La Constancia del Viento is the first show to be produced at Buenavía Estudio, a collaborative theatre space in Palermo. Pablo Iglesias´ work is an homage to melodrama in grand style. It premiered in Buenos Aires in February, and will run until the 28th of July. His wife, Clara Virasoro, is among the cast-she plays the lovelorn girl with a heart of gold-and the other two points of the love triangle are brought to life by their two close friends and collaborators, Marìa Cecilia Miserere and Martin Palladino. Martin plays her paramour, promised-of course-to Maria’s character, the “wicked witch.”

The theatre is a tiny space, and the audience sits on four or five rows of bleachers. As I hunkered down in front of the set, a claustrophobic Victorian parlor in scarlet and black, I wondered what I was about to see. The play had been advertised as a dramatic love story, and I had pictured fluttering handkerchiefs, waxed moustaches, tragic romance. (I was mostly right.) But the tableau onstage was unsettling: a housemaid in sterile white, face contorted in grief, inky trails of mascara staining her cheeks. How were we meant to react? What were we about to see?

La Constancia del viento clocks in at a streamlined 50 minutes, but never feels constricted or overdone. It scales the dizzy heights of passion without a single false step. Martin Palladino described the impulse behind La Constancia del Viento as part of the melodramatic spirit: “More than anything-the decision to write a melodrama was what sparked this. We have always worked together, the four of us. And we decided to create a melodrama together, to collaborate. It attracted us-the extreme emotions, the need to make them credible but at the same time a little bit…overdone, a little bit larger than life. That genre seemed like a very interesting challenge.”

That aim, so carefully distinguished from simple satire, results in a much sharper, more developed final product. The play is intended as a true melodrama: part of the long tradition of telenovelas, fotonovelas, and vintage films that carry doomed lovers into eternity. The four collaborators spent several months combing through different sources of inspiration, ending up with “a season of telenovela scripts in fifty minutes.” The plot points are shopworn cliches, the twists ludicrous and the denouement contorted, but at no point does this work lose its audience.

I was impressed throughout by the agility with which the three actors managed the intense emotional pitch and surreal drama of the work. Despite its debt to older stories, this play is a new incarnation of the genre: it has a modern alacrity, an acrobatic confidence, a supersaturated emotional and aesthetic palette. As Martin Palladino put it, “You can’t paint in pastels. You’re always working. And on a physical level, it’s intense. The gestures, the body language.” Miserere agrees: “The space didn’t allow for any breathing room. We were always up against each other, in each other’s space. Nothing was ever passive. We were always acting.”

Despite the heavy lifting required by the script, none of the acting seemed forced or laboured. Throughout, I was impressed by the sense of joy embodied in the play. As Martin says, “We tried to make a treat for the spectator. A confection. And earlier production notes played into that-we created an atmosphere. Here in the ticket booth, the villainess. And here in the reception area, the housemaid. We kept some of that spirit, with the glasses of wine and the bonbons. We wanted it to be fun. We had fun.” And Ceci adds,“It was a lot of fun playing the lady you love to hate.”

There is a line of latitude connecting Buenos Aires to Cape Town, South Africa: the 34°S. Through this parallel, the two countries exchange performing art and theatre thanks to Proyecto 34°S, the independent artistic exchange behind Theatre in Translation.

Back in 2010, Proyecto 34°S asked playwrights from both Africa and Latin America to submit their plays for a theatre contest: the winners each won a trip to the other country to present at the premier of the translated version of their plays.

Two years later, the experiment lives on thanks to an online library that showcases African and Latin-American dramas selected throughout the Theatre in Translation/Teatro en Traducción (TT) project.

An eclectic collection of 20 plays from these two continents is now available to download in both English or Spanish, to allow readers “stepping into the other worlds created by the talented, courageous, sensitive and funny writers featured here,” as it reads on the Proyecto 34°S’ website. A book featuring the top plays was also printed in few hundred copies and it is available on request.

“We are planning to premier the winning South-African play, called Luce Verde in Spanish [Green Man Flashing in English] here, next November,” explains Nikki Froneman, founder and director of Proyecto 34°S.

