El Salvador Blog & Press Release // Blog Del Salvador y Artículo Prensa

Acting Workshop in El Salvador

The acting workshop hosted 11-15 April in San Salvador, El Salvador, by ESCENICA and Escena X, was a great experience!! We would love to thank both organizations for their hospitality, sincerity, and the wonderful disposition of their actors and students.

LLECA's Mick Sarria was much appreciated for his fresh focus and intensive posthuman training method. Assisting professor Xavier Espinoza of the Nicaraguan National Theater School, he spent a good week in El Salvador's capital where the maras and the civil war are still painful and silenced subjects of conversation. Again violence proved to be the common idiom of corporeal communication. Upon arriving in San Salvador by bus Saturday afternoon Xavier and Mick found themselves passing by a bus that had just been taken under fire by the mara. Their bus, however, led them to one of San Salvador's 'safe zones' - a zone they did not leave for the duration of the stay. Impacted by the historical similarities of the civil war period, Mick was taken by surprise by these social differences between the two brother countries that in the end live very different outcomes of a similar conflict.

This time, instead of focussing on creating free spaces, as in Nicaraguan prison, Sarria focussed on creating safe spaces. Participating actors and students of the ESCENICA theater program were pushed to find their physical limits and trauma's by encountering their inner animal. Mick uses this methodology - part of his posthuman theater training - to bring out the emotional intensity of the actors when on stage; a true connection with oneself is the starting point for impacting others. Sincerity is the key that can give way to intensity. The actors were allowed to loose themselves in their animal in order to learn how to control their emotions and re-play (not re-live) emotions on stage. The safe spaces the actors were able to create enabled them to talk freely about traumatizing experiences otherwise left untouched, memories of experiences that were sometimes uncanningly horrific.

We will definetly be revisiting El Salvador, most probably in November 2011 - and will keep you posted! The participants and organizers have become a part of our network and future collaboration is a fact!

LLECA will be co-producing a contemporization of Albert Camus's novel "The Stranger" that is planned to celebrate its opening night in El Salvador.

Embedded in the title is a Salvadoran press-released article about the workshop!

Love, LLECA