Vol. xxiv #1

March, 2003

The year 2002 began with the world submerged in a new war: the war against terrorism declared by the United States. At the margins of that conflict, Honduras entered the year installing a new government, a new model of political caboose which like the previous models -- with more publicity, a heavy dash of cynicism and little realism -- assured the populace that they had found the magic formula to end poverty, corruption and violence.

Far from the war and deep within Honduras, where nothing of importance ever happens, where no one expects anything good to appear, teatro la fragua initiated 2002 sporting a new dynamism in the midst of repairs to the old building, organizing the calendar of artistic activities for the year, checking out the Central American countries where workshops would be conducted, and defining tactics and strategies (distinct from the military ones) of how to improve the organization and administration of the group.

Heat and dust stamp the hot season in the city of El Progreso. The green of the mountains fades slowly to brown in the first months of the year. Many children and not a few adults flee the heat, taking refuge in the swimming holes of the wounded rivers which cross the city. Keeping up the tradition established in previous years, la fragua dedicated the first months of the year to rehearsing and preparing the Lenten/Holy Week season with the work The Assassination of Jesus. The rehearsals were complimented by classes on theatre history, organized during the afternoons by Jack Warner, the founding director of la fragua. A penetrating and original reading of the history of theatre, which helped the actors understand the theatrical traditions that underlie The Assassination of Jesus, and which have defined the style of teatro la fragua.

Soldiers and police take the streets and barrios of El Progreso: the policy of "zero tolerance", the security recipe of the new government to put an end to street violence throughout the country. Nonetheless, the presence of camouflage-garbed soldiers and police armed with antique M-16's does not intimidate organized crime and its lucrative kidnapping business, and even less manages to control the crime and violence of the juvenile gangs. In this context of "high security", the uncle of one of the muchachos of the teatro is attacked by teenagers who kill him to rob his bicycle, the uncle of another is shot and killed in a daytime hold-up of the store where he is buying school supplies for his children, various actors and their wives are mugged in full daylight on the streets of Progreso. And a vigilant security patrol detains two of the actors who are walking home after work: they are lectured on the evils of wearing earrings, the police rip off their earrings and throw them into a drain.

In a different deployment, groups of actors of the teatro have mobilized during February, March and part of April to give theatre workshops to youth in cities and towns of Honduras and in El Salvador. These workshops strive to awaken the creativity of the young population, and to forge a culture of peace and non-violence. Not in the naive belief that art or theatre are the definitive remedy that will end violence; but there is something in the arts, and particularly in theatre, that gets one back in touch with that font from which goodness flows and which directs our energy towards a different class of violence: the violence of a beauty that humanizes us.

During this time three teachers from a Jesuit school in Guatemala arrived to learn first-hand the technique of la fragua for dramatizing the Gospel, with the hope of being able to introduce theatre as a necessary complement of the education and human formation of the students of the school. For a week they took part in all the routines of exercises and drills of the actors, they watched rehearsals, and they went with the group to study first-hand the technique of giving a theatre workshop. This visit planted the possibility, which would soon become reality, of an interchange between la fragua and the Jesuit high school in Guatemala.

The Assassination of Jesus, on top of sporting a new spiffed-up edition, also sported new faces: two female and one male who had arrived at the teatro hoping to convert themselves into actors. The show opened in the National Theatre in Tegucigalpa, as part of a Central American theatre festival organized by Teatro Bambú of the capital. This was a good experience for the bonds it forged between la fragua and various groups in the capital, where normally little respect is paid to groups who arrive from the "interior" (as those from anywhere outside the capital are referred to there). This experience was the beginning of a constant presence that teatro la fragua maintained through the year in the self-enclosed capital, with a series of workshops and other shows during 2002. The following weeks the same work continued to run in Progreso, for a varied audience of students and people of the barrios, and Holy Week itself saw the now traditional tour of churches in various towns.

The Holy Week season finalized at the beginning of May with a tour to Guatemala, to the Jesuit school Liceo Javier in the capital. Without a doubt the stand-out activity of teatro la fragua in the first semester of 2002. For a whole week la fragua presented its interpretation of the Passion of Jesus to groups of students and their families. It was a comfort to rediscover in that high school auditorium that we human beings are still capable of achieving the triumph of the beauty of goodness and collaboration. The most telling recognition, the strongest applause for the play and the good work of the actors during that week was that of one of the grade school girls, who four times skipped out of her classes to see the play four times, each time with the same enthusiasm, with the same joy and the same enchantment. And meanwhile the newspapers and the television shook with images of Israelis and Palestinians killing each other like flies; and they entertained us with the details of a telephone conversation -- supposedly private -- in which Presidents Fox and Fidel Castro gave eloquent testimony of how perfidiously low politics can sink.

