DIGGING FOR WORDS
SOCIETAT Doctor Alonso

INTRO
Tomas: There are two of us in the company, me and Sophia. We’re a couple. I come more from the theatre field, she comes more from the dance field. We’ve been working for 18 years together. Six years ago, we got tired of working just between ourselves. We established ‘times of investigation’, to work differently. We invited different artists whose work we liked, but who we’d never worked with before, to investigate with us around a theme we wanted to deal with. It became a very successful and helpful form of work.
We used to be artists who did pieces, like any artist, and now we say we investigate around themes and sometimes we come out with a piece, and sometimes we don’t. When we invite the artist, we’re very clear, we say we have this money and these moments of meeting, and we just want to involve you in the investigation and after that if we want to do a piece, we’ll see… This process has given us a deeper persepctive on what we do and why we’re doing it. For this most recent piece, we started with a question about language and words in this technological revolution that we’re living through now – do they retain their meaning? During the investigation we discovered this tool, which you can find on this website, though it’s in Spanish. We’ve been working in prisons with it, with young people in schools. In English it’s called The Gravedigger. We want to go deep down in the earth to find the original meaning of words. The piece is focused on the parts of history that are hidden from official history. The tool is a conversation tool where people are forced to talk in a different way to usual – there are some rules. We discovered that often when we talk with other people, we just end up trying to win the conversation, to convince the other person. It’s hard to find a group that is really openly trying to find a theme.
The Gravediggers tool was used in the piece to make the text. The tool is useful for many things, it can be used in different types of group. But we used it theatrically. The words we put in the middle are big words, like ‘democracy’ or ‘justice’ or ‘freedom’. Words that have been at there from the Greeks to now, at the basis of society. And we use them a lot and we think these words define us, but we don’t really know what they mean any more. What is freedom for this group today now? And we have to go down to the original meaning. It’s all this metaphor on digging. We worked with archaeologists too. It’s also useful in factories or companies to solve conflicts. In the rehearsal process we went through 15 words with the actors and we taped every excavation. From there, we picked finally four words. Nation, Shame, Testimony, War. These four words stayed. As archaeologists say, when you look for something, you will probably find other things on the way, and you never find the whole thing together. ​

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​NATION, SHAME, TESTIMONY AND WAR.
​THESE FOUR WORDS STAYED.
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Jose: What did you find?

We found that humour is very important to dialogue. We  found that silence is very helpful – so when you don’t have anything to say, it’s better to shutup and wait for the next digger to come into the conversation. We talk too much, humans talk a lot. It’s really a loss of energy. Because to think, you need to listen. So we found also rhythm is involved in language and when a group is tuned in the rhythmic sense, thinking goes much better. We have to really be aware that language is a rhythm. We also found out that words that are important are very picky, they stay there, they’re very solid. It’s not easy to dig into them. When you practice a lot in language, you see that it’s really alive and it changes from context to context. So if you dig into ‘time’ with artists, you’ll go somewhere and if you dig into ‘time’ with prisoners, this word has another meaning. So words are attached to a place and a context and a precise moment. Young people have a more flexible mind, but when you see them working with language, they’re really brilliant. To be more clever, you have to unlearn a lot of things. Language is a mountain of bullshit in general that you keep in your mind and you use always the same patterns.

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​Theatre is supposedly a fiction, but it's very real - we're there with people, it's more real than TV, this ritual thing
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Jose: I see on your website you describe your work as a type of displacement, linguistic displacement maybe…

T: Lately we are very concerned with how people see reality. What is reality? Theatre is supposedly a fiction, but it’s very real – we’re there with people, it’s more real than TV, this ritual thing. We’ve been practicing a lot and we think that to see something real, you have to unsee something. You need to block some things to let the audience see something. Invite them to take off their normal glasses and put them on a different way. Finding tools that allow us to let the audience come with us and see things in a new way.

Some people say we’re very political. I think in the dramaturgy somewhere… we’re really undermining the normal way of looking at things. And we make the audience work, come with us. Sometimes you get too far and people don’t go with you. We change the form a lot from once piece to another – each process needs different people, different tools and a different approach.

J: We are always as artists trying to make something that is going to change the world or wake people up… some sort of movement, a change always. And it seems, it’s not the product that is actually getting to other places and creating changes, maybe it’s the process that is the most interesting. What do you think makes a process valuable in this sense?

T: I think there has to be a very precise question that’s being looked at in a process. To make it useful for a lot of people. In our case, the problem is how we as humans dialogue. It’s good because it has limits in its focus. Society accepts that science takes a lot of time, whereas society doesn’t accept that our work as artists takes a lot of time too. They want results now.

J: Yeah, because science is actually a process – whereas art is now in a product-based economy.
More on Societat Doctor Alonso here.