In memory of maestro Seki Sano, father of theater in Mexico

MEXICO CITY (Process).- The Maestro played a very important role on the Mexican scene as a director and trainer of actors and directors, from his arrival in our country until his death in Mexico City in 1966.

When my friend Héctor Mendoza, a few years ago, a great teacher, playwright and theater director, knowing that I was a disciple of the teacher Seki Sano, suggested that I write a text about him on the anniversary of his birth, because without a doubt for him He was the great innovator of the Mexican scene. Seki Sano ended up with the Spanish Theater School, whose main representative was the Mexican actress María Teresa Montoya, of whom the teacher Seki Sano expressed that if she had not died, he would have executed her, due to the exaggeration of her performances. I wrote the text in question and never published it until now on its one hundred and eleventh anniversary.

Seki, as we called him, was born on January 14, 1905 in Tientsin, a Japanese concession in China. The master’s life was eventful and reckless, since he lived in different countries, and due to his status as an artist and political activist he was expelled even from his own country and even from others such as Stalin’s Soviet Union and the United States of America. During his time in Germany he was appointed Japanese representative of the International Revolutionary Theater Organization.

In 1931 they moved the offices of this organization to Moscow, and there he met and worked with none other than Konstantin Stanislavski, the creator of the school of experience who was also the teacher of Lee Strasberg, who founded the Actor’s Studio in New York, formator of a chain of actors such as Marlon Brando, James Dean and Marilyn Monroe, to name a few. Seki was also an assistant to the Russian actor and theorist Vsevolod Meyerhold. Finally in 1939, after passing through the United States of America and settling in a camp for Japanese, German and Italian immigrants, the teacher found asylum in Mexico.

Before continuing with the master’s odyssey, I want to tell you how and when my first contact with theater was, and years later with it. When I lived in my native Aguascalientes, I was barely twelve years old when the wife of the governor at that time, Ana Ibarra de Rodríguez, had the idea of ​​putting on the play “Don Juan Tenorio” by José Zorrilla, performed by children between twelve and thirteen. years, to benefit poor children’s Christmas, and was presented at the Morelos Theater, headquarters of the 1914 Revolutionary Convention.

The performances took place over four weekends. For this production, Mrs. Rodríguez hired a theater director from the capital, and had the corresponding costumes made for each child; I had to play Captain Centellas, who as we know was the one who killed Don Juan Tenorio. I don’t know if he was financially beneficial for charitable purposes. Over the years since then, my love and curiosity for theater were part of my life.

In 1956, when my family and I came to settle in Mexico City, I found out about the existence of Seki Sano’s workshop, about whom I had read in the newspapers about his great success as director of the play “A Tram Named Desire.” by Tennessee Williams, in 1948, which was performed at the Fine Arts Theater with María Douglas and Wolf Ruvinskis at the head of the cast.

After several hesitation, I signed up for his performing arts workshop, which was located on the upper floors of the Chapultepec Cinema, on Paseo de la Reforma, next to the Chapultepec Café, both locations now gone.

The importance of Seki Sano in theater in Mexico is truly transcendental, I do not believe that to date he has been given the place that corresponds to his work in Mexico.

He came to innovate our scene for his taste, by choosing works with social content, for example “Clothes for a Summer Hotel” and “The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams; “Trial by Fire” (1956), “A View from the Bridge”, “They Are All My Children” (1959) by Arthur Miller; “The Mandrake” (1956) by Machiavelli; “The Fallen Fruits” by Luisa Josefina Hernández; “A man against time” by Robert Bolt; “Brute Force”, which focuses its action among farm workers in a California wine valley, the work of John Steinbeck, and many more. Although pocket theaters already existed in Mexico, the one who really promoted current theater was Seki, who also directed the adaptation of “Corona de Sombra” by Rodolfo Usigli in 1951.

One of his greatest admirers was Don Armando de María y Campos, a great theater chronicler of the time and an expert on the various productions that Seki Sano made. In some of his chronicles, he points out the master’s predilection for selecting works with content of social criticism. He attributed it to Seki Sano being convinced that the artist could not be indifferent to the society and the times in which he lives; He must be an active agent for raising social and political awareness, like the work he staged in 1946 by John Steinbeck, mentioned above.

When I decided to enroll in acting courses (at that time, it was somewhat expensive, 300 pesos a month), three days a week: Monday, Wednesday and Friday from 4 to 6 in the afternoon. I clearly remember the first time I entered his class, it was a terrifying experience; His personality was imposing. He always had a sour appearance, he was lame, I never knew what accident caused his immobility in his knee, I think it was the right one. This fact forced him to use a cane. From his private life I only remember that he was once married to the dancer and choreographer Waldeen; He also spoke of a romantic relationship with the actress María Douglas.

