Paper presented at the event Latin American Scenic Space

Sao Paulo, Brazil, November 10-14, 1998.

FROM REPRESENTATION TO PARTICIPATION

THE SEMIOTICS OF SCENIC DESIGN AS A DETONATOR OF SOCIAL CHANGE

 

I have been asked to talk about current set design in my country, and its projection to the future. But since I am not a critic, nor an expert in the arduous task of evaluating, I will briefly contribute with an inventory of the most important tendencies in the recent history preceding me, at least to try to understand where the present comes from.

Traditionally, fine artists have made the greatest contributions in the field of scenography. I am obliged to mention just a few names: Jacobo Borges, Marisol Escobar, Alejandro Otero, Mercedes Pardo and Asdrúbal Meléndez. A second current is represented by architects borrowed to the field of set design, who, with only a few exceptions, understand very little about the inherent problems to the theater and its meaning, apart from heights and scale protractors. A third current arrived in waves, depending on the political fluctuations at the ‘South Cone’. Migration of Uruguayans, Argentinean and Chilean artists who, unfortunately and giving them their due, have not made substantial contributions in regard to innovative language or a methodology that helps to organize a line of thought. Exception made of Rafael Reyeros who (having nothing to do with migratory waves) worked beside Carlos Giménez at the Rajatabla Group, contributing an important scenic proposition.

But the future in this field is hard to foresee, because of the lack of coherent cultural policies in the realm of education and development on the part of State organisms. I mean to say, nowadays Venezuela has 56 Big Leagues baseball players, besides more than a hundred young men prospects signed in minor leagues. It so happens that in Venezuela, baseball has achieved the three stages needed for the development of any discipline: education, scope and sphere of activities. Education for since childhood, families in all social strata get their kids registered at the children leagues. Scope, because to be a baseball player is a respectable profession, demanding discipline and perseverance. Sphere of activities, because its range does not stop at the country’s frontiers. Any Venezuelan kid dreams of making it to the Big Leagues or the Caribbean Series. These conditions do not exist for the theater maker, so I will circumscribe myself to talk about my personal experience on talking about theater in Venezuela.

For some unknown reason, I started acting at the age of fifteen. It was street theater. More specifically, we played under a bridge, a pedestrian crossing, we took over on weekends to show the results of our rehearsals. That was in 1964. I lived among performances, happenings, biomechanics and Grotowski’s researches coming to us through the ‘Universidad Central’ theater group. In 1969, I left for London with seven thousand Bolivars and a one-way ticket. I wanted to study Design at the Royal Academy. But I could not make it, much the less could I afford it; instead, I was admitted at The Place, Martha Graham’s theater and school, where I managed to exchange lessons for work.

Two years later I returned to Venezuela, insisting on acting, and I remained acting, with ups and downs until 1976, when I moved to New York, once again with the intention of studying set design.

This time, I had the support of an official institution (FUNDARTE) to cover my expenses, therefore, I entered New York University, where I found a small but lively Design Department, with professors who followed a tradition closer to the European thought currents than to the technicality dominating the rest of the universities offering Theater Design Departments. Still holding to my acting experience, that same year I met one of this century’s most important directors and thinkers, Richard Schechner, with whom I had the opportunity of attending a workshop.

It was during that period that my theatrical foundations consolidated, in the shadow of people like Lloyd Burlingame, bearer of the Jungian tradition of Robert Edmond Jones and designer of historic plays like Peter Brook’s ‘Marat Sade’. Sally Jacobs, also designer with Peter Brook of unforgettable plays like ‘Marat Sade’, ‘Birds’ Conference’ and ‘Ubu Roi’ among many others. Or John Gleason, lighting professor, who taught me how to think without formulae, to understand light as a problem of ideas and point of view, of life commitments and not of lekos and fresnels. From Richard Schechner I keep the most solid foundations, when in his course on Performance Theory he forwarded us his manuscripts, today fundamental books in the making of our cultural thought.

