A dinosaur approaches the La Moneda palace but does not seem to have hostile intentions. On the contrary, the monster's head leans against one of the balconies and the president of Chile, Gabriel Boric, tries to caress it. It happened at the beginning of January, when the street show Saurian and the witnesses from outer space, by the French company Plasticiens volants, arrived in South America for the first time to inaugurate the thirtieth edition of the Teatro a Mil festival.
In these thirty years, the Chilean event has become one of the most prestigious in Latin America -along with Cervantino from Mexico or FIBA from Buenos Aires- not only because of its long duration -three weeks, which this year have become four to celebrate the round figure- or because of its volume and geographical scope -130 national and international productions, several of which have been presented in all the neighborhoods of Santiago and in all the regions of the country-, but also because in these three decades it has managed to get world-renowned artists and centers to come to Chile to present their works or even co-produce them.
Perhaps the international figure who contributed the most to other renowned artists traveling to the ends of the world was the choreographer Pina Bausch, who was present at the festival in 2007, 2009 -months before her death- and also posthumously in 2010, when her latest creation, inspired by Chile and Violeta Parra, premiered: Like the moss on the stone, oh yes, yes, yes.... "Pina did her last residency in Chile and her last creation was dedicated to Chile", The director and founder of Teatro a Mil, Carmen Romero, told La Vanguardia.
Something similar happened with Peter Brook, who in the 2022 edition, six months before he died, directed Tempest project from a distance, a particular adaptation of Shakespeare's The Tempest, which this year has repeated in the contest. Already in 2007, the British director had taken to Chile The Grand Inquisitor and Sizwe Banzi is dead.
Creators such as Thomas Ostermeier, Robert Wilson, Lemi Ponifasio, Robert Lepage, Peter Greenaway, Christoph Marthaler, Ariane Mnouchkine, Sasha Waltz, the French company Royal de Luxe or the now canceled Jan Fabre when it was on the crest of the wave were also in Chile. .
“I learned with Pina Bausch that getting these figures from the scene to come to Chile is not just an economic matter; Entering the agenda of these great artists, making them fall in love, has been a process and that is very human, but when they meet us, they love us, and they want to return because they find a country that surprises them”, explains Romero.
Àlex Rigola premiered in 2008 the adaptation of 2666, the posthumous novel by the Chilean Roberto Bolaño. La Fura dels Baus was in 2009, with Orbis Vitae. The influence of Catalonia has always been relevant in the festival. In fact, this year the Catalan productions have constituted the largest presence in a European territory: Un cadavre exquis II, the dance solo by Pau Aran; the gigantic Insectes from the Sarruga company; the multidisciplinary proposals The Incredible Voyage of the Galactic Hood and Orpheus, both by the Insectotropics collective; and the unclassifiable Tomeu Amer with his Peix.
That Catalan influence has been reinforced in this edition: with more than forty people, the one from Catalonia has been one of the largest delegations that have come to Platea, the market of the festival: an exclusive program for programmers from all over the world, where they the Ramon Llull Institute, the Catalan Institute of Cultural Industries or the Grec participated.
The dinosaur of La Moneda was not hostile, but General Augusto Pinochet was, who on September 11, 1973 ordered the bombing of the emblematic government palace, in a coup d'état that marks the fiftieth anniversary this year, which the festival could not pass taking into account the importance of Chilean theater in the resistance during the dictatorship.
“It was impossible for the theater not to talk about the coup: the Chilean theater is sociopolitical,” says Romero. “In Chile, theater was done during the dictatorship, theater was done in the concentration camps, it is a tradition, it is a language, it is part of a culture, it is an expression of the country,” adds the festival director. “During the dictatorship, the theater had censorship but it existed, and the resistance was made in the theater, there you would get together, in those theaters politics was set up, people got together, I think that the dictatorship did not understand much that the theater It was dangerous,” adds Romero.
Pinochet's coup and its consequences was present with works such as Oleaje, which tells the story of Marta Lidia Ugarte, a communist militant whose body, tied to a rail, was thrown into the Pacific from a helicopter in 1976, although the body later surfaced. and the case ended up becoming an emblem of the disappeared.
The coup that ended the government of the socialist Salvador Allende was also the reason for the festival to promote the installation of a permanent mural in the National Stadium of Santiago -which was a concentration camp and torture center-, which at the beginning of January was carried out the fashionable Chilean singer (and painter), Mon Laferte, and the renowned muralist Alejandro Mono González. At the same time, an exhibition on the career and musical and pictorial work of Laferte -based in Mexico- can be seen at the Gabriela Mistral Center in the Chilean capital.
In addition to joining the anniversary of the coup, Teatro a Mil has also reflected in its thirtieth edition the problems of current society, such as the environment, feminism, neoliberalism so questioned by the social outbreak, migrations, racism, or the indigenous peoples, who in Chile have a special component for the Mapuche issue.
And it has done so with some top-level international productions, such as The Jungle Book Reimagined, created by the famous choreographer Akram Khan and which could be seen in Santiago before the Liceu, where it was presented the last week of January. In this spectacular dance version of Kipling's story, Mowgli is a migrant girl rescued by animals, in an environmental plea.
Another outstanding work was Contes et légendes, by the French director Joël Pommerat, which was offered in its original version with subtitles and where a group of adolescents questioned the viewer about feminism or the vision of the world of the new generations.
One of the works that in this edition recalled that the current political revolution that Chile is experiencing in search of a new Constitution and a welfare state denied by the military comes from afar was Facts accompli, a critique of neoliberalism released in 1981 -during the midst of the dictatorship - by the Chilean playwright, Juan Radrigán.
The festival closed with the stage version of the opera-performance Sun
In three decades, Teatro a Mil has contributed to the revolution of the theater at the end of the world, to put it on the map, along with Chilean playwrights who have gone out into the world like Guillermo Calderón or Marco Layera, and to the creation of a quarry that reflected in the number of theater schools -fifteen in Santiago alone and many within the universities- that have emerged in these thirty years.
