n2 edition
DESCRIPTION
on ¡Lazaro! travel and collaborationTRANSCRIPT
MAGAZINEDIGITAL EDITIONJANUARY 2011
N2
MASNÀDA ASSOCIAZIONE
Thank youSara Rossi, Manuel Beyeler, Marcello
Cartolano, Allessandra Giussani, Michele Mauri, Guido De Sigis, Barbara Salerno,
Luisa Pedrazzini, Teatro il Foce.
Teresa Costantini, Fundación Arte Vivo, Daniel Macke, Agustina Maruca, Germán
Britos, Ricardo Mackintosh, Isabelle Petersen, Cintia Sola, Corinna Steinmann – Camenish, Eros Robbiani, Hans Ruedi Bortis, Edgardo
Avila, Graciela Antognazza, Ines Durañona, Patricia del Mar, Diego Vigano, Diego de
Elizalde, Nicolás Kohen, Pablo Lopez, Natali Gaskins, Cabuia Teatro, Gustavo Zidan,
Emilio Gutierrez, Daniel Genoud, German Amato, Diego Fabrizio, Ana Inés Quadros,
Lucas Ciarg, Camarín de las Musas, Teatro el Galpón.
Mauricio Toro, Nicky Dice, Simone Spring, Astrid Juliana, Paolo Vignolo, Didier Pfifter, Malicanti, Consuelo García Frugoni, Henry Reyes, Andrea Ramirez, Manuel Sanchez,
Elfos de San Gil, Unisangil, Carlos Zatizabal, Patricia Ariza, Sala Seki Sano, Corporación
de Teatro Colombiano, Casa del Teatro Nacional, Teatro Varasanta, Mapa Teatro.
Emanuele Santoro, Enrique Sanz, Mercedes Quadros, Gianni Macconi, Celestino
Macconi, Catherine Maridor, Sambo Gansser, Romina Kalsi, Serena Wiederkehr, Mila
Macconi, Rocco Macconi, Boris Tarpini, Mia Wojcik, Benicio Britos, Mara Bertelli, Vania Lurasky, Alfonso Zirpoli, Teatro Il Cortile, La
Cambusa.
Luis Molina, Elena Schaposnik, Centro Latinoamericano de Creación e Investigación
Teatral, Luis Masci, Emily Lewis, Baraka Theatre Company.
Piers Nimmo, Cosmo Cardoso, Polly Huggett, Instituto Cervantes Londres, Olvido Salazar Alonso, Siobhan Songour, Miguel Oyarzun, Heriberto Montalván, Robert Archer, John
Weston, Hugo Maciel, Francisca Bancalari.
¡ LAZARO! 2011
ActorsFelix Augusto Quadros, Mathias Britos
Original MusicMathias Britos, Marco Fagotti
Dramaturgy and Direction Felix Augusto Quadros
Movement Direction Luca Zanetti, Salvatore Motta
Production in ColombiaSalvatore Motta, Colectivo Errante
Production in Argentina Daniel Macke
Set Marco Bertozzi, Felix Augusto Quadros
Stage Music Switzerland Ricardo Torres, Robinson Chaparro
Stage Music Colombia Efren Ramirez Bello, Edgar Villamizar
Stage Music Buenos Aires Jorge Platero
Stage Music Montevideo Jorge Platero
Stage Music SwitzerlandStephan Selhorst
Art Jacob Logos
Street Art Jaz (Franco Fasoli)
Graphic Design Concept Masumi Briozzo
StillsJan Eckert
PropsSambo Gansser
A.V. ¡Lazaro! Ticino David Induni, Ricardo Torres, Fabio Salmina
Teaser and Audiovisual ArgentinaNicolas Bachmann
¡LAZARO!
N2
General Edition Felix Augusto Quadros
Graphic DesignYaku Sto
Cover IllustrationJacob Logos
Written Collaboration Paolo VignoloSimone SpringMauricio ToroJacob Logos
Mathias BritosFelix Augusto Quadros
PhotographyJan Eckert
MASNÀDA
+41 79 360 6579
¡LAZARO!Wandering through the desert, the Squire and the Bard follow the trail of Lázaro.
But always, it seems, they’re somehow late. A bit too late.Death threatens, hunger oppresses, in the fine game between the real and absurd
the traces left behind by the fugitive possess them in the favor of revisiting his deeds.What knack will they need to survive the endeavor!
.
EDITORIAL
5
PUBL IC CHARACTER
10
F INE ENCOUNTERS
by Felix Augusto Quadros 13
TORO
by Mauricio Toro16
KNITT ING NETS
18
SPR ING
by Simone Spirng20
FASOL I
23
LOGOS
by Jacob Logos27
SOUND, POUND, TWIRL
by Mathias Britos29
VIGNOLO
by Paolo Vignolo31
ROCK AND ROLL
by Felix Augusto Quadros35
Primera Edicion 5
A year is a lifetime, or in the case of 2010, with ¡Lazaro! it’s been several. The way of the ashes, the long rite of passage and sacrifice in death and resurrection, is at times quite as tormented as creation itself and, throughout the tours, we were confronted with the intimate fact that one’s creation can take control over one’s own life. Many times have we asked ourselves, just before darting onto the stage, what was it that held us there: our faces in white, silhouetted in the cloths of two eternal seekers, to then understand it wasn’t that important to have an answer, but to keep going. On the road, facing the most precarious moments on the road, we’ve always found friends, family, brothers and fellow travellers who have given us the benefit of the doubt with their help and pledge to our work. We’ve talked about the exclusiveness of theatre; we’ve transformed our art into a product to then take it back into itself. We’ve knitted our aims into impossible circumstances to then retrace our steps and get the rhythm back into what is ours. Into what is small. We’ve grown accustomed to the physical training needed for the show and the duty in contemplating the void now and again and for a while. And thus, after over a year of travels, efforts, certain frustrations, dedication, investments, luminous collaborations, a lot of singing, and the value of gifts, presents to be carried for our life continuance, we’ve managed to articulate on the luxury of dedicating our time to one play for so long, through the many geographies of our existence. This Second Edition shows how the Lazaresque spirit has forged its path through encounters and an artistic debate raised from several art perspectives. We came back to Lugano, Switzerland, to close this cycle. Certainly changed, in the manner of an unconscious ardour of coming back to life every night on stage, to ensure in us a sort of transformation with the fire of life. ¡Lázaro! is sometimes picky and certainly jealous and has always demanded our full commitment. It is now time to show it with the riches it has gained, and through the hands of all who have carried it a while.
