|
Organizers: Teatro La Máscara Cali, Colombia September 21 - 30, 2002
|
|
Magdalena
Pacífica Theater Festival: Women
Acting for Change in Colombia
|
|
(*leer
la versión en español, que
fue publicada en
Marlène Ramírez-Cancio December 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 of 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—the street riots of the infamous “Bogotazo”
destroyed the capital in 1948, and later, with the emergence of the armed
opposition and counter-opposition groups, violence reached new intensities.
Today, paramilitary squads, guerrilla forces, drug traffickers and the army
kill whomever they consider to be their enemy. Entire towns are destroyed.
Car bombs go off on the streets. Kidnappings abound —and it’s
not just the famous “pescas milagrosas” (or, “miraculous
catches”) and the political kidnappings carried out by the guerrillas—but
also by common criminals, who have adopted kidnapping as a standard practice.
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 bikini, news broadcasts often show ultra-explicit
scenes of bodies gunned down covered in blood; between the Colombian soccer
team and the Colombian beauty queen, the lacerated body of the nation is displayed
for all to see. 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” (press release, August 2002).
Origins
and Goals of the Magdalena Pacífica
Besides the threat of death stemming from the armed conflict, the women
of Teatro La Máscara have experienced personal death threats for being
feminists (in the 1980’s). They also live under the constant threat
of artistic extinction. Despite having just celebrated 30 years of artistic
endeavors in Cali last year, the work of Teatro La Máscara –the
oldest and one of the only all-women theater groups in Colombia—has
been constantly ignored and invisibilized. The country’s violence and
economic crisis, coupled with the generalized prejudice against (or lack of
information about) what “feminism” means have made the last three
decades extremely challenging for the members of La Máscara and their
director, Lucy Bolaños. As Pilar Restrepo, founding member of the ensemble,
told me: “there is a false notion of feminism [in Colombia], a pigeonholing.
Feminists are always accused of being radicals, of hating men, of wanting
to take away their power, of not believing in the family and in moral values.
The term ‘feminism’, far from revolutionizing, has become a false
pamphlet” (personal interview, 1998). They’ve been excluded from
local festivals time and again, denied funding... But, with great effort,
determination and passion, these pioneers in Colombian women’s theater
have ensured the survival of their group. They have continued developing their
work, not only on stage with their collective creation plays, but also offering
workshops to marginalized communities, creating and maintaining ties between
women in different sectors, and actively participating in peace protests,
such as the huge march in July 2002 in Bogotá called “Las Mujeres
Paz Harán” (Women will Make Peace).
Since 1994, La Máscara has presented its work in the international
theater festivals of the Magdalena Project (International Network of Women
in Contemporary Theatre, based in Wales, Great Britain), which has fed their
commitment to women’s theater and strengthened their contact with other
women beyond national borders. Since 1999, when the Magdalena Project lost
funding, the organization of the festivals has had to rotate between participating
groups. Last year, it was Teatro La Máscara who took on the difficult
job of organizing 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 it “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 River (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 “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”
(ibid).
This goal of “cultural reflection” manifested itself in
multiple aspects of the festival, whose reach was as wide as La Máscara’s
desire for communication, and extended to cultural areas beyond the theatre
arena. In just ten days, there
were over seventy events in different parts of Cali, which included 70 shows
by 40 theater groups; special events called “Voces de las Mujeres del
Mundo por una Colombia Pacífica” (“Voices of the Women
of the World for a Peaceful [Pacific] Colombia”), which were discussion
forums that brought together women activists, politicians, journalists, social
leaders, academics, writers, economists, etc; there were poetry readings,
workshops in theater, singing and dance; video projections; visual art exhibits;
and, lastly, the opening and closing events, which consisted of music shows
that were free and open to the entire city.
For the organizers, an important priority 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 example, they
provided transportation and cheap tickets to a group of young mothers with
whom Teatro La Máscara had worked, and they 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.” With such a wide selection, having
to pick one out of the ten shows that were going on every night, all
at the same time, was not easy... I will briefly talk about some of the ones
I did get to see.
The
Performances: Brief Highlights
On Saturday, September 21st, in the open air, it was rap
music that opened the festival. After a “ritual for peace” presented
by the women from the Velvet Heartist Troupe (U.S.), the young caleñas
of La Colonia, a “women’s hip-hop group with a social message,”
took control fo the stage with an explosion of energy. Based on their life
experiences in the Agua Blanca district of Cali —known as one of the
poorest areas of the city— the original music of La Colonia was filled
with strong lyrics that expressed their particular view of the world, always
grounded in the female perspective, manifesting, among other things, their
desire to “leave behind the idea of the feminine sex symbol.”
