Theatre Design & Technology - Summer 2012 - 15

It was November already, so I said,
"What's this for?" I knew it couldn't be for
Halloween. She said, "It's for a play. Next
...I would
week we're going to hold auditions, the
whole school's involved, for a play called
play at
Christmas in the Jungle. We need two first
graders to play monkeys." So I forgave her
making
about the bag, and the next week I auditioned, and I won my first role. I mean I
plays with
was one of two first graders that won the
monkey role. She made a costume that was
my cousins
better than my own clothes, I must admit:
little green pants, red shoes, a little red vest,
and with
a little cap, a little tail, and the mask that
she made from Mama's taco bag, which she
my friends.
painted beautifully. And I was in heaven. We
started to rehearse, and the whole school
This is
started to get involved. It was great. It was
a little old country school, a beat-up stage,
what I'd do
but for me it was like Hollywood. It was like
my debut, it was Broadway. This is my debut
any place.
before the world, and my whole family's going to see me.
Now what happens is this. The week
of the presentation was on a Friday, and on a Monday or Tuesday when I
came home, my mom says, "We're leaving tomorrow." I said, "Mom, the
play's on Friday!" She said, "Yes, I know, mijo (my son), but we've been
kicked out, we've been evicted from the labor camp." "But the play!" She
says, "I know, but we have no place to stay." And I cried, and she cried
with me, but that was it. I couldn't believe it, but the next morning before
dawn, we were up. My dad got the truck fixed somehow, and we climbed
into the truck and drove away. And I'll never forget, we passed Stratford,
which is where the school was, Stratford, not Stratford-on-Avon, Stratford
on the San Joaquin, and the little town disappeared into the fog. And I felt
this hole open up in my chest, it could have destroyed me. But I've always
believed you can turn any negative into a positive, and in this case, I took
with me the secret of papier-mâché.
After that, I would play at making plays with my cousins and with my
friends. This is what I'd do any place. During Christmas, we'd erect fake
trees and make papier mâché masks. And that stayed with me, that stayed
with me. And that hole became the hungry mouth of my creativity. And for
the last sixty-five years, I've been pouring out plays and scripts and poems
and stories and now books. The hole is still there, but it's much smaller.
But that six-year-old is still alive in me, and with that, the anger, the residual anger of being kicked out of the labor camp.
So approximately twenty years later, I had to go to Cesar Chavez and
tell him I want to do a theatre of, by, and for farmworkers. I want to do
even the score, it's the only way I can do this. So you see, coming out of
a vacuum, I created a life. And I didn't know my teacher's name. It turns
out, I spoke to a conference of superintendents a few years back. One of
the superintendents went back and checked the school records and sent
me a photostatic copy of the attendance record for the 1946 first grade
at Stratford School, and there, handwritten, are the list of students, and
down at the bottom it says Luis Valdez. That kid was there for thirty days.

At the top of list was my teacher's name, Ruth Tremaine. It's the first time
I learned her name. I remember her, but I didn't know her name. I don't
know where Ruth Tremane is today, she must be about 120 years old,
but God bless her, because she launched me and my career without even
knowing. So I tell people, you never know who you're performing for
as teachers, you never know who you're teaching. You never know how
you're teaching. So my teacher launched me and gave me a career and
she gave me the hunger, the unsatisfiable hunger, the insatiable hunger
that's still there. That became my motivation. But the thing is you can turn
a negative into a positive, and that's been the nature of my whole life. You
can turn a vacuum into something.
So in addition to the idea of the circle circumscribing the square,
there is the concept of the Mayan zero. I have gone back to my ancestry
and discovered that the Mayans are more or less the Greeks of the New
World. They're the distillation of pre-Columbian concepts of the world.
Like the Greeks, the Mayans discovered zero a thousand years before
anybody else. They had a mathematical system. People hear that, and it
doesn't compute. But you who work in technology, you who work with
numbers, must understand; you must love numbers the way I love numbers. I was math major my first year in college, and I made straight As. I
mention that because I don't look like a math major. I don't look like I
can spell. But I was pretty good at numbers. I attribute that to my ancestry.
When I go back to numbers, the concept of zero is what fascinates me
because it is an empty fullness and a full emptiness.
Some years back, in 1973, El Teatro Campesino hosted Peter Brook
and his International Center for Theatre Research. Of the three months
that they were in the United States, two were in San Juan Bautista at El
Teatro Campesino. One of the people who was with them was a young
blonde by the name of Helen Mirren. Working with Peter Brook's concept
of the empty space, it turns out, was not unlike my concept of the Mayan
Zero, my concept of what the stage is. You who design sets, you who build
sets, you who design costumes, you who design lights, you have to understand what it is. For me the process sometimes is like laying clay on clay
and building up a form, and other times it is like sculpting stone and reducing it and finding the proper form. And sometimes it is turning nothing
in to something, building something out of nothing.
To me the magic of Cesar Chavez as a leader was that he created a
movement out of nothing. The man had no money, the man had no political backing. He went out to the San Joaquin Valley by himself with his
family, he had his kids out there handing out leaflets, and yet he started
a movement. How is that possible? The lingua franca, you know the currency, ultimately, that we all engage in is our spirit. It is our human spirit.
That is what the theatre taps into. It is that undying spirit that exists to give
us our vibration, that gives life to human civilization. And the theatre is
one of its most aesthetic and complete expressions and articulations of
our spirit. When you design a space, when you fill a space, you're filling
an empty fullness and a full emptiness. Too much is as bad as too little.
Sometimes you search for the balance. As an artist I have moved across
disciplines and know how important it is to be sensitive to the changes.
At the Teatro we have evolved different forms for ourselves because we
were not capable of doing full lengths plays at the beginning. Cesar was
right, there was no place to rehearse, there was no time. So we started our
theatre on the picket line, and in those days, our stage was whatever car
we'd get into. In 1965, General Motors was still producing cars and panel

summer 2012

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