By: Martha Luisa Hernandez Cadenas
The end of this theatrical year leaves me a sense of excessive joy. I am not referring to a festive enjoyment (which may well be it), or a complacent enjoyment (which by harmful and common, might well fit it) but the enjoyment of witnessing encouraging stage experiences (reflections on them would be excessive, if making justice). Processes which I will discuss below catch my eye , by how they have chosen to explore text, thematic or conceptual motivations, and by saying how I am not only referring to the formal treatment that those aesthetic impulses have had, but to the processes themselves, its constitution as experiences and thus their refraction before the public.
I think, with nostalgia, in ¨La ultima cena¨ (The Last Supper) by El Ciervo Encantado. Earlier this year, this work eminently trans-disciplinary, closed and inaugurated a stage in the life of the unique Cuban group. Those presentations were, no doubt, an unnamed party, shared among friends and dissimilar creators, which served to celebrate, from a critical and reflective stance, what the project led by Nelda Castillo has been. Also, marked mainly by the performative , those shows at La ultima cena Café Theater in postmodern time, testified what that space for teacher training (El Ciervo Encantado) has represented. To which we should add to round off the opening of a new headquarters for the company, already safeguarded by the typewriter with which Severo Sarduy wrote part of ¨Cobra, ¨which is located under the new stage that hosts the theater project.
Impressive was the discovery of La M ision, directed by Mario Guerra, from the homonymous text of Heiner Müller. Presented as a work in progress at Raquel Revuelta Theater, and later shown as part of the German Theatre Week, it is a work marked by the performative and self-referential. The rigorous exercise , besides being marked by the fragility of the accidental, the unpredictable, tried to be an essay on the meaning of the Revolution. This caused the theatrical presentation became a manifesto on the political ( against Cuban society, about the actor’s work, on the sense of theater). These latest ideas forced me to consider it as a unique work, since, due to the constant deconstruction of the staging; it tries to be a manifesto about theater.
The research on Delirio Habanero, by Alberto Pedro, which would define the poetics of Teatro de La Luna, was returned to the stage this year. This time it fell into the hands of young actors who transformed fictions of two precious beings in the cultural imagination of the nation, through its truth, I am talking about Yaser Rivero, Yordanka Ariosa and Luis Manuel Alvarez. In the case of this restaging, I am excited by finding a privileged space from which three young artists discover their obsessions with rigor and poetry, that of a changing Cuba where oblivion seems common, and in which, however, fear for future demolitions, nostalgia for past dreams are not overcome. The characters revived in memory do not stop writing and describing the history and the present, and that’s where the work of this restaging takes shape. That is what Raúl Martín manages to tell us when permitting them to be partakers in an inquiry with a strong symbolic burden to a generation of actors distant from those who founded Delirio… and that they recognize on the work their own artistic questions, even if that finding is common for the reception.
I do not know if it’s because PIRATA (PIRATE) and PATRIA (HOMELAND) have the same letters, that ¨El mal gusto¨ becomes a patriotic study of our piracies (theatrical, emotional, historical, representational, and heroic). Premiered during the German Theatre Week, it has been one of the staging linked to the more solid playwrights Rogelio Orizando and Marcos Diaz (who shares the direction with German Moritz Schonecker). Proof of this is the work of young actors (Carlos Alejandro Halley, Noslen Sánchez, Emmanuel Galban, Amalia Gaute and Violena Ampudia), and especially Juan Miguel Mas, who with this work offered one of the most beautiful scenic presences in 2014. From this work I was very interested in the participation of Elio, the transporter, not because he has to do with PIRACY, but because his experience in creating the WEEKLY PACKAGE has been one of the riskiest and enterprising critical looks of Cuban reality and present. And his testimony alerts on the growth of documentary theater in Cuba.
Among the greatest joys I’ve had in the performing arts, Peer Gynt by El Publico Teatro occupies a very special place. Shown as a work in progress in Ibsen Spaces during the Norwegian Theatre Week, it was a luxury experience, if we consider the scenic speech aimed at the (re) discovering in public, marked by the auto-thematic aspect and confessional tone of the cast. The stage of Trianon Theatre, without the usual artifices of the set and stage design, although that in itself was a plastic composition marked by simplicity and precision, became an altar to think the theater as a limit, convention and beauty. Carlos Diaz conceived a very touching platform, from the great metaphor that the character of Henrik Ibsen represents on the life of a man, his learning and destruction, to present the actor through an unusual way. A n immense amount of young players remain on stage throughout the show, but the total diversity and formal complexity of the staging is reversed in a poetic look at the crossings of the youngman Peer Gynt, revisited by dreams, frustrations and truths of a new generation of actors sharing scene with their teachers, with their greatest artistic references and with testimonies that give strength to the exploration of the text. And among the forecasts of next year, it is expected to be premiered in three days, allowing telling the drama from tributes to the history of Cuban theater, considering the precedent set by Los Doce Group with its Peer Gynt.
Although it is not a stage presentation, I think the issue corresponding to September-October of La Gaceta de Cuba is an important signal about Cuban theater panorama. This volume contains dossier devoted to theater, marked by the most heterogeneous reflections on profiles of the national scene. Proof of this is the cover, a version of the poster design made by Robertiko Ramos Mori for Antigonon: an epic contingent by El Público Teatro. And the works produced by Maite Hernández-Lorenzo, Omar Valiño, Lilian Manzor, Yohayna Hernández, Carolina Caballero, Andy Arencibia, as well as contrasting interviews to Abel González Melo and Rogelio Orizando, which allow passing through the poetics of both authors.
I would like failing to mention some projects, events and facts that have occupied the theaters, not only occurred in the capital. I am talking about Mayo Teatral Theatrical Season, the Weeks of English Culture, the German Theatre Week, the Ibsen Spaces (important strategy to give visibility to theater made by young people, as well as the production profiles by Ibsen Laboratory) and the Camagüey Theatre Festival.
The visits by Hans-Thies Lehmann, Alberto Villarreal, Sergio Blanco, Gabriel Calderon, Sarah Israel, Oscar Cornago have been important contributions to the theatrical praxis and theory, and I would especially like to highlight a workshop offered by the French director and philosopher Jean Frederic Chevallier with the presentation of R / T Poetry 4. I mention them by the possibility of updating provided by the confrontations with closer references -or not-who are often key figures, or at least indispensable if we intend to think contemporary theater.
As I initially warned the joy left by this past theatrical year could not be synthesized as I tried, but at least I mentioned those experiences that think the theater since creation. In principle, by the risks assumed (the fragility of work in process and the sample of an unfinished work) expressing open searches, causes of repositioning to the ways in which the theater watches and is being watched. Despite theater lives moments of crisis, and it is increasingly more relevant to question ourselves what the real spaces of inquiry and visibility are; what productive and creative priorities drive directors and groups to choose certain foreign author, theme or creation team are; what the ways through which these intentions take shape are, it is becoming common concern to find new ways to say, adapted to language changes that the receptor dominates. I do not know if rating it as an excessive enjoyment, when also the crisis (which like any crisis defines ethics and policies) occupies most of the space. However, I want to believe, perhaps by youthful enthusiasm, that these are the suitable examples to address a complex and heterogeneous theater which does not stop thinking about Cuba, from a viewpoint that goes towards the self-referential: asking ourselves what theater is from the theater itself may be the greatest incentive to crises and days for an audience looking for truth above all things.
