Mexico City, March 7, 2023.- 70 uninterrupted years of performances of the staging of The MousetrapThe Mousetrap, by Agatha Christie and the company of Theater Company of the Universidad Panamericana has not been left behind to pay tribute to her.
The Mousetrap
Under the direction of Victoria Carreras Cruz, the staging of the play La Ratonera, which was first presented in London in 1952 and has never been made into a movie, took two semesters and involved 21 students from first to ninth semesters from different careers, such as: Law, Pedagogy, Business, Engineering, Communication, ESDAI, Music and Innovation and Psychology .
This one presents the story of Giles and Mollie Ralston, a young married couple opening their new guesthouse in the outskirts of London, who do not suspect that their newly opened business will become for a few days the epicenter of a macabre criminal game, with a murderer on the loose among its customers.
A multifaceted management
Vicky Carreras has been a choreographer and performing arts director for 40 years. She is currently the director of the Data Intelligence and Cybersecurity Engineering degree program, has been a choreographer for the UP Theater Company for 10 years and has been its director for only two years.
About the opportunity she had to direct the staging of La Ratonera, she says: "I am very proud to have directed it because it is a play that not many directors dare to do due to the complexity of the script, the double reading of the characters' psyche, the amount of text that each actor must handle and the necessary dynamism on stage".
"Precisely for all of the above reasons I decided to tackle it, so that Teatro UP could be proud to have presented it," he adds about the challenge.
Post-pandemic challenges
Carreras explains that the staging, in addition to taking place in a single location, relies exclusively on acting quality, which was a huge challenge for the students who had just faced isolation due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
"The children found it difficult to concentrate, memorize the texts, the lines, because it is also a very dynamic play. We had to ask for help from the psycho-pedagogical department to help us generate exercises with the students to improve their concentration and memory," says the director.
The economic resources were another constraint because they were really scarce, so Vicky explains that the scenery are simply printed canvases and the costumes "came out of the closets of each of us or our families".
High level of acting
Considering the weight that acting has in the play La Ratonera, the director recalls that in order to inject confidence in the company she chose not to tell them what they were facing: "(...) I always told them that they were ready to play their roles and every day I asked them for more and more. They were afraid, even if I didn't tell them, they felt the complexity, but I kept pushing them to achieve the goal".
"One fine day the play ran completely, they began to nuance their characters, to achieve the necessary twists and turns. In short, they made them their own. Then, and only then, I told them that I admired them enormously for what they had achieved and that they had emerged victorious from an enormous challenge," he says.
And he continues: "They looked at me with eyes like saucers when I told them that it had only been performed once before in Mexico because of the level of difficulty it implied for professional actors".
That is why she says she is enormously proud and grateful for the effort and sacrifice that the staging implied for each of the members of Teatro UP. The challenge was successfully met: "I have rarely seen in Teatro UP these levels of acting", she says.
Artistic and professional development
UP Theater is not only for a specific student profile. Being part of a staging helps young people to improve their public speaking skills, develop thinking structure, grow in abstraction capacity, improve their empathy and memory. Likewise, it is useful for body coordination and language management and teaches them to work in a team and solve problems.
María de la Luz Soní Rico, a student of Pedagogy, who plays Mrs. Boyle in La Ratonera, says that she was motivated to join the theater company because it gave her "the opportunity to develop my artistic side and integrate it into my academic and professional life (...) my colleagues in the company have become like a family to me".
He also reveals: "It has helped me grow in general. I have learned to really work as a team towards a common goal, to take initiative and give ideas, to express myself and, above all, to empathize with others."
But Diego Morales Gómez, from Data Intelligence and Cybersecurity Engineering, explains that the artistic part is not the only one that can be developed as a student at Teatro UP .
He, who is part of the company from the technical area, specifically in charge of audio, says: "there are many areas in which you can learn several values such as teamwork and discipline, with which you gain experience.
He points out that his participation has opened other doors: "Thanks to the opportunity Vicky Carreras gave me to belong to the company, I am doing my social service outside the UP, since a producer from another company sought me out to support his productions".
Would you like to be part of Teatro UP? Write to mx_arteycultura@up.edu.mx
