Lorelis Amores

Lola is, nowadays, an excellent actress. She has performed at theater festivals in Colombia, Canada, Mexico, Spain, South Korea, Ecuador, Brazil, India, among other countries. She was part of El Ciervo Encantado for 11 years, one of the most important theater groups of recent times in Cuba. She was, along with Eduardo Martínez, also an actor, and her partner for more than 15 years, half of that collective. Later they abandoned it and founded La Isla Secreta, which is located in a small house in Centro Habana.

After finishing secondary school, Lola enrolled in the vocational institute "Che Guevara" in Villa Clara. Initially she thought about studying Journalism or Psychology; until she heard someone comment about acting auditions in Havana, and decided to try out.

She traveled alone to the first exam. She competed with more than 300 people from the central zone of the island, and passed. "They put me in a gloomy basement, and asked me why my name was Lorelis. I was chubby, country-like, wearing a leotard. And I told them it was the name of a Mexican woman who had killed her husband, that's why my mom had named me that. I think I scared them."

Shortly after, the second round of exams began. This time, a smaller group had to undergo different tests over a week in which they would be eliminated. Lola also passed. But she says that when it ended she cried a lot without knowing why. It was a very tense experience.

In September 1995 she began at the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA). These were years of economic crisis in Cuba. "I didn't even have clothes to wear, transportation was terrible. There was nothing, but I had all my dreams ahead, and I trained, and I didn't know what the future would be."

Lola says that she had absolutely nothing in those years; she carried her books and pen to classes in a plastic bag. All her clothes fit in a small bag. She had only one pair of shoes: black and purple flip-flops that they called "pegueta" shoes. She used them for both parties and for going to school. Once she took them off for a training session, and left them along with her classmates' shoes behind the professor's chair, who threw a lit cigar that immediately made a hole in one of the soles. Thus, with the hole, she had to keep using them for a while.

She remembers eating a lot of cornmeal with sugar that they made at the scholarship residence; she became a vegetarian for two years during which she ate almost exclusively rice and peanuts.

The professors during her studies constantly changed; in her fourth year she had none. During the months she was on scholarship she became depressed. She wrote very sad letters to her mother; she told her that she looked at the trees through the window while crying. She also had difficulty relating to people, she didn't like going to parties.

The crisis would take its toll on her generation. After graduating, in 1999, many of her classmates emigrated to other countries, and some changed professions.

Lola's father moved to Havana, where he worked as a school director, but after the crisis of the nineties he had to abandon his profession to begin selling at a crafts fair. This way he was able to ease the family's economic needs for a time, until, in December 1999, five months after his daughter's graduation, he died.

Lola lived with him almost all five years of her studies, because she didn't adapt to the scholarship residence. He demanded a lot from her, always wanted more from her. Lola's friends were in love with him, but he was gay. Lola accompanied him to parties, very intense drag shows that were held secretly in the corners of Havana.

After her father's death, she decided to take over the stall at the fair. And that's why now, 18 years later, she is sitting in a plastic chair behind a table where crochet fabrics are mainly sold, in the central Don Quixote park.

"I kept the fair to help my grandparents in Villa Clara. Sometimes I came once a week, when I started at El Ciervo, and the rest of the time I had to leave the stall empty, because assistants weren't allowed. My family in Santa Clara also lived off this."

Lola has assumed this occupation naturally. She says that sometimes she torments herself a little because each person who appears tells her a different story about the purchase: what they're going to combine it with, or who they're going to give it to, or where they're going to take it. And it also happens to her that many times she feels embarrassed when they ask her the prices, and she doesn't know what to do. On more than one occasion she has given the clothes away. "I don't think I'm very good at this," she confesses.

After graduating, Lola didn't like any of the options offered to her. She ended up accepting a position as a theatrical advisor at the García Lorca (now Teatro Alicia Alonso), where she was placed in an office where everything seemed old. Her task consisted of choosing the year's programming for a small theater room, but when she arrived it was already done. They told her she had to come every day, but to do nothing.

