Saturday, March 28, 2009

"Manteca" and some memories about the Cuban Theatre I met 15 years ago.


In January 2009 Cubans celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution, without Fidel, and, it seems, they celebrated with little joy as well as with little support from the Cuban Revolution’s followers in Latin America. Watching journalistic notes about the government celebration, I remembered my last visit to the island, more than 15 years ago.

I do not want to talk (although it is unavoidable) about the condition of Cuban politics and their troubles nor about their achievements and successes (as Raúl Castro has called them). No, I do not want to analyze their situation during those years, I prefer to talk about what I experienced in that visit: its theater.




I travelled to Havana in 1994 as part of a Mexican committee for a theatrical publications encounter, "Encuentro Internacional de Pubicaciones Teatrales Conjunto 94", organized by Casa de las Americas, a very well known Cuban organization. I represented Escenología, the renowned Mexican publishing house as well as the Performing Arts Research Centre, with a donation of some copies of its stage collection books (very famous in the Hispanic world), which comprised about 50 volumes in those days. My job there was simple: to take a course (attending lectures), make a nice speech about Escenología and donate the books in a small ceremony, nothing else. The rest was about enjoying Cuba, its theater and its artists.

The first and biggest impression I had was that theater was immensely popular in the island; apparently, the lack of electronic ways of mass communication dominated the Cuban cultural spectrum, and so theater as a live media was one solution for the entertainment of the common Cuban, exactly as bicycles were for transportation.

I met a few theatre groups, directors, writers, actors, set designers and producers, all of them eager to contact artists and researchers from abroad (I was there as part of Escenologia and not as an actor, so I was kind of a researcher or journalist for them), as I was also eager to learn about their world. These are three of the contacts I still remember clearly.


“Teatro El Público” and Carlos Díaz.



The first encounter was during the inaugural meeting of the congress, with some actors from “Teatro El Público”, a company considered "gay" in Cuba, considered “gay” because of its drama as well as the director, actors, playwrights and of course its subjects. This company had become famous thanks to the stage production of "Las Criadas" (The Maids) by Jean Genet and “Hacia Moscú”, an adaptation of “Three sisters” by Anton Chekhov. Those three sisters in “Hacia Moscú” were played by men. They were preparing a new production of "El Público", the controversial play by Federico García Lorca, whose text is very well known because of its homosexual subject. The group of actors led me that night to the complete company with which I had an informal reunion. It seems that they were on the verge of collapse, but surviving; many of its members had left the country and many others wanted to follow suit; that was a common feeling in the Cuban artistic environment.

They wanted to share their theatrical experience in those productions and repeated some texts and movements for me; it was the first time I listened to Chekhov’s texts with a Cuban accent and the first time I saw them played in that way. I was amazed by this “alternative” way of staging in a communist regime and they absolutely gained my support. They told me about the public reaction to their performances: some spectators reacted by leaving during the play and some by staying and welcoming every movement and text. They also told me that they weren’t chosen to perform during the congress, maybe because of their different productions which could mislead the idea of the Cuban Theatre in the minds of foreigners (I have learnt about that very well now that I am living in China). My meeting with Carlos Díaz, the director, was very short and we could only talk about simple things, and, of course, about the difficulty they had in producing any play of their style, but almost nothing about the acting technique they used or their future plans. Now I have read that Díaz and his company are still working in their own theatre and they are an important institution in the Cuban cultural world (2).

Video: Carlos Díaz (2008)
(http://www.havana-cultura.com/EN/performing-art/carlos-diaz/teatro-el-publico.html#1519)

CARLOS DIAZ / Carlos Diaz' interview




Grotowski followers: "Segismundo, exmarqués"


Note: The next photographs about "Segismundo, exmarqués" appeared in several Internet sites; it seems that the source of them is the next link:



My second contact with Cuban theatre artists was an invitation to a special performance, "Segismundo, exmarqués" by "Teatro Obstáculo", a company which promoted their work as “artaudian and grotowoskian”; my memories are weak about this company but I can remember very well my experience during that performance.

