La Jornada: Variations on coffee portrays on stage the impact of work on the female body

Before the performance begins, the audience is already part of the experience. 23 bags with different amounts of coffee beans are lined up on three tables. Each one keeps notes written during weeks of work.

Attendees walk through them, read the texts and smell the aroma before taking their places. The ritual precedes Variations on coffee, in season at the El Galeón Abraham Oceransky theater, of the Centro Cultural del Bosque (CCB). The piece was built from almost two years of field research with women from Pluma Hidalgo, in the mountains of Oaxaca.

The performer and Uruguayan researcher Mariana Blanco, who has lived in Mexico for two decades, began the process during the pandemic. The Mexican curator and scenic creator Alicia Laguna joined the project.

When Blanco arrived in Pluma Hidalgo he did not have a defined narrative: he sought to discover how questions about the female body resonated outside of his own environment.

“I approached the community before knowing what the show would be about,” Blanco recalled in an interview with The Day. The weekly visits, body workshops and conversations with a group of coffee growers were no longer just part of an investigation.

As time went by, those women began to participate in the project’s decisions, attending rehearsals and discussing the way they would be represented.

“I call them playwrights of the work,” Blanco explained. “It was a work forged through consensus, with a very careful discussion of each fragment.”

All of this is also visible from the first minutes. The bags contain the notes that Blanco wrote while counting seeds, an exercise proposed by Laguna to bring the interpreter closer to the physical repetition that the sorters face daily. For 40 days he dedicated nearly 30 hours to that task before incorporating it onto the stage.

“Before a result, the important thing was that Mariana lived that exercise,” Laguna said. Rather than defining from the beginning what would happen, they sought to recognize what was happening physically and mentally during a prolonged action.

On stage, Blanco talks to the audience about the weight of the coffee and its qualities. Little by little, the grain stops being the protagonist. In their place appear the women who support that profession and the traces that the work leaves on them.

The projections incorporate the voices of the inhabitants of Pluma Hidalgo. Their testimonies dialogue with the personal history of the actress, who remembers her mother, her sister and the decision to cut her long hair. Later he evokes the accident he suffered and the surgery that forced him to shave part of his head again, an episode that adds another dimension to his fragility.

For Laguna, that word was never linked to weakness. “Fragility does not necessarily mean a defect or a weakness; it can be quite the opposite.” Therefore, the proposal does not rest only on testimony. “We were looking for the body to be involved.”

One of the most powerful images shows a member of the team entering, weaving a long artificial strand into the actress’s hair and securing it with a ring to a suspended structure. Blanco slowly ascends until he is in front of a sack.

The image refers to a scale: on one side remains the body of a woman; on the other, the weight of countless hours of manual labor. The scene summarizes the meaning of the work.

During the first meetings, several participants preferred to keep their names anonymous due to the prejudices aroused by a group of women meeting to talk about their bodies and their daily lives. Today they participate in new stage projects and some even go on stage. “It brought me closer to them and I think it brought them closer to me,” Blanco summarized.

Variations on coffee It runs until July 19, with performances Thursday and Friday at 8 p.m., Saturdays at 7 p.m. and Sundays at 6 p.m., at the El Galeón Abraham Oceransky theater, of the CCB (Reforma and Campo Marte).

Then it will go to the Scenic Garden Laboratory, from July 30 to August 2, with performances Thursday and Friday at 7 p.m., Saturdays at 6 p.m. and Sundays at 5 p.m.