Soma Mnenosine (Review in English)
Along with Si el río hablara, (also in this year’s Festa) and a work called Cuerpos Gloriosos, which I haven’t seen, Soma Mnenosine is part of Teatro la Candelaria’s Trilogy of the Body, which emerged from a 2010 proposal by Maestro Santiago Garcia to investigate el cuerpo en el teatro (the body in the theatre).
Soma Mnemosine, which I believe translates as The body of memory or The memory of the body or maybe The Greek goddess of memory, the mother of the muses, whose first name is Body, is a wildly ambitious work that uses nearly every tool in the experimental theatre kit–video, dance, music, moving the audience around from place to place, costumes that seem to come from a dream ritual–to explore the fragility of our embodied existence both in times of violence and in ordinary life. I remember especially Nohra Gonzalez as the imperious goddess herself (or is she Death?); the autopsy scene, with audience huddled round the body, squeezed into a tiny corner of the stage; the shadow dancers dangling over the mountains of Colombia; and Santiago Garcia, eighty-plus-years-old, in floor-to-ceiling video, opening his shirt and showing us his wounds (bullets or surgery?) and then joining in a raucous goodbye party.
