Theatricalities, an exploration of contemporary Ecuadorian theater

Teatralidades, is an artistic research project that brings together a film record of the Theater Company of the Universidad del Azuay from 2016 to 2018, and interviews with stage artists such as Francisco Aguirre, Aristides Vargas, Carlos Michelena, Wilson Pilco and Jaime Garrido, in a conversation about the state of contemporary Ecuadorian theater.

The documentary about this project was exhibited at the 23 University in November. In addition to the voices of the artists, there is a follow-up of those bare feet, of voices, of songs, of change.

It is that metamorphosis of two years of the Theater Company, from the play "Dream of a carnival night" to its last presentation "So five years go by".

That beginning, from its first presentation that took them to a national tour, demonstrates an artistic and personal transformation.

The documentary gathers those purest and transcendental experiences that provoked a profound change in each one of them. The presentations in detention centers, travel, new places, festivals, makeup and one of the most important: its presentation in Canoa a few months after the 2016 earthquake.

This last one, is one of the purest scenes, because it is the show of that theater that is made in the street, on the dust, with bare feet, in front of faces that look with joy, with expectation, that theater that is done with passion and that for some members of the Theater Company has transformed them.

"To Ecuadorian theater you have to feed it, invent it", says Vargas in the documentary, referring to taking great works like those of Shakespeare or Lorca and achieving a link with the audience, making them not see a European work, but an Ecuadorian one and achieve what precisely was done with "Dream of a carnival night": to make an English work, a basque, through the introduction of popular music and the Andean cosmovision.

Afterwards, he delves into the most important part of a play, the human being. The corporality, the conscience of the body and the breathing, that which marks the verisimilitude in a work. Beyond the physical, the palpable, we also talk about that internal body that Vargas defines as a social body, shot, that hidden part that really impels the people who make theater.

Finally, there is beauty, that quality so pure that, by its subjectivity, many times and especially in art, it has been overshadowed by the absence of meaning, of saying something. Michelena retakes the most important role of acting as a theater, social function, being a spokesperson, telling through narratives and dialogues what happens in society.

And in this Francisco Aguirre delves deeply, criticizing that Ecuadorian theater can do aesthetically beautiful things, but lacking meaning, incapable of generating a criticism in society; and for this are the books, Aguirre invites to generate a habit of daily reading in each person, because as Kafka mentions, literature is an expedition to the truth.

It is these mutual experiences, the fatigue, the joys, the transformations, the criticism, the movement and all the work that is behind, before being able to go out before a stage or the street. It is that non-televisual character of the exaltation and exaggerations, but that real, deep, pure follow-up of the daily routine that the director Cristian Maldonado and the research of Carlos Loja and Jaime Garrido have given to this piece of documentary film.

UDA Correspondent