Latin American Theater: we are non-negotiable energy

By Marianella Morena, Uruguayan playwright and theater director.

We had all the conditions for NO, but we chose YES. Out of stubbornness. For resilience. Survival capacity. And survivors. We could have stayed with NO. The walled NO. With the mandate. The colonial gaze. The voiceless voices. Neoliberal voices.

Despite that, we went for ourselves. We choose yes, again, to show that: It is possible. We choose. Neither coincidence nor accidental. The yes is born in the self, and is amplified plural: collective. The yes begins biologically to be a political/poetic yes, and becomes stronger.

We come from the yes generated, and generated again. Because they wanted us to be forgetful.

In theater we practice YES. I repeated after myself: in theater we reinvent YES.

We are words, ready to defend ourselves. Word that orders the quiet, the hidden, the sinister.

We are dialogue. We are a body that exercises the physical encounter. We are a body that creates the present.

WE ARE NON-NEGOTIABLE ENERGY. We are people who express ourselves with theatrical tools and we decided to share it with unknown people.

In the darkness of the room, each person expresses themselves sensibly, without caring who is next to them, if they vote the same as me, if they think the same as me, if they believe in the same thing as me. We expose ourselves emotionally, we laugh and cry in the intimacy of the event. To then applaud as a gesture of unity, as a civilizing attitude in a time without time.

We give ourselves to a community without a prior agreement, and we do not fear, we are not afraid. There is no violence. There is no desperation, no anxiety. We remain silent, we turn off our cell phones. We disconnect from the imposed maelstrom, and let our thoughts merge with that group with which we will never share the same experience. We won’t even see each other again.

And then we go to the bar, or we simply have a warm heart, because: there is no lonely seat. Let’s go for the expanded, widened, materialized yes.

Without fear, or profitability. We have produced symbolic field without bank account.

The laws of the market impose: success, approval, acceptance.

The laws of the market are not here to talk.

The laws of the market have nothing to do with our universe.

The laws of the market plan ambushes on happiness, on creativity, on renunciations, on deception, on what to say to make more money.

The laws of the market are the disguise.

And I answer them: I am the one who makes mistakes every day. And doing so is not a catastrophe. It’s a test. Theatrics are offered to be used, inhabited, represented. There is no reason to loot them secretly, feigning authorship.

Theatrics are at the service of the people. We are in perpetual construction. In perpetual contradiction. Like Latin America. Without noise, without red carpet, without quote, or dollarization, a yes with the same S for pesos.

We are a society in liminal borders. We are yes to recover public policies, in a humanity that sees us, without seeing us.

We are yes to banish job insecurity. The apathy, the double standards.

There is a reality that defends normality and places us in the fantastic, to enjoy and forget.

But, a text resonates, a cast resonates, a montage resonates.

We are a stage that manipulates history, in the spine of this continent, without abandoning hope. That’s theater…