Gold Standard If the Stars Can Make You Forget Who They Are, That's When You've Seen Greatness

By Ann HornadayWashington Post Staff WriterSunday, February 22, 2009

In the opening moments of "The Visitor," actor Richard Jenkins stands at a living room window, nursing a glass of red wine, staring into the middle distance. As scenes go, it's a brief one. A man stands, looking out a window. Nothing happens. ¶ And yet, everything happens. Or at least everything the audience needs to know about Jenkins's character, Walter Vale. He's alone. Isolated. Depressed. He's craving connection but can't break through. It's all there, in the way he stands, the way expression barely plays across his face, and especially in his eyes -- eyes that seem to contain worlds of pain, loneliness, grief. A few seconds later, he's taking a disastrous (and very amusing) piano lesson, and the audience realizes: We may not know Walter Vale, but we care about him. A lot. ¶ Like Potter Stewart and pornography, we know good acting when we see it. But what, exactly, is it? How do we explain why certain actors move us and others leave us cold? Why did you find yourself bawling at Angelina Jolie's performance in "Changeling" while your best friend sat beside you dry-eyed? Why did one critic describe Brad Pitt in "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" as "standing there like a sensitive zombie" while another one called it Pitt's "most impressive outing to date"?
Is Robert Downey Jr. really acting in "Tropic Thunder"? Or is he just a dude playing a dude disguised as another dude?
The easy answer is that it's all subjective. That's half-true. Every viewer brings biases and personal baggage to a performance that even the finest actor can never overcome. But there are objective standards that apply to screen acting, even at its most ethereal and unquantifiable. Maybe not rules, exactly, but principles -- involving physical control, intelligence, intuition and nuts-and-bolts technique -- that make it possible to discern whether there's more going on in Marisa Tomei's performance in "The Wrestler" than taking her top off.
How do we know that the actor or actress we just watched laugh, cry, break down or even die on-screen delivered a tour de force -- or a turkey? If you're asking yourself the following questions during a movie, you know a performance has failed, because if it were succeeding you'd be too caught up in the story to be analyzing it. But a few hours later, you can ask yourself these few questions to decide if what you just saw was acting . . . or something else.
Was that really him up there? There's a glib way of describing acting as "disappearing into the character," but it's true that the best actors utterly transform themselves -- physically, vocally, psychologically -- to become the person they're playing. Robert De Niro famously put on 60 pounds to play Jake La Motta in "Raging Bull." Nicole Kidman donned a prosthetic nose to play Virginia Woolf in "The Hours." But often the most startling performances have nothing to do with makeup or fakery but can start with something as subtle as a character's walk. For his role as the politician Harvey Milk in "Milk," the solidly built Sean Penn became almost elfin, affecting a gliding, hip-swaying walk, his hands fluttering up to his mouth with a shy giggle. He sent his voice -- in real life, a smoker's gravely mumble -- into a fluting, upper register, which in combination with a slight New Yawk drawl helped create not just the character of Harvey Milk but an entirely new man we barely recognize as Sean Penn.
When Heath Ledger starred as the repressed gay cowboy in "Brokeback Mountain," he told interviewers he decided to play the character as if he had a fist in his mouth. That single choice seemed to inform everything about a character defined by what he held back, and what he couldn't say.
Did I just watch a performance or a stunt? In "Frost/Nixon," Frank Langella didn't really look or sound like Richard Nixon. If he had, his performance as the disgraced former president would have had little more artistic heft than an old Rich Little bit on "The Tonight Show." Instead, he developed an outsize, almost Shakespearean physical and vocal persona, giving Nixon a brooding, bearlike physicality and a growling baritone completely at odds with Nixon's actual cadences. The reason it succeeds is that it's a full characterization, grounded in Langella's own preparation for the role and defined by every single choice he makes, from where he focuses his eyes to the way he walks across a room.
"It's almost like a farce, it's so extreme," says acting coach Larry Moss of Langella's performance. "He almost plays Nixon like a hunchback. The face, the voice -- those are acting choices. . . . You can see the self-delusion in the eyes, the deep repression and lonely quality he had, as if he's the only person in the world."
Of course Langella, as well as his co-star Michael Sheen, were able to deliver their own versions of their characters because they were given the latitude by Peter Morgan's script and Ron Howard's direction. Conversely Jamie Foxx, who won the Oscar in 2005 for his portrayal of Ray Charles in "Ray," while certainly giving an uncanny impression of the rhythm-and-blues legend, was almost too spot-on, especially within the context of a too-tidy biopic structure. The result was less a story about a genuine character than an Encyclopaedia Britannica entry brought to note-perfect but somehow artificial life.
Where did I go? Once, after a particularly uninspiring screening, a friend bent down to whisper something in my ear as he walked out of the theater: "I could have been turning my mulch."
Were you mentally gardening during the movie you just saw? Thinking about your shopping list? Or did you seem to go somewhere not of this world? The best sign of a completely immersive performance is when an actor not only disappears into his or her character but allows viewers to forget the screen altogether and project themselves into the story. It's not Richard Jenkins in "The Visitor," or even Walter Vale -- it's us, discovering New York as if for the first time, leaving our comfort zones to find improbable emotional connections, even making a tentative stab at late-in-life romance. When Jenkins seems to be just standing there, he's really showing viewers the tip of an iceberg that begins with deep preparation, developing layers of inner and physical life for his character that he brings to even the most uneventful moments.
