Katia de la Cruz, Colombian who teaches Spanish language and literature at UCT, convened an intercontinental group of future facilitators of Pre-Texts. The still ongoing workshops y include participants from Costa Rica, the U.S., South Africa, and Australia. Finding a time that worked across all our time zones wasn’t easy, but Katia managed to launch insightful and enjoyable sessions. With increasingly difficult texts that would otherwise frustrate most readers, we have been “defrosting” from conventional competition, learning to ask naive questions and to explore responses together. Discovering fresh perspectives and engaging deeply with each other takes advantage of the group’s diversity to turn difficulty into artistic challenges. So far, we have made drawings, soundtracks, pantomime performances, and poems. As artists, we lose fear and manipulate the material. In collaboration with “playmates” it’s even more fun.
