Rosa Luisa Márquez talks about her work
Rosa Luisa Márquez
Here are five examples of work I've done since 1982. One theatricalized children¹s tale, three performances on the Puerto Rican family, the homeless and the Caribbean and a classic theatre play about waiting, adapted to the Puerto Rican reality. Sixteen years collaborating with graphic artist Antonio Martorell and some circumstantial evidence...
La leyenda de Cemí: University of Puerto Rico from 1982 until now, with several casts and diverse performance spaces.
In 1982 I staged a theatricalized version of a children¹s tale for the University¹s traveling unit. La leyenda del Cemi (The Legend of the Cemi, an indigenous god) was based on a short story by the Argentine/Puerto Rican author, Kalman Barsy. The story narrates the mythical birth of the island of Puerto Rico. In a deliberate as well as recurrent practice of distancing myself from traditional dramatic form, I distributed the text to four narrators who also acted as puppeteers. Oscar Mestey, one of Puerto Rico¹s most interesting visual and performance artists executed the scenic elements. The stage was a small fish tank made out of painted canvasses. The canvasses were positioned as a four page flip-chart. Sometimes the puppeteers would hide behind the structure to reveal a bunch of tiny crabs. (The actors fingers were the crabs legs; plastic marbles on rings, their eyes.) The small crabs would tickle the belly of the World, painted on one of the canvasses in the manner of a Modigliani abdomen. In the story, the World explodes in an outburst of laughter, creating volcanoes, oceans, mountains and, finally, giving birth to the Island. Puerto Rico emerges from the depths of the ocean protected by an enormous blue parachute and illuminated by a cardboard Caribbean sun. Two musicians accompany action and narration. The audience is invited to sing along.
Performance space: theatres, classrooms, playgrounds, town squares.
Time: a repertory piece created originally in a month, conceived totally by me in the fashion of a traditional director.
Participants: designed as a Traveling Theatre piece for four university student/actors and two student/musicians. The piece was re-staged with another student cast in 1986 and with professionals in 1998. It has had more than 100 performances in Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, the United States, Mexico and Brazil.
Materials: a discarded parachute, cloth, cardboard, pony tail holders and toys.
Content: on the mythical birth of the island of Puerto Rico, a struggle is enacted between the unmovable the rock that represents the Island and the rhythmic movement of the dancing and tickling crabs; the tale calls for the need of as well as the possibility for change; the piece was designed to teach how to stage stories with recyclable materials.
Audiences: the piece was staged for the general public but the best way to present it was to have children in the first few rows and their parents in the back rows. The performance called for and got active audience participation.
Photos:
slide 1: the stage: hanging from a basket ball ring at an elementary school, the parachute frames the action.
slide 2: the stage at a distance: a larger audience from another school.
slide 3 That¹s impossible the Medusa tells the rock that it is impossible for it to grow.
slide 4: the tickling crab meets the rock.
slide 9: the tickling crabs applaud
slide 11:the tickling begins
slide 13: the rock/Island surges from the deep blue sea
slide 14: the map of Puerto Rico echoes the rock shaped like a Taino indian idol, and is protected by the woman in the back who represents the Island of Puerto Rico.
Foto-estáticas--1985 for the opening of Family Album, an exhibit of Antonio Martorells drawings. Staged by different collectives until 1993. It will soon be adapted for a dance theatre company.
Brincos y saltos, or creative drama, a course I designed in 1979 for the Theatre Department, has produced major performances, of which the most significant was Foto-estáticas (1985), a sequence of tableaux on the subject of the Puerto Rican family, built with Augusto Boals Image Theatre techniques and staged as a living photo album. The audience collaborates in an unconventional way. One hour before the performance, audience members are invited to collaborate with the actors in the creation of paper costumes - a workshop process which can occur in the street as well as in enclosed spaces. Audience members develop skills in frotage (paper rubbing), Mexican cut-paper techniques, and wood-block printing. The actors are lavishly dressed for a wedding. But the wedding costumes are made out of paper, paint and masking tape. At the beginning of the performance, audiences are shown a sequence of tableaux vivants of the wedding which are presented as photographs: the bride in front of the mirror, the wedding march, communion, the kiss and the family in front of the altar. The groom turns to the bride and tears away her paper wedding gown. At this point, a gasp of disbelief is always heard from the audience, after which there ensues a slow motion fight between all the actors that ends in the destruction of the costumes. From the inert mound of paper on stage a new version of the Puerto Rican family is born. It grows and quickly passes through emblematic social and political situations: traffic jams, unemployment and supermarket lines, compulsory military service; traditional family scenes in front of the TV set, domestic violence, births and deaths. A full cycle of life for the entire family/ensemble who at the end composes a huge family portrait in constant and rhythmic flow. The photographer of the wedding sequence takes the last photo through his paintbrush camera and traces the familys silhouette on the cyclorama. A huge white sheet is flown over the family portrait. A cymbal crash is heard and the family collapses under the sheet leaving the traced memory of their bodies. I acted as a music conductor. Seated downstage, with my back to the audience, I directed the rhythms of the play, establishing movements, sounds and silences. I usually perform in my pieces, sometimes as a protagonist and at other times as a secondary presence.
