As a author, I all the time really feel deeply honored once I get to learn a manuscript. It’s not solely the chance to be taught from a colleague, but in addition to enter an intimate, sacred area of the literary craft. It’s like moving into an altar earlier than the church doorways open for mass.
When studying a play, one inevitably wonders in regards to the staging. And within the case of All of the Black Butterflies Die within the Sea, by Heny Ilse Roig Monge, that query turns into much more compelling, as a result of Heny approaches her characters with a profound poetic sensibility and a multi-artistic imaginative and prescient that mixes choreography and imagery. In different phrases, she breaks free from phrases and dialogue; she locations emphasis on motion and pictures.
That makes my creativeness soar, and, on the identical time, it makes me surprise what interpretation the director will convey to the piece. And I don’t doubt that I shall be stunned, since IATI Theater in New York has a outstanding monitor document of presenting high-quality productions.
Don’t miss it. You possibly can see it till Sunday, October 5. I promise you’ll not solely witness a play, but in addition go away with many questions on our our bodies, about gender, and in regards to the identities we derive from them.
And it is usually an honor to talk with the writer, for in doing so, we achieve yet one more dimension of her work.
JS: Heny, inform me about your skilled profession. How did you turn into a playwright, coming from a background as an actress and researcher? How did your work journey from Chile to be introduced at IATI Theater, such an emblematic stage in New York’s East Village?
HRM: Some circumstances in my life happened by easy likelihood. Whereas learning theater, I took lessons with the distinguished playwright Juan Radrigán, who obtained Chile’s Nationwide Arts of Efficiency Award from the Ministry of Tradition, Arts, and Heritage. He was the one who guided me towards writing, and I shall be eternally grateful for that reward.
In 2013, throughout my last 12 months at college, I based, along with Rayen Castillo, the collective “Matriz,” main a analysis mission on the pedagogical work of the playwright titled From the Cry to Creation: Discontent because the Soul of Playwriting, Conversations with Juan Radrigán, printed by Ediciones Cuarto Propio and included in 2020 in Chile’s first on-line catalog of performing arts publishers.
As for IATI, I noticed an announcement on social media in regards to the 2024 CIMIENTOS residency for playwrights and I utilized. IATI knowledgeable me that the play had been chosen from lots of of worldwide proposals as one in every of ten highlighted items for its staged studying collection. In 2024, I traveled to New York to witness the method with the IATI workforce, and it was an unbelievable expertise. This 12 months I obtained the information that the play was chosen for the 2025 Mainstage Season. The remaining is a part of what we’re experiencing at this time.
JS: You studied on the Pontifical Catholic College of Chile, the place you earned your grasp’s diploma, and likewise on the Universidad Academia de Humanismo Cristiano, with an emphasis on theater pedagogy. That mixture of Christian and Catholic contexts—how does it affect the sensibility of your work, if in any respect?
HRM: That’s a great query. Each universities have crucial histories. The Universidad Academia de Humanismo Cristiano was created in 1975, when Cardinal Raúl Silva Henríquez based a examine middle to advertise pluralism and educational freedom in response to the intense human rights violations affecting Chile, offering an area for the creation and dissemination of information about Chile’s political, financial, social, and cultural actuality. The Catholic College of Chile, however, is without doubt one of the most prestigious universities worldwide and was one of many first in Chile to include theater research on the educational stage, what in Chile is named “College Theaters.” In actual fact, this 12 months its theater faculty is celebrating its eightieth anniversary.
Typically selections are tied to different circumstances. This query really jogged my memory that I studied at a convent faculty, the place there was a chapel for prayer and all of the symbolism associated to that universe. Once I give it some thought, my reply is all the time that it was there I discovered the that means of formality—an idea intently linked to the performing arts—and it was at that college that I met the one that impressed me to put in writing this play, to whom it’s devoted.
JS: In your grasp’s thesis, you explored “the physique as a territory of resistance in up to date Chilean theater.” May you inform us extra about that concept and the way you’ve gotten continued to develop it in your creative work?
HRM: My apply relies on the idea of counter-conduct, and in that sense, it questions the notions of the physique (biopolitics) as a topic of political dislocation—a territory of resistance insofar because it poses a big rupture with conventional hegemonic representational fashions. I perceive the idea of physique as each producer of disappearance and failure, as materials for scenic composition inside the aesthetic expertise generated in efficiency, and as a web site of suspension of illustration and social construction.
Currently, as a researcher, I’m all in favour of extracting phrases from the physique—making the phrase flesh, or embodying the phrase—permitting a hyperlink with the reminiscence that inhabits our first territory, the physique. This physique comprises not solely the current reminiscence that shapes us, but in addition the ancestral, the historic. On this pursuit I’ve educated in numerous scenic strategies (Biomechanics, Grotowski, Kalarippayattu, Up to date Dance with Colectivo La Vitrina), and in recent times I’ve included Somatic Motion, learning to turn into a Somatic Motion Educator on the Physique Thoughts Motion Faculty in Chile (Mark Taylor), to strategy my scenic course of each as researcher and playwright.
