Storify Timeline on Guatemalan Issues I discovered while living there.

http://www.lostiempos.com/diario/actualidad/internacional/20130406/perez-molina-rechaza-acusacion-por-genocidio_208321_446639.html

If you click on the link above my curated story about the Guatemalan issues surrounding the genocide trial appear. I am trying out Storify, a new platform for social media, curating the news. I will be trying to combine it with Joining the Dots, a kind of infographic style timeline that organizes stories by context, setting, time and theme.

I am being slightly short in this post, just because I want to see how many of you like that interface. I will still be posting here, but not in the same way as before.

Enjoy.

Update on Xela

Wow... it has been so long since I posted. I am no longer sure where to start.
After the whole of January, life became a bit of a blur. I had to prepare a bunch of schedules for my bosses from ArtCorps, who scored the gig with Cultural Survival for me and set out a project plan. That was painful, but I got through it.

It all started out really well, but soon the 14 kids who started out with me learning video production began to slack off. It was all great until they had to start learning how to edit, and they began to object to learning "theory" as they called the main tenets of editing, not realising that I was teaching them settings on the computer that they needed to understand and also the basics of pixel resolution, light in video and how to colour correct, as well as how the timeline on a sequence works. Basics. Nothing more. But 10 of them wanted to play with the cameras and not necessarily create a story with what they had filmed on video. They wanted to see themselves on video and on the camera viewfinder. Not even on a computer screen. It was a bit of teen psychology I was not aware of before.

So here we are, almost at the end of my time here, finishing off two of five videos, starting the third one and organising four and five. Yet, our second video is going to a surprise to the organisation, because it is so long and so information heavy that we are going to have to divide it into 3 videos. I will be giving them more than they bargained for and end up with hopefully two highly trained students. Yes, 2. Not 4. These 2 are the die hards, the committed, the really talented, who stuck through the rainy season, no money to get on the bus, the shutdown of the radio station they volunteer for during 2 months, and recently, the raid on their radio station by the Guatemalan police.

All of these are important things I wish to touch on relating to my learning experiences here, but this is just a tidbit of what is to come.

Immigration Timeout

Yep, let's take some time out to talk about this. Especially for those of you who are thinking of coming to Central America for a volunteering period or an artistic residency.

If you are not a Central American citizen, from what is called the CA-4 space, you have to leave the region every 3 months. This means that on entering any one of the four countries comprising CA-4 space (remember the Schengen space in Europe), you have 90 days to leave that space, not just that country.

So far so good. The problem is that the nearest borders depend on where you are. I am currently in Xela, which has a border close by with Mexico. However, Mexico requires you on your first visit inbound, to say 4 days before you return to CA-4 space via the border with Guatemala. Afterwards, you can easily go in and out in 24 hours.

This I discovered to my detriment, on an odyssey that took all day. I went to Tecun Uman with the intention of crossing the border to Ciudad Hidalgo about two weeks ago. I was spectacularly unsuccesful. I wanted to exit as an Australian citizen from Guatemala, and go in and out of Mexico the same way, but re-enter Guatemala with my DUI. I failed. For many reasons.

What is a DUI you may ask? It is the Salvadorean identity card, which I obtained in December last year, just for this purpose. Whaddya mean, I hear you wonder. Well... this is the deal: El Salvador is part of the CA-4 space. As a citizen of a member country of the CA-4 space, I have 90 days in each country, separately, not collectively. This gives me a bit of leeway in the space, which means that instead of having  90 days in Guatemala, Honduras,  El Salvador and Nicaragua, I have 90 days in Guatemala full stop. I also have 90 days in Honduras, full stop. And 90 days in Nicaragua, full stop. Plus, no need to show a passport, only the DUI. So far so good.

Well, that was not the case on the Mexican border, even though, legally I should be allowed to enter Guatemala as a salvadorean with my DUI from any border. I am not sure if I was told a barefaced lie by the people who usually do the transaction at the border or not. These were not immigration officials. They were guys who do this for money. So maybe they just wanted money out of me. This little joke cost me a whole day's journey to Tecun Uman, plus the bus fares to get there, the tuk-tuk fare from the bus terminal to the border and back and the return bus fares to Xela. It was crazy. It was also highly uncomfortable. Which was why I decided to regularise my status ASAP.

You want to know how I did that. Easy. Not. Back in March 2012 I queued up to get my passport issued. The salvadorean one. Little did I know. This turned into another Ulyssian effort. The passport office told me my DUI only had one last name. This was unacceptable to them because on the database my last passport showed up as having two last names. Paternal and maternal.

For the uninitiated to Latin American names, all of us carry our paternal and maternal last names with us legally and pass on our paternal names to our children. Ad nauseam. Ad infinitum. So, usually, a document of identity with only one last name is deemed incomplete.

So the passport office sent me to the DUI Centro to change my DUI. They were huffy about it and sent me to the equivalent of the Attorney General's Department to get my name changed legally with a Statutory Declaration.

When I got there, they told me that was the wrong thing to do and sent me to another government office: the Register for Natural Persons. They gave me other advice and told me that they could give me a statutory declaration that I didn't need a name change and that I could elect to use both my parents' names on my DUI. You would think this would be a same day thing. Uh, uh. No way.

They told me to ring in a week to see if the document was ready. I did. Nobody answered. I rang the following week and finally, the guy who was delegated to draft the document answered. He told me he needed a week or two to look at my file and draft the document, so I told him I would come and see him before Easter. I did. The guy still had not drafted anything coz he needed to discuss it in person. Argh!

So, when we met up in person he gave me two options:
(a) keep my documents all with two last names and get my DUI modified through an authorisation issued by his office; or
(b) get my birth certificate modified and have everything with one last name.

I decided to take option (a). I was leaving for Honduras the same day, so I had to pick up the authorisation the Tuesday after Easter.

Finally, I picked up the document, went with it to the DUI Centro and queued up for 2 hours until they finally gave me what I wanted: my modified DUI with two last names. I then headed off to the passport office, where I had to wait for 4 and a half hours before I could get my passport issued. But I got it. Finally. Now, I don't have to worry about my immigration woes anymore...Until the next 90 days are up.

Day 4 at the Theatre of the Oppressed Festival

The posts are getting shorter, I know, but I am trying to make good my promise to Ana Braconnier (one of the organisers of the festival) before the year gets under way and while all the attendees are still reading the Festival blog.

I will just cover the warm up games, coz really, at this stage the workshop consisted of honing the piece of theatre we were preparing to perform in front our fellow workshoppers:

1. We pretended to try and catch a fly, passing it on to the person next to us, going round and round in a circle. 
2. We did a collective primal scream. 
3. The first person in the circle clapped and passed on the clap to the person next to their neighbour, while their neighbour crouched, the neighbour would then stand up and pass the clap on the person after their neighbour, and so on. 
4. We also created a tight little circle and bent our knees deeply, trying to sit on each other's laps. 
5. We ended the workshop by giving each other massages in pairs and in threes. Our facilitators called these massages washing machines, because we were meant to give massages resembling an automatic car washing machine. We scrubbed and pounded each muscle until they were completely relaxed. 

Day 3 at the Theatre of the Oppressed Festival - delayed report

I'll keep this short and sweet. Our workshop on the third day consisted of debriefing initially about the play 3000 Mujeres, from the day before. We then warmed up to our workshop by checking in with a sound and a movement (that ring a bell to anyone doing Playback Theatre or Applied Theatre?)

The next game was fast paced: the leader would start off saying yes to the person next to them and that person would have to reply Yes. If the person wanted to move the sequence in the opposite order, they would have to say No. This would then be repeated ad infinitum in the circle of performers.

Then came mirroring, which is quite a standard physical theatre exercise in my experience. You basically mirror the action your partner makes. If they place their hand on your shoulder you place yours on theirs. The workshop facilitators added a twist: they called out the actions and we had to do them, no matter how ridiculous. At one point, they had us touching bum to bum, hand to shoulder, shoulder to shoulder, nose to nose. It got REALLY intimate.

The inevitable next step was to get into rehearsals and analysis of the piece of theatre we were developing. Olivar and Luiz, our facilitators from the Rio de Janeiro Centre for Theatre of the Oppressed, gave us feedback on the character portrayal, the dramaturgy, even our set design. After the feedback session, we dispersed off to lunch with 500 other participants, in the largest mess hall I've seen in a looong time.

In the afternoon, I dropped in to see Alas de Mariposa (Butterfly Wings) by Nicaraguan Theatre of the Oppressed outfit Ventana. They performed the story of Lucero, a blind girl who is eager to go to her new school, but due to misconceptions and discrimination against blind people in her school, is turned away at the door. The interventions all seemed to center around the same moment: when Lucero meets the school headmistress. It is at this crucial turning point that Lucero can enforce her rights in the new Nicaragua.