When her coworkers realized that Lola was the only one arriving early, they gave her their attendance cards so she would punch in for them daily. After a month, after receiving her first salary of 198 pesos, she asked for a leave alleging that she would join an "actors' pool." Her coworker, a bit annoyed, told her to think it over well, that not everything in life was meant to be Giselle. In the Human Resources office they told her she had to return half her salary.

She was in the "actors' pool" during October, November, and December, during which she took care of her father, who was already very ill.

In December 1999, while her father was spending his last days in a hospital, Nelda Castillo called her to invite her to be part of her theater group. Lola, at that moment, due to the situation she was going through, couldn't attend. After a month, with her father now deceased, Nelda called again.

At that time Ana Domínguez, an actress who had been with the group for several years, had just left, and she needed to be replaced as soon as possible because they had a tour of Canada scheduled. This is how Lola began at El Ciervo Encantado, adapting in record time.

She was enchanted with the group from the first moment, mainly because of their working methods. "Each person made proposals for the show. That is, first you thought about a theme, and from there each one researched on their own and presented a proposal of ideas in action (a kind of short exercises through which the path the character would take was defined) to the director and the rest of the team."

Each proposal included the character, the lighting, the makeup, the costumes, and the text, if necessary. From there, the others debated what worked and what didn't, and, based on that, they thought about a new proposal until little by little, among all the actors, guided by Nelda, they built the work.

The first times in the group were very intense. First, a tour through several Canadian cities, where they shared shows with Cirque du Soleil. The work they took was very physical. Shortly after, another tour through northern Mexico, this time with Pablo Milanés, the Bolshoi Ballet, and an opera group from Mexico City. For approximately 20 days they did two presentations daily.

Upon returning to Cuba the group was very cohesive, so they agreed to begin working on a new work, Pájaros de la playa, whose theme revolves around death. It was the first time Lola participated in the process from the beginning.

That specific work helped her drain the pain caused by her father's death: "It gave me the creative possibility to propose things, present them to my teammates and have them question them. An intellectual world opened up to me, other knowledge about Cuba different from what they had taught me at school; I learned to find things in my own body, in my memory. It was an explosive moment. They were my first professional shows, tours, trips… It was wonderful."

In El Ciervo Encantado's dynamic, the actor is the center. Work is based on his physical or sensory memory, often within his own unconscious. It's very personal work, because it stems from each person's memories, and also from their family and their ancestors. When an actor leaves El Ciervo Encantado it's almost impossible to repeat the work, because you can't double the characters, since they're not characters, but beings. It's work that always aims at personal search, at self-knowledge.

The theatrical works of El Ciervo Encantado, at least until Lola and Eduardo's departure, and later those of La Isla Secreta, are not made with a predetermined text that actors learn plus costumes and lighting chosen by someone else. The work is collective; it combines deep research with the actor's intuition or subconscious. The characters' texts are not written, but remain in the memory of those who perform them.

The training is also very intense. Eduardo comments that they are high-performance actors. If they stop training their bodies suffer, pains appear, they can even get injured.

Always, before performing, they do several exercises. First, Chi Kung, a technique that serves to control energy and breathing. Furthermore, it's an exercise with which will is exercised. Then, in a preferably closed and dark place, they lie down with bent knees and their back in contact with the floor. In that position they do breathing exercises, through sighs, to work on releasing tension, resonators, and concentration.

Then they work with body weight, which they transform into energy. That's when they begin to let themselves fall. This way they eliminate the responsibility of carrying their own weight and reach a sensation of freedom.

At that point the exercises can vary depending on the show: from the most acrobatic to energy containment, improvisation, or mirror mask work. It's by doing these or similar practices that they spend the three or four hours before each performance begins.

Lola explores the physical, the intuitive, and the unconscious greatly in her works. This training is the fruit of more than a decade at El Ciervo Encantado alongside two other extraordinary artists, Mariela Brito and Nelda Castillo, in addition to eight years at La Isla Secreta.

