Grace Protopapas caught up with Los Murciélagos, Argentina’s blind football team, before they headed off to London to compete in the 2012 Paralympics.

Camera and editing by Hans Fresen
Lead image by Luján Agusti

IdeaMe is an online platform, which helps creators, be they inventors, artists, or designers, among others, to finance their projects through crowd funding. Each week, the Indy features and promotes one project every week, with the aim of helping the creators finance and achieve their dreams. This week: Teatro Ciego.

Teatro Ciego is located in Abasto (Photo courtesty of Teatro Ciego)

Theatre is, without a doubt, a visual experience. While sound is not absent, the emphasis is laid on what you see. The audience looking in one direction, collectively watching on stage action. They watch actors’ movements and facial expressions, while cleverly placed lighting visually heightens tension, drama and emotion.

As such, ‘blind theatre’, in which the entire concept of visuality is removed from your theatre experience and replaced by absolute darkness, may seem like a bizarre idea.

Yet, El Teatro Ciego has been plunging theatre audiences into disconcerting darkness for the last ten years. With a wealth of experience, the group has established themselves as the only blind theatre group in the world, offering a highly unique and alternative theatrical experience.

This week’s IdeaMe project sees one of Buenos Aires’ most innovative theatre groups hoping to raise funds to put on their next play. This time round, the actors are presenting their own interpretation of the contemporary Argentine comic, Inodoro Pereyra, in total darkness.

Written by writer and cartoonist Roberto Fontanorrosa in 1976, the work follows the life of Inodoro Pereyra, a solitary gaucho. The character parodies traditional gaucho figures of Argentine literature, not least Argentina’s most famous gaucho, Martin Fierro. The use of incessantly repeated phrases and Pereyra’s bizarre characteristics allows the author to poke fun at accepted and tired notions of gaucho tradition.

In preparation, the group are studying the entire work, comprising of more than 20 chapters. Through a selection of the best and most important parts of the comic, the group are creating their own play, offering a unique interpretation of a popular story, well-known to many Argentines.

The idea for blind theatre originally arose in 1991, and El Teatro Ciego was born after founder Ricardo Sued became inspired by the Tibetan notion of “Zen”, seeking to create a unique theatrical experience, in which theatre-goers were rendered blind.

By placing audience members in the dark, El Teatro Ciego forces audience members to ‘see’ by using other senses.

Comparable to how the blind or partially sighted find alternative ways to visualise the world around them, members are encouraged to focus on hearing and feeling, as well as trusting and working with others in the audience in order to understand and ‘watch’ the plays being presented.

The theatre group then not only upturns theatrical norms, but also radically changes the notion of visuality: the emphasis is not laid on seeing things exactly how they are, but instead on visualising plays in an imaginative and personal way. As the group so aptly puts it: “The darkness excites the senses and works to destroy the preconceived notions of how we see things and replace it with them with how we imagine them.”

While the group is quick to note that “this is not a theatre of blind actors nor is it for the blind,” El Teatro Ciego also allows blind and partially sighted actors, as well as those with disabilities, to work in an environment that would usually present obstacles to them. One actress in the group, Julia Francisquez, says “theatre in the dark gave me the chance to work and prove what I’m capable of.”

The experience of theatre in the dark also aims at social inclusion, and to give members an understanding of what it is like to be blind, allowing them to discover how it is possible to see even when the physical ability to do so has been lost, partially or altogether.

While El Teatro Ciego remains the only blind theatre worldwide, the group needs help with funding, in order to uphold the highly innovative and unique theatrical experience offered equally to audience members as well as blind and partially sighted actors.

“We want to generate a deep impact with this show, we want to share it with a wider audience,” says Martin Bondone, director of the group. “We know that theatre in the dark is good for people, and it has a positive effect on the people that experience it.”

Argentina’s blind football team, Los Murciélagos (‘The Bats’) finished in a disappointing seventh place as they sought to retain their title at the Blind World Cup that concluded in Hereford, England yesterday.

The five-a-side game played with a ball containing ball-bearings to enable players to hear the ball as it moves, has seen Argentina at the pinnacle of the sport for more than a decade. World Championship runners-up in 1998 and 2000, Los Muciélagos were crowned champions in Rio de Janeiro in 2002, and again in Buenos Aires four years ago.

As defending champions, Argentina were red hot favourites along with 2008 Paralympic Champions, Brazil, to progress from Group B into the knockout stages, but were sent to a shock defeat in the opening game by France, going down to a last minute Frederic Villeroux goal.

