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Teatro La Máscara:
Twenty-Eight Years of “Invisibilized”
Theater
(*leer
la versión en español)
Marlène Ramírez-Cancio
La verdad es que estamos
cercados por el miedo. Estamos a tres fuegos:
la guerrilla, los
paramilitares y los militares, pero también tantas otras “fuerzas
oscuras”…
Yo quiero hablar de eso,
aunque todo el mundo lo esté viendo en los periódicos. [1]
—Lucy
Bolaños, Director, Teatro La Máscara
Estaban dando la telenovela,
por eso nadie miró pafuera…[2]
—Rubén Blades
How can political theaters address violence in a society of violence?
Scarred by fifty years of civil war, Colombia is known as one of the most
sanguinary regions in the world. Paramilitary forces routinely massacre unarmed
villagers, accusing them of collaborating with guerrilla forces. Guerrilla
kidnappings abound, and recent events include a woman decapitated by a
“necklace” made of explosives, also killing a policeman and ripping
off the arm of another. What is the role of political performance in a country
like this, where violent atrocities are constantly acknowledged and exposed?
Where the words “violencia,” “masacre,” and
“crisis” appear in almost every article, every news hour, every
radio show, and even many advertisements? I want to explore the work of Teatro
La Máscara, a women’s theater collective from Cali that has
existed for twenty-eight years but has remained largely unrecognized, even
“invisibilized,” as they challenge multiple forms of violence.
Much of the discussion surrounding oppositional
theater in Latin America places it in the context of repressive regimes, where
the “official story” in the news far from reflects people’s
lived experience of violence, but rather seeks to “disappear” it.
In places like Argentina during the military dictatorship, for instance, people
were “forced to focus on the given-to-be-seen,” Diana Taylor
writes, “and ignore the atrocities given-to-be-invisible, taking place
around them” (Taylor, Disappearing Acts, 120). Seeing, or admitting to
seeing violence, was “dangerous seeing,” and “put people at risk in a
society that policed the look. [...] They knew people were
‘disappearing’ [but...] had to deny what they saw and, by turning
away, collude with the violence around them” (123). This act of turning
away in terror, of choosing not to see, this “self-blinding of the
general population” is what Taylor calls “percepticide”
(122). Under such circumstances, political theaters used performance as a means
to expose the destruction people endured, insisting on “creating a community
of witnesses by and through performance” (Taylor, “Staging Social
Memory”, 27). Reversing Peggy Phelan’s postulation that
“performance becomes itself through disappearance,” Taylor suggests
that “Disappearance, as Latin American activists and artists know full
well, becomes itself through performance” (21).
While this certainly applies to many Latin
American contexts, the situation in present-day Colombia is different. People
do not need performances to “make them witnesses” to the violent
events around them. Far from covering them up, major Colombian newspaper El
Tiempo features headlines that
are explicit to the point of sounding melodramatic: “Desplazados, en el
límite del delirio” (Homeless Refugees, on the Edge of Delirium),
“El Salado: Otro pueblo fantasma” (El Salado: Another Ghost Town),
“Se desborda la crisis” (Crisis Overflows) ... Some of the
scenarios described are indeed cinematic: “Hacia las ocho de la noche de
ayer, cinco minutos antes de iniciarse un partido de fútbol en pleno
parque central de Doncello, jugadores y espectadores tuvieron que correr por la
lluvia de balas que anunció una incursión de las FARC. Tres
muertos y diez secuestrados” (Around eight p.m. yesterday, five minutes
before the a soccer match began in Doncello’s central park, players and
spectators had to run from the shower of bullets that signaled an attack by the
FARC. Three dead and ten kidnapped). The online version of El Tiempo often includes surveys concerning
violence—one in February 2000 read: “¿Quiénes son los
mayores violadores de los derechos humanos en Colombia? Haga clic y escoja: la
guerrilla, los paramilitares, los narcotraficantes, o el
ejército...” (Who are the biggest violators of human rights in
Colombia? Click and choose: the guerrilla forces, the paramilitary, the drug
dealers, or the army...) (El Tiempo, Feb 22-27).
Violence, and the threat of violence, has
become a part of people’s everyday lives. In the words of medical doctor
Juan Marcelo Vásquez, quoted in El Tiempo after he assisted victims of a massacre,
“Dante no conoció el infierno; nos tocó todo a
nosotros” (Dante did not know hell; it was all given to us).
Bogotá’s RCN Evening News—having reported that the number of
child kidnappings increased by 66% between 1995 and 2000—aired a brief section
reminding parents of the “Nine Rules to Prevent Your Child from Being
Kidnapped.” This list includes advice such as: “Si su hijo es el
consentido, evite que se note” (If your child is the family favorite,
avoid showing it), “No permanezca solo con su hijo en la finca” (Do
not be alone with your child in your country home), or simply, “No
permanezca solo con su hijo” (Do not be alone with your child).[3] Privacy is a site of danger and love is a
liability: showering a child with affection might put him/her at risk of being
taken away, hurt, or—as many indeed are—murdered.
Such daily bombardment of tragedy by the media
would perhaps be met in the United States with a severe case of compassion
fatigue, a term which Olin
Robinson says is “meant to describe Western public reaction to a
succession of Third World disasters.” News and statistics such as
“a child dies of hunger every 2 seconds,” or “women
gang-raped by soldiers,” he writes, are “instantly reported and
brought into virtually every home in the developed world” (Robinson,
webpage). In a website entirely dedicated to compassion fatigue, Leslie Smith
describes the term as “a loss of confidence in our individual abilities
to address the problems of our society, especially those that result from
poverty” (Smith, webpage).
