Five men and a woman move back and forth across the stage in perpetual motion. Dressed in their own clothes, with laptop, microphone or lamp in hand, the performers speak or sing in a multitude of different voices.
The narrative shifts too: from bald historical fact to memories delivered in song; the action from a wrestling match; a mother’s grief and anger accompanied by opera; a hitman describing his torture methods; Walter Benjamin’s angel of history defines progress; chattering children say what they would like to be when they grow up; images of brutality flash up on screen; and a family’s home movies from the 1960s flicker into life.
The small audience sits in silence, unable to look away, sometimes in tears, often laughing but mostly compelled by these stories, opinions and ideas that make up life in a Mexican border town.
The city of Juárez has been called many things. Originally, it was known as Paso del Norte – “the passage to the North”; Ciudad Juárez followed, as a close-knit community surrounded by cotton fields became one of the fastest-growing cities in the world. In 2011, the Mexican government renamed it Heroica Ciudad Juárez, in recognition of its residents’ long struggle with the cycle of drug-running, corruption and extreme violence that gave the home of 2.7 million people its best-known title: the Murder Capital of the World.
The UK’s Telegraph newspaper first coined the phrase in October 2009 when the murder rate in Juárez, which shares its border with El Paso, “America’s Safest City”, reached 133 per 100,000 inhabitants, a rate 22 times higher than New York’s. In October 2009 alone there were 195 deaths and a local newspaper declared: “With this, our city has reached a new historic mark in violent acts that verifies this is the most violent zone in the world outside of declared war zones.”
No one was safe. That year the victims included 85 children and 107 women and the term femicide entered the lexicon. But while photographs of mutilated corpses, mass graves and police cordons illustrated the newspapers’ grim narrative, extreme violence is only part of the story.
Rubén Polendo’s family used to live in Ciudad Juárez. The artistic director of Theater Mitu and associate professor of theatre at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) was born and grew up against this backdrop of fast-tracked social change. His family finally moved across the border to El Paso, Texas, only after Polendo and his sisters had left home and his parents were robbed and assaulted in their home.
Polendo’s latest work, Juárez: A Documentary Mythology, tells the story of the transformation of his birthplace through interviews with the residents of Juárez, as well as the family’s home movies and the words of his 85-year-old father. The result is a powerful piece of theatre which sold out during its short run at NYUAD last week. “I created this show along with the company members of Theater Mitu as a way to rediscover my hometown and El Paso, its sister city across the border,” Polendo writes in the programme.
“For years I had been hearing stories in the news about the violence, cartels, kidnappings, murders, drug smuggling and other woes that plagued this border community. Most of my family still lives in the area, and though I returned occasionally, I began to feel it was quickly becoming a foreign place to me.”
Being an outsider with inside knowledge proved a unique vantage point in the year-long research process that used news reports and the work of local authors and journalists including Charles Bowden and Molly Molloy as a starting point, before field trips with members of Theater Mitu to Juárez itself.
“I asked them to enter with me as foreigners to help me remap the city and in a way to understand it from the inside and the outside,” Polendo tells me. “We decided that the best way to do that was not to imagine a play or adapt a story but to engage with the community there to tell their stories.”
With its mix of photography, faded home-movie footage and documentary-style interviews for a “script”, Juárez: A Documentary Mythology follows an increasingly popular modern theatre tradition – “the theatre of the real” – in which the source material is not a playwright’s imagination but documented fact. The research team of performers, with Polendo and a young stage manager who also grew up in Juárez, gathered 300 hours of interviews to represent an enormous range of voices and opinion: from the mayor of Juárez and local journalists to street kids, anthropologists, activists, lawyers, social workers, waiters and professors, mothers, fathers, sons and daughters. The performers on stage speak extracts from the interviews fed by an earpiece rather than acting out a memorised script.
For the company, the interview process was both emotional and revelatory. As Aysan Çelik, a founding member of Theater Mitu and an assistant professor of theatre at NYUAD, tells me: “I came in very much as an outsider. I knew I did not understand what was going on. I knew that I was frightened of the situation and for these people. And then walking in and having your mind blown by these incredible stories of resilience and of hope … it becomes personal as soon as you sit down and talk to someone and know them.”
Dramatising an interview transcript is easier said than done, Polendo says, particularly when the setting is Mexican but the cast is from New York. “If we were to make a performance of a person who we interviewed, they would have to perform ‘Mexican-ness’ and I cringe at the thought of that.
“So we decided to engage this text in a different kind of theatricalisation, which is almost as if dreaming of a visual art installation. Instead of taking that text and showing what that person looked like or sounded like, we are going to take that text and somehow bring it to life so we can share what it felt like to be in the room with that person.
“If the story was so moving and dark and difficult that we felt like we could not breathe in the room, then that becomes the challenge: how do we manifest that on stage? And then we start getting into a really interesting theatrical vocabulary and you begin to have an emotional experience of those stories, not simply an informational one. And then, in stringing them together, you get an emotional map of that landscape.”
That emotional map is necessarily bleak but the final section, entitled Change, is an attempt to introduce redemptive themes of survival and the hope for a better future. One of the last voices we hear is a pastor who says: “…we have survived a perfect storm of violence, crime and corruption. And that’s good”, before the words “Que viva Juárez” ring out.
These notes of optimism chime with the actors’ experience of their time in Juárez, as Polendo explains: “We would always walk away with this incredible sense of hope. You would think that you’d walk away with a sense of depression but, again and again, it became almost this triumph of the human spirit.”
Juárez: A Documentary Mythology was first staged before its most critical audience – in Juárez itself – in January. The performance proved cathartic and people stood up, applauded and cried, Çeylik says. The actor Ryan Conarro adds: “We all felt that people were so eager to be heard. People in Juárez especially are all experiencing this pressure. You realise that many people don’t have the opportunity to tell their story … the opportunity to just tell what’s going on was, I think, valuable to people.”
Their reaction was necessarily unique to Juárez but the show’s message also resonated with audiences in New York, who referenced the experience of Detroit and San Francisco. “We heard about cities in the Midwest where unemployment is leading to corruption and crime and [people are] feeling like ‘we have to stay hopeful’ ,” Polendo says.
From Abu Dhabi, the production will move to Cairo for a short run, where Polendo hopes that the work will assume a new relevance. “I want to make sure that this piece has some resonance and, in conversations with Cairo, one of our producers said: ‘Your story is about a community in the middle of so much change and violence and still trying to reach for hope. I think we have something in common.’”
And for the rest of us, fortunate not to live in the crossfire of warring drug gangs or bloody political upheaval, the play carries a different message – not of hope but, rather, a stark warning about progress. Polendo quotes a phrase from an interview with his father: “He said: ‘You know, Juárez is the story of every city that has been abused by progress.’”
Seen through that lens, the director argues, the play becomes a vision of the future that acts as a cautionary tale about development. “I think of cities like Abu Dhabi, like Shanghai,” he says. “Places that are in a really exciting moment which is the idea of things progressing forward … but with that comes a kind of responsibility. And the responsibility is that progress not abuse the landscape.”
For me the show’s message hits home a few days later when a newscaster announces the death of Nazario Moreno González, “the Crazy One”, a particularly vicious cartel boss. My immediate thought is for the people of Juárez whose lives have been shaped by the drugs trade; the mothers, fathers, sons and daughters who will be affected by the turf war that will inevitably follow.
Clare Dight is editor of The Review.