Puerto Rican Troupe Merges Art And Politics
An interview with Dianilu Cora, Rosalba Rolon, and Alvan Colon of Pregones
Pregones Touring Puerto Rican Theater Collection visited Ann Arbor from March 9 to 16. They performed a variety of plays to student, church, community and children's groups. The troupe also held an all-day workshop in which they discussed their theater techniques with theater students.
Pregones, who takes their name from the Spanish colloquialism for the cries of street vendors, formed in 1979. The troupe is dedicated to promoting drama and staging plays that present a Puerto Rican as well as a Latin American voice in the United States. The plays are in Spanish, English and bilingual.
Pregones' first play, "The Collection," is a collection of scenes from plays written by Puerto Rican playwrights over 100 years.The group wrote chants, modeled after those used by vendors in the streets, and sung them to link the scenes together.
Pregones has a 98-seat theater in a local church where they and other groups perform. Pregones is the only community-based theater group in the South Bronx. The troupe runs theater workshops for teenagers, children, adults and senior citizens.
The following is an edited version of three interviews conducted with members of the nine member troupe during their stay.
Q: What do you see as the basis of your work?
ROSALBA: The basis of our work is that we have a responsibility as artists, meaning that there is no such thing as an artist that is not political. Rambo is political, and so is our work. This is a choice that we make. You can decide to ignore any issue and decide that you don't want to deal with it. But I think you are taking a political stance by deciding not to deal with it.
The word political has such a bad implication . But everything is political. It is just a broader concept that helps to explain all of the different social and economic relationships in society. Art is an industry and we are workers of that industry. Some of us love our work, yet some artists are forced to work in places that they hate because they need to live. However, we decided a long time ago that we didn't want to deal with that We wanted to work with the types of material that we felt were significant.
Q: What do you see as the relationship between politics and art?
ROSALBA: When you do things you do them in a particular context. You do them in a particular moment, a particular time, and in an historical period. So you cannot say when you are doing something at a particular moment in history that you are devoid of the politics of it You cannot say that it is apolitical.
However, one thing that does have a very bad reputation is political art. Some of it is an earned reputation. I think that political artists have not always been very responsible in terms of placing importance on the quality of the work. It is very easy to be passionate about politics and forget that if it's not good art then you're just a bad artist If you're a good politician but a bad artist then you had better become a politician and forget about art.
We believe in trying to achieve as good a balance as possible between content and form so that the artistic quality is always the highest priority. This doesn't mean that the politics or the social issues aren't important. It's just that once they are clear in our heads and once they are clear for the community, then we have to make sure that the way in which we convey the message is the best way possible. We think that the artistic quality of political art or shall we say revolutionary art, must be better than other types of artistic work.
I will al ways remember three years ago when we went to Nicaragua and heard this incredible person speak, Comandante and poet Tomas Borge. You know, everyone in Nicaragua is a poet. He said "One thing that we can't afford as a revolution is to have bad art." I think revolutionary art has to be the best. How can you possibly have bad revolutionary art? I think Tomas Borge is right. So we do dedÃcate a lot of time to our artistic growth. Otherwise, we are cheating and fooling the audience because we are essentially, fundamentally artists.
Q: How is your theater different from thal of other groups?
ALVAN: Our group differs both administratively and artistically from other other companies. Administratively, we are the opposite (see PREGONES, page 10)
PREGONES (from page one)
of the company. The company has its model in the 18th-century traditional European theater companies where one Diva or one artist would be the center and the axis, around which everything else would rotate. All of the political decisions and administrative decisions of that company were centered on that figure. This is where the company has its origins. Later on the theater company became more market-oriented. So to be able to fit into the theatrical industry, which is like any other industry , you must lean toward the corporate style of doing business.
We don't have anything to do with this. We are a group in that we do not align ourselves around a person or persons. We align ourselves around an effort. And this effort is to do theater that is socially relevant to our community. This effort is to do theater that promotes social justice, because we believe the rest of the theater companies around don't really emphasize that. Even though they may do theater pieces that will contemplate those issues, that is not their main emphasis.
All of our work is structured in a way that is not a corporation and not a for-profit business. We are a collective. Everybody has responsibility in the decision-making process and tasks are assigned. We do have responsibilities in terms of direction, administration, fiscal affairs, public relations, logistics and house-managing, because we are an institution with an organizational chart. But all political decisions are made by the collective.
Q: What is the collective creation method?
DANILU: It is a method in which the theater piece is actually created by the actors that are going to participate in it. Somebody brings a monologue, somebody else brings a poem, and someone else writes a song, and someone else writes the music, and collectively we create the piece. It's a lot of work, but it is fabulous because you can explore and create so much. I think it's a really important part of what it means to be an actor/actress. Not only to receive a piece and do it, but to also create it, using your own imagination, and put it on stage.
Q: What project Is the theater company currently working on?
DIANILU: We have four productions which are currently running. The first is a children's play called "The Caravan," which is about a caravan of Vejigantes (characters associated with Puerto Rican, religious traditions) who travel from town to town telling stories. The play tells several legends and concludes by having the children determine the outcome of the play.
The second is "The Embrace." It deals with the relation of AIDS to the discrimination which of ten comes with it. In it we talk about how people are rejected at the very time when they need, more than ever, to be hugged, to be embraced. We do two scenes and we stop the action at the highest point of tension and ask the audience if they want to change the situation. If they say yes, in order to change the situation they have to come on the stage, assume the role of the most oppressed character and change the situation.
The Department of Health in New York gave us a grant to present 29 performances of "The Embrace" in East Harlem because the incidence of AIDS, mainly due to needle sharing, was really high. Something like 58% of all of the AIDS cases in New York were Hispanic and Black so we performed in a community which is very affected by the disease. We performed the play in community centers, schools, soup kitchens, hospitals, and many other places. The response was always very positive and people were so willing to work and to change things. Actually it was so successful that they gave us money for 18 more performances to run this year from April to June.
Then we have "Migrants," which is a chant for immigrants and migrants. It is a history of the Puerto Rican culture from the Indians to the present, and the reasons why people were forced - or moved out of necessity - to the United States looking for a better way of living.
Finally, "Voices of Steel" is something that we started working on 18 months ago, so it's now in the developmental process. It is a collective creation about the will to survive in the prison world of uniform color, uniform smell, and uniform lighting. We inform our characters partly on three women who were held in the Lexington Control Unit (LCU), in Kentucky. The LCU signifies the emergence of a new strategy in deten tion aimed at poltical transformation via isolation, extensive surveillance, and sensory deprivation.