He has conducted theatre studies in Navarra and Madrid. Has it been a long formative process? I've
been very lucky and a lot of things to learn. There is a lot of talk about talent and imagination, but we must demand and value the theatrical technique. The knowledge of a strong body of knowledge that generates culture enriches artistic practice.

Why did she decide to stay in Madrid at the end
of her studies? Because I felt like I wanted to stay there. I started a workshop called Skin with Skin with the company Calatea and fell in love with this project.

If you're working on creativity, you can live wherever you want, but I think it's important to know what's going on elsewhere. In short, theater is a collective artistic practice and seeing what others do, you can feed your practice more easily. I see it enriching.

But for small peoples like Euskal Herria, isn't it dangerous that talent goes to those magnetic poles? I think more than going through talent. In our field, talent is nomad, and that's good because it enriches the cultural landscape. On the other hand, there
are groups and artists who are deeply rooted here, who are doing essential work that must also be reinforced. Both are necessary to enrich our cultural system.

As for performing arts, it should be taken into account that they require time, space and teamwork. In this sense, the training spaces, the youth companies, the places that offer the possibility of performing artistic stays are of great importance. In general, allowing space, time and work is breaking culture.

We ultimately need the right conditions to work, like any other trade. All aid to encourage creative work is therefore of great importance. With Lore More we created Trapu zikinak, for example, thanks to the scholarship of Geuretik Sortuak Udalbiltza. It is a very powerful initiative that allows its founders to make their projects materially possible. This scholarship is a particularly interesting call because it includes adhesion to territoriality and the valuation of creativity.

How does Lore More emerge? Mikele was born of friendship between Urroz and both. We decided to create a company to talk about the things we would like. In
2018 at the Olite Theatre Festival we made an adaptation of Maxima star, Bohemian Lights, with Naiara Carmona. Then we did a dramatic reading of the text written by me, Herri Hura, in Tabakalera, and then came the scholarship from Udalbiltza. Mikele and I, actress and singer Laura Villanueva, and producer Lucía Ezker, started working on this work. It was a very nice process.

What are you talking about in Trapu zikinak? The work is a
tribute to the women who walked through the laundries. We wanted to highlight the networks of collaboration between our ancestors. Women went to the laundries to do a hard job, that's right and we don't want romantic, but it's true that there were also networks of mutual protection there.

Were they more than just places of work? Yes, they were meeting places. It was one of the few places where women socialized. Apart from jail and church, laundries and fountains were almost the only places where women gathered outside the house. As researched, it was also an
important place to construct the gender role. There it was resolved who was ordained, who was clumsy, who punctual... there were also social sanctions, no doubt, but we wanted to value the other side, that of mutual aid. Sometimes counting dirty rags or helping others is a cleaning exercise and we have worked with that metaphor.

They sing nice old songs… Yes. To calm the
work, women sang a lot in the laundries. We have asked and searched for information, and that has been a very nice job.

You use several dialects. Why? We have sought
to reflect the realities of different territories and to do so we have used several dialects. In short, it is a kind of journey within the Basque Country. This diversity is a gift that our language offers us.

In addition to the 27 actions made possible by the scholarship, you have performed others. What is the intention from now on? From now on, continue to do so both in the theatres and in the villages’ laundries. The washrooms have a special charm. In many villages, nice laundries have
been restored, and it is nice to imagine the interviews and the recognitions they have had. It creates a special environment with the nearest public, the water present…

The smallest house speaks to the children of refugees. How do you do this? Courage, prudence and confidence. In the case of children, it is very important
never to lose hope and to think that life always finds a loophole to move forward. To put an end to the tragedy of refugees, we cannot tell children that arms trafficking or businesses destined for war should stop or that the distribution of money should be fairer in the world... They are complex phenomena and are outside their scope of intervention, which can lead to great powerlessness and that this feeling, at last, leads to the belief that nothing can be done. We'll have to teach them what's in their hand, and that's why I'm talking about taking care of friends and being a refuge for other people. In order to move forward, we must always offer hope to children.

