tlf news

Vol. xxxi #3

December, 2010



Our Christmas




teatro la fragua's normal year of work is bookended by two pieces that we do every year. The work year starts in February (the school year here follows the calendar year, and we follow the school year) and the first show is always El Asesinato de Jesús, our version of the Passion, which we do both in a version by the professional company and in myriad versions by local groups who have learned the piece in tlf workshops. And the year ends in December with Navidad Nuestra -- Our Christmas.

Both of these pieces have arrived at their present state via a long period of development. And that development has defined the theatrical style of teatro la fragua.

Navidad Nuestra began its journey into its present form in 1984. Christmas comes every year, and for several years each November was a time of building on the creations of earlier years. The development of the piece was a result of the collaboration of many different persons who contributed elements of music, dance and theatre.

The piece places the Honduran Christmas in a context of the universal celebration of the feast and the rich diversity of cultural expressions that it has inspired throughout the world over the centuries.

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 Brueghel, 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.

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, 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. To any Central American, the scene conjures up images of the civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala, 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 a show-stopper 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.

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.




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