“In the long-term, our objective is to establish a biennial festival of African theatre in Latin America and vice versa. But this is huge. In the meantime, we decided to work with already existing festivals in Latin America, so they can start including more African content – and of course the other way round. This way, people can get used to the idea, so it would be easier from there to move forwards.”

In 2009, Nikki Froneman planted the first seeds of her ambitious project with the production the first Festival of South African Theatre in Buenos Aires.

During five days of performances from three award-winning South African theatre companies, more than 1200 people enjoyed the cross-country cultural immersion offered. The programme also included live music performances as well as the screening of a documentary.

Proyecto 34°S has an erratic character, following the nomadic life of its founder, Nikki, shuffling back and forth from Cape Town to Buenos Aires many times a year.

Last summer, Nikki brought the Argentine play Machitún to the South African National Arts fest. Directed by Argentine Javier Drucaroff and featuring choreography and performance by Cirque du Soleil acrobats, it was an outdoor spectacle with flying bouncing acrobats, ethereal dance and dream-like live electronic music.

“For our TT project, we tent to look for plays that had a very strong physical theatre component, so that it wasn’t very text based and people could understand it better. Even though we worked with text-based plays as well,” Nikki explains.

Plays, however, are not the only cultural product exchanged across the 34°S parallel.

“We are making sure that the wider community gets also involved in what we do. We work basically in replicating the format with local structures of the production, so it can stay in the country for much longer period, in order to exchange not only theatre but everything that could come out of that.”

This philosophy indeed reflects the short-term goal of Proyecto 34°S and its spin-off, the TT project: to get the plays off the page – in new languages, new places, with new casts – and new audiences watching, enjoying, absorbing and, most of all, thinking.

It comes easy to Nikki to explain why African theatre might be relevant, or at least thought provoking, for an Argentine audience too.

“Here in Argentina, people are not so much struggling with the big questions: ‘who/what/where/when are we?’ Everyone seems to be very clear about relationships between different groups of the society,” she points out.

“On the other hand, South African theatre is still quite concrete when talking about drama and real life issue. Where Argentine drama is on a more experiential level, more intellectual perhaps, in South Africa a lot of time you still deal with more concrete issues in terms of subject matter.”

In terms of staging, however, South African plays can be extremely creative. “We do a lot of experimentation with non-realistic staging too, like setting a play in the middle of a dusty road in the country-side, and perhaps we are a little be more interactive with using the stage,” said the South African-born theatre producer.

The big difference between the South African arts scene and the Argentine one is, however, a matter of scale, size and opportunities.

“Here in Argentina there is so much theatre around that it is possible to see everything, everywhere. The trick is to find very good stuff. There are some 500 theatres in Buenos Aires: a commercial circuit (Corrientes), than state theatre (San Martin, Sarmiento) and then independent circuit (San Telmo, Microcentro, Almagro, Palermo). It’s so huge that artists can live off their art, perhaps by doing classes in five different places, working for three different shows at the same time, [working on] solo shows, coaching etc.”

“In South Africa, however, it’s either you are in Arts or you are not. The industry and audience are small.”

For people working at Proyecto 34°S, there is still a lot to learn and to be exchanged, as Nikki admits. “Rather than comparing South Africa with the US, Europe or Netherlands, we prefer to exchange experiences with Latin America. From a development, social, cultural and technological point of view, we are on a completely different level from those places.”

Buenos Aires has therefore been a bridgehead. “That there are a lot of similarities between South America and us, we are going to keep exploring them,” she said, widening the scope of the Proyecto 34°S vision. Perhaps, more similarities than people could think of.

Proyecto 34°S will be encouraging the promotion of a much wider social consciousness and cultural understanding also in Brasil, at the Escena Contemporanea festival in July, and with its on-going collaboration with the Mercosur Festival in Cordoba.

The hard part was to create a contact. Then, cultures and continents easily unfold ahead.

Have you been seeing posters about town exhibiting wafting colourful fog coming out of what appear to be magical hands recently? Well, it’s not your imagination, but an ad for the latest musical to hit the Av. Corrientes theatre strip: Excalibur.

This new production has not been done before; or rather, it has, but not in a musical format. The dynamic Cibrian-Mahler duo, the creators of the Av. Corrientes-hit ´Dracula´, make their 2012 return to the Buenos Aires stage with a reworking of the mythical tale, featuring Dracula´s star: Juan Rodo.

