Acts of ViolenceTheatre of Resistance and Relief in the Colombian War Zone Barnaby King

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TDR: The Drama Review 52:1 (T197) Spring 2008. ©2008 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Barnaby King is a theatre director, teacher, and performer living in Portland, Oregon. He has an MA in Theatre Studies from Leeds University, England, and was Associate and Artistic director of The Theatre Company Blah Blah Blah in Leeds for eight years, producing theatre for children and young people. In 2003 he set up his own company, Yellow Belly, dedicated to exploring clown theatre, and continues to perform and teach clowning internationally. He has also been a regular visiting lecturer and guest director at the University of Leeds Workshop Theatre, Bretton Hall College of the Performing Arts, and York St. John College, with a special interest in intercultural performance, theatre-in-education, community theatre, clown theatre, and improvisation.

On the AtratoA Clash of Cultures

1 December 2005—We have stopped so many times to let armed military personnel check our papers, verifying we are Varasanta, a theatre company from Bogotá, that we no longer feel intimidated by their menacing looks and suspicious questioning. We are already into the third day of a tour that started in Quibdó, capital of the province of Chocó, and will take us 200 miles down the river Atrato to the village of Bellavista and beyond. Although Chocó is just a 20-minute plane journey from the Colombian capital, Bogotá, it is like being in a different world. We are in dense jungle, there are no roads, and the only way to travel is by boat along the mazelike network of rivers, jumping from village to village. What’s more, the region is heavily militarized due to the ongoing conflict between guerrilla and paramilitary forces that has beleaguered certain regions of Colombia for nearly 40 years.

So, to relieve the tension while we wait for the go-ahead, some of us take out musical instruments and start playing a song in the traditional Chocóan chirimía style. The rhythm of chirimía is impish and playful, the snaking rise and fall of the clarinet piercing the sense of resignation that flows through this place, inescapable as the river itself. On neighboring boats people are smiling, heads and hips swaying gently to the music. One woman turns full circle, shoulders shimmying and arms raised to the sky. In that moment, we—a boat full of performers from Bogotá, in the middle of conflict-ridden jungle—feel instinctively connected with the local people, engaging with the rich cultural heritage of this region. However, while enjoying this moment of connectedness, I am aware of my own deep-rooted skepticism. What does it mean to feel connected? Is that the same as being connected? And what is the relationship between “us” as performers and “them” as audience in this moment? What right do we have to come here and play their cultural forms back to them? Is this temporary relief of tension more cathartic for us than for them? And do my concerns about appropriation and imperialism, which spring perhaps from my immersion in postcolonial discourses that have left me inherently suspicious of easy notions of equality and exchange, really mean anything in this context? The Chocóans are enjoying listening to the music; we are enjoying playing it. Why can’t this be a moment of pure “human” expressive connection, beyond culture, beyond difference? Is it arrogant, or merely naïve, to believe it is possible to communicate across the chasm of cultural, social, and economic difference that separates, say, the white/mestizo members of the Varasanta theatre company, from the African-descended population of Chocó?

These questions, crystallized by this one instance, tinted my entire experience of the tour of Kilele, which I was fortunate to be able to witness both as artist and observer. They also became the compelling force behind this article, in which I want to try to untangle some of their threads.

Kilele was written in 2004 in response to a specific act of violence in Chocó: the massacring of 119 civilians in a church. In the words of Kilele’s author, Felipe Vergara: “It [Kilele] will attempt

Figure 1 (facing page). Wooden walkways used to get around in the flooded village of Curvuradó. (Photo by Barnaby King)

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to place the tragedy into a mythic space-time that will universalize and ritualize it, with the aim of understanding the cultural and historical implications of an event” (Vergara 2004b).1 The play’s full title, Kilele: Una Epopoya Artesanal, which translates as “Kilele: An Artesanal (or homespun) Epic,” tellingly reveals Vergara’s universalizing ambition. The play follows the flight of “everyman” and epic hero Viajero (“Traveller”), who is expelled from his destroyed village, has to endure unimagi-nable suffering, and is finally propelled home to give the spirits of his murdered relatives the funeral rites they need to move on to the next world.

Derived from the Swahili word kelele, the title can be translated variously as yelling, grieving, weeping, agitation, celebra-tion, reunion, and rebellion. The overflowing, even contradictory multiplicity of meanings within this single word, its suggestion of political resistance, and the simple fact of its being an African word carried into common usage in Chocóan Spanish, usefully signal the sometimes contradictory, sometimes controversial intentions competing within the play itself and its production. Who is its target audience, for example? Its first production, codirected by Vergara and me, happened in Leeds, England, in December 2004, thanks to a British Council scheme to bring together emerging artists from Bogotá and Yorkshire. Nine months later, with funding from the Colombian government, Vergara began working with director Fernando Montes and his small, but established theatre company, Varasanta. Building on their own core of five actors they put together a cast of ten, auditioning recent graduates of Bogotá’s acting schools, and began a season in their own 60-seat studio space, playing three nights a week to packed and emotional houses of habitual Bogotá theatregoers. However, it was always Vergara’s ambition to take the play to the region that inspired it, and in November 2005 a three-week tour was facilitated by more money from the Colombian Ministry of Culture and a grant from the US embassy. Since then, it has continued to flourish in Bogotá, and was even showcased in the culturally elitist IboAmerican Theatre Festival held in Bogotá in April 2006.2 A US tour is now being planned for 2008, thanks to invitations resulting from the festival.

Looking at the complex issues surrounding the play, its production, its various funding sources and audience groups, really poses more questions than it answers. The play criticizes and exposes the actions of multiple governments, yet it is funded by them. It is indicative of its creators’ desire to communicate with grassroots communities, but it has also raised the company

1. All translations from Spanish, unless otherwise noted, are by Barnaby King.

2. Festival de Teatro IboAmericano in Spanish, this biennial festival is the largest international theatre festival in the world. Approximately 10 percent of its performances are Colombian; the rest are from overseas, including Asia, Europe, Australia, and North America.

Figure 2. Armed soldiers in Bellavista walk beneath the poster commemorating the tragedy of May 2002. (Photo by Barnaby King)

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to international status. It attempts to draw on the African-based culture of Chocó, yet it has been performed almost exclusively by white/mestizo actors from the UK and Bogotá. Does Vergara’s desire to be “all things to all people,” his desire to communicate across different groups, across cultural and economic divides, mixing and matching material from all, make him a naïve humanist who, lacking in cultural specificity, ends up communicating to no one? Is he merely arrogant in his belief in the universality of his art, or worse, is he a cultural appropriator, begging, borrowing, and stealing to create an artistic potluck, serving nobody’s ends but his own and those of the global audience, hungry for the new, the exotic, and the (at least nominally) dangerous?