Back cover of “La Calle” magazine, from Bogotá, with an image that could reproduce a scene of the operetta in the play.
EDITORIAL
Editorial 5
Primera Edicion 9Second Edition 9
PRESS
PUBLIC CHARACTERDetails
From top left:Poster bills for ¡Lázaro! in the streets of Bogotá.Luca Zanetti, movement director, talks to the RSI at the Teatro Il Foce, Lugano, January 2011.
Above, Trasguardi poster, with th Canto de Lazaro as closing guest.
LINKS: MASNADA TVwww.masnada.orghttp://vimeo.com/channels/95568
11Caracter Público
LA REGIONE TICINO 14TH OF JANUARY 2011
IN SEARCH FOR LÁZARO.MATHIAS BRITOS AND FELIX AUGUSTO QUADROS AT THE FOCE IN LUGANO.
“Masnàda is born as a formal position of a process of many years, carried through travels and the will to understand the reality in which we live in, from a voice that needs constant translation into action.” Explains Mathias Britos. After a year and a half, and a tour through Latin América, ¡Lázaro! Returns to Lugano, tonight and tomorrow night at 20.45 at the Teatro Foce, where in 2008 Britos and Felix Augusto Quadros have devised the Masnàda project. A theatrical soul, this of Masnàda, between Switzerland and Uruguay that, according to Quadros “happens through the resolve in manifesting a movement through collaboration, with an artistic twirl that is not limited to theatre.” A formal quest that finds many languages, from graphic design to music in which, he adds, “the idea of a “dramatic clown” exposes the universe we are after, in a revealing theatrical expression, open, generous: a complicity with the audience in order to share a trail on stage.” An idea of theatre, Quadros continues, founded “on ardent curiosity and an outspoken use of the body, an expression many a times stronger than that of our brains: that’s how we can present a show fully spoken in Spanish in Lugano.” ¡Lázaro!, inspired in the Lazarillo de Tormes (anonymous author), Jacques the Fatalist by Diderot, and the Golden Ass by Apuleius (second century A.D.), sees both authors (Quadros in the text and direction, Britos with the music accompanied by Marco Fagotti) in the cloths of a Bard and a Squire. “¡Lázaro! – Quadros explains – has had a sort of transformation: at the beginning the search was based in the Lazarillo and the Golden Ass, two characters invisible for society but who see everything. The work on stage, as well as the pictorial descriptions by Australian Artist Jacob Logos, has taken us to a much stronger image of Lázaro, irreverent, almost a sort of super-hero taken from the epitome of an anti-hero, larger than life that knows the way back from the dead.” A Lázaro that the protagonists are continuously, unceasingly, searching adds the director: “He is a character that we never find, but somehow we always do: as he exists in every single one of us.” The show brings to the stage a contemporary crisis that is not only an economic crisis. ¿How do you avoid the flat common place of a mere chronicle that looks into the universal? “We propose an examination on the symbolic, the frantic rhythms of a world always on the verge of crisis and the constant transformation. The image, the symbolical part of the word, has a lot of strength.” And, now continues Britos, “that which we see of this crisis is the desire to live and overcome it, to journey through desperation: the overall image is that of an animal that, as it drowns, manifests a grand desire to live.”
Claudio Lo Ruso
“... that which we see of this crisis is the desire to live and overcome it, to journey through desperation: the overall image is that of an animal that, as it drowns, manifests a grand desire to live.”
La Regione Ticino,14th of January, 2011.
Carácter Público 11
13Un Mundo Generoso
COLOMBIA
FINE ENCOUNTERSUnder the spell of magic and candor
We feel a bit as storytellers of old, searching for fabled continents and finding mythological beings. Paradise does not live in this imaginative world we take for granted, and the reigns of legends inhabit us today in a measure a bit more grotesque and certainly ubiquitous. Gog and Magog is the reprieve of large capitals. The Cyclops dawns recumbent in the restless sidewalks. A friar that looks for the answer of all answers can look at you in the eye, a bit on the side in the eye, and ask you for “a spare coin, for a bread.” And one believes one’ self a little dreamer, in the illusion that did bring us together in Bogotá, and then out into Colombia during two long and intense months. Because in La Candelaria, Bogotá, life and the street seem to be in constant a rapport, a sort of breathless embrace, sort of hollow. Devotion impregnates each voracious glance from the by passer, a gesture, a greeting here and there, spare any change?, and the guy that charges on minutes for the use of a cell phone would seem to be in assistance to an everydayness that, for anyone not familiarized with this milieu, simply drifts as air through you fingers. Living life, for the many, is more an outburst of insistence than the precious gift of simply being.
Something happened at La Candelaria.
Something in our surroundings and the circumstances that surrounded us. ¡Lázaro!, the play, changed in humor, raw into a fleshy fur it trembled from inside: what was amusing was tinted with anguish, as if we were living that abandonment that came in through our eyes and resides
Laz kick by Jacob Logos for ¡Lázaro!
Above: view from the Jardin del Colibrí, Gusca, Colombia.
Below: Calle del volcán, La Candelaria, Bogotá.
“Here is where we get to, we’ve evaded death, battled the devil to a deuel in robes, held discourse with our ancestors in the most ludic of fantasies to never reach an understanding, and still there is nothing in here, within.”(Squire, ¡LAZARO!).
