Forging Connections in a Fragmented Hemisphere
Searching for Latin American theatre at international festivals can mean navigating an intricate maze
By Randy Gener
Top left: Filo de Fuego (Blade to the Heat) at Miami's Teatro Prometeo (photo courtesy of Teatro Avante); bottom left: Gerardo Riveron and Julio Rodriguez in Aire frio at Miami's Teatro Avante (photo by Asela Torres); top middle: Teatro La Zaranda's Those Who Laugh Last, from Andalucia, Spain, at TeatroStageFest 2008 in New York City (photo courtesy of TeatroStageFest); bottom middle: a production of Fiddler on the Roof by Venezuela's Palo de Agua (courtesy of Michel Hausmann); right: Robinson Diaz (center) in a Mexican/Colombian Hamlet at TeatroStageFest 2007 (photo courtesy of TeatroStageFest).
In attempting to map out what is happening in Latin American theatre—and in so doing, interrogate and unravel the diverse, necessary roles that a handful of U.S. theatre companies and nonprofit organizations are playing in reimagining and interacting with this utopian enterprise in America's so-called backyard—let's begin with the state of theatre in Hugo Chávez's Venezuela. In 2009, alarming reports suggested that the leftist Chávez's plans to nationalize vast sectors of the Venezuelan economy, including that country's largest phone and utilities companies, were moving into radical overdrive. In addition to regulating some civic groups and grassroots organizations out of existence, Chávez, who won a third term in a landslide election victory in December 2006, also moved to silence or take control of media outlets, some of which have been critical of his government or have simply exercised their journalistic independence. Radio Caracas TV, one of the oldest channels in the country (it began in 1953), which had favored the opposition and even supported a strike against Chávez in 2003, was recently closed down. In a 2006 speech, in which he announced that he would pull this channel's license, Chávez said he would not tolerate media outlets working "at the service of coups against the people, against the nation, against national independence, against the dignity of the republic." According to recent reports, Globovisión, a local television station, may be next on the chopping block; the network's president was recently arrested for allegedly insulting Chávez.
Now, it seems, it is the Venezuelan theatre's turn to feel the effects of the Chavista approach to governance (see "Controversy in Caracas," below). According to Michel Hausmann, a Venezuelan stage director whose for-profit production outfit Palo de Agua has seriously felt the effects of the censorious atmosphere since last year, "There are many theatre companies in Venezuela experiencing political discrimination. Most of the cases are established theatrical companies that have been operating for more than 15 years." The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, an autonomous organ of the Organization of American States, reports that the Asociación Teatral Grupo Actoral 80, the Asociación Civil Teatro del Duende and the Asociación Cultural Skena lost their government subsidies last year as a consequence of accusations of "pernicious public conduct." A clause within the Agreements on Cultural Cooperation (Mesa Técnica de Teatro y Circo de los Convenios de Cooperación Cultural para la Plataforma del Instituto de las Artes Escénicas y Musicales) states that funding will not be given to groups and individuals whose "pernicious public conduct affects the collective psychological and emotional stability of the population, making use of offensive language, discrediting, lying and manipulating through media campaigns with these aims." Basilio Alvarez, the director of Skena, has attacked this clause as "nothing less than a fascist and authoritarian criterion."
The leftist government, moreover, last year expropriated the Ateneo de Caracas, one of the oldest cultural centers in Venezuela; its administrators were ordered to evacuate the Los Caobos premises they had occupied for decades. (Parts of the state-owned building are now occupied by the University of the Arts.) "El Teatro Teresa Carreño, our version of the Kennedy Center," Hausmann adds, "is only open to pro-Chavista shows. My company, Palo de Agua, performs at a theatre located in and operated by the Central University of Venezuela. It is one of the last 'free spaces' to do theatre, since the government now controls all other venues larger than 500 seats."