With a lot of guts and a lot of heart, and with a stage presence that demanded
respect and solidarity, these young women tackled issues of pregnancy, discrimination
against women, socio-economic inequality, and racism, with powerful phrases
that elicited loud applause from the audience, such as: “si crees que
se acabó la exclavitud, mira a tu alrededor...” (“if you
think slavery’s over, just look around you...”) — all this
to a fresh rap beat, with some melodic interventions in several of their songs.
In terms of plays, I was able to see the following: Teatro
La Máscara, Casa Matriz (text by Diana Raznovich, directed by
Diego Vélez); Próxima Estación, Corazón abierto
(collective creation, Nohora Ayala and Fanny Baena, Colombia); Trama Luna
Teatro, Matando horas (text by the Spanish playwright Rodrigo García,
directed by Luz Marina Gil [Colombia]); Teatro delle Radici, Umbral
(one-woman show by Argentine actress, writer and director Cristina Castrillo,
based in Switzerland); Artspot Productions, Rumors of War (written
and directed by Kathy Randels, from the United States); Magdalena Project,
water[war]s - Guerras por el agua (collective creation directed by
Jill Greenhalgh); Nomad Teatro, Las sin tierra 1.00: Siete intentos de
cruzar el estrecho (concept and development by Mike Brookes, directed
by Jill Greenhalgh); and National Theater Company of Lithuania, The Lover
(written by Marguerite Duras, directed by Birute Marcinkeviciute). I would
like to discuss —very briefly— two of these shows.
A project that deserves special attention is the collectively-created
performance called water[war]s (Guerras por el agua), directed by Jill
Greenhalgh, founder of the Magdalena Project. The idea for water[war]s
emerged in 2000, and “arose from a question, and an answer, that
haunt the director: ‘...and
over what will be the wars of the next millenium? Not of land, nor of oil,
nor of gold, but of water” (http://www.themagdalenaproject.org/waterwars/project.html).
From the project’s beginnings, Greenhalgh has been invited to different
countries to create ever-changing versions of the performance with groups
of local actresses. Within a very short period of time (usually four or five
days) the actresses work together, each of them choosing an aspect of the
project’s theme and developing her own image-sequence, which Jill then
integrates and combines with the work of the other members of the group. In
Colombia, the collective was made up of eight local actresses and two from
Mexico, and they worked on the topic of water shortage in the planet. Greenhalgh
chose to stage the performance inside an empty house (undergoing construction),
where the spectators walked among the characters, who moved in cycles and
swept us through a kind of labyrinth in a medley of voices, sounds and images.
The result was a living gallery containing different textures and temperatures,
starting with the blue cold and ice of the entrance, passing through the abundance
of water in the middle, and finally arriving at the brown dryness the orange
fire of the back yard. And always, in the background, a precise and constant
voice, like a litany, reciting a list of statistics about the excessive waste
of water, the amount of water in the human body, the predictions of imminent
shortages of drinking water, etc.
As for Teatro La Máscara, Lucy Bolaños and her daughter Susana
Uribe presented an excellent rendition of Casa Matriz (translated as “Matrix,
Inc” or “Dial-A-Mom”) a one-act play by the Argentine
writer Diana Raznovich, directed by Diego Vélez. It was an ideal play
for this mother-daughter team: written for two actresses, the play presents
the story of Barbara, a woman who is turning 30 (just like the Teatro La Máscara),
and who is searching for the perfect mother. To celebrate her birthday, Barbara
decides to splurge and buy herself a very expensive present: she will hire
a “substitute mother” from Casa Matriz, an agency that specializes
in providing their clients with moms-for-a-day, entirely custom-made, every
detail crafted according to the emotional needs of their clients. But Barbara
is very demanding, so the professional mother has her work cut out for her.
She is forced to change constantly from one role to another: she goes from
being the cold mother, to being the self-sacrificing mother, the cheerful
mother, the diva mother and even the dead mother. Uribe’s and Bolaños’
performances conveyed all the humor, tenderness and criticism of the female
stereotypes contained in this ingenious play.
This gender-based critical approach to social patterns has
always been an element in La Máscara’s theater, ever since they
began staging plays by Brecht about prostitution and abortion. Diana Raznovich’s
play has fit them like a glove, and as I was told during an interview, the
audiences have responded with enthusiasm: this year’s opening run lasted
two months, which is long compared to the two-week runs they usually do. This
is extremely encouraging, especially knowing La Máscara’s history
and all the resistance they’ve had to confront, coming from colleagues,
audiences, men and even women themselves. I hadn’t seen them since 1998,
and now that I returned four years later, I saw that—although things
are looking up for them in many ways, including the expansion of their theater’s
infrastructure with the help of a German NGO— one thing has not
changed: the attitude of machismo (direct or indirect) that surrounds
them. I had only spent three days in Cali, and a director had already called
me neurotic, diagnosed me with hysteria and accused me of being a fascist
because I was apparently too feminist for his taste. The first night of the
Magdalena Pacífica, in the waiting area of La Máscara’s
theater, I heard a man telling a “joke”: “Why do women get
married in white?,” he asked. “To match with their refrigerator
and washing machine.” A few nights later, I was sitting at a table with
a group. Some of them were artists, others were directly involved with the
festival. Amid laughter, one of the men told another: “Oiga hermano
pero qué redundancia esto del Magdalena Pacífica... Eso de ‘mujeres
en escena’, ¿qué quiere decir? Pues, ¡’mujeres
que la montan’! ¡Valga la redundancia!” (“Listen
man, this Magdalena Pacífica thing is so redundant... ‘Women
onstage,’ what does that mean? Well, it means ‘women who nag!’
