~ Celeste Insell (check out Celeste’s blog http://www.
I was racing towards having breakfast with the director of the show “Amarillo”– Jorge
Vargas. I was a bit late as the conversation between Kendra Fanconi (“The Only
Animal” theatre company – Vancouver) and Jorge Vargas (“Teatro Linea de Sombra”
theatre company – Mexico City) was in progress. I sat back to listen and I took notes
from time to time.
Jorge Vargas was asked about how the play “Amarillo” came together. He said he
started doing political theatre in the 1970′s, when he was at the Universidad de
Mexico. He was also moved by what had happened in Chile, with the collapse of the
Salvador Allende Gossens’ government in 1973. One of the first shows he did, entitled
“Histories in Jail” was the story of a writer whose book gets banned; and little by little
he loses his freedom in order to protect his book.
Somewhere, Jorge Vargas said he got “lost”. He stopped doing that kind of political
theatre. He lived in France for a while and he studied with Jerzy Grotowski (Polish
director and theatrical innovator); which led him down a path that was completely
wrong in terms of what he wanted to express in his work. It took him thirty years to get
back to where he started — back to a work like “Amarillo”.
The company’s method of working is to “create actions – not stories”. Vargas states:
“An actor who constructs, does not interpret- the actor is not trying to be dramatic”. In
other words, the work comes out of physical actions and how the actors interact with
the objects they bring into the process as they create the piece.
He used the example of how one of the actors took articles of clothing and with that
clothing he constructed bodies. In turn, this physical construction helped to create an
image of the dead. Jorge Vargas also does not like the term “improvise” because he
thinks that leads to “acting” rather than “discovering” things through construction.
When he and the cast were working on “Amarillo” they spent three months reading
and having conversations. They talked about the “kits” that migrants carry with them to
help them survive their journey: A back pack , running shoes, tuna, lemons, pain
killers, water and a loaf of bread. Men walk up to 80 kilometers a day carrying these
kits.
Jorge Vargas decided to use film in this performance piece in several different ways.
He used the “top shot” when filming some rehearsals to create a three-dimensional
world when it is projected on the screen; giving you the feeling of looking down on the
scene. This camera angle also creates the feeling that the actors are being watched
by “surveillance cameras” as the camera simultaneously records the live action on
stage. The scenes of trains and migrant workers riding on top of the cars, draws you
into the canvass on stage making you feel like you are part of the action. Images of old
1930′s movies during the depression flashed through my mind.
Later, the actors were told to bring in inexpensive objects to work with and that is when
the candles, water bottles and the sand became part of the rehearsal process. At first,
Vargas did not want to have the sand become part of the piece because he thought
the image was “too obvious”. However, the actors kept wanting to work with the sand
in many different ways, so eventually it had to stay in the piece. To me, the drawing of
the circles in the sand on stage, represented traveling in circles in the dessert, and
always returning back to the same place. To Jorge Vargas and the cast it also
represented the transient – the impermanence of life itself. In the end, we return to
sand and are blown away disappearing in the wind.
Another important part of the play was the vocal sound scape that was provided by
Jesus Cuevas. Jorge Vargas just happened to meet him in a small town when he was
auditioning some other actors. Jesus Cuevas, is an opera singer and the sound
scape he created, Vargas explained, was much like the songs of the black workers in
the Southern United States picking cotton. It is more like chanting. For me, listening to
this sound scape was like listening to the voices being carried in the wind.
I was also struck by the actions of the women (Alicia Laguna, Maria Luna and
Antigona Gonzales) — dancing, sitting in an intimate setting near the warm light of a
candle and meeting with a man (their lover, brother, a friend?). One woman plays
with the fire assuming dangerous positions — risking getting burnt– while knowing that
the man will leave her to scale the wall and cross that border, soon.
In the middle of the play the action was stopped to deliver “A Letter to the Audience.”
This letter was about the exploitation of land that was taking place on the sacred land
of “Burnt Hill”. Jorge Vargas goes on to explain that this location is where the
Canadian mining company “Silver Majestic Company” is conducting “open air
mining”; This mining is polluting the land and destroying the habitat of the White
Eagle, which is an endangered species.
The final sentence in the letter is ” it is not my problem” which the actor (Raul
Mendoza) delivers in english to the audience. Based on what Jorge Vargas said in
his conversation with Kendra Fanconi, I believe this sentence means that like in so
many countries, multi-national corporate greed and corruption helps to create a
situation where it is necessary to leave your native land and try to make a living
elsewhere.
The finale of the play leaves it up to us to decide what we must do to change this
situation. Jorge Vargas tells us that the work presents us with questions. We must find
the answers.
Thank you Jorge A. Vargas, Raul Mendoza, Alicia Laguna, Maria Luna, Antigona
Gonzales and Jesus Cuevas for bringing this amazing work to the PUSH Festival.