Performing arts in the ERAM classrooms

The performing arts are a space for creative expression and reflection, where multiple disciplines and perspectives converge. Over the years, they have established themselves as an essential means of understanding and transforming the world around us. Through the words of some teachers of the Degree in Performing Arts of ERAM, we explore this conceptual and practical richness and how we find the performing arts in each subject.

What role do the performing arts play in the interpretation of our environment?

Answered by Xavier Bobés, teacher of the subject “Theatre of objects and puppets”:

The performing arts are a meeting between the art of the ephemeral, poetry and empathy. We create to generate links between people, our imaginaries, our emotions. The theatre of objects presents us with the possibility of realizing that everything we feel and learn throughout life is also manifested from everything we touch, everything that surrounds us. The subtlety of everything that goes unnoticed in everyday life becomes a theatrical metaphor of infinite power. And from the play between things, materials, actions, body, space… we invite the viewer to look, interpret, understand, from the eyes of a child, everything that can become a metaphor, and therefore theater.

What does it mean to have acting as a profession?

Answered by Alberto Díaz, teacher of the subjects “Reproduction of human behavior” and “Area of ​​creation II”:

The craft of theatre is a long-distance race and, as performers, the instrument with which we work (and will continue to work throughout our lives), is our own body. Also, therefore, our voice, our sensitivity, our imagination, our emotions… I understand work as a journey from ourselves, but that we must be able to expand into infinite possibilities. Starting from ourselves to inhabit other bodies, travel through other emotions, expand sensitivities and multiply imaginaries. And always train to do everything as if it were the first time, with curiosity, honesty, truth and commitment.

What is the role of the School during the training of GAE students?

Response Sílvia Escuder, teacher of the subjects “Techniques d’interpretation de los linguas corporals”, “Area of ​​creation I”, “Actoral training” and “Advanced acting in front of the camera”:

When the theater student finishes his training process, he will not have finished the process that will make him an actor. He needs his whole life to achieve it, and not even then. But if the School (the classroom) has given him the tools to be a curious, autonomous and passionate being, the School will have fulfilled its purpose. It will have given the world a being capable of challenging it, questioning it and making it evolve.

Consciousness must be awakened. And the School that trains them, too. For this reason, training in dramatic art must be very rich. Of course, a teacher can have a method that gives more importance to the body than to the spirit or the word. Or vice versa. But that is of no importance. It depends on personal tastes.

We must believe in the possibility of changing the world, accepting that we ourselves are modified!

The School must encourage the student to search, to question themselves first of all, to question everything, to take and throw away certain ideas, to become a conscious instrument that contributes to the enrichment of art and culture.

How does dramaturgy relate to the audience?

Ferran Joanmiquel, teacher of the subjects “AEA” and “Dramaturge”, answers:

The performing arts have the project of acting as a mirror for us. A collective, social and personal mirror at the same time. The stage (the theater, the street, it doesn’t matter) is the place where the audience’s imagination intertwines with the creative metaphor to create together a universe rich in images. These images can take the form of choreography, dialogue between characters, musical scores or the free flight of bodies and emotions that travel through empty space, letting go of the bar of one trapeze to grab onto another, in constant balance, on the edge of the tightrope to continue representing us.

Why work on the fundamental critical discourse behind artistic practices?

Responds Judit Vidiella, teacher of the subjects “Expressions of contemporary culture” and “Final Thesis of Degree”:

A key element in the training and professional career of people who dedicate themselves to cultural creation in the performing and performing arts sector is to equip themselves with a grounded critical discourse. Having an extensive genealogical, theoretical and methodological background on the various approaches to past and present artistic and cultural productions helps to understand, analyze and evaluate the various practices and expressions in relation to their historical, political, economic, social and cultural context. These dialogues with artistic practices, analyses of social events, and theoretical and philosophical frameworks help to provide us with references, discourses, tools and positioning when putting into action processes of research and educational creation based on the arts.

