ACTOR, POETRY AND TEXT

By Cristóbal Peláez González

Translated by César David Salazar Jiménez

Published by EL MUNDO, 1998

The concerns about an autochthonous theater, about a national dramaturgy, reveal the preoccupations about a mean of expression that is yet to be installed with plenitude among us. We have not been able to find the right tone of the dialogues, nor those atmospheres that are truly necessary for dramatic poetry. Lorca found them above frivolous comedy and went on to the last consequences of an arnichesque entanglement. And we can say the same about Valle Inclán. Among ours, Álvaro Cepeda Samudio, without being a dramatic author, gave us a form of universal -yet particular- dialogue. But we still keep waiting for the tones and the atmospheres. We have been driven by a regional tone, by the political temptation of considering that reality is what dramatic poetry really should be.

Dramatic writing in Colombia has fallen into two excesses: on one side, robbing portions from reality to install them in a stage –a naturalist theater that wants to confuse extraordinary explosions in space and time with the lack of a true dramatic literature-, and on the opposite side, a theater of puzzling rhetoric, completely separated from any kind of referent.

The task of theater is not to vindicate an author, a religion, a race, a language or an époque. Its highest task is poetry. And poetry’s highest task is to make existence bearable for us.

The matters of theater are not an exclusive patrimony of their creators. It is more the stigma that faces society. Writers of short stories, novels or verses tend to look at the playwrights and the actors with despise, as if the physical demand of theater was something impure and ignoble. It seems like the scenic practice, instead of dignifying the actor, is diminishing him in front of his colleague. People forget that the humanistic edification of writers and artists during the nineteenth century included theatricality per se. Any well-respected artist contemplated frequently the practice of dramatic writing, and even sometimes the acting practice: Valle Inclán, Shaw, George Sand, Virginia Wolf… examples shine among painters and surrealist poets at the beginning of this century.

Stanislavski insisted on generality as an enemy of art. The French assured that detail was God’s residence. And the Greek talked about a God that geometrized. The stage should pursue mathematics; nothing should be left to spontaneity. Nevertheless, where there is no spontaneity there is no poetry; a rich contradiction.

Theater organizations created throughout all these years to defend our scenic aspirations have burst in ideologies. Between the 60s and the 80s, were created and multiplied several groups of enthusiasts that wanted to give some space to an entertaining practice, a posteriori they stayed to cover up a poor demand from universities, syndicates and educational centers. To prevent death, they had to make an agile, critic, actualized theater. Evolution made most of these groups disappear, remaining only those that, from the beginning, evolved into the form of a “team”, those structures that understood and practiced the individual role. The team conceived as a reunion of talent and discipline.

The theater group should offer the individual the possibility of making more effective his work in art –everything that is above discipline and mysticism, above the obedience to a collective purpose. The individual should feel that the team offers him human and poetic opportunities that are elusive outside. Otherwise, the group is obsolete.

But, at the same time, the group could be the opposite: a place to hide mediocrity under the shadow of others; a frequent thing.

I know actors and actresses that, in the space of five years, only have been able to create and put on stage one character that they repeat endlessly. They are the prisoners of a character, of an obsession. The very own nature of representation consists in living continuously a bunch of borrowed existences. The actor is hysteric rather than obsessive. Pessoa’s hysteria forced him his heteronyms.

The culture in our field is invariably linked to the idea of poverty. Until just a few days ago, the words Symphonic Orchestra were not associated in our region with fine music, but with misery, with difficulties. When the word Theater is mentioned, its synonyms appear: resource instability, lack of support, hunger, ruin, narrowness. We should practice with real effort the exercise of making public opinion think that we enjoy great material and intellectual privileges; that we are some sort of privileged sect; all for the love to a job rich in spending imagination.

Splendor convenes, misery scares away.

