2024-08-07 03:34:48
With fewer premieres than last year – in 2023 there were seven and in 2024 there will be four works – TNC Produce in the Country was launched, the federal program promoted by the Cervantes National Theatre. It has just been released in Rada Tilly (Chubut) Darwin’s leapa piece written by the French-Uruguayan playwright Sergio Blanco with address of Silvia Araujo which explores grief through the hallucinatory journey of a family to fulfill the posthumous wish of their son: to scatter his ashes in the confines of Patagonia. The proposal follows the one that premiered on July 4 in Salta: Like cheap corsican foamwritten and directed by Natalia Aparicio.
The 2023 TNC call for entries included a list of dramatic texts designed for each region: among the contemporary works by foreign authors for Patagonia was Darwin’s leap. In dialogue with Page 12Araújo says that she was particularly interested in the corrosive tone of the play. She put together a team to undertake the production –Génesis Torres (assistant director), Matías González (lighting and sound), Alfaro Valente (costumes) and Manuel Barros (image design)–, the proposal was selected and they began to work at the Rada Tilly Cultural Center. In April they held auditions with Alejandro Bontas (executive producer of the TNC) and the cast was made up of local artists: Marcelo Vázquez, Patricia Soto Giménez, Gonzalo Dato, Agustina Fernández Pérez, Alejandro Plaza and Nahuel Araujo.
–What were the axes that guided the staging?
–Two ideas were central: grief and transformationThe play takes place on that threshold where the living and the dead share the same territory, the same experience and the same journey. Grief tears the time of the living apart, tenses it and implodes it. Grief as pain and loss: the life of the son of this family is lost on the battlefield, but the Malvinas Islands are also lost. They are the “lost little sisters” of Argentine history. If, as Jelin states, each vision of the past implies a vision of the future, the question that arises is why in the case of the Malvinas war the slogan is “we will return” while in the dictatorship it is “Never Again.” The dictatorship is thought of in terms of closure so that confrontations, deaths and disappearances are not repeated, while the war is evoked under the idea of repetition and recidivism, not as a closure. Perhaps because the grief has not yet been worked out, like that of the family in the play. The starting point for thinking about the entire production was, precisely, mourning as a matrix for producing meaning.
Another key premise was the transformation of both the characters and the space. “This axis guided the search for instability and imbalance in the construction of the scenes. In this sense, Darwin’s intertext that appears in the work, in line with the character of Kassandra, opened up an interesting working hypothesis for us. This transformation was central to the organization of the space, which begins as a campsite and gradually transforms into something else.” The play also explores a dimension that has been revised in recent times: the construction of masculinities. Araújo quotes a phrase by Carlos Gamerro, who maintains that “in military service and in war men are not made – they are undone, and from the parts a soldier is made,” and thinks of this “hegemonic form of masculinity as a static, universal, ahistorical, inevitable and immovable category.” In turn, he refers to the Church and the Armed Forces as “examples of institutions that build, sustain and promote specific models of masculinity” and highlights: “The character of Kassandra arrives to destabilize all the institutional constructions of family, gender, language, nationality and, at the same time, energize the transformations of all the characters in the work.”
Regarding the importance of a federal program such as TNC Produce, the director points out that “having the full support of the TNC and the co-production of the Rada Tilly Culture Secretariat in our city is truly invaluable,” since “this type of public theater policies are essential to make visible, promote and strengthen the construction of theater identities in our territories, especially in times like this of dismantling of the State, through the advancement of a massive plan of cuts and layoffs in the public sphere.”
Author’s reflections
The author Sergio Blanco once defined Darwin’s leap as “a text of reconciliation with the linguistic experience” because, in a way, he made peace with his mother tongue there. The playwright reflects on the subject: “writing is a way of relating to language, creating a bond with the words that are the material with which one works. When I wrote Darwin’s leap I had just finished writing a series of texts that talked about the end of language and, as the pieces progressed, the language was disjointed, damaged or deconstructed until it ended up becoming something incomprehensible. These were forms of writing that were very violent with the language. At one point I moved so far away from language that I even wrote a whole text in English called Kassandra –at the end of August, an opera composed from this text will premiere at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires–. This entire period of writing showed a noticeable discomfort with the language. It was only when I wrote Darwin’s leap I was able to return to a peaceful connection with language, since it is a text where words once again inhabit the characters, Spanish once again contains their stories and language constructs them as subjects. That is why I speak of linguistic reconciliation: in this work I somehow make peace with Spanish. And that is why the main theme of the piece is the celebration of the end of the war, the condemnation of military combat and the ridicule of military conflict. Darwin’s leap It is a text that celebrates peace.
