It’s reported at length in the
article that Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz's "Camelia la Tejana,"
which will be performed this month at Long Beach Opera, is actually three
stories in one. First, there's the legend of Camelia la Tejana, a Mexican
drug-smuggling queen who shot and killed her lover in a jealous fit — of
course, if she really existed. Then there's the tale of how Camelia's gruesome
exploits were immortalized in the smash tune "Contraband and Betrayal,” written
by Ángel González and recorded by the superstar band Los Tigres del Norte. Finally,
according to the author’s words, there's the story of how Ortiz and her brother
stumbled upon a 1986 interview with a woman claiming to be the "real"
Camelia la Tejana in a well-known Mexico City newspaper. That tabloid
confessional, Ortiz says, helped persuade her and her sibling that the lurid
saga of Camelia was the stuff of which great opera could be made.
Whether any of these stories — or
elements of each — are true, false or occupy some shadowy land between fiction
and reality, it’s necessary to emphasize that "Camelia la Tejana" is
going to be something out of ordinary. Spectators and those who have been involved in
its creation and production claim that the six-scene work, ironically subtitled
"Only the Truth,” is a meta-opera that uses Brechtian staging, video
projections and a mash-up of musical styles to deconstruct the mythology
surrounding its mysteriously compelling central figure. It was also revealed
that its dramatic characters, including the title one, are all based on real
people: their sometimes conflicting, sometimes overlapping accounts shape the
work's prismatic perspectives. Reed Johnson adds that, simultaneously,
"Camelia la Tejana" seeks to seduce audiences with a melodramatic
tale, part western, part film noir, that hardly could be more timely, given the
spasm of drug-fueled violence that has killed at least 60,000 Mexicans in the
last six years while feeding the insatiable habits of Uncle Sam's offspring. Thus,
according to Ortiz Torres himself, the theme is how a character in a song gets
created through the media into a myth, because the character supposedly doesn't
exist. In this connection the author expresses the idea that those ambiguities
helped attract the Ortiz duo to Camelia’s story, which has now really become
very famous; it’s interesting that Ortiz accounts this success also for the profession
of an artist itself: as a good actor, you have to convince people of the
honesty of the work.
The author concludes by saying that dead
men and make-believe women may lie, so art must seek its own truth. From my
point of view, these words can be interpreted in the following way: one may or
may not believe in characters on the stage or screen and in what they say, but
art is all the same a specific sphere where everything is relative. If I am
right, it’s really so, and you don’t need to take anything at its surface value
when watching a play or a movie – just enjoy the performance.
Well done!
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