“Chin Yonk” attacks the Cervantes Theater with an unusual transdisciplinary work

“Chin Yonk strikes again” is a concert and theatrical work directed by Sebastian Irigo which premiered this weekend at the Teatro Cervantes and has two more performances left, with the hope that it will be revived in the near future given its deployment and quality.

Written by Fernando Albinarrate and starring Josefina Scaglione, Nacho Pérez Cortés, Jesús Villamizar and Tincho Lupus, This mixture between French operetta and candombe, features music by Zenón Rolón, rescued after the valorization of her manuscripts. Rollon He was a descendant of slaves who received his musical training at the conservatory in Florence, Italy. Upon returning to his homeland, he premiered various musical shows and this delirious operetta has as its protagonist Jack the Ripper, who was believed to have fled from London to Buenos Aires. The authors make it Japanese and place it in the Andes mountain range. We spoke with its director about this work.

Journalist: What can we say about the story of Zenón Rolón? Why was the author of this work interested in it?

Sebastian Irigo: Gonzalo Demaría, director of the Cervantes, has been studying Zenón Rolón since 1992, Lucio Bruno Videla and Javier Lorenzo, together with Gerardo Delgado (our rehearsal pianist) have been researching and restoring his work for decades. Rolón is a pioneer composer of our musical theater, history or I don’t know what, he wanted the work of this extraordinary Afro-Argentine musician of the 9th century to be forgotten in some archive, his history and his music is part of our identity, what we identifies and explains who we are, a value in culture. Knowing, knowing those who preceded us makes us understand, from the mind and heart, who we are and why we do what we do. I think there is in this show an act of cultural responsibility with our identity.

Journalist: What attracted you to this kind of musical with scores rescued from oblivion?

Sebastian Irigo: I found the proposal captivating, the cast Josefina Scaglione, Tincho Lupus, Nacho Pérez Cortés and Jesús Villamizar are magnetic to me. Working with three musical directors of the stature of Fernando Albinarrate, Lucio Bruno Videla and Javier Lorenzo, some of the most exquisite bars in academic music, with such a numerous choir and a symphony on the stage of the María Guerrero room, were already more reason That was enough to accept the challenge, added to the repertoire of Zenón Rolón, who did not know his music and when I started working it was magical, his work is in our DNA.

Q:How is this Japanese Jack the Ripper located in the Andes mountain range?

YEAH: Enrique García Velloso, one of the fathers of our theater and the founders of Argentores, wrote together with Mauricio Nirestein (another eminence) this hilarious and transgressive argument for that and any era. The work Chin Yonk, was performed only once in November 1895, is surreal and disruptive, the authors were 15 years old when they wrote it and carried all the self-confidence of their youth, Rolón thirty-something, and was already a recognized composer in the world. half. As at all times the stories of serial killers were captivating for the public, generating this fiction gave a sensation of a priori interest. Our theater is extraordinary, whether ancestral or contemporary.

Q.: How do the Liberador San Martin, the leading quartet, the National Choir and the candomberos coexist on stage?

YEAH: They coexist in art, it is wonderful to work with artists of such a level, I am very happy to bring this show to stage. I think it is a fundamental and necessary contribution at this time.

Q.: With such an array of artists, why only 4 performances?

YEAH: There are only 4 performances due to the size of the show, precisely, we have the National Argentine Music Choir and the Libertador San Martín national youth symphony orchestra, which are stable organizations and have a highly requested agenda, just like the Cervantes theater in its programming, for For this reason we were able to find only these two weeks on the agendas, let’s hope that new dates appear later, that is my wish.

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Q: How is Cervantes in this difficult time of cuts?

YEAH: Cervantes has passion in its sales, the passion of its workers, who are all of remarkable professionalism. The national theater has a director who lives and breathes theater from love, and that makes everything take another turn. The cut is huge and painful, but its people make everything happen despite the dark reality that afflicts us. Better times will come, these are hard times, in the meantime, we will continue doing theater no matter what.