It was a kind of in-home theater (a house where it seems they also lived in) in a central part of Havana. The group caught my attention at that time because of their acting technique; it resembled what we were working in Escenología with Jaime Soriano’s teachings. Jaime, years earlier, had assisted Grotowski in the US, so our links through Grotowski’s way of seeing theatre were evident.




During this performance I saw everything that I had learnt with Soriano, but what I didn’t see was a line, or a sense of one. I remember getting sleepy during the whole performance, though I never found it totally boring. I was enjoying their movements with a very well trained, disciplined body, different movements, and also enjoyed their especial voice, different sounds also, kind of religious songs, some sound explorations using their bodies in combination with their voices, all in an apparent (I can not assure it) disjointed assembly; everything was slow and strange. I discovered those were the same exercises we usually did in our place, but there didn’t seem to be a chain of actions telling a story, it was like a ritual game without sense. Nothing was helping to appreciate that performance: the time of day (noon) and the heat (there was no air conditioning), and lunch hour. The only thing we all were thinking about was getting out at soon as possible to refresh our selves and have a good lunch.

At the end of it I spoke with some other guests, but not with anyone from the company (they left at the end and did not appear again). I have read that the whole company left Cuba and work in Miami.


Fidel and “Manteca”


My third experience with Cuban theatre was the performance of “Manteca”, a play by the Cuban playwright Alberto Pedro Torriente (born 1954). The organizers of the encounter wanted us to appreciate Cuban theatre, but for some reason didn't want we see this performance. They had prepared three others including "Segismundo, exmarqués", "La boda" by Virgilio Piñeira and "Las penas saben nadar" by A. Estorino but not "Manteca".

"Manteca" was a successful Cuban theater production, a production that had attracted crowds during the months before. It was 1994 and Cuba was in the middle of a very strange political moment: some months before Castro had opened the doors for anyone who wanted to leave the island, and thousands did leave, and then he ordered them closed again, followed by some prosecutions and many new restrictions; people were not happy, people were maybe even angry.

I remember this production as a great farce with some points of social criticism. The success of the play had a very simple reason, the reading subtext about a pig secretly raised in an Havana appartment. In the play the animal is loved but hated, it is motif of desire but also of resentment; the pig was identified with Fidel Castro himself. As we were warned of this general reading of the play before seeing the performance, we could then understand the loud laughs among the Cuban spectators that night, it was a public practically in euphoria. The symbolism with the animal clearly took me back to "The Wild Duck" by Ibsen (the pig, as the duck, never appear on stage), but the audacity of Cuban slang and game was what made it truly memorable. The work that we were experiencing as spectator was the theatrical phenomena itself, an event whose worth lies within its context: Cuba with her doors closed once again after the last exodus of the early 90's.

I have rarely enjoyed a live audience as much as I did that night, I can not remember how actors played, and it must have been more common, even more superficial than the other two companies I had seen in Cuba, but certainly they worked well for Cuban standards; those were very functional actors with a very functional technique.

I also discovered that Cubans went to the theater as ancient Greeks did it, to experiment a social catharsis; they could not unleash their anger and their pain in real life but they could do it in a comic piece, in a crazy farce, laughing, clapping, screaming. Everyone wanted the pig, and everyone wanted to steal the pig, and everyone wanted to kill it, to eat it but the animal was untouchable, it was desirable; that was Fidel.


My farewell.

I have not returned to Cuba since that visit and my memories have become a kind of myth edited by my imagination. It is important to write this exercise to locate and deal with them. The 50th anniversary of the revolution and the happiness of the leaders who speak about it made me think about what I lived and what I watched in just the few days I was there. I personally do not remember happiness among Cubans. I remember sadness and worrying faces, especially one, that of a poet I exchanged several books with (a good part of my library exists thanks to an absurd exchange with Cuban artists and students). He chatted with interest about an exchange of ideas with foreign artists, but he was sad and angry; he didn’t want to sell his books but there was no choice, he wanted to eat different, something he could buy in a shop of imported products. I paid for them and I don’t feel bad for it.

