JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS
Paige Allerton, Carlos García Estévez, Johanna Skibsrud
MANIFESTO POETICO:
TOWARD NEW THEATRICAL LANGUAGES
ASAP/Journal
Volume 5, Number 2, May 2020, pp. 281-296 (Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/asa.2020.0015
For additional information about this article
MANIFESTO POETICO is an international theater research group and production company that proposes a theater “for and with the people.”(1) Their work began twenty-two years ago after artistic leader and founder CARLOS GARCÍA ESTÉVEZ was provoked by his teacher, the renowned theater innovator JACQUES LECOQ, to delve more deeply into the tragic depth of Commedia dell’Arte and masked performance. After years of research and collaborations with such artists as DONATO SARTORI, DARIO FO, TAPA SUDANA, SIMON MCBURNEY, and MIQUEL BARCELÓ, CARLOS became a recognized authority on Contemporary Mask Performance. A contributor to the Routledge Companion to Commedia dell’Arte, (2) CARLOS has taught masked performance all over the world and presented at major conferences and festivals including at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, the International Encounter of Theatre of the Oppressed, and the International Commedia dell’Arte Festival. In 2010—responding to a growing disassociation between the theater and more popular cultural forms—he was inspired to entirely reinvent his practice. What was necessary, he recognized, was not more or different forms of theater—that is, more or different depictions of human experience within a previously established representative mode—but new languages, new ways of communicating experience that could accommodate and employ the techniques and effects of our rapidly changing technologies, social realities, and points of view.
With this goal of arriving at new theatrical languages in mind, Carlos began collaborating with the performing artist and anthropologist Paige Allerton in 2014, a partnership that has expanded Manifesto Poetico’s international reach and the scope of its research and philosophy. Today, Paige and Carlos codirect Manifesto Poetico, making theater using what they call “Spatial Dramaturgy”—a language where the abstraction of space, the spirit of imagination, and the essence of the collective form the basis of both narrative and emotional communication. Drawing on a range of artistic and scientific discourses and charging their work with the language of everyday experience, as well as with urgent contemporary issues, Manifesto Poetico seeks to challenge performers and audiences alike to rethink the possibilities of theater, composition, and imagination. Their ideas are regularly tested through their itinerant research laboratory, the aim of which is to challenge practitioners to change their ways of seeing in both a physical and an intellectual or theoretical sense. Within an international, multidisciplinary, and multilingual context, Laboratory participants are invited to engage with what shapes communication at an elemental level: the deep, structural realities of space and time.
This research is applied, in turn, through Manifesto Poetico’s TransPoetico Productions. For these productions, the group is commissioned by theaters, festivals, performing art centers, and theater academies from all over the world to create and direct shows with casts of local artists. Recent TransPoetico Productions include: Nama Kamu Atas Perahu (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 2013), Tito’s Dream (Storrs, CT, 2014), Bogota in Action (Bogotá, Colombia, 2015), New York Lands (New York, NY, 2016), Klassiek van de Toekomst (Haarlem, Netherlands, 2017), Hann: Voices of a Bay (Dakar, Senegal, 2018), and PULSE (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 2018).
The core aim of these and other Manifesto Poetico productions is to investigate and apply the basic shared elements of human perspective and experience— what Carlos refers to as “universals.” Everyone, everywhere, Carlos reminds his students, experiences gravity. Everyone knows up, down. Everyone knows push, pull, fixed point. Manifesto Poetico works with local artists and theater collectives to explore these foundational elements, which also serve as potential points of connectivity between persons—both human and nonhuman. Today, when—as Paige puts it—“isolation, disconnect, removal, division, categorization, partitions, competition and ownership are within the architecture of globalized civilization,” she and Carlos propose a theater of connection and contact that might move us beyond the preconceived limits of individual perspective and established discursive modes. Recalling the Greek etymology of the word “Trans,” which means to go beyond, and the etymological root of the word “Poetic,” which refers to creation—to making or doing—TransPoetico emphasizes the group’s conscious effort to go beyond what has been created by accessing and igniting the imaginations of participating artists and audience.
