La Obra SocioTeatral

Lili Weckler, 2010

Theatre in the Chilean Street

My month with La Obra SociotÈatral of ConcepciÛn, Chile, was a hands-on experience of full incorporation. La Obra is a theatre company focused on performances intended to inspire social discourse and action. While I was in ConcepciÛn, I joined the company for a tour of small, poor towns in the ConcepciÛn area, where people have no access to or means by which to see theatre performances. The play in which I performed is called Zapata y la Rabia del Pueblo. It is about a man who travels around South America with a band of three musicians, running into problems such as poverty, hopelessness, negative Western influence, and Globalization.

During the tour, we set up the backdrop of the play in town squares, on the fronts of houses in the middle of streets, and even in a gymnasium in a factory town. I brought my guitar with me to Chile, and the day after my arrival in ConcepciÛn the other two musicians came to my house to teach me the songs. The director decided that since I arrived after the show had been blocked, I would play a blind musician, so that the other musicians could lead my character around the stage and I would learn the blocking much more quickly. Along with playing the songs, Gisel, the director, also gave me several lines in Spanish. We had a couple of group rehearsals in which I was blocked into the show, I practiced the songs like crazy on my own, and then several days later I was performing with the rest of the group. Because I was blocked in late in the game and had very little time to develop a full character, a lot of my performing was improvisation. Even though I am a member of Otter Nonsense Improv Players at Middlebury, improvising in a language that is not my mother tongue was hugely challenging.

I felt very sensitive to how expertly and tightly blocked the piece was before my arrival, and the challenges of adding a new person late in the game. The songs in the piece were all played using a Latin strumming style with which I was unfamiliar. I spent a lot of time practicing, and ended up learning to play them quite well, as well as learning the words of the songs so that I could sing along with the other two musicians. I think my performance improved greatly with each production of the show, as I got more comfortable performing in Spanish and was more and more capable of singing the songs while I played them. It was a huge challenge to incorporate myself into a piece of theatre in another country in a foreign language and I’m so thankful to have had the opportunity to have this experience. The company is full of kind, welcoming, passionate people who incorporated me into the group as if I was one of them. I feel that in three weeks I made close and lasting friendships.

I learned a huge amount about myself and about what I want from theatre during my month with La Obra. I dream of one day starting a political theatre company in the United States that would have connections with local theatre companies in other parts of the world, especially Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East. Working with La Obra was in line with what I hope to make my career and my life’s work. La Obra is a Franco-Chilean company, and they have a branch in Guatemala as well, so I got to see how the community theatre company in ConcepciÛn works, and also how they manage their international affiliations. I even spoke to Gisel about the possibility of one day starting La Obra in San Francisco. As the modern world is becoming a more and more international place, and many of our challenges as a human race are global challenges, or at least local challenges that have global implications, I like the idea of a socially conscious theatre company having connections in other parts of the world that support each other artistically as well as socially and morally. I definitely made the kinds of connections with the people involved in La Obra that I think will lead to co-projects and future partnerships.

Because I was traveling with La Obra all the time, and performing as if I was a member of the company, I saw all the intricate joys and the challenges of trying to organize a group of actors and coordinate this kind of ‘in the street theatre.’ Everyone in the company works not for money but because they care about using theatre to make change in the world. However, because La Obra has very little money as an organization, and so all the actors work for free, it means that many of them have day jobs in order to live. This makes coordination, especially when it includes travel, extremely difficult. This is why we only had two rehearsals with me included before I performed. We had shows in the region most evenings, and we would travel further on the week-ends when most people didn’t have to work. It was summer in Chile, so the students involved in the production had freer schedules, but for everyone else it meant that they often worked all day and then performed until 10:30 or 11 ‘oclock at night. Generally, I was really inspired by the dedication of these people to art that they think can make a difference in their community. However, there were times when someone just could not show up to a performance or a rehearsal for one reason or another, and we would have to go on without him or her. In my second show, one of the musicians could not make it, and the other two of us had to cover for him.

Witnessing the challenges of creating high-caliber, fully committed theatre at a purely community level reinforced my desire to have a socially-focused theatre company that would perform at a national level. I would like to work with a group holding similar acclaim to that of ACT or Berkeley Rep. I realize that this is a much bigger challenge, as it very hard to make any money in the theatre in general, especially by doing theatre with a social focus. Bill T. Jones, who does movement workshops with people with terminal illnesses, and then uses their movements to choreograph internationally acclaimed dance pieces, is one of my models of the kind of performing art I would like to create.

While performing the show over and over again in these small towns I kept asking myself the same question: “what is the goal of this performance? What action is the play suggesting for the audience to take in order to make their world a happier, more livable place?” On my second-to-last day in Chile, Gisel, the artistic director, came over to talk with me about the experience, to offer her thoughts on my performance throughout the month, and to ask my opinion of the company as a whole, and any constructive criticism I could think of for them or for her. When asked about the play, I said I though it was very effective and that physical humor as well as music, movement, and masks were expertly used to create an engaging out-door theatre experience. My one piece of constructive criticism was that the play poses a lot of local and global problems to the communities in which it is performed, but it doesn’t suggest any actions to be taken to write these problems, or at least to work towards righting them. I think it’s great to inspire dialogue about world issues, but so much of the media to which we are exposed communicates the gravity of these issues without providing any suggestions for how to make change. A presentation that centers solely on what is wrong with a culture has the possibility of creating a jaded audience so focused on the negative they end up feeling powerless. I know it’s just as difficult for a bunch of leftist actors to think up how to make the world better as it is for poor citizens and politicians. I think it is important for a political street-theatre performance to have clear goals, and even more constructive to propose some kind of positive action.

Contact the Career Services Office for more information on this internship.