Vol. xxi #4

December, 2000

The goal of the stories is to offer the children educative and humanizing entertainment. The program hopes to stimulate in them enthusiasm for reading, so that they will leave the "theatre" and head in the direction of books of stories, from which they can learn solidarity, tenderness, joy and the human values that the universal literary sensibility has assigned to the children's stories of all times.

The theatrical techniques which have been developed for these purposes emphasize the direct contact of the actor and the audience, artistically integrating values like solidarity, cooperation and love of nature. The technique is the soul of simplicity. A narrator reads the story: the BOOK is the principal prop so that the kids are very aware that all of this comes out of the book. The group of actors provide the equivalent of illustrations, but illustrations in three dimensions that move and talk.

The Children's Stories were conceived by teatro la fragua as a means of attending to the needs of the victims of Hurricane Mitch during the weeks immediately following that ravaging torrent. In his novel An Essay on Blindness, José Saramago tells the story of a society attacked suddenly by an inexplicable blindness. The victims are isolated and are interned in desolate and filthy shelters. With nerve-shattering realism, Saramago describes how little by little these victims are dehumanized and converted into wolves preying on each other, turning the shelters into fields of fierce battle, fighting violently to survive the abandonment and rejection of the society. In his tale the Portuguese Nobel Prize winner paints a desolate landscape of the human condition in the last gasp of the last century, although he retains a timid space of optimism in which break sparks of hope for humanity.

Fátima is a marginal barrio of El Progreso in a zone that the street gang M13 has converted into their lair and center of operations. It lies on the other side of the old train tracks, now abandoned by the fruit company. Along one side of the tracks runs a ditch that serves as the open sewer carrying the waste of the city to the waters of the Río Ulúa. The entrance to the barrio is flanked on both sides of the tracks by dirty and deteriorated cantinas, human sewers where the town machos weep their misfortunes in the ample breasts of fat prostitutes. The actors' van advances, searching for the school along a dirt path that in the rainy season becomes a swampy river of mud. Standing guard on the edges of the street, begging money from passersby, are a few youngsters of the M13 who watch the actors suspiciously. The actors park the van very close to the ruins of what was once the town slaughter-house, which brought to this zone of the rail line swarms of buzzards and filled the area with the nauseous aroma of rotten meat. The actors pass into a narrow alley. From all the houses emanate the sounds of radios turned on since the crack of dawn. They are small and very elemental houses. Outside, in rustic washbasins, resourceful women do the laundry which they then put out to dry on the wire fences.

The distance between literary fiction and the reality which began to be seen in the shelters of the victims of Mitch was not all so great. teatro la fragua saw clearly that it was not sufficient to save and protect the body of the victims with food, clothing and refuge; it was also urgent and necessary to save and protect the spirit of the victims, a spirit worn down by fear, sadness, frustration and aggressivity. For this reason the actors, apart from distributing food, began to organize groups of young people and to rehearse with them small theatrical pieces which could be presented in the different shelters. And the result was what was expected: the smiles of the children signaled the rebirth of hope in the adults.

The teachers are señoras who could be the housewives of any of the surrounding houses; they wear white blouses and blue skirts. The actors ask where they can do the show. The teachers suggest the space of a double classroom. But that poorly constructed matchbox has to be cleaned and arranged to accommodate 200 kids. The actors sweep, another helps the teachers remove a species of screen that serves as the division between the two classrooms, the others move and arrange desks. Once "the stage is set", the teachers call together the children and go stuffing them in however they can.

Such is the standard set design within which teatro la fragua presents these stories. Not all the public schools of El Progreso are as small and unpleasant as this one; but the majority are poorly maintained, with somber classrooms that invite boredom rather than thirst for knowledge. Some have not recovered from the deterioration of walls, ceilings and furniture left behind by the wave of victims of Mitch which used them as shelters. Foreign volunteers who come from countries where state education is in a better state of health are shocked and moved when they get to know the conditions in which our children are educated.

Jammed together, some sitting and others standing, the children fill up the room. In the doorframe the crammed latecomers push and shove to make room; a little girl uses her desk as a ladder to see over the heads of her classmates. A few curious neighbors observe from a window. And there in front of the children, paying no attention to the heat, in circumstances which other artists would flee because there is no space for the movement of the piece, an actor appears and opens a book, looks around at the children, and begins to read enthusiastically: "Many years ago there live in the city of Alter a shoemaker named Hans." The True Story of the Pied Piper of Hammelin has begun.

Edilberto, the singer/songwriter of the group, appears as the ringmaster of one of those travelling circuses that used to go from village to village carrying enter-tainment to the remote inhabitants with no more resources than an old patched tent, an improvised ballerina, a taciturn and undernourished lion, and a costumed monster announced with sensationalist frenzy as the most spectacular phenomenon on earth. This is the homage of la fragua to those forgotten comedians who chanced a thousand adversities -- poverty being the first -- to take entertainment and popular humor to the pueblos. That sort of circus has disappeared in the face of the inundation everywhere of the electronic entertainment media (movies, radio, television, computer games). It is good that today's children know that once there existed artists like those the circus ringmaster announces hysterically, and that they formed part of the childhood of those who are now their parents.

The scene of the circus serves as introduction to the story The Boy who went looking for Yesterday, by the Nicaraguan writer Claribel Alegría, which in a very simple way teaches the children the importance and the beauty of the present. The story integrates songs from the children's folklore of Honduras -- songs which are rarely sung by children today, in the midst of the bombardment of songs from other cultures. teatro la fragua uses the stories to transmit to the children the riches of their own juvenile culture, expressed in verses and children's games which are seriously endangered species.

Montaigne said that children are not bottles that have to be filled up but fires which have to be lighted. teatro la fragua believes that with these travelling stories presented from school to school we are helping to light those little fires which will bring us the luminous splendor of a better society.... We hope.

--Carlos M. Castro