By Marlène Ramírez-Cancio

La verdad es que estamos cercados por el miedo. Estamos a tres fuegos: la guerrilla, los paramilitares y los militares, pero también tantas otras “fuerzas oscuras”… Yo quiero hablar de eso, aunque todo el mundo lo esté viendo en los periódicos. [1]

—Lucy Bolaños, Director, Teatro La Máscara

Estaban dando la telenovela,

por eso nadie miró pafuera…[2]

[The soap oper was on, that's why nobody looked outside...]

—Rubén Blades, "Desapariciones"

How can political theaters address violence in a society of violence? Scarred by fifty years of civil war, Colombia is known as one of the most sanguinary regions in the world. Paramilitary forces routinely massacre unarmed villagers, accusing them of collaborating with guerrilla forces. Guerrilla kidnappings abound, and recent events include a woman decapitated by a “necklace” made of explosives, also killing a policeman and ripping off the arm of another. What is the role of political performance in a country like this, where violent atrocities are constantly acknowledged and exposed? Where the words “violencia,” “masacre,” and “crisis” appear in almost every article, every news hour, every radio show, and even many advertisements? I want to explore the work of Teatro La Máscara, a women’s theater collective from Cali that has existed for twenty-eight years but has remained largely unrecognized, even “invisibilized,” as they challenge multiple forms of violence.

Much of the discussion surrounding oppositional theater in Latin America places it in the context of repressive regimes, where the “official story” in the news far from reflects people’s lived experience of violence, but rather seeks to “disappear” it. In places like Argentina during the military dictatorship, for instance, people were “forced to focus on the given-to-be-seen,” Diana Taylor writes, “and ignore the atrocities given-to-be-invisible, taking place around them” (Taylor, Disappearing Acts, 120). Seeing, or admitting to seeing violence, was “dangerous seeing,” and “put people at risk in a society that policed the look. [...] They knew people were ‘disappearing’ [but...] had to deny what they saw and, by turning away, collude with the violence around them” (123). This act of turning away in terror, of choosing not to see, this “self-blinding of the general population” is what Taylor calls “percepticide” (122). Under such circumstances, political theaters used performance as a means to expose the destruction people endured, insisting on “creating a community of witnesses by and through performance” (Taylor, “Staging Social Memory”, 27). Reversing Peggy Phelan’s postulation that “performance becomes itself through disappearance,” Taylor suggests that “Disappearance, as Latin American activists and artists know full well, becomes itself through performance” (21).

While this certainly applies to many Latin American contexts, the situation in present-day Colombia is different. People do not need performances to “make them witnesses” to the violent events around them. Far from covering them up, major Colombian newspaper El Tiempo features headlines that are explicit to the point of sounding melodramatic: “Desplazados, en el límite del delirio” (Homeless Refugees, on the Edge of Delirium), “El Salado: Otro pueblo fantasma” (El Salado: Another Ghost Town), “Se desborda la crisis” (Crisis Overflows) ... Some of the scenarios described are indeed cinematic: “Hacia las ocho de la noche de ayer, cinco minutos antes de iniciarse un partido de fútbol en pleno parque central de Doncello, jugadores y espectadores tuvieron que correr por la lluvia de balas que anunció una incursión de las FARC. Tres muertos y diez secuestrados” (Around eight p.m. yesterday, five minutes before the a soccer match began in Doncello’s central park, players and spectators had to run from the shower of bullets that signaled an attack by the FARC. Three dead and ten kidnapped). The online version of El Tiempo often includes surveys concerning violence—one in February 2000 read: “¿Quiénes son los mayores violadores de los derechos humanos en Colombia? Haga clic y escoja: la guerrilla, los paramilitares, los narcotraficantes, o el ejército...” (Who are the biggest violators of human rights in Colombia? Click and choose: the guerrilla forces, the paramilitary, the drug dealers, or the army...) (El Tiempo, Feb 22-27).

Violence, and the threat of violence, has become a part of people’s everyday lives. In the words of medical doctor Juan Marcelo Vásquez, quoted in El Tiempo after he assisted victims of a massacre, “Dante no conoció el infierno; nos tocó todo a nosotros” (Dante did not know hell; it was all given to us). Bogotá’s RCN Evening News—having reported that the number of child kidnappings increased by 66% between 1995 and 2000—aired a brief section reminding parents of the “Nine Rules to Prevent Your Child from Being Kidnapped.” This list includes advice such as: “Si su hijo es el consentido, evite que se note” (If your child is the family favorite, avoid showing it), “No permanezca solo con su hijo en la finca” (Do not be alone with your child in your country home), or simply, “No permanezca solo con su hijo” (Do not be alone with your child).[3] Privacy is a site of danger and love is a liability: showering a child with affection might put him/her at risk of being taken away, hurt, or—as many indeed are—murdered.

Such daily bombardment of tragedy by the media would perhaps be met in the United States with a severe case of compassion fatigue, a term which Olin Robinson says is “meant to describe Western public reaction to a succession of Third World disasters.” News and statistics such as “a child dies of hunger every 2 seconds,” or “women gang-raped by soldiers,” he writes, are “instantly reported and brought into virtually every home in the developed world” (Robinson, webpage). In a website entirely dedicated to compassion fatigue, Leslie Smith describes the term as “a loss of confidence in our individual abilities to address the problems of our society, especially those that result from poverty” (Smith, webpage).

