Interview Summaries

By Linda Frye Burnham

All interviews were by Arnaldo Lopez. They took place between December 21, 2000, and March 31, 2001, in New York City or (Dianilú Cora) San Juan, Puerto Rico. All have been edited for length by CAN. The full, unedited transcripts are available on request. Thanks to Rosalia Berrido for her translation of some interviews from Spanish to English.

Interview with Wanda Arroyo, audience member

Arroyo says came to New York nine years ago and has attended theater only five or six times "because most of them are in English and, even though I speak some English, it’s easier for me to understand and listen to shows in Spanish." She was introduced to Pregones by a friend who worked for the theater and asked her to come and bring some friends. Arroyo organized a party of 50 people, "and it was all very successful. They always ask me when we’re going to the next show, they are always looking forward to it." She says she enjoys the Pregones atmosphere "because it’s really intimate and when it’s over you have the opportunity to talk with the people who put on the show and with others [in the audience]. It made me feel at home, nothing to be afraid of. Everything is in Spanish, and everything is cultural. Not everything is necessarily from Puerto Rico. People think that when you say ‘theater in Spanish’ it means it’s for a certain community, they don’t think that the Latino community includes all the other countries. Going to the theater means a new experience, something new to learn." The friendly atmosphere, she says, encourages the audience to take part: "We heard music and two of the people in our group walked down onto the stage area and started dancing."

To read the entire (edited) interview with Wanda Arroyo, click here.

Interview with Alvan Colón Lespier, associate director

Colón relates his early theatrical experience in Puerto Rico: agit-prop, ensemble and Latin American-style popular theater with fellow university students, including a play with fishermen about a local oil-spill disaster. He describes his immigration to the U.S. and his encounter with Pregones. He says they are "pretty settled on a notion of national identity. The work that we do is born out of our experiences as Puerto Ricans living in this city." He describes the process of making some of his favorite Pregones pieces, and discusses their sense of the term "community" as well as the active, participating audience for the theater. "It’s easy for us to identify with that community when we travel and it’s just as easy when we are here."

Colón says that if Pregones has a legacy, it is in "the way we as an organization relate with other artists. We establish relationships with other artists without asking for too much in exchange, with a lot of honesty and a lot of respect." Aesthetically, he feels Pregones is guided by "a historical review of what Puerto Rican theater has achieved as Puerto Rican theater, and what it is that we should be doing vis-a-vis what they have done and are still doing." As an example, he describes their relationship with the local electricians union, with whom they are doing a play about the history of Puerto Rico.

To read the entire (edited) interview with Alvan Colón Lespier, click here.

Dianilo Cora, former ensemble member

Cora, in an interview in Puerto Rico, speaks of her devotion to "the concept of community theater, for me, in my career, in terms of my function as a human being in relation with everyone else. And of Pregones, the theater that gave me that vision, how we set forth from a collective consciousness that [says that] this has to be for everyone." She speaks of her audition for the company when she was an acting student at NYU, and the plays that opened her eyes to working collectively with the ensemble and with people who were directly affected by the issues the plays were about (example, "El abrazo" and people with AIDS).

She credits her artistic development with Pregones for bringing her "to the point where, in terms of theater, I can basically do anything. It’s in the importance of [knowing] what is the use of theater, what is it here for? It’s here to give, it’s here to heal, its here to contribute to peoples’ personal growth. My entire discipline as an actor comes from Pregones." She especially credits collective creation, the incorporation of audience response and the incorporation of personal lived experience: "Collective, it’s collective. All the way to the grave. You see it there, you see it in everything and that gives coherence to the ensemble, the secret for success."

Cora describes the dynamics of change in the theater from the early stages when the Bronx audience was new, enthusiastic but unaccustomed to a theater tradition. "And to see that [ticket] line was very reassuring, because before that in the South Bronx people got in line only to see who was going to deliver today’s drugs. We got to the point where we were creating lines for something else, where people came with the hope that when they walked through the door they were going to participate in an experience so unique they’d come to the South Bronx to find it."

At the end of the interview she is joined by Jorge Merced and they both attest to the skills and passion they learned in Pregones, now put to use in creating theater that will record the history of Puerto Rico for their descendants. "I think that my daughter has to come to know these things. It’s really important that we never lose that," says Cora. "All that needs to be rescued and kept alive in every sense, because I think that if I didn’t have [Pregones method] as a tool, I wouldn’t know how to do it today."

