Chiapas Jan 2008
Rudi Galindo and Nick Trotter
from Nick's blog....
Tuesday, 15 January
Saturday, we loaded up and drove down to Ostuacan. In our
convoy were the seven clowns from CHISPA, and some CHISPA
staffers to take care of us. One of the clowns brought her
husband, three children and one of her teenage son's friends.
There were about 17 in all, in four vehicles. I rode in the
pickup truck with four others who spoke no English; the trip
had a lot of silence! WE did manage to have one conversation
about sports, drugs and the recent steroid scandals in the
US. I got about one sentence out every kilometer.
I'm having to think pretty hard to say anything properly.
When I just start talking, what comes out is a mixture of
Spanish, Portuguese and French. Often the Portuguese version
of a word is the first to come to my mouth, and I tend to
glue everything together with French conjunctions and prepositions.
It's kind of funny, but frustrating. I'm discovering that
my French vocabulary is starting to disappear. Scary.
We drove down past a couple of the Zapatista "Autonomous" zones--villages
and valleys that the Zapatistas control and that the Mexican
government allows some peace. They have built their own schools
in there, and apparently there's no such thing as property
taxes in this part of the world, so they really have their
own governments in there.
The landscape transitioned from the piney hills near San
Cristóbal to misty cloud forests to the incredibly
dense green rain forest of the flat lowlands. The flooding
and road blockage was so intense that we had to drive way
north of Ostuacan to get to it; the easier routes were blocked.
Along the way, the road was plagued with collapsed shoulders,
landslides from above, and outright faulting down the middle
of the pavement! To some extent, this is pretty common on
mountain roads; roads themselves tend to destabilize hillslopes
and if the surrounding cuts aren't stabilized when the road
is built, there's trouble. And it looks to me like the highway
department here didn't invest much in the hillsopes and cuts
when they built the roads.
That said, the effects of deforestation, overgrazing and
monocultural farming have never been clearer to me. Ostuacan
is a little backwater town, a market-node for a vast region
of coffee plantations, cacao farms and cattle ranches. It
lies at the foot of the northernmost range of the Chiapas
Highlands, along a riverbed, with a plateau of gently rolling
hills to the north. Every slope nearby that is less than
35-40 degrees has been deforested for plantation or ranching.
And every inch of that land is eroding away. One of the photos
here shows just a green hillside; if you look closely, you'll
see linear formations in the surface of the hill that run
in roughly horizontal lines; these are literally waves of
topsoil that are flowing off of the mountain. The soil is
deep and rich, but it depends on the root systems of forests
to hold it there; the grasses and herbs that dominate after
deforestation are not enough to hold it. Further, when the
cattle diminish the grass and loosen the soil with their
hooves, the situation is exacerbated. The torrential rains
that come twice a year then just wash the whole place away.
Eventually only bedrock will remain here, muddy badlands
where nothing will be able to grow, and the soil will not
have the years that it takes to develop. Then even ranching
will be impossible. The rivers fill with mud and choke out
the fish; the people will most likely leave and crowd into
cites somewhere. They've mortgaged their future for a few
years' profits--or, more likely, corporate or governmental
farming programs have.
The floods that have devastated Ostuacan and the surrounding
communities are not a natural disaster: downstream from the
town, the deforestation allowed an entire hillside to collapse,
damming the river. The resulting lake drowned several communities
and blocked roads, which is why we had to drive so far north.
I don't know how many people, if any, were killed. The lake
is now being drained into another stretch of river via a
cut that the authorities have made (see photos). Unfortunately,
of course, the maps available of this area are rare, of too
small a scale to show much detail, and probably wildly inaccurate.
If I could map this for you, I would.
In the town of Ostuacan itself, the refugees who did not
flee to the sports complex in Tuxtla were moved into plywood
cabins built on concrete pads in the middle of town (see
photos.) Kitchens are communal and there is no running water.
Food stores are kept in fenced-in areas of schools and administrative
buildings, and are guarded by armed security guards. A school
outside of town has been taken over as a camp, where people
sleep in gender-segregated "dormitorios" (classrooms)
and the whole place is operated and guarded by the army.
When we drove down, we were told that we'd do four shows
here--two on Saturday and two on Sunday. But the local authorities,
with whom CHISPA had made the arrangements, weren't too clear
on things, apparently, and when we arrived they were surprised
and had no idea where we were to perform. It was getting
close to sundown, so the venue was going to have to be lit;
we ended up doing only one show that night on a basketball
court (that was being used as a soccer pitch) with a pavilion
roof and big lights. The show went pretty well.
Our show on Sunday was at the school outside of town, because
we woke up that day to torrential rain and the outdoor venue
that had been proposed was unusable. We crowded into one
of the classrooms, which was maybe five meters square, and
the people sat tightly around the periphery or looked in
the windows. The CHISPA clowns' part of the show was cut
drastically; they did one clown/folk dance and a song. Then
Rudi and I started. Our show had to be cut down, too, partly
because of time and space, and partly because one of our
essential props is a newspaper, which can actually be very
difficult to find down here.
All in all, the four shows that were planned for the weekend
were cut down to two, and the show that we were supposed
to do on Friday never materialized; so out of six planned
gigs so far, only three have happened, and the last two we
had to really fight to do at all. This is apparently par
for the course in Clowns Without Borders; in these parts
of the world where resources are few and everything is improvised,
life has a nasty habit of coming up short.
