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nyutheatrepractices2020 · 5 years ago

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Geniuses, Idiots, and Reflections on Resilience

¡Buen dia! Saya here – I’ll be taking you though what Echo, Casey, Clear, and I were up to in Alejandra’s Physical Theatre class on Tuesday.

Tuesday began as mornings often do here in San Juan: with a brief but torrential downpour, which I watched from the safety of Los Pinos, our favorite cheap breakfast place. The sky quickly cleared up, and as Clear, Casey, and I rode along in our Uber, we watched turquoise whitecaps crashing on the beach below Avenida Munoz Rivera.

Meanwhile, Echo was rewarded for doing the long walk to class: as vendors set up for the Festival of San Sebastian, a smiling man approached her selling beautiful white flowers. He told her they were only a dollar and would make her room smell fresh. When Echo apologetically told him she didn’t have cash on her, another Puerto Rican man jumped in to buy the flower for her – “This guy was written up in The New York Times,” he told her. “You have to get a flower from him!” (Here’s that NYTimes feature.) Echo walked into class elated by the kindness of the residents of San Juan.

Below: Echo posted about the flower vendor on her Instagram story.

Above: Echo shows us a photo of the flower vendor, and Alejandra is inspired.

Echo’s flower proved to be a pedagogically useful tool that day. Alejandra has been working with our class on Alexander Technique, a process used by many actors to retrain spatial awareness and release tension in the body. One of the partner exercises we did on Tuesday morning was called “The Genius and The Idiot.” The “genius” puts their hands gently on the front and back of the “idiot’s” torso and imagines a connecting force moving through the idiot’s body between their hands. The genius’ job is to take their idiot on a walk around the room.

“Imagine, idiots,” said Alejandra, “That you are Echo’s flower. Your spine is a long stem. Your spine is strong, but you are available to your genius’ input.” The idiot has the task of relinquishing all control – their goal is to not know where they are going. “Ahhh, relinquish,” says Alejandra, chewing on the word with a twinkle in her eye. “I love that word.”

Below: Alejandra demonstrates how the Genius & Idiot exercise with Casey as Clear and Echo look on. Turns out Casey is more prone to genius.

Turns out I was a big fan of relinquishing, too. I was paired with Echo, and when it was my turn to be the idiot, I felt so relaxed and safe as she took me on a walk. After a week of navigating a new city in a language I don’t understand, feeling stressed about earthquakes, and trying to get to know a new group of people, it felt nice to let someone else worry about which direction I was walking. In contrast, Echo initially hadn’t enjoyed being the idiot as much – “I feel like I’m just a weight Saya has to drag around,” she said. But once Alejandra introduced the image of the flower stem, I felt something in Echo physically changed. Instead of being all bendy and stomping around the room when I would give some input from my hands, her core became strong. To me, post-flower metaphor, it felt like she knew she could be in charge if she wanted to, and she was therefore able to release. Theatre exercises, man.

As you have seen in my classmates’ blog posts, we spent last week moving at a frenetic pace, moving from one activity to the next as we adjusted to this island. Now, San Juan and Santurce are familiar, and we are settled into our groove. The focus is now on creating pieces to perform at the San Sebastian festival. During our afternoon Physical Theatre session, we began improvising “scores,” or creative outlines, to potentially use to shape our performance. We had signposts we wanted to hit and improvised between them. Here’s an example of a score Casey and I came up with for our semi-planned, semi-improvised first draft, along with some feedback from Alejandra:

(Alas, as has happened to my co-authors, Hotel Miramar’s wifi has gotten the best of this photo upload. Check back another time!)

Below: Echo and I improvise potential material for our piece.

An unexpected morning highlight for our Physical Theatre cohort yesterday was getting to participate in filming a TV spot for a bomba class that will be happening at El Bastion. (See Carey’s Jan. 9 blog post to learn about the cultural context of this dance.) As Awilda told us in our all-group bomba workshop, bomba is traditionally a strictly gendered dance: there is a specific role and set of moves for the women and a different set for the men. Lio Villahermosa, the dancer who will be teaching a series at El Bastion, is a renowned bomba practitioner in Puerto Rico who is queering the art by letting anyone dance any role. (Look Lio up on Instagram to see what I’m talking about!) When we walked into El Bastion, he was twirling madly in a ruffled bomba skirt as he locked eyes with the drummer to co-create a tornado of swirling skirts and rhythm. We loved spending our morning revisiting la bomba. Catch us on Puerto Rican TV on some channel… at 1pm one of these days… in the near future? We think? It’s unclear.

