Vol. xxiii #1

March, 2002

-Baltimore Beltrán

Know your village and you know the world.
Leo Tolstoi

Those of us who began the workshop called Emergency Theatre: Children's Stories, offered by Jack Warner in the last International Encounter of Higher Theatre Schools sponsored by the National Theatre School of Mexico, were far from being able to imagine beforehand what awaited us in that week's work.

The proposal of the director of teatro la fragua was very concrete: to stage in one week dramatizations of three children's stories using a method known as Emergency Theatre. The method has its origin in 1998 when Hurricane Mitch wrought havoc on the whole population of Honduras, and Jack and his actors felt the necessity to respond. They did this by creating theatre pieces for the children and adults who found themselves beaten and despairing in the wake of that natural disaster.

In order to stage the stories we had to call up all the resources we had acquired up to that moment in the course of our training at the school, since the primary demand of the method is direct contact with the audience, corporal expression and fundamental concepts of stage direction. Once we had been given a basic orientation, communication and group integration were urgent requisites for each of the three groups formed to put together by the end of the workshop a theatrical program ready for presentation to an audience.

The work had a focus similar to that of a course in first aid; the difference was that there was no need to wait for an emergency to happen. For our Emergency Theatre the emergency was already there, present and permanent.

Not the emergency of a natural disaster or a war; rather, the emergency situation of our vast population of children for whom in the best case scenario the only cultural option is television and who (although it seems incredible) have never had the opportunity to witness a theatrical work.

Jack framed the workshop within this reality and emphasized the importance of responding to this constant emergency; he challenged us to carry the Stories outside the bounds of the National Center for the Arts.

Our first destination was a primary school in a marginal zone on the outskirts of Mexico City. We gave the show and its impact was beyond anything we had imagined. The impact was mutual, an exercise of the cycle of human communication, revealing to the audience and to the recently formed company the full meaning of the theatrical event, and creating another emergency: that of satisfying the need felt by some of the members of the group to continue this work.

That first experience determined that Emergency Theatre had to become a permanent project; the feelings we all brought home after that first show confirmed the theatrical dictum that the actor who doesn't seek out his audience is dead.

We were faced with new questions that demanded practical replies. How do you create a theatrical space where it doesn't exist? How do you deal with the unforeseen events that inevitably occur when every show is done in a different space for a wide variety of audiences?

A year later, experience has taught us some solutions to these and other problems and the apprenticeship has carried us further afield to new questions we hadn't even thought of.

We have confronted a reality which doesn't exclude our theatrical activity, a reality which is unavoidable and which poses to us another question: why and for whom do we do theatre? Each one will respond from their own perspectives and aspirations, but no one can escape the essential objective of the theatre: communication with an audience. And the audience doesn't come from who knows where; the audience is part of a concrete community which will embrace the theatre as its own if the theatre communicates something more that they don't encounter in their everyday reality.

This project of Itinerant Theatre brings with it many factors that help us learn what communication really is. One of these is the direct contact with the audience: we are inevitably presented with otherness. Understanding who your audience is and perceiving what they receive humanly from a theatrical work teaches us a lot about the importance of the work of the actor in society. Crossing beyond the borders of the School is another positive factor: your world expands, your reality references are enriched, and so your acting is enriched.

A vacation trip is not the same thing as doing a tour throughout the city (in the case of Mexico City that's saying a lot) with the commitment to doing theatre. Persons, things, circumstances and places acquire a different meaning. It's extraordinary how you can pass a place hundreds of times without perceiving its vitality; but when you arrive at that same place and do a show, the daily life of the place opens to you and shows you all its vital meaning. Your perception is raised to another power and you are forced to open your eyes. For example, the muchachos talk about how in Amecameca, after the show, a señora came up and gave each of them as a gift some of the candies which she sells on the street for a living. This and many similar experiences have left their mark on the company. They understand what that payment means; they recognize the symbolism of the act and it moves them, it humanizes them. I don't want to say they become better persons -- that's the responsibility of each individual -- but that they experience a human contact and that, I am sure, will be reflected in their attitude on stage.

Within the group that attitude is being forged, and mutual respect appears as one aspect that is being seriously cultivated as a result of those experiences. The attitude is basically founded on identity: it's a mirror trick which leads us to recognize others and ourselves at the same moment. When we experience that intimate contact with the children and adults who make up the audience during the performance, that recognition is forced on us and it gives us identity, it fortifies us, it shows us we belong to something, and on top of easing the angst of isolation it gives us something concrete to communicate on stage.

All of this implies a responsibility. A viable theatrical work does not appear by magic. It is not constructed from a series of "inspired" moments, but from a constant development of our acting skills, of a greater commitment to our learning process and to a permanent artistic search: if we ever lose that we have lost almost everything.

As time has passed this project has fortified our conviction. At first there was doubt and even skepticism, but experience has cultivated in us the belief that theatre is capable of that something more; in this case to become collaborators in the developmental work of the imagination, to help open up the world view of children who live a reality which denies them the possibility of full development.

If things are going to be important, they have to be necessary; for us, Emergency Theatre has been transformed into a necessity.

Whenever we do a show of Children's Stories, in a school playground, in an open space here in Mexico City, in a children's hospital or in a visit to a jail, I always remember the characters in the play Ñaque -- Agustín Solano and Nicolás de los Ríos. They can't stop doing shows, no matter how much the times do to impede them, because if they stop acting they are dead. They discover that in the face of overwhelming human loneliness their only salvation is solidarity. And so they continue acting eternally, and in spite of the fact that at moments they separate, they will return together to find themselves anew, to be ñaque (flotsam) -- "two men who bear only a ragged beard, play the tambourine and charge a brass coin" -- because they need each other and no human being worthy of the name can survive alone.

And so like them, our ambition and our hope lie in the audience: we will continue to live via the seed we plant in them.

(Lic. Baltimore Beltrán is a theatre and film actor, graduate of the National Theatre School in Mexico City.)