BY FEL IX AUGUSTO QUADROS
Fine Encounters 13
in the most basic of solitude: to share when there is nothing to share. The text and dramaturgy filled with questions. ¿The same again? And the audience of those first weeks in the Seki Sano theatre, experienced our stage work every night more as a transformation, an animal that changed it skin, a bit in suffering without relinquishing the vigor to skin itself alive and deliver us to the end a bit changed.This too is Colombia: Country of a thousand colors, rich and generous. A place in the earth where nothing seems to change in the bellicose state of things, and where anything is possible with a bit of magic. Where nothing has a definite endgame, and everything can start all over again, form one day to the next. Faithful reality is the music and love that from Colombia have populated the world. Its literature and the labyrinths of solitude that found their way into our hearts. One lives with the intensity of a child that has lost his ingenuity but refuses to loose the fresh scent of taste, and dance, and a marvelous stance and desire in life. Strangled with the yearning of what we were leaving behind, loved ones in our distant homes, we launched ourselves night after night onto the stage in an appeal to clear the belly and come out a bit more graceful: with more answers and less questions. Keen in understanding how possible it is that what was actually happening to us on stage could blend so much with reality out there, and that reality could not creep in so much onto stage. “I wanted to shout ¡Lázaro! during the performance” confessed to us a young kid after watching the show, as if the reflection of the audience was already flush. A Colombian dramatist felt he was taken by the Spanish zarzuela, the quijotesce angles in the jaws of the ass, the flutter of Beckett and the absurd of a wait to bring it here, to the distress of the “here”, and all for a piece of bread.A Chilean dramaturge felt the play was an image that got in deep into his subconscious. “¡¿Where are these devilish actors?!” shouted the Cuban miracle of
an actress, and perhaps we actually were a bit possessed. Some felt they were submitted to an upheaval of energy. Others were taken into a more poetic world with the physicality. A furrow through the comic world, a pinch of film motion, one student felt she was in “Tim Burton’s darkness”, and the insolent camouflage of the street, the Latin-American aroma that impregnated it all, an operetta with a scent of death and rebirth, the absurd not completely absurd, masks without a veil, a grotesque that never had a chance to laugh of himself: we faced the waste of what we couldn’t express ourselves right there, in the audience in front of us, each night; In San Gil’s abundance and generosity, at the Varasanta with it silent auditorium, even in our last week at the Mapa Teatro on its walls swirling with theatrical flair.
Each creative step, it seems, taxes something. Perhaps life is such that one needs to relinquish a piece of one’s self to take another: In Colombia we too scrabbled our subconscious, with anguished hunger, each night in search of more riches. Because Colombia is a gift full of recognition, with an audience ready to share, a world of gathering that broadens the moment. We understood that a story breeds sharing breeds a product; that each encounter has a bit of magic. That each situation adds to the vigor of things alive. That a shared moment presents the opportunity to share it even further. And in this way every person weaves in bind our reality, so that encounters never cease to happen. Because Colombia seemed to insist with us that what is ours is collaboration, and what is ours is also yours.
MASNADA TV Vimeo Links Opposite page: from top to the right: extract from the mural by Rosenkranz, artist from San Gil, photos of our journey through the Parque Natural Tayrona, and Edgar Villamizar preparing the alchemy for the stage.
Jacob Logos, an impresión for ¡Lazaro!
At home of the heirs of the Gaiteros de San Jacinto, who treated us to over an hour of inmortal music: “A fire of pure blood sang with lament”.
“Perhaps life is such that one needs to relinquish a piece of one’s self to take another...
15Un Mundo GenerosoFine Encounters 15
ART ICLE
TOROA fabric of life
Finely seen, the fabric of life is a succession of ordered dots, related one to the other, in a kind of natural regulation that needs a precise interrelation of all energy in time, movement, colors, sounds, smells, sensations, pure creative perfection. However, so fragile is it’s natural arrangement, that its magnificent bind can be easily interrupted. This equilibrium in strength and energy that is life, this transmit ion of natural joy, this exchange in the world or the fabric of relations, is disturbed by the most intelligent species: man. Paradoxically, it is also mankind that could, with its interrelated nature, re-establish a natural order of things.
¿How important is to weave?
For our ancestors the value of weaving is not only in the physical action with the outcome of an object with practical use. It is also the weaving of thought with word that makes possible the relationships and action for prosperity. We need only observe how interrelated the fabric of nature is in our mother earth to comprehend a sense of harmony, wisdom, abundance and the stunning sample of creative products we as humans are beneficiaries of.
JARDIN COLOBRI is located in a small village called Guasca, within the Colombian plateau about an hour away from Bogotá, and at 3000 meters above sea level. Here, we produce fresh and organic food that are distributed within a net of naturally conscious consumers, and processed for the visitors. At the same time, we organize the land as a place of Education and Medicine with a group of Mestizos, Muiskas and Wiwas from the Sierra Nevada of Santa Marta. This is organized with the use of elements and definitions such as: the fabric (mambeadero), medicinal plants (for treatments), pottery, and visiting sacred places throughout the region.
Everything is ordered through the ritual of the word, or Mambeadero as we call it locally. This is an ancestral ritual, and the sacred principle of communication, on agreement, on the caring of the other. It is the verb consecrated as creation of life. The circle of the mambeadero is performed with the aid of the Coca leaf and Tobacco, always around a fire representing the sun and the heart of human beings. With the mambeadero collective agreements are realized with the scope of collective work.
JARDIN COLIBRI is thus a fabric of life that has been naturally elaborated through the work of a couple, a family and now a community. It is a union of thought, word and action of an Anglo-Saxon woman and a Mestizo from South America seeking to establish a more profound relationship with their land, their children and humanity in general. It is through the understanding of the word in a constant outcome of action that a common spiritual unity through matter and its relationship with mother earth can become possible. It is here where that we’ve received Masnàda, with a heartfelt welcome and in the direction to strengthen its search and thus continue the mambeadero, and the sharing of a word of unity, reflection and understanding. Here, in this land, we’ve shared the Ayo (coca leaf ), we’ve knitted our language through conference, and delivered our ancestral word- action to be taken through the heart to the other side of the world, where the mambeo will surely continue in the refined backpack that is Masnàda.
¡Lázaro!, the play, is a splurge of movement, color, sounds and sensations. A creative fabric that has the power of transporting us into real scenarios and the dream side of our everyday life. It is a product with an aesthetic value that communicates the frustrations, solitude, and hopes of the street, of what is urban and of what is ancestral. ¡Lázaro! is an alchemy of differences making it possible for it to exist on any stage, only in need of an audience sensible enough to question itself and ask perhaps, what is behind the illusion of ¡Lázaro!? A fabric of relationships that feeds abundance? A though of unity in constant development? The first creative stroke in the elaboration of a fine bag that allows the relationship fabric, that unites us with this world, with the other?
