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A House for Writers
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A House for Writers Vicky Richardson
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Sssh … To Be is to Be Perceived Charlotte Skene Catling
What is the link between a theatre in Barcelona and an Irish playwright who wrote in French? VICKY RICHARDSON looks at the work of Flores & Prats at Sala Beckett and its inspiration in the plays of Samuel Beckett.
11 Sala Beckett in photographs 19 A New Chapter at Sala Beckett Interview with Flores & Prats 22 A Brave and Committed Theatre Interview with Toni Casares
Cover: Bam, Bem, Bim and Bom are the four characters from Samuel Beckett’s play What Where, written in French in 1983. The names stay the same no matter which language the play is performed in. This booklet accompanies the exhibition What Where: Crossing boundaries in the architecture of Sala Beckett Commissioned by Roca for London Festival of Architecture 2019 1 June – 31 August 2019 Roca London Gallery www.rocalondongallery.com Curator / editor: Vicky Richardson Exhibition and graphic design: Perrin Studio Sub editor: Julia Dawson Printer: Tradewinds
Vicky Richardson Vicky is an architectural writer and curator. Her work over the past decade has focused on expanding knowledge of design and architecture through international connections. As Director of Architecture, Design and Fashion at the British Council (2010 – 2016) she commissioned the British Pavilion at Venice Architecture Biennale and organised major touring exhibitions and events around the world. Previously she was Editor of Blueprint magazine. Vicky is Co-founder of the Lantao UK Fellowship for Chinese and British designers, a guest lecturer at the RCA (Interior Design) and a thesis supervisor at NYU London. She is an Honorary Fellow of RIBA and a member of the Advisory Committee of V&A Dundee. Perrin Studio Perrin Studio was set up in 2000 by Martin Perrin, who is former Creative Director of Architecture magazine and The Architect’s Newspaper. The studio specialises in exhibition and graphic design for the arts. It developed the graphic identity and print publications for the Parrish Art Museum in New York, while other recent projects include a major exhibition about Paul Rand at the Museum of the City of New York, and several exhibitions for the Center for Architecture, NYC. In 2008 Perrin Studio was graphic designer for the US Pavilion at Venice Architecture Biennale. www.perrinstudio.com
The subject of boundaries and identity preoccupies us today, but Sala Beckett and its namesake Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) remind us of a universal human condition. The exhibition What Where has been an opportunity to find out how the design of a theatre by Flores & Prats relates to the activities taking place within it: writing and making theatre inspired by one of the 20 th century’s greatest writers.
shop and grand rooms for entertainment, meeting and socialising. Most of the competing architects proposed to demolish it. However Flores & Prats, despite the fact it had no conservation status, saw that the 1927 Pau i Justícia cooperative was highly suited to be a ‘house of writers’. They felt that the building expressed an important moment in history: the emergence of workers’ associations which had created their own place in the city with a sense of spatial and decorative grandeur to express pride in their communities.
Shortly before Beckett’s death 30 years ago, the founders of Sala Beckett wrote to ask for his permission to name their new company after him. As Toni Casares, the current director of Sala Beckett, explains on page 22 of this booklet, they were inspired by his theatrical minimalism, artistic rigour and intellectual openness. Sala Beckett is unusual in being a company that puts the emphasis on language and writing in theatre (as opposed to interpretation and scenography). It has a high opinion of its audience, often presenting challenging work but inviting the public into the building to be part of the creative process. As Casares says, it is not the kind of theatre where the audience turns up, eats and goes home. Sala Beckett is experimental without being self-absorbed or aloof.