To read the entire (edited) interview with Dianilú Cora, click here.

Interview with José Joaquín García, former ensemble member

García is a Nuyorican who was with Pregones for seven years and is now the director of his own theater, Rubí Theater Ensemble. He was one of the first Nuyoricans to join Pregones, and realized "that we are Puerto Ricans and there are a lot of things we share, but a lot that we don’t share. There are two Puerto Ricos. There is Puerto Rico the island and there is Puerto Rico the people" and "we have to reach other Puerto Ricans who speak only English." Things he noticed about Pregones from the beginning were that "in their training, whatever they did there was always a discussion of class, gender, race," "a lot of expresión corporal, stuff having to do with stamina, with strength, opposition" and no "naturalistic theater" because " to show naturalistic theater is to accept that things don’t change, that this is the way we are and we’re going to imitate real life and they [Pregones] never did that."

On the other hand, says García, "we don’t fall into this very abstract thing that only we’re understanding, because that’s a bore." Aesthetics relate to political animation in terms of the audience response. He talks about seeing work by some of his students that mimicked the naturalistic action sequences in TV production, which caught the audience up, but left them passive. "The audience was going, 'Oh, bendito, I can’t believe that happened, that’s so sad.' Instead of, 'This needs to stop, what we’re watching on stage needs to stop.' So, they wind up perpetuating." In Pregones, "we try to make it very, very clear that you are watching a theatrical production. We’re not here to take any trips with you, we’re not interested in that, we just want you to see these things and step back, and, of course, we use alienation techniques."

He talks about what he took away from Pregones and uses in his own theater. He says he felt empowered by the group process, and "I didn’t have any of those complejos that actors have about inferiority complex, about giving your power up to other people." His experience in Pregones with Boal's forum theater techniques taught him how to risk himself onstage with the constant intervention by audience members. He also learned by example about raising his own child in a theater environment, how to be generous with his own company and their professional needs, and how to be compassionate but distance himself from personality conflicts. He discusses the artist's position as part of the community, but "in a different class, whether you like it or not, you’re an artist so you have the third eye," and the responsibility of saying what you see in front of an audience. He remembers the stubborn positiveness in the early days with Pregones, having to explain to the neighbors what theater is: "Wow, we’re not talking about creating an audience, we’re talking about developing, we’re talking about starting a theater."

To read the entire (edited) interview with José Joaquín García, click here.

Interview with Jorge Merced, associate director

Merced, born in Puerto Rico but a longtime resident of the U.S., describes his own journey into Pregones, "from music to architecture and from architecture to dance" to theater in Spanish with a Puerto Rican student group at college. He says his "life didn’t involve the Latino community per se." His "political development" evolved from being "in the company of a largely Jewish North American community, a liberal left" into a "political restlessness," which he shared when he found Pregones. "We were all in one place researching the history of Puerto Rico. It was a process of mutual validation in the recognition of gaps in our history."

Merced describes Pregones' tenure at St. Ann's, and the building of community around the theater's content, concerns and experimental approach, using forms of popular culture ("to see how they become a platform from which we may find a contemporary voice, an active voice, a new voice for questioning"). At the same time he began involvement in gay Latino organizing, and other Puerto Rican arts and nonarts groups began to share the space at St. Ann's. As he moved into the Bronx himself and began to lead youth workshops for Pregones and meet the children's families, he evolved "ways of coming to terms with the so-called community I had joined. The theater process gives way to the children’s most intimate stories, so many of them heartbreaking, because I identified in them a missing connection to identity, the definition of what makes you unique, what makes you yourself. They had no connection, the way I had no connection growing up in Puerto Rico until I arrive at Pregones and I begin to understand how the world around me works. These children did not have that space, and Pregones offers that space for them to pursue their own questioning."