With Foto-estáticas, we began referring to performance instead of theatre as a term that better defined our work. Each staging of this play had a completely different character. Colors, textures, rhythms varied depending on who was involved in the process. Audiences and locations always determined the atmosphere. We are presently planning a dance version of Foto-estáticas for an experimental dance company that performs in traditional theatre spaces. Making the audience participate while constructing costumes through the isles will provide a provoking challenge.
Foto-estáticas was my second project with graphic artist Antonio Martorell and marked the beginning of an extraordinarily meaningful collaboration. Since then, Martorell and I have maintained a performatic dialogue. We have created more than one hundred events which comprise book presentations, lecture demonstrations, political debates, parades, banquets, museum pieces, installations, as well as more traditional proscenium performances. Often we take over and transform empty lofts with the help of interested participants. Cardboard, newsprint, cloth and other inexpensive recyclable materials serve us well in the construction of environments for performances or for the making of performas as Mexican artist Felipe Ehrenberg has baptized such events in Spanish.
Performance spaces: theatres, street corner in Old San Juan, shopping centers, open spaces, the lobby of Brazils national bank.
Time: the piece was created in four three hour sessions, through the use of Boals Image Theatre techniques. We then connected the images, placed them in a coherent order and added transitions, graphics and music.
Participants: thirteen members from the Creative Activities course at the University of Puerto Ricos Theatre Department.
Materials: newsprint, white cloth, photographers cyclorama, cardboard and household items such as pots and pans to produce sounds.
Content: the Puerto Rican family as perceived by the original creators of the piece. Scenes such as the wedding, the betrayal, the traffic jam, the unemployment and grocery lines, the military service, deaths and births and the passage of time were depicted.
Audience: students, family, bystanders, from one hundred and fifty to one thousand attending a Theatre of the Oppressed festival in Río de Janeiro.
Photos:
slide 1. preparations, materials on the floor, ready to begin constructing the wedding costumes with the help of the audience.
slide 2. the veil is placed on The Bride before the beginning of the performance and in front of the audience.
Slide 4. the wedding march. (you have this group photo with you)
slide 5. a wedding photo.
slide 6. the destruction of the wedding costumes.
slide 7. the nuptial bed.
Slide 8. the sounds of daily life.
slide 9. employment and un-employment line
slide 10. We the people line
slide 11. compulsory military service
slide 12. the car ride
slide 13. the car accident
slide 14. the last portrait
slide 15. the covering of the portrait
About my collaborative work with Antonio Martorell since 1984
How to describe the nature of our work when its so circumstantial? We work with time and space considerations. We is Antonio Martorell, a multi-faceted graphic artist and performer and I, a teatrera or theatre person. We have collaborated since 1984 in more than one hundred projects, which have included the staging of regular plays at conventional theatres, the staging of non-theatrical pieces such as short stories, news releases and poems in parks, squares, streets, museums, shopping centers, schools and universities as well as the total transformation of empty spaces, like dilapidated basements, into environments where the audience can travel to experience multiple sensorial stimuli.
We have created theatricalized lectures as well as performance events to defend our political preferences and have performed them as a duo. We have also developed huge parades celebrating peace as well as commentaries upon the Fifth Centennial of the Discovery of the Americas in which hundreds of participants have created the props and scenic elements as well as the different choreographies. Our work with groups is usually developed over a short but intense period of collective creation of graphic materials as well as concepts. We recycle garbage, spaces and ideas. Our performances have been created at home in Puerto Rico as well as at such diverse places as MIT, the streets of Austin, a church in the Bronx, a museum and a school in Hollyoke, a bank in Rio de Janeiro and a small town close to Havana.
We discuss issues such as prejudice, AIDS, harassment, domestic violence, the state of the arts as well as our dreams and nightmares. Commitment to issues, time, space, working materials and the skills of the performers are the main elements in the development of these projects. An enormous dosage of serious playfulness surrounds the nature of the experiences described.
If a Grain Does Not Die: a Very Foodish Tail
MIT School of Architecture, Cambridge, Massachusetts, January 1992.
Prologue
An empty space
an antique ladder
a couple of fans, one broken
ten stools
three tables
scraps of tin
tons of paper imprinted and newsprinted
colored tissue paper, folded, cut
hung or pasted around pipes, bodies
and thoughts
bread, tortilla, rice and pasta
and us!...
a meeting between peoples of Korean, Taiwan, African,
Mexican, Venezuelan, Dominican, Jamaican and Puerto Rican roots
fed into...
a savory stew, Sancocho, or pot luck brewed for then days...just for you!
Bon appetit...buen provecho, Enjoy!
A key example of the collaboration between visual arts and theatre, Martorell and I, was the staging of If a Grain Does Not Die: a Very Foodish Tail (1991), in the basement of the Massachusetts Institute Technology Department of Architecture. During eleven days and with twenty participants from MIT as well as the Boston/Cambridge Latino community, we transformed this barren basement into four ambiances where food was shelter. The idea for this performance came from seeing many homeless people living on the streets surrounding MIT. Each ambiance represented a distinct type of culture and was decorated with its main staple. The Mexican section was covered with colorful tortillas. A female narrator told the story of how Woman and Man were created from corn, according to the Popol Vuh, the Mayan bible. At the same time a Fairy Godmother recounted the story of Hansel and Gretel and The Wizard of Oz with its yellow brick road and how it took everyone over the rainbow in search of a pot of gold.