The architect’s first task was to create a detailed inventory of the interior. Over three months they drew by hand hundreds of the elements they saw as ‘ghosts’ from the past: the cornices, ceiling roses, floor tiles, decorative windows and doors. They then built tiny models of each element at 1:50 so that they could be positioned and repositioned in the project models, as if actors on a stage. Their aim was not to restore the building but to keep it alive by reinventing the materials and decoration that expressed the ideals of the cooperative, as the character of a new workspace for Sala Beckett. Model-making is a key part of the design process for Flores & Prats, allowing them to test the scale of their proposals; and providing a tool for dialogue with a client. Casares and the team from Sala Beckett could relate to the use of models; and enjoyed the craftbased approach of the practice that seemed to correspond to their own way of working. When Sala Beckett opened to the public in 2016, the models that had been on shelves around Flores & Prats’ studio were grouped into portable
R E PU R POSI NG A R U I N
Barcelona-based architects Flores & Prats were selected through an architecture competition and began work in 2011. The city government had given the Sala Beckett a derelict cooperative building, which until the 1980s had been a gathering place for the working-class community in Poblenou — once known as ‘the Manchester of Catalonia’— with a grocery 3
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theatre where the audience is in the picture, breaking down the ‘fourth wall’ through which in traditional theatre the audience seems to be eavesdropping on the actors. At Sala Beckett there is no pretence of reality: the actors sit on chairs in full sight at the side of the stage waiting to play their parts.
last decade of his life. His experiments with the form of theatre had begun a lot earlier, for example his 1969 play Breath consists of just an inhalation and an exhalation. Also written in the 1960s, Film, Beckett’s only attempt at cinema, features just one utterance on the sound track, a whispered ‘sssh!’
Flores & Prats’ meticulous approach to observing Sala Beckett matches the playwright’s meticulous approach to crafting words. Beckett often wrote in French to avoid the unconscious use of English idioms. In his later plays particularly, he boiled down the structure, dialogue and staging so that the stage instructions of many of his short plays took longer to read than the plays took to perform. In the notes for the filming of What Where (1985), he wrote ‘process of elimination’ and drew a diagrammatic plan of the staging area. Samuel Beckett on the set of Film, near the Brooklyn Bridge, in 1964. Photo: I.C. Rapoport / Getty Images
storage containers, each with flaps that open out in sequence to explain the stages of the design process.
on the walls, and the repurposed fixtures and fittings — the ‘ghosts’— would contribute to the development of new theatrical works.
To emphasise that Sala Beckett is a workshop for theatre, the building was left ‘unfinished’, as if a work in progress with paint peeling from the walls and the traces of the original staircase in the remnants of mosaics on the wall. But their interventions were also bold and irreverent. Floor tiles and fittings were moved from the first to the ground floor; large holes were cut out of the first floor to allow light to the foyer, and the original grand staircase was repositioned. Newly designed elements, such as a sweeping oak-faced bar, and fitted furniture in the circulation spaces were added.
In a 1:25 scale model of the main auditorium, Flores & Prats used a tree to represent the set for Waiting for Godot. Ricardo Flores and Eva Prats had been to a production of Oh les beaux jours directed by Peter Brook in Sitges, and were thinking about Beckett as they entered the competition.
B ECKETT’S LEGACY
As they explain on page 19, they discovered that silence, which can be technically hard to achieve, is important in Beckett. Beckett’s characters tend to lapse into wordlessness, which is often consciously referred to in the plays themselves: ‘Time passes’, says Bam in What Where. Or, ‘In the meantime, nothing happens’, as Estragon says in Waiting for Godot. Beckett is part of the modernist tradition in
Their aim was always for the original building to change and adapt in support of the work of Sala Beckett, rather than to be preserved in its original state. They hoped that marks left 4
AN EXPE R I M E NT I N CI N E MA
Film was Samuel Beckett’s only ‘motion picture’ and starred an aged Buster Keaton in one of his last roles. An investigation into the medium of cinema itself, Film was shot in New York and set in 1929, the year silent movies gained sound. Keaton plays O (object), with the second character as the camera itself, E (eye). Film can be seen as, alternatively, an absurd physical comedy; a chase film in which O tries to escape E; or as a haunting exploration of human consciousness. Critics at the first screening in New York in 1965 thought it none of these: one dismissed it as a ‘load of old bosh’. Film is one example of Beckett’s fascination for the tenet Esse est percipi, or ‘to be is to be perceived’, from the Irish Enlightenment philosopher George Berkeley (1685–1753) whose theory was that ‘the existence of an idea consists in it being perceived’.
