Friday, November 18, 2005
Show
Sunday, May 29, 2005
Today I was driving over Costanera Avenue, an avenue on an upper class neighborhood in Santiago, Chile. In Santiago, “red-stop-light shows” are quite common. While a stop light is red, children start doing a juggling show—some are more skilled than others—and after the short show ends, the children ask for money from the audience in the other cars at the stop light. I don’t know if it is necessary to clarify that the children who perform these shows belong to low-income families and neighborhoods.
Today the show consisted of the following: a kid juggled with three little balls while standing on the back of a bent down woman who was in her fifties. Sadly, I don’t have pictures, but this woman was bent forward while the child stood on her back. At the end of the brief show, the child descended from the woman’s back and she simply stood up with no expression on her face while she moved to the side of the street to let the children look for their pennies in the wealthy cars.
This Show is remarkable, because it actually shows. I can’t help but be perturbed by the explicit character of the resignation of this woman, by the years over her shoulders, by how accustomed she had grown to frustration, to being an instrumental object, by her implicit acceptance of serving, and her acceptance that “nothing new will come.” I surely do not want to get into the hysteric discourse about “the woman who suffers,” but this woman reminded me of another one, who I met seven years ago, who I was able to chat with after she asked me for money to buy medicine for her children. We stayed outside the pharmacy talking (With time, one becomes particularly skeptical and would rather buy the food or medication than just give money away), and she told me about her inability to work because she could not trust anyone to take care of her children. She made disparaging comments about her neighbors who left their kids locked inside the house while they went to work, and exposed their children to being raped by their own fathers or stepfathers.
I left this conversation with the feeling of being locked, the feeling that one way or another that woman was going to end up losing something: “I do not have any money because I cannot work, and I do not work because if I do, my children will die as victims of a fire, or rape, or drug overdose.” It is not necessary to use statistics to know that this is the reality of most of the women with no income and that is why I applaud this shocking and explicit show—because of the drama of its secondary actress, its realism, its capacity to communicate and for its montage: to be in the right place and at the right time, just in front of our eyes.
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Today I was driving over Costanera Avenue, an avenue on an upper class neighborhood in Santiago, Chile. In Santiago, “red-stop-light shows” are quite common. While a stop light is red, children start doing a juggling show—some are more skilled than others—and after the short show ends, the children ask for money from the audience in the other cars at the stop light. I don’t know if it is necessary to clarify that the children who perform these shows belong to low-income families and neighborhoods.
Today the show consisted of the following: a kid juggled with three little balls while standing on the back of a bent down woman who was in her fifties. Sadly, I don’t have pictures, but this woman was bent forward while the child stood on her back. At the end of the brief show, the child descended from the woman’s back and she simply stood up with no expression on her face while she moved to the side of the street to let the children look for their pennies in the wealthy cars.
This Show is remarkable, because it actually shows. I can’t help but be perturbed by the explicit character of the resignation of this woman, by the years over her shoulders, by how accustomed she had grown to frustration, to being an instrumental object, by her implicit acceptance of serving, and her acceptance that “nothing new will come.” I surely do not want to get into the hysteric discourse about “the woman who suffers,” but this woman reminded me of another one, who I met seven years ago, who I was able to chat with after she asked me for money to buy medicine for her children. We stayed outside the pharmacy talking (With time, one becomes particularly skeptical and would rather buy the food or medication than just give money away), and she told me about her inability to work because she could not trust anyone to take care of her children. She made disparaging comments about her neighbors who left their kids locked inside the house while they went to work, and exposed their children to being raped by their own fathers or stepfathers.
I left this conversation with the feeling of being locked, the feeling that one way or another that woman was going to end up losing something: “I do not have any money because I cannot work, and I do not work because if I do, my children will die as victims of a fire, or rape, or drug overdose.” It is not necessary to use statistics to know that this is the reality of most of the women with no income and that is why I applaud this shocking and explicit show—because of the drama of its secondary actress, its realism, its capacity to communicate and for its montage: to be in the right place and at the right time, just in front of our eyes.
Post a Comment