Do You Still Remember the Storytellers on the Hill?

When was the last time you went to San Antonio Hill? If you join me in this text we will remember together and I will make you think about some more things about this emblematic space for stories and storytellers.

Imagine arriving before most. It's Saturday at 6:30 p.m. and there are few people. You find a place in the center of the stands and sit down to wait for the start of the show. Soon the curtain opens, which is a traditional way to refer to the fact that we stand on top of a wall to shout: "Cueeeentos, Cueeeentos". Did you know that in 2008 we screamed the same way and a little black dog with Labrador features howled and then went to the center of the agora so that we could give him a prize? With that same call the people who are waiting on the path approach the theater, but the dog no longer comes: they stole it.

All this happens at the height of Carrera 10 Oeste # 1 - 93, there is the stone path that leads to the Chapel of San Antonio, heritage of the city of Santiago de Cali. This path was designed for parishioners, for tourists wanting a nice view and was transformed, over time, into a waiting room for the evening performance. Yes, it is usually on that stone path where people wait for the call of the Santa Palabra storytellers and it serves as a reference point to remember. It also contradicts what Marc Auge once said, that a route between two points is a non-place. But in this case the theorist is wrong or I am wrong at my convenience, since that path guides us and helps us explain a city phenomenon. It is precisely in that non-place that the public waits for the stories and it is at its side where a theater of stone and cement was built, under the shelter of an emblematic tree, like an epic story.

In less than thirty minutes there are more than a hundred people gathered and you are in the best place. The function begins. A comedy routine sets the rules of the game. They are simple agreements: First: everyone with their phones on silent mode. Second: occupy a place where you can see and allow others to do so. Third: at some point we will pass out the backpack, the typical hat for street performances and you will be invited to put it on. Fourth: neither smoke nor drink alcohol, because it is a space for words to be celebrated and the family to participate; It is not a bar, it is a theater for all ages. Fifth agreement and anticipation of content: yes, perhaps you are thinking of laughing, but we tell stories and humor is a condiment, not an end.

The first hour of the show passes and there are already three hundred people in the place. The profile of the attendees is varied and you notice it. The people come from different parts of the city and all have very different cultural, academic and economic levels, they are of different ages, with different political and religious beliefs and, yet, they are all united under the same discourse. All the people attending for a moment unify, meet, merge in front of the stories. Each attendee imagines their own story and everyone connects with you because they travel through the same story. And in that community that you are part of, sensations of love, hope, disgust, sadness, laughter, all the emotions according to the story told, are released together.

You enjoy the backpack pass on two occasions, where each person contributes according to their pocket; It is one of the peculiarities of this space. Because it is open to the public, it never requires payment of a ticket. In this we have to exalt the importance of popular theater and what influences the creation of an audience. When we pass the hat we are teaching that art must be paid for and eventually, that same audience will learn to get to the theaters. It is a fundamental step that allows us to jump to the box office and this step, like all steps, is learned. Santa Palabra became an option due to the lack of audience training for theater halls or a solution to the lack of budget; We must also say this. The thing is that for many the thing is complex and there is no money for a theater performance. In that sense, we do the task of generating spaces of social inclusion, where everyone, regardless of origin, has a place.

With us you will spend the night, listening to some of the unforgettable stories: Don Guillermo, the peasant; Role play, The story of Antonio el Bobo, The strange old man on the road; and in Fraga's voice you will hear, perhaps: The friends of the King; A letter, a ghost, a love; Paragliding adventures... They are stories that you may not know because of their titles, but that at the first line you hear you say: "yes, it's a classic."

Perhaps we agree that over the years the Hill of San Antonio is known not only for its beauty or its emblematic church, but for its storytellers. Of course, it has been the recommendation, the voice-to-voice reference that has managed to constitute a unique space for the Caleno inhabitants and their visitors. What is the first thing you say when you are going to recommend storytellers? Then you answer this, through any of our networks, because we would like to know.