Thomas McCarthy, who wrote and directed "The Visitor," says though he didn't talk about Walter's specific back story with Jenkins, "we did talk about relevant history. So by the time we were shooting, any question that arose pertaining to Walter's history, Richard immediately had an answer for: 'Of course I would' or 'I'd never do that.' I think good actors do that homework automatically and lock it in, so all their decisions are based not on arbitrary acting choices but specific choices that their character would make."
When an audience is riveted just by the sight of a character making a sandwich or tying her shoe, acting coach Moss says, "they're not just in the now, they're in the now of the now." Often, the immediacy of a scene is a function of vocal dynamics, an element that Mickey Rourke has mastered throughout his career, from "Diner" to "Body Heat" to his comeback performance in "The Wrestler." In each of those films, Rourke has scenes in which he barely raises his voice, but whether he's whispering to William Hurt in a prison or conferring with a fellow gladiator in a locker room, we're leaning forward to catch every word. We're in the now of his now.
Did she ask for the laugh, or did she ask for the tea? One of the scandals (okay, minor outrages) of last year's Oscars was that Amy Adams wasn't nominated for her performance in "Enchanted." Sure, it was a family comedy, about a rather frothy fairy-tale princess, no less, but watch Adams closely and you never see her wink. She plays her character, Giselle, completely straight, with a touch of pathos that is genuinely affecting. (Just watch how she says "And ever?" after she learns that divorce is forever. That's serious.) Comic performances are notoriously ignored when it comes to acting awards, which, from a degree-of-difficulty point of view, is wildly unfair. As an actor reportedly said on his deathbed, dying is easy, it's comedy that's hard.
"In a comedy film, 'trying to be funny' is certain death," wrote Michael Caine in his book "Acting in Film." "First you have to be a real man or woman. Then you slide on the banana skin, and then it will be funny. If you are a comedian sliding on a funny banana peel, nobody will laugh because you're not real. The history of the cinema is littered with great comics who failed on the screen largely because they weren't actors; they could not be real up there." Elizabeth Kemp, chair of the acting department at the Actors Studio Drama School, a master's program at Pace University in New York City, concurs. "There's a great old story about Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, in which he's in a play and he comes off the stage and says to her, 'I didn't get the laugh when I asked for the tea.' And she says, 'That's because you asked for the laugh and not the tea.' " Think of the great comic performances of last year -- Downey in "Tropic Thunder," Sally Hawkins in "Happy-Go-Lucky," Penélope Cruz in "Vicky Cristina Barcelona." Each of those performances would have had the same integrity if it had been in the service of a drama (even Downey's pretentious Australian Method over-actor). All of them asked for the tea.
Was the outburst earned? Meltdowns are part of why we go to the movies. There's nothing more cathartic than watching a pro in a full-tilt, floor-pounding, curtain-shredding breakdown. But as the acting teacher Sanford Meisner said, you can't cry, scream or otherwise start chewing scenery until you've done everything possible to hold it back. Angelina Jolie finally collapsed in "A Mighty Heart" only after her character had made an almost superhuman effort to keep it together after her husband was kidnapped and probably murdered. In "Changeling," she plays a woman who snaps after being committed to an insane asylum and the effect is almost risible. Jolie's character, Christine Collins, is never grounded or rounded enough, never allowed to be more than a symbol of suffering, so an otherwise wrenching, intimate moment instead feels like a masquerade. What Jolie creates is emotionalism, not emotion.
Can you watch the movie with the sound off and understand every word? "There's an exercise I have my students do," says Moss, "which is to watch three completely different performances by Daniel Day-Lewis and Meryl Streep without sound, just to study their physical behavior. That's when you know an actor has really done their work. You can see it in their bodies -- picking up a glass, walking, using their hands." This is an easy experiment to replicate at home, and not just to observe an actor or actress's body, but -- perhaps most important -- the eyes. Watch an actor's eyes when his character isn't talking, just listening. Does a little light go out? Or does he listen with the same focus and intensity he brings to his own lines? (This, by the way, is what's important about Tomei's performance in "The Wrestler." Even when she's taking her top off, her eyes don't lie.)
Acting, finally, demands superb physical expression, facial control, intellectual acuity and delicate intuition -- all harmonizing to create a performance that, while carefully researched and conceived, occurs completely spontaneously. After all the training and exercises and script analysis and research, after an inner life has been invented and a physical life settled upon, after the sense memories have been plumbed and the lines have been memorized, when the lights are hot and the camera is on -- that's when the actor ceases to act and simply is. When he received an honorary Oscar in 1980, Alec Guinness recalled that as an acting student, "it dawned on me that if I was seriously going to have a career in movies, the wisest thing was to do absolutely nothing at all. And that is more or less what I've done since then." And that, more or less, may be what all great actors have in common: They do nothing, and make it something.
© 2009 The Washington Post Company