Argentina recovered somewhat in their second game, as captain Silvio Velo gave a virtuoso performance against Greece, scoring a hat-trick in a 3-0 win that could easily have reached double figures.

Any hopes that the Argentines would be contesting for honours were dashed in their third game against an extremely physical China team, when they went down 1-0 to Zhou Bin Wang’s goal shortly before half-time. Argentina were handed numerous opportunities to get themselves back into the match, but were left to rue five missed penalties.

Los Murciélagos did recover a measure of lost pride when they drew their final group game 0-0 against the eventual tournament winners, Brazil, before going on to beat Japan 1-0 in the classification match for seventh place

Martín Demonte’s side will be hoping to give a better account of themselves when they return to England for the London Paralympics in 2012.

Groupo Ojcuro perform "La Isla Desierta" (Photo courtesy of Teatro Ciego)

José Saramago, a Portuguese writer and Nobel prize literature winner, in 1995 wrote a world famous novel called ‘Ensayo sobre la ceguera’, (essay about blindness) in which he warns about having eyes when others have lost them, in a metaphoric way.

In one part of the novel he talks about a man who is driving in the middle of the city and who stops at a red traffic light. But when he goes to continue when the light turns green, he is the only person who is stopped in the middle of the avenue. He cannot advance; he is paralysed and making all type of gestures and signals to other people who are passing by, trying to say something. Someone gets close and can hear him screaming: “I’m blind, I’m blind!”

This is a metaphor of a novel, but in a parallel level, but it does open up the question of how it would be if we could not see the anger and happiness in another people’s eyes, what if we could not describe things around us, or if we could not see the daylight? How or in what way could our other senses help us?

Well, for those curious to find out, this feeling can be experienced for an hour and a half in the outstanding play, ‘La isla desierta’ (the desert island). Written by Argentine writer Roberto Arlt and performed by Grupo Ojcuro (a blind theatre group), the play takes place with the total absence of light, and with actors who are blind.

The concept of the play is the alienation of human beings when they cannot find a way of escaping from their mundane daily lives, and how they can find a way to feel alive. In front of the characters’ office is a port from, and they see how many other people part to unknown destinations and return from everywhere. Their instincts related to the fantasy of being somewhere else, somewhere exotic making them fantasise about what they would love to do, but can’t. They feel trapped. And while they dream about impossible trips, one of them becomes the storyteller.

As soon as you arrive at the theatre you stop seeing. The lights are off and someone who directs the spectators in order to get them in the place asks you to put your left hand on the shoulder of the person who is in front of you, leading the line of people into the theatre to seats in the middle of complete darkness.

José Menchaca, who directs ‘La Isla Desierta’ and Gerardo Bentatti, who is the producer and one of the main characters, met in 2001 when they were already doing theatre in the darkness. They explain how they wanted to continue working with such technique, and found Arlt’s play perfect, as it invites you to dream.

Menchaca points out that voice is the instrument that makes the only comparable element to the eyes. Each of the characters has a distinct voice, making all the difference when sight is removed.

The sense of smell, in one scene, where you have an idea of a remote Asian place from the smells of the food they are eating, and other descriptions develop your senses of smell, hearing, and even touch, as each story tells you about a time, a place with their colours, spaces, people, sounds and spirit.

Difficult to put it in words, using sensations and perceptions the spaces seem to be wider and time seems to stop when the impossibility of seeing it is put in context.

El Globo Theatre perform Dracula (Photo courtesy of Teatro Ciego)

And for the deaf…

Another fantastic approach to life is the creative initiative for people who cannot hear and are hearing-impaired.

The well-known play ‘Dracula’ is performed in El Globo theatre and uses sign language during the performance.

First shown in May and making a comeback in late August, it was the first time in South America that a play has been shown where the actors are official interpreters, teachers and sign-language students. They belong to the group Villasoles, an institution for deaf people, who have been working in theatre for 20 years.

They work alongside the Mutualidad Argentina de Hipoacúsicos (Deaf Society of Argentina), an institution that has been working already for 55 years to help hearing impaired and deaf people improve their lifestyles. The main aim of the association is improving members’ social participation through technology and human resources. And one of the areas focuses on promoting the arts and cultural participation.

Being part of the experience of perceiving in the way we think is not possible is an extraordinary challenge. And both these groups invite us to.

Grupo Ojcuro perform ‘La Isla Desierta’ on Fridays and Saturdays at 9 and 11pm, at Zelaya 3006, Abasto. For more information, visit www.teatrociego.com

For more information on Dracula, visit www.mah.org.ar