La Ternura es Radical
La Ternura es Radical is a project about the story of Ismael, Javier and Cucharas: three ex-prisoners who have been living from theater in CDMX, opening up their present, their memories and their actoral practice to show us the profound existential and social changes that theater brought along. In broader terms it is therefore a work on the ways of healing traumas linked to structural violence.
For years, Mexico has been fighting inequality with violence: militarization, criminalization of marginalized communities, and massive incarceration. These measures have not only not done anything to reduce social issues, they have exponentially worsened them. Investment and promotion of arts and sports, activities known to heal personal and collective trauma, are not deemed as essential and have been increasingly relegated in favor of more police, and bigger jails.
How do you address inequality without the use of violence? How does it look and feel when you choose a different path?
Ismael, Javier and Juan Luis all spent time in jail. All of them for different reasons. What they have in common, is that they all got involved in theater while being locked up. By putting themselves in the shoes of different characters and having the courage to be vulnerable and reflect on their emotions, they all left their old lives behind.
This project follows all three of them today, after years of having been released from jail. They are all working actors who credit theater with changing their lives and pointing them towards a different path.
In the end, the project is a love letter to theater or, more broadly speaking, to the arts. It has the intention to remind people that art should not be a luxury for the few when it is a necessity for the many and that it has a crucial role to play in these turbulent times if we are to create a better future.
1st Chapter - ISMAEL
Ismael Corona, as he usually describes his own story, always had death on one hand and life on the other. As he grew up on the marginalized barrios of south eastern Mexico City, the hand that held death had a far stronger sway over his life. He channelized his acute intellect, overwhelming energy and existential anxiety to gang life and mischief that differed little with crime. Anger, resentment and violence grew within him. At the age of 17, during a brawl between rival gangs, Ismael stabbed 12 times and killed a rival gang member.
He spent the next 3 years of his life in a juvenile prison in Mexico City. He came out a changed man. Not because of the torture and confinement he suffered from the prison guards. But because he got involved in theater workshops as an actor. Today, looking back over his life, he realizes that acting and theater gave him the psychological, emotional and social tools that were absent during his upbringing. All of a sudden, he had an activity that allowed him to critically reflect on his life and actions, a discipline that took the shame away of feeling sad and admitting he was lost.
Acting and theater, or more broadly speaking, art, brought about a seismic rupture in Ismael´s life. He has now collaborated with some of Mexico's most acclaimed playwrights and has been nominated to some of the country's most prestigious theater awards. 10 years have passed since he came out of prison. In that time, he never went back to crime, he got married, had a son and has devoted his life to acting and to the Compañia de Teatro Penitenciario, a theater company that works with inmates in the Santa Marta Penitentiary in Mexico City. With the Compañía, Ismael works daily to build the tools that will allow others to overcome the same emotional, psychological and, hopefully, social issues he once knew so well. It is to this work, not to the awards or to the fancy theater companies, that he devotes his life to now.
The boy who once held death on one hand is now a father. Ismael says that he will do his best to place life in both of his son's hands, because he now knows that choosing life is the most important thing a human being can do.
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