Sabina Berman, Mexico  
(writer, journalist)

We can imagine.

The tribe is hunting birds by throwing small stones into the sky, when a giant mammoth suddenly enters the scene and RAGES – at the same time, a tiny human being RAGES like the mammoth. Then, everyone runs away…

This mammoth roar emitted by a female human being – I would like to imagine it is a woman – is the beginning of what makes us the species we are today. The species capable of imitating what we are not. The species capable of representing the Other.

Let's jump ahead ten, a hundred or a thousand years. The tribe has learned to imitate other beings and, deep in the cave, in the flickering light of the fire, they represent what they hunted that morning: four men are the mammoth, three women are the river, the men and women are birds, trees, clouds. Thus, the tribe captures the past through the gift of theater. Even more astonishing: thus the tribe invents possible futures, tries out possible ways to defeat the mammoth, the enemy of the tribe.

Roars, whistles, murmurs – onomatopoeias are our first theatre – will become verbal language. Spoken language will become written language. In another way, theatre will become ritual, then cinema. But in all these forms and in the seed of every form to come, theatre will continue to exist. The simplest form of representation. The living form of representation. Theatre, the simpler, the more intimate, connects us to the most amazing human capacity, that of representing the Other.

Today, in all the theaters of the world, we celebrate this glorious human capacity to make theater. To represent and, thus, capture our past in order to understand it, or to invent possible futures that will bring the tribe more freedom and more happiness.

I am talking, of course, about the plays that really matter and that go beyond entertainment. These plays that matter today aim to do the same thing as the oldest ones: to defeat the contemporary enemies of tribal happiness, thanks to the capacity for representation.

What are the mammoths that must be defeated today through tribal theater?

To me, the biggest mammoth of all is the alienation of people's hearts. The loss of our capacity to feel with Others: to feel compassion. And our capacity to feel with the non-human Other: Nature.

What a paradox! Today, on the last stage of Humanism – the era called the Anthropocene – the era in which man is the natural force that has changed and is changing the planet the most – the mission of theater is exactly the opposite of what brought the tribe together when theater was played in the depths of the cave: today we must save our connection with the natural world.

More than literature, more than cinema, theater – which requires the presence of human beings in front of other human beings – is wonderfully suited to fulfill the task of saving us from our transformation into algorithms. Into pure abstractions.

Let's strip away everything superfluous from theater. Let's strip it bare. Because theater, the simpler it is, the more capable it is of reminding us of the one indisputable thing: that we are as long as we are in time, that we are as long as we are flesh and bones and hearts that beat in our chests. We are here and now, that's all.

Long live the theater! The oldest art. The art of being in the present. The most amazing art. Long live the theater!

Translation: Ligia Soare

Biography – Sabina Berman, Mexico

(translation from the original in English)

Sabina Berman Born in Mexico City, Berman is a writer and journalist. Considered the most critically and commercially successful contemporary Mexican playwright, Berman is one of the most prolific living Spanish-language writers.

Before her birth, her parents fled the persecution of Jews in their native Poland and sought refuge in Mexico. Sabina, along with her two brothers and sister, grew up fully aware of the tensions that the conflict had exerted on the family's fate, which the writer still considers a decisive factor in her life.

As a writer, she mainly deals with themes related to diversity and its obstacles. Her style tends towards humor and the need to overcome the limits of language. She is a four-time winner of the National Dramaturgy Prize of Mexico (Premio Nacional de Dramaturgia Juan Ruiz Alarcón) and a two-time winner of the National Journalist Prize (Premio Nacional de Periodismo). Her plays have been performed on stages in Canada, North America, Latin America and Europe. Her novel La mujer que buceó en el corazón del mundo ("I / The Woman Who Plunged into the Heart of the World") has been translated into 11 languages and published in over 33 countries, including Spain, France, the United States, the United Kingdom and Israel.

He currently works in film and television.