On the provocation of memory (transcription)
October 14, 2020
Conchi León and Lukas Avendaño speak with Aluna Theatre – from the RUTAS 2018 International Multi-Arts Festival.
This is an English transcription of the conversation, which was originally in both English and Spanish. Click here for the Spanish language podcast episode.
Why don’t we start with who you are, and what is your place in the world and how your art flows from that
Lukas: Well, I’m Lukas Avendaño now. I say now because Lukas Avendaño could be reduced to an invention. An invention that could be summed up to the tip of an iceberg, because this Lukas Avendaño is the tip of this iceberg. This Lukas Avendaño is the fourth of seven children, an orphan, a homosexual, and a lot of vectors converge at that point. The latest vector that’s been added to this invention is that now I’m the brother of a man who is missing in Mexico.
Now I say I do ethnography from the stage because I believe that through these ethnographical exercises on the stage, memory can stay alive longer. It seems that the internet can overwhelm us with all the information that shows up, but the real complicated truth of Mexico, being such a large and diverse country, is that the number of realities could be as many as to the number of things that appear on the internet. Being able to be on stage is to keep this cumulation of complexities and realities in Mexico alive. It can be sustained like when you pay for an event on facebook and when you open your profile it’s the first thing there. So this invention that is Lukas Avendaño, that I’m intending to do, is to sustain these memories for a long time as if it were a paid event.
Conchi: I am Conchi Leon, from Yucatán. My theatre is the footprint of where I come from. This has a lot to do with how my grandmother taught me how to see the world. My grandmother was a Mayan woman who read nature. She’d say, ‘the butterfly of rain just flew inside, take down the clothes because it’s going to rain’. So we’d all go out to take in the clothes that were drying on the line. My sisters would go put the clothes away and I’d stay behind looking out the window and a huge storm would come, and I’d say my grandmother does magic. How could she anticipate the rain, even on very sunny days? She was always feeding my imagination with stories. Stories that had to do with the place I was born, stories she would sometimes bend a bit in her head, and stories that were beyond her as well. And when I say stories that were beyond her, I refer to stories that women don’t tell due to shame. Those stories are of women who are abused, raped, who see their children killed at the hands of their own husbands. Many times when my grandmother would tell these stories she had to stop to cry, and that would be an uncomfortable moment for me, being a young girl. I didn’t know where to look when my grandmother would cry. I think trying to find where I could place my gaze when that happens is how I found theatre.
My grandmother died and I kept all her stories. So I find that the theatre is a place where I can let those memories flow and not disappear like my grandmother disappeared from the world. Because people die and disappear. When my grandmother died my mother made me kiss her corpse and I remember her being as cold as stone. That wasn’t my grandmother. My grandmother was the most warm being in the universe. There’s always been a great matriarchal presence in my family.
Since I didn’t have the stories of women through my grandmother anymore, I went out to the streets to find them. I started talking to women I’d meet on the street. It all started with a mestiza, which is what we call Indigenous people in Yucatán, with her huipil. She was wearing her huipil and a pair of Rayban sunglasses, and it was a very powerful image. I stopped because I couldn’t continue walking until I found out why this Indigenous woman was wearing Rayban sunglasses. It turned out that she was hiding a bruised eye. Her husband had beaten her and she was covering it. When she told me this story, it felt as if she had hit me for all the times my grandmother, my mother, and my sisters have been beaten.
So that’s the way I started my form of creating theatre, speaking with communities – what I call small communities, big stories. Then I started going to specific communities, in the past 5 years in jails some maximum security prisons and some rehabilitation centres. The hardest thing about working in prisons is working with the women. They’ve been very stigmatized and they’re very ashamed to say why they’re in prison. Lately I’ve tried to make my work connect to society, from reclaiming rituals and traditions, connecting theatre with education, theatre and health, and I think this has brought answers into our company, and in a better case, answers out to the community.
