Chile has just commemorated its bicentenary, celebrating a nation that rises as one of the most advanced in Latin America, these festivities awake in us many questions about our identity, our past, our future, about who we are and