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Julia Varley: The Coffee Pot
I had just watched Eneyda Villalón's
performance Carolina
de Alto Songo in Santa Clara in Cuba, at a factory where
domestic goods are made. The workers had sat on one side of the
room where I also sat with Gema Castro, the young actress who works
with Antonia Fernández, while some other women who participated
in the Magdalena Sin Fronteras Festival sat on the other side.
Listening to Eneyda's beautiful voice and seeing
her generosity and emotion shine through her eyes at the end of
the performance had made me happy. She had participated in my workshop
and so I had had the opportunity to get to know her well. Together
with many other people, I went to hug the actress in the office
she used as a dressing room.
Before the performance, as often happens in
Cuba when there is an official visit from foreigners, they had
showed us something of the place. In a kind of giant cage at the
side of an enormous empty hall, we had seen how Italian style coffee
pots were manufactured. An Italian had been there many years earlier
to teach how to make Moka machines to brew coffee, and Che had
inaugurated the factory: the many different leaders who accompanied
us on the visit told us all of this. The workers smiled and tried
not to get distracted while the visitors took photographs.
Leaving the dressing room/office I had an idea:
it would be nice if the factory offered a coffee pot to Eneyda
as a small appreciation and exchange for the performance. I knew
that it was not usual to think this way, but I was confident that
the enthusiasm created by the show could facilitate a variation
in the rules and I tried to speak to the leaders present there.
No way. No-one could assume the responsibility for this decision.
We don't have the authority, they told me. But who does? This question
remained unanswered.
In the absence of people who decide and commit
themselves personally only regulations and laws are left as a defence
and way of life. In theatre, however, we are forced to transgress
and find personal approaches in order to create our performances.
There, in the Santa Clara factory, two ways of thinking were in
collision, two ways of conceiving one's own professional survival.
I left the factory sad. This sadness coloured my last visit to Cuba
quite a bit. I have travelled to Cuba many times before, always full
of admiration for the capacity for resistance demonstrated by the
inhabitants of this island and for this society's achievements in
education, medical services and the struggle against poverty. Every
visit has given me something important and I have made many close
friends there. In some ways I feel half Cuban. This time I was there
to participate in the international theatre festival and meeting
of women organised by Roxana Pineda and her colleagues of the Estudio
Teatral de Santa Clara.
The sadness I felt as I left the factory was
also caused by other examples I had experienced of how individuals,
in order to avoid problems, have 'unlearned' how to take the initiative.
We are then confronted with rules without a human face, forwarded
from one office to the next, until we finally give up organising
something that should be simple but becomes more and more impossible.
Not even the leaders are able to change the established way of
doing things.
In the final Round in Santa Clara - the last meeting in a circle
during which all the women who had participated in the Magdalena
Sin Fronteras event spoke one at a time - the tears, dreams, laughter
and wishes to participate again next time, the need to meet and the
thanks were a demonstration of how much oxygen the Festival had provided;
a space necessary for the Latin American and Cuban women as much
as for the foreigners.
In an interview for television I had been asked:
will there be another Magdalena in Santa Clara? I answered that
I didn't know if Roxana and Gretzy, Alejandro and Joël, would have the persistence,
strength and patience to face the organisation of another event despite
knowing how important it is for their group and for the Cuban theatre
women who attend.
The theme of the festival and meeting was "Actresses/Directors".
The theme probably arose from Roxana Pineda's concerns: she wants
to continue as an actress in her group but has begun to direct in
the school where she teaches as well. The theme was also the consequence
of the Magdalena environment where many women have passed through
the same process. They have grown initially in the profession as
actresses and little by little, to satisfy personal needs and the
demands of their pupils, they have begun to direct: Cristina Castrillo,
Geddy Aniksdal, Jill Greenhalgh, Maria Porter, myself... The same
has happened for many Cuban women theatre practitioners: Flora Lauten,
Antonia Fernández, Nelda Castillo...
The questions Roxana put to us were: how did
we become directors, how do we work and how does our craft as actresses
influence us when we direct. The answers arrived in different ways:
through the performances; the workshop showings; the work demonstrations;
in the forums; through the comparison between the abstraction of
the words and the reality of the work; in the need to find principles
and know how to move in the opposite direction when the situation
demands it.
The last two performances I have directed are
with actresses and actors with whom I have already worked (the
Argentinean Ana Woolf and the Italians Lorenzo Gleijeses and Manolo
Muoio). My first need on meeting them again was not to repeat anything
that we had done before. Every time I direct, in the same way as
every time I face a new production as an actress, I feel that to
start I must first leave all the previous weapons, costumes, techniques
and knowledge behind. I need to do this to be able to hear what
the new situation is trying to tell me, to savour its particular
perfume.
