"La Cruzada de los Niños de la Calle"

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, March 12, 2000

Six Authors in Search of Justice for Children

By ROBERT MYERS and MIRIAM AYRES

IN his celebrated 1950 film ``Los Olvidados'' (``The Young and the
Damned"), the Spanish surrealist director Luis Buñuel chose brutal realism
to portray the cruelty a gang of poor delinquents wreak on their weaker
neighbors in the streets of Mexico City.

Half a century later, six Latin American playwrights have created a very
different form to demonstrate the plight of children abandoned on the
streets of many of the region's major cities. Their play, "La Cruzada de
los Niños de la Calle" ("The Street Children's Crusade"), which had its
world premiere in Madrid in January, sets out to show the almost surreal
horror of the children's lives.

Creating an even more brutal milieu than Buñuel's, the writers and their
Brazilian director, Aderbal Freire Filho, have used an episodic format and
a variety of theatrical styles. The children, who remain largely unseen,
are no longer predators but prey. Their exploiters are adults, sometimes
even their own parents, who force them to sell drugs and their bodies --
either for sex or, more literally, piecemeal, to supply organs for wealthy
customers' transplants. Or, as in the notorious real-life Candelaria
massacre in Rio de Janeiro in 1993, the children are assassinated as they
sleep. The rapid-fire scenes, which take place in a netherworld that is at
once gritty urban landscape and glittering nightmare, flash before the
audience's eyes like acts in an expressionistic sideshow.

The six Latin American authors were either born in or live in Argentina,
Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Costa Rica and Mexico. Their dramatic
styles in "The Street Children's Crusade" range from a Conradian morality
tale in the Ecuadorean sections, to light-hearted popular theater in the
street-sweeper scenes in Bolivia, to the melodrama of sexual tourism in
Costa Rica.

The production, which opened in Spain's 19th-century national theater, the
Centro Dramático Nacional, traveled to several other Spanish cities in
February before returning for its current run at the Teatro de Madrid.
Later this year, it will be presented at the Hanover Theater Festival in
Germany and subsequently in various Latin American countries. It is being
produced by the Centro Dramático Nacional and Artibus, a private group that
has presented the work of international artists like that of the American
Robert Wilson.

The Madrid reviews after the opening were mixed, though the project itself
was lauded. Some critics objected to what they considered the inherent
difficulty of critiquing such loaded material on a strictly aesthetic
plane. Others found the piece insufficiently "Brechtian," a criticism that
the play's director, Mr. Freire, 58, found vaguely amusing.

In the 1970's, Mr. Freire said, when many Latin American theater artists
were under the sway of a programmatic Brechtian approach to theater -- best
exemplified by the theories of the Marxist Brazilian playwright Augusto
Boal in his 1975 book, "Theater of the Oppressed" -- Mr. Freire was
attacked for "having aesthetic concerns." "Then," he added with a smile,
"in the 1990's, when I proposed the creation of an institute to develop
plays about social issues, some of the same people said I was 'too
political.' "

The idea for "The Street Children's Crusade" was conceived by the Spanish
dramatist José Sanchis Sinisterra, who coordinated the writing and editing
of the play. Mr. Sinisterra, 59, is best known in the United States as the
author of "Ay, Carmela!," a play set during the Spanish Civil War on which
Carlos Saura's 1991 film of the same name is based.

One purpose of "The Street Children's Crusade," Mr. Sinisterra said, was
"Bolivarian," meaning that it brought artists together from various Latin
American countries in a joint artistic endeavor in the spirit of the
19th-century Venezuelan liberator Simón Bolívar.

One of the playwrights involved, Aristides Vargas Sosa, an Argentine who
works in Ecuador, said, "We can easily name directors and theater companies
from Europe and the U.S., but we know next to nothing about our neighbors."

Because, Mr. Sinisterra said, he believed a documentary approach held the
danger of "exoticizing misery," he encouraged the playwrights to seek out
new artistic formulas to treat the subject, which resulted in the variety
of theatrical styles.

"I'm a man of the left," Mr. Sinisterra said. "In the 1950's and 60's, I
did pamphlet-style, schematic, speaking-to-the-converted, black-and-white
theater. Then I realized that things are more complex and indirect, and art
has its own language."

The writers were chosen because Mr. Sinisterra admired their work or
because -- as in the case of the Bolivian Ivan Nogales, whose theater
group, El Trono (the Throne), is partly composed of former street children
-- he knew of their interest in the subject.

The group first convened in Madrid in late 1998 to discuss the play's
creation. There, one of the playwrights, Dolores Espinoza, who had met Mr.
Sinisterra at a workshop in Patzcuaro in her native Mexico, said he
proposed that the group use the concept of the medieval children's crusade
to create a frame for the play. The crusade occurred in 1212, when Jesus
was said to have appeared to a young French boy, exhorting him to recruit
other children for a mission to the Holy Land.

The playwrights thought the idea would work because it offered a structure
on which they could weave individual episodes set in their respective
countries. Yet when Mr. Sinisterra made another suggestion, sharp
differences of opinion emerged. His idea was that the street children's
motive for traveling through Latin America should be a quest to post-Castro
Cuba to retrieve the remains of Che Guevara. This journey, Mr. Sinisterra
thought, would be provoked by a character's religious vision induced by
glue-sniffing, a practice common among Latin American street chidren.

