Scenes from Santiago: Chile's protests spill from streets to stage

Scenes from Santiago: Chile's protests spill from streets to stage

This article is more than 4 years old

The city’s theatre is emotional, indignant and polemical finds our critic on a whirlwind trip through a dozen shows

doing, they tell us, before launching into their show, Too Much Sexual Freedom Will Turn You Into Terrorists. “Burning subways” gets the biggest laugh. We are, after all, in Santiago, where only three months ago people took to the streets and did exactly that. Even now, in spite of soaring summer temperatures, Chileans continue to protest every weekend. Their list of complaints ranges from inadequate private pensions to an out-of-touch president. The graffiti creeping across every surface calls for an end to police violence, for the renationalisation of water and for the indigenous Mapuche people to fight back. Sprayed everywhere is the figure 6% – President Sebastián Piñera’s popularity rating.

While all that’s going on outdoors, things are just as polemical in the theatres. “We are in a special situation here, but Chilean theatre is always political,” says Carmen Romero, director of the Santiago a Mil festival, sitting in the sun outside Centro GAM, once the political headquarters of the Pinochet administration, now a city-centre arts complex. “Theatre is always thinking and writing about the social process.”

Nearly all of the dozen shows I see in the festival bear her out. Sometimes comic, sometimes earnest, always indignant, Chilean theatre repeatedly gives voice to the abused, the angry and the dispossessed. In Too Much Sexual Freedom, directed by Ernesto Orellana Gómez, four performers turn a panel discussion into a confrontational cabaret about fat shaming, HIV prejudice, discrimination against sex workers and trans rights. Upfront and ribald, they perform with intelligence, humour and an impassioned sense of injustice. “Let’s decolonise gender,” they say, as they pick apart forces of oppression lying deep in Latin America’s history

Going deeper into the story of state violence in southern Chile is Trewa by KIMVN Teatro. It’s a sorrowful look at a community’s response to the suspicious death of environmental activist Macarena Valdés in 2016 and the police shooting of teenager Brandon Hernandéz Huentecol the same year. The large production is set around a kitchen table where all generations congregate, creating a vivid sense of family and friends united in a David-and-Goliath struggle. So plain are the injustices – many simply stated as a voiceover itemising the numbers of executed and disappeared – that the actors seem less angry than disappointed.

As a play, it is more conversational than dramatic, but when the whole audience erupts into chants of “libertad” at the end, the division between art and life appears seamless. Indeed, Santiago’s curtain calls often feel incendiary. Having taken a bow, the performers will place a hand over one eye, a gesture of solidarity with the scores of protesters blinded by rubber bullets and teargas canisters in recent months. It raises the emotional temperature every time.

“This is a very special edition of the festival because of the emergency,” says Romero, who had to cancel street theatre performances and schedule daytime shows to keep the festival going. “We are living in a crisis and we need the opportunity to talk about what is happening.”