Perhaps of all my concerns, Diana Taylor articulates the uppermost one when she asks a question about the Peruvian company Yuyachkani:

How can a group, made up predominantly of urban, white/mestizo, middle-class, Spanish-speaking professional theatre people […] have access to the memories of the Andean communities? Can it celebrate their fiestas or perform their rituals? Can Yuyachkani tell their story of cumulative social trauma? How to avoid charges of cultural impersonation and appropriation? (2003:194)

My own experiences on the tour incarnated many such concerns, and steering a path between theoretical ideals and pragmatic realities, this writing attempts not so much to document the physical journey as my personal process of questioning and discovery at the intersection of academic discourse and observed practice. It behooves me, however, to draw attention to my limitations as a neutral or objective observer. As a white, middle-class British theatre practitioner and academic I was there due to the patronage of the British Council, which immediately denies any claim to objective neutrality. I am ostensibly a third-party “other” to both the theatre company and the Chocóan audience, but the reality is that I have more in common, both culturally and economically, with the former than with the latter. My theatrical education, like theirs, is based firmly in a foundation of Stanislavsky, through Bertolt Brecht, Antonin Artaud, to Jerzy Grotowski, Eugenio Barba, and Peter Brook (to name a few), and it is through the lens of their ideas that I will inevitably see and interpret events.

Back on the river, still at the military checkpoint, I continue to wrestle with these issues in my head as a couple of young boys mess with some wires behind four huge loudspeakers piled in the back of the boat next to ours. Without warning the woofers burst to life sending a volley of rhythmic bass tones shooting out across the river to ricochet back at us off the jungle wall opposite. Our acoustic folk music is powerless in the face of the driving and sexually suggestive reggaetón, a popular Puerto Rican hybrid of hip-hop and reggae, which plays regularly in bars and on radios throughout Colombia.

As the thumping bass beat drowns out our merry chirimía, my first response is to read this as a sign of changing times and I feel a pang of sadness for the loss of traditional culture. What we from the city consider to be popular culture in Chocó is perhaps a nostalgic construct; in reality this commercialized, pan-American culture pervades everyday life here. Maybe the intrusion of reggaetón is a symbolic and violent act of defiance against our tendency to romanticize Chocóan culture.

And then I remember the smiles I saw on the faces of the Chocóans while we were playing the chirimía, and the feeling of connection I got from them. Their appreciation had not been imagined or feigned. Suddenly, my simplistic explanations no longer suffice: possibilities multiply and meanings proliferate. I have been guilty of projecting conflict onto the situation, believing in the necessity of one thing to succeed or replace another, an either/or situation, rather than the possibility of peaceful coexistence. In the juxtaposition of two admittedly very different elements, maybe there exists the possibility of creative tension, not violent conflict.

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TagachíA Conflict of Interests

3 December—In Tagachí, as in most places we come to early in the tour, we are greeted with shouts of recognition and welcome. We are taken to the Centro Humanitario (humanitarian center), built by NGOs working in the area and identical to that in every other village, where we will sleep; we then make our way to a large, circular, community meeting hall where we will perform the show. There is no power here and the generator is so loud that we decide to give our performance by candlelight for the over 200 villagers who have paddled to the hall in canoes, as the village is flooded. In the flickering light they sit around the circular playing area with mixed expressions of recognition, shock, and bewilderment at the playing out of a story that seems to be their own, but strangely different. In the center of the action stands a rough wooden archway—our only large piece of scenography—which represents the door of a church just a few miles further downriver in a village that, in some respects, is the focal point of the whole project. At the end, several community leaders speak to us about why this play was so important to them:

This performance is the best way to ensure that those who committed this crime will live permanently in their punishment, knowing that these facts will never be forgotten but will remain forever in the memory of the village. (Oscar 2005)

In May 2002 a homemade bomb was thrown into a church in the village of Bellavista on the Atrato, killing 119 people, many of them women and children, who were being used as human shields in a battle between guerrillas and paramilitary troops. The Colombian media jumped on this incident as an emotional symbol of the troubles suffered by the country at the hands of the warring factions. Florence Thomas, a well-known columnist in El Tiempo, made a powerful statement by leaving her column completely blank the day after the tragedy. Ironically, the blankness of her column more accurately reflects the absence of real knowledge throughout most of the world, and even among most Colombians, regarding the situation in Chocó.

Overseas, the conflict in Colombia has universally been labeled a drug war. But such stereotypes cover over the economic and political complexity of the situation in hotbeds of the conflict such as Chocó. A low-lying coastal region dominated by hot, humid jungle, 90 percent of Chocó’s inhabitants are black descendants of slaves transported from West Africa, who later escaped and built fortified encampments in the inhospitable depths of the jungle where they thought they could live undisturbed. But although these early settlements, known as palenques, were discovered and frequently attacked by the colonial Spanish, ultimately this resilient ethnic group survived and populated the region.

For many years Afro-Chocóans lived largely neglected, untouched even by the civil war that blighted much of the Colombian countryside—untouched that is until about 10 years ago. While living simple lives, surviving economically from fishing and small-scale livestock rearing, the Chocóans have been literally sitting on a gold mine. Chocó in fact boasts a wealth of natural resources including one of the largest gold reserves in the world, native forests containing valuable supplies of timber, and perfect conditions for massive-scale cultivation of African oil palms, of which Colombia is the fifth-largest producer in the world. With a yield of more than 500,000 tons of palm and palm kernel oils annually, this region has once again attracted the unwanted attention of intruders (governmental and corporate) from all over the world (Fedepalma 2005).3 So although Chocó represents the confluence of many economic, political, and geo-strategic interests, very little of this benefits Chocóans, who have seen their quality of life erode daily as they lose their land to multinationals whose plantations extract natural resources without contributing to the development of the region. According to a 2003 UN

3. Also, Colombia is South America’s largest producer with more than 150,000 hectares currently planted.

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survey, Chocó was the most impoverished province in Colombia, scoring 21.9 percent on their human poverty index (the national rate is 10.6 percent). From 1990 to 1998, the government spent US$30 per year per capita on social improvements in Chocó, compared to US$212 in Bogotá. Only 46 percent of the region’s population have access to drinkable water and the literacy rate is 10 times lower than that of Bogotá.4

Beyond simple exploitation, however, Chocóans are seen increasingly as an obstacle to those who want to acquire the land for its natural assets, and the resulting widespread phenomenon of forced displacement has become a major humanitarian crisis, as here recognized by the Support Group for Displaced People Organizations (GAD):

At the end of the ’80s and at the beginning of the ’90s, internal displacement (ID) was identified only as a product or secondary effect of the armed conflict. Today it is recog-nized, even in official declarations that in many cases forced displacement is a necessary requisite for taking possession of or dominating territories.5 (GAD 1999)

