11 January

Not much to report today; we had no performance gigs. There had been a possibility of one at a school opening somewhere around San Cristóbal, but the guy never got back to Rudi about it. Kind of mysterious.

On the way into town this morning, walking down the hill from Rudi's house to where we catch the Colectivo minibus, we saw some workers in the woods; they had cut down a large tree and were hewing it, on the spot, into boards with a chainsaw! This must be how the rough beams I see holding up peoples' ceilings are made.

My first thought was, "now, that's a skill!" A good example of skill coming from necessity and subsistence. It was a far cry from the giant tin shack that we call a sawmill back in Eureka; these were workers getting and cutting the wood they needed for a job. Not cutting down a forest and selling it later.

After lunch I sat around in the Zócalo thinking about how to approach the music number that Rudy suggested at the end of our show; the problem is that my guitar is too big to fit into his trunk, and it's kind of random to just grab a guitar and start singing. I wish I had brought my ukelele. I looked for one at a music store here, but they didn't have one; if there had been a cheap one, I probably would have bought it and given it to Rudi. I was already planning on getting a Cavaquinho (the Brazilian version of the uke) later in my trip, so there was little point, really, in getting one now unless I could get rid of it — because I don't want to travel with one, and if I did, I should have brought the one I already own!

So I started thinking about ways to contrive an instrument out of junk--perhaps a washtub bass made with a 5-gallon bucket and a broomstick. This lead to a bunch of dramaturgical ideas, naturally, about building a story by which Ferdinand discovers music in the junk. It's an old idea, really, a classic bit that could be really cliché. But it turned out later on that Rudi had the same idea--maybe that I could contrive and play a glass marimba. This is very much in line with Bruce Marrs' observation that music is more within my skill set than juggling or other standard circus skills.

The problem is that we have four show this weekend with a lot of travel in between and little time to work up such a routine. I suppose it'll have to evolve onstage....

Music can also contribute to the balloon bit; I can easily "discover" the sound of a balloon squeaking and be inspired to perform the Blue Danube Waltz. I have no idea if there's enough familiarity with that music around here for people to get the joke, but the music itself is pretty funny so I'll start by playing with that!

===========================================================


Tuesday, 15 January

Gat back late Sunday night from our trip to Ostuacan; yesterday was spent recovering and running errands in the centro of San Cirstóbal.

Saturday, we loaded up and drove down to Ostuacan. In our convoy were the seven clowns from CHISPA, and some CHISPA staffers to take care of us. One of the clowns brought her husband, three children and one of her teenage son's friends. There were about 17 in all, in four vehicles. I rode in the pickup truck with four others who spoke no English; the trip had a lot of silence! WE did manage to have one conversation about sports, drugs and the recent steroid scandals in the US. I got about one sentence out every kilometer.

I'm having to think pretty hard to say anything properly. When I just start talking, what comes out is a mixture of Spanish, Portuguese and French. Often the Portuguese version of a word is the first to come to my mouth, and I tend to glue everything together with French conjunctions and prepositions. It's kind of funny, but frustrating. I'm discovering that my French vocabulary is starting to disappear. Scary.

We drove down past a couple of the Zapatista "Autonomous" zones--villages and valleys that the Zapatistas control and that the Mexican government allows some peace. They have built their own schools in there, and apparently there's no such thing as property taxes in this part of the world, so they really have their own governments in there.

The landscape transitioned from the piney hills near San Cristóbal to misty cloud forests to the incredibly dense green rain forest of the flat lowlands. The flooding and road blockage was so intense that we had to drive way north of Ostuacan to get to it; the easier routes were blocked. Along the way, the road was plagued with collapsed shoulders, landslides from above, and outright faulting down the middle of the pavement! To some extent, this is pretty common on mountain roads; roads themselves tend to destabilize hillslopes and if the surrounding cuts aren't stabilized when the road is built, there's trouble. And it looks to me like the highway department here didn't invest much in the hillsopes and cuts when they built the roads.

That said, the effects of deforestation, overgrazing and monocultural farming have never been clearer to me. Ostuacan is a little backwater town, a market-node for a vast region of coffee plantations, cacao farms and cattle ranches. It lies at the foot of the northernmost range of the Chiapas Highlands, along a riverbed, with a plateau of gently rolling hills to the north. Every slope nearby that is less than 35-40 degrees has been deforested for plantation or ranching. And every inch of that land is eroding away. One of the photos here shows just a green hillside; if you look closely, you'll see linear formations in the surface of the hill that run in roughly horizontal lines; these are literally waves of topsoil that are flowing off of the mountain. The soil is deep and rich, but it depends on the root systems of forests to hold it there; the grasses and herbs that dominate after deforestation are not enough to hold it. Further, when the cattle diminish the grass and loosen the soil with their hooves, the situation is exacerbated. The torrential rains that come twice a year then just wash the whole place away. Eventually only bedrock will remain here, muddy badlands where nothing will be able to grow, and the soil will not have the years that it takes to develop. Then even ranching will be impossible. The rivers fill with mud and choke out the fish; the people will most likely leave and crowd into cites somewhere. They've mortgaged their future for a few years' profits--or, more likely, corporate or governmental farming programs have.