Let ¡Lázaro! continue opening a track and helping in this fabric of life and community, and we shall continue sowing the seed of abundance. For a healthy growth and a plentiful harvest.
MASNADA TV Vimeo Links
BY MAURICIO TORO
1717
Above: The Mamo and his family in the house of the Jardín del Colibrí.
Right: Center of the Maloca (sacred cabana) at the Jardín del Colibrí, where the mambeo, word ritual, is practiced.
MusicaToro 17
CREAT ION
WEAVING NETSThe baggage travels
Felix y Mathias at the Seki Sano theatre, La Candelaria, take a break before binding the elastics for the set.
Mathias and Edgar arrive at Mapa teatro.
Flaming bags towards the end of the tour at the Foce theatre in Switzerland, as a result of much looking for a solution that would fit in the traveling case.
Edgars preparation, his instruments behind the scene at San Gil, Santandér.
Opposite page, Felix test the bags full with baloons.
Staging at Mapa Teatro in Bogotá.
19En el HangarWeaving Nets 19
When I first saw the printed material presented to me by Salvatore Motta at the Swiss Embassy in Bogotá, concerning the show ¡Lázaro! by Masnàda, I was very much surprised by the vitality in the naked faces, to portray it somehow, as by a sort of oriental stoicism in the painted masks that seemed to have the quality of screens on the actors’ faces. As I saw the show for the first time, I had to rectify this impression of Asian stoicism, as I could now see how the painted faces gained a life. I perfectly understand that the act of applying make up generates a sort of insinuation and one gradually becomes the character to be embodied thereafter. In ¡Lázaro! one remembers that the make up is also, par excellence, a source of powerful scenic expression. Kesho, kabuki make up, means to adorn in order to change. The result of this process includes the original persona and the new character, giving gradual birth to a new being. In the case of Felix Augusto and Mathias, the characters are so abundant, the beings and faces they exhibit and that they own in an intrinsic way, that I felt I was facing a cabinet of mirrors, surrounded to the infinite by these their reflections, different all the time. However, there is a narrative thread that is a conduit at a visual plane and this is the depth of their eyes and the intensity of their gaze. An ancient proverb says “the eyes say as much as the mouth.” As a consequence, we must “hear” the eyes. In the case of their make up they achieve to create a backdrop on which the acting of the eyes results even more intense and powerful, sometimes raw. Lecoq says that each person carries in his being an abstract dimension of colors, space, light, materials and sounds. The elements in our diverse experiences, our sensations and emotions, everything we have touched, tasted and seen, remain inevitably printed in our memory and our body. From this basis there impulse to create finds its birth. And this base for them is of an extraordinary richness. And thanks to this, their audience is transformed in a canvas on which they write with their eyes, their mouths, their flesh, their blood, turning us into accomplices of this journey in their interior. It was also Lecoq who said that each person carries within a mask. Mathias and Felix, you merge and sometimes confuse with your characters, with your persona, dreams, fears and desires, mixing the frontiers of an abstract reality, and sometimes fragile and solitary, sometimes streetwise, but always vibrant and emotive. We’ve talked at times about the small encounters that have always surrounded the play and the importance in meeting, also beyond the stage, as a form of expression and relationship. In the dictionary of the Real Academia de la Lengua Española, “encounter” means:1. m. Act of coincidence in a point two or more things, commonly colliding one against the other (colliding, a little?)
2. m. Act of finding (finding, a little?)3. m. Opposition, contradiction, etc (opposing, contradicting, a little?)
Why the summary? Well simply as an introduction and explanation on why I cannot conceive “small encounters”… Rather it is an encounter, or an involuntary and casual contact. This contact with Masnáda was definitely and encounter. In her book “Les Vaisseaux du Coeur”, French writer Benoit Groult say something like “there are people who touch our skin and there are people who touch our heart.” You must have surely read Kavafis, my favorite part is this:
Always keep Ithaca in your mind.To arrive there is your final destination.But do not hurry the voyage at all.It is better for it to last many years,and when old to rest in the island,rich with all you have gained on the way,not expecting Ithaca to offer you wealth.
Ithaca has given you the beautiful journey.Without her you would not have set out on the road.Nothing more has she got to give you.
And if you find her threadbare, Ithaca has not deceived you.Wise as you have become, with so much experience,you must already have understood what Ithacas mean.
Everything that is not taken care of, as they say in Mexico, dies sooner or later. And what is important is the road. And we are in it, not dependent on directions, rather the crossings. And if there is no crossroads, there is always a phone, internet, and so much more. Walking on a road without exploring the universe that surrounds it lacks sense. Somehow, the most important aspects of the journeys are the stops on the road that allow you to touch, feel, and taste the world. And Masnàda for me was a key station, becoming a long and magical station. This encounter was with ¡Lazaro!, Felix and Mathias, but also with myself, allowing me to return in time, change the horizon, and retrieve part of this capacity of dream and fight on an artistic backdrop of rebellion and questioning of society, it forms and its reality. And this was how rather than complicity, it was the birth of a beautiful friendship. As human being evolved, the various artistic manifestations have
ART ICLE
SPRINGListening with the eyes
BY S IMONE SPR ING
* Simone Spring, cultural attaché for the Swiss embassy in Colombia, at the present at the Sektion Kulturprojekte in the Ministry of Culture in Bern, Switzerland.
Primera Edicion 21
transformed many times in a product to be consumed. However, the roots in art are always found in its ancient ritual and magical role. Through ¡Lázaro!, you manage to transmit this archaic artistic language. You have your roots beyond your land, your Swiss and Latin-American roots, beyond your education, your culture, your knowledge and capacities. ¡Lázaro! was an adventure and a trip into the landscapes of memory, the search for lost keys in the unity between the body, the word and its encounter. “What is metaphysics on stage? It is the attempt of the actor, the
person, to surpass the limits of his body (…) I work with the body, not with ideas. From the very start, I break the text, to create a high temperature vertigo. A room of ecstasy. When one exists only in his mind and recites the text, then he remains in a single sphere, the sphere of ideas.” As Thodoros Terzopoulos, you break with the text, surpass the limits of your bodies and leave the audience stunned and without breath. Your theatre is not limited to style, to time, or a language or a region, it is an organic theatre, very much yours, yes, but at the same time very much of everyone and, of course, much much mine.