As Carlos explains to me: “We did not see the theater of ancient Greece, but today we are still eating from those seeds, 2000 years later. To me that is the meaning of storytelling and the popular tradition. Our job is to continue to plant the seeds . . .”
Manifesto Poetico’s most recent TransPoetico project, The Epic Borders Trilogy (2019–2021), tells the stories of people living in border regions with long histories of unrest. The trilogy aims to present the complexities of three very different histories and locations in order to highlight the integral connections between—and the epic proportions of—our ongoing global struggle both to maintain and disrupt political, geographical, and conceptual boundaries. The trilogy began in September 2019 with the production of The Gate of Hope in Guadalajara, Mexico. This was followed closely by part two of the trilogy, Belfast 1919, which premiered in Northern Ireland in October 2019. The concluding production, In the Name of Humanity, is planned for July 2021, on Canada’s Manitoulin Island in collaboration with local Indigenous and First Nations artists.
Figure 1.
From the TransPoetico Production The Gate of Hope, Part One of The Epic Borders Trilogy. MET Festival, Guadalajara, Mexico, 2019. Photo by Felipe Morán.
Figure 2.
Paige Allerton working on the TransPoetico Production The Gate of Hope, Part One of The Epic Borders Trilogy. MET Festival, Guadalajara, Mexico, 2019. Photo by Felipe Morán.
This final production takes its inspiration from the 2015 book by Riccardo Petrella. An Italian economist and political scientist, Petrella is a leading figure in the anti-globalization movement. In the foreword to the English translation of Petrella’s book, Roberto Savio writes: “In the Name of Humanity observes what should now be clear to all and is certainly not to the system in power: we are at a global impasse that no one, with the paradigms in place, is able to solve.”(3) Manifesto Poetico’s In the Name of Humanity, and their work more generally, similarly challenges us to look again at our paradigms, to come to terms with the limits those paradigms have established for us, and to reimagine the possibilities of our own actions.
I first met Carlos and Paige in the fall of 2018. I’d received a Fulbright fellowship to study the critical and creative applications of clowning pedagogy and was about to begin a five-week intensive course under the tutelage of the clown and clown pedagogue Philippe Gaulier. What interested me, and what I hoped to explore through my research into the Commedia dell’Arte tradition, was the necessarily uncertain relationship between poetry and practice, as well as between personal vulnerability and public responsibility. I visited Carlos and Paige in their tiny studio on Faubourg St. Denis—right next door to the famous Jacques Lecoq school where both artists did their training. They were in between productions and discussing their immanent relocation to a hillside town near Madrid, Spain, in the same region where Carlos was born and raised.
Figure 3.
Carlos García Estévez working with the ensemble for the TransPoetico Production The Gate of Hope, Part One of The Epic Borders Trilogy. MET Festival, Guadalajara, Mexico 2019. Photo by Felipe Morán.
The following interview is drawn from a conversation that lasted several hours. During that time, we spoke about what the word “poetic” means to us—and how it might become possible for something so necessarily rooted in process and potential to become “manifest” through embodied actions and relations. We also discussed the way that the history and practice of Commedia dell’Arte today offers a powerful way of reconnecting with—and at the same time reinventing—a popular theater form that operates “for and with the people.” Through their work, Carlos and Paige strive to make space not for their own creative vision but for new possibilities and relations. They engage closely with international groups interested in transformation and social change and yet their approach encourages a resistance to designating what transformation should look like and what social change might be. They also seek—despite their “for and with the people” motto—to disassociate from the word “democratic.” Instead, as Paige notes, the word “anarchic” understood as order without power is more appropriate to their investigations and techniques. Paige and Carlos suggest in what follows that the structures we have come to take for granted have helped to entrench certain ways of looking at the world that are ultimately destructive to both ourselves and our planet. In order to effect real change, those structures have to be re-seen; paradigms have to change; power and social structures have to radically shift. As Paige puts it, “What’s important is that we start to think about how we want to live with what threatens us—what reality we want to imagine from here.”
