ACT I

Introduction to the Buendia’s family and the daguerreotype (First invention of a photographic camera)

Melquiades y los Gitanos (Melquiades and the Gypsies)

Persecuting the singing of the birds, Melquiades and the gypsies arrived in Macondo. Melquiades was an alchemist and gypsy wizard. He brought to Macondo miracles and magic, the philosophical stone, the magnetic metals, telescopes, and dry ice.

Vivir de Amor (To live of Love)

Pilar Ternera was the happiest, most sensual, passionate, friendly and talkative woman. She was the greatest fortune-teller who lived to Love and for the Love. She taught Love to whom did not know it, and helped find impossible lovers with her magical fortune telling. With her provocative smell and her explosive laugh, she inspired passionate love to the most ingenuous lover.

“Y la llamaron Rebeca” (And they called her Rebeca)

Little Rebeca arrived in Macondo one Sunday after her parents died. She came with a Guagira Indian whose name was Visitacion. She carried her parents’ bones in a canvas sack. Her only family was Ursula Buendia, the mother of the Buendia’s family but Ursula didn’t remember having any relatives with those names. “They kept her because there was nothing else they could do and they decided to call her Rebeca.”  She “only liked to eat the damp earth of the courtyard and the cake of whitewash that she picked off the walls with her nails,” but “she was more affectionate to Ursula than any of her own children had been.”

La plaga de la Insomnia (The Insomnia Plague)

It was with Rebeca “sucking her finger and with her eyes lighted up in the darkness like those of a cat” that the most terrible plague of insomnia arrived in Macondo. Their bodies did not feel any fatigue at all, but its inexorable evolution toward a more critical manifestation: a loss of memory. “The recollection of the childhood began to be erased from the memory, then the name and notion of things, and finally the identity of people and even the awareness of the own being, until they sank into a kind of idiocy that had no past.”

Aureliano “El Coronel”

The soldier who was born with the gift of clairvoyance. His heart was unable to love because he cried in his mother’s womb. Aureliano, “El Coronel” used to trace a circumference around him to avoid people getting close to him. He lost every battle of war but death passed over him several times and he finally died of old age.

The house was full of LOVE (“La casa se lleno de AMOR”)

Pietro Crespi, Italian expert in dance and music brought the metronome, the clavichord, and wind up dolls of human sizes. He was the sophisticated dance and music teacher for the girls of the Buendia’s family. Amaranta and Rebeca fell in love with him but he only returned the feelings to Rebeca, and from that moment, Amaranta hated Rebecca until the day of her death.

“Se caso con el que creia era su hermano” “(She married with who she thought was her brother)”

Rebeca, tired of waiting for Pietro Crespi and scared of Amaranta’s jealousy, discovered her real love, and married with whom she thought was her own brother, Jose Arcadio Buendia.

“Ni muerta, me casaria contigo!”  “(I wouldn’t marry you even if I were dead!)”

When Pietro Crespi came back from Italy, his girlfriend, Rebeca, was already married. His only hope of love was Amaranta. She was madly in love with him but would never be the second love. His desperation and her remorse took them to a tragic ending.

ACT II

Yo me voy pa’ Macondo (I’m going to Macondo)

Amaranta y la Muerte (Amaranta and the Spirit of Dead)

Amaranta receives an omen of death. The Spirit of Dead forces her to weave her own shroud. She will have to die the same day her shroud is finished. Amaranta tries to escape from her inevitable death weaving her shroud as slowly as she can.

Fiesta “La Muerte de Amaranta” (Celebrate “Amaranta’s death”)

(It is an indigenous tradition to celebrate the dead and cry the baby born)

“The news that Amaranta Buendia was sailing at dusk carrying the mail of death spread throughout Macondo before noon, and at three in the afternoon there was a whole carton full of letters in the parlor. Those who did not want to write gave to Amaranta verbal messages, which she wrote down in a notebook with the name and the date of death of the recipient. ‘Don’t worry’ she told the senders.” ‘ The first thing I’ll do when I get there is to ask for him and give him your message.’ ”

Los mas altos pajaros, jamas me alcanzaran…(The highest flying birds, will never reach me…)

Remedios, “La Bella,” with her pure, innocent, unreal and exceptional beauty, was not a creature of this world.

“She stayed there wandering through the desert of solitude, maturing in her dreams without nightmares, her interminable baths, and her deep and prolonged silences that had no memory. One afternoon in March, she began to rise with her purity bareness, in the midst of flapping sheets that abandoned with her the air of this world, and they were lost forever, where not even the highest-flying birds of memory could reach her.”

Todos los animales de la tierra se multiplicaron! (All the animals of the earth multiplied!)

Aureliano II and Petra loved each other with sincerity, the most passionate and deepest love until their death. All the animals of the earth multiplied with their outrageous love.  

