We wanted to achieve a strong impact on society, using the expressive techniques available, to make it concerned about the problem of the penal system used in Europe, with regard to the tragic issue of relapse: around 70% of prisoners in many of our countries, as soon as his sentence ends, he commits a crime again and goes back to prison. Certainly, theater does not solve the problem but it can give a voice to those who do not have it, a cultural education to those who have not been able to obtain it, and not only to the prisoners but to their families, their children, who pay with social stigma. a crime they have not committed. On the other hand, at a time when the idea of Europe has been widely denigrated from various strata of society, the fact that the inmates of European prisons, with a single voice embodied in the spectacle broadcast on social networks, will be shocking and social channels, assume the importance of a united Europe. Almost an evangelical idea, that the last become the first. And that all this happens at the time of the plague will give you a lot to think about. During this time everyone has been able to feel the meaning of the confinement.
Teatro del Norte has been doing theatre in Oviedo prison for more than ten years. We are one of the few current experiences of this practice in Spain. Penalists, pedagogues, psychologists, certify the value and importance of this practice, but it is not possible to elevate it to a system and promote it both among criminalists and among spectators. If the confinement situation was already difficult to sustain for both inmates and prison staff, the COVID pandemic has made things worse. Cutting off all contact with the outside world has been like becoming a concentration camp. At the request of the educational body we have been able to break the isolation by taking all the precautions, and adapting the theatrical practice to the new situation. The previous experiences that we have successfully carried out with European projects have stimulated us to generate this project, with three objectives: to break isolation, to update our methodology with the appropriate training, to create the bases for a European network of prison theatre. We have followed with interest the work of the Italian partner and the German partner in relation to the use of cinematographic techniques and Internet dissemination.