It seems that one cannot shake more after so many losses. But this is a devastating time. Alexis Díaz de Villegas has just died in Havana and it is a blow as strong as Brose’s, Yosvany Abril’s, Pancho Fernández’s. Alexis was a theater animal, although to some it may sound like a set phrase. He was not an academy boy, nor did he follow a curriculum learned from the classrooms because he lived and understood theater on stage, since the late eighties when he rose to the fourth wall with Obstacle Theater. Even in those beginnings, he assumed the scene as a risk zone that was gradually turning into his space of salvation. To him too, as to its director Víctor Varela, we owe the commotion that that ritual exercise with Artaudian presuppositions generated in the public and critics of that time.
I still remember Alexis’s emotion when, in the panel for the ninety years of Vicente Revuelta, he shared his experience as a disciple of that teacher, fundamental in his career as an actor. He and Vicente in an apartment, on a stage, in the empty space for creation, for the search for the other, in the strangeness of the theatrical. He and his teacher, embracing the ideas of Brecht, Stanislavski, Grotowski. He, even after the master of him, retracing between the floating islands of Eugenio Beard; by the mysteries of the cultural practices of the East. I think so today, when his death is inconceivable and scathing like so many others. Thus, because in the constant exercise of bequeathing his learning to others, he also showed us the teaching profession as that zone of trust and complicity with the other.
For Alexis, educating was a genuine experience. That is why she did not need to be in her role as a professor at the University of the Arts to teach her notions of scenic practice. He also did it by sharing the stage and stalls with the young and the not so young; from the workshops, the talks, the demonstrations. Just like I saw him do ten years before, in the eighty riotsto present The Trac, by Virgilio Piñera, a show that came to life from their exchange and their work together with Vicente himself. And he did it until the last day with his group “Impulso Teatro”, where he decided to cultivate his own sense of theater as a director.
The Alexis that I knew when I was still a teenager, already carried all that overwhelming force, a mixture of wisdom and intuition, in his characters within Argos Teatro. I saw it mutate into Life and death of Pier Paolo Pasolini between containment and emotional overflow, between the slow pace and the stormy gesture, as always happens with true human passions, and as if we never knew where the body becomes fictitious or the character becomes reality. I see him still pale, close to me, sitting on the floor of the Ninth Floor; him under the guidance of Carlos Celdrán, with an exact light designed by Manolo Garriga and in front of an equally shocking Pancho García. Images that open a deep nostalgia in my bowels as a spectator. As others also remember Se-Chuan’s good soul, Miss Julia either Stockman, an enemy of the people.
I imagine him again in his delirium to reach the moon, dissatisfied, like a Caligula on a par with the great Camus. Because in Teatro El Público, together with Carlos Díaz, he demonstrated his ability to speak almost perfectly, for the impudence and irony put into the actor’s voice and body like a forceful slap in the face of the audience. And I remember it in Phaedra, now, with the same awe that I think of Broselianda Hernández. I read it and look at it in the images of icarosof Celestineand while the twenty-five years of this group are celebrated, I feel that from there it also left a great legacy for the history of Cuban theater.
Others will remember him more as a movie actor, because he was just as accurate in his roles for the big screen. we saw it in kangamba, between cyclones, The horn of plentybut it undoubtedly became, in the popular imagination, Juan of the Dead. An opportunity in which he showed his skill for black humor and irony, as proof that he was, above all things, a man who never stopped searching and who saw experimentation not as a fashionable jacket that is placed on the shoulders, but as a way of life that always kept him restless, alert, eager to continue learning and inheriting.
The sorrow of this loss falls on the entire Cuban theater, but it constitutes an unexpected brake for its Theater Impulse and the actors who with him returned to inhabit the scene as a laboratory, as a temple. In times when uncertainties, shortages, apathy and diaspora leave little room for these notions of group theater, Alexis was able to build a house for his creative family, in which we also saw his wife and disciple Linda Soriano grow up. Their Poor BB’s Ballad, insults to the public either The exception and the rule, are proof of the authenticity of a path opened by Villegas that took up the training of the actor and the study of the history of theater as a living fact for creation. I saw this many times when he allowed me and other colleagues to alternate with him in his rehearsal space, when he enthusiastically welcomed that Home and other projects like stage postdirected by Ámbar Carralero and Yudarkis Veloz, with a humility that only a few truly profess.
Thank you for that Impulse, Alexis dear. For the years in which you yourself were the Cuban theater from your Caligula, your Pasolini, from the sound of a track or the inheritance transmitted from a Brecht, from a Vicente, from a bunch of masters together in your body, almost like a miracle of the scene. Thank you for sharing your space with us when we wanted to dream, like you, of the theater we needed to do. I will never forget your generosity and trust. Your willingness to leave your house to open the door of your headquarters for us, which in those months was also to open the doors of utopia.
My hug for the beautiful family you built in life and for you, always, infinite applause.
Video based on Roland Schimmelpfennig’s text-manifesto “The last function”” created and recorded in confinement 2020.
