La revolució no serà tuitejada

The revolution erupts on your phone

The production that opened the 2013/14 season at Teatre Lliure in Barcelona was written and directed collaboratively with playwrights Jordi Casanovas and Pau Miró. It was performed by Teatre Lliure’s new resident company, featuring David Verdaguer, Mima Riera, Javier Beltrán, Paula Blanco, Pol López and Laura Aubert. The play presents three stories set in an Apple Store that reflect on the use of new technologies in our personal relationships and our interaction with social change.

In 1970, North American poet and singer Gil Scott-Heron released one of the most important political anthems in twentieth-century popular culture: Revolution will not be televised. He summed up its message like this: “the song is about your mind. You must change the way you think before trying to change the way you live, and what changes people cannot be recorded by a camera, because it will not happen out there but inside your head. One day something will click in your brain and you will realise: I was wrong until now.” He said this during one of the most turbulent decades in United States history. Its streets filled with demonstrations, street battles, speeches and slogans that have become eternal. The struggle for the civil rights of Black people, women and gay people, and opposition to the Vietnam War turned the streets of America’s major cities into powder kegs.

Today, forty years later, the powder keg is in our own homes. It is our streets that are catching fire. And however insistently television shows them to us, however much Twitter has taken over by giving millions of testimonies an unprecedented immediacy, the revolution is still inside all our minds. The revolution remains in this mental click, more than in the click of our mouse.

What changes after the click? How do we move from citizens to revolutionaries? What do we do to change things? When do we realise that we have been wrong, and what do we do to put it right? These and other questions are explored by the authors of La revolució no serà tuitejada.