Theatral May

by: Omar Valiño

Translated by: by Josué Vélez

From theatral may, from the Casa de las Américas, we will remember "O Marinheiro" from the colombian group Matacandelas for a long time. Even when you have studied or read about poetic theater, few times or any you have seen it on stage, at least in this "orthodox" way as Cristóbal Peláez, director of the play and the company, understands it.

Thats the way Maeterlinck wanted, and then Fernando Pessoa, who following the first, writes this theatrical poem that Peláez gets to uderstand in its spirit, and in its scenic materiality. He finds for the text in portuguese a situation of unique enunciation: those three characters, as came out from theunknown entities, who have a dead body at their feet, and only excange between them their phrases and atonishment for everything that is around, they will remain in the retina of any member of the audience able to open himself to a diferent "theatrical" contact.

Actually, the staging places us in front of a painting, in front of an image that is never completely revealed to us. Lights light as lightnings, maybe because the characters are in heaven, near to God (the tecnic perfection isn't less dazzling). It represents the yard of a house in ruins, or a hill that looks to the sea, certainly an edge, an abism. The characters look in our direction, in the direction of the audience who, as very few times in theatre, are being trapped in a mist that becomes real. Trough this we see, some sort of birds of death, sorrowed souls, fortune tellers who speak without any physical action. They are "sculptured" in the space, but, oh, those words come all charged with meaning, and are filling the heart of the receptors with anxiety, the fear among all present, among all existence.

You can touch the subtlety of every silence, the line of sound from the voice of the actors and it is produced a strong magnetization of the space and the public. It Is extremely wreid an act that can make you feel the mystery.

Who are they?, we ask to ourselves, what are they doing there?(here?), at the feet of the dead body, wich we dont know well if it is a man of a woman, or that sailor they're talking about, who we can not place in a precise time either, because the memory is maybe pure invention and we don't know if the future that terrifies them, is also known memory.

The asociations travel trough infinite paths, due to the achievement of an amazing theatrical grammar, to an indisputable actoral shine, to a risky proposition of a theater placed beyond a trend, beyond a genre, beyond a country, beyond a time, but also, picking up all that inside itself.

I also say risky because we are in front of one of those shows that colud be perfect or simply abominable.

From La Jiribilla