After that we started to work on the
play, Ten Days That Shook the World, a
Soviet work based on John Reed’s book.
But when we got the‘script we realized
we could not present it to a Colombian
audience that doesn’t know anything
about the Russian Revolution. This was
done by a Soviet group for its own audi-
ence who already knows its history and
can relate to it very easily. So we had fo
Start from scratch. Some of the scenes

which were originally in their play are —

in ours, but within a different situation
and context. Basically it is our own cre-
ation, although we got some ideas from
the book.

The play is from the point of view of a
theater company whose director has a
Certain liberal outlook toward the Rus-
Sian Revolution — the way liberal histo-
Tians look at the revolution as one re-
Volution among many, nothing special.
Little by little the actors of the company

_Tebel against the director’s vision of the

revolution and propose their own solu-
tion. The play is a permanent struggle

tween the director and the company
as to how they are going to portray the
revolution.

In a sense the play has two levels:
the narration of the Russian Revolution,
Per se, and how that story is going to be
told, whether from a liberal point of
view — that it is just any revolution,
Nothing special — or from the point of
View of the proletariat — as the first
Socialist revolution. This brings us into

€ present context much more than if
We had just presented a narration of the
Russian Revolution. This shows us that
Colombia in 1978 is further behind Rus-
Sia of 1917. The play does not tell of the
Ussian Revolution as if it were in the
Past, but shows it as the future of Col-

Ombia.
In February we start performing to

the public. The season should run about -

e€ months:

__ Other theater groups in Colombia
_ re working in the same way. They take

an historical or sociological theme and
€velop it in their own way. Many

These four photographs are from the production of Guadalupe Afios Sin Cuenta, an original play
by La Candelaria which telis of the civil war in Colombia trom 1949-1953, a period of massive
government violence against the Colombian people.

groups have had to resort to collective
work simply because the playwrights
cannot produce enough for all the thea-
ter groups in the country that want to
work on these kinds of themes.

Q. Is there an organization of inde-
pendent theater groups in Columbia?

A: Yes, all the major groups work
within the Colombia Theater Corpora-
tion — an organization of over 80 inde-
pendent groups. All don’t work in thea-
ter as many hours as, say, La Can-
delaria or others do. We work six to
eight hours a day in theater; other
groups only rehearse once or twice a
week. They’re workers or students, but
they all have a common interest in the
theater and have joined the corpora-
tion. This is the organization that runs
the National Theater Festival which is
financed by the Institute of Culture of
the government, but it has no say in the
running of the festival. It just gives the
money and we do the rest.

Q: How do the members of these dif-
ferent groups earn a living?

A: It depends. What La Candelaria
makes pays for the house, telephone,
light bills, cleaning, most of the mainte-
nance costs which come with having a
house. The main problem, however, is
that its members cannot make a living
from it. Everyone has to have some kind
of job in the afternoon. We rehearse all
morning and at night. In the afternoons
we try and get a part-time job, freelance
or whatever we can do. We have people
who teach classes in theater or painting
and with that, hopefully, they can get
enough to pay their rent.

For some years now the theater has
provided its actors with lunch, and for
the past year, dinner. So their nutri-
tional needs are more or less taken care
of. Apart from that you have to make
enough to pay for telephone and light
bills at home, and, of course, the rent. A
lot of people don’t even manage to get
that together. It’s a very unstable
economic life. The theatrical group it-
self is very stable, most of the actors
stay for a long time, but economically
it’s not that stable.

Q: Have you performed on TV?

A: Television is a very difficult
medium for this kind of work to be done.
The only groups that sell their work to
TV are those doing classical plays put
on especially for that medium. Once,
however, they wanted to buy one of our
plays, the Brazilian poem. Since it is in
poetry the language is not very direct,
and yet right off the bat they asked us to
cut two scenes: one showing armed
peasants leaving the countryside be-
cause of the violence imposed on them
by the military; another of a virgin who
is the saleswoman for the dead — people
on stage with masks selling their death
waresor their religious wares — and the
patron (the one who hires emigrant
peasants) asks one of the characters if
he knows how to pray because that is the
only job he can give him. Cutting those
two would have left the play with only
three scenes since it was a short play
anyway.

Sometimes they do programs on the
National Theater Festival — they show
one minute of a scene without the text —
but it will be a long time before any of
these plays can be put on TV.

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—FEBRUARY 17, 1978—Page 9