Landscape, Memory and Theatre

The participants in this seminar are authors recommended by collaborating institutions.

Humans have attempted to tame every landscape they have looked upon. Every culture has interpreted, shaped and reworked the spaces around them. Cultivating, destroying, capturing, building. The control of space is unrelenting. And our landscapes shift and change because of this. They make us. We move through new ones. We remember old ones. Our memories connect with them, and are intertwined with them. They are personal, communal, private and public, we are so small within them.

Every landscape is active. They do things to us and those around us, if we notice it or not. The politics of a place infects landscape with ideas and events that we have little to no control over. Our emotional responses to landscape shape how we see ourselves and how others see us. Every landscape has its own social codes, it’s on collective and personal histories. The towns, cities and countrysides that we come from are always influencing how we think in the past, present, future. Who are we now? And who were we then? How do we interact with them? Are they restrictive spaces to try and escape from, or remain, and attempt to change from within? When we go to a new landscape, how does this space make us feel? Welcome? Unwanted? Oppressed?

So how do we think about landscape as playwrights? How do our stories, our plays, use landscape as a way of sharing ideas, anxieties and hopes? Does a landscape have to be physical? What about an emotional landscape? How trauma is linked to time and place, and how does landscape respond to that emotional connection? How do we express those shared human ideas, but also allow us to look upon unfamiliar landscapes, unearthing stories about people we rarely see? It feels like sometimes people are too busy marvelling at the view, instead of seeing the people potentially suffering inside of it.

Think about how landscapes are directly affecting the people within them. How does the silence of the countryside dictate behaviour? How does someone from a small, potentially conservative thinking town, fully express who they want to be if it differs from what people expect? How does memory and landscape interact to show us moments from the past that have shaped a life? What echoes still linger, bouncing off the bricks of a post-industrial town? Can we see a dangerous future in the glass and metal of a modern cityscape? A countryside field for one might be an image of pure peace, but for someone else, a space haunted by war and conflict.

All those shared hopes and anxieties that float, quietly and unseen over every landscape around us: how can we make these known?

Simon Longman

The guest playwrights of this edition are Nanna Cecilie Bang (Denmark), Matteo Caniglia (Italy), Nicolas Girard-Michelotti (France), Somebody Jones (USA/Great Britain), Karoline Una Moen (Norway), Oriol Morales i Pujolar (Catalonia) and Ruth Rubio (Spain). All of them have been recommended by international theatres and centres. They will send in advance a short play on the subject. These plays will be translated into Catalan and presented in the form of a staged reading. The readings will be open to the general public.

Within the GREC 2023 Festival de Barcelona

With the collaboration of: