BY MARIA GALLUCCI
The News
Friday, Dec. 18
Imagine sitting at home one evening, loafing on the couch and flipping through the channels, when a knock raps on the door. Curious, you turn the knob, opening up to a group of eager-faced actors asking to come inside. And to use your living room for a rehearsal.
The concept of such spontaneous and unexpected performances is the brainchild of Seres Comunes (Common Beings), a Mexico City-based theater collective that coordinates the at-home shows through its Salas de Urgencias (Emergency Room) project.
After wrapping up its second year with the impromptu theatrics, the group is preparing to bring rehearsals to more homes and other unconventional spaces, such as cantinas and cafeterias, in 2010. “The idea is that this creative laboratory can serve to make the spectator an accomplice,” Alfonso Cárcamo, artistic director for Salas de Urgencias, said from his home office in the Centro Histórico.
The project essentially works like this: During a two-month period, a group of actors, directors and playwrights will walk around knocking on between 20 to 30 doors around the Santa María la Ribera neighborhood.
In each living room, rooftop or café, the group will perform various stages of the play, from rudimentary readings to a complete run-through. After each performance, the crew engages the viewers and collects feedback to add to the play. Hosts are invited to view the final production at the nearby Sergio Magaña Theater.
“It is the perfect strategy to draw in the public and convince people that the theater is accessible, both economically and thematically,” Cárcamo said.
Seres Comunes actress Naomy Romo added, “It's no longer a piece of theater that's shown behind this velvet curtain. It becomes much more accessible and personal.”
The idea for the grassroots project began in 2007 in Cárcamo's apartment, when his Seres Comunes colleague Luis Ayhllón presented an informal reading of his play “Los caracoles estresados” (“The Stressed Snails”) to a group inside the home.
After fielding comments from the audience, Ayhllón showed his progressing rehearsals inside 15 random spaces in the Federal District, the State of Mexico and in Veracruz. A final performance debuted in a summer theater festival in La Paz, Bolivia.
By summer 2008, Mexico City's Secretariat of Culture adopted the concept as a pilot program to implement in the communities surrounding the Sergio Magaña Theater, a centrally located stage with a low turnout rate.
“People around the theater just stopped going, for various reasons. They didn't like the play, they thought it was too expensive, they didn't know the lineup,” said Romo.
Through Salas de Urgencias, however, the program managed to draw in more than a thousand viewers to the theater in 2009 alone, with a set of 21 “interventions,” or in-home rehearsals, and eight final shows from February to March, and an additional 32 interventions and four shows in July and August.
The roster also included widely known Mexican choreographer Antonio Salinas, who carried out a series of dance performances throughout the year. Next year, the program will expand to include cycles from February to March, June to July, and October to November. In addition to theater and dance, interventions in 2010 will include a musical component as well, and final performances will also be shown in the Centro-area Teatro del Pueblo (Community Theater) and the Tlatelolco Cultural Center.
Cárcamo said that while many times people refuse to let a bunch of strangers into the privacy of their homes, those that do welcome the theater group inside become very excited and energized as they take part in the creative process.
“The key word here is 'complicity,'” he said. “The idea is that when a movie or TV show ends, you can no longer see the actors. But with theater, when the play is over, you can converse, share ideas or have a drink with the actors.”
The artistic director added that by visiting more humble homes and meeting residents with lower levels of education, both the hosts and Salas de Urgencias members have learned that quality theater is not just a pastime of profound intellectuals or high-income viewers.
“In Mexico, people keep their distance from the theater, because many times it feels untouchable, and so the audience is left with nativity plays or grade school shows,” he said.
“The solution that we've found is to present contemporary texts with professional actors to the public, and we have reached around 3,000 people [through these shows] in our two years of work.”
For more details, visit http://salasdeurgencia.blogspot.com, or www.serescomunes.com
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Plaza de Toros offers "la brava fiesta"
[Author's note: Grupo Mac remembered that a Web site might be a good feature for a 21st-century newspaper to have, so here's the most recent story that's on www.thenews.com.mx).
