The incomplete score

I know how to behave. Let's say, for example, that I go to the National Theatre of Catalonia. I know the tacitly choreographed protocol and I can follow it to the letter. I know which version of myself is welcome, which fits in and doesn't cause discomfort, I know which identity to perform to be read: a little dark but without overdoing it, a little flashy but without overdoing it, I have to be that note that gives a certain twist, a very slight one, to the general score. Everything else remains out of focus. No one has explicitly asked me, but I have understood that otherness has no place here.I have lived in this country for 22 years, I have level C in Catalan, almost one hundred percent of my affective network is Catalan, I have a Catalan son... but I am still perceived as a migrant person. They continue to speak to me in Spanish and congratulate me on my "nice" accent. But it's okay, I can manage that. The complex part comes on the professional level: my place, perennial, seems to be the margin. This place where the system places me does not come from personal exclusions perpetrated by individual agents, but is the structure. And, let it be said here, mea culpa, it is also an ambiguity that is not accidental, but a survival strategy.Somehow, this "being where I can be read" that I sometimes perform is what W.E.B. Du Bois defined as double consciousness. Migrant people always look at ourselves through the eyes of others, who, as a reading mass of acceptable alterities, are the ones who measure the value of our presence. We are looked at under a catalog of options ranging from curiosity to condescension. The splitting is, without a doubt, exhausting: it is me but it is also the version that the viewer needs to feel diverse without feeling questioned. I interpret my own identity.

Shall we bring it down to earth? Come on... What I mean is that, from my moderately privileged position (I'm involved in art, I'm even a columnist for a newspaper!), I see perfectly well that there are tacit limits. I'll give an example: a Catalan and Caucasian female stage director has to elbow her way to get a space in the theatrical scene. But once she achieves a certain space, you'll find her now directing a Greek tragedy, now a postmodern play, now a contemporary classic of Anglo-Saxon realism. It's taken for granted that if she knows how to do her job, she'll do it with whatever challenge is put in front of her. In my case, I'm expected to lead certain types of projects, and the demand has been so efficient that these are the projects I usually lead. But a Santiago Rusiñol... what? You? Absolutely not, this corner of Catalan identity can never be in the hands of a neo-Catalan.Living on that margin has a certain bitter taste, the truth; sometimes it is a condemnation and a border, the one that Gloria Anzaldúa defines when two or more cultures rub against each other and create a non-place, a borderland that is the only possible place where I can live by not fully fitting into the official narrative of what it means to be Catalan. Then, when I am at a premiere, in a room, at an institutional event, I am not fully invited as "part of it," but rather it is an act of nepantla, a Nahuatl word that means "land in between" and that speaks not only of a physical space but of an emotional, psychological, and political state. If living in a non-place – the “I am not from here nor am I from there” that Chavela Vargas sang – is like being in a waiting room, nepantla is being seated there, in that room, with the door through which you entered closed, and the door towards where you are going... closed.Now, it must be age, but I have been living in this kind of limbo for some time with a certain illusion. Well, illusion is not the word. I have been observing both realities for some time with a certain curiosity, being a kind of chimera from a medieval bestiary, a hybrid that walks through the theater halls defying taxonomy and that asks itself – every day – if the effort is worth it. Yes, I suppose it must also be age, but living from resistance is tremendously uncomfortable: you feel outdated, fragmented, and alone.

So, I pose the question: what does Catalan culture do with this intermediate space?I have been saying for a long time that we are diversifying above our deconstructions, and what I mean by that is that putting faces of different phenotypes on stage or on screens can be an empty aesthetic act if practiced with impunity and frivolity. Integrating imaginaries, phenotypes, and diversities is not a kind act or an act of good will, but a redistribution of power. And here is the crux of the matter: those who have power do not want any redistribution of power.It is not enough to scatter diverse faces on the billboard; it is not just about adding new stories, but about rethinking who writes what we see on stage, who programs, who legitimizes, who qualifies, who constructs imagery. And, moreover, I wonder: under what conditions is that new narrative that questions, accompanies, or nuances the idea of Catalanity accepted? Can the migrant, migrated, racialized, diverse population... transform the narrative or just join it?It must be age, here too, but now I see the seams of the system. And it is exhausting to live in this state of transition and chaos that Anzaldúa talks about. I am not a note to make the structural harmony less flat, I am the evidence that we have not yet learned to write scores where those of us who inhabit this borderland can carry our silence, our noise, and our truth. So, I'm sorry, but without us the score is incomplete.