Oriol Broggi (Barcelona, 1971) is one of the most renowned theatre directors in Catalonia and on the international stage for his ability to innovate and surprise with the classics. Broggi, who holds a degree in Dramaturgy and Stage Direction from the Institut del Teatre and is trained in image and sound, will give the opening lecture “Looking at life as if from the stage” at the 22nd Conference of the Catalan Society for Quality Care. The event will take place on 9 June in the auditorium of the University Hospital of Bellvitge.
- You will be addressing an audience of health professionals. In your book, “The memory of beauty” (El record de la bellesa - L'Altra Editorial), you refer to the aspiration of theatre to leave a memory in the viewer. What would you like to leave the audience with on this occasion?
- I would like them to consider life just as if it were a play, to look at everyday life as a fiction, adding futility to life, which is not at all trivial.
- What will be at the heart of your keynote address?
- I come from a family of doctors, although I am not one myself. However, the vision of someone who is dedicated to theatre and who invents a small world in each play can be interesting. When I create a scene, I invent a world by copying what I see and have around me, and I work on it as if it were the most important thing. However, mine are small stories....
- Every day many stories pass through the doctor's office. Is there a parallel with the world of theatre?
- There is a lot about actors that can be useful to doctors: how to place the voice, how to keep the viewer’s attention… When difficult messages have to be conveyed to the patient, the doctor has to find the most appropriate way of communicating. In theatre, we work with people's feelings, and so do doctors. They have to take into account the staging, the expression they have to show on their face, which script will generate the utmost peace of mind in the patient…
- Recently, you have also innovated by converting the Aribau cinema in Barcelona into a theatre. Does innovation imply genius or mental flexibility, neither or both?
- I think that to innovate you have to go back to the past references. You can't innovate from nothing, unless you're a genius like Mozart. In theatre, this is very complicated, because everything has already been done. The only thing left is to find new combinations: to take the old, rediscover it and rethink it. In theatre, innovating means rethinking codes, languages and looks, expressing them and staging them without complexes.
- Could this rethinking of codes be applied to any discipline, such as medicine, for instance?
- For me a very clear example of that is the time that doctors have for a patient and the few resources available for this to be quality time. Instead, everything has to be summarised in the electronic medical record. Having to keep an eye on the computer screen takes away the weight of the doctor's gaze into the patient's eyes while they are explaining what the situation is.
- How to combine technology and a human gaze at the same time?
- By studying how to innovate and recuperate the doctor-patient relationship without losing the essence and possibilities of new technologies. My father has been involved in medicine and bioethics, and he always talks to me about it. When I do theatre, I think about this continuous tension between what happens in reality and what I put on stage. The doctor has always faced this difficulty of treating the patient's health while treating the person. In theatre, our difficulty lies in how to treat the story that we are telling to the audience, which is a large entity, but in turn is made up of individuals.
- On some occasions, you have quoted the writer Jorge Luis Borges, "the classic is that work or idea that will know how to incorporate even later visions". Is medicine a good classic for innovation?
- Borges said this about fiction, of narrative, artistic and aesthetic forms. Medicine and society also incorporate new visions, and they become valid and classic ideas. There was once someone who started working on anaesthesia, looking for a way to remove pain at the moment of surgery, as suffering did not allow for certain surgical interventions. Nowadays we need to innovate in relation to the management of feelings and emotions.