Book of reflections on the theater thing

Splinters
by/about/against
the Actor, the Theater and Some National Vices

by: Cristóbal Peláez González

Gestus Magazine. 1998

Translated by:
César Darío Salazar Ríos y Vanessa del Pilar Osorio González - Pereira
César David Salazar Jiménez - Pereira

Final translated version by:
César José Lombana Rodriguez - Medellín

In Matacandelas Theater there isn’t what we might generally call “professional actors” and rarely do we have guest actors. We are a small group that gets together for all the shows and performances. This makes for obvious limitations, but also shows its goodness.

Even now when the GROUP concept is considered obsolete, we can say that it has worked for us and has allowed this association to become a tool in which twelve people – and I say people, not actors- can build a guild of qualities to use the theater in favor of the audience and themselves. An association where problems are also twelve fold, but which just as easily gives rise to the difficult exercise of tolerance, of difference and of shared mistake. Human nature that tends to simultaneous and alternating sociability and unsociability fully reflects in this modest group.

We are not a microscopic society of angels. We are in vitro, as well as human society More so when our work days last as much as twelve hours. Cohabitation, be it in marriage or group, is the tomb of respect and friendship. This understood, we have arrived at tolerating and even loving each other, because we know that “outside” everything is worse.

During these 18 difficult and beautiful years we have spurred on in this association because we’ve understood that an actor’s creative exploration has its advantages amongst those who have long known each other.

If one argues that working with a new team and new faces every time is most fructiferous and exciting we cannot controvert. We are not here to defend or propose truths. In this world we have chosen the art of theater freely, voluntarily and happily. Sharing it with the audience, even if small, is the pleasure of an expression, of a message. To the actor it is the pleasure of hysteria, of hypersensitivity of heteronomy and prostitution, (multiplicity); phenomena not exclusive of an actor, but rather are more latent in him, possibly more self noticeable.

We are not a static association either. Its configuration changes with desertions and enrolments. A high dose of romantic spirit is required, maybe of senselessness, to opt to be a partner in an adventure in continuous decline. Such is why we are not an option for professional actors, for graduates who are looking for artistic and work stability. Dozens of school graduates that approach us flee when they learn about our inner reality: a phalanstery, a naïve and utopian sect, an association of weak and poor people that have wanted to escape – Matacandelas Theater is a fragile raft– from all we were destined to: factories, commerce, workshops, bureaucracy, common activities, and the work force.

We have balked at a destiny drawn for us. That is why our actors are not in the traditional sense; such is the why of our inner social composition.

That is why as a group we have quit the vanity of outward redemption, of “saving the national theater”, of delivering concepts and theories that show “a way” and “creative truths”. Our only reality is the stage that we have practiced with passion, with proud humility, with mystical willingness to share it socially. It’s a work in process, practice subject to verification and review; theater as a scenario of doubt and interrogation.

Limitations in the acting within groups are not unknown: excessive practicality and theoretical deficiency, given that continuous configuration changes make orderly team training impossible. Urgency in production gives us a certain circus nature: learning by watching, learning to shoot in the course of war.

Another danger is that with time, a group actor gets stuck into stiff ways, paralyzed in a style, working as if “trained”, repeating it over and over again in his characters, often all his roles are the same character, single voiced, the same movements, changing only in disguise. Above all, because acting maturity is associated with a great technical use of the stage where the actor refuses – unknowingly – to be and represent another, and only wants to be himself, with his great figure. He fears not being recognized by his own public. When pampered too much, he adopts a pose of stardom.

After 20 years – this is an empirical, simple external observation – our theatrical groups have an air of tiredness. They look wasted due to an extremely hard job. The actor has worn out his best years and on stage operates on “auto pilot”. He has ended up convinced that he wasted his years entertaining a public who easily forgets him. Is there a sadder reality for the actor than Chekov’s Swan song?

This drama is more pronounced when many of our actors end up internally recognizing their failure: lack of opportunities, anonymity (anonymity being already a tragedy for an exhibitionist).

The struggle to preserve and enhance a passion and an ethic is nowadays a death challenge. Maturity simply represents the loss of innocence.