The plenitude of the actor does not resides in giving a finished character to his audience –a character easy to understand, but in creating a spectrum, a being full of absences that we would want to know better beyond time and representation; meaning that, as long as the scene lasts, we would feel motivated by everything that is not being showed but is possible anyway –just like we do not get to really know someone in real life; a living character always disposed to give us either a good or an unpleasant surprise; trying to make the character show nothing but a part, setting up an obscure zone for the spectator to be intrigued by it. The same goes to the dramatic situation. It calls our attention when we discover, in the character by which we feel attracted, one or various features that elude our comprehension or that we do not share. Everything that is above our own comprehension claims an enigma, it claims us. We are not interested in plays that are less smart than the audience.

When Mallarmé directed IGITUR to the intelligence of the spectator –because that was what really made the scene possible- we found there a reflection that helps us understand dramatic art as five deep theses about the nature of theater.

Success and failure are ephemeral, a couple of liars. To success –it has been said- you have to taste first the bitterness of failure; then, when I fail I know I am paving the way to triumph, and, at the same time, triumph is the mother of failure; a vicious circle.

Theater as a journey to other worlds; each time a spectator says the play is very real, I shake.

Theater is everything that is irrepresentable about life. ¿Who said that?

The art of representation is a form of despise towards yourself, because we rent our body and soul to other beings. We pretend being others in stage, to hide our own existence. We play the game of becoming others and often we feel bothered with ourselves. We undo ourselves in others, to prevent us from suicide.

But this mock of pretending being others also could become something corrupt. Some actors do not perform the transformation form the self to an imaginary other, but they come out adorned with the other to exalt the self. It is no longer about embracing the body and soul of Hamlet, but exhibiting how great “my Hamlet” looks.

There are actors that are too technical and show us how a character behaves in a given circumstance. They keep the distance because they have enough talent to simulate from the outside. Another type of actor needs to get inside and suffer the character with his own flesh. They both have a different way of facing the event, both probable and plausible. Honesty and talent set up a distance.

The actor, due to the nature of his job, has a proclivity to social vanity. He stands out from the rest because he does something that is exposed to the eyes of many others. Thus he tends to think that he has a talent above the average, and even gets to believe that he is illuminated and that his creative capability is beyond his audience. He forgets that his job is a gregarious task based in the observation and the study of man and society. He forgets that ideas and art are social products.

Like Flaubert and Baudelaire said, art is a thing of patience. Because there is not a muse that could endure 18 hours of correction, said Flaubert.

Our intimate theaters for 70, 80 and 100 spectators are really useful for the communion between the actor and the audience. It offers the possibility of getting into the situation, giving the spectator the opportunity to help himself like the eye of a camera. There we have found an instance that a great building does not have. Just like the movies, the spectator makes his own shots, but instead he will not have a very good general perspective. Spectators show a great similitude with tennis or ping-pong crowds following the ball’s trajectory. Our negligible theaters determine a bigger aesthetic depuration, a stiller, tenderer actor, and a scene enlarged with a rigorous attention to the details. Actors and spectators feel each other’s breath. There is an atmosphere of familiarity; theater goes back to the rituality: Cult Theater.

Those who claim that we are making theater for a minority, a theater for the elites, ignore one fact: that everyday at 8:00 p.m. (figuratively) thousands of actors around the world are stepping in a stage, and millions of people are going into a theater. The villager spirit judges the world according to the state of its moneybox.

We are following a game, a ritual that humanity started since its origins and got to its highest peak during the ancient Greece. Today it is continued, and humanity comes to live it again. It always will. Names shine in our family tree: Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides, Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, Calderón, Molière… our grandfathers. We are not making a bastard art. Only few jobs can present names like these, we descend form them and they reincarnate in us. We say it proudly, with a Dandy air.

The preoccupation about a theater that show us “real characters”, that speak the language of the people, is a democratic preoccupation that has nothing to do with aesthetics, an occupation that searches for an ideal language. Science and art do not speak in a common language because their final purpose is the universe and the mystery; science as a process of perfection; art as a path to utopia, the best world possible. The territory of science is the study and correction of nature; the territory of art is the dreams.

Shakespeare brought us near to an idea of man. Bach brought us near to an idea of God, the indemonstrable.