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Staging the Magdalena Pacífica Theater Festival: A
Culturally-Specific Take on Feminisms' Tasks and Strategies |
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Marlène
Ramírez-Cancio (Presented
at the Comparative Drama Conference Ohio
State University, April 2003) |
“Colombia condenses
all Western
dramas.”
—Patricia
Ariza
From the glossy surface of my Magdalena
Pacífica Festival program, a set of black eyes stare out at me; they
belong to a young woman dressed like Frida Kahlo: wide eyebrows, a solemn
gaze, and flowers in her hair. She stares at me now just like she stared at
me from every poster, schedule, button and T-shirt in Cali, Colombia, for
a week and a half in September 2002. She was everywhere: taped to store windows,
on the corners of theaters, on the lampposts in the streets, on the glass
doors to the museum… Under the photograph, a name: Melisa Contento.
I remember the moment when, standing in front of one of the largest banners
of the festival, someone looked at her photograph and told us that Melisa
Contento was a rap artist from Bogotá, and that she had recently died
in a car accident. Looking at her now, having again returned from Colombia
with a feeling of urgency around the violence the country is suffering, I
see how —in a single click of the camera—this photograph captures
two things simultaneously: women’s artistic expression and death.
The awareness of those
two elements was ever-present in the Magdalena Pacífica Theater Festival
I attended in Cali. The women of Teatro La Máscara (the organizers
of the festival), decided to frame the event as a collective reflection about
the rampant violence in Colombia, through the voices and bodies of women.
Colombia has endured over fifty years of armed conflict. Paramilitary squads,
guerrilla forces, drug traffickers and the army kill whomever they consider
to be their enemy. Entire towns are destroyed. Kidnappings abound. Increasingly
afraid, many city dwellers no longer travel by land to other parts of the
country, and so, the country gets smaller and smaller for its inhabitants,
confined to one city and (perhaps) to the airplane that once in a while takes
them to other cities, which are just as confined. Violence, and the daily
threat of violence, has become a part of people’s “normal”
lives—and the media showers them with it. Between the latest soccer
scores and the close-ups of models in bikinis, news broadcasts often show
ultra-explicit scenes of bodies gunned down and covered in blood. That is
why the women of Teatro La Máscara declare that, for them, “it
is essential to express our concern about the situation of violence that has
intensified after the breakdown of the peace process and the resurgence of
combat mentality. We know full well the risks we live under” (La Máscara,
press release, August 2002).
As I have detailed elsewhere
(Ramirez-Cancio 2003), they still remember the late 1980’s, when they
had to leave the country due to repeated death threats. Lucy Bolaños,
the director of the group, says they began getting phone calls saying “We’re
going to kill you, out you rats, leave the country, you anti-Colombian bitches,
Black Flag with you all!’
A close associate of theirs, Patricia Ariza, was also the victim of threats
during this period. As the story goes, she would walk around wearing a bulletproof
vest she had decorated with embroidery and sequins—a gesture which called
attention to the alarming degree of normalization that violence had reached.
Besides the danger
of this very real, physical death, La Máscara is also haunted by the
constant threat of another kind of death: artistic invisibility. Despite
having just celebrated their 30th anniversary, the work of Teatro La Máscara
—the oldest and one of the only all-women theater groups in Colombia
and Latin America— has been constantly ignored, excluded from local
festivals, denied funding, “invisibilized” time and again. First of all, they are a political theater
dealing with themes of violence in a country bombarded by the media with images
and news of that violence —unlike people in other countries who might
turn on their television to watch other people’s horrors (over
there, far away) and suffer compassion fatigue, people in Colombia
suffer from what I call crisis fatigue: they’re exhausted of
their own crisis, so when they go to the theater, the last thing audiences
want to see onstage is their crisis one more time. Furthering La Máscara’s
invisibilization is the insidious machismo and an atmosphere where
“feminism is a curse word”, if not entirely dismissed. To quote
Pilar Restrepo, founding member of the ensemble: “Feminists are always
accused of being radicals, of hating men, of wanting to take away their power,
of not believing in the family and moral values. The term ‘feminism’,
far from revolutionizing, has become a false pamphlet” (personal interview,
1998). But, with great effort, determination, passion, and —they would
say— “stubbornness”, they have ensured the survival of their
group and have continued to develop their performance work. Santiago García,
director of Bogotá’s renowned Teatro La Candelaria, once wrote
that “A theater movement or scenic arts tendency that doesn’t
develop its own dramaturgy is destined, if not to perish completely,
then at least to fade away and barely leave its mark on the culture
in which it is located” (García, 7, my emphasis). But is “dramaturgy” the only
way to “leave your mark” in culture, the only way not to perish?
Besides the work that remains in the Archive, there are other ways to transmit
knowledge, namely through embodied practice, or what Diana Taylor calls “the
Repertoire” (Taylor 2003). La Máscara’s focus is not on
writing dramatic texts (when they do create “original”
work, they grab material from different authors —oftentimes non-dramatic
texts such as poetry and torture testimonials— and make something new
through collective creation). But I consider their work on stage as just a
slice of their performance work, which extends to offering workshops
to marginalized communities, creating and maintaining ties between women in
different sectors, and actively participating in political demonstrations
both locally in Cali and nationally in Colombia. And I don’t think that
kind of work “perishes” or “disappears”,as is usually
said of live (or non-documented) performance. I see the staging of the Magdalena
Pacífica Festival as one of La Máscara’s performances,
as an intervention into the social memory of their city.
Their struggle for
survival, their desire to “leave their mark”, and their wish to
have their city engage in multilayered dialogues about violence, women,and
peace propelled the festival and determined the festival’s goals. Since
1994, La Máscara has presented its work in the international theater
festivals of the Magdalena Project (an International Network of Women in Contemporary
Theatre, based in Wales) which has fed their commitment to women’s theater
and strengthened their links beyond national borders. When the Magdalena Project
lost its funding, the organization of the festivals had to begin rotating
between participating groups. Last year, Teatro La Máscara took on
organization and hosting of the festival. This provided them the opportunity
to explore what for them is an urgent concern: rethinking the role
of women in the construction of peace in Colombia. They named the event “Magdalena
Pacífica” not only because it was a festival from the Magdalena Project taking place in the Pacific coast of
Colombia, but also (in a beautiful coincidence of words) to express their
wish that the land of the Magdalena (the “mother river” of Colombia)
may someday exist in a pacific (peaceful) situation,
free from war and violence.
Through the national
and international participation of women artists in the Magdalena Pacífica,
therefore, they wanted to unite the city of Cali in a common celebration,
to (quote) “propose other ways of putting an end to the attitudes of
war makers, [...] not by means of military confrontation, but by means of
cultural reflection” (La Máscara, press release, August 2002).
This goal of “cultural
reflection” on a large scale was their first priority, and it manifested
itself in multiple facets of the festival. Its reach was so wide as La Máscara’s
desire for communication, and “grew tentacles” to extend to cultural
areas beyond the theatre. In just ten days, there were over seventy
events in different parts of Cali, which included 70 shows by 40 theater groups;
there were poetry readings by women, workshops in theater, singing and dance;
video projections; painting and photogrpahy exhibits in the Museum of Modern
Art; and special events called “Voices of the Women of the World for
a Peaceful [Pacific] Colombia”, which were discussion forums that brought
together women from many walks of life. We heard not only from feminists and
theater directors, but also journalists, economists, philosophers, indigenous
leaders, politicians, and activists who insisted that “we cannot achieve
peace with a logic of war”. Women like Vera Grabe was there: for 16
years she was a guerrilla fighter in the M19, and she was one of the key figures
in the negotiations that led that group to disarm. She recently ran as a Vice
President under presidential candidate Lucho Garzón. In her talk she
said “We who waged war know very well the value of peace.”
Another goal was that
the festival generated the largest possible number of spectators among the
different communities of Cali, and that they had access to the festival events.
For instance, they provided transportation and cheap tickets to groups of
young mothers and invited high schools and colleges to take their students
to the Special Events during the day. The general public of Cali was also
taken into account when creating the programming: although a few plays were
performed during the afternoon, all the rest were scheduled for 7:30 pm, because, as Pilar told me "that's
the time when people usually go to the theater”. Finally, the opening
and closing events were big celebrations that consisted of music shows that
were free and open to the entire city. This festival was made for Cali
and its citizens, to create audiences, to generate discussion. Such a wide
selection was ideal for audiences, but having to choose one of the
ten shows that were going on every night, all at the same time, was not easy…
Both Lucy and Pilar
received extremely critical comments from several participants, veterans of
the Magdalena Project, who thought La Máscara’s version of the
Magdalena had failed because its main focus wasn’t the participants’
sharing their work with each other. In previous years, the festivals had been
smaller; the Magdalena AoteaRoa in New Zealand, for example, ended with the
participants staying together in an island for three days. The Magdalena Pacífica, according to some colleagues from the Magdalena
Project, had been too ambitious and spread out, “not feminist enough”,
and some said that the forums and other special events had “nothing
to do” with the spirit of the Magdalena Project.
