Requiem for an exemplary teacher

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María Hernández-Fernández

This prose elegy honours Fernando Sánchez Santos (1968–2025) and his legacy as a teacher, psychologist, writer, inventor, activist and dancer, through the integrated dance collective Liant la Troca and the documentary A Way to B (2022), which challenges normative ways of looking at functional diversity.

Ableist liturgy. The master of ceremonies asks those present to stand as a sign of respect. He does so in a neutral, procedural voice, without hesitation. Around me, most bodies remain motionless: wheelchairs aligned, forced to wait until the end of the bipedal procession before being awkwardly placed in the aisles and at the back of the room, with barely any visibility. Supports. Held breaths. Raised eyebrows. I remain seated as a sign of respect.

A lifetime of struggle and protest, and the barriers have not disappeared. Not even here, on the day of your funeral, my dear friend. I had learned of your death a few days earlier, through social media, via a post by the artivist Xavi Dua. How? I could not believe it. You, who came into my life when I was a mutant teenager—strange, insecure, maladjusted. You were the first person who spoke to me about architectural barriers and Plato’s allegory of the cave. I must have been around fourteen, my feet barely touching the ground. I understood your idea of walls perfectly. I recognised them daily in the sensitivity—or lack thereof—of most adults.

Do you still remember, or have you already drunk from the waters of Lethe? You were a teacher and psychologist at l’Alzina secondary school in Barcelona, and we could ask for an appointment with you whenever we needed to. Your office was behind a door, tucked into the hollow of a staircase on the ground floor: no natural light, no windows; tiny, a bunker where barely two people could fit. And yet that precarious space was a territory of radical listening, because educating also means sustaining a conversation in the penumbra. In that confidential space I could express myself freely, speak of delusions and fantasies. I will never forget your voice: poetic, steady, velvety. You had studied Ericksonian hypnosis, and in that misunderstood adolescence the idea that words could open up other perceptions fascinated me.

As the years went by, our relationship transcended the academic and the therapeutic and became a friendship. I followed with enthusiasm the publication of your first short-story collection, Muerte en seis escenas (Ediciones Áltera, 2000), whose reading allowed me to grasp the harsh hospital journey you endured after the accident that, at just sixteen, had transmuted your existence. Years later, you validated me as a professional. You proudly asked me to revise and proofread your first novel, El cómplice necesario (Escribe tu libro, 2008), which you gave me together with the design of an automatic bookmark—your first patent—and a beautiful dedication: “when the apprentice becomes the teacher”.

As neighbours in the same district, one day I ran into you in the street and you said to me:

—I’m in a dance company. Would you like to come to a class?

Said and done. I remember we went by bus. I accompanied you to one of those sessions at La Caldera. It was a revelatory experience. I felt I could flow and experiment without feeling judged. Something opened up then: a playful spirit, an unexpected freedom to share choreographies and co-create a poetry of the body. That space was an oasis, a point of departure, and the discovery of a new artistic language for me. I imagine you already knew.

Seated here, in the hall of your funeral, I perceive with utter clarity the violence of “standing up”. Why didn’t they say: “now you may dance as a sign of respect”? And that is why, when your companions from the Liant la Troca collective speak to me about the documentary A Way to B, I find a door in the wall—this pending conversation in the penumbra—a way of continuing to dance with you. Although the film premiered in 2022, today I see it as part of your creative legacy: a work that continues to breathe and deserves to be revisited, in order to make its way through a frenetic age, always hungry for novelty and so quick to forget.

“Talk, talk, talk… utter empty words to fill empty spaces”.
The spotlight illuminates the actress who declaims this text. “Why so much talking? When what matters is looking the other in the eye and truly touching them. What matters is… communicating”. A direct arrow to the heart. Something so simple and yet so powerful.

A Way to B engages, in an uncomfortably timely way, with a present that still does not know how to look at certain bodies. The documentary by Jos de Putter and Clara van Gool, centred on the Liant la Troca collective, challenges the categories of the status quo through the force of art and community. It is no coincidence that it formed part of the Filmoteca de Barcelona’s programme Per amor a les Arts (2023–2024), a cycle that proposed dialogue between cinema and other artistic disciplines such as dance, theatre and music. In this context, A Way to B finds an especially fertile framework: the film understands the body as a political language and dance as a performative manifestation of thought. Each gesture and each choreography question the normative standards that determine which bodies are deemed legitimate and which are excluded from the dominant narrative. The stage thus becomes a space of affirmation and symbolic dispute.

A Way to B is constructed as a danced portrait of several members of the Catalan collective Liant la Troca, founded by Patricia Carmona and directed by Jordi Cortés Molina. The film accompanies the group in the creation and presentation of one of their performances, alternating rehearsals, shows and moments of everyday intimacy. From the outset, the film makes clear its hybrid nature: documentary and dance intertwine and transform one another, giving rise to an open, organic narrative form. The choreographies—tactile, voluptuous, stylised—occupy diverse spaces: the theatre, the street, a square, a forest, the interior of a home. These settings become extensions of the body and of the performers’ experience. At the same time, the dancers share their personal experiences with frankness, marked by physical, urban and social barriers that continue to shape their daily lives. Their testimonies put words to the mistreatment and prejudice they have suffered, set against the transformative force of art.

The film does not shy away from bodily diversity: some performers dance in wheelchairs, others walk with prostheses or steel corsets; some have amputated limbs, others lack sight… Yet these realities are never presented as narrative limits, because they are instead points of departure for rethinking movement, desire and our relationship with others. Dance thus appears as a form of thought, a different way of seeing, loving and communicating beyond words.

Structured as a journey over the course of an autumn day in Barcelona and its surroundings, A Way to B offers an uncommon perspective on resilience and love. The film moves between final rehearsals, performances in public spaces and staged presentations, underscoring the idea of dance as a universal language capable of addressing the viewer and transforming mentalities. More than documenting an artistic process, the film invites us to inhabit it. Indeed, the closeness with which the camera accompanies the collective reinforces this proposal. The attentive following of the different personalities that make up Liant la Troca generates a rare sense of intimacy, based on trust and shared time— a relationship that allows a complex emotional truth to emerge, made up of fragility, humour, tension and real affection.

Ultimately, A Way to B clearly displaces the habitual discourse surrounding functional diversity. Rather than insisting on lack or limitation, the film places the emphasis on potency: the joy of movement, the desire to create, collective energy. The vitality that runs through the film refuses to turn difficulty into the centre of the narrative. My dear Fernando Sánchez Santos, friend and teacher, perhaps this is where the deepest lesson you left us resides: what endures is a celebration of life in common, and of art’s capacity to reforest the imagination and re-enchant the world.

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* Audiovisual quotations included in this text fall under the right of quotation for the purposes of critical analysis, in accordance with current legislation. A Way to B (Jos de Putter and Clara van Gool, 2022).

Source: educational EVIDENCE

Rights: Creative Commons