At the end of my stay I organized a party with those who I had known. I didn’t spend much money and I could buy what they had a hard time to find and enjoy: cans of tuna, chicken, ham, biscuits, cheese, soft drinks, alcohol ... nothing special. It was a fantastic experience: I learned how to drink “café expresso”, in one stroke; I was taught how to drink rum, smoothly to endure the aroma; and certainly I was taught how to dance alone, with a partner, and in a group. Sweating copiously, the heat of Havana had become bearable, even enjoyable. We all were speaking loudly, in a chaotic way, with alcohol inside and with our heads dancing as well. At some instant they read some texts, some others spoke of their dreams. In the end, the satiety of the meal and the alteration of the vessels stopped, and we began to talk about “the pig"; everything changed, their mood, their faces. They said they were powerless trying to remove that "revolutionary" image of Fidel, they were artists, their work was the theater, not to carry on the Cuban revolutionary image of Fidel all over the world. After hours (literally) of bitterness, they began to get up and leave with some phrases common to them: -"Once again, ending with Fidel!"-, -"All of our parties end up with Fidel" -, -"Now I leave, you continue talking." And that happened, many of them also left Cuba years later.

Our party was almost over, so I left with the last ones for a walk through the “malecón”. At one point a police patrol stopped near us and asked questions; they said we wanted to exploit some tourists or even steal something (they thought I was Cuban, like them), but we were free to go after they checking my papers. My new friends were nervous, some angry, as I was.

Once among friends and in that long and great way along the seaside, with some bitter smiles, I looked at the sea and the huge row of lamps burning through the morning in Havana.

We were free in the solitude of the malecón, we were refreshed by the air, the sea's movement was strong, it was almost dawn, the sea that night was the Cuban theater and it was somewhat rough.






(1) This is a link to a Cuban official cultural site where Díaz is very well treated: HYPERLINK "http://www.havana-cultura.com/EN/performing-art/carlos-diaz/teatro-el-publico.html#1519"http://www.havana-cultura.com/EN/performing-art/carlos-diaz/teatro-el-publico.html#1519
(2) The company's director is Victor Varela, a very well known Cuban director. You can see some examples of his work following this link: www.youtube.com/user/lujuriaenvidiosa

Víctor Varela


Thursday, March 19, 2009

4 Days of Monlam Festival (Tibetan New Year). Day 1: Procession of the Buddha Maitreya at Niantog Monastery.


Map of Qinghai Province, China



Introduction


The ancient Tibetan region of Amdo in western China is known today as Qinghai Province, a region populated mostly by Tibetan-speaking ethnic groups that have been part of China for hundreds of years. Amdo is part of a vast region of Tibetan culture, which extends from Nepal, India, Tibet, the Chinese provinces of Qinghai, Gansu, Inner Mongolia and Mongolia (the country), all these regions share a common language (which varies by ethnicity and of course under the influence of national languages and Mandarin), Tibetan Buddhism and with it a variety of religious paraphernalia that makes up the everyday life of its population, including the festivities and, of course, their performing arts.

Each lunar new year is celebrated throughout the region with a festival that the western world calls the Tibetan New Year, and Tibetans call Monlam Chenmo (which means "Preaching festival”). Monlam Chenmo comes after a few days Chinese lunar new year is and has its own calendar of events, all of a religious nature. There is no event during Monlam Chenmo not led by the monks of the monastery of each region and, so "represented" by the monks themselves, people from their villages are involved in a seemingly passive way or, as we would say in the performing arts, they act as spectators.

This year 2009, due to the problems facing China across the Tibetan region of its domain (almost one third of its territory), the central government decided not to allow foreigners to enter any Tibetan area except the small region of Tongren, precisely in Qinghai, the former Amdo. As the monasteries of Lhasa, Labrang, and others would be closed to tourism, there was no choice but to visit this region, and it was a wonderful choice; Tongren was kind, peaceful and rich in scenery and religious traditions.