BY MARIA GALLUCCI
The News
Thursday, Dec. 24
It starts with the quick thud of charging hooves and the graceful shuffle of the matador's feet. Horns lowered and cape raised, the dance begins. The dramatic act continues with flashes of red and huffs of rage until finally, somebody falls.
It is, as Juan Castañera says, the art of the “corrida de toro,” or bullfight.
The controversial colonial tradition has persevered in small Mexican villages and booming metropolises alike, with suspenseful shows drawing thousands of spectators into open fields and grandiose plazas each year.
In Mexico City, the biggest bullfight season of the year is already underway at the Plaza de Toros, a stadium that plaza spokesman Castañera called the biggest bullfighting arena worldwide in terms of capacity. The bullring, located near the city's Ciudad de los Deportes neighborhood, can hold around 40,000 people.
The season began in November and will offer fights every Sunday through the end of February next year. The next fight is slated for Dec. 27. The plaza publishes its lineup of international matadors, also called “toreros,” each Tuesday before the fight on its Web site.
“The torero in his moment is creating art, and this has inspired many writers, artists and painters to transfer this to their works,” Castañera told The News. “This art is glued to our culture, our music, our poetry.”
The spokesman explained that bullfighting, or the “fiesta brava,” came to Mexico along with the Spanish colonizers some 400 years ago. The first fiestas were very rudimentary but began to define themselves as the Spaniards pegged bullfighting to pagan celebrations for each pueblo's patron saint, effectively expanding the Catholic faith through Spanish culture and religion.
As the bullfights spread to larger capital cities, such as Tijuana, Monterrey and Guadalajara, the tradition outgrew the limited, once-a-year celebrations and broadened to include year-round fiestas at centrally located plazas dedicated to the sport.
Mexico City's Plaza de Toros was built on Feb. 5, 1946, and nearly every year since then has held a smaller season from July to October and a larger one at the end of the year, with a grand anniversary celebration that takes place in February.
At the fights, the matador attracts the bull with a large red cape and twists his body to dodge the charging animal. A pair of picadors is often close by on horseback, jabbing the bull with lances.
In the end, regardless of whether the matador wins or the bull defeats him, the bull is killed with a sword to the heart.
Over time, the nationwide shows also matured from inexperienced matadors with young bulls to professional bullfighters challenging adult bulls. Imagery also became a large part of the spectacle, with matadors dressing in distinctive suits of a fitted jacket with embellished shoulder pads and matching cropped pants exposing colorful tights. A simple felt hat and flat black shoes often round off the outfit.
Castañera said that he did not think raising and killing bulls purely for spectacle is particularly cruel to the animals. He reiterated the industry position that bulls are raised in small land preserves and that the protected species would not exist if not for bullfighting.
“These animals would otherwise be killed in the fields because they are a danger to the people,” he said. “These animals are preserved because of the 'corridas.'”
On the other hand, many animal rights activists and, recently, Mexican legislators have spoken out loudly to the contrary.
The Mexico City-based Gente Por la Defensa Animal (People in Defense of Animals) said on its Web site (www.gepda.org) that bullfighting was neither art nor graceful theatrics, but rather the science of torture in which the bull and horses are subjected to miserable conditions before the event and a slow, painful death during the show.
“It is not humane to attend these events. These traditions do not belong in the 21st century,” the group wrote.
Last week, members of the Mexico City legislature (ALDF) presented an initiative that would modify the stipulations of the law Public Performance and Protection of Animal in the Federal District.
“Our intention is not to prohibit the bullfights, but rather prevent the torture until death of the bulls,” Christian Vargas of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) recently told the Mexican press.
“If we want to stop being a capital of the Third World, we have to change our mentality and the laws to better protect non-human living beings,” he told the press.
Bullfighting has already been banned in nearly 10 countries in Latin America and Europe. The Canary Islands in Spain and most of France have also banned bullfighting, although nationally the fights are permitted.