The armed groups, left-wing guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries (often with the collusion of the regular army), have been responsible for an array of human rights abuses designed to strengthen their hold over the people and ultimately force them out. From destruction and theft of property, extortion of money, and forced recruitment of young people to kidnappings, assassinations, and open attacks—villagers often find themselves caught in a crossfire of brutal intimidation tactics:

An attack by one of the armed groups against a village where the police are not present […] creates the conditions for a subsequent “retaliatory” attack by the opposing group. The attack is justified by the claim that the previous aggressors were given some kind of backing by the inhabitants. This continual change in pressure and intimidation contrib-utes to individual and family displacement that may not be recorded in its totality. (GAD 1999)

BuchadóA Play of Contradictions

4 December—As we continue our journey downstream, steering a path between two impenetra-ble walls of exploding green foliage, we know that somewhere behind those natural ramparts brigades of armed militia are hiding out, waiting for their moment to raid some unsuspecting village. As we dive deeper into the jungle and further from home, I am reminded ominously of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and his character Kurtz’s voyage up the Congo, and I begin to envision this tour as a kind of search or pilgrimage back to the dark heart of the play’s inspira-tion, Bellavista itself. Ironically, though, it is partly the intention of playwright Vergara to posit the massacre not as a one-off event but as an example of the many similar acts of violence that have been perpetrated by both sides in the region, and indeed throughout the world:

The project aims to retell the tragedy of Chocó in a theatrical work that penetrates the collective imagination, such that it is remembered not just as a localized episode, but can be seen as an archetype of the enduring disasters that are produced by armed conflict. (Vergara 2003)

4. The UN Human Poverty Index is calculated according to life expectancy, literacy, access to drinking water, health services, and proportion of children underweight (Gomez et al. 2003).

5. “Displacement has become a strategy of war, insofar as the population is either forced to abandon the area, thereby facilitating the creation of a military or supply corridor for the sides in the conflict or is accused en masse of col-laborating with the military adversary” (Valencia 1998:236).

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However, at its inception, Vergara was drawn toward Chocó more by the promise of its ethnic “otherness” than by the specifics of the conflict.

The project was born on 17 May 2002 when Vergara, already a successful writer and former artistic director of Teatro R101 in Bogotá, read in El Tiempo newspaper of a strange-sounding ritual known as La noche de las maldiciones y los maleficios (night of curses and spells) that had recently taken place in the town of Quibdó in the province of Chocó. Gruesome and sinister curses had been cast on FARC guerrillas, paramilitary forces, and the state—those perceived as collectively responsible for the massacre in Bellavista just a few days before. Fascinated by

the persistence of such a strong belief in the power of magic, Vergara began reading anthropo-logical research about West African culture, and he discovered a rich vein of material for a new theatre project which he believed could contribute to the nation’s understanding of itself. He applied for and got a Colombian Ministry of Culture “research and development” grant to go to Chocó for three months, the outcome of which was Kilele.

In Chocó, Vergara was exposed to the truth of the conflict: children die daily of malaria because of the lack of proper health care; hundreds of young men disappear every month, presumed kidnapped and forced into action by one or other of the military groups operating up and down the river; and piles of unburied bodies are left to rot by the river banks or flung into unmarked pits without proper funeral rites. The experience of meeting people and listening to their stories led him down a more pragmatic path: “The gates of perception finally opened: we were among people, not objects of study. To hell with exotic rituals! What could we do for you here and now?” (Vergara 2005).

Vergara’s search for the exotic and “other” in Chocó was quickly confounded when he discovered that his “night of curses and spells” was not, in reality, an authentic or intact relic, the preserved tribal practice of a society frozen in time since the days of its African forebears, but rather a consciously symbolic performance created by student intellectuals and poets in Quibdó, blending cultural elements from Cuba, Brazil, and Haiti with their own versions of the local folklore of Afro-Atrateños. It was in fact an intercultural concoction, born from the artists’ need to make a strong statement of resistance in the face of a dehumanizing act of violence.

The example of the “night of curses and spells” was not lost on Vergara. Indeed it prompted him to engage his own cultural eclecticism and write a play that even as it begs, borrows, and steals from a range of world cultures, also encourages Chocóans to return to and draw strength from their roots.

The play is a stitched-together patchwork of characters taken from different cultural sources. The hero, Viajero, is accompanied by ghost-like companions Ulysses and Aeneas, heroes of

Figure 3. Viajero performs the final funeral rites of the dead spirits in Kilele (2005) by Felipe Vergara, directed by Fernando Montes in Quibdó, Chocó. From left: Liliana Montaña, Nicolás Cancino, Catalina Medina. (Photo by Barnaby King)

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Greek and Roman epic poetry, bemoaning their plight and struggling against their onerous destinies. A second set of characters, the “new gods,” fight with each other to destroy small model houses and snuff out candles, which represent human lives. Their bright costumes and wigs have the flavor of French aristocracy, and their cavorting stands in contrast to their namesakes Elmer, Noel, and Manisalva, notorious guerrilla and paramilitary generals. These upstarts have used money to usurp the position of another group of characters, the “old gods,” garish hybrids of Catholic saints and African gods who, exiled from their home, appear most of the time drunk and crazy. Another grouping, the anguished souls of the dead, float in and out of the performance space, wearing ghoulish masks and carrying candles. With deliberate ambigu-ity, the masked spirits seem in certain moments to become desplacados, refugees whose villages have been taken by the “new gods.”6 Lastly, a group of umbrella-carrying village gossips act as a chorus, filling in and commenting on the action.

This complex interweaving of sets of characters played by the 10 actors, each of whom takes on at least three roles, reveals the complex matrix of social, political, and spiritual relations at play in Chocó. For example, the ambiguity between the dead spirits and desplacados collapses the boundaries between the living and the dead in Chocó and functions to illustrate the experience of being a displaced person. The two groups are essentially the same, the living dead—cut free from one world but unable to find their way to the next. One living desplacado complains that the world has underestimated the number of victims in Bellavista by citing only the 119 who actually died in the church. The figure should be much greater, complains the

6. Desplacados means literally “displaced people.” A more common translation might be “refugees,” although “displaced” seems more accurate to describe the process by which the people have been forced out of their homes and villages.

Figure 4. Audiences arrive by boat from the other side of the Atrato in Opogadó. (Photo by Barnaby King)

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villager, since “roaming about like this for eternity, we already look like souls in anguish” (Vergara 2004a).

Vergara also wants to reveal the direct causal link between economic interests in the region and forced displacement. Significantly, while the three gods are supposed to represent the three warring factions—the guerrillas, the paramilitaries, and the national army—the three are envisioned as playmates, squabbling and bickering but reveling together in their destructive game. The village gossips describe how one group is as bad as another, enacting the same atrocities but with different political justifications. They are similar pero diferente (“similar but different”). This phrase, much repeated, becomes a key motif in the play.