The floods that have devastated Ostuacan and the surrounding communities are not a natural disaster: downstream from the town, the deforestation allowed an entire hillside to collapse, damming the river. The resulting lake drowned several communities and blocked roads, which is why we had to drive so far north. I don't know how many people, if any, were killed. The lake is now being drained into another stretch of river via a cut that the authorities have made (see photos). Unfortunately, of course, the maps available of this area are rare, of too small a scale to show much detail, and probably wildly inaccurate. If I could map this for you, I would.

In the town of Ostuacan itself, the refugees who did not flee to the sports complex in Tuxtla were moved into plywood cabins built on concrete pads in the middle of town (see photos.) Kitchens are communal and there is no running water. Food stores are kept in fenced-in areas of schools and administrative buildings, and are guarded by armed security guards. A school outside of town has been taken over as a camp, where people sleep in gender-segregated "dormitorios" (classrooms) and the whole place is operated and guarded by the army.

When we drove down, we were told that we'd do four shows here--two on Saturday and two on Sunday. But the local authorities, with whom CHISPA had made the arrangements, weren't too clear on things, apparently, and when we arrived they were surprised and had no idea where we were to perform. It was getting close to sundown, so the venue was going to have to be lit; we ended up doing only one show that night on a basketball court (that was being used as a soccer pitch) with a pavilion roof and big lights. The show went pretty well. It started slowly — The CHISPA clowns don't really understand that you can't keep an audience waiting — and the energy was pretty low by the time Rudi and I were to start. We started pretty quickly and then settled into an even-paced rhythm which Rudi later said was a little slow and unvaried. But we have a relaxed groove together, one that keeps the show moving, at least, and allows for some play.

I can't stress enough how lucky I feel to be working with a such a seasoned pro who knows his routines, knows how to change them according to the situation and when to cut them, extend them, or modify them on the fly. He knows how to make room for me in his show; can play either part in a routine and can change roles or actions as necessary.

He knows how to work an audience and get kids to participate onstage. he knows how to develop a silent dialogue with a kid in order to, say, get the kid to do a hat routine or some acro — without forcing the kid to do anything. He's open to kids and their impulses. And he loves to play with them.

He also demonstrates the thinking-process of creating or developing a bit according to character. When we were decompressing Sunday night, we debriefed the shows a little bit and ended up rehearsing a new routine for two hats. He knows how to look for (and find!) the comedy in a situation.

He thinks like a clown, and it's fascinating to see the process outside of the context of Ronlin Foreman's classes.

There's a lot I can learn from him. I wish I had more time as his apprentice.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Our show on Sunday was at the school outside of town, because we woke up that day to torrential rain and the outdoor venue that had been proposed was unusable. We crowded into one of the classrooms, which was maybe five meters square, and the people sat tightly around the periphery or looked in the windows. The CHISPA clowns' part of the show was cut drastically; they did one clown/folk dance and a song. Then Rudi and I started. Our show had to be cut down, too, partly because of time and space, and partly because one of our essential props is a newspaper, which can actually be very difficult to find down here.

All in all, the four shows that were planned for the weekend were cut down to two, and the show that we were supposed to do on Friday never materialized; so out of six planned gigs so far, only three have happened, and the last two we had to really fight to do at all. This is apparently par for the course in Clowns Without Borders; in these parts of the world where resources are few and everything is improvised, life has a nasty habit of coming up short.

On the drive back, the group decided to go through Tuxtla since some of the CHISPA staff live there, and because on the map, it looks like an easier drive... Ha! We ended up on several tiny dirt roads (that were actually just mud, washing away like the rest of the place) and almost lost. Traffic lanes are only taken as suggestions, here, and in the country anything goes. The driver of my vehicle, Fredy, is a great guy but he drives with an almost religious conviction that the left side of the road has fewer potholes than the right, which made for some consternation among drivers heading in the opposite direction.

All in all, drivers here, while impulsive and unpredictable, are not aggressive and they keep a pretty light touch on the gas pedal; they're very aware of people or vehicles that might move in front of them. Small maneuvers that would cause wrecks in Denver are no problem here, and I think a lot about driving in Brooklyn, where people who learned to drive in places like this are sharing the road with aggressive Yanks and the relentless stress of the city. Brooklyn seems less random and insane in this context — but still worrisome and scary.