Tsunami: Chronicle of a Theatrical Research Process
Tsunami: Chronicle of a Theatrical Research Process
About the Company
Since its founding in 1990, the La Puerta Theatre Company has actively participated in the national performing arts scene, touring its productions across the country, from Arica and the northern desert to the southern city of Punta Arenas. Over its three decades of existence and through 36 premiered productions, La Puerta, under the direction of Luis Ureta, has carried out a sustained theatrical project over time, evolving in its exploration of theatrical languages and placing the issue of acting work at the center of its scenic proposal. In recent years, La Puerta has maintained a steady and fruitful presence in the most important theatre events in our country. Evidence of this is the strong presence the company has had in various editions of the Santiago a Mil Festival, the National Playwriting Festival, and the Contemporary European Playwriting Festival.
The themes of the works staged by La Puerta have been varied. In its first stage, the company moved from the exploration of philosophical/poetic texts (Los Monstruos, Zaratustra, Ulises) to, in the present, the staging of contemporary dramaturgies characterized by fragmentation and by questioning current forms of coexistence, associated with societies shaped by consumption and free markets (Sex, Electronic City, Palabras y Cuerpos, El Bus). Likewise, its productions have addressed the questioning of scenic procedures themselves, including the issue of the creative process in staging (construction and later realization) as part of the themes included in some of its most recent productions (Calias, Plaga, Páramo and its latest creation: Tsunami).
Tsunami
The Tsunami Project is the latest artistic project developed by La Puerta to date. Sponsored by Fondart under the trajectory category, in the context of the company’s 30th anniversary, it consisted of a research process that included the creation of a new play based on the theme of sustainability. In addition to the members of the internal La Puerta team—Luis Ureta (director), Andrea Giadach, Carlos Ugarte, María Paz Grandjean, and Sergio Piña (cast), Giselle Rubio (assistant director), Bosco Cayo (playwright), Cristián Reyes (set designer), and Daniel Marabolí (musician)—an external team was also involved: a producer (Gestus) and an advisory research team composed of Mauricio Barría and Mónica Drouilly.
The need for an advisory team is related to the singular nature of Tsunami. This is a project in which its members are both subject and object of the research. In short, one could say that in the Tsunami project, La Puerta reviews and evaluates its own trajectory, raising questions and challenges about the work of an independent theatre company in Chile.
The project design was based on two fundamental axes:
- Company trajectory: critical review of the artistic memory of the collective. Research into documentation, and conversations between current members of La Puerta and other historical collaborators.
- Research based on the question of how to be sustainable, both as a theatre group in contemporary Chilean society and in relation to sustainability in its social and cultural dimensions.
The project included seven months of rehearsal, a run of 12 performances at Matucana 100 as part of the Santiago a Mil Festival in 2021, and touring performances in Concepción and Ovalle.
Sustainability
The concept of sustainability was at the center of the project. On this point, one may say that a widely accepted truth is that one of the most pressing challenges for the current globalized world is its continuity, or sustainability. Being sustainable is humanity’s general response, and society’s specific response, to the challenge of avoiding decline, collapse, and breakdown, as defined by American geographer Jared Diamond (his examples of the Moche, Maya, and Rapa Nui cultures are especially revealing). The concept of sustainability first appears in the Brundtland Report (1987) and consists of “trying to ensure the needs of the present without compromising future generations.” That is, maintaining a dynamic balance among three fundamental pillars: environmental protection, economic growth, and social development. The pillar of social development seeks cohesion among communities and cultures in order to achieve satisfactory levels of quality of life, health, and education. In this area, seeking cohesion between communities and artistic practices has been an exercise intrinsic to culture. The performing arts have not been alien to this vocation. Theatre, understood from a sociological perspective as a “social game,” broadens the spectrum of possibilities offered by a conventional idea of the performing arts as an “artistic discipline.” Advances in neuroscience, biology, and the liberal arts offer us new ways of interpreting everyday events. What was once recognized as an artistic discipline is now a scenic praxis in a liminal territory. In Chile, works such as Ñi Pu Tremen, Calias, Suárez, Cuerpo Pretérito, among others, have explored the frontiers of theatricality. In Germany, Rimini Protokoll creates