Both the Teatre Lliure in Gràcia and the venue in Montjuic are the result of buildings being rescued, and during their restoration, taking on new forms and meanings to accommodate a new vision of the theatre.
Exhibitions and installations
Gràcia
"He wants to do theater and talks about throwing the stage?"
29/09/22 - 31/07/23
This sentence by Joaquim Gubern i Palacios, president of the Cooperativa La Lleialtat for 45 years, seems to us the title that best summarizes the particular paradigms that drive the successive transformations of the building in which we find ourselves right now. Those are transformations made to combat the established models of each moment.
The exhibition wants to be a sample of the journey lived by the building of the headquarters of Gràcia along the XX century and beginnings of the XXI. Its changes have been marked by two key drivers: the consumption of essential goods and that of cultural goods. They are fuelled by a spirit of cooperativism that offers citizens and neighbours a quality of life in the social and political contexts where they have to live.
When talking about the Cooperativa La Lleialtat and the company that founded the Teatre Lliure we talk about two brother spirits. They share a new vision of collectivity, of service to the citizen, of associationism and, obviously, of cooperation to change their way of living and representing life.
It is impossible to understand the birth of an identity and its changes without taking into account its context and, for this reason, the exhibition works on three frameworks that complement each other: social, architectural and human.
As in a theatre where we see the backdrop, the scenic space and the characters acting, we show here the social contexts — most as close as the city of Barcelona itself — that drove the creation, transformation and reform of this building. Against this backdrop, the spaces erected to respond to new needs (the different features of the headquarters of Montseny 47 street) are superimposed and, last but not least, who devised, worked and gave testimony of both the Cooperativa La Lleialtat and the Teatre Lliure and filled these spaces with meaning and experience.
THANKS TO
Cooperativa Obrera La Lleialtat and Arxiu fotogràfic del Museu de les Arts Escèniques. Institut del Teatre.
Slèvia
12/10/22 – 18/06/23
Montjuïc's Hall
‘Puigserver planned and built the Lliure as a vast container of mirrors, where even the spectators could see themselves as actors-observers on the other side of the fiction’.
We recovered in Montjuïc the exhibition on Fabià Puigserver that could be seen in Gràcia last season.
The theatre space, the stageless stage box that Fabià Puigserver dreamt up, created a play of mirrors, as the dramaturg and director Jaume Melendres describes, which not only placed the audience within the fiction but also played with arranging them on different sides so they could gain different perspectives on the same action. It thus broke with the architectural perspective of the Renaissance, better known as the Italian style, and created a freer theatre.
In this photograph exhibition, we are also suggesting a play of mirrors, a first step towards a retrospective on Fabià Puigserver during his sojourn in Poland, where he encountered a new social and cultural landscape that proved to be essential in his years of training. Without that life experience, we would be unable to understand the artist we know today. And the mirrors also help us see ourselves reflected in his life because, the way the Teatre Lliure was conceived, neither life nor death has lost sight of us—we, the audience.
Slèvia is the pseudonym he used to sign his works when he was in Warsaw, and even a few of them after he had returned to Barcelona. By this name, he acknowledged both cities, and we have revived it as proof of the bridge he built between them, always crossing the two cultures, especially the two stage cultures. The texts we present are part of a conversation with his close friend, the architect of the new Lliure venue on Montjuïc, Manolo Núñez Yanowsky, who also has ties with Eastern Europe. In this conversation, Fabià explains the open choir as the way his life in Poland was, and his vision of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe.
The influence of the theatre from these European countries in reconstruction and the 30 years that have elapsed since the death of Fabià Puigserver converge this season in a retrospective that we are presenting both here and later in Montjuïc. Mirrors that tell us who Fabià was in Poland, and that reflect us, like a rear-view mirror, via the mementos that we conserve from that stage in his life.
[quote by Jaume Melendres (Fabià Puigserver / overseen by Guillem-Jordi Graells and Antonio Bueso. Diputació de Barcelona : Fundació Teatre Lliure: Associació d’espectadors del Teatre Lliure: Institut del Teatre, 1996. p. 71)].