"The Role of Their Dreams" New York Times

May 7, 2009
The Role of Their Dreams
By SARAH KERSHAW
WHILE preparing for her role as Addison Montgomery Shepherd, or the villainous Mrs. Dr. McDreamy to fans of the hit series “Grey’s Anatomy,” Kate Walsh reached into the depths of her dream life.
Working with an acting coach and in workshops with other actors, using an increasingly popular technique influenced by Jungian psychology in which actors study and play the characters in their dreams, Ms. Walsh mined her unconscious for clues to understanding her character.
“When you’re hooking into your unconscious or working on a dream,” said Ms. Walsh, who played an ob-gyn on the show and now plays her on its spinoff, “Private Practice,” “you’re connected in a real way that you are not manufacturing or trying to force.”
Ms. Walsh has used many other acting tools, including observing real doctors in delivery rooms and researching gynecology and obstetrics. But she said that using material from dreams over the last five years to develop her role has made it “that much deeper.”
In the last decade, dream work, as it is known, has spread into actors studios and classrooms across the country, taking its place among the ever expanding techniques of actor training and in the long-running debate over what leads to the most authentic performances.
Dream work grew largely out of Method acting, and it is now being taught at the New York home of the Method, the Actors Studio, and by several teachers in Los Angeles and elsewhere.
Teachers say that at least 1,000 actors have been trained so far and that interest is growing in the technique, which is inspired by the theories of Carl Jung, who believed that dreams are the expression of the unconscious, and the images and symbols in them communicate crucial information to the conscious mind.
Dream work is used by such stars as Ms. Walsh, Meg Ryan and Harvey Keitel, who said in interviews that it was essential to preparing for their roles.
“I see a place for this in all the acting schools across the country once they come to know about it,” said Mr. Keitel, who, along with others who study dream work at the Actors Studio, knows it as the Way.
“Actors are always searching for ways to get close to the psychology, the life, the experience of the characters they are creating,” Mr. Keitel said in an interview at Bubby’s restaurant in TriBeCa. “And we investigate all these situations, looking high and low for the experience that will bring us closer to this mysterious character we’re trying to create, we’re trying to know, to understand and to be.”
He added, “The dream work brought to the actor another tool — we stage our dreams, we put them on their feet.”
People have mined their dreams for insights into their lives for milleniums — Genghis Khan was said to have used his dreams to prepare for battle — but pure Freudian and Jungian dream analysis has faded in practice somewhat since it was popularized a century ago. Still, the use of dreams in psychotherapy, particularly for work on recovering from trauma, is still fairly common, psychologists say. Actors in particular appear to be drawn to the work of Jung, who once wrote, “The dream is a theater in which the dreamer is himself the scene, the player, the prompter, the author, the producer, the public and the critic.”
Jung’s theories were first adapted for actor training in the early 1980s by Sandra Seacat, an actress and acting coach, who went on to work with Ms. Ryan, Mr. Keitel and many others.
In a telephone interview, Ms. Ryan, the star of “Sleepless in Seattle” and “When Harry Met Sally,” said she had long been interested in Jung and had incorporated dream work in her career for years, though she declined to speak about individual roles. “There’s dark and light within you,” she said. “So there’s a way of not going outside for inspiration, but going inside.”
Acting teachers using dream work instruct their students to use dreams to help them connect their own personal struggles with the struggles of the characters they are playing. An actor preparing to play Blanche DuBois in “A Streetcar Named Desire” might write a letter to herself asking her “inner self” to reveal in a dream how her own emotional experiences may be similar to those of the tortured Blanche.
“They are really living the part,” said Ms. Seacat, 72, who continues to coach in New York and Los Angeles. “I believe that the artist is a wounded healer, that they are healing wounds of their own, and when they do that truthfully they heal the audience.”
Dream work has much in common with the Method, the approach to acting championed by Lee Strasberg, who taught his interpretation of Konstantin Stanislavski’s “naturalism” for the stage.
