Dialog Festival

Simulacro

text: Compañia La Resentida,  script, costume and set design, lighting, music:  Compañia La Resentida, premiere: May 2008

cast: Benjamín Westfall, Nicolas Herrera, Carolina Palacios, Pedro Muñoz, Marco Layera

 

“This production is about who we are and who we want to be, what we have forgotten and what we don’t want to notice. You can’t just describe Chile, as the authorities would like to do; you can’t show Chile as a clean, finished object in which all are equal. Chile is not like that.”

Marco Layera  

The production of Simulacro was being mounted at a time when many Latin American countries, including Chile, were preparing the celebrations of the 200th anniversary of their independence. The media and the governments trumpeted the region’s economic transformation, local war heroes and common, allegedly consistent history of South America. This omnipresent and official discourse provoked opposition in young artists from the La Resentida company, who decided to take a look at the real collective memory of the Chileans.

Simulacro gives up the narrative telling of history. The scenes make up a mobile mosaic consisting of various fragments of identity: we have a paroxysm of national folklore and a son who cannot enter a stadium where his father was once tortured; we have a talentless actor, a recipe for a traditional Chilean cake, a panda bear without an opinion and a Peruvian emigrant who dies carrying a plasma TV set; we have vulgar comics and actors questioning the sense of theatre.

“Theatrical revelation of the year… A must see.” 

Rodrigo Alvarado, La Nación

COMPAÑIA LA RESENTIDA is a company from Santiago de Chile founded in 2007 by young actors, graduates of Teatro Escuela La Matriz in Valparaiso. Political involvement still is a fundamental issue for the company. The La Resentida artists treat theatre as an instrument of social influence, preservation of cultural identity, reflection and creation of new values. They believe that theatre must be subversive and should always question the established order.

Producers: Natalia Matus, Daniela Montt