Could this explain why, as director of La Máscara Lucy Bolaños perceives it, Colombian audiences do not want to see their “crisis” re-presented onstage? Most people know these atrocities happen, Bolaños says, but “we rarely talk about being afraid….Everyone’s doing their own thing, going forward, without talking” (Bolaños, 1998 Interview). After so many decades of unceasing violence, Colombians are certainly tired, but theirs is not “compassion fatigue.” Compassion fatigue implies a position of privilege in relation to the suffering “Others,” be it people in the so-called Third World or poverty-stricken groups in one’s own country. People experiencing compassion fatigue are not themselves threatened, they are standing by, watching, and often “just” watching.[4] As Kai Erikson writes in “Notes on Trauma and Community,” those who are “not touched [by trauma] try to distance themselves from those touched, almost as if they are escaping something spoiled, something contaminated, something polluted” (Caruth, 189).

Colombians do not have this privilege of distancing themselves from the violence in their country. You can be walking to work or getting home and a “carrobomba” (car-bomb) can explode on the street and you can die. You can sit among a hundred people in an airplane from Bogotá to Cali, or even in a church on any given Sunday, and be kidnapped by the ELN for months on end. Everyone is aware of this. As Lucy Bolaños said, it appears in the newspapers every day: violence, crisis, violence, crisis, violence, crisis overflowing…

If Colombians are suffering from fatigue, I would argue it is a kind of “crisis fatigue.” Their nation has remained in crisis—by definition, a turning point—for far too long. “More and more, the long years of war and violence seem to be the essence of our recent history,” writes Jorge Orlando Melo in an online February 2000 issue of Revista Semana. The taste of violence is stale in people’s mouths. They want—and perhaps feel they need—to talk about peace.

The media knows this, too. For every article on war we see a slogan for peace. The slogan for one of the major national banks is: “Bancolombia: Porque todo puede ser mejor” (Bancolombia: Because everything can be better). There are T-shirts sold and banners posted everywhere that read, “La paz somos todos” (We are All Peace), “La paz comienza contigo” (Peace Starts with You), or “Dale una oportunidad a la paz” (Give Peace a Chance). La Luciérnaga (The Firefly), a political satire radio show, is announced every day as “La Luciérnaga: Una forma de sonreírle a la dureza de la vida” (The Firefly: A way of smiling at the harshness of life). Every morning and afternoon, at 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. sharp, the national anthem is broadcast on every single radio and television station in the country. Radio Caracol streams in live through the web, too, so even in New York I can hear the anthem be announced—punctual as ever—as an “homage to one of our national symbols.” One night this February, immediately after the anthem, I heard a children’s chorus sing: “Que haya paz / Que haya amor / Que seamos todos felices / Y que todo sea mejor / Que haya paz / Que haya amor / Con café Aguila Roja / ¡Alegría de sabor!” (May there be peace / May there be love / May we all be happy / And may everything improve / May there be peace / May there be love / With Aguila Roja Coffee / There’s flavor happiness!). A cheerful male voice followed, exclaiming: “Para los que pensaban que el país estaba estancado, una nota positiva: ¡Llegó la nueva batería Willard, con su súper potencia duradera!” (For those who thought the country was stuck, a positive note: The new Willard battery is here, with its super-lasting power!).

When the country’s batteries are running low, so to speak, is a jolt of cheerful peace the only thing people have to hold onto?

The soundbyte “Peace” has thus become a spectacle itself. It has become—like women posing in bikinis—a marketable commodity that can be sold as well as used to sell products. It can be consumed (with your cup of coffee?) and has indeed become a kind of TV-dinner that is served as a palliative, a sign that the country is “working on it.” Examining what it would actually mean, politically and economically, to reach that peace is a more difficult question, one that the media (owned for the most part by a few powerful families) does not encourage their audiences to ask.

In the face of all this, political theaters are fading and commercial TV comedies and telenovelas are booming. The last thing people want to talk about when they go to the theater is violence—again. This poses a significant challenge for political theaters that do continue their work on violence. Besides their struggle to survive on scant economic means, they are faced with an even harder question: how can they re-present the horrors that the media is already (and almost pornographically) presenting on a daily basis? How can they do this in such a way that touches people differently than the media’s excesses do? What strategies need they use to expose what is ostensibly already exposed, to pull the invisible out of the visible? And what happens when the political theater in question is all women-run and feminist?

Here is the story of one such theater. Through the interviews I conducted with the members of Teatro La Máscara I will present, largely in their own words, the history and goals of this feminist ensemble. Through my experience with one of their plays, I will also discuss their strategies for thematizing violence on stage, laying bare the “normalized” but insidious fear that Colombians (both privately and collectively) wish to push under the surface.

Teatro La Máscara, Universo femenino / Feminine Universe

I first met them by accident.

I was sitting in the dining room of Teatro La Candelaria in Bogotá with my friend Cristina Frías, having lunch after a long morning of theater workshops at Festival al Aire Puro/Open Air Festival. It was the summer of 1997, the first time I had ever been in Colombia, and going on tour with the San Francisco Mime Troupe was a brilliant accident in itself. I was just beginning to approach Latin American theater, a task I found much facilitated by the Mime Troupe’s recognition: it allowed me to meet dozens of teatristas, playwrights, and directors,including “El Maestro” Santiago García, director of La Candelaria, who had invited our group to lunch that afternoon. He was sitting across from me at the end of the table, talking to two women I had not seen at the workshops. One was in her forties and I remember being struck by her poised, grounded presence. The other was younger, tall, and gestured with her hands as she spoke. At a certain point Cristina and I began talking about our upcoming trip to Cali, where we planned to go after the rest of the Mime Troupe returned to San Francisco. The youngest of the two women overheard us and looked up. “When are you going to Cali?,” she asked, “We’re from there.” That was Ximena Escobar. She said they were from an all-women’s theater collective called La Máscara, and introduced us to the woman next to her, their director Lucy Bolaños. By the end of lunch, we had their address and phone number, and they had offered us a place to stay during our visit.

