'Hamlet' with performers with Down syndrome comes to Sagunt a Escena festival
The Sagunt a Escena festival hosts 'Hamlet, a very free version' at Sagunto's Roman Theatre this Tuesday, featuring seven performers with Down syndrome and one actress with an intellectual disability.
The Sagunt a Escena festival presents 'Hamlet, una versión recontralibre' ("Hamlet, a very free version") this Tuesday, 11 August, at Sagunto's Roman Theatre. The play is staged by the Peruvian company Teatro La Plaza, directed by Chela de Ferrari, and comes to the city thanks to the theatre programme run by the Diputación de Valencia (Valencia's provincial government).
The production uses Shakespeare's famous "to be or not to be" as a starting point to reflect on the lives of people with Down syndrome in today's society. The cast brings together seven performers with Down syndrome and one actress with an intellectual disability, who draw on their own life experience to question the value society places on people who do not fit dominant models of efficiency, productivity and beauty.
Since it premiered in 2019, the play has toured theatres around the world and has won awards, including the audience prize at the Mostra Internacional de Teatro de Ribadavia (an international theatre showcase in Galicia) in 2022. Teatro La Plaza, the company behind the show, opened in 2002 as a creative space to explore and interpret reality, building a critical viewpoint together with its community.
The venue itself carries its own controversial history. Between 1990 and 1994, Sagunto's Roman Theatre underwent a restoration by architects Giorgio Grassi and Manuel Portaceli that Spanish courts later ruled breached heritage protection law, on the grounds that the new construction hid the original ruins rather than preserving them. Despite that legal controversy, the site remains the city's main open-air cultural venue today.
The Institut Valencià de Cultura (Valencian regional culture institute) rounds out the Sagunt a Escena programme with cultural mediation projects designed to help different community groups take part, making the festival's offer more inclusive and accessible. As part of that effort, the workshop "Un lugar para danzar" ("A place to dance") ran on 1, 5 and 10 August, led by choreographers and dancers Ana Lola Cosín Torada and Lucas García.
Fourteen members of InsProject, a Sagunto association that works with people with disabilities, took part in the workshop, practising movement through accessible techniques at the Casa de Cultura in Puerto de Sagunto. The mediation project wraps up this same Tuesday, when the group attends the 'Hamlet' performance at the Roman Theatre, closing the loop between the awareness work and the stage production. According to Valencia Plaza, with additional background from Wikipedia on Sagunto's Roman Theatre.