Vol. xxiii #4

December, 2002

Carlos Mario Castro

You know, dear reader, that when I was little the spirit of Christmas arrived in my barrio with the cold winds of late October (which nowadays aren't so cold). We children were happy because the school year was about to end, and we celebrated by constructing kites and from the top of a small hill we set them flying and delighted in their dips and skips in the wind. The late afternoon sparkled with the rainbow colors of those kites. The radio and the television began to spread the sounds of Christmas airs like The Little Drummer Boy and the strains of Silent Night filled the air like a peaceful murmur from a distant place.

The first lessons that helped me begin to decipher the true message of Christmas didn't come from mid-morning Sunday sermons; nor did they come from the wise piety of my grandmother, whose teachings were a prime factor in my early formation. The most sublime interpretations of Christmas which rekindled in me a youthful hope came from a short story and a play.

During a Christmas season many years ago, without realizing it I first met Oscar Wilde in the form of one of his short stories, The Happy Prince, presented on television as part of a special of Christmas tales. I remember vividly how I was moved by the generous dedication of the Prince to alleviating the pain of the poor whom he had never known in life, and the knot in my throat as I contemplated the beauty of the friendship and love of the Swallow, determined to accompany the peeling statue of the Prince and paying no heed to the severity of the winter cold. From that story and others like it, repeated innumerable times during the carefree years of my childhood, I came to understand the meaning of Christmas as a time of unexpected and surprising human miracles, a time when the spirits of profound goodness and solidarity awaken from their slumbers .

Many years later, in December 1991, in a humble village church in the humid far north of Honduras, the experience that Wilde's story had sparked in my childhood flamed up anew. This time it wasn't television that led me to a deeper understanding of the message of Christmas; this time it was teatro la fragua. Navidad Nuestra,the colorful and original adaptation of the story of the birth of Christ, opened up for me a whole new vision. Before my eyes the letter of the Gospels blossomed with a vigor and a tenderness I had rarely experienced. In the course of the presentation you saw clearly that the Gospels were written to be proclaimed aloud, narrated with force and beauty and joy and rhythm like teatro la fragua did it that chill night in December. Rarely have I seen people's eyes glow with the complicity and the enthusiasm which that audience radiated during the performance of la fragua, hanging rapt on every scene, every word, every song and every dance used to tell the human and symbolic events surrounding the birth of Christ.

In the evenings families would blow the dust off boxes that guarded clay figures and sawdust that would serve as the raw materials for the construction of the nacimiento. Even today the nacimientos are a prodigal display of creativity and fancy, imaginative versions of our own villages created from cultural scraps discarded from every-which-where, in which bad taste is intimately entwined with an exotic tropical beauty.

Navidad Nuestra is a part of the project ĦEl evangelio en vivo! which also includes the work El asesinato de Jesús,presented every year during Holy Week. This project was born in 1984 thanks in part to the support of Padre Fernando Bandeira, at that time pastor of the parish of El Progreso where la fragua is based. Fernando was a Jesuit who at one time had been a leader of the worker-priest movement in Spain. He was one of those men who possessed an amalgam of talents which are difficult to find in the same person: an enviable instinct for pastoral work, a sense of originality and good taste for construction (the churches of El Progreso bear witness to the sobriety and freshness of his vision), and the ineradicable vice of reading late into the night. Fernando shared the opinion of Cervantes that "the finest voice in the world loses some of its karats when it is not accompanied by an instrument, be it the guitar or the harpsichord, an organ or a harp." And so he encouraged Jack Warner to take his teatro into the churches and to dramatize the Gospel stories. Fernando's impulse got the project rolling that with time has become the heart of teatro la fragua, the project which has defined its style and its theatrical identity. Every time I have seen or acted in Navidad Nuestra or El asesinato de Jesús, it has confirmed anew my conviction that the voice of the Gospel gains more "karats," more life and seductiveness when it is garbed in this narrative style: the music, the rhythm, the color and dance of teatro la fragua.

la fragua invokes the memory of many traditions of the interpretation of the meaning of Christmas, giving the work a universal character and highlighting the message of hope in a way that can be clearly understood by all, regardless of their background or cultural level. Navidad Nuestra insists that Christmas is the revelation of the Good News for all humanity, a revelation that excludes no cultural tradition. As a result, the work is a colorful and joyful theatrical mosaic that weaves together multiple strands of traditions created throughout the world to celebrate Christmas. Following the lead of painters like Peter Bruegel, whose recreation of the census in Bethlehem takes place in the snowy winter of the Low Countries of Europe, la fragua situates these ancient traditions in the context of the Honduran tropics. This is the continuation of a tradition that was brought together in the XIX century when P. José Trinidad Reyes systematized in the form of pastorelas the expressions and rites used by Honduran campesinos in their Christmas celebrations. These pastorelas established the bases for the birth of theatre in Honduras.