The audience then walked into the next chamber where a mechanized butcher forced-fed Hansel and Gretel in order to eat them. A giant bird cage with children in captivity contained a Xerox machine that transformed loaves of bread into MIT bread certificates. The performers chanted: I think, therefore I am; I am what I eat; If I dont eat, what am I?
The Fairy Godmother played her magic flute like the pied piper of Hamelin. The music put the butcher to sleep. She then saved the children and led them into a Japanese garden showered by pasta and decorated with a carpet of rice over which a child on a swing ate oranges. Through a sequence of window panes, the mushroom cloud of Hiroshima bloomed into a beautiful flower. Finally, actors and audience arrived at a Caribbean environment. In it they found their winter coats sheltering an object which turned out to be the proverbial pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. This time, on the coldest day of winter, the pot was filled with a hearty soup we all proceeded to drink while listening to the warm sounds of the drums.
Performance space: barren basement around sixty feet by thirty, turned into four separate rooms by the use of paper curtains.
Time: eleven days, four hours of daily contact, ten hours a day for Martorell and me.
Participants: thirty minority students from MIT, members of the Boston Latino community, teenagers as well as adults. Collaboration from a neighborhood soup kitchen.
Materials: newsprint, color construction and tissue papers, xerox machine to blow-up student IDs and duplicate Bread Certificates, bread loafs, Mexican tortillas, spaghetti and rice, New England Clam Chowder.
Content: the homeless, food as shelter, myths and fairy tales.
Audience: two hundred members of the MIT and the Boston Latino community.
Photos:
Slide 1. the creation of Humankind at the tortilla house, the story-teller narrates the Mayan myth of the creation of man and woman from corn cobs.(you have the original slide for this one)
Slide 2. politicians at the tortilla house, the Fairy Godmother and the story- teller meet, they exchange versions of their creation theories and introduce Hansel and Gretel, the children that will guide the audience throughout the performance.
Slide 3. the bread house and the Butchers kitchen. Here the butcher captures and holds Hansel and Gretel prisoners while feeding them Bread Certificates. Many other children are held captive. They repeat their food chant until the Fairy godmother appears and saves them.
Slide 4: the pasta and rice house. A child on a swing eats oranges while the rest of the children escape. The image of the Hiroshima mushroom blooms into a flower.
Slide 5: the coat house and the audience. From the coat house the sound of Caribbean drums emerge. Inside the house, Hansel and Gretel find the Pot of Soup and share it with the audience.
Slide 6: this cardboard Pot of Soup turns into a real clam chowder for the audience to eat.
Godó-The University of Puerto Rico¹s theatre and the Segura Theatre in Lima, March 1997, May 1998
During the last twenty two years I have directed plays by Wole Soyinka (Nigeria), Badal Sircar (India), Jean Claude Carriere (France), Arístides Vargas (Ecuador), Osvaldo Dragún (Argentina) and Myrna Casas (Puerto Rico), among others. I want to offer my students an ample register of how theatre is conceived in the most diverse regions of the world. Nevertheless, when we stage these plays we place them within the context of Puerto Rico. We make them ours.
One important example was Godó, our version of Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett (1997). The two Beckettian vagabonds became Puerto Rican homeless men. Estragons stone was a motionless supermarket cart. Martorell turned the traditional schematic tree into a huge one made out of industrial waste that extended towards the audience. One of its branches was raised by the actors as an opening curtain. The leaves of the tree became the leaves of a calendar. Pozzo and Lucky entered the theatre from behind the house seats and approached the stage through the center aisle, traveling from faraway as do all visitors to our Island. The audience was seated on the stage, facing the two thousand empty house seats. From that vantage point, what it saw was the end of theatre as well as humanity. Lucky delivered his rambling speech balancing himself like a tight-rope walker on the crest of empty seats. Vladimir and Estragon waited -the way one waits for change to occur, the way Puerto Ricans wait for a change of political status. And they played games and killed time in order to avoid despair, as we also do.
Paradoxical as it may seem, Godó gave us lots of hope. It provided an excuse for the most exquisite gathering of skilled performers: a female impersonator enacted a male role for the first time in a long while; two of our best-trained young dancers chose to minimize their craft and carry their characters through austere micro-movements rather than dance exhibitionism; a talented actress and teacher played the role of two distinctively different old men; a student actor did the messenger as a crippled angel of death; and, finally, a musician composed and played on the contrabass, music to accompany each character. It was a generational passing of the torch. We shared exercises, styles, approaches to improvisation and ways of conceiving theatre; during the six month rehearsal process we explored cabaret, dance theatre, games, aerobics and gymnastic techniques. Martorell designed the environment and I directed, taking into account the richness of the proposals offered by the performers. For the first time in the history of Puerto Rican theatre the actors received a salary during rehearsals. We traveled to Lima, Perú, and performed at the Segura Theatre, the oldest in the Americas, representing Puerto Rico in a gathering of independent theatre groups. In Godó, we emphasized theatricality, reversed the traditional placement of actors and spectators, made room for serendipity, allowed characters to change roles and costumes on stage and women to create/perform male characters. In Godó, we gave ourselves the freedom to play.
