The theater is like a three-headed monster that lives in a cave and appears two or three times a day. It is more night than day. And very fond of artificial light. The writer Max Aub He said that those three heads of the monster were the play, the actors, and the audience; and “not always married to quality, success depends on their relationships”. The curtain opens and the imagination appears. The manager of Neighborhood Theater, Ana Camacho, explains that theater is a form of expression that helps open the mind. And she assures that “any type of cultural stimulation is good at any age”. “Because it moves us inside and makes us more awake,” she says, so it is very useful to receive these stimuli when the brain is still in its most developed moments. For Camacho, not all people are capable of expressing feelings with the word: “That is why art is needed”.
From the Teatro del Barrio they try to program works for all kinds of audiences, such as musicals Piccolino y Aúpa Leré, since “families must instill the value of any type of art in children, including theater, because art opens up other worlds”. For Camacho, people are not uniform and theater “is a wonderful tool to understand and accept each other.” And as he says the phrase: “The theater reaches where other types of caresses do not reach”.
Since The Tin Inncreative and artistic school of Alcalá de Henares, the director David Vicente He affirms that, in addition to entertaining children, theater provides them with many useful tools for development. “Empathy towards the feelings of other people, the ability to express body and words, the loss of fear of speaking in public, the increase in creative capacity and teamwork.” This school has been open since 2013 and children and adults receive courses in creative writing, theater or cinema. Faced with the absence of practicing and developing the arts in the school curriculum, fathers and mothers come to La Posada de Tinplate to fill the gaps in art in educational centers.
Vicente assures that “it seems that everything that does not have a practical and immediate reflection is useless, and this is absurd”. For the writer and director, the true essence of the human being is left aside for the benefit of the supposed search for future professionals. “Art is a means for creative development and the channel of expression of the human being. With the theater, a vision of the world and what surrounds it is provided, ”he argues. Through the different artistic disciplines, boys and girls transmit their emotions and feelings. And thanks to this, they can better understand both themselves and their peers. David Vicente believes that theater educates in empathy and this is increasingly necessary in a world that ignores so many people.
The National Drama Center is running the program New Dramatics. Each season a group of 25 children between the ages of eight and 10, who attend their educational centers near the spaces of the National Dramatic Center, have the opportunity to experience the magic of theater. Lucía Miranda is the pedagogical coordinator and beyond this project she is the director and founder of Cross Border, the company specialized in working with communities and with theater as a tool for transformation. She says that its purpose is the development of curiosity, imagination and improvisation as life tools: “Listening to the other as the basis of democracy and good coexistence, the transmission of emotions and their recognition.”
Regarding the project, he affirms, they have several objectives. On the one hand, it is that children know the theater as a space and the different jobs that are carried out there. He believes that through the game, not as a typical visit, the people who work in it (machinists, ticket clerks, cleaning, set design, costumes, lighting) carry out creation workshops with the boys and girls so that they learn in a practical way the work of each figure. They also have sessions just with Miranda where they work on how to move and choreograph. “This season I am using viewpoints and it’s wonderful to see them create little pieces of movement,” she says. For the director, with the theater workshops listening is trained, “essential in acting work”, and sometimes you also learn to write and compose a piece: “We play, we play a lot, we create a cast and also a space for talk and share topics that matter or concern you.”
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