FERNANDO GARCÍA

I AM A PARTY AND A COMMUNITY ACTOR

By Cristóbal Peláez G.

Translated by: Diana Marcela Vásquez

Everybody knows him as El Gordo, and that is talking about neighborhood, parade, commune, party. He’s been a pioneer in the carnival and everything else that can have the meaning of revelry. His are the colors, the dances and the rhythms. The streets greet him because he’s been a man that has always lived in them, without walls or doors. He feels the beating inside of a neighborhood in heart shape.

THE BOY OF THE CAMELIAS

I was already a chubby-cheeked boy, maybe because of some huge empanadas of beans and meat, which I used to eat while my mom and dad danced tango. I had to be born where today the Explora Park is. Moravia, back then, had very sandy lowlands, all full of onions and tomatoes, where a couple of old men lived and cried all day long of peeling onions, I didn’t quite like that. My father was a building worker; he looked after a huge workshop of the municipality full of dump trucks. My mother was “Anita the Camelias dressmaker”, our home was close to the Sevilla station. We were few kids, in the family only my sister and I, and later on we were eleven. I’m a native son of the “Bosque de la Independencia”.

My childhood is full of bars and drunks, full of seeing misery and pain, of seeing those Camelias’ women shoulder the burden, because in the night they were beautiful but in the day they were unhappy. My friends were the sons of all of those prostitutes. My mom used to cut those boy’s hair, took care of them, she was their nurse and she was a leader doing of midwife. And my toys were those trucks of the municipality. When I was eight I already drove them. Later, the botanic garden became a place where the schools used to go and I ended up as an entertaining guy. I had one or two hundred kids and I received in change a snack. I did it for fun.

THE FISRT STILT WALKER

There, I met the first stilt walker. His image is very powerful. A man arrived every single Saturday; he put on really high stilts, black pants, a bow tie, a hat, gloves and some make up that made him look like a mime. He started to build saeticas where he threw cofio and minisigüí. I got up early to see him get dressed and we became pretty good friends.

I BECAME BOOKSELLER

I ended up as a bookseller, because next to the space in which my father looked after the municipality infrastructure (this space was the one they were using to build the stadium), there was a Jews office, their last name was Lerner. They gave a job to one of my cousins. And sometimes I, with eleven years old, went to the office and helped him. I was growing up beside the Jews and they took me later to a library that they opened, it was called the Avi Lerner, I stayed there until I was more or less seventeen. I changed from there to the “Oveja Negra”, and then I continued in “La Alegría de Leer” and finally ended up installed in the “Continental”. But, because of going up and down arranging books, selecting them, classifying them I got a backbone sprain and I started to suffer from migraines. There was so much pressure that I finally had to quit.

THAT SPARKLING MEDELLÍN

I had to live when Medellín was in its seventies, with its student skirmishes, in the middle of strikes and stones. The libraries were the gathering spots for the thinking Medellín, traveling students, revolutionaries, theater people, poets, writers and madmen.

THE PHOTOGRAPHER IS BORN

Another thing is that since I was a little boy I had an obsession for the photography. I got a Canon F1 and I took a picture of the places that I liked. Suddenly I met the “Pequeño Teatro” in Villa Hermosa and I took pictures of the rehearsals of Macbeth and I began to like a lot the theater of the city. I started to chase Juan Guillermo Rúa. I have pictures of the first International day of theater in Medellín. So, while I worked in the library I took pictures to the theater people whom never had a penny to pay for a photo. I gave them the pictures for free.

“EL TALLER DE COLOMBIA” THEATER

In the 83 El Taller de Colombia came to Medellin with La Cabeza de Gukup. In that memorable performance in the Oriental Avenue, someone introduced me to Jorge Vargas in order to make pictures of them. From there, I went to live to Bogotá. I had to stay with Odin Theater in the whole tour.