LomaResistance Is Useless

6 December—Every morning at 7:00 am we get up, pack our props, the bulky wooden archway, our personal luggage, and our food (we have taken all our food for the two weeks with us) into the boat and head back out onto the river. All our traveling is done early in the day, as this is the safest time to be out.

Often we travel for five or six hours between villages, but the trip from Buchadó to Loma is just a short jump up a side-tributary of the Atrato, and so we arrive before noon. The village is built up on a high riverbank, which means it is less flooded than other places. It also has a higher concentration of military, probably due to its proximity to Bellavista. Taking advantage of the extra time and the dry streets, I purloin a costume (a yellow raincoat and wide-brimmed hat), put on a red nose and go out with some of the others to play. Before long we are engulfed in a crowd of children and together we cavort around the village, dancing to the strains of a chirimía, while villagers and soldiers look on with varying degrees of amusement and suspicion. Amidst the chaos, an armed soldier approaches two of the actors and extends a hand in friendly greeting. They shake hands and think no more of it. But later that night Alexis, one of the leaders of ACIA (Association of Indigenous and Afro-Chocoan peasants), who is traveling with us, gathers the whole company together to give us a stern warning: “It’s dangerous. You cannot shake hands with them,” he warns us, “If somebody sees you, we could become a target for anyone who is an enemy of the government. You don’t know who these people are. You have to be careful.”

What seemed like a relaxed and friendly village to me is suddenly a sinister and foreboding place. During the performance later that night I picture a potential enemy in every audience-member’s face, and I am convinced that the building is surrounded by armed guerrillas who have heard about the government-sponsored theatre company from Bogotá and have come to abduct us.

The difficult question this brings up for me is, what exactly is the power relationship between us and our audience in Chocó? Does our presence here implicate us politically in the conflict, and if so, whose interests are we representing? My imagined fears may not have materialized, but the continued warnings of Alexis and others make me understand this is a place where, by our very presence, we are creating shock waves of which we are no doubt largely unaware.

Figure 5. The Chorus of village gossips in Kilele (2005) by Felipe Vergara, directed by Fernando Montes, in Buchadó, Chocó. Performed by Isabel Goana and Catalina Medina. (Photo by Barnaby King)

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Maybe any illusion of neutrality was refuted by the $50,000 touring grant from the Colombian Ministry of Culture, part of a government that is considered by many to be heavily invested in the war itself. Even more compromising in Vergara’s own opinion was the significant funding from the US embassy:

The fact that they support projects like this means that they can distract attention away from their more destructive policies, which I am criticizing in the play. They can point to these projects as examples of the good work they are doing, and so it undermines the effectiveness of our political message. (Vergara 2006)

The invisibility of the enemy in war situations such as that in Colombia, and the ever-present question of “Whose side are you on?” or put another way, “If you’re not with us you’re with

them,” raises a thorny moral question for any artist entering the war arena. James Thompson, through his extensive work in the war zones of Sri Lanka is only too aware of the problem: “Without extreme care theatre projects that dig up narratives, experiences, and remembrances can blame, enact revenge, and foster animosity as much as they can develop dialogue, respect, or comfort” (2004:151).

There is a potential violence, it seems to me, in the act of the tour itself: the violence of one culture invading another with its value systems, occupying even the church that was the heated epicenter of the play’s inspira-tion, unwittingly carrying back to that center a metaphorical

compound of explosives whose shock-waves echo those of the original explosion. We are 20 performers motoring down the Atrato in a boat larger than almost every other we have seen on the river, presenting our version of their story, which we have created in a theatre studio in Bogotá, to hundreds of people whose movement is severely restricted and who live under a constant threat of death. Could this act conceal a violence, a violation (drawing on the word’s etymology, the Latin verb violare), that implicates us in the abuse of rights we are endeavoring to expose? In addition, is it possible that a piece of theatre, within the atmosphere of fear and mistrust that exists here, could actually “sustain armed struggle and promote violent resistance” (Thompson 2002:114)? How does the play itself deal with the representation of violence? If, as Thompson asserts, “war situations are maintained by a complex pattern of narrative creation, mythmaking and assertions of truth” and therefore “the act of telling a story in these contexts exists within these networks of competing and often war-sustaining accounts” (2004:163), then where does Kilele stand within this network of competing accounts? What version of truth does it assert?

At the heart of the play lies a scene that unquestionably “digs up experiences and remem-brances.” Flames, chaos, running, screaming, 119 paper bodies burned by the euphoric “new gods,” all contribute to a viscerally shocking and immediate experience that seems to conjure the horror of the original massacre. Fragments of real stories of survivors are told by actors lit

Figure 6. Viajero on his journey with Aeneas and Ulysses in Kilele (2005) by Felipe Vergara, directed by Fernando Montes in Opogadó, Chocó. From left: Alexander Morales, Nelson Camayo, Nicolás Cancino, Salvatore Motta. (Photo by Barnaby King)

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only by torchlight. This collage of astonishing violence, both real and imagined, framed through the lens of the dramaturge, never fails to create a stunned silence in our audience, the visible response of a community coming face-to-face with a traumatic memory, the immediacy and pain of which is only just beginning to dull, three years on. The scene digs up memories, but does it lay blame or enact revenge? Significantly, Vergara does not sidestep the question of who is to blame but, as we have seen, he lays it squarely at the feet of the three warring factions (guerrillas, paramilitaries, and state army) represented by the three gods. Rather than depicting them as fighting one another, however, as a conservative assessment of the reality might, he presents them as playmates ganging up against the real victims, the powerless villagers.

Vergara equates the political and physical powerlessness of the villagers with actual death, and in a state of being dead, enacting anything (revenge or otherwise) seems like an impossibil-ity. Exiled in the jungle, Viajero wanders like a dead person, weighed down, unable to act: “Maybe it’s not that I can’t, maybe it’s just that I don’t want to move. Without movement there is no time. And without time there is no responsibility or anguish” (Vergara 2004a:39). Eventually it is the spirits of his dead ancestors who force his hand by “taking” his daughter Rocío (taking her into the land of the dead, implying that they essentially kill her). At the point of absolute suffering and desperation, Viajero’s first act is to call down the wrath of the gods, not upon the spirits who took Rocío but upon those responsible for the massacre:

Destroy the evil assassins who hid in the wooden horse and destroyed Tragosmiando! Finish off all those savages who were hiding among unarmed civilians! Strike down those who did nothing to save us! Send a bolt of electricity through all their bodies! Bring down the fury of the dead on their killers, so that I can help them to cross the river that leads to the valley of San José. (Vergara 2004a)

Again blame is laid at the door of the three groups: “the evil assassins” are the guerrillas who threw bombs into the church; the “savages who were hiding among unarmed civilians” are the paramilitaries, who were using the population of Bellavista as a human shield; and “those who did nothing to save us” refers to the state military, the army who turns a blind eye to much of the violence when it suits them. But this time, Viajero’s impassioned rhetoric, fuelled by anger and animosity, seems to conjure into being the possibility of, or at least desire for, real acts of vengeance. Is Vergara, in his use of such provocative language, betraying his unvoiced endorse-ment of violent resistance?