In the first decade of this century, El Ciervo Encantado grew incredibly. Located first in a small space at the Faculty of Plastic Arts of ISA, and later at the corner of 5th and D, in Vedado, it became a cult group. The duo formed by those four artists undoubtedly marked an era in Cuban theater.

Until one day in 2011, when the breakup was announced.

In investigating that separation I found various responses. At times, both Lola and Eduardo evade the subject; at other times, they tell me without prejudice.

"I left El Ciervo because everything has a cycle, a moment and a stage," says Lola, "and that creation stage ended. When you stop growing, when you stop creating, everything ends. We were already forcing something that wasn't working. The last show took us several years to mount. There was a lot of wear and tear, that's natural."

The extremely long delay in mounting Variedades Galiano showed that the group wasn't functioning as well as before. Its members had grown a lot professionally in the last decade, but had lost synchronization.

"For me Nelda's voice was a very strong guide. I had great faith in everything she told me. I felt guided by her. When I left everything like that I didn't know which way to go. But there I was discovering that I didn't work all those years for nothing. It was very good, after going through so much pain, to know that I could move by myself, and it's very gratifying to know that one can develop alone. Recently I saw myself alone at a university in Connecticut taking apart a work with my characters and I said: 'Look where I got to, when I was terrified; I saw theaters and trembled,'" Lola recounts.

The work at El Ciervo Encantado was very intense. They barely had time for anything else.

"It was a way of life that we enjoyed a lot, because there are things that steal your time and take your energy to create, and you can't do everything well. I couldn't keep up with all my friends, or go to all the parties I was invited to. Sometimes people think it was a prison, a jail, but on the contrary, it was a way of focusing on what you wanted to do and develop it to the maximum. It was like a creative tunnel you enter, and sometimes you don't even notice how you came up with a certain idea, but it's because you've been talking among everyone for days and days, creating, proposing, speaking. It was a very rich world, plus the training, maintaining the material part of theater, painting… There are people who complain that they didn't see me, but I was fine. The family complained, but imagine…"

On a typical day they got up at 7:30 a.m., by 8:30 a.m. they were already at the theater. At 9:30 a.m. they began to train, three or four hours. They prepared their proposals. Before they knew it, it was six or seven in the evening. Besides, they had to do technical things: change light bulbs, scenery… There were times when they left at midnight.

Lola left so exhausted in every sense from her time at El Ciervo Encantado that she decided to stop acting. She felt disappointed, theater had been very ungrateful. She felt that after the effort and sacrifice of those years she received nothing in return. She fell into a kind of depression; she came to believe that what she had done during that time didn't matter to anyone.

"I didn't want to act anymore," she confesses, "not in theater, not in film. We burned ourselves out. I thought I was incapable of doing something without Nelda. I was 34 years old, had been doing theater for a long time, had awards, recognition, tours around the world, and I felt incapable. I didn't know if I was doing well or poorly."

After a month they began to feel pain. The theater they did was very physical, and when they stopped training the body suffered. So they went back to running, exercising, doing Chi Kung. Just to ease the pain. Then they decided to put a small platform at home, because training on the floor isn't ideal. Until they finally agreed to create their own group.

"It was like a love affair, a marital depression," Lola explains. "We didn't have the strength to build from scratch an experience, we were hurt, it was a pain that paralyzed us, consumed us. I didn't want to get depressed, but it was impossible. And we had to build a theater, again. Because when you leave, you lose everything. Beyond whether it's fair or not, that's what there is. And we didn't have the energy for that. After so long to start from zero. But we realized we needed it."

And in the living room of their house at that time, in building 308 on Soledad Street, in Centro Habana, they created the headquarters of La Isla Secreta.

They began working on the show Oración. A kind of spiritual search to heal everything that had broken after leaving El Ciervo… A way of asking themselves what had happened to them, and responding before the public.

"It was a moment when we needed to unite, because we felt we had fragmented. Also to talk about it with others, share it with others, that's why we decided to hold a gathering with the attending public after each performance," says Lola. "I bake a pineapple cake and offer them tea, because once they enter my house they are my guests. We wanted to know what we were missing, and one of those things was contact with the public; that they would talk to us."