—Johanna Skibsrud
JOHANNA SKIBSRUD/ You talk about wanting to move outside of, or beyond, traditional theatrical languages. To combine the poetic (what’s invisible, undefined) with what’s manifest (the here and now) in order to create a contemporary theater that will speak to audiences today. Could you talk a little more about the “new language” you envision—and why it’s necessary at this time?
CARLOS GARCÍA ESTÉVEZ/ In 1917, the French theater director Jacques Copeau said something very clear: everything has to be made again. From zero. We have to start from zero and start again. Why did he say that? He came from a powerful tradition, a rich history. So why did he need to start again? Well, because his society, and all time, had been moving to a point where that legacy wasn’t useful anymore. It needed to be questioned. We’re at this point again. If Stanislavsky was here right now, for example, he’d recognize in one second: “my method is no good anymore. I need to move on.” Do you see what I mean? We need to move on, but we’re also lazy. There is a laziness in theater—I’m talking of course in general—but I see this. I see every day the same program, the same approach. And I think, yeah, okay, that’s very good, but . . . how can we serve the actor, and the stage, and the storytelling of today?
Figure 4.
Paige Allerton and Carlos García Estévez working on the TransPoetico Production The Gate of Hope, Part One of The Epic Borders Trilogy. MET Festival, Guadalajara, Mexico, 2019. Photo by Felipe Morán.
JS/ So the method and approach of theater needs to change if you want to communicate to audiences today—but what stays the same? I mean, what is it about theater that is still important to you, and to others? What can theater—in particular—convey?
CGE/ If we do theater today, it’s because we want to remind ourselves of what we are. We want to understand the structure and essence of human being—and communicate that somehow. Theater didn’t invent that essence, but theater has always tried to represent it. It has always tried to represent real life. So if we want to be true to the spirit of theater, we have to ask, what is real life—today? We can’t just look to theater’s past to find out, because theater is bigger than that. Inside of it you find philosophy, science, anthropology, literature. . . . We try to bring together all of these elements in our effort to find out how we can reach audiences today. We don’t just want to make contact briefly, or count our ticket sales, we want to really touch them—on the inside. We also want to help expand the notion of what an audience is. For us, the “audience” is not just made up of those people specifically looking for a theater play. It’s also the people who are not going to the theater anymore.
In our work, and the research behind it, we ask: Why don’t they come? Why do they go to the movies? Or why do they watch hours and hours of series, not movies? Or why do they do none of the above, but they play video games instead? Our research goes there.
Figure 5.
From the TransPoetico Production BELFAST 1919, Part Two of The Epic Borders Trilogy. Brian Friel Theatre, Belfast, Northern Ireland, 2019. Photo by Kiko Dapena Martín.
“For us, the “audience” is not just made up of those people specifically looking for a theater play. It’s also the people who are not going to the theater anymore.”
Figure 6.
From the TransPoetico Production PULSE. Damansara International Arts Festival, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 2018. Photo by DPAC Press.
JS/ In a sense, then, are you suggesting that the process of reinventing tradition is an integral part of the history, or tradition, of the theater?
CGE/ Yes. There is always this movement— and there has to be. Because time moves, and technology does too. In the time of Commedia dell’Arte, when there was no electricity, if shows were performed in the evening, they were viewed by candlelight. Now that might be romantic, but today we don’t need that. Pouff! We can have a fantastic line of lights if we want it. Because of this, the way we perceive reality is just simply different than it was in 1500. In that time, too, there was a very clear hierarchy among the audience members. The poor ones would not be allowed a chair. They were put with the animals. Nowadays, luckily, we don’t have as much of this stratification. My father, for example, who’s a cook, lives right next to the owner of a telephone company in Madrid. Sunday morning, you see the two of them having ice cream together and you don’t know who owns a telephone company and who cooks in a school—they both wear jeans. And you don’t need to know that. So, it’s clear: things have changed. So why do we have to keep doing the same thing, using the same traditions? We need new, living languages.
