NOHAYQUIENSEPA (NO ONE KNOWS): A REQUIEM FOR THE FORCIBLY DISPLACED by the company, directed by Trevor Schwellnus (Aluna Theatre). At the Theatre Centre (1087 Queen West). Runs to March 27, Tuesday-Saturday 8 pm, matinee Sunday 2:30 pm. $20-$30, stu/srs/Sunday $15, March 18 gala $75. 416-538-0988. See listing. Rating: NNNN
Who knew that a non-narrative piece could be so emotionally stirring?
Aluna Theatre’s Nohayquiensepa (No One Knows) takes as its inspiration the events in the Colombian town of Puerto Berrio, whose residents found bodies and body parts floating in the nearby Magdalena River. Moved by these unknown people, the townspeople set up a mausoleum to their memory, sometimes naming the bodies and giving them histories.
Director Trevor Schwellnus and his company use this starting point to create strong impressionistic episodes in both Spanish and English. The vital production, though, relies as much on Olga Barrios’s choreography, Thomas Ryder Payne’s sound design and Schwellnus’s striking design to make its emotional and political points.
The visuals are especially exciting, a combination of projected text and imagery, energetic performances and live video shot by an overhead camera. The latter contributes to dual images of the performers (Carlos Gonzalez-Vio, Lilia Leon, Victoria Mata, Beatriz Pizano, Chris Stanton and Mayahuel Tecozautla) as we sometimes watch them in a conventional, straight-on fashion and simultaneously see them from above.
In one memorable episode, Pizano invents a full biography for a hand found in the river Gonzalez-Vio’s image is superimposed on Pizano as she devises the man’s story, giving him a visual as well as a verbal identity. In another, Tecozautla dances an impassioned solo of pain, followed by three figures in black attempting, unsuccessfully, to offer condolences for her loss.
Along with litanies of names and dates of those who have disappeared, tombstones are a recurring feature in the production. Lorena Torres Loaiza’s live drawing creates row after row of crucifix-marked blocks, implicitly representations of the deceased. At one point these are grouped by fives – four strokes with a fifth crossing them – and the groupings increase until the numbers of bodies is astounding. Finally, the bars “trap” the live actors in a prison of death. It’s one of the show’s most chilling moments.
Just as impressive is the use of silhouettes against a screen: characters increase or decrease in size as they approach or distance themselves from the backstage light source. Thus a giant figure can overwhelm a tiny one, or several actors can create a multi-headed, multi-limbed creature attacking a helpless villager.
One of the production’s themes is paramilitary violence against the innocent as the text suggests, Canadian mining conglomerates are among those behind some of the activity, despite the companies’ denial of culpability. Without pointing a finger directly, the production implicates those who place financial gain over human life and those who do nothing to stop the suffering.
The poetic Nohayquiensepa begins and ends with a sense of ritual, dancing figures in white bringing candles and offerings to graves. The events depicted are hard to accept, but the suggestion is that when one honours the dead, understands what’s happening and finally protests the horrors, change is possible.
jonkap@nowtoronto.com
