The Fugitives by Alejo Carpentier

Residency Prize, Ministry of Culture, 2008-09

Direction: Everett Dixon
Choreography: Yovanny Martinez Riaño
Assistant Choreographers/Interpretors: Jairo Lastre/Julian Garces
Lighting Design: Robinson Achinte
Musical Direction: Claudia Velez












Jairo Lastre (Cimarron) and Julian Garces (Dog) in the premiere of The Fugitives by Alejo Carpentier, February 19, 2009. University Hall, Javeriana University, Cali. (Photo: Claudia Vélez)


DANCE-THEATRE: PERFECTLY REDUNDANT

The essence of dance is movement. The essence of theatre is action.

True dance is not a question of perfection of form: the dancer's impulse is not just the serene internal movement of the martial arts master, but also the expression of an irrepressible human need - a shout made movement.

True theatre isn't just a question of form either: theatre action is a conflict manifest, an internal movement which expresses an irrepressible and tragic human need.

In this sense dance and theatre are the same art - both seek to express a conflict through concrete and directed movements - and there is something about the expression "dance-theatre" which is perfectly redundant.

However, there is no doubt that the traditions and conventions of these two sister arts are different, especially in its least successful incarnations. In dance, for example, when there is perfection of form, the interpretor can hide within, their spirit can go to sleep, and the audience, lulled by the beauty of movement, falls asleep in kind. Dance tends irresistibly to an empty "poetic" beauty, to elegant forms which don't really say anything.

The theatre, on the other hand, in its intent to express more "internal" conflicts, sometimes becomes very banal for its lack of expressive means, especially its physical expressivity.

This is why these two arts need each other constantly. Dancers teach actors to be physically present on stage, to express physically what their character wants, to attain a expressive conviction and forcefulness through physically dynamic actions. And actors teach dancers to be present in the "spirit", to participate spiritually in the actions they are carrying out, to react internally and to keep focussed on clear aims, to say something real, to want something real on stage, and to express this want in concrete but spiritual actions.

In a very specific sense, dance really reaches the audience when it has action and conflict - that is to say, when it has a theatrical essence. And theatre really reaches the audience when it has an urgency to its movements, when its has a dancistic essence. It's not a question of making away with the limits between the arts, but rather of recognizing that each art needs all of the others to get to its fullest expression.

This is what we have tried to achieve in this story about true freedom, this adaptation of the famous short story The Fugitives by Aleja Carpentier – five dancers, four actor, and a theatre director: to devise forms so theatrical and yet so anchored in movement that the audience ask at the exit: was it dance or was it theatre? We shall be happy if we have achieved it at least in some moments of the play.














Nattalia Izquierdo, Camilo Jaramillo and Lina Riascos as the Animal Chorus in The Fugitives by Alejo Carpentier. Javeriana University, February 19, 2009. (Photo: Claudia Vélez)


CAST

Cimarrón - Jairo Lastre
Dog- Julián Garcés
Grey Dog - Marcela Vanegas
Peacock - Nattalia Izquierdo
English Dog - Lina Riascos
Chorus - Actors: Camilo Jaramillo, Juan Pablo Astudillo, Lina Riascos, Nattalia Izquierdo
Dancers: Marcela Vanegas, Jhair Cambindo, Andrés Cardenas

Alejo Carpentier

Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier is considered, beside Mexican Juan Rulfo and Argentinian Luis Borges, to be one of the greatest writers of Latin America. Though none of the three ever won the Nobel Prize, it is generally held that they had deserved it much more than their outstanding, but lesser, followers, such as Gabriel García Marquez and Miguel Angel Asturias. Carpentier, with his novel Kingdom of this World, is credited with having invented the style of magic realism, and his stories, like this one about an escaped slave (or Cimarron) who develops a friendship with an escaped slave-hunting dog, are unsentimental looks at how cruelty and violence are at the centre of our most fundamental need for freedom and happiness.

Poverty is no Crime by Alexander Ostrovsky

Director: Everett Dixon

Dramaturge: Irina Kóstina

Colombian adaptation: Students of the Performance Workshop II

Musical Direction: Claudia Vélez

With a special appearance by Libardo Carvajal

Production Design: Jorge Reyes

A production of the Universidad del Valle's Theatre Department and Four Worlds Theatre Research Group.