Could this explain why, as director of La
Máscara Lucy Bolaños perceives it, Colombian audiences do not
want to see their “crisis” re-presented onstage? Most people know
these atrocities happen, Bolaños says, but “we rarely talk about
being afraid….Everyone’s doing their own thing, going forward,
without talking” (Bolaños, 1998 Interview). After so many decades
of unceasing violence, Colombians are certainly tired, but theirs is not
“compassion fatigue.” Compassion fatigue implies a position of privilege in relation to the suffering
“Others,” be it people in the so-called Third World or
poverty-stricken groups in one’s own country. People experiencing
compassion fatigue are not themselves
threatened, they are standing
by, watching, and often “just” watching.[4] As Kai Erikson writes in “Notes on
Trauma and Community,” those who are “not touched [by trauma] try
to distance themselves from those touched, almost as if they are escaping
something spoiled, something contaminated, something polluted” (Caruth,
189).
Colombians do not have this privilege of
distancing themselves from the violence in their country. You can be walking to
work or getting home and a “carrobomba” (car-bomb) can explode on the street and you can die.
You can sit among a hundred people in an airplane from Bogotá to Cali,
or even in a church on any given Sunday, and be kidnapped by the ELN for months
on end. Everyone is aware of this. As Lucy Bolaños said, it appears in
the newspapers every day: violence, crisis, violence, crisis, violence, crisis
overflowing…
If Colombians are suffering from fatigue, I
would argue it is a kind of “crisis fatigue.” Their nation has remained in crisis—by
definition, a turning point—for far too long. “More and more, the
long years of war and violence seem to be the essence of our recent
history,” writes Jorge Orlando Melo in an online February 2000 issue of Revista
Semana. The taste of violence
is stale in people’s mouths. They want—and perhaps feel they
need—to talk about peace.
The media knows this, too. For every article on
war we see a slogan for peace. The slogan for one of the major national banks
is: “Bancolombia: Porque todo puede ser mejor” (Bancolombia: Because everything can be better). There are T-shirts sold and
banners posted everywhere that read, “La paz somos todos” (We are
All Peace), “La paz comienza contigo” (Peace Starts with You), or
“Dale una oportunidad a la paz” (Give Peace a Chance). La
Luciérnaga (The Firefly), a political satire radio show, is announced
every day as “La Luciérnaga: Una forma de sonreírle a la
dureza de la vida” (The Firefly: A way of smiling at the harshness of
life). Every morning and afternoon, at 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. sharp, the national
anthem is broadcast on every single radio and television station in the
country. Radio Caracol streams in live through the web, too, so even in New
York I can hear the anthem be announced—punctual as ever—as an
“homage to one of our national symbols.” One night in February
2000, immediately after the anthem, I heard a children’s chorus sing:
“Que haya paz / Que haya amor / Que seamos todos felices / Y que todo sea
mejor / Que haya paz / Que haya amor / Con café Aguila Roja /
¡Alegría de sabor!” (May there be peace / May there be love
/ May we all be happy / And may everything improve / May there be peace / May
there be love / With Aguila Roja Coffee / There’s flavor happiness!). A
cheerful male voice followed, exclaiming: “Para los que pensaban que el país
estaba estancado, una nota positiva: ¡Llegó la nueva
batería Willard, con su súper potencia duradera!” (For
those who thought the country was stuck, a positive note: The new Willard
battery is here, with its super-lasting power!).
When the country’s batteries are running
low, so to speak, is a jolt of cheerful peace the only thing people have to
hold onto?
The soundbyte
“Peace” has thus become a spectacle itself. It has
become—like women posing in bikinis—a marketable commodity that can
be sold as well as used to sell products. It can be consumed (with your cup of
coffee?) and has indeed become a kind of TV-dinner that is served as a
palliative, a sign that the country is “working on it.” Examining
what it would actually mean, politically and economically, to reach that peace
is a more difficult question, one that the media (owned for the most part by a
few powerful families) does not encourage their audiences to ask.
In the face of all this, political theaters are
fading and commercial TV comedies and telenovelas are booming. The last thing people want to talk
about when they go to the theater is violence—again. This poses a
significant challenge for political theaters that do continue their work on violence. Besides their
struggle to survive on scant economic means, they are faced with an even harder
question: how can they re-present the horrors that the media is already (and
almost pornographically) presenting on a daily basis? How can they do this in
such a way that touches people differently than the media’s excesses do? What strategies need they use to
expose what is ostensibly already exposed, to pull the invisible out of the
visible? And what happens when the political theater in question is all
women-run and feminist?
Here is the story of one such theater. Through
the interviews I conducted with the members of Teatro La Máscara I will
present, largely in their own words, the history and goals of this feminist
ensemble. Through my experience with one of their plays, I will also discuss
their strategies for thematizing violence on stage, laying bare the
“normalized” but insidious fear that Colombians (both privately and
collectively) wish to push under the surface.
Teatro La Máscara, Universo femenino / Feminine Universe
I first met them by accident.
