ARCHIVES 2012 / Los Santos Inocentes

On 28 December 2009, Heidi Abderhalden went, along with her crew from the Mapa Teatro, to Guapi. That same day, in this small town in the southern region of Pacific Colombia, the inhabitants, mostly descendents of slaves brought from Africa, celebrated Los Santos Inocentes. Disguised and masked, they plunged headlong into a singular carnival in which the evocation of the Biblical massacre of the innocents of Bethlehem, ordered by King Herod, blended with the commemoration of their ancestors. History and the myths reactivated in this unbridled ritual echo, in a striking way, the looting and massacres of the paramilitary militias with which the present is still riddled. The Mapa Teatro brought back, from this dizzying experience, accounts, images and sounds. On the stage, in the midst of rubber balls and streamers, illusion and reality intertwine. The enemy quickly arrives and enters the festival to make it explode into pieces. Fragments of reality, recent and old memories, dreams and fantasies are reflected to infinity. Through this hallucinated kaleidoscope, the real from time to time takes on the look of alarming fiction whereas the theatre takes charge of returning to a disturbing reality. The actors' subjective narratives open up a world of unresolved questions to us, in which a multi-facetted violence lurks, all the more threatening as it can never be clearly identified. Only the marimba music of the master Genaro Torres seems to escape from the agitation. Beyond its beauty, it rings out as an act of resistance, an unshakeable assertion of existence. SC