When our fellow citizens stand on stage

Every summer, when Theater Spektakel announces its new programme, I do not look for famous names. On the contrary — it is the performances I know very little about in advance that draw me in. Maybe it is a professional deformation after more than two decades of organising cultural events, or maybe plain curiosity. I am always more interested in the idea behind a performance than in the name on the poster.

That is how, this year, I stopped at Multitud, by the Uruguayan choreographer Tamara Cubas. The few lines of the description said that there would be around eighty residents of Zurich on stage. Not actors, not dancers, not people who have lived off the theatre for years — but citizens who will, for a short while, become part of an artistic project. The longer I thought about that idea, the less it seemed like a theatrical experiment and the more like an interesting question addressed to all of us.

We live in a city where we pass hundreds of people every day. We share trams, shops, parks and streets, and yet we know almost nothing about one another. Sometimes it seems to us that we know the city we live in well, when in fact we only know its routine. We know the way we take to work, where we drink our coffee and in which shop we buy our bread. Far more rarely do we think about the people who build that same city every day simply by being present in it.

Maybe that is exactly why this performance caught my attention. I have not seen it yet and I do not know what impression it will leave on me, but the very decision to invite people of different ages, professions and life experiences onto the stage strikes me as a reminder that a community is not made of institutions or buildings, but of people. When we pass them every day, they become part of the city scenery. When we see them on stage, they become individuals with their own body, voice and story.

That is why it seems to me that Multitud is not a performance only about the people who will be on stage. It is, at least from my perspective, also a performance about the audience. About how ready we are to recognise, in an unfamiliar face, our neighbour, a colleague, or the man we see every morning at the same tram stop. When the line between the stage and the city blurs even a little, theatre gains an entirely new dimension.

Maybe after the performance some will talk about the choreography, some about the direction, and some will go home with an entirely different impression. What interests me most right now is what happens to a city when its residents briefly switch roles and become its storytellers. That question alone seems to me worth a trip to the theatre — even before I have seen the performance.

In a time when there is so much talk of divisions, differences and loneliness, projects like this remind us that togetherness is not an abstract idea. It comes into being every time people agree to do something together — a performance, a concert, volunteering, or a simple conversation after an event. Maybe that is why, every year, I expect more from Theater Spektakel than a good programme. I expect it to remind me that a city is not the sum of its streets, but the story of the people who live in it.

If Multitud manages, even for a moment, to change the way we look at one another once the performance ends and the audience steps back out onto the streets of Zurich, it will be a reminder that art sometimes changes the world not with grand gestures, but with a very quiet shift of our gaze.

— Evica