He talks about uprooting in the work of that country. Yes. It's a story told to adults. The need to leave the country of origin also means leaving aside the stories that could potentially happen. That is why this work has a tone of mourning. It's a story about
what it could be. It shows that the decision to move is not available to everyone. Some of us have that privilege, but others don't. As a feminist view is an essential perspective, we should be clear that we should also look at the world in the eyes of racialized people, people in poverty or refugees.

He has participated in the recently released Teatrodix festival held in Pamplona. What is that? It's an initiative created by Arterias and
Paris 365. Paris 365 guarantees, above all, a decent diet for people in poverty or social exclusion, but what about their cultural aspirations? How to ensure access to culture for those who have difficulty meeting their physical needs? In collaboration with other associations, this year we have immersed ourselves in community and social theatre. This year’s theme has been interculturality, coexistence in diversity and migration. It has been very interesting, for example, to associate one of the developments in Orkoien with another in Ecuador and ask what it is for them to receive a city. What they need to feel welcome. We need time to be together, to listen and to invent new ways of living together.

What is the Skin Cover project? I have been teaching theatre courses at the Theatre School of Navarra
or in schools, but this workshop is different. It's not so much teaching theatrical techniques as making a montage, but using theater to perform a stage research. In this workshop we analyzed phenomena related to sexual violence or issues such as the trafficking of people of sexual exploitation. The aim of the initiative is to make young people aware of these realities. It is not so much that we tell that these phenomena exist, that we can make a collective reflection on them.

Through improvisations we began to raise different situations. For example: you are from Romania, you fall in love with a man and he tells you that you go to Spain looking for a job with him. This can be the starting point for improvisation. We work different situations from the body, from emotion -- we get into the skin of these people. So we want to explain that there are not people who are very good and other very bad, but that all people are very complex, that we live in different situations and that those situations also lead us. We try to understand it. We propose a humanistic, profound understanding.

But do the students who get into the skin of human traffickers also empathize with them? Empathizing is difficult in these cases. It is one thing to understand the causes that have caused some behaviors and another to coincide with them. Very interesting situations arise in the exercises. For example, a person from a very poor place goes into trafficking because he needs money to keep his family alive. It's not easy. We also
need to know the causes behind the facts, but that does not mean that I agree with those behaviors.

Through these activities, we ask young people how we want this world to be. We give them the opportunity to do a theater magic and to propose other realities. The denunciation is very good and essential, but we must also try to build alternatives, even if it is in fiction. To build another world, we have to imagine it before, and that's the opportunity that theater gives us.

Is that the project you want to bring here? Yes. It is held annually in
Madrid seven years ago and in Barcelona four years ago. My intention is that the next course will be here one or two groups to start at the level of Navarra, but then in Euskal Herria in general. The idea is to be in contact with the groups in Madrid and Barcelona, because there may be very interesting interactions. The participation of 15-17 year-olds in these workshops is voluntary and free of charge, which is why we must seek the involvement of different centres and entities to carry out these projects.

How do young people participate? They appreciate that they feel listened to. We ask them questions and try to think together. To think together assumes that the adults who carry the workshop share the process of reflection; we do not want to bring the young people to our conclusions, but they give us a
tour together, sharing doubts, with respect and using the group as a place of learning. Anyone likes to value their own opinion.

I think the situation of young people today is very difficult. They have a lot of stimuli that tell them what a hard imaginary should look like. If identity itself is something that is discovered or done, it takes time to do so. In this period of search, sometimes there are no great things to tell or show, but in today's world the opposite happens, and kids are required to have regular exposure, photography, opinion, answer -- and they find it very difficult to live with that pressure in those gray areas. Theater games allow us to create spaces between peers and friends. Young people need closeness, contact them and join a group, something that has also been banned for two years because of the pandemic. This has caused them and we need physical spaces to play, dance… to overcome all that and share the benefits that it brings us to build life together.

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LAST WORD
Creative Women

"We've begun to familiarize ourselves with women as creators, fortunately, but at the same time a lot remains to be done. From a gender perspective, for example, many classic theatrical texts can cause tremors. We have to build our imagination. Feminism has taken very important steps in different areas of life, and it remains to do the job of translating them into telling our stories. We must take a look forward to looking at stories that are in the collective imagination."