Below: Dancing the bomba as Lio talks to the camera.

Above: Clear, me (Saya), Lio, the drummer, Casey, and Echo after shooting the bomba class TV spot.

El Bastion is expanding my definition of what an artists’ space can be and what it means to be a community organization. El Bastion is located across the street from the Instituto Cultural, the arts-focused branch of the government which Alejandra tells us is now bankrupt. The Instituto used to produce a biennial arts exhibition; they then had to make it a triennial due to lack of resources, and now, the event has ceased to exist. Alejandra echoes what many other Puerto Rican artists have said: that due to bad management and corruption within the local and federal governments, state-based arts initiatives are failing. That is where El Bastion comes in.

Below: Raquel is one of El Bastion’s leaders. From morning until night, she sits with her laptop generating marketing content for El Bastion, balancing the books, taking publicity shots, running the cafe, and organizing for the donation drive. Behind Raquel you can see that the artisans who were supposed to be hosted by Instituto Cultural are setting up their vending tables.

The Instituto Cultural was supposed to host an artisans’ and crafts people’s market as part of the festival, but they cancelled last minute, citing the fact that they had been without power in the days after the earthquake. The festival brings these artisans roughly 35% of their annual income, so not being able to sell their paintings, sculptures, and jewelry at San Sebastian would have been a huge blow. El Bastion, which is already hosting tons of performances (including ours), jumped in to offer their space to the artisans. Over the past week and a half, we have seen the folks who work at El Bastion welcome our program with open arms despite not having electricity, organize a earthquake supply donation drive and transport the items to the south themselves, and now save the day for these artisans.

A friend of mine who grew up in Santurce recently posted this Washington Post article on Facebook called “How much more do we Puerto Ricans have to do for ourselves?” I’d like to highlight a few excerpts from that article:

"While Puerto Ricans are reproached for not having emergency backpacks — or for living in homes that aren’t properly reinforced — we come to learn that 95 percent of our public schools aren’t built to withstand earthquakes, and that the government didn’t take structural integrity into account when it decided to close a quarter of the schools in the name of austerity. We also learn that public funding for Puerto Rico’s Seismic Network was reduced as part of the fiscal board’s cutbacks to the University of Puerto Rico’s budget, and that there isn’t even a preliminary draft of the public emergency plan that the government commissioned more than a year ago [...] In the absence of government preparation, public scrutiny has turned toward the public: On the airways and across social media, we are told that we build our homes poorly, we prepare inadequately and we respond inappropriately. We are told to run in the face of an impending tsunami, and then we are mocked on the radio when we flee to the mountaintops and the tsunami doesn’t come. They tell us to stay put in our homes and stop sleeping outside, but then they blame us when the walls crumble on top of us. They told us the electricity would be back by noon last Tuesday, and then they’re shocked when we believe rumors and fake news accounts more than the newscast. [...] When we look at the elementary school in Guánica — which was certified as safe after the first 5.8 earthquake but then turned into an open lot of crushed debris on Tuesday — we shudder at the thought of what would have happened at that site if the 6.4-magnitude quake had occurred during class time. How would those students have been served by the emergency backpacks that we’re told to leave by our doors?"

The more time I spend here in Puerto Rico, the more dismayed I am by how little social safety net there is here. I admire El Bastion immensely, but I also wish it didn’t have to exist. I wish it could just be a place for people to joyfully create art, not a place that is also burdened with providing basic necessities.

Many of my friends back home and people covering Puerto Rico’s earthquakes in the media have been commenting on the “resilience” of the Puerto Rican people. As was mentioned in an earlier blog post, both Deborah and Alejandra hate the word “resilient.” It seems to me that resilience has become the baseline that is assumed of Puerto Rican people, and it therefore becomes an excuse not to provide them with aid. “In situations of abuse,” Alejandra points out, “resilience is a miracle. It is an exception. It is miraculous when someone suffers immensely and comes out stronger on the other side, when they are resilient. It is not the norm.”

Alejandra also tells us that when she first heard the word for resilience in Spanish, resiliencia, she thought it was a mispronunciation of another word: resistencia (resistance). In Puerto Rico, it seems vital to combine these concepts into one.

Street art on Avenida Munoz Rivera

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