Premiere: September 2008

Doña Cecilia with two guests (Isabella Moloney with Oriana Gironza, Diana Tapasco) in Poverty is no Crime by Alexander Ostrovsky. (Photos: Juan Diego Muñoz, Jorge Suzarte)

Ostrovsky is the most important Russian playwright, and were it not for the fame of the Moscow Art Theatre, and the subsequent rise of Anton Chekhov, who knows if we would not rather be staging Ostrovsky in all the theatres of the world, and not Chekhov?

As with Chekhov, Ostrovsky is dismaying at first because his plays don't seem to have any conflict. It is difficult to understand them at first, because no one is who they seem - the characters are neither good nor bad, and they never finally reveal themselves. In this aspect, Ostrovsky is more authentic than Chekhov himself, whose almost seasick vision of people's banality lead him, out of extreme sensitivity, to make quite cruel moral judgments of them.

Ostrovsky is more generous than sensitive, and he always seems to be waiting himself to see who his characters really are. As the Ostrovsky scholar Lakshin writes: "The very hero throws the author off a little. [...] Perceptive as an artist, Ostrovsky analyses life and brings to light new types of characters, without out making definitive judgments on them." Ostrovsky suspends moral judgment, - in a way this is the essence of his style. You Never Can Tell (title of a play by George Bernard Shaw) could be the title of any of Ostrovsky's plays, and it would be well worth taking the time to compare these two prolific playwrights (Ostrovsky wrote 47 plays with 728 characters, Shaw wrote 57 plays with fewer characters, as Russian plays are always more crowded). The fact that Ostrovsky pegs popular sayings to his plays does not reflect the simplicity of his vision, but rather the complexity of popular wisdom, which is older than all of us, and also knows that things are never what they seem.

In contrast to his contemporaries, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Turgenev, Ostrovsky has a more modest background; he was born in Zamoskvarechie ("The Other Shore"), the huge merchant class neighbourhood on the south side of the Moscow River. His plays, like many from the sixties in the XIX century, mark a fascinating transition in theatre history: the plays are still within the great tradition of melodrama, and are full of brilliant effects, tableturnings, unexpected endings, etc., but at the same time the context is no longer the nobility but rather the aggressive world of the merchant class, depicted with great fidelity. The term realism was coined in Russia by the critic Dobroliubov, speaking of the new plays by Ostrovsky. There are few writers in the history of literature - except perhaps Ostrovsky's contemporary Anthony Trollope - who better describes corrupt lawyers, poet-merchants and scheming accountants, and yet Ostrovsky was also a poet, whose dreamlike parentheses in the action, incomprehensible for the more conventional realistic writer, gave his plays all of their vitality. (At the very climax of Wolves and Sheep, two characters in conflict suddenly begin to speak about tobacco.)

With the rise of neoliberalism all over the world, Ostrovsky's plays, at one time thought to be the parochial works of a provincial Russian writer, have experienced a re-evaluation in the world, and his themes are more pertinent than ever. Ostrovksy is also modern in his treament of women: the great majority of his plays, including the two mentioned, have as their principal character strong-minded and independent women.

His great masterpieces are The Forest (staged by Meyerhold, one of hos three or four most important productions, in 1923); Wolves and Sheep, one of the first important artistic successes of the Fomenko Theatre under the direction of Peter Fomenko and Ma Zheng Hong; and The Storm the most famous play by Ostrovsky outside of Russia. This production's director began his directing carreer with a production of Truth is Good , but Luck is Better in Ottawa in February 1996.

The Musicians (Lina María García, Estefanía Díaz, Cindy Muñoz and maestro Libardo Carvajal) in Povertu is no Crime by Alexander Ostrovsky. (Photos: Juan Diego Muñoz, Jorge Suzarte)

This play unites three types of characters: a group of young people who are just beginning to live, and want to live life to its fullest (Mitya, Liubov; characters who have lived too long and who want to recover a happiness that seems to be slipping from their fingers (Korshunov, Tortsov); and characters who are simply happy despite their condition (Pelageya, Liubim, Arina). As in another play which confronts the heady aspirations of youth with the nervous nostalgia of age, Romeo and Juliet, this play is about a group of people who are ever after a happiness that only falls into their lap, miraculously, at the end of the play. Shakespeare's play is a failed comedy; this play by Ostrovsky is a failed tragedy, and both playwrights mixed comedy and tragedy in unexpected ways in all of their plays.

