There are those who live to tell and there are those who count to live. There are also those who do both. This vital versatility converges in the Colombian storyteller Carolina Rueda who, after months of international tour, visited, last Wednesday, the Casa América de Catalunya, in Barcelona, to end her trip with the show The Game of Shadows.
Drunk with erotic, humorous and fanciful stories, Rueda's proposal selects stories and fables by Latin American authors crossed by reflection on the human condition and the origin of their desires. Accumulating praise such as "stage beast" or "the monster of storytelling", Rueda was welcomed by an expectant audience who ended up applauding and celebrating her. Hours before facing his last performance, Rueda met with La Vanguardia at the Casa América in Catalunya to discuss the power of oral storytelling and the freedom it grants to those who dare to imagine, with or without uncomfortable silences. half.
Do stories have borders?
I don't think so. His exercise is precisely to jump over obstacles. The narrative is an expert at skipping them and discovering them. It is true that depending on which country the terms mean different things. And that is difficult to discover unless you narrate it. Narrative is a way of highlighting boundaries and breaking them.
And how do you build bridges with those borders?
In the imagination. There is something without borders that creates bridges when explaining a story: silence. Everything is suggested by silence, because it is understood in all languages.
And that's when the erotic springs forth...
Exact. Just by hinting at it, people already understand it, whether they are in Spain, the United States or Argentina.
How do you narrate the invisible? How do you build those common places of connection?
If you sit down to talk to a friend and he tells you an anecdote, he will remember it so vividly that it will make you see the colors, the schedule, the costumes. In that power of imagination we can find ourselves, because we all share memories. People keep very strange things in their memory. The oral word awakens that memory, that imagination. And you complete what I suggest.
So the viewer is also a storyteller...
The spectator works. When you come to hear a story, you come to work. And during the tour I discovered that you not only work under me, but you also work against me. Because when I tell you, you want to guess what's coming, so that I can't surprise you with some twist. The viewer enters into dialogue with me.
There are those who define their performances as a journey...
Yes, because you are going to forget the passage of time. I believe that the narrator's exercise is to take you to eternity, to no time. And for a while you forget about death, about problems, about the bill, about the girlfriend, about the boyfriend, about whatever you have. The story takes you to another place where there is no time and you are a witness to a life that enriches you like life itself.
Does it become other than no time?
Yes, at least it happens to me as an audience. There is no action more powerful than a storyteller, because I travel and experience an experience of eternity. And I'm not talking about something religious, I'm talking about transcendence.
Is that how you understand your art?
Yes. Art teaches you to see yourself in a formative, deforming and monstrous mirror. There is monstrous art because we can be monstrous too. It's hard to see it from the front, but stories help us see it, even if it's out of the corner of our eye.
As with the stars...
Exact. The stars cannot be seen from the front in a telescope, they have to be seen out of the corner of the eye. You have to focus in another direction and notice it from the corner of your eye. The same thing happens to us with our weaknesses or insecurities.
Your main tool is your imagination, can it be trained?
It can be trained like any muscle. When we started telling at the academy, a 10-minute story seemed long, then a 15-minute one, and now I can tell an hour and a half story without problems. You learn to keep images at their full power. And sometimes I have been told that it has a lot to do with theater, understanding it as something scenic, but I think that what happens deep down is a very lively image. That's the key.
Did they tell you many stories when you were little?
He had a very talkative family. My dad was an announcer and narrator. And my mother often told me about her childhood. I thought that I had not been told stories when I was little until I found an evaluation of the nursery school I went to. She said the only way to keep me quiet was to tell me stories or allow me to tell them. And that surprised me a lot.
Have you been criticized for appearing simple?
It bothers me when they look at us and don't value what we do because they always say, "but they don't do anything except talk." But the thing is that the time I spend on stage is not for people to look at me. This is not an act of striptease, it is an act of undressing. I am getting naked with my fears, my hatred or my difficulties, and you will end up doing it too. And in that mutual undressing the miracle occurs.
What moves you to tell?
Explore restlessness and the exercise of freedom. Counting seems to me to be an exercise of freedom. When you imagine, you are exercising freedom and today freedom is a revolutionary act. Because freedom does not imply great feats, rather it implies small joys and going to find what you can provide and provide for yourself thanks to art. And to finish we will say that art allows you to speak from another place where everything is possible. That liberates, invites and provokes.