JS/ This seems to be reflected in the name “Manifesto Poetico.” Can you talk a little bit about what Manifesto Poetico means to you? And the thinking behind it?
CGE/ In Spanish, manifesto is “to manifest”—a verb. You put the punch of your fist on the table: “Manifest! Bah!” It’s engaged. Like in English. It says: it’s not enough that I have the idea; I must do something about that idea. It says: it’s not enough that I know I must do this thing I intend to do; everyone around me must also know that this must be done—and that I’m going to do it. Maybe I’ll die before I get the thing done, but I really believe that it must be done. So when we say, “manifest” or “manifesto,” we manifest not only the idea but also how we are going to do it.
PAIGE ALLERTON/ A “manifesto” is also extremely concrete, it’s written down.
CGE/ By bringing the two concepts together, what we create is not a company but a laboratory. We aim to provoke, to use storytelling in order to invite people to use their imaginations and create a better world. That’s the role of the artist as I see it. That’s the role of the one that was before the artist was born: the shaman, the witch. The artist is the one who can imagine an element into existence. So that’s why there always needs to be a new language, because every time you try to say something [slaps the table] capitalism is going to integrate it. That’s a real problem for artists who, like us, don’t have big money, or big influence, or big corporations behind them, and all that. We have to ask ourselves: what is the strength of an artist who doesn’t have money and cannot manipulate the strings of the world? It’s all the things you don’t see. It’s the invisible, the magical aspect of art. Artists are the ones who are going to touch those elements that we don’t see directly with our eyes but that we all know exist. Their strength is that—that they can suggest the invisible aspects of our lives, make them real. That’s the “poetic,” right? We don’t talk about this “poetic” from the point of view of a poem, or of poetry. We talk about poetics from an Aristotelian point of view: for us, it’s the process of how we develop and create. So, of course, going back to our name, these two words—“manifesto” on the one hand and “poetico” on the other—are in clear contradiction. We say: I’m going to write something, but it’s not going to be on paper. It’s going to be in an empty space instead, and no one is going to see it—but they are all going to believe it. We say: we’re going to make something concrete, but you can’t pick it up with your hands, you can’t take it.
“We have to ask ourselves: what is the strength of an artist who doesn’t have money and cannot manipulate the strings of the world? It’s all the things you don’t see. It’s the invisible, the magical aspect of art.”
JS/ In what ways do you see the effort that you’re describing here to still be specifically connected to the Commedia dell’Arte tradition?
CGE/ I think about the tradition of Commedia dell’Arte as a survival mode. Performers sought connections with their audience by speaking directly to, and provoking, the working class. There was so much oppression that they had to find a way of laughing about it, and at their oppressors. You couldn’t say anything critical directly, of course, or your head got cut off. So there was this other way: the poetic, the suggestive way. . . . These techniques—these survival techniques—were developed by artists over a long period of time. Now, today, we are in another time and have access to different resources and technologies. I see us continuing this tradition, but only in the sense that we are continuing to ask the question: what language can we use in order to survive? What is the language that, while keeping the critical spirit of Commedia dell’Arte alive, will still be understood and accessed today? Because, remember, when we’re talking about Commedia dell’Arte, we’re talking about a popular tradition. Before there was the term “Commedia dell’Arte,” there was just: the baker, the carpenter. When they were done with their work, they expressed themselves; they dressed up, performed, and laughed; they ate and drank together. That’s the popular tradition. My father, my grandfather, the father of my grandfather, they used to do it this way and not through an intellectual, academic, and bourgeois background. Now Paige and I— we’re lucky—we have the chance to dedicate our careers to telling stories. So we have to ask ourselves: how can we create a theater with elements that you don’t see, but are really there, in the tradition of our grandfathers? A theater that makes the audience feel, and be, clever. Because that’s the goal. To create a language where everyone can access it: the rich, the poor, the intelligent, the less intelligent, the ones that go to the street, the ones that go to a venue, etc. When people leave the theater, we want them to leave the theater saying, first of all: wow, we were there together. We were watching this, witnessing this. And we did it together.
