By Juan José Olivares on April 7, 2023 from Mexico City
La Colmenita performs at the UN in 2011, photos: Bill Hackwell
“Children should meet once a week to see who they can do some good for.” This phrase of Cuba’s José Martí is recalled to La Jornada by Carlos Alberto Tin Cremata, director and dynamic founder of La Colmenita, Cuba’s national children theater company; unique in the world in which, before being an artist “one learns to be a good person”.
A visitor to the Los Pinos Cultural Complex, here in Mexico City, described Wednesday afternoon as a dream: blue sky, the usual greenery of the venue, where many young people were seen competing in a major chess tournament and even better witnessing a musical theater play offered by La Colmenita, that has its origins in the theater group La Colmena, also created by Cremata, who told this reporter “when art and childhood come together, the only thing that can emerge is a bomb of love”.
And that explosion of good will sparkled in the new “Plaza Jacarandas” -as the Secretary of Culture of the Mexican Government, Alejandra Frausto, named it before the presentation-, where La cucarachita Martina was presented, a musical tale that made those present have their dose of love through music offered by a group of young Cuban girls and boys, owners of a beautiful aura who see the stage as the way to grow as good people.
Named goodwill ambassadors for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), La Colmenita is a pedagogical project that uses theatrical tools to transmit ethical and aesthetic values across ages.
“La Colmenita teaches us many values, among them learning to live in a positive way within society in general. It instills art in us so that we can pass it on to be better adults. In my case, it has given me the ultimate desire to be an actress, but the best thing: it has taught me values and beautiful things that I will take with me for the rest of my life… In La Colmenita you learn to be a good human being”. This is the voice of a mouse named Charro Díaz, one of the main characters of the play, which tells of a cockroach that is getting married and has to choose between several suitors, among which are two mice, a goat, a rooster, a bear and a lark.
The mouse Charro Díaz, who sings “three or four numbers” in the montage, is actually Sofía Viñas Rodríguez, who has been part of La Colmenita “since I was three years old. Now I’m 13. I want to dedicate myself to acting, but not all the children who join the company want to do it to study it. In fact, most of them don’t choose that career years later. Because La Colmenita essentially teaches us to be good people,” says Sofía, who has already performed with the group in Panama and Ecuador. She is the sister of Camila Viñas, who plays Martina the cockroach in love, who came to the company through a theater workshop, where “one day, Tin’s daughter saw us perform and invited us”.
Camila shares that what she likes most about the play is that it teaches us good human values, because “in the end it’s not the prettiest character who stays with you, and that tells you that what matters is the inside, not the outside”.
Socially oriented theatrical collective
La Colmenita has its origins in 1989, when Iraida Malberti and Carlos Alberto Cremata (mother and son) directed a gigantic aquatic show (Sinfonía para una perla) in an important Cuban nautical base. A few months after that show, they decided to form a small group of actors for film work. And it was then, on February 14, 1990, that the first 14 members who founded the group met.
For almost a decade, La Colmena and La Colmenita worked as a united company where adults, girls and boys coexisted in the same endeavor, until April 2, 1994, when the first theatrical performance of the show Meñique was offered, only with girls and boys, in front of more than 5 thousand people at the Karl Marx Theater. From then on, La Colmenita became established on its own and is only “the tip of the iceberg” of a whole theatrical collective focused on social issues.
“We are happy to have come so far, it is the first time we go out and Mexico is one of my favorite countries. I know that there is a lot of brotherhood between our peoples, and we know Andrés Manuel López Obrador who we admire very much”, said, Damián Devasa Martínez and Sebastián Fernández Robledo, 9-year-olds who have been with the company since they were three and four, respectively.
Maicala Sánchez is 10 years old. She plays the role of the cotorrita and the bee and she has been in the company for five years and has traveled extensively with the group. El Chivo (named Marco Aurelio) has been with the group since he was four years old and plays the violin. Mingollo Perez, the mouse, said that it feels “very good to be here and to meet new friends”. He has been part of the group since he was four years old and plans to devote himself to singing.
Tin Cremata comments that “the phenomenon of La Colmenita has grown like a snowball. Every province in Cuba now has a Colmenita and the idea has also spread to other countries such as Argentina, El Salvador, Venezuela, Nicaragua and even Mexico, where “there are three; one in Querétaro, Chiapas and San Luis Potosí”.
The director goes on to say, “it is not a matter of artistic expertise, but rather that families see a good perspective in groups like these. We come together to go out and live every day with the thirst and hunger to do good deeds. Not that chance puts an elderly person in front of us to help, but to go out and look for him. Theater is a pretext to spread human values and grow as better human beings and is a valuable tool to unite”.
La cucarachita Martina is a beautiful narration with adapted songs in which the creations of authors such as Adalberto Álvarez, Juan Formell, Emilio Frías, Antonello Benditti or Led Zeppelin can be heard. In the end, the Cuban flavor and candor of these cute island children is what prevails.
In the story – whose script was written by Julia González Carid and the extraordinary music by Yamel Romero Soto – a flirtatious little cockroach makes herself up with rice to wait, first for a romantic lark that performs the first song, then for a sonero goat that plays a son to the rhythm of the tumbadoras (drums). A grumpy Alaskan bear and a Mexican mouse (Charro Diaz) also show up as her suitor. She rejects all of them until another little rodent arrives, this one from Cuba: the aforementioned Mingollo Perez, who is not the most graceful, but the one who sings the best. They celebrate the wedding and are celebrated by the whole community of singing and dancing bees with a bunch of surprises. That is to say, one more bunch of good songs, which made even the jacarandas of the audience dance… This is how La Colmenita said goodbye, making everyone leave in full enjoyment.
Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – US