In Argentina, Struggling To Survive A Depression
'The Marriage of Figaro' has been performed many times at the venerable Teatro Colón, but the premiere of the latest production last month came with a twist that reflected the hard times here. Because the collapse of the Argentine economy in December has meant periodic shortages of paper, no program was available for the opera's opening night.
'Neither you nor the artists nor I deserve this,' Emilio Basaldúa, the Colón's artistic director, told the crowd that evening. Audiences at later performances have been getting a program, but one whose production cost is one-quarter that of the past; it is made of coarser paper, with six photos of performers to the page, rather than two.
As Argentina struggles to survive a four-year economic calamity that in statistical terms is now the equivalent of the Great Depression in the United States, the impact on the nation's cultural life is felt in every way and at every level. Cultural producers are not only scrambling to try to do more with less, they are being forced to rethink the role, function and nature of culture in Argentine society.
The easiest way to measure the crisis in the arts is in terms of opportunities lost and events canceled. Popular music artists ranging from Rod Stewart to the jazz guitarist Mike Stern have called off shows here, for example, and the sparkling new Buenos Aires Museum of Latin American Art has had to cancel a pair of major exhibitions, one featuring works by Roy Lichtenstein and the other Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.
'Those shows were extremely expensive and had to be suspended because they were beyond our operating and financial capacity,' said Marcelo Pacheco, who became director of the museum in June after his predecessor resigned. 'I'm not averse to high-impact shows, but not if they consume two or three years' worth of my budget.'
But the situation here is even more complicated. In the words of Marcos Aguinis, a prominent author and a former culture minister, 'the paradox of Argentina today is that in spite of the crisis, culture continues to resist, and that even without money you continue to have expositions, conferences and other activities.'
So while bookstores are closing, sales at the recent Buenos Aires book fair were up by 25 percent over last year. Corporate sponsors for arts events have dried up, but the employees of an abandoned plastics factory have turned it into a cultural center offering plays and tango shows. And though 20 percent of the nation's 155 cultural magazines have ceased publication, traditional folk music forms like murgas and candombe are reviving. 'In times of extreme crisis such as this, people have a greater inclination to participate and to do things that establish an identity,' argued Jorge Telerman, the culture secretary for the city of Buenos Aires. There is a feeling here, he added, that since 'our culture is the only thing left to us, we can't afford to lose it.'
Since its opening nearly a century ago, the Teatro Colón has been Argentina's symbol of culture. But to keep the theater's programs running since Mr. Basaldúa took over as artistic director last October, 'one month before the country exploded,' as he put it, he has had to confront situations that would be unimaginable to directors of similar institutions in other countries.
In late April the Bertolt Brecht-Kurt Weill opera 'The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny' was being presented, precisely because 'Buenos Aires was the city in the real world that most resembled Mahagonny at that time,' Mr. Basaldúa said. But the government had just ordered all banks closed indefinitely, no money was available anywhere, and the Colón ended up simply throwing its doors open to the public and offering the last performance free.
A month earlier, demonstrators had broken into the theater and disrupted a show, responding to rumors that President Eduardo Duhalde and an elite group of the rich and the powerful decked out in jewels and furs were in attendance. In reality the theater was offering a concert at discount prices intended to attract middle-class patrons who might otherwise no longer be able to afford tickets.
The Colón's plans for the rest of this season remain unchanged, including a production of Alban Berg's 'Wozzeck' at an abandoned factory. With the value of the peso having dropped from parity with the dollar to as low as four to the dollar, Mr. Basaldúa said his problem is not this year's program but next year's.
'How can you possibly negotiate contracts when you don't know how much a peso is really worth?' he asked. 'We are working from day to day.'
At the moment Mr. Telerman is confronting a similar problem for the same reason. He received $10 million just before the collapse for the expansion of the Museum of Modern Art, but now finds that construction companies refuse to make bids on the project because they do not know when or how they will be paid.
Buenos Aires remains one of the few Latin American cities close to fulfilling Unesco's recommendation that 5 percent of government budgets be directed to culture. But that spending is now way down in dollar terms as a result of the devaluation: from $145 million to $34 million for the city, Mr. Telerman said, and $45 million to $10 million at the Colón.
The 'immense distance between the reality of the crisis and the image of Buenos Aires as a city under siege,' hasn't helped either, Mr. Pacheco said. Museums abroad have become more cautious about lending works following Sept. 11, and street disturbances earlier this year, which have largely ended, made Argentina appear dangerous and drove insurance rates beyond the country's ability to pay.
With it difficult to attract or afford foreign artists, some of the gap has been made up by Argentine artists living abroad who want to help. Daniel Barenboim, for instance, agreed to perform the complete cycle of Beethoven's sonatas at the Teatro Colón from July 27 to Aug. 10 for 'a fee that is symbolic, a fraction of what he could be earning elsewhere,' as Mr. Basaldúa put it.
'The money is not the important factor for me in this case,' Mr. Barenboim said in a telephone interview from Germany. 'This has to do with the fact that I was born there, that both my parents were born there, that I still have relatives and friends there, that I went to the Colón often as a child and that my first musical memories are there.'
Hoping to increase revenues, the Colón has stepped up efforts to rent out its opera sets, and has recently done so to companies in Brazil and Spain. It has also opened its doors to popular music artists like the Argentine rock star Gustavo Cerati, who performed recently with the National Philharmonic Orchestra in a show that dismayed some traditionalists but drew widespread critical praise. The Colón's management has also taken advantage of the crisis to revise generous labor contracts negotiated in 1978. The Colón remains 'an island of artistic perfection in a country in ruins,' said Pablo Batalla, the theater's financial director, who also argues that political stability and artistic quality are not directly related. 'The best of Greek classical theater was performed when the gates of Athens were about to burn,' he said. The crisis also appears to have had the beneficial effect of forcing a new realism on Argentina's intellectuals and cultural elite. Many illusions have had to be discarded, the most pernicious of which may have been that Argentina had more in common culturally and politically with Italy or Spain than with neighboring countries.
'Argentina, and Buenos Aires in particular, has always felt it was expelled from Europe and obliged to be anchored in Latin America,' Mr. Pacheco said. 'But that fiction, and the image we constructed of a country that wanted to be what it was not, cannot be sustained any more. Now, for better or worse, we are forced to be interested in the place that we are really a part of.'
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