Flying Swing (Columpio de Vuelo)
By Carlota Llano. 2009.
What we do and think abounds with the being of
the father and our ancestors.
Walter Benjamin
With gratitude
To my family on both shores, always present.
To my Master´s degree teachers, especially Adriana Urrea, my director and consultant, and a marvelous listener.
To Ana, my piano teacher, for her patient lessons which helped me loosen up my stiff fingers.
To my masters of other horizons, for the light and the shoving.
To my peers, especially Sylvia Jaimes, who taught me how to play with images.
To the Creator for the creative winds.
And to life.
Life appears from the threshold of death
“The notion of life cannot be claimed in art unless there is absence of life.”
Tadeusz Kantor
Two years later. Many clouds have spilled tears and caresses in the greenish-blue mountains whose threshold clearly appear through my crystal window. I look back and see the idealized image of happiness: Nara, the imagined child that I dreamt of in a white dress laughs and flies in her swing. For a long time, she filtered through a crevice of that threshold towards the deep end of my soul. She is now an adult “in the middle of the road of life” and she is confused while watching how the past and present melt in her memory. Her name is Carlota.
Inevitable Carlota.
I wanted to write a creation beyond pain – a happy one – far away from the place where sadness dwells. The starting point was the deteriorated images of an 8-millimeter movie. My father enjoyed filming our childhood, and the young flock enjoyed watching the films over and over again during many weekends, rewinding the film once and again on the movie projector. We watched ourselves climbing the diving board of the swimming pool forwards and backwards. These “backward” images were our favorites. The outcome of these encounters as well as our “cartoon evenings” resulted in the magical moments of movie nights in the mountainous Valle where we spent three months of our unforgettable summer vacations. Years later, one of my sisters found some boxes filled with cans of movies and rescued what was left of them after the passing of time, as some of them were moldy and full of fungus. I suddenly received 10 DVD´s filled with memories I never imagined I would see again, unless they appeared in my dreams.
I returned to my childhood bedroom. The images brought along many friends. My brain was swamped with memories; my emotional world was shaken by smiles and tears. Those who had died, returned – parents, grandparents, and my murdered brother, Alberto. The happy and playful images of those who were alive when we were children were also a paradox – the happy world that no longer exists and the image of paradise lost. The ceiling strongly collapsed in the present, launching the difficult and violent facts of the past, because once again, the house caved in. Ah, the tricks memory plays while it knits its network, trapping us without a way to escape!
From the very first moment, I was aware something must be done with these images. I felt the synergy, the strength of things that seem to happen by chance but actually invite the creative forces to release their energy. I also felt as if a separate identity was trying to communicate through us, as if we were “mediums” who were expressing someone else´s messages. I realized that this separate identity would be the one to pull the reins of this project. I lost control as this piece wrote itself day after day, and knots were tied to join the pieces. The only definite characteristic of this play was its uncertainty, so essential in artistic creations, which held the hand of that certainty that needed to walk through the ashes and rubble of the fallen ceiling.
I worked in my childhood bedroom, where I lived prior to any knowledge of language, where innocence guarantees honesty. There was no need to conceal anything, unless I was playing hide-and-seek. Hidden in a balsamic liquid, Alberto, my dear brother, appeared. His murder reminded me I must be careful with memory lane; I must be brave. However, there was no space left to elude these memories.
Will I manage to speak with Alberto; will we meet at the threshold? Will I be able to continue his legacy and move on? Furthermore, will I be able to “reconcile with death, to accept that life is made up of death, that death is the raw material of life, that each death marks a beginning, and that to run away from death is like running away from life?” according to Dr. Carvajal’s wise words?
In our country, it is common for death to install itself in our families. We must face it as an essential part of life so that it will not defeat us before its uncertain, although definite appearance. There is no joy in living a solitary life. This is simply not a possibility. We must live and die. We must dwell amid dawn and sunrise, between day and night, while the sky shows us how light is the essence of ‘shadow’, and how life is made up of death – how each day that departs is the night that arrives.
“Flying Swing” is the result of an intimate urgency which crept up my spirit, looking for space to take off. It belongs to the world of art which begs to be performed on stage because, according to contemporary theater master Heiner Muller: “Theater is about astonishment/ the happiness of the metamorphosis that unites birth and death/ It´s need is based on this principle.” I believe that the living arts allow us, in a special way, and because of their essence, to deepen our understanding of human nature…when something moves us, when we learn about the classics, when we share space and time with others, when we try to find our identities, when we feel a catharsis. The ‘need’ that Müller refers to is satisfied when “the profound sensation of humanity” is shared. This experience leaves its trace in our unique and ancient human parchment.
Because of their experimental characteristic, the living arts allow for time/space structures which delve into the uncertainty of our human nature, relieving those in mourning from their weight, and reliving individual as well as collective retrospections. Reminiscing transforms the heart, while the eye and the brain tend to forget. I am fortunate because my profession allows hands-on experiences. During the process of the creation of “Flying Swing”, I was lucky to have been able to conclude my period of mourning. I managed to reproduce the happy memories of my childhood and contrast them with the absence of my murdered brother. While creating this piece, his things kept on appearing in my mind – his vests, his case, his meter, his whip, the harness of his horse Scare, and his pictures. Alberto´s footprints. Tracks of his parchment.