its productions through interviews with “experts in everyday life,” generating new expressive forms that incorporate the subjective experiences of men and women who contribute their testimonies, which become material for developing forms of theatricality that erase the barrier between artistic praxis and social experience. In this context, the members of La Puerta, on the occasion of their 30th anniversary, wanted to explore these creation methodologies in order to rethink their work, aware that their sustainability also depends on their ability to integrate their scenic practices with the immediate social environment. Thinking of La Puerta as a company that gives shape to an ecosystem within the cultural industry emerged as a necessary challenge in the name of sustainability. The disintegration of important national companies (Teatro de Chile, La Loba, Equilibrio Precario, El Cancerbero, among others) is a warning sign that reveals the unstable situation experienced by independent artistic collectives in Chile. Regarding this issue, the CNCA, in its Theatre Promotion Policy (2010–2015), describes companies as unstable groups “forced to come together and break apart depending on theatre projects and available funding sources,” highlighting the difficulty this instability creates for building a long-term artistic project or for sustained work in audience development. According to this diagnosis, addressing the problem of sustainability in the context of Chile’s ecosystem of independent companies appeared as a necessary challenge, which implied innovating in La Puerta’s production methods, moving from the staging of pre-existing texts to an open historiographic dialogue between the testimonial and the fictional.
The Tsunami project emerged from this evaluation and sought to align itself with the current needs regarding sustainability that we identify in contemporary Chilean society.
Context
The Chilean sociocultural context of 2018–2019, marked by the many citizen movements aimed at bringing about changes in our country at the educational, political, economic, and other levels, was interpreted by the members of La Puerta, metaphorically, as a kind of tsunami that sought to dismantle an important part of the ossified structures of the institutional framework inherited from the 20th century. This context of social unrest and its various manifestations (street marches, looting, protests, verbal and physical clashes, etc.) motivated La Puerta to reflect scenically on the convulsions and desires for transformation evident in the demonstrations of civil society during those turbulent years (social sustainability) and to relate them to our own history as a theatre collective (artistic sustainability).
March 2020
The first news about COVID-19 appeared timidly as brief side notes in the news broadcasts in December 2019. Our country was still immersed in social and political effervescence, which made it very difficult to gauge the scope and consequences of those first reports coming from China. It was in this context that the first full-team meeting for Tsunami took place, at the offices of the producer Gestus, in the Lastarria district. It was the first days of March 2020. The meeting covered logistical, procedural, and artistic matters. The rehearsal schedule, performance dates, and touring plans were confirmed.
Smiles, hugs, projections about the future.
After that day, everything changed.
In the days and weeks that followed, our vocabulary was forced to incorporate new words: lockdown, Zoom, in-person, online… The health emergency had been declared.
During the coronavirus pandemic, the Tsunami project was forced to reconsider many of its initial assumptions. How does one rehearse during a pandemic? The project members found themselves immersed in an uncertainty that affected not only the development of the project itself, but also different areas of our family, social, and civic coexistence. Every citizen, both in the country and around the entire planet, was marked by the unease and questions brought by this new global situation.
Faced with this new landscape, the company decided to strengthen the focus of its original proposal, emphasizing in both time and form the research process and the review of archival materials and available records.
This translated into providing the actors, designers, directors, producers, and playwright with a digital folder in Google Drive, where they could explore various photographic records of premiered productions, staged dramatic texts, and audiovisual materials in order to deeply understand the company’s historical and aesthetic journey.
This approach made it possible to sustain a dialogue that encompassed both the visible artistic results and the review of archival material, production records, and critical documentation associated with each production. This strategy was made possible thanks to the prior effort of documenting every appearance in the written press since 1990, collecting key moments in the company’s work. For these purposes, what happened during the Bicentennial project in 2010 was particularly relevant, when the company carried out its “Bicentennial Trilogy.”
