PuSh Festival: Playwright Carmen Aguirre premieres dark comedy Anywhere But Here
Credit to Author: Stuart Derdeyn| Date: Fri, 31 Jan 2020 19:00:43 +0000
Anywhere But Here opens Feb. 4 at the Vancouver Playhouse.
When: Feb. 4 to 15
Where: Vancouver Playhouse
Tickets and info: From $19.99 at eventbrite.ca
A refugee is someone forced to leave their place of origin due to any number reasons, almost always negative ones. The key word in that definition too often missed is “forced.” Stripped from what has been home, they come seeking refuge.
Where they arrive may never feel like home.
In Anywhere But Here, award-winning author/playwright/actor Carmen Aguirre addresses both the power of the state and the powerlessness of statelessness in a portrayal of a exiled family returning back to Chile from Canada sometime in 1979 during the U.S.-backed military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. At the U.S./Mexico border, they journey into a world both hyperreal and surreal as time weaves and shifts.
Moving through history and memory with a healthy dose of magical realism thrown in, the expansive performance includes the elaborate stage and lighting design and other technical prowess that Electric Company Theatre is renowned for. It also features an original score from composer Joelysa Pankanea and original raps created by Aguirre and Netflix Hip Hop Evolution documentary series host, Shad Kabango. It’s the first time the rapper has co-written a song.
Billed as “a darkly humorous vision of exile,” Anywhere But Here is part of the 2020 PuSh International Performing Arts Festival. The show marks one of the largest Latinx casts and crews to ever mount a production in Canada. Latinx is a gender-neutral term sometimes used instead of Latino or Latina.
A Chilean-born Canadian whose family were part of the resistance against the illegal regime of the Pinochet junta government, Aguirre says this feels like achieving a goal she set out pursuing 30 years ago. To see both the face and the stories of her community represented on the country’s stages has always been a dream. Her motivations aren’t just about the narrative content.
“Of equal importance to me, it’s really a labour issue, in terms of who actually gets work, because if the barrier is race, I have a major problem with that.” said Aguirre. “I was able to continue pursuing a career, no matter what, because I come from a place of privilege being middle class. For many others going into the business, they either got no work or only offered racist stereotypes which impacted on the numbers of Latinx actors in Canada to date.”
But things are changing.
Guatemalan-born Alexandra Lainfiesta is an award-winning actor/singer/playwright who plays 11 year-old Carolita in Anywhere But Here.
Entering her third season as part of the Stratford Festival, the actor won the 2017 Jessie award for outstanding performance in a lead role for her work in Solo Collective Theatre’s Green Lake. Like so many of the top theatre artists in Canada, she is a Studio 58 graduate. She says Aguirre has hit on something deep and fantastic in her writing, defining both Latinx, as well as, generational identity.
“One of the characters in the play talks about “being the centre of the magnet that pulls you North and pulls you South,” and that is something that I think Latinx artists experience so much, trying to constantly regain those roots again,” said Lainfiesta. “To be back in Vancouver, working on this play with so many members of my community is so special. My generation of Latinx artists owes so much to all those who came before us and opened the pathways for us to be able to do something like this play, which is so important.”
The cast of Anywhere But Here features nine actors.
Eight of them are Latinx, which Aguirre describes as “already a coup.” Curiously, although the story is about a Chilean family living in exile in Vancouver, there are no Chileans in the cast. Aguirre says that works, because the real story is the shared experience felt by all who have left their homelands behind.
Those who haven’t will also be drawn into the play’s multi-tiered storytelling and universal love of time travel in a top-down chrome convertible
“We want you to go on this ride with us, to accept our invitation, to a cosmology that is not seen through the mainstream Canadian lens,” said Aguirre. “This cosmology is one where the veil between this side and the other is very thin. We can talk to ghosts, we can talk to people from different eras, which can happen simultaneously. It’s serpentine time and we invite the audience to look at the world in this way, if they don’t already.”
Lainfiesta recalls working on an early concept of the show almost five years ago in a workshop as part of Ruby Slippers’ advanced reading series at the Fringe Festival. She says that seeing the transformation of the work into what it is now and be able to be part of bringing it to the stage is powerful.
“To bring the external representation of the internal turmoil that it is to live in exile is very important, and the play does that,” said Lainfiesta. “Carolita is the embodiment of what it means to live so rudderless and feel like you don’t belong anywhere. Her family’s roots have been pulled up from the ground and moved to a place that is so foreign to everything else that was life before that they don’t really belong either place anymore.”
Not belonging to either world, but living in both, is key to the encounters the family has with people crossing, and those guarding the line between the land of Trump and Latin America. That the piece arrives in a politically-charged U.S. election year makes Anywhere But Here seem perfectly timed.
“It will always be a timely play, but people going to see it now might think it was written yesterday,” said Aguirre. “But it was begun five years ago and it’s been in my head for 30 or more. There have been a lot of discussions with these characters over that time.”
Recognizing that Anywhere But Here is bound to spark conversation and debate, there will be pre-show conversations (Feb. 6, 11 and 14) and post show talkbacks (Feb. 7, 12 and 13). The piece runs 190 minutes with an intermission.