Two weeks later, we were in Cali. We arrived at the address they had given us, on Carrera 10, in the heart of Barrio San Antonio. Number 3-40 was a two-story building with a blue mural on the front wall, a plant-filled balcony, a black wrought iron door, and a red sign that read “Teatro La Máscara: 25 Años”(La Máscara Theater: 25 Years). We rang the doorbell. A few moments later Lucy came out in a white bathrobe, led us through the hallway and welcomed us to her theater. The front room —an open area with large black-and-white tiles on the floor and an incredibly high ceiling— was decorated with their old stage sets and props, including a wooden archway with the words “Canción de Naná” (Naná’s Song) painted in silver letters. Next to the door to the theater area, almost like a guardian, stood a tall sculpture of a woman made of white wire. She smiled.

Through that door we walked into the 250-seat house and then onto the black stage, which was set up for their show A flor de piel (Skin Deep) with what seemed to be a giant bamboo mobile. Lucy took us through the backstage area, by the lights and mirrors of the narrow dressing room, and out the other end to a small outdoor patio. There were two doors off to the side. One was ajar and I could see it was the bathroom. Pointing to the other door, she said, “This is where I live.” She opened the door to a small room with a bed, the walls covered with bookshelves, postcards, and clippings.

This theater was her home. I was immediately drawn in.

I learned that La Máscara was one of the few (and one of the oldest) all-women’s ensembles in Latin America. They had worked closely with Enrique Buenaventura, the Teatro Experimental de Cali, and the Corporación Colombiana de Teatro—yet we had never heard of them. Nobody had mentioned them at the festival in Bogotá.

So the next day—after staying at Ximena’s nearby apartment, a few blocks away from the TEC—we went back to La Máscara with a tape recorder. Four out of the five women in the group were there, Ximena, Lucy, her daughter Susana Uribe, and her niece Janeth Mesías. Once we gathered in the backyard, Lucy leaned into the small black recorder and said: “My name is Lucy Bolaños. I am the founder of Teatro La Máscara.”[5] We sat back and listened:

This group was started in 1972, so we are now celebrating twenty-five years of artistic work. It was a group that started as a mixed collective, made up of about thirteen men and women. We put up plays during that time, with texts from people like Shakespeare, Enrique Buenaventura, Bertold Brecht, and also the Chicano director Luis Valdés. After 1985 La Máscara becomes an all-women’s group, because the difficulties of doing theater, of making a living out of theater, are enormous in our country. That is what made our group become unstable, and all the men left. It was a crucial moment. A few women remained who had already begun working together for an International Women’s Day. We were Pilar Restrepo, Valentina Vivas, Marina Gil, Claudia Morales, María González, and myself. We took advantage of the circumstances, and from that moment on we focused on taking the feminine problematic to the stage. This became the principal endeavor of Teatro La Máscara. (Bolaños 1997).

Pilar Restrepo—the fifth ensemble member, who was not living in Cali at the time of this interview—has written elsewhere about the group’s shift in creative focus. She explains that the change “responded to a consciousness and a need to negotiate transformations in every form of social discrimination, and to a feminine urge to find our own language, one that ‘reveals’ and ‘rebels’ us (que ‘nos revele’ y ‘nos rebele’), in the face of habits that “invisibilize” and “imbecilize” the image of woman (de ‘invisibilizarnos’ e ‘imbecilizarnos’ la imagen de la mujer)” (Restrepo, La Máscara, la mariposa y la metáfora, 16). The focus on feminine issues, she writes, reflected their desire to “find a historical identity that dignifies not one, but all women” (17). The challenge of doing this on stage, she proposes, is not to “simply point out the habits and relations of dominance that have become ‘naturalized’ between men and women, but to make them comprehensible to the spectator’s eyes” (Restrepo, “La Máscara ‘dice verdad sobre sí misma’,” 2). Lucy continues:

Our first show was Noticias de María. It is a play we put together based on Nuevas cartas portuguesas, a book written by Las Tres Marías, three Portuguese writers whose work was banned in their country, and who were put in jail for attacking public morality. We got to know this book through Jacqueline Vidal, who is Enrique Buenaventura’s wife. On the one hand, the show speaks about education, and on the other hand about the relationship of a couple—how the woman at a certain point prefers madness or death rather than returning to her husband. [...] We do not stage texts only by women. We have also used with works written by men, like Bertold Brecht. For example, in “Canción de Naná” he deals with prostitution. “María Farrar” talks about a young domestic worker who becomes pregnant and, out of fear, tries to have an abortion. But it doesn’t work, so she has her child. When the baby is born, she wants to stop him from crying, so she kills him herself. In these poems Brecht takes up some issues that women must face, and presents them as a social problem. A few years ago, we did a collective creation based on a non-theatrical text by Ntozake Shange. The way we build a performance out of twenty poems, the way we make characters speak them, transforms them into dramatic text, makes them a theatrical spectacle. The same thing happened with the texts taken from Galeano and Rigoberta Menchú, which we used in Mujeres en trance de viaje.[6]

“Our experimental work on poetry, narrative texts, and epistles,” writes Restrepo, “forces the audience to an attentive reading because the lyrical becomes gesture without losing its verbal strength. The play does not end without the audience feeling that we’ve ‘stuck our finger in the wound’ (‘el dedo en la llaga’)” (Restrepo, “Las comediantas de la legua,” 5).