The young history of theater in Colombia is the story of a frightening curve: a brutal rise and fall. Where are the joyful jumping youngsters who used to climb on a stage “for nothing”? Where are those joyful faces that could bear the night, the tiredness and endless rehearsals? Today we are “respectable teachers”, comfortable bourgeois or wrinkled employees who move from one university to another teaching what we don’t know and give practical advice to youngsters. In other words, we are dead.

We have craftily placed ourselves in the normal course of events. It has taken us years to discover that the system is not quite unbearable. We have ended up looking and thinking like our parents, whom we, in deserved rebelliousness, reproached for being inconsistent and done with. This we did because they were in conflict with our vocation which we imagined an island of fantasy far from prejudice and social stupidity. The romantics of yesterday reproached the romanticism of young people. We wanted to “change life”, but it was life that changed us. Dreadful!

Like Baudelaire who didn’t see values other than those of the prophet, the warrior and the poet – “everything else is for the whip” – we have to realize that the public started abandoning the theater, among other reasons, because his prophet-warrior-poet – the actor – has been economically obliged by society to look for occasional work in order to survive, to sell his voice and image to publicity that help businessmen sell their stuff. However, they have never helped us in promoting the theater.

Thus is why we look in horror to the future, the kind of corpse we are to be, given that the decomposition has already started.

Against that spectrum, we at Matacandelas Theater have, for some time now, undertaken a painful war against ourselves, so as not to surrender to lethargy, and to “die lucidly”.

The following transcribed statements are merely glimpses of long conversations constituting thoughts and purposes that might as well seem a creed… but what the heck.

