This Sunday closed the sixth edition of ‘Palabras al vuelo’ leaving for the end his main course. At least one of them because the edition of this year, as it could be heard in the later huddles, has not faltered by any of its edges. Not by any of its artists.

The appointment was in the theater of Tías and around 200 people gathered to listen to what Alberto García
Sánchez had to tell them. The narrator, actor, author and director born in Barcelona and settled in Belgium
premiered in spanish, in Lanzarote, his award-winning play ‘She and my gender’. For it, written originally in French, he received the Molière prize in 2011.

In principle, the contest was complicated because, with what right does a man speak of the condition of being a
woman? Is not that mansplaining? García Sánchez, stopped to explain at the beginning of his performance how he
came to make the decision to dare to attack with words the issue of the situation of women. “It came up in a
conversation with friends, but when talking about it, not only my friends were there, other women started to appear, all the women, my mother, my grandmother next to Simone de Beauvoir, Emma Watson, all of them,” he said. In
that conversation, someone proposed him to create a play that dealt with women’s problems.

At that moment, after many cold sweats, he fell asleep and dreamed that he had awakened inside the body of his
wife and his wife inside his man’s body. Therefore, yesterday we did not see Alberto García Sánchez but his wife.
The ease which he developed on stage, creating with movements, sounds and words hospital rooms, palaces in
the middle of the forest, even conclaves of gods and souls playing to the roulette of fortune, made the wife of
García Sánchez the perfect icing to the festival cake because as she said, himself, well, the other said “the
experience is something very useful that is useless”.

Now, speaking (more) seriously, García Sánchez’s exhibition, never lacking in humor and irony, is a shaker. The
criticism to the role of women in the world, a role always granted by man, from the perspective of a man in a
woman’s body, is enlightening and empathetic. The wounds belong to everyone. The problems women face must
not be only women’s problems.

The last time Alberto García Sánchez was in Lanzarote, also in Tías, was 28 years ago. May the wait will not be so
long, many of the attendees must have thought. ‘Palabras al vuelo’ surely can manage to rescue him before it pass
that long again.