Figure 7.
Manifesto Poetico Open Laboratory, Spatial Dramaturgy: Three-Dimensional Awareness. Paris, France, 2018. Photo by Jérôme Ragot.
PA/ Yes, and the important part is that they see what wasn’t there. Carlos has a famous example. He does this just about every time we teach if the question about poetics comes up. When we make gestures, he says, for example, if I go like this [Paige traces half a circle in the air], what do you see me doing next?
JS/ Completing the circle?
PA/ Exactly. But of course each audience member will finish their own circle.
CGE/ When the audience feels like the story is made by them, that’s when the story is real.
JS/ So that’s the “poetic,” am I right? When the audience begins to create the piece themselves—or you see that they’ve already created it?
CGE/ Yes. We don’t want to project or to impose our own story. We want our theater to be “for and with the people”—and we want our language to be, to a certain extent, universal. We’ve traveled with our work all over the world now and have found that it doesn’t really matter where you go in the world— you could be in Japan or Alaska—there are certain permanences. In Japan, you can push and you can pull. Those are the only two movements you can do inside of this planet. There are two forces. In America, you can push and you can pull. (Maybe some people push more than others . . .) When you breathe out, you’re pushing, when you breathe in, you pull (or vice versa, depending on your perspective). This is the type of permanence I’m talking about. This kind of common denominator. We approach these permanences from an anthropological angle. We’re observers and collectors—and that’s why we travel so much. We just finished working in Senegal, for example—in Dakar—and then three days later we’re in San Diego. There are big differences between these two places, of course, but we also identify elements that are the same everywhere. Everywhere. These elements are the tools that we work with. Three colors, three ways of describing movement: push, pull, fixed point. Three directions: vertical, horizontal, diagonal. By returning to these universal elements we return to the root of the theater—and of possibility. A few years before he died, Jacques Lecoq said that literature had killed the theater. Why? Because theater—a conventional theater play—has a layer of text, of good literature—but that text is not the theater, it’s just the text. To bring the text alive is another story . . .
JS/ What is that process? How is a story brought to life beyond the limitations of language and text?
PA/ We work with patterns—finding and activating them, allowing them to be seen. We don’t do codes. Codes always have an overlay of assigned meaning attached, but patterns are just patterns—they’re just there. The poetic part of our work is allowing people to see that—to see what’s already there but is invisible. We’re interested in the geometry, the overall structure. It’s for this reason that a lot of our work is based on thinking about geometry and science, not theater or art. Geometry, in the ancient Greek, is the measure of what is invisible. Like a circle, it both does and does not exist.
CGE/ We draw a lot of inspiration from new technologies, too. Skype, for example—I remember the first time I used it. It really blew my mind! Before, you know, I’d always paid a lot of money to talk to my parents—I’d barely be able to hear them on this crackly telephone line—and then all of a sudden I’m looking at them on a screen and talking for three hours. I remember the first time my mother was crying, saying, “can you believe that we are talking like this?” Right after—I was in Boston—I went to dinner at the house of the lady that had invited me. Her husband was there, too—a computer scientist and researcher—a fantastic crazy guy. I told them about how I’d talked to my parents that day and I said, “Wow, I mean this is over how many thousands of kilometers? Do you understand it?” The scientist just laughed and said, “yeah. I made these things.” I said, “but how can you understand it?” And he said, “because I speak the language.” This flipped my head. I couldn’t sleep the whole night. I started to think about it and wondered whether it was possible—in my terms, in my profession—for the space to tell the story instead of the actor. I thought: I don’t know if this is possible but why not try to make it possible? A language where space speaks.
“Geometry, in the ancient Greek, is the measure of what is invisible. Like a circle, it both does and does not exist.”
JS/ And this is especially important now, you think, because technological developments have changed the way we think and see?