A clarification: This article is not another U.S. media screed attacking Hugo Chávez. For obvious reasons, most foreigners fail to see Chávez for what he is: one of the most popular and powerful political figures in the Western hemisphere. Since the creation of a new regional organization of 32 Latin American and Caribbean countries, provisionally named the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (from which the U.S. and Canada were excluded), Latin America has taken strong moves to assert its geopolitical independence. From a U.S. political perspective, Chávez might seem like the next Fidel Castro, but many leaders of countries south of the U.S. border have long sought to control their own resources, strengthen regional ties, be treated as equals with the United States and become financially independent of international political bodies.
Not all of these independent-minded Latin American leaders, though, set out to silence their opposition, as the Chávez administration appears to be doing. And the problem, from a global arts perspective, is that this fearful environment has a chilling effect on intercultural dialogue, and in particular theatrical exchange. The government's takeover of the Ateneo and Teresa Carreño was a crushing blow not only to Venezuelan theatre artists but to the international community: Both these arts centers actively supported and hosted the Festival Internacional de Teatro de Caracas (FITC), a now-defunct performing arts festival, similar in intent and makeup to the Festival Iberoamericano de Teatro de Bogotá (FITB) in Colombia (see sidebar below). Realized by late theatre director Carlos Giménez, FITC had been Venezuelan theatre's pride and joy—a gift to the Venezuelan populace, to Latin America and to the world at large.
Like the Bogotá festival, the Caracas festival was founded and driven by a strong personality, so when Giménez died in 1993, the festival went through various iterations under different leaders until it ceased operations in 2007. "In Latin America," says Olga Garay, executive director of the City of Los Angeles's Department of Cultural Affairs, "it is not unusual for cultural institutions and cultural happenings to completely go underground when a political party changes. The Caracas festival was one of the most respected and most fertile festivals in all of Latin America. Now it has fallen out of favor with Hugo Chávez, and it has been decimated. For theatre artists and culture lovers, the Caracas festival was a source you could go to, not only to see work from Latin America but from other parts of the world. The events in Caracas were curated and well presented. Likewise, another wonderful resource, Festival Internacional de Buenos Aires, has gone through a lot of ups and downs because political parties have changed. One year the festival is vital and alive; the next year it's the kitchen sink."
The ghost of the Caracas festival, in fact, loomed over the soap-opera intrigues that beset the Bogotá festival when the Colombian organizers quarreled over who would assume control after the death of the latter's founder, the actress Fanny Mickey. Many observers greatly feared that what had happened in Caracas might happen again in Bogotá. But the struggle to keep the Bogotá festival going has resulted in a happy ending—the people of Bogotá have embraced FITB as part of their cultural heritage, to the delight of international performing arts communities avidly in search of works from Latin American theatre. With FITB back on track, an avenue has opened for Theatre Communications Group and the Association of Performing Arts Presenters to send their own delegations of theatre artists, producers, presenters and company representatives to FITB's VIA (La Ventana Internacional de Artes Escénicas) international performing arts showcase, designed to provide opportunities for Colombia's artistic communities to market their work internationally. Through VIA, more than 100 presenters and performing arts professionals from 21 countries, including Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Croatia, Ecuador, France, Ireland, Peru, Poland, South Korea and even Venezuela, can forge collaborations, deepen research, pursue development and seek co-production or touring opportunities.
"Historically, Latin American festivals," notes Garay, "tend to be less reliable than some European theatre festivals, maybe even some Asian festivals, because international festivals in Central and South America are more subject to volatile political ups and downs. Some Spanish-language festivals are just out of the way—outside the circuits of the Avignon and Edinburgh festivals, which many curators and decision-makers regularly frequent. The Latin American circuit is very fragile and unpredictable."
Which is all the more reason that, for Americans seeking out Latin American work to program in their own festivals or to base collaborations on, a strong level of commitment to the region becomes essential—and the rise and fall of the fortunes of performance festivals in America's unruly "backyard" is but one of the elements that make such efforts something of a labyrinthine affair. The question of language matters, of course, but there are a host of other political issues and hard-to-crack difficulties that remain underexamined and inadequately addressed. In addition to often-debilitating visa problems, one can cite the lack of good translations, the issue of super-titles, and the questionable economic solvency of both the theatrical and state institutions, as well as the near-disappearance of reputable journals and general-interest publications that might illuminate new developments. And yet festivals devoted to Spanish-speaking theatre are the waters where the fish swim—the ecology in which theatre productions and the art form's major players from Latin America circulate.
