"Certainly, the eye sees, the ear listens, but only intelligence knows. Therefore a man wants to see with his eyes and listen with his ears to the depth of his intelligence, once it has shown itself. And so, that is how I present myself in the scene. " Paul Claudel
Federico García Lorca, playwright, poet and prose writer of the greatest works of Spanish literature attached to the generation of ‘27, said about theater:
"The theatre is one of the most expressive and useful tools for building a country, and it works as society’s barometer, measuring its greatness or decline. A sensitive and well-focused theater in all its branches, from tragedy to Vaudeville Theater, has the power to change people’s sensitivity in just a few years. On the other hand, a broken theater, where the hooves replace the wings, can lull and make an entire nation uncultivated. The theater is a school of tears and laughter and an open forum where it can be put to evidence old or equivocal morals, and explain with living examples eternal norms of the heart and feelings of men. "
Theater has been present since prehistoric times, establishing itself as one of the first forms of artistic expression, when mankind awakened to its own communicative potential. With this newfound consciousness and after developing language, man began his search for new forms of expression through mourning ceremonies, hunting rituals, celebrations and ancestral representations that were used as a tool to learn about the past. Later on, music, dance and even masks were added to these rituals.
When men could finally document word through writing, these performances where captured in what would later be known as scripts, which had their foundation first in beliefs, then in history, and finally in literature. In that moment, the concept of a playwright was born, understood as one who writes a literary piece with the purpose of it later being represented in a scenic space.
The actor’s job is to embody the character captured in the script. To accomplish this, he must put himself in the situation that he wishes to express or narrate on the stage. His performance may or may not be accompanied by set design, lighting, wardrobe, music, etc. All of these elements not only help the actor, but they can also make of the spectator an ally, enveloping him in the story.
Luigi Pirandello, who in recognition of his value as a novelist and playwright received in 1934 the Nobel Prize in Literature, believed that it only took a simple truth, like “nothing is what it seems”, to base on it the restlessness from which all theatricality emerges.
You could say, at first an abstract idea was launched and with it, an emotion was provoked, from which an endless number of plays were originated and were also taken to other art forms like film, sculpture and novels.
