Arte y Escuela

What happiness. Yesterday was an amazing day for me. I stayed up almost the whole night writing and translating what I would be saying before each school's presentation. I had been very busy in the days before.

The presentation from Colegio San Ignacio was quite good. The students spent the whole morning rehearsing it over and over. It was a short presentation, just under 10 minutes, but everyone had a chance to do their own part, because there ended up only 4 students performing. The process began with 24 students, but not everyone attended consistently, so just last week we divided up the group into those who were willing to dedicate their time and wanted to participate acting in the performance, and the rest who would contribute to the design component, and 8 decided they were interesting in doing the scenes. One girl ended up going to Bogota, so she just contribute a monologue that someone else performed, two ended up not attending the following classes, and finally two days before one student had his tonsils taken out and was unable to perform.

The four students created some small 'machines' representing the students of San Ignacio, their lives in six years, the fathers of San Igancio, and each gave a monologue someone connected to individual expression and identity formation. They chose these topics, they wrote everything, they created everything, I simply guided them through it. It was just an example of our work, which was really about the exercises we were doing with the whole group, but I felt it hit on the overall issues the students expressed, being boxed in by parents and teachers protected from the world outside, looking for opportunities to assert who they are, artistic expression being discouraged, etc. This is a private school, one of the best in the city, and these students are kept quite apart from the rest of the reality of Medellin. They remained somewhat timid, but often moved their bodies freely, spoke with clarity, and didn't miss a beat.

But the work from Maria Cano is what really brought the house down. Since it was almost everyone's first time performing in anything like this, I had them play a game together on stage, walking around and hugging each other in groups of numbers I called out, while I gave my little opening speech, so they didn't have any time to make themselves nervous waiting in the wings.

They decided to frame their presentation with a Spectrogram, a sociometric exercise we used as a medium for people to speak their opinions and to see the general opinions of the others in the room, moving to one side of the space or the other to indicate to what degree they are in agreement or disagreement with a given notion. Whether the statement is 'I like soccer' or 'I feel safe in my school' or 'my life has been effected by violence,' students voiced their opinions, and the viewing audience was able to see a sampling of the school community's opinions and experiences.

Then, they went into scenes representing the conflicts in their school and community. They originated all these scenes with images that they then turned into improvisations. Some also included a solution to the given problem, but regrettably we didn't have the time to develop that stage with all of them. These conflicts ranged from cutting in the snack line to warring gangs. Some of the scenes were a bit sensationalistic, and they knew it, so I asked someone to say something about their relationship to gang conflicts after one of these scenes. He expressed that these conflicts are real, but a lot of the time become like myths in the community that verge on fictional. Others had more simple ways of addressing serious community issues, like scene of a young girl choosing to sell herself for the first time after seeing all the nice things her friend has who does the same, or a monologue about fights breaking out just because someone is wearing a t-shirt supporting a different soccer team. These are the things they thought of when they thought of Granizal.

It ran just under 40 minutes, with fifteen students in the main scenes and the entire group of over forty on stage for the closing Spectrogram. It was received extremely well by everyone involved in the festival. I could not have been more proud. The elation in the group maintained for the entire rest of the day; dancing together, starting chants (a number of times of my name), there was an energy unmatched and noted by the teachers and every other school in attendance. And what I found one of the strongest signs that what I had done with this group really signified something, is when the festival ended and they were about to leave in the bus, without my saying anything they insisted on forming a circle holding hands with their eyes closed to pass a pulse around the circle, the way we closed every class together. This from a group that the first day would be pushing and shoving each other doing a simple exercise walking around the space, messing with each other at every chance, and it would be almost impossible to get to be quite for more than a few seconds during an exercise. I think I was in a picture with every one of those forty students individually at least twice following the presentations. I was beaming the whole day. We danced together, they all signed my shirt, I got a dragon painted on my face, and I received an unrelenting flood of high fives, hand shakes and hugs.

Although I spent the whole day happy, that is not to say there weren't some other conflicts. Remember that originally I was to be working with a third high school, Santa Elena, but do to some conflicts, the Colombo decided I wouldn't return? Well, Santa Elena had its own presentation as a part of the festival, since they worked with Oneidis on some other artistic projects. After a dramatic entrance of a Silletero (a tradition in Antioquia where they carrying a huge frame of flowers on their backs) and the national anthem, four students each said a little something. Two of those somethings were about me. To be honest at the time I wasn't paying attention. I was overwhelmed with the success of the Maria Cano presentation, not really listening to what was going on. It's easy to turn off my ears to a language when it isn't my first. But, I did notice an odd energy in the room, and was informed afterwords that one student said the reason they did not have anything to present was because "the Yankee left, denying us freedom of speech." And another said something about "we began with the anthem, which features the mountains as a symbol of liberty, because the gringo from the empire was imposing his Yankee oppression" or something like that. Then they showed a slide show of their art projects with the techno song 'Love is Gone' as background music.

What happened my first and only day in Santa Elena is during our introductions some students said things like 'I hate the empire,' 'I'm xenophobic,' and a few other things directed at me when saying something personal about themselves accompanying their name. We began exercises, which many of the same students refused to participate in. Then during an interaction in an exercise one of the students made a physically threatening gesture towards Juan. Juan left immediately. The teacher said and did nothing in response to any of this. After talking with the director of the Colombo, Juan and he decided it didn't make sense for me to return there. What surprised me most about this, is that for the presentation called 'Desearte Paz' which means 'we desire you peace,' the teacher would decide to permit the same students who caused the problem in the first place to be the ones to speak at this festival, and launch similar insults my way. It was not as though they did this without the teacher's permission. She was clearly angry as well, and chose to include this as part of their presentation.

During lunch, I found this a great opportunity to talk with my students about how to react to a situation of conflict. I feel we had a very fruitful conversation as a lunch table about the different options, and how to choose what is the right response. Obviously Juan was enraged, and I had an entire festival full of teachers and students who felt what was said was odd and unjustified. It wasn't even my choice to stop working there in the first place. And after I offer a presentation where students swear, mock smoking marajuana, represent prostitution and gang violence, who really thinks I'm restricting students' speech? Later in the day, a group of girls called me over, and said that they were from Santa Elena, and were not in accord with what was said. Near the end of the day, a girl mounted the platform with the teacher, and said in the name of Santa Elena, they would like to apologize to me for what was said when I visited their school. I'm not sure if they expected a response from me after this, but I didn't give one. I carried on dancing with my students.

The past week was a blitz. We had a powerful final class at Circo Momo, with tears throughout, and truly warm thankful close. Saturday I went to the year end presentation from Renovacion, featuring students' music, dance, and theatre. It really is a great group, and it was good to spend another night in Castilla. The work with APICP was the best yet Monday, but the class didn't happen Thursday. I met up for drinks two nights with Matt and James, friends from New York who were stopping in Medellin for a couple days as they travel through Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia. I spent all day Tuesday at a retreat in San Vincente with Mujeres Que Creen, where I gave short workshop amidst sessions on the properties of plants, making natural shampoo and sun tan lotion, and practicing a song for their the opening of their art piece next week. Not to mention rehearsals everyday with either Maria Cano or San Ignacio, and sometimes both in a day.

I have one more week in Colombia and I have to decide what to do with it. Tomorrow I'm going, I just haven't chosen where. Choco, Bogota, Manizales for the festival, the Amazon, or a list of gorgeous pueblos to stop into. There's a lot more thoughts I've been having and things to write about, but it really is necessary that I go out to the fiesta. I'll try to let you know where I end up.