Less than a month to go and I’m working through restructuring my play! After looking over the transcripts of all the interviews I had, the original outline just seemed to be ineffective. I had a little crisis about it yesterday before several people convinced me that I should stick with the original ideas and thoughts I had, since our presentations are coming up, but that I can work on it during the summer and early fall before the show goes up next semester. I think that’s definitely a good point, so I’m feeling calmer about it. Still, so much to do! I still have a few more things I want to shoot in Havana Vieja, at least one or two projection sequences to pull together (they’re getting weirder I think), and of course, the script to put together.
I’ve been coding interviews, and here are a few key things that I want to make sure make it into the final play:
Tourism as the pillar of Cuba’s economy
Tourism showing up in a big way in the 90s
The Special Period
Stories of what life was like in the Special Period
Differing opinions on the “loss of values”
Tourism creating divisions in society
Police stopping Cubans for walking with/talking to tourists
Getting charged with “tourist harassment”
Hotels being off-limits to Cubans till 2010
homes collapsing regularly while hotels and historic sites get repaired
Tourists coming to consume Cubans (sexually or as an image)
Define jineterismo, la lucha (the struggle), el invento (invention)
How a basic Cuban salary is not enough to live on
The need for el invento
How profitable/ desirable it is to work with tourists
Foreigners as aliens
Critiques of the image of the virile Cuban man as jinetero
Do all this and make it a theatrical piece worth watching? Oh boy! I really need to find an assistant and a choreographer asap.
