Vol. xxxv #1

September, 2014

35

35. Thirty-five. It doesn't look or sound particularly special as an anniversary, like 25 or 50. I wasn't paying much attention to it - just another anniversary more - until it started appearing in headlines in the newspapers and the radio and television.

We have just finished our annual Temporada de Expresión Artística -- our Season of Artistic Expression -- in our home theatre in Progreso, always a celebration around our official birth date, 19 July. That was the day in 1979 that we opened our first show. (It was also, by sheer chance, the date the Sandinistas took power in Nicaragua. I remember vividly listening to the short-wave Radio Sandino every night after rehearsals to follow the process of the Revolution.) So the Temporada is always an anniversary season in the months of July and August.

The Temporada is a project that now has many years' standing. Using as a model a summer-stock season, we have a period of two to three months when we have something different on the boards every week-end. To achieve this, we invite in other groups -- dance and music as well as theatre -- to complement what we ourselves have to offer. Apart from giving our audiences here in Progreso the chance to experience the gamut of Central American artistic expression, it is an attempt to develop a paying audience which will support the teatro in the future.

So it was the Temporada celebrating 35 years.

This year the Temporada was dedicated ""For a Honduras at peace."" And it started with an event that underlined the need for peace in what has become the world's most violent country. Ex-actor Herlyn Espinal was murdered the first week-end of the Temporada.

Herlyn Espinal worked with teatro la fragua from 2001 to 2005, while he studied journalism at the San Pedro Sula branch of the National University. From the beginning he aspired to be a tv news reporter, and on graduation he left the teatro and started work with the cable channel in his native Santa Rita, a town about 25 kms. south of El Progreso. He quickly worked his way up, landing a job with a national channel in San Pedro Sula, and soon becoming their star reporter. In this capacity and as news anchor, he was very well known, and his murder and burial were front-page headlines for several days.

Herlyn joins the unfortunate group of people closely related to teatro la fragua who have joined the murder statistics without the front-page headlines: Guillermo Fernández, Jorge Orellana, Walter González, Eduardo Panting. He also joins them in the fact that his murder is unsolved and likely to remain so.

Guillermo was an actor-director who worked with the teatro from 1981 to 1996; he was one of the stars of the film ¡Teatro! Guillermo was murdered in 2006. Jorge Orellana was teacher in the ballet school and choreographer in the 90''s, and like Herlyn was a TV news reporter, murdered in 2010. Eduardo Panting (also murdered in 2010) was the husband of our bookkeeper. Walter González was our technical director; he was murdered in 2012.

The Temporada is a prayer of petition for a Honduras at peace. But it's hard to see any hope that the prayer is being answered.

The ballet school of la fragua has the responsibility of a show for one of the week-ends, and this year was no exception. The school's show turned out to be for me the highlight of the Temporada.

For a couple of hours, light and color, music and movement managed to dispel the reigning darkness.

This was not, of course, on the level of a program of the New York City Ballet - it was a program of young students, 38 of them, at many different levels of development, formation, training and ability.

The conductor of the St. Louis Symphony, David Robertson, was speaking of music, but his words can apply equally well to ballet and theatre:

""Music is a kind of place where everybody's free to meet regardless of what their background is, regardless of their heritage, or regardless of their personal preoccupations. It's this sort of open space. It's an open forum, where you can come and be involved with what it means to be part of the human community.""

One of the outstanding dancers in her category was Angie Panting, 10 years old, the daughter of our bookkeeper Patricia and her late husband Eduardo Panting, murdered in 2010.

In the wake of John F. Kennedy's assassination, Leonard Bernstein defined an artist's duty in the face of violence:

""This will be our reply to violence:
to make music more intensely,
more beautifully,
more devotedly than ever before.""

We hope that teatro la fragua is a worthy disciple of Bernstein.