There’s no one in the National University of Arts in Caracas (UNEARTE) that hasn’t seen him in his corner with a cigarette between his lips. His harmless look sometimes adds up a few years to his count. With his sparkling childish eyes, nobody would imagine that for several years he directed an international theatre program beside the Kennedy family. Always leaned to the same column, he watches the world pass by. A lot of people approach him, salute him, and share the smoke and the stories overflowing his mouth.
(Rojas filmming a music video that can be found here.)
Trino Rojas embodies the wisdom of many lives in just one: he has studied, lived, worked and experimented in every corner of the world. Born in Barquisimeto, Venezuela, he started his career studying Biology. A Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Arts scholarship turned his life around and made him decide to move to London without a pound in his pockets or a word in English within his vocabulary. Four years later he was graduating with honors, a flawless handling of the scene and the language. Is the perseverance, and no the talent, what Trino assures it takes to be a perfect artist and a perfect professional.
Currently he is the voice and diction teacher at the Universidad Nacional Experimental de las Artes, and he just became part of the renewed cast of the resurgent National Theatre Company (Compañía Nacional de Teatro, in Caracas). Most of the theatre population in Caracas has practiced with one of his vocal exercises and has heard him relate with great admiration the talks he had with Normal Aleandro, his favorite actress and teacher. The ones that haven’t, have probable seem him privilege the Venezuelan tables through the voice of some Rengifo or Chalbaud character.
With a lost and glazed look, he tells by memory Charles Chaplin interviews and Chinese legends. In whispers, he also confesses the hunger that strikes him and the bad payments he sometimes doesn’t even receive. His rickety clothes are the maximum statement of the respect that this country shows for its teachers, for its sources of knowledge. He has never let any of this put him down, but a body that is also an instrument requires a level of caring he’s not receiving. The passion for what he does is what gives him the energy that he should be gaining from food, and his pride makes him hide the cane that helps him walk every time he goes to an audition. He hides under the tables of his soul the rudeness and rejection he gets within his own gild.
Of the parts he cheerish the most in his career, he always stands out one he did while studying in London. At the age of 23 he played the character of a father in an Arthur Miller piece. He will always be grateful with César Rojas for the play La Disculpa (The Apology), a true story that happened in Margarita where his character was a man torn apart by the early death of his son that decides to open the doors to the family his son created and that he rejected while he was alive.
(Rojas in The Apology)
Trino has never been a father, but he’s always surrounded by sons and daughters. Is probably his protective quality and his aura of wisdom the reason he always gets fatherly roles and what has him always surrounded by little apprentices hungry for knowledge and human warmth. Because if there’s something that Trino Rojas has to offer is warmth. He never hesitates when it comes to sharing the little he has, whether is stories or a piece of bread. He always tells that his mom used to say that he would have been “the poorest little hooker of the neighborhood” if he had been born a woman, because the size of his heart makes him incapable of saying no to anyone.
That’s how he has formed his own hangar of adoptive children, warm souls devoted to passion as the spirit they follow. That’s how Trino ignores that he has no health insurance, a house or an income worthy of the pledge and the work he puts on the culture of his country and the entire world. Because love and wanting to make other people happy is what fills him with the encouragement he needs to get out of his rented room every day and get to college first thing in the morning even when he doesn’t have to go to class that day. Because he will always find somebody whiling to hear his stories, and he, as the generous soul that he is, will always be whiling to tell them.