In those olden days it was customary for us children to write letters to the child-God (the Market-God and Santa Claus had not yet retired him from his post as mailman). They were naïve letters, naïve like we who wrote them with a lead pencil and an uneven hand to ask the child in the crib for all sorts of extraordinary presents. There was humanity and there was magic in that Christmas ritual; those innocent requests included toys, of course, but also begged for other presents a lot harder to come by, like world peace and fraternity among all peoples.

Navidad Nuestra captures the spirit of the Christmas season, a spirit rich in nostalgia and sadness, imbued with a deep longing for communion and companionship and goodness. In the shadow of those feelings the work opens in the darkness into which bursts the light of the birth of Christ: the stage vibrates with the chords of a Mozart adagio (the octet for winds K. 361) and three actors proclaim the prologue of the Gospel of John, while the rest of the company fills the stage with a choreographic montage of images which invoke a visual summary of the Christian history of salvation. A history full of the human predicament (all too human at times) and replete with symbols whose horizon signals the conviction, thoroughly devaluated in our era, that love and the commitment to bettering our human situation and directing it into the paths of peace and justice will be reborn even in these times; that they will be made flesh and committed action in the lives of many persons throughout the world. A message of hope in a time when war, hate and violence lurk around every corner in our globalized "civilization".

la fragua also makes use of Christmas theatrical traditions that arose in Europe in the XII century (in Jack Warner's reading of theatrical history, the era when theatre was re-invented in monasteries and churches). Concretely, la fragua incorporates the Auto de los Reyes Magos, a classic text from Spain given new youth by the energy of the actors who proclaim it with the accent and intonations of Honduran Spanish to the rhythm of a catchy reggae beat. Another medieval text which the teatro incorporates is Rex est natus from The Play of Herod,used for the massacre of the innocents, one of the strongest and most dramatic moments of the piece. I am Salvadoreño and it is impossible for that scene not to conjure up images of the civil war in El Salvador, and very specifically of the Río Sumpul massacre in 1980, when troops of the Salvador army ripped children from their mothers' arms and impaled them on their bayonets and the river ran red with blood. Much of the dramatic force of the scene comes from the fact that the song Rex est Natus is left in the original Latin, an eerie martial intrusion that rivets the attention of the audience, making them relive that moment of horror repeated so many times in our history.

In Matthew and Luke there are two different versions of the genealogy of Jesus, lists of the men and women from the Old Testament of whose stock Jesus is born. The text is a heavy one and its important message (the brotherhood of Jesus in this family of the not-exactly-perfect) is hidden from readers who don't understand why such a text is even included in the Gospels and remain simply bewildered by all those weird names that are so difficult to pronounce. In Navidad Nuestra this soporific genealogy is converted into one of Eminem's greatest hits as the actors break into the dance steps and rhythms of rap to narrate the list to the audience; and the rap style established here continues afterward to drive forward the narration of key texts of the infancy narratives.

Joseph and Mary come back to life in the mestizo bodies of youngsters in the country and in the city. Every night, accompanied by a procession of the curious and the believing, they wander down streets and alleyways, knocking on doors and asking for shelter. A rite which reminds us of the importance of hospitality in a civilization where it is dangerous to be a foreigner; a rite which insists on the importance of the common bonds we share as a civilization and as human beings, those bonds which transcend all national or cultural barriers.

An essential component of Navidad Nuestra, apart from the shows of the professional group, are theatre workshops in which the actors of la fragua train groups of youths in rural and urban parishes in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. November and December are the months in which there is most demand for these workshops. Over the years the workshops have become a therapy that awakens the creativity of those massive sectors of youth who have little or no access to education and culture. But the workshops are also laying the foundation for a serious theatrical tradition in Honduras; through them thousands of young persons have experienced their own liberation and formation. Theatre has become a door through which many young Central Americans have learned to master their bodily expression and have discovered the power of the imagination, which has made it possible for them to enter into contact with the artistic and cultural heritage of the best that our civilization has created.

Navidad Nuestra has helped me understand the fascination of Wilde and of so many other artists with Christ and the Gospels: they are the inexhaustible font of an esthetic of human hope and suffering. For my part I remain convinced, because it has been my own experience, that theatre is a form which here on earth brings salvation to body and soul.