The architecture of Sala Beckett and the text of What Where share a precise and rigorous use of structure and elements, whether bricks or words. But where Sala Beckett is a space to be ‘at home’ in the city; Beckett makes us feel uncomfortable and baffled. The title What Where is a statement but suggests a question. In fact the play is about an interrogation: an inquisitor is sent to extract information and he in turn is tortured when he fails to get it. Characteristically of Beckett, it is rather grim and, like much of his work, is concerned with mortality and time.
What Where seems ‘designed’ to be read rather than performed. On the page, the stage notes have an almost architectural quality to them with diagrams and instructions that make one think of a set of annotated working drawings. The play has symmetry, structure, shape and a musical pattern: even the character’s names — Bam, Bem, Bim, Bom — are graphically pleasing. It is one of a number of short plays (playlets or dramaticules that reject the standard format of a play with interval) Beckett wrote in the 5
Observation and looking at the world was fundamental to Enlightenment thought. Although Berkeley was an idealist, as opposed to the empiricism of David Hume, it is useful to think about the issue of perception and raises the possibility of stepping outside our own subjective experience, to be able to see oneself through another’s eyes. Watching Film, it is easy to miss the philosophical ‘point’, just as reading What Where is uncomfortably confusing. This is no surprise as Beckett resisted interpretation, or the idea that his work solved problems, as he felt he did not have the answers himself. He is reported to have resigned as a lecturer at Trinity College Dublin in 1931 because he could not bear the idea of teaching others what he did not understand himself.
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are often best understood in their own terms (or to put it another way, I would not want to live in a house designed by Beckett!). Nonetheless, despite their particular generation, location and cultural backgrounds, Flores & Prats and Beckett share a deep commitment to observing the world and justify a plea made by Sontag in Against Interpretation: ‘What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.’
Despite the abstract quality of his work, Beckett offers simple observations of human life and shows us things as they are. It is not necessary to understand the meaning of a Beckett work to feel uplifted by it, or to appreciate it. Once you have accepted this, you can relax and enjoy the structure and language.
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TH E R ISK OF I NTE R PR ETATION
Writing around the same time as Film, Susan Sontag called for the appreciation of form in art. Against Interpretation (1966) seems incredibly pertinent in today’s world where often the interpretation or curation of a work ignores or even consciously subverts the original intention. Naming Beckett as a writer who was wilfully over-interpreted, Sontag warned of setting up a ‘shadow world of meanings’, where we only look at works of art in order to translate their content. Sontag might have been thinking of Beckett when she wrote: ‘Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.’
considers Samuel Beckett’s only experiment in cinema, the enigmatically titled Film.
CHARLOTTE SKENE CATLING
(1685–1753); Esse est percipi : ‘to be is to be perceived’. This premise dictates the film’s structure and its two ‘characters’. Buster Keaton plays O (for Object), and E (for Eye) is the camera itself, whose perspective shifts so that by the end O and E merge in an epiphany, or annihilating moment, of self-awareness.
