The ball of letters

La Pelota de Letras. is a comic monologue by Colombian Andrés López, who is considered the pioneer of the stand-up comedy genre in Colombia.

Standup comedy

The first performance was held in February 2004, at the Hard Rock Café Bogotá and to this date Andrés López continues to perform with La Pelota de Letras on different stages in Colombia and abroad. This work has been considered as a socioanthropological analysis of the last four generations in Colombia. More than 1,500 functions have been performed with a total of more than 2 million attendees and their versions change according to the country or region in which López performs. According to Semana magazine, Andrés López, its creator, is considered one of the forty, under forty, protagonists of the history of Colombia in the coming years.

The Ball of Letters on DVD

In December 2005, at the Hard Rock Café Bogotá, Andrés López released La Pelota de Letras in DVD format under the production and label of Universal Music Colombia, with the purpose of disseminating his work to Colombians who live outside the country and to motivate people to buy the original DVD and in this way combat the sale of pirated DVDs that circulated throughout the year throughout the world.

International Tour

López has presented La Pelota de Letras in numerous Colombian cities and abroad. In January 2005, the presentations in the United States were sold out in the cities of Miami and New York, due to this success he received his first international award, the "HOLA" Award, in the category of "Outstanding Solo Performance& #3. 4;.

On March 2, 2006, Universal Music Colombia presented Andrés López with the Diamond DVD for exceeding 60,000 original DVD sales, which made La pelota de letras the best-selling DVD in Colombian history. The Dominican singer Wilfrido Vargas was invited to this special celebration, who took the stage and thanked López for spreading through his work, his famous music in the 80s.

Andrés López has been making successful international tours with special adaptations of La Pelota de Letras in different countries, the cities he has visited have been: Madrid, Barcelona, Pamplona, Valencia, Palma de Mallorca, Spain; Los Angeles, CA; Panama, Panama; Quito, Ecuador; Toronto, Montreal and London, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Canada; New York, NY; Miami, FL; Greenville, NC; Houston, TX; Orlando, FL; Atlanta, GA; Queens, N.Y.; Elizabeth, NJ; Boston, MA; San Jose, Costa Rica; Caracas, Maracaibo, Barquisimento, Mérida, San Cristóbal and Valencia, Venezuela and Mexico DF, Mexico; Santiago, Chile. Presentations have been attended by between 700 and 4,500 people per event, promoting his work thanks to Colombians living abroad and people of various nationalities who support him. López also teaches new comedians the art of Stand up Comedy in Colombia with his Taller de Comedia.

Central body of the work

The name of the work alludes to a type of rubber ball that was used by children in the 1970s-1980s and which recounts the changes of the different generations that comprised during the second half of the 20th century.

This work has been constructed based on several works that the author has previously represented in the last 18 years in theaters and in universities, among others: "A lo Vietnam",“The Academic Avenger”, “ Who flies?", "Steps for a rumbeo", "Tales of a law student", "Chronicles of Partials", "Corabastos New Wave", "Behind the Kreatón", "The Guava Generation" and "Give me one @ from guava.com" Other plays in the company of other actors such as: "And if it's so easy, why don't they do it?", "A que te cojo ratón" and others.

López's work has an Ethnographic method, and uses the tools of the discipline of Anthropology, which allow him to account, as he says, of "the vulnerable" of human beings. The descriptions of the people, the attitudes, the settings show that de López lived and lived with families from strata 3 and 4 in various cities in Colombia.

In La Pelota de Letras Andrés López divides the generations:

1. Generation W: It is alusive to the artistic, literary and youthful avant-gardes in Colombia between 19XX and 1968; from it are parents and mothers by conviction not by accident.
2. Generation of Guayaba: This generation belongs to the author (1969-1974) and gives the predominance to merengue music and the introduction of the first Japanese cartoons, known as animes, and the American series on Colombian television, in synthesis to the Nuclear Man.;
3. Generation X: It is the period from 1975 to 1980 and is given the development and experience of the first cultural exchanges and the diffusion of other languages. His motto is Confuse and reign. “It is characterized by its confusion of thought, word, work and profession, perhaps because it is a generation of children of divorce or, what is the same, of the hippies dreamers of the 1960s. They are the ones who are doing postgraduate degrees, working on multinationals” A.L.;
4. Generation Y: understood from 1981 to 1992, characterized by the exaltation of beauty and art "All are beautiful". Her motto We have a world apart, no one knows what it is.;
5. Generation Z: From 1993 to 11 September 2001 in the morning, characterized by globalization and the diffuser predominance of European and American animation; they want to dominate the world.
6. The last generation is the AAwhich comes after 11 September in the afternoon of 2001, which could be characterized, according to the author, by the environment of terrorism and the intensive dissemination of video games. They want to oppress "Ctrl"+"Alt"+"Supr" on the world's keyboard. Andrés López grew up and studied in the Modelia neighborhood. The history of the neighborhood is the history of different generations as if they were parallel lives.

Media

"I took a promiscuous dare by naming these categories in a totally arbitrary way. I had looked up who had taken the trouble to study the generations and I found that only the journalists from Life magazine had talked about the Baby Boom, the postwar period, the children of Vietnam, generation X, the hippies... I thought it was from generation X until in the '90s I started talking about the guava generation, a fruit so generous that it is born anywhere, and with whose juice we are raised. And so is my generation, generous" Andrés López, Tour 2006. Madrid, Spain. Interview for the newspaper El Latinoamericano