Garay, for example, took 14 international trips in 2006 so that she could curate Lincoln Center Festival's mini-program of Latin American theatre in the summer of '07. "I think it's incredible that we as a country would think nothing of doing collaborative research with other countries on the issues of AIDS, water conservation and the promotion of green practices across the globe, and yet we always seem to be very wary and suspicious of anything to do with supporting cultural exchanges," Garay maintains. "In so many countries, such as the Netherlands, France, Japan and Ireland, their patrimony is indelibly connected to the arts and cultural products. That lesson seems not to be easily absorbed here in the U.S. Argentina, for example, is one of the most learned and intellectual countries in the universe. A place like Cuba that hasn't got a pot to piss in is known worldwide for its music and dance culture. Again and again these countries have acknowledged the power that arts and culture can bring to a national identity. Americans have not harnessed Latin American theatre, because we have always seen the situation from a market point of view. The market forces of Hollywood have allowed a certain brand or a narrow sector to gain an international market dominance."
BECAUSE Latin America represents a multiplicity of voices and visions, Latin American theatre, in a profound sense, does not exist as a single and collective entity. The term expresses a utopian ideal: At its best, it can be conceived of as a kind of performance springing from a specific geographical area with Spanish and Portuguese as the two official languages. At worst, though, the term is wholly inadequate to the blurred realities and multiple self-identifications resulting from the diasporas of Latin Americans all over the world (particularly in the U.S. and the Caribbean), as well as from the dissolving of cultural and national boundaries brought about by rootless transnational migration in the age of globalization. Sometimes traces of elitism mark Latin American theatre as a figment of cultural production, as theatre in indigenous languages (such as Mayan or pre-Columbian drama) are insufficiently considered for their richness and alternative potential. Despite the best theoretical studies of several Latin American theatre scholars and progressive thinkers, U.S. Latino and Latina theatre, in particular, continues to be segregated from Latin American theatre.
At a recent NoPassport conference held at the Nuyorican Poets Café in New York City, Henry Godinez, director of the biennial Latino Theatre Festival of the Goodman Theatre of Chicago, observes that "even as we continue to stake our claim within the American theatre, great Latino writers are barely even on the radar of a thriving international Spanish-language theatre scene. To many of the adventurous, cutting-edge theatre companies of Spain and Latin America, or to the many exciting young Spanish-language theatres and artists that grace the stages of international festivals in Colombia, Argentina and Brazil, our great Latino writers and their plays are virtually unknown."
To help bridge that gap, the Goodman festival, running June 19-July 25, purposefully mixes the menu. To complement Godinez's production of Karen Zacarías's The Sins of Sor Juana, the two-week festival will host the U.S. premiere of two productions by Teatro Buendía of Cuba, both performed in Spanish, and a series of readings by Chicago Latino troupes (Aguijón Theater, Teatro Luna, Teatro Urbano and Teatro Vista) of new Mexican writers from the Lark Play Development Center of New York's innovative U.S./Mexico Playwright Exchange Program.
"Several years ago," Godinez adds, "as I marveled at the exciting work being presented at the huge Festival Iberoamericano de Teatro de Cadiz in Spain, I asked the director of the festival, José Bablé Neira, if he ever thought of inviting Latino productions from the U.S., and his response was, 'If they are in Spanish.' I started to feel like we were indeed 'the other,' even to our own sisters and brothers in our native or ancestral homelands. And I realized that what our Latino writers of new work were doing was creating our unique identity, giving voice to our new community of people. The more I travel, the more I see how unique we are. Unlike our sisters and brothers in Latin America, we Latinos are a reflection of the larger veritable melting pot that is the heart and soul of this nation; it is what makes us great, racial tensions and all."
