TEATRO POBRE DE AMÉRICA Y EL DE ORILLA (1968-1972) AND THE METAMORPHOSIS OF MY MASSES

After moving to New York in 1967, I joined a group of Puerto Rican “teatreros” that were integrating political activism with theater presentations. First, the group  called itself Teatro Pobre de América and then became Teatro de Orilla. I had begun my graduate work at Teachers College, Columbia on communications and education, while participating in the “consciousness raising” movement that was in vogue among the more progressive, leftist and irreverent members of society, including a bunch of Puerto Rican students (we were all students, except the director of the troupe who was a permanent college dropout) who wanted to help make the world a -if not better- a fun place to live in; and fun we had with our theatrical endeavors. 

Our work was produced collectively, except that the final decisions were made by the director, and it was consciously and politically based on the ideas of troupes, authors and directors like Osvaldo Dragún, Richard Teschner, Augusto Boal, the Living Theater Collective, Grotowsky, Teatro de la Candelaria. Our work and ourselves also responded to the mood of the times. 

Of all the presentations, the one the stuck the most in my memory was the staging of passages from the Mayan Popol Vuh. Entering into a world of ideas and cosmologies that were quite separate from our own controlled/educated understanding of issues such as death and nature, gave us an opening into a view that was not to close ever again; consequently, the ideas on people and education were also transformed. 

In one scene, dancing to Death as an entity -not necessarily a body in spirituals language, the metamorphosis that the corpse goes through, when the person enters into a new “life, form, or whatever death can be called”, was celebrated and performed for New York City Latinos in the barrios of the city (not even off Broadway theaters, but in community centers and on the streets during the Summer). The work intended to explored the Judeo Christian ideas on suffering and possible infernos for the dead body in opposition to the ideas on death presented in the Pool Vuh; shown thru dance, body movements and selected passages from the Mayan book, a new way of “being”, a metamorphosis.

The difficulties presented during the performance were not caused by the theatrics or complex production, but because, after all, we did not stop believing in the old view of death over night, and the public was there to have fun and not to be elevated culturally or politically. Since the metamorphosis of the dead needed to be recreated using different anthropomorphic figures, immediately after we began our screams and howls and crawling all over each other and the floor, creating all kinds of surrealistic images, the kids in the audience started to join us in the stage; and without shame imitated us, dancing and howling and making strange face gestures. 

How we reacted was -luckily- part of our belief in integration: we expected it, so we also had a good laugh afterwards,  On the raising of consciousness, too late in my life, with so much body, theatrical, historical mass holding me, to even pretend I know much about it.