Although the actors wore the subtext on their sleeve, the acting was fresh, authentic and believable. Despite the large amount of exposition, and the abundance of dialogue, it was very touching and Lucero's character was well established. It was a very satisfying performance.

That evening's performance was Detras del Cuadro (Behind the Frame). It is the story of a single mother living with her mother who keeps her lesbian partner a secret until the day that her five year old  daughter requests her mother invite her partner to her birthday party. After much to-ing and fro-ing, she does so. She tries to warn her mother that she is inviting her partner to the party, only to find that her mother assumes it is a man. When confronted by the same sex relationship, her mother throws her partner out of the house and threatens to take away her granddaughter from her daughter because of her "immorality". This brought on a plethora of responses, including one clueless guy who was trying to explain to the daugther that the single mother's friend was actually her partner.

More about Day 2 of the Theatre of the Oppressed Festival

I have an apology to make. To those amazingly wonderful people who gave up their time, blood and sweat (as well as sleep) to organise the 2nd Latin American Theatre of the Oppressed Festival. I should have been writing all along but it just got way too intense to keep up. And I wasn't even partaking of the parties every night, like the peeps who had bussed it from Costa Rica, Honduras, Chiapas and so forth. They were all bunking down at the venue, which happens to be a technical school. Drafty, cold, bare bones. The bathrooms were beyond basic. In fact, the members of Escenica X from El Salvador were working wonders taking cold showers in the freezing Xela weather in January.

Missed telling youse all about the Colombian play Viento Nocturno (Night-time Wind) as well. Here goes: a one man play, the protagonist is a 14 year old growing up in 1980's Colombia with two left-wing brothers. His hero is Che Guevara. He even writes a letter to Cuba, signing himself as a revolutionary. It is his only infraction. In the Cold War climate of Latin America which made McCarthyism look benevolent, the slightest whiff of communist leanings could turn ugly. We're not talking defamatory or even discriminatory here. We are talking full torture. Solitary confinement. Bullet to the head territory. The performer is at once the torturer, the tortured, the troops taking the kids away to a School of the Americas torture chamber and the survivor coming out the other end. It is a gruelling play to watch. Perfect example of Theatre of the Oppressed. Except that there is no forum. There is no way that you can actually change what happened. Colombia in the 80's was every bit as scary as Central America. The Cold War had frozen any chance at real democracy, human rights and diverging points of view in the Americas.

As a performance, it started off well, with symbolism used quite heavily, but the portrayal relied heavily on narration. The overt amount of exposition detracted heavily from the powerful topic it was touching on. Lighting design was superb. It did away with any need for stage design. Using gels, filters and even strobing lights, the audience absorbed the moods ranging from fear, horror, violence to relief. Sadly, the subtext was on the surface, something I am beginning to observe happens a lot in theatre here in Central America. I like my subtext just the way it's supposed to be, under the surface, not coated so thickly on it, you could mistake it for Vegemite on your toast.

As a way of provoking discussion however, it was masterful. It is rather timely, as the discussion centered around torture used as way of inducing terror. There was a historical overview of how so many paramilitary groups in the Americas were schooled in torture as a means of striking fear into the populace by the School of the Americas.

It used part of Boal's method of Forum Theatre but diverged greatly from it, as there was no possible alternative you could use or find to rescue the oppressed in this case.

One thing I did admire was the warm up exercises the performer used to get the crowd involved:

• breathing exercises
• individual and group reactions to the scenes
• dancing together in total chaos
• creation of a tableau and its transformation character by character
• creating an ensemble from the audience where each person would join the tableau separately and add to the story on stage
• the use of ritual to dissolve emotions and celebrate catharsis

That same evening, I went to see the Mexican play 3000 Mujeres, about the human traffic that tricks young girls into prostitution. In Puebla alone, 3000 women disappeared in one year and the authorities did nothing about it. This play is about Lorenza, a 17 year old girl who hooks up with a human trafficker unwittingly. Her friends are suspicious of the new boyfriend, but by the time they realise that this aloof, macho guy who showers her with dubious gifts and takes her clubbing is not what he appears to be, Lorenza is deeply ensconced in some two bit brothel. 

