The Theater, The Theater, What´s Happened to the Theater?

So a few weeks ago I signed up to volunteer with the International Theater Festival of La Paz (FITAZ) which brings companies from all over the world to a relative dramatic backwater for two weeks every March. My friend Hortencia signed up as well and having a bit of theater experience from high school, I was excited to get involved on the professional level. While I´m still excited, thus far my encounters with the festival´s colorful characters, chronic organizational malfunction, and demanding hours seem to be teaching me more about Bolivian culture than the world of international theater.

One of the first surprises I encountered in this volunteer experience was when I sent in my form listing all of the times I was available to work for the festival. Whereas in the US when you say you could conceivably work for 5 hours every night for 9 days, you probably will not be asked to do so, this has proven not to be the case in Bolivia. I´m sure the volunteer director lit up at seeing what he obviously interpreted as my eagerness and now I´m the theater assistant in Teatro de Cámara from March 20-28, 7:30-12:00.

Another surprise has been the drastically different expectations of theater etiquette between my past experience and what I´ve encountered here. Not only do most theater patrons loudly munch snacks during the performance, leave and enter seemingly without consideration to timing, and treat humble theater volunteers with contempt, but several people I´ve seen hardly act differently in the playhouse than they do in the soccer stadium. Don´t get me wrong, I´m really enjoying the theater (run-ins with aggressive 60-something women included) and have met a few great people. But at the same time this has maybe been the biggest cultural shock of my time here.

For the most part theater in the US is an almost sacred space with pretty concretized rules and expectations (although obviously several American theaters purposefully try to subvert that system). To compare that structure with the chaos of theater in Bolivia highlights one of the biggest differences in our national cultures. While Americans aren´t as disciplined or timely as the Swiss or Germans for example, Bolivian disorder makes the US seem like a utopia of systematic precision. If you´re into that.

I don´t think it´s possible to make a blanket statement about which is better. Certainly in some circumstances a bit more organization would be nice (I would love for one of these plays to start on time for example) but not in all. As much as I don´t like being the bullied volunteer (I´ve always been a martyr for the arts), the unruliness also makes the theater more accessible in a way. Maybe I´ll lose that relativistic perspective as the week wears on, but my theater outing has been a great test of my ability to adapt, go with the flow, and for at least 5 hours a day, adopt a more "Bolivian" mentality.