I was sitting in the dining room of Teatro La
Candelaria in Bogotá with my friend Cristina Frías, having lunch
after a long morning of theater workshops at Festival al Aire Puro/Open Air
Festival. It was the summer of 1997, the first time I had ever been in Colombia,
and going on tour with the San Francisco Mime Troupe was a brilliant accident
in itself. I was just beginning to approach Latin American theater, a task I
found much facilitated by the Mime Troupe’s recognition: it allowed me to
meet dozens of teatristas, playwrights,
and directors, including
“El Maestro” Santiago García, director of La Candelaria, who
had invited our group to lunch that afternoon. He was sitting across from me at
the end of the table, talking to two women I had not seen at the workshops. One
was in her forties and I remember being struck by her poised, grounded
presence. The other was younger, tall, and gestured with her hands as she
spoke. At a certain point Cristina and I began talking about our upcoming trip
to Cali, where we planned to go after the rest of the Mime Troupe returned to
San Francisco. The youngest of the two women overheard us and looked up.
“When are you going to Cali?,” she asked, “We’re from
there.” That was Ximena Escobar. She said they were from an
all-women’s theater collective called La Máscara, and introduced
us to the woman next to her, their director Lucy Bolaños. By the end of
lunch, we had their address and phone number, and they had offered us a place
to stay during our visit.
Two weeks later, we were in Cali. We arrived at
the address they had given us, on Carrera 10, in the heart of Barrio San
Antonio. Number 3-40 was a two-story building with a blue mural on the front
wall, a plant-filled balcony, a black wrought iron door, and a red sign that
read “Teatro La Máscara: 25 Años” (La Máscara Theater: 25 Years). We rang
the doorbell. A few moments later Lucy came out in a white bathrobe, led us
through the hallway and welcomed us to her theater. The front room —an
open area with large black-and-white tiles on the floor and an incredibly high
ceiling— was decorated with their old stage sets and props, including a
wooden archway with the words “Canción de Naná”
(Naná’s Song) painted in silver letters. Next to the door to the
theater area, almost like a guardian, stood a tall sculpture of a woman made of
white wire. She smiled.
Through that door we walked into the 250-seat
house and then onto the black stage, which was set up for their show A flor
de piel (Skin Deep) with what
seemed to be a giant bamboo mobile. Lucy took us through the backstage area, by the lights and mirrors of
the narrow dressing room,
and out the other end to a small outdoor patio. There were two doors off to the
side. One was ajar and I could see it was the bathroom. Pointing to the other door,
she said, “This is where I live.” She opened the door to a small
room with a bed, the walls covered with bookshelves, postcards, and clippings.
This theater was her home. I was immediately
drawn in.
I learned that La Máscara was one of the
few (and one of the oldest) all-women’s ensembles in Latin America. They
had worked closely with Enrique Buenaventura, the Teatro Experimental de Cali,
and the Corporación Colombiana de Teatro—yet we had never heard of
them. Nobody had mentioned them at the festival in Bogotá.
So the next day—after staying at
Ximena’s nearby apartment, a few blocks away from the TEC—we went
back to La Máscara with a tape recorder. Four out of the five women in
the group were there, Ximena, Lucy, her daughter Susana Uribe, and her niece
Janeth Mesías. Once we gathered in the backyard, Lucy leaned into the
small black recorder and said: “My name is Lucy Bolaños. I am the
founder of Teatro La Máscara.”[5] We sat back and listened:
This group was started in 1972, so we are now
celebrating twenty-five years of artistic work. It was a group that started as
a mixed collective, made up of about thirteen men and women. We put up plays
during that time, with texts from people like Shakespeare, Enrique Buenaventura,
Bertold Brecht, and also the Chicano director Luis Valdés. After 1985 La
Máscara becomes an all-women’s group, because the difficulties of
doing theater, of making a living out of theater, are enormous in our country.
That is what made our group become unstable, and all the men left. It was a
crucial moment. A few women remained who had already begun working together for
an International Women’s Day. We were Pilar Restrepo, Valentina Vivas,
Marina Gil, Claudia Morales, María González, and myself. We took advantage
of the circumstances, and from that moment on we focused on taking the feminine
problematic to the stage. This became the principal endeavor of Teatro La
Máscara. (Bolaños 1997).
Pilar Restrepo—the fifth ensemble member, who was not living in Cali
at the time of this interview—has written elsewhere about the
group’s shift in creative focus. She explains that the change
“responded to a consciousness and a need to negotiate transformations in
every form of social discrimination, and to a feminine urge to find our own
language, one that ‘reveals’ and ‘rebels’ us (que
‘nos revele’ y ‘nos rebele’), in the face of habits that
“invisibilize” and “imbecilize” the image of woman (de
‘invisibilizarnos’ e ‘imbecilizarnos’ la imagen de la
mujer)” (Restrepo, La
Máscara, la mariposa y la metáfora, 16). The focus on feminine issues, she writes,
reflected their desire to “find a historical identity that dignifies not
one, but all women” (17). The challenge of doing this on stage, she
proposes, is not to “simply point out the habits and relations of
dominance that have become ‘naturalized’ between men and women, but
to make them comprehensible to the spectator’s eyes” (Restrepo,
“La Máscara ‘dice verdad sobre sí
misma’,” 2). Lucy continues:
Our first show was Noticias de María. It is a play we put together based on Nuevas
cartas portuguesas, a book
written by Las Tres Marías, three Portuguese writers whose work was
banned in their country, and who were put in jail for attacking public
morality. We got to know this book through Jacqueline Vidal, who is Enrique
Buenaventura’s wife. On the one hand, the show speaks about education,
and on the other hand about the relationship of a couple—how the woman at
a certain point prefers madness or death rather than returning to her husband.
