Since the end of 2011 Antic Teatre has been developing a community project with local residents of our Casc Antic district of Barcelona. 2017 will therefore be its fifth year.
This project consists in creating an artistic performance piece with some of the senior citizens who live near the Antic Teatre, and in recovering each of these neighbours’s memories about the area and their roots in the Sant Pere, Santa Caterina i La Ribera neighbourhood of Barcelona. By doing this we aim to encourage and highlight the inclusion of older people in local cultural activities, intergenerational co-operation, and relations and cohesion between the various senior citizens who live here. We believe these aims are vital as this particular collective is one of the worst affected by gentrification and neo-liberal policies, which abandon many elderly people (who have worked all their lives) to poverty, lonelines, mobbing and being forgotten.
The artistic tool used for working with this collective is dance, as it encourages knowledge of one’s own body, has health benefits, helps teach correct breathing and moving confidently within a space.
In March of 2017 begins the Antic Teatre’s community arts project with local residents. After an intense work of more than 5 years with a group of people of +65 years led by Isabel Ollè and Quim Cabanillas, starts a new project led by the author and director Marta Galán.
It couldn’t be any other way: we have explored the concept of beauty with them, and set it out in relation to their bodies, rich in years, and their minds, perceptive, that contain the simmering history of determined caring; the vital memories of working women, mothers, daughters, that are bypassed by the official accounts. This has been the basis of our working process: exploring theis beauty and making it shine through different actions, images and texts. They say that beauty is what moves us as it happens; a place where the eye can rest because it understands and breathes, a revealing instant.
Author and director Marta Galán has taken over the community arts project with our local Casc Antic residents that Antic Teatre has been running for more than five years and is presenting, together with the participants, an initial stage of the work they are doing.
Antic Teatre‘s community arts project in the neighbourhood consists of dance and movement workshops for older people and a series of public performances over the year. This provides access to the language and artistic expression of dance with the accompanying benefits that this has in terms of social inclusion and cohesion. At the same time, we create awareness of the needs and methods of expression of the least visible members of our community – the elderly.
Also included in the project are various activities designed to encourage relations across the generational divide, between the eldest and youngest residents of our neighbourhood.
Marta Galán is an artist-educator, author and director of stage projects since 1999. In 2009 she set up the TRANSlab project, from where she co-ordinates various teaching and collective or community creation processes using performance and theatrical arts.
