Reflections notebook about the theatrical issue.

Image, text, word and action

By Cristóbal Peláez, 2002

Translated by: Juliana Gutiérrez Rúa

Since man appeared on earth he has not stopped talking. All our theatrical tradition is a speaking tradition , therefore a history of literature. A literature subjected to what is specific to dramatic art, it is fair to say to Action, to the conflict that is performed.

---

A late Aristotelian interpretation of dramatic art as mimesis, tries to reduce the term to an imitation of the gesture or movement, forgetting that THE VOICE is also mimesis.

---

Thus, Craig Gordon, who restore the actor as a dancer's son rather than a poet's. It is understood as a reaction against a conversation theater, lets remember Shaw and Wilde, that had reduced the stage to an ideas exposition field, an assembly of ethical debate.

---

The statement of predominance of image, gesture and physical action over the word has not created a few flaws in the scene of the Colombian theater's short history. Few years ago act training was painting borders with bodybuilding more than with an appropriate methodology corpus. As a legacy of British and French schools, and as a feudal remnaining of the robe and the sword movies and even some schools forced their students to fencing classes (Brecht proposed to change fencing to shooting).

---

The result camed soon to the eyes. Players in good physical strength, good ability to move on stage, but helpless in fornt of the dramatic action and speech. Our theaters were filled with muscles and sweat, epileptic movements. Overacting was the general picture. The actor puted on each piece of action his soul and liver. To speak with an athletic example: they made the 5000 meters with the effort of 100. It was the time of acting without proportion.

---

Besides, the actor had heard that the characters should be alive, and this is often confused with putting force. So that, it was possible to even find the training techniques of fighting, wrestling, taekwondo. Sometimes we came across closer to preparing for war. We looked like men of steel.

---

And by the fact that education has been marked by a moral of own the truth, we have thought to find truths in all fields, including the theory of theater, which justified: then when the plethora of Street Theater was installed, the only and indivisible truth was, the real drama was an open field action, the color, the party and imagination formed its core. The closed theater and the word were démodé again. The headword of Lautreamont "Poetry must be made by all and not by one" was interpreted in a politic way always connected to the terms ¨community and ¨crowds¨.

---

The enormous enthusiasm of the street was calmed by the wear of similar the images and the recurrence of the same themes, dancethe has tried to lead a new momentum. So it was born that hybrid (The real drama again?) called Dance- Theater, a kind of Music-hall of movement that has privileged the situation over the action.

---

Dance-theater would be strictly the petit-bourgeois Aristotelian complex, the Oedipus fight of an actor.

---

It seems that any trend or theory, as fleeting that as it looks, that put the role of literary drama against the wall , offered from the beginning a good future.

---

Colombia is a country that given its gossip curiosity, to specialize in collecting all the trash of Europe, Polish, Russian, Greek.

---

On the other side of the river, they have restored the tale-telling, it is completely verbal phenomenon that their creators wanted to match to drama, and it has known in recent years the great fervor, it has come to talk about another AUTHENTIC theater. A way to tell the truth, that worn itself out at the speed of light suffocated by its limitations: that recitative tone like a student assembly, that unbridled and predictable way of trying to surprise the public with a quick and unexpected end, that settled kleptomania with Eduardo Galeano. Much of the strength of this movement owes much to this word: ¨free¨.

---

On this side, such as first rhetorical cousins, it is defended poetry, an demagnetizing field with diluted characters in a oniric retouching, inventions we never know if they are dream or they are in the flesh, they speak less by their own mouth and much by delusions of the author, that is the way how Colombian drama have been filled with ghostly figures who speak in verse, in a strange jargon, a product of an overdose of reading of Julio Florez and Guillermo Valencia.

---

The melodrama, that nineteenth-old corpse, which has now risen successfully on television, was the only dramaturgic legacy we received from Spanish, our theatrical development has had to be invented from there, was born the new theater, the exalting of collective creation, the claim.

---

Synthesizing, five elements of what could be this short and dramatic history of the theater in Colombia. Five items that complement or contrast, to set the cross-trait feature of drama in Colombia:

1. MELODRAMA. The Spanish heritage, ability to be move.
2. NEW THEATER. Against old content and the old formulas. Critical capacity.
3. COLLECTIVE CREATION. Developing the gregarious nature of creativity production
4. STREET THEATHER. Expanding the theater to community as part of everyday life
5. ANTHROPOLOGIC THEATER. Beyond the political situation to reveal to man in his cultural status.