To answer this question we need to look beyond Viajero’s verbal response, to his actions, his “embodied expression” (Taylor 2003:16). His vengeful rhetoric gives up the responsibility for violent physical action to the gods, while he himself takes a different path: in the company of his ancestor spirits and the village gods he improvises a half-remembered, half-invented ritual, “Kilele.” Both celebration and rebellion, the ritual is equally a journey back to the heated center of the conflict, a violation of the limits imposed on him by the war, and an enactment of the funeral rites denied to his dead relatives. From a place of inaction he is compelled to action, and the improvised ritual he performs is an act of resistance more effective than any involving real weapons: it represents the survival not just of people but of a culture, where culture is not a static entity, but an ever-evolving, constantly shifting site. This form of resistance involves no physical violence but it is violent nonetheless: “We have learned that theatre can be more than theatre: that it is, in fact, another weapon which can be used by a culture to ensure its survival” (Vergara 2005). To describe theatre as a weapon demonstrates how Vergara con- sciously redefines the very notion of violent resistance within the context of “embodied cul- ture” (Taylor 2003:16).

Taylor makes a useful distinction between what she terms, “the archive of supposedly enduring materials (i.e., texts, documents, buildings, bones) and the so-called ephemeral repertoire of embodied practice/knowledge (i.e., spoken language, dance, sports, ritual)” (2003:19). She challenges the purported ephemerality of the repertoire, arguing that both

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are mediated, and both are subject to slippage and transfor-mation over time, though in different ways. The real relevance of the distinction in relation to Chocó is the question of power arrangements, which determine an unequal access to the archive. Texts, documents, and buildings cannot exist with any degree of permanence in communities that are literally displaced from month to month and where literacy is negligible. For Taylor, the reclaiming of the repertoire as a contemporary medium that can “generate, record, and transmit knowledge” rather than as an archaeological relic, is a political act that “invites a remapping of the Americas, this time by following traditions of embodied practice” (2004:20). In the context of the Peruvian theatre group Yuyach- kani she reiterates the argument: “Whose memories, whose trauma, ‘disappear’ if only archival knowledge is valorized and granted permanence?” (Taylor 2003:193) This helps

elucidate several points in relation to Kilele. First, in the body of the play itself, Viajero’s actions—his embodied practice—are what finally make a difference, rather than his impassioned rhetoric. We never learn whether or not his vengeful desires have been fulfilled; indeed we assume that the killers continue living. That is the reality. Second, it reveals Vergara’s use of performance’s embodied immediacy to inscribe in the community’s collective memory the acts of violence occurring on a daily basis in Chocó, which is a response to the difficulty of recording such traumas in writing (or other archival forms), as evidenced in the blank newspaper column referred to earlier. As such he is simultaneously offering an example to the Chocóans of how they might re-member their traumatic histories for themselves: by inscribing it into their repertoire of embodied memory.

Vergara and Varasanta are clearly demarcating the realm of embodied culture and shared ritual as that in which the people of Chocó may find their source of relief and resistance.

VigíaWords Begin to Fail

8 December—In apparent recognition of the widening geographical distance between us and the city, villagers further along the river seem to be less friendly and more guarded when it comes to answering any questions relating to the play or the subject matter of the play. They are reluctant to express opinions, to be interviewed or filmed, or to be seen to be too friendly with us. Often the only information we have to measure the impact of the play is visible or

Figure 7. The author, Barnaby King, performs some clown skits in Loma. (Photo by Catalina Medina)

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audible reactions in the moment, and these seem to be getting more unpredictable. In the boat we discuss whether it is problematic when audiences misunderstand our intention, or seem not to “get” specific cultural allusions, laugh in moments of dramatic tension, or fail to laugh at obvious jokes. The possibility of direct or simple communication appears to be breaking down.

There is a scene in Kilele in which Vergara condemns the empty acts of charity typical of the response to the Bellavista massacre: a group of flashy celebrities arrives in the village amidst music and fanfare to meet the survivors of the tragedy and announce donations of useless items of aid from international governments and charities. Turning the joke on us, one of the items announced by the celebrity fashion models is una obra de teatro (a piece of theatre). Having offered their deep-felt sympathies, the models offer to “hug the survivors.” The villagers look appalled and make a hasty exit, except for one who is cornered by the models and forced to parade with them in front of the flashing cameras. The ridiculous scene is performed with spoonfuls of irony and accordingly, when performed in Bogotá, consistently produces ripples of derisive laughter. In Chocó the response is generally muted, but in Vigía we are taken by surprise when the audience bursts into spontaneous applause. Are they applauding the satire or, as we guess (given the difficulty of getting feedback) welcoming the models’ statement at face value and entirely bypassing its ironic intention?

In another attempt to provide comic relief, Vergara consciously uses what he ambiguously terms humor negro (black humor). This involves the adaptation of colloquial jokes and everyday banter that Vergara heard in Chocó and which, in their original context, helped to relieve suffering. In one scene, a traveling villager does a hyperbolic impersonation of an over-zealous checkpoint guard, requisitioning supplies and generally harassing the group of travelers he is with. They roar with laughter, enjoying the comedy of the scenario, which contains more than a grain of truth, and they taunt the faux-guard, saying things they would not be able to say to a real one. The expectation of the scene is that the audience will laugh at the joke along with the characters, recognizing the form of humor lifted directly from their own vernacular. However, in Chocó generally, as with the models’ scene, this barely raises a titter.

Conversely, the scene in which Rocío dies, playing with a bowl of water and a plastic bag she has found, cavorting, laughing, and pulling childish faces, finally drawing the bag over her head and suffocating, consistently produces howls of laughter. My assumption is that the laughter comes from the recognition of a child’s clownish antics, ending with a moment of poignant black comedy. And although it contains death, this scene has no obvious reference to the conflict. To laugh at this is safe, while the previous joke aimed at the military represents a more transgressive kind of comedy, one that implies subversion. Implicit in the silence, then, in the lack of laughter, is fear: fear of publicly declaring an allegiance, fear of an enemy within.

Figure 8. Nighttime performance by candlelight in the village of Loma, where there was no electricity. Kilele by Felipe Vergara, directed by Fernando Montes in Loma, Chocó. (Photo by Barnaby King)

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The radical range of reactions we observe points to the differences in cultural and social milieux in which scenes are placed, and the use of certain dramatic conventions, genres, and modes of communication that shift their meaning when displaced from their original context. The tragic and ironic modes in the death of Rocío and the celebrities scene, for example, are clearly recognizable to theatre audiences in Bogotá (or any Western theatregoing audience) but have no predetermined meaning for the Chocóan audience. The impersonation of the guard, on the other hand, demonstrates an attempt by the playwright to integrate a Chocóan mode of speech into the play. We cannot necessarily be sure whether its failure to generate the desired effect is due to an inaccurate imitation of the mode of speech itself or rather to the inauthentic and risky context (the public arena) in which it was placed. Whatever the specific reasons behind these unexpected responses, they demonstrate a slippage between transmission and reception, pointing to the very real difficulties of translation and direct communication across a divide that is social, ethnic, and cultural.