Performance space: two traditional proscenium stage theatres, one at the University of Puerto Rico, the other a Seventeenth Century baroque theatre in Lima, Perú. In both cases we altered the conventional relationship between actors and spectators. The audience sat on stage looking towards the houses empty seats. The actors played in the space between and through the isles.
Time: the actors developed their characters, found their costumes and props during a six month period of experimentation, improvisations, and blocking. The second act was directed taking into account the movement patterns of the first act and applying them to the condensed text of the second act. This was the lengthiest rehearsal period I have ever experienced and it gave the performance depth and textures I had not experienced before. It was extremely satisfying.
Participants: four professional actors and dancers, one student actor and one composer musician.
Materials: PVC pipes, air conditioning ducts, cardboard, wire and scraps of metal, plastic garbage bags, a supermarket cart with oxidized wheels, an old wheel chair, recyclable garbage.
Content: Becketts script on waiting, boredom and killing time, adapted to the Puerto Rican reality and rhythms.
Audience: three to five hundred spectators during fifteen performances. The University community in Puerto Rico. Participants in an independent theatre Festival in Lima as well as theatre students.
Slides:
slide 1: scenery for Godó at the University Theatre in Puerto Rico; the audience is seated on stage looking towards the house which holds 2,100 empy seats. The tree is made of air conditioning ducts and pipes; three huge back drops decorated with garbage fly over the set while framing it.
slide 2: Vladimir by Martorell (painted over a zinc pane, placed at the entrance hallway).
slide 3: Estragon by Martorell (painted over a zinc pane, placed at the entrance hallway).
slide 4: Pozzo by Martorell (painted over a zinc pane, placed at the entrance hallway).
slide 5: Lucky by Martorell (painted over a zinc pane, placed at the entrance hallway).
slides 6 & 7: second act: Estragon and Vladimir listen to the sounds of the leaves.
slide 8: second act: Vladimir and Estragon find Lucky¹s hat under the tree.
slide 9: second act: Vladimir and Estragon hold Pozzo in a standing position.
slide 10: the crippled messenger brings in the news that Godó will certainly be there tomorrow.
Carivé-November 1998-Casa de América, Madrid
Four workshop days in order to ride through five centuries on a waves crest. Five centuries and one night, this night. Program notes.
Workshop and performance developed within the context of a week of Puerto Rican culture at Madrids Latin American Center.
Performance space: a round sixty foot diameter empty amphitheatre surrounded by glass, reminiscent of an enormous fish tank. The space was used daily for lectures on Puerto Rican literature and politics, the installation slowly took over the conventional lecture layout. By Friday, the day of the performance, the conference room was totally surrounded by the installation.
Time: five days, working ten hours a day, four hours of daily contact with workshop participants.
Participants: fifteen artists, teachers and community activists from Spain and Latin America.
Materials: newsprint, long calligrapher pieces of cloth recycled from a previous installation by Martorell. The glass walls were covered by cutout paper resembling waves and ocean foam, from the ceiling hung the pieces of cloth, also in waves, creating pathways of color and text.
Content: The Caribbean, according to the participants who had never been there and to us that live in it. Collective sculptures were created to define what the Caribbean evoked in all. A dream sequence developed to contain all the proposals, which were staged at three islands inside the performance space. A mobile scaffold served as ghost ship to leave performers in their particular islands. Poets and storytellers from the conference told tales of the birth of the Islands, travel, and long lost loves. Martorell drew the faces of audience members as they listened. They tore their portraits in order to retain a memento of the experience as they left.
Audience: one hundred and fifty barefoot spectators who sat on the floor and turned to see the action happening around them.
Photos:
1. Rosa Luisa Márquez and Antonio Martorell read a text by Martorell about the death-like sleep of his mother. A seven-month pregnant performer lay at their feet as a premonition of the many births that were to take place during the performance. Before starting, the audience had a chance to become familiar with her calligraphered belly and their surroundings. They chose where to seat comfortably.
2. Medusa. A chant is heard and the Medusa, made out of newsprint enters the performance space to guide the ghost vessel that carries the rest of the performers to their acting islands.
3. The ghost vessel. The performers chant a childrens song about a very small ship unwilling to sail. The scaffold travels leaving each unit in its acting area.
4. 5. 6. 7. The Caribbean. One of the moving sculpture sequences which depict the discovery of the Island/woman, the rhythmic beats of the drums, the re-birth and the love-violence dichotomy. The following sequences are then performed in each island.
8. Tales and poems from the sea. The performance integrated two distinguished artists from Puerto Rico who were part of the film and literature lecture series: Jacobo Morales and Mayra Santos. They told original stories and poems.
9. A view of the audience while Jacobo reads his story.
10. Rosa Luisa tells The Legend of the Cemí, about the mythical birth of Puerto Rico. The audience participates singing a traditional plena. Antonio draws participants and audience members on a long sheet of newsprint which they proceed to tear out at the end in order to keep as mementos.