With this education I returned to work in my country, confronting design as a total vision as long as circumstances allowed it, that is, designing the whole production conception: scenography, lighting and costume. From this period dates a job I consider a success, which became for me an obligate reference in future years: Moliere’s ‘Tartuffe’. There, for the first time, the elements that would develop in my work years later in all their strength, such as transparence and the unveiling of structures, began to appear.

I started working at the ‘Teatro Teresa Carreño’, which had opened as one of the most important theater houses dedicated to opera in Latin America, devoting myself with immoderate furor to lighting design. My passion for light became an obsession. Nevertheless, the restrictions imposed by a salaried job, the ill-planned seasons leaving me no space or time to develop my designs, and the mediocrity of State bureaucracy, led me to a self-imposed exile. I went to live at the Gran Sabana, Venezuela’s frontier with Brazil, where I remained for four years without electricity, applying myself to the study of light in nature and to breed bees.

But a theatre animal does not surrender. Like the bee, I felt again the call of the beehive and I returned to design, this time with a knowledge that had been digested and decanted by time and distance, and having established clear priorities and commitments. With the freedom granted to me by self-commitment. With the certainty that my first commitment was with my principles and the things I believe in and value. With no return.

Having been an actor gave me a different vision on design. The perspective of someone who knows where is the theater’s focal point. There is no theater where there is no actor and no spectator. All the rest is disposable. Lope de Vega has given the most accurate and unadorned definition: "Two players, four planks and one passion." How to confront design from this perspective? Theater design is not a problem of architects or painters, sculptors or artisans, but of poets. And of course, by poet I do not mean the verse-writing artist, but the poietes, the creator. And if culture itself is a poiesis, the result lies not in things, but in possibilities. An artist does not create objects; he creates by means of objects (Rank). "A theatrical design has no life in itself. Its emphasis is directed towards performance. It does not exist in the player’s absence". (Robert Edmond Jones. 1941).

So, feeling free and dispensable, I started on a road that I can refer to today. It aimed towards essentiality and the primogenial in opposition to artificiality and mimesis. To unveil, to discover, to show ourselves in a common and essential origin that could identify us. To think about what is honest and real as a mean for communicating emotions. But where does that original, true, honest act dwell?

I deepen my knowledge by researching the origin of the art that occupies us.

"Theatre is the first human invention. Theater is born when a human being discovers he can observe himself. When he discovers that in the act of seeing he can see himself, see himself in situ, see himself seeing.

An animal hunts its prey, but it is not capable of self-observation. When a human being hunts a bison, he sees himself in the act of hunting, which is why he can paint a picture of the hunter -himself- hunting the bison. He can invent painting because he has invented theater: he has seen himself in the act of seeing. An actor, acting..." (Boal. 1995).

But why does he paint? What is he marking when he paints? More than the indication of a reflexive act, there is the marking of a special place, a place with a special meaning, a meeting place, a place for encounter and celebration. Words that become key when we search for the original act. Meeting, celebration, encounters; in short, performance, as defined by John McAloon:

"More than entertainment, more than didactic or persuasive formulations, and more than cathartic indulgences. They are occasions in which as a culture or society we reflect upon and define ourselves, we dramatize our collective myths and histories, we present ourselves with alternatives."

I understood theater as an organic process, where truth lied within my content, my subjectivity, my guts, my vital organs, and where reason could only help me in carrying out what intuition and emotion pointed out to me. Artificiality avoids risks, and there can never exist committed theater where there is no risk. Up until now, at least in Venezuela, at least for me, theater was oriented towards representation, narrative, the enclosing and the construction of subjects in a physical and psychological space, the domain of codified structures and symbolism.

The concept of performance, defined as behavioral modes that are repeated and socially sanctioned, led me to think that the difference between doing and performing lies not in the framework of the theatrical versus real life, but in an attitude. We can carry out actions without thinking, but when we think about those actions, when we watch ourselves, this introduces an awareness that gives them a quality of performance. This suggests that it is extremely difficult and particularly useless trying to make a distinction between the real world of ‘responsible’ actions and the imaginary realm of play and performance. Objects and actions in performance are not totally real or illusory, sharing instead aspects of both. It is not as the simple theory of making believe suggests, where the spectator is involved in linking his being to the illusion; it goes beyond that, linking him to a type of reality that maintains a tension between what is mimetic and what is real. Richard Schechner has expressed this binocular situation in a memorable manner, in terms of a double negation: "Within an event’s framework, a performer is not-himself (due to the operation of illusion), but he is also simultaneously not not-himself (due to the operation of reality)". Performer and audience operate equally in a world of double awareness.

