At the theatre

One of the great things about Buenos Aires is that it's one of the cultural capitals of South America. There's tons of cultural activity - concerts of all types of music, theatre, dance, galleries - and it's pretty accessible, unlike in Santiago where shows can be pretty expensive.

This weekend I decided to start dipping my toes into the cultural waters. I had seen a poster in the Subte for a documentary called Rio Arriba, that caught my eye because it took place in the communities north of Salta where I just visited. It tells the story of a young Argentine whose grandfather was owner of Salta's San Isidro Sugar Plant. Though now most are closed or automated, sugar used to be one of the region's, and the country's, important industries. But the plant owners culled their workforce from small aboriginal villages in the nearby Andes, practically forcing them to work hand-cutting sugar cane in back-breaking conditions and for pay that was less than ideal. And in the process, the aboriginal communities abandoned the traditional way of life they had known for centuries. The kind of story of exploitation of minorites for the sake of development that can be found in countless places around the globe. But what was interesting for me as a foreigner was learing about this particular incident in the context of Argentina. And the filmmaker told the story in a very personal way; his being the grandson of one of the men responsable for such exploitation, the film was structured around his coming to terms with his family history through the visiting of aborignal communites and farms and hearing the stories of those who had worked on the plantations.


Saturday night Jessica and her boyfriend Manú and I checked out a play called Isla Desierta by the Teatro Ciego at the Ciudad Cultural Konex. The Konex is this huge cultural complex converted from an old factory in an industrial part of town. There are a couple of theatre spaces, a cafe, a gallery, a huge outdoor space where they have festivals in the summer. They've really kept the rugged unfinished feel of the factory, and the spaces are huge.

Teatro Ciego means "blind theatre", and what was cool about the piece, besides the fact that some of the actors are blind, is that it all happened in the dark. Pitch dark. You enter the theatre in pairs, hands on the shoulders of one of the actors, and you go through a long passageway, through a some curtains, and then you are led to your seat. And there's not one speck of light - you can't see your hand in front of your face. And then the play starts, but everything happens in the dark, and the plot unfolds through dialogue, live sound effects, music, odours, sensations... The story was nothing extraordinary; a group of office workers on the 10th floor of a tower near the city port, who dream of travelling on one of the boats that continually enter and leave the harbour. One guy has travelled, and so he tells the stories of his travels to the group. As he recounts his adventures at sea, in China, and in the jungle, each of these worlds is created by the actors using all the senses except sight. I don't know how they did it, but they recreated live the sounds of a rowboat rowing through the water, people swimming ashore; they made a thunderstorm using some kind of fan and mist and when he arrived in China all of sudden you smelled what could only be what a busy Chinese street smells like.

My only complaint was that the story ended really abruptly and they flicked on the lights and you saw the actors and the theatre space, which everyone had imagined in their own way. It would have been nicer for the story to gradually wind down and the lights to come up slowly. The coolest part was less the story, though, and more the being in complete darkness.

While at the Konex I also picked up tickets for an aerial dance piece (!) for next Friday night. Cool!