In the Tongren region there are about 10 monasteries, one in every small town; the monasteries are gigantic in comparison with the smallness and poverty of the villages, and each held, on different days, the same religious events during Monlam Chenmo; so you can see, if you have time, the same event represented in a different way by each monastery.

On this visit I had the opportunity to observe the celebration for 3 days at the main and biggest monastery of Tongren, Rongwu Monastery, and one day at Niantog Monastery. At Rongwu there were three events: the unveiling of a gigantic Thangka with the image of Buddha, a procession of the statue of Buddha Maitreya, and a representation of Cham Dance or Demon Masks Dance, and, at Niantog, a small Monastery 10 minutes from Rongwu, another procession of the statue of Buddha. All those were wonderful events for my eyes as a foreigner, but they were also deeply moving and interesting acts for those who travel and seek representational art worldwide.

It is experiencing live this kind of festivities and religious rituals when we discover the undeniable origins of human theatrical activity, and we can also understand much of its extent and development into many fields of human activity. I usually define my experience with a very recurrent phrase, "a return to sources”.

I've been (and I remain) completely ignorant of the structure and origins of most of the events I witnessed in Tongren and the information I give about them surely has blunders and shortcomings; however, I believe that the document itself (photographs and videos), in addition to my personal descriptions of the events, can be a useful material for both the merely curious as the researcher who has not had the opportunity to witness these events live.


Day 1.

Procession of Buddha Maitreya at Niantog Monastery.




Photographs of the procession of the statue of Buddha at Niantog Monastery

If for some reason the pictures of the presentation can’t be seen well, click inside the box and it will take you to a Picasa page where all the photos are in.






Narration of the event:


On February 7, 2009, we were told that at Niantog monastery there would be a procession at midday, we arrived there at about 11:30 in the morning and we had to wait for about 2 hours for it.

The preparations occupied the entire time of our waiting. Monks came and went with religious objects, musical instruments, and placing all at different parts of the monastery; the temple was closed to non-monks and villagers were also preparing their offerings, some elderly women slowly started taking a seat at the back of the monastery’s small square, some children appeared wearing beautiful and colorful costumes (worn especially for the occasion), and dozens of photographers and journalists were upsetting me by taking photos here and there, arranging people as objects and demanding poses for their shots ... They simply broke the charm of those preparations I was witnessing.

Almost at 2 in the afternoon we began to hear the sound of the so-famous Tibetan horns, and a small procession of beautifully attired monks came to the temple among the raucous music of their trumpets, entered the chapel, and hung a curtain to prevent us from seeing inside. They started to pray, it sounded like mantras (I’m sure that was), repeated over several minutes, one after another, relentlessly. The beauty of the thangkas painted on the walls of the temple’s entrance and the sound of the prayers of the monks created a unique atmosphere around.

On the other side of the monastery a monk followed by a group of villagers was walking and praying, performing certain rites that were simply hard to grasp and understand; I could see how he entered with the group of followers into a small temple near the main one (every monastery has between five and ten smaller temples), some minutes before I had listened to a monk playing a drum in that place, and now this other monk had climbed unto a small bank and stayed at the same place, ringing a metal bell several times, and all the others followed him to his side repeating a mantra.

Even when I speak of prayers, mantras and rituals, I must clarify that, without exception, none of the participants seemed to be concentrating or in a "special" psychological mood, they even seemed to be as if at something both very common and without much sense, but my perception was unfounded, my ignorance about these people's body language, which I watched for the first time in my life, is evident.

Suddenly we heard the sound of a gong that came from the top of the temple, and deduced that the celebration was about to begin (if it had not already started hours ago, of course). Dozens of monks, one by one, and with a very slow pace, were leaving the main chapel. Horns and drums were the only sounds, repetitive music, solemn, it seemed to mark the rhythm of the steps yet it never came up to become a dance or a procession, it was a kind of presentation that lasted around half an hour.

The square was filled with a fairly wide circle of monks, with their musical instruments and banners of various types. Those elderly women I talked about before now were singing at several points of the monk’s presentation, they sang a very common kind of singing in Tibet, in a sharp and “spiritual” tone, we heard that chant throughout this festival.

