The comfortable meeting room of a hotel located near Callao and Córdoba serves as a meeting point to talk with Alberto Ajakaan actor who exudes passion when reflecting on his craft.
Performer, director and playwright, begins the year with the premiere of “Made in Lanús”a new version of the masterpiece by Nelly Fernández Tiscornia, which will be directed by Luis Brandoni and where he will share the stage with Cecilia Dopazo, Malena Solda and Esteban Meloni.
Ajaka is enthusiastic, talkative and eager to talk. It’s a good time to read what he has to say.
News: You did “Othello”, “Hamlet” and “Macbeth”, you must be one of the few Argentine actors who had that rare privilege. What does Shakespeare mean to his career and why is he still so relevant today?
Alberto Ajaka: Perhaps because of my late access to the theater phenomenon, I had a certain irreverence in my approach to some iconic materials that are canonized. The place that Shakespeare occupies has a great symbolic charge, there is a relationship between his literature and us Argentines. We have Italian roots and as Borges said, Shakespeare was “an Italian who wrote in English.” It seems to me that Argentine acting has a lineage inherited from the Italian tradition and that makes it so unique, there is a strong link there.
News: Does our theater feed more on the Italian imprint than on the Spanish one?
Ajaka: Yes, from now on, at least the Buenos Aires theater. It is clear in the way of acting. There is something about Buenos Aires that feeds on that expressiveness, a line in space that is very ours. I often do the exercise of stopping at traffic lights or on corners, turning off the radio and sitting for a while looking at the gestures, the strength of the expressions, the circuit of passions that have so much to do with Shakespeare.
News: To make a Shakespeare, do you have to get rid of the burden that it implies a little?
Ajaka: In my case the relationship with him was very direct, very frontal. I started acting and directing almost simultaneously once I started doing theater fully. I took two or three years of very diverse, strange and intermingled courses and in the third year I began to work on a very important work called “From bad to worse” by Ricardo Bartís, in the place where I studied with him, which was Sportivo. Theatrical. That was my strongest learning along with acting and directing “Othello” almost out of nowhere, a chamber version with five characters in independent theater.
News: Speaking of Shakespeare, unlike others, he was a very popular author in his time. You are a father of three children, how do you deal with money in your profession?
Ajaka: That’s true, he knew how to attract people to his works, in fact Don Shakespeare seems to have been quite interested in money and became a fairly prosperous landowner (laughs). I worked for 20 years in a family printing company, I had the economy figured out, I had earned capital, I started with a full belly. I lead a modest life, I am convinced that having a lot of money is a problem. But at the time I let go of financial security and understood that if I wanted to act I had to do it. With my partner, María Villar, I made a work called “The Hunger of Artists” to understand that mechanism that moves art, and the hunger for money is a big driving force. Because let’s agree that hunger is not only the desire to eat but also something else that who knows what the hell it is. Perhaps desire, that which makes one move in search of a moment because no one knows what is going to happen later. It happens to me that a priori I don’t feel like acting, I start living it and then I don’t want to stop.
News: When you played Donofrio in “Guapas” they asked you a lot if it bothered you to be classified as a heartthrob, what do you think about that?
Ajaka: When they asked me that, I told them that you have to understand what it means to be a gallant for you and what it means to be one for me. Because For me, the heartthrob is the complex construction of a character, being given the title of heartthrob can never weigh on me. because that shell is not me. I know how to play the tricks to woo in any case. It is not a minor construction, it is minor if it is just pure appearance.
News: This year, because of those things of fate, of the three most successful films, two had his presence, “Extortion” and “Almost Dead.” Fernán Mirás directed you in the latter, does the fact that he is also an actor influence?
Ajaka: I told that to those at HBO, I’m going to look for you as a press agent! (laughs) The truth is that it doesn’t matter if the director is an actor, what interested me was to meet Fernán and I gave myself the pleasure. He is a great person. Stop, I told you that it doesn’t influence… and then a little bit yes, on the other hand it is a story that repeats itself in cinema with people like Orson Welles or Chaplin. Basically a director needs skill to surf that wave that is a film and in Argentina it is not so easy, it is reserved for a few like Adrián Caetano, Ariel Winograd or Daniel Burman, for example, people who repeatedly make films. An actor deals with his own neuroses and if I get scared of mine, imagine if poor Fernán had to enter our heads (laughs). A director has an imaginary with which he compares all the time, I am a theater maker, I act, I write, I direct. A film director, whether a colleague or not, contains in some way, but in cinema the real dialogue is between the actor and the camera.
News: And now another actor directs it in “Made in Lanús”. What motivated you to agree to do this work that is almost a classic?
Ajaka: Yes, Luis Brandoni no less, another man of theater. I’m good at making iconic works of the national theater it seems (laughs). I was in “Juan Moreira” and “El gran deschave”, I like to put the flesh on those characters. Being able to meet Beto Brandoni, so admired by my parents, weighed when I decided to make “Made in Lanús”, it had a symbolic meaning.
News: Why after so long has “Made in Lanús” not lost its validity, is Argentine history repeating itself?
Ajaka: The essence of the plot of “Made in Lanús” resonates a lot, this idea of going or staying, of deciding to return or not, is something that is still very present today. Although we make the original text, without any modification, certain themes are always the same. There is an idea since 2001 that whoever leaves is a lively person and whoever stays is an idiot, before that was the other way around. Why leave this country? Brandoni told me that everyone is right, those who leave and those who stay. I also like to think of it as whoever is free from that should cast the first stone, we are all right and to blame.
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by Leonardo Martinelli
