Day Five: “History is ours, and people make history”
Hey everyone! My name is Sarah Gagarin, I’m a sophomore in MSU’s BFA Acting program, I’m sure it’ll come as no surprise that today was another fantastic day in Chile for all of us. We kicked off the day by gathering in front of the Afro Cafe-a fantastic mom & pop coffee shop located across the street from our apartments-before heading out. Sipping on our Americanos and iced coffees we descended into the bowels of Santiago's Metro system, bound on this morning to visit The Museum of Human Rights, also called the Museum of Memory.
Chile is by far one of the most beautiful and prosperous countries I have visited, but if I have learned anything definitive of the Chilean identity it is the resilience of the people.
On September 11th, 1973 the democratically-elected socialist government of President Salvador Allende was overthrown through the military force of his opposers; a coup that was sponsored and aided by the CIA. What followed was seventeen years of a horrendous dictatorship controlled by Augusto Pinochet. During this period of time nearly 200,000 Chileans were driven into exile, 3,000 were executed or went missing, and tens of thousands were tortured and interrogated inside internment camps because they were believed to be supporters of the former President Allende. The museum opened in 2010 as a culmination of all of the memorials across Chile dedicated to those lost during the Dictatorship.
To say that the museum is moving is a gross understatement, between the artifacts found in the internment camps, personal testimonies from those people who were taken by the government and their families; the truth of living in that timeis inescapable. Everything is so carefully documented, and covered in painstaking detail that despite the two hours we spent there, we probably were unable to see at least a third of what the museum had to offer. I could have easily spent the whole day there.
My personal experience of the museum was, almost indescribable. It felt as if this museum was a gift that the people of Chile gave not just to those who had been lost, but to the world. A unflinching reminder of what can happen when fear and power collide. The first exhibit was dedicated to chronologizing the day of the coup, it contained footage of the Presidential palace being bombed while President Allende’s final speech, just prior his suicide played on a loop. As I sat and listened the passion in his words brought me to tears, as it dawned on me what my country had taken from this one. Another exhibit that stopped me in my tracks was a section of the museum dedicated to the signs and drawings made by the children of those who had been taken by the government; with wobbly handwriting and bright colors they protested against Pinochet and demanded justice or at least information about their parents whereabouts. I was struck by the maturity of their words, and once more it sunk in to me that these children had been robbed of a childhood.
There is so much more that could be said about our time there but in short. The museum was beautiful, it articulated the feeling of immense rage, sadness, and suffering the Chilean people endured while under the dictatorship. The museum never targeted the CIA’s involvement, they never even mentioned The United States. Yet, a feeling of shame and guilt followed me the whole way through, multiples times I felt myself whisper, “I’m sorry” to the pictures of those who had been taken. As a citizen of the United States this is a part of my history, and it is something that cannot be ignored for its ugliness.
After that we were all emotionally, physically, and mentally exhausted but with just a few short hours before rehearsal we swung by cafes to grab sandwiches, and settled in for the work. Today Heather opened our rehearsal with some Suzuki work.
While the upperclassmen of MSU and some of the older Mayor students have had experience with Suzuki, I, along with the majority of the other students, have not. This did not deter Heather in the slightest. She pushed us all to our max, encouraging us to use our breath to move us through the intense physical rigor of the exercises.
In the Suzuki exercise of statues we explored what the difference is between “performing” our statues and “exposing” our own emotional truth within the container of the statues. This grew into us moving through the space switching from our “performance” selves (eager to have the spotlight and be seen as the best/most talented) to “exposing” our deep inner emotional truths. Afterwards we had a long conversation about what it is to truly peel back the mask that we put on in front of everyone. Those of us who were green to Suzuki brought up that because of the muscular stress we were feeling in our legs we didn’t have the time to try to worry about what the “performance” was in statues. Yet, we all came to the realization that the emotional truth lies in having the struggle and allowing yourself to live in it. To let it feed the work, that is where emotional truth lies.
As we finished with Suzuki, our professors stepped out to converse about what to do next. Instructing us to perfect our work on the chair dance, and then put it to music. These self run rehearsals are always fascinating to experience because in complete spite of the language barrier we always have clear and constant communication. We chose to pick up the overall tempo of the dance given that its previous incarnations tended towards slow and methodical. After about an hour Heather, Debbie, Leonor, & Gabriel returned to watch the work we had accomplished. After running it once for them, they instructed us to perform the dance without counting out the beats together. “Turn up the music, breathe together, and listen,” Heather instructed as we nervously returned to our starting positions. This time through, the silence as we waited to begin frightened me. I was certain that we would fall apart and out of rhythm immediately, yet as the music began we moved in unison. We exhaled and inhaled as if we were one person dancing, even moments of audible sighing occurred simultaneously. In the moments when we teetered on the edge of falling apart we always pulled together with practiced ease, and for the first time the choreography was no longer choreography. Every movement, every Look, meant something; while it certainly varied from person to person we all had similar themes in mind when we discussed what we could do with what we had found in the dance, especially in relationship to Love Languages and “exposing” vs “performance” afterwards.
Now, it was Debbie’s turn to run our lives. She had us participate in an exercise where we went up and told the story of a moment-or the moment-when we realized we wanted to do theatre. Contrary to our standard procedure we did not take pauses for what we said to be translated. As each student went up be they from Chile or the US their voice, their truth, and their story was heard. The word for word meaning became unimportant, as I sat and listened to the Mayor students speak I understood their stories. It’s difficult to explain how I understood it but I did. At the end of each person’s story they had to stand and allow the audience (en español el público) to uproariously applaud for them. Trust me when I say that that is harder than you would think.
At the end of that exercise we gathered to work on our first chunk of text from Neva by Guillermo Calderon. Our professors had been carefully selecting and cutting the text to fit what we believed we had found in our work. Working tirelessly with Roman as our translator, Heather explained the cuts to us and gave each of us collective chunks of text to memorize with excitement for putting it into the work tomorrow.
-Sarah Gagarin
