“I’ve been working for over 20 years on a personal language”
Since he founded La Carniceria Theatre, in Madrid, in 1989, the Argentinian director Rodrigo Garcia has been creating an extremely challenging and highly physical theatre. In November 2009, Rodrigo Garcia was awarded, in Poland, the “New Theatrical Realities” Prize, with Pippo Delbono, Guy Cassiers, Arpad Schilling and Francois Tanguy. This summer, Rodrigo Garcia will have his first performance in Romania, at the National Theatre in Timisoara.
The representation of your performance “Accidens (matar para comer), in 2009, in Wroclaw, in which a lobster is cooked live on stage, received violent reactions from the audience and brought up into discussion the ethics of using animals on stage. What is your position to the responses you had to the performance and the type of theatre that you make?
We kill, we cook and we eat a lobster on stage. That does not mean that my theatre will always like that or always of this type. It is a poetic gesture. The same happens in restaurants, only there is no poetry in restaurants. I believe that the audience complaining with it is being hypocritical.
To what extent do you want your theatre to stir up scandal?
Don’t make me laugh! There is scandal in politics, in the sharing of wealth between the elected, in the abuse of the ones in power. A theatre work doesn’t scandalise anyone. I profess to be giving the audience the poetry lacking in everyday life.
You find it difficult to write plays?
I find it difficult to express myself with a certain poetic quality and I make a lot of efforts in this regard. We have come a long way in this line; I’ve been working for over 20 years on a personal language, which is constantly changing, just as I and the entire world is.
Do you write plays because you need texts to direct or are you regarding writing as a literary activity in itself, to which you occasionally come back as a director?
Only I can tell things the way I do. There are better playwrights than I am; millions of them. But I have my own voice, and the compromise resides in an attempt to make my voice heard - with the doubts and weaknesses that I hope to share with some people.
Do you ever write texts that you do not direct?
I used to, a few years ago! Now I write as I create my work! For Timisoara I will take texts that I wrote a long time ago. But it will be a new performance, as I am planning to mix pieces from different plays!
Can you please list some of the shortcomings of contemporary society which you discover in your everyday life and that of others that you bring up in theatre?
Enmity. Selfishness. Famine. That what is called “moral deviations”. And their opposite,that is to say love, altruism, abundance, “normality”.
Where is to be found the psychological connection between your father’s butchery and your performances?
There is none! I got away from working as a butcher, which I disliked! And ironically, I called my company La Carniceria (The Butchery – Ed. note)! But there is no metaphor to it.
What similarities and dissimilarities do you find between the street in South America where you grew up and the European street where you live now?
Everything is different, apart from people's attitudes, which is the same! We, humans, always do the same things: want everything for ourselves and a kick in the ass for the others!
Do you direct as you write, or it is when you meet the actors?
The actors are the most important. It is for them that I work! I come with ideas when we are rehearsing and come up with proposals so that they start working. If they feel comfortable with my proposals, they can take my ideas to an incredible limit. They take them so far, so deep, that they are no longer my ideas, but become part of themselves. If my proposals do not work, I never insist, and think of others instead. Later we get to an assembly process, where we are welding the material obtained in the rehearsals and we build a consistent play.
What are the local / regional / European / world specific issues that you are planning to bring up in the performance that you are going to do in Romania?
We are not so culturally different! We all have Internet and football; we all know classical literature and theatre. My relationships with actors, from individual to individual will matter most!
Interview by Ciprian MARINESCU
Translation to / from Spanish by Madalina Marinescu and Alexandra Irimia
Interview published in the theatre magazine Atent