This alienated feeling, perhaps not surprisingly, is shared by other players in the international Hispanic theatre festivals in the U.S., such as TeatroStageFest of New York and the venerable International Hispanic Theatre Festival of Miami. Along with Jose W. Fernandez (who was recently appointed by President Barack Obama to the post of assistant secretary of state for economic, energy and business affairs), Susana Tubert, producing executive director of the nonprofit Latino International Theater Festival of New York, founded TeatroStageFest in 2007 as an annual New York showcase for Latin American and Ibero-American theatre. Asked how the definitions of "Hispanic," "Ibero-American" and "Latin American" influence her thinking about TeatroStageFest's programming, Tubert replies: "For me, these terms stand for 'The Great Beyond.' They are the cultural and artistic geographies that many non-Latinos in this country know little about, either because they have never traveled to a Spanish- or Portuguese-speaking country, or because of a preconceived notion that a story narrated by a U.S.-born Hispanic, Latino or Chicano playwright (let alone someone from Ibero-America or the Caribbean) most likely has 'little to do with me.' These are the labels that keep many great works by artists from these communities from being produced more frequently on the main stages of American theatres. What drives my passion for the work I do are not the definitions you speak of, but rather the possibility of providing multigenerational and multicultural Latino and non-Latino audiences with a stamped passport and a ticket to an unchartered territory where they might just see, and be moved by, a little piece of themselves."
TeatroStageFest has had some recent successes in serving Latin American theatre. Its inaugural festival in 2007 featured Timbre Cuatro's The Omission of the Coleman Family, an Argentine show from an independent theatre group that had been overlooked that year at the international festival in Buenos Aires. "During the play's run at TeatroStageFest," recalls Tubert, "a colleague from the International Hispanic Theatre Festival of Miami attended one of Timbre Cuatro's sold-out performances. A month later, when a production that was originally slated to open the Miami festival ran into last-minute difficulties, Timbre Cuatro was invited to take its place. Claudio Tolcachir, the Argentine company's director, credits TeatroStageFest with launching their subsequent international trajectory: New York led to Miami, which led to the Ibero-American Festival in Cadiz, Spain, and from there many invitations poured in, including a long run at a theatre in Madrid."
Another example: Last year, TeatroStageFest hosted the U.S. premiere of Diciembre by Guillermo Calderón from Chile. Since that gig, a U.S. tour of Teatro en el Blanco's production of Calderón's play has traveled to Los Angeles, Denver and Miami under the auspices of the Performing Americas program of the National Performance Network, and La Red de Productores Culturales de Latino America y el Caribe (La RED) has supported the touring of U.S.-based artists to La RED sites in Central and South America. This same Performing Americas creative-exchange program was responsible for the residency in Cochabamba, Bolivia, of the Spanish version of Agents and Assets by the Los Angeles Poverty Department.
Says Tubert: "Fellow programmers abroad are also turning their eyes to TeatroStageFest to find Latin American shows to bring to their own festivals. Last year, when the artistic director from the Auckland Festival in New Zealand called to say that he was considering attending TeatroStageFest to view our international program because 'it takes less time to get to New York than to South America,' I was pleased to see that in a very short time, our young organization has become a portal to the Americas—something I always envisioned and hoped for." In an interesting break from past seasons driven by text-based theatre, TeatroStageFest's 2010 festival, running June 17-30, emphasizes highly visual theatre from Spain (m3 - A NoSpace Odyssey), Brazil (Ricky Seabra's Skyscrapers and Airplanes) and Argentina (the circus troupe La Arena).
The most distinguished U.S. portal to the Americas is, of course, the International Hispanic Theatre Festival (IHTF) of Miami, headed by Teatro Avante producing artistic director Mario Ernesto Sanchez. This 25-year-old festival has been indefatigable in its efforts to establish, maintain and enhance Hispanic theatre, especially Cuban theatre in the U.S. and abroad, and has earned a battery of international awards, including this past year the prestigious Atahualpa del Cioppo Award in Spain, named after one of the most revered figures in Latin American theatre. (The late Fanny Mickey of Bogotá won the same award a year before she died.) This past March, Sanchez's production of Aire frio (Cold Air) by the great Cuban playwright Virgilio Piñera represented the U.S. at the International Festival of the Arts in San Jose, Costa Rica, and then this past April toured to São Paulo. It will land at the Ibero-American festival in Cadiz in October and then Barcelona right after.