This was proper Forum Theatre. There was a turning point in which Lorenza could have managed to avoid the trap. It was at this juncture that several interventions happened in the forum. Others tried to intervene at a later stage, through the police, which turned out to be a futile exercise.

The performances were subtle. Italia (the performer) was a convincing Lorenza: head over heels in love with this older guy who took her to exciting places and bought her nice things. By the time she has been inducted into the brothel it is way too late for her to get help. The only distraction was the set. It was covered in red with photographs stuck on it. It detracted from the performances themselves, which were coherent, had strong character development and maintained the suspension of disbelief right til the end. I would have given it four stars (in At The Movies parlance).

Day 2 at the Theatre of the Oppressed in Xela

This is going to be one whirlwind post peeps. I'm afraid that I was way too tired yesterday from all the exertions so you get an abridged post today.

After a little debried yesterday on how our first day had gone, Olivier, our facilitator, took us through some basic stretches. Then we got into the theatre games. Oh joy! No irony here. First one was called "casa,terremoto, morador" (meaning house, earthquake, inhabitant). I'm not kidding. In a land where earthquakes reign, we played a game with it. Two people are the house, one is the inhabitant. When the facilitator says house, the people who comprise the house run around seeking a new partner and a new dweller. When the facilitator yells dweller, the inhabitant runs around looking for a new house. When he yells earthquake! we all run around like chooks with our heads cut off.

Fun and games I tell ya.

The next one is more of a physical theatre exercise. We stand in a circle, and the first person becomes a cog in a machine that fabricates one emotion, eg: hate. Every other participant then joins in, making a sound and an action in that same vein. In the end you have a machine that makes hate noises and movements. The interesting part was when we became the opinion machine, on the subject of life in Latin America. I jumped in and swam upstream. Other people became working peasants on the land. Others dancers, others cooks, others paramilitary troops, others politicians. It was a sight to behold, but we couldn't see it ourselves. You can watch parts of it on Ustream at the conference website.

The next game was to pair up and lead our partner through an imaginary trip, using our imaginations. My partner led me on a mountain climb up the Everest. This wasn't entirely clear to me. I just knew I was walking, I was holding onto a surface and I couldn't let go. That part was interesting. It had become clear that I had to hold on or perish.

The next one was an exercise in semiotics: giving banale objects a new meaning or context. We were given a bottle, an orange cloth, a table and a chair. My partner and I enacted a kidnapping. Yes, a bit drastic, but we our task was to show a social issue current in Latin America. Two girls enacted a birth, they started out the traditional, horizontal position for birthing, and ended up in the indigenous style: standing up.

Forum Theatre was up next. We had an example of it, by putting four actos up who were marching in unison and a fifth actor dancing and singing. The marchers then tried to pummel the dancer into submission. The group was then asked to give several alternatives to what had happened. What could the dancer do to achieve their desire to dance and sing? Some people came up with mass demonstrations of dancing and singing, others tried to make the marchers dance and sing and I pulled in two members of the audience after pretending to cower from the pummeling to help me divide and conquer.

Following that we worked on the dramaturgy of Theatre of the Oppressed. It works slightly differently to the usual 3 act structure. Although we begin from the protagonist - antagonist conflict, the narrative arc begins by establishing the backstory with the unfulfilled desire of the protagonist. This then escalates into a Chinese Crisis (danger coupled with opportunity), where the protagonist has the chance to turn things around, but the eventual ending is failure. The audience then has to provide alternatives.

Stay tuned, up next is my review of a one man show from Colombia on torture in the eighties and a Mexican Forum Theatre performance called 3000 women.

Day One at Theatre of the Oppressed in Xela Pt 2

Okay, so I skipped a few things before, like giving you a bit more info on Theatre of the Oppressed and on the Forum itself. Well, it's been in the pipeline for a while, the first one was in Buenos Aires and it took roughly 3 years to organise. You heard right. Or rather, you read right. In 2006 there were only 5 or 6 practitioners of Theatre of the Oppressed in Argentina and the easiest way they saw to network with other theatremakers around the continent was by email. Eventually, they all went for labs, workshops, internships or residencies in Rio de Janeiro and came out fully versed in the mysteries of Theatre of the Oppressed. That's the long and the short of it.

Then came the others, the Bolivians, the Peruvians, the Colombians, the Costa Ricans, and somewhere in there, the Salvadoreans and the Guatemalans. Today there are 60 + participants from Central America, when in 2009 there were only 2. The power of ideas huh? This is one powerful medium. Particularly when it comes to Forum Theatre.