La Máscara works mostly with guest directors, among them Enrique Buenaventura, Jacqueline Vidal, Patricia Ariza, Elena Armengod, and Wilson Pico. They view artistic creation as a mixture of group experimentation and a director’s individual work. The director never has full command or the final say about any performance—some, like Wilson Pico, come from other countries to work with them for a week or two, lay the groundwork for a piece, and then leave it to the actresses to elaborate the finished product. But even when the guest director stays with them during the full rehearsal process, s/he must always work closely with Lucy. She has remained at the head of the collective throughout its entire trajectory (not only as actress and director, but also as house manager and business administrator—positions so undervalued in the discussions of small theaters, and which often include sweeping floors, mopping, cooking, etc.). She has also been responsible for maintaining the group’s commitment to women’s issues (Restrepo, La Máscara, la mariposa y la metáfora, 15).

One of the most difficult times for La Máscara was the late 1980’s. Lucy again tells the story:

In 1987 and 88 a wave of violence erupted in Colombia, a wave of persecution against artists, intellectuals, teachers, poets. I say it was the work of ‘dark forces’ because one never knew who they were. The extreme right, the paramilitary, the guerrilla forces, the military, one never knew. It was horrible. Many people were tortured and disappeared, so many people were killed. [...] We began getting phone calls saying “We’re going to kill you, we hope you keep your mouths shut.” We got threats by mail that said “Out, you rats, leave the country, you anti-Colombian cunts, Black Flag with you all!” Black Flag, like the spray, as if they were going to kill insects. These constant threats kept us up at night, we felt persecuted on the street, as if we already had the gunshot on the back of our heads, you know? It was at that time that one of the women from a feminist organization helped us leave the country and we went to Costa Rica. It was there that we had our first year-and-a-half long tour. With our daughters, we went from Costa Rica to Mexico, to Cuba, to Nicaragua, a year and a half of traveling, waiting for things here to calm down. We established contacts on our own, sell tickets for our shows, and the solidarity and collaboration we received from people in those countries allowed us to live through it. [...] Our return home was safe, things had settled down somewhat. Based on that experience, we created a new piece called Mujeres en trance de viaje (Women in Travel Trance), directed by Patricia Ariza.

La Máscara has had a very close relationship with Patricia Ariza, actress and writer from Teatro La Candelaria, head of the Corporación Colombiana de Teatro, and director of Trama Luna Teatro. Ariza, one of the most important influences on the ensemble’s development, was herself the victim of death threats during this period in the late eighties. As the story goes, she would walk around Bogotá wearing a bulletproof vest she had decorated with embroidery and sequins—a gesture which called attention to the alarming degree of normalization that violence had reached.

In 1994 Ariza wrote and directed a play for La Máscara entitled Luna menguante (Waning Moon), described in the program as “a voyage into the feminine universe, where four women try to go beyond the barriers of their own self-imposed limits” (La Máscara). Ariza. “After that,” Lucy continues, “we did A flor de piel. We took some poems from Oliverio Girondo, an Argentinian poet, but the show consists mainly of dialogue generated by us during improvisations on the topic of sexuality. From those improvisations and from some interviews we conducted offstage, we elaborated a ‘survey on sexuality’ which we later incorporated into the text. We as an ensemble (whoever is in the group at the time), together with the director, always select the final dialogues.”

La Máscara’s only constant members have been Lucy Bolaños and Pilar Restrepo. The rest of the members have kept rotating, and the group has been comprised of about ten actresses at different moments, which is why Lucy qualifies the ensemble as “whoever is in the group at the time.” Some have found it hard to stay, she said, “because we don’t have a salary (for being actresses). It’s a ‘rebusque’, as we say here, you teach workshops, you make costumes, you do make-up, even jewelry. Each one has to develop a skill to find a means of survival. We constantly strive towards being able to stabilize the group’s economy, so we can provide the actresses with a fixed salary.”

At the sound of these words the other three actresses let out a huge laugh. The thought of a fixed income for theater seemed absurd to them at the moment. Lucy’s twenty-four year-old daughter Susana spoke up: “But even still, I can’t see myself doing anything different from theater. It’s a passion.” Sitting next to her, Ximena raised her hand and said, “It would be great—and I’m not going to say a creative word or give any of those spiels— but I just feel it would be so great and so important if women in theater began to get together, to organize encuentros... Because there’s a different language here, one particular to women, one that belongs to us and expresses our interiority. There has to be a dramaturgy dealing with that search.” And after a short pause she said, “Okay, I have spoken.” Janeth, the newest member of the ensemble, said in a soft voice, “For me, theater is a woman, really. Because at every moment, something new is being created, is being born. And it really does come from inside everyone here, every one of us at La Máscara. It is something very beautiful that grows and grows until it becomes ours. We are mothers to our theater, and with every play something leaves and then something else is born again and grows…”

With a few words, Susana finished her cousin’s thought: “It should be called teatra.”

It was late afternoon and we had been talking for hours, clicking the tape recorder on and off. At the end of our interview together, I asked them if they wanted to say anything else to wrap things up. The four women gathered closely around the tape recorder and sang a popular song they had used in their play ¡Emocionales! (Emotional!), entitled “Mujeres feas” (Ugly Women): “Hay mujeres regulares,/ hay mujeres desgraciadas/ hay mujeres con mal genio/ y las hay con mucha gracia/ Pero feas feas feas/ pero feas y con ganas/ no hay ninguna mujer fea/ yo lo juro por mi alma” (There are women who are so-so/ There are women who are wretched/ There are women who are cranky/ And then some are very graceful/ But ugly ugly ugly/ Ugly really downright ugly/ There is no ugly woman/ I swear it by my soul).

