There will be few functions. From February 2 to 12, Los nacimientos will be in the María Guerrero room, kicking off the new season of the Cervantes National Theater. The show was written by Marco Canale and he shared the direction with Javier Swedzky. The cast is made up of Ramona Escalante, Adelaida Franco, Marta Giménez, Marta Huarachi, Candelaria Ospina, Roberta Reloj, María Rojas, Esther Romero, Paula Severi, Flora Solano, Beatriz Spitta and Francisca Vedia, nine of them live in Villa 31. Filming will be crossed with live performance. The functions will go from Thursday to Sunday at 8:00 p.m. and will cost $900. They had the support of the Institut Français d’Argentine and the French Embassy.
The author and co-director, Marco Canale emphasizes: “I studied cinema at ENERC, then I studied at RESAD in Madrid. There I had Juan Mayorga as a teacher and I connected with Angélica Liddell. When I went to Guatemala, I continued working with non-actresses, where I crossed the biodrama with the creation of fiction. To create I look for memory and testimony. The previous proposal, The speed of light, the army also in Germany, Tokyo and Switzerland. In Japan, in addition to the play, I filmed a fiction film that I already presented at the Mar del Plata Festival with the title of Noh”.
While the other co-director, Javier Swedzky, is from Córdoba, where he began his studies. He remembers his steps through Venezuela, Mexico and at the ESNAM school (École Supérieure des Arts de la Marionnette- de Charleville-Mézières) in Paris. He anticipates: “Between March and April I will return with Here there are lions, surely in Area 623 and we will continue with the Company at the Foot of the Bed in the Garrahan Hospital, making puppets for children who cannot leave their rooms.”
—How did you get to Villa 31?
MARCO CANALE: When I returned to Argentina in 2016, I was very lost in the city, with six years in Guatemala, a country with a large indigenous presence. I decided to go to 31, because I have friends and as Father Mujica used to say: “the villas are the unconscious of the porteños”. That’s how I started giving a workshop in a chapel of the village priests. After a year and a half I spoke with Federico Irazábal and FIBA helped me. It was a process of more than two years that was titled The speed of light.
—Why and when did you join?
JAVIER SWEDZKY: In 2018 (Canale) called me because he wanted to do this show, The Births, using puppets. When I saw his cast, I told him that it was very difficult for them to be able to manipulate them due to their age, since it is somewhat difficult. That’s why I suggested working with dough, and that’s how the idea of the bread of the dead appeared, which is called tantawawas and is a tradition in Bolivia.
—How do you address the actresses while you are on stage?
C: After seven years of work, for me today they are all actresses. The difference is that there are nine that are from Villa 31 and the other two are from the other side of the city.
S: Working with non-professionals is a very sensitive task. In this case they are also older. We are on stage to accompany and help them, we also take out and put scenery.
—When did Villa 31 move to Cervantes?
C: Today we are a group and we made it clear that we wanted to do the step, since it is very difficult to see this narrative in a national theater. There are usually no older women. They are between 75 and 85 years old. There are from Bolivia, Peru, Paraguay and Argentina, descendants of European immigrants. Already in the 1930s there was Villa Esperanza, which was between the port and Retiro.
—Do drugs and crime appear?
C: This proposal is very true, the result of seven years of work and you cannot fall into the strong line. Its protagonists are unique and luminous beings. Most people don’t know the history of Villa 31 and they were and are there. The Videla dictatorship demolished hundreds of houses, leaving only twenty. We address the issue of drugs, but from the intimate.
S: I think there is a lot of ignorance about life in the villas, in addition to prejudices. There is a lack of meeting, which does not allow knowing their lives and trajectories. We don’t have a bridge between 31 and the other part of town. Surely there will be drugs, but it will also be consumed outside the villas, perhaps the quality will change. They are prejudices, like crime, which we find everywhere. I worked in Ciudad Oculta and 11 21, where there is poverty, but that doesn’t mean you can’t talk, they don’t limit you as a person. There are many more who work and study. That’s why I think it’s important to make it known. We propose a meeting between these parts of the same city.
—What prejudices did they set out to break?
C: There is a phrase in the Tao Te Ching that says: “The best action against evil is a decisive action in favor of good.” Breaking or reporting is not our policy. We seek to illuminate what was dark. The people who go will be pierced by the spectacle. We do not point fingers. The politics of these times is very much based on going against. Perhaps the objective of the piece is to look in a mirror.
“Is there a crack?”
C: There is another larger crack, which is the one that separates Florida from Villa 31, it is barely six hundred meters and we seek to illuminate it. There are other cracks
beyond that of party politics. The show transferred to two cultural managements of different ideological color. There are many people who don’t know: if you go early in the morning you see four hundred boys in white coats going to school. The
media never show you the families. We know that there is crime, but not everything is like that and I am not paternalistic. In El Nacimiento these women tell how they worked. Today her children and grandchildren are already professionals, because they went to university.
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