Film is a curious black and white, silent short written by Samuel Beckett in 1963 and performed by Buster Keaton in 1964. It was Beckett’s only motion picture. Throughout his writing, Beckett uniquely explores human consciousness, expressing profound ideas and experiences using minimal means. With Film he simultaneously explores the human condition and the medium of filmmaking from a central tenet originally expressed by Irish philosopher Bishop George Berkeley
Film was directed in New York by Alan Schneider, a Russian-born theatre director, principally known for his interpretations of
A still from Film, first shown at the 1965 New York Film Festival Beckett on the set of Film in 1964
Courtesy Milestone Films
Asking ‘what where’ about the connection between Sala Beckett and Beckett, has been a chance to consider the relationship between text and architecture; the idea of the universal and the way that artistic and cultural ideas cross boundaries. Despite the fashion for blurring the boundaries between art forms, what has become clear to me is that disciplines 6
Courtesy Milestone Films
Architecture today, one might argue, has become overly didactic and concerned with content (or programme / impact) at the expense of form. Beckett offers a complexity and delight in form that architecture could learn from. While being generous and publicspirited, Beckett had a deep-rooted objection to social engineering and would be highly suspicious of contemporary architecture’s desire to ‘nudge’ occupants’ behaviour.
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Stills from Film, which was originally going to be called The Eye
on a single organ has the effect of drilling into its larger subject. In Beckett’s play, Not I, the entire monologue — an inner scream — is delivered by a disembodied mouth, spotlit and floating on stage, the rest of its owner blackedout and invisible. Films were later made of the performance, where the mouth dominates the screen with a very different relationship to the space around it, transforming the aural to the visual.
Beckett’s work, and for the American premieres of the work of Orton, Pinter and Brecht. In 1969 Schneider wrote the wonderfully revealing, ‘On Directing Samuel Beckett’s Film’, in which he describes its convoluted and often painful background. What emerges is Keaton’s bemused compliance, and Beckett’s dedication to the project; his theatrical approach, and his flexibility in working around constraints and problems as they arose. Beckett replaced the failed first shot of a crowd (the original opening of the film) with the iconic image of Keaton’s eye. At first unrecognisable and filling the screen, the closed and wrinkled eyelid looks like a vast landscape. With an open stare (and homage to Buñuel?), the central theme is immediately set out. Keaton’s closing eye then became the final shot. The intense focus
Film has no dialogue except for a single, whispered, ‘Sssh!’. It was set in 1929, the year ‘talkies’ were introduced. Beckett imagined a stylised ‘silent movie’ approach to filming — strangely anachronistic — and contacted Charlie Chaplin first, then Zero Mostel and Irish actor Jack MacGowran (a great Beckett 8
Courtesy Milestone Films
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Courtesy Milestone Films
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Keaton died 18 months after shooting Film
from stage to screen the ambiguity of the space shared between audience and performer is lost.
interpreter), before Keaton. Physical movements were to be exaggerated. The action of the film follows O as he furtively makes his way along a ruined wall, into a building, to an almost empty single room. The camera is in pursuit, spinning around the tiny space without catching O’s face. Haunted by their gaze, O ejects a dog and cat, covers the cage of a bird … a goldfish … veils an icon. He tears up photographs of himself at different stages of his life. He attempts to remove all perception, but ultimately fails, unable to escape self-perception.
Beckett’s characters have a pathos that seems to spill out and permeate the real world. Maybe because he absorbed and projected in concentrated form what he saw around him. Like a scene from a Beckett play, when Schneider first went to LA to meet Keaton, he arrived at what appeared to be a four-handed poker game, only to be told that the game was imaginary: it had been going on since 1927 with players long-dead, and two million dollars in accumulated debt. Schneider As in Beckett’s plays, the space becomes an himself died young; he was hit by a extension of the consciousness of the character. motorcycle crossing a London road to post But unlike on stage, the camera controls where a letter to Beckett. the eye focuses, with less success. In the shift 9
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Schneider lamented the response to Film when it was shown at a New York festival, but is himself ambivalent about its success. The audience had gone to see the Buster Keaton they knew. ‘Who the hell was Beckett? At the end they got up on their hind legs and booed. Lustily. I thought of Godard and Antonioni and a few others at Cannes; wept, and ran …’ He concluded that Film should be reassessed. ‘All of his [Beckett’s] stage plays, radio and TV pieces, first get slammed, derided, ignored. Then, five years later, they are hailed as classics. It’s about time for that to be happening to Beckett’s Film. After all, it’s 1969.’
