Santiago Amoukalli

And so, they came upon this town, influenced by the almost magical stories once heard in the city, amidst their leftist environments. For them it was the chance to at last set foot in a territory that belonged to the Nahua, so thoroughly researched and yet still unknown. Deep Mexico.

“Santiago Amoukalli is the name of a town located in the southeastern region of Mexico where Nahuatl and some Spanish is spoken. Luisa Pardo and Gabino Rodríguez came across Santiago Amoukalli and its inhabitants. Foreigners in their own country, they spent a short period of time there that coincided with the elections on the 7th of June 2015. There were downpours. This story takes place in a troubled time, in an ill country; to jittery people and in a place that perhaps never existed.”

Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol, 2016

This play started from a real event: we [Luisa Pardo and Gabino Rodríguez] were hired by a Canadian NGO to work in a project of Social Art at two Nahua communities in the southeast of Mexico. This experience made us question the way in which we as artists get involved with projects that pretend to “improve” the life conditions of poor communities. We questioned welfare programs, the way in which rich countries work in “un- derprivileged” ones and the mechanisms through which they finance “good” projects that typically have close ties to transnational companies that operate with no consideration whatsoever of human rights. In the play we fictionalized the NGO that hired us, the community where we worked in and much of what happened there. We named it “Santiago Amoukalli” and the NGO “Some Water”.
The play began with a narrator played by Francisco Barreiro, warning that what was about to be told was a fictional story. The narrator intervened constantly explaining what we, Luisa and Gabino, were thinking and feeling. He began telling our arrival (we’re going to give workshops to the children in the community about hand washing and water cleansing, about how to “change their habits and improve their lives”) and end- ed at the moment of leaving after having discovered a painful secret that the town had kept hidden: the memory of a massacre that occurred there many years ago. The auditorium was split into two frontal segments with the stage in the middle of both. A considerable portion of the stage was taken by a scale model that display Santiago Amoukalli, with two big mountains. In these mountains were the church, the school,
a basketball court and some houses scattered around. A screen showed pictures of the
place, some videos and an interview in Nahuatl, with a fake inhabitant of Santiago Amoukalli. The pictures had a soundtrack to them in the style of La jetée by Chris Marker. We wanted to create a tension between sources clearly derived from fiction (a narrator’s voice, the actors performing while completely ignoring the audience, among other things) and other elements that were aimed at provoking doubts on whether what was being shown was “real” (the pictures and a series of evidences ex- posed on stage for the audience to look at after the performance).
We used narcocorridos and traditional Nahua songs.

Un proyecto de A project by Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol • Dramaturgia/actuación Dramaturgy/performance: Luisa Pardo y Gabino Rodríguez • Narrador Narrator: Francisco Barreiro • Espacio y dirección técnica Space and technical direction: Sergio López Vigueras • Maqueta y telones Model and curtains: Pedro Pizarro • Video Video: Carlos Gamboa • Audio y diseño Sound and design: Juan Leduc • Voz final Ending voice: Cuauhtémoc Cuaquehua • Coproducción Co–production: Belluard Bollwerk Festival, Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol y residencia INTEATRO Polverigi • Agradecimientos Thanks: Chantal Peñalosa, Taller de pintura Tay Tia, Proyecto Yivi, Jeroen Fabious, Alex de Icaza.

Santiago Amoukalli premiered at Belluard Bollwerk Festival in Fribourg. It has since been performed at the University of Oklahoma; Teatros del Canal, Madrid; Teatro El Milagro and Teatro La Capilla, Mexico City; Temporada Alta, Girona and Lima; among others