That's what you've been waiting to hear all about. Especially after the last teaser in the last post. What is Forum Theatre you ask? I found out today for the first time. We worked up to it, too... and so shall you, so sit back, relax and grab a martini. Shaken, not stirred. Nick Cave in the background would make a great soundtrack to the explanation. I'm listening to him as I write. So here we go.

The fabulous gentlemen from the Centre for Theatre of the Oppressed took us through this step by step, starting with an exercise in which we all pair off and look like we're frozen as we shake hands. Then, one of the pair breaks off, looks at the alternative stories that can be told by their counterpart's body language and embody a new story, taking on a new position. Their partner waits for them to settle into position, then moves away, checks out their body language and responds accordingly. Repeat ad infinitum. Once we got that right, our facilitators or Kuringas, took us through the next stage, of trios doing this exercise. Once we had mastered that stage, all of us joined into one mass frozen scene, slowly joining into a scene after watching it and making sense of it in our heads. Once we were all into position, our facilitators went around asking us who we were and what we were doing. It was very interesting. The Spaniards all thought they were part of a demonstration in which the police was manhandling the protesters. The Central Americans all thought it was an indigenous village that was being raided and its villagers killed because they were unjustly accused of crimes. Our collective histories reflect our points of view and how we interpret actions, obviously.

The next step was to start weeding out personal stories to create a piece of theatre collectively. Oh how I love ensemble work, when done properly and guided by professionals. We listened to each others' stories of personal oppression until we settled on the most urgent one. It happened to be a Guatemalan man of K'iche origin who is HIV positive, a single father and suffering discrimination from every sector. Although it was moving to listen to other's stories, his carried such a systematic abuse of human rights that we could not ignore it. We get to turn it into theatre tomorrow morning.

In the meantime, I went to two works in that vein:  La Petaca, from El Salvador [based on the short stoy by Sallarue] and Coisas de Genero from Brasil. Although they were both fantastic, there was an immediacy and realism to La Petaca that I recognised the scene they set immediately. A physically deformed girl in her teens suffers from beatings and verbal lashings at the hands of her family, who want to rid her of her hump so they can marry her off, as her mental retardation prevents her from helping effectively around the house. The way they speak is vintage farmer Salvadorean Spanish. It touched a chord deep inside me. Sometimes it was almost comical, if it weren't so true. A Guatemalan lady didn't seem amused by the expressions that caused me a bit of mirth, as opposed to the situations. The Kuringa then went through the whole of the work and deconstructed it with the audience's assistance. Between the subtle performances of the actors and the incisive analysis of the various types of violence and discrimination perpetrated, it was a highly effective piece of applied theatre. It made me proud to be these actors' countrywoman.

Coisas de Genero was grander. It took place in the Municipal Theatre, a Neoclassical jewel, that has European style wooden booths. It had lighting and stage design. It had a live Bossa Nova orchestra, that also dabbled in Brasilian indigeous and candomble rhythms. The scenario was one well known around the world: boy and girl are born without prejudices. Their parents then condition them into wearing certain clothes, playing with certain toys, getting married and dividing tasks by gender. Of couse, this turns into bitter war right at the end, with the wife getting the short end of the stick. The dancing and choreography were superb. Corporal expression through movement was beautiful. The costumes were breathtaking and imaginative. It was just a little too long for my taste. The point had been made 10 minutes before the ending. No matter, after that it was time for the Forum. Eh? What? Yeah, you'd forgotten that's what I started with: Forum Theatre. This was definitely an example of that and so was La Petaca. In both cases, audience members who suggested alternative courses of action for the oppressed character were invited to come onto the stage and perform their suggestions. Each performance was then deconstructed again from various perspectives, until either a solution was found or conciousness about the issue was raised.

Don't think it was all academic blah blah though. Real people with real opinions and examples would stand up to speak. And to top it all off... we all danced to Bossa Nova afterwards. I kid you not. The live orchestra kept playing and invited the audience to come up and dance. Truly magical stuff.

Theatre of the Oppressed in Xela Pt 1

Bit of a jump from last post innit guv? Well, it's just a quickie, to let all of you know a bit about today's happenings at the Theatre of the Oppressed Forum happening right here, right now, in Xela. The day started cold, foggy and bloody cold, and we didn't start warming up til 10 am, when the actual workshops began. 

