“S
Hey when I wonder. I am when I repair my holes ”, or “And again on the street I get the illusion / again on the street I bite my heart / and again on the street I become sideboard.” From this existential place the artist looks, writes, sings and acts. His song, like his theater and his poetry, insist on looking to the other side of social masks, the unlocked history of progress and capital. The father’s memory was fundamental:
I am the son of a refugee of the Spanish Civil War; Of the last ones that were in the front of Barcelona and with their brother were in the French concentration camps. One day they said: “There is a last ship that will come out”; They thought he could go to Africa, but he was not received and wandered, and Cárdenas received it.
Thus arrived Sebastián Ballesté Marquet, separatist and anarchist Catalan to Mexico, where he meets Margarita Gálvez Linares, from Veracruz; They procreated Nury, Mercedes and Enrique. From Spain, Mariano came, the half brother 12 years old who took the little brother as a partner and began it in passions such as music, song, girls and football.
My brother was very gallant, and the kids, for ligating it to him, linked me to me; They sat on my knees and kissed me, but that meant number of things like music, and theater, which gave me rise to me.
Being a child, Enrique did songs and rode small theatrical works that presented his cousins and friends in the family home, along with his sister Meche, who would later sing in the group we followed the same. René Zúñiga narrates:
He says his first songs taught everyone; He sang, danced, acted, except his parents … because they were sleepy in his armchair and that did not like Enrique.
The young man Enrique had an abrupt turn, which moved him away from the soccer fields to concentrate his attention on theater and music. But the taste for that sport never disappeared, when a kind of micrescenary of human behavior was.
I was going to play football, it was my vocation. I played in the Atlantean, but I lose my eye. But I am a football fan; I think it reproduces a social situation worldwide, which is somehow example to see how you behave.
Study philosophy and letters, contradicting the family expectation of studying chemistry. He saw his possibilities in theater and music.
The guitar was a tool and theater; Both were growing in parallel. But my father said: “You have to go to study in Spain.” Then I sold my library, I went by boat, I already said seven months: “What do I do here?” I must go there. And I arrived in 68.
The trip to Europe left learning, but also a feeling of loneliness. In Barcelona, with 21 years, he finds out about the death of the Che Guevara and returns to Mexico, where his social concerns crystallized during the XIX Cultural Olympiad.
In 68 I returned failed; I did not conquer Europe. He was an Indian who had been excited that in Europe the best of the theater was, and arriving here a watershed, young people got into a social process: “They no longer have to tell us what we have to do. We are going to do what we want, what we believe; our hands and reason will give us a more real, more fair life.”
Theater and song as a way of political participation; In those days he wins the Celestino Gorostiza award for his work Life and work of dalomism.
The media overwhelmed me because many colleagues went to the guerrillas, and I said no, because I had a career that I wanted to develop. I did Life and work of dalomism .
Awarded as the playwright of 68, Enrique rejected the theater atmosphere of awards and flattery, oblivious to social and political commitment.
The 68 gave me theme: “If I am Mexican, what am I doing?”; Growing with the teachers of exile, very well, they give you level, but they don’t give you country; The 68 gave it to me. And I spent singing my songs, Serrat style, Judith Reyes style. But I was not politicized and 68 generated a great reflection of what happened in my country, what I was doing. On the one hand I said: “I have my tool”, but on the other hand “I have not made my tool, I have not practiced it.” Then I tried to start doing songs talking about the songs, even pamphly.
In the dramaturgy he developed technical, pedagogical and methodological proposals, such as the “immediate theater” and the “necessary theater”, in front, for more than three decades, of the theater and music group buzzing and forming generations of playwrights and independent actors.
Algeria Ek Ballesté Viveros directs a dignified and loving dissemination work of her father’s archive, working the memory, preserving and spreading her prolific work. Show this, the coordination of works such as Dramatic anthology I and II (2017), Memory of 68the poems Revolver (2024) and his thesis, pending published: Enrique Ballesté: Construction of a personal file and a collective memory.
* Author of Song of Fire
