The Brooklyn Rail

En Parábola/Conversations on Tragedy, Part I opens with a trio of discrete shots of a boat’s wake unfolding across the film’s channels, the camera positioned backwards as the boat drives forward. Throughout En Parábola, images of water recur as the film periodically returns to slow shots of the Hudson, the Gowanus Canal, and the shores of New York and Puerto Rico. In an interview accompanying the installation, filmmaker Natalia Lassalle-Morillo quotes Martinican writer Édouard Glissant who describes departure as “the moment when one consents not to be a single being and attempts to be many beings at the same time. In other words, for me every diaspora is the passage from unity to multiplicity.” 

What happens when one consents to be more than one being at the same time? The question repeats throughout En Parábola, which Lassalle-Morillo co-authored with teacher and poet Erica Ballester, artist Nina Lucía Rodríguez, consultant and researcher Raquel Rodríguez, and writer Emma Suárez-Báez. In the film, Lassalle-Morillo uses Sophocles’s tragedy Antigone as a framework to consider the political, social, and economic state of Puerto Rico. Through a call to non-actors, Lassalle-Morillo invited participants in Puerto Rico and New York’s Puerto Rican diasporic community to attend a series of open rehearsals, where they read and remade the text of Antigone. In doing so, she initiated an emotional space for collective catharsis. In the first rehearsal scene, she tells the group that they don’t need to act or perform, but only to lend their voices to the characters. She punctures their readings with the spoken word agua, which signals a moment of pause for participants to recount their experiences of migration and displacement, and to reflect on how catastrophe operates within both Antigone and their current communities in Puerto Rico and the diaspora.

At the opening, musician Xenia Rubinos led a participatory performance informed by Pauline Oliveros’s practice of Deep Listening, where participants become attuned to their present sonic environment through the act of conscious listening. During the performance, the audience improvised vocalizations in response to Rubinos, moving in a procession from Amant’s courtyard to the room of En Parábola’s installation. There, narrow pieces of white paper with printed text were circulated, and as the hum of the collective chorus continued, the audience was invited to read into the microphones at the center of the room. The participants became a vessel for the printed words, which were excerpts from interviews and testimonies Lassalle-Morrillo collected throughout the course of the project. In the polyphony of the film and the performance, authorship became dispersed, liquid and multiple.

Antigone has been an iteratively central text for Lassalle-Morillo, enacted in previous staged theater performances and short films. The tragedy has a well-documented history of being remade and restaged with political applications, particularly in Latin and South America. Throughout Lassalle-Morillo’s projects, Antigone serves as a viewfinder for considering chaos, catastrophe, and the impacts of collective trauma. Lassalle-Morillo has said her use of this text is not primarily an intellectual project but an affective one. En Parábola is constructed with tenderness: the subjects are frequently filmed at an intimate distance, the camera dwelling on participants as they embrace, or lean on one another, sharing weight. In the scenes discussing Antigone’s characters the participants bring an uncommon compassion to their considerations, suffusing the characters with emotional and symbolic complexity. In one scene they imagine King Creon, Antigone’s uncle, as representative of natural catastrophe or capitalism or patriarchy, but they also personify and modernize him, saying that he’s like a patriotic uncle who advocates for Puerto Rican statehood rather than liberation.

The impulse to modernize Antigone’s characters is a shared project in the work of poet Anne Carson, whose writing has informed Lassalle-Morillo. Early in En Parábola, one participant reads from Carson’s Antigonick during rehearsal: “I’m a strange in-between thing, aren’t I? Not at home with the living nor the dead.” Partway through the film, Haimon, son of Creon, and Ismene, Antigone’s sister, are pictured beside one another, their faces split across the left and central screens. “After the revolution, what becomes of you, Ismene?” Haimon asks. Ismene responds that they’d like to be buried in their backyard and for their body to become a tree, as the left screen goes black and Haimon leans their head against Ismene’s.

The film’s final ten minutes are devoted to an extended closing scene of a chorus rehearsal led by Rubinos, a primarily sonic exercise with the occasional integration of spoken text and calls of entres de aguas (between these waters) or libertad. The sound coalesces and eventually breaks down. One of Lassalle-Morillo’s collaborators, Raquel Rodríguez, stands at the microphone, repeating the word agua, speaking with such force that she eventually breaks from language and into a scream. In two close-up shots—one on the right screen and then on the left—the camera catches the studio lights reflected in the tears that have welled in the eyes of the participants.