Taking place at several Miami venues July 7-31, IHTF has scheduled another intriguing lineup that will mix local productions (Teatro Prometeo's Filo de fuego by Oliver Mayer and Hispanic Theatre Guild Corporation's Pasos by Antonio Alamo) with imports from Mexico (Teatro de Ciertos Habitantes's El gallo by Claudio Valdés Kuri), Brazil (Oco Teatro Laboratorio's Los sueños de Segismundo), Uruguay (Nidia Telles's Gracias por todo by Julio César Castro) and Chile (Tryo Teatro Banda's Pedro de Valdivia, la gesta inconclusa by Juan Francisco Sánchez Brkic). A past IHTF hit, Argentina's Timbre Cuatro, will return with a new production, Tercer Cuerpo.
As is obvious from this menu, as well as its Miami location, securing visas are the main headaches for Mario Ernesto Sanchez. "It depends on who you are, whether you've been here before, or if you have family over there," says Sanchez. "We have a long history, thank God, in our 25 years of producing the festival that no one has ever stayed illegally. They have all gone back. One year an Argentinean artist met a Puerto Rican girl. I took him personally to the airport. I told him: I will send you another letter of invitation, and you can go back for another reason. Now they are married, and he became a U.S. citizen. But at the time I told him: You are not going to do this while my festival is going on. With immigration problems in the U.S., certain countries are indeed profiled. It depends on the country; it depends on the group. They check your criminal record to see if you belong to the Communist Party or if you've worked for terrorist groups. We've always had a problem with Mexico because of the issue of illegal residents and with Colombia because of drugs. What bothers me is that it's financially very painful for groups to go to the American embassy (sometimes they have to fly to the capital where the embassy is located), and the embassy charges a great deal of money for the appointment—and this still doesn't assure that you can get in. For us, it costs more than $200 for each group, and we still don't know. Immigration lawyers help us out, and we pay a thousand dollars for premium processing in a couple of weeks. If the artists are rejected in their home country, we lose that money."
According to Sanchez, traveling to festivals abroad offered him a clearer picture of how his company compared with groups from other countries. "At the beginning I was afraid to travel. You don't know where you stand. You don't know how you would fare in the international arena. The festivals gave me an idea, a thermometer, of where I stand."
What distinguishes IHTF from other international festivals is that it doesn't put a premium on the Spanish language. Its mission is to promote and preserve Hispanic culture in the U.S. "When we began touring, it became even more important that we were bringing Hispanic groups from Latin America and Spain. And if the productions come from non-Hispanic countries, the only regulation is that the play must have been written by a Hispanic playwright or an artist or individual of Hispanic descent, or be an adaptation by a Hispanic of a classic, such as Shakespeare with a Hispanic flair. Then when we began touring to Eastern European countries like Slovenia, we wanted to promote Hispanic theatre in non-Hispanic countries. We're proud of what we have accomplished in the past—the festival has won four major prestigious international awards. People out there feel that what we're doing is preserving and promoting the culture on two continents, and not the language. Miami is the middle ground."
Make no mistake, however—TeatroStageFest and IHTF are not the only nonprofit organizations breaking ground by widening the field and blurring the boundaries between Latin American and U.S. Latino/a theatres. Many Latino and Hispanic companies across the U.S. have their own local efforts that receive scant national attention. Those groups include Repertorio Español of New York; Teatro Visión of San José, Calif.; Teatro del Pueblo in the Twin Cities; Portland's Miracle Theatre Group; Borderlands Theater of Tucson, Ariz.; and Pregones Theater of the Bronx (whose Worldwide Carousel Theatre Project is perhaps the most visionary international cultural exchange involving such Latin American countries as Peru and Colombia). In the fall, Teatro de la Luna of Arlington, Va., will prepare the 13th edition of its International Festival of Hispanic Theatre, which showcases critically acclaimed troupes from Spanish-language countries, usually with live English dubbing. For seven years, until its last edition in 2008, Los Angeles had the FITLA International Latino Theatre Festival of Los Angeles. "FITLA was fairly active for a period of time," says Olga Garay, "then one of the principals went to Spain and the other one went to Mexico." José Luis Valenzuela, artistic director of the Latino Theatre Company and the Los Angeles Theater Center, in 2008 organized the Face of the World Festival, a Latin American festival with a strong international component.