PA/ Yes. To go back to what Carlos was saying about the Commedia dell’Arte tradition and survival, our work is a “poetics of survival”— and we take this very literally. What’s important right now is not conveying any more information about current events, or the things that threaten us, like climate change, or perhaps it’s better to say climate crisis. What’s important is that we start to think about how we want to live with what threatens us—what reality we want to imagine from here. These are the questions that we want to touch on. We talk about art being a bridge because there’s a lot of people out there doing the raw research that is so important to help us make decisions—but the problem is that information can be so inaccessible. And it’s not about the information at this point. It’s about touching people with what they already know.
CGE/ There’s a moment for us in which the content, the story, is not important any longer. The main thing is instead that you are there, and I am here. The story is just an excuse. But how we look at each other, as human beings, that’s the key. We talk about all this: climate change and social justice issues . . . but all of these problems are the result of the fact that there is no love between people. We’re all going to die, eventually. That’s for sure. Because of climate change, or because of something else. That’s clear, no? So we say: let’s do it together. Let’s do it together, because it’s too late. Really! If you look to the scientific data, there’s no hope, at least for the civilization that we know today.
JS/ You’re saying that it’s not the facts of our shared reality that matter at this point, but our shared vulnerability in facing those facts? But what if, because of your art, or someone else’s, we do manage to make connections—does that, in your opinion, have an impact, potentially? Can art, in your opinion, be a vehicle not only for contact but also for change?
Figure 8.
Manifesto Poetico Open Laboratory, Spatial Dramaturgy & The Four Dimensions. Paris, France, 2019. Photo by Wesley Mulder
CGE/ Possibly. We don’t want to prescribe change, though. It’s the awareness that is interesting to us. And the process of questioning. When students ask me questions in class, for example, I often just say, I don’t know. I’m on this planet just like you, and we’re both equally responsible for finding the answers. But, in fact—I tell them—the main thing is not that you find them; it’s that you continue to look for them. If you find the answer, it’s over. It becomes dogmatic.
JS/ So would it be right to say, then, that your search for “new theatrical languages” is also a sort of pedagogy?
“When we have twenty-five people moving together with the help of The Elastics, it creates an energy, a feeling of, “Wow, I belong to a collective.” The language that is created—you can’t do that by yourself.“
CGE/ What we want is to give back to the people the power to imagine, the power to dream a better world. If we give them everything already packaged and done, like some (not all) of what is available these days at the cinema, then we don’t succeed in giving back this power. Sure, you can reflect on what’s out there right now if you are already inclined that way or engaged in certain subjects— but you don’t make it, someone made it for you. That’s why we defend a theater “for and with the people.” We want to give people a chance to use what they’ve helped to create, later on, when the show is finished. The process is extremely democratic—it has to be. We’re not interested in what we think about life. We’re instead interested in looking at and working with people and having them tell their stories. The artist is the person that creates an entrance, or opening, that invites people to be able to feel things, and express themselves— it’s someone who allows people to escape from this huge wave of manipulation that is the media, that is the internet. . . . The artist is someone who is able to provide freedom for your mind.
PA/ Yes—but, really, I think we need to use another word other than “democratic.” What we’re talking about here is power. Power structures. And diffusing them. By saying “democratic,” we know of course that the suggestion is that everyone—in the ideal—gets their voice heard or represented, but we also know that it’s not that easy, that democracy doesn’t truly exist; it is an ideal just like the circle. So speaking of needing to reinvent . . . what if we use the word “anarchic” instead? Anarchy—order without power. It’s an organic diffusing of power structures. Using this term might get us closer to what we’re really talking about, what we’re really after: finding a way to give people freedom, moving away from manipulation and hierarchical power structures.
JS/ And this is something you’re exploring very specifically on a spatial level. I’m intrigued, for example, by your use of elastics in your training sessions with actors. If I’m understanding your process right, The Elastics are used to frame the action, to allow both the actors and the audience not just to visualize but actually to experience the limits and possibilities of their actions and how they’ve been—or might be—“framed.”
