It's a milestone for Oregon's only professional Latino theater group...30 years of performances. Milagro Theater comes to Roseburg next month.
(sounds of set building)
Milagro is getting a show ready to go on the road. The painted cloth, canvas and rope emulate a circus. Co-founder Dañel Malan says that goes back to the roots of Latin American peasant theater:
"The campesino came from the old tradition of carpa, so that was how they would do the shows, in a tent."
Their current play, Aztlán, starts with the banning of the Mexican-American studies program in an Arizona school district and becomes a teacher's satirical road trip. She meets characters searching for the original Aztec homeland in the Southwest U.S., Aztlán:
Actors: "I took leave from my guerilla squadron in Nueva Mexico and we are searching for Aztlán to take it back for the people, once and for all. And how do you intend on doing that when you haven't been able to find it in, dare I say, más de treinta años? Más de treinta...thirty years? Mmm-hmm. I've been out here that long? Perdido! Like a vagabond."
About half of Milagro's shows are lightly bilingual. The idea comes from co-founder Jose Gonzalez:
"I was reflecting on this by watching some old John Wayne westerns, when he was an Army soldier and would encounter Native Americans, and I was really surprised to see that the Native Americans spoke in their own language."
--Indian language
At their home theater in Portland, Milagro has taken on everything from an hispanic spin on Shakespeare to Cervantes to a dark new comedy called "Opción Multiple." A woman has multiple personalities, each played by a different actor:
--Spanish language drama
When Milagro started in the mid-eighties, Jose Gonzalez says its coincided with a rapid increase in Oregon's Latino population:
"Over a decade it was in the neighborhood of 144-percent, it's an unbelievable amount, and so we knew that there was going to be continued growth and there was going to be a community that needed to be served, but as well there was another community that needed to understand who they were."
Brian Wagner of the Oregon Arts Commission says Milagro also serves as a kind of mentor to many Latino artists around Oregon:
"They have this impact on a variety of other artistic disciplines. It's dance, it's theater, it's visual arts, in this culturally specific way. And I think that that's been very powerful."
Artistic Director Olga Sanchez says being together for 30 years is a kind of miracle and she attributes it to the passion that the Milagro staff has for what art can do:
"I really believe that art is part of what makes us better people. That's critical. That's exactly what we need. There's too much violence, there's too much war, there's too much poverty, there's too much injustice. Art is part of healing all of that."
When Milagro goes on the road, they head into local schools for workshops. At Hood River Middle School recently they began by showing kids Diego Rivera murals and they got them acting:
"Awesome. Thank you guys. I want you guys to choose a character in that mural. Are we being humans or are we being the machines themselves? You're being the humans operating the machines. Oh good!"
Hood River principal Brent Emons invited Milagro to help get Latino students to participate in the school's theater and music programs and to reconnect to their own culture:
"The overwhelming majority of the Latino students at our school come from families that originated in Mexico, but most of our kids are now born here in Hood River, in Oregon and definitely the United States. So this is really just another way of showing the depth and complexity of Mexican culture."
Milagro performs at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg on February 24th.