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Charlotte Skene Catling is Founder and Board Director of the Architecture Film Festival London. She is Co-founder of Skene Catling de la Peña architects and is completing a research project with the photography department of the Royal College of Art and the Rothschild Foundation focused on representation in architecture.
Perhaps 50 years later, in an exhibition celebrating the elegantly reworked Sala Beckett — champion of experimental theatre — the time has come.
Courtesy Milestone Films
Beckett and Keaton on the set of Film
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A new Chapter at Sala Beckett Vicky Richardson spoke to RICARDO FLORES and EVA PRATS about their transformation of a derelict 1920s workers’ cooperative into a contemporary centre for theatre. The former cooperative was not protected by conservation orders. What potential did you see in it?
V R: Sala Beckett was originally the workers’ cooperative Pau i Justícia, which played an important role in the community of Poblenou. How does that relationship continue with the renovated building? F&P: We found the building in a state of
The cooperative was generous in its dimensions. In a dense city like Barcelona spacious rooms like these are unusual. Even nowadays, as architects, deciding that the height of a room is going to be 6 metres is not at all common. The building still had many of the original doors, floor tiles and windows that we thought were great to keep. As the original building was very economical in its construction, those elements gave a human and delicate dimension to it.
disrepair but we kept everything. As a consequence, former cooperativists still living in the area have come back and recognise it as their place. Everything has moved around but it stills seems that nothing has changed since it was abandoned some 30 years ago. There is now a large bar in the corner where there used to be a grocery store; and a row of large windows open onto the street to make it a very public place. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
Sala Beckett is located in Poblenou, a former industrial district of Barcelona The restaurant / bar occupies the corner of the ground floor, originally a grocery store Original windows have been repurposed to make a ticket office in the foyer Traces of the old staircase can be seen in the line of original mosaic tiles A workshop theatre on the upper level is a more informal auditorium with natural light Circulation space on the first floor is generous to allow for encounters with the public Holes were cut in the upper floor to allow light to reach the foyer below The rehearsal room on the first floor with a six metre high ceiling Stairs to the upper level, and on the right, doors to the café Original tiles were salvaged and moved from the first to the ground floor Every door and window was drawn by hand and recorded in A1-size inventories Traces of the original signage and mosaic tiles were left in place
Photography: Adrià Goula
We were very happy to inherit such big rooms with vestiges of a different time: the time of the workers’ cooperatives — our grandparents generation — right before the Civil War. It wasn’t that long ago, but so much from that period has disappeared. We also saw a future in the abandoned atmosphere, the traces of previous lives that could be mixed with the theatre people, playwrights, all of them working together, writing a new chapter within the walls of the old building. How did your approach respond to the aims and work of the client, Sala Beckett?
The great thing about the Sala Beckett project was that the director Toni Casares was very clear in giving us information on how they work and what they needed to develop their activities. We worked closely with him throughout the whole long process, from the competition in 2011 to the opening in 2016.
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You found the cooperative as a ruin, and you have kept a sense of dereliction in the patina of the interior and exterior. Why was this important?
We were interested in showing different chapters of the life of the building: its origin as a cooperative, the abandonment, and the new occupancy. The abandonment is an eloquent moment. Why do we abandon things and buildings? It explains a lot about us as a civilisation. This building was abandoned because the cooperative spirit had disappeared. It was left empty for several decades although it had a great story to tell. Toni explained to us that the traces of the past on the walls and ceilings would be helpful for their future activities as they would encourage new playwrights to conjure up stories.
Beckett’s work explores the human condition, in all its complexity and contradiction. How does Sala Beckett respond to the audience, and how did you conceive of a typical user of the building?