JS: Once I learn the topic of your thesis, I considered an surprising connection: the American writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, in his guide Between the World and Me, speaks of how freedom for African People is marked by a bodily downside—the physique as a web site of oppression and the inheritance of slavery. In a parallel approach, once we converse of ladies’s autonomy and rights, we’re additionally talking of the physique as territory. Do you discover that connection legitimate? How does your work dialogue with these discussions round physique, reminiscence, and identification?
HRM: Completely. In fact, from different historic and political connotations, since unraveling the important relationships that make up a shared, traditionally constituted area permits us to deconstruct a spot named hierarchically and articulated by absolute truths implying a single line of pondering. In my thesis I targeted significantly on understanding conceptualizations of the political in theater—not simply because the consequence of partisan manifestos via ideology, however slightly because the disarticulation of theatrical self-discipline itself, breaking the operation of the regime of sensibility, and thus making an attempt to work from a brand new configuration of fabric and symbolic area.
In that sense, Rancière factors out, for instance, that politics consists in reconfiguring the division of the smart, in making seen what was not seen.
This play was born from the necessity to discover the oppression of the feminine physique as a biopolitical entity, ranging from the idea of motherhood, to query the position of ladies in society, understanding the physique as the primary territory—so essential on this second of change, decision-making, and agreements via the social cloth inbuilt encounter. I requested myself: How will we wish to relate to one another? How will we wish to inhabit our territory? What’s it that we nonetheless can’t say? How is my physique affected? How does it rework? What phrase inhabits my physique that has not but been verbalized?
JS: I learn All of the Black Butterflies Die within the Sea as a poem, and I say that as a praise: the musicality of the language, the ability of the pictures, the precision of the phrases. However it doesn’t cease there—you’re employed not solely with dialogue and narrative, but in addition with motion described intimately and even with drawings that accompany the stage instructions. How do you describe the play from that hybrid standpoint? How did you weave in these different languages—visible, bodily, rhythmic—that we don’t normally see in a written play?
HRM: Primarily as a result of I’m all in favour of different arts, significantly music and dance. I used to be additionally all the time fascinated by visible poetry. So I spotted I wanted to construct a basis that might permit me to mix all these universes within the cloth of a play. Throughout the course of, Chilean musician, director, and composer Angelo Solari shared with me his thesis Narration and Didascalia for his Grasp’s in Composition and Principle with a specialization in Musical Theater on the Hochschule der Künste Bern, Switzerland, the place he created a particular categorization of didascalias (motion selections, tone, pace, transitions for the scene and between scenes, and so on.).
In that course of, Angelo shared with me the conviction that writing could possibly be seen via the lens of composition—understanding composition because the group of all materialities over time—and that staging is a complexity, a posh of materialities and languages. Subsequently, writing can set up rigorous guidelines that allow a selected notation approach. From this, I started to create my very own theatrical framework, one which any skilled—whether or not from music or dance—might have a look at on paper as theater professionals do, and on this approach, we might discover a level of encounter via a shared document.
JS: After studying the textual content, I need to confess that I used to be left with a robust need to see the staging. What stands out to you in regards to the work of Antígona González within the course and the choreography of sarAika Motion Collective? How did the staging steadiness your phrases with the bodily language of the performers?
HRM: From the second I started writing the play, I knew it was not a easy textual content, and the trail to its staging was not easy both. Each Antígona González and sarAika Motion Collective had been very delicate professionals in understanding the play. With Antígona, we had lengthy conversations, discussing every a part of the textual content, and that gave me quite a lot of reassurance. As for sarAika Motion Collective, they felt very impressed working with the piece and are contemplating increasing this collaboration. I consider this dialogue will proceed for some time, and that’s fascinating.
JS: Lastly, I want to know extra about your upcoming tasks. What comes after All of the Black Butterflies Die within the Sea? And let me take this chance to thanks in your time and for permitting me to learn the total script.
HRM:In some unspecified time in the future, I spotted that the themes of my writing apply need to do with the politics of loss of life, pondering of mourning as denunciation and ritual as a risk of social transformation. Past the non secular, I’m all in favour of cultural and symbolic reflection on farewell rituals as private, intimate, and likewise collective acts—a theme that isn’t expressed actually in my works. Once I write, I accomplish that as an intimate tribute to my useless.
For the time being, I’m writing a textual content the place I ask myself: In what methods does a blind particular person relate to the town?
The conceptual foundation, when it comes to dramatic construction, is identical, however I modify the theme addressed in every bit, and naturally, I examine ideas that the theme itself offers. On this case, I’m significantly researching echolocation.
I’m grateful for this chance, and to you for this interview. You made me keep in mind, replicate, really feel deeply, and query myself. Thanks. I really feel very honored.
Heny Ilse Roig Monge is a Chilean actress and researcher with a Grasp’s in Arts from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, the place her thesis targeted on the physique as a territory of resistance in up to date Chilean performs. She holds a level in Theater with a minor in Theater Pedagogy from Universidad Academia de Humanismo Cristiano. Her work facilities the aesthetics of the physique, trauma, and identification. She is co-author of Del grito a la creación: La disconformidad como alma de la dramaturgia, a guide of conversations with famend playwright Juan Radrigán.
