Since the founding of the association and the appointment of Josu Camara as president, the questions to be answered have been numerous, both in the media and in the street. Camara says that in these first months she has noticed some interest. “People want to know the state of the theater. Until now it has been quite invisible, perhaps as a cultural area it has been somewhat forgotten. Another question is how all these people respond when there are apparitions of Basque theater.”

Idoia Gereñu works as a coordinator and, in her opinion, the substantive work is still pending. “We met the goal of last year’s course, to make the partnership public and get it going. We can equate this year with the first year of a newborn child, now he has to grow up to take the first steps.” As in the theatre, the movement does not emerge from scratch, improvisation is always about something, the body has asked the EHAZE to reflect on the situation that the Basque theatre is experiencing.

How is the Basque theatre?

The seed of the EHAZE was planted three years ago, when people from different areas of the theatre met in the context of the Hik Start meetings. According to Camara, this was a diverse group: teaching people, professional actors, amateurs... “In this meeting everyone was worried, pessimistic, because they saw problems in the Basque theater”. Among the most serious problems was precisely the dispersion of all. “Everyone tried to solve their own micro-universe without a unified response to the general problem.” After that meeting, they began to take steps, making contacts and networks, until June of this year. From the beginning it has been clear that it must be a project structured around the amateur, according to Camara, the ability or desire to do something for the Basque theater is something that must be measured. “Being a fan association, we want to emphasize that it does not have the vocation of being a professional association. Since the relationships that are usually made at the professional level are quite commercial, we are far from the spectator.” The association wants to break this dynamic: “In the programming scheme we have here, the viewer is a passive agent, a mere consumer. What we would like to achieve through EHAZE is that it is an active agent, that it also has the ability to ask what it wants.” Considering the

concept of the amateur, it seems inevitable to mention the impact of the success of the verse. Camara said that she was very present at the beginning, but less lately. “Bertsolarismo is very local, a cultural area that has been awakened with great strength. It becomes a reference to how many people, how many fans move around it. We have a very good relationship with the Bertsozale Association, there are probably ideas that can be taken from their experience, but we see that we have been created to face another problem: at the moment, for example, there is no bertsolaris to give birth”. Although there are more cultural infrastructures in the Basque Country than ever before,

they are largely emptied of Basque. According to Camara, it’s an issue that has been around for a long time: “The problem we feel is that the theater is, in fact, quite central. With the exception of the phenomena that survive in the North, most of the manifestations that have been created for adults since the 1960s have been created in Erda. When later programming has been consolidated, both in the North and in the South, it has been complemented by shows coming from abroad and especially in Spanish or French. Theater is 18% of programming. This includes children’s theatre, which accounts for 80% of all Basque. And that 80 is not going up; cases are emerging that also require programming in Spanish for children.” The diagnosis of

Basque theatre is one of the first purposes of the EHAZE. “We are collecting data to analyse how the Basque theatre is doing. How many groups there are working in Basque, how many plays there are to offer, who are amateurs, professionals; for both adults and children... Sometimes we have heard that there is a willingness to program but not enough work to maintain a program. Is that ignorance? Or laziness, because they haven't made much effort to look for it? “There are jobs, there are jobs.”

Developing the Textualization

With the aim of spreading the hobby, EHAZE also has numerous projects to fill in the gaps that the people who work in the theatre industry have felt. Among the work groups that have been created is the one that deals with documentation, since one of the most important objectives is the social integration of the legacy generated by the theater in Basque. Pablo Barrio is in this work group. “It is a long-term initiative to be carried out in collaboration with agents of the other type, which should be carried out in a Documentation Center of this type.” There are many fields of work that have been planned for this purpose: collect the history of theatre in Basque and research on it; collect texts that have already been created and encourage the creation of new texts; collect essays and theoretical research, pedagogical materials, practical guides, etc.; obtain works related to technical areas or staging, such as dramaturgy, scenography, etc.; collect

audiovisual archives. According to Barrio, the most urgent thing among them is to satisfy the lack of text: “If a group wants to prepare something, the first concern is the text. Nothing is published, I would say less and less. On the other hand, there are many texts there: those that are written, presented to a contest and stored in the drawer, or those that are represented by some group and then lost in oblivion, for example. Collecting them, combing them, classifying them and making them available to everyone is the first task we have imposed on ourselves.” They will launch the website with texts, with a tab that summarizes its characteristics. “It’s a lot of work that needs to be done in

the field.” The feelings that arise around the textualization could also be representative of the general situation. Barrio has reflected extensively on the subject: “There are a lot of problems with the Basque theatre and the text is not the smallest of them. It is true that the text is only a complement to a process, often not the most important, and in this sense it should not be overdramatized, but at the same time it is true that without the text there is no healthy theatrical production in Basque.” The problem of theatrical texts could be understood in the context of literature or even culture. “It has been said that theatre, in the form of literary genres, is on its way to extinction. In our case, if one’s taste is not there is little reason to create theatrical texts and no economic reason. In this way, something of quality will emerge at some point, but if we want healthy theatre, quality will have to emerge from quantity. But it doesn’t seem to matter to anyone, not even to people in the theater world, unfortunately.” To the extent that

Barrio believes that the EHAZE can be a meeting point for people working in the different areas of the theater, it could channel mutual knowledge between textualists and groups. “The real challenge and contribution of the Theatre Association is to bring together all the sectors that move around the theatre. If we really succeed in bringing the EHAZE to life, the association itself will naturally become a meeting point, it will open the doors to mutual knowledge, it will bring those who were far away closer together.”