Lavapiés, theatrically, draws its diffuse roots from the Golden Age. It keeps memories of bygone eras and today resembles a neighborhood subject to several strata: immigration, legal tourism, illegal and consensual tourism, and apprentice actors who want to make their success story there. That Lavapiés is a preeminent theatrical area of the shortest memory, the one that began in the “80s”, is a truth. And it is consolidating itself, with its particularities, as the “West End” of London in the Spanish way.
In the warmth of the Olimpia Theater (today the Valle-Inclán Theater, second headquarters of the National Drama Center after various uses for the leisure of the people of Madrid and Enrique Tierno Galván’s favorite stand), various halls, minor theaters and various drama schools came together. There was no such thing, or at least there was no such thing tacitly, in the spirit of the neighborhood, to make and create a neighborhood dedicated to theater; but History, here in capital letters, imposed its spirit making Lavapiés, once the Olimpia Theater opened, a moral center where dramaturgy developed through an infused science. Lavapiés, as a concept, is part of the biography of Viviana López Doynel, Argentine, who currently directs the El Umbral de la Primavera hall.
Doynel has a history of resistance to the military dictatorship of his country and that of money, although his optimism crosses and overcomes oceans and difficulties. He complains that near the Olimpia Theater, the element that unites the Lavapiés Theater, there is no “plaque that remembers it” as it was; the unifying point of the most repetitive and artisanal theater in Madrid.
His memory, already from Madrid, is that of a father and brother exiled in Spain; and his journey, that of “wanting to do theater since the age of 20” in a vocation that became a way of life when he entered the Dance Theater founded by Antonio Llopis and Luis Olmos. Its premises have a kind of Cordovan patio and a room where all the comforts are possible. It tells one of the keys to why Lavapiés is the epicenter of the most artisanal theater and with less neon: it gives back to reason, the presence of “Olimpia”. And he personalizes it: during a trip to his country in 1994, he understood, despite all the difficulties, the success of doing something, a “own space”. In his memory is the day of the opening of the Umbral de la Primavera, March 23, 2014, with spring itself triumphant in Madrid.
Before, in the bitter memory of the tango of his life, “the crisis of the corralito” and an idea that was reinforced: “The theater will exist even if there is great hunger and we die.” The pandemic influenced them, since the Chinese virus hit them hard when they were beginning to “consolidate themselves as a place in 2020” after opening six years earlier with all the hopes in the world. Although in there, there is also the bittersweet malaise of post-confinement: seeing that “very active people” were left out of the circuit but, also, that the union, and he remembers it as “beautiful”, did “the impossible to adapt.” An extreme that, he says, the institutions did not reach, which “did not live up to it.” In his smiling memorial, there will always be those “people who supported the programming in the middle of a pandemic.”
Proper names
There is no war of numbers because business fluctuates, and that is why there are no disappointed faces but rather the pride of a common project, which has been “tried to organize on several occasions.” But in the imagination of the protagonists of this report there is something in common; They all agree, in increasing or decreasing numbers, to list about fifteen places dedicated to dramatic art in the neighborhood. A list that they cite almost in a litany: “El Umbral de la Primavera, the Valle-Inclán Theater, the Teatro del Barrio, the Mirador Room, the Pavón, the Price, La Escalera de Jacob, La Cuarta Pared, the Karpas Theater. , La Grada, La Encina, the Nuevo Apolo, the Plot Point, the Espacio Teatro y Crecimiento…”, and even, “the Naves del Matadero” in a more remote place. The Madrid City Council, for its part, estimates, in a tourist guide still available on the internet, that there are 70 rooms that theoretically operate in Lavapiés. A figure that includes those casinos that, in 2014, along with the theaters and established venues, offered something to the public: from magic to the most acidic monologues.
The Mirador Room, created in 1993, is the evolution of the Cristina Rota School of Acting, born in 1979. An interior neighborhood patio gives way and leads, in a very urban way, to the different performance spaces. Nur Levi, its deputy director, considers Lavapiés as a “West End” in the traditional sense. Perhaps because, since their arrival in 1993, the neighborhood has become a “multicultural nerve center”, due to its “multicultural and rich” character. Regarding the respectable, this very obsession of Lorca, they assure that they are “lucky to have an audience that responds well to the house’s programming offer”. Although the client knows that Lavapiés is a territory of dramatic art, he recognizes that “Madrid is a difficult capital in terms of display, due to the number of shows offered daily”. The silent reference to the Broadway of the Gran Vía is clear.
Levi emphasizes an inevitable synergy; the number of spaces and “art galleries or bookstores” enrich the neighborhood in the same way as what happens pictorially in what is called the triangle of art in the shadow of the Reina Sofía. However, he regrets the housing problem in Lavapiés, which, among other dramas, expels citizens who confirm and confirm “the identity of the neighborhood.” However, they continue their efforts; that the people of Madrid have “a thirst for culture.” And this hunger is satisfied, he says, by making the theater an element “as accessible and close as possible.” He also focuses on another reason derived from the concentration of the union in the same neighborhood: they “watch and look for shows and projects related to the line of the house.”
Among these dramaturgy entrepreneurs is the “incendiary” memory of the Barbieri Theater; each with its own interpretation. And, one day in September, many years later, a window displays a theater rehearsal. It is the Theater and Growth space, by Adolfo del Río and Déborah Izaguirre. There, someone memorizes a “sui generis” critique by Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, proud of his “open door” policy. To welcome “people with disabilities.”
Stage and dispensary
Among the fifteen fixed premises mentioned above that remain in the “Parnaso de Lavapiés”, the Teatro del Barrio stands out, created in December 2013 and located at number 20 of Zurita Street because yes, because the location in the neighborhood in particular “It made perfect sense.” Ana Belén Santiago, artistic director, claims the location for its topicality because she is mainly dedicated to “political theater”, hence the reason for its headquarters.
During the pandemic, they transformed the stage into a food dispensary. “It was important to stop thinking about the script and act.” In these almost eleven years, “Angélica Lidell or Pepe Viyuela” have passed through there. And in Lavapiés there is an “architectural something that allows it.”
For the Sevillian actress Ana Ruiz, a regular on the Madrid stage, if “Lavapiés is not synonymous with tranquility and a peaceful neighborhood, it smells of theater, the National Drama Center, the Mirador and the Primavera.” Heads and tails of a theater neighborhood that reinvents itself day by day.