As far as the action of the play is concerned, this play celebrates national prowess, and for this reason it would make no sense to preserve the original Russian songs and traditions, but instead it is better to look for their equivalents here in Colombia. Our version is full of traditional colombian music, the "llanera" style which so much resembles, in atmosphere, content and complexity, Russian music, and the action of the play takes place in a different generation, the age of our grandparents, in the forties, when traditions still hadn't broken down before aggressive modernity.

In short, this play is a party that some of the characters want, and fail, to spoil. We are delighted to present this author unknown in the Spanish world, and we are proud to present this Latinamerican premiere of Poverty is no Crime.

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

Director: Everett Dixon
Acting Coach: Camilo Carvajal
Set and Costume Design: José Aristizábal

Página web del teatro Anhelo del Salmón
Programación de Esperando a Godot en el XII Festival Iberoamericano de Bogotá
Reseña de la obra en el blog del maestro Sandro Romero
Entrevista con Everett Dixon con Colombia.com













Leonardo Villa, Gadiel López and Edward Gómez as Lucky, Estragon and Pozzo in Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. (Photo: Carlos Mario Lema)


THE PARADOX OF SAMUEL BECKETT

Beckett dedicated his life to unmasking the emptiness behind language, and was implacable in his honesty at the manipulative senselessness of daily discourse. He put all of his linguistic virtuosity - as another brilliant writer, Vladimir Nabokov - into the game of taking language apart. But it is curious that an author who kept after emptiness so much should write plays so full of meaning beyond words. His plays, set on avoiding the traps of language in search of a terrifying honesty, surprise us with their light vitality, their childlike innocence, their readiness to play, and, significantly, their abundance of meaning. The best moments in Beckett, like Pozzo's description of the sunset, are suddenly, and shockingly, moving. Milton, in writing Paradise Lost, wanted to write a morality play, and wound up writing an inadvertent apology for the devil and original sin. In some ways, Beckett does the opposite: he wants to show that there is nothing beyond language but nothing and more nothing, and he winds up writing eloquent testimonies to ineffable fullness of life.

This irresistible exaltation of the fullness of life comes in his plays from two sources. The first is the same vital energy that unites us all, which the Catholic Church calls the Holy Spirit, the Japanese call ki, and actors like us, always more prosaic, simply call "play". In his project to prove the senselessness of life, he wound up writing a celebration of life. But was it really his project? Or has the old fox deceived us all? Sometimes I think that old Sam, always suspicious of words but always ready to laugh, has played a wonderful practical joke on us: it seems that he knew all along that the only way to express the fullness of life was with a mute paradox, an "act without words". An old fox so determined to feign cynicism that many still believe it years after his death. The second source of the irresistible energy of this play is in the paradoxical vision of Beckett himself.

We come to the theatre, fifty four years later, we see the absurd antics of Estragon, Vladimir, Pozzo and Lucky, their awkward desires, their innocent attempts at meaning "in spite of everything," and we come out curiously revitalized. They have nowhere to go at the end of the day, the food is slight, but still, the road has its special luminescence, and where all else fails, the four are still able to tell a good joke. As Beckett says somewhere, there is nothing more comic than tragedy, but don't tell anyone.

CAST

Vladimir - Camilo Carvajal
Estragón - Gadiel López
Pozzo - Eduard Gómez
Lucky - Leonardo Villa
Boy - Alexander Herrera

Leonardo Villa, Edward Gómez, Gadiel López and Camilo Carvajal as Lucky, Pozzo, Estragon and Vladimir in Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. (Photo: Carlos Mario Lema)

Research Group Teatro Cuatro Mundos, Theatre Department, Universidad del Valle, 2008-present

In 2008, Dixon founded the research group Teatro Cuatro Mundos, dedicated to the investigation of post-colonial playwrights, and canonical contemporary and classical playwrights unknown in the Spanish-speaking world. In both cases there is also an emphasis on playwrights for women. The first line of research is to develop the work at the Pacific Coast Workshop for Young Artists in Buenaventura (Colombia's New Orleans), an extended outreach program created by the Theatre Department of the Universidad del Valle in 2004, in conjunction with the Ministry of Culture and the Buenaventura Branch of Univalle. The TCM group has staged two successful productions under the direction of Manuel Viveros, Colombian adaptations of Beef, no Chicken by Derek Walcott, and The Piano Lesson by August Wilson. This last production has been invited to the XII Festival Iberoamericano de Teatro in Bogotá in 2010.