Here are five examples of work I've done since 1982. One theatricalized children¹s tale, three performances on the Puerto Rican family, the homeless and the Caribbean and a classic theatre play about waiting, adapted to the Puerto Rican reality. Sixteen years collaborating with graphic artist Antonio Martorell and some circumstantial evidence...
La leyenda de Cemí: University of Puerto Rico from 1982 until now, with several casts and diverse performance spaces.
In 1982 I staged a theatricalized version of a children¹s tale for the University¹s traveling unit. La leyenda del Cemi (The Legend of the Cemi, an indigenous god) was based on a short story by the Argentine/Puerto Rican author, Kalman Barsy. The story narrates the mythical birth of the island of Puerto Rico. In a deliberate as well as recurrent practice of distancing myself from traditional dramatic form, I distributed the text to four narrators who also acted as puppeteers. Oscar Mestey, one of Puerto Rico¹s most interesting visual and performance artists executed the scenic elements. The stage was a small fish tank made out of painted canvasses. The canvasses were positioned as a four page flip-chart. Sometimes the puppeteers would hide behind the structure to reveal a bunch of tiny crabs. (The actors fingers were the crabs legs; plastic marbles on rings, their eyes.) The small crabs would tickle the belly of the World, painted on one of the canvasses in the manner of a Modigliani abdomen. In the story, the World explodes in an outburst of laughter, creating volcanoes, oceans, mountains and, finally, giving birth to the Island. Puerto Rico emerges from the depths of the ocean protected by an enormous blue parachute and illuminated by a cardboard Caribbean sun. Two musicians accompany action and narration. The audience is invited to sing along.
Performance space: theatres, classrooms, playgrounds, town squares.
Time: a repertory piece created originally in a month, conceived totally by me in the fashion of a traditional director.
Participants: designed as a Traveling Theatre piece for four university student/actors and two student/musicians. The piece was re-staged with another student cast in 1986 and with professionals in 1998. It has had more than 100 performances in Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, the United States, Mexico and Brazil.
Materials: a discarded parachute, cloth, cardboard, pony tail holders and toys.
Content: on the mythical birth of the island of Puerto Rico, a struggle is enacted between the unmovable the rock that represents the Island and the rhythmic movement of the dancing and tickling crabs; the tale calls for the need of as well as the possibility for change; the piece was designed to teach how to stage stories with recyclable materials.
Audiences: the piece was staged for the general public but the best way to present it was to have children in the first few rows and their parents in the back rows. The performance called for and got active audience participation.
Photos:
slide 1: the stage: hanging from a basket ball ring at an elementary school, the parachute frames the action.
slide 2: the stage at a distance: a larger audience from another school.
slide 3 That¹s impossible the Medusa tells the rock that it is impossible for it to grow.
slide 4: the tickling crab meets the rock.
slide 9: the tickling crabs applaud
slide 11:the tickling begins
slide 13: the rock/Island surges from the deep blue sea
slide 14: the map of Puerto Rico echoes the rock shaped like a Taino indian idol, and is protected by the woman in the back who represents the Island of Puerto Rico.
Foto-estáticas--1985 for the opening of Family Album, an exhibit of Antonio Martorells drawings. Staged by different collectives until 1993. It will soon be adapted for a dance theatre company.
Brincos y saltos, or creative drama, a course I designed in 1979 for the Theatre Department, has produced major performances, of which the most significant was Foto-estáticas (1985), a sequence of tableaux on the subject of the Puerto Rican family, built with Augusto Boals Image Theatre techniques and staged as a living photo album. The audience collaborates in an unconventional way. One hour before the performance, audience members are invited to collaborate with the actors in the creation of paper costumes - a workshop process which can occur in the street as well as in enclosed spaces. Audience members develop skills in frotage (paper rubbing), Mexican cut-paper techniques, and wood-block printing. The actors are lavishly dressed for a wedding. But the wedding costumes are made out of paper, paint and masking tape. At the beginning of the performance, audiences are shown a sequence of tableaux vivants of the wedding which are presented as photographs: the bride in front of the mirror, the wedding march, communion, the kiss and the family in front of the altar. The groom turns to the bride and tears away her paper wedding gown. At this point, a gasp of disbelief is always heard from the audience, after which there ensues a slow motion fight between all the actors that ends in the destruction of the costumes. From the inert mound of paper on stage a new version of the Puerto Rican family is born. It grows and quickly passes through emblematic social and political situations: traffic jams, unemployment and supermarket lines, compulsory military service; traditional family scenes in front of the TV set, domestic violence, births and deaths. A full cycle of life for the entire family/ensemble who at the end composes a huge family portrait in constant and rhythmic flow. The photographer of the wedding sequence takes the last photo through his paintbrush camera and traces the familys silhouette on the cyclorama. A huge white sheet is flown over the family portrait. A cymbal crash is heard and the family collapses under the sheet leaving the traced memory of their bodies. I acted as a music conductor. Seated downstage, with my back to the audience, I directed the rhythms of the play, establishing movements, sounds and silences. I usually perform in my pieces, sometimes as a protagonist and at other times as a secondary presence.