[...] We do not stage texts only by women. We have also used with works written
by men, like Bertold Brecht. For example, in “Canción de
Naná” he deals with prostitution. “María
Farrar” talks about a young domestic worker who becomes pregnant and, out
of fear, tries to have an abortion. But it doesn’t work, so she has her
child. When the baby is born, she wants to stop him from crying, so she kills
him herself. In these poems Brecht takes up some issues that women must face,
and presents them as a social problem. A few years ago, we did a collective
creation based on a non-theatrical text by Ntozake Shange. The way we build a
performance out of twenty poems, the way we make characters speak them,
transforms them into dramatic text, makes them a theatrical spectacle. The same
thing happened with the texts taken from Galeano and Rigoberta Menchú,
which we used in Mujeres en trance de viaje.[6]
“Our experimental work on poetry, narrative texts, and
epistles,” writes Restrepo, “forces the audience to an attentive
reading because the lyrical becomes gesture without losing its verbal strength.
The play does not end without the audience feeling that we’ve
‘stuck our finger in the wound’ (‘el dedo en la
llaga’)” (Restrepo,
“Las comediantas de la legua,” 5).
La Máscara works mostly with guest
directors, among them Enrique Buenaventura, Jacqueline Vidal, Patricia Ariza,
Elena Armengod, and Wilson Pico. They view artistic creation as a mixture of
group experimentation and a director’s individual work. The director
never has full command or the final say about any performance—some, like
Wilson Pico, come from other countries to work with them for a week or two, lay
the groundwork for a piece, and then leave it to the actresses to elaborate the
finished product. But even when the guest director stays with them during the
full rehearsal process, s/he must always work closely with Lucy. She has
remained at the head of the collective throughout its entire trajectory (not
only as actress and director, but also as house manager and business
administrator—positions so undervalued in the discussions of small
theaters, and which often include sweeping floors, mopping, cooking, etc.). She
has also been responsible for maintaining the group’s commitment to
women’s issues (Restrepo, La Máscara, la mariposa y la
metáfora, 15).
One of the most difficult times for La
Máscara was the late 1980’s. Lucy again tells the story:
In 1987 and 88 a wave of violence erupted in
Colombia, a wave of persecution against artists, intellectuals, teachers,
poets. I say it was the work of ‘dark forces’ because one never
knew who they were. The extreme right, the paramilitary, the guerrilla forces,
the military, one never knew. It was horrible. Many people were tortured and
disappeared, so many people were killed. [...] We began getting phone calls
saying “We’re going to kill you, we hope you keep your mouths
shut.” We got threats by mail that said “Out, you rats, leave the
country, you anti-Colombian cunts, Black Flag with you all!” Black Flag, like the spray, as if they were going to kill
insects. These constant threats kept us up at night, we felt persecuted on the
street, as if we already had the gunshot on the back of our heads, you know? It
was at that time that one of the women from a feminist organization helped us
leave the country and we went to Costa Rica. It was there that we had our first
year-and-a-half long tour. With our daughters, we went from Costa Rica to
Mexico, to Cuba, to Nicaragua, a year and a half of traveling, waiting for
things here to calm down. We established contacts on our own, sell tickets for
our shows, and the solidarity and collaboration we received from people in
those countries allowed us to live through it. [...] Our return home was safe,
things had settled down somewhat. Based on that experience, we created a new
piece called Mujeres en trance de viaje (Women in Travel Trance), directed by Patricia Ariza.
La
Máscara’s only constant members have been Lucy Bolaños and
Pilar Restrepo. The rest of the members have kept rotating, and the group has
been comprised of about ten actresses at different moments, which is why Lucy
qualifies the ensemble as “whoever is in the group at the time.”
Some have found it hard to stay, she said, “because we don’t have a
salary (for being actresses). It’s a ‘rebusque’, as we say here, you teach workshops, you make
costumes, you do make-up, even jewelry. Each one has to develop a skill to find
a means of survival. We constantly strive towards being able to stabilize the
group’s economy, so we can provide the actresses with a fixed
salary.”
At the sound of these words the other three
actresses let out a huge laugh. The thought of a fixed income for theater
seemed absurd to them at the moment. Lucy’s twenty-four year-old daughter
Susana spoke up: “But even still, I can’t see myself doing anything
different from theater. It’s a passion.” Sitting next to her,
Ximena raised her hand and said, “It would be great—and I’m
not going to say a creative word or give any of those spiels— but I just
feel it would be so great and so important if women in theater began to get
together, to organize encuentros... Because there’s a different language here, one particular to women, one that belongs to us
and expresses our interiority. There has to be a dramaturgy dealing with that
search.” And after a short pause she said, “Okay, I have
spoken.” Janeth, the newest member of the ensemble, said in a soft voice,
“For me, theater is a woman, really. Because at every moment, something
new is being created, is being born. And it really does come from inside
everyone here, every one of us at La Máscara. It is something very
beautiful that grows and grows until it becomes ours. We are mothers to our
theater, and with every play something leaves and then something else is born
again and grows…”
With a few words, Susana finished her
cousin’s thought: “It should be called teatra.”
It was late afternoon and we had been talking
for hours, clicking the tape recorder on and off. At the end of our interview
together, I asked them if they wanted to say anything else to wrap things up.
The four women gathered closely around the tape recorder and sang a popular
song they had used in their play ¡Emocionales! (Emotional!), entitled “Mujeres feas” (Ugly
Women): “Hay mujeres regulares,/ hay mujeres desgraciadas/ hay mujeres
con mal genio/ y las hay con mucha gracia/ Pero feas feas feas/ pero feas y con
ganas/ no hay ninguna mujer fea/ yo lo juro por mi alma” (There are women
who are so-so/ There are women who are wretched/ There are women who are
cranky/ And then some are very graceful/ But ugly ugly ugly/ Ugly really
downright ugly/ There is no ugly woman/ I swear it by my soul).
