Teatre Lliure, En Procés: Theatre Meets Politics

Introduction

Recently, the relationship between literature and politics and the role of literature in the world have again been questioned (González Blanco, 2019a). From this perspective, the concept of parrhesia (i.e. the frank expression of what is considered true) transcends the concept of isegoria (the right to speak in the public assemblies of democracy of ancient Greece), and acquire fundamental importance. Despite the fact that both terms have often been used indiscriminately (and erroneously) as synonyms, parrhesia is based on frankness and not on the persuasion of speech. It represents the instrument with which individuals seek the truth; a truth composed of fragments of the discourse of the subjects who integrate the community and which is reconstructed through the dialogue between all those who form that same community. Hence, parrhesia has in itself a revolutionary potential and even turns out to be dangerous, when it expresses an opinion opposite to that of others and becomes the tool to enunciate a truth in the name of a revolution that is intended to propitiate and achieve within the community (Foucault, 2011, p. 43).

In the literary field, the relationship between parrhesia and dissidence proposes a vision of the politics of literature as linguistic excess, closely related to the combination of politics and truth (González Blanco, 2019c, p. 53). Indeed, since democracy is the space for dissent, this dissent is also manifested in literature, due to the inevitable link between political and literary practices. From these reflections it emerges that literature is exposed to its politicity from innovative perspectives, ranging from the sharing of political meanings to the relationship with biopolitics, the rereading of utopias, new narrative grammars and its potential for dissidence. That is why we are facing the political turning point of literary studies, which sketches the literature as a discursive mode of discrepancy, in contrast to other consensus-oriented modes. Thus, political action identifies situations and their actors, it associates events and deduces from this constraint possibilities and impossibilities using fictions. However, the way in which the fiction activates literary emancipation is not achieved through action or plot but through the description of images; so, literature becomes a laboratory to experiment with forms of description and expression of experience, which builds a time of equality for the community at any given moment, because literature appropriates and re-expresses the disruptive experience that allow people to live a life of responsive equality. For this reason, the fiction of writing makes it possible to rethink a new time -within everyone's reach-, the indefinite time of events (González Blanco, 2019b, pp. 1-2, 4). All this is realized through the strength of some words and topical moments and events lived in common on the streets of any city by an anonymous population. That is how a certain literature manifests itself as an agent of change: in such circumstances, the parrhesia is not represented by a single complete or absolute image but is composed from the individual and partial visions of all the members of a community. In fact, in building the truth, everyone participates (as in classical Greece, where those who do not have a voice in the assembly acquire the right to speak in the tragedy, as is the case, for example, with the choir of slaves). Thus, some metaphors of contemporary art present and represent the concept of 'multitude' as a political subject, opposing the 'amorphous mass' to the 'organized demos'. These innovative metaphors (spring, tide, tsunami, etc.) go beyond the previous ways of representing a community politically. Literature and politics, therefore, are united by the expression of dissent, by the inexistence of a given situation, whether it is previous or final, and unconditional (González Blanco, 2019b, pp. 5-8; González Blanco, 2019c; Higuera 2019).

As far as theatre is concerned, it should be stressed that, like politics, it is a public act, and, like politics, it is represented by one or more subjects that address an audience. The collective staging and fruition of the theatre condition its reception, which is also a collective act, i.e. the multiplication of individual reception by the number of spectators. All this, outlines theatrical representation and reception as public acts in which the individuals involved end up forming a community, consisting of the sum of the individual experiences thus shared.