The difference is that while the Method also seeks to draw on the unconscious, it involves actors reaching back into their life experiences and real memories, both happy and traumatic, to evoke emotion in their roles, rather than taking inspiration from their dreams.
Elizabeth Kemp, who studied for seven years under Mr. Strasberg at the Actors Studio, began incorporating dream work into her coaching, directing and acting in the early 1990s, after training at the C. G. Jung Institute in New York. “The results from working with dreams were extraordinary,” said Ms. Kemp, chairwoman of the acting department at the Actors Studio Drama School at Pace University.
She coaches Mr. Keitel and has been teaching dream workshops at the Actors Studio for about six years.
“In the Method, we revisit something we lived through,” she said. “But there are still pockets in the unconscious or the psyche that have a residue of feelings, feelings that have not at all been expressed in life.”
Just as Method acting has long been criticized by more traditional dramatists, dream work is also drawing skepticism.
Robert Brustein, the founding director of the Yale and American Repertory theaters, said it was another example of actor training that was self-absorbed, in which focusing on a player’s own psyche and emotions can turn written characters into the people playing them, rather than the other way around.
“This is a continual debate that will never be resolved,” said Dr. Brustein, adding that Stanislavski’s work has been misinterpreted over time. “He taught how to bring the character close to the actor, instead of how to bring the actor close to the character. Instead of making an imaginative leap into the mind of a big character who is raging against the universe, everything gets minimized.”
“Blanche DuBois is a fully created character by Tennessee Williams,” Dr. Brustein added. “It doesn’t need the actor’s dream life to act her. She has her own dream life.”
Mr. Keitel said that the Method — and now dream work— were continuously misunderstood by people who had not experienced them firsthand. “We do some things that might be construed as voodoo, but nevertheless it gets results,” he said. “I question everything, but I haven’t been able to puncture any holes in this dream workshop.”
At a recent class in Manhattan taught by Kim Gillingham, a protégé of Ms. Seacat, 15 students lay on yoga mats, their dream journals beside them. Incense burned, candles flickered and musical selections from Chopin and the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt helped muffle the street noise outside the Chelsea studio. Students had been told to bring with them a dream to work on individually. Other times, they act out one another’s dreams.
“Whisper into the mat what you wouldn’t want anyone else to know,” Ms. Gillingham said. “Tell it where you’re scared, tell it where you’re stuck.”
After the mat work, the students stood up and Ms. Gillingham said, “Breathe out like an old horse.” They did so, followed by a guttural chorus of “ahhhhhhhhhhhhh.”
“Travel to the place, the thing, the energy that you most don’t want to deal with,” she instructed.
Her assistant and student, Ken Barnett, an actor, walked around the room with tissues, and many students used them as they wept. Others shouted, ran in place, shook out their hands and legs and spoke aloud to the people in their dreams.
“You have the freedom to speak to them now,” Ms. Gillingham said. “Any acting would be a waste of time.”
Later, Keith Nobbs, a television, stage and film actor, said he had been skeptical when he showed up for the workshop. “When I first read about it — dream work, body work and voice work — I thought, Put the gun to my head, please. You imagine a first-year acting class where people are acting like dogs for 45 minutes.”
But he said the workshop had been helpful for him as he prepared to play an autistic man in an independent film. He is exploring “what is emotionally terrifying for the character in a way that I can understand, because I’m looking at the real parts of myself.”
Mr. Barnett, who assisted in the New York dream workshop, recently appeared in the musical “Atlanta” at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles, in which he played a Yankee soldier in the Civil War pretending to be a Confederate soldier in order to survive. The character was under the command of an abusive colonel.
“Working on a script like this as if it were a dream, I begin by asking myself, What is at war within me?” Mr. Barnett wrote in an e-mail message. “What are the two sides of me battling to protect a union? What part of me is like the colonel, judgmental and cruel? How am I cruel to myself?”
The audience, he said, “didn’t know what I was doing, but for me, the action of the play held more potency than just the pretend circumstances. Instead, it offered me, as every script inevitably does, an opportunity to confront a dynamic in my own life and work on it, night after night.”