After a bit of a slow start, with people eating their breakfast while they listened to the plenary, we all found our classrooms and got stuck into one of the most fascinating genres of applied theatre I've seen in a while. No, I'm not an expert. No, I have not been through an Applied Theatre degree [ I leave that to the Griffith University kids back in BrisVegas] but I've dipped my foot in Theatre of the Oppressed once before and trained in Playback for a year and half, so I kinda think I know the lay of the land, even if I still take the odd wrong turn. 

We began by trying to demechanise our bodies, which required us to do opposing actions with each limb, not always successfully. Then we had to pair up, follow our partner's hand around the room, and viceversa. Then - this I had never seen before - we had to lead and follow at the same time. Bedlam did not ensue, thank God, as everyone had some theatre background to carry them through. 

Our facilitators were the real deal, Brazilians from the Centre for Theatre of the Oppressed in Rio de Janeiro. Their creative and artistic director had been none other than Augusto Boal for 20 years. What a score!! At $5 US a day to participate, I can see scores of Aussies getting on the next plane for the next forum. That includes all our meals, by the way. BYO plates and cutlery though, we might be poor, but we're green. 

After that we did a rhythm and sound game, where we paired off again, the counted to three  between two of us, then had to substitute the numbers for a sound and an action, which the other would replicate when it was their turn to do the number. Confused yet? We were. It took a while to get a rhythm going. 

Then came the trust exercise, we had to lead our counterparts around the room with a sound only while they kept their eyes closed. I bumped into half the world coz my partner had chosen a sound 3 other people liked as well. 

Finally, we began working on Forum Theatre, which I had not yet explored in my first foray into Theatre of the Oppressed but which I had learned in Playback in pair work. 

But more of that later tonight, after La Petaca, a salvadoran work that goes on stage in 5 minutes. 

Quetzaltenango Pt 1

Ok, so here I am. Finally. In Quetzaltenango, otherwise known as Xelaju. It didn't take this long to get here, no. In fact, since my last post, it was another two weeks of waiting for the weather to subside before I came to the place I was meant to be working in. And the words "meant to be" are not by chance.

Where do I begin? Xela, the other moniker Quetzaltenango goes by, is an awesome place to live. It is in the safest corner of Guatemala. It nestles comfortably in a highland, surrounded by mountains, at 2500 m above sea level. It is cobbled. I kid you not. Really, truly, the streets are cobbled. It's amazing, though it's a killer on a pushbike. I don't even have my trusty old mountain bike with me. I'm borrowing a second hand racer that the project officer for Cultural Survival lent me. On occasion. To go further than the 15 minute distances of the huge La Democracia market. Scoff at me will ya? Have you tried walking long distances at high altitude? It's exhausting.

Back to the wonders of Xela though. It's a city that charms you slowly, beckoning to its heart with small, cozy, funky cafes. Try and ignore the grandiose buildings in Neoclassical style and the interspersed ArtDeco bits and pieces and you will fail. Terribly. Its central plaza houses something like Roman amphitheatre, except that is fully round with no atrium. The Cathedral overlooking the plaza is like something out of a Baroque fantasy. Surrounding it are homes from colonial, post colonial and German plantation days. Excuse me? German plantation days? Yep. At one point, one of the presidents of Guatemala gave away large tracts of land to German settlers who married local indigenous women and set up house here. There are now a bunch of kids who can trace their ancestors to Germany. Very very weird.

Back to the funky cafes, coz that's where the city pulses. At places like El Cuartito, Cafe Baviera and Artesano, NGO workers and backpackers studying spanish huddle over their laptops, making use of the free WiFi. At less foreigner-oriented places like Cafe RED and Tilde, you find the artsy types of Quetzaltenango. They organise festivals. They play music. They do hip hop. They graffiti. They write poems. They do murals. And they are, almost all of them, Guatemalan. If you want to hang with the heavies in Guatemala's cultural capital, this is where they are. My first month in Quetzaltenango I spent every late afternoon and evening there, getting to know the heavyweights for future reference and boy, did that come in handy!

I bet you wanna know what happened with ArtCorps and Cultural Survival and the mayan kids that want video skills. All in good time. Tune in for the next post, which will have a mixture of that and the 2nd Latin American Conference on Theatre of the Oppressed, coming live to you from Xela. In the meantime, I leave you with the videos I took of the 12 of October march in the capital.