“The elements in our diverse experiences, our sensations and emotions, everything we have touched, tasted and seen, remain inevitably printed in our memory and our body. Lecoq”
Spring 21
Extract from the mural by argentine artist Jaz (Franco Fasoli)
opposit page, extract from mural.
Jaz in action.
23
STREET ART
FASOLI The wall is not for sale
“The wall is not for sale” reads in the verse of a manifesto, in a big white square, surrogate of a well-sized frame and canvas, and within a big deep blue wall. Around it a silhouette. Now half a silhouette. Franco Fasoli, known muralist artist as Jaz, was prepares his black base and a roller to cover this very wall to paint his mural on ¡Lázaro!. He tells me, it seems there is a man, known by now, that covered the walls with fiberglass, chiseled the section out of the wall as you would a canvas, and sold them for a good price in well know galleries. This piece, painted by Jaz, fetched about twenty thousand pesos. A prosperous amount. There are codes, even out in the savage streets, which correspond to an artistic civility. The wall is not anonymous. In the habitude of dedication, pugnacious no doubt, Buenos Aires is covered with a braced movement of muralists, of which Jaz has been around for years. His murals, can completely surprise you on a corner wall, and never fail to shake indifference. I first knew of Jaz the man through a book on porteño (from Buenos Aires) muralists. A year after this I was talking to him in his studio about the chance to collaborate. It was the simplest thing in the world, a heartwarming meet that never failed to carry the intention of a mural, and even extended into practically setting up Jacob Logos’ residency in Buenos Aires: key in the gathering of two artists from different worlds. For Jaz, the characters in the play were dead, and constantly confronted their own mirrors and shadows. ¡Lázaro!, omnipresent, was he who would finally give them the key to come back to life. It was Jaz who gave ¡Lázaro! its permanence in the cold streets, now in Fitz Roy and Loyola, near Palermo Viejo, already Chacarita, in the city of Buenos Aires.
MASNADA TV Vimeo Link.
Fasoli 23
25Hipervínculos
Mural by Jaz, “Lázaro Aquí” in Buenos Aires.
Fasoli 25
“The wounded Lion of Nemea”, by Jacob Logos painted during residency at Lemos 55, Buenos Aires.
Opposite page, from above: “Tiger” by Logos, two illustrations for ¡Lázaro!, Jacob in street action in Buenos Aires, Mural on Thames street inn Villa Crespo, and a colonial street in Colonia, Uruguay.
27
ART
LOGOSFeline spirits, streets and etchingss
My painting studio out in Chacarita reminded me of an old country house. I swept out an internal courtyard which provided the best light if you shifted easels throughout the day, and the construction noise ( of what should soon be the areas best theatre cafe ) could be drowned out if sonic youth was up loud enough. For the weeks I was there, between visits and our numerous roamings of the streets of BA, I was able to dedicate time to experiment and practise the textural techniques that for me holds together subject matter and dictates composition. For instance, the walls and colours of the buildings of Colonia and Carmelo in Uruguay, are exactly the kind of uncontrived surfaces I strive to create as a basis for my paintings. In BA, tagging along with Jazz and the guys, I got a chance to paint directly onto such surfaces at some of the many great allocated painting walls the city has to offer, a concept my home town in South Australia would do well to follow. Failing that, I will continue in the practise of transplanting those beautifully subtle walls onto canvas. On the subject of how an internationally scattered collaboration works, with the resources available I think its now more powerful than ever. It was of course important to get over and spend time with the artists, in the arena, where the action takes place and where the momentum is, but going away the pictures can be made anywhere, and seen anywhere. The trip also made another aspect of the collaboration clear, all indications directed to the idea of a book, of developing the parts of the characters and their world into a collection of illustrations, quotes, poems, lines, symbols and marks. I have already started compiling drawings and prints that I made in my studio time and sketch books in BA, its now a case of making something authentic, that accurately depicts the tone and forges into bound pages what currently exists as separate elements.
MASNADA TV Vimeo Link.
Espíritus CreativosLogos 27
BY JACOB LOGOS
STORYTELL ING
SOUND, POUND, TWIRLI talk music
Each one of our senses can be refined through the exercise of stimuli. At the start of the process of the mise-en-scene of the show, in London, my job was one of on stage musician. I mean, to resound the actions that were played during certain moments of the show. The thing was pretty immediate and effectual. After this first stage, with the play developed and written for two actors and finding ourselves with the need to give it music, almost by an act of magic we received the fundamental collaboration, most precious, of two great friends: Robinson Chaparro and Ricardo Torres. Their intervention in the musical ambience of the storytellings opened new and unexpected frontier, allowing us as actors to fell much freer in our actions on stage. For example, to perceive, through the explosion and the sound of a projectile in slow motion, a physical backlash in the shivering skin that precipitated into a long wave through the entire body. Something similar occurred in Colombia as we worked with Efren Ramirez Bello as on stage musician. We convened in Guasca, a small household over 3000 meters above sea level, in the layout of the countryside, to focus and work with the new team. In the care instruments of all type, drums, maracas, goat nails, claves, cajón, whistles, and many other. During rehearsal we realized how much we missed that bass and all the electronic sounds to which we had become so accustomed during our performances in Switzerland at the time of our debut. We searched for solutions to fill the void. Then, after a number of arguments over to have or not to have a new bass player, we grew convinced that we should submit to rigor and propose the entire piece in an acoustic tone. This projected us in a direction we looked for since the beginning, meaning to depend on nothing but our strengths. Making the show as autonomous to foreign sources and be able to present it anywhere, even in the street. As in Switzerland, Colombia gave us new solutions, necessary, inevitable, fortifying. Thus initiated a very interesting work, one of reproducing sounds that were of latter pre-recorded from real sounds to a simple acoustic instrument. Sounds like that of a bomb, shots, a car passing by at high speed, jingles, etc. Rhythm is also melodically, even more so if it is reproduced with the most varied of instruments, such as pans, trays, bells, and a drum deck completely made of recycled material. The need to render it all acoustic forced us to sharpen our inventiveness and alter our actions on scene that now needed to rediscover the precise meeting point with the harmonics of the music. Edgar Villamizar, in charge, amongst other, of the special effects, started to participate on the sound effects from behind the curtains, provoking in the audience to perceive the sound as if it were a Dolby surround, but acoustic. The loneliness of the two characters on scene was now circumscribed by sounds and murmurs that arrived form all directions, provoking in us, actors, new and organic reactions. In Buenos Aires and Montevideo we worked with Jorge Platero, a master of Candome of Uruguay. Having grown in Montevideo, son of the art, and emigrated to Brazil in search of the Africa of his roots, he condensed into an only musician all of what we had learnt so far, adding this to our most valuable musical baggage.
