addressing the current challenges for cultural policy aimed at promoting theater, dance, circus and music, with special emphasis on creation and national and international dissemination”. The replacement of Joan Francesc Marco will soon be approved by the Council of Ministers.
Philologist and cultural manager, throughout her career Santa Cecilia has been deputy director of the National Center for New Performing Tendencies and Production Director of the Andalusian Theater Center, the Teatro de La Abadía and the Teatro Central in Seville, as well as coordinator of the performing arts programming within Salamanca 2002. In addition, she has taken charge of the artistic direction of international festivals such as the VEO Festival of Valencia, the Escena Contemporánea Festival, the IDEM Festival in La Casa Encendida and is attached to the artistic direction of La Venice Theater Biennale with Rigola.
From 2017 to 2022 she was executive producer of La Ribot Ensemble in Geneva, as well as a member of the State Council of Dance within the State Council of the Performing Arts. In the last year, she has worked for the Performing Arts area of ??Acción Cultural Española carrying out a study on international mobility and evaluation of the Program for the Internationalization of Spanish Culture.
