By Valmir Santos*

 

The autobiographical realm and inventive ambition bring a fruitful balance to the performance of Bolivian troupe Chakana Teatro.

The author, Ariel Muñoz, also directs, leads and transcends into the primordial source of what is brought to the stage. The hindsight look at life around the age of 30, specifically from the mother’s womb in the sixth month of pregnancy, makes Chancho an exhilarating investigation in the tone of genetic criticism.

Much like in literature and other forms of expression, in which the creative process is reconstructed from early sketches by researchers scouring for traces of materiality, the drama piece touches upon traces of orality in a mother and an aunt. It builds a lifelike world in which memory does not attempt to hide the wings of fiction.

The ensemble makes this distance present and intimate, without being subdued by the mere figure of the self. So much so that the author strays away from his own name, addressing himself as Eduardo.

We are faced with a narrative system in which the voices of the son and the two women of the family, mother and aunt (by Glenda Rodríguez and Adriana Ríos), also overarch the narrator’s speech.

He is the man occupying one of the stalls in an airport restroom. In a given moment, the position of his body resembles Rodin’s The Thinker. It is the same airport in which his foreign father was once forcibly deported in the early 1980s, carried by two men.

His interpretation of what he was told about that day boiled down to a feeling of love and faith tangled up with the reasons that led to his father’s departure or disappearance, before he was even born.

Besides the looming ghost of his father, the absence that moves him, Eduardo is faced with a childish dilemma, but one that its crucial for his existence. To break or not to break the piggy bank he won from his mother at the age of six, where he pledged to keep his savings until his father’s return. Both in Spanish and Portuguese, “chancho” means pig.

He was kept from using his savings all these years. A metaphor. The concern with saving money speaks to the origin of social class. The heir/editor of these memories spent years mopping the floor of a hospital specialized in gastroenterology. (As the bathroom does in the territory of reflection, the text ventures into the realm of physiology, the functioning of organisms. In fact, there is a body there, brooding and reverberating the entire time: this man.)

On the other hand, clinging on to each coin saved meant hiding away from the possibilities of a more independent life. This psychological reading is set by the scene; it is not at the forefront of the performances. On the contrary, the performative register overshadows the dramatic aspect in this front.

Neither is the essentialist set anchored to the assumption of reality. The public restroom is more a suggestion than a given, since the story slides through in fragments and opens up to the indigenous genealogy of Andean countries, incorporating the mythical Quechua chanting. The undertone here is the aftermath of the colonizing process for the indigenous population of an entire nation.

“Between doing and not doing, we must do,” says the protagonist, relegated to telling this story with love – the emotion through which he was conceived, as his mother always adamantly reminds him. “Time heals everything.”

Different flashbacks are refreshed in Eduardo’s conscience as he is about to travel to the Canadian province of Quebec. Indeed, displacements are also of a geographical nature. From that very country he received a phone call from someone in a religious order, informing him of the death of the one whom he had never met and whom he now is not so sure he should meet. What would it mean to see his father’s face for the first and last time, after he is dead?

One can draw an analogy between the performance and the art and technique of sculpting objects out of clay. The earthy substance created from the decomposition of rocks can vary in color, with shades ranging from white to red, as well as plasticity and its ability to absorb water. The performance’s lighting and set also convey this notion of an ever-changing landscape.

In yet another brief Hamletian insight, Eduardo/Ariel insists that the piggy bank is made of clay, while his mother or aunt say that it is made of ceramic. Like in an imaginary photograph or under blindfolded eyes, the sensorial universe of Chancho draws parallels of speech and silence, two distinct but complementary qualities of one seeking or asserting his identity.

Created in 2012 in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Chakana Teatro drew inspiration for its name from the indigenous expression of pre-Columbian times. A symbol in the shape of a four-sided set of stairs that have been interpreted in several different ways for millennia. The art of Ariel Muñoz and the group can be seen under this same angle, as they have shown in their passage through Mirada.

 

*Valmir Santos is a journalist, critic and scholar. Founder and publisher of the site Teatrojornal – Leituras de Cena Master of performing arts from USP.