Working with him has been, as always, an experience marked by the innumerable repetitions and the finding of solutions. Here too, the arsenal of instruments had to be reduced to the possibilities at hand. The main issue, this time, was the stands. The technique to transmit that that is necessary at a certain sound level had undoubtedly improved, we knew now how to reproduce certain sounds and what solutions were actually the better. Platero, having to elaborate on the huge information he received from us reacted with calm and reflection. Even if the matter was an explosion, by requisite a violent sound, in the choreography of beats of the moment it was difficult for him to reach the drum, and used instead a ramshackle thin wire to sound a dish and was hardly heard. The rhythm was perfect but subtle and somehow sweet. Jorge that for years now works in the field of music therapy acted on us subtly weighing on his own need in finding equilibrium between the music and the action. In despair of no having the furious percussion at the moments we needed, we delivered our hopes to the hands of his fair judgment. Everything that was Earth as an element would go to the left, and that which was Air, to the right. Jorge introduced the elements into the musical space, taking with them this subtle energy that impregnated the sounds by him reproduced influencing our actions forever and marveling the audience. Back in Switzerland with 24 show on our backs, between Switzerland, Colombia, Argentina and Uruguay, we felt physically ready, relaxed and capable of provide to the new musician on stage, Stephan Selhorst, the vast information for the job that the storytellings demand with solid clarity. In Lugano, the instrumental aspect has not been a problem for the musical activity held during the entire year opened itself in a rehearsal studio that resembled a small museum of drums, and varied sounds, all ready to play their part. Stephan acted with extraordinary efficiency, worthy of enormity. In four days, with an absolute record, we were on scene in front of a thick audience at the Teatro il Foce in Lugano. The music perfect, the audience dumbfounded. To finish, I’ll take the opening words: each one of our senses can be refined through the exercise of stimuli. Nothing more true, each sense can be cultivated and from this work discover that what was previously lineal exists in turn formed by a vast quantity of dimensions, tones, levels, intentions, sounds, volumes, colors, elements, accents, etc… Sound is composed in a myriad of variables that in the whole can transmit stimuli that accompanied by an action, offers form to a complex universe impregnated of sensations. With Felix, Robinson, Ricardo, Efren, Edgar, Jorge and Stephan each particular sound in ¡Lázaro! hems the endeavor and work of all.
BY MATHIAS BR ITOS
MASNADA TV Vimeo Link.
Primera Edicion 29
Extract of the music work for the storytelling by del colombian musician Efren Ramirez Bello.
The musicians that have worked with us during our travels. (from bottom to top): Ricardo Torres and Robinson Chaparro.Efren Ramirez Bello andEdgar Villamizar. Jorge Platero.Stephan Selhorst.
Suoni, Colpi, Capriole 31Sound, Pound, Twirl 29
31Canto de Lázaro
INTERVIEW
VIGNOLOOn folklore and latin feats
“Paolo Vignolo turns up with a smile from ear to ear. A long red beard, and fiery tresses arranged in locks, all possess the man with a striking gesture of surprise with life. Anything is possible with Paolo, he can jolt into the meeting with an umbrella, a suitcase, and several books in hand, and after an intense chat, “mate” in hand, leave forgetting all but holding his head in a tight scramble. And one gets to question how has this man managed on his trips deep into Amazonian jungles, on adventures and research trips around the Colombian back country, with stories in frontiers that transcend the very imagination for a history professor in the Facultad de Ciencias Humanas at the Universidad de Colombia. Paolo is that sort of Indiana Jones that one does find in Latin-America. Italian, very Latin, very cheerful, but as he laughingly refers to himself, more than a Jones rather like an “alpine Obelix.”
Paolo, you were a theatre man yourself during your years in Italy, with Residui Teatro, for example, to then move into research and the academic world as an historian. But we all carry our life experiences with us, ¿how have you resolved your theatrical life in your search as an historian?
Theatre for me is an addiction, an enchanting addiction. Get bitten by the theatre bug, and there is no cure, one must learn to live the rest of one’s life in temptation. Perhaps you don’t carry it as a full time craft, but it will always be there. In my case the bug bit me at the start of my university years, when I used to work as usher in the Piccolo Teatro in Milan. “Usher” in Italian translates as “Mask”; in the “a la italiana” theatre the “mask” is the figure in charge of keeping a relationship between the stage and the audience: a perfect place to understand the behind curtains, rehearsals, re-runs, the panic before opening night, the gossip of the dressing rooms, technicians and their long after nights, the sleeplessness of the actors, the comments of the crowd. When I got to Colombia I discovered another theatre, a theatre that overflows the walls themselves, and gets out to the streets. It settles on traffic lights, it jumps on buses, theatre sieves into houses, schools, families. That’s how several years afterwards, when were given the chance of setting up a workshop at a juvenile centre in Rome, we took it into exploring the metro, the abandoned buildings, non-conventional spaces. Residui Teatro surged from this, and now runs its tenth year in activity! Without me now, as I came back to Colombia in 2003, to take on into full time university and research life. However, theatre is still very much part of my everydayness, thanks to scholar activity; finally every college room is a stage, and every class a mise-en-scène. There are seminars in which audience participation is prime, there are workshops of pure improvisation, conferences that keep the solemnity of Shakespearean theatre, o perhaps that of an Ubu Roi. Certain classes assume brechtian tints, or grotowskian, other are á la Ibsen or to the style of oppressed theatre. Sometimes the situation crawls into a dramatic theatre exercise, or turns into the comic, and even sometimes degenerates into a psychodrama.
