Past weekend we had our first encounter with the Matagalpan sexual diversity activist group Actors of Change (agentes del cambio) to talk about their desires of making and presenting a play. Artistic director Mick Sarria agreed to help them voluntarily with the direction and writing of the play centered around the theme of sexual diversity. LLECA´s artistic outset is to break off from educationalist/pamphletarian theatre - art-as-art, we´re convinced, can also speak of social inequalities and discrepansies in other idioms than the political-educationalist one. After they elaborated on their ideas and desires we elaborated on our modus operandi and our artistic principles and conceptualizations. We agreed with the AoC that the play will thus have no uniform message but that its aim is to confront and move the audience into reflecting on the personhood of the sexually diverse, to take the audience on an emotive trip into the heart of their doubts and internal conflicts. That the play is meant to transcend the mere desire of educating an audience, and the ambition is to make an artistic product with conceptual bases that can be presented and exported nationally as well as internationally - that they will constitute momentarily (or if they decide so permanently) a theater group in which activism and actorship can be combined. Based on the first physical practice yesterday and the specific desire of the AoC to place the play´s central conflict in a religious context, the play will be a collective creation probably centering around two childhood friends. Though both of them accompanied the local priest at mass one of them becomes a street corner transsexual prostitute, and the other an indecisive intern of the seminary. The seminarist struggles with his antagonistic feelings of jealousy and repudiance of the transsexual, while on the other hand confronting his internal conflict with the church. Intimacy will constitute a core pillar of the play - intimacy in the light of celibacy, prostitution, and a waist-down paralized angry youngster.
So that´s what we have this far, we will keep you posted on the progress of the process, and will be posting some photo´s soon!
Love,
LLECA
