Don Juan Tenorio in the Campo de Cebada: restaging urban space after 15-M

Abstract

The spectacle of the encampments that occupied public plazas throughout Spain during the 15-M protests of 2011 asserted what urban theorist Henri Lefebvre (1968) and others have called the “right to the city.” In a similar vein, the free open-air performances on All Saints' Day in 2011 and 2012 of José Zorrilla's Don Juan Tenorio by the theater collective AlmaViva Teatro in the self-managed neighborhood space called the Campo de Cebada have also been an effort to reclaim urban space. These performances called Don Juan Tenorio en La Cebada are notable not only for their use of a repurposed vacant lot left abandoned in the wake of the financial crisis but also for their dynamic staging that required the public to move throughout the large vacant lot for each of the play's seven acts. As the public traversed the reappropriated space of the Campo de Cebada, the performance was framed by the urban backdrop created by the bright lights of the Teatro Latina and the adjacent residential apartment buildings. This movement of the public not only foregrounded the trope of mobility evoked by the shifting dramatic spaces within Zorrilla's work but also the mobile and changing character of urban space produced by the perpetual investment and divestment of speculative capital. Just as Don Juan Tenorio journeys from the physical world to the spiritual one and moves from a secular space of individualism to the communal space of heaven, these performances have created an urban experience that promotes community and connection that stands in stark contrast to the cold, individualistic logic of mobile capital and real estate speculation that characterized the economic bubble that preceded the current crisis.