Circus and theatre based on the largest book burning in Latin America

“Today the work has double value, because it is historical, because it evokes when books were banned, like ideas, films, art and people, and it has another great challenge because of the current era. These are technological times in which the book as a tool is in a kind of threat of disappearing,” says Paula Sanchez, who together with Mariano Bragan They created “24 Tons”, a show designed for children, which crosses the language of the circus and the theatre, based on the burning of books at the Centro Editora de América Latina warehouse, which took place on a vacant lot in Sarandí, Avellaneda, on June 26, 1980, during the last civil-military dictatorship.

After having appeared at the National Cervantes Theater, El Argentino de La Plata, Roma de Avellaneda, Municipal de Quilmes; having performed at Spaces for Memory, the Buenos Aires International Book Fair, the Library of the National Congress and having participated and received awards at Provincial and National Theatre Festivals, she comes to the Beckett Theatre for a season.

Produced by the Los Payasos del Matute Group, it offers performances on Sundays in August and September at 4:30 p.m. This company also presents “3er cadena del conurbano, una tragedia oscuro” (3rd belt of the suburbs, a brown tragedy) on Saturdays at 9 p.m. at the Beckett. We spoke with Sánchez.

Journalist: Where did the interest in this terrible book burning come from?

Paula Sanchez: In the middle of the pandemic, we heard this story that had happened very close to where we have our circus school. Mariano Bragan was given original books from the Publishing Center that had survived that fire, and from there we began to investigate and spoke with a worker there, Amanda, who witnessed that fire because the formal act was done by forcing the workers to photograph that barbarity. They even took up a collection to buy gasoline because the books did not catch fire, they had been stored in a warehouse for two years before being classified and destined to be burned. They were filled with humidity so when the time came to set them on fire the phrase was “The books resist being set on fire.” The neighbors also managed to get in days later to rescue some.

Q: How do you use circus language?

PS: We decided to tell this story from the fusion of circus and theatre. We wrote it for a year, during the pandemic. We couldn’t rehearse and since we had a canteen at school that we had set up to help, we sat down to write in those days.

Q: How did you conceive it for children?

PS: We took a risk in telling a story like this for children. It was a challenge because it is a hard, harsh subject, and language is key in that. That is where we focused on making it kind, beautiful, poetic, so that the terrible story could be told with beauty. There is a decision that the books can be saved by children, which of course is a license in terms of historical rigor, but children must be given and treated with beauty. So we twisted the ending.

Q: There is an aspect of the disappearance of books that in the past was with censorship and today it is with technology.

PS: The threat that books faced was because they were a tool for ideological transmission and the propagation of ideas, an incentive for imagination and thought, which is why the military banned and burned them. In the play we mention many books that were banned beyond burning, censored, buried. One of the arguments that the military used was “excessive imagination.” We took that phrase, we thought it was wonderful to bring it and with that they supported the censorship. And today there are times when the book as a tool is in a kind of threat of disappearing. I think it will not be achieved, but children do not read from books, technology or AI has replaced them, so when they leave the play rescuing a book and taking it home, we feel that it is a symbolic act where that boy or girl will leave with something that is important to preserve and defend. Art is a tool with which we defend things that are not supported by technology. The great mission of adults is to connect them with books, be it through art, movies, books.

Q: How do you see culture and theatre today?

PS: It is a terrible time for culture, threatened from all sides, economically, by state policies, sometimes it is more censored as in the dictatorship, more restricted as in the pandemic, more liberated. Always, surreptitiously, culture gets into the interstices and is a second language that is born even when there are problems. Our project seeks a theatre that represents us, a territorial theatre, from the suburbs, a territory that is not the artistic model of Europe but that speaks of us and our identities.