The second line of research is developed in the Professional Cycle of the Theatre Department, and began with a successful production of Alexander Ostrovsky's XIX century musical comedy, Poverty is no Crime.

Productions with the Young Artists' Workshop

The Piano Lesson by August Wilson. Directed by Manuel Viveros
Beef, no Chicken by Derek Walcott. Directed by Manuel Viveros

Dancing at Lughnasa by Brian Friel

Dirección: Everett Dixon

Traducción del inglés por Everett Dixon, Claudia Vélez y el grupo de Montaje IV.

Michael and Chrissie (Cristian Vásquez and Francia Solano) in Dancing at Lughnasa by Brian Friel, Padres e Hijos. (Fotos: Catherine Ávila)
Bailando en Lughnasa es una obra muy parecida a otra obra renombrada “chejoviana”, El Zoológico de Cristal de Tennessee Williams, pero se distingue de ésta (y de Chéjov) por su notable falta de crueldad. Sin sentimentalizar, esta obra logra dignificar a la gente sencilla por la poesía de su vida cotidiana. El proceder de Friel aquí es el del arzobispo-cronista Lombard en Haciendo Historia: ajusta la narrativa caótica de la vida de los personajes – del narrador Michael, de la tía Maggie, del padre Jack – a la propia visión idealista que tienen, luego se divierte tejiendo esta visiones contrastantes en una estructura de transiciones inesperadas. Por lo tanto, se arma un conflicto inhabitual en el teatro: el abismo que se abre entre nuestro vuelo imaginativo y la irrevocabilidad del pasaje del tiempo. Como su compatriota Shaw, toca una problemática moderna – en este caso la angustia existencial – y como Shaw da una solución de sentido común: hay que alegrarse. Comamos, bebamos, alegrémonos, que mañana moriremos. Esta obra tiene la alegría dolorosa de un alabao, herencia africana como las ceremonias que describe el padre Jack en el segundo acto, y la insistente presencia de la música en la obra no es una casualidad. Y visto que la obra habla del tiempo, pues, toma su tiempo, como las veladas nocturnas de nuestro propio festival pagano de otoño, la Noche de los Muertos.
REPARTO
Michael, joven, narrador - Johann Philipp MorenoKate, cuarenta, intitutriz - Ximena OrozcoMaggie, treintaiocho, ama de casa - Lauren CeballosAgnes, treintaicinco, tejedora - Satiana LondóñezRose, treintaidos, tejedora - Gianina AranaChris, veintiseis, madre de Michael - Francia SolanoGerry, treintitrés, padre de Michael - Cristian VázquezJack, cincuenta y tres, sacerdote misionero - Andrés Camilo López
Michael, quién narra la historia, también dice los textos del niño, es decir, Michael mismo cuando tenía siete años.Acto Primero: un día caliente de principios de agosto, 1936. Acto Segundo: tres semanas más tarde.La acción transcurre en el hogar de la familia de los Mundy, a cuatro kilómetros de la aldea de Ballybeg, en la condad de Donegal, Irlandia.
Arkady, Arisa Vlasyevna y Vassily Ivanich (Julián Caicedo, Sindy Ángel y Diego Robledo) en Padres e Hijos.
Visite la página web del montaje de la misma obraen el Teatro Estudio Fomenko, Moscú, Rusia.«Танцы на прaздник урожaя»


Para ver fotos de la obra, haga clic en la foto de la página web.
FICHA TÉCNICA
DirecciónProductora
Everett DixonSatiana Londóñez

Dancing at Lughnasa by Brian Friel

Direction: Everett Dixon
Translation by Claudia Vélez, Everett Dixon, and the Performance Workshop group.
A production of the Theatre Department of the University del Valle in Cali, Colombia.
















