Interview with Ricardo Bartis: Caught Between Time and Space, Towards a Liberation
by Sergio Lo Gatto
With your theater you have been telling about your country, Argentina, your people, your reality, refusing a classical way of work and letting reality break in interpretation and narration. How did theater evolve and how did Argentina change during these past 20 years?
Theatre dialogues- it holds a constant talk with real, it is in its own nature. Towards theater reality works as a stable fiction, ruled by specific laws made of organization and sense. In this very reality lives a double theater: there is the cultural event and a theater always in conflict with reality. This second kind of theater keeps the first alive and makes the theater of reality possible. That used to be the very meaning of theater in my country. If we wanted to be moderate we would say that Videla’s dictatorship produced a “discussion”. A discussion in which everybody and everything was involved, the cultural possibilities in first place. Theatres represented and mirrored a breaking point in the political and cultural plateau: with the liberation these two fields suddenly became a place of discussion. It goes without saying that the 80’s and the 90’s have been very important years because we had to start again from scratch. We had no “fathers”, no traditions to lean on. Traditional theater was and is the first thing to question: impossible to draw up, unable to be popular, it forced the non-conventional theater to search for spaces, times and opportunities. The Argentine experimental theatre uses the same space both for rehearsals and the performance, the workshop condition is enhanced and promoted as a linguistic research. That’s how the internal structure shapes the production, the timing and the perspectives of an artwork. Thus to say that when you work in experimental and non-conventional theater, you immediately feel that you are doing something “against”. Now the most common way of looking at theater in Argentina is like: if its structure really has to be fixed, its life should never be exhausted, it must keep its power indefinite. In the 80’s and the 90’s, when we were acting and producing we were looking at the performance as something created from the inside, not from the outside. This power has been losing its substance lately, because State is no longer “against” us. Something came to a stabilization.
So the former “ theatre of conflict” became the institutional one?
It’s not quite a political matter, but much about the theatrical language. Now we do have both an official one and an (apparently) alternative one. The great difference stays in the creative process: one affirms the acting, the other questions it.
Postales Argentinas premiered in Buenos Aires in 1989 and it’s been gloriously successful, to the point that they asked you to write down in a definitive way a “text” which originally was more like a “stage engraving”, the dramatic product of a group of people acting on stage. What does the translation from dramaturgical material into a text mean for you?
It still is an horrifying passage. I feel very shy about writing, I feel very uncomfortable in it, because of the heaviness of the process. For instance, the law must be written in order for everybody to refer to it, but who is in charge of recording a man’s memory? How could you stand such a responsibility? I’m exaggerating, yet so it is. To me the writing seems to be too conclusive. Whatever moves on stage lives on stage and it constantly tries to “meet” the situations, creating a translated reality. Then the moment comes to put it all down in words. What I must go through is the horrifying sensation that that “text” will be the only thing surviving. I know it has to be done, and yet I can’t help myself, because I feel that writing lines will be weakening and mystify my vision of the rehearsals.
What is the role of improvisation?
My works don’t change from date to date, non radically anyway. The dynamics are settled. The improvisation (or the sense of it) it’s not right in the words but in the connection between discourses and characters. It’s all about creating an honest, dynamic and instinctive relationship between body and space. The story goes on by associations. I mean, time and space are always there: dramatic literature sorted their conflict out simply stabilizing the two of them as elements. But the story must be told as a negative image of reality, in which a deep echo of humanity is reproduced. That echo cannot be ignored, it actually must lead to a new place which is beyond the simple representation. Theater of actors, theater of reproduction is mortal because it frustrates acting’s plans to tell an idea which is and must stay associated to others, without any rational stabilization. It’s a bit like when you run a tap on, you are releasing a stream. Dramatic literature tries to stabilize that stream, to canalize it along a frozen language. When an actor simply reproduces the text he comes to be another “me”, while the actor himself should be there not just to impersonate somebody, but to experience the obsession and the precariousness of that changeable “me”.
From a thematic and methodological point of view your work seems to be strictly connected to the concept of time.
On stage the action undergoes a mythic and unchained time. Time jumps, as Meyerchol’d used to say, it is an elastic convention, crossed by others, influenced by several aspects that modify its value. If we just think about the history time: our past flows on our present. Life forces us to measure that time, putting us through a constant exercise in repression, in control. That’s not the way it goes on stage. Time is not under the usual control, there is always something concerning the past.
Last question, just for fun. Postales Argentinas, your first work, was set in 2043. It was full of melancholy and nostalgia for the good times gone. Now 2043 is much closer: do you think you will be missing times like these?
That’s not just fun, this is a very confidential question indeed! Nostalgia is one of the most human feelings. You can try to dissimulate, yet you are always missing something from the past, the very image of losing time. In Argentina this sensation has its life in tango. Theater is a wide, fake space where everything is possible and yet everything is bound to disappear. Even this conversation. It’s going to be nothing left. This link between you and me gives no guarantees, it’s short and limited, it’s fragile. That’s why we must give ourselves completely. Always. To live to the full at least this very moment, the only one allowed.
This article was originally published in Italian on Krapp’s Last Post (www.klpteatro.it)
Tagged: Argentina, Guest, Italy, Ricardo Bartis