In the gatherings, which can extend late into the night, attendees converse about any topic. They discuss the work, but also tell their own experiences. This is how they discovered that there were many people in situations similar to theirs. That there were many more "secret islands" than they thought.

It was at one of those gatherings where they met Félix Montesino. The young man, a student at CUJAE (polytechnic institute), was visiting a theater for the first time. Eduardo commented that that would be their last performance for a while, because the girl in charge of the lights wouldn't be able to continue; she was leaving the country. Félix raised his hand; said he was willing to do it.

The journalist Carla Colomé, after seeing the show Oración, wrote:

"Whatever preconceived idea you have of theater—very conventional or very transgressive—set it aside if you're going to see La Isla Secreta. Don't go prepared in advance with any rule or tradition, don't go expecting to find a theater room or an entrance ticket or grand set pieces. It's not that La Isla Secreta has reinvented theater in Cuba—if there's anything left to reinvent—but there are certain cases where one must strip oneself and everything else, if you want to take away a fragment of the show, a specific phrase, a movement of the actress's hips. And that's why, if I had to recommend, I would say go blank, practice beforehand an exercise of searching for and liberation of spirit, and attend naked simply to watch Lola and Eduardo. Do what's your part as an audience member. The actors will do what corresponds to them as actors: if they have to be air, they will be purer and fresher than air, if they have to be a vase, they will be a vase, and if they have to be sad, they, as actors, will be sadder than anyone."

Living in the house on Soledad, with the small platform in the middle, became harmful. Theater consumed all their time. Sometimes they would get an idea at 12 at night and jump out of bed to try it. They could spend the whole night there. It wasn't healthy; they needed to leave.

They moved to a small apartment that belongs to Eduardo's mother, located on the 17th floor of a strange building in Vedado. There, about 50 meters above the world, they began to inhabit their own island.

In the room everything is white: the walls, the furniture, the shelves, the lamps. There are two windows, one on each side. From the first, you can see the city: Vedado. From the second, only the sea, which tints the apartment a beautiful blue.

And here was Lola, cleaning the floor, the day they called her on the phone to tell her that she had won the award for best actress at the Guadalajara International Film Festival, one of the most important in Latin America.

One afternoon, while they were walking through Vedado with Eduardo's sister, she asked why they didn't try working in film. Lola explained that they didn't know how castings worked, that is, that it wasn't their world. By chance, minutes later, she saw filmmaker Carlos Lechuga in the distance.

Lola, joking, said that when she got close to him she was going to intentionally stumble to greet him and propose doing film. When they approached, it was Lechuga who spoke to them. He said that he had been looking for them for a while, because he was going to film a movie and would like to try them as actors.

"At first he wanted Eduardo," says Lola, "and he wanted the female character to be in her twenties, to contrast the age. Then I wasn't going to audition. But later he changed his mind, and asked me to rehearse with him. I thought it was to relax him a bit. He also tried with other girls, but he chose me. I fought for it!"

We talk about the audition for Santa y Andrés (2016), the controversial film that tells the story of a prohibited writer and the person in charge of watching him.

The subject interested them from the beginning. Eduardo has studied a lot about writers like Severo Sarduy, Delfín Prats, Reinaldo Arenas, who had experiences similar to that of the character Andrés. For Lola, on the other hand, she was motivated to play a peasant woman.

So she began to research her family; she returned to those origins in the countryside of Villa Clara. She went to find the dark side of Cuban peasants.

"My mother was very ill," says Lola, "admitted to the Cancer Hospital [of Havana], and we took advantage of the month she was there to research with her and my grandmother, who told me things that I used in the character—things related to childhood games, with my aunt who almost drowned in a river. I researched suicides in the village: women burned themselves and men hanged themselves."

Finally, the film, a plea against censorship and extremism, was censored in Cuba. This generated great controversy among some intellectuals. Although they remained outside of those debates, Lola and Eduardo regret that their families weren't able to go to the Yara or any other cinema to see them for the first time.