If there was ever a belief on the part of Varasanta in the possibility of communicating across this divide, it could perhaps be explained by the group’s actor-centered and broadly humanist approach to theatremaking, which, in the spectrum of the “intercultural debate” (Pavis 1996:14), leans more toward Brook’s “culture of links” (Pavis 1996:66) or Barba’s exploration of “pre-expressive” universals of performance than, say, Rustom Bharucha’s protective insistence on cultural specificity and context (see for example Barba 1995:150; and Bharucha 1993:32).

Like many companies in South America, Varasanta creates performance through a variety of devising methods that allow the actors significant input into the final piece. The group’s director describes the creation of Kilele:

For a long time the actor-creators took over the building: installations appeared in corners, stages in the garden, angels and demons on the balcony. Before we knew what was happening, our house was inhabited by dreams, rituals, and real life transformed into action. With these we built the initial structures in which Kilele and its characters were still only tacitly implied.

[…] I felt that the most important thing was to find how this story resonated deeply for each of us. So we were always creating material closely connected to ourselves as human beings, and to the raw version of reality which the text offered. (Montes 2006)

The process is a meeting between the text—which Montes refers to as a “raw version of reality,” consisting of authentic material gathered by Vergara on his research trip (including narrative material and cultural forms)—and the actors’ personal revelations. In this way, the play is supposed to be able to transcend cultural specificity and become a conduit for channels of communication and understanding between diverse groups of audiences:

The play will open up to the spectators a whole new world of reference, which will help them understand their own role in the conflict. They will see that they are not so far from the war as they may have thought, and those who have been victims of violence will be able to see themselves from the other point of view. (Montes 2004:12)

I think it would be fair to say that this idealistic scenario was being challenged by the “slippage between transmission and reception” that I was observing on the tour. In the cold light of day (or rather, the stifling heat of the Atrato), the earnest desire to bypass the difficulties of cultural difference, and initiate direct dialogue and understanding (not just between the company and the audience, but, as the above quote suggests, between different groups in the conflict) was being shown up as naïvely optimistic:

“[W]e”—whether in our various disciplines, or languages, or geographic locations throughout the Americas—do not simply or unproblematically understand each other. I propose that we proceed from that premise—that we do not understand each other—and

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recognize that each effort in that direction needs to work against notions of ease, deci-pherability, and translatability. (Taylor 2003:15)

OpogadóAppropriation/Reinvention

9 December—At the climax of Kilele, as part of the funeral rites, one of the actresses, Catalina Medina, sings a Chocóan funeral chant, called an alabao. It is part of the project to incorporate certain elements of Chocóan culture. Medina is a trained anthropologist and went with Vergara to assist on his initial research trip to Chocó, where she learned the song. To my ears, it is a beautiful and haunting melody, providing an emotionally charged ending, but it sounds com-pletely different from “authentic” alabaos I have heard (authentic in the sense of being sung by a native Chocóan). When we perform the show in Opogadó, the group of women who originally taught Medina the song tease us and say that it has become an alabao Bogotáno (an alabao from Bogotá). In a spontaneous singing lesson after the show, they try hard to correct the actress’s rendition, but it is clear she will never be able to replicate their voices—and so it remains “similar pero diferente.” I am reminded of Grotowski’s story about the teaching of a mantra to a Westerner:

An Oriental will often try to teach this quickly to an Occidental by teaching him the melody plus a certain ardor […] There is a profound misunderstanding on both sides. The Oriental teacher looks at the Westerner and says to himself, “For him, that’s enough.” (1984:8)

The initial belief in the possibility of “transcultural” dialogue in the project is especially evident in Varasanta’s funding application to the Ministry of Culture, which states one of the project’s aims:

To create an approximation of the songs of the Pacific and other Afro-Colombian cultural elements (cosmology, ritual, daily life) taking advantage of their expressive and organic qualities to develop a language to be used in the production, as part of the search for a primordial actor. (Montes 2004:7)

This search for the “primordial” (also translatable from the Spanish as “elemental” or “primi-tive”) surely owes something to Montes’s roots in Grotowksi and Barba, who were both involved in similar but distinct experiments to unearth a “pre-cultural” or “pre-expressive” language of performance. It is symptomatic of a tendency of some Western artists to consider their investi-gations of the “Other” simply as a means of enriching their own practice:

In Colombia there is a cultural richness to explore, and the epic quest implied in Kilele presents a wonderful opportunity to enrich the expressivity of the actors by means of a conscious exploration of performative elements that come from the cultural field in which the play takes place and the theatrical development of those elements. (Vergara 2004b:6)

There is a clear consciousness of an intercultural relationship here, which requires further exploration.

Figure 9. The masked spirits of Viajero’s dead relatives in Kilele (2005) by Felipe Vergara, directed by Fernando Montes, in Quibdó, Chocó. From left: Magda Niño, Liliana Montaña, Alexander Morales. (Photo by Barnaby King)

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According to Patrice Pavis, the intercultural “creates hybrid forms drawing upon a more or less conscious and voluntary mixing of performance traditions traceable to distinct cultural areas” (1996:8). Within this broad definition lies a plethora of perspectives, from oversimpli-fying universalism to absurdly protective political correctness. Most, including myself, would agree with Daryl Chin’s asser-tion: “To employ elements from the symbol system of another culture is a very delicate enterprise. In its crudest terms the question is: when does that usage act as cultural imperial-ism?” (1991:94).

Theorists and practitioners disagree on when that particular

line is crossed. In Kilele, then, is there an implicit exploitation of the object culture, a deliberate looting of exotic material, such as the alabao, which will enrich the subject culture—in other words, another kind of violation?

“Alabao” (from the Spanish alabar meaning “to praise”), is a song normally sung at a funeral by a wife or mother, intoxicated by alcohol, and thought to be possessed by the spirit of a dead soul who is speaking about what it is like on the other side:

For me there is neither sun nor moonNor any kind of light.All I have to accompany meIs a sorrowful darkness. (Porras 1995)

Developed by slaves in Colombia as a form of resistance to the Spanish masters who forbad the practice of any African customs, the alabao has its roots in African chants fused with Catholic hymns. Although lost in many parts of the country, the alabao is still sung at funerals in Chocó, where it remains a potent symbol of resistance. Evidence of the ever-mutating cultural crucible that is Chocó, new alabaos have even been written to describe the current situation, comparing it to the earlier invasion by the Spanish:

Founders of QuibdóThey came in search of goldThey took possession of our landAnd they massacred the black people.