BY MARIA GALLUCCI
The News
Thursday, Dec. 24
It starts with the quick thud of charging hooves and the graceful shuffle of the matador's feet. Horns lowered and cape raised, the dance begins. The dramatic act continues with flashes of red and huffs of rage until finally, somebody falls.
It is, as Juan Castañera says, the art of the “corrida de toro,” or bullfight.
The controversial colonial tradition has persevered in small Mexican villages and booming metropolises alike, with suspenseful shows drawing thousands of spectators into open fields and grandiose plazas each year.
In Mexico City, the biggest bullfight season of the year is already underway at the Plaza de Toros, a stadium that plaza spokesman Castañera called the biggest bullfighting arena worldwide in terms of capacity. The bullring, located near the city's Ciudad de los Deportes neighborhood, can hold around 40,000 people.
The season began in November and will offer fights every Sunday through the end of February next year. The next fight is slated for Dec. 27. The plaza publishes its lineup of international matadors, also called “toreros,” each Tuesday before the fight on its Web site.
“The torero in his moment is creating art, and this has inspired many writers, artists and painters to transfer this to their works,” Castañera told The News. “This art is glued to our culture, our music, our poetry.”
The spokesman explained that bullfighting, or the “fiesta brava,” came to Mexico along with the Spanish colonizers some 400 years ago. The first fiestas were very rudimentary but began to define themselves as the Spaniards pegged bullfighting to pagan celebrations for each pueblo's patron saint, effectively expanding the Catholic faith through Spanish culture and religion.
As the bullfights spread to larger capital cities, such as Tijuana, Monterrey and Guadalajara, the tradition outgrew the limited, once-a-year celebrations and broadened to include year-round fiestas at centrally located plazas dedicated to the sport.
Mexico City's Plaza de Toros was built on Feb. 5, 1946, and nearly every year since then has held a smaller season from July to October and a larger one at the end of the year, with a grand anniversary celebration that takes place in February.
At the fights, the matador attracts the bull with a large red cape and twists his body to dodge the charging animal. A pair of picadors is often close by on horseback, jabbing the bull with lances.
In the end, regardless of whether the matador wins or the bull defeats him, the bull is killed with a sword to the heart.
Over time, the nationwide shows also matured from inexperienced matadors with young bulls to professional bullfighters challenging adult bulls. Imagery also became a large part of the spectacle, with matadors dressing in distinctive suits of a fitted jacket with embellished shoulder pads and matching cropped pants exposing colorful tights. A simple felt hat and flat black shoes often round off the outfit.
Castañera said that he did not think raising and killing bulls purely for spectacle is particularly cruel to the animals. He reiterated the industry position that bulls are raised in small land preserves and that the protected species would not exist if not for bullfighting.
“These animals would otherwise be killed in the fields because they are a danger to the people,” he said. “These animals are preserved because of the 'corridas.'”
On the other hand, many animal rights activists and, recently, Mexican legislators have spoken out loudly to the contrary.
The Mexico City-based Gente Por la Defensa Animal (People in Defense of Animals) said on its Web site (www.gepda.org) that bullfighting was neither art nor graceful theatrics, but rather the science of torture in which the bull and horses are subjected to miserable conditions before the event and a slow, painful death during the show.
“It is not humane to attend these events. These traditions do not belong in the 21st century,” the group wrote.
Last week, members of the Mexico City legislature (ALDF) presented an initiative that would modify the stipulations of the law Public Performance and Protection of Animal in the Federal District.
“Our intention is not to prohibit the bullfights, but rather prevent the torture until death of the bulls,” Christian Vargas of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) recently told the Mexican press.
“If we want to stop being a capital of the Third World, we have to change our mentality and the laws to better protect non-human living beings,” he told the press.
Bullfighting has already been banned in nearly 10 countries in Latin America and Europe. The Canary Islands in Spain and most of France have also banned bullfighting, although nationally the fights are permitted.
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