The Twin Rigors of Art and Community, or Not the People Who Said Green: Thoughts on Teatro Pregones

Somewhere in the heart, Teatro Pregones is rooted in a concept of community that is way deeper than simple geography. For Pregones, community is a gathering of people around shared traditions, common culture and a commitment to theater as a place for ideas, growth and joining of forces. After all, Pregones started as a touring organization. Though the South Bronx has been the home for their creative work for 20 years, their first four years (1979-1982) were exclusively on the road, performing for Puerto Rican and Latino audiences throughout Connecticut, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. They continued regular tours through this extensive region while building a series of creative partnerships in the Bronx until 1986, when they set up more permanent residence in St. Ann’s Episcopal Church, in a South Bronx community called Morrisania. They have demonstrated their commitment to their home communities in the Bronx through several relocations since St. Ann’s, yet they still tour today. They bring summer productions to nontraditional venues throughout the Tri-State area and schedule a variety of touring residencies across the nation that they arrange on their own and in collaborative partnerships with other ensembles. One of the most notable of these partnerships is called The Exchange, their ongoing, long-term creative collaboration with Roadside Theater from Whitesburg, Kentucky, and Junebug Productions from New Orleans.

Their strolling presence is consistent with the spirit of their name. Pregones is the Spanish word for the chanting of street vendors who walk from neighborhood to neighborhood selling their wares. Their roving consciousness also reflects certain distinct realities of the audiences they intentionally reach. Puerto Ricans and Latinos of all origins have come to the east coast of the United States, settling in various cities and towns, moving where opportunity suggests. The rich and complex artistic identity the company has developed, and Arnaldo Lopez has so finely captured in his field notes, charts a fascinating interaction that can exist in a healthy artist/community relationship. What is particularly important is that this interaction, for Pregones, is neither defined nor confined by a specific geographic neighborhood or locale. In this reality, I believe that Teatro Pregones offers a challenging model of the artistic relationship with the world around it, a model that is useful in gaining constructive understanding of the crucial function of art: fulfilling essential human needs and the social impulse of community building.

Rosalba Rolón, the founding artistic director of the ensemble, is a pioneer. Her life work has taken the idea of contemporary American theater beyond the notion of simply producing seasons of plays. For Rolón, theater is the continuous exploration of a popular and accessible aesthetic, the development of style that comes out of a long-term artistic investigation of the culture and life realities of the audience, and the creation of "innovative and challenging theater rooted in Puerto Rican traditions and popular artistic expressions." The Pregones ensemble creates new theater works using any useful process and approach that particular projects may require. They adapt nontheatrical source material. They integrate dramatic text with music and dance. They utilize any number of other approaches that realize the specific artistic vision in actual performance and creative choices. Most important, Pregones ensemble members assume that their work is entirely and deeply integral to the culture of their audiences.

This reality expects and requires the constant education of the artists in the ensemble in order to deepen their understanding of that culture and how their own creative vision can be expressed in ways that are accessible and exciting for their audiences. This is quite different from the all too common assumption that new theater requires the education of the audience, that the audience has to learn how to appreciate plays, artistic choices, and innovative visions of performance.

Rolón’s interview is particularly clear about artistic responsibility in relationship with community.

… audience and community are the same thing for us. Our audience comes from the community that we serve and, for us, community and neighborhood are not the same thing. Sometimes I don’t know if people talk about community when they’re trying to say neighborhood, or if they are talking about community in a broader sense. Plus, we may fall in the trap of thinking anything can be community: ten people think this is green, so it’s the community who said "green." That’s not it. The community is a very important, very specific social structure.

The continuous education of the Pregones ensemble includes the deep investigation of this social structure. A significant aspect of this structure is the multitude of institutions and agencies that constitute daily life in the community. Pregones’ history is filled with creative partnerships with schools, churches, unions, groups of citizens organized for self-help projects, social agencies – a remarkable diversity of formal and informal organizations. Furthermore, the core ideals of Pregones as expressed in these interviews assume that ensemble members live their lives within the realities of the social structure – raising children, going to church, joining clubs and generally participating in the life outside of work.