Now they come from the EastWith money and technologyTo steal our landsAnd take away our lives. (Porras 1995)

Taylor describes exactly the same kind of merging and multiplying of old/new forms in post-Conquest Mexico. Indigenous people, under the pressure of oppressive rules of the Catholic

Figure 10. The Celebrities mob an unsuspecting Villager in Kilele (2005) by Felipe Vergara, directed by Fernando Montes in Quibdó, Chocó. From left: Eduardo Guevara, Salvatore Motta, Beto Villada, Elizabeth Ramírez, Nicolás Cancino, Nelson Camayo. (Photo by Barnaby King)

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monks governing their embodied behavior, were forced to reinvent their own rituals and deities, as exemplified in the reappearance of the Mesoamerican goddess Tonanztin in the cult of the Virgen de Guadalupe. Such blendings and confusions are seen as a strategy for survival, not just for the people but for the culture itself:

This strategy of doubling and staying the same, of moving and remaining, of multiplying outward in the face of the constricting social and religious policies tells a very specific story of oppression, migration and reinvention. (Taylor 2003:49)

The problem with the insistence on the purity of cultural property is that it rests on the conservative assumption that cultural identity is a monolithic entity with clearly definable boundaries. In all of South America—and Colombia is no exception—communities have emerged out of centuries of competing cultural influences, clashes, blendings, impositions, assimilations. Chocó is defined by its chaotic blend of cultural ancestries, principally West African, pre-Colombian, and Spanish Catholic, which have woven unique patterns so convo-luted that it is often impossible to untangle the threads and understand the complex genealogies of any given hybrid. Nor is this necessary.

Taylor’s affirmative illustration of the proliferation of multiple meanings associated with the same cultural element allows us to look at the alabao incident in a different light. Placed into the context of a self-consciously concocted ritual, created by the actors of Varasanta, drawing in part on Chocóan culture (hence containing all of the elisions and complexities already inherent in that), and in part on the actors’ own embodied memories, Kilele represents a new version, a new retelling in the here and now.

Those who have not learned that cultural identities (like racial ones) are fluid composites with multiple genealogies, will perpetuate for us all the sad history of racism and intercul-tural animosity that has been part of the human inheritance in the twentieth century. (Peters 1995:210)

Although Vergara’s project involves an interaction between two economically unequal cultures, it would be a mistake to see either as culturally pure or with clearly definable boundaries. The subcultures of Chocó and Bogotá are both “fluid composites with multiple genealogies.” The creative reinvention of cultural symbols should not be confused with the forced appropriation of land or houses. Of course, detrimental cultural appropriation can and does occur, but I do not believe it is happening here. The Chocóan audience is not violated by the adoption and contorting of their cultural representations (such as the “alabao Bogotáno”), partly because their own culture is one that has survived and perpetuated itself by appropriating and assimilating others to reinvent and redefine itself. The only cultural oppression that can be done to them is that of imagining that they do not have the power to reinvent themselves:

Who owns a culture? […] Nobody, of course. For when one inherits, one inherits a global collective web, a web not concentric or symmetrical, but connected in all its parts, a web which one is meant, indeed bound, to reweave. (Peters 1995:210)

The “night of curses and spells” was one such reweaving, as was Viajero’s improvised funeral rite, Varasanta’s devising process, and, of course, Vergara’s own creation, which goes back even to classical mythology to weave its very particular web.

BellavistaThe Trojan Horse

11 December—When we arrive in the village of Bellavista, in the heart of the troubled war-zone of Chocó, there is a palpable tension and anticipation among the actors. We sit in our boat watched over by soldiers on a towering military gun-ship docked next to us as the tour organiz-ers go to find out if we can perform Kilele in the church. On the side of a building a huge banner

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overlooking the river bears the face of a small child and the words: “In his memory: so that we may never forget.”

To represent also means to perform an action, to place aside all those cultural codifica-tions, to achieve a ritualized action, to persuade both actors and spectators that they are participating in a sacred ceremony. […] It is a question of a way of “performing a culture,” of “acquiring a kinaesthetic understanding of other socio-economic groups.” (Pavis 1996:18)

When we are finally given the go-ahead, we spring into action, forming the customary human chain from our boat over the muddy bank to transfer the cases of props and costumes into the church. The wooden archway passes through the real church door that it represents in the play. Once inside the church, however, an atmosphere of solemnity sharply descends. Surrounded by graphic reminders of the massacre, commemorative plaques, banners, artworks representing the event, and the broken figure of Christ, severely damaged in the explosion, displayed in a glass case high above the altar, I sense in this air of disquiet an unspoken question hovering in all our minds: Do the people of this damaged village need yet another reminder of the tragedy that occurred here three years before and which is played out every day in this and other villages in less dramatic but equally horrific acts of violence and intimidation?

But, it is this very repetition of violence that makes the performing of it so important. The repeating of one act of violence reminds us that it was not an isolated incident:

The attempts at communicating an event that no one cares to acknowledge need to be repeated again and again. […] Trauma becomes transmittable, understandable through performance—through the reexperienced shudder, the retelling, the repeat. (Taylor 2003:208)

The performance itself is unforgettable and feels very different from every other. People come slowly, intrigued by the gaudily dressed Bogotános hanging around their church. When we finally start, the church is packed to bursting, and there are soldiers standing on walls outside to see in through the windows. But despite their numbers, they are quieter and more sober than other audiences. During the scene described earlier in which the massacre is evoked, a visible “shudder” ripples outwards from the stage through the audience. It is as if the impact of the original explosion, dissipated with time, was reconstituted and re-released with a new energy.

The idea of the creative act as a violent one is proposed by Anne Bogart in A Director Prepares. “Art is metaphor and metaphor is transformation” (2001:57). The metaphor trans-forms by bringing together apparently unconnected elements to carry us above (drawing on the etymology of the word “metaphor”) the original meaning of those elements. It is the making of such bold creative choices (necessary for art to transform) in the placing together of these apparently unconnected elements, which Bogart asserts is an act of violence: “Committing to a choice feels violent […] because the decision is an aggression against nature and inertia, […] a violation of the free flux and flow of life” (2001:57). Kilele’s constant catchphrase “similar pero diferente” draws our attention to the sometimes uncomfortable juxtaposing of disparate cultural and historical elements, which may appear to be forced together. Vergara clearly believes that his cultural eclecticism can “carry us above” the literalness of everyday life:

Kilele […] distances itself from reality, creating metaphors which utilize mythology to provide a new picture of the current situation. […] The play allows the creation of a new universe which has its roots in the real cosmology of Chocó, that of its African ancestors and the shared cultural heritage of the Greeks and Romans. (2005:8)

