Cuban Theatre and the Environmental Dilemma
(an essay)
"If we consider that the intimate space involves a vast array of biographical experiences that come from the
realm of the real, we might think that it is those very experiences that, (re) built by an “I” in a place of fellowship and a here and now, could enable the subject to access a reality and intervene in it, a situation that would explain the power that it is given to the intimate space in the new practices".
Juan Manuel Urraco, Dramaturgies of the Real in the Contemporary Scene
When looking at recent years, it is possible to recognize gestures and diverse intentions pointing to a rethinking of the relationship between theater and environment in the landscape of the Cuban theater scene.
They are mainly fueled by anguish: how to represent the impact of existing strategies of erosion in the contemporary world and the need to preserve the natural balance between humankind and its environment?
How does one show through theater, an art where representation before a spectator defines a certain quality of unreality, the real pain for the loss of that essential balance, the complex relationship between humans and their habitat, death, or gradual deterioration of a system of links between beings, natural phenomena, and spaces whose formation and survival has taken millions of years?
In the Cuban context, we would have to consider certain factors when analyzing this relationship, such as the scarce industrialization of the country as part of that strange “strip” of nations called Third
World, and its socialist system of government, with its naturally less aggressive forms of environmental exploitation. This brings up another important element in the field of Cuban theater, at least in the
one developed after 1959, when the artistic sphere entered a phase of intense strengthening: there are not many examples of groups, projects, and artists who have been willing to dedicate their work to exploring
the impact of climate change and its causes originating in human action, the erosion of ecosystems, pollution, and the disappearance of entire species.
It is possible to find, however, efforts produced within communitybased projects, such as works of Escambray Theater, founded in the 1970s, and many of the works performed by Teatro de los Elementos and its director Jose Oriol González. Moreover, important scripts and performances were developed in the 1970s and 1980s. In those decades, the country still supported cultural strategies that allowed theater artists to address concerns of political, social, and racial topics through their art. The concept of the marginal, the contradictions born of a new socio-political system, which generated strong strains and
was still immersed in the battle to find a stable path of development, were also present in this period. Then in the 1990s, most of the projects that emerged under the birth of the National Council for the Performing Arts (1989) had to struggle for survival at a critical moment where, in addition to economic shocks that marked one of the most remarkable periods of economic crisis in the history of Cuba, issues such as emigration and family divisions became evident. This also meant the breakdown of a social utopia that had hitherto sustained
the hope of several generations of Cubans who remained in the country.
All these elements worked to characterize a theater community dedicated to understanding and exploring, from a thematic point of view, what was happening in Cuba. Paradoxically, they helped to develop the search for new expressive languages and poetics of authorship related to avant-garde influences by international referents that began entering the country starting in the 1980s. Thus, the turbulent and changing political, social, and cultural situation that Cuban citizens and artists experienced well into the 1990s had interests
deeply rooted in these elements, which also spanned the ancient preoccupation with the concept of identity and the notion of the Cuban.
The concern with addressing environmental problems has been closely linked to a type of theater that defends the idea of community, the notion of collective creation, and work based on experience. The influence of these three points generates an art of procedural nature, where the interest in presenting the theme is powerfully united to an approach to creation that comes from the personal experiences of the artists and their immediate environment. This interest also comes from a way of thinking that, even when it has institutional connections,
departs from the original frameworks of traditional production and calls to the power of the individual, to a condition originating from art in relation to nature and in man in relation to the collective.
Thus, there have been projects addressing the topic of environmental protection and the grave danger in which human beings have put themselves in thanks to indiscriminate practices of natural exploitation,
but they have done it without a politicized discourse and starting from an essential need: to show certain phenomena occurring in their communities by the power of individual experience, the corporeality
of the actor, the performer, and the use of material and cultural elements directly linked to the lives of these men and their communities.
