What will the Peru of tomorrow be like? A play asks the question

What do you expect from a country where everything goes wrong? May things, at some point, get better. But part of the process of imagining the future involves examining the present. That is what “Tomorrowland” does, staging the National Higher School of Dramatic Art (ENSAD), where four actors play the Wayras (“little doctors”), characters from a Cusco dance that satirizes power and that appeared at some point in the Republican era. In this work, the characters interpret scenes from our society; daily and unresolved injustices.

The work is divided into six moments. In each one, the Wayras show the viewer a painting inspired by Peruvian reality and reinterpret it as a theater scene. For example, in the first painting the Motherland appears besieged by buzzards. Dramatically, this painting is staged with three children, each one representing a sector of society, who strive to take the house away from her mother. In another painting, a woman carries a map of bleeding Peru on her shoulders.

“Country of tomorrow is being created precisely in a social, political and human upheaval that the country is experiencing,” Ricardo Delgado, director of this work of collective creation, told El Comercio. “We ask ourselves what is happening in our country, which is not only the responsibility of the politicians or the rulers in power, but also of us as citizens: the way we vote, how we behave, how we relate to each other classism, racism and little empathy,” he said.

In its 78 years of history, ENSAD had not had its own cast. This time he already has it and from there “Country of Tomorrow” starts, played by actors Josué Cohello, Jazmín Labrín, Conny Betzabé and Rafael Mena. The work also emerged in a dangerous context for the school, whose budget was about to be reduced by 60%, like other higher art schools. With such a reduction, study centers were on the verge of practically disappearing; ENSAD was close to not having a tomorrow. The work is not optimistic about Peru; he treads cautiously and raises more questions than answers.

“They asked us a question when we did a sample of the work. How does the Ministry of Education finance a work like this? And I tell them that he does not have a political position. We are talking about a reality. (…) This work quietly happens throughout Latin America, it is not necessarily here in Peru. What it suggests is to reflect on what is happening, to ask ourselves, and I think that is very important,” said the director.