That’s so redundant!” [‘montarla’ in Colombia
not only means ‘to stage’ but also ‘to nag’]).
If women who work in theater are nothing but women who nag, then I
hope that La Máscara keeps on nagging and nagging, and that they inspire
other women and men to bring down all those old stereotypes that (even if
they hide behind the “dark humor” we’re supposed to ignore,
because it’s “just a joke”) trap so many people in rigid
cages of expired identities...
The
Special Events
The
discussion panels were truly special events for me: I had the honor
of listening to the ideas and proposals of so many women who are active in
cultural life and participate in the peace initiatives in Colombia. One of
them was Patricia Ariza, director of the Corporación Colombiana de
Teatro, actress of Teatro La Candelaria, collaborator of Teatro La Máscara,
and co-organizer of the Magdalena Pacífica Festival. In her talk, Ariza
emphasized the incredibly high number of people in Colombia who live in hunger,
below the misery (not just poverty) levels, and who are internal refugees
in their own country. “Colombia condenses all Western dramas,”
she said, and “the West is being devoured by exclusion.” Among
these dramas we also find the struggles of activist women, who, in their search
for transformation, have had to live in that difficult space “entre
la casa y la plaza” (“between the home and the public square”).
She concluded that, for now, “we have to live with this contradiction,”
continue to seek peace, and get involved in specific projects, such as saving
the Amazon River—a cause Ariza herself has been fighting for these past
few years. Joining Ariza in this appeal to protect the environment, Leonor
Zalavata, a Colombian indigenous leader, shared her theory of peace with us,
a theory rooted in nature. Her main cause is the social and cultural rights
of indigenous people, “because we’re the ones who suffer the brunt
of the war” and the devastation of natural resources and the changes
to labor reforms “are killing us anyway.” For her, it is extremely
important to remain calm, to go into nature and find herself, after having
spent time in the city, because —she teased— “who doesn’t
get the urge to grab one of these government workers and strangle him?”
With her joyous energy (tongue-in-cheek but with a very serious undertone),
she told us that what’s essential for her community is “not giving
up the indigenous traditions [because] it is in the strengthening of our own
spirit that peace resides.”
Ana Teresa Bernal, activist and social leader from the Red
de Iniciativas por la Paz (Network of Peace Initiatives), commented that the
recent end of peace negotiations under Uribe’s government, “we
are once again ruled by profound confusion, as if we were starting all over
again.” She urged everyone present to commit themselves to peaceful
solutions, starting at the individual level, in the home, and said that they
shouldn’t leave everything up to the government, which insists so much
on combat. “We cannot achieve
peace,” she concluded, “with the logic of war.”
In this same panel, we also heard from Vera Grabe, who spent sixteen
years of her life as a guerrilla fighter for the M19 (guerrilla force), and
was one of the key figures in the negotiations that led that group to disarm.
She recently ran as vice president with Lucho Garzón, the presidential
candidate for the Polo Democrático party. In her talk, she told us
that: “We who waged war know very well the value of peace.” For
her, it is of fundamental importance to offer governmental alternatives to
the country, in which citizen’s participation plays a much more active
role, creating the conditions of possibility for peace together with the government.
Basing herself on the history of other great cultural movements, she added
that this type of change is possible, saying: “The great revolution
of the past century was the women’s revolution, and it was a peaceful
revolution.” Today’s revolution—the transformation of Colombia’s
culture of war—can also be achieved, she suggested, if the country follows
the example of those women to reach their goals, beginning with personal (individual)
transformation and education.
Leaving
their mark...
The
closing event, which also took place in the outdoors theater, was full of
people. You could see the silhouettes of the people filling the place up to
the highest seats. I remember Lucy Bolaño’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 smiling and absorbing the
magnitude of her accomplishment, especially because that had been a particularly
difficult day for her: both Lucy and Pilar had received criticism from several
participants, 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 be flexible when we negotiate,
on a transcultural level, 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.
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 background,
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?
Back to the Introduction |:| Versión en español publicada en Conjnto |:| Photos |:| Article 1
Abbreviated version (English) presented at the Comparative Drama Conference