At the end of the performance we will see each other up close, a greeting, a hug without fear of a pandemic and then a farewell. When you leave you will find the path of stones and cement again and you will surely see the little green house of the Colombian National Police. The image could seem like a critical story in itself, the presentation of two opposites: pragmatic thinking on the one hand and the flexibility of the imagination and the possible on the other. The truth is that the police are older than us and the acoustic shell, the agora, is rather recent. The space also had other conditions against it. It was built and for many years in the habit of nothingness; It was a space designed from the beginning for people to listen to something and for a long time it was filled with silence. Before becoming a stage for constant cultural programming, it was: an improvised soccer field, a refuge for lovers, a place to take an astral trip and even a public bathroom. One day the storytellers took the "non-place" and turned it into territory.

I want to tell you, without pedantry and rather to give support to this text, that I am the storyteller who has been telling stories for the longest time on the Hill. I wasn't the first. To say this would be to contradict the very humanity that was expressed around the words and also to overlook that since the construction of the place many artists visited seasonally. But a territory is never built with isolated visits, but rather through constant practice. Manuel Delgado, in his book Animal publico, tells us about those architectural structures that have been designed for something and that fail for a long time in their purpose only because the inhabitants do not want to use them. We provoke the desire, never with the very objective of appropriating a space but for the love of what we like, and in this way we create the use (I have another concept in the background: the practiced space, thinking of Michel de Certeau). And that is why today we can account, not only for the transformation of the speeches issued by artists since 2003, but also for the stories woven into that public-storyteller relationship.

Forgive me if I became academic, it is a vice that certain books leave one with and the desire to avoid emotional stories because it breaks my soul. It's just that I've been in that place for days without counting because of the pandemic, because of Covid-19.

I continue with the reflections. Together with my stage partner I have seen children become adults and we ourselves went from teenagers to men. For years we have dedicated every Friday, Saturday, Sunday, holiday Monday and holiday seasons to telling our way of seeing the world in a park where people like you come wanting to imagine.

Holy Word became, little by little, something of the people, part of their stories of love, friendship, family, life; and without meaning to, we offered what Delgado says in the book I recommended: we offered a response "to that need for community belonging, a brotherhood capable of facing the loneliness that life so often leads to in urbanized contexts".

In many moments we were the beginning of some beautiful story. Many knew us because they were attracted by the neighborhood and its view and suddenly, after turning around, they dared to enter that place where there were so many people and they found the story and its variables. As they passed, they came across a number of people gathered in front of one or two men and curiosity (others call it gossip) led them to the networks of a word from the storyteller, then to the social networks of Santa Palabra. It is what makes public space a delicious space, non-conventional theater a stage in constant construction, a place of pure possibility for those who walk through it.

And among all that, among the street vendors who pass by from time to time, among the old cars that once or twice a night take a bride to her next husband, you and we made the connection. There are many stories to tell about those relationships we built. How can we forget the grandmother who always visited us with her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, the terminally ill person who dedicated some of his last days to visiting us, the blind couple, those who have asked their partners for marriage; those who first went together, then separately, and then with others; to the one who asked us for a story to apologize, to the foreigner who learned to speak Spanish better by visiting us, to the man who hugged me one day because he had gotten out of prison and among the things he wanted to do when he regained his freedom was to listen to stories again; to the lord of the "mani, mani", to the sellers: Ruben, Juliana, Lola, Gonzalo, Nubia... We keep all of that in our memory.

And to think that when we went for the first time we were on the hunt for some tickets for a bottle of wine, in that time of adolescence and bohemianism, without responsibilities or conscience. Then we became professionals, entrepreneurs, we reflected on our repertoire, we changed... We have grown thanks to you, to that complicity. Have you seen us grow? Do you feel happy about who we are today? Someone once told us that Santa Palabra should be declared a cultural heritage of the city, and that made us know the great responsibility we have. That is why we continue here, as did the griots, rhapsodes, palabreros, bards, minstrels, troubadours, weavers of words. We continue spinning myths and legends, writing urban and rural stories, betting on the art of words, improvising stories, making ingenuity endure in the spoken word and hoping to return to the space of San Antonio Hill to fill you with stories. Here we remain firm in the craft of weaving stories, preserving the exercise of storytelling because this keeps us united.