It was a fun ending to the conversation, yes, but the thought of Black Flag threats never left my mind.

Feminismo es mala palabra / Feminism is a Curse Word

One year later, in the summer of 1998, I returned to Cali. This time I had the express intention—and the fellowship funding, which also meant a video camera—to document all I could about La Máscara. I was there for the opening night performance of their new piece, Los perfiles de la espera (The Profiles of Waiting), directed by Ecuadorian master choreographer Wilson Pico. [7] Out of the four actresses I had met the year before, two were gone: Ximena had moved to Spain, and Susana was doing theater elsewhere. A few days before the performance, I finally had the pleasure of interviewing original ensemble member Pilar Restrepo. She was no longer an actress—and had not been for several years—but she was and still is an integral part of the group, as a writer, theorist, and organizer (at the time, she was finishing her book on the group, so far the only published theoretical study on La Máscara). She is a thin woman about Lucy’s age with short brown hair, wide-open eyes, and a deep raspy voice. She sat on a folding chair in front of the video camera and asked, “Should we start?”

I pressed the red button and asked her how she first got involved in La Máscara. She began at the beginning:

I got to know theater through my oldest sisters. When I was a girl, we would participate in the school plays. The first one we ever did was called The Chinese Princess. We had to buy our own costumes. We had no money at home at the time, and for my character I needed a kimono with very wide sleeves... I remember I cried so much because I wasn’t going to have a costume, and I was the Princess! My mother cut up one of my sister’s Sunday dresses, and she made the sleeves from a different fabric. It had nothing to do with China, but it didn’t matter, I felt I had the best costume ever... So that was the age when I began to feel the passion for memorizing texts and poems. Then I had the opportunity to see Enrique Buenaventura’s La Maestra. More than any other play I’ve ever seen, that one has impacted me the most.I lived in the suburbs in northern Cali, where we were never allowed to go out alone or take the bus... But I would run from school, still in my uniform, to go see the TEC’s rehearsals. And every weekend, that theater was an adventure—I felt like the bravest girl going downtown at eight p.m. to see a play by myself. It was forbidden in our family to associate ourselves with the TEC. My parents would say, “Those people are working class! They are communist revolutionaries!” It was absolutely forbidden. So my sister started dating one of the actors... Imagine the scandal?... I met Lucy during one of those escapades, when I was in high school. I got involved with La Máscara from the beginning, from its first plays in 1972, when there were still men in the group... The men left the group in 85, and Lucy and I were left staring at the ceiling... We committed ourselves to political causes, and performed at political events. The women from the [communist] party, the feminists, and even the M-19 [guerrilla forces] would call us to do shows. We would stage a poem and go. (Restrepo, 1998 Interview).

It did not take long for Pilar to start talking about the obstacles they faced because of their commitment to feminism. As feminist theorist Florence Thomas[8] has written in Conversaciones con un hombre ausente (Conversations with an Absent Man), the general attitude in Colombia seems to be, “Why talk about women? Don’t you think that subject is a little out of place? Don’t you think that in these times, in our so terribly battered Colombia, there are other urgencies, other priorities?” (Thomas, 23). Within the country’s intellectual community (and this is certainly not limited to Colombia), there is a legacy of intolerance regarding the discussion of gender inequalities. In the name of revolution and political struggle, some refused to address such “secondary” issues, because “the only valid cause was the proletariat… ‘And prostitutes, comrade, are not proletariat!’” (Restrepo, La Máscara, la mariposa y la metáfora, 116-17). This type of posture, according to Pilar, has proved to be one of the toughest obstacles for the ensemble. “The mere fact that we are women who do theater is reason enough for rejection,” she affirms. “I am so tired of those attitudes. Even women themselves tell us, ‘Ay no, I don’t like feminist theater!’” I asked her what she thought people in general understood by “feminism”, and she responded:

[Feminism] is such a terrible word here, it’s pejorative, it’s evil. It’s “You’re insane, how could you be a feminist?” Instead of being the opposite, a vindication for women, it becomes a stigma. [...] Feminists are always accused of being radicals, of hating men, of wanting to take over men’s power, of not believing in family and moral values. Here, feminism is understood as the opposite of machismo, as if they were both the same thing, two sides of the same coin. [...] To give you a recent example, yesterday a man was interviewing Lucy on the radio about our latest play Los perfiles, and he asked her: “So, now you’ve switched from feminism to politics?” And these are the hosts of a cultural show in this city! We haven’t stopped doing feminist work. Feminism is politics. People here don’t get that.

María Mercedes Jaramillo has written that La Máscara’s plays “dramatize taboo themes in a conservative and Catholic milieu” (Jaramillo, 214). Indeed, Cali is a very Catholic city—I remember my first Sunday there, being awakened at six in the morning by the trumpets, drums, and chanting from the massive weekly procession outside. But when I asked Pilar who, in her opinion, were the people that least “get it,” her immediate reply was, “Actually, it’s the artists who are the most reticent. Our male colleagues themselves enforce our group’s ‘invisibilization.’ They complain, ‘There you go again with those sad plays, talking about those problems! Theater is entertainment, it’s laughter!’”

Discussions of gender inequality and feminism are shoved aside in the name of Colombia’s “other priorities,” but ironically, when these women tackle the issues of violence and armed conflict, they are chided for producing “sad plays.”