The former cooperative building already had very large rooms where we could fit the programme described in the brief. But we also wanted to add some situations to make people feel at home inside it. We wanted to accommodate the visitor who enters the building early in the morning to join a workshop; as well as the one that comes at the end of the day to celebrate a theatre night, so that the building welcomes you as if you are entering a big house, a place where relating to others becomes easier. Natural light enters the circulation spaces, and as you move around you notice that the building has many overlapping views, so it is easy to bump into other people. There are spaces adjacent to the circulation, where you can stop for a chat or sit alone and work. The building is waiting for you to occupy it.
When you were first thinking about the design, did you look into the work of Samuel Beckett and what were you impressions?
Yes, we had seen some of his plays, and we saw Oh les beaux jours directed by Peter Brook in Sitges. But the team from Sala Beckett had been working in Barcelona for more than 20 years when we met them. They have a similar role as the Royal Court in London, promoting new plays and new writing. When they referred to Samuel Beckett in a working meeting it was actually to talk about the importance of silence during the plays: that’s when we called the best acoustician in town to help us.
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We are responsible for the building through our drawings, so they need to be precise. We spent three months in the building drawing all the different elements — everything — without knowing how we were going to use them. We have more than a hundred drawings of different elements; each element is described in an A1-size document.
In the case of Sala Beckett, the director was used to working with models: when preparing a play the stage designs are tested on 1:20 scale models. So there was much affinity between the handicraft method of the theatre and our physical way of working. We had lots of conversations with them with the help of models.
We liked everything inside the building: its cornices, rosettes, floors and doors. In Barcelona these elements are very common — you find them in all the buildings of the city grid. They are so common that people don’t even notice them and they can be found in the street when an apartment gets renovated. By drawing the details we gave them an importance, so the builder could understand that they were precious to us and that he had to look after them and not break them.
Many of your models are contained in portable cabinets and the smaller items in boxes and tins. Where does your fascination for organisation and containers come from?
Models need to be precise if you are testing proportions in them. So it takes a long time to make them and it is very difficult to throw them away afterwards. So they stay around us on shelves or hanging on the studio walls. Then, when we have time, we collect the ones from a built project and make a container for them. Usually there are a lot of tests for one project and, by ordering them, we can recall the process of the project again. We build the containers so that, when you open them, they display the models in a way that helps us to remember how the ideas move from one to the other, expressing the doubts and discussions on the project and where we considered different options.
As well as drawing what you found, you made dozens of intricate models of items such as doors and windows. What role did these miniature models play in the design process?
We collected all the doors, windows and floor tiles, thinking that the final quality of the place would rely on them. Once they were drawn, we built them as small models at 1:50 scale in order to work with them in the project model. Seeing their specific qualities, we could decide where they would take their place in the new project. It was a very intuitive approach. Later, when we started drawing the new circulation around the building, the doors and windows found their new places in the plan and later in the 1:50 model. Making them was also a way of assuring that we were not forgetting any of them.
Sala Beckett has played an important role in your practice. How have your ideas changed since you got involved with the site in 2011?
Sala Beckett is still a very recent project for us, so it’s too soon to tell. But we are currently designing a co-working space inside an old industrial building in the same neighbourhood of Poblenou. In this case though, preservation is more about the outside of the building than the interior: inside there are no treasures like in the old peace and justice cooperative. But in the street there are some beautiful fully grown trees that have developed a great crown, and we are drawing the extension of the building around the trees in order to preserve them. So it looks like this is an opportunity to develop ideas and definitions of adaptive reuse that are new to us.
Why are models so important in your practice? Precision and detail are incredibly important in your work (as it was in the work of Beckett). Why is this?
The attention of the visitor jumps from the general to the detail, making the journey much richer and more intense, avoiding homogeneity in the quality of the spaces. 20
Models come after drawing, they are tests to understand the scales of the proposals, first in relation to the city and later within the different spaces of the building. We fabricate models during the process and often we build just fragments of the project that help us to question and discuss certain parts. 21
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A Brave and Committed Theatre TONI CASARES , Director
of Sala Beckett, spoke to Vicky Richardson about the influence of Samuel Beckett, and the relationship between the theatre and the city. Beckett worked at the frontiers of theatre and language. For us, the emphasis on text is important and the written word remains, in our opinion, indispensable for a poetic shared thinking and emotion. We see Sala Beckett as a ‘house for writers’ and we hope to restore the important role of writing within theatre.
