CREATION IN THE THEATER MATACANDELAS

By: Cristóbal Peláez González

Translated by: juliana gutiérrez

The Theater Matacandelas is a stable cast, all actors are in all productions, including works that are kept in repertory for many years, even decades, and new assemblies (averaging one per year) that will add to a contingent tour by the city, by the people and sometimes when it is possible by other countries.

Actors with uneven paths, some with many years of working together, of creating some ideological and emotional esthetic links, allow us to converge on some common questions and some level of internal commitment and with society. The plays are a common heritage, infrastructure and public that we have built up over 28 years of stage (it has been built in 28 years and can be disrupted in a night, we are afraid of that).

The starting point for an assembly is almost never on stage. It will emerge in various ways, it goes by so strange in our conversations, we are persecuted, sometimes obsessively, sometimes comes in the form of a topic, or author, or simply in the tone of a literary text to submit to the test of time, These long periods when starting to speak, read, talk, analyze, we can lead to disappointment or reaffirmation. - If the test of time (maybe three years or ten), is surpassed by that text, or that subject, or that idea, we believe that we can put on stage the play.

- Key point in our creation: improvisation. it is chosen in a collective starting point, a particle will be subjected to endless meetings that will take months when it will look as the first emergency representatively (narrative). Among one and other improvisation, which becomes a wonderful (and frightening) laboratory, embryo is emerging in the esthetics of the show. - It often happens that after half of hundred improvisations (sketch called by painters) we find the language that we feel is appropriated. One third of the assembly time it takes the development of the first five minutes of the show. There are concentrated all the codes. - The Theater as a "not knowing" is a pleasant experience. Under this approach it is preserve the possibility in which every time we go into dark areas, strangers, be prepared for surprise, for chance, for spontaneity. - The rest is engineering and architecture.

- Faced with the overvaluation of the creative there is an aspect that we do not intend to underestimate: the value of social use of the play. It means that today the theater has also entered in the stage of product for immediate consumption and easy disposal. Before immersing ourselves in the new assembly we try “measuring the consequences”, the projection that the play may have on the environment, their socialization.

- It does not mean  that we examine by the outside wondering what the public wants, rather, what we view as potentially valid in a philosophical and esthetic level, no matter who is against the taste and general acceptance. The esthetic will always be an authoritarian gesture. Not popular in the first instance.

- We do not know what it is, what we specifically designate as theatric. It supposes to be the chance of represent something in stage that is capable of sustaining the interest of observers, and get critical approval. When actors perform movements and voices on stage and people watch them with indifference or boredom, we talk about failure. Attract, seduce, remains within the larger human goals, and most obvious of course that the theater is a practice of exhibitionists.

- The compulsion of seduce has marked several addresses in the theater. Technically it is referred as communicative strategies. Playwrights and directors seeking with frenzy to keep the viewer get cough to the chair. Some even use fireworks and other monumental effects beyond nude attractions, jokes are released, the actorsbreak their necks in circus pirouettes. Always here and around the world the horror that makes us the empty seat.

- In the Theater Matacandelas we know that we do not want but we yet ignore what we want. We do not want a theater that is a mere end of reality (it is not an esthetic counterpoint to the reality?), Neither a theater information, or  a theater that is a brilliant scenario where each actor is trying to showcase their creative greatness over the rest of the common mortals, Less a theater that is towing the wagon of the social programs of institutions (NGOs and Public) which try to deal with his conscience, demanding a theater of photocopy of population sufferings, and Less, less a melodramatic theater with Latin American accent, with the odds to be awarded for underdevelopment in Europe.

- Then Matacandelas it will be a dinosaur. Not even worthy of being included in a small program on Discovery Channel .The rest is literature.

- But what do we want? Sometimes digging within us, we have asked if in the background of the stage it has not been a mere pretext to throw literature, pure joy of living word, fascinated by the human voice. O Marinheiro by Fernando Pessoa, one of the plays which have made us recognized (everyone talks about it and few have seen) is a large flow of words of four actresses that hardly waddles (Is this theater? Skeptics wonder where they see).

- The blinds of Maeterlinck, is still in the same line. And we can add to our repertoire, especially the Medea of Seneca, author who had been said it is to read and not to represent. Therefore, perhaps with justice, we have been accused of statics, cold, impersonal. After all it has ever tried to put axioms of theatrical art, but this always makes fun of the formulations. Nowadays, we believe, is marked by exploration, by the excess of freedom. The public and public is a virtual word, is ready to support any creation that is marked by the key: rigor.

- Rigor. It compared to fast and exuberant productions that today are made in the USA and Europe, our collective, so craft, still put so much interest and time to consider or creating joint scores, the improvisations, and distribution of the work. Perhaps, it is because the theater is not our profession but our way of life. We found much delight in the representation as in research time and staging. We are not professionals (and do not ask us how we live, that we can not respond), we do not go to the theater to meet a labor discipline. Our groups in Colombia have been the case; they are extended family, gangs of stage. Very small societies with individuals who live theater as a romantic juvenile adventure, or because perhaps rooted in childhood, we are people that refuse to adulthood.

- The Colombian government and it lets say Colombian government for grammatical comfort, has been emphasizing the need to regulate the existence of groups, putting with a hand, some modest economic contributions and with the other extending laws and decrees that speak the need to take them out of informality. Behind this regulation it is clear, the tax.

- This friendly hand of government is the hairy hand. We went from being happy scenic gangs to become into "enterprise" and an enterprise is a device that creates products and those products are manufactured by workers, and there is not worker in the world, besides wages, who is interested in his enterprise and the enterprise must do business feasibility study to supply the customers about the products they need. And then the theater will be an occupation for most of unemployed people. And it will become into entertainment, ie, in this horrible thing that some people call "kill time".