ROOM: PRACTICES IN INTIMACY

For the third consecutive year, ROOM, a space for reflection for professionals, creators, producers, administrators and theorists, offers the chance to study and exchange knowledge about theater arts.  This is a discussion open to the public and supported by SISMO, acting as a liaison and providing the venue.   Often we identify intimacy with private matters, separate from public space, but intimacy defies associations, in the same way it resists accurate portrayal, and not because it has stage fright (intimacy likes games and whispered stories) or is shy around people (intimacy not only welcomes company, it needs it, beginning with the 'other' that is inside oneself), but rather because in the fragile space of intimacy there is no room for the economics of gain, of the gain of signs, the gain of actions, therefore time is measured differently and one's relationships with others doesn't come about because of the construction of an identity, but rather by touch, and one's relationships with things doesn't come about due to posession, but by contact.
  In choosing intimacy as a discussion topic for this edition of Room, one does not intend to continue this interminable debate (perhaps because of how successful it is) about the defense of all things private against what is public —we could ask ourselves who are the ones most interested in defending privacy—, nor does one want to hoist yet another flag and put up a barricade against the invasion of public things, thinking that only from the outside in, inside oneself, can one find some kind of truth; instead the opposite is proposed: we suggest intimacy as a way of being, or rather, doing, in space, that allows one to think differently about public things- the public, by definition the venue for portrayal- to think differently about the act of standing in front of (or next to) others and about what the viewer's eye suggests and entails, the eye for which a portrayal is created, or speech, with which words are expressed.  The recourse of intimacy in the field of the arts is not a random tendency nor is it a trend; it is a necessity, but not just for art, because while privacy has gone down in history  as a something conquered and as a right, intimacy, which has been with man since his very beginnings, is part of his social nature.
 Intimacy has many impressions, of smells and memories, of textures and bodies, that are more related to vivid experience than to the telling of that experience, because intimacy is not explained, it is lived.  This material dimension- that of a kind of 'performance'-  is what secretly links theater to intimacy; it is what explains why the theatrical tendency in the arts has also been a tendency towards intimacy as a medium, more than of communication, of being, more than for showing, for sharing, not a secret, but rather a moment.
The goal of the discussions over these three mornings is reflection, using the material suggested by several artists and theorists, about the contributions of the attendees as they participate, relative to these dimensions, theatrical and therefore intertwined with intimacy.  One might discover different ways to create (or practice) intimacy and its raison d'être in today's political and economic context.                                                                                                                                                                  Óscar Cornago