Chain ourselves to the mast like Ulysses and cover our ears with wax so we don’t hear the singing of the mermaids (applauses, success, bragging, importance, prestige, distinction, fame and a thousand and one ways with which society hounds breed mediocrity).
Don’t go against anything. We always become that against which we waste our best strengths.
Discipline, work, enthusiasm.
Moral, social and creative dandyism.
Untidiness of the senses
Shuddering
Heterodoxy
Hate the social system like we hate ourselves.
Instead of scandal, essentiality
Permanently worshiping our elders: Poe, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Andrés Caicedo, Silva, Shakespeare, Ibsen, Esquilo, Beckett, Maeterlinck, Perec, Pessoa, Pavese, Joyce, Kafka, Buñuel, Schopenhauer, Plato, Hitchcock, Freud, Marx, Fernando Gonzalez, Zuleta…
Never stop being kids.
Distrust directors, managers, police, bankers and businessmen.
Don’t complaint about the selection of our profession because the practice of theater is beautiful and gratifying. It makes this world livable.
The Colombian state is inferior to our moral and spiritual dignity.
Non adaptation to the normal flow of events.
Our war is with ourselves, with our own adaptability.
Matacandelas Theater is a small theater, infinitesimal, intimate, for a limited public. It’s impossible to reach out to the masses.
Publicity is an infamous practice.
The strongest man in the world is he who is alone (Ibsen).
Be sublime without interruption” (Baudelaire)
Theater doesn’t recent, it challenges.
Acting sickness, posing, extroversion, and pedantry, should be counteracted by silence, reflection and daily stage exercise.
Frequent contact with children audience purifies.
Do not disbelieve in failure.
Theater: beautiful because it’s useless.
Cultivate leisure.
Art, whatever its expression, has a plenary; intangible and undefined moment: poetry.
Daily whipping of the bureaucrat we carry inside.
A purpose of life, supposing it has one: Playing.
For Matacandelas a performance in London is as important as one in a neighborhood in Medellin.
“Notice for non-communists: everything is common, even God” (Baudelaire)
It’s ok to die – to die lucidly – so that slowly old ideas, as well as irrational obsessions and “ethical” prejudice start to fade. The new will appear slowly and splendidly over our dead bodies. That’s how it will be, that’s how it should be.
The world has changed, man is no longer the centre of the universe or creation, and he’s no longer the measure of all things and is now in bad style. He is a creature at odds with totality. Art tries to justify it. It’s our illusion.
A Hamlet, a Fugue of Bach, Bosco’s paintings can perhaps compensate for the passing of this horrifying creature over the surface of the earth.
Commerce is a criminal practice.
The country can live without poetry, like the pigs.
An excess of reality is destroying us. The actor tries to escape that excess.
His battle cry is the same as Blanche’s “A Streetcar”, as Williams': “I don’t want realism, I want magic”.
Theater can be learned anywhere, except on a stage.
The misfortune of many actors comes from choosing a profession thinking that they can look like the bourgeois’. They want to look like their parents, the businessmen.
There’s too much nightlife in our actors, too much bohemianism of Papier Mache. Their acting is also nightlife, their creative intention is nightlife, and their life is nightlife, mediocrity.
There are directors who rise up by stepping on actors’ heads.
Résumés are necrological files.
Our actors are denied the status of artist because they’re no longer like the sculptor, the painter, or the novelist. They’re artists but they distrust themselves with contempt. They’re now closer to the town crier than to art.
There are two kinds of human beings: the exhibitionists and the voyeurs. The actor’s exhibitionism is natural. Hard work on himself must indicate to him moderation and modesty.
In theater academies the idea of returning to the use of the whip as a pedagogical element should be taken into consideration.
The aspiring actor should be whipped to kill the bandit inside of him.
Our actors barely read or study the environment because they believe they have it inside. That’s strange for a creature that has chosen a profession where “I’m the other”.
It’s true that the government, our owners are no longer interested in controlling certain social spheres, such as, the university, but they would never loose control over television. Actors who hope to sell their charms there should know this.
In our acting academies there’s too much of the Suzuki (pelvic) technique, too much haughtiness, too much tenacity, but little thrill..
A theater academy should forbid the entrance of theater teachers for the first year. There, the new student would be guided by astronomers, soldiers, biologists, psychologists, and cooks, adventurers, ex prisoners, bricklayers, sailors, guerrilla, painters, craftsmen and above all, novelists.
In level two, just music and architecture.
Give me a music apprentice and after a while, I’ll give you two: a musician and an actor.
The reading of good poetry and good prose would be mandatory everyday, like a prayer, before, mid and after each session.
The whole task in the formation of and actor consists in helping him become a stage ANIMAL, which means living with the DEVIL inside. That’s why it’s said that the teacher is an instigator, a provoker, a non-disciplinarian.
The name of every actor is LEGION. (My name is legion, for we are many)
There are teachers of theater who have the physiognomy and the manners of a notary.
There are students who long for the professors’ job. They don’t want to learn, they want the teacher’s job.
Some actors stupidly think that their exercise is one step inferior to stage directing.
What we have plenty of in this country, beyond real stage directors, are dictators of enthusiasm.
More than real actors, viewers excited by theater abound.
Applicable to many groups: “It would be good if all the quality groups went away, so that the only good group would be mine”
The ways of the merchants are also used in our groups: mad scrambles for the costumer. If poetry as a daily practice doesn’t move me, then who does it move?
A warning for theater folks: It’s common thinking that poetry “is everything that is written downwards.” Poetry doesn’t need to be written. It’s said that De Rilke did poetry even when he washed his hands.
Our schools and groups reek of commercial entity. It smells like a shopping mall.
We are imbued by the eagerness for novelty. We should be innovatively old-fashioned, even prehistoric. “The Greeks are my contemporaries” (Borges).
Members of Matacandelas Theater are accused of two things: Being too static in their acting, and too pale. The static issue is an imitation, a hygienic situation against the mobile epilepsy that has invaded the country. Paleness is the result of overwork, of confinement. There may also be certain hint of melancholy: the world oppresses us, it hurts us.
