In 1888 there was a strike by gastronomic workers against the “conchabo notebook”, in which employers wrote down the behavior of those workers that could help others to hire, or not, someone. Different professions joined in to this measure, especially those related to the daily life of the wealthy sectors: domestic staff, hotel staff and coach drivers. They had to give in to the workers’ demands to repeal the booklet. That fight is what counts Babel kitchen (Sundays at 8:30 p.m. in El TingladoMario Bravo 948), a struggle of the most humble that was resolved without bloodshed. “I really like works that have to do with the workers’ struggle”states to Page 12 the author (along with Patricia Suárez) and director Rita Terranova. “First I thought about doing something with the broom strike, but it was a massacre. While searching for something that makes the worker want to continue fighting, I found the conflict over the conchabo notebook,” he says about the origin of the work, which is in its third season.
“The beauty of history taken by Babel kitchen “It was a spontaneous movement,” analyzes the author and director. “When they went to look for the notebook, a waiter said no, he took off his hat and apron. He started everyone, the ball spread,” she highlights and compares: “The rumor and persecution has not changed. The notebook thing was more or less like when they now ask you for your resume or references…”. Since the premiere three years ago many things have changed, even small fragments of the work. “The oligarch says ‘There is no money’, which the actor added one day”Terranova confesses. “At first we didn’t want to put obvious current references, we thought a lot about whether it was appropriate to put something like that, but it was liked so much that we left it. It’s theater. Or before we said: ‘Buy me this flower, the libertarian flower!’, because the libertarians were the anarchists. “So we said we had to put the anarchist flower on it,” she laughs. “The original libertarians were anarchists who sacrificed themselves for their cause. In socialism they were more intellectual. The anarchists were bomb throwers,” she points out.
With 14 people on stage to represent around twenty characters including florists, beggars, nannies, milkman’s helpers, coachmen, waitresses, cooks, seamstresses, nuns, abandoned brides, desperate mothers looking for their son, an uncomfortable aristocrat and a accommodating journalist, links are developed that give body to the work in a dynamic that is built frame by frame sustained in the relationship between the characters. “I really like to tell from this variety, and with great joy,” Terranova enthuses. “Always with theatricality, of course. I wanted a lot of people on stage, to come and go, to occupy the space. That there was music… When the actor comes in he brings it, it is not an external element,” she explains. Music that resonates: from the sound works of The Lone Ranger either The kid even songs from the Spanish Civil War, frame each of those scenes. “Little stories, yes. But ours,” says one of the characters.
–Babel… It takes place at the end of the 19th century, Argentina, the “melting pot” where order was repression, but you never see the police, who are threatening throughout the work. Because?
-We thought about it a lot. He does not appear so that everyone can give the enemy the face they want. It could be the police or it could be something else. It is symbolic, it is the Evil that is threatening you. At that time they were the oligarchs. Miguel Cané, because he went to the Buenos Aires National School, is idealized by some sectors, but here he is shown as he is. In the work there is a fragment that I took verbatim from Cané! I like to show the 19th century because it is a century idealized by many. They say that we were a rich country, and 80% of the population was illiterate. That is why (Domingo Faustino) Sarmiento was so concerned about literacy. I like to tell about this time, where there was a very marked difference between the rich and the poor. It was the time when they took the cow on the boat! The other day I heard from a boy that we have to return to that Argentina, and he terrifies you… There was abundance, but for few and at the cost of workers’ hunger.
On a stripped-down stage with multiple entry and exit points, like a Creole theatrical babel, a melting pot of characters from different origins appear who represent those mythological years (with their good and bad) of an Argentina in formation. Babel of characters also has a range of variants that are articulated in the theatrical genres deployed: the Venetian masks remind us that it is theater, the narrator of the Greek tragedy tells us what will happen and each story develops in the Creole grotesque, the farce or comedy of art. Scenic medley, a narration by chapters that as time passes are woven together like vignettes of a story that make sense when all its pictures are articulated and thus gain a strength that each one would not have on its own. The work proposes winks that expand the universe of meaning of Babel to Frida Kahlo, Evaristo Carriego, Bertolt Brecht, among others.
-The work takes a position in the conflict it narrates. Does theater have a social function?
-Absolutely. I don’t mean to indoctrinate (laughs), but rather to help you think. The play is undoubtedly political theater, not partisan, and this is very clear. Many people after the performance tell us that they are going to look for the notebook, or the kids leave thinking about what things are good and what things are bad. There is something about anarchist theater, which always ended with a birth. We liked the birth, and I liked that it was a woman. This is the good thing, that people leave thinking, moved in some way. Chekhov said that theater is a hug that a human being gives to another human being. Theater sometimes makes you better, more reflective. I don’t know if this is out of fashion at the moment, I don’t think so…