Also the theatrical is continually present in my research activity, not only in the class work, but also in one of the main axis of my work through the exploration of festivities, rituals and performance actions.
What brought you to Colmbia, what keeps you still in love with this country, its culture, its way of life?
I was brought to Colombia by a sailboat, imagine. Me, I get dizzy on a bus. It was 1992 and I had won a small scholarship for an exchange in Colombia that was meant to last for 6 months. It wasn’t hard to win, in fact I was the only candidate. In the times of Pablo Escobar Colombia wasn’t a very prized destination. Well it seemed that the father of a friend of mine was organizing a sailing trip across the ocean, taking advantage of the commemorative regatta on the 500 years since Columbus’ journey to América. The matter was quite serious, the eight-man crew had been training for many months each weekend. However, a last minute work problem for one of the sailors left the crew short of one member. One night, Carlo, my friend, jokingly said: You’re going to Colombia right? Well if you want, will give you a ride, we’ll take you to Puerto Rico. Said and done. That’s how it was. I had no idea of sailing but ended up embarked as a young lad in an extraordinary adventure. I still thank this, a most unforgettable experience. In the ironies of luck I suppose, I now work in a research about the conquest of América, and find myself in open dispute with that same rhetoric in celebration that brought me here in the first place. That’s how I got to Colombia, for the love of the journey, the seeking of adventure, and escaping that bourgeois bubble of Milano’s everydayness. And I got hooked, “amañado” as they say around these parts. I fall in love, and am still in love, with this land, and its people. Surely enough, the infatuation of the first times has shaped into a more mature relationship, to say. Let me give you an example: in the beginning it was all emotion, adrenalin. If nothing happened to you, the political violence and armed conflict were exotic anecdotes that one lived through in a state of wild semi-unconsciousness. Now, that I’ve got family here, a network of profound affections, I’ve learnt in my own body the very Colombia expression: “it’s the country that hurts.” This pain, this grief that I have now incorporated in me, that accompanies me, follows me, belongs to me. Yes, because in Colombia there is practically no family that doesn’t carry its mourning, its pain rooted in the political violence of the last 50 years.
We face the stage, the set is lit, lights dissolve, two masked characters are expelled onto the stage: How do you perceive these first moments in ¡Lázaro!? Where does this opening take you throughout the play?
You said it precisely, the characters in ¡Lázaro! are “expelled” into the stage. From this first moment the audience is confronted with a paradox. I was previously telling you how a theatre that overflowed the
BY PAOLO VIGNOLO
Vignolo 31
theatre house and invaded life itself fascinated me. Well, with ¡Lázaro! I felt the opposite process, as if the characters land on stage by mere chance, as another spot of their wanders through the world. Expelled from life, they find provisional refuge in a theatre, to finish again expelled on stage. ¡Lázaro! regains the theatre of the absurd and takes it beyond absurd itself. It is not, as in European dramaturgy, the vain search for a sense of existence through the lack of meaning, but the hunt for existence, beyond meaning or non-meaning. There is no meaning, but there is the search. Life itself is a sort of uncompromising hunt. The theatre of the absurd in Latin-American metropolis confuses itself with a simple chronicle. Vladimir and Estragón cheat on time waiting for a Godot, Rosencranz and Guilderstein play hide and seek with destiny in the shadow of Hamlet, the Bard and the Squire in ¡Lázaro! on the other hand, recycle, recycle, recycle, music, texts, images, objects, everything gets recycled. It is something similar to what Brazilian vanguard of the nineteen twenties raised with the anthropophagic manifesto, to face the hegemonic culture one must become a bit of a cannibal, as the “savages” of tupinamba, that ate civilized man. ¿To devour European culture, digest it, assimilate it, defect it? ¿Tu – pi or not Tu – pi? That it the question. ¡Lázaro! calls to this peculiar form of cultural anthropophagy that is to recycle. It is a quilt made of remnants from the nightmares of surrealism, from the non-sense of the theatre of the absurd, from “the dreams of reason that create monsters”. ¡Lázaro! is a quilt made of a remnant that does not pretend to defend an existential position, but simple to find covering from the coldness of a hostile world.
As theatre man, academic, walker of the long roads through research, the meeting between diverse activities are always a need: ¿How do you see the proposal, as with Masnàda, from the smallness of a context of constant collaboration to achieve the big aspect of telling a story through different means?
I guess the name says it all: “Masnàda”. The first time I heard it I could only relate it to the Italian meaning of gang, clique, clan, a band of thugs. Then I realized the implications of a small slide in the accent, from Italian into Spanish, or the itañol: Masnàda, Más-nada (more – nothing), nada más (nothing more), almost a Statement. The looks of thugs, yes, but modest thugs. Your humble thugs. And still we would only need a coma to move from humility to the most excessive pride: Más, nada (More, nothing). Almost as someone saying a non-plus ultra, nothing beyond, better, impossible. A yearning to get past every limit. If Masnàda manages to make explicit the multiple paths already implicit in its etymology it can go very, very far…. Beyond… ¡more nothing!
Bogotá has been centre of a street theatre movement during the 80’s and 90’s. How important has this long event of artistic substance been that it still vibrates in Colombian theatre?
“...the Bard and the Squire in ¡Lázaro! on the other hand, recycle, recycle, recycle, music, texts, images, objects, everything gets recycled.”
Abaporu (1928), bu Tasila, painted during the surge of the anthropophagic movement in Brazil. In the Guaraní language “aba poru” means “man that eats man.” Image later taken by brazilian modernists for the construction of their cultural identity in the fight for intelectual freedom ffrom Europe.
Previous page: for us, the fire and spirit in an illustration by Carl Jung for his Red Book.