There would be a third instance to point out, “people too detached”. The national association environment, whatever the association, is atrocious.
If the quality of many of our actors and groups were measured by the intensity of their “parties”, we would have the best theater in the world.
Emotions can not be taught, nor can feelings. But you can strive to transmit authenticity, sincerity, honesty, vertigo. I mean, you can strive.
We can be actors until the day we realize we are still suitable for other work.
Government subsidies are necessary, even if dangerous. They have meant economic oxygen. Paradoxically, passion for the work has decreased
Government subsidies can also create a small army of economically dependant people. May God forgive me for what I just wrote.
The government should create a Special Reconciliation Police Force. They would wear masks, nightsticks and in some cases would apply forced labor (a lot of field needs plowing).
Government subsidies relieve us in some way of the burden of poverty, but at the same time they make us look like beggars.
This is a notice for Government employees: When it comes to subsidy money, you don’t give it as much importance as claiming your paycheck.
In theater there is a great drainage of females. It’s now almost impossible to find a beautiful woman on stage. All of them are doing casting.
Television actors time and again declare tirelessly that the theater is their thing. They live with a constant feeling of guilt and apology for the live stage. They have a tired, sad, satisfied and pedantic look. Few show courage and authenticity on their faces. I say few, not none.
Our strength comes from a simple fact: our ambition has always been to do theater, and we’re doing it. Even if we work like enslaved animals.
What kills an actor is the lack of a loner’s strength.
Our soul asks for performance. We give it theater. It needs no more.
Flaubert’s correspondence alone, well studied and applied is a true organon for any art, for any creative profession. It exceeds Brechtism.
We would not have this wonderful method today had Flaubert had telephone and fax.
There are groups that have been doing bad theater for some twenty years thinking that the public is the one with bad taste. That’s called dying with your boots on.
How about an academic level named Baudelaire?
How about one with Poe?
We won’t have a great theater until we surpass farce and achieve drama. This also goes for dramatists.
For actors and directors: live by jolts, from shocks.
Actors and directors lack the serenity and patience of the writer: I mean the true artist.
We should also have a friendly list of hateful people and behaviors in theater. Publishable in 50 years.
Theater is not a fraternity. Arguing and hatred also make us grow.
Actor: refinement, evasive personality. Lacks shape because here humanity nests.
For the actor, for the director: God’s residence is the gift.
For the actor, for the director: the residency of profound is the surface.
Paradoxically, a good actor should keep certain despise for his audience.
The director should stage his show only for himself, the audience comes last.
In Matacandelas Theater a text is chosen and made based on the taste of its actors, their physiognomies, their conception of reality and their capacities. There’s not a previously established criteria. It’s about succumbing to a given text that suddenly appears as an illumination to our existing concerns.
The moment we stop working for Matacandelas Theater a good audience is to be had.
And what if the acting school includes painting?
Our Colombian actors, with very rare exceptions, don’t know about reciting. They stress the “S” too much and extend unbearably the finaaaal vowel. Some of them, many, talk with a strange trembling voice. As if they were copulating. Mostly the actresses.
And talking about copulating, the smell of sexism has invaded the entire Colombian stage, dramaturgy, and ways of acting. A lot of breathlessness and moaning. Repression takes the stage. Urination, excretion, copulation, prayer and eating are acts of intimacy. Poetry is like the act of love, doors closed and without witnesses, like Breton used to like it.
Certain matters force the usage of the metaphor and metonymy.
And for decorum. Read Lessing.
The great masters of art are so because of their use of metonymy. See “Battleship Potemkin”.
Always one for all: a secret. If there are any.
“Movies show us man running. We want him still for that’s when he thinks” (Ramon Vinyes)
There’s something aberrant and horrible about the actor’s profession: He needs an audience.
The question is not what kind of acting, what kind of theater the audience requires. The question is to what kind of acting and to what kind of theater do I oblige on them.
Do not fear being left alone.
The audience is an abstraction.
But is there anything sadder than the ticket office?
The theater – I heard from Santiago Garcia – should be free, like education, museums and parks.
Theater-ism, childish sickness of theater, is about, among other things, talking like it’s done in theater, behaving like actors, doing theater like we’ve seen it in the theater. Almost all theater I see is like a mimicking of the theater I see.
The art of acting doesn’t know just one way. The young person who ventures into learning, from the beginning, joins a “school” a “style”. Facing an orientation he’s helpless.
There wouldn’t be a human being who used up all the complexities of the actor’s art. Only Satan can acquire all the looks, all the ways of the human being. Or Proteus.
For a very long time, the Catholic Church looked down on the actor and condemned him because pretending to be “another” in “another” situation was EVIL, a situation where the human being, temple of celestial spirituality would challenge ONENESS, and INDIVISIBILITY. Such a conversion, such transmutability is a crime against nature. The church was right.
I’ve worked with many actors; not one who could be considered a “normal” human. And if there is, he is not an actor.
Actors don’t seek a director, they seek a father. Orphanhood is more common than we believe.
And what about academic levels with names like Fellini, Hitchcock and Buñuel?
Advice from Lao Tse to any artist: eternity starts at your feet.
The sad urban animal that we are and to whom few things occur, now that we are far from epic times, that consumer who divides his days between movies, the supermarket and meaningless everyday hops – this we call life – turns actor to provide his existence with GOD and MACHINE in order to live other times, other situations, rents Himself out for some hours to be Others, the Ideal Me. Because imagination is a muscle that enjoys working.
All written so far and what comes next, deserve not to be taken into account; it is reading to fall into oblivion. It does not constitute dogmas. It is all to be seen yet. Let’s hope it doesn’t work for anyone.

