“Make yourself a tasty drink and a succulent snack,” an announcer told his audience on a recent weekend. “This is first call! First call!”
But there was no concession stand at the videotaped performance broadcast via Facebook. The audience would have to make do with whatever was in their fridge before the digital curtain went up.
At the start of Musée Vivant — the new cabaret from the Hermosillo troupe AndamioSteatro— the audience meets La Chola Chela: a street-wise woman with a stereotype-defying mastery of art history.
“Tell us where the paintings are and what you did with them!” a museum manager shouts at her. “Maybe you stole them to sell! Or to buy yourself drugs!”
“Take it easy woman!” La Chola retorts.
What actually happened is far more fantastic: those paintings came to life the night before, unloading decades of gripes and trenchant social criticism served up with humor.
The audience hears from the woman in Mujer comiendo banana by the Colombian painter Fernando Botero, known for the exaggerated plumpness of his subjects.
“Did you see the fat woman?” Pamela, as she’s named in the play, says, mimicking disrespectful museum visitors. “The fat woman this, the fat woman that. Always being discriminated against!”
“Botero doesn’t paint fat people! He paints volume, and the sensuality of form!” she continues.
The woman in Gustav Klimt’s masterpiece The Kiss also gets to share a piece of her mind on the reality of the relationship behind the iconic image.
“He pays attention to everything! Not a single detail escapes him. Always watching me 24/7, at all hours. My phone, my friends…,my family,” she says with a nervous laugh. “That’s how love is, right?”
Tres cuadros atrapados por una doble condición.
“Three paintings doubly trapped,” said AndamioS Director Hilda Valencia, a former professor of the group’s other co-founders. They’re each stuck in a museum closed by the pandemic, and stuck eternally in a frame by their creators.
“And they rebel against that reality,” she adds.
While not quite rebelling, Valencia’s troupe has also been trying to adapt to the pandemic reality. 2020 had been shaping up to be a promising year: workshops, shows and tours in the calendar.
“That was all canceled,” she said. “Everything.”
The cabaret production won support from a federal Culture Ministry program to help independent performers weather the pandemic. A few hundred viewers tuned in for its premier over a recent weekend, many paying for tickets as they would for an in-person show. There are plans for online workshops as well.
“The situation is not resolved,” she said. “It’s not resolved, but through next month (July), yes.”
Sink or Swim
But they’re not just in a financial bind. Digital production is also a profound break from the group’s normal way of working.
“It was literally like being thrown in a pool without knowing how to swim,” said Manuella Rábago, who played La Chola Chela. “And I learned to swim.”
Not having a live audience — or even peers — reacting to your performance was especially difficult, she said.
But in the end, it was a worthwhile experiment. The group had been toying with the idea of something like a digital performance for a while, but it took the pandemic to finally make it happen, according to Rábago.
'Faced Many Problems'
The third painting to come to life is Gustave Courbet’s haunting self-portrait The Desperate Man, and he did it with a few bursts of yelling and laughing.
“I’ve spent 140 years holding it in, and was right and necessary to let it out!” he said.
What follows is an impassioned plea to other men to be more comfortable with expressing their feelings. And Roberto Borbon, the actor who played Gustave, feels worried.
“Because of this crisis, we’re dealing with our own crisis,” he said of his troupe.
He sees promise in digital alternatives, but is uncertain about their long-term viability. Theater is an essential part of a healthy society, Borbon says, and it’s important that governments step up to help keep it alive. But that alone won’t save them.
“We’ve faced many problems, during these nine years,” he said of the rough decade AndamioS has been together. That includes the transformation of a semi-abandoned house in downtown Hermosillo into a community arts space.
“Obviously we’re going to figure it out, but it’s going to be complicated,” he said.
