tlf news

Vol. xxxiv #1

September, 2013



A Season of Artistic Explosion




That day actors and actresses, family and friends, audience and protestors, came together in the street. It was the inaugural parade of the Season of Artistic Expression of teatro la fragua. According to the logic of their understanding of culture, the new season had to begin in the streets. In that public space which the society has lost, snatched away by violence, insecurity, dirt, organized crime, corruption and state sinecure. They took to the streets to demand peace with a lot of faith and the conviction that with justice we can construct a better world for all.

And then it was time to return to the boards, to the space where actors and actresses converge with their audience. To the space where men and women become one in art and we dream of different worlds, or at least of a city of El Progreso which is distinct from the one we presently inhabit. To return and, from the options which art permits us, to think of how we can reconstruct and create another society, other peoples, other cultures.

This year the Season has names and faces, it has identities and allures. The Season includes a hefty dose of social demands and reveals the faces of those who live marginalized lives of poverty, of loneliness and the violence to which we are subjected by the institutions and the public administrators to whom the future of the fatherland has been entrusted. Juana la Loca and The House of Bernarda Alba, for example, are two of the pieces that adorn the schedule which show us in a cultural context how the society accepts and imposes violence.

This year the Season is named Peace. A peace based on justice, justice built on the legality which comes from the fight for incorruptible institutions and ethically exemplary representatives. Peace which springs from respect for the rights of others, from the recognition of human dignity and of the institutionalization of an effort which legitimizes the whole truth and not a half-truth which sells us an economic model that assassinates with impunity the human species and consolidates fictitious institutions.

The Season has faces. Faces of women. Of women who are victims of social violence, violence which comes from men who are representative of a society, a society which makes them human, a humanity which gives them citizenship, citizens who have a territory, territoriality which is given them by a state, a state which gives them rights, and permissive rights which allow for the woman to be mistreated. That is to say, the face of woman violated by the State and all the gears -- political, social, cultural, religious -- which denigrate and condemn them. The violent death of a woman in a country which presumes to be a law-abiding state is the moral condemnation of a society which presumes magical dignity emanating from the gods and which boasts of taking them into account in their system of administration.

And so the Season is about identity and about attractions, because it lets you inhabit the world of others, now not only as a spectator of a show but as the subject of change in the society of our dreams. Talent and art have the floor to denounce what, in this society of impunity, runs the risk of being forgotten. That is to say plays and their actors, their directors and scripts lead us to the enjoyment of art against the background of denunciation.

I would like to finish these letters thanking teatro la fragua for doing it really well this year. But to say it that way would imply that former Seasons haven't been at this level. I prefer to say Onward, teatro la fragua, your contribution to the construction of a society with culture, and from there with social and economic dignity, is determinant in a context and a structure which resists change, resists recognizing that men and women are above the state when the State denies them the right to realize themselves as human beings.

-- Chaco de la Pitoreta





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