It was a fun
ending to the conversation, yes, but the thought of Black Flag threats never
left my mind.
Feminismo es mala palabra / Feminism is a Curse Word
One year later, in the summer of 1998, I returned to Cali. This time I
had the express intention—and the fellowship funding, which also meant a
video camera—to document all I could about La Máscara. I was there
for the opening night performance of their new piece, Los perfiles de la
espera (The Profiles of
Waiting), directed by Ecuadorian master choreographer Wilson Pico. [7] Out of the four actresses I had met the
year before, two were gone: Ximena had moved to Spain, and Susana was doing
theater elsewhere. A few days before the performance, I finally had the
pleasure of interviewing original ensemble member Pilar Restrepo. She was no
longer an actress—and had not been for several years—but she was
and still is an integral part of the group, as a writer, theorist, and
organizer (at the time, she was finishing her book on the group, so far the
only published theoretical study on La Máscara). She is a thin woman
about Lucy’s age with short brown hair, wide-open eyes, and a deep raspy
voice. She sat on a folding chair in front of the video camera and asked,
“Should we start?”
I pressed the red button and asked her how she
first got involved in La Máscara. She began at the beginning:
I got to know theater through my oldest
sisters. When I was a girl, we would participate in the school plays. The first
one we ever did was called The Chinese Princess. We had to buy our own costumes. We had no
money at home at the time, and for my character I needed a kimono with very
wide sleeves... I remember I cried so much because I wasn’t going to have
a costume, and I was the Princess! My mother cut up one of my sister’s
Sunday dresses, and she made the sleeves from a different fabric. It had
nothing to do with China, but it didn’t matter, I felt I had the best
costume ever... So that was the age when I began to feel the passion for
memorizing texts and poems. Then I had the opportunity to see Enrique
Buenaventura’s La Maestra. More than any other play I’ve ever seen, that one has impacted me
the most. I lived in the
suburbs in northern Cali, where we were never allowed to go out alone or take
the bus... But I would run from school, still in my uniform, to go see the
TEC’s rehearsals. And every weekend, that theater was an
adventure—I felt like the bravest girl going downtown at eight p.m. to
see a play by myself. It was forbidden in our family to associate ourselves
with the TEC. My parents would say, “Those people are working class! They
are communist revolutionaries!” It was absolutely forbidden. So my sister
started dating one of the actors... Imagine the scandal?... I met Lucy during
one of those escapades, when I was in high school. I got involved with La
Máscara from the beginning, from its first plays in 1972, when there
were still men in the group... The men left the group in 85, and Lucy and I
were left staring at the ceiling... We committed ourselves to political causes,
and performed at political events. The women from the [communist] party, the
feminists, and even the M-19 [guerrilla forces] would call us to do shows. We
would stage a poem and go. (Restrepo, 1998 Interview).
It did not take long for Pilar to start talking about the obstacles they
faced because of their commitment to feminism. As feminist theorist Florence
Thomas[8] has written in Conversaciones con un
hombre ausente (Conversations
with an Absent Man), the general attitude in Colombia seems to be, “Why
talk about women? Don’t you think that subject is a little out of place?
Don’t you think that in these times, in our so terribly battered
Colombia, there are other urgencies, other priorities?” (Thomas, 23).
Within the country’s intellectual community (and this is certainly not
limited to Colombia), there is a legacy of intolerance regarding the discussion
of gender inequalities. In the name of revolution and political struggle, some
refused to address such “secondary” issues, because “the only
valid cause was the proletariat… ‘And prostitutes, comrade, are not
proletariat!’” (Restrepo, La Máscara, la mariposa y la
metáfora, 116-17). This
type of posture, according to Pilar, has proved to be one of the toughest
obstacles for the ensemble. “The mere fact that we are women who do
theater is reason enough for rejection,” she affirms. “I am so
tired of those attitudes. Even women themselves tell us, ‘Ay no, I don’t like feminist
theater!’” I asked her what she thought people in general
understood by “feminism”, and she responded:
[Feminism] is such a terrible word here,
it’s pejorative, it’s evil. It’s “You’re insane,
how could you be a feminist?”
Instead of being the opposite, a vindication for women, it becomes a stigma.
[...] Feminists are always accused of being radicals, of hating men, of wanting
to take over men’s power, of not believing in family and moral values.
Here, feminism is understood as the opposite of machismo, as if they were both the same thing, two
sides of the same coin. [...] To give you a recent example, yesterday a man was
interviewing Lucy on the radio about our latest play Los perfiles, and he asked her: “So, now you’ve
switched from feminism to politics?” And these are the hosts of a
cultural show in this city! We haven’t stopped doing feminist work.
Feminism is politics.
People here don’t get that.
María Mercedes Jaramillo has written that La
Máscara’s plays “dramatize taboo themes in a conservative
and Catholic milieu” (Jaramillo, 214). Indeed, Cali is a very Catholic
city—I remember my first Sunday there, being awakened at six in the
morning by the trumpets, drums, and chanting from the massive weekly procession
outside. But when I asked Pilar who, in her opinion, were the people that least
“get it,” her immediate reply was, “Actually, it’s the
artists who are the most reticent. Our male colleagues themselves enforce our
group’s ‘invisibilization.’ They complain, ‘There you
go again with those sad plays, talking about those problems! Theater is
entertainment, it’s laughter!’”