Performance undoes or deconstructs theatrical competence, codes and structures. Even though it starts with the theater’s material -codes, bodies seen as subjects, actions and objects involved in meaning and representation- it breaks these meanings and representational relationships to allow the free flow of experience and desire. There is nothing to be trapped, projected or introjected, except by flows, networks and systems. All the rest appears and disappears as a galaxy of transitory objects representing only the failure of representation. Performance attempts to incite synesthetic relations among its subjects.

The creation of meaning, then, made no sense when what was attempted was to subvert the representation. I had to concentrate on creating significants that would trigger in the spectator a collective imaginary, entities in which to identify processes. Ethnographic evocations that would lead him to ponder through emotion, and this emotion, in turn, should lead him to his social transformation which is, ultimately, the ulterior aim in the creation of an event. When what we want is to produce realities that are different to the one we are referring to, because to pretend, to present, to reproduce or to represent a reality is impossible.

In 1993, I was invited by José Ignacio Cabrujas -with whom I had worked on three previous occasions as opera and theater lighting designer - to design C.W. Gluck’s opera ‘Orpheus and Eurydice’. The Cultural Complex ‘Teresa Carreño’s concert hall ‘José Félix Ribas’, posed a hard to gnaw bone because of its asymmetry and the stage’s completely irregular shape which on top of it, lies sunk in the manner of an amphitheater.

This opera, first staged in Vienna in 1762, with its extraordinary musical mellowness, introduced radical changes in the Italian tradition ruling at the time. Contradictions started to mount. A modern concert hall intervened by a contemporary kinetic artist, Jesús Soto; a mythological theme describing a journey of terrible scenes and encounters: the tragedy of an impossible love and sweet and delicate music. The hall lacks an orchestra pit. José Ignacio did not want the chorus on stage and, besides, we had very little space. The singers must be able to see both the conductor and each other, for the musical entries are very complex. There is just one stage entrance and a half balcony in one of the laterals communicating with stage level by an internal staircase. Due to the kinetic soffit covering the whole hall, there are few possibilities of hanging lighting instruments above the stage.

My proposition -based on an absolutely visceral communication with the space, the problems outlined and adjusted to the principles above mentioned- took José Ignacio by surprise. A spiral starting from the useless lateral balcony - from which I removed the railing- and ending at the only backstage entrance. I inverted the spiral’s stilt so that the ramp’s slope faced the raised auditorium. The orchestra gained its ‘pit’ at the spiral’s center, and the chorus its space on a set of scaffolding attached to the back wall. A vertical space, virtually snatched away from the stage. The ramp, a structure made of pipes with orthogonal and pivoting clamps, was lined in expanded steel mesh which made it transparent. The chorus space was covered in webbing net. The conductor, Philip Picket, was placed at the low end of the spiral, so the singers were able to see him from any point on the ramp. Several reflectors on the ground and underneath the ramp helped me to create atmospheres, and above the stage, four Intelabeams (moving lights) substituted for the lack of bars or grid. The result was a scenography that happened and by contrast the music and the voices achieved unsuspected sonorities against the scaffolding and the iron. The orchestra at the center gave the singers and auditorium possibilities that would have never been achieved in a baroque theater. The Intelabeams gave a magic accent to the story, creating contemporary hells contrasting with a costume design that combined baroque costumes with a romantic and Chopinian Orpheus and striped lycra tights in black and silver for the extras.

After this successful encounter, Cabrujas invited me to take part in a dream that was being born: El Teatro del Paraíso, with the Teatro Profesional de Venezuela. The theater: a hall built during the 50s in the model of Italian communal theaters, with 500 people seating capacity, restored and technically improved. The Teatro Profesional de Venezuela was the resident/managing group.

