Can a theatre group ‘tropicalize’ Stratford?
What’s this? Why are there palm trees? And bougainvillea? And cobbled lanes meandering between whitewashed stucco facades? Why is it so hot?
Simple — you are not in southern Ontario anymore. THIS IS EL SALVADOR, where a warhaunted and still depopulated former guerrilla redoubt named Suchitoto is trying to duplicate the feat that Stratford pulled off with such remarkable success.
What’s more, Stratford is here to lend a hand, or at least some of its people are — a rotating group of theatrically minded volunteers who donate time in the off-season to share their skills and experience.
“We need to give people a sense of pride, of being useful,” says Tatiana de la Ossa, director of Es Artes, the Salvadoran side of the two-country experiment. “Theatre and the arts can change the way we behave.”
So they can — and that explains much of what’s going on six days a week in a 200year-old former colonial hotel on Tercera Avenida Norte, a slender cobbled street that wanders through this idyllic Central American town, an hour’s drive north of the capital.
A workman labours in the alfresco courtyard, repairing a movable stage that’s already warping in the humid tropical heat, even though it’s only months old.
Also on hand are 14 young Salvadoran students and more than half a dozen Canadian volunteers, all at least somewhat older than their Central American protégés and all expert in one thespian discipline or another, ranging from props to costume design, from sound and light to wardrobe. There’s even a professional fundraiser. “They want to replicate the experience of Stratford 60 years ago,” says Melissa Renaud, a production coordinator from Stratford, one of seven Canadians here on a recent weekday morning. It’s her fourth visit to Suchitoto in three years. “The goal is personal- and community-development.” JUST NOW, the Salvadoran contingent — part of a larger group that numbers 28 — are huddled around a large, white plastic table in a lofty room overlooking the sunsplashed courtyard. They pay close attention as Michael Walsh, a Stratford soundand-light expert, explains some of the intricacies of his trade.
Pausing occasionally so that a Salvadoran interpreter can render his words in Spanish, the red-headed Canadian rattles off a series of arcane explanations, peppered with technical jargon such as “submaster” and “grandmaster” and “blackout.”
He employs a somewhat battered 24channel control panel to illustrate his meaning, later demonstrating the same ideas with a state-of-the-art device with 1,024 channels.
About equally divided between men and women, the Salvadorans seem rapt. They are all impoverished youths, mainly from farming backgrounds, who normally would face bleak prospects on their country’s anemic job market.
Worse, at least some would be targets for recruitment by the pandillas, or street gangs, that maraud much of El Salvador, running extortion rackets, waging turf battles or winding up dead.
“The young people find hope in the project,” says Antoni Cimolino, the Stratford Festival’s executive director, who has travelled to El Salvador several times in order to push the theatre initiative forward. “It’s also a very important anti-gang strategy. I think we underestimate the centrality of the arts to a civilized country and a democracy.”
El Salvador, and Suchitoto, have struggled on both scores.
Long ruled by a succession of brutish dictators, the country was plunged into a devastating, 12-year civil war that claimed 80,000 lives before a peace agreement was finally signed in 1992. Suchitoto was especially hard hit, as government troops spent those years trying in vain to dislodge left-wing rebels from their stronghold atop a nearby ridge called Guazapa.
Before the war, the town and its surrounding municipality were home to 35,000 people, a population that plunged to 8,000 during the fighting and has yet to recover, 20 years on.
Nowadays, about 25 Suchitoto or the su side, according to ou Martínez.
LIKE OTHERS IN THE
praise for the fledglin
“The initiative is b flavour,” he says duri ducted over coffee i naded municipal h short-term initiative the young. It’s not t talent. It’s that they d ty.”
They don’t have o phrase should proba El Salvador’s coat of tutes the central ver
5,000 people dwell in urrounding countryutgoing mayor Javier
E TOWN, he has high ng theatre project. beginning to take on ing an interview conin the town’s colonhall. “It’s not just a e. There is talent in that they don’t have don’t have opportuniopportunity — the ably be embossed on f arms, for it constirity for young people in a country plagued by economic stagnation, social disarray and violence.
Maybe the Stratford model offers a way out.
“I think we can ‘tropicalize’ Stratford,” says de la Ossa. “It’s a fantastic model, a beautiful idea. We can make it ours.”
The idea for a Stratford-like initiative in Suchitoto originated with field workers from the Canadian foreign aid group CUSO International, who were traveling through Central America in the mid-2000s, on the lookout for new development schemes.
They approached Cimolino, who quickly took an interest in the proposal.