Discussions of gender inequality
and feminism are shoved aside in the name of Colombia’s “other
priorities,” but ironically, when these women tackle the issues of
violence and armed conflict, they are chided for producing “sad
plays.”
La Máscara has small,
self-selected audiences of people who are generally more open to their work,
comprised mostly of women, students, and people from the communities to whom
they offer workshops. However, the ensemble has felt most supported during
their travels abroad, not only during their period of exile, but also through
their participation in international women’s festivals such as the
Magdalena Project in Cardiff. Having had the chance to interact with other women’s
ensembles, and seeing how strong women’s movements work, Pilar commented,
“we were shocked, because we’ve had to do most of our work alone
here.”[9]
Bisexuality and homosexuality
(especially in women) are realities Pilar feels are still unspeakable in
Colombia. La Máscara has felt the brunt of this silencing, and have at
times even imposed self-censorship on the kind of work they have produced.
“We still haven’t created the play that would...” and she made a punching gesture with her
fist. “It’s not like we set out to talk about scandalous or taboo
things in order to cause sensation,” she explained, “those are very
interior issues. [...] In A flor de piel, we touched upon the topic of feminine homosexuality, but only tangentially,
because it was in the context of laughter, a kind of joke that showed that
it’s no big deal. Now I really feel the urge to do a piece about that
theme. It starts to become a need inside you, to talk about it. [...] If
we’re already so stigmatized as ‘lesbians,’ then let’s
make a play that will give them something to talk about!”
I asked her what she thought would happen if a
playwright openly declared herself gay, and began to produce shows about
relationships between women. With a smile, she answered, “I don’t
know what would happen, but I’d love for it to happen… Here in
Colombia we are so far behind, though, that Congress is still debating whether
gay professors should be allowed to teach. [...] Because of things like these,
I went through a period when I did not want to return to Cali or to this
country.”
Would you want to leave now?, I asked.
“No, not now,” she said. “I feel a vital responsibility with
La Máscara. There is so much to be done, and I’m dying to do
it.”
Los perfiles de la espera /The Profiles of Waiting
¿Cómo
convertir el dolor en creación?
El teatro es lo que nos devuelve la vida, nos permite vencer los miedos.
—Patricia
Ariza[10]
At the beginning of this article I posed some questions about the status
of political theaters in Colombia: How can political theaters re-present crisis
onstage when a country is already fatigued by its own crisis? How can they
address violence in a way that differs from the media, with its bombardment of
violent images on the one hand, and its palliative catchword
“Peace” on the other? This binary can be a trap, severing the
possibility for any real discussion. What does La Máscara do, then, to
approach the violence that, as Lucy said, “everyone is seeing it in the
newspapers”?
La Máscara’s most recent piece, Los Perfiles de la espera, is a two-woman piece centered around the labor of waiting. We see the women
in their private spaces, as they perform mundane tasks such as washing and
sewing. They are mostly silent—they express themselves with their bodies,
their physical movements, the sounds they make with their feet and hands, and
their versatile handling of two plastic tarps. These tarps figure prominently
in the piece, as each woman continually transforms them into a myriad of
objects, such as sewing fabric, laundry, tablecloths, skirts, shawls, hiding
places, and even the water under which one of them is drowned. As the two women
in the play attempt to stay engrossed in their housework, the traumatic
memories of violent events—recorded in their bodies—are repeated
time and time again: they get startled, get up, hide, go back to work, get
startled again, get up, and the cycle repeats itself almost identically. When
the characters do speak, it is a fragmented collage of commonplace phrases
mixed with texts from Mercé Rodoreda, Eduardo Galeano, Jorge Luis
Borges, Miyo Vestrini, and actual testimonies from the families of the
disappeared. Its initial sequences are as follows:
The stage is dark. Andean flute music is
heard. The backlit figures of two women become gradually visible against a
doorway upstage. We see two small tables covered with large, translucent
plastic tarps; in front of them, two tin buckets. Very slowly, still in
silhouette, the women embrace. They embrace again. They stand looking at each
other and, as the stage becomes dark once more, they cover their faces with
their hands. When the lights come back up, the two women quickly walk downstage
and begin to recite a list of names: “I am Rosa Paredes. My name is Clara
Cortés. They call me Carmen Llanos. I am Rita Pelayos...”[11] They then go to separate tables and sit
down. Each woman grabs a plastic tarp and begins scrubbing it, beating it with
her hands, desperately washing it against the table. After this has gone on for
a while, Woman 1 (played by Lucy) stands up and, as if she’s heard
something, quickly runs upstage to peek out of a large window. She sees nothing.
She turns around, slaps her temples, and goes back to work. The silent washing
continues. It becomes slower and slower until it stops.
There is absolute silence. Both women
rearrange their positions on the tables: the tarps now become large pieces of
cloth, and the tables stand in as sewing machines. While tapping their bare
feet on the floor (recreating the sound of machine engines), the women slowly
slide the tarps across the tables, sewing straight lines onto them. Woman 2
(played by Janeth) stands up and wraps the tarp around her waist, trying on the
garment she is working on. She, too, gets suddenly scared, runs to the window,
slaps her forehead, and comes back to the table. Woman 1 yells out, “The
neighbor got a telephone! She’s so happy!” Woman 2 takes the tarp
and puts it around her shoulders. “You don’t say!” she
replies. And again, they both resume their sewing.
The music changes to a slow waltz, and Woman
2 stands up, then kneels, and covers her face with her hands. She crawls under
the table and hides, then stands up, retreats, and sits on the table. Covering
herself from the waist down with the plastic tarp, she says: “Time and
space disappear. The speed and force of the blows extinguish all signs of life.