With Foto-estáticas, we began referring to performance instead of theatre as a term that better defined our work. Each staging of this play had a completely different character. Colors, textures, rhythms varied depending on who was involved in the process. Audiences and locations always determined the atmosphere. We are presently planning a dance version of Foto-estáticas for an experimental dance company that performs in traditional theatre spaces. Making the audience participate while constructing costumes through the isles will provide a provoking challenge.
Foto-estáticas was my second project with graphic artist Antonio Martorell and marked the beginning of an extraordinarily meaningful collaboration. Since then, Martorell and I have maintained a performatic dialogue. We have created more than one hundred events which comprise book presentations, lecture demonstrations, political debates, parades, banquets, museum pieces, installations, as well as more traditional proscenium performances. Often we take over and transform empty lofts with the help of interested participants. Cardboard, newsprint, cloth and other inexpensive recyclable materials serve us well in the construction of environments for performances or for the making of performas as Mexican artist Felipe Ehrenberg has baptized such events in Spanish.
Performance spaces: theatres, street corner in Old San Juan, shopping centers, open spaces, the lobby of Brazils national bank.
Time: the piece was created in four three hour sessions, through the use of Boals Image Theatre techniques. We then connected the images, placed them in a coherent order and added transitions, graphics and music.
Participants: thirteen members from the Creative Activities course at the University of Puerto Ricos Theatre Department.
Materials: newsprint, white cloth, photographers cyclorama, cardboard and household items such as pots and pans to produce sounds.
Content: the Puerto Rican family as perceived by the original creators of the piece. Scenes such as the wedding, the betrayal, the traffic jam, the unemployment and grocery lines, the military service, deaths and births and the passage of time were depicted.
Audience: students, family, bystanders, from one hundred and fifty to one thousand attending a Theatre of the Oppressed festival in Río de Janeiro.
Photos:
slide 1. preparations, materials on the floor, ready to begin constructing the wedding costumes with the help of the audience.
slide 2. the veil is placed on The Bride before the beginning of the performance and in front of the audience.
Slide 4. the wedding march. (you have this group photo with you)
slide 5. a wedding photo.
slide 6. the destruction of the wedding costumes.
slide 7. the nuptial bed.
Slide 8. the sounds of daily life.
slide 9. employment and un-employment line
slide 10. We the people line
slide 11. compulsory military service
slide 12. the car ride
slide 13. the car accident
slide 14. the last portrait
slide 15. the covering of the portrait
About my collaborative work with Antonio Martorell since 1984
How to describe the nature of our work when its so circumstantial? We work with time and space considerations. We is Antonio Martorell, a multi-faceted graphic artist and performer and I, a teatrera or theatre person. We have collaborated since 1984 in more than one hundred projects, which have included the staging of regular plays at conventional theatres, the staging of non-theatrical pieces such as short stories, news releases and poems in parks, squares, streets, museums, shopping centers, schools and universities as well as the total transformation of empty spaces, like dilapidated basements, into environments where the audience can travel to experience multiple sensorial stimuli.
We have created theatricalized lectures as well as performance events to defend our political preferences and have performed them as a duo. We have also developed huge parades celebrating peace as well as commentaries upon the Fifth Centennial of the Discovery of the Americas in which hundreds of participants have created the props and scenic elements as well as the different choreographies. Our work with groups is usually developed over a short but intense period of collective creation of graphic materials as well as concepts. We recycle garbage, spaces and ideas. Our performances have been created at home in Puerto Rico as well as at such diverse places as MIT, the streets of Austin, a church in the Bronx, a museum and a school in Hollyoke, a bank in Rio de Janeiro and a small town close to Havana.
We discuss issues such as prejudice, AIDS, harassment, domestic violence, the state of the arts as well as our dreams and nightmares. Commitment to issues, time, space, working materials and the skills of the performers are the main elements in the development of these projects. An enormous dosage of serious playfulness surrounds the nature of the experiences described.
If a Grain Does Not Die: a Very Foodish Tail
MIT School of Architecture, Cambridge, Massachusetts, January 1992.
Prologue
An empty space
an antique ladder
a couple of fans, one broken
ten stools
three tables
scraps of tin
tons of paper imprinted and newsprinted
colored tissue paper, folded, cut
hung or pasted around pipes, bodies
and thoughts
bread, tortilla, rice and pasta
and us!...
a meeting between peoples of Korean, Taiwan, African,
Mexican, Venezuelan, Dominican, Jamaican and Puerto Rican roots
fed into...
a savory stew, Sancocho, or pot luck brewed for then days...just for you!
Bon appetit...buen provecho, Enjoy!
A key example of the collaboration between visual arts and theatre, Martorell and I, was the staging of If a Grain Does Not Die: a Very Foodish Tail (1991), in the basement of the Massachusetts Institute Technology Department of Architecture. During eleven days and with twenty participants from MIT as well as the Boston/Cambridge Latino community, we transformed this barren basement into four ambiances where food was shelter. The idea for this performance came from seeing many homeless people living on the streets surrounding MIT. Each ambiance represented a distinct type of culture and was decorated with its main staple. The Mexican section was covered with colorful tortillas. A female narrator told the story of how Woman and Man were created from corn, according to the Popol Vuh, the Mayan bible. At the same time a Fairy Godmother recounted the story of Hansel and Gretel and The Wizard of Oz with its yellow brick road and how it took everyone over the rainbow in search of a pot of gold.
