On 6 February 2020, the dumping of the Zaldibar landfill occurred, when two workers, Alberto Sololuze and Joaquín Beltran, were captured below. At the time he was standing on the Ximun Fuchs motorway, director of the play "Disaster", standing, after the performance of the previous play created by the same companies: “You saw everybody out of cars, nobody understood what was going on. It was an end of the world, or the first.” He found something to take in his hands. “This story has a myth: the mountain has fallen. Workers fall into need or work, like slaves. Almost every week workers die working and we accept. We recognize it as a society. In the name of our welfare, as a consumer, we accept it. Increasing age at work, late retirement. Let's go with all that trash. The waste of well-being causes death. That gives a lot to think about society,” says Fuchs. What is garbage if it's not a metaphor?

It was March 14, 2020 in Spain, by pandemic, when they first sent home, and they did it three days later in France. “This story sounds like a Greek tragedy, the mountain has fallen upon two people,” says the author of Harkaitz Cano. “To this tragic burden we have added the obstacle of a global global pandemic.” The play blends Zaldibar's detachment with the subsequent pandemic. After one accident, another. One theme involves covering the other, the end of history, as in reality. “Now it is a nuclear war and then it will be another. We go against the wall faster and harder, a high-speed train goes against the wall”, Fuchs. However, Cano has discovered that historically there is a link between the pandemic and landfills, as the first landfills were created to deal with pandemics.

Eye and eyes

“Often the word is minimal,” says the author. “The text is one of four or five things. Asking the actors, while they speak, you have to change clothes for the next character while moving around or taking a focus.” This work also keeps the public alert. The combination of several stimuli occurs at several moments and, although it seems suffocating, the commitment to express the theme in a visual way enriches the proposal, turning the viewer into one more actor. “There is a story we tell as an artist. Pandemia and Zaldibar are there, of course, but also the story, how it counts,” said Fuchs. One of the protagonists is a journalist, also a dantzari. “Artists are also talking about art. We always try to hold on with humor, each in our role. We have something to tell. What we count, how we count, who and for what. These things are important to the public: to say what kind of journalism, what kind of art we want as a community.”

Unlike television or cinema, the word and what is said have more weight in theatre than in other audiovisual. Cano has appointed a compromise between literature and audio-visual. However, the importance given to visual communication in this work is clear. They have used many resources to complete the nature of the work: music and songs live and recorded, live images, real images, screen, letters, public space, spotlights on hands, shadows, costumes on stage, singing and dance. Messy scenery and elegance over trash. Simple and understandable marked spaces.

Meanwhile, the trash stops and moves on top. No solutions. Who is the responsibility for? Whose lives depend on? What is important and for whom? Does it make sense to ensure health against plague when death is accepted at work? Does the truth end? Each of them. Pass the load. At the same time there are many events, feelings and emotions, very fast, very intense: “That was the pandemic,” says Cano.

There are seven on the table: Maite Larburu, Ander Lipus, Manex Fuchs, Ruth Guimará, Eneko Gil, Ane Sagüés and Jon Ander Urresti. But they represent more than twenty characters: workers, family members, journalists, politicians, collaborators, nurses, health counselors, entrepreneurs, artists, sick people, etc. Not everyone has to do with everyone, but they're connected. We can see different points of view in the face of a problem: for age, for work… There are people with word and power, wanting to change anything, conscious, looking at their navel, setting limits, meeting limits, jumping. The writer has said that the goal has been to explain the complexity of the characters, to reach the bones so that everyone has their own moment of weakness: “Everyone has some time when for different reasons they are or feel at the edge of the abyss: grave or human. Most don’t end in the same place they start doing it.” Because, as the director said, even though they question everyone with a vote and who has the ability to speak, they have wanted to put the characters in the crudest humanity: “This is not a complaint, this is another work.”

Deformed mirror of reality

“It’s not a pamphlet, we don’t say this is bad or this is good. We are not able to do that. We are not priests, preachers, military or political. We are playwrights. We have a deformation point, the reality is much more raw, harder, cruel and ridiculous”, Fuchs.

They say that much has been documented to carry out the work, listening to how they live with relatives of those killed in Zaldibar and with several nurses. “We have asked for permission to tell.” And if the theater really has, though they share the doubt of the same truth in the play itself. Zaldibar is spoken of, but the characters are fictional. For his development, the writer has used the testimonies of others. “It’s something that still moves us, because it’s still moving. Responsibility for reality and freedom of fiction. That is the combination.”

The subject is dark, hard and hard, although it does not lack humor. They tell something that's too close or too far away, that some don't want to remember, others they haven't forgotten. They play with a two-year timeline, and although they lose track of time, people believe they're forgotten. “Everything is canceled very quickly in these times. Everything goes so fast that what happened a year ago we have to remember. We have forgotten them. This collective fact or exercise of collective memory – performative, memorandum, chronic, complaining or as you like – is more beautiful when it occurs in common. And that is guaranteed by the theater.”

Art as a gesture

Once the pandemic began, many journalists asked whether something would change, whether we would learn something, whether it would be the end or the beginning of an era. Are things going to be different? Will we have another way of dealing with life? The writer says no. They will change, “more control and less freedom, but that’s a constant over the last thirty years,” smiling loudly.

Disaster work, as you have explained, intends to influence the public, seeking a reaction. Let the viewer not be the same when it comes in and out. These are stories related to family, art, garbage, staff, nurses, medicine, body. Convinced that the public is not uniform, they expect different interpretations and people dream of taking their own. “This is my story, it’s been there, but it’s my story.”

The pandemic and its consequences have not ended and the incident at Zaldibar has not been resolved. Art has not returned to the previous situation. They also wanted to translate it into the play, turning a dancing character into the protagonist, for example, through some of their quotes. “We have seen this, the pandemic has shown us that art is not essential. Food yes, jogging yes. And theater doesn't. Counting our myths together is not essential. And I think yes, it is essential. Otherwise, we will become mere consumers. The pandemic brought a huge drop in cinema that has not recovered. We see it in the theater. They are not just artists, a whole society has stayed and that society has become accustomed to being in front of a television or a screen. As a Basque, it is our death, because all these contents are not in Basque. In addition, we did not meet as a community. Theater and democracy emerged at the same time, and it's no accident. Theater is the framework of a democracy, a free moment where things are said, spoken and lived collectively and individually. Before a screen no. I'm not saying to you that we don't think, that we don't develop the critical spirit, but there's no way to react or share, but through other screens. So everything is commercialized. Our relationship is normally traded. The theater is still quite archaic, in part, to get rid of it. And that’s why we talk.”

“On Yotube, on Netflix, on Filme… we have everything in hand, but the theater has that news and that peculiarity: that here and now it is happening and for you, and that tomorrow, although it repeats, it will not be the same,” the writer added. In this sense, and convinced that the theater is a school, they want to emphasize the transmission: a pedagogical report will be opened and directed to teachers and students, bringing the play to schools. They will also hang on the website songs, verses, drawings, documentaries, films…