I must stop at this point to talk about synchrony. How at some point four or more people, without deliberately planning it, enter in a sort of wavelength where parts interlock producing the search for a common language that identify ourselves with the task of producing a highly professional quality theater with a clear intellectual conception, directed toward a big audience. The first play on which we worked: ‘El Pez que Fuma’ (‘The Smoking Fish’), by Román Chalbaud was a stage adaptation of a film script by Cabrujas himself adapted in turn from the original theater play. A story taking place in a roadside whorehouse. A story of everyday events, expressing in popular language the tragedy of characters dragged down by jealousy and betrayal. An almost folkloric tragedy with multiple locations and a cinematographic rhythm.

Nevertheless, no theater, film or television staging can ignore its context and the milieu in which it is expressed. Theater has to compete with the spectacularity of cinema, television’s hypnotic seduction and the astonishing world of thematic parks such as Disney World. My way of competing is by involving the audience in the creative act.

In the making of this multifocal, feminine scenography, a scaffold, a division, a color extension, intuits in advance the movement of bodies in space. I wanted to create a reality where the illusory is not present, but suggested. Each tying, each fabric, each joint, shows with ease its irreverence towards what is mimetic and representational. It is in this sense that scenography achieves the crystallization of the staging: by synchronizing all scenic effects as significant effects. An anthropological, indicant reading in which the audience fills in the silences with their own sounds. "Pleasure lies not in watching reality dissolve in the misè-en-scene, but in acknowledging the dialectic tension between reality and mimesis" (Alisa Solomon. 1997).

The scenography’s multiple spaces (about fourteen, in four levels) and their constant use, obtained through lighting an interactive link allowing an uninterrupted fluidity of systems. A self-sufficient ecosystem where the day uncovered the everyday promiscuity of the kitchen and common bathrooms, and the night, the masqued sordidness of make-up and the bar’s Chinese lanterns. A scenography so charged with evidence that even when visited in the absence of the players, it worked like ethnography in the language of installations.

I quote Abdel Hernández (1994):

"In the business of Latin American Theater, the use of space simply as support, as landscape and even as a direct, flat translation of the play’s literary content is typical. There are very few cases in which, having fulfilled the scenic conciliatory rules, a higher level of participation is explored and an active search for the audience’s decoding experience is undertaken. This recurrent vision of scenography simply as support and environment is made evident, above all, in those plays whose acting, playwriting and narrative repertoire originates on realistic and naturalistic poetics. Precisely because when a play emphasizes dialogue, the recreation of period environments, history and psychology, there are less possibilities for interpretation and recreation for the set designer and for all the professionals involved in its staging."

At the end of the successful season of ‘El Pez que Fuma’, Cabrujas suggested García Lorca’s ‘The House of Bernarda Alba’.

It was a matter of discovering, unveiling, avoiding artificiality to show the entities composing our collective imagery, to transform quotidian events into an exciting act, to support the player, for everything starts with him, and to avoid a naturalistic proposition that would function simply as a decor. There was no adaptation from the original text, it was García Lorca to the last comma. And despite this, we had very few discussions and exchanges regarding these problems. From the beginning, we all intuitively knew the play should be located in a Venezuelan town. I suggested Clarines; José Ignacio, Carora. Both, towns with a more than three-centennial tradition, closed, rural, conservative societies. I devoted myself to investigate for a period of three months -an extraordinarily long period in a country such as Venezuela, where there is more lip service than reality in the support for cultural research-. The result was a work that is on intimate terms with Chío Zubillaga and Alfredo Armas Alfonzo’s magic realism.

