“Theater can offer humanity the opportunity to remember that we were once people.”

Diana Alonso

The concept of “person” has a theatrical origin. The word comes from the Greek prosopon (πρόσωπον), which means “the living voice behind the mask, the breath.” For Luis de Tavira, playwright, director, and essayist, it is no coincidence that it was in that space where human beings learned to recognize themselves as unique and unrepeatable creatures, capable of imagining their own essence and, therefore, of embracing their freedom.

He explained that when an actor embodies another person, they become aware that there is an identity distinct from their own. They also discover the capacity to understand, represent, and share it with the audience. In this encounter between actor, character, and public, an exchange takes place that, in the playwright's words, has always been shrouded in mystery. Something inherent to an art "built with living bodies, lived in real time, and akin to a dream."

With this vision, De Tavira began his participation in the 10th Meeting of Humanism and the Humanities, entitled “The Survival of Theater in the Age of Dehumanization: The Importance of Personal Development in Higher Education.” More than a lecture, his presentation resembled a soliloquy, a reflection on the human condition and the role that theater can play in the face of various contemporary crises.

He pointed out that machines appeared as a promise of liberation: they would take over the tasks that consumed people's time so that they could dedicate themselves to what makes them truly human, such as reflection, art, and work understood as the act of creation.

“But what else is art, if not the recognition of the human faculty that has managed to transform reality? That action we call work, through which humanity has not only managed to satisfy the need for survival, but has also founded the consciousness of its own dignity by recognizing within itself that spiritual capacity to humanize matter, as well as to materialize the human,” he noted.

De Tavira warned that in modern societies (driven by capitalism), people and objects no longer matter, only prices and profits. Labor has been reduced to a means of production, and machines now dictate the rhythm of daily life. Thus, people have become servants of a system centered on accumulation, in which processes and relationships are no longer important, but rather productivity and economic gain.

Consequently, "what is properly human is becoming industrial waste" and "the machine is the constant, man the variable in the exhaustion of modernity."

He asserted that, although one might think that a reality dominated by mass production and market logic would ultimately condemn theater to disappear, the opposite has occurred. Precisely because it is an art based on presence, encounter, and shared experience, it has intensified its artistic and human power.

Unconcerned with industrial dynamics, theater retains an artisanal and communal character that makes it resistant to efficiency and profitability criteria. In it, he maintained, it is still possible to experience genuine human connection and share an experience that only exists while it unfolds.

He explained that at the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries, this discipline underwent a process of "transtheatricalization," a radicalization that led it to rediscover its essence. It ceased to be a mass phenomenon and became a shared experience among small communities. "What it loses in numerical reach is proportional to what it gains in artistic power," he stated. In this way, theater recovers one of its original functions. "It ceases to be fleeting entertainment and reclaims its status as an event that provokes lasting effects," he maintained.

Because, although their nature is ephemeral, De Tavira believes that few spaces today retain the capacity to remind humanity that they were once inhabited by people and to "dream that life could still be intense."

De Tavira's participation was part of the second day of the 10th Meeting of Humanism and the Humanities, organized by ITESO. Her presentation was part of the fourth of the six themes that structured the meeting, entitled "Perspectives from the Intentionally Human: Literary Art, Dramatic Art, Philosophy, and Spirituality," which explored the role of the humanities and artistic expressions in a context marked by social, cultural, and technological transformations.