Buenos Aires, 12/2019
Teatros imaginados y deseados. A veces estoy en ellos. Subida. Montada. Pero cuando no hay público. En general en horarios extraños. Cuando los sonidos de las calles refieren a actividades de la vida cotidiana. Se compran, colchones, estufas, refrigeradores … Hace 20 años llegué a un teatro que nunca había imaginado. Pero parecido a muchos otros en los que había estado. Ese nuevo teatro me llevó a este futuro que hoy vivo. Muchos teatros que siguen apareciendo. Incontables. Ahora vivo en la ciudad que más teatros tiene — o por lo menos eso dicen — y trabajo para una ciudad en la que la gente de teatro está uniéndose y formando una gran coalición, luchando por sus derechos. Mi padre viene de un país donde en los teatros ahora se debate el futuro de una nación. Mis hijxs han crecido acompañándome a los teatros. Me enamoré de mi marido en uno de los teatros más lindos del mundo. Entonces, no imagino un teatro, vivo, respiro, sueño teatro. Pero si aún así tuviera que imaginar, entonces quisiera imaginar que las lenguas que han sido olvidadas, aquellas que se siguen hablando en muchas partes del mundo, formarán parte de la nueva dramaturgia. Una dramaturgia donde las lenguas dominantes dejarán lugar a las lenguas que casi nadie habla. Esas lenguas originarias que lentamente están siendo rescatadas por varixs artistas en todo el mundo. Ese es el teatro que imagino. Uno donde nos sentemos a escuchar el renacimiento de esas lenguas.
Imagined and desired theaters. Sometimes I am on stage. Off stage. Backstage. But when there is no one to see me. No audience. Most of the time at odd hours. The sounds in the streets are sounds of everyday life. Se compran, colchones, estufas, refrigeradores… Twenty years ago I arrived at a theater I had never imagined before. Yet it looked like many theaters where I had been. That new theater took me to this future, where I am now. Many theaters after that. Too many to count. I live in a city that has more theaters than any other — or at least that is what they say. I work for a city in which its theater community is uniting unlike any other time to fight for their rights. My father comes from a country where right now people are in theaters debating the nation’s future. My kids have grown up in the various theaters where I have worked. I fell in love with my husband in one of the most beautiful theaters in the world. I do not imagine a theater, because I live theater, breathe it in and out; I dream it. But, if I had to imagine a theater, then I’d like to imagine that the languages that have been forgotten, which are still spoken in many parts of the world, would be part of this new playwriting. A playwriting in which dominant languages make space for the languages no one speaks; those original languages that are slowly being rescued by various artists around the world. That is the theater that I imagine. A theater where we could listen to the rebirth of those languages.
Translation by Alexandra Ripp.
Historias mínimas
Nací y crecí en tierras australes que fueron habitadas por Selknams, Yaganes y Kawéskar; en una ciudad donde no había teatro. Tengo un apellido Mapuche pero no hablo la lengua de mis ancestros.
Me encantaría soñar en mapuzungun e imaginar futuros posibles junto a mi hijo en dicha lengua.
Sin embargo, hace dos noches muchos hombres salieron a las calles creyéndose dioses y quisieron repetir la horrible historia de nuestro pueblo; emulando a los conquistadores, armados con palos y piedras, arremetieron contra dirigentes Mapuches que hasta el día de hoy luchan por sus derechos.
¿Qué hacemos con tanta miseria? ¿cómo sobrevivimos a tanto nacionalismo barato? Han pasado siglos en los que los poderosos han contado y tergiversado la historia y ya no basta con imaginar. Es tiempo de contar todas esas historias mínimas que aún no han sido contadas. Entonces ya no seremos espectadores de la historia de unos pocos, sino que seremos protagonistas de la historia que queremos.
Hace varios años un sabio dramaturgo chileno escribió a propósito de Chile: “un infierno que se sostiene a fuerza de milagros, una esperanza seca que perdura”… creo que esta expresión nos hablaba de cómo lo imposible puede sobrevivir a fuerza de amor. Una característica que ha marcado al teatro por décadas en muchos países, es su condición de ser un espacio que nadie entiende cómo se mantiene en pie, sino es por la convicción de quienes en él se desempeñan.
De esta manera, en un mundo atravesado por una pandemia, llenos de incertidumbres y dictaduras disfrazadas de democracia, me atrevo a convocar desde la convicción que me da el amor a nuestro oficio para que no imaginemos teatros sino que los creemos y los multipliquemos.
Nacen teatros donde se escuchan y recuperan las lenguas de nuestros pueblos indígenas. Al otro lado de la montaña nacen teatros que cuentan la historia de nuestros ancestros que no fueron héroes. En una serie de islas perdidas en el mar nacen teatros amateurs, de barrios, de comunidades migrantes, de sobrevivientes de todas las batallas posibles de esta travesía llamada vida.
El teatro es nuevamente un lugar de reunión y de reflexión no sólo para las élites, sino para todas y todos. De esa historia es de la que quiero ser parte junto a mi hijo.