La Máscara has small, self-selected audiences of people who are generally more open to their work, comprised mostly of women, students, and people from the communities to whom they offer workshops. However, the ensemble has felt most supported during their travels abroad, not only during their period of exile, but also through their participation in international women’s festivals such as the Magdalena Project in Cardiff. Having had the chance to interact with other women’s ensembles, and seeing how strong women’s movements work, Pilar commented, “we were shocked, because we’ve had to do most of our work alone here.”[9]

Bisexuality and homosexuality (especially in women) are realities Pilar feels are still unspeakable in Colombia. La Máscara has felt the brunt of this silencing, and have at times even imposed self-censorship on the kind of work they have produced. “We still haven’t created the play that would...” and she made a punching gesture with her fist. “It’s not like we set out to talk about scandalous or taboo things in order to cause sensation,” she explained, “those are very interior issues. [...] In A flor de piel, we touched upon the topic of feminine homosexuality, but only tangentially, because it was in the context of laughter, a kind of joke that showed that it’s no big deal. Now I really feel the urge to do a piece about that theme. It starts to become a need inside you, to talk about it. [...] If we’re already so stigmatized as ‘lesbians,’ then let’s make a play that will give them something to talk about!”

I asked her what she thought would happen if a playwright openly declared herself gay, and began to produce shows about relationships between women. With a smile, she answered, “I don’t know what would happen, but I’d love for it to happen… Here in Colombia we are so far behind, though, that Congress is still debating whether gay professors should be allowed to teach. [...] Because of things like these, I went through a period when I did not want to return to Cali or to this country.”

Would you want to leave now?, I asked. “No, not now,” she said. “I feel a vital responsibility with La Máscara. There is so much to be done, and I’m dying to do it.”

Los perfiles de la espera /The Profiles of Waiting

¿Cómo convertir el dolor en creación? El teatro es lo que nos devuelve la vida, nos permite vencer los miedos.

—Patricia Ariza[10]

At the beginning of this article I posed some questions about the status of political theaters in Colombia: How can political theaters re-present crisis onstage when a country is already fatigued by its own crisis? How can they address violence in a way that differs from the media, with its bombardment of violent images on the one hand, and its palliative catchword “Peace” on the other? This binary can be a trap, severing the possibility for any real discussion. What does La Máscara do, then, to approach the violence that, as Lucy said, “everyone is seeing it in the newspapers”?

La Máscara’s most recent piece, Los Perfiles de la espera, isa two-woman piece centered around the labor of waiting. We see the women in their private spaces, as they perform mundane tasks such as washing and sewing. They are mostly silent—they express themselves with their bodies, their physical movements, the sounds they make with their feet and hands, and their versatile handling of two plastic tarps. These tarps figure prominently in the piece, as each woman continually transforms them into a myriad of objects, such as sewing fabric, laundry, tablecloths, skirts, shawls, hiding places, and even the water under which one of them is drowned. As the two women in the play attempt to stay engrossed in their housework, the traumatic memories of violent events—recorded in their bodies—are repeated time and time again: they get startled, get up, hide, go back to work, get startled again, get up, and the cycle repeats itself almost identically. When the characters do speak, it is a fragmented collage of commonplace phrases mixed with texts from Mercé Rodoreda, Eduardo Galeano, Jorge Luis Borges, Miyo Vestrini, and actual testimonies from the families of the disappeared. Its initial sequences are as follows:

The stage is dark. Andean flute music is heard. The backlit figures of two women become gradually visible against a doorway upstage. We see two small tables covered with large, translucent plastic tarps; in front of them, two tin buckets. Very slowly, still in silhouette, the women embrace. They embrace again. They stand looking at each other and, as the stage becomes dark once more, they cover their faces with their hands. When the lights come back up, the two women quickly walk downstage and begin to recite a list of names: “I am Rosa Paredes. My name is Clara Cortés. They call me Carmen Llanos. I am Rita Pelayos...”[11] They then go to separate tables and sit down. Each woman grabs a plastic tarp and begins scrubbing it, beating it with her hands, desperately washing it against the table. After this has gone on for a while, Woman 1 (played by Lucy) stands up and, as if she’s heard something, quickly runs upstage to peek out of a large window. She sees nothing. She turns around, slaps her temples, and goes back to work. The silent washing continues. It becomes slower and slower until it stops.

There is absolute silence. Both women rearrange their positions on the tables: the tarps now become large pieces of cloth, and the tables stand in as sewing machines. While tapping their bare feet on the floor (recreating the sound of machine engines), the women slowly slide the tarps across the tables, sewing straight lines onto them. Woman 2 (played by Janeth) stands up and wraps the tarp around her waist, trying on the garment she is working on. She, too, gets suddenly scared, runs to the window, slaps her forehead, and comes back to the table. Woman 1 yells out, “The neighbor got a telephone! She’s so happy!” Woman 2 takes the tarp and puts it around her shoulders. “You don’t say!” she replies. And again, they both resume their sewing.

The music changes to a slow waltz, and Woman 2 stands up, then kneels, and covers her face with her hands. She crawls under the table and hides, then stands up, retreats, and sits on the table. Covering herself from the waist down with the plastic tarp, she says: “Time and space disappear. The speed and force of the blows extinguish all signs of life. What remains in the aggressor’s hands is an inanimate doll. A ball of yarn. A sheet filled by the wind.” Woman 1 stands up and faces the audience: “This is my foot,” she says, pointing to it. “This is the table. This is the chair. This is the room. That is the window.” She sits down, whispers and gestures at someone we can’t see, as Woman 2 says: “Before. After. Yesterday. Meanwhile. Now. Right. Left. I. You. He. Time and space disappear. The speed and force of the blows extinguish all signs of life. What remains in the aggressor’s hands is an inanimate doll. A ball of yarn. A sheet filled by the wind.”