33Cuerpo
When I got to Bogotá I had no acquaintances. In a week I was wrapped in a feverous theatre, rumba, and political activity. It was a city in the brink of collapse, flooded with street violence, armed conflict, bombs and drug trafficking, light blackouts several times a day, impossible car jams, and a disturbing international isolation for a metropolis of seven million people. But it was also a city in steam, every day would be lived as if were the last one, with the same intensity. “At least here you can’t get bored”, it used to be said with a common black humor. I remember a graffiti in the toilet of the “Goce Pagano”, a pike of a club in a run down neighborhood where we would go dance the best salsa in town: “The country is crumbling, ¡and we are rumbling!” Everybody was curious of what was happening on the other side of the puddle, of Gringoland, of Europe, of Italy… and yet everybody kept telling me “bacano that you’re here, this is the place were you have to be”. And so it was. Those years were very prolific, very intense in the theatre scene. Many groups nourished from this cultural and artistic humus, many of which are very renowned. The appearance of the Festival Iberoamericano de Teatro and the Alternative Festival, today perhaps the most important theatrical event in the Américas, owe their part to this fervor. Groups like “El teatro de los Sentidos”, “Mapa Teatro, “Varasanta”, “Ensamblaje Teatro”, “Teatro Tierra”, “Adra Danza”, “Teatro Malandro”, only to name but a few of the one’s I know best, created schools, formed people, opened roads. An example, a few months after my arrival in Colombia I started working for a couple of years with a group of students from the Universidad Nacional, under guidance from Enrique Vargas, who made wild theatrical experiments with the senses, the smell, in a basement under the central auditorium. From this box of lunatics the “Hilo de Ariadna” montage came to being, to then circle the earth and win several international awards and merits in big international festivals. Today, the Teatro de los Sentidos, has a wonderful space in Barcelona and is one of the most acclaimed groups in Europe. Few remember it was born in the basements of the Nacional.
Latin America rises from its ashes again and again. Rebirth is an aptitude of this wonderful continent. How many masks and festivities keep this magic alive? How is the Carnival a party of death and rebirth?
I agree. The cycle of life, death and resurrection, that is the base of every carnival process, is also the key to understand the dynamics of these parts, a land of ancient defeats and charted renewals, of miraculous achievements and wasted belongings, of stark exiles and damned bonanzas, of dancing deceased and stinking living. Yes, because to be reborn one need to die. There is no resurrection without passion, and there is no passion without suffering.
Now, well, ¡Lázaro! in my view represents the arid aspect, the somber of the cycle, the crossing through the desert, the ears of doña Cuaresma, Atahualpa Yupanqui’s torn guitar. ¡Lázaro! is the road of the famine, the droughts, the fasting, carnival only appears as the dream of the Cucaña game, fruit of the hallucinations from hunger, as the “sensuality of the desperate lives” Paolo Conte would say, as the desire of community of he who is alone in bustling in this earth and knows it. This is why I am thrilled to know Masnàda is now about to explore the other side of the mask of ¡Lázaro!: Carnal. Carnal and ¡Lázaro! are two complementary masks of the same face, or two faces of the same mask, I don’t really know yet. Carnal the lazarún or Lázaro fleshed, something like that. I hope to accompany you in this new journey.
“Es un espectáculo entre teatro, música y mimo sorprendente...”
Vignolo 33
35Cuerpo
R IO DE LA PLATA
ROCK AND ROLLTo the heart
Seen from the Caribbean the River Plate is the far South. Once there, in another turn of life, one cannot but agree with the perspective: it “is” the far South. In the cradle of tango taken since on every step, one needs but to repeat that attraction by Solanas and Piazzola, “I come back to you South, as one always comes back to love, to you, with my desire, with my fear”, to understand that the porteño vein is nostalgic. Jorge Platero, who accompanied us for two long months of preparation and performances, used to talk about this muddy looking River Plate, silvery as the sun sets on the edge of the night, as depositary of the sediments that from Brazil and Paraguay churn all the way down. It’ s the Mississippi of Latin-American. It fashions the blues in the milonga. In Buenos Aires everything is intense and moving, Latin and sizzling, a slice through the lips, flush in an attitude of provoking and then running, and amongst such convulsion it is impossible to make anything beyond this functional chaos than Buenos Aires itself. Impossible to live in constant crisis without surrendering to it. The boldest psychological labyrinths of its people are for the foreigner impenetrable. And as much as these roots run through ¡Lázaro!’s blood, and in us, playing it locally is like wanting to move a bolder with one’s breath. Knife in hand is the matter, gaucho. And as with tango, the dance is only possible after having tasted disenchantment, and love betrayal, and that cold intellectual melancholy that defines it all and then leaves you there, sort of disposed of, without much to it. It is so easy to bask in the enchantment and seduction of the porteño exuberance, where everything is yet to be done and everything happens all the time. But it’s brief and, as with a femme fatal, one needs to fast understand the impotence in shaking off desire, that things are always the way they are: the game is already played beforehand. There is more than truth in singing to the choir:
“...Always she was lying About true love everlasting Yet I cannot help it: I’d risk it all on her!”
When we realized, always a bit too late, it was already December, and we were already kind of out of the game. A jump to Montevideo, gave us back the appetite for a noble audience, as the one that came to the Teatro el Galón, historical and familiar. The territory itself most familiar. So much as we have searched, all year round, an exclusive relationship with what we do, when all seems dependent on the massive scale, the relationship between the small, intimate, theatre as measure of success and the absurd in throwing oneself to the local charter without much profit, and in these times, it was then at the Camarín de las Musas, a place of cult and devotion to the local art, where we received exclusive comments full of thankfulness and vocation. And it was there, in this house, that ¡Lázaro! conceded to us, at last, the enjoyment of all seventy minutes that had us here!, in the most arid region or our subconscious, that as with pulse itself pushes us to continue, and continue, and continue.
It was night. I got up got with a bit of a strain. Fuck, what a pounding. It hurt inside, in the kidneys. I could smell that scent of sewers in my cloths and in the hand yet. Have I been drinking? I don’t recall. Up in the street a lantern hanged scantily. I felt my pockets and there were still some coins. And a card. A slanted look. Or rather observation. It was a seven, of coins. Rich in days I would then find a queen of diamonds. And loose it thereafter. If I could only remember what had happened, I thought, I would perhaps know where I am. I walked my way to the corner. Far in the edge a couple of drunkards played with a dragged bottle. Two girls came out of a sort of establishment behind me. Amused, toying, high in heels. A beat from the inside. I walked in.
MASNADA TV Vimeo Link.
BY FEL IX AUGUSTO QUADROS
Rock and Roll 35