The audience then walked into the next chamber where a mechanized butcher forced-fed Hansel and Gretel in order to eat them. A giant bird cage with children in captivity contained a Xerox machine that transformed loaves of bread into MIT bread certificates. The performers chanted: I think, therefore I am; I am what I eat; If I dont eat, what am I?
The Fairy Godmother played her magic flute like the pied piper of Hamelin. The music put the butcher to sleep. She then saved the children and led them into a Japanese garden showered by pasta and decorated with a carpet of rice over which a child on a swing ate oranges. Through a sequence of window panes, the mushroom cloud of Hiroshima bloomed into a beautiful flower. Finally, actors and audience arrived at a Caribbean environment. In it they found their winter coats sheltering an object which turned out to be the proverbial pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. This time, on the coldest day of winter, the pot was filled with a hearty soup we all proceeded to drink while listening to the warm sounds of the drums.
Performance space: barren basement around sixty feet by thirty, turned into four separate rooms by the use of paper curtains.
Time: eleven days, four hours of daily contact, ten hours a day for Martorell and me.
Participants: thirty minority students from MIT, members of the Boston Latino community, teenagers as well as adults. Collaboration from a neighborhood soup kitchen.
Materials: newsprint, color construction and tissue papers, xerox machine to blow-up student IDs and duplicate Bread Certificates, bread loafs, Mexican tortillas, spaghetti and rice, New England Clam Chowder.
Content: the homeless, food as shelter, myths and fairy tales.
Audience: two hundred members of the MIT and the Boston Latino community.
Photos:
Slide 1. the creation of Humankind at the tortilla house, the story-teller narrates the Mayan myth of the creation of man and woman from corn cobs.(you have the original slide for this one)
Slide 2. politicians at the tortilla house, the Fairy Godmother and the story- teller meet, they exchange versions of their creation theories and introduce Hansel and Gretel, the children that will guide the audience throughout the performance.
Slide 3. the bread house and the Butchers kitchen. Here the butcher captures and holds Hansel and Gretel prisoners while feeding them Bread Certificates. Many other children are held captive. They repeat their food chant until the Fairy godmother appears and saves them.
Slide 4: the pasta and rice house. A child on a swing eats oranges while the rest of the children escape. The image of the Hiroshima mushroom blooms into a flower.
Slide 5: the coat house and the audience. From the coat house the sound of Caribbean drums emerge. Inside the house, Hansel and Gretel find the Pot of Soup and share it with the audience.
Slide 6: this cardboard Pot of Soup turns into a real clam chowder for the audience to eat.
Godó-The University of Puerto Rico¹s theatre and the Segura Theatre in Lima, March 1997, May 1998
During the last twenty two years I have directed plays by Wole Soyinka (Nigeria), Badal Sircar (India), Jean Claude Carriere (France), Arístides Vargas (Ecuador), Osvaldo Dragún (Argentina) and Myrna Casas (Puerto Rico), among others. I want to offer my students an ample register of how theatre is conceived in the most diverse regions of the world. Nevertheless, when we stage these plays we place them within the context of Puerto Rico. We make them ours.
One important example was Godó, our version of Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett (1997). The two Beckettian vagabonds became Puerto Rican homeless men. Estragons stone was a motionless supermarket cart. Martorell turned the traditional schematic tree into a huge one made out of industrial waste that extended towards the audience. One of its branches was raised by the actors as an opening curtain. The leaves of the tree became the leaves of a calendar. Pozzo and Lucky entered the theatre from behind the house seats and approached the stage through the center aisle, traveling from faraway as do all visitors to our Island. The audience was seated on the stage, facing the two thousand empty house seats. From that vantage point, what it saw was the end of theatre as well as humanity. Lucky delivered his rambling speech balancing himself like a tight-rope walker on the crest of empty seats. Vladimir and Estragon waited -the way one waits for change to occur, the way Puerto Ricans wait for a change of political status. And they played games and killed time in order to avoid despair, as we also do.
Paradoxical as it may seem, Godó gave us lots of hope. It provided an excuse for the most exquisite gathering of skilled performers: a female impersonator enacted a male role for the first time in a long while; two of our best-trained young dancers chose to minimize their craft and carry their characters through austere micro-movements rather than dance exhibitionism; a talented actress and teacher played the role of two distinctively different old men; a student actor did the messenger as a crippled angel of death; and, finally, a musician composed and played on the contrabass, music to accompany each character. It was a generational passing of the torch. We shared exercises, styles, approaches to improvisation and ways of conceiving theatre; during the six month rehearsal process we explored cabaret, dance theatre, games, aerobics and gymnastic techniques. Martorell designed the environment and I directed, taking into account the richness of the proposals offered by the performers. For the first time in the history of Puerto Rican theatre the actors received a salary during rehearsals. We traveled to Lima, Perú, and performed at the Segura Theatre, the oldest in the Americas, representing Puerto Rico in a gathering of independent theatre groups. In Godó, we emphasized theatricality, reversed the traditional placement of actors and spectators, made room for serendipity, allowed characters to change roles and costumes on stage and women to create/perform male characters. In Godó, we gave ourselves the freedom to play.