Language has been shattered for these women, replaced by circular, disjointed shards of speech. What La Máscara has done is pry open the domestic space of two women, making visible the ingrained effects of violence in everyday life. No actual violence is depicted onstage, however, only the memories of its damage. (Even when Woman 1, as I mentioned earlier, is being drowned under the tarp/water, we only see her and her struggle, without an attacker present.) A particularly provocative image is created near the end of the piece. The two women walk downstage, turn the tables on their sides, and kneel down. They reach into the water buckets and pull out soaking white rags. After a moment of contemplation, they raise the wet rags and place them over their faces. In this move, the familiar chore of washing clothes is twisted to evoke the image of a burial shroud. Lodged in their bodies, the scars of violence, death, and terror inevitably puncture every gesture, every task.

As the program for the play declares, “This is a theatrical act made against persecution, torture, desperation, and fear. The two actresses fundamentally represent the many women, at home or in their workplaces, who are living the anguish of waiting for their disappeared family members. The words and movements of the characters subvert silence, making us witnesses to a world encircled by fear” (La Máscara). But I believe Perfiles does more than this. The strength of this piece for me lies beyond making us witnesses to the world of these specific “Others.” It targets the denial that results from crisis fatigue, the self-blinding which, unlike percepticide, is not rooted in the fear of being caught looking (by outside forces), but rather, in the fear of catching oneself feeling one’s own fear. What Perfiles suggests is the following: even if you haven’t been directly hit by violence, even if you haven’t had a family member killed, or had to wear a bulletproof vest, or been forced to flee the country, you’re not exempt from the reality of violence. Living with constant fear is being a victim of violence. And drinking Café Aguila Roja or buying Willard batteries will not solve that.

Furthermore, La Máscara insists on “sticking its finger in the wound” of “our so terribly battered Colombia” while simultaneously examining the specificity of women’s positionality within it. For them, one critique does not exclude the other.

And yet, their achievements have been repeatedly ignored, their work has been marginalized, and they remain unrecognized as one of the oldest theater ensembles in Colombia still working today. Even some of their staunchest supporters, albeit unwittingly, also help to “enforce their invisibilization”: Jacqueline Vidal’s introduction to Pilar’s book, for instance, describes La Máscara as “autoras de esta realidad teatral para seguir siendo niñas, jugar” (authors of this theatrical reality to continue being girls, playing), a comment whose hint of condescension could very well serve to downplay the depth of their work, to keep them inside a parenthesis of naïve femininity.

All this said, I find it truly remarkable that La Máscara has survived for twenty-eight years. I especially admire them for their last fifteen years of work, unwavering in their commitment to political work on gender, without succumbing to the multiple pressures they continually endure. Their consciousness and passion for the work they do are absolute. It was through my encounter with them, through our conversations, and through their own reflections about their obstacles, that I began to formulate the questions I pose here and will further investigate in my work. La Máscara may not have all the answers, but they will continue to search for strategies to resist the resistance, to “transform pain into creation,” to examine their country’s wounds and the wounded women within it.

“I have battled this out for myself,” Lucy said at the end of our last interview at the theater, which, let us not forget, is also her home. “The men in La Máscara were the ones who couldn’t handle it and left the group first, and it was just us, the women, who continued the struggle, despite the many people who told us, ‘Why do you keep insisting?’” But they insisted. “We got here because we were stubborn, and it’s because we’re stubborn that we’re still here. That is the challenge of life.”

APPENDIX A

The following list appeared in RCN Evening News, Bogotá, Colombia, 10 March 2000.

Nueve Reglas para Evitar que Secuestren a su Hijo

1. No permitir que los niños sean ostentosos ni establezcan rutinas.

2. No permitir que los niños caminen solos por la calle o centros comerciales.

3. Si su hijo es el consetido, evite que se note.

4. No permanezca solo con su hijo.

5. No permanezca solo con su hijo en la finca.

6. Las madres no deben salir solas a la calle con hijos de brazos.

7. Adviértale a sus hijos mayores sobre los peligros de permanecer en la calle.

8. Si acaba de dar a luz, no deje que saquen a su hijo de la alcoba.

9. Dialogue con sus hijos sobre la subversión.

Nine Rules to Prevent Your Child from Being Kidnapped

1. Do not allow children to be ostentatious or establish routines.

2. Do not allow children to be alone on the streets or shopping malls.

3. If your child is the family favorite, avoid showing it.

4. Do not be alone with your child.

5. Do not be alone with your child in your country home.

6. Mothers should not go out alone with their babies.

7. Warn your older children about the dangers they face on the street.

8. If you’ve just given birth, do not allow your newborn to be taken out of the room.

9. Talk to your children about subversives.

APPENDIX B

Plays by La Máscara, from 1972 to 1979:

1972: No saco nada de la escuela, by Luis Valdés, directed by Guillermo Piedrahita and Jorge Herrera (from TEC).

1973: Una historia vulgar, based on poems by Pablo Neruda, directed by Carlos Bernal (from TEC) and Enrique Buenaventura.

1974: Cuánto cuesta el hierro, by Bertold Brecht, directed by Carlos Bernal.

1975: La Mina, Enrique Buenaventura’s adaptation of Ferenc Herzec’s play, directed by Gilberto Ramírez (from TEC).

1977: Macbeth, Enrique Buenaventura’s adaptation of Shakespeare, directed by Helios Fernández (from TEC).

1979: La mandrágora, by Machiavelli, directed by Luis Fernando Pérez (from TEC).

1984: María Farrar, based on a poem by Bertold Brecht, collective creation and direction.

Plays by La Máscara, from 1985 to 2000:

1985 and 1986: Noticias de María, based on two sections from Las nuevas cartas portuguesas (“María M” and “Las tareas”), by Maria Teresa Horta, Maria Isabel Barreno, and Maria Velho da Costa, directed by Jacqueline Vidal.

