ON THE TRANSMISSION OF THEATRICAL JOB

By: Cristóbal Peláez González

Translated by: César David Salazar Jiménez

There is a necessary premise: to clarify that Colombian theater is too young, that it has a very short history. Its history is so young that we still can cross our paths with some of our fathers, those that are still living, creating and producing plays, as well as writing thoughts of true actuality.

Our theater is an excessively fresh endeavor to Colombian society. What we had before 1950, were plays and works that appeared sporadically, but they did not flowed as something organic and systematic, about these efforts we can write and hypothesize, but we cannot consider it properly as a movement, as a history.

And just yesterday we were talking about this here in Bogotá with a group of new, young actors. We were saying that they would be the third generation in Colombian theater. On transmitting the job, I can only speak about those things that the first generation really transmitted me. When we first began working in 1979 with Matacandelas, we were in some sort of junction, so it was not a reaping of anything, not a heritage, but a purpose. In that time, we were living and watching, socially and politically, a set of things that we did not liked at all, and we realized that from our own inclination towards theater we could develop an expression that would be our own aesthetic, philosophical point of view.

Therefore we were interested enough on what we began to see, to hear and read about people like Enrique Buenaventura, Santiago García, Enrique Camacho, Eddy Armando, Miguel Torres. They were something like an artistic evidence from other reads that we did a lot: Fernando González, Estanislao Zuleta, Gonzalo Arango, and we realized that we were in the middle of a fissure, in the middle of two Colombias: on one side a land of numbness and disgrace, on the other side a new thought, a new way of looking at ourselves and towards the rest of the world.

And that is how a group of confused youngsters began to try, as many others, to construct our surroundings, to dream of another nation because we felt that we had no homeland, and of course, we knew that we were not alone, because there were people who thought thoughts that were orienting us, thoughts that they transmitted us. Of course we were not interested in an exclusive, pure path of theater. The allure was no other than this world of ideas, this philosophical spectrum that was presented to us. That humble fight against national obscurantism.

We read frequently, we watched theater frenetically, and we began to reconstruct, not to construct, but to reconstruct some sort of homeland, a republic to ourselves, to our own use.

We thought then (and we still do) that theater was a proper vehicle to express our thoughts and feelings. We did not take theater as and end but as a mean, as a sort of tool for subversion –we still think that way-, meaning that the priority was life not theater, theater was simply a way for us to try to live a better life, and it was fundamental, we already defined that at the time –a little bit resignedly- because otherwise they would crash us, because Matacandelas is more than a theater group, is a 720 mts.² independent republic, a little tiny island with very diplomatic ways towards our neighbors, as long as it has been possible.

We have lived a forced marginality, some sort of exile, and therefore we have this proclivity to authors that are really damned. We are asked frequently about this proclivity to deal with the damned, the disclassed, the defeated. The answer is really simple: these authors are more similar to our own way of living and conceiving reality. There is Fernando Pessoa and his “O Marinheiro” (The Sailor), Andrés Caicedo and his works “Angelitos Empantanados” (Bogged Little Angels) and “Los Diplomas” (The Diplomas), Sylvia Plath in her “La Chica que Quería Ser Dios” (The Girl who Wanted to be God).

One of the conditions of art (that is some kind of curse), is that as you make theater, art, you destroy yourself, pay the costs, and in many times with a high prize. Of course there are other forms of being involved with art, to build you, to get yourself a good position in society.

I have to say that my predecessors transmitted everything to me, but I am not interested in transmitting anything at all. I am not a priest, nor a messiah, and I am not interested in carrying a cross. Publicly I declare that I am making theater to separate myself from everything I hate, to demarcate a territoriality: theater is a bordering strip, a delimitation zone.

In that territory I am not concerned about setting up a group for that same group to be perpetuated. I have already told the guys that, once I pass away, I do not give a shit if Matacandelas keeps existing or not, because I do not base my own existence and my passion on the expectation that someday there would be a “Cristóbal Peláez Auditorium”, no thanks, I am not interested, and I am not interested in a street or a bridge with my name on it. One goes through Medellín and sees things like the Don Jorge Hugo Lopera Urquijo Bridge; ¡One with the name of a bridge!

And I am not in the mood of transcending anything, nor of “serving the new generations”, or that my work could go on because is a model of… I am not a model of anything, and I do not want to be important. The only reason I have been making theater is because I like it and also to get rid of working, that is a horrible thing to do. The exercise of theater has been a camouflaged way for me to be a hippie.

