Pan Optikum

Yesterday went from being fairly uneventful (it was Sunday, so many things were closed, plus I have come down with a vicious cold so we took it easy) to being pretty spectacular. During the day, we lingered in cafes and watched some street performers. The clowns alternate through two sides of the Plaza de la Paz and mostly we don't watch, in part because Peter can't understand anything they say, and in part because I can't understand much, but mostly it seems to involve bringing audience members into the "stage" and asking them to do silly things.
However, we did stop and wait when we saw the group of people decked out in medieval armor (made of pleather and machetes altered into swords) getting ready to go on. They did stage combat, with varying degrees of talent. There were small kids in costume also, though they didn't fight -- they were the sword boys and girls (much like bat boys and girls, their jobs were to retrieve the swords at the end of the fights and return them to the next fighters) and also collected money from the audience in a skull shaped chalice. The two men who seemed to be the most experience were great -- fast and without the obvious aiming for the swords or looking where they were going to strike.
From there to another square, Plaza de San Fernando, where we lingered at an outside table at a cafe waiting for whatever was next at the temporary stage there. Turned out it was going to be something we had seen the day before -- people covered in white make-up doing some avant-garde dance that was beyond our experience to appreciate. We had overheard a guy earlier explaining to his friends that it was an art form that emerged in Japan after the atom bombs and as a reaction. Once we realized it was going to be a repeat performance, we left to come back to the hostel. I took sudafed in the hopes that I would feel well enough to go to a 10pm show across town. I didn't think we would make it, but then we described it to one of our new roommates, Greta from Germany and she decided she would go, so we mustered the energy to join her.
I'm going to let Peter explain what we saw:

The show was an extravagant commentary on the sport of soccer. It was almost entirely in Spanish, but for the most part it was very easy to understand. The soccer star, who loves the game becomes disillusioned with the rampant commercialism of the sport and quits. The press and the soccer club itself blasts him for it and his adoring fan turns from idolizing him to reviling him. It also brought up the idea that the spectacle was beginning to overshadow the sport or at least that was my take on it. Given my difficulty understanding the finer points of the critique, it was easy enough just to focus on the staging and performance of the show itself, which was the most amazing part. The piece was performed in an open space near the entrance to Guanajuato. There were four movable stages, which moved through the audience throughout the show. The floors of the stages were about at head-height and were pushed through the crowd by men in soccer uniforms. The first stage was for the soccer star. His stage was the smallest and was mostly made up of a large moving floor, like a treadmill, so he was forced to walk throughout the entire show. The motion of his stage and his motion on his stage made for some powerful moments of reflection, surprise and struggle. The three other stages were also mobile, moving through the crowd separately and coming together to form a single large performance space. They seemed like they were made from theater lighting scaffolding and so in addition to being stages for walking they also were able to incorporate some aerial performance as well. Also, they had plastic screens which could be raised, for projections of images and shadows. When we arrived people were dancing on the stages beneath other performers in harnesses which allowed them to spin and flip completely around casting shadows on the screens. The dance seemed to incorporate motions from soccer players, referees and fans. Since the whole performance was done in an open space, actors would leave their stage only to show up on an entirely different place, sometimes across the field. At one point, the news commentator character appears on the roof of a nearby building, spewing invective at the soccer star who has decided to quit the game and "build a Japanese rock garden and wait until he knows what there is to know." Also fireworks were used throughout the show, sometimes as decoration and at others to bring your attention from one side of the show-field to the other. The two last parts of the show were certainly the most amazing. In one, the three stages had come together at one end of the field, where the soccer club owner, the fan, and the media agent were talking about (or so I think) stepping up the showiness and spectacle of the game --build the perfect players, the perfect team, the perfect club, by removing the human element. The president was in a suit that was filling with air, the fan was on some kind of bungee cord contraption and was trying to climb the poles on the stage with a flaming ball counterbalanced behind him, and the media guy was... um talking or something. As the level of frenzy increased, the president was lifted onto a trapeze, the fan had fallen down onto the stage and was jumping from platform to platform as fire sprung up from below the floor, and the media guy (in one of the harnesses from earlier) seemed to be walking up the walls and then onto the ceiling of his stage area while fireworks shot from the helmet he was wearing. Certainly a spectacle.

Then, at the other end of the field, the soccer star had appeared in a man-sized hamster wheel on a tower about 30 feet off the ground. Through various scenes, he was running or spinning the wheel, while giant flaming spheres swung behind him. In the finale, the three chorus women were hung in harnesses in a framework attached to the wheel, so they spun and pinwheeled around the spinning wheel as fireworks shot up behind them, sometimes from just behind them on the contraption. The finale fireworks show was comparable to one that you might see a small city put on for the Fourth of July, but happening in quick time. It seemed to keep going and going... Curtains of sparks, bursting flowers, spinners, and fountains. It was just amazing.

As Juliet said, we were very tired and almost didn't go out. We're both so glad we did. I wasn't really expecting all that much from the show, but thought it might be fun. Instead it was one of those smashingly over-the-top experiences that raises the bar for crazy things people do in the name of art. Thanks Cervantino, you blew my mind.

Back to Juliet: One thing I want to remember was that, as the fireworks smoke cleared, I looked up to the sky and saw what I thought were bits of ash swirling and then realized they were white birds circling way above -- the fireworks must have disturbed. They didn't seem like night birds. I asked our German roommate about the themes of the show, but she said she didn't understand what they were trying to say, though she had understood all the Spanish and German of the show.

Nyquil sleep for Juliet and earplugs for both of us, but this morning finds me (J) full of cotton in my head and considering crawling back into bed. It's times like this when a private room would be nice. It's Monday, so the museums are closed. I'm off to bed and Peter is off to a Papeleria to get a white pencil -- we got him a colored pencil set yesterday with some artist pencils, but that store didn't have white.