an interview by John Bell

Rediscovering Mask Performance in Peru

Gustavo Boada,

Maskmaker with Yuyachkani

an interview by John Bell

For over two decades Yuyachkani has been considered not only the most important independent theatre group in Peru, but a leader from the s gen-eration of Latin American theatre groups. Yuyachkani, under the direction of Miguel Rubio, became well known for productions that combined the political theatre aesthetics of Bertolt Brecht, the anthropological theatre approaches of Augusto Boal and Eugenio Barba, and, perhaps most importantly, a rediscovery and reappraisal of the performance aesthetics of Andean culture: the dramatic dances, music, masks, and costumes of its fiestas. Not all Yuyachkani produc-tions use masks or puppets, but the company is characterized by an ability to incorporate them effectively into its work, and an openness to do so wherever they seem to offer a powerful means of communication.

Gustavo Boada began working as a maskmaker with the group in . He also taught maskmaking techniques at Peru’s National School of Dramatic Art, and has worked with the Gran Circo Teatro of Chile as well as Puerto Rico’s El Mundo de los Muñecos. Boada currently teaches puppetry at Brooklyn College’s School of Education, and creates his own puppet and mask productions, such as Antigone Now and Wasalisa. I first met him in 

in Vermont, at a workshop of the International School of Theater of Latin America and the Caribbean (EITALC) led by Bread and Puppet Theater, and entitled “Paper Maché vs. Neo-Liberalism.” Boada returned to Vermont to work with Bread and Puppet in the summer of , and this interview was held in the Bread and Puppet Museum on  July . Teresa Camou pro-vided simultaneous translation.

BELL: Could you explain what Yuyachkani is?

BOADA: The name Yuyachkani is a Quechua word that means “I am think-ing, I am remembering.” In other regions, where Quechua is a bit different, it means “I am your memories, I am your thoughts.” Yuyachkani comes from the attitude of young people in the s who had decided to make theatre based on political ideas and the social problems of Peru. This reflection on the prob-lems of the country obliged us to travel a lot to towns very far from the city.

 John Bell

BELL: When did the theatre start?

BOADA: It started in . Miguel Rubio and Teresa Ralli, only  and 

years old, were part of an experimental theatre group named Yego. And because they witnessed a miners’ strike and the violent way the police took control of the situation, they really felt affected by those problems, and they started to be-lieve that they had to make some kind of theatre. They learned about the exist-ence of political theatre, and this led to the first appearances of Yuyachkani.

Discovering Masks

BOADA: In  they had a performance in Allpamina, a mining town. They did a piece called Puño de Cobre (Fist of Copper). The story was based on a strike at a copper mine named Cobrisa. The show talks about how the police killed some of the miners who had gone on strike—there are a lot of stories in Latin America about these kinds of situations. The actors were acting in blue jeans and white T-shirts, and after the performance the miners told them that they really did like the show, but that “next time, don’t forget your cos-tumes.”^ They thought they had forgotten their costumes, because for the miners—who are very connected with nature, and appreciate colors—for them happiness is color. Mask imagery is very important for them, and dance is an equally important element. They didn’t think any other kind of theatre existed. But Puño de Cobre didn’t use any of these elements. This event made Yuyachkani realize they were making a very different kind of theatre than what the population knew. So they decided they had to figure out not only how to investigate social problems, but also how to investigate traditions, and the significance of each element of those traditions.

BELL: Did Yuyachkani begin to use masks after this?

BOADA: Yes, they did shows in each community they visited, and after the show there would be an exchange: the people from the community performed their dances, and the company learned the music, the songs, and the dance.

That’s where they started accumulating masks, from many different places, of many different types and materials, and started to perform with masks.

. Yuyachkani maskmaker Gustavo Boada and one of his masks: a commedia dell’arte Arlecchino.

(Photo courtesy of Archivo G.C. Yuyachkani)

Gustavo Boada 

BELL: Why was this type of mask theatre unknown to Rubio, Ralli, and the other members of Yuyachkani?

BOADA: The reference points for people involved in theatre at that time were Western: European theatre, Spanish theatre. They didn’t know any other kind of theatre existed, because they were young people, from the city.