1986: Historias de mujeres, two poems by Bertold Brecht (“De la infanticida María Farrar” and “La Canción de Naná”), and “María M” from Las nuevas cartas portuguesas, directed by Enrique Buenaventura and Jacqueline Vidal.

1987: Las viudas, poem by Bertold Brecht, directed by Lucy Bolaños.

1990: Mujeres en trance de viaje, collective creation (based on texts by Eduardo Galeano, Rigoberta Menchú, Patricia Ariza, and Las brujas de Salem), directed by Patricia Ariza.

1992: ¡Emocionales!, based on For colored girls who have considered suicide, when the rainbow is enuf : a choreopoem by Ntozake Shange, directed by Rubén Di Pietro.Misterio de navidad, directed by Héctor Fabio Cobo.

1993: Bocas de bolero, based on twenty-two classic boleros, directed by Wilson Pico. Sin reflejos de la luna, esplendores en la noche, directed by Héctor Fabio Cobo.

1994: Luna menguante, written and directed by Patricia Ariza.

1995 : A flor de piel, collective creation, directed by Elena Armengod.

1997: A flor de piel, a re-elaboration, directed by Lucy Bolaños.

1998: Los perfiles de la espera, collective creation, directed by Wilson Pico.

In process for future performance: La cabellera femenina, collective creation.

Works and Interviews Cited

Ariza, Patricia. Audio recorded interview conducted with Pilar Restrepo in Bogotá, Colombia, 13 April 1998.

Bolaños, Lucy. Audio recorded interview conducted in Cali, Colombia, 10 September 1997.

---. Videotaped interview conducted in Cali, Colombia, 6 September 1998.

Buenaventura, Enrique. “Prospecto promocional de La Máscara.” Archivo Teatro La Máscara: Santiago de Cali, 1986.

Erikson, Kai. “Notes on Trauma and Community.” In Cathy Caruth, ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Maryland: John’s Hopkins University Press, 1995.

Jaramillo, María Mercedes. “La Máscara: teatro de práctica artística.” Gestos 19 (April 1995): 213-219.

Melo, Jorge Orlando. “La paz, ¿Una realidad utópica?” Revista Semana, February 27,2000.

La Máscara. Archived materials (programs, promotional writings).

Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London and New York: Routledge, 1993.

Restrepo, Pilar. “’Historia de mujeres’ en el teatro.” El País, Magazín Dominical. Cali (August 1987): 3-5.

---. “La Máscara ‘dice verdad sobre sí misma’.” Unpublished essay, 24 February 2000.

---. La Máscara, la mariposa y la metáfora: Creación teatral de mujeres. Cali, Colombia: Impresora Cruzz Ltda., 1998.

---. “Las comediantas de la legua: Testimonio del trabajo de cuatro mujeres que un día decidieron salir a recorrer el mundo.” El Espectador, Magazín Dominical No. 327 (July 16, 1989): 4-7.

---. Videotaped interview conducted in Cali, Colombia, 6 September 1998.

Smith, Leslie. “Dealing with Compassion Fatigue.” On the Internet: www.geocities.com/~sleepwake/Members/fatigue.html.

Taylor, Diana. Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War”. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997.

---. “Staging Social Memory: Yuyachkani.” Unpublished essay, 1999.

---. Theatre of Crisis: Drama and Politics in Latin America. Lexington, Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, 1991.

Thomas, Florence. Conversación con un hombre ausente. Bogotá, Colombia: Arango Editores, 1997.

[1] “The truth is we are fenced in by fear. We are in a triple crossfire: the guerrilla forces, the paramilitary, and the military, but also so many other ‘dark forces.’ ….I want to talk about all this, even if everyone is seeing it in the newspapers.” All translations of interviews and texts from the Spanish are mine.

[2] “The soap opera was on, that’s why nobody looked outside…” (lyrics to Rubén Blades’ song “Desapariciones”)

[3] See Appendix A for the complete list.

[4] I understand “compassion fatigue” to be different from the notion of “bearing witness” discussed in trauma studies, whose subjects actually bear the burden of responsibility that their witnessing entails.

[5] All interviews with the members of La Máscara were conducted in Spanish. In this article, the interviews appear only in their English translation.

[6] For a complete list of plays performed by La Máscara please see Appendix B.

[7] Wilson Pico founded Ecuador’s first modern dance company, the Ballet Experimental Moderno (BEM) in 1972. For thirty years he has been a dancer, choreographer, director, and teacher, and is considered to be the pioneer of contemporary dance in Ecuador.

[8] Thomas is originally from France, but has been living and working in Colombia since 1969. She founded the first graduate program in Feminist Studies in Colombia, at the Universidad Nacional in Bogotá.

[9] An exploration of the wider, transnational feminist collaboration that is engendered through this kind of encounter (“teatra”?), as well as through the sharing, translation, and reusing of printed texts, certainly merits further attention. Equally important is the investigation of the differences and clashes, for instance, in what Latinas (U.S. included) consider to be “feminist” or “political” performance. While I plan to elaborate a more detailed study on the subject, for the purposes of this article I have chosen to stay focused on La Máscara, their history, and the challenges they face in their local context.

[10] “How do we transform pain into creation? Theater is what brings us back to life, it allows us to vanquish our fears.” Conversation with Patricia Ariza, 13 April 1998 (quoted in Restrepo, La Máscara, la mariposa y la metáfora, 131).

[11] All text from Perfiles de la espera, or any other material from La Máscara, is originally in Spanish. Translations into English are my own.

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