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Aluna under a full moon in Bogotá

April 13, 2012

Our opening in Bogotá was a magical and charged evening.  For our first show at 5pm, our audience was composed of the mothers, daughters, wives and grandchildren of several targeted groups such as the survivors of the Union Patriotica and the Falso Positivos (False Positives).

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This was not planned – just before we go on stage, the festival organizers asked me if we would mind if these groups came in to see the show.  They didn’t have any money to pay for the tickets.  There were also concerns about how so many children would behave during the performance.

We were honoured to have them be part of our first ever international performance of Nohayquiensepa, a piece that questions our relationship to the death of strangers and how we react in the face of human rights violations in places far away from “home”.   We wanted them to see the show no matter what.  It was also a reminder that many people there and in our own Toronto can’t see theatre because they simply can’t afford it.  Secondly, Patricia Ariza taught us a long time ago that the best audiences for young works are children, as they are completely honest in their response.  She often has an invited audience of children before she opens a new work.

The significance and our relationship to these groups went beyond “bums on seats”, an expression that usually makes me cringe anyway.  Many even in Colombia do not know who these victims are.  Here is a short list:

The Union Patriotica or UP was a leftist political party founded by the FARC and the Colombian Communist Party in 1985, as part of the peace negotiations that the guerrillas held with the Conservative Party and its leader Belisario Betancur.  This was an unprecedented move in Colombia and a time of hope.  Peace had a chance.  Then drug lords, paramilitaries, and military agents led a campaign of violence against the UP massacring more than four thousand leaders of the party, and initiating more decades of atrocious human rights violations.

False Positives: the army’s extrajudicial killing of civilians who are later presented as guerrillas to increase the battle count.  Yet another atrocity against humanity and the Colombian people committed during the presidency of Alvaro Uribe. Soldiers and officers were offered vacations, promotions, and trips abroad as a reward for high quotas of rebels eliminated.  This scandal broke in 2008, and since then approximately 2,600 ‘false positive’ cases have been reported.  A number of army officers and soldiers have been brought to trail.  Many of those killed were of course poor people who were promised jobs by these murderers only to end in mass graves. For the recruiters, each victim was worth about $300.

Back in Bogotá, as the play is about to begin, the performers (myself among them) are behind a screen.  I can hear the youngsters, the bustling crowd.  Then it all goes silent – and remains like that for the entirety of the performance, except for those moments of comic relief in Nohayquiensepa, where we are reminded of the beauty and resilience of the people who have endured violence but continue to fight for peace.

As the curtain falls the audience rises to its feet.  What an emotional moment, and such a special one for an artist!  As Patricia introduced Aluna and the play to the audience she also reminded everyone that The Festival de Mujeres en Escena por La Paz was not a “window shopping” festival; an event about egos, but a gathering of artists and audiences; an opportunity to reflect on the work with other invited artists, and a chance to experience the real impact of the work on our society at large.  Always thinking about the possibility for change.

Working in our studio in anticipation of the festival, we could not all see beyond the artistic anxiety of presenting a new work.  In the weeks before we flew to Colombia we began to introduce our investigations of the impact of Canadian mining interests in Colombia into the show.  What we learned blew our minds – not only for the scale of negative impact that common mining practices have on the environment, but also its connection to violence, displacement, and human rights violations at the hand of third party ‘security’ forces.

Foreign interest and investment in Colombia has been a major factor in the violence and human rights violations committed throughout the modern history of the country.  Nohayquiensepa attempts to bring some awareness of our own responsibility as Canadians for this violence.  Our foreign investments have the potential to affect many people around the world for better or worse.  We need to know what happens far away from home and how we are directly connected to it.

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