Whoever managed to survive the first three classes was able to see the great personality of Seki Sano, because deep down he was a person with a great knowledge of human beings. I remember that several of the classmates did not last longer than the first class and did not return, others left crying, and the bravest of us who resisted after the first week, realized that their rudeness was pure appearance and that deep down it was a noble and generous person.

He tested us. For example, the first attack I had from him caused a lump in my throat and I was about to run out of the classroom, when he said to me: “What? What? What are you saying to me? “Landeros? What are you telling me?”, and I answered I don’t know what, and he told me: “Speak well, modulate your words, I don’t understand you at all, you talk like a dog.” I was stunned, almost stammering on the verge of crying, and after he got over myself I responded: “That’s why I’m here, teacher, so you can teach me how to speak.” And since then I lost my fear of him and realized everything he was capable of teaching us: from analyzing theatrical texts to creating a character. What he didn’t teach me was how to reinvent myself.

On another occasion we were going to set up an exercise in which each student could choose the scene from the play that they liked the most to act out during the end-of-course exam; So with a friend of mine, a poet who became a character at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters in the sixties, a Uruguayan who I loved very much, whose name was Alcira Soust Scaffo, we chose the scene from Henrik Ibsen’s work “Spectros”. ”, where Mrs. Alving, Osvaldo’s mother, is, at the moment when he begins to lose his mind, when he asks her to give him the sun, Seki Sano laughed at us, and Alcira told him that she was a very flirtatious and that he had not understood anything about the character. She told me the opposite.

The interesting thing about the School of Experience was that it forced us to work on the background of each character that we were going to play, that is, each of us, when choosing that character from the work in question, had to build it through his background, we had We had to invent what education the character had, when he was born, what his situation was within his family, knowing what influence he had had from his mother, his father, his brothers, etc. Depending on the case we had to build, that is, invent the background of the character to be played, and also resort to memory. For example, if it was a sad scene, we were forced to remember something that had happened to us in our lives to motivate us to create the character.

Seki Sano was a man who loved theater and lived for it. The great teacher’s honesty forced him to live very modestly. I remember some classmates we paraded through their school. Benito Alazraki, film producer, comes to mind; the rumbera Rosa Carmina, who wanted to teach herself how to act (Seki responded that he didn’t perform miracles, but that she would try). There were also the painter Carlos Nakatani, the dancer Salvador Zea (brother of María Luisa Zea, an actress in Mexican cinema in her early days), Manolo Barbachano and several others.

Another colleague, Estela Bracamontes, to whom he once said: “Why do you always have the same face, no matter what role you play?” Estela answered him bluntly: “Teacher, because I have no other choice,” which made all of us students bite our tongues to keep from laughing, and there were many other anecdotes. She had a beneficial impact on me personally, because she taught me to observe the importance of the small, big details that make up a character.

I was able to realize how the actor must go a long way to

build the character. I remember how he told us to watch people when they walk with their heel first and then their toe, which indicates a strong and confident personality; On the other hand, those who step first with their toes have a different personality. He taught us to walk, to imitate how a dog or a horse walks, from the tones of voice, the diction, knowing how to move our lips; because there are actors, for example Rita Macedo, who gave us diction class, who was never able to move her upper lip and could not correct the defect. Even in the way you sit and the way you walk, how to observe even the smallest detail and how to create a character.

Seki did not allow Broadway productions to be plagiarized, as other directors did, for example Manolo Fábregas. Seki, like Héctor Mendoza, was bringing out the character from the actors, step by step, they were truly architects of the performance.

Another Seki Sano contribution is having demonstrated that the director not only manages the actors, he must take care of even the smallest detail of the stage production; that the lighting was correct, that the musical background was adequate, that the technicians were up to the task, and whether or not its realism had to be, a realistically constructed set, or if I wanted, a library, perhaps It was a simple painted curtain, but that did not mean that the theatrical convention stopped being realistic.

Seki Sano was a master with all his letters, who left an everlasting mark on the theater of Mexico. I dare say, perhaps, the best era he went through in theater in our country.

As one hundred and eleven years have passed since his birth, I think it is urgent to pay him a great tribute.

*His journalistic work has been compiled in several volumes. In 2010, the first edition appeared, in two volumes, of “Protagonistas de su tiempo (1963-2010)”, an anthology published by the Autonomous University of Aguascalientes.