What remains in the aggressor’s hands is an inanimate doll. A ball of
yarn. A sheet filled by the wind.” Woman 1 stands up and faces the
audience: “This is my foot,” she says, pointing to it. “This
is the table. This is the chair. This is the room. That is the window.”
She sits down, whispers and gestures at someone we can’t see, as Woman 2
says: “Before. After. Yesterday. Meanwhile. Now. Right. Left. I. You. He.
Time and space disappear. The speed and force of the blows extinguish all signs
of life. What remains in the aggressor’s hands is an inanimate doll. A
ball of yarn. A sheet filled by the wind.”
Language has been shattered for these women,
replaced by circular, disjointed shards of speech. What La Máscara has
done is pry open the domestic space of two women, making visible the ingrained effects of violence in everyday life. No actual
violence is depicted onstage, however, only the memories of its damage. (Even
when Woman 1, as I mentioned earlier, is being drowned under the tarp/water, we
only see her and her struggle, without an attacker present.) A particularly
provocative image is created near the end of the piece. The two women walk
downstage, turn the tables on their sides, and kneel down. They reach into the
water buckets and pull out soaking white rags. After a moment of contemplation,
they raise the wet rags and place them over their faces. In this move, the
familiar chore of washing clothes is twisted to evoke the image of a burial
shroud. Lodged in their bodies, the scars of violence, death, and terror
inevitably puncture every gesture, every task.
As the program for the play declares,
“This is a theatrical act made against persecution, torture, desperation,
and fear. The two actresses fundamentally represent the many women, at home or
in their workplaces, who are living the anguish of waiting for their
disappeared family members. The words and movements of the characters subvert
silence, making us witnesses to a world encircled by fear” (La
Máscara). But I believe Perfiles does more than this. The strength of this piece for me lies beyond
making us witnesses to the world of these specific “Others.” It
targets the denial that results from crisis fatigue, the self-blinding which,
unlike percepticide, is not rooted in the fear of being caught looking (by
outside forces), but rather, in the fear of catching oneself feeling one’s own fear. What Perfiles suggests is the following: even if you
haven’t been directly
hit by violence, even if you haven’t had a family member killed, or had
to wear a bulletproof vest, or been forced to flee the country, you’re
not exempt from the reality of violence. Living with constant fear is being
a victim of violence. And
drinking Café Aguila Roja or buying Willard batteries will not solve
that.
Furthermore, La Máscara insists on
“sticking its finger in the wound” of “our so terribly
battered Colombia” while simultaneously examining the specificity of women’s
positionality within it. For them, one critique does not exclude the other.
And yet, their achievements have been
repeatedly ignored, their work has been marginalized, and they remain
unrecognized as one of the oldest theater ensembles in Colombia still working
today. Even some of their staunchest supporters, albeit unwittingly, also help
to “enforce their invisibilization”: Jacqueline Vidal’s introduction
to Pilar’s book, for instance, describes La Máscara as
“autoras de esta realidad teatral para seguir siendo niñas,
jugar” (authors of this theatrical reality to continue being girls,
playing), a comment whose hint of condescension could very well serve to
downplay the depth of their work, to keep them inside a parenthesis of
naïve femininity.
All this said, I find it truly remarkable that
La Máscara has survived for twenty-eight years. I especially admire them
for their last fifteen years of work, unwavering in their commitment to
political work on gender, without succumbing to the multiple pressures they
continually endure. Their consciousness and passion for the work they do are
absolute. It was through my encounter with them, through our conversations, and
through their own reflections about their obstacles, that I began to formulate
the questions I pose here and will further investigate in my work. La
Máscara may not have all the answers, but they will continue to search
for strategies to resist the resistance, to “transform pain into
creation,” to examine their country’s wounds and the wounded women
within it.
“I have battled this out for
myself,” Lucy said at the end of our last interview at the theater,
which, let us not forget, is also her home. “The men in La Máscara
were the ones who couldn’t handle it and left the group first, and it was
just us, the women, who continued the struggle, despite the many people who
told us, ‘Why do you keep insisting?’” But they insisted.
“We got here because we were stubborn, and it’s because we’re
stubborn that we’re still here. That is the challenge of life.”
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________
(This article was published in Women and Performance:
A Journal of Feminist Theory, Issue 22, 11:2, Latin
American Women Perform (2000): 227-249.)
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________
APPENDIX A
The following list appeared in RCN Evening News, Bogotá,
Colombia, 10 March 2000.
Nueve Reglas para Evitar que Secuestren a su Hijo
1. No permitir que los niños sean ostentosos ni establezcan
rutinas.
2. No permitir que los niños caminen solos por la calle o centros
comerciales.
3. Si su hijo es el consentido, evite que se note.
4. No permanezca solo con su hijo.
5. No permanezca solo con su hijo en la finca.
6. Las madres no deben salir solas a la calle con hijos de brazos.
7. Adviértale a sus hijos mayores sobre los peligros de permanecer
en la calle.
8. Si acaba de dar a luz, no deje que saquen a su hijo de la alcoba.
9. Dialogue con sus hijos sobre la subversión.
Nine Rules to Prevent Your Child from Being
Kidnapped
1. Do not allow children to be ostentatious or establish routines.
2. Do not allow children to be alone on the streets or shopping
malls.
3. If your child is the family favorite, avoid showing it.
4. Do not be alone with your child.
5. Do not be alone with your child in your country home.
6. Mothers should not go out alone with their babies.
7. Warn your older children about the dangers they face on the
street.