For U.S.-based artists to receive wider recognition on the world stages of Latin America, there is, without question, a need to financially support works being created by Latin American artists in the U.S. "These works," says Garay, "are often extremely underfunded and always relegated to an underclass, because they don't have the resources to rehearse adequately or have the production values that they should aspire to." Sounding more sanguine, Sanchez agrees: "This country has had a history of not supporting the arts at any level the way it should. The exception for me is Miami-Dade County. But even here, as late as last year when the economic shortfall hit the country, the mayor of Miami-Dade suggested taking away [nearly] 100 percent of the funding for the arts. We had to go to hearings and write letters. We had to unite to stop that barbarity."
In many cases, international U.S. festivals like TeatroStageFest and IHTF must depend on government support from abroad. Says Tubert, "It is less a matter of whether we should depend on support from governments abroad, as much as it is that without it, we may not be able to bring foreign companies to the U.S. For example, our inaugural festival was able to feature a huge co-production of Hamlet, thanks to support from the Ministry of Culture and Foreign Relations of Colombia and CONACULTA in Mexico. It is short-sighted of our government not to invest in this type of reciprocal activity. The fact is that the local governments abroad help to underwrite these costs, because they see themselves investing in a group of international ambassadors that will go back to their own countries and rave about their experiences there. It's as much about communicating a positive image of that country to the rest of the world as it is about the possibility that this will, in turn, drive cultural tourism to their particular city."
Both in the U.S. and abroad, festivals of Latin American theatre are hemispheric connectors, necessary hubs where theatre artists and producers from everywhere can broker international collaborations and cultural exchange. Unless strategic alliances are made—and unless Latin American work is truly integrated into established ways of creating and thinking about theatre programming here—Latin American theatre will remain a collapsible labyrinth that always has an intractable and outsider feel to it.
Controversy in Caracas
CARACAS, VENEZUELA: On March 7, tear gas was lobbed into the dressing-room area in the middle of the Sunday evening performance of Palo de Agua's production of Jesus Christ Superstar at the Aula Magna Theatre, located at the Central University of Venezuela. "The actors were affected by it," says Michel Hausmann, the Caracas-based director of the musical, "but they went on with the show. The audiences were never in any danger, and they only found out about it after they went home and turned on the news." A police investigation turned up no culprits, but Hausmann says the incident caused a precipitous drop in ticket sales: "People felt it was dangerous to come to the theatre."
Cecilia García Arocha, director of the university, told the Nacional that the tear-gas incident was a continuation of a spate of violent incidents targeting the university. Hausmann, going a step further, refers to this attack as an example of government intimidation rampant in Venezuela against all theatre groups who are branded "enemies of the revolution" because they seek to maintain their autonomy.
As Hausmann tells it, it all began in February 2009, 10 days before the March opening of his for-profit company's Fiddler on the Roof, when the president of Gran Mariscal de Ayacucho orchestra decided to exit the show, because he was afraid his government-funded orchestra would lose its subsidy by participating in a "Jewish play." Scrambling to hire new musicians, Hausmann's producing team decided to go public with the story. He says, "It became the subject of many editorials and articles in Venezuela. It became news for the Jewish world outside of Venezuela." After this incident of self-censorship, Hausmann faced a still more troublesome incident involving his refusal to agree with last-minute advertising conditions imposed by the state-owned cellular phone operator Movilnet. Hausmann recalls: "We had reached an agreement with the Mexican headquarters of RIM BlackBerry to be the main sponsor of the show. BlackBerry was going to invest $150,000 in cash and $150,000 worth of advertisements. The deal had to go though Movilnet, which would work as RIM's operating arm in Venezuela."