Tomado de la Página Web de la profesora Elizabeth Kemp

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/07/fashion/07dreams.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

Luis Alberto Quintero Valero - Opina sobre la obra "Cuando el Tiempo Descubrió su Poder"

"El domingo 22 de Mayo pude apreciar la puesta en escena de la obra “Cuando el tiempo descubrió su Poder”. Para mi se trataba en primer lugar de apoyar el trabajo progresivo y profesional del grupo de talentos integrantes del “Gimnasio de Actores”. En segundo lugar tenía interés en descubrir ese supuesto disfraz infantil de la obra, del cual tenía una referencia anticipada. Desde un primer momento me conecte a través de la música, que sonaba en la antesala, con el mundo infantil de mis recuerdos. Una vez entrado el desarrollo de la obra, esa aproximación infantil tuvo que contactarse con la adultez necesaria para entender de manera más profunda algunos de los contenidos allí expuestos. Ese disfraz cargado de imágenes y símbolos referenciales de tono infantil, paso a convertirse en una excusa inteligente y fresca para lograr contactar múltiples lecturas de mi presente adulto y poder contextualizarlo. Lo más interesante fue que pese a esa complejidad disfrazada, logre identificar significados y valores básicos que pueden ser de mucha trascendencia para un niño desde la óptica de la enseñanza. La propuesta me mostró virtudes en ese sentido que me parecieron muy valiosas y de las cuales carecen muchas de las alternativas teatrales infantiles en nuestro país. Me quedó claro que el teatro estaba funcionando como una herramienta de aportes infinitos conectada con el mundo del arte, abriendo las puertas de la sensibilidad estética, de la reflexión, de la capacidad de emoción y sirviendo de facilitador para la comprensión, con un estilo y un lenguaje propio, de diferentes visiones y realidades de la vida y del mundo cotidiano que nos rodea. Desde mi percepción como un espectador adulto más, reconocí en la obra un trabajo interesante, de contenido denso, de mucha uniformidad y compromiso actoral. Pondero la búsqueda por presentar una propuesta inteligente en su concepción. Justificó la importancia de ese disfraz infantil como generador y semillero de enseñanzas en el entendimiento de los paralelismos con nuestra realidad. Quizás es necesario convertirnos en niños de nuevo para cargar las esporas del aprendizaje y conectarlas con la esperanza y la búsqueda de los cambios en positivo. Le doy una valoración especial a este trabajo por el reto del compromiso. Habría que preguntarle a un niño cual fue su experiencia al respecto. "

