2023-06-18 06:15:26
Nacha Guevara is the author of Nacha in pajamas, at the Astros theater. Everything in the play is her, and not (of course). Pandemic, 80th birthday, complaints that only someone like her, with 50 years in between, might say out loud, and also, of course, lessons -that are never considered as such- that, we return, only Nacha can say, with his way, and his dedication, his courage and his exceptionality. She herself defines it as something “very different from what I have done. Very different. Although I have always exhibited, and I have always managed to mix (adding characters), here vulnerability is shown more. That produces emotion inside and out.” Did Nacha Guevara need to show that emotion? “I did not do it to show, there was no urgency. That surprises me. It was not deliberate. But obviously he was there, he was crouching down, he wanted to get out. So, following a show that plays with limits, with her figure, with an 80th birthday alone in a pandemic, and with other items: what is intimacy for Nacha? “Intimacy is something sacred, it is a place that must always be preserved. We live in the age of exposing everything, and we believe that the more people watch your privacy, the more successful you are. It is something sacred, something that must be preserved. If someone doesn’t have that, it’s alarming. It is another terrifying aspect of modernity. What is seen on stage, as in any theatrical act, is an augmented reality. If not, it does not make sense. The theater is an augmented reality, because if we are going to see reality we do not need to pay a ticket”.
—What did you want to exaggerate then in this staging and in this work?
—The ridiculous thing, that for example appears in the work when you see a plant running, or responding to you, or that moves and disobeys you. That’s not realistic. But it shows loneliness a lot, without being obvious, without saying “I’m alone”, which is realism. Or you show him fighting with a painting of a cat. Especially in that period, that pandemic that we show, that we all go through in that way. There is a lot of empathy in that sense: something similar happened to all of us in those days, there is a moment when they completely identify, because it was a collective experience that was lived.
—The one in the play is a character with a double edge, on the one hand loaded with tenderness and on the other loaded with anger. How did you manage to make these two aspects coexist, the sardonic and the emotional?
—On the one hand it is my nature as an actress, I have that, what you would call a sudden actor, who can go from crying to laughing quickly. That’s a feature. You have it or you don’t have it as an actor. It’s very difficult to learn, and it allows me to go from very deep emotional states and make fun of that very state. To distance yourself and laugh at yourself. For example, following singing “Go to hell”, she cuts the shoes with knives, that’s very difficult, it’s a very complicated transition. It is one thing for the character to be crazy and another for the person who does it to be crazy. You have to have a very careful hand and many years on stage.
—What is art today for you?
—It is something essential, what it has always been for me and for the human being. It has been essential, since the Altamira caves, to express something in a different way, which is not reality. The Altamira caves are those little drawings of animals, and they are caves that I was in, tremendously inhospitable, and they painted the ceiling lying down. What moved them? What was the engine? What is the need? The need to create beauty is inherent. And today some harmony is more necessary, something harmonious, elevated, that takes you to a better place. Art is the truth, the truth of the work. It can be the truth of a song, of a painting, of a sculpture. But the truth is not in the work, it is in the author of the work, who was able to tell it. In the one who paints, in the one who sings, in the one who writes. It doesn’t matter what counts, otherwise it mightn’t count, without truth you can’t count, and you can’t look for results, look for success. Success is the experience of doing. The rest may or may not come, and nobody has the recipe. Success is that journey of doing what you wanted to do. I learned that at DiTella.
—What is your truth today at art time?
—The value of the error. The value of being wrong. The right to be wrong. In science and in art there must be trial and error, or mediocrity is assured.
—There is a moment when your protagonist watches television, does channel surfing, and seems to be angry with what she sees, does it happen to you?
—There is a compendium, of course. It’s all put together, but it’s what we see and hear every day. I don’t like it, what’s more, I hate it. Because of their lack of imagination, of vocabulary, even of spelling when they write the graphs. Serious. But I’m not nostalgic, I’m anxious. I am more of anticipating the future. It’s nonsense, just like being stuck in the past. The truth is that all we have is here and now, and there is nothing else. Humans have a hard time understanding that, which is why we are always anticipating the future or looking to the past. It’s a lack of intelligence actually. Not racial intelligence, but an absence of knowledge.
—You make a very moving greeting thanking the public, why?
“I’ve wanted to do it for a long time.” I thought of it as a song. In a longer format, even counting moments with the public. I might never fit him into a show. Here it came out more naturally, it was time to express that greeting to the public, to what it is, to what it means, to what it teaches. Everything I’ve learned regarding acting, I’ve learned from the teacher who is the audience. It is not with laughter or applause that you learn. It is a more subtle language, more difficult to describe, that if you are attentive, you receive constant information from the public. But it is not rational, it cannot be explained. The public teaches you, in rehearsals you learn the stage. But what you find, the moments, the pauses, you find with the public. That is why it is so old and so modern at the same time. In a world where everything is so two-dimensional, this human communication has enormous value. It is one of the few that remains of human beings communicating, without mediating machines.
“You said you weren’t nostalgic but is there something you miss?” Anything you feel is no longer in the world?
—Collective dreams, utopias. Without utopias it is impossible to live. Utopia is the collective dream. And that makes an impossible dream possible, as history shows. There are many examples of dreams that were made possible because they became a collective ambition. Strange that there is no utopia. I don’t know what the collective dream is. So, I don’t really know where we are going as humanity.
—What to discover on stage every night?
—In this case, what I am discovering, and the public returns it to me, loud and clear, that there is a certain part of the girl, of play. Not childish, being childish is being an asshole. But getting the child back is another matter. This show gives me a chance to get the girl back. Being more relaxed, more unprejudiced, that I don’t care if they’re looking at me. Innocence and freedom, the two virtues that we lose along the way.
life on stage
—I feel that your comedy is never fully celebrated, that it always manages to be present and here too. How do you see that side of you?
—The show is tragicomic. But a good actor has to have the tragedy right there when he does comedy, the tragedy behind, hence the duality. Do one thing, and that his contradiction is there. If not, the performances are very flat. The great teacher of that is Chaplin: he is the great trainer, the great teacher of all the actors in the world. That ability to be playful, to play, to be nostalgic, that enriches the stage a lot, much more attractive than just crying. As the English say: dying is easy, the hard part is acting. We have lost comedy, today jokes are made. One following the other, but comedy requires intelligence, a sense of humor, a tempo. That is not measured with a clock, it is an instinct. If you change the moment it doesn’t work.
—What did you learn from art that you didn’t expect to find there?
—Theater allows you to learn to live. The same laws that govern the theatrical drama are those that govern the drama of life. If the actor is aware, it is a round trip, between what the theater teaches you and what life teaches you. Everyone should study theater with certain schools. It gives you knowledge of yourself, of certain laws of life, which are there, on stage, magnified, and it gives you another possibility that occurs in more advanced spiritual schools, which is to observe and act at the same time. That in real life is difficult, on stage too.
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#collective #dreams #lot
