The Guadal Publisher presents Scenes and essays. Socio-theatrical critics from Catamarca, from Gonzalo Reartes andn next Friday, August 12 at the Ezequiel Soria Room. The presentation will be in charge of the educator and popular communicator Sebastián Pinetta.
Telling a story is, in addition to telling it, thinking about the person who listens and sees the narrator’s gestures, hears his breathing between words, feels the proximity of the other’s body, observes the entire set of actions that are put into play to paint an action or a sequence of actions.
There is a story by Borges, ‘The search for Averroes’, which has within it a small story told by a traveler, which listeners receive with caution because he may be inventing it while he is telling it, to get out of the quagmire in which he those who asked him to refer to a marvel have entered. He recounts that in a city in the Far East he saw some people, in a house whose end he cannot see, who were telling a story, pantomiming the events of that story. The interlocutors of the narrator of that wonder do not understand what he is talking about. One, with general approval, argues that to tell a story you only need one person and not a group of them that mimics the original story. They ignored what the theater was, they did not understand the fact of a story with actions, with movements, in a house destined for that only.
What drives us to want to hear and see stories? Perhaps the pleasure of receiving from others a story of the world in which we live, perhaps because we perceive in those stories thought, written, acted, suffered and enjoyed by others, in those constructions of a different language, we see shreds of our existence and we see them , we insist on seeing them, to weather a bit of loneliness.
When Gonzalo Reartes writes ‘Escenas y essays’, he is giving an account of his encounters with those stories, with the dramatic speeches, with the first emotions that overwhelmed him when he first saw that reference to a staged story, with bodies that put their bodies to other people, other events. He is writing a story, yes, but a critical story of those stagings, already very different from what Averroes means: Reartes already knows what theater is. We will find reflections that seek, within his own thought, some answer to those questions that arise when he attends to see a play.
It is also a story. Truly, his history with the theater, his short history with the theater. He went to see the works and it is from that action that he writes. His initial emotions leave room for reflection on the language, on the proposal, on the connections that can be established, that he can establish, between what he sees and what he knows, what he has thought. Within that history, which has its chronological order, there is, at the same time, a history of theatrical works of recent times, not all of them, which coexists, in addition to social reflection on the works, with an incipient history of thought on the staged text. And this is what should attract attention and what should be emphasized by the reader: Gonzalo Reartes is making his way in the reflection on theater, beyond or closer to the historical characteristics that we mentioned above. The analysis, initially as a result of the emotion, the impact, produced by a work, turns, as the feeling calms down, into a thorough journey through the meanings that flourish upon a careful reading of Reartes. He is discovering, for and before those of us who read, a series of meanings that are connected with philosophical thought, popular knowledge, in a plot that invites us to ask ourselves questions rather than to feel that we have found the answers or with prescriptive statements about the meanings of a work.
The author shows himself, in the speeches that make up the book ‘Escenes and essays’, as someone curious about knowledge. That is, someone who enters with his tools, with his knowledge, in the leafy habitat of the theater and is giving an account of the various elements that constitute a work, of its language, of its intersections of languages, to show us, passed through the sieve of language and its philosophical knowledge, a universe of connections, a neural network of meanings.
The book appears to us as a necessary and lucid contribution due to its equally lucid writing, due to its dissections of the theatrical event, due to its discoveries of meaning, but, above all, due to the rigorous nature of its manufacture: we can guess the conscientious search and meticulous disarmed to reassemble the works in order to give us the semantic substance of the staging. Gonzalo Reartes tells us the history of staged stories. It is, as the character in the story of Borgesthe “speaker” who tells us, by himself, a story that involves many more people than whoever is telling it, but, in reality, what happens here is that what is shown to us in a story, yes, but the story of a reflection, the diachrony of a thought that a synchrony is going to tell us, a state of the theater in Catamarca. And this is because the book proposes a journey through authors, both group and individual, who make up the theatrical scene in the province. Thus, we learn about the artistic work of Manuel Maccarini and Los Pejertos, Marité Pompei and Los Guardapalabras, Hugo Velardez and Uturungo Physical Theatre, Carla Acosta and La Precariedad Theatre, Carolina Maidana and The Scenic Body Company, Emiliano Gómez and Anxiety Group, Sebastian Sánchez and Theatrical Territories, Gabriela Borgna and Cía. Argentina of Minor Theatre, Leandra Rodriguez and Company and, Alberto Moreno and the Running, and Idangel Betancourt and the Municipal Comedyl. And that’s what makes ‘Escenes and essays’ a work that marks a beginning, a different way of looking at the works produced in the province. The road is started. We hope that more walkers will follow soon.
* Teacher and writer.
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