Breathe
By Brenda Macias
Tomorrow, November 22, 2024, 30 years after the death of Nancy Cárdenas, the capital of Coahuila will revive one of her plays, El día que pisamos la luna, a typewritten draft delivered to Mabel Garza -director of the staging that summons us today and of Luz del Norte Teatro- via Elena Madrigal of El Colegio de México, to join the commemorative activities for the 90th anniversary of Nancy's birth and for the 30th anniversary of her farewell from this earthly plane.
It took 30 years to vindicate Nancy Cárdenas in Coahuila, a native of Parras de la Fuente, the place where she was born and which at the same time stimulated her to conquer the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Yale University and the National School of Film, Television and Theater in Lodz, Poland.
Chroniclers and friends of Nancy Cárdenas, such as Carlos Monsiváis, called her a woman of multiple vocation because, as well as directing theater, she wrote and acted it; she was an announcer for Radio UNAM where she produced, among other programs, the series Nuevo Teatro, and also directed some radio plays, among them El cántaro seco, of which she was the author.
In 1971, Nancy Cárdenas founded the Frente de Liberación Homosexual (Homosexual Liberation Front) that would drive the Homosexual Liberation Movement in Mexico, today the Sexual Diversity Movement, and participated at the forefront of the first Gay Pride March in Mexico in 1978.
Nancy, the so-called "Parras Atenea", made Sapphic women visible in the public space, because in the first person she openly revealed herself as one of them, in spite of the discomfort they cause. She did it before the cameras and microphones of Jacobo Zabludovsky's Noticiero 24 horas, of the Televisa monopoly in 1973, the same year in which homosexuality was removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or DSM, for its acronym in English.
Lesbian trilogy in Mexican theater
According to an interview with Nancy Cárdenas conducted by Elena M. Martínez and published in Issue 134 of fem -a magazine published between 1976 and 2005 and known for being the first feminist periodical in America-, Nancy Cárdenas explained that El día que pisamos la luna is part of a trilogy of works that address the theme of love between women. The trilogy includes Colette's musical comedy Claudine and W.R. Fassbinder's The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant.
Before the play El día que pisamos la luna came to Saltillo, it had an ephemeral presentation on October 8, 1981, at the Teatro El Granero Xavier Rojas of the Centro Cultural del Bosque in Mexico City, and Mabel Garza was a spectator of that stage event that had Nancy Cárdenas as director and playing the role of Marina; July Furlong as Beatriz 1, Nerina Ferrer as Teresa and the first actress Angélica Aragón as Beatriz 2.
On this occasion - 43 years after that first premiere - on the stage of La Besana - one of the bastions of independent theater in Saltillo - Andrea Galindo, Martha Matamoros, Melisa Soto and Victoria López - four of the best actresses Coahuila has ever produced - lend their bodies, voices and energy to recover a lesbodrama or bollodrama, as they say in lesbian slang, and thus reflect on how in sex-affective relationships between women not everything is just peanuts.
In this comedy that criticizes the toxic forms of love in which half-truths, infidelity and disaffection prevail, political theater appears and reveals to us the ravages left on the militants and activists by the massacre of students in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Tlatelolco, in that fateful year of 1968. That historical event would remain in the memory of the future (present) of Mexico as one of the clearest events of state authoritarianism against the civilian population and would show us the other wounds and cracks left by violence: the emotional ones. But also how, despite the catastrophe, there is a possibility of a future.
And what does the arrival of man/onvre to the moon have to do here, you may ask? I think it was the perfect pretext that Nancy Cárdenas found to address the power of the assemblies and to gather four women in a space to talk about what is important: desire, lesbian love, infidelity, widowhood, codependence, the playful consumption of marijuana and all that we want to unlearn as romantic love from the discomfort because for Nancy Cárdenas "feminist consciousness is an uncomfortable treasure".
The musical selection of the play
The musical selection of The Day We Set Foot on the Moon is the emotional score of the play, it is a guide that gives meaning to the plot proposed by the dramatic text. The list of selected music amplifies the emotions of the characters and at the same time will resonate -using Augusto Boal's terminology- in the actress and the spectator -what we call audience- to reinforce the theatrical event.
The lyrics of this repertoire will cry out to us the constants of the work: lost love, vulnerability and the struggle we face in trying to master attachments. The music undoubtedly rubs salt in the wound. It places us in a time when songs of love, spite and seduction marked the sentimental education in Mexico.
The playlist is the auditory sample of the melodrama and the possible tragedy that romantic love means, because as the poet Cristina Peri Rossi says, "we come out of love as from an air catastrophe".
This musical selection of iconic authors such as José Alfredo Jiménez, Armando Manzanero, Vicente Garrido, Agustín Lara, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, among others, allows us to peek into Nancy Cárdenas' personal record library. Undoubtedly, it is another character. It is the way Nancy, as the author, is present in the work today, she is the emotional DJ of this catastrophe we are about to witness.
El día que pisamos la luna by Nancy Cárdenas is a saltillo for the vindication of sexual diversities in this city and a great leap for the LGBTIQ+ population towards their recognition and respect, here and now, in Mexico and the world.
Let's get started!
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of the company. Opinion 51.
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