–The work is defined as a theatrical road movie, what kind of challenges does it pose for the purposes of the production?
–In this work I wanted to talk about the journey and that need that we humans have to move continuously; that is why I chose the format of the road movie where everything always revolves around the subject of the journey. There is something that frequently happens in this genre and it is the unleashing of a double movement that I find fascinating: the desire to leave like Moses in search of a promised land and, at the same time, the desire to want to return to the place of departure like Ulysses. It is a paradox in which the wandering Jew and the navigating Greek coexist. And if there is something that shows all this clearly, it is the narrative structure of the road movie where the characters are always looking for a better world at the beginning – a promised land – but then they want to return to where they started. This poses many dramatic challenges in terms of the rhythm and speed of the story, but above all in terms of interpretation, because the characters are permanently inhabited by this contradictory movement of flight and return.
–What do you remember about the moment you wrote this piece? What were your reasons and what did you need to tell?
–When I sat down to write this work I wanted to talk about the war. And I chose to talk about the Malvinas because my childhood was very marked by this war, since it was very close geographically. But deep down, as I say in one of the captions of the text, it could also be Saigon, Kosovo, Kabul, Baghdad or Troy. When I started working with the Malvinas, I discovered that they are a key point in the famous trip that Darwin made in the mid-nineteenth century: a few months before reaching the islands, he made a stopover of several days in Montevideo where he received from England the second volume of Principles of Geology by Lyell. There Darwin will read the word for the first time evolution used in its transformative sense. The incredible thing about this story is that the reading of this text together with his observations in the surroundings of Montevideo and the Malvinas is what will lead him to the idea of the evolution and transmutation of species. That is how I decided that along with the subject of war I would also talk about Darwin and one of the aspects of his thought that fascinates me the most: his profound humanism when studying human behavior. Darwin considers that the human being is the one who stops the old selective law – that of the triumph of the fittest and the elimination of the weakest – to establish in its place a system of anti-selective and supportive behaviors of mutual help and protection that constitute the very heart of civilization. The war took me to the Malvinas, the Malvinas took me to Darwin and Darwin took me on the journey of a family who decided to go and scatter the ashes of their son who died in the war…
–How was your experience with the productions and what do you think of this approach that will not be in Capital Federal but in Rada Tilly, within the framework of a federal program?
–The play was staged in Uruguay and Spain and the experiences were excellent. In both places it was very successful because it touches on themes such as war or domestic violence, which are universal. Although there is a deep love between the members of that family, love unleashes complex, intense and even monstrous aspects. Darwin’s leap paints the chiaroscuro of human beings, that we are beautiful and horrible at the same time. Beauty is ugly and ugly is beautiful, say the witches of Macbeth. And I find this very interesting. The complexity that exists within this family also exists in all communities of people who decide to organize themselves to live together. It is something linked to the human species: at times we were capable of the best, but at the same time we were also capable of the worst. It is true that we are a marvel capable of building Notre Dame, Chichén Itzá or Lascaux, of writing the Martin Fierro or creating an instrument like the harpsichord, but in many ways we have also been a disaster. That is how we are made and this chiaroscuro that defines us as a species is fascinating to me. The fact that the installation is not in Capital Federal but in Rada Tilly is extraordinary to me and I celebrate it like any event that invites us to decentralize, to leave the center, to move away from the axis. I am increasingly interested in things that propose to challenge the spotlights because I believe that it is outside of these centers where surprising things happen: in decentralization there is always wonder.
*Darwin’s leap It can be seen on Fridays and Saturdays at 9 pm at the Rada Tilly Cultural Center (Av. Almirante Brown No. 438) until September 28.