Performance space: two traditional proscenium stage theatres, one at the University of Puerto Rico, the other a Seventeenth Century baroque theatre in Lima, Perú. In both cases we altered the conventional relationship between actors and spectators. The audience sat on stage looking towards the houses empty seats. The actors played in the space between and through the isles.
Time: the actors developed their characters, found their costumes and props during a six month period of experimentation, improvisations, and blocking. The second act was directed taking into account the movement patterns of the first act and applying them to the condensed text of the second act. This was the lengthiest rehearsal period I have ever experienced and it gave the performance depth and textures I had not experienced before. It was extremely satisfying.
Participants: four professional actors and dancers, one student actor and one composer musician.
Materials: PVC pipes, air conditioning ducts, cardboard, wire and scraps of metal, plastic garbage bags, a supermarket cart with oxidized wheels, an old wheel chair, recyclable garbage.
Content: Becketts script on waiting, boredom and killing time, adapted to the Puerto Rican reality and rhythms.
Audience: three to five hundred spectators during fifteen performances. The University community in Puerto Rico. Participants in an independent theatre Festival in Lima as well as theatre students.
Slides:
slide 1: scenery for Godó at the University Theatre in Puerto Rico; the audience is seated on stage looking towards the house which holds 2,100 empy seats. The tree is made of air conditioning ducts and pipes; three huge back drops decorated with garbage fly over the set while framing it.
slide 2: Vladimir by Martorell (painted over a zinc pane, placed at the entrance hallway).
slide 3: Estragon by Martorell (painted over a zinc pane, placed at the entrance hallway).
slide 4: Pozzo by Martorell (painted over a zinc pane, placed at the entrance hallway).
slide 5: Lucky by Martorell (painted over a zinc pane, placed at the entrance hallway).
slides 6 & 7: second act: Estragon and Vladimir listen to the sounds of the leaves.
slide 8: second act: Vladimir and Estragon find Lucky¹s hat under the tree.
slide 9: second act: Vladimir and Estragon hold Pozzo in a standing position.
slide 10: the crippled messenger brings in the news that Godó will certainly be there tomorrow.
Carivé-November 1998-Casa de América, Madrid
Four workshop days in order to ride through five centuries on a waves crest. Five centuries and one night, this night. Program notes.
Workshop and performance developed within the context of a week of Puerto Rican culture at Madrids Latin American Center.
Performance space: a round sixty foot diameter empty amphitheatre surrounded by glass, reminiscent of an enormous fish tank. The space was used daily for lectures on Puerto Rican literature and politics, the installation slowly took over the conventional lecture layout. By Friday, the day of the performance, the conference room was totally surrounded by the installation.
Time: five days, working ten hours a day, four hours of daily contact with workshop participants.
Participants: fifteen artists, teachers and community activists from Spain and Latin America.
Materials: newsprint, long calligrapher pieces of cloth recycled from a previous installation by Martorell. The glass walls were covered by cutout paper resembling waves and ocean foam, from the ceiling hung the pieces of cloth, also in waves, creating pathways of color and text.
Content: The Caribbean, according to the participants who had never been there and to us that live in it. Collective sculptures were created to define what the Caribbean evoked in all. A dream sequence developed to contain all the proposals, which were staged at three islands inside the performance space. A mobile scaffold served as ghost ship to leave performers in their particular islands. Poets and storytellers from the conference told tales of the birth of the Islands, travel, and long lost loves. Martorell drew the faces of audience members as they listened. They tore their portraits in order to retain a memento of the experience as they left.
Audience: one hundred and fifty barefoot spectators who sat on the floor and turned to see the action happening around them.
Photos:
1. Rosa Luisa Márquez and Antonio Martorell read a text by Martorell about the death-like sleep of his mother. A seven-month pregnant performer lay at their feet as a premonition of the many births that were to take place during the performance. Before starting, the audience had a chance to become familiar with her calligraphered belly and their surroundings. They chose where to seat comfortably.
2. Medusa. A chant is heard and the Medusa, made out of newsprint enters the performance space to guide the ghost vessel that carries the rest of the performers to their acting islands.
3. The ghost vessel. The performers chant a childrens song about a very small ship unwilling to sail. The scaffold travels leaving each unit in its acting area.
4. 5. 6. 7. The Caribbean. One of the moving sculpture sequences which depict the discovery of the Island/woman, the rhythmic beats of the drums, the re-birth and the love-violence dichotomy. The following sequences are then performed in each island.
8. Tales and poems from the sea. The performance integrated two distinguished artists from Puerto Rico who were part of the film and literature lecture series: Jacobo Morales and Mayra Santos. They told original stories and poems.
9. A view of the audience while Jacobo reads his story.
10. Rosa Luisa tells The Legend of the Cemí, about the mythical birth of Puerto Rico. The audience participates singing a traditional plena. Antonio draws participants and audience members on a long sheet of newsprint which they proceed to tear out at the end in order to keep as mementos.
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