To be an adult and an artist in Neverland


 
I have yet to know how to become an adult. I am a man of almost 40 who can’t seem to feel mature.
Sometimes I think of myself as if I was 26 or 30, I rarely manage to feel my age.
What does age feel like?
It is common that when I meet someone, I think they are older than me, even if I later discover that they are much younger.
I still think of adulthood as a state to be achieved.
Does this happen to all of us? What does it mean to be an adult? Is it important to assume oneself as one? What are these sleepless nights thinking on maturity and what is behind them? Why do I think so much about this?
At 19 I left my father’s house and my life changed radically. Back then everything was new, I started to do plays and to act for films, to live alone and to travel. When I look back on it, much of my life is still the same as it was then: I’m financially independent, I don’t have a fixed job ruled by a contract, I still pay rent every month, still wear jeans and tennis shoes, and don’t have any daughters.
The feeling of continuity in certain aspects of my life worries me. Why? I wouldn’t know. A vague sensation that things should change… more. It is clear that not all is the same, my life has changed in many ways: I’ve managed to devote my life to art, I’ve been able to save some money, but I still don’t understand when I will feel like an adult, or if it already happened and I didn’t realize. 


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Marina likes to talk about time. One of those conversations led to Captain Hook and his fear of the ticking sound that came from inside the alligator, but mainly to his hatred for the boy who never gets old.
Peter Pan is a tale I encountered during childhood, in the movies. Some months ago I read the novel and was fascinated by it.  It begins like this:

“ALL CHILDREN, EXCEPT ONE, grow up. They soon know that they will grow up (…). Wendy knew that she must grow up. You always know after you are two. Two is the beginning of the end.”
I knew that this story had something to tell me. Peter Pan, the eternal child who lives in Neverland, who has a fierce fight against adults and particularly against Captain Hook.
J. M. Barrie, its maker, worked on the story obsessively, first as a play, then as a novel and ultimately as a text located at the Kensington Gardens. He wrote in his youth journals: to grow up and have to abandon marbles, a terrible thought.

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From 2018, motivated by a vague feeling, I started making a series of conversations with theater directors I admire and who are older than me. With some we sat to drink and eat, others we exchanged emails, and with some I simply watched their interviews and read what they had written.
I was interested in the perception they had on their work after having done theater for so long. I wanted to ask them about those of their plays that left a mark on me and about their most recent ones which, generally, don’t interest me much.
Why did I lose interest in their plays? Did my gaze change; was it their work, or the world? What happened? What do they think today of their first plays? How do they face the new ones? What do they think they won and lost on the way?
My question, really, was one that I didn’t dare to ask directly:
Why do theater directors age poorly artistically?

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In 1983, the year I was born, (…) “the psychologist Dan Kiley published a self-help book devoted to the description of a clinical condition which he said he was increasingly encountering in his professional practice: the Peter Pan syndrome. It affected males who refused to grow up. This pretended syndrome centered around the inability to mature is part of vulgar and self-help psychology”.
I don’t recognize myself in it, because it is not that I can’t or don’t want to mature, rather I don’t know what that means. I’m not running away from something defined, I’m confused at an idea that I don’t know how to materialize.
In no way do I long for some supposed good old times where adulthood was something delimited within very clear boundaries. I simply don’t know how to face maturity in the world in which I have to live.
The structure of a life cycle has changed vastly throughout history. I supposed a part of my disorientation has to do with being a son without children, with the consequences of the precariousness of the working conditions in which I live: I belong to a group of people who do not have to worry about having something to eat the next day, but who don’t have a house of their own, medical insurance, an allowance, who don’t have an image of the future, or if they do, it’s out of focus.


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For centuries a person was a young artisan or a young poet – young worked as a prefix for a title, it placed the person in a trajectory of apprenticeship in regards to an occupation. But as time went by youth became a state of being, people are young, nothing more. 
This change was deepened during the 20th century, in which the number of people who were able to attend university increased: adult people in use of their civil rights, but who were still economically dependent on their parents. This led to a temporal window in which adulthood and youth began to superimpose, to blend.
In addition, I suppose, the rites of passage have mutated, and the social indicators which separated youth from adulthood became blurred (at least among certain liberal middle classes, in which I include myself).
I don’t know if it was really like that, but I grew up thinking that there was a time in which a clear line divided one age from the other: you wore different clothes, had different behaviors, went to different places, used different words. Not anymore, not entirely.
Now youth (without youth) is gradually expanding towards other stages of life. 

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What do you think of my perception that early or middle-age plays are the best and then a sort of decadence begins?

