WORLD THEATER DAY

Theater will only die with its last spectator

By Cristóbal Peláez González

Translated by César David Salazar Jiménez

A movement, an époque in theatrical art does not proceed, and cannot proceed in a lineal way, always ascending, symmetrically. Progresses, bumps, relapses and setbacks form the transversal feature of an art whose crisis has always been stated. Perhaps if one day critics stopped pointing at the crisis, then theater would enter a real crisis.

The social role of theater has not been the same through history. We cannot longer complain about this art not playing the same role it played during its beginnings in ancient Greece, or having the kind of acceptance the English Renaissance Theater had, or covering that vast moral and philosophical influence and that huge value of diversion of theater in Europe during the nineteenth century. The times and the world had changed and with them people and societies, and instead of missing the past we should commit to the purpose of knowing what scenic art is and what it could become today, in the specific place that we are now, with its social and political conditions, its historicity.

Nevertheless, this thoughts form a field that escapes from the lean dimensions of these notes and, instead, it is possible to venture a few lines about the now, about Medellín and its theater, with the occasion of celebrating the WORLD THEATER DAY, a festivity that comes back from oblivion to remind us that there is a thing called theater. Now that we are the center of attention for a day, when institutions and the media polish their sense of disdain and disregard (and silence and negligence and ignorance) to take a momentary look at us, it could be the time for recognizing that when art is not useful to anybody or does not generate any interest at all, then that art, as much poetic status as it has, should disappear. One thinks about the question Moisés Pérez Coterillo asked, in relation to men of theater being stubborn about working on an art at risk of being at the same level as knife sharpeners or old organ repairers.

Trying sometimes not to get stuck in a dinosaurian plan, theatrical movement has leaded its exercise through chaotic trails, perhaps wanting to convince itself of its social function. Then we have seen theatrical forms subjected to civic and social plans, which end up compromising men and groups and turning them, by the sake of survival, into welfare organizations. Theater for peace, ecologic theater, social action theater, dangerous bordering flirts with recreation, pedagogy and catechesis.

It is clear that theater can only be popular if it takes forms of representation inherited from a communitarian tradition and guided by those same ethical and philosophical contents, but it is uncertain, as they want us to believe, that theater could justify its social validity by participating in programs against drug addiction, or warning people about deforestation, or helping eradicate illegal crops, and even less by fulfilling charity works driven by international organizations and their paternalistic view on the “third world”.

Theater as a ritual, as a meeting point for sensibility, intelligence and entertainment, theater as a field of shivering, theater as aesthetics, away from immediate purposes, has become minuscule in front of a monumental, gigantic environment: films, television, musicals, and sporting events. The entertainment offer has grown and diversified. We are no longer in Ibsen’s old Oslo, isolated by fjords with theater as the only urban entertainment offer for us to be comfortable in the caring warmth of four hours of representation to enjoy a story. Sartre had stated that the arrival of television has enhanced art by releasing it from its most petty function: to entertain.

Fortunately in Medellín there are still –and not in ways of extinction, we hope- some theater spectators that justify it; a minuscule proportion in relation to the whole population, mostly young students (adults had decided to drop dead for theater, or to install themselves in a world without concerns and questions). These are the people who are seducing many others in their influence areas (universities, schools, family environments), by their own initiative. They are looking, like us, for a theater that would go beyond political information or actuality, and they envision a theater where poetry, joy and reflection are distinctive against that interpreters’ theater with its ferocious offer: to “kill time”.

The task of creating and developing a theater in the city of Medellín is still and will always be an outcast exercise of solitude, a passion of the defeated. The actors and those reduced audiences are ignored by the big media: radio, press and TV are so entertained with the voracious instinct of informing about battles and floods, and so hypnotized with the turgor of “bataclanas”1, that they have forgotten their mobilizing role; they remember even less that diffusion and calling towards aesthetic expressions are constitutive parts of their job. Sometimes a bigger or a lower level of information is due to the sympathies or antipathies that journalists in charge had towards theater; even more, some evenings the presence of the audience in a theater downtown depends on the good or bad digestion of some journalist.

A theater of exploration, of searching, a laboratory that would go beyond the marketing mediocrity is today completely impossible in Medellín. Official institutions have also forgotten the theatrical art because they have understood that theater really is not that useful; for instance, it could not stop the earthquake in the Coffee Zone, so they preferred to ignore all cooperation. They respond to any initiative always like a parrot: “¡there is no budget; there is no budget; there is no budget; rrrua!” In “the best corner of Latin America” the proposal for entering the year 2000 was to burn some fireworks, ¿or was there any other?

Theater in Medellín -this hostile, rustic environment- agonizes between panic and crisis: some people work against the flow, others capsize, a few others wait for calm and a few more keep their names and pretend they work. They come out of schools graduated and with diplomas, trying to get back their old jobs in hair shops, factories and offices. Nothing new is rising, there are no new projects, and a lot of people call themselves actors just because they got to do two performances a year, one in Medellín and the other one, if they are lucky, en La Ceja or Titiribí. Maybe if theater has not disappeared for good is only because of the high percentage of unemployment (in that case, occupational therapy is definitely useful).

Anyway there is a drop of optimism that still remains unscathed: Theater will only die with its last spectator.

1 A Bataclana is a woman who is supposedly singing or dancing but is really just showing off her body. (Note from the Translator)