In his interview, senior ensemble member and associate director Jorge Merced describes his entrance into the ensemble. Born and raised in Puerto Rico, Merced entered college as soon as he arrived in New York. In college he began to discover what he calls a "political restlessness" but "in the company of a largely Jewish North American community, a liberal left," not the Puerto Rican or even the Latino community. When he started working at Pregones, he was struck, at first, by the

physical aspect to the work, meaning I … had to walk, had to go to a specific place in the Bronx … that put me in a different space, outside the safety-net of a college campus. And so, rather innocently, I begin to associate that with a community with the community. Night after night I worked there with the company and started to see how many Puerto Ricans lived there, in the oldest neighborhood. Then I begin to identify, to appreciate what a community in the South Bronx was all about, and what it is that I do in there. In essence, my first few months with Pregones were very important because I was pushed to or forced to understand another space where dialogue among artists is taking place. I start to define community in those terms and before that I did not have that.

In some ways, then, Merced describes the social structure of the community in physical, even geographic terms. He goes well beyond that, however, when he also describes community as a "space where dialogue among artists is taking place." This is a constant theme in the interviews with the Pregones ensemble and a particularly important aspect of the Pregones model – a sense of a community of ideas, of the struggle for identity, of shared common interests that go beyond geographic terms. Merced shares insight through his subsequent embrace of this broader, deeper sense of community when he worked with children and young people in the neighborhood. Moving his own living quarters into the neighborhood near the theater, he realized,

I take on the task of living and working in that community, with the understanding I then had about community, what it was, my misunderstanding of what it meant. … Misunderstanding because it limited my perception of the breadth of the work one does; that [the work] is not determined or limited by the four, five or six blocks around the place where the show goes up. But it was crucial for me to go through the process of living there, teaching to kids and teens who come from Pregones’ immediate surroundings. It was really important because we built close ties with the children, the parents … . And, of course, 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 [to] 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 when Pregones offers them that space for them to pursue their own questioning, it was a very intense period, both for them and for me. … It was a beautiful project.

We can imagine the intensity of that beauty, as artist and child, teacher and student experience what it means to learn together, to share common discoveries, and to release them in the artistic expression of plays they create together. Allowing theater to be a "space" to give way to stories for common discoveries may be a simple way to describe the essence of Pregones’ mission and practice. It also describes how the theater form can be a structure of the community, a mechanism for recognizing community, a way even for building community. This notion of community structure goes well past the sense of neighborhood or geography and identifies it with function, the act of the theater event itself. Merced and his students grew together, despite their very different personal backgrounds, by discovering their common realities.

This process of building community, a self-acknowledged function of Pregones, is repeatedly honored and documented in these interviews. Wanda Arroyo, an audience member and clearly a fireball of energy, describes how her enthusiasm for what she discovered when she first encountered Pregones moved her to become an organizer of theater parties. She brings groups of friends and acquaintances (50 at a time) who come because they find it fun. They love to socialize, to dance and laugh together.

That’s one of the things that I love about Pregones, because everything is in Spanish and everything is cultural. … I go and I enjoy it but I’m also learning. …I’m surprised, I find myself thinking, "I never knew that" or "I never knew it could be like that." Plus I love the intimate connection between the actor and the audience. … That made me feel at home, nothing to be afraid of.

This, to me, is a remarkable testimony to the accomplishment of Pregones, to have combined traditional cultural practice with innovation and discovery to stimulate learning and growth in a nonthreatening communal process. This is the highest of standards when it comes to assessing the worth and value of art in our lives.

