Guillermo Guzman Lester smashed a handful of popcorn into his mouth, snuggled against his mother and watched the actors dance just feet in front of him as he sat on the grass of the soccer field in San Juan Bautista.
Lester, 6, was watching a free outdoor performance of “Popol Vuh: Heart of Heaven” that adapts parts of the Popol Vuh – the sacred book of the Mayan people – to tell a story about the creation of the earth and the first people. El Teatro Campesino, a San Benito County-based theater troupe, ran the free show Saturday, Sunday and Monday at 3 p.m. in San Juan Bautista during Labor Day weekend. The actors will perform the same free show in Hollister at 3 p.m. this coming Saturday and Sunday in Dunne Park.
“I liked the foxes and birds,” Lester said as he assessed the performance.
“He’s half Mayan,” noted his mother, Sarah Lester Guzman, who teaches parts of the Popol Vuh stories in her advanced placement Spanish classes at Seaside High School.
Guzman offered her students extra credit if they attended a show during the weekend, but as she scanned the crowds Saturday, she didn’t see any familiar faces.
“I don’t see any, but they might come some other time this weekend,” she said.
While El Teatro Campesino has performed at schools in Hollister as part of the San Benito County Arts Council’s Artists in the Schools Program, this will be the first big show that comes to the city since the late 1970s, said Kinan Valdez, whose father founded El Teatro Campesino nearly 50 years ago when he started writing short skits to help educate farmworkers of their rights during the Delano Grape Strike of 1965.
“We’re really excited to be taking this to Hollister,” said Valdez, who adapted the show’s script from the Popol Vuh stories he first heard as a child.
The audience poured into the grassy performance area and watched as actors donned painted paper mache masks and manipulated puppets more than 10 feet tall.
The trilingual story tells the tale of the creation of the cosmos and the first humans in a mixed narrative of Spanish, English and Quiché – the Mayan language used to pass the story of the Popol Vuh through generations as families listened to the stories around fires at night or danced it out.
This particular show tells the story of creators who make the first animals only to discover the beings cannot use words and have no way to say the names of those that created them.
“How can we be remembered on earth?” says one creator in Spanish.
“We must try again,” says the second creator in English.
The creators make a variety of beings, including “dolls carved with wood” that harm the earth’s animals, mud people that speak nonsense and, finally, humans.
For Valdez, the story is special because it tells the tale of the beginnings of the earth and humanity. But for Chas Croslin, the producer and co-director of the show, the beauty of the production lies in its focus on the importance of respect for the creators and the land.
“It’s respect, primarily,” Croslin said. “First and foremost, the act of staging the Popol Vuh as a creation story – it celebrates the culture of the indigenous Americas.”
While this coming weekend marks the actors’ last performance in San Benito County, the show will continue on to Los Angeles. Next year, the Center Theatre Group – the same group that produced the “Zoot Suit” show that helped put the El Teatro Campesino troupe on the map – will produce an adapted version of the “Popol Vuh: Heart of Heaven” in Los Angeles. In that production, a local cast will dance the numbers and design the masks. Valdez sees the community-based production process as a way to embed the arts into people’s lives by having local people help create the performance.
“We’re aiming to keep these beautiful stories alive but also to make art available and accessible to community participants,” he said.
“Popol Vuh: Heart of Heaven” shows:
El Teatro Campesino will perform free shows of the “Popol Vuh: Heart of Heaven” at 3 p.m. Saturday and Sunday at Dunne Park on West and Sixth Streets. For more information go to the theater group’s website: elteatrocampesino.com.
Check back:
Check back next week for a story about Luis Valdez, the founder of El Teatro Campesino and an American playwright who is regarded as the father of Chicano theater in the United States. His play “Zoot Suit” became the first play written by a Latino to be presented on Broadway. Valdez’s newest play “Valley of the Heart” opened Aug. 30 at the El Teatro Campesino Playhouse at 705 Fourth St. in San Juan Bautista. The show will run every Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday through Oct. 12. For more information, call the box office at (831) 623- 2444.