A MATTER OF HONOR

Similar to some professions, there should be a THEATRICAL CODE of HONOR that would prohibit the following:

Black tights
Chinese shoes
Loincloths
Scarves
Allegoric characters (“Violence”, “The world”, “Nature”).
Black eyeglasses
Raincoats.
Adamic language
Theater academies of prestigious TV actors (because of unplowed field)
Newscaster voices
Characters with half face black and half white
Mimes that mimic
Mimes that pull strings
Mimes who palpate glass
Mimes with small flowers
Mimes that smile gallantly at women and give them a poem
Mimes with a painted tear
Tenacious directors who make tenacious experiments
Television actresses who answer when asked how the filming was, “fantastic, more than a team, we were a family” (such an answer should be worthy of jail).
Scenographic changes with a musical curtain and low light.
Actors coming out on stage carrying the chair they’re going to sit on.
Actors who writhe too much because they “feel too much”.
Texts full of lyricism (Ex: Oh, night that drain over my love quivering flesh. Come to me, enjoy what butterfly…etc)
Invasion of incoherent texts (Ex: I love you with love hate, hate resentment, resentment resentment, Wednesday, love nightmare, agreement disagreement...etc, etc)
Festivals to have a cool time.
Scenic vaginism.
Musical curtains with songs from Carmina Burana.
Characters that come out from the audience.
Old themes of old ways including a TV and four small theatrical dance hops so that the play be post-modern.
Theatrical dance showing an actress representing solitude with a sorrowful face, slaps her thigh with her hand, then her forehead and spins (Holy god! Where did I leave my gun?)
Brazilian theater actors in festivals who talk like singing, and the girls who go crazy.
Argentinean theater actors who already invented everything (and the Spaniards)
Theater groups that have been to three countries but talk about 40 international tours.
Theater groups that stage 30 plays a year but talk about 120.
Groups that announce their play with the repetitive “by popular demand”.
Actors who desert after the twelfth performance.
Those very creative theater people. (Well, there aren’t any creative people, there are only two requests: discipline and work).
Obviousness.
Story tellers who tell to the likes of student general assemblies of the 70’s.
Stories from story tellers with unusual endings.
Street actors who urge audiences to “defeat sadness”.
Dramatizing stories of Jairo Anibal Niño.
Theater as social salvation.
Actors who don’t comb their hair before going on stage.
Forums.
Directors in presenting their play to the audience talk about “a very complicated” staging “process” that took “a lot of research”.
Groups that organize to take their plays to festivals.
The stink of festivals.
Parties at festivals.
Actors who think theater is the prelude to movies and television.
Actors who believe that an audience of children is naive.
Children’s plays with clouds and tender characters.
All Dario Fo’s plays.
Trends (Beckett, Muller, Kantor).
Theatrical muggings. (At each one’s imagination)
Actors who panic if their show is not sold out.
Theater made to please.
Actors who think they haven’t succeeded because they haven’t found a good director and vice versa.
Characters of dukes, counts and marquises.
Those who hide their mediocrity in a lack of resources.
Workshop-ists.
Those who eternize themselves in nightlife staging “master pieces”.
Qualifying as Post-modern those plays we don’t understand.
Believing a lack of dramatic structure is Post-modernism.
Lacking modesty.
Groups that delay or cancel shows because of technical problems (99% is simply not having anything else to do).
Very angry directors.
Directors who think they know everything because they say so.
Directors with a director’s look.
Directors who show their director faces.
Directors who sit down to watch a scene, put their hand on their jaws and stare very concentrated looking like experts.
Rehearsals with shouts of nervousness.
Hysteria in the openings.
The famous quote: “In that play, lighting is another character”.