In particular the worlds of the Odyssey and the Iliad are used to create his “new universe.” However, Vergara’s foray into classical mythology and cosmology is not just to “provide a new picture of the current situation,” but to propose, via Viajero’s journey through the land of the

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dead and back to the living, yet another model of peaceful resistance, this time to counteract the tendency of Colombians to take the role of victim, which Vergara perceives:

The violence which exists in our country tends to be reflected in art and culture in a tragic or sometimes melodramatic mode. In a nation lacking commonly known creation myths, this leads to the forming of a national identity based primarily on assuming the role of victim. […] “It’s because of the war that we cannot progress as a nation,” is the common belief. (Vergara 2005)

Challenging this attitude of hopelessness and resignation, the characters of Aeneas and Ulysses appear alongside Viajero as heroic archetypes of resistance from a distant culture. The Greek and Romans too believed that they were a fragile people, at the mercy of the forces of nature and the evils of man, but for them it was not an excuse to give up. On the contrary, suffering creates heroes, and although the Romans and Greeks had a predominantly determinist view of their destiny, Ulysses and Aeneas never stopped trying to change it. Their strength and bloody-minded perseverance act as a model of heroism for Viajero, and by extension for the Chocóans: “to help us discover our own way to be heroes and confront our tragic destiny, not in the same way as the Greeks, but emerging from our own situation” (Vergara 2005).

“Similar pero diferente”—the presence of Ulysses and Aeneas alongside Viajero evokes the universal and the specific at the same moment. Our situation is not the same as that of the Greeks, and we need to find our own way to be heroes, but we can draw strength from that culture’s resilience and comfort from the knowledge that we are not isolated but stand in a long tradition of oppression and conflict. Through an awareness of history we can be relieved of our immediate suffering and find new roads toward progress. Making the point even more transparently, the wandering souls chant a list of cities around the world that have suffered or are suffering terrible violence, including Troy, Fallujah, Srebrenica, Sarajevo, Hiroshima, Baghdad, My Lai, Guernica, Bellavista, ending with the assertion, “They are all the same village. In which, from time to time, explodes a horse full of new gods who don’t want us here” (Vergara 2004a).

This overt intercultural intertexuality, the reference to the Trojan horse, reminds us again of Viajero’s role as epic hero. And as all epic heroes, Viajero finally comes through his hardships and returns to his village to enact his own funeral rites, which bring an end to his own painful journey as well as that of the dead. No longer a victim, Viajero has forged his own heroic path and, like Ulysses and Aeneas, is able to be the subjective actor of events rather than their object. Through his own transgression of boundaries and throwing together of cultures, “similar pero diferente,” Vergara is offering the possibility of radical reinvention, of cultural liberation as a source of resistance against real physical acts of violence. But, more significant than the intercul-tural experiment in the text itself (and we have seen how slippery texts become when communi-cated across such cultural divides), is the intercultural dialogue embodied by Varasanta’s tour to Chocó.

This dialogue is perpetuated through a raft of theatre-for-development activities headed by Vergara and Inge Kleutgens, a German theatre practitioner working in Chocó. Working with groups of young people in some of the villages we toured to, they have been using drama to help people articulate their often horrific stories and experiences. They have trained groups and directed performances, which have then toured back to Bogotá. In the context of the influx of foreign aid, this type of theatre-for-development is crucial in providing the means for Chocóans to speak back, take part in a dialogue with the outside world, and be actors in their own destiny instead of passive recipients of the world’s pity. This dialogue is a part of the embodied culture—that is, of the repertoire—which cannot be recorded in full.

To go back to Pavis’s sentiments at the beginning of this section, for communication to occur the spectator and actor must be locked together in a joint sacred act of reinvention. At the very end of Kilele, having enacted the funeral rites and sung the alabao, relieved of their burden (as

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wandering souls and as actors), the members of Varasanta walk through the wooden archway onstage, as though entering (or perhaps leaving) the church. They stand facing the audience (the real people they have just been portraying) and door of the church (the real door to the real church that the archway has been representing), visibly out of breath and sweating from the exertion of the physical ritual they have completed, their eyes full of the experience they have just been through. Although the movement is rehearsed and they have enacted it 50 or more times, this time feels quite different and somehow spontaneous, a sharing of the grief and suffering that is paradoxically unique to this village and, at the same time, common to all humanity. These final moments of the play, the actors sitting or kneeling before the audience, looking into their eyes, demonstrate that the performance has been neither an attempt to hold up a mirror to a culture that is not theirs, nor an attempt to relieve guilt, but rather a living ritual enacted by one group of people for another in a “ritualized action,” or “sacred ceremony,” in which all participants acquire a little more knowledge of each other through the expression of what these events mean personally to them. The ceremony is also a conversation, and the tour of Kilele was just one half of the dialogue. The opportunity for Chocóans to respond with their own ritual and embodied expressions is being provided by the larger theatre-for-development program mentioned previously, through which plays have been produced in Chocó and toured to Bogotá. Each time I have attended one of these performances, I have witnessed a sacred ceremony unfolding in the space of tension between the two groups, “similar pero diferente.”

Rio SucioActs of Celebration

12 December—Bellavista, though it felt like our ultimate destination, was not the furthest point downriver of our tour. Our final stop was a larger town named Río Sucio, a particularly afflicted community where 16 people were killed and 170 kidnapped by FARC guerrillas in July 2005.

As it is nearer the river mouth, Río Sucio is more flooded than anywhere else we have been. Water laps up around the doorsteps that are several feet off the ground, and people get around along narrow planks precariously propped up on wooden stilts or in impossibly narrow canoes, in which they stand while paddling. Due to the flooding there is no space dry enough or big enough for us to perform Kilele, so we decide instead to perform a variety show of stories, skits, and songs for the children in a small wooden house owned by the diocese of Quibdó, a small two-level building of the usual thrown-together wooden construction. In a bizarre and often chaotic jumble, these bemused kids encounter an eclectic parade of characters and stories, ranging from the adventures of two sock puppets, to a jaw-harp-playing Italian immigrant character, to a neurotic English clown and a Commedia mime artist. The show ends with musicians playing songs, a mixture of traditional chirimía, and the fashionable reggaetón. Over a hundred children are on their feet dancing and singing in a small room, and the house is trembling with their collective energy. The thought crosses my mind that so many children all jumping up and down at the same moment could be enough to cause the thin wooden stilts holding us up to buckle and collapse the house into the water. But my fears are unfounded. They remain strong and they resist.

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2004b “Proyecto de Gira por el Atrato de la Obra Teatral Kilele, Una Epopeya Artesanal.” Funding proposal presented by Teatro Santa Carmela to the US Embassy, Bogotá, for the tour to Chocó. Translated by Barnaby King.

2005 “Introduction to Rehearsed Reading of Kilele.” Talk given in Teatro Colon, Bogotá. Translated by Barnaby King.

2006 Email correspondence with author, 2 March. Translated by Barnaby King.