conversations in ten questions 69: Antonio Afonso Parra

What is the essence of good play/playwriting in your opinion?

Something that entertains me, keeping me away from my own existence for some while. And then it gets back at me while i’m driving home to perceive that it was a moment of non self-explicative text that spoke about things that keep me awake at night. 

Do you believe in the transformative power of art? How?

I have to, otherwise I would be doing it for rocks and plants. The fact that we charge tickets for our works of art is the perfect answer to that question. We keep trying to send a message to our audience, not essentially trying to convince them of what our points of view are, but just to keep them aware that we exist. It is a market exchange: I tell you something, you’ll leave the place richer, whether it’s on self-awareness or on the things that surround you that you didn’t know. 

When you are working on a text, what sources inspire you? Do dreams play a role in your works?

When I start a text I never know where it’s leading me. I believe the main source of inspiration is the story and the characters themselves. I need to create a universe and the possibility of a game first, and for that, any primal idea is valid. After that first part, I just lay down and keep as an spectator seeing where things are going and thinking if I’m interested in them. That’s my barometer. Dreams are good just to give me exquisite thoughts, the ones I normally wouldn’t think about. I had a dream some years ago, where the Romans sailed to the American continent. They arrived and realised they didn’t had the technology to be there colonising anybody, so they sailed back home. I never wrote about it because it’s a stupid idea, but kept thinking that that is the matter of dreams, unusual stuff that just comes to surface. I find it enriching. 

When do you decide to give a title to a work you are working on if it already does not have one?

Naming something is extremely easy. Sometimes you have to name the project months before you write the text, in order to start the pre-production work. And then the name just sticks with it. Other times you have the text finished and you need a name to call it, in order to publish it or just to save it down on your computer. Well, on those occasions I just look at it and it comes down to me. I don’t believe the naming is an Issue. It can be a text’s powerful ally, but even if the author messes up and calls it something uninteresting, if the play is good, the name won’t spoil it. The classic authors kept it simple. Alas, nowadays some authors seems to think the name would improve the quality of the text, so they write poetry and full sentences to name some play, but if you look at the title as just the shortest résumé we can find out of something, that becomes not a decision you have to make, but something you have to extract from it. 

Are there any writer, artist or person whom you think influenced your art most? And if there is such a figure, who?

I see any artist as a pot, where they cook artistic recipes. If, for instance, we think of art as soup, the ingredients can come from so many different places. The so called non artistic people, the ones we meet everyday in the grocery shop, in the bakery, ultimately end up by being our biggest inspiration. They are the most organic and honest human tissue we will ever see. Of course artists I speak to and work with inspire me a lot. But they are the same as me, collectors of ingredients for their soup. We discuss music, theatre plays, dance shows, paintings, always searching for inspiration and to share emotions. I read a lot of graphic novels, and cinema as always inspired me as well. But those are fabrications that I use to inspire myself and to be able to live my life in a much more satisfying condition. I use art to inspire my life in order to use life to inspire my art. 

When you consider the current state of the world in every sense, what is the most important and urgent issue for you as an artist?

The world is ruled by mankind. So that ought to be our target if we want to change something. As an artist, I want to provoke something on people. But people don’t want to be educated, so I think I try to disguise my art as entertainment as a way to reach them. It’s a dangerous path, because people might think the artist wants them to agree with his choices and opinions, but, ultimately, what I’m trying to do is just to get people thinking about the subject of my work and making their own conclusions. I believe the human society as already began to collapse, so our job is getting increasingly difficult. Everything nowadays looks like an imposition of any way of thought and we are closing the gap for discussion, turning it instead in a plain polarised two sided-argument. To be honest, this is not an easy question to answer. And the more I think about it, the less hopeful I became. I guess I’ll just wait for this to end soon. 

What are your main concerns when a play of yours is translated into another language?

My work never got translated, so I don’t have those kind of concerns. If that comes to happen, I just wish I would get a sensitive translator. In theatre, the important thing is action. As long as the translator can reproduce the action, the play will fulfil its purpose. If my poetry was to be translated, then I would be seriously worried. 

Do you believe your works resonate more with your local culture/community or more universally?

I work mainly in theatre. And, as any kind of artwork, mine resonates more with my audience, which is, in it’s majority, my country’s population. So I would never speak about a universal impact, because there isn’t a universal understanding of my work. 

You started your career in the performing arts as an actor. How did you get into the writing side of the performing arts? Does your acting training contribute to your playwriting?

Of course. Being able to inhabit a stage for a lot of years gave me the comprehension of the dimensions of the theatrical game itself. I never write something without being able to picture what it would be like to play my own words and gestures on stage. I will be a forever influenced author by the life that happens during the representation sacred time. 

Do you have any expectations from the Turkish directors who will be staging your play’s reading?

Not at all. Art exists in the eyes of the ones who perceive it. As soon as I finish my job as an author, it doesn’t belong to me anymore.

[The Turkish version of this interview was published in unlimited.]