Brief Flashback: Bicentennial Trilogy
The Bicentennial Trilogy (2010) was an emblematic La Puerta production, consisting of the rewriting of three significant Chilean plays: Plaga, a rewriting of La Mantis Religiosa by Alejandro Sieveking, by Coca Duarte; Páramo, based on Amo y Señor by Germán Luco Cruchaga and written by Mauricio Barría; and Hombre Acosado por Demonios ante un Espejo, a rewriting of Los Invasores by Egon Wolf, conceived by Rolando Jara. This project, funded by FONDART, included an audiovisual component: a documentary filmed by documentarian Mauricio Álamo, available on YouTube and running 72 minutes. In this documentary, the company members of the time offer testimony about their research process and the aesthetic development of each work. The project can be reviewed on YouTube.
Thanks to this and other resources, the Tsunami team was able to review, study, and share impressions and experiences. During this stage, the constant participation of playwright Bosco Cayo was essential; he collected the testimonies, reflections, and contributions of all the members in each rehearsal (online, let us not forget).
Zoomnami
The rehearsals for Tsunami were held consistently during the first five months of work through the Zoom platform. In addition to the meetings among La Puerta’s members, sessions and interviews were held during this process with prominent cultural agents from the Chilean theatre ecosystem. For example, philosopher Sergio Rojas was a key participant in these discussions, contributing his philosophical clarity to the theatrical analysis. María de la Luz Hurtado also carried out a valuable analysis of the theatre landscape related to independent companies in Chile, offering a solid and fundamental sociological perspective. Complementing these, artists and technicians who had worked with La Puerta over the years were invited to share their testimonies. These invitations were organized according to chronological criteria: guests from 1990–2000, guests from 2000–2010, and finally guests from 2010–2019.
The participation of these various La Puerta collaborators, who shared their memories and experiences both as performers in the company’s productions and as spectators, provided perspectives that helped shape the implementation of a working and rehearsal methodology born in a context of emergency. Special mention should be made at this stage of the participation of Roxana Naranjo, founding actress of La Puerta, who, after leaving the company in 2018, generously agreed to take part in this phase of the Tsunami process, contributing her memories, experiences, and opinions.
The sessions/meetings/rehearsals were held via Zoom three times a week, for three hours each, allowing interaction between those involved and archival materials, and providing, given the general restrictions on human gathering, a workspace that brought with it a kind of spiritual oxygenation. Despite the global crisis, it was possible to reconnect with our theatrical activity, which at that moment was outside the bounds of convivial exchange. For each member of the team, rehearsing became an oasis, a respite that connected us with our vocation, our human and artistic histories, and with the deeply human dimension of encounter and conversation, despite the distance and mediation implied by a screen.
In this context, it was possible to explore the four stages that can be recognized in La Puerta. As director of the company, I pointed out that from my perspective I could identify four stages in the company’s trajectory. In a first stage (1991–1998), La Puerta focused on staging works whose problems were inspired by sources that had no direct relationship to theatrical writing: these were always poetic, literary, or even philosophical texts brought to the stage through the method of collective creation. This work included the figure of a director/dramaturg (in the European sense of the term) who drew both on the literary sources that originated the theatre projects and on the contributions that emerged from reflective and scenic discussions with the actors and designers of each project. This mode of work meant for our group a long-term process for each of the premiered productions, in which the notions of trial and error found a thoroughly justified expression. This period includes, among others, the play Comedia funeraria, whose first performance we staged in the living room of the house of the anti-poet Nicanor Parra; the trilogy of works based on adaptations of Cagliostro, Huidobro’s novel-film; Ulises, based on Homer’s Odyssey; and Zaratustra, a theatrical creation based on Nietzsche’s philosophical poem, La Puerta’s first play presented internationally, which exceeded one hundred performances.
The second period (1998–2001) is made up of a set of dramatic works by theatre authors, mostly Chilean, whose texts resonated with us enough to later be translated into scenic form. This stage begins with Cocodrilo by Paco Zarzoso, followed by premieres in association with some of the most important Chilean authors of the 1990s. Among the titles premiered, the following stand out: Edipo Asesor by Benjamín Galemiri, premiered as part of the 7th edition of the National Playwriting Showcase; Dios ha muerto by Marco Antonio de la Parra; and finally Esperpentos Rabiosamente Inmortales by Juan Radrigán, premiered initially at the Teatro Antonio Varas and later revived at the now-defunct Teatro El Conventillo.
