FORCE OF NATURE
QUANTUM PITCHES A TENT IN FRICK PARK TO GO ‘ LOOKING FOR VIOLETA’
Two pals were on a quest for a theatrical project as they drove through the Chilean capital of Santiago four years ago. They were looking for Violeta, but they didn’t know it right away.
To understand why their search led Karla Boos’ Quantum Theatre to a tent in Frick Park and the world premiere of “Looking for Violeta,” you should know at least a little something of Violeta Parra, the Mother of Latin American Folk Music.
Parra was a cultural matriarch to Chileans such as Carolina LoyolaGarcia, Boos’ pal on that journey and an associate professor of media arts at Robert Morris University. She also is a multidimensional performer and collaborator with Boos, who had been traveling with LoyolaGarcia in her role as curator of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust’s 2018 Festival of Firsts,
Though they discussed other influential Latin American artists, Boos heard Parra’s music, and she was hooked.
Before her unexplained suicide, at age 49 in 1967, Violeta Parra was world renowned as a preservationist of her country’s musical traditions and an activist- artist whose own music inspired generations to come. Her life has been depicted in films including “Violeta Went to Heaven,” winner of the 2012 World Cinema Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. As for that tent on the Frick Park lawn bowling green, Parra pitched one similar to Quantum’s as a gathering place for like- minded Chileans to share food, music and activism.
Loyola- Garcia was a teenager and becoming politically aware at the time Chile was under the brutal dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who had ousted President Salvador Allende. She was among those inspired by Parra’s voice of protest.
To get to the essence of her music, the women turned to Emily Pinkerton, a singer- songwriter and ethnomusicologist who has traveled extensively in Chile. She plays many instruments, including the guitarrón, the large 25- string guitar common to Latin American music.
“At least a couple of decades of my life has been about searching for her spirit anyway,” Pinkerton said of her personal connection to Parra.
“Looking for Violeta” gazes with new eyes at Parra’s suicide. which most often is attributed to the death years earlier of her infant daughter. Quantum also attempts to see her life through the eyes of her brother.
“Early on, we knew there was something about our project that was going to be different — it’s not just about the facts of her biography, hence came this idea of trying to find her essence, and also connecting to this character who was her brother, Nicanor.”
Nicanor Parra, who died last year at age 103, was a physicist who carried his sister’s legacy as a burden. For Quantum, he will be played by bass- baritone Eugene Perry of the company’s “A Winter’s Tale” opera.
“I feel that a lot of the popular thinking about Violeta Parra paints her as some sort of martyr, someone who was broken,” Loyola- Garcia said. “And I think that was what was different for us, to tell a different story. That she was very much in control of what she was doing and about her life. Yes, she experienced a lot of emotions, but it wasn’t this one story that killed her, and we went fishing for that.”
“For me,” Pinkerton added, “why I like this project is, I feel we are living a lot in her creative brain. To the best of our ability, we are inhabiting her poetry and telling her story through this poetic structure …”
That would be the decima, a Latin American tradition in both poetry and lyrics. “Looking for Violeta” is being told “in a kind of poetic form that’s common to Chile, but it has a lot in common with Shakespeare and it has a lot in common with rap,” Boos explained. “That’s the bridge — poetic spoken word — but we are telling the story in song.”
Quantum was able to secure the rights to one Parra song, her most famous one, “Gracias a La Vida” (“Thanks to the Life”). The rest of the music in this world premiere is by Pinkerton. The team looking for Violeta also includes writer María José Galleguillos and music director Daniel Nesta Curtis. Performers include Kelsey Robinson, Jerreme Rodriguez and Raquel Winnica Young, with Pinkerton leading a band of Jon Bañuelos, Erik Lawrence, José Layo Puentes and Ryan Socrates.
They are all invested in this deep dive into “a remarkable woman [ who was] very much ahead of her time,” LoyolaGarcia said. “She was primordial in aiding the social conscience in Chile that led to the election of Allende. And that she left us much too soon.”
That she was “a force of nature, there can be no doubt,” Pinkerton said. In looking for Parra, the composer is searching for “the creativity that just welled up out of her. She had her ups and downs, but the power of what she could say in one line of poetry, set to a line of music? How did she do it? She could captivate a listener so completely.”
“And this creativity,” added Boos, “was at the service of something. Which was her people and her land. Anybody can relate to that, and it rang so loudly and clearly, the whole world noticed.”
You don’t have to be steeped in the knowledge of Chilean politics to understand the power of one person who could inspire a movement through song. The protest music in the United States, from the Dust Bowl to Vietnam, had its eyes and ears on Violeta Parra.
At a 2014 press conference in Buenos Aires, Joan Baez talked about three icons of folk music: “Pete Seeger for the commitment to the poor, and for the price he paid for his commitment; Bob Dylan for the power of his lyrics and songs; and Violeta Parra, needless to say anything,” Baez said, as reported by music magazine Efe Eme.
Pinkerton described the original adventure as “a folk chamber opera,” but that is within the context of a Quantum adventure, about a Chilean music legend, in a tent pitched on a bowling green.
“It’s quite theatrical and quite abstract in some spots,” Boos said, “and leaves a lot of room for the audience to have the experience they are going to have, on a wave of music — the most emotional language we have.”