I am not a director who chooses themes at the
beginning, who knows beforehand what to say. I use the process
precisely in order to detect this. In the same way as I do as an
actress, I concentrate on finding the truth of the action, with
its rhythms, associations, colours, synchrony of behaviour, music,
oppositions, light, complementarity, atmospheres, clothes, depth,
mystery and objects. I am not an intellectual director who has
read many books and remembers them; I trust more in my intuition,
which recognises in the stage actions the questions I ask myself
when faced with the drama of history and the simplicity of my everyday
reality.
The performances, when confronted by the spectators, don't forgive.
The relentlessness of what works or doesn't is imposed on me by my
director when I work as actress, and I impose it on myself when I
direct. I began to give creative autonomy to a German actor, Harald
Redmer, providing him with different starting points to build actor's
material and collaborate with the different directors that his group,
Pumpenhaus Theater, took on from time to time. I saw a performance
that decided for itself grow before my eyes: Aus den Spuren des
Yeti . The same thing had happened to me with my solo performance The
Castle of Holstebro , which began as a work demonstration and
decided to turn into something different, to tell its own story.
My training as actress and director has been to detect in the work
the elements that indicate a path that takes me to a place that I
don't know but will recognise sooner or later.
In the Magdalena Sin Fronteras, as a director, I showed The
Taste of Oranges . The actress of this performance, the Italian
Gabriella Sacco, at the beginning of rehearsals presented me with
some mystic poems. I had difficulty in understanding how I would
connect with this theme. But the work didn't give me time for this
kind of uncertainty. When the actress showed me how she had concretely
materialised my ideas, how she had transformed words into actions
with dedication and commitment, I could do nothing else but work.
At the end of the process I understood that my not-at-all mystic
experience as a political activist revealed itself in the necessity
of creating a memory, of telling the stories of people in whom
I believe. The performance is my way of continuing to keep alive
my dead friends, of thanking those who have given something to
me. It was important for me to show it in Cuba.
The Estudio Teatral had a lot of support (Thank
you Julián!
Thank you Nelly!) to carry out Magdalena Sin Fronteras , but all
the same they had to solve thousands of problems; for example tasks
that, in spite of having been organised in advance, turned into unassailable
labyrinths: the transport, food and lodging.
In the context of the Magdalena Project's network,
we have always insisted on the importance of basic organisational
details for an event to turn out well and allow the participants
to concentrate on the artistic and pedagogical exchanges. To eat
all together, to sleep under the same conditions, to assure the
agreed technical necessities, to have a common space to meet informally
after the performances, to be able to arrive easily at the work
places and lodgings are examples of conditions that facilitate
the exchange, the reciprocal knowledge and the analytical understanding
of the environment that makes one kind of theatre performance emerge
instead of another.
This time in Santa Clara, especially in the
first days, the division due to the payment systems between Cubans
who live in Cuba, Cubans who live in exile, Latin Americans and
foreigners, between teachers and 'youngsters', between artists
with performances, workshop participants and simple spectators
who wanted to join in didn't help create the Island Without Borders
that this event intended to be. This did not depend on Roxana's
or the Estudio Teatral's organisation, it was caused by the habits
of having to follow rules without a face.
In 2005 the surprise was to discover the strength
of a Festival that invaded the city, among children, old women
and students. This time there were many more participants and there
was an even stronger necessity to find places and times to share
and get to know each other without the divisions caused by the
differences of experience and places of origin.
For example, one night I spent several hours
speaking with Dijana, Sanja and Maya of the Serbian DAH Teatar
about how to transform the words of the teachers and to begin to
speak with more simple and personal terms, about how we imitate
in the beginning in order to learn but after some years of experience,
we attain a different kind of language and should have the courage
to express ourselves through it even though this doesn't give us
the same degree of security. We met not so much to find answers,
but to share the questions that it takes us so much time and work
to formulate.
That night we drank beer, paid in convertible pesos. This is the flavour
that I have left from those days together with the bitter flavour of
coffee from a coffee pot that the factory had unlearned to give as
a present. But I still look forwards to drinking a good Cuban coffee.
The meetings need to continue! Next time?
JULIA VARLEY (Britain/Denmark) has worked as actress
with Odin Teatret since 1976, is an active member of The Magdalena
Project and artistic director of Transit International Festival and
Meeting, dedicated to themes of interest for women working in theatre.
Julia Varley has directed productions with Pumpenhaus Theater (Germany),
Ana Woolf (Argentina), Hisako Miura (Japan), Lorenzo Gleijeses (Italy)
and Gabriella Sacco (Italy) . Julia Varley has written various
articles and essays published in theatre journals, is editor of The
Open Page and author of Wind in the West and of Pietre
d'acqua about her work as an actress of Odin Teatret.
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