These traditional Andean performances did not separate theatre from dance and music. They were dance/opera syntheses, like Peking opera, which com-bines music, acting, dance, acrobatics.

BELL: What were the first shows done after this experience you’ve described?

BOADA: The first was Allpa Rayku [], which was based both on the popular fiesta of Andahuaylas and the story of the seizure of lands there by the people of the town. There had been a leftist military revolution in  and a new agrarian reform law in  that promoted land redistribution. The land-owners hired armed guards to keep their land, but since these landland-owners did not have the law on their side, the campesinos fought and took the land.

BELL: And that show used a lot of elements of popular culture?

BOADA: Yes: masks, costumes, colors, the Quechua language.

BELL: Did the structure of the show reflect different ideas?

BOADA: It had the structure of the fiesta, and the fiesta’s arrangement of sce-nic groups.

BELL: Does this also involve calling the presentation a fiesta instead of a the-atre piece, a drama?

. Gustavo Boada in his mask workshop. (Photo courtesy of Archivo G.C.

Yuyachkani)

 John Bell

BOADA: Yes. The story begins with a conflict: there is a fiesta, but the fiesta is interrupted because the news arrives that there’s been a revolution and the land can be owned by those who work it. The dramatic conflict is mixed with the structure of the fiesta.

BELL: Have all of the shows of Yuyachkani since that moment used masks or other popular theatre forms?

BOADA: Yes, in this show and those that followed, they started using a lot more musical instruments, and worked with masks.

BELL: What was the response to these shows, in Lima or other cities, where people like the actors in Yuyachkani had grown up with European ideas of theatre?

BOADA: Well, for many years Yuyachkani was doing shows in the prov-inces. They didn’t have a place to rehearse, and so they always performed in the countryside.

BELL: Not for an audience in Lima?

BOADA: There was an audience in Lima later, generally in the universities, or among immigrant populations of miners or campesinos on the outskirts of the city.

Mask Traditions in Peru

BELL: Are there a variety of different types of mask theatre in Peru? I re-member a knitted mask was used in Adios Ayacucho; what other different types of mask traditions are there?

BOADA: At a certain moment in Peru an independent theatre movement grew outside of the commercial and traditional classical theatres. The move-ment was based, more or less, on the same thinking as Yuyachkani. About 

groups in the whole country appeared, and they did research in different ways. A group from Cajamarca called Algovipasar, for example, studied the

fi-. Yuyachkani incorporated Andean performance tradi-tions—masks, costumes, colors, and the Quechua language—in their 

production Allpa Rayku.

(Photo courtesy of Archivo G.C. Yuyachkani)

Gustavo Boada 

estas in their province and had a particularly regional identity. It’s the same thing that happened with Yuyachkani.

BELL: Does Yuyachkani have a connection to any particular cultural identities?

BOADA: Yes, more with some than with others: with Puño, Cuzco, Huancayo.

BELL: Which popular traditions are seen in different masks? For example, if there are masks made of wool in some areas, are there masks of wood in oth-ers? Is it similar to Mexico, where different regions have different mask styles?

BOADA: There are many varieties of masks. For example in Huancayo, the capital of the province of Junin, they make masks of painted screen—they have a Spanish origin. Five minutes from Huancayo there is a town named Mito, which makes masks out of wood. But  kilometers further, they make screen masks again. It’s not a question of proximity or distance, but of iden-tity. In higher elevations, where there are a lot of sheep, wool is the only ma-terial for making a mask, and that’s why they use it. In some places they use gourds to make masks, in others, animal skin.

BELL: Has there been a lot of anthropological or folkloric research into these mask traditions?

BOADA: In Peru there are a lot of anthropologists researching mask designs as well as their meanings. But their research is only interpretation, because it is not based on what the people think. Moreover, when researchers ask indig-enous people or campesinos about the origins of something, a very ancient re-jection repeats itself—because the Spaniards came in the same way, asking them if they knew about any “yellow metal,” and the Inca Atahualpa ordered everyone to bury the cities where the gold was. Later, in colonial times, after Tupac Amaru revolted and the Spaniards killed him [in ], they prohibited all cults, rituals, and holy objects of the old religious traditions, including tra-ditional costumes, music, and dances. From that moment on there has been a feeling among indigenous people to close off information about the signifi-cance of these traditions.

