A gateway to the political project of Atirohecho

Abstract

This article is proposed as a space from which to begin to analyse the meaning and political functioning of the Valencian theatre company Atirohecho, based on the ideological assumptions that shape it and within a social and cultural framework with which it interacts. Thus, we understand Atirohecho as a narrative for dispute, that is, a type of cultural agent that focuses its dramaturgical production on the intersectional class conflict and elaborates a critical proposal against the neoliberal postulates of the capitalist system. Given the combative nature of the company, it establishes a complex relationship with the cultural field. It does not insert itself into it in an aconflictive way, but rather tensions and challenges it, exposing some of its main power dynamics. For all these reasons, we construct a gateway or an initiatory handle for the study of the company that is based on three axes. Firstly, that of physical theatre (which dances), from which the use of the body in the dramaturgical space is conceived as a working tool that is linked to the notion of workers' solidarity. Secondly, we address the axis of workerist theatre, which has memory as its centrepiece, i.e. the updating of class analysis based on feminist postulates and the popular movements of Latin America. Finally, we focus on the links that Atirohecho maintains with popular theatre and social movements, which they recognise as the protagonists of their theatre and in whose actions they participate. The company, which has filled the city with references, slogans and visual elements, has reactivated a way of understanding theatre as a tool of struggle for a disputed territory, politically convulsed in recent decades.