The connection of memories: While sharing my testimony, I am expecting the spectator to open up and recognize his own recollections through the impact that watching me on stage will hopefully cause. Director Romeo Castellucci claims that while the actor is on stage, he is completely vulnerable; he cannot elude being a victim or escape the pathos that results from his agitation. Thus, I am a victim, remembering another victim which in turn stirs the ashes of others. The violent acts which claimed my brother´s life and those of so many other fellow countrymen convert ones loved ones into statistics – or things. In contrast, art permits us to reach a metaphysical dimension of truth in which the loved one who is absent becomes real.
Finally, I believe that first and foremost, “Flying Swing” is a love story…love towards my family, my brother, my country, art, nature, each other.A story about deep fear, fear of death – contrasted with love – in an effort to deal with things in a different manner, both within myself and with my surroundings, because, as Walter Benjamin says: “Happiness means being able to see oneself without fear.” The theater of the spirit has the potential of generating encounters with others. It´s an act of love and gratitude which leads us to reject insensibility and radiate humanity. And in our Colombia, it has yet another meaning – to swim upstream in a country that forgets, erases, repeats, and walks round and round in blood circles. It is a testimony, a reminder of those who are gone, a memory of the country, with the hope that history will not continue repeating itself.
To Alberto, my brother, in memoriam,
a concert in our mountainous Valle
CAST
Creation and execution: Carlota Llano
Chief technician: Giovanny López
MUSIC:
-Live music: “Inventions No. 8 and 1” by Johann Sebastian Bach
-Recordings of the aria and four variations of the “Goldberg Variations” by Johann Sebastian Bach, interpreted by Glenn Gould
-English horn at the beginning of the second movement of the “New World Symphony” by Antonin Dvörak.
“Only from the other shore, during daylight, is it lawful to apostrophize dreams with the evocative power of memory.”
Walter Benjamin
SYNOPSIS
Carlota receives the audience, leading them to the space where the performance will take place – a triangle which will accommodate them on two of its sides. Unidentifiable voices, childish games, and songs can already be heard. Once everyone is seated, she enters the stage, shoving and playing with a tin house. She is singing a lullaby between a child and an adult.
Two bonsais are on stage. One of them is a liquidambar. She evokes the “liquis” which her brother planted and she plays hide-and-seek. She looks, she doesn´t find, and she proceeds to ask him to look inside the house with her. Childhood films are then projected on the house. These are 8-millimeter movies that her father filmed. The “Goldberg Variations” by Bach can be heard, as well as Carlota´s voice emitting sounds and unintelligible words.
During the projection, she interacts with her family through withered images of children at birthday parties, family reunions, races, her brother Alberto riding a horse, grandparents, the mother and her babies, monkeys and other animals, and the first communion, among others. This is a game between the present and the past.
The fifth episode leads her to the keyboard, where an imaginary piano teacher asks her to play Bach´s “Invention”. In the meantime, images of the family are being projected on the wall. They are trying to control a goat, but the projection is backwards. She races against the piano and these images. During her parents’ anniversary, she plays another “Invention” by Bach. This performance is interrupted by banging on the keyboard, which destroys the harmony and evokes difficult episodes, thus interfering with the happy world of childhood. Next are many moments in the water: the ocean and a pool full of children who are either playing or swimming. She ends up jumping next to herself when she was a child from the water to the diving board.
The confusion of adolescence is then portrayed. We see a group of harvesters at work, while a group of teenagers are rehearsing a play next tothe pool. Songs of the period as well as revolutionary songs can be heard. She is confused and jumps from one place to another and gets entangled on the rubber band she was formerly playing with. Finally, she pulls out a jar full of stones from the house and pours them on the tin ceiling.
She reaches adulthood. Images of her brother Alberto horse-back-riding since he was a child are projected. An ogre from Bali overshadows these while she plays with Chinese shadows. Towards the end of the projection, the ogre symbolically shoots the rider who is already 35 years old. The image projects him bleeding and the horse without the rider. Through shadows, on a white wall, she moans the death of her brother. Next, two packets arrive. She unwraps them in silence while the funeral elegy is being heard in pig-latin. She slowly lays the objects belonging to the horse and the rider on the ground. She strongly ties the tin house with the whip. She then unpacks a toy horse which has been destroyed and she throws it at the legs of the figure that is lying on the ground. She goes to the piano, and while the projection shows us a faded cowboy show in slow motion, she sings “Vámonos” as if she were in a bar. The images then show us the family at present, introducing us to each one’s position in the world. The murdered brother disappears from the images; instead, she places the liquidambar bonsai. The other bonsai is placed next to the house. She sits and watches herself on a flying swing in the video which is being projected on the wall.
Fragments are then projected on both screens: house and wall. The barber which cuts her hair can be seen on the screen, while in real life, she leaves chunks of her hair lying around.Finally, the deer-sun, characteristic of her mountainous Valle, appears on the house. She sits and watches the sunset with the audience while she plays a sea-drum. Meanwhile, dogs enter the stage to smell her brother’s belongings.The play ends when she calls the dogs and leaves the stage.
The play lasts 55 minutes. No intermission.
