Making Waves: Teatro La Fragua
Stories of Participatory Communication
for Social Change
TITLE: Teatro La Fragua
COUNTRY: Honduras
FOCUS: Raise community consciousness, cultural creativity
PLACE: El Progreso
BENEFICIARIES: El Progreso, Northern coastal zone of Honduras
PARTNERS: The Jesuit Community
FUNDING: Misereor, Trocaire and Accion CuaresmalSuiza (40 percent), individual donations (50 percent) and ticket sales (10 percent)
MEDIA: Theatre
Three actors, two musicians, bare stage. A deliberate entrance, a strong introduction, and the sudden hush of an audience involuntarily seized by the power of electric performers. The physical presence grabs the room and doesn't relent. Most of the audience has never known the human element to be capable of such raw personal power, power that comes from vision, inspiration, and much work. Raw, unfettered power that emanates from the soul and not from a gun. The power of hope, not of fear.
The audience at first is not sure of this presence. A nervous uncertainty grips the crowd; the actors feel it, and their rhythms are rigid. Then the children save it: the honesty of children who don't know their hope has been hocked to a foreign lender.
An icy-clean four-year-old's laugh slices through the night; the scald of oppression eases, and adults join the little girl. Actors struggle to maintain character; one musician can't suppress a grin as the single shiver of laughter continues above the rest. A child has saved it. A four-year-old has revealed an impulse in every person, has taught her parents, her superiors, the basic lesson of life: joy is the first rebellion against oppressors, the wildly revolutionary act, a defiance of all authority that says life will be suffering. This is raw, gritty, tough theatre in a land beset by hurricanes, deforestation, corruption and poverty. Theatre that finds it as important to train its audience as it does to train its actors; theatre that competes for its audience with cockfights, machete duels, floods, harvests, and a cultural illiteracy that has robbed these people of their proud Mayan heritage. Tenacious theatre that refuses to concede defeat in the face of washed-out bridges, tenuous funding, and moonscape highways.
Why do we do theatre in a country as desperately poor as Honduras? Why do we do theatre in the midst of all the needs that are so obvious? Theatre is never going to lower the infant mortality rate. Theatre will not save (nor even ease the pain of) a child dying of malnutrition. Theatre isnever going to change the world. But a child's laugh reminds us that theatre can fulfill another need perhaps as desperate: theatre can make a child laugh. Perhaps it can even give a child a spark of hope.
Writes Jack Warner S.J., founder and director of TEATRO LA FRAGUA.
Teatro La Fragua "The Forge Theatre", is a theatre group based in El Progreso, Honduras' third largest city. Its goal is "to forge a national identity by means of the people's own expression", and "awaken the creativity of the people with the help of theatre, to find solutions to current problems." Jack Warner, a Jesuit priest, has been its artistic director since he created it in 1979. The company consists of fourteen Hondurans who not only perform, but also do the maintenance and public relations. Teatro La Fragua started in 1979 in the remote eastern town of Olanchito, but quickly moved its base to El Progreso, which is more accessible to major population centres like San Pedro Sula, the economic capital of Honduras. The building that is now the theatre had fallen into disrepair, much like El Progreso itself. It was once the social hall of the banana company's country club, a place where executives and their families enjoyed dances and parties.
To address social issues and to achieve their mission of creating a Honduran national identity, Teatro La Fragua has adopted a strategy that includes: 1) staging of dramas often featuring Latin American writers; 2) performing religious plays, such as ¡El Evangelio En Vivo!(The Gospel Live!); and 3) dramatic adaptations of Honduran stories, myths and folklore.
They have created a varied body of work: explorations of Central American history and traditions; dramatisations of biblical stories in a Honduran context; adaptations of theatre classics; and theatre for children. Teatro La Fragua performs in plazas, churches and schoolyards, primarily for poor and working-class audiences illiterate with little access to the sources of official culture, who otherwise might never see a play. It has dedicated itself to the principle: "If people can't come to the theatre, then theatre must come to the people". Actress Nubia Canales notes, "the small villages we visit always turn out to be our most enthusiastic crowds. They treat us like we're really important".
Other than creating dramatisations, La Fragua conducts training workshops in Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Cuba, Guatemala and Belize, and it has toured in the United States, Mexico, Spain and Colombia. More than 600 youngsters are involved in drama classes and workshops. It has also invited Honduran guest artists to perform in its theatre, including El Teatro Latino (puppeteers), Son Cinco (modern dance) and Guillermo Anderson (a singer-songwriter who fuses jazz and reggae with the rhythms of Honduras' Caribbean coast).
La Fragua operates under the auspices of the Jesuits, who own the complex on which the theatre is built. The troupe devotes six months of the year to religious plays associated with the Christmas and Easter seasons, while reserving the other half of the year for works of a more secular nature. Many of the troupe's members have joined through their involvement in church-related youth activities, including the drama classes that the company sponsors. The religious connection offers the group a network of support and a public legitimacy in a society where most secular institutions, both public and private, are characterised by inefficiency and corruption.
A group of international friends of La Fragua provides 50 percent of the funding. Misereor, Trocaire and other religious agencies also help (40 percent), while local contributions and selling tickets for performances makes up the rest.