When Lola and Eduardo were at El Ciervo, it was common for many people to keep a great distance from them: they saw them as androids. Whenever they arrived at a festival and started doing Chi Kung, some people would get scared. Furthermore, their shows, which usually take place in a kind of semi-trance, are very strange.

Isabel Cristina, who accompanied them as an advisor at La Isla Secreta, says she met them personally one morning when they showed up at her door. She was impressed when she saw them. They were looking for her to work together, following the publication of a review she wrote of the show Oración that they had liked very much.

She also recounts that when they went for the first time to the International Puppet Workshop in Matanzas, the organizers called them very embarrassed, because they didn't have vegetables to offer them, except for a tomato. That is, they thought they were vegetarian-Buddhist-yogis.

It has also happened to them that, because they transform so much on stage, they've sat next to people commenting on their works without recognizing that they are the actors.

They built the small theater room on Soledad Street with their own hands. They bought wooden boards and made a small platform. With light bulbs and empty puree cans, they created the lights. They installed an air conditioner, and set up a small space for the audience that holds approximately 20 people.

Reservations are made by phone, and it's incredible how that Central Havana corner fills with people to see the shows. Even some neighbors, who had never set foot in a theater in their lives, take out their best clothes to visit apartment number 12.

The first thing Lola and Eduardo do before a show is clean the floor with water; then, converse…, and only then does the training begin.

The masks, the process they usually use to develop their characters, is extremely strange. The first time I saw them transform before a mirror I found it impressive. Now, some time later in the middle of the crafts fair, I ask them about it.

"We investigate ourselves," says Lola, "but ourselves is something very big. So we have to go different ways. For that we use the trial-and-error system. We discover the characters' own definitions ourselves, we don't build them. It's not about searching, but discovering. There's no written text."

"How is that possible?"

"The body stores memory," Eduardo explains, "right now if you ask me about the specific text of one of my characters I don't know it, but if I take the character's posture I'll say it all, from beginning to end. I have all the characters I've ever played stored in my memory. But not just mine, those of my parents, my grandparents. The work is discovering them."

"Then we develop the lights, the costumes, the objects. We develop the masks, which are oneself. When you put it on it flows. You have to forget what's established in that moment," Lola adds.

"In the masks, while one does it, the other goes conducting, not directing," Eduardo clarifies. "There we use the maxim of Saint John of the Cross: to go where you don't know you must go where you don't know."

"And that's a risk, because sometimes it leaves you in a feeling of tremendous emptiness," Lola continues.

"When a mask doesn't work, it's not eliminated. That character remains as a base. You climb on its shoulders to make a new one, you no longer look at ground level," Eduardo says.

"Before we take out the masks we spend several hours in psychophysical training," Lola explains, "that we've learned over many years, under Nelda's direction at first. First we have to get rid of our personal tensions, know ourselves, to reach a state of availability. Confront being, put ourselves within the mirror, leave the mind blank, so we can then lend ourselves and become that being."

The afternoon I met Lola in Matanzas, despite the shortage of time, the performance was impeccable. The Sala de Teatro Papalote, with more than a hundred seats, overflowed, to the point that many attendees came in with plastic chairs and placed them in the aisles, and many others sat on the floor.

At that moment I didn't know about the Soledad Street headquarters, but I remember Eduardo, with shining eyes, celebrating the larger platform, and eager for the public to arrive.

I also remember that, at the end of the work, preceded by five hours of uninterrupted work, Lola seemed very relaxed. I asked her how she wasn't torn apart after so much work, and the answer was the opposite. It was in that moment that she felt most rested.

Then they began collecting everything: curtains, tree roots, the costumes, the mirror, the masks. When the stage was already clean they ate something: just a few bites, because it was close to 12 at night and the food was cold. They decided to spend some time at a kind of party for the participants in the event. As we headed there, we talked about anything. Lola laughed, and traces of makeup remained on her face.