As a theatre maker, I crave plays made of poetry you can feel in your gut, and creations that are ritual-infused, inventive, even experimental, made as a matter of survival and transformation. Aluna Theatre’s upcoming International Performance Festival, RUTAS, which is described as a “TransAmerican experience,”delivers all of this and more.
The festival opens with Xilopango, by Salvadoran-Canadian Irma Villafuerte. XiIopango is the Nahuatl name for a volcanic lake, a place of origin and a site of a war within the underworld itself. Most important, it is the place where Villafuente evokes her grandmother, who was a target of political violence, a mujer desaparecida (forcibly disappeared woman).
In this work of dance theatre, relationships between women — dead and living — and land — trembling, throbbing, erupting — are conveyed through symbolic images, for example bowls that resonate as both skulls and wombs, and through primal, seismic choreography for warrior bodies, often bare and close to each other.
Villafuerte says that in making the work, the memory of her grandmother’s life became a skeleton around which the other dancers created their own nervous tissue, drawing on parallel memories and traditions. The result is utterly haunting.
Similar themes also ignite Mujer Venado, a Spanish translation and bilingual performance of Nlaka’pamux playwright Tara Beagan’s Deer Woman, co-presented by Article 11. This play, acclaimed in Edinburgh, Australia and Aotearoa, is as yet unperformed in Canada (in any language).
The text is a monologue belonging to Lila, the daughter of a hunter. She’s ex-army, too. Lila is avenging her baby sister’s murder while exercising the skills taught her by the Canadian government. Beagan’s masterpiece of a monologue is graphic and violent. It expresses resistance and empowerment and registers, in the words of the playwright, “the rage families of missing and murdered Indigenous women have felt at being powerless to seek justice.” Mexican actor Lissete VC, making her Canadian debut, gives a fully committed, riveting performance informed by her own proximity to the crisis of missing and murdered Mexican women.
Side by side, Xilopango and Mujer Venado reveal and resist the personal consequences of political, structural and neocolonial violence, offering audiences deeper understandings, cross-community solidarities and a call to action.
In true Latin American theatre tradition, RUTAS regards us, the audience, as active, dynamic and creative. So, the festival balances the investigation of historical wounds, with opportunities for healing, humor and collective action.
Documents Perform | Documentos Actúan gives the stage to an online cast of artists, activists, and community leaders who want to redo and re-align social and arts policies across borders. In this bold theatrical experiment created by Natalie Álvarez, Katiana Gonçales Rangel and Richard Maxwell, audiences, artists and activists from across the Americas live-hack key economic and arts policy documents – recreating them as platforms for breaking boundaries through forging of new creative alliances and making works of art.
In real time, text hovers on the stage, being cut, spliced, reworked, transformed, and moved (you could say the text is performing). The clock is ticking down until a new policy is read aloud in English and Spanish, ratified by the audience and sent to the appropriate power brokers and ministers. This is a hardworking yet playful show. It’s an opportunity to witness theatre as political space and policy engine. In the words of co-creator Richard Maxwell, it’s a new “proposition about what theatre can be.” In this age of AI authorship of everything, I think this piece exemplifies the wonder and vitality of real humans thinking and editing one another together.
To round out the festival, internationally acclaimed visual theatre company La Llave Maestre, from Chile presents Pareidolia. Pareidolia is a neurological term for finding pattern and meaning in random physical phenomena: a cloud has the form of a hare, a scar on bark blinks like an eye.
Pareidolia is an extraordinary visual and emotional journey of show. True to its name, it begins with a sheet of plastic undulating overhead, is it a piece of garbage shuddering in the wind, a cloud, a wave, a membrane, a capsule, a womb, a flower petal or somehow all of these? Then, objects become hands, hands become objects. The trajectory of life is sketched. Without speech, nothing interrupts the dreamlike experience. This meticulous and wistful work is an immersion in the mystery of our unique, very human imaginations. Indeed, it’s a wonderful show for families with curious children and adults.
The full festival program can be viewed on line at rutas.ca and includes Latinx artist gatherings, bilingual workshops for diverse arts workers, family friendly shows, and community art making experiences in addition to insurgent theatre.
RUTAS is on from Sept. 24 to Oct. 4 with performances at Factory Theatre (125 Bathurst St.), Passe Muraille (16 Ryerson Ave.) and Hart House (7 Hart House Cir.).