Todo el pueblo la olvido… (All Macondo forgot her…)

Rebeca died after Jose Arcadio’s death. She locked herself for months and they found her with her finger in her mouth and with large, startled eyes of immense suffering.

“La Soberana” (The Queen)

“ ‘She is different, she will be a queen’ the nuns said in the convent where she grew up”. “Fernanda del Carpio, ‘the Queen’ dreamed with a legendary reign, until the day of her wedding ”, with Aureliano II, “a great rumba of 20 days.” With her out of place sense of shame and her arrogance of being an imaginary queen, she couldn’t love anyone.

“Aureliano II opted to believe he married a nun” and went back to his true love, Petra Cotes.

Parranda desaforada (Extravagant party at Petra Cotes’ house)

Petra Cotes and Aureliano II celebrated their “LOVE” with big parties, tremendous cumbiambas that lasted three and more days.

Mariposas Amarillas (Yellow Butterfies)

“The yellow butterflies would invade the house at dusk.”  It was Mauricio Bavilonia who was always surrounded by yellow butterflies. Without Mauricio and his butterflies, Meme would loose her love of life…

El Diluvio (The Deluge)

“It rained for four years, eleven months, and two days.” “The spirit of Ursula’s invisible heart guided her through the shadows. Those who noticed her stumbling and who bumped into her archangelic arm she kept raised at head level thought that she was having trouble with her body, but they still did not think she was blind.” Ursula was 122 years old when she promised to die after the deluge.

La ultima plaga (The last plague)

“Estaba previsto que la ciudad de los espejos (o de los espejismos) seria arrasada por el viento y desterrada de la memoria de los hombres, que es irrepetible desde siempre y para siempre, porque las estirpes condenadas a cien anos de soledad no tendran una segunda oportunidad sobre la tierra”

“It was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men. It is unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.”

Translation of Spanish article – El Espectador, Tuesday, November 3, 1987, Bogotá, Colombia

. ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE AS A DANCE

The Santander Jazz Ballet dance company, gives love and faith through dance. They are young artists of Colombia but their tradition in the art of dance started 25 years ago in Bucaramanga, were the Santander Jazz Ballet has its home.

Macondo, Ciudad de los Espejos (Macondo, City of the Mirrors) was their production for the Second National Dance Festival presented at the Crisanto Luque last week. Based on "Cien Años de Soledad", an homage to Gabriel Garcia Marquez and a celebration of the 20 years of the novel in the hands of the world.

They say "If the life exists, there is a way to live" and before they go on stage, they put their hands together, transmitting in themselves the energy that it is only possible with the interaction of the bodies in movement. The spiritual moment and under sounds, even the sounds of silence and relaxation; then this beautiful energy is given away to the audience.

The final result of 2 hours without interruption of choreography and narrative sequences provoked to the capital audience (that usually reacts in a cold way) was non-stop standing ovations. The audience went to look for the dancers to continue in a prolonged euphoria of satisfaction.

. The Choreography

The coastal ambiance took the Crisato Luque by storm. From the heat of the Atlantic towns, the accordions, tiples and guitars, to the spontaneous feelings of the people from the coast, the ballet and drama sections are combined with excellence. It looked like every moment was created in Macondo, in a day of a high temperature as usual, and together with Ursula and Aureliano Buendia.

The music is authentic, coming from the heart of the Atlantic coast of Colombia. El Vallenato and its philosophic relation with the coastal culture, the hammocks sounds, the roosters’ wake up sound early in the morning, every scene was studied with precision.

Ana Ines Barragan is the choreographer. Her mother, Dora Olarte de Barragan started the Dance program in Bucaramanga 25 years ago and now with her two daughters and granddaughter is living the passion for the dance.

The choreography combines the high-energy movements with the soft breaks but continuity. The lights, bright colored costumes, the sections of dramatic theater were very well combined with the dance and music.

Their lines are "curves", moving like a leaf in the wind. Their long and expressive arms and legs adorn the music. You don’t see the long scenes of the traditional modern dance. They don’t dance as a corps de ballet with equal characteristics. The seduction of the Santander Jazz ballet is more than that, the fragile harmonious and sweet gave with authentic desire of giving. That was maybe the reason why the capital (Bogotá) audience couldn’t stop their ovations to the Santander Jazz Ballet.

Telegram from Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s grandmother; Carmen Garcia de Mancera after the premier of Macondo, ciudad de los Espejos

Wonderful is the person like you that without receiving anything in return gives all your soul to enrich the arts and the community. With deep emotion, Congratulations! for your extraordinary representation of Cien Años de Soledad.

Macondo, Ciudad de los Espejos will get very far nationally and internationally like the novel of the Master.

Kisses,

Rodolfo, Carmen Garcia de Mancera and children

For more information, email us to latinballet.va@verizon.net  or call us at (804) 379-2555