“Ayer es Hoy” is a performance about social networks, technologies and new media seen by old women in the villages. It is a form of research that explores, through the living arts, the intersections between rurality, women, elderly and communication.

“Ayer” is a physical action involving my body and a handful of trunks, that asks what place old women from Braojos (a Spanish mountain village) have in the media outlook. A symbolic unearthing where I break journalistic conventions by writing “yesterday” when it is still “today.”

The audience goes to a field. Lots of wooden logs literally buried me in the middle of nature. The jumble of wood crushes my body to the ground, but the public only sees a woodpile and three old women sitting behind it, each one in a chair, proud, empowered, present, guarding the wood in this landscape of apparent stillness.

The public listens to the recorded voices of three women. We hear their points of view about breaking news, media, internet and social networks. When their recorded voices stop, silence emerges. The three women get up and slowly remove the logs that oppress my body. My hand emerges from the pile and I free myself with the help of the old women. In contraposition with the living burial of old people that we used to do in the occidental culture, the three women unearth someone new, something new. And we embrace together. The emotion of an intergenerational meeting. Something moved. Something has happened.

After the first performance, the piece was also performed in the Festival Braojos Escena Abierta/BEA (Braojos de la Sierra, Madrid, on October 27, 2012) and the VII Encuentro de Teatro de la Sierra Norte (La Cabrera, Madrid, on November 15, 2012).