Journalist: How is this new adaptation of Manuel Puig’s novel to dance?
Renata Schussheim: This is not dance specifically, it is dance theatre, it is very difficult to define. Manuel’s texts are wonderful, so when we adapt it, we select fragments intertwined with each other. It is not an adaptation, everything that is heard was written by Manuel. The soundtrack is based on his words, mixed with the music, there is a very meticulous selection and what the contemporary dance group achieves is a party.
Q.: You say it’s theater dance but it’s performed only by the San Martín Theater ballet, how is that?
RS.: When we first raised it with Telerman, the idea was to do a combination of actors and dancers. We started with the casting and the members of the dance company were all so good that today there are three Nené and several of each character. It is that we have more, it is a luxury, although with quite a few post-pandemic difficulties, but here we go. We are in the birth canal with Boquitas, about to be released.
Q.: What is the contemporary view of the novel that you bring to this version and how is it different from the previous one?
RS: From the gestures, the proposal to work in theater as if it were cinema, the shots, how people interact; It is not a recreation, we resorted to video, to projections that we did not use before, it was a smaller room. They are scenes that are threading one with another.
Q.: What was the chosen aesthetic to recreate the cinema and radio drama of the 30s and 40s?
RS: In addition to having a lot of humor, those years are recreated from the makeup, the stereotypes, in the characters of the characters. There are some amazing eyelashes that a drag queen makes. She is zero naturalistic, she enters the most experimental terrain of the puppet and exaggeration. She was always like that, Boquitas, and now even more so. The spring festival is crowned by a dress that looks like a wedding cake. It was a time with a very particular and wonderful fashion. When we made it for the first time, I went to American fairs and got authentic clothes made with love by women who sewed by hand, they looked like jewels, they took that time to sew that garment, time that there isn’t now. .
Q.: How was the social behavior of the time that is translated into those speeches of the cinema and the radio theater?
RS: It was another world, but there is something so Argentine in “Boquitas”, the national being, that terrifying word, and also the prototype of the cinema, the charming boy, the tormentor, the seducer but a liar. It happens in a small town, where everything is known and everything is hidden. It is a melodrama, a very particular genre.
Q.: How is the work with the costumes of the Theater Complex?
RS: It is very important to have preserved it if we remember the moment of great tension that was experienced because they wanted to build on that land. But luckily it was preserved. It had cost a lot to put it as it is, from the foundation of San Martín to various sponsors who had contributed. Luckily it continues and is a great place to find changing rooms.
Q.: How valid is Puig?
RS: Manuel is wonderful, pleasant, a great author, with a theme that suddenly becomes very present. There is something of a certain glamor and perfume because he loved cinema, but repression also appears, genres, what is spoken today, is absolutely current.
Q.: How do you see the performing arts?
RS: It is an interesting moment, like everything that happens in crises or apocalypses. I have seen things less framed, at the dance, theater and visual levels, following the transdisciplinary, everything is mixing a little and becoming multimedia. I was talking with the director of Recoleta that people sometimes need to label when they don’t understand, it disturbs them not being able to define, they need to label it but these are times when labels are flying. People need to remain calm to define what it is about, but everything is always completed with the gaze of the other. That is the attraction and the wonderful thing, the experience of the viewer who ends up completing and seeing his own film.
Source: Ambito
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