We decided to keep a sense of period in the costumes, without historical restraints. I based the stage plan on the spatial distribution of Carora’s typical houses, very similar to the original Andalucian ones that inspired them. We collected many props native to the region, mostly borrowed, such as saddles, riding gear, plows, scythes, oxen yokes, earthenware jars, furniture, chairs, doors and windows. The materials were extremely seductive because of their beauty and authenticity, but their assemblage on stage could become dangerous if the environment that would contain them was not demystified. I was in a delicate situation, walking on a tight rope between reality and representation, and I had to create the hic et nunc (here and now) of performance. I needed to create the reality of the event where these elements would become significants and not a sample case of our good job as field researchers. I took the risk, accompanied by the production team, of laying bare the house’s structure, removing the walls in a play whose central theme is confinement. That left the actresses virtually uncovered. How to communicate this confinement in a completely open house? What would support them in their relationship with the environment? Thus, I decided to give them an absolutely real floor in order to give them that support, so they could relate organically with a house element to get anchored. We installed clay tiles floor, with a small interior yard marked by the colored cement tiles. A dry tree in the backyard now wholly visible, completed the play’s oppressive psychological environment that was reflected in the cyclorama lighting against which the house’s skeleton was outlined.

With pertness we went on carving with the lighting García Lorca’s poetry and the immensity of the suggested space became terrible and oppressive in the same measure.

Again, the play ran without interruptions, without intermissions, releasing a flow of experiences and desires in which both actresses and audience were involved. We produced a reality that was distinctive and autonomous of its socio-political referent. García Lorca’s play intact in its literary contents reached new readings when the bodies filled the space and the changes produced emotions, synesthetic relations among the performance’s subjects. It is these synesthetic relations that can trigger off a social transformation in the spectator through the pondering on an experimented reality. The spectator watches what is being lived and thus lives what he sees. The actresses, faced with magical surroundings that render visible what is invisible, acquire a new meaning by making their own, in an organic way, the beautiful sonority of Lorca’s poetry, impacting the spectator with a vital experience. That spectator, so drowsy and numbed, set apart from participation because of the slow and persuasive inoculation of cinema and television.

As a way of introducing the next production we undertook at the Teatro del Paraíso, allow me to quote Phillip Auslander in his book ‘Presence and Resistance’ (1994):

"Post-modern performance provides resistance precisely not by offering ‘messages,’ positive or negative, that fit in comfortably into popular representations of political thought, but by challenging the processes of representation itself, even though it must carry out this project by means of representation. It is of necessity an elusive and fragile discourse that is always forced to walk a tightrope between complicity and criticism".

In a similar way, Alan Read has suggested that the theater is not ultimately limited to representation — "the reflection of an existing proposition as though it were a fact- but rather to the presentation of radical and exemplary alternatives and possibilities."

Post-modernism has called attention to this aspect of theater’s performantic capacities, ethically connected to a common interest in the unstabilizing of rules and the dissolution of certainties. Michel De Certau’s description of ethics also applies to the possible world of theater and performance: "Ethics is articulated through effective operations, and it defines a distance between what is and what ought to be. This distance designates the space where we have something to do."

After this introduction, I want to talk about ‘Sonny’, fatefully called José Ignacio Cabrujas’ last play. In it, he adapts Shakespeare’s ‘Othello" and Verdi’s opera under the same name. Not in vain José Ignacio was an operatic music lover and a regisseur of unforgettable stagings.

The story was located in the port of La Guayra, on the shores of the Caribbean Sea, during the 50s, under the dictatorial regime of Marcos Pérez Jiménez. A story about boxers where violence and our representative political system are criticized without being obviously enunciated as a pamphlet. A story of multiple locations, moving from Havana’s ‘José Martí’ Multisports Palace to the square of La Guayra, to Inmaculada’s (Desdemona) room with the promptness of a film script. In this play, one of the most important features of Cabrujas’ theater, the poetization of colloquial language, reaches its summit. Popular characters express themselves within their context and José Ignacio achieves pure poetry in a deeply moving way. To this should be added the dimension of the Shakespearean tragedy, with its almost mythical characters, which have become archetypes in our Western cosmogony.

