Zenén Calero and Rubén Darío Salazar, artisans of beauty selected for the 2020 National Theater Prize

July 10, 2020

# An immense joy swept through a good part of the Island yesterday, and not only among those linked to the performing arts, upon proclaiming Zenén Calero and Rubén Darío Salazar as National Prize Winners for Theater 2020. They have become living and active symbols, especially, of puppet theater art as part of the Cuban theatrical movement.

The National Council of the Performing Arts recovered this award, which had not been presented at its natural date in January. And the prestigious jury, made up mostly of national prize winners, spoke in favor of this duo, something also unusual in recent years, because a single recognition is established as the norm. But as every rule has its exception, nothing more just than in the case of both of them, who form an inexhaustible couple of love, life, and art.

Matanzas native Zenén, Santiago native Rubén, come together at the end of the 80s of the last century, under the roof of René Fernández's Papalote Theater, who would be the teacher of both. I will never forget that professor Mayra Navarro took us that night of the first encounter between René and Rubén, from the isa to Matanzas, with the explicit purpose of inserting Rubén, about to graduate, into the creative protection of a René in a state of grace.

The years of Fernández's Afro-Cuban cycle were running with those unforgettable stagings designed by Zenén Calero, who, with previous training in the plastic arts, became a scenic designer there and specialized in the universe of animated figure theater.

Now I recall the fact and I reaffirm myself in the importance of well-calibrated guidance in school, of the individual following their own vocation against all prejudice (such as that of those years against puppet creation, not yet entirely extinguished), and the supreme value in theater of the daily workshop that a group represents, with a mentor at the helm.

This same thing, a quarter of a century later, is now Teatro de Las Estaciones, the collective that Rubén Darío and Zenén founded together with a handful of actors in the midst of the crisis of the 90s, among other vicissitudes. Because, who that is and fulfills themselves is not a fighter against obstacles and walls? I will not dwell on the milestones of that journey, nor will I enumerate the relentless chronology of shows conceived with risk and intelligence by Salazar and expressed in the magnificent and sensitive visuality of Calero. Suffice it to say that they, together with their successive work teams, are artisans of a unique beauty, always surprising, full of a humanism that electrifies children and adults. Beauty that they know is political without seams, because with it they pursue that zenith of art that is happiness.

And they are more than a simple couple, an essential entity, a perfect yin-yang, whose persistence has allowed them to move mountains in Cuba and in the world. In Matanzas they built a workshop, a hall and a garden, now they have in Havana the keys to the National Puppet Theater under rehabilitation, and Rubén has the keys to his native Santiago, they are tireless promoters of knowledge by any usable means, of encounters and pedagogical strategies. Students before, teachers now.

They only lacked the National Prize for Theater to reaffirm to them that they also have a heart distributed throughout all of Cuba, grateful.