The third stage (2002–2019) is connected to European writing, and in particular to German-language writing (within which the staging of La Cosa is included). The company’s uninterrupted participation for ten years in the Contemporary European Playwriting Festival represented an extremely relevant experience in terms of connecting with poetics and textual materials coming from contexts, traditions, and sociocultural realities significantly different from our own. Our first contact with these textual materials meant a true revolution for us. Proof of this is the first play that inaugurates this stage, Heidi Ho ya no trabaja aquí, by the recently deceased German author René Pollesch (later we would also stage Sex, según Mae West, by the same author, where multimedia explorations found a radically more complex field of experimentation). The most recent premiere associated with this dramaturgical line dates from 2018, with the play El Bus, by Swiss author Lukas Bärfuss.
The fourth stage (2007–2012) is intimately linked to the concept of rewriting and begins with the premiere of Calias, tentativas sobre la belleza by Rolando Jara. This title is joined by the three plays that make up La Puerta’s Bicentennial Project. With the Bicentennial Project productions, La Puerta took an important step forward in articulating some theatrical procedures that have defined its scenic work in recent years. At that moment, we decided to celebrate our 20 years of life by rewriting the three works of the selected Chilean playwrights, thereby reaffirming our interest in and appreciation for our theatrical tradition, re-dimensioning, from the present, the significant zones and identity traits that traverse the writing and scenic praxis of Chilean theatre, past and present.
On the other hand, the project’s researchers, Mauricio Barría and Mónica Drouilly, offered a different perspective, identifying three stages in La Puerta’s trajectory.
Stage 1 was marked by work focused on the actor’s body. In this stage, it is possible to observe how La Puerta’s poetics gravitated around the place of the actor as the motor of the staging, albeit in different ways. These stages could be distinguished as follows: 1. the body as a volume of expression (the 1990s); 2. the body as a support for characters (the first decade of the 2000s); and 3. the intermedialized body, which began in the previous stage but was consolidated in this second decade. In each of these periods, La Puerta’s research has not focused exclusively on acting, but has developed methodologies and ways of working with the actor’s body. These three stages, in fact, do not constitute a linear structure for the researchers mentioned, but rather a rhizomatic search in which La Puerta continues to explore and to go back.
Tsunami: The Text
The online work described above took place between March and July 2020. During these months, Bosco Cayo took notes on what was happening in our meetings, processed the information gathered, and at the same time constructed a dramatic text in service of the project. In August, Bosco presented the company with a first draft, which was discussed and slightly modified according to the collective’s observations. In general terms, the dramaturgical proposal situates the action in a storage room, where a director and a cast interact around objects and memories. Structurally, the play presents three major moments. The first is characterized by 12 monologues; in the second, the four performers/characters interact in the company’s storage room; and in a third moment, the action takes place in Chiloé after a natural tsunamigenic event.
The Return of In-Person Rehearsals
During September 2020, the restrictions related to movement and lockdowns had already begun to change somewhat. The first in-person rehearsals of Tsunami could finally take place. As director, I decided to work in a more segmented way during this stage, first addressing the monologues proposed by Bosco Cayo. These were rehearsals in which only one actor or actress and the director participated. This stage ended with a collective rehearsal in which each of the four members could present their particular performances to the rest of the team and, in turn, become familiar with the proposals developed by the other project members.
We already had half an hour of the play staged.
Between October and December 2020, the rehearsals increasingly moved toward a more traditional format. During the first weeks, the collective rehearsals took place outdoors, thus easing some reasonable concerns about possible contagion. As the premiere date approached (January 2021), the masks disappeared, bodies grew closer, and reunited. We collectively agreed to resume work in an indoor rehearsal room, equipped with technical elements (sound, lighting, props) needed to approach the physical actions, interactions, and relationship with the material objects demanded by the stage action.
By mid-November we already had the structure of the staging. We made significant decisions, the result of various alternatives that we had previously approved or discarded in light of the scenic evidence produced during rehearsals.