Becoming a Maskmaker in Peru

BELL: I wanted to ask you about your personal connection to Yuyachkani, how you came to work with the group, and how you came to be the primary maskmaker in the group.

BOADA: Before I met Yuyachkani, I was a sculptor. I had a studio with other artists, and one day in  Yuyachkani came to see my work, after they had seen Bread and Puppet in Puerto Rico. They wanted to do a work-shop with giant puppets in Villa El Salvador, an urban neighborhood in which the majority of people were immigrants from Ayacucho. And they asked me if I would like the idea of working with giant puppets, giant sculptures. This is how I met them. I worked with them for three months in Villa El Salvador, and then I came back to my studio. I started to study theatre for a year, and then Yuyachkani proposed that I work with them. So I quit my theatre stud-ies and began to make masks.

BELL: What was your sculpting like before you started working with Yuyachkani?

BOADA: Before working with Yuyachkani, I was looking for a form of ani-mated sculpture of image or color. I investigated emptiness, the absence of mass. Not the external form, that is, the one you can touch, but the internal

 John Bell

form. I imagined the public inside a sculpture. It was a search for something, and when Yuyachkani took me on for the workshop, I saw that these huge animated figures suggested a very interesting path to me. That’s why I decided to study a lot of theatre and read.

BELL: When you started making giant puppets with Yuyachkani, how did you know what to do?

BOADA: When you do huge sculptures, you have to think of the armature that that big volume is going to have, and what material can support all that weight.

When I knew I was going to use paper, I had to calculate which material could support the paper without weighing too much. We used chicken wire, cutting it and giving it shape, and then we applied the paper. That was the first time.

Later I saw that chicken wire was very expensive, so we started to use clay, and the different structural techniques to support clay, and we used paper.

BELL: So were you inventing this yourself as you went along?

BOADA: Yes.

Pukllay: Playing Theatre As Fiesta

BELL: Could you describe a recent production of Yuyachkani which uses masks or puppets, how these objects are used in that production, where they came from, and how you conceived of them and built them?

BOADA: Our most recent production, which we have been working on for two years [–], is called Pukllay, which means “let’s play.” It’s a game based on the fiesta we have been going to for five years, in a town called Paucartambo, in the region of Cusco. The fiesta is connected to the worship of the Virgin of Carmen of Paucartambo. In it, there are  comparsas, groups of dancers who use the same mask, although the Caporal or Capitán and his Lady use different masks. There are  characters, or  comparsas, who each have a different significance, and they move around the village, having en-counters with each other, wars, and dances. There are some characters, called saq’ras, who only walk on tops of roofs: they’re a kind of devil that comes from the rainbow. It’s taken some time to investigate this tradition, to under-stand the significance of the choreography, the costumes, and the roles of the characters, because the characters can have one role in the fiesta and another during the religious ritual. In the religious event they have a role relating to the Virgin; but in reality at that moment she represents not simply the Virgin but an ancient Andean god, Mama Pacha, or Mother Earth. It’s difficult to in-terpret something which, as I explained earlier, people don’t want to explain:

the significance of their rituals. While anthropologists create their own inter-pretation, we create another interpretation of the show, not of its religious or anthropological significance, but of its representational play: the relationships between the characters and the audience, and among the identical characters in the  different saq’ras. At the same time, we are also doing research about the masks. We’re not necessarily going to copy the traditional masks, but situ-ate them in a kind of re-creation in a basically different space: a big plaza in Lima.

BELL: I saw a videotape of a Yuyachkani performance at night in a big plaza in Lima. Was this the same show?

BOADA: That was the first attempt at the show. We tried out the materials we had at that moment, but we saw that everything was too low.

Gustavo Boada 

BELL: How do you mean?

BOADA: We didn’t have a lot of height. The audience couldn’t see, so the solution was to build big movable platforms where we could place masked and sitting idols, something like sphinxes.

