Uruguayan theater launches into audiovisuals with TV series

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Hit by the pandemic’s standstill, an Uruguayan theater decided to bite the bullet and risk it all in an innovative adventure: to produce a fictional TV series with a team that allies playwrights with filmmakers and its stage transformed into a film set.

Unaffected by the sanitary debacle that led to the fact that, since March 2020, almost no play has been premiered inside the theater, the entrance of El Galpón theater remains intact while, inside, the stage is unrecognizable.

DESIRE, RISK, AND ADVENTURE

The black of the boards and the curtain now make up an impeccable apartment with living room, kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, and balcony surrounded by spotlights and cables, since, as Lila García, administrative secretary of the historic theater, this Monday the filming of “Temporario” began there, a project as innovative as it is risky.

“It is an adventure that is neither cinema nor filmed theater. What we want to do is to investigate a path that is the mixture of the confluence of these forces”, emphasizes the actress and theater director.

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As García says, the series’s project arose from the pandemic’s impact when, in light of the suspension of shows, the theater struggled to find alternatives that would allow it to keep its work afloat.

“The first thing we did was to develop a form of ‘streaming’ (live transmission). There was a period of research on the technical elements to achieve quality streaming, very much inspired by what was being done in many parts of the world,” he says.

Although she notes that the audiovisual world was not alien to the team, the theater’s director points out that the process was not easy. Due to lack of initiative or scarcity of resources, there is almost no national fiction in Uruguay productions for TV.

“We do it at great risk, exploiting all the capacities we have (…) it has been all based on agreements, the need to transform our sector and solve labor situations of closed theaters, of unemployed people or people on unemployment insurance”, he stresses, and adds that the impulse was given with “desire” and “learning”.

MERGING EFFORTS

A key element in the production of “Temporario” was the contribution of several playwrights who, having become scriptwriters, created each chapter under Argentine scriptwriter Esther Feldman, who had the original idea, and the advice of cultural manager José Miguel Onaindia.

Among them is Uruguayan playwright Gabriel Calderón, who this year won international recognition with works in Spain and Italy and who describes the proposal as “attractive” and “intelligent” at a time when, he notes, “the entire theater sector is having a lot of difficulties not only in producing but also in reacting.”

“It seems to me that El Galpón had an intelligent reflex in saying: ‘it is a moment in which stage activities are paralyzed and, nevertheless, the world of the audiovisual industry is booming, let’s see if we can help in that passage,'” he says.

On the other hand, Calderón, who chose for his episode, which was about death, to make a comedy to “have another perspective” in a context of pandemic, considers that it was challenging to adapt his work to the audiovisual.

While he affirms that he actually wrote “for theater” knowing that his piece would later be translated into a television script with the help of the filmmaker and artistic director of the series Guillermo Casanova, the playwright says that a central difference is that there are not “800 eyes watching”, but a camera on which everything is concentrated.

Likewise, as he will also be directing an episode, the Uruguayan explains how the preparation on a shoot differs from that of a play.

“We always rehearse, we make it flow because when a play starts, it doesn’t end until an hour, an hour and a half or two hours later. Here the rhythm is built later with the editing, so above all, we have to train the ability to sustain the same state, the same performance, for many takes,” he stresses.

PROJECTING INTO THE FUTURE

Noting that independent theater “always reinvents itself” and finds a way out of the situations that overwhelm it, as happened with the members of El Galpón during the last dictatorship (1973-1985), García is confident in the recovery of the sector.

With her eyes set on the premiere of the series, which will be broadcast on Uruguay’s Channel 10, the secretary says she would like to see initiatives like this one replicated in other institutions in the country and even in other countries in the region.

At the same time, she hopes that the project will encourage reflection “on the need” for local audiovisual production “for reasons of identity and cultural development”.

Source: efe