We could say that there is virtually no construction, no artificial preparation of the scenery, the costumes, the design of the characters, or creatures that the performers embody. There is no ornate construction of the topic, the way the performances are presented to the public, or how the artists conceive of theatrical intervention. There is, though, a communal and individual commitment that is also understood and
shared by the community. This is possible thanks to sustained work with the members of such communities, so trained in the reception of this kind of artistic proposals that the majority of times they are integrated
into a relation of direct participation.
In recent years, some theater groups have implemented these kinds of strategies in the spaces where they reside. They all work explicitly on environmental topics. On a recent trip, the author of these pages
has had the opportunity to share viewing and exchange experiences with American university professors Melinda Levin, Filip Celander, and David Taylor. As part of this collaboration, it was possible to identify
some of these groups and projects, all of which were closely connected with the experience of collective creation already rooted in Latin American theater groups since four decades earlier. For example,
the work of Jose Oriol González has been influenced by previous experiences such as the Escambray and La Yaya, who not only conceived their plays based on natural spaces, but also set them in that particular kind of setting.
Furthermore, they gave the Cuban peasant, its primaryaudience, the ability to interact directly, and even decide on the fate of the characters and the outcome of such works. In that case, the history of Teatro de los Elementos is paradigmatic, because it is a collective formed by artists of heterogeneous origin who
decided to have not only the experience of working for a community starting from their most urgent conflicts, integrating it and involving it in its efforts, but also because they decided to live in the community
and remain in direct relationship with the environment.
The land and living space for Teatro de los Elementos can be described as a preserved natural space. Built by its members, it includes spaces for performance such as an amphitheater, and endless possibilities for the
engagement of the natural space. In the bridges, rivers, trees, and hills of its land, the group has managed to fuse an interest in including a kind of collective community experience with the environmental problems
stemming from that same relationship between man and the environment.
The members of Teatro de los Elementos practice and encourage a type of life practice which is not abusive to the local landscape and is interested in dealing with any public environmental problems, whether it is pollution or the drying of a river, water scarcity, or the urgent need for its conservation. What matters is how the subject, far from subjugating the formal aspect, integrates with the way the problem is represented, and the group then takes the art of “Playback Theatre” to achieve not only a real and direct communication with the audience, but also a personal exposure of the actors as individuals, who perform without assuming any artifice.
The technique allows the public to propose a passage or topic, and the performers to improvise and elaborate with the help of the viewer. The viewer from the community becomes a director, capable of intervening in the presentation of a problem and deciding on the actions of the actor. This collective act radicalizes the estranged relationship which has traditionally owned the stage space and opposed it to the space of the audience, and serves as a powerful area for the confluence of interests, a space for public political exchange in the Ancient Greek sense, a space for unanimous exposition and discussion. The exploration of the theme of
environmental conservation is then assumed to be living experience, understood as a circumstance defined by immediacy, and in which it is possible to identify each one of the participants as parts of a community
that enjoys and suffers the same tensions and gaps.
The performative dimension of theater, which articulates the moment of scenic representation as a unique situation where certain relationships that are impossible to record or even grasp are produced, defines a special relationship between theater and reality, and enables degeneration of a spontaneous and authentic
that would otherwise reach the public turned into pamphlet.
In one of his most seductive works, Spanish professor and theoretician José Antonio Sánchez states, “Reality is the others, real is the relationship itself. The real is immaterial, and it is only representable as a process.” The ability to not only generate this process authentically, but also show it through a representational scheme that can materialize issues like the environmental dilemma and the place humans occupy in it, is an important and remarkable achievement, particularly when thinking about the links between theater and reality and between modern humans and their most pressing contradictions.
The work of other groups and projects working in the mountains, in the fields, and inside rural communities can be understood in connection with that same conception. Experiences like those products of the
Guantánamo-Baracoa Theater Crusade (Cruzada Teatral Guantánamo-Baracoa), an event conducted annually when various groups in the country visit small villages and hamlets of eastern Cuba for several
weeks, create a type of performance art that supports a conception of theater that is more experiential and closer to the social problems affecting this population, among which, of course, there is the relationship
of these communities with their environment, with the consequences of severe droughts, and the contamination of the widest rivers in Cuba, the impact of industrialization and the extraction of copper
and nickel, and a growing wave of invasive tourism the local population is having to learn to live with.
