Theatre Design & Technology - Summer 2012 - 16

trucks that you could climb up on top, you know; these were metal cars,
and you could get on top without denting them. So that's what we started
with. We had a big panel truck, and we'd all climb up there. Our job was
not to entertain the scabs in the fields, but to grab their attention and pull
them out. Our devices lent themselves to this process, it was very practical. We had a very practical objective. And so we'd use signs and we used
mime and masks, and it was all very direct. It was war. It wasn't entertainment, it was war. And in the heat of that struggle, suddenly the theatre
becomes a weapon, a nonviolent weapon. It's exhilarating when you can
do that. It's happening today, just in the last few days, in India. In Dharamsala, India, you have Tibetans setting themselves on fire. I don't know if
you saw the video of that on the Internet and the photographs of Tibetan
monks running through the streets in front of Chinese rulers in flames. I
mean, that is the extremity of theatre as far as I'm concerned, that people
could set themselves on fire to dramatize their protest and to give their lives.
But I mean that kind of intensity and immensity in human expression speaks
in the theatre. It's a wide range. We knew that by acting our butts off we
didn't get beaten. But at times it did come to us. I had a loaded gun held up
to my head at one point on the picket line, and I had to decide at that moment, catch my breath, whether it was worth dying for what I was doing, for
doing theatre. And I concluded that, yes, it was, because that's who I was,
that's who I am, I can't deny that. And that spirit has taken me across the
disciplines; it's taken me across the country and into Europe with the Teatro.
We've developed forms that speak to actions, to political activism, where our
objective is to activate the audience and to get them into action. You see that
alive again in the streets of America, if not the world.

theatre design

& technology

summer 2012

Our "actos" deal with myths, and perhaps the greatest expression is
our biennial presentation of the Virgin of Guadalupe. We've been doing it
for forty years now, and ten thousand people come at Christmas to see the
play in the mission at San Juan Bautista. It is an invocation of the mission
that was built with Indian hands with these adobe bricks that were built
by California Indians way back by themselves. We're evoking their spirit
with this play, which is the history of the Americas, and we take it on to
"historias." Zoot Suit was a history, an attempt to capture history and
to try to re-write history. Isn't that what Shakespeare did? isn't that what
Chikamatsu Monzaemon did in Japan? Isn't that what all the playwrights
who deal with history do?
And you, at the technical end of it, have the other responsibility,
which is to represent that history and that moment and that story through
all your technology and everything that you can bring to it. That whole
history of theatre technology from the campfires and the limelight, all the
way to today's laser beams, all of that is part of the same continuum. In
1995, I became a founding professor at Monterey Bay, and I founded the
Institute of Teledramatic Arts and Technology, because I felt that given my
experience in the industry, I could see more or less the direction that our
craft and our art form and our profession was headed into. I felt that the
theatre, film, and television and the Internet, all of them were becoming
one long continuum. I could see it happening. It is something we could
trade secrets about, or we could talk about opportunities. But it seems to
me if you're going to be into theatre, you're also in all these other forms
of expression . It's all right to move back and forth, but let's not forget
the campfire, because that's where it all begins. Let's not forget the empty
space, because I began in the most empty space there can be. I come
from the most crude and primitive place you can be. When the Teatro
performed in Paris some years back, a reviewer in Le Monde newspaper
said, "Watching El Teatro Campesino is like being at the birth of Commedia del Arte." That was true. We performed in those plazas, we performed on the streets in Paris. That is our spirit, and we embrace it. Lope
de Vega said, "Give me a plank and a passion, and I'll create a play."
We are that passion, we are that plank. And we performed on flatbed
trucks. But we also performed in huge theatres with three balconies. We
performed at the Winter Garden on Broadway. We performed on sound
stages in Hollywood. We have performed in ancient Greek and Roman
amphitheatres in Western Europe, and we have performed at the foot of
the Pyramid of the Moon in Teotihuacan, Mexico. We have performed in
all these places. And you know what? It's exactly the same experience.
Anywhere in the world, I go into the theatre and I feel at home. I see the
stage and I see the seats and I feel at home. I feel a brotherhood. No matter what language is being spoken. It is my language. It is the language
of the human spirit.
So where does all this go? Ultimately, to whom does the future belong? That is the question that we're posing ourselves professionally, but
also within our professions. Artistically and philosophically, it is the question that absorbs and obsesses us from day to day as artists: where are we
going with all this? I think that possibly as we go with technology, one of
the things that I'm very interested in now is 3D film, because I managed to
make the transition from theatre into television and into film. As an artist I
feel very grateful for the opportunity to have done so and also to go back.
I'm back in San Juan Bautista, in an old packing shed, because there's a
purity there that, as poor as it is, nevertheless it keeps me in touch with

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