“Just over a year ago, Toni Casares phoned me to invite me to take part in the In Residence project organised annually by Barcelona Institute of Culture and Barcelona Education Consortium. I remember that I had difficulty in understanding what the initiative was about when Toni described it to me. He said that I would have to go to Institut Príncep de Girona every Friday and share the process of writing a theatre play with a group of second-year secondary pupils. “You mean I have to write a work for teenagers?” “No. You just have to share the process to help them understand your work”. And I thought: “I’ll teach them lots of things – I love my work!” But now, having spent a whole academic year with them, I get the feeling that they taught me more than I taught them. Maybe I enabled them to learn about the technical part of my work, but they – no doubt quite unaware of the fact – transmitted an attitude to me, a way of seeing the world. I talk to my parents, and they believe that what we have now is fine, because it’s better than what they had before. But I talk to these boys and girls, who were born just thirteen years ago, and they question the whole system. They don’t have an earlier model to compare it with and they don’t accept the “things were worse before” argument. These two opposing ways of seeing the world are the base of the conflict in Consell Familiar [Family Council].”

Cristina Clemente

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Her contact with a group of third-year secondary school pupils inspired the playwright Cristina Clemente to create some of the characters in her latest play, Consell Familiar [Family Council].

The play, autobiographical to a certain extent, reflects the everyday life of a family that has installed democracy in the home. The youngest character represents the critical attitude of protest found among the pupils that Clemente worked with as part of her participation in the In Residence programme, a generation that will not settle for democracy but also demands sincerity and justice.

This family elects a president, follows electoral rules, establishes state structures and apply their own economic system. When one of the characters realises that he doesn’t want to carry on living in this way, he is brought face-to-face with the difficulty of changing a system in which the other family members have become used to living.

Consell Familiar was premiered at the Temporada Alta festival (Girona-Salt) on 16 November 2013 and was performed at the Sala Beckett / Obrador Internacional de Dramatúrgia (Barcelona) from 21 November 2013 to 4 January 2014.