Cristian Vásquez and Francia Solano (Gerry, Chrissie) in Dancing at Lughnasa by Brian Friel. (Photo: Catherine Ávila)


Dancing at Lughnasa is very similar to another famous “chekhovian” play, The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, but it parts with this play (and Chekhov) for its remarkable lack of cruelty. Without sentimentality, this play manages to dignify simple people through the poetry of their daily life. Friel’s strategy is the same as that used by his character Lombard, arch-bishop and chronicler from Making History: he adjusts the chaotic narrative of the life of his characters – of narrator Michael, Aunt Maggie, Father Jack – to the idealist vision they have of their own lives, then he plays at interweaving this vision with contrasting scenes from reality, making for a structure of constantly unexpected surprises. And the result is an unusual conflict in the theatre: the chasm which opens between our imaginative flights and the irrevocability of the passage of time. As does his compatriot, Bernard Shaw, Friel touches on a modern problem – existential anguish – and as Shaw he gives a common-sense solution: be happy. Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. This play has the painful happiness of an Afrocolombian alabao, the celebratory songs to the dead that are sung in the Colombian Pacific – an African legacy like others described by Father Jack in the second act – and the insistent presence of music in the play is no coincidence. And since the play talks of time, it takes it time, and asks us to do the same, as in the same wakes where alabaos are sung.
















Lauren Ceballos, Francia Solano, Satiana Ordóñez and Gianina Arana (Maggie, Chrissie, Aggie and Rose) in Dancing at Lughnasa by Brian Friel. (Photo: Catherine Ávila)

Brian Friel (Omagh, 1929)

The most important contemporary Irish playwright, Friel has cultivated a deceptively simple dramatic structure: His plays, which deal with the passage of time and the fragmentary and idealistic mirages of memory, are testimonies of the failures of characters who nevertheless manage to tranform their reality through the poetization of their past. Friel is master at details that distract our attention, the pauses we make to contemplate a child's kite or smell the herbs in the garden, episodes and details that finally have more weight in the fortunes of these characters than their most painful misfortunes, Adapter of Ivan Turgenev, (Fathers and Sons, 1990), this Irish dramatist has an extraordinary affinity to the great notoriously warm-hearted Russian stylist. Other plays: Translations, 1986; Making History, 1989; Wonderful Tennesse, 1993.













Camilo López and Satiana Ordóñez (Father Jack and Aggie) in Dancing at Lughnasa by Brian Friel (Photo: Catherine Ávila)

Characters

Michael, young man, narrator: Johann Philipp Moreno
Kate, forty, schoolteacher: Ximena Orozco
Maggie, thirty-eight, housekeeper: Lauren Emilia Ceballos
Agnes, thirty-five, knitter: Satiana Ordóñez
Rose, thirty-two, knitter: Gianina Arana
Chris, twenty-six, Michael's mother: Francia Elena Solano
Gerry, thirty-three, Michael's father: Cristian David Vázquez
Jack, fifty-two, missionary priest: Andrés Camilo López

Michael, who narrates the story, also speaks the lines of the boy, i. e. himself when he was seven. Act One: A warm day in early August 1936. Act Two: Three weeks later. The home of the Mundy family, two miles outside the village of Ballybeg, County Donegal, Ireland.


Crew

Direction: Everett Dixon
Traduction: Claudia Vélez
Production: Satiana Ordóñez, Gianina Arana
Musical Consultant: Ramiro Soto
Music: Catherine Ávila
Choreography: Satiana Ordóñez, Gianina Arana
Lighting: Cristian Vásquez, Edwin Ramos
Stage Technician: Sergio Cardona
Secretary, Theatre Department: Myriam Valencia
Chair, Theatre Department: Mauricio Doménici
Programa Director: Gabriel Uribe


Visit the website of the same play at the Fomenko Studio Theatre (Moscow): «Танцы на прaздник урожaя» To see photos of the performance, click on the website photo.

Anhelo del Salmón Theatre, Bogotá

In 2007, Dixon was chosen as Artistic Director of the Bogotá theatre Anhelo del Salmón, with where he staged Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. This production has had successful runs in Cali, Medellin and Bogotá, and has been invited to the XII Festival Iberoamericano de Teatro in Bogotá in 2010.

Productions

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. Premiere: Guarne, Antioquia, August 2008.
The Misanthrope by Moliere. Premiere: Casa del Teatro, Bogotá, May 2010

Workshops

Analysis of Five Canonical Plays, October 2009
Rhythm and the Theatre of the Absurd, July 2009

Workshops for the XII FITB, 2010

"Theatre Games Workshop", Theatre Training Workshops for Teenagers, in conjunction with the District Secretariat for Culture, Recreation and Sports, January to March 2010
"Theatre Games Workshop", Theatre Training Workshops for School Teachers, in conjunction with the Ministry of Education, March 2010