Compa-Trono
At the end of the 1990s, the police incarcerated a group of children that had been living on the streets of La Paz. The phenomenon was common in those days, and the simple name "Rehabilitation Center" frightened any kid unlucky enough to live on the street. Bolivians love irony, so the children began to call the jail "The Throne." "There you live like a king! They give you food and a bed and you don't do anything!" "Tronado" also can mean "destroyed," which gave a double meaning to the joke.
A young sociologist and actor, Iván Nogales, proposed an arts project to the jail: he and the jailed children would create a theater troupe. The idea was so strange that the prison bureaucracy accepted it, and a small group of kids began to dream of drama. Chilla, Claudio, Ángel, and several other children imagined a house in the impoverished neighborhood of El Alto, with a theater, cinema, music studios, and bedrooms for kids with no place else to live. As they dreamed this dream, they also created a play about their lives, made costumes from the rags left behind in the washroom, and talked about the stage.
Amazingly, in the last twenty years, almost every dream has been realized. The Trono theater company, named after the jail where it was created, has toured Europe, the US, and Latin America. Many of the group's founders are now theater and music teachers for a new generation of marginalized children. They built a huge building from recycled materials, a kind of lighthouse of culture in El Alto, where children come from all over the city for arts, theater, music, video, and dance workshops.
Walking through Ciudad Satélite, at the end of El Alto at 14,000 ft above sea level, Compa stands out. Its windows come from colonial and modernist buildings; its terraces and balconies hang elegantly above the street, and its towers look rather like a castle. In spite of its hodgepodge of styles, the building is brilliant, and has influenced a whole school of Bolivian architecture. After walking along "Culture Street" and walking in the open front door, one passes by a small restaurant and community space. A pit opens in the floor, the opening to "The Mines", a museum dedicated to teaching children about the traditions of miners in Bolivia
Climbing the staircase, one arrives at the public entrance of the theater, where the audience sits in a "U", rather like in the Globe of Shakespeare's day, providing both an intimate and professional feel. For many years, everyone in Bolivia saw La Paz as the country's artistic center, but one of the great achievements of Compa-Trono has been to decentralize the arts. Today, the country's elite take taxis and cars and buses up onto the cold altiplano to see poor children act in avant-garde theater. There are now several children's and teenage theater companies that perform here.
The next floor holds a movie theater, where a group of teenagers shows alternative cinema, showing that there are movies much more interesting than what one might see in Hollywood. There is also a library and a ballet studio, where teachers offer classes in classical ballet, modern dance, folklore, and even flamenco. Dance is essential to Compa-Trono's work, because it helps to "de-colonize the body" of the mostly indigenous children who come to the site for arts education.
The third story is the most active and interesting, because that's where the practice studios are. At all hours of the day, one can find a group of children or teenagers working on a new play; when I was there, two groups were preparing for a tour of the Yungas (part of the Amazon jungle below La Paz), where they were going to present plays to help people think about the coming Constitutional Assembly. One play dealt with the relation between the center and the periphery of the global economy, represented by local and international chocolate companies. Another play represented the events of the short lived Bolivian revolution of 1952. The play offered numerous opportunities to yell political slogans (always fun for adolescents), but it also opened a space for reflection about the responsibilities of the public in moments or radical change, like what has happened in the last several years in Bolivia.
Compa's work with theater is fascinating for many reasons. First, it is a clear case of children become agents in their own lives, because the teachers and organizers of the workshops are all young people. They write and adapt the script (with tremendous creativity) and bring in music and dance. As children's theater, the work is always a balance between serious and playful, but most of the time they accomplish it quite well.
One also hears the sounds of Andean instruments from the music studio on the third floor. When I visited, a group of children from 8-14 years old was recording a CD of indigenous and criolla music, where they worked with a professional teacher, but also spent hours and hours practicing and teaching each other. You can listen to the disk at www.compatrono.tk : click on the button that says "Tronitos." (#5, "Mamita", is particularly good).
On the fourth floor, one comes to the Hostel. In the end, the space is for international volunteers, and not for street kids, but it is fully a part of Compa, and the kids feel as comfortable in these rooms as anywhere else. On this floor one also finds another music studio, a video editing studio (a new project for Compa-Trono) and a nice space for meetings. Above, one finds Iván Nogales's small house, and an open terrace with the most beautiful view in Bolivia, with Illimani (6400 meters) and Huayna Potosí (6000 meters) so close you could touch them.
Compa-Trono's activities range far beyond the building. Every Saturday -- and many other days -- the "theater-truck" takes culture around the city. The converted tractor-trailer turns into a stage, where the young actors present plays at schools, street fairs, political demonstrations... and a Mobile School, full of educational games, brain twisters, and an immense game of chess. In many cases, the young actors perform and then give workshops at a local school or community center.
Compa-Trono does not want to be an institution that stigmatizes or labels kids as "poor", "street" or "Indian", so it is open to everyone. Most of the participants come from the poorest neighborhoods of El Alto and La Paz, and the program does all that it can to integrate parents into the process. Every night there are parents in the halls, watching their children practicing, while also building an adult community. Compa-Trono also works with schools to build community, and the program has trained more that 600 teachers in arts education.
Compa-Trono has expanded to work in Cochabamba -- in marginalized neighborhoods -- and in Santa Cruz -- with children served by other organizations.
The first actors of Compa-Trono dreamed of art that could transform reality, a peaceful and constructive alternative to the guerrillas. The events of 2005, when the young people of El Alto -- many of them artists and musicians -- peacefully overthrew two corrupt governments and brought the first Indian President in Bolivia to power, offers a tribute to how well they realized their dreams.
Comunidad de Productores en Artes (Compa)
Ciudad Satélite Plano 404, Calle 17-B #615
El Alto, La Paz
Bolivia
Casilla 1823
La Paz, Bolivia
591 2 281 1284
www.compatrono.tk, www.compatrono.com
contacto: Iván Nogales, compain@yahoo.com