Already the third time in the same theater and with the same team. This gave me a knowledge of the stage and the space that allowed me to contribute solutions to a text that was handed down to us by bits as the rehearsal period was in progress. Cabrujas wrote special lines for particular actors as a result of the rehearsals themselves. My task was to anticipate events and to foretell circumstances, for the production could not have the same pace as rehearsals and writing, but had to go ahead of them, so that finally the misè-en-scene and the production could be coupled on time for the opening night. Again, the pressures of our country’s cultural policies, imposing a rigorous expenses calendar to its subsidized entities, inhibits the freedom to execute an investigation and a process in the time required by the work itself. Thus does State bureaucracy condition the creative process. Notwithstanding, and in spite of it, I quote the following stage direction as an example of our stamina:

"Music. Domestic interlude in a coastal way.

Time.

An edge of dawn at the square.

Light on Sonny’s home and gymnasium, a large space of long Venetian

Blinds and boxing props.

A fan turns overhead.

Blanca, bundle in arms, waits the time of an errand.

Inmaculada does not take long to appear."

This was the kind of stage direction with which Cabrujas used to describe places and actions. Atmospheres suggested with poetic turns which had to be interpreted to create both in players and spectators the uneven ground of a passionate coastal town imprisoned between mountain and sea, the sweating stevedores, the radiance of light on the beach and the salty stickiness of bodies. I felt plastic on my skin, and I married it. I created a structure providing me with a stage similar to the Elizabethan Globe stage, possessing an inner/below and an outer/above. I created stairs and levels, small pathways and labyrinths, which I later lined with wrinkled plastic stained with rust. I created a new proscenium arch superposed to the existing one, gaining two new spaces on the ground and places for hanging the lighting instruments. A plastic cyclorama, as well as a plastic floor, completed the enclosing of a metaphor made real by the magic of the players. A masculine, rough, scenography, devoid of furniture and ornaments except for "a porcelain dog" or a curtain for a room. An irreverence for logical codes. Labyrinths that allowed the plot to be seen and to hide it. A stained transparence and the feminine as an object within an alien world.

Again, I put the player in the position of creating against a scenography that does not support him in the literal sense, but opens possibilities, creating alternatives. José Ignacio makes use of it in an easy way, challenging spatial codes and transgressing its use as players climb, slide or jump on the structures. And as an accent to this environment, a motorized boxing rink of real dimensions that slides back and forth to the down stage as the plot’s central axis, where Sonny achieves fame, exercises, is betrayed and kills his loved one, later to kill himself.

I must say at this point that I have received more awards as set designer than as lighting designer; nevertheless, I consider that not a single one of my set designs was conceived as more than a means, a huge object to be lighted. I feel that, in ‘Sonny’, light is responsible again for lending a credible life to what would otherwise have been a very unpleasant and ugly mess of plastic and iron. Only through light the instances needed for the system to flow organically as an experience and not as an illustration, were created.

I think that once again we achieved that both players and audience operated within a world of double consciousness where the tension between mimesis and reality causes pleasure, emotion and ponder.

No words can describe the enormous emptiness that the death of José Ignacio Cabrujas, who regrettably passed away during ‘Sonny’s season - "so untimely in the business of passing away..." — left in us. Two years would elapse before we could go back to the stage with an aesthetic proposition that summed up all of our conceptual grounds, and which had been intuitively perceived by Cabrujas himself, twenty years before, in what I consider to be the fundamental play in his dramaturgy: ‘Acto Cultural’ (‘Cultural Show’).

This time, under the direction of Iraida Tapias, head of the Teatro Profesional de Venezuela, we confronted the production of this play, originally staged under Cabrujas’ own direction in 1976.

‘Acto Cultural’ proposes transparence, the instances, the negation of representation, in a text that plays with the comings and goings of actors within these realities: the Board of Directors of the Pasteur Society and their personal stories performing the drama ‘Columbus, Christopher, the hallucinated Genovese’. In it, players and characters that in turn become players of still other characters make the most incisive X ray of our country, its identity and its culture.