Forget whichever version of the medieval legend – King Arthur, round table, knights, etc – you may have come across before in books or films (including the Disney classic ‘The Sword in the Stone’). The only thing you really need to remember is that Excalibur is a sword and it’s powerful.

The Verdict

Bearing in mind this is a new musical, and a new take on the story itself, the programme for Excalibur is unhelpful even by Buenos Aires standards. It offered nothing but a few unexplained character names, members of the orchestra, and a brief lacklustre synopsis. The rest of the blanks were filled with irrelevant advertisements. No song-listing, no extra help. Everyone was going in blind.

The show begins with a confusing opening scene involving two kings, Arthur and Guinevere, that had me totally baffled. Were there two kingdoms? Did Arthur and Guinevere already know one another?

This feeling of uncertainty was a recurring theme for throughout the show, as the audience was transported into different worlds and time-periods, having begun somewhere around the year ‘medieval.’

The underlying story was pretty simple: sword, crown, baddies, goodies, you know how it is. Following the storyline as it went from scene to scene, however, was a little harder to piece together.

The songs were not clearing things up either, mainly because they were difficult to understand, not only for an
English-native ear, but for Argentines too. At the end of songs, I heard many audience members speaking out loud, questioning who was who and what was going on.

On a more positive note, the quality of the set design was wonderful. The cog-wound backdrop surrounding the stage was beautifully detailed and as the show went on, impressive trucks were rolled on, similarly to how they were in Dracula, using many levels and containing skillfully painted props.

Perhaps the most impressive part was when Emilio Yapor –who plays Arthur- sent his Excalibur sword in flight up to the dress circle. It was a little bit rickety as it went up the wire, and I was a little worried it might fall on our heads, but it made it safely.

The costumes, however, did not match up quite the same way. They were often pantomime-like and distracting, particularly Rey Algac -played by Leonel Fransezze- and Rey Verix -played by Pablo Rodriguez- who looked like they had been dressed from a school play costume closet. Most of the time their wonky crowns were about to fall off, off-putting enough to make it difficult to concentrate on what they were singing.

Arthur’s costumes were odd too, at least when standing next to the rest of the cast. He was dressed sort of like Romeo in Zeffirelli’s version of Romeo and Juliet, but with a more impressive colour palette, while Morgona and her clan of chorus supporters were many times dressed in something that looked like a clash of Rocky Horror versus Xena WarriorPrincess clothing. At times small tributes were even made to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but I’m pretty sure, unintentionally so.

Morgona’s character, played by Candela Cibrián, was an odd choice in every way. Not only was she given bad songs to sing, her screeching calls to ‘Merlin’ made you want to run for the exit. Physically she was set to portray a ‘baddie’ but her singing and the costumes she was put in were so off-putting, it was hard to be convinced by the character in any way.

But it was Merlin who was the oddest character in the show. In my book, Merlin is a magician. He should have been wearing a crooked wizard’s hat and looking something like Gandalf. Instead, the part played by Rodo was given a strange pink and purple stripy drawn-back wig. This included stripy sideburns and a beard, which looked like a bristled out-of-control lions mane stuck to his face.

His presence on stage was not very magician-like either. His movement was sloppy and heavy footed, perhaps intentionally so, but it made him look more ogre-like than anything else. Rodo is actually a sound actor and singer, but even in his grand solos, his voice was drowned out, swallowed up by his accompaniment. Dracula definitely gave Rodo a better chance to shine than in his role as Merlin.

Also, his world was set in the ice age, or somewhere close to the North Pole, which was also distracting, due to his strange clown-like mime-artist disciples who mimicked every bad line read by the character. It worsened as they later returned to the same place, but pulled out the He-man style costumes.

To conclude, the musical is described as a ‘leyenda musical,’ yet I regret to say that it was not at all. The music was often ruined by poor sound and scratchy speakers, paired with uninspiring songs, lyrics and 80s style cheesy melodies. For a musical with bad music, it’s unsure how long lasting it can be. That paired with a weak, muddled-up storyline and a poor use of a talented cast calls for what could end up being a short stint along Corrientes.