The second semester of activities of el teatro takes off with intensity and novelty: the ballet school gets a new teacher, Christine Kjellberg, a young volunteer from Norway with excellent training. And for the first time the three panels of The Historical Trilogy are presented together: Réquiem por el padre Las Casas, Alta es la noche -- about Central American independence hero Francisco Morazán -- and Romero de Las Américas. With this project teatro la fragua tries to address one of the most urgent needs of our times: to recover the historical memory of the region, presenting it in an accessible and attractive form for an audience, especially the younger audience, who have had little or no contact with the social, political and religious history of Central America. While Edy Barahona began rehearsals of Alta es la Noche, Jack Warner made a lightning trip to Chicago to receive an award for "Excellence in the Arts" from The Theatre School of DePaul University. He took advantage of the trip to consult with experts on the upgrade of the teatro's lighting system which was already in process. On his return to Progreso, his brother Mike (who had done some stints with the teatro in the '80's) arrived to deliver his son Kevin to his first stint (working on computer music programming).

The run of The Historical Trilogy began with six weeks in El Progreso, then moved to San Pedro Sula, in the auditorium of the Museum of Anthropology and History, returned to El Progreso for another three weeks, and the run concluded back in the National Theatre in Tegucigalpa with Romero de Las Américas. la fragua acted history on the stage and in the streets of Honduras groups of teachers skirmished with the police, protesting and demanding of the government a worthier standard of living for teachers. And while the actors recreated the lives and the committed humanistic legacy of priests like Las Casas and Archbishop Romero, or the cry of "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" of the independence hero Francisco Morazán, the mayor of El Progreso, on a television program, celebrated with great emotion (as if it were the most important and memorable event of the year) the opening of Pizza Hut and Burger King in El Progreso, according to her, the unequivocal symbol of development, the miraculous panacea against underdevelopment, the eloquent symbol of progress and modernity.

After the run of The Historical Trilogy in July, August and September, la fragua spent the two following months re-mounting the project of Emergency Theatre, doing shows in the schools of El Progreso and near-by towns. The dramatization of children's stories has become an effective instrument for providing entertainment and humanism to a large number of children studying in difficult conditions, especially during 2002 when the schools of the public school system passed a great part of the year in strikes and protests. For the last couple of years the style and theatrical techniques of the Cuentos infantiles are being used as part of the formation of actors in the National Theatre School of Mexico. The result there has been a project which is a legitimate offspring of the Cuentos infantiles of teatro la fragua, which the Mexicans have baptized as Itinerant Theatre, opening the doors of the academy and taking theatre to the marginalized zones of Mexico City. A new application of the project in Honduras was the presentation of the stories in various fishing villages on the North Coast, in the context of a campaign organized by Doctors without Borders with the goal of awakening the sensisbility of the populace, in an effort to move them to an attitude of greater solidarity and acceptance of persons infected by the AIDS virus, whose number in Honduras adds up to an infection rate that is one of the highest in Latin America.

It seems that the obscure Greek philosopher Heraclitus was right: war is the prime matter of which the world is made. In November and December the United States attack on Iraq seems inevitable; and while the drums of war threaten once again the fragile peace of the planet, teatro la fragua presents a new edition of Navidad Nuestra, narrating the story of how the birth of Jesus Christ signifies the triumph of hope and finally of peace and goodness. During these last months of 2002, the actors also work extensively giving theatre workshops teaching the same material to groups in rural areas of Honduras and El Salvador.

2002 was a year of many achievements, of a variety of enriching experiences in both the professional and personal lives of the company. In the midst of the joy over a job well done, sadness pitched its tent. While the actors were preparing to open Romero de las Américas in Tegucigalpa, Santos de Jesús Cerrato (Chunguito) was dying in a nearby hospital. Death took him without giving us much explanation. He had worked with la fragua for nearly 12 years, 12 years in which he earned the affection of his companions, time sufficient for him to give festive testimony, always with great simplicity and without a trace of vanity or ambition, to beauty and hope. We continue invoking his memory and praying that he continue to accompany us in spirit, helping us with his smile to live life with enthusiasm and commitment.

The year 2002 is now history, and like a necessary change of direction our tracks have returned again over the old road, where memory was awaiting us with the inventory of achievements and failures, of the encounters and good-byes, of the found and the lost, of the laughter and the tears; the inventory, in a word, of a now faded yesterday.

--Carlos M. Castro