But, in a society saturated
with war like Colombia’s, I am convinced that, on the contrary, all
of the festival’s events had everything to do with that spirit. The
performance project of the women of La Máscara is inextricably linked
to the social and political context of Colombia: violence is an urgent
issue, it’s the here and now, one that these women, yearning for change, don’t
want to --and cannot-- put aside. If the new government has created “networks
of civil informants” to rat each other out, why not create networks
of differential consciousness through events like this one? The goal of this
festival was not to bring women to an enclosed, intimate environment, but
rather to open them up to the entire city, to create spaces of reflection
about violence, to reach the diverse communities of Cali, to rethink the role
of women in the country’s transformation, to imagine alternatives different from what
the mass media and its blood-filled images broadcast every day. The Magdalena Pacífica was a strategy
to act (in and out of the theaters) towards peace,
through the art, thoughts and presence of women. I think it is fundamental
to understand that the world of “women”
is not homogeneous, that the priorities and goals of the women in one country
won’t be the same to the women in another— and that if their
goals differ, then their strategies will also differ. We have
to adapt to local objectives and strategies, be flexible when we negotiate,
on a transcultural level, the “shoulds” or the “duties”
of feminisms (plural). I submit that the Magdalena Pacífica,
far from being a “deviation” from the Magdalena Project, was an
extension, an expansion and a positive re-signification of it, in a particular
context.
The closing
event in the outdoor theater
was full of people. You could see the silhouettes of the people filling the
place up to the highest seats. I remember Lucy’s face as she looked
at the people in the crowd, dancing and clapping to the music that marked
the end of the celebration. I was glad to see her smile and absorb the magnitude
of her accomplishment. Seeing Lucy watching the audience that last evening,
I could feel the mark that she was leaving on her city’s social memory.
As Vera Grabe had said, “Peace is a way of seeing the world; we have
to change the culture of violence in this country, and that’s something
we all have to do together”. I also imagined the mark that all those
women and men in the audience were leaving on La Máscara, driving them
to continue their theater work on gender from the terrain of their own
feminism.
And,
through this all, of course, the huge image of Melisa Contento in the backround,
also watching in silence, with her impassive eyes, from the white posters
of the festival. If from her portrait we could have heard her singer’s
voice, in what words and in what rhythm would she have described what she
was seeing?
WORKS CITED
Bolaños, Lucy. Audio recorded interview with Marlène Ramírez-Cancio
conducted in Cali, Colombia, 10 September 1997.
---. Videotaped interview with Marlène Ramírez-Cancio conducted
in Cali, Colombia, 6 September 1998.
Bolaños, Lucy, Pilar Restrepo
and Susana Uribe. Videotaped interview with Marlène Ramírez-Cancio
conducted in Cali, Colombia 1 October 2002.
García, Santiago. “Introducción”.
In Teatro La Candelaria. Seis obras del Teatro La Candelaria. Bogotá, Colombia: Ediciones Teatro
La Candelaria, 1998.
La Máscara, “Magdalena
Pacífica: Comunicado de Prensa.” Press release, 8 August 2002.
Ramírez-Cancio, Marlène. “Teatro La Máscara:
Twenty-Eight Years of Invisibilized Theater.” In Diana Taylor and Roselyn
Costantino (eds). Holy Terrors: Latin American Women Perform. Duke
University Press, 2003. (Also published in Women and Performance: A Journal
of Feminist Theory, Issue 22,
11:2, Latin American Women Perform (2000): 227-249.).
Restrepo, Pilar. La Máscara,
la mariposa y la metáfora: Creación teatral de mujeres. Cali, Colombia: Impresora Cruzz Ltda., 1998.
---. Videotaped
interview conducted in Cali, Colombia, 6 September 1998.
Taylor, Diana. “Acts of Transfer.”
The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke UP, 2003.
---. Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s
“Dirty War”. Durham and
London: Duke University Press, 1997.
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