Me atrevo a invitar a tod@s a esta re-construcción postpandémica, que sea el teatro el lugar de las historias mínimas, un lugar cuya brújula sean las palabras: Amor, Respeto y Comunidad.
dedicado a Frie Leysen
Small Stories
I was born and grew up in southern lands that were inhabited by the Selk’nam, Yaghan y Kawésqar peoples, in a city where there was no theater. I have a Mapuche last name but I do not speak the language of my ancestors.
I would love to dream in mapuzungun and, in that language, imagine possible futures with my son.
However, two nights ago, many men went out into the streets believing themselves gods. They wanted to repeat our country’s horrible history, emulating conquistadors, armed with sticks and rocks, attacking Mapuche leaders that are still, to this day, fighting for their rights.
What do we do with so much misery? How do we survive all this cheap nationalism? Centuries have passed in which the powerful have told and twisted history, and now, imagining is not enough. It’s time to tell these small stories that still have not been told. Then, we will no longer be spectators of the history of a few but rather protagonists of the story we want.
A few years ago, a wise Chilean playwright described Chile as “a hell that sustains itself by the strength of miracles, a withered hope that endures….” I think that this articulates how the impossible can survive through the strength of love. One trait that has marked theater in many countries, across decades, is its ability to survive against all odds, through the belief of those who make it.
In this way, in a world permeated by pandemic, full of uncertainties and dictatorships disguised as democracies, I call on us not to imagine theatres, but rather create and multiply them.
Theaters will be born in which we listen to and revive the language of our indigenous peoples. On the other side of the mountain, theaters will be born that tell the story of our ancestors who were not heroes. In a series of lost islands in the sea, amateur theaters will be born — those of neighborhoods, of migrant communities, of survivors of all the possible battles of this journey called life.
The theater will once again be a place of meeting and reflection not only for the elites but for everyone. This is the history that I want to be part of, together with my son.
I dare to invite everyone to this post-pandemic reconstruction. Let theater be the place of these small stories, a place guided by the words: Love, Respect, and Community.
Dedicated to Frie Leysen.
Translation by Alexandra Ripp.
Language/Generations
I was at Weiwuying, the National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts in Taiwan this past December. I had been invited to attend a conference on arts participation and lead a workshop on festival curation. I’d been to Kaohsiung many times to visit family, but it was my first time there in a professional capacity. Everything was familiar and unfamiliar at the same time: I recognized the humidity, the smells, the tempo of this southern port city, but I was still a stranger.
In between conference sessions, I arranged to see a matinee. As my liaison handed me a ticket, she warned me that I likely would not understand it because it was in Taiwanese Hokkien, not Mandarin. The piece was inspired by the history and site of Weiwuying, built on former army barracks. It featured a genial narrator, a popular aging folk singer, Chinese opera, jokes about a local chain-store, beautifully shot city vignettes. It was a love letter to the city. I understood half of the language and references, but recognized the humor and the people. I felt strangely, and wonderfully, at home. I realized I’ve only experienced Hokkien around a dining table, not as live performance. It was a performative language full of inside jokes, loan words, specific rhythms — a linguistic dance I was more aware of perhaps because of my distance from it. For the first time in years I wished I hadn’t lost the language.
I wondered, how would this show do in festivals? How to translate it, would it translate? And I caught myself. The piece was made to resist being read easily by an outsider, and I had reflexively tried to package it for international consumption. Artists don’t necessarily make their work to tour; they tour if the economics of the making necessitate it. Not every piece is for a touring circuit, asshole.
My parents immigrated from Taiwan to Singapore a few years before I was born, in the 1970s. Growing up, there were different languages spoken at home: a mix of English and Mandarin with my sisters, Mandarin with my parents, and halting Taiwanese Hokkien with my relatives and grandparents. Japanese was also in my home — the remnant of the colonization of Formosa, but also from my parents’ genuine connection with the culture.
In homes and public spaces, Singaporeans speak Malay, Tamil, Mandarin (and the dialects Teochew, Cantonese, Hokkien, Hakka, etc.), Peranakan Malay, Hindi, Singlish, and more. English is the (dominant) working language of the state. Malay is the indigenous, official language of the country. Children are educated in English and take lessons in their “Mother Tongue” (Malay, Tamil, Mandarin) as a Second Language. In the race from “third world to first,” the government (like others) pressed on with regulation and standardization, privileging certain languages over others in the name of progress: English instead of “Mother Tongue,” Mandarin instead of the dialects, and so on.
Language can be lost in one generation — I worry about that every day with my young daughter speaking Mandarin. What, then, to make of the dialects that are spoken less with each successive generation, the very dialects that have drowned out indigenous voices? The globalization/colonization of cities presses languages out of cultures and out of the land. The globalization of culture presses art/works into particular aesthetics and a linguistic framework that is legible and translatable. If I had to imagine a theatre, it would be a theatre that resists with all its might being easily read, that flourishes in moments that are impossible to translate.