Many directors considered they had made plays with a force that never repeated itself in their lives. Most of them thought there existed some good old times. But the interesting thing is that no one seemed to be able to tell clearly what was good about them. Except for the youngest one among the interviewees, who said: theater belongs to young people.
The phrase “their first plays were very good” is commonly heard. Less common is hearing the opposite. Why does that happen? What is it that you lose? Should careers be shorter? Does everything end? What do young artists have that old do not? Why is it different in other disciplines? Is everything in life about losing? What is the artistic potential of the passage of time?
During the interviews, the directors told me about the changes that the theater world has undergone over the years, about the conditions under which they began working and that no longer exist, about how this has forced a constant readjustment: the production of plays by public institutions is scarce, direct invitations have given way to open calls, seasons of 100 performances have been replaced by those of 10 performances, and the system of ‘big names’ has washed out considerably. There is also a new moral in the art world that regulates what can  and cannot be done. Positive and negative changes coexist in a present that is… interesting.
The interview ended with this question:
What can an old artist do that a young one cannot?

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In the Peter Pan play, an aside reads: the kids pick things up quickly, they wash the imaginary dishes in an inexistent dishwasher and store them in a closet that is not there.
Further in the play, the kids need a doctor. One of them plays one, while the others follow suit.
“The difference in a moment like this, between Peter and the other kids, was that they knew it was all a game, while to him fantasy and truth were the exact same thing”.
Peter Pan believes in things in an absolute way. He doesn’t draw a line between reality and fiction, for him there is no difference between belief and the factual reality. And we could think that as the secret of the life he leads – that is why he can fly, that is why he can get fat on imaginary food: real effects with fictional stimuli.
Pan is convinced that life is disputed between those who believe and those who don’t, between those that can transform the world with their desires and those who accept the given conditions. A sentence said by the narrator condensates this feeling: Every time a child says ‘I don’t believe in fairies’, there is a fairy somewhere that falls dead
For Pan, to be an adult is to stop believing.

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There was a time in which being young and not being revolutionary was a contradiction.
The left traditionally seeks to transform a state of things while the right seeks to maintain it. But the identification between youth and the desire for a different world has stopped being as clear. After ’68 and the armed movements of the 70s, the link between the political project of revolution and youth has gradually vanished. First because The Revolution ceased to be a programmatic project, but also due to neoliberal societies imposing a different logic upon the possible and the desirable.
The idea that people were revolutionary when young and then grew up to become bourgeoise feels increasingly strange, distant. Because that thinking responded to vital trajectories which are no longer fulfilled like that, or less so.
What Angélica Lidell saw in the young protestors in France who demonstrated against the modifications in the pension system is still striking: a youth that is no longer worried about changing the world, rather about their retirement conditions.
It’s not a minor change, it’s quite something. 

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What I find hard to accept is that the trajectory of artists is defined beforehand. Directing has an important physical component. It is an activity that requires carrying a project on your back, imagining a sensibility for the world. I think that doesn’t happen with acting. I see aged actresses who are still doing important performances for their career, under their own terms. But, dare I say, it is not physical strength that which explains the artistic decadence of plays, but a relationship with desire. 
Directing has to do with proposing desire, with showing a way in which someone desires something. Every theatrical project is at its core an approach on desire.
Someone desires and organizes a time, a series of intensities, an information, an idea so that another person perceives it. Attending a theater is going to encounter someone else’s desire.
There is a cliché, which has some truth to it, about old people liking the music that they listened to when they were young. As if youth was the moment in which taste is defined and solidified – it’s not only that you will still enjoy those things you liked when young, but that they “are” what you enjoy. As if taste, which means desire, were essentialized. Maybe it’s in recofinguring, modifying, renovating desire where the force of artistic creation lies.
How is desire renewed?


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The fight between Captain Hook and Peter Pan is revealing:
“Pan, who and what art thou?” he cried huskily.
“I’m youth, I’m joy,” Peter answered at a venture, “I’m a little bird that has broken out of the egg.”
For Pan adulthood is the opposite of happiness, spontaneity, joy, festivity and rejoicing. That is why he hates older people, because they are the proof of a way of living life that he does not want for himself.
The author puts it very plainly in the following description of Peter Pan:
“And he was so full of wrath against grown-ups, who, as usual, were spoiling everything, that as soon as he got inside his tree he breathed intentionally quick short breaths at the rate of about five to a second. He did this because there is a saying in the Neverland that, every time you breathe, a grown-up dies”
But it is in the final chapter when Wendy grows and Jane, her daughter, is about to fall sleep, where adulthood is seen as an obstacle, a hindrance, a disability:
“Why can’t you fly now, mother?”
“Because I am grown up, dearest. When people grow up they forget the way.”
“Why do they forget the way?”
“Because they are no longer gay and innocent and heartless. It is only the gay and innocent and heartless who can fly.”


