Vol. xxxvii #2

September, 2016

A season to regain hope

It is just so, just as it was thought what was thought for whom it was thought and with whom it was thought. The Season of Artistic Expression of teatro la fragua has arrived at its end, at least for this year. Leaving, during these eight week-ends, the mark of a smile on the faces of those of us who assisted at each of the sixteen functions. Every show in itself was a "just so story" and taking off from that particularity, an unsurmountable wager to mark the difference.

teatro la fragua returned to the boards and to its audience to demonstrate that we can create culture. To teach us that there is no frontier when we are speaking of art and that talents are to be put to the service of all and not only an elite few. To teach us that it is worth while to continue dreaming. To bring back the faith in this small country, poverty-ridden and badly informed, which is capable of producing noble persons of fraternal hearts.

It was a season of fusions which were made possible in distinct aspects of the season: in the music, in acting, in scenes among actors and actresses with the audiences, between the old and the new, in dance and juggling, between characters with puppets and marionettes, fusion between the national and the internacional, between the merely magical and realidad, between those of us present at the boards and those who followed it virtually. Fusions,

How to read 37 anniversary in teatro la fragua language.

teatro la fragua has become without any doubt a universal language, and celebrating 37 years is the best proof. But that reading is possible only if we think of perseverance, talent, creativity committment and dignity. Those days are far gone when in an old pick-up they criss-crossed the country with a new proposition re-inventing our cultural life. Crazies, they said, communists they accused them of being, heretics they called them, but the theatrical company didn't stop and and with all that continued singing, dancing, acting and with all that contributing to the transformation of Honduran culture.

It is a new language in the national and international cultural dynamics. If you want to write, project, publicize and share a cultural project you should come, at least once to la fragua because nothing is understood if it is not from a tradition, the impact, the charism and the synergies which those boards generate between art and audience. It has to be read from the scripts chosen, the works staged, the generations of actors and actresses who have passed for those boards or who remain animating them. And that from the great variety of artistic manifestations.

During these years it has been necessary to contend with persecution and violence, with the forced migration of waves of youth who are also actors and actresses, with the financial crisis which makes the arts impossible and with the absence of a state policy that promotes and defines art as an essential part of the development of peoples. But in the face of that panorama teatro la fragua rises up from creativity creating options and betting on allies, from the flexibility which, well understood by them, has not meant renouncing the theatrical identity which defines their being, but rather to consolidate it and adapt it to new circumstances, all of this without the least possibility of renouncing the committment to place a wager with art as their banner, for a Honduras truly inclusive and just for all.

You’ve got to read the history straight through without periods, because in these 37 years tlf has not paused in their zeal to create culture and encourage the arts. They have travelled to every corner of Honduras, staging an impressive list of scenic works and opening thousands of doors so that others, in the heat of the boards, can spread their wings and take flight in the promotion of their talents. Of that I can testify from my own experience.

Theatre in times of war

Without doubt one of the great merits of tlf is its unconditional wager on the side of a society at peace when the very air that we breathe is violence. As a matter of fact the last few years havee seen a diminution of audiences that responds to the climate of insecurity with which we live in Honduras and especially in our city of El Progreso. And in spite of that to continue. Peace is not the absence of war, and that in Honduras is more than evident: without being at war the greatest part of the national budget is destined for national security and cultural projects such as those that teatro la fragua promotes are forgotten because they are not politically income producing and in passing they are critical of the installed corruption.

Honduras bleeds, and part of those broken arteries from which she bleeds have a direct link to the State. A state which permits that partisan political governments rob the funds for health, education and socio-cultural projects to finance their electoral campaigns, their nepotism and the intolerance towards those who are not in agreement with the form in which the country is administered, the country which belongs to all of us. And teatro la fragua, valiently, has not renounced its committment to denouncing this and in spite of the economic posture which that can mean, shouts from its plays that another Honduras is possible, that juridic and just equality among all is not found in the wet paper of the constitution of the present Republic, but rather in the ambience that transcends the constitution which makes us citizens possessing inalienable rights.

-- Chaco de la Pitoreta

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