GOING BACK TO MEDELLÍN

Much time later I got back to live in Manrique and started to go up in stilts and play some music with the guys of the neighborhood. From there, A Recreo Teatro was born. We planned Barrio Comparsa, for the Northeast zone, where 56 groups gathered together. 10 days going through those neighborhoods, in between the war, the frightened people looked at us through the windows, without daring to go outside. Barrio Comparsa became famous in eight days and at the 10th day we went out from Nuestra Gente to Palos Verdes, going in front of the toughest gangs. When we arrived to Comfama of the 45 street, Maria Emma Mejía was the presidential adviser, she was doing the first forum of the Northeast commune and someone introduced me to her. So what do you think; Medellin in the middle of a war and we here playing around.

ILUSTRIOUS DR. JUAN GÓMEZ MARTÍNEZ

We weren’t trying to qualify as an aesthetic product to go to The United States or Barcelona, but we were just in the neighborhood. The idea was the informal, but also the learning, we weren’t worried anymore for the newly born parades, but how we were going strengthen them. That helped us to relief a little bit. There was a parade of myths and legends, where 520 guys came out and we divided the parade in two. Dr Juan Gómez Martínez got really pissed and I got suspended from the parades for three years, because we were 30 and we ended up like 120 because everybody made a line in there, every single one of them felt from Barrio Comparsa. To me was like the guys’ revolution. During the administration of the Dr. Juan Gómez Martínez, I locked myself.

FROM THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAINS

María Emma Mejía was a very important spot in the work with the communes. Once, she sent us to the Iberoamericano of Bogotá and we seized the 7th street. That was it, it was awesome, 48 boys with music and in stilts. It might happen that in here there is not street theater but the city already has a structure to be able to stage it. Because it always has been the parade, that’s freer, more expressive more festive than a dramatic structure. Or rather, what Barrio Comparsa did, was to improve 22 boys to be able to do the street theater here. We are about to be in a very big stuff.

THE HURACANE EYE

We generated a movement from Barrio Comparsa. We have some competence levels that don’t allow us to move as much as we did 5 years ago, back then when we only sold two or three tickets monthly. Now we sell four or five a year. Now all became an alternative for those boys. So, they see themselves from Castilla, well dressed up, with chirimías, with images, a well done copy.

MY CHILDREN

I’m more playful than I’m a musician, but I do play the percussion. My children Sebastian, Juan Fernando, Nicolás and Catalina are all musicians and actors, but I don’t only have four children I have about forty, having in mind the children of others that are here because this became an alternative for them. My daughter, Catalina, writes me from Guatemala and tells me about all the achievements she’s gotten, and I feel very happy, just as I was there. The deal is that in Central America there’s a lot of memoires about all this

BARRIO COMPARSA IS GENERATION

What it really created was a sensitive space, where thousands of dreams and stuffs can be fused. We have worried to keep up with this space with the workshops as well as going to the spaces of the communities where this same point of view is, and getting it stronger. The culture in America has been precisely all that, the spaces, the spots where the people are, the social gatherings or the environment of knowledge, fantasy or hallucination. People say I’m the shaman of those boys; some others call me the leader.

AND NOW THE FEAR TO DIE

Just right now I’m scared as hell to kick the bucket. I haven’t really been scared to die and I have been very daring at getting into as many things I found and every single one of them at the same time, but after a health crisis, when I pass by those emergency rooms and see that that machine starts to beep and kick out death bodies, I felt making the final line. I started to have a grudge for that beep of the machine that was there controlling our temperature and the blood flow. All that didn’t exist for me, I hadn’t ever been in an emergency room, I had been in microsurgeries but I had never had something that keeps me in bed and makes me see everything in purple. I have always been this happy and calm guy, and suddenly this sensation of hearing your own heart fading away, when it always has been hyperactive. Blood pressure going down, the switch going off, I broke out in sweat and shivering. I started to be afraid of falling asleep because I heard a nurse say: “You can’t fall asleep; if you do we might lose you”. ¡How come I hear that!. So I told her to put me some ketchup on in order to not to fall asleep and when my machine beeped, that scared me as hell; the others’ machines beeped also, but they were gotten out all cold, and when mine beeped, the nurse came along and said: “Doctor, it’s going down, it’s going down”. An hour from there I was resting in a bedroom. ¡I’m saved motherfucker!

