“What do I believe?”
It’s a question that Aluna Theatre artistic director Beatriz Pizano returns to again and again as she curates RUTAS, the company’s biennial festival of international performance. This year, the festival’s theme is “Manifesting Curiosities” — inviting artists and audiences to embrace the complex, the controversial, and the magical during one-and-a-half weeks of performances by theatre artists from across the Americas and beyond.
The festival features seven ticketed shows spanning three Toronto venues — Factory Theatre, Theatre Passe Muraille, and Hart House — as well as a variety of community-engaged events, ranging from workshops to conversations to an amulet-making session. The importance of community is a core belief that drives RUTAS. “Communities need a space to come together, to breathe together, to think together, to see the same thing together and see different things in the same thing that they’re seeing together,” Pizano shared in a video call. “That is the belief that we give this space to, to tell these stories.”
RUTAS opens on September 24 with Xilopango (Canada/El Salvador), a contemporary dance work choreographed by Irma Villafuerte, which Pizano saw in development at SummerWorks Performance Festival last year. “When dance moves me, moves my soul to that extent… I was on my feet and crying when the piece ended, and I didn’t need to understand anything. I just felt it so deeply, the images and the archetypes,” she recalled. “Although it’s a very personal story, it is the story of many. It’s about women and the connection to the land, and really digging into those roots.”
Shifting from a physical medium to one constructed entirely with words, Documents Perform 2 and 3 (Canada/Brazil/U.S.) opens the same weekend. In this hybrid performance piece co-created by Natalie Álvarez, Katiana Gonçales Rangel, and Richard Maxwell, several actors — “hacktors,” located across the Americas — edit policy documents in Spanish and English in real time on screen. “It is about us as artists, activists, academics participating in policymaking across the Americas, cultural policymaking, which is so critical right now,” said Pizano, who programmed the theatrical experiment’s first iteration at RUTAS 2024. “The arts create transborder collaborations, which is also a belief that I have: If we can look beyond borders — not to deny people their identity or their nationality — but understand that we can communicate, we can form allegiances.”
Documents Perform tackles the policy framework “Beyond the Build: A New Canadian Strategy for Latin America and the Caribbean,” as well as the 1951 document “Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences,” also known as the Massey Commission. “As artists, that project really gives us an incredible opportunity,” said Pizano. “First of all, it’s fun. It’s beautiful to see [how] these other minds across the Americas on Zoom are editing a document live. At the end, we read all the edits and see how each contribution is so beautiful, talking about their own place and how they see things.”
Where Xilopango communicates through physical movement and Documents Perform 2 and 3 play with the written word, Mujer Venado brings a viscerally challenging first-person narrative to RUTAS. A collaboration between Aluna and ARTICLE 11, Mujer Venado — presented in Spanish with English surtitles — is a new translation of Deer Woman by Nlakaʼpamux playwright Tara Beagan, addressing the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and Two Spirit people. “We are very careful in the pieces we choose. For us, human rights are very important, and telling stories that are connected to conversations that are going to make us better if we can sit and have them,” said Pizano. “The challenging or difficult ones — yeah, there are some conversations that we wish we didn’t have to have, like with Mujer Venado. Wouldn’t it be wonderful not to have to have a conversation about femicide, not only in Turtle Island but across the Americas?”
But we must have these conversations, insisted Pizano — especially in theatres. “It’s very violent. It is Tara Beagan being Tara Beagan. She is a warrior. She is not shying away from anything. This is a woman talking about violence against women. But you can sit in that violence, and it comes from a place to create beauty.”
The final weekend of the festival invites younger audiences to RUTAS, with two shows that aim to enchant children and adults alike. “In this moment in time where children are participating in the world, these pieces invite them to participate as thinkers,” said Pizano.
Unga Klara’s Guardians of the Gods (Canada/Sweden/Argentina) is based on interviews with children around the world and will be performed in 11 countries in multiple languages during the coming year. “I enjoyed [that show] so much, and it left me thinking about so many things,” said Pizano. “The fact that there were adults and children experiencing this work together, and it’s about children, and how they see. And there are some heavy topics they are talking about. I found that very, very interesting.”
La Llave Maestra’s Pareidolia (Chile/Spain), meanwhile, is an inventive visual theatre piece that transforms everyday objects into living beings. “I come from physical theatre, I love physical theatre, but [it was so captivating that my reaction] was like ‘oh my God,’” said Pizano. “The very political message of this piece right now is that we need to ignite our imagination to see the world and understand that you can look at the world from different perspectives.”
In a time when distractions are many, deep curiosity is a vital capacity to cultivate in ourselves and our communities. For Toronto audiences, RUTAS offers an international array of performances to ponder, grieve, and move through — manifesting Pizano’s belief that people need to gather together in order to thrive.
RUTAS Festival runs from September 24 to October 4. More information is available here.
Aluna Theatre is an Intermission partner. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.
WRITTEN BY
Haley Sarfeld
Haley Sarfeld (she/they) has reviewed theatre for the Kingston Theatre Alliance, Kingston Whig-Standard, and Intermission Magazine. Her coverage of Theatre Kingston’s Fringe Festival in 2024 was recognized with a Nathan Cohen Award for Excellence in Critical Writing (Outstanding Emerging Critic). As a playwright and composer-lyricist, her work has been featured in the Shortwave Theatre Festival, Watershed Music Theatre Festival, and Kick & Push Festival. Haley loves word games and is a regular crossword puzzle contributor for The Skeleton Press.
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