/ARTS WEEKLY/ THEATRE-CHILE: 1980s-era Playwright Rekindles Passion, Ideas

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Gustavo González

SANTIAGO, Jun 17 2003 (IPS) - Ramón Griffero, one of the greatest playwrights to emerge in 1980s Chile, has returned to the stage with "Tus deseos en fragmentos" (Your desires in fragments), a play in which he reaffirms that today it is art, not politics, that generates passion and ideas.

The play premiered recently in Santiago on the 20th anniversary of the Teatro de Fin de Siglo (End of the Century Theatre), the company that Griffero created in 1983 to engage in cultural resistance against the Gen. Augusto Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990).

"My greatest fear is to live once again in periods of terror," the playwright said once in an interview, and that seems to be the central notion of his works, which are aimed at purging the phantoms of oblivion and maintaining memory.

"The plays are a record of our history, and in 100 years, when people want to know about their past, they are going to obtain much more information from art than perhaps from the press," Griffero said just before his new play’s premiere.

"Today the fantastic thing is that art is what is providing passion and ideas. Politics has become (a job of) administrators of the state, it is not the place of the social imaginary," he told ‘El Mercurio’ newspaper.

As such, "Tus deseos en fragmentos" is like a "great museum", according to the definition provided by the playwright and director himself, "a montage in which theatre dominates as an artistic form and with conspicuous views about the era that surrounds us."

In the play "there are speakers of the present, of the past and others of desire," says the author, providing a sort of key for understanding the "conceptual irruptions" and the "poetics of text for a poetics of space."

It was in 1985, in the midst of Chile’s dictatorship, when Griffero wrote his "Manifesto for Autonomous Theatre", in which he called into question an art caught in the circumstances of the Cold War and produced under the watch of a military regime that imposed its discourse of modernity.

"To avoid speaking like they speak, we cannot represent like they represent," is one of the most cutting lines of his manifesto, published the same year as the debut of his most applauded work, "Cinema Utopia".

In that play, characters in a movie theatre in the 1940s watch a screen that portrays a reality of the 1980s, one that they are unable to comprehend. It was the second in a trilogy that began in 1984 with "Stories of an Abandoned Warehouse" and ended in 1987 with "The Morgue".

The empty space of the warehouse, the screen in sepia confronting characters living in the limbo of the past, and the morgue full of cadavers provide a metaphorical record of Chile in the 1980s.

"In Griffero’s theatre is reflected the paralysing spirit of those times, when there were few channels for expression, without means for equipping an appropriate stage or even theatres for independent artists," journalist Macarena Garrido, author of a comprehensive study of contemporary Chilean theatre, said in a conversation with IPS.

It was precisely in that "revolutionary space" created by his dramatic artistry that the Griffero staged "Cinema Utopia", which Garrido describes as "the iconic play of the 1980s rebellion."

Griffero’s critical eye on modern society and his country did not shut once democracy was re-established in 1990. Testimony to this are the three plays he directed during the period of democratic consolidation: "Ecstasy" (1993), "Downriver" (1995) and "Midday Lunch" (1999).

With "Tus deseos en fragmentos", Griffero reintroduces a theatrical approach in which text and space intermingle, and the audience can build or rebuild the story through the visual narrative.

The theatre is conceived within a rectangle, just as other visual expressions are, such as film, photography, painting, television and computers, says the playwright.

"Tus deseos en fragmentos" unfolds from a diversity of spaces, from the mind or an Internet chat room. "These texts are written for multiple installations that are put together and then fade away, producing the sensation of a mental labyrinth."

Griffero’s return to the stage as a playwright and director comes at an exceptional moment for Chilean theatre. Young people are showing up for plays in droves.

"In Argentina, theatre only attracts an audience that is 40 or older, while in our theatres, 50 percent are young people," he says.

Griffero points out that in 2002, whether at the professional or amateur level, more than 600 plays were staged in Chile.