BELL: I believe I saw masks of many different character types: a doctor, maybe a lawyer, and a politician. Is that correct?

BOADA: All the characters that we perform in this show are from the Paucartambo fiesta. They are characters created by the imaginations of the ar-tisans; it is very probable they have recognized the character they want to sati-rize in their masks. For example, El Doctorcito (a doctor of law) represents the lawyer who is always using the law to cheat. He performs a ceremony to marry someone from the audience with a man dressed as a woman. After they are married, the bride takes something from her new husband, and the hus-band chases after her. She goes to the Doctorcito to tell him to fix the situa-tion, and the Doctorcito says to the husband, “You know sir, you just got married, and you have to share everything you have.” The settlement at the end is that the man has to buy a case of beer for the comparsa.

BELL: This is what happens in the original fiesta, or in the Yuyachkani per-formance?

BOADA: In the fiesta. But these types of situations help us to create other situations.

BELL: What are the differences between the situations Yuyachkani creates and the indigenous ones you’ve been looking at?

BOADA: In the first place, we do the show in Lima, the capital, which is normally not a favorable climate for this tradition. To do it in the most im-portant place in the city, the Plaza Mayor, and to bring together more than

, people, is a very important moment for the people of the city, who will see the old traditions from where they’re from. This is one of the reasons why we do it.

. Using puppet, dance, and fiesta structures as po-litical theatre:

Yuyachkani’s Allpa Rayku, . (Photo courtesy of Archivo G.C.

Yuyachkani)

 John Bell

BELL: Are you trying to recreate an old tradition?

BOADA: No, what we do is a re-creation, but in the Paucartambo fiesta, the principal element of dramatic action is the Virgin of Carmen. We don’t do that. We created two characters: the Caporal de Contradanza (the Chief of the Dance) and the Lady of a Majeño, who are the masters of the fiesta.

CAMOU: What is a Majeño?

BOADA: Majeño is a powerful, prosperous businessman. A little despotic.

And the Lady is his wife. The Caporal de Contradanza is a person who has a lot of land. In Pukllay these characters organize the fiesta for some important people; so we can bring in political characters: a policeman, the mayor, a priest—those are always the main characters.

Pukllay begins with a procession through all the streets. The masters of the fiesta go around the plaza, mount a little platform, and call for the bullfight to begin. It’s a comic or satiric bullfight called Waca Waca. A bull comes out—it has a frame like a hobbyhorse with a small head of a bull—and it chases every-body. The bullfighter trembles, hides himself in his cape, and plays bullfight with the audience. Finally, the bull goes up on the platform and everybody runs away. At this moment the Saq’ras, the devils who come from the rain-bow, appear on the roof with fireworks and go to the platform, and a female Saq’ra, the China Saq’ra, is swinging on a swing. They get to the point where the bullfight is going on; and the Chief Saq’ra lassos the bull and pulls him to the ground. Then, while the Chief Saq’ra is occupied with the bull, the rest of the Saq’ras climb up to the China Saq’ra (the wife of the Chief Saq’ra) to grab her and take her away, because the Chief Saq’ra isn’t there. This subversion of order indicates an absence of power. It’s very traditional in the fiestas: to

Pukllay begins with a procession through all the streets. The masters of the fiesta go around the plaza, mount a little platform, and call for the bullfight to begin. It’s a comic or satiric bullfight called Waca Waca. A bull comes out—it has a frame like a hobbyhorse with a small head of a bull—and it chases every-body. The bullfighter trembles, hides himself in his cape, and plays bullfight with the audience. Finally, the bull goes up on the platform and everybody runs away. At this moment the Saq’ras, the devils who come from the rain-bow, appear on the roof with fireworks and go to the platform, and a female Saq’ra, the China Saq’ra, is swinging on a swing. They get to the point where the bullfight is going on; and the Chief Saq’ra lassos the bull and pulls him to the ground. Then, while the Chief Saq’ra is occupied with the bull, the rest of the Saq’ras climb up to the China Saq’ra (the wife of the Chief Saq’ra) to grab her and take her away, because the Chief Saq’ra isn’t there. This subversion of order indicates an absence of power. It’s very traditional in the fiestas: to