The central idea in this play is to transgress. And that idea was behind the outline of the concept of transparence we worked on, which in this case no longer unveils structures or artifices, but the player himself in his two spaces, outside and inside, which become, by means of this display, a double outside with no personal secrets. It unveils the player and the way in which he relates to the happenings occurring behind the scenes and the event. Handling nakedness, relating values with symbols and archetypes, showing the miseries and human smallness in opposition to the great Discovery epic. The small cultural show in San Rafael de Ejido, so similar to the outrageous cultural show of our politicians both in government and in institutions such as the Congress of the Republic. Taking risks, we found in the palace’s halls the cultural show’s essential elements: a table -the one portrayed at the ‘Signing of the Independence Act’ by the painter Juan Lovera, which is exhibited at the Caracas Municipal Council- seven chairs for six actors and an absence and a huge, gold-framed painting: the mural painting ‘Venezuela’, by Pedro Centeno Vallenilla, displayed in a special hall at the Armed Forces’ Military Circle, which describes, in his peculiar style, the most important components of the Venezuelan identity: the Founding Fathers, the Races and the Motherland Symbols. With these elements I had to serve both dramas. The table stood in for a bed, a writing desk, a latrine, a kitchen, and a ship, whereas chairs passed for doors, a confessional box, a throne, bedside tables and, in the ship, as keel and rudder support. The huge painting was printed in sharktooth screen, an opaque material with frontal illumination that becomes translucent when lighted from behind. This helped to display the dressing rooms of the actors playing the drama presented by the Pasteur Society. Actors, who never left the stage, and who, in the course of the season, developed small personal dramas that were superimposed, as another layer, to the ones already described by the playwright.

With this scenography, void of superfluous elements I then stressed a costume design concept which would allow me to transgress the codes of temporality and culture and values appropriation that, as seen from the First World, are supposed to be alien to our cultural education. With the utter complicity of Iraida, the director, I encompassed a panorama of costumes and props ranging from an Egyptian crown to a Miss America carrying a lightning ray. From Velásquez’ Infantas cutout as paper dolls, to High Renaissance and the Middle Ages, passing through American Indians with Nike head bands and Rodrigo de Triana displaying a Nordic helmet and riding trousers.

I entered the instances proposed by the playwright, posing as a designer/character who creates the costumes for the secondary drama: "Herminia: How’s that, my secretary is leaving? And jilting me, with this attire that cost my a small fortune...?" I played with the relations among members of the Board of Directors, dressing them according to their own interests: those of their characters representing the play within the play, and their personal interests. Costumes were made to measure physically and psychologically both for the actors and the characters with which they were going to relate to. I played again with unveiling and uncovering realities that normally we try to keep hidden.

In ‘Acto Cultural’ I synthesize an aesthetic proposition, a way to do theater based on the unveiling of structures, both physical and intellectual, on honesty as a resource to trap and move the spectator; on the social responsibility of whoever summons an event, on the transformation of the individual for the creation of a better society under the premise that all theater is political, on the freedom of creation granted by self-commitment and finally, on the belief that the possibility for social change takes root in the modification of authoritarian discourses immersed in the politics of representation. When the structure of the performative situation itself is acknowledged as being involved in the operations of the dominant social systems, a directly opposing performance becomes highly suspicious, because there is no outside from which to operate. Incapable of moving outside the operations of representation and thus unavoidably involved in its codes and reception adjudgings, today we have to resist or, moreover, to subvert these codes and adjudgings from within. The key to this orientation lies in the operative concept of performance itself, which, like any restored behavior, simultaneously opposes and rewrites pre-existing models.

I do not care whether there is novelty in this proposition. It is no longer a matter of being original. Its value lies in implementing its statements and in how the praxis transforms us. In a world dominated by logocentrism and post-colonialist practices, by the production of thought in the developed centers, only the strategic alliance of the periphery, of the borders, can produce substantial changes in the dialogue with them. We can only attain universality if we start from our own subjectivity, our local contents and the socio-political referents in which we happen to live. In this era of globalization, of exchange of information as a mechanism for development, we must rescue for our work an agency dimension as far as the discursive activity is a form of social activity, an activity in which we attempt to apply the roles of the discourses we assume, placing ourselves plainly face to face with our responsibility as historic actors. Maybe all this arises from my feeling of being ill represented in society.

 

Fernando Calzadilla

Caracas, October 11, 1998.