THE MOST TERRIBLE MOMENTS OF MY LIFE

The first moment was when I was eight years old, when the school took us to the movies. We were about one hundred students making a line, took by the hands to go inside and watch the movie. We entered to the Laika Theater, which had a very narrow entrance with these long stairs and we had to sit down in the last chairs. The theater was full of kids from all Aranjuez. The movie started and I was in the last line that was very long, and I was in the last chair. The movie was “The five falcons”, and suddenly those horses came out shooting away. I felt all those horses over me and that was what everybody in the room felt too. All of a sudden I saw these kids running toward that tiny little entrance and since I was the first one I went down stairs, but I stayed in a metal tube, the one that controlled the entrance with the register machine, all the kids passed over me. That was my first death, I lost consciousness, I was bleeding by the nose, the ears, everywhere and I had the diaphragm closed. I got home bleeding all over the place and with my eyes bulging out, and as soon as my mom saw me we went to the hospital. Now I had this funny fear to shows with big crowds and what a paradox, I work in those.

MY SECOND DEATH

I was in a pay phone in the highway to Santa Elena, like in the 94 km, and two shaved head and fat hit men went down from a Renault 12. They were pointing at me and I saw one of them shooting me and he was saying that he had seen me in Arajuez with Barrio. It was such a scary moment that I died executed.

MY THIRD DEATH

I was in a parade in Riosucio and somebody gave me some rum or moonshine that poisoned me in about three minutes and took me to the hospital. I remember that I was falling down and that there was a photographer, but he was actually a doctor from the Antioquia University that saw me going down and he gave me an injection that saved my life. They had poisoned me, I don’t know if on purpose, I think that chicha had scopolamine or something. With the time I realized that people were being poisoned in that damned carnival. I don’t know if it was because they were pissed or something.

THE CITY

I like to open spaces or gathering spots, because that’s what people find very hard: to find spaces. The city now has libraries, really magic places but people also need those places where they can have more peace, more confidence, more talking. The meeting, the joy, the dance are part of the collective healing, where the life worldview is shared. That’s getting better although we live between lots of conflicts. The people are more confident now. Ten years ago you couldn’t be calmed in a corner, but now young boys make these encounters possible.

SELFPORTRAIT

I’m a dancer, I like dancing and partying a lot. I don’t drink at all, but I enjoy more the dancing. I’m the guy who entertains the drunks, I cook them, I make the great atmosphere at the parties, but I’m not such a party guy. I’m very interested in creative things: production, the colors and the black box. My mother used to say to me: “You’re going to be an inventor”. To me the photography changes me everything. Once I thought about doing theater and I built stage design. The black theater of Praga really marked me; I saw it when I was pretty young. I haven’t done what I could have done. From the sensitivity point of view I have, but aesthetically I haven’t been able to do what I want to. To make a really good street theater school would be great.

I would change just one thing that has taken me a lot of time: all the testing. I would focus more in the idea because I have passed a lot of time in the social- communitarian things. Just only in the last couple of years I have gotten more into the aesthetic and the construction. I have had a lot of ear to hear what’s out. Above all, the violence in this fucking country has made me go to the social side.

My existence has been very quiet. The three women I have had in my life have been all divine with me. The one who gave me the children; the one who suffered with Barrio Comparsa and the one who’s now supporting me. All of that has been really beautiful.

I’m a regular citizen, who wants to be happy and live in a happy or crazy city. I see the atmosphere of the community in the party. I’m a party and community actor, that’s my definition.

My vocation is to be a people man; it’s a stuff of the culture.

What I’m after is the idea of not to lose the happiness and the sharing, the sympathy, the peaceful environment. In Manrique I never had to close the door of my house and it hurt a lot when I finally had to due to the shooting, because the boys used to come inside to lend stuffs, to be read to, and as all my life I’ve had library I was happy reading them poems or living the story, as the boys say.

I lived all my life between criminals, that’s why I’m not a criminal. I’ve never had a gun in my hands; I’ve had the boys beside me, advising them, talking to them and playing soccer with them. A lot of them have died.

I’ve liked cinema, the theater, but every time I go inside a theater room I look for the doors just in case we have to run away.

After everything that had happened in the Laika Theater, I stayed over ten years without going to the movies, I was terrified.