The high quality of Latin American theatre seems to be a well-guarded secret, like Teatro a Mil. For 16 years, Santiago, Chile, has been hosting an exciting month-long international theatre festival. This year 53 productions were staged in 21 venues scattered throughout the downtown area. The troupes had travelled from Latin America, Germany, Lithuania (a contemporary Hamlet), even Korea (a stylized variation of Medea) and China. While the northern hemisphere shivered, Santiago’s mellow summer-in-January was also ideal for the spectacular, free street theatre of La Fura dels Baus, a Catalan group famous for colossal marionettes, original aerial work, and mesmerizing sound-and-light ambience.
The shows I caught were all in Spanish, and with my limited skill I had to struggle to understand the dialogue, so I approached many of the productions through the theatre of image, which in Latin America is instinctual and expert. There is something liberating and bracing about theatre in a new language – just as opera sung in a foreign tongue is more moving. I had to pick up new clues. I was more dependent on the acting and blocking. And I became part of a different audience, one whose reactions were not always mirrors of my own.
So much surprised me – how the political was mixed with the bizarre or blatantly entertaining, the insights into traditional characters, and the insertion and emphasis on dance and song. De Monstruos y Prodigios: La Historia de Los Castrati (written and directed by Claudio Valdés Kuri), a work by Teatro de Ciertos Habitantes from Mexico, set its goals high and brought along an impressive arsenal of talent to reach them. The play opens as a naked centaur, with long black curly hair, locked behind a stable door painted with a bullfighting symbol, paces and rants. At the half-lit front of the stage, a native clad only in a loin cloth lifts a conch shell and blows strong, beautiful notes. These, we think, are the monster, and when the harpsichordist in peruke and elaborate 18th century dress relates the discovery of natural castrati, we are misled in believing that this is the theme. Two men wearing white perukes, in white face and red lipsticks, play Siamese twins linked at shoulder and hip, wearing one shared period costume. They play the violin badly (an amazing coordination), but sing an astonishing range of music – Gregorian chants, classical love duets, choral numbers – movingly and with evident vocal training.
The characters are all a warm up for the podgy, frightened boy who will be moulded during the play into a star. His castration has empowered him; and each of his costumes is more flamboyant than the last; they are comical and impressive. As he gains in a self-confidence bordering on arrogance, his recitals become increasingly magnificent. The jealous centaur aims his bow but is too moved by the music to shoot. The native, for not behaving, is castrated on stage in a mock ceremony. Even the boy beats him. In a series of disconnected scenes, the monsters and prodigies have recognized each other and become enemies.
The play leads to the French Revolution. “I am a man” the twins say and separate. “I am free.” Napoleon appears and shoots a cannon. Popular tunes vie with church music. The cast (who now resemble Samuel Beckett-style bums and show a flare for physical comedy) come alive in the farcical battles. But at the end, after the revolution, the castrato sits alone, weeping for his loss and the passage of time, as he and we listen to a beautiful but scratchy recording (1902) of Alessandro Moreschi, the last of his kind. We have taken a journey full of wonder and surprise toward a question about human values.
Not to be outdone, a local Chilean group staged its own exploration of political history in Apoteósis Final: BBB-UP, directed and written by Paulina García from personal interviews, newspaper articles, and new scholarship. Chile is still struggling to come to terms with the Pinochet regime (1973-1988), when at least 3,197 were murdered, 29,000 tortured, and tens of thousands forced into exile.
BBB is an attempt to recreate onstage a period of time before Pinochet and the effect of the coup on a nightclub. It is a back stage story until politics intervenes and changes everything. The nightclub could be a metaphor for society. We follow the performers -- two beautiful rivals for top billing, a drunk, a stand-up comic, the manager – as they squabble, share gossip, shop, enjoy love affairs and perform both synchronized and comically off-tempo routines. The elegant period, flashy show biz, and relaxed back stage costumes are all eye-catching. Two red staircases and a photomontage of Santiago at night form the set. The simple, clever construction allows for quick scene changes. Set at an angle, the space between the staircases becomes the dressing room. Together they are a performance space for the dancers -- or a torture room.
The story is told in part through paradoxical symbols. A entertainer wraps her necklace around the statue of the Virgin. The women all in white, like angels, perform a fan dance – while we hear planes overhead indicating that the coup is beginning. Periodic appeals are made by the chorines to Mister -- an imaginary figure in the audience. He is a stand-in for god or a financial backer (an angel) – a Godot-like figure. Nuns with crosses confront soldiers with guns. The men remove their shirts; the nuns strip to sequined costumes, and they all mambo. It was, the play says, a time of great confusion.
