¿Donde esta el Teatro?

I have been all over the place literally and mentally over the last month, so sorry for not posting anything in that time. Yet I can tell you I have been working, and learning a lot about European theatre. I have also been attending the current theatre and art scene happing in Madrid, and learning about how a theatre company functions and how it collaborates with the community in Spain. I have also been traveling all over this marvelous country. I also have a date that I will be returning to the US :^( After its all said and done I will spend thirteen weeks in Spain a relative drop in the bucket, but something I will take with me for a long time. As I have gotten completely off track on these blogs I figure I will write a total of thirteen blogs, so between now and the end of November I will write six more blogs of about five hundred words each. In addition I will also post three play reviews, and I will have one large final paper. So "hold on to your butts!"

To bring you up-to-date I have spent the last seven weeks working at Teatro Tyl Tyl. It is a Children's Theatre south of Madrid in the quite town of Navalcarnero. Tyl Tyl has been creating plays for children since 1984 under the direction of Daniel Lovecchio. What has left the biggest impression on me thus far is the outreach of the theatre. It only has a staff of nine hardworking Spaniards, yet it produces a ten month season of performances. The theatre has created over forty original works since 1984, and has roughly 30,000 people visit a year. It also travels Europe and the world with performances, and produces a literary division of books and magazines on children’s theatre, and on top of that also runs a performance school for children. My first day at the theatre I took in the company’s organizational meeting were the scope of this year work was discussed. I was overwhelmed when I heard all the plans for the year, but I was even more shocked that I was the only one overwhelmed. Almost the whole staff has been apart of Tyl Tyl for a long time so the scale of the work is normal to them. What also surprised me was the theatre also has plans to expand and diversify.  For exsample, what I have been doing working on mainly is working on bring a Tyl Tyl production to the states by applying to children’s theatre festivals in the US, and Cananda. I am blown away with the amount of work this company does, but what sets it apart in my mind is professional atmosphere and the quality of the work. It is innovative and creative work that goes into these productions for children.

I will write more on what I have discovered on Children’s theatre in another blog. Here I want to compare a little of how theatre is done in the US compared to Spain. To do this I will make a small comparison of theatre in Navalcarnero, Spain and that of Conyers, Georgia as I know the two well and comparisons of apples and oranges can yield bananas.

Both towns have a population that is about 16,000 people, and both have major cities with roughly six million people each within a thirty minute drive. Theatre as I know it in Conyers happens roughly on two levels high school and community. High school theatre one could argue is supported from the community as the high schools are publicly funded. In Conyers for example there are three high schools, and each got a state-of-the-art theatre built in 2000. While community theatre is largely made up of people of the local area that form a non-profit, and put on shows usually drawing from private funding, donations, and perhaps some public funds. I will call it armature only because the work is usually unpaid. If they do pay it is the top people of the organization, and it is a pence. Conyers has the Rockdale Council of the Arts that performs in a hundred seat black box purchased in 1995 after a donation to the group. Navalcarnero has Teatro Tyl Tyl which is a professional children’s theatre that is also a non-profit group supported by various governmental groups, and some sponsors. It is a professional group meaning all workers and actors are employees and collect an income. Navalcarnero also has another theatre Teatro Centros which I know less about, but I understand it is also a professional theatre that is mainly funded from the city of Navalcarnero itself. Navalcarnero also puts on cultural weeks with large musical and dance performances and even runs bulls. Yet from what I understand there is little support in the high schools for theatre or other arts. The quality of I hesitate to judge because it is hard to compare professionals with students. Were I think their is an interesting comparison is the amount of audiences members Each town brings in. Navalcarnero must dwarfs Conyers as the cultural week alone brings in more people in a week than a two year stretch of the Rockdale Council of the Arts and the high schools combined. Yet with the high schools of Conyers the children really get a chance to perform and get interested in the arts. Were maybe ther’re students in Spain that get less opportunity?

Bulls will be coming soon......