Xavier Fàbregas, historiador del teatre català modern
Abstract
In 1966 Xavier Fabregas started an investigation about the history of modern catalan theatre trying to systematize, classify and redefine ideologically and literary the immediate Catalan theatrical tradition, which changed completely the established method and interpretation of an already scarce and old historiography.
Until around 1972 Fabregas worked within a strictly historicistic outlining as show his studies Teatre catala d'agitació política (1969), Angel Guimera, les dimensions d'un mite (1971), or bis first synthesized report Aproximació a la historia del teatre catala modem. In the preface of this work he reactioned significantly against the exclusive identification between theatre and literature that Fabregas had maintained until that moment.
From this moment on Fabregas used the concept «theatreperformance » upon which he based his later investigation: in Les farmes de diversió en la societat catalana romantica ( 1975) he incorporated the paratheatrical performances as a new discipline.
In his Historia del teatre catala (1978) we find a literary and spectacular global approach, in which he synthesizes the studies and critical contributions of those years. When he finally had decided to undertake an anthropological approach of theatre, he offered in his Josep M. Folch i Torres i el teatre fantastic (1980) as reading of the dramatized tales without saving at all the analysis of its spectacularity.
The renewal of all studies and reports dedicated by Xavier Fabregas to the modern Catalan theatre are as follows: to assume theatre as a reality connected to the rest of cultural expressions in a specific historie context on the one hand, and, on the other, to the guidelines of modern Catalan and foreign literature; to recover popular tradition that had lost prestige because of ideological and aesthetic reasons given by the established historiography, and to establish the main power centres —authors, currents, influences— of modern Catalan theatre, which reached its top thanks to the promotion of authors coming from independent theatre.
