Passion for the boards

Although Juan Miguel started out first as an actor, he soon switched to directing. "It's more of a sacrifice. The level of involvement with the play is much higher. More time, resources, money... When you are a director, you have to prepare the rehearsals, manage the props, the wardrobe... A thousand things that make you feel the project is more yours. I like directing much more," he confesses. 

His first contact with directing was in Mariana Pineda, by Federico García Lorca. In fact, Juan Miguel was one of the two assistant directors of the play (a previous step before becoming a director), but due to a series of coincidences he had to take charge of the first essay. "Juan Emilio Garrido, who was the director of the play, was in the United States, where he had spent the summer working, and was going to arrive in Spain a few days later. And the other assistant director, Isabel Adalid, had something important come up and also had to miss that first essay. So there I found myself alone! I desperately called Juan Emilio and he gave me a kind of sketch with the movements. I was very nervous because it was literally the first essay after the script reading," he recalls now with a smile. "In the end it turned out well, I think. Or so I'd like to think," he laughs. "What is certain is that I learned a lot that day," he says.

After Mariana Pineda, already as a director, Juan Miguel took charge of La barca sin pescador, by Alejandro Casona. This year he directed William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, a complex play in which twelve actors work. "It's complicated to take on a play like this. The staging can't last more than an hour and average and you have to cut the text. How do you do it without destroying Shakespeare?" he smiles. That same respect is what holds him back when it comes to directing his favorite play, Calderón de la Barca's La vida es sueño (Life is a Dream). "It's a play that I find mind-blowing. It is beautiful. But it's a titanic work, with many characters... and I wouldn't dare take out a single phrase," he confesses. 

theater training

Through Campus Creativo, the University of Navarra Museum provides theater groups with a theater training plan, led by director Liuba Cid, in which students receive advice on how to improve their technique and staging. "At the beginning, the sessions were aimed only at directors and dealt with rehearsal preparation, script rewriting... Then, the main actors could also attend , so we also worked on aspects related to development and body expression. This last year, we have joined a design subject , in which we have worked with a team that has elaborated a proposal for the whole scenography", he explains.

Juan Miguel especially highlights the support during the creative process. "It is very valuable to receive feedback on our work. Sometimes we arrive with an edited scene and they point out weak points that we hadn't seen. These are changes that, although they make us rethink everything, always end up improving the result".

An ephemeral but essential art

"What defines theater is the now, the present moment," says Juan Miguel. "The words that are said die at that moment, in the sense that they will never be said again." And this ephemeral nature of the performing arts is even greater in the case of university and amateur theater. As Juan Miguel explains, the plays he directs are performed once during the Theater Fortnight held in March, and with luck they get a second or third performance; sometimes, taking the play to some festival. "It seems absurd because it takes a lot of preparation work to do one or two performances. But that effort is worth it because theater always enriches the person, whether you are a theatergoer or a spectator," he says. 

For the university, the theater groups not only enrich student life, but also strengthen the sense of community and commitment to culture. "The university gives us the opportunity and we try to contribute something with what we do. We learn from it, but I think it can also learn from us."