After a day of squishing mud for a friend´s construction project, the time came to return to Chile. We went and bought the tickets to Mendoza and realized that we weren´t going to have enough cash to make it from Mendoza to Santiago. I haven´t used my credit card in such a long time that I have forgotten the pin number and can´t find where I wrote it down and so my credit card is useless for ATM machines. So the easiest way to withdraw the money would be to perform. And since we had four hours until the bus came, I decided to throw a show down in the local park, a block from the bus terminal. It being a small town where street shows don´t come along all too often, I took the decision to walk around the park and invite every person to come and watch my show “the entrance is free” I assured them. And before beginning, I had a crowd of 50 people. After getting changed, a boy in the audience yells out to me “you looked better in your other hat from before”. And here, the show began! The front row of kids, including the one that called out to me, all wanted to be “in” the show. And they got what they wanted. These children asked questions during the show, they stepped in to pass me what they thought I might need, they shared their opinions of what they thought about the tricks “that trick would have been better if you hadn´t have fallen” and “that’s not your elbow, that´s your shoulder”. There was only one way to perform the show with these children, and it was to play with them, not against them. So I incorporated them into the show. I let their commentaries interrupt and transform the show. And remembered what Sue Morrison said “show the crisis”. In the part of my show when I demonstrate how I threw stones from a cliff top to the sea, in stead of miming the rocks, I used the most talkative of the children as the rock. And ended up giving her a whizzy dizzy. Then the second most talkative child came up and wanted one too, and at this point of the show, I say “I threw the rock like this, like this and like this, UNTIL THERE WERE NO MORE ROCKS TO THROW!”. The line worked perfectly, because it made sense in the show and the child accepted it as an fair refusal to his request. And here I ended the show, earlier than usual (by mistake!) and explained that the entrance was free, but the exit had a price. And here I passed the hat, and believe it or not, raised the money necessary to get from Mendoza to Chile … just! Travelling back to Chile, I began noting down all the potential new material I had learned for the show during my trip in Argentina, all thanks to my honest mistakes and responses.