The strength of Pregones’ following has been proven to overcome, even ignore the impediment of distance. Pregones has moved several times since it first set up shop in St. Ann’s. Each time, audiences have moved with it, confirming wide-spread satisfaction consistent with Arroyo’s declared appreciation for Pregones’ unique form of theater. Beyond the development of this kind of community support in the immediate neighborhoods of the South Bronx, a significant percentage of Pregones’ regular audience travels in from further distances. "Forty-five percent come from Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and adjacent areas," says Lopez, who applies an interesting term to this reality.

Experts use the term "translocal" to describe the unfixed geography of Latinos in the United States. Latino communities, they say, are never altogether of one place. The ties that bind will draw them in many different directions, pull them towards more than one home. Making community will often entail travel. It does not mean an inability or an unwillingness to stay put. Rather, it means drawing from significant sources near and far. I asked audience members where they came from and confirmed that it is not uncommon for people to travel a distance to visit Teatro Pregones. Upstate and out-of-state families make the trip regularly. … It is not so much where they live but where they meet, and why they meet, that matters.

Lopez goes on to identify why Pregones has become "a signal landmark," a place to meet for so many from so many places.

People spoke of Pregones as an organization they can trust. Programming was repeatedly described as "genuine," "honest" and "true." … "I trust Pregones because they speak my language," offered one patron, "because I know they like to eat their tostones con mojito. That’s why I think people will come in here with their guards down – it’s safe. But it’s not just about that. It’s not like at the bodega or at the [Puerto Rican Day] parade. You’re not gonna leave the same way you came in."

How does the ensemble earn this trust and how does it accomplish artistic events that affect, even change their audience’s perceptions, understanding and sense of the world with such surety and consistency? By diligent, professional, smart application of hard work. The discipline of Pregones, says Lopez, "obeys the twin rigors of artistic vocations and commitment to community." The interviews of Pregones ensemble members and associates burn with this rigor and the joy it brings them. This is an ensemble of highly skilled, professional artists who are on fire with their commitment to community.

An especially revealing reality in this ensemble is that it is made up of Puerto Rican artists who were born, raised and trained in Puerto Rico, then moved to the U.S. and, in near equal measure, Puerto Rican artists born, raised and trained in the U.S., for whom English, not Spanish, is their first language. The differences between the native Puerto Ricans and the Nuyoricans constitute the realm of "the other" just as rigidly as any other cultural collision. The interview with José Joaquín García exposes the hard, challenging work the performer and the ensemble undertake with each new ensemble member. The substance of the problem García faced is not only language in all its manifestations but gesture, common understanding of the world around us, and common practice in relating to all the people in it. García’s joy in mastering Pregones’ required skills and vision is mixed with a remembered pain at the cultural gulf he experienced as he struggled to find his way into the ensemble. Besides the quite beautiful story that he and the other ensemble members recount in these interviews, García’s journey marks a strong pathway for thoughtful, effective cultural education. Recognizing, honoring and crossing cultural boundaries is a life skill that is increasingly required of all who live in the United States (and the world, for that matter). Certainly theaters and arts organizations are faced with these challenges as a matter of simple survival, if not as a central function of their purpose. In this, as in its artistic accomplishments, Teatro Pregones is a model of exceptional value, offering challenge, courage, and pathways for many, regardless of specific cultural background or orientation.

The process of bringing new members into the ensemble, a process of acculturation, parallels the creative process of adapting traditional texts into contemporary performance – a signature process for Pregones. Jorge Merced describes a moment when he realized the substance of this process.

Understanding that all [the popular sources and materials] are a part of us and that we can own them, use them, take advantage of them, see them upside down, inside out, that is something I hadn’t done until then. I didn’t understand that, in fact, within the codes of so-called folklore or the so-called cultural identity of a community or of an ethnic group, or even a country, one may find the tools to craft a new voice without sacrificing that which is dear.