In Ontario we don’t often see a lot of theatre that has so much religious imagery. Our relationship is different. So for the spiritual life that is expressed, it’s not just Christian iconography I’m curious about, it’s how it’s taken and used as part of a theatre language. It’s like watching a language I know, but someone’s speaking so differently with it.
Conchi: Well, I hate the church. However I grew up in a Catholic family where God made everything. Where one of my aunts, at 13 years old, was impregnated by a priest. In a city where a priest hid a 13 year old girl so no one would give her an abortion, because there were movements to get her one. Yucatan is a very Catholic state. How could we not be, because of the way we were brutally conquered by the Spanish? We have our pyramids right in front of these huge convents and churches. The images of saints and virgins usually have traditional clothing, the huipiles. There’s a syncretism between Catholic culture and Mayan culture. The cross is green because it’s intertwined with the ceiba, which is a sacred tree to the Maya. For me it’s always been devastating how everything can be forgiven through the word of God. But there’s an innocence to these people who believe in this superior being who’s going to come and put everything back together.
I’ve always had a very tense relationship with my mother in regards to the Catholic Church. If I challenge her about a priest, my mother won’t talk to me for a year. And because dialogue is very important to me, I prefer to put these symbols in place of humor. In the case of Del Manantial del Corazon, it’s about how these women are sacrificed, crucified for their own stories. Syncretism has led to very powerful images that you can see in the communities. There are stories and legends that are very powerful. I am seduced by places of faith. In Mexico, the Guadalupe will constantly appear on a cactus pad, on a tortilla, in the mud stain on the ground, on the body of a cow. People really believe that. For me, it’s always been very intriguing to tell those stories through theatre.
Lukas: I come from a very religious culture. I was born in Tehuantepec, in Oaxaca, around Zapotecas. I grew up with my grandmother and before bringing us to bed, she would bring us to the altar to do the sign of the cross and pray. When we woke up, it was the same. The first thing we’d do is go to the altar to arrange the flowers, clean it, do the sign of the cross and pray. All that to say, it’s a very religious society. But it shouldn’t be thought that this religiousness is Christian, Catholic, or Judeo Christian, but rather that religion is something total, like a cosmology. The first missionaries that arrived to what was then called New Spain were the Franciscans. In their manual of evangelisation, there were 3 foundational matters: polygamy, sodomy, and idolatry. Idolatry as multiplicities of a being. I think we’re a very religious society because of that.
One day my grand uncle took me to the farm, and he was talking to me about the plants. Suddenly he asked me, ‘Where is God?’ and I didn’t know what to say. Then he pointed at the sun and said, ‘He is God, because he sees everything and is everywhere’. I was around 8 years old but that image of God stayed very present with me. Around that age I started participating in religious youth leadership programs. These programs were led by Catholic liberation theology. Once in a spiritual retreat, a bishop visited. I was 15 years old. He told us in his service, ‘praying is not enough’. After that age, I went to the mountains and stopped professing Catholic faith. I got to a community where everyone was Baptist, and then Jehovah’s Witnesses, and then many other communities. By that time, I’d already declared myself an atheist. And even though I’m very atheist, I believe that religiousness understood not as Christianity, is in our bodies and memory. In these moments of so much crisis, the only thing that sustains us is our sense of religiousness.
So is the work you do on stage an expression of religiousness?
Lukas: I would say that, because of the nature of all these intersections with religiousness, the subtitle for Réquiem para un Alcaraván would be: a ritual for make amends with the whores of the world. The word ‘whore’ also encapsulates non-heteronormativity. The aggrieved whore is not the empowered whore. The aggrieved whore is one who, despite all their resistance, was not able to survive their injustice. This happens now.
When Indigenous artists speak about creating their place here in Canada, a word I’m hearing more often is “Resurgence.” I’m wondering, is there empowerment in that for you as artists? Are you reaching into a different ancestral place of power?