PA/ Yes. There are strong forces at work in what we do with The Elastics. There are laws of physics—the relationship between order and chaos. The Elastics allow us to explore these laws. They allow us to suggest that there’s chaos in order, and order in the chaos—that it’s a kind of conversation, an infinite flow back and forth. . . . Something that illustrates this, I think, is that, though our Laboratory introduces participants to super strict patterns and systems and it can seem, at times, like there’s so many rules, a lot of people have said that they’ve never felt more free . . .
CGE/ Yeah. When you create, you can think of it like this—“I impose something.” But you can also think of it a different way. For us, creating is a way of seeing, and of actually experiencing, the way that everything we do is part of something bigger. We’re always using, and relying upon, the physical laws of movement and the forces of the universe—we all exist in relation to gravity. Because we’re human. When I pull back my arm, the other arm needs to move forward in compensation. The Elastics draw our attention to these physical laws, so that we can see that we cannot so simply say, “Oh, I create that . . .” No. It’s already there. What I created was a channel, a way of seeing that what we do is always collective. When we have twenty-five people moving together with the help of The Elastics, it creates an energy, a feeling of, “Wow, I belong to a collective.” The language that is created—you can’t do that by yourself. It’s impossible. It needs the collective. We are always so grateful to see that—to see people recognize: “Oh, I’m involved also.” On a very basic level. Like: if we suspend an elastic line between two people, the line cannot exist without those two people. On another level, when we produce a show and we see the inner joy that every singular performer feels on stage, I don’t think about me anymore. I think, “Oh, we did it.” We made it. And not just the players, but the stage managers and the audience, too. This is what is interesting to me—and we can achieve it because we have help from the elastics. But now, for us, the question is, how do we create the same thing, but without the elastics? I don’t mind having The Elastics, but if I can have this same effect without elastics . . .
JS/ The Elastics are part of the process of questioning—they’re not, in themselves, a solution.
CGE/ Yes. For example, we’re now busy doing research for a “theater of permanence.” We are thinking about this from an anthropological perspective, but also. . . . It’s like . . . the movement of the sea. You go anywhere you want, and the modulation is there. It’s permanent. Or like the movement of the sun. . . . There are other examples. It doesn’t matter where you go: love is love. Or, it doesn’t matter where you go: hate is hate. And in the end, when you hate is when you feel love. And then there’s happiness . . . what is happiness?
JS/ Push, pull, fixed point.
CGE/ Exactly. Let’s see what principles belong to all of us; then let’s remark on the differences. It’s hard to create a theater that’s not just full of ideas but is instead full of permanences— but that’s what we aim for. We’d like the audience to create the ideas, to create their own freedom, their own new languages and possibilities.
Copyright © 2020 Johns Hopkins University Press. This article first appeared in ASAP/Journal, Volume 5, Issue 2, May, 2020, pages 281-296.
NOTES
(1) “Our Vision,” Manifesto Poetico, https://www .manifestopoetico.com/.
(2) Carlos García Estévez, “Mask Performance for a Contemporary Commedia dell’Arte,” in The Routledge Companion to Commedia dell’Arte, ed. Judith Chaffee and Olly Crick (London: Routledge, 2014), 130–38.
(3) Roberto Savio, foreword to Au nom de l’humanité: L’audace mondiale, by Riccardo Petrella (Brussels: Couleur livres, 2015).
PAIGE ALLERTON
is an international artist and anthropologist born in Canada. She is an actor, dancer, writer, dramaturge, and the creator of The Poetics of Survival. As the codirector of Manifesto Poetico, and cofounder of Spatial Dramaturgy, she edits the group’s research contributions and directs their Department of Anthropology and Content Creation.
CARLOS GARCÍA ESTÉVEZ
is an international artist born in Spain. He is an actor, stage director and pedagogue, as well as the founder and artistic director of Manifesto Poetico. Carlos has received international acclaim for his research and innovations in developing new theatrical languages, such as The Architecture of Gestures and Spatial Dramaturgy. He is a specialist in contemporary mask performance and multidisciplinary and multicultural theater creations. To find out more about Manifesto Poetico, their upcoming activities, and opportunities to join them, visit www.manifesto poetico.com.
JOHANNA SKIBSRUD