"It wasn't just political," said Christiane Jatahy, a playwright from
Brazil. "It was as if this idea meant we already had a solution to the
problem, a political solution, and we did not want to say that. We wanted
to find something new that would be more of a question than a solution. For
a time in Brazil, Che Guevara was an important figure, but these days,
especially for street kids, he's nothing more than an emblem on a T-shirt
sold by street vendors."

The impasse lasted into the next meeting three months later in Cartagena,
Colombia, although the authors continued to research and write the stories
set in their respective countries. It was only when the group met last May
in Rio de Janeiro and visited the site of the Candelaria killings that a
solution was found for the motive for the children's quest.

Candelaria, a cathedral in Rio's central financial district and the name by
which the killings have come to be known, was the site of a planned attack
that occurred in 1993. Hooded police officers opened fire on a group of
sleeping street children camped on the steps of the church, killing six.
The police, who also killed two other boys, were apparently angry because
several street children had thrown stones at a police car the day before.
The case, which attracted international attention, led in 1996 to the
conviction of one of the men and helped focus attention on the problem of
street children throughout Latin America.

When Victor Viviescas, a Colombian playwright, saw the crosses outside the
church marking the sites where the children had been gunned down, he said,
"In Colombia, massacres like Candelaria occur periodically and the society
does not even react."

The playwrights, however, agreed they had found the solution to the play's
narrative problem: a Candelaria survivor, an 8-year-old girl who remains
unnamed (played by an adult actress, Pilar Aranda, who is Mexican), sets
out to find her friend Espoleta, who was with her during the massacre.
Approaching a police officer (Orlando Valenzuela, from Colombia), she
recognizes him as one of the assailants and, in a sort of grotesque
annunciation scene in which the officer plays the role of exterminating
angel, he takes the glue she has been sniffing and throws it in her eyes,
goading her to find her friend now that she is blind.

The child then sets out on a fabulous quest through the continent, calling
upon street children to join her, as if she were a contemporary Pied Piper.
In the scenes set in Colombia, Costa Rica and Ecuador she appears as a
spectral figure, a troubling presence that reminds the adult characters of
the unseen children who are being exploited.

This frame story and the six episodes created by the playwrights were
presented at a reading in Madrid in July. After further reworking by Mr.
Sinisterra, who tried simultaneously to find thematic intersections between
the episodes while preserving the different styles and voices of the
authors, a stage version was given to Mr. Freire, who arrived in Madrid in
November.

Mr. Sinisterra had invited Mr. Freire to participate not only because the
Brazilian had directed extensively in the Spanish-speaking world, but also
because he shares Mr. Sinisterra's preoccupation with the creation of new
dramatic forms for treating social and political themes.

Both men's careers have straddled the worlds of commercial and politically
committed theater. They met in 1993 when Mr. Sinisterra traveled to Rio for
a production of his play "Ñaque o De Piojos y Actores" ("Useless Comics or
Of Lice and Actors") and saw Mr. Freire performing. Mr. Freire was in a
play he had both written and directed about the Brazilian president Getulio
Vargas, which was being staged in the palace where the president had
committed suicide in 1954.

Mr. Freire chose his cast for "The Street Children's Crusade" from Spain
and various Latin American countries and left the order and structure of
the play's 30 scenes more or less intact.

On opening night, before a near-capacity audience, the various forms of
Spanish and Spanish idiom spoken onstage and, especially, the abrupt shifts
in style underlined the advantages and disadvantages of collaboration, and
occasionally gave the production, at least in this early manifestation, a
cobbled-together feel. But the stark lighting and the clever use of orange
barrels, serving as either sewers or hiding places from which street
denizens popped up and down, punctuated the horror of the world depicted.

One episode, by Mr. Viviescas, takes place in a Beckettian street landscape
where a couple, sleeping in a sewer, awaken to discover that their blind
and deformed baby, Angelote, the source of their sustenance as beggars, has
disappeared.

But perhaps the section by Mr. Vargas was the most troubling, in part
because of its subject -- the selling of children's organs. Instead of
treating the topic with indignation or incredulity, he presented a
credible-seeming doctor (Fidel Almansa, from Spain), who nonetheless
exploits the street children and poor parents in need of money. The
character is icy in his clinical self-justifications, at least until he is
kidnapped by the crusading children, blindfolded and put on trial as his
unseen jury bombards him with the body parts of mutilated dolls.

Paradoxically, the ultimate power of the play, whose creators have so
consciously forgone realism, resides in the almost juridical closing
monologue of the nameless Brazilian street girl. Having barely communicated
beyond grunts and inarticulate phrases, she finally arrives back in the
streets of Rio with Angelote -- the only other survivor of the quest -- and
recalls what she witnessed at Candelaria. Her description, punctuated by
details, like the sight of Espoleta's oversized trousers falling from his
hips as he is gunned down, suddenly makes it clear that her friend is dead.

This final monologue almost necessarily directed the attention of the
audience, some of whom were crying, to an exhibition in a gallery adjoining
the Maria Guerrero Theater of photographs of street children donated by the
renowned Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado. In one, dozens of
abandoned, diaper-clad babies crawled around an orphanage playground with
city buildings rising behind them; in another, three boys slept in a square
concrete hole.

"I hope," Mr. Sinisterra said about the play, "that we affect the public
like a butterfly flapping its wings that can cause a storm on the other
side of the planet."


Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/