Opinión de María Gabriela Gómez sobre la obra ¨Cuando el Tiempo Descubrió su Poder¨

...¨sólo te quería comentar que me encantó la obra. Le decía a los panas con los que fuí que la mayoría de las obras infantiles a las que he llevado a mis sobrinos son novelas de TV tipo Cristal o Marimar pero infantiles, ja, ja, ja. No es de extrañarnos que después que crecemos las obras que gustan son las que están de moda tipo mi marido es cornudo, y peor aún, la vida se vive de esa manera... ¡Qué bueno poder ver algo diferente! donde se nos habla del amor hacia la humanidad, de lo que podemos aprender del otro, de que a pesar de nuestros miedos hay posibilidades y una vez alcanzadas es difícil entregarlas....me encantaron los actores, se veían espectaculares en escena, me impresionó el trabajo entre ellos, se sentían un equipo, no hubo divas ni divos todos lucieron con su propia luz, ojalá en la oficina puediésemos trabajar así.... Gracias por ofrecernos siempre algo que valga la pena. Eres una excelente maestra y directora. En cuanto a tu pregunta, cuando lleve a mis sobrinas de 5 y 6 años voy a saber si la obra es infantil o no. ¨

Fotografias de Elisa Quero de la Obra Infantil ¨Cuando el Tiempo Descubrió su Poder

Funciones Sábados y Domingos en la Sala 2 Celarg

Sobre el Indio Chacao

"Cuando el Tiempo Descubrió su Poder"

A partir del 22 de mayo en la Casa Rómulo Gallegos, Celarg

Una obra para niños disfrazada de infantil

Música Original Santos Palazzi

Letra Matilda Corral

CÍRCULOS, TRIÁNGULOS Y CUADRADOS

Un regalo, una razón
Un regalo en mi corazón
Es una emoción, es una pasión
Que espero con amor

Un regalo en nuestro siglo
Un regalo circular
Girando van los días
Añorando su llegar

Y es un círculo redondo y espacial
Un círculo inflado y especial

No sé de mí
No sé qué haré si no llega
No sé si seguir en esta espera
Tengo fe que llegará y que nunca más se irá.

Y es un círculo redondo y especial
Un círculo inflado y espacial

Y a lo mejor está ya con nosotros
Solo hay que saber mirar
Está en los bosques
Cerro el Ávila
Está en los parques
En el este y del oeste

Este es el mejor lugar
Es aquí donde disfrutaremos
De un regalo sin igual

Los dioses nos envían un regalo… especial

Es un círculo redondo y especial
Un círculo inflado y espacial

TRIÁNGULOS Y CÍRCULOS

Arrancamos el bosque
Quitamos el parque
Construimos al regalo un pedestal
Un enorme monumento
Con gigantes columnas de metal
Paredes de relleno
Construidas con cemento

Y a lo mejor él ya esta con nosotros
Sólo hay que saber mirar
El regalo son las aguas
El regalo es nuestro Güaire
Este Güaire que nos brinda la ciudad