In such proposals, working with the experiential reflects a commitment that goes beyond aesthetic frameworks, and reaches, in other cases, a more rigorous degree of formal elaboration. This applies, for
example, to projects such as Watermark, by the group Teatro de la Fortaleza, based in the province of Cienfuegos, and to works by the TECMA project (Theatre Collaboration Environment), in the city of
Pinar del Río. Both reside in cities far from the main theater circuits, and practice experiences of theater in and for the community in which they are part of.
They do it using various genres and techniques: the form of theater called dramatic, produced in a theatrical space conditioned by the members of the group Cienfuegos, and street theater, whose impact is also recordable from the number of people who spontaneously join the group in each of its interventions and the relationship it builds with the space in which it operates.
In Marca de Agua (Watermark) and Galápago (Terrapin), Atilio Caballero, novelist, poet, and playwright, leader of Teatro de la Fortaleza, and Luis Manuel Valdes, director of TECMA, reflect a concern for the development of speech that adds another path to the development of a relationship between theater and
reality.
Ecological and conservationist thought moves and reaches the viewer through a process of collective creation that leads to a product less influenced by improvisation and public participation in site, instead operating through a more intellectualized and associative reception and building from heterogeneous symbols and references.
Marca de Agua is the result of an experience of research on an extreme situation lived by a city founded in the 1970s, which seems to have been conceived as a space of utopia and realization of the socialist dream. The Ciudad Electronuclear (Nuclear City) (CEN) is located at the foot of the secluded shores of Cienfuegos Bay, and was founded with the construction of three of the five nuclear reactors that would turn the city of Cienfuegos into the mecca of nuclear power generation in Cuba, and where hundreds of engineers would work and live with their families in buildings that were never completed.
In the 1990s, the place became a forgotten place, a symbol of a broken utopia. Today, the lives of its inhabitants are full of contradictions with the environment, and the arrival of water in the area, as well as the means to find it, are problems of greater severity. In response, two actors and the director of the group built a creative process that sought to address the issue through dance, the intervention of official documents pertaining to the Kyoto Protocol, and images of the devastation of a city already lost in time. All of this filtered through a markedly poetic language with clear metaphorical undertones and greatly empowered by the weight of symbols.
The product of this work generated discussions that brought to the fore the urgency of a matter made apparent by the body of the actor and the relationship developed with the spectator through a shared experience. Again, the theater serves as a forum, and as a site that is political in nature. Through proposals that erect the performative condition of theater and that radicalize it in connection with a particular community, the approaches to the environmental dilemma and the relevant change produced in the biosphere through years of irresponsible exploitation and depletion of natural resources can finally reach the Cuban viewer, especially in remote towns of the capital and major cities.
They establish a more direct relationship with the natural environment and thus perceive more clearly the gradual impact of global policies that have helped damage a delicate natural balance. Given the limited levels of education and knowledge concerning the environmental dilemma that still affects the contemporary world,
a form of art such as theater constitutes an attempt to find answers through a diverse exploration of the concept of experience, of the procedural, and the collective. Possibly, the mechanisms of traditional representation would be less efficient because they would create a distance with a spectator deeply in need of developing conscious thinking about the problem.
The directors do not put their stakes in fiction, at least not in absolute fiction. Individual and community experience in Cuba has become the fundamental tool to find an answer to the stark choice offered by theater and its relation to reality.
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Translation: Enmanuel Pardo
Text Published in Magazine ISLE (Interdisciplinary Studies of Literature and Environment),
Oxford University Press, United States, 2016
Text Published in book An Island in the Stream, Lexington Books (edited by David Taylor)
United States, 2021
Photo external post: courtesy of David Taylor
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