Carlos Aladro takes action (and forgets Gómez)

Carlos Aladro (1970, Madrid) says that the coincidence of his coming out as director of the Theater of the Abbey with World Theater Day has not been intentional, but he has taken the opportunity to begin his presentation with the manifesto written by Carlos Celdrán: "Before my awakening in the theater, my teachers were already there (...)," he read.

In this case, one of his mentors has been José Luis Gómez, from whom he takes the witness and from whom he has commented that he learned that this scenario is not only interpretation, "but also management". This is demonstrated by a career that has already led Aladro (from 2001 to 2009) to the theater he will now direct, collaborating first as an artistic direction assistant, and then in the programming and management of the Foundation, as assistant director and assistant director. . "A day-to-day practice that is not taught in schools," he said.

That would begin with his incursion in management, but the "true master", he says, would come from 2009 to 2016, with his stage at the head of the Corral de Comedias de Alcalá de Henares -center dependent on the Abadía Foundation-, "where we had to negotiate with the crisis. " Then came the Fall and Classics Festival in Alcalá, his last administration work.

With this CV in the management comes Carlos Aladro to the leadership of an Abbey in which he has directed up to six productions, despite the fact that his beginnings had little to do with the boards, "rather with ecology," he says. But the goat pulls the bush, which says the saying, and his past was already marked by a father puppeteer and a mother journalist performing arts. So the agronomist theater group put a worm in his body that three decades later is unstoppable.

A small introduction in the past of Aladro that he himself has done before exposing a very incipient project and with which he has signed for five years, plus a possible extension of three. "It's only been a week," he justified himself. Thus, the first thing Madrid wants to address is the "diagnosis of the strengths and weaknesses of the center." As ideas, he proposes that "what has been until now the house of the actors advances to be the house of the creators", in which the figure of the "omnipresent, omnipotent and omniscient" director becomes obsolete and the "Confluence of a number of associated creators that change the word for action, and in which the widest possible range of languages, risk, innovation and where there is a right to failure opens".

With this, the new director intends that the Abbey does not stop being a "chamber theater", "I love it", in which the proximity continues to be one of its main virtues. A place where the director, he, Aladro, is "a mediator that connects actors with creators and artists with citizenship. And where I can also add my work as a pedagogue. "

Project that, still not defined and that will handle a budget of more than 3.5 million euros (2,265 subsidized and 1,325 of own revenues), seems to open a gap with the Gómez stage. Significant is the possible change, in the words of Aladro, of the Abbey's motto: to move from "The intelligence of pleasure" to "Intelligent pleasure". "I look at it and I read it like that," he explained this morning about leaving behind the academic's work. "As Chekhov said, it does not matter why, but why. It's life, some come and others leave, "he defended from a" transformative "project, neither renovating nor reformist. I think it will be a loving revolution. "