How has the conception of theatre evolved from the 19th century to the present day?

Response Carolina Martínez, teacher of the subjects “Dramatic Theories I”, “Dramatic Theories II”, “Dance interpretation techniques” and “Audiovisual Dramaturgy”:

Today the field of Performing Arts includes multiple disciplines: theater (text, physical, object, multimedia…), dance, circus, performance… And its uses are also multiple, assuming not only an individual transformation (of the artist and the spectator), but also a collective one.

Since Wagner formulated his theory of the total work of art at the end of the 19th century, it served as inspiration for the stage creators of the 20th and 21st centuries, who stopped contemplating the stage art as a scenic translation of a theatrical text, to perceive the theatrical event as a sum of artistic disciplines in dialogue, with the performer being a key piece. 

This new conception of theatre as a synthesis of staging, dramaturgy, technology and acting allowed the West to overcome the crisis in which theatre was in the 19th century, constituting the term that would later be called postdramatic theatre and which would begin to become an art that would question not only the individual and society, but also itself, perceiving itself as a phenomenon in constant (and necessary transformation). It is precisely with this global perspective of the stage that the Degree in Performing Arts at ERAM was created and articulated since its birth, with the idea of ​​training students with a 360º vision of the stage, providing them with the basic tools of each of the constituent disciplines of theatre that are essential to know this art and then be able to specialize (or not) in a specific field of it.

Has the essence of interpretation evolved over the centuries?

Responds Xicu Masó, teacher of the subjects “Ámbits de creación II“, “Ámbits de creación IV“, “Stage direction”, “Stage performance” and “Final degree thesis”:

The essence of what we do has been the same for thousands and thousands of years. Humans have the need to tell stories to each other; to understand each other better, to know who we are, to celebrate, to get through the mourning, to burn demons, to learn things, to make memories. Those who tell can be many or few, those who listen too. We can do it by the fire or with high technology, but it is the same need. Therefore, the most important thing, in our business, is to communicate. Our job is to learn to communicate as well as we can, our art is to do it from beauty, in all its breadth and complexity. Why is the theater that is recorded with cameras so bad? Because the most important thing, as I said, is the communicative fact and what the cameras cannot record is the energy that is produced between the one who tells the story and the one who listens to it, between those who dance and those who watch, between those who sing and those who listen.

How is Jaques Lecoq’s pedagogy applied in the performing arts?

Answered by Aïna R. Marès, teacher of the subjects “Body language interpretation techniques”, “Àmbit I”, “Actoral training” and “Diction”: 

The performing arts can transform our environment and at the same time the world in which we live. The performing arts school is a space of trial and error where students can investigate and discover their own language so that, once they enter the job market, they can transmit their own vision of the world.

This, then, is the ideal space to make mistakes and learn from mistakes, where to acquire the necessary tools to know how to be on stage without fear, without complexes, without tics, without shame, without manias. Based on the learning acquired, students gain more confidence, strength, energy, passion, security, lucidity, and concreteness in the actions they perform on stage.

From the pedagogy of Jacques Lecoq, we embark on a journey through different masks that will give the future actor or actress tools to develop their body on stage. The basis, according to Lecoq, is body work. The goal is to create a blank page so that we can fill it with the most extensive color palette. The more we find our own neutrality, the more permeable we can be when creating characters.

“No actor or actress enters the stage without their body”, said Lecoq.

How is dance applied in the teaching of performing arts at ERAM?

Response Laura Alcalà, teacher of the subject ” Dance interpretation techniques”:

Dance moves space and allows us to create from the body, from the world of matter and from what already exists. In this subject we work on interpretation and creation in dance with the aim of achieving technical, physical capabilities and above all tools that can be extrapolated to stage creation, whatever the point. starting point. We work from practice, addressing theory and methodologies of creation in dance that allow us to move, compose and write with a spatial, material perspective and put a reflective, performative and compositional body into operation.