V R: When was Sala Beckett founded, and why was it named after Samuel Beckett? TC: Sala Beckett opened to the public in
November 1989 as a space for artistic creation; and as a place for theatrical creators to encounter other disciplines. The founders of Sala Beckett, Luis Miguel Climent, an actor with the Teatro Fronterizo Company, and José Sanchis Sinisterra, a playwright and professor, wanted to pay homage to the figure of Samuel Beckett whom they admired for his art and vitality.
Beckett wrote ‘process of elimination’ in his notes for the production of What Where. How does the idea of elimination or minimalism influence the way you stage plays at Sala Beckett?
Sanchis Sinisterra appreciated Beckett for his commitment to crossing the boundaries of theatricality and making connections with other artistic languages. He admired the theatre of Beckett for its condition of essentialism, theatrical minimalism, and above all for its aesthetic and philosophical radicalism. Beckett’s artistic rigour is never complacent or slavish to the conventions of traditional theatre. His writing is polymorphic and works as narrative, poetry, theatre, radio and television. Its character is subversive and sceptical and in contrast to uncritical certitudes, and its intellectual openness is unlimited.
The search for essentiality, an approach to finding the minimum necessary expression, allows us to work within the limits of theatricality and emotion in order to be able to know and experience possible connections with other artistic disciplines. At the same time, almost absolute deprivation confronts us with the deepest sense of the human condition.
From our point of view, Beckett makes a connection between the 20 th century and the present day. His gaze on the world and the human condition influences many contemporary theatrical texts, without younger authors even being aware of it. That is why it is important to revisit his work and to recognise in it the trace of our own interest in theatre.
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speak with the actors to voice their opinions. We don’t want the theatre to be a closed world.
the shadows where it resided during the last decades of the 20 th century. Sala Beckett gives this work more light and at the same time recovers the domestic character of places of artistic creation.
How has the new building changed the work of Sala Beckett?
At Sala Beckett we have always proposed a theatre that appeals to the active reception of the viewer. A theatre that places more emphasis on suggestion than evidence, that proposes more questions than answers in its plots and content. A brave and committed theatre where the author and the public share doubts and concerns with a frank, honest, horizontal gaze.
With its new headquarters, Sala Beckett does not seek growth in the aesthetic format of its shows. Our interest remains in the proximity between actors and audiences with a minimal use of scenography. What we seek with the new headquarters is to improve the relationship between the contemporary theatre and the city, its inhabitants, its professionals and young people. Our aim is to increase the number of spaces (for example, classrooms and workshops) devoted to teaching, research, experimentation, meeting and dialogue between creators and the public.
We have high expectations of the audience. During the process of making a production, members of the public come to rehearsals and
With the technical improvement of these spaces, we hope to dignify the process of contemporary creation and remove it from
Beckett explored the human condition, in all its contradictory ways. How does Sala Beckett correspond to this in its relationship to audiences?
How important is it to maintain an ongoing connection with Beckett?
Audiences at Sala Beckett are involved from the early stages of development of a play. Photo: Adrià Goula
Beckett’s work has been staged all over the world, and Beckett himself expressed an idea about internationalism. Does it remain an important part of Sala Beckett to cross national and cultural boundaries?
Yes, of course. Sala Beckett aims to be both a gateway to Barcelona for the most interesting international authors and an international showcase for contemporary Catalan drama. Cross-border dialogue between different traditions, writers and dramatists is, after all, what nurtures thinking and culture.
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Crossing boundaries in the architecture of SALA BECKETT
The cooperative Pau i Justicia with a grocery store where now there is a café
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