8. If you’ve just given birth, do not allow your newborn to be
taken out of the room.
9. Talk to your children about subversives.
APPENDIX B
Plays by La Máscara, from 1972 to 1979:
1972: No saco nada de la escuela, by Luis Valdés, directed by Guillermo
Piedrahita and Jorge Herrera (from TEC).
1973: Una historia vulgar, based on poems by Pablo Neruda, directed by
Carlos Bernal (from TEC) and Enrique Buenaventura.
1974: Cuánto cuesta el
hierro, by Bertold Brecht,
directed by Carlos Bernal.
1975: La Mina, Enrique Buenaventura’s adaptation of
Ferenc Herzec’s play, directed by Gilberto Ramírez (from TEC).
1977: Macbeth, Enrique Buenaventura’s adaptation of
Shakespeare, directed by Helios Fernández (from TEC).
1979: La mandrágora, by Machiavelli, directed by Luis Fernando
Pérez (from TEC).
1984: María Farrar, based on a poem by Bertold Brecht, collective
creation and direction.
Plays by La Máscara, from 1985 to 2000:
1985 and 1986: Noticias de
María, based on two
sections from Las nuevas cartas portuguesas (“María M” and “Las
tareas”), by Maria Teresa Horta, Maria Isabel Barreno, and Maria Velho da
Costa, directed by Jacqueline Vidal.
1986: Historias de mujeres, two poems by Bertold Brecht (“De la
infanticida María Farrar” and “La Canción de
Naná”), and “María M” from Las nuevas cartas
portuguesas, directed by
Enrique Buenaventura and Jacqueline Vidal.
1987: Las viudas, poem by Bertold Brecht, directed by Lucy
Bolaños.
1990: Mujeres en trance de
viaje, collective creation
(based on texts by Eduardo Galeano, Rigoberta Menchú, Patricia Ariza,
and Las brujas de Salem),
directed by Patricia Ariza.
1992: ¡Emocionales!, based on For colored girls who have
considered suicide, when the rainbow is enuf : a choreopoem by Ntozake Shange, directed by Rubén Di
Pietro.
Misterio de navidad,
directed by Héctor Fabio Cobo.
1993: Bocas de bolero, based on twenty-two classic boleros, directed
by Wilson Pico.
Sin reflejos de la luna, esplendores en la noche, directed by Héctor Fabio Cobo.
1994: Luna menguante, written and directed by Patricia Ariza.
1995 : A flor de piel, collective creation, directed by Elena
Armengod.
1997: A flor de piel, a re-elaboration, directed by Lucy
Bolaños.
1998: Los perfiles de la espera, collective creation, directed by Wilson Pico.
In process for future performance: La
cabellera femenina, collective
creation.
Works and Interviews Cited
Ariza, Patricia. Audio recorded interview
conducted with Pilar Restrepo in Bogotá, Colombia, 13 April 1998.
Bolaños,
Lucy. Audio recorded interview conducted in Cali, Colombia, 10 September 1997.
---. Videotaped interview conducted in Cali,
Colombia, 6 September 1998.
Buenaventura, Enrique. “Prospecto
promocional de La Máscara.” Archivo Teatro La Máscara:
Santiago de Cali, 1986.
Erikson, Kai. “Notes on Trauma and
Community.” In Cathy Caruth, ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Maryland: John’s Hopkins University
Press, 1995.
Jaramillo, María Mercedes. “La
Máscara: teatro de práctica artística.” Gestos 19 (April 1995): 213-219.
Melo, Jorge Orlando. “La paz, ¿Una
realidad utópica?” Revista Semana, February 27,2000.
La Máscara. Archived materials
(programs, promotional writings).
Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of
Performance. London and New
York: Routledge, 1993.
Restrepo, Pilar. “’Historia de
mujeres’ en el teatro.” El País, Magazín Dominical. Cali (August 1987): 3-5.
---. “La Máscara ‘dice
verdad sobre sí misma’.” Unpublished essay, 24 February
2000.
---. La Máscara, la mariposa y la
metáfora: Creación teatral de mujeres. Cali, Colombia: Impresora Cruzz Ltda., 1998.
---. “Las comediantas de la legua:
Testimonio del trabajo de cuatro mujeres que un día decidieron salir a
recorrer el mundo.” El Espectador, Magazín Dominical No. 327 (July 16, 1989): 4-7.
---.
Videotaped interview conducted in Cali, Colombia, 6 September 1998.
Robinson,
Olin. "Compassion Fatigue". Commentary aired on Vermont Public Radio,
17 May 1991 (found online at:
www.salsem.ac.at/orcomments/1991/vpr-051791.html).
Smith, Leslie. “Dealing with Compassion
Fatigue.” On the Internet:
www.geocities.com/~sleepwake/Members/fatigue.html.
Taylor, Diana. Disappearing Acts: Spectacles
of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War”. Durham and London: Duke University Press,
1997.
---. “Staging Social Memory:
Yuyachkani.” Unpublished essay, 1999.
---. Theatre of Crisis: Drama and Politics
in Latin America. Lexington,
Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, 1991.
Thomas, Florence. Conversación
con un hombre ausente. Bogotá,
Colombia: Arango Editores, 1997.
[1] “The truth is we are fenced in by fear. We are in a triple
crossfire: the guerrilla forces, the paramilitary, and the military, but also
so many other ‘dark forces.’ ….I want to talk about all this,
even if everyone is seeing it in the newspapers.” All translations of interviews and texts
from the Spanish are mine.
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