/ARTS WEEKLY/THEATRE-CHILE: The Reunion of a Lost Lieutenant Bello

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Gustavo González

SANTIAGO, Dec 10 2002 (IPS) - The innovative theatre troupe Lieutenant Bello, which erupted on the scene in the 1980s when Chile was beginning to rebel against the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990), is preparing the debut – after 16 years away from the footlights – of "La pieza que falta" (The Missing Piece).

"More lost than Lieutenant Bello", a standard adage in Chile, though perhaps incomprehensible to foreigners, provided the name for this collective, which will be one of the main attractions at "Teatro a Mil", a popular theatre festival held every Southern Hemisphere summer in Santiago and other Chilean cities.

Alejandro Bello Silva, a lieutenant in the Chilean army, took off from Santiago on Mar. 9, 1914, in a biplane as part of his exam to enter the country’s nascent military aviation programme.

He flew towards the beach town of Cartagena, some 100 km west of the capital, in what turned out to be a one-way trip. Bello and the aircraft both disappeared without a trace. Search parties combed the area for several weeks, but efforts proved fruitless.

The fuss surrounding the event was quickly assimilated into popular speech, giving rise to the expression, "more lost than Lieutenant Bello".

The phrase is used with sarcasm to describe someone who is disoriented, unable to keep up with general events, or simply lacks common sense.

In the 1940s, the case of Lieutenant Bello inspired the novel "Pachapulei", by Hugo Silva, and in 1998, journalist Francisco Mouat wrote a book about personalities that had been forgotten by Chile’s historians, titled "Lieutenant Bello and Other Losses".

Beginning in the 1950s, when the phenomenon of UFO sightings began to gather force, there were those, of course, who attributed Bello’s disappearance to alien abduction.

When poet-writer Gregory Cohen, journalist-novelist Roberto Brodsky, writer Francisco Za?artu and architect Igor Rosermann founded a theatre group in the early 1980s, they dubbed it Lieutenant Bello.

It was their attempt, according to the daily El Mercurio, to call attention to the fact that they were young intellectuals, victims of an existential detour, members of a generation without direction.

The group took shape when the initial military triumphalism of the Pinochet dictatorship gave way to an economic crisis in which unemployment shot up to 36 percent, leaving thousands of Chileans – and young people in particular – without hope.

The crisis, precursor to the protests that in 1988 ultimately unfolded in Pinochet’s defeat in a referendum on whether he should remain in power, also changed the type of theatre that was being done in this South American nation.

The metaphorical – and largely hidden – messages on human rights in the 1970s were replaced on the stage by experimentation with new issues and character types.

According to cultural journalist Macarena Garrido, the Chilean theatre movement in the 1980s was able to provide an ironic, protest-based and committed look at society, which was still living the horror of human rights violations committed by the military regime.

Brodsky considers the group’s name a paradox, "because Lieutenant Bello was a member of the military, but he was also a ‘disappeared’." The Pinochet regime is blamed for more than a thousand forced disappearances.

"We had nothing to lose. Because we weren’t trained actors, we weren’t so worried about what they said about our acting. We had the freedom of irreverence," says Cohen.

The group debuted with "Lily, I Love you". Other works that attracted crowds were "Adivina la comedia" (Guess the comedy) and "Tribute to Surrealism".

But the play that perhaps best reflected their theatre aesthetic of those years was "Dialogue between Napoleon and Bolivar about the problems of power and glory, intervened by General Francisco Miranda." The group disbanded in 1986.

The idea to propose a reunion – another paradox – of Lieutenant Bello came from theatre producer Carmen Romero, one of the organisers of the Teatro a Mil festival.

The former members of the team rose to the challenge, putting their energies into the debut of "The Missing Piece", written by Brodsky and Cohen.

The play’s characters are a Hearer who hears but cannot reproduce what he has heard, a Writer who cannot work because the Hearer does not give him information, a Huaso (a Chilean peasant) "punk" who tries to get the two to work together but fails, because what is lacking is Fault, the fourth character, who reveals the problems of the other three.

/ARTS WEEKLY/THEATRE-CHILE: The Reunion of a Lost Lieutenant Bello

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Gustavo González

SANTIAGO, Dec 10 2002 (IPS) - The innovative theatre troupe Lieutenant Bello, which erupted on the scene in the 1980s when Chile was beginning to rebel against the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990), is preparing the debut — after 16 years away from the footlights — of “La pieza que falta” (The Missing Piece).
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