But one day before the kick-off of the ad campaign, the Palo de Agua team was informed of "a new item in the contract." Both Movilnet and RIM specified that Palo de Agua "could not advertise with our own money in newspapers and on TV stations that were considered anti-Chávez." In a letter the following day, Palo de Agua replied that "no sponsor could tell us how we communicate with our audiences using our resources." In response, he says, "They pulled out of the show." This BlackBerry-Movilnet debacle "is almost forcing us into bankruptcy," he adds. "We hire more than 100 people per show and are an important source of jobs in the industry. We are the only company not dependent on government funding that has suffered this kind of discrimination. We will be taking some time off and will seriously think about relocating." An NGO devoted to freedom of speech, Espacio Publico, has submitted Palo de Agua's case to the court of the Organization of the American States, headquartered in Washington, D.C., for arbitration.
In Bogotá, An Homage to a Diva of Iberoamerica
How do you take the place of a tsunami? How do you follow on the heels of a red-haired sorceress of Latin American theatre, known for her magical ability to turn Bogotá's dream of international recognition into reality—a sort of female Prospero who conjured the impossible out of thin air?
"Fanny Mickey was not a person—she was a force of nature," remarks Ana Marta de Pizarro, who has succeeded the charismatic Mickey as the new director of El Festival Iberoamericano de Teatro de Bogotá.
Mickey came from Argentina in 1959 and adopted the Colombian nationality. No other individual in Colombia's recent history has contributed more to the development of its artistic and cultural infrastructure. In 1981 in Bogotá she founded La Fundación del Teatro Nacional, which supports the national theatre. More important, she put Colombian theatre on the world map by co-founding, with Ramiro Osorio, FITB—one of the largest theatre festivals in the world, and the most important hub in the Americas for performing-arts events with a hemispheric reach.
Every two years since 1988, this monumental Iberoamerican Theatre Festival literally shakes up and remakes the streets of the Colombian capital. "The Fanny phenomenon was unique," says Felipe Gamba, a Colombian producer now based in New York who originally designed and ran VIA, the performing arts marketplace arm of the festival. "Founding the festival was the crowning achievement of a long career; she had been in the public eye for so many years as an actress. She imbued FITB with her special agency and passion for Colombian culture."
This year's edition of FITB (the 12th), which took place March 19-April 4, was the first festival without its red-haloed impresario, who died in Cali on Aug. 16, 2008. Thousands accompanied her coffin in a parade to the national palace. The festival's homage to its deceased founder comes in the form of a cartoon-like emblem: a cloud of red hair from which dangles two glamorous legs in pointy heels. Transmuted into a happy logo, Fanny Mickey's signature visage has turned up everywhere: on T-shirts, baseball caps, pins, magnets, mugs, handbags, lobby displays, posters. At the festival's citywide kick-off this past March, a sea of Fanny Mickey clowns could be spotted along the parade route; men and women, both in the crowd and on floats, donned red wigs and bright-yellow camisetas. The organizers built a giant Fanny marionette almost eight meters in height, which presided over the stilt-walkers, saltimbancos and jugglers.
Ana Marta de Pizarro was Mickey's natural heir. For more than 15 years, de Pizarro and Mickey were more than friends and colleagues at FITB; they were the closest of accomplices. Educated as an anthropologist, de Pizarro trained as a dancer as a young child but got bit by the theatre bug after collaborating with Mickey on a concert. "My ideas about theatre were formed by my work with Fanny," de Pizarro says.
De Pizarro's Apollonian calm complemented Mickey's Dionysian qualities, and the 12th edition of FITB has been a critical test of her mettle. Her top challenge now is to keep the festival vital after its April close—to create new projects during those in-between years when the festival is not happening. This coming fall, she will co-produce with the Music-Theatre Group and Salón Volcán (Gamba's producing organization) Juan Darién: A Carnival Mass by Julie Taymor and Elliot Goldenthal, which the festival hopes to tour in Latin America and the U.S.
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