THEATER FOR THE ARRIVING CENTURY

By Cristóbal Peláez González

Translated by César David Salazar Jiménez

How is Theater in the twenty-first century going to be, how could it be like?

When deliberation anticipates, cabala takes us automatically to an answer that most of the times involve –viciously- technology. We start thinking about media; we expect big changes in scenic architecture, in advanced forms of representation, in a new way of hearing and seeing according to the speed and the compulsion that the city sets up for us; along with the media that influences changes of rhythm in perception.

Several times theater has been pointed at, unfairly, as an outdated art, forgetting that its own limitations constitute its greatness. The stage works with “hard”, “heavy” materials, because actors are its very own substance, physical beings; ascertainable, tangential beings. Only three flimsy elements rest gravity to the scene’s physicality: light, sound and word. Everything else is just relief “on stage”, pure traction.

It has been demanded from theater something that is the complete opposite of its nature: to become cinema, to become video, to get “more contemporary”, as if theater had been asked to become a newspaper –in one word: to stop being theater. It is clear that we can innovate, bring together the biggest and greatest technological resources, but we can never forget that the essence of theater is to be “a static frame where soul wanders and suffers”

We have to say, finally: in art, in any form of art, there is evolution, but there is no progress. The great Estanislao Zuleta established a remarkable comparison: a current North American warship could easily destroy the entire navy of the ancient Greece, but we need to ask if North American poetry has the same qualities as ancient Greek poetry’s.

Is there any playwriting today (now that we have all the advanced means) that could be better than the one that was done during the English Renaissance Theater? Shakespeare wrote with a quill pen. It is not true what merchants trumpet about when they advertise their products: that not accessing to computers is the same as being illiterate. Today we enjoy the undeniable benefits of informatics, but that does not mean we can look at Plato with disdain.

Today, when they talk about the death of book, they also curse theater with renewing or dying. They talk about a new generation of squared-eyes and children with little squirrel hands, atrophied by Nintendo and computers; they talk about a new generation that only believes in heavy sounds and images with a speed five times faster. Advertising works at a new rhythm, following the new necessities, because our senses work with a forced revolution, where ignorance is dictating that nobody wants to read anymore and that theater is barely a human memory.

The word PROGRESS dances like a monotone myth; it is a psychic trace associated with great highways, advanced means of transport, efficient, fast communications and huge instruments used for war and death.

Even cinema, the art of movement by excellence, is letting true storytellers down and leaving it all on the hands of technicians and engineers. The visual effects, explosions and thrilling images menace fable, and sometimes theater bears it and wants to imitate it, there is when it has been impoverished. The genius of Beckett resides precisely on the fact that he impoverished theater just to renew its splendor. Theater of shortage: testimony of the spiritual impoverishment of our century, of man, that fragile creature that still does not make it into adaptation. When the audience walks into a theater, they feel, there in the stage, the palpable sense of the “difficulty of living”.

The new century will keep exploring; and theater will march with its times, but its fundamental sign will be to document the sorrows and concerns of the people of its time, which means that its essence will remain the same as our grandfather Aristotle stated 2400 years ago: drama as a conflict of volitions.

There will be searched some innovative ways of storytelling, there could be searches and there is predicted an evolution that will be experienced by the side of the auxiliary hand of language sciences. With semiotics we have not learned how to write better, but we sure have learned what and how we write, and in some way we have also learned to orient what we write and put on stage.

The boast of a “modern” theater, along with “new times”, does not have a value as a phenomenon itself. With the greatest means, there is an outdated art being made. On this purpose we recall a recent representation from a prestigious group of Brazilian theater that came to Colombia preceded by an outstanding publicity as “post-modernist” and whose greatest presentation card was the bale of countless tons of scenography and utensils. When the act started the whole room was stunned with the power of the first images. At 15 minutes of the show, we all knew that was not going to go anywhere, then changes of posture and little coughs took place; the first spectators began leaving the room. 85 minutes of lethal boredom: that group wanted to make a movie; they have confused their form of expression. Because all cinematic illusion dies in theater when our looks collide with the physicality of theater drapes and stage curtains.

Much more modern, more advanced, more theater, appeared to us the memorable representation of the group Teatro de la Llanura, marked in the humbleness of two actors, a guitar and a few lights. A drama by which many people was driven to tears. There was a tragic fissure of existence which was moved by the minimal.

If Shakespeare would have had the current lighting and sounding possibilities at his hand, his theater would have been different, we don’t know if better or worse, just different. Theater, any form of art, does not exist in the void, above the possibilities of its own times, nor underneath its material scopes. We have to admit it: versus cinema and television, theater had lost its power of persuasion during the twentieth century. Society comments, discusses, crumbles sometimes with certain film or series; so few plays –not to say no one at all- have managed to shake the foundations of a community. We are far away from the public celebration of the Ancient Greece where theater molded the citizen’s life, to the point of provoking faints and premature births (the case of Medea), or, more recently, persuading, like that premier of Hedda Gabler, a young woman to commit suicide by the end of the representation, “to die like Hedda, with beauty”. Or as happened with the public discussion around “A Doll’s House”, also an Ibsen’s play, to the point where invitations to social reunions in Stockholm used to have the following request: “Please do not talk about A Doll’s House during the party”.

Today in Colombia it is hard that a play could provoke the dissents and accessions as “Guadalupe años sin cuenta” –a play by the group La Candelaria- did. Such influence appears today unlikely for theater.

In exchange, any TV series, boring and repetitive, full of adulteries, sexual intercourses and pregnancies, shudders general opinion paralyzing the citizens’ life, affecting all night life offers around the country. Please, let us recall the time when theater plays, concerts and artistic programs were announced offering “a big screen projection of a soup opera” before the event.

Instruments for entertainment had changed not because humanity in general would have changed, but because, paradoxically, it resists changing. That fact is well known by merchants. We are far away from those times were our enemies -like the mystics wanted- used to constitute world, demon and flesh, today our enemies are still three, but much more powerful: INFORMATION, ADVERTISING and TELEVISION. We all walk towards global stupidity.

Theater, right here, right now, in the arriving century and the others yet to come, will transform its own narrative laws, will learn from great progresses, but will remain the same in essence: THE MEETING POINT OF SENSIBILITY, INTELLIGENCE AND ENTERTAINMENT.

Surviving the surrounding abundance, the stage will not be competing with other means in equality; it will keep moving forward on the shoulders of its true essence: THE ACTOR, THE SPECTATOR AND THE GAME OF SIMULATION. Everything else, as it has been in the past and will be in all possible future, is secondary.

Theater faced to gigantism is a huge defeated, just like the entire humanity.