Conchi: In my case, it’s the magic that’s real. Mysticism is real. We’ve all been witness to that. The knowledge of being able to cure someone with the tea of an herb you find in the street. The power of the Indigenous word, which can be poetic, political, can denounce, in one single phrase. It can also be full of hope. The Mayan gods are there, we don’t remember their names any more. We don’t have to light candles, they’re inside us. You do a ritual when you know you need it. As opposed to the church, who asks you to be there every Sunday. When you listen to that inner voice that knows when, that’s very intuitive, that’s beyond any religion or divine word.
Lukas: There’s a rule in Mexican law that I think, objectively, is the most powerful argument. It says, “whoever is first in time, is first in law”. Once someone asked me if I was trying to legitimize myself through my work, or legitimize queerness in my work. I said that I don’t have to legitimize myself for anyone, because the persecution of sodomy comes after 1521 and we’ve been here much before 1521. I don’t worry about Catholicism. What does worry me is the Adventists, the Latterday Saints, the Pentecostals, the Mormons, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the number of sects that are surging in Tehauntepec. Because historically Tehauntepec has had a specific cultural characteristic where there’s been a symbiosis with how sexuality is practiced in different spheres. Masculinity, femininity, traditional power structure, sexuality, and religiousness. That universe has led to what we know now as muxe culture. The arrival of those sects is not something that just happened. Especially when in their neo-evangelist sermons they deliberately say that they want to eradicate sodomy. On the one hand. And on the other hand, I can say we have stories in common with Colombia and Canada, because particularly with this government, with the declaration of special economic areas of the country, Mexico is opening up to foreign mining. Specifically in Oaxaca the mining companies are Canadian, and the disappeared come along with them. So I think this cross between foreign politics, missing people, religious sects, they don’t come innocently.
Can I ask something? You can tell me yes or no. I know your brother has disappeared recently.
Lukas: Yes. May 10th. I think this is the topic I feel the most confident talking about. When one talks about circumstances, there’s the idea that there’s some element that justifies the disappearance. I try to think about it in another way. I think no one deserves to disappear. But luckily, because you have to be lucky to disappear as well, I’ve said it before, or rather this disappearance has led to this idea: if Bruno had disappeared in a neighbourhood that’s deemed dangerous, the authorities would say ‘why was your brother in a dangerous neighbourhood?’. If he had disappeared at night, the authorities would say ‘what was he doing at night, walking in the street?’. Because the authorities are always looking for a reason why the disappearance happened. But luckily, Bruno’s disappearance was during the day, in a family space. It was May 10th, which is an important day for many Mexicans. Even though we had those 3 variables, no one saw anything. No one knows anything. And until today, the authorities have been incapable of giving any answers to what happened, like the thousands of cases you can see from 2014 to 2018. 37 000 cases of people disappeared in this country in the past 4 years.
Okay, let’s continue.
How can artists in Canada support a conversation across borders about how to make the world a little bit better for the next generation?
Lukas: My relationship with Canada is forming. The first time I came to Canada was January 2015. Saskatchewan. Last year I met Beatriz, and now I don’t only know Beatriz, I’m meeting the community and the network as well. I’ve met Daniel as well. He knows that he can arrive and stay in the sanctuary of utopian butterflies whenever he passes by, in Tehauntepec. Or in Merida, where I’ve stayed a number of times, which we’ve declared is another sanctuary for utopian butterflies and a cultural centre. Even if we don’t share a space, we accompany each other.
Conchi: I’m utopian and I think we can change the world through doing theatre. As Eugenio Barba said, “theatre is not sacred because it changes other people, but rather because it changes us”. Having grown up surrounded by violence, I had severe problems with rage. I probably would have ended up in jail like a lot of my students. I did end up in jail, but making theatre. I make the inmates make stories from horror and violence. That’s why I think theatre is a great transformer. And the faces we see in the theatre become our family. So in crossing borders, we’re making our theatrical family bigger, and that’s how we transform ourselves.
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