Odei is dead. Seventh member of a group of friends. The box containing his body can be seen in the center of the stage. Soon after receiving the news, his friends will be dressed in rigid suits, his eyes glazed in black. Six people from the same generation will give you the final goodbye of a busy party that will break the air of the stage and fill it from song to song. In the end we won’t know if they are talking about Odei or the ashes of their dreams, ideas and memories of their youth.

By Ainara Gurrutxaga, Ander Lipus, Manex Fuchs, Miren Castañaga, Urko Redondo, Ximun Fuchs. All the actors we've been able to see from stage to stage. Igor Elortza and Unai Letraaga have written the words of the play thanks to improvisation. There are many things that unite them in addition to the theater: they belong to the same generation and their ghosts have been invited to the stage in the middle of the party. According to Ximun Fuchs, this was the same as the seed of Ash: “What have we done with our dreams? It can be said that the Basque Country is almost the last place in Europe where the ideology of the 70s has been passed on to our generation. You almost still believe in the revolution. In Spain and France our generation is cynical, maybe they have some ecology. What has our generation retained from what it has received? In fact, there is a distance between having these ideas and living in reality.” It is

from this thread that the characters’ minds, intentions, relationships and failures will be combined. Each character has its own profile: the one who lives mortgaged, the one who has remained as in his youth, the Basque traveler, the one who has not moved from the village, the perfect Basque... However, we can all have something of each one. “We know each other somewhere, even as an audience.” The way in which

the box containing the body is used in the play is directly related to the Kasarranka around Lekeitio, and in addition to using its symbology, Odei itself could also be a metaphor. “What is this good of our generation that we burn when we are 35 years old, what does our generation abandon?” There is

reflection at the bottom of the Ashes, but above all it is a theater, alive and dynamic. For Ximun, they will not offer an answer. “We don’t have enough distance, several doors close and then reopen. In the end, it’s our job, that’s our job.” The clown or even the buffoon, as Manex says: “We make fun of ourselves. Whatever the case, even if we had distance, let’s say 40 years from now, the young people of that time would send us to hell. If people laugh because of our cruelty, that will bring a series of answers.”

Five dialects and united in the same gang

Ximun Fuchs has not only worked as an actor, but has also directed the play. The monologue Juglarea, the whore and the madman, which he represented, can be remembered by the spectator, since the box was then also the axis of the stage. Manex suggests that the theater is because the theater is in motion, because it is in evolution. “There’s a lot of other stuff, too.” In Juglar Ximun collected three monologues, each in a dialect. In the case of Cinderella, the relationship between theater and Basque has been deepened, since each character has its own dialect. According to Ximun, at first they tried to talk to Batu and Zuka. “There was something missing in the words, after all, that each one gave it from him. The path we have taken implies on the one hand that a metaphorical tone is strengthened, because there will not be many such squads in the Basque Country. I think that’s what the audience listens to. Finally, we all work together, and that brings us closer to work.” From the West, from the Centre, from Navarre to

Lapari, from Navarre to Zuber and united in the same group of friends. As Manex recalls, they have experienced similar situations: “In the schools in the north there were Zuberos, Navarrese, thieves... and also Biscayans, who were multiple children of refugees. Sometimes there were new words we learned, but we never had language problems.” In any case, the work of Igor Elortza and Unai Sourceaga has been

fundamental in shaping what the actors have created during the improvisations. Ximun admits that they had already made a kind of script based on the work of the actors. “We soon realized that we are not very good writers. When such a group of friends come together, there are ways of speaking among them; a common story had to be perceived in the way of speaking. The warmth that comes with proximity, the circuses...” In order to continue with the soul of the play, they sought the bertsolaris of their generation to carry out this work. “The theatrical forms of the North have a relationship with bertsolarismo in the forms and in the relationship with

the public.” And the song is not far from the verse either, because the actors will connect the action with melody. “The songs are the thread throughout the theater. That’s what keeps us together, that allows us to rebuild a group, and at the same time that memory work is done: there are traditional songs, and on the other hand Kortatu, Hertzaines, Itoiz, La Polla... when they sing, memories come to all of us.”

Modes of Theatre

Ximun
Fuchs has directed a group of actors who have worked for years on the path of aesthetics and languages of their own. Lipus and Castañaga with the Imaginary Theatre, among others, staged the play Flores de Babylon just a year ago. Redondo and Gurrutxaga have created a series of shows within the Dejabu doll laboratory, the last of which is the Man is not a bird and the Last Port. The Fuchs were immersed in the theatre by Antton Luku, Ximun has collaborated as a director for eight years in the school theatres promoted by him, and Manex co-founded the Empty Chair with Lipus. It does not seem easy to combine actors with a deep personal trajectory, but as Ximun says it is a matter of decision: “If there is no danger, there is little pleasure for the actor. The actor who does not advance goes to the liver. It takes anticipation to discover new worlds. That's what we're trying to do. The direction is drawing, the painting, but the actors make the theater.” According to

Ximun, there are two axes in the form of the representation of Cinderella: one naturalist and the other more modern. “We are all dressed up with a tie. The symbolism of this is that we are now adults, socialized, normal people... even though we really have a hard time accepting it (ha ha).” They have taken the use of the actor’s crown from the traditional forms of the theatre, and the way to break it and highlight its contradictions.

Those of us who have the habit of watching the theatre are perhaps too accustomed, if one can get used to it, to seeing works with little soul staged in artificial Basque. Cinderella may be able to get out of it, but Manex perfectly sums up what's at the base: “When the different groups work together there are multiple intellectual intentions full of enthusiasm and values of doing theater in the Basque Country, but at the same time we have that complicity on the board among some drunken lovers of the hostel, we have an astapito of pleasure working together”.