MAKING FACES IN ARGENTINA

It's a long trip from late spring to late fall, a bit shorter if you're traveling from New York to Buenos Aires in May.  Fortunately, my hosts at Cabuia Teatro y Compania eased the shock of landing in a city which seems familiar but which, for me, was challenging to navigate.  Despite my feeling that I understand Spanish, either Argentinian Spanish is very different from the Spanish I hear in Philadelphia or I have a highly inflated sense of my language abilities.  Probably the latter.  My ego was definitely put in its proper place after several confusing hours of polite smiles and suspended glances while I searched for even the most basic Spanish phrases.  I must admit that I did relish ordering items off a menu which I only had a hint of the ingredients, to be completely surprised at what ended up on the plate.  

 

The language barrier was a necessary jolt to my system, reminding me of all the things I don't know.  During the 5 days of workshops I taught on clown and half-masks, it also reminded me that theatre needs words like fish need campfires, or like trees need coffee.  Working with an interpreter, Pablo Lopez, a founder of Cabuia, a graduate of LISPA, and a world-class host, my thoughts were filtered and my comments were translated.  I was forced to choose my words carefully and this restraint proved to be such a valuable lesson.  Pablo and I began to get into a rhythm, at first quite clunky but eventually seamless.  And we all made the most of sounds and gestures to avoid the "telephone-like" communication.  Most of what transpired in the workshops needed no translation as it transcended spoken language.

 

Perched atop a school for psychotherapy (I learned that Buenos Aires is one of the, if not the, leading locations for psychotherapy in the world), Cabuia's rehearsal space, recently renovated by a crackerjack team of Paraguayan builders, was big, comfortable and ideal for a mask and clown workshop.  As the clown workshop begins, I wonder if the psychotherapy will be visible, both through osmosis in the building and through the participants' self-knowledge and reflection.  Can I put the clowns, once we meet them, on the couch to see what conditions they suffer from and what neuroses they possess?   Would this theme yield a specific Argentinian clown state?  Which clown will I cast as the psychotherapist?  Will she or h diagnose any new ailments of the mind?  I begin to enter a little delirium about this theme.  

 

In the end, the workshop is filled with as many non-Argentinians as Argentinians with participants coming from Chile, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Mexico, and Uruguay.  Instead of the mind of each clown, we begin with a focus on the body.  One clown slinks, another sleuths; one wants to be looked at, another hides.  One appears to float a few inches above the earth, yet another's strength comes from a density in her shoulders.  Each clown, as different from the other as we human beings are from our neighbors, searches to find the way of expressing him/herself to the audience.  Each tries, sometimes desperately, sometimes with ease, to communicate his/her lot in life: high status, low status, full of responsibility, utterly carefree, magnetized to another clown, repulsed by another still.  We begin to assemble a rag-tag bunch of Latin American clowns, a mini-society.  I am struck by the commitment of these students.  They like to play.  They may have doubts and might, at times, hesitate to make bold choices, but they begin, in a short time, to give in to the clown lunacy and resist removing the nose when I am giving notes.  I begin to talk to the clowns rather than to the actors and this animates my own stake in the workshop.  I, too, begin to play along with them.

 

Joel, a tall and strong young man from Puerto Rico who is a member of the National Circus of Puerto Rico and is in Buenos Aires for 3 months training at an acrobatics center, finds a perfect clown to suit his large frame.  This clown drinks from a certain cup of stupidity and inhales fumes of idiocy.  Though he could squash any other clown in the room, he is a gentle giant, in love with everyone and terrified of his own potential power.  We pair him up with one of the smallest women, a potent source of ferocity and teenage-like sexuality.  Sparks fly between the innocent boy toy and the seasoned vixen.  As a couple, his gigantism and her compactness inversely speak to their social status.  He follows her like a puppy; she teases him like a tiger teases a mouse.

 

This clown work segues into a workshop on half-masks.  I've brought 13 of my masks from Bali and 2 masks from Italy to Argentina, clutching them as though they are ancient ruins that I am smuggling into or out of a country as I pass through security, immigration and customs and make my way from the airport to the psychotherapy school.  They arrive mostly intact; though one-half of one of the Bali masks' mustaches has disappeared.  I fantasize about a customs official taping half of a white mustache on to entertain his oft-bored colleagues.  

 

Turns out, though this group is strong in clown, they excel with masks.  The work takes off quickly.  The clowns began to talk back to me, the teacher.  But the masks are in full revolt.  I do my best to interview them, to suss out their logic and to, occasionally, tie their brains, hearts and groins in a knot.  But these masks talk back, they protest, they rewind scenes that are being performed to show me, in slow motion, how things occurred.  They treat me like the idiot while they share their world view.  They are experts on everything from sun to moon to the beginning of time.  

 

Arturo, the founder of the National Circus of Puerto Rico who is also in Buenos Aires training in acrobatics,  has us in stitches as he performs Arlecchino setting up his security alarm system to monitor the world's most precious diamond.  Of course he has an iris scan, finger print scan and many layers of laser protection.  But he also has installed a breathalizer, a video surveillance system, x-ray machines and other forms of sci-fi technology meant to detect any criminal behavior.  We nearly fall off our chairs as two amateur thieves manage to steal, break, swallow and re-construct the diamond with the sometimes help and sometimes bafflement of our chief of security, Arlecchino.

 

The masks are happy to be in such capable hands.  For them, I am sure it was a work-out.  I always worry that commedia dell'arte becomes a style that tickles theatre zealots but annoys everyone else.  I worry that the themes are stale and don't actually speak to us anymore.  I worry that the mystique of the style - the old story of the original theatre troupes, caravanning around Europe - encrusts the masks in a tradition that is no longer alive but that some keep working on for much the same reasons as individuals take part in Renaissance Faires and historical re-enactments.  I know this kind of tradition has its place and there are certainly many who are passionate about such pursuits.  For me, though, I desire for these masks to struggle to survive in 2011 and for them to say something about our current condition.  In Buenos Aires, for the first time in a long time, I found, again, this life.  These masks could rap and dance hip-hop.  They worried about global warming; they texted each other and, on one occasion, sexted each other.  My fond memories of Buenos Aires are of this time with the masks.  It really reminded me that a performer can break through the tradition and make something utterly contemporary out of something old.  The hollow gestures and dusty archetypes quickly gave way to con artists, lovers, bosses and buffons that you could meet on any street corner in the Western world.

 

I left Buenos Aires with the 15 masks I brought with me and with another 15 that I commissioned from a wonderful Uruguayan mask maker who has worked for decades in Argentina named Alfredo Iriarte.  He is a performer, puppeteer and mask maker and made me, in short order,  5 expressive masks and 10 larval masks that we'll use during the first year of the Pig Iron School.  My worries about entering Argentina with 15 masks were easily trumped by my worries about entering the United States with 30 masks.  Are leather masks organic material?  Will the dog sniff them out and think I'm importing some strangely shaped beef jerky?  Will the guards open my enormous mask suitcase and begin wondering about the potential ritualistic purposes of the larval masks?  Can I import goat hair (used for the Balinese mask mustaches and eyebrows) into the U.S.?  Thankfully, all 30 masks managed to get along and make their way to my home where they wait to have life again as they had in the studio above the psychotherapy school in Buenos Aires or they wait for a return visit to the land of enormous steaks, the widest boulevard in the world and a theatrical hub that is ripe with talent from across the Latin American world.

 

--QUINN BAURIEDEL