After this long presentation and ritual, the monks began to spread, it seemed they were simply going out; as if it were a sign, people started to pile near the entrance to the Buddha’s chapel, a chapel with a beautiful and colorful altar entirely made with yak butter. The carriage for the procession was ready to receive the Buddha and the excitement was quite high. When the small statue took its place everything went crazy, men ran for the rope that would help pull the carriage, old women threw white scarves to cover the statue, many of them, men and women, were frantically trying to put their forehead somewhere near the Buddha, and songs were chanted to follow the procession. Someone threw candy and the crowd ran to pick them, the procession continued and the crowd followed the carriage in turn.

The carriage with the Buddha would stopped at every church and chapel of the monastery and then it would return again to rest in his chapel until the following year. As we had been there for almost five hours already we could only stand to see the first stop on a beautiful newly renovated chapel. Hence we decided to leave the place, completely satisfied with everything that we had finally seen and experienced.





Video: Procession of the statue of Buddha at Niantog Monastery

The video is edited in HD (high definition), here you'll see it in standard resolution, but if you want to see it in better definition go to the Youtube page and click on "watch in HD.


Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Theatre and Early American Films Part 4: Acrobatics. (Visual Documents about Lost Ways to Perform in Theatre)


Introduction*

As I talked in my post "Sarah Bernhardt and Eleonora Duse, Audiovisual Documents on the Net and An Extinct Way of Playing", early silent films are real documents about what we considered extinct ways of acting. I was greatly surprised when I found in the Library of Congress site a big collection of early American films, most of them simple transposition of short stage performances or dramatic excerpts: comedy, acrobatics, dance, "melodramas", and even some kind of tragedies.

The difference with other early cinema shorts filmed by Edison or Meliès (documentary images or camera tricks, even stories made especially for cinema) was that these I am showing here were chosen because were interesting "stage performances" for the eye, workable and practical for the new only visual Media, Cinematography, but also because were common and successful theatre performances at the time; some of them based in plays but staged on cinema set and, of course avoiding text or voice (some of the comedy sketch possibly), but the change was in place but not in style. The American Mutoscope & Biograph Company changed its simple style of doing things when DW Griffith entered to direct the company and when Edison's company joined (buying a big part of Mutoscope) to make a big Cinema Enterprise.

So, we have here some real documents about physical movement and performances on theatre from the end of 19th century and beginning of 20th. These are not playing by the best of the time nor even the stars but for common actors and performers.

We can quietly and calmly watch positions, chains of actions, gestures, even tempo and rhythms utilized on American stage more than one century ago. Once more, and that has been my own objective publishing, we can se"e this film-documents as one different point of reference for a new appreciation to what we have called "good playing" and "bad playing" during the "dictatorship of Realism" in the 20th century.


Acrobatic Films

This is what The Library of Congress site says about its acrobatic films collection:


"
Physical culture

Physical culture acts include acrobatic performances, contortionists, boxing, strongmen, iron jaw acts, and other exhibitions requiring physical prowess or dexterity. Several of the acrobatic acts featured here probably would have been the opening or closing acts of vaudeville bills. They were known as "dumb" acts, because they contained no dialogue and were, therefore, deemed appropriate for the opening and closing of shows when people would be noisily milling in and out of the theater.

Some of the acts in the motion pictures selected are advertised by the film production companies as being vaudeville or circus performers, implying that they were indeed professional performers who appeared on the variety stage. These include the "Japanese Acrobats," the Three Buffons in the comedic "Three Acrobats ," Neidert of "Bicycle Trick Riding, no. 2 ," and Hadji Cheriff from the Midway Plaisance at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition (" Arabian Gun Twirler").

Other film selections feature acts that were described in advertisements or short articles in The New York Clipper. These include the "Gordon Sisters" with their "bag punching and scientific act;" Treloar, a Harvard graduate and ex-varsity oarsman who later won a prize for being the most perfectly developed man in the world; and Latina, who strongman Eugene Sandow describes as a type of "the perfect woman." Sandow, billed as "The Most Powerful Man on Earth," was an immensely popular attraction on the variety stage and is shown in these selections flexing his muscles and doing a back-flip.