It is fascinating to understand these two stories in parallel, to hear how the processes of gaining performance mastery within a new culture resonate with the processes of making new art from existing texts and other sources and materials. Each process confronts that which is often considered somehow "untouchable" – uh oh, can’t go there. Pregones removes the taboo and accepts the difficulty. This, then, is the terrain and region of Pregones’ work – making valued contemporary art and artists out of the cultural traditions and resources rooted in Puerto Rican life. Besides vision and courage, this work insists on discipline or, as many Pregones’ members call it, rigor.

The interview with senior ensemble member and Associate Director Alvan Colón Lespier defines with clarity the depth of training and the constancy of continuing education that the Pregones ensemble requires of itself to do its work. Beyond, or perhaps, around the classroom, workshop and rehearsal space, the ensemble’s artistic "inheritance" includes Puerto Rican poets, visual artists, as well as theater practitioners, political activists, artists of all disciplines and community leaders from throughout the Caribbean, Mexico and Central and South America. This is a company that actively draws on global sources to create theater with their audiences gathered locally. Colón’s passion and intensity when describing what theater is for him, as a consequence of this amalgamation of the world onto the stage, resonates truthfully in the imagination. Acknowledging, in his own words, the dual intentions of the ensemble – the artistic, aesthetic with the political, ideological – Colón proposes the image of discovery as an orientation for his sense of theater: "Discovery in the sense of removing the veils that cover the issues of our time…." Given Colón’s deep appreciation for this image, it is gratifying to the reader (as it must be to Colón himself) to hear so many audience and performers echo the image in their own stories about the ensemble. Recounting conversations with many people surrounding Pregones, Lopez says, "Coming to Pregones for the first time was often described as ‘an awakening,’ ‘a discovery,’ or ‘a revelation.’"

In light of the intense value Pregones places on the twin rigors of artistic vocations and commitment to community, their internal struggle with the currently favored labels of "community-based" and "grassroots" adds to an understanding of the model Pregones offers the world. While they "didn’t mind" those labels for a while, they have come to understand them as confining, restricting and belittling of their work. They see that the terms, perhaps originally intended to identify specific focus of artistic excellence, have come to be used to separate out a set of artists from accepted legitimacy.

Rolón says that "Pregones is known as a theater in the Bronx, which equals community theater and translates to a permanent slot in the lower ranks of grant making, for instance." Lopez echoes the concern in more comprehensive terms and includes a lengthy quote from Colón on the subject in his field notes. The terms "grassroots" and "community-based" are often used to make a distinction from what some would intentionally describe as "real" art or the so-called "mainstream" art. Pregones holds up for me the challenge that what we call mainstream all too often falls prey to a consumer interest of name recognition and generic formalism. Pregones proposes the human experience of discovery of self and the world. The point of the matter, it seems to me, is that the art of Pregones is inseparable from its community. This does not mean its neighborhood. It does not strictly mean its lingual home. Rather it means the community from which its audience springs, the people who share with Pregones common trust, hope and joy.

The field and this project can learn a great deal from these interviews and the model Pregones and its ensemble members propose with such elegance and success. Pregones opens theater making to the fertile potential for healthy community building simply because, when the connection between theater artists and their audiences is forged effectively, the gathering of people together in a specific space for a commonly valued experience is a force of unity and capability. And, as Judith Rivera, a former ensemble member and associate director, reminds us, this kind of theater is "exciting, genuine, sincere, beautiful, and magical."

Robert H. Leonard is associate professor in the Department of Theatre Arts at Virginia Tech where he teaches directing and improvisation. He brings 30 years of experience as founding artistic director of the Road Company, a nationally recognized theater ensemble (1972-1998) based in Johnson City, Tennessee, which created and produced two dozen original plays reflecting the history and issues of the Upper Tennessee Valley and Central Appalachia. Leonard served as a site visitor for WagonBurner Theater Troop for "Performing Communities," and currently serves as a member of the national board of Theatre Communications Group.

References

All unattributed citations are from this research project and can be found in the online interviews of "Performing Communities: The Grassroots Ensemble Theater Research Project."

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

Original CAN/API publication: November 2002