In fact, the town was already striving to chart a new kind of future, but it suffered from a lack of money, technical skills and other resources.
Along with several others from Stratford, Cimolino travelled to El Salvador for a first-hand look.
He loved what he saw — a quaint colonial pueblo, criss-crossed by narrow cobbled streets, festooned with flowering trees and bedecked with antique houses, whose rows of stucco facades trace the contours of a broad green hill above a sprawling blue lake called Suchitlán.
Already, the town boasted several shops and galleries as well as two small but elegant inns. Each February, it hosted a month-long festival of the arts.
“We found lots of committed people,” says Cimolino. “The town has some great hotels. The infrastructure was in part there. I thought, ‘There may be something here.’ ”
BACK IN CANADA, Cimolino started to raise money, and festival employees or contract workers were soon shuttling down to Central America during the off- season to act as teachers and mentors.
“It’s not a vacation,” says Cimolino. Now in its third year, the initiative runs on a bare-bones annual budget of about $150,000, with financial support from Scotiabank and Power Corp. In a recent fundraising drive, Stratford residents ponied up an additional $17,000 in small donations. CUSO helps with the logistics and pays a modest per diem to each of the volunteers.
The program’s budget also covers the volunteers’ airfare and underwrites the operating costs of the Es Artes school.
“The intention over time is to develop a theatre that draws tourists from Central America,” says Cimolino. “Enjoy the community, take in the arts and buoy the local economy.”
Not all of the students now enrolled in the program are certain to remain with the company, so organizers are bringing in a volunteer from Peru named Érica Legua, a specialist in entrepreneurial training, who will teach a course in smallbusiness development.
“The idea is to give them a general theatre arts education,” says Renaud. “Maybe they will use those skills or transfer them
“The young people find hope in the project. It’s also a very important anti-gang strategy. I think we underestimate the centrality of the arts to a civilized country and a democracy.”
ANTONI CIMOLINO STRATFORD FESTIVAL EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
to other jobs.”
You can’t deny the enthusiasm or dedication of the students.
Consider Érica Martínez, 22, an exuberant, round-faced young woman with expressive dimples.
For three months last fall, she had to get up each morning at 4 a.m. to plant sugar cane along with her mother, both working as hired labourers and each paid a scant $1 (U.S.) for every 42-metre stretch they planted.
Martínez toiled in the fields till noon each day, went home to shower and change, and then headed for Es Artes, already dog tired but determined not to miss a moment more than necessary.
“The two courses I like the best are acting and design,” she says. “It’s magic to be on stage. I would never give this up. It completes my life.”
BUT HUGE CHALLENGES remain. The group has no theatre and instead makes do with its warp-prone movable stage in the courtyard at the Es Artes school, where a large mango tree presents a falling-fruit hazard each spring.
“Believe it or not, we manage to fit 160 people in here,” says Renaud. “It’s a little bit dangerous come March.”
The group produced eight shows here last year, including works by Molière and Spanish playwright Félix Lope de Vega.
Not all the local parents were initially delighted to learn their offspring plan to make a career of putting on plays.
“In the beginning, really, my parents were not in favour,” says Hector Vides, 19, a thin, intense youth with his black hair tied back in a ponytail. “My father is a farmer. Here in El Salvador, there’s a tendency to think you have to work in agriculture. I want to break this cycle.”
Vides was among 14 Es Artes students who journeyed to Washington, D.C., last fall at the invitation of Allan Culham, Canada’s permanent representative to the Organization of American States.
The trek coincided with a meeting of OAS culture ministers and was intended to highlight Canadian development efforts in the region.
“We went there to work,” says Vides. “It was hard but, truly, it was great.”
While in the U.S. city, the youths from Suchitoto performed excerpts from The
Imaginary Invalid by Molière, both at the Canadian embassy and later in the OAS Hall of the Americas.
There were risks. Several of the Salvadorans have friends or relatives who live among the U.S. capital’s large latino community. In some cases, they pressured the visitors to skip the homeward plane and just stay put. Illegally. You can appreciate their logic. By one estimate, it would cost a Salvadoran about $7,000 in bribes and other expenses to make the same journey by the heavily frequented clandestine route, and here were these young Salvadorans, plunked down in Washington — for free.
Go back to El Salvador? You’d have to be crazy.
And yet, when the returning plane took off, every last one of the Es Artes students was on board.
“It was pretty moving to see,” says Renaud. “They had a reason to come back.”
Or, as they might soon be saying in Central America: rompete una pierna.
Break a leg.