The later Spanuth films feature performers of even greater skill. For example, the " Kawana Trio" perform difficult acrobatic stunts with their feet, and " Three Jumping Tommies" execute a series of impressive acrobatic stunts on the floor."


Bicycle trick riding. A film by Thomas A. Edison. 1899.


Arabian gun twirler. A film by Thomas A. Edison. 1899


Japanese Acrobats. Film by Edison. 1904.


Three acrobats. A Film by Edison. 1899.


Trapeze disrobing Act. Film by Edison. 1901.




* I repeat the same introduction I wrote for the first part of this series of entries on early American films.



Thursday, March 5, 2009

Theatre and Early American Films Part 3: Dance. (Visual Documents about Lost Ways to Perform in Theatre)

Introduction*

As I talked in my post "Sarah Bernhardt and Eleonora Duse, Audiovisual Documents on the Net and An Extinct Way of Playing", early silent films are real documents about what we considered extinct ways of acting (and in this case of dancing). I was greatly surprised when I found in an US State Department site a big collection of early American films, most of them simple transposition of short stage performances (or parts of them): comedy, acrobatics, dance, "melodramas", and even some kind of tragedies.

The difference with other early cinema shorts filmed by Edison or Meliès (documentary images or camera tricks, even stories made especially for cinema) was that these I am showing here were chosen because were interesting "stage performances" for the eye, workable and practical for the new only visual Media, Cinematography, but also because were common and successful theatre performances at the time; some of them based in play but staged on cinema set, so the change was in place but not in style. The American Mutoscope & Biograph Company changed its simple style of doing things when DW Griffith entered to direct the company and when Edison's company joined (buying a big part of Mutoscope) to make a big Cinema Enterprise.

So, we have here some real documents about physical movement and performances on theatre from the end of 19th century and beginning of 20th. These are not playing by the best of the time nor even the stars but for common actors, dancers and performers.

We can quietly and calmly watch positions, chains of actions, gestures, even tempo and rhythms utilized on American stage more than one century ago. Once more, and that has been my own objective publishing, we can see this film-documents as one different point of reference for a new appreciation to what we have called "good playing" and "bad playing" during the "dictatorship of Realism" in the 20th century.



Dance Films


This is what The Library of Congress site says about its Dance films collection:

"Dance

The selections in the dance category reflect the wide variety of dance styles that were performed on the variety stage during this period. It appears that many of the performers used in these films actually performed on the vaudeville stage. The Franchonetti Sisters, advertised by the American Mutoscope & Biograph Company as a "popular team of vaudeville artists," perform the French quadrille dance. Fougere, "the famous Parisian chanteuse," performs her ragtime cakewalk, "Hello, Ma Baby." The cakewalk dance, popular in minstrel shows, is performed in these motion pictures by a professional troupe from New York ("Cake Walk" and "Comedy Cake Walk"). Crissie Sheridan performs a skirt dance similar to those done by the popular Annabelle. Versatile dancer Ella Lola performs two dances, a period-style belly dance (Turkish Dance, Ella Lola) and one based on the "Trilby" craze. (In the play "Trilby" by George Louis Palmella Busson du Maurier, an artist's model named Trilby falls under the influence of the hypnotist Svengali.) Kid Foley and Sailor Lil provide a vivid example of a Bowery dance reminiscent of the Parisian "Apache dance." Cathrina Bartho performs her Speedway dance in "A Nymph of the Waves" that takes advantage of film tricks to make it appear as if she is dancing on waves. Ameta , a specialist in "novel" and "elaborate" dances, according to The New York Clipper, creates a swirling funnel from huge pieces of cloth in a variation on the skirt dance. (The comedy and burlesque sections also contain dance performances including "The Boys Think They Have One on Foxy Grandpa, but He Fools Them," "Karina," "Princess Rajah Dance," and "Turkish Dance, Ella Lola.")"






*
I repeat the same introduction I wrote for the first part of this series of entries on early American films.



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