San Sebastián, May 9 (EFE) .- “It is not the only award but it is certainly the most important”, are the words of the director of the San Sebastián Study Theater, Manuel Gómez, who confesses that he lives a few days of “emotion and joy “after learning that the organizing committee of the XXIV Max Awards for Performing Arts will award his company the Max Award for Social Character 2021.
The director has confessed in an interview with Efe that they could not imagine that the Max award was going to correspond to this amateur group from Donostia, so much so that when he received the news, he relates, he thought they were “kidding him.”
He receives the award for the more than 60 productions that are credited to the company and for “its verifiable and therefore indisputable commitment to theatrical training in values, the neighborhood cultural revitalization and the approach to the theater society as a tool for social integration “, stand out from the organization of the Max Awards.
Proof of this are the collaborations that the company has made over the years with the Martutene penitentiary, the Loiola neighborhood women’s association, the Berio nursing home and many others.
A social work, which, as the director comments, allows it to be an amateur company, capable of opening up to other groups and representing in places that nobody represents. “” We have always been willing to go where they called us, “he adds.
From the beginning, the company was “a neighborhood group and it acted fundamentally for the neighborhood. For a working-class neighborhood, moreover, as was the Antiguo neighborhood,” he says.
The Teatro Estudio de San Sebastián debuted on stage in 1965 with the play “A man sleeps” by Rodríguez Buded and since then, says its director, it has always taken care that the selected works “had something to say to society.”
“We have tried to make the theater say something,” he sums up, although he also clarifies that it has not been a permanent theme in the history of Teatro Estudio because “it would be a presumption” on his part.
When looking back at his beginnings, he remembers how initially the amateur theater companies had a very local path, but since they joined Scene Amateur, an association that brings together many of Spain’s amateur groups, the situation has changed and the scope of action it stopped being local to become national.
This is how recognitions began to arrive, in 1990 with the Award for Best Company, Best Actress to Esther Remiro and Best Direction to Manolo Gómez, from the XII Arcipreste de Hita de Guadalajara Contest; the outstanding presence at the International Hispanic Theater Festival of Miami in 1991 or the Award for Best Actor to José Luis Torres and Best Director at the 1st Tirso de Molina de Almazán Amateur Theater Competition, Soria, in 2008, among others, which have culminated with this 2021 Max Social Character Award.
Currently, the company represents “Baile de Huesos” by the playwright Elena Belmonte, a work that Gómez describes as “a little diversion” that talks about death, although in the director’s eyes it is “a song to life.”
The 2021 Max Award for Social Character will be collected by the director of the company on October 4 at the ceremony to be held at the Arriaga Theater in Bilbao.
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