Teatro La Fragua has survived public indifference, economic setbacks and political repression to become one of the most stable and enduring popular theatre troupes in all of Latin America.
Honduras suffers from a long history of dependence and underdevelopment. Still dragging the leg irons of a feudal past, this is a country where the majority of its peasantry can neither read nor write; chronic malnutrition and disease make surviving very difficult. Campesinos farm on steep and rocky slopes not far from the immense and fertile plantations of multinational fruit companies. The country typifies the concept of a banana republic. During many decades it has been under the occupation of the multinational United Fruit Company, and has served as a military base for U.S. troops during the decades of guerrilla activity in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. Statistically it continues to trail even its war-torn neighbours in terms of life expectancy, unemployment and per-capita income. All this in spite of an unprecedented decade of United States military and economic aid, including millions of dollars funnelled through projects sponsored by USAID, as well as one of the largest Peace Corps programmes in the world.
Honduras seems to be in search of its historical and cultural identity. In Mayan times its sparse indigenous settlements were but outposts of an empire centred in the Guatemalan highlands and the Yucatan lowlands. In colonial days, Honduras was but a remote province of the Spanish Kingdom of Guatemala. By the time of Honduras' independence, British imperial interests controlled large sections of the country's sizable Caribbean coast, logistically remote from the capital of Tegucigalpa. This century, the international fruit companies have enjoyed an economic sovereignty over this same coast.
In contrast to the occasional nature of most campesino theatre in Honduras, Teatro La Fragua constitutes a year-round, professional attempt to use theatre as a means of empowerment. What La Fragua seeks to do address socio-political issues, explore Honduran history, teach literacy, and stimulate personal and group autonomy is similar to what the other Honduran campesino groups seek to do.
The theatre group has cultivated a form of performance that sees a relationship between theatrical and spiritual values. It performs for a community that sees no distinction between the two, like the audiences of the medieval passion plays.
Through its work La Fragua has challenged the values of the political and economic establishment in a land where doing so means risking political persecution. While director Warner eschews propagandistic theatre, he still views La Fragua's feat as political: It's political in the sense of being from the point-of-view from which one sees the world. We're trying to create a theatre in which the point-of-view is precisely that of the dispossessed. Teatro acts politically by giving Hondurans the opportunity to see themselves reflected on stage and to hear their own language.
As another avenue for making theatre a vital part of Honduran society, La Fragua places high emphasis on developing children's theatre. They stage "Historias Exactamente Así", from Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories. The adapted story, How the First Letter Was Written, conveys the importance of learning to read and write, a theme that strikes a particularly resonant chord in a country where approximately half the population is illiterate.
In 1989, Edward Burke, Ruth Shapiro and Pamela Yates directed the documentary Teatro! focusing on La Fragua; the film was seen on public television in the United States, bringing the group's work to the attention of English-speaking audiences.
According to Harley Erdman, the religious core of La Fragua' work, has led the troupe to forge a theatrical style that may be termed "neo-medieval", appropriate for a country with a feudal past, where the majority of its peasantry can neither read nor write. In this neo-medieval society, the church, gracing the central plazas of its far-flung towns and villages, remains for many the central focus of life. A major part of the work of Teatro La Fragua is focused on the development of a community tradition of theatrical expression. The model for this is taken from the cycle plays of medieval Europe. The members of the troupe are continually involved in workshops, which use as their base youth groups in the rural parishes.
La Fragua eclectically mixes the didacticism of Brecht' "epic theatre" with Grotowski' actor-centred "poor theatre" to create stylised pieces which rely heavily on gesture, pantomime, dance and music. Says Jack Warner: "Images matter much more to non-literate audiences than the written word". This emphasis on images comes through in all of La Fragua' work.
Although it places a primary emphasis on movement, the group maintains a healthy respect for text. The group prefers plays written in verse, accessible in a greater extent to rural audiences. "It's easier for our audience to understand verse", Barahona, an actor, explains."It's the rhyme, I think. Prose is the hardest thing for people with no education".
To understand the difficulties La Fragua has faced, one must understand something of Honduras, which usually ranks among the hemisphere' poorest countries. The early years were difficult for a number of reasons. Support from the local community was not forthcoming. "A lot of people thought we were crazy, especially because of all the physical exercises we do", Barahona recalls. Questions that had to be answered included: How to find an audience in this country where lack of education and years of foreign domination have created a cultural vacuum? How to "forge" a Honduran cultural identity?
As Honduras was suffering from the repression, disappearances and cases of torture in the early 1980s, La Fragua' social commitment bothered some authorities. In one instance, during a performance inside a church, they learned that the building had been surrounded by armed troops who eventually dispersed, having made theirpoint. In another case, an actor was detained for four days, for no apparent reason.
This chapter is mostly constructed with excerpts from articles available at Teatro LaFraguas Web site - Click here for web site and e-mail exchanges with Jack Warner.
Harley Erdman: Taking It to the Streets A People's Theatre Thrives in Honduras.
Carlos M. Castro: El Progreso, Yoro en Honduras: Clay and Hope.
Jack Warner S.J.: Plank a passion.
John Fleming: Forging a Honduran Identity: The People's Theatre of Teatro La Fragua. Teatro! documentary film on Teatro La Fragua produced in 1989 by Edward Burke, Ruth Shapiro and Pamela Yates.
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