Teatro Trono: Youth Theater in Bolivia
Dangl, Benjamin
Teenage actors parade barefoot onstage, jumping and pounding drums. Others walk in with notebooks and briefcases overflowing with papers. Each actor spouts fragmented political speeches. The play...
...the ghost says...
...This was the beginning of what is now Teatro Trono...
...Others studied the mining movements...
...I ask if he was excited about the group's upcoming tour in Europe, where they will perform plays on the traditional use of coca leaves in the Andes...
...At Teatro Trono, located in El Alto, a sprawling city neighboring La Paz, homeless children are the actors, and the plays deal head on with Bolivia's harsh reality...
...The seven-story building confronts the sky in a posture of defiance like a giant, many-windowed pirate ship...
...We had meetings and study sessions, and learned little by little...
...Jeremy Kevin Acarapi Garay, 13, the most outspoken and boisterous of the group, advertises his temperament with wildly spiked hair...
...You fall in love with this place...
...Don't cry, Mom...
...That's black humor," says Iván Nogales, the group's founder and director...
...One girl gives the man her earrings for a small cup of water, which she shares with the whole community...
...The camaraderie is another reason he has stuck around...
...We were trying to reclaim democracy through art," he says...
...They help us lose our fear...
...People eventually put it all together...
...At Trono, he says, "they make us do theater in front of people we have never met...
...Indeed, such themes aren't distant from daily life in this working-class city, where state repression against protesters has been common, and the question of nationalizing Bolivian natural resources still divides the population...
...It's a bustling environment, a cocktail of order and chaos...
...Their book, El mañana es hoy, contains stories of Teatro Trono told by the actors...
...If you don't have money to eat, someone helps out," he says...
...It'll be a great adventure," he says, a smile spreading across his face...
...Now many of them are teachers here...
...In Spanish, the word trono means something that breaks, falls down, or crashes, but it also means "throne...
...I live on the throne.' " Nogales started the theater company in the 1980s during the military dictatorship of Luís García Meza...
...I died bravely even though they gouged my eyes out and tore me apart...
...Chila, whose family's alcoholism forced him into homelessness at age nine, said the street was his home...
...The actors would say, 'I'm broken, I'm from the streets.' But at the new theater they'd say, 'I am the king...
...There he united with his friends and shared food, spoils from robberies, and drugs until he found Trono...
...It's a history of frustration, but also of glory...
...The kids learn something, and it helps them...
...Government repression made it hard to perform...
...We have reconstructed a family [for street children]," Nogales says...
...It's a community...
...I walk into a Trono room that smells like a high school gym class...
...I like what I do here," he continues...
...All of this was done collectively without a director...
...Bolivia's history is one big tear," actor Vladimir Mamani Paco, 27, tells me after the show...
...Such a scenario is familiar to El Alto residents, who have dealt with high water costs, privatization, pollution, and water shortages...
...This first Trono group was composed of homeless children whom Nogales invited to live in his apartment, which included a stage that converted into beds at night...
...When I arrive, the sound of hammers and music mixes with the cheers of actors...
...But the police would often arrive to shut down their street performances, sending actors running for safety...
...Don't cry...
...Puppet-making and juggling lessons go on in the same room...
...The play depicts revolts and counter-revolts throughout Bolivian history, ending with a dramatic exchange between a mother and the ghost of her dead son, tortured during a dictatorship...
...Describing the collaborative writing and performing of a recent play, Mamani Paco says, "Some studied the Chaco War...
...In one Trono play called The Meeting of the Water Gods, a businessman buys a river from local residents who later come to him for a drink...
...Though the theater started out working with homeless children, Trono now works more on prevention rather than rehabilitation, with outreach efforts that seek to stop children from becoming drug addicts...
...The theater stands out against El Alto's flat landscape...
Vol. 40 • May 2007 • No. 3
