Velório Chileno
Theatre
5 Jul 2013 - 22:00 | 6 Jul 2013 - 22:00
Teatro do Bairro
Admission 15 €
Director: Cristián Plana (Chile)
For those who know little about the history of Chile or for those who think that modern times should be as light as possible and lived to the full, as fast as the information that circulates among us, this work that analyses the narratives about the period of Pinochet’s dictatorship, made some years ago by many theatre companies, even appears to be a ’local‘ obsession, a problem of ‘theirs’, the ones who live on the other side of the mountains. And yet, these works help to promote some form of reconciliation. They are instruments used for analysing the historical past that so often prevented the cleansing of crimes and atrocious acts and they are also instruments that can be used for analysing the present. So that there can be some peace, this staging of the question of history is fundamental. “Chilean Wake”, based on a text by Sergio Vodanovic (1926–2001), and directed by Cristián Plana, is a play about a banal episode, a night spent among friends who are commemorating the Coup d’État led by Pinochet, on the night of 11 September 1973. Like this, we can see how the resentment motivated by the loss of one’s ‘class position’, by the fear of the other unknown neighbours, by marital frustration, by the attractions of power and authoritarianism, creates direct accomplices of that same authoritarianism. In this play, sexuality, or the frustration of not being able to express it, takes on a dimension that many historians, out of a sense of shame or through their own incapacity, have rarely associated with the manifestations of dictatorships of this type. And here it is, analysed and contextualised in a most lucid manner. Violence can have many different forms, and, in this field, it can also be fascist in nature. The actors are wonderful.
CRISTIÁN PLANA (Chile, 1979)
Cristián Plana is a classically trained actor who turned his hand to directing with Werther, in 2003. Two seasons later Mi madre premiered, and was picked for theater directing week by the Centro de Investigación La Memoria. In 2008 he staged Partido, an adaptation of a piece by Thomas Bernhard that made the playbill for the following year’s Santiago a Mil Festival, in the category of emerging theatre. His next work was another Bernhard adaptation, Comida alemana, which was performed at the same festival in 2010. Plana’s style in these adaptations has won a reputation for relocating the original stories in roughly contemporary Chile, and creating stifling atmospheres with the help of one of the most influential young designers in the country today, Rocío Hernández.