Martín (inspired by "I don’t want to be Che Guevara"/ Gabriel Fernández Chapo
The second co-production of PLATFORM 11+ with the Iberoamerican Schoolyard Stories project. Opening is in May in Santiago de Chile. Staged and perfored by *LA FACTORIA TEATRO*
I Don’t Want To Be Che Guevara
by Gabriel Fernández Chapo
In the bathroom of a private school, Martin, dressed in a strict uniform, calmly smokes a cigarette during the break, while in the other toilet,
his mates are beating and kicking a younger boy, Alan, ‘to teach’ him the proper behavior at school. Martin, an Arnold Schwarzenegger fan
is the leader of the group and while we hear the shouts of the young boy, Martin reflects, in a monologue, about violence, about deception,
lack of future and likens life at school to a forest in which one has to survive. He thinks also about what to do with his life. Martin wants to
leave school. He wonders whether school is good for anything at all. He thinks that it would be better to work with his father, a political
officer who carried out illegal activities in a neighbourhood.
So Martin decides to give the final kick to Alan. Maybe then the school will finally expel him.
In technical training schools, the creativity of students is usually very limited, almost replaced by a universe of scientific knowledge related
mainly to the hard sciences. In this context, the possibility that students could express their view on the representation that they have in the
break and the schoolyard served as a good opportunity to express the uniqueness of their voices.
The initiative was made by simple first-person testimonies, poems of which they were the authors, songs that they thought were representative
of their views and thoughts. Under these conditions, creativity blossomed, and the voices of the students became meaningful
and significant.
No quiero ser el Che Guevara