The central love story is between a showgirl and a revolutionary. At the end, she is taken prisoner by four soldiers who dance suggestively against her, probably signifying a rape, flush her head down a toilet several times, and hold a microphone to her mouth to testify. It is erotic and frightening. There is a picture of the national palace burning. The flag of Chile drops. Her lover arrives at the club covered in blood and falls, never making contact with her. I am killed, he says, his arm raised. Resist!
Paula Vogel is an honoured playwright in Santiago. Her How I Learned to Drive (staged in translation as Como Aprendi a Manejar and directed by Marco Espinoza) won an award in May and was restaged for the festival. The production was extraordinary for its visual choices and performances – and it was a treat to see a play I knew. The minimalist set – a house, a table, the curved white line of a road painted on the steeply raked floor – was enhanced with film sequences – from a driver’s perspective, through the eye of the camera during the photo shoot, in the rear view mirror. The student actor playing the male chorus was a master of transformations – into the sexist grandfather, the awkward adolescent, the waiter, and other usually toss-away roles. Uncle Peck, who began his seduction of his niece when she was eleven, was always appealingly. One of the unsettling aspects of Vogel’s drama is that we too are seduced by him. The actor playing the mother took hold of the restaurant scene, which is rarely staged well, and made it a show-stopper. (The Festival offered a booklet of plays but no programs or press releases, making it hard to identify performers.) And the actor playing the girl, who must age-shift rapidly and in no sequence, earned a round of applause. She had our hearts at the first scene and never let us -- or her character -- slip away. The staging was presentational. Uncle Peck caresses the air in front of him, and his niece, seated beside him, becomes aroused. One scene that Vogel wrote as narrative is staged; it was a wise choice. Even the blocking unfolded secrets about the characters. The final song encapsulated the irony of the play well: “This Is Dedicated to the One I Love.”
La Fura dels Baus, founded in 1979, added the mythic to the political and the poignant in Orbis Vitae, street theatre. 20,000 people, some with baby strollers and families, crowd into a main avenue in Santiago as the sky darkens. Vendors of necklaces with flashing lights and snacks soon have trouble making their way through. Atonal space music, interspersed by a throbbing pulse, and spotlights announce the beginning of the performance: a large puppet in white (Jesus? The Angel of Death?) moves slowly back and forth over the crowd. Acrobats in white (astronauts?) slowly descend down a downtown high rise. Large pieces of confetti are rained down upon the audience. From certain angles, the scene looks like an image of Sept. 11th.
When the scene ends, the sound continues but we are left in darkness. People shuffle with anticipation. Eventually a giant robotic figure, a construction from an oversized erector set, appears, and as it approaches crowd managers shift nervous people out of the way of its huge, lobsterlike claws. At the centre is the captain (or a devil), a commanding longhaired man with black gloves.
Then begins the most awe-inspiring visual in this theatre of images. Huge cryptic symbols are set on fire and paraded singly, then in formation around the manned vehicle. The only light is from the flames. The worshipers or priests gather in a horseshoe around the captain’s command module as the torches burn down. In the dark, a giant wheel, motionless on a side street, rolls slowly toward us. From one side we see shadows of the human “hamsters,” young athletes, male and female, hanging from ropes to move the canvas-covered wheel. Their shadows resemble those of apes until the wheel turns and we see them clearly, beautiful young astronauts shifting the balance as they float through space. The crowd leaps back to make room, and the two giant structure meet and link. Evocative, galactic images are projected on a high, oversized screen and on the buildings. We look up in admiration and fear. Then it ends, and we are left to ponder if we have seen a moon landing, a scene from Dante’s Inferno, pagan tribal worship, or totalitarian fear tactics. On the walk back, we are all now part of a giant living thing, the crowd, moving at its different paces. Our imaginations were the real stage. The group has performed in the United States, but not on this scale. They offered three presentations, but my scheduled permitted us to attend only one.
The name Teatro a Mil indicated the festival’s early ambition, to make theatre accessible to everyone in Chile by charging about less than $2.00 (1,000 or mil pesos) a performance. Many of the tickets remained reasonable, about $10 this year. In 2010, the festival will celebrate the country’s bicentennial by dedicating itself to domestic drama. But in keeping with the international flavour, Pina Bausch, a choreographer “who changed the design of contemporary dance and moved its border into the theatre” will be one of the festival highlights.