Each member of Matacandelas should be responsible for its stay in the group. Some stay a certain amount of time, and some others, more stubborn, get to stay longer. More than a school, our theater is a place where we seek to share. Paradoxically this is a very large group –considering our field and circumstances-. Today we are 22 people… and the more you kick people out the more they keep getting in…

More than transmitting the occupation from a pedagogic point of view, I like provocation and contagion. I am not interested in teaching, or giving “good professionals” to the national scene. If Colombian theater disappears, I could not care less about it.

I think that Colombian theater’s dynamics froze when that unreasonable interest in transmitting the job appeared. Actors, directors and playwrights stopped making theater to engage with pedagogy. There are like sixty thousand teachers transmitting the job to three or four theater students. We are in the middle of a professional fever, excused on economic reasons. Then there has emerged a new specimen: graduates that took eighteen thousand courses and lessons, full of degrees and diplomas and charges but never have been on a stage.

And we already know that there is some experience required for the technical foundations of any job, meaning those delegable, teachable, transmittable codes (as it has been expressed properly by José Assad today), but there is something that is not transmittable: the poetic shiver. That temperature of soul is hard to show. It could only be done with risk in provocation and contagion.

Anyways theater, what we call theater, keeps being the actors’ patrimony. And theater, we know it, is only in stage. Conversations about theater are not theater; lessons about theater are not theater; books about theater are not theater; written, published plays are not theater. It is well known that theater is that ephemeral term in space and time between two obscurities, between two voids. That game between the actors and the audience.

What is important in the actor’s instruction is that permanent contact with the job, because you are an actor or an actress as long as you have contact with the stage, not with companies or friends, nor with the declarations of the press.

Due to their specific nature, their organicity, actors are quite strange animals (poets are too), and in many times they do not know they know but they do it anyways. Perhaps they are not what you can call very structured persons; many times they do not want to live by the speech, they are not necessarily dominated by rational thoughts. These strange beings, with such a complex formation and aesthetic nature, go out to a stage and they are enlightened, they will always amaze us for their carnal knowledge of the world.

Thank you very much.

Some answers to some questions:

Question about the empiricism in which some theater makers were formed.

C.P.: Perhaps the advantage of this third generation is that it does not have to walk that tortuous road that we walked, when we had to study and get information out of a mimeograph –as Ricardo Camacho said-. We were too naïve. I remember when some pirate document appeared, with theories of some guy called, let’s suppose, Giorgio Tartá; two weeks later there would be in the guild a bunch of people calling themselves “tartaists”. We believed everything we read, not having any tool for selection or depuration. We gave a lot of blind steps.

We now have made progress. There are actors and directors that had access to knowledge on transmitting technical and theoretical foundations. Fortunately, young people do not have to take those huge curves from the past. We also have made a lot of progress regarding our knowledge on referents in an international context.

QUESTION:

I would like you to talk about what you published in “Gestus” magazine, “Esquirlas” (Splinters).

C.P.: Those texts were material for provocation. Some religion teacher from the hipercatholic school where I had the misfortune to go to came into the class saying: “God does not exist”, and then on, with that tricky premise, he got us all into big trouble, he made us debate all year. And that reminds me a little of all those bestialities that one writes…

Let’s say they are strategies, ways to argue with a field that soon gets trapped in fashion and repetition. In Medellín, we are somehow more virgins and impenetrable, like country maidens…

In Bogotá, after a long time of not coming back, I had trouble watching certain plays, I saw incredible things, such strange things. Then I thought: “¿Has Theater changed so much in so little time and we have not realized it yet?” I watched actors on stage doing a series of automatic gestures, robotized; they suddenly got convulsive and compulsive, like possessed, and I even got to think that they were going to do Hara Kiri in front of the audience.

I was told that those were “techniques” taught by I don’t know who and that it was the new, most revolutionary acting method.

I saw –on tape- a demonstration on “directing actors” taught by someone who, so they said, was the non plus ultra of world theater, this guy was called Anatoli Vassiliev, and the video showed a bearded, really important artist looking man screaming and screaming, ¡how that guy screamed! He yelled hysterically to his actresses and those poor blondes did not make more than shake with pure panic, ¡how they shook! That seemed to me like a scam.

There is even a “spy that came from cold” whose greatest work in Colombia was affirming that Colombian theater did not exist, that it never existed. He, in a messianic role, looks like he came to create that history. And it is quite possible that he succeeds because we, by tradition, have always been docile towards colonization.

Each time I come to Bogotá I find that in the Hit Parade is always a new guru that drives all people crazy. Fashion always changes. From that point of view Bogotá is a much more penetrable, naïve city, more capable of being cheated. From that point of view I wrote those “splinters” for GESTUS, to try to mess up the house a little, to make a shoot in the air. A copy of that article was publicly exposed in some billboard in Medellín, and I was told that some theater students began to throw in curses. I would like it if they would have spit on it.