Tapamos el Güaire, secamos el caudal
Le montamos un piso, un inmenso pedestal
Un enorme monumento de baldosas sin igual
Con gigantes columnas construidas con cemento

Y a lo mejor ya él esta con nosotros
Solo hay que saber mirar
El regalo son las montañas
El regalo es más allá
Es el Ávila que nos brinda la ciudad

Quemamos el Ávila, tapiamos su bondad
Le montamos un gran piso, un inmenso pedestal
Un enorme monumento de baldosas sin igual
Con gigantes columnas construidas con cemento

Mira a tu alrededor
Sembrar más parques
Limpiar el Guaire
Cuidar la montaña

Columnas, baldosas
Cemento en cantidad
Cabillas, concreto
Tapiando la ciudad.


CUADRADOS

A mí no me parece
Y a usted, ¿qué le parece?
Parece y no parece
Y a usted, ¿qué le parece?
Si parece o no parece no es el punto
Lo importante aquí es resaltar
que si a alguien no le parece entonces tal vez es mejor
¿qué aparezca? ¿o desaparezca?

A mí no me parece
y a usted ¿qué le parece?
¡Qué se esfume! ¡Que no exista!
¿Proteger el Ávila? ¿Construir un pedestal?
Ja, ja, ja, ja
¡Qué absurdo!

A mí no me parece
Y usted ¿qué le parece?
¡Que se esfume! ¡Que no exista!
¿Limpiar El Guaire?, ¿Ponerle baldosas?
Ja, ja, ja, ja
¡Qué ridiculez!

¡Costosísimo!
¿Saben a cuánto está el cemento?
¡Imposible!
¿Y las baldosas?
Aaahhhh

Conservemos nuestras posibilidades
Que con tantas calamidades es mejor
siempre esperar lo peor
Pongamos el regalo en..,
¿La plaza? ¡La plaza!

A mí sí me parece
Y a todos nos parece
¡En la plaza! ¡Qué gran idea!
¡Fantástico! ¡Magistral!
Ja, ja, ja, ja
La plaza…

A mí sí me parece
Y a todos nos parece
La plaza, ¡estupenda!
El regalo va en la plaza.
Los dioses complacidos
Y los gastos reducidos
La plaza, ¡Claro que si!

Sobre el Indio Chacao

En nuestra próxima obra infantil "Cuando el Tiempo Descubrió su Poder" aparecerá el Indio Chacao y le dedicamos estas líneas que hablan un poco de su historia,


Cuenta la leyenda que el Indio Chacao habitaba estas tierras que llegaban
hasta lo que conocemos como Los Teques, capital del estado Miranda. Se alió
con Guaicaipuro y participó con un grupo de jefes indígenas que durante
siete años mantuvieron el control sobre todo el valle de los Caracas y la
región montañosa de los indios Teques, resistiendo la cruel invasión
española. En 1567 el indio Chacao se enfrenta a Juan de Gámez, oficial de
Diego de Losada, quien lo reduce a prisión. Al saber Losada que el bravo
Chacao es su prisionero, decide dialogar con él y recobró su libertad. En
1568 renueva su alianza con Guaicaipuro y con sus hombres acude al sitio de
Maracapana, serranía adyacente a Caracas.


Conocida su inclinación a ayudar a los débiles, especialmente a los niños y
mujeres, se le hace saber que un capitán llamado Catario había secuestrado
yesclavizado a dos niños indígenas. Chacao juró rescatarlos y devolverlos
sanos y salvos a su familia. Cuando fue a rescatar a los niños, entró con
gran destreza al campamento español y los liberó. Los hombres de Chacao
observaron a su regreso que su jefe estaba gravemente herido, fue atendido
de inmediato pero ya no había nada que hacer, el cacique había perdido mucha
sangre. Su muerte causó un profundo dolor en su pueblo. Hoy se le recuerda y
se le rinde homenaje por su valenntía y amor a Venezuela. Pueden visitarlo
en una pequeña y hermosa plaza ubicada en la Avenida Francisco de Miranda.


.