"Martín Fierro arranged alphabetically": Pablo Katchadjian's play arrives at the Teatro Colón

Between the payada , that definitive song that is measured by ingenuity, the ability to defeat the other through words and that can end in the knife and death and the gesture of that narrator/character who places himself in the text and on the scene with his song, the poem by José Hernández is structured.

To the verse that tells the epic of the gaucho Martín Fierro , his sufferings and final escape, Pablo Katchadjian responds with a technical procedure: ordering the verses of Martín Fierro alphabetically becomes, in reality, a way of disorganizing it, of dismantling the story and transforming it into pure sonority, into a dismembered adventure that is inserted into a contemporary poetic.

Pablo Katchadjian published El Martín Fierro orden alfabéticamente in 2007, and his Borgesian experiment turned classification, the transfigured use of unchanged verses, into a rhythmic proposal that begs to be spoken . Martín Bauer and actress María Inés Aldaburu undertake this task by exploring the possibilities of speaking this text, of transforming it into a shared scene within the framework of the Solo en el Centro de Experimentación cycle at the Teatro Colón .

The actress's voice sounds dark and clear at the same time. She knows how to discover the resonances of situations lost in their referentiality, demanded in the repetition of words that propose a cadence where the scenes emerge fragmented, in rapid episodes, to be dissolved in the prominence of the words.

If Katchadjian challenges the notion of author with a decision as simple as it is structuring, where the modification of an order puts meaning into crisis, Bauer's decision to choose a woman to carry out this reading also questions the notion of character . María Inés Aldaburu establishes with her presence an entity that is no longer part of the gauchesca but of a poetry where language itself (the non-place of language to resort to the way in which Michel Foucault interpreted Borges's writing) is the stage where the events occur.

The actress will take some verses from the second part of Martín Fierro ( The Return That Does Not Integrate Katchadjian's Experiment) to express them as questions . In this way, the canonical text, the central poem of Argentine literature, is invaded from its internal structure, shaken by destabilizing an order in writing and speaking.

What is called into question by Katchadjian's procedure is the meaning of a narrative that makes it possible to follow an event but also the manifestation of a discourse that had a political strategy and needed to be clear and memorable for a mass readership.

That voice that in Katchadjian's poem has been freed and lost, as César Aria pointed out in an article published in the magazine Otra Parte , from the possibility of telling us or making us understand something, can be the voice of anyone, it can even allow the incorporation of other voices, as happens in Bauer's staging where Aldaburu's reading will be interrupted by the intervention of Bruno Lo Bianco (also in charge of percussion) and Martín Bauer himself who will read some fragments.

Katchadjian's proposal encourages a sonic exploration because the original material is brought to a kind of abstraction where the relationship between words generates new conflicts and musical approximations. On another level, it fosters association as a kind of discursive collage.

The introduction to this performance will be led by Bauer with the reading of a text by Borges about Martín Fierro published in the book El hacedor (1960) and towards the end the voice of Martín Caparrós will emerge with some episodes from his latest book with Illustrations by Rep : The True Life of José Hernández Conted by Martín Fierro (Random House) where Martín Fierro becomes the author to talk about José Hernández in an act of rebellion by the character who recovers his voice, who presents himself as a being emancipated from the author and questions the entity created on paper.

This articulation of dissimilar texts takes the gaucho poem as a formal, political territory and, mainly, as a material to be rewritten, an act of appropriation that continues the Borgesian imprint. Let us remember that Borges even invented a new ending for Martín Fierro.

This performance recovers that song that begins the poem from a matrix that connects writings, images, sounds, ways of acting and speaking that no longer respond to a single universe (that of that melancholic pampa) but to a dissonant present.

The gazes that appear in Germán Campos's audiovisual design (close-up shots of eyes ranging from Hernández or Martínez Estrada to those of the actress in this performance) speak of a constellation of authors and characters who thought and created in relation to Martín Fierro and of a divergent, haphazard timeline that is synthesized in a woman reading a poem about a gaucho who flees, who refuses to be obedient, who prefers to desert, to go to the desert. The words, in the new order Katchadjian gives them, are that escape into the present of the scene.

The Martín Fierro, arranged alphabetically, will be presented on Wednesday, July 30th and Thursday, July 31st at 8:30 p.m. at the CETC.