Merced talks about the emergence of Pregones' style with a play about Puerto Rican political prisoners, "without propaganda, something truly interesting and artistically complex." It was also the first show with a smaller cast. Merced discusses how individual work relates to the ensemble process: "Collective vision is evident during production and staging, everyone participates, everyone does the readings and the group discussions, everyone contributes. [Even thought they are solos] they are plays by Pregones." He also describes Pregones' programs in the schools, which bring in significant income "because there is demand for Latino artists who speak Spanish and who also espouse an aesthetic, a Latino perspective." This "allowed artists to join the company as teachers in our partnership with the schools, and in training [workshops]." Teaching Pregones' theory, he says "is an opportunity to better internalize that theory until the time comes to use it in our own works." He describes Pregones' collective administrative style.

When asked about the dynamics between the artists and the audience, he points to their outdoor Summer Stage events, where "people will claim ownership of their geographical space, that street, and they decorate it, and they play music before and after, and they bake cakes and things for people to share, and we become part of that event. Sometimes people talk to us while we’re on stage, or they want to get up and join us on stage and participate in the show, or they want to comment on what we’re doing. There is one community that presents us with a trophy every year, a trophy for the artists who come to their street to perform. It’s all very beautiful "

To read the entire (edited) interview with Jorge Merced, click here.

Interview with Judith Rivera, former ensemble member

Rivera, a Pregones ensemble member for 12 years, now works in Puerto Rico in mask theater. Here she talks about her place in Pregones as Nuyorican, a Puerto Rican born and raised in New York, not fluent in Spanish, when all the ensemble members were Spanish-speaking immigrants. She was invited into the ensemble because "they wanted me to be a part of the new pieces that were being created for Latino English-speaking youth audiences." She joined at the same time as José García, another Nuyorican, and "we contributed Nuyorican themes and English-speaking characters." She describes the period when Alvan Colón became interested in the methods of Augusto Boal, which they used when doing "The Embrace" about AIDS with members of the community, touring it to hospitals, drug rehabilitation centers, schools, senior centers and prisons.

Rivera discusses ensemble work centered on Puerto Rican issues, like "Voices of Steel," about "Puerto Rican political prisoners who were in high-security units in U.S. Federal prisons," and "Medea’s Last Rosary," loosely based on the Greek classic, "suited to match [factual] events that occurred in Puerto Rico." She remembers becoming an associate director and helping rewrite the mission statement to include all the things Pregones was doing: "Performing and creating new works, maintaining a repertory, presenting other artists, touring, teaching workshops, community activism, presenting high-quality theater, accessibility to the community, networking on a national and international level, hosting a Latino Theater Festival and so on."

Rivera says, "Without the community we would not exist. [We] presented works in progress for audience feedback. We listened to our board of directors, who are people of the community. A lot of our programs were born from community needs or requests. My experience with Pregones formed my theatrical life and the opinion I have for theater rooted in a community. I like this kind of theater. It is exciting, genuine, sincere, beautiful and magical."

To read the entire (edited) interview with Judith Rivera, click here.

Interview with Rosalba Rolón, artistic director

Rolón describes the beginnings of Pregones, in which she and co-founder Luis Meléndez tried to avoid working as an ensemble because "even though our experiences had been positive, we knew the tendencies of a group theater." She says there was little Puerto Rican theater in New York at the time, except for Puerto Rican Traveling Theater, Pregones’ model of a mix between classic and contemporary Puerto Rican styles. They worked with 65 plays, producing "La colección," covering 100 years of Puerto Rican theater in nine scenes. Some work is issue-oriented, some is "purely theatrical craft."

Rolón quibbles with the use of the term "community": "Audience and community are the same thing to us. Our audience comes from the community that we serve, and for us community and neighborhood are not the same thing." She identifies "community" as "a very specific social structure," whether at home in the Bronx, or Latinos "scattered everywhere. That which is community somehow belongs to many places." She says they chose take up permanent residence in the Bronx because it was "like a desert" in terms of Latino theater. People came from all over to see them. "The decision to create a theater was the biggest decision we ever made in our lives. The biggest."

She discusses presenting artists from other cultures, institutional challenges of space and finance, and the theater’s legacy for the next generation. She says that they occupy the "lowest ranks of grant-making" because they are only seen as a theater in the Bronx, but they don’t "seek political support" and "don’t have political debts." She talks about their after-show discussions with the audience, and their methods of ensemble creation.

To read the entire (edited) interview with Rosalba Rolón, click here.

PERFORMING COMMUNITIES
Carpetbag | Cornerstone | Dell'Arte | Jump-Start
LAPD | Pregones | Roadside | WagonBurner
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