From the Director’s notebook, 16 September 2010
So I have returned to Buenos Aires with my 70+ hours of footage, and at this point have seen most of it… and am just starting to put it all together with great joy and struggle.
I keep referring to this experience as finding myself in a labyrinth that we fought our way into, deep deep deep, where we reached the beast in the center. I’m not sure who won that battle, but now we need to find the way out, find Ariadne’s gold thread that will lead out of the maze of dead-ends, in order to emerge in the wider world with a story to tell, and a path that we can point to for others to follow to the center of this story. (To find the carcass of the beast we slayed? Or a reborn beast? Or does the beast take on a new shape for each adventurer, a minotaur for Theseus, a kharisiri fat-sucking white man for an Andean, a multi-headed pastiche of archetypal and pop monsters for a Westerner?)
In the next few entries here, I’m going to go into my personal musings and brainstormings as director, to give you an idea of the creative process undertaken in the construction of this film. The film itself explores the creative process of constructing the play and the performances that Teatro Trono takes to the stage and the streets of Bolivia, so it seems only fitting that we continue delving into these creative dynamics as we construct their construction.
Here below and elsewhere, “Actors” refers to the real people, the characters of the film, “Characters” refers to the characters in the play. Of course, the real people also put on their for-the-screen masks, play themselves, and it all gets richly confusing.
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How to begin? So many ways to open a film…
Option 1
Start with the everyday scenes of the actors with their families, cooking and eating and discussing their latest play and the personal experience of “what happened” in the revolts of 2003? This sets up a conversation about identity, culture, memory. In a way, it starts at the beginning, both in terms of the beginning for the Actors, and through personal memories it point to the beginning for the city of El Alto as an adult city in rebellious maturity, and the beginning of the “new” Bolivia under the lead of Evo.
Peeling potatoes, the most Andean of foods, Maya asks her mother about who taught her to peel potatoes (it’s obvious by her relaxed lightning speed peeling that the mother has peeled millions of potatoes). Is this a question about her grandmother? Later Maya puts on a traditional cholita dress for her character, like her mother and one must assume her grandmother. At home with her real-life cholita mother, Maya is submissive and quiet, while onstage her cholita character is a rebel, with a rifle and a Zapatista mask, overthrowing the government. And with her theatrical “family”, she’s outgoing and assertive, a far more experienced actress than she is potato-peeler.
The generational difference (gap?) is obvious, as is the value placed on updated tradition by these young actors: contrasting with her mother, Maya wears a t-shirt emblazoned with Ayni Rock El Alto, “ayni” being the Andean reciprocity, the foundation of the community. This rebellious migrant city, El Alto, is a source of great pride for these politicized artistic youth, and their plays and interventions glorify and sympathize with the migrants whose pains and uprootings and upheavings and transformings gave birth to this city, to these actors, and to their art. Perhaps their art is a form of ayni, a way of reciprocating by reflecting-replicating-resurrecting-redirecting the struggles of their parents and neighbors.
And perhaps even more sticky and interesting: this “ayni” is contentious and controversial. This latest generation of creative progressive social actors has inherited the spirit of protest, and honors the memory of the last generation’s struggles… by paradoxically criticizing the establishment created by these same struggles. For example, they satirize their neighbors’ violent lootings during the uprisings of 2003 which were excused as “redistribution of wealth”, and the current acts of mass violence in the not-uncommon lynchings which are excused as “community justice”; and they even attack Evo Morales, the supreme international symbol of successful indigenous struggle, who has recently impeded justice for the military crimes of the past in order to stay on the good side of the military.