Performance
First, we chose to begin the play in the form of a performative experience associated with the relational aesthetics developed by Nicolas Bourriaud. The proposal invited future spectators to move freely around four specially arranged installations. Each installation was led by an actor/actress who developed a gestural and sonic score, nourished by the different monologues. The four installations unfolded simultaneously and were supported by sequences of video images and photographs specially designed and timed for each sequence, projected in each of the four spaces. The proposal offered a kind of four tableaux vivants, in which each spectator could freely choose whom to see and hear, and for how long. Second, we decided that the second part of the play would be set in the storage room proposed by the original text, leaving the third part of the dramatic text out of the staging. This final decision was grounded in the identification of a dramatic conflict present in the second part (the storage-room scenes), which grew in expressive force during rehearsals and led us to consider it as the climactic axis of the production.
The confirmation that the play would be part of the artistic program of the Santiago a Mil Festival in January 2021 was good news that encouraged us to remain focused on the premiere, given the value in outreach and audience-building that this important programmatic event would provide. It would be a premiere worthy of the effort invested and of the content we hoped to communicate.
A Tsunami Over Tsunami
In January 2021, the Chilean health authority declared, within the framework of its “Step by Step” plan, that it was necessary to implement a “reduction in attendance for social gatherings and in the number of weekly permits,” due to the rise in COVID-19 infections. The uncertainty surrounding the run of the play forced us to assess the future of the project and make a very difficult and complex decision. On the one hand, we could speculate about the odds and bet on staging the play in person if “health conditions allowed it,” or we could implement a safeguard for the work by using the theatre facilities at Matucana 100—where the set had already been installed—while recording Tsunami with the help of technicians and artists specialized in audiovisual language. The second option meant mobilizing significant financial resources through the reallocation of previously assigned funds. After evaluating and consulting with all involved (the Tsunami team, Matucana 100 theatre, Fondart, and Santiago a Mil), we opted for the second alternative: to record the play audiovisually with proper professional support.
From Theatre to Video
That decision forced me, as company director and production director, to rethink the project. While theatrical language and audiovisual language may share some common elements, they are, in essence, entirely different. Benjamin’s aura, for example, constitutes one of the abyssal distinctions between live arts and those that allow reproducibility. There was no time. We had to act quickly. New lockdowns could come. It was necessary to “make the loss.”
New participants were brought in: audiovisual director Liú Marino led a team of technicians (sound engineers, camera operators, and editors) who, over the course of two weeks, designed in dialogue with the theatre director and the project producer a meticulous production and recording plan. Travellings, subjective camera shots, framing, inserts, aerial shots… were discussed.
The recording of Tsunami took place over five days, in eight-hour sessions. The first day was devoted to recording each of the play’s monologues in full and in detail. The following three days were spent recording the various ensemble scenes, including Daniel Marabolí’s musical contributions and the careful, complex lighting, audiovisual projection, and props work by designer Cristián Reyes, an unfailing artistic accomplice of La Puerta.
On the fifth day, Tsunami was performed once with an audience.
Attendance at that one and only performance was limited, in those dark pandemic days, to a very small number of people.
I treasure, with contradictory affection, the memory of that day.
Condensed into a single performance with an audience was a long rehearsal process that had examined a 30-year trajectory of theatrical work. All the fragility of our craft was reflected in that day, in which affections, doubts, professionalism, and trust in individual and collective work intertwined in an energetic feedback loop that somehow managed to be captured in the audiovisual record we preserved.
The recording of Tsunami was later presented/broadcast—in the context of new lockdowns—in numerous venues and institutions across the country during 2021. The post-screening discussions provided important feedback about the scope of the themes and procedures addressed.
PostTsunami
Today a dry and silent tsunami has taken away the set of the play.
The storage room is empty.
Sustainability remains an open question.
In this exercise of memory that has been writing about that exercise of memory which was the Tsunami project—memory understood as a mixture of past + future and as a tendentious exercise proper to the human condition and its complexity—I recall an enigmatic phrase that accompanied us persistently throughout the rehearsal process, and I would like to recover it as an open ending:
The time of memory does not fit within history.
The resonance and implications of this phrase remain valid, both in the actions/decisions linked to reflection and analysis of La Puerta’s artistic practice in the past, and in those we hope to generate and confront in the days to come.