On the drive back, the group decided to go through Tuxtla
since some of the CHISPA staff live there, and because on
the map, it looks like an easier drive... Ha! We ended up
on several tiny dirt roads (that were actually just mud,
washing away like the rest of the place) and almost lost.
Traffic lanes are only taken as suggestions, here, and in
the country anything goes. The driver of my vehicle, Fredy,
is a great guy but he drives with an almost religious conviction
that the left side of the road has fewer potholes than the
right, which made for some consternation among drivers heading
in the opposite direction.
10 January
Today was our first show, at a sports complex in Tuxla Gutierrez
that is serving as a refugee camp for over 800 people from
Ostuacan, Tecpatan and other communities along the Rio Grijalva
in northern Chiapas, which flooded this winter. The complex
is called the " Instituto de Seguridad Social de los
Trabajadores del Estado de Chiapas" (ISSTECH.) Our contact
for this performance was Alejandro Alarcón Zapata,
Director General of Chiapas Solidario por la Alfabetización
(CHISPA), who also happens to be Rudi's neighbor near San
Cristóbal. His organization is a state office which
advocates and teaches literacy; the literacy worker's we've
been working with are Alejandro's employees.
Before the performance, Rudi and I were briefly interviewed
for CHISPA's television program on the local Channel 10;
our performance at ISSTECH was also taped. We don't know
yet when the broadcast will be, but I will post that info
as soon as possible. Supposedly the piece will also appear
on YouTube. Stay tuned... Photos will be forthcoming, too.
The refugees were sleeping on the floor of a basketball
gymnasium, and hanging their laundry out on ropes between
the trees around the grounds. A flock of chickens and turkeys
occupied the small, fenced-in playground. When we arrived,
the people were mostly just hanging out in the courtyards
and under the food pavilion. We chose the our performance
area: a section of courtyard backed by the basketball gym,
where the people could pull chairs over easily from the dining
pavilion and surround us on three sides.
The literacy workers performed first. I was dressed and
ready to go when they started; toward the end of their first
number, I left the swimming-pool building we were given as
a dressing room, and immediately pulled so much of the audience's
attention from the performers onstage that I had to go back
into the pool building and hide. But this gave me a problem:
Rudi was next to the stage and was expecting me to watch
the first part of the show from there; but there was no way
I was going to go out there and not pull focus. So I waited,
and decided that when the literacy workers finished their
last number and took a bow, I'd make the biggest possible
entrance I could: when they left the stage, I screamed, allowing
my voice to echo across the pool, ran out of the pool area
and slammed the gate, and ran screaming all the way over
to Rudi, who had to calm me down. I tried some quickie-pantomime
to show that some kind of Loch Ness Monster had attacked
me from the pool, but I don't think it played too well. Anyway,
afterward Rudi said the entrance in general was a good decision.
How was I going to appear and not pull focus? There was no
way. And this will be an ongoing issue on this tour.
Tuesday, 8 January
Today I assisted Rudi in a clown workshop he's teaching
at El Centro Porfirio E. Hernàndez La Albarrada, a
local institute that teaches literacy, conflict resolution,
peace culture, organic farming, and other worthy processes.
The students are literacy specialists who are working on
using Clown to promote literacy. Rudi is teaching them basic
scenographic structure and principles for working with props
and other characters. This was his second day working with
this group.
He started with some basic warmups: follow-the-leader, Sun
Salutations, joint articulation and isolation. Then he led
an action-mirroring game in which the group forms a circle,
one person steps to the center and each person around her,
in turn, does an action that she must mirror. After everyone
has had a turn in the center, the focus changes: the central
person must do an action which is somehow the opposite of
what the other is doing. This introduces the idea of partnership--the
person initiating the action must, through their action,
help and direct the central person. So actions must be simple
and articulate.
Next we stood, five in a line, all facing the same direction.
This is an improv where there must always be two people squatting
and three standing, but people must change position frequently,
and do it decisively. The person in front has the most freedom,
and the people in back have the most responsibility to maintain
the rules. AFter this is played for a few minutes, of course,
we change direction and the roles are reversed.
We then improvised, in groups of four, a series of tableaux.
One person would take a position, and the other three would
then add to the image. Strength of image comes from physical
connection to one another, direction of energy and clarity
of focus. Rudi then would give us three seconds to change
the tableau.
The students were then given five minutes to rehearse their
homework from the previous class, which was to do a scene
with an object, two minutes maximum, in which the object
is somehow transformed. The exercise brings home the difficulty
of trying to effect illusions in pantomime — it's easy
to appear psychotic! One's perception of time onstage is
also explored, as each scene was timed with a stopwatch.
Rudi then led the whole group in a scene that he's used
on stage before: he has a recording of a buzzing fly that
we must all see together as it flies around us. We have to
react as a group, being sensitive to the dynamics of the
recording, to the fly's actions — landing, taking off,
dive-bombing the group, etc. How does the group listen together?
How do we follow each others' visual focus and change leaders
according to the dynamics of the scene? A difficult exercise,
one that requires deep ensemble, I think, to be really successful.
We then split into pairs and worked on another of Rudi's
comic routines, where a #1 is trying to read a newspaper
and a #2 pesters him, eventually gaining his seat, his paper,
and inducing the 1 to destroy his own hat.
http://nicktrotter.blogspot.com/2008_01_01_archive.html
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