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In our time, youth has less to do with revolution than with beauty. Now society fights against time because looking young is a mandate for social and sexual success (which is the cornerstone for any other).
You have to look young.
As Jaime Cuenca writes: ours would be a juvenile society, in which looking young or having a youthful life are imperatives for social success. Youth and capital, the desire to be liked. Being young today does not mean to belong to any phase of a biological process, rather to appear capable of seducing others in a social interaction mediated by consumption (…) But not only has the opposition kid-adult been replaced by teenager-old person, it has even begun to be conceived as something interior, something subjective, related to the attitude which one unfolds in front of others.
Youth as value and old age as stigma.
Nobody wants to seem naive. Optimism has become a symbol of naivety, while pessimism is equated to critical thought. The usual is then saying that the future will be worse than the present. The future stopped being the place where utopia could be experienced and became that in which our worst nightmares could become real. Marina Garcés suggests an idea that I misquote from memory: the anxiety of a certain class in our times is played out in the question: “For how long?” For how long will I have a job? For how long will I be healthy? For how long will I make plays that are worth it?
The future as a threat. 


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All the older artists I know feel underrated. In a way they demand something from society that it hasn’t given back to them, at least not in the measure they would want it. They have an amount of recognition that does not fit the idea they have of themselves.
And this feeling of bitterness among artists is spread to such an extent that I consider it important to try and find another way to live. To learn to desire. To desire other things. To build a different ethos around adulthood, art and desire.
An adulthood which keeps the desire to insist in the intensity of life, not pretending to be young but trying to maintain a level of commitment towards the plays while we distance ourselves from bitterness and approach desire. A different desire.
To try and distance us, as much as possible, from the notions of success and failure of everyone else. To try and articulate an artistic career in our own terms, with our own parameters. To depend as little as possible on the opinion of the majority. To trust the view of the people we admire. To remember that we are not influencers and art is not a popularity contest. That followers are followers and spectators are spectators. That art is not a popularity contest.
The legend has it that Diogenes Laertius often stood in front of a statue and begged it for money. When he was asked for the meaning of his action, he answered: I’m getting used to rejection.

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I supposed that asking myself how to grow old is a natural thing in someone that is about to turn 40, I suppose these are the questions that growing up entail. I suppose it is also in part a social pressure, I suppose it has to do with having sent the last twenty years working with a group of people who I’ve seen grow, in some cases mature, suffer, etc. People who have attempted, to the best of our abilities, to reinvent ourselves, to re-enchant our world, to fight cynicism. People with diverse struggles but who have tried to fit the passage of time into a life path that transcends the mere “save yourself as you can”.

I have done many things to change: since three years ago I have a different name and a different face. A different hair. I have, I hope, a different personality. These changes happened as I felt I was settling down. On the one hand I have the will to mature and, on the other, the impulse not to settle down.
I think what I have is fear. Fear of being sad or bitter, fear of becoming a cynic, fear that I will care more and more about money. Fear of not knowing how to live this life. Fear of starting to like young women, fear of the “cement” and the “crystal” generations. Fear of the idea that intensity or the path of a life is predetermined. Fear of that meme in which the great actor Steve Buscemi is carrying a skateboard and saying: “What’s up fellows?”
José Sánchez says that when asked, where to begin?, one could answer in the first place: shaking off melancholy, living the present as if one were immortal.
Natanael Cano says: I will never die.
Maybe the lesson to be learned from Peter Pan is just that: to live as if our own potency were inexhaustible, as if the world could be changed. To preserve the possibility of believing, of trusting, that is to say, of desiring. To look upon the future with optimism, bravery, joy and cruelty.
And to be able to repeat what Pan said: To die will be an awfully big adventure.

Lázaro Gabino Rodríguez

(Nothing is mine everything is stolen)

Luisa Pardo corrected this text. 

Translation by Salvador Amores 
Thanks to Clarissa Malheiros and Juliana Faesler. To Jesusa Rodríguez, Martín Acosta, David Hevia, Miguel Rubio, Heidi Abderhalden, Alejandro Tantanian, Claudio Valdez Kuri, Ruben Ortiz, Barbara Van Lindt, Rabih Mroue, Roger Bernat, Angelica Lidell, Edit Kaldor et al.