Mayo Teatral

Chucho Valdez turns Chopin into smooth wooden building blocks. He stacks them up, knocks them down. Now they’re red, yellow, blue and black, taller, taller, nothing. The off-beat towers of a broken skyline. What I really don’t understand is how he can whittle a city with no knife.

These are some of the shows I’ve seen at The Mella, The Roldan, The Charlie Chaplin and the numerous other theatres within a five-minute walk from our house in Vedado.
A puppet show about when Che was Ernesto.
A contemporary dance company perform an hour long swinging, swimming, flinging, clinging, ticking, broken record of a story of five friends and their complex, suicidal relationships in Havana.
An absurdist play about the loneliness of old age.
The most impressive all-ages dance exposition: Danzon, cabaret, salsa, rumba, samba performed by dancers in the most ornate, velvet, silk, batik outfits.
Los Van Van.
An opera about the medieval crusades sung in an old incomprehensible dialect of Spanish. Never have I seen so many performers simultaneously passionate yet contentedly conscious of their unparalleled ability to put at least ¾ of the audience to sleep within five minutes.

Because artists are viewed as equal contributors to Cuban society they are compensated with a “living wage,” (that’s another topic) just as is any doctor, lawyer, teacher etc. Its pretty clear that, at least in Cuba, eclecticism is the result of removing the profit motive from the creative sector of society.

I can’t remember the last creative performance I’ve seen in Ann Arbor or Northampton despite the abundant artistic culture in both small cities. It’s overwhelming to think of the tab I would accumulate attending so many impressive performances, and of the uniform demographic that would be represented in the audience, in comparison to the black, white, teenage, abuela, infant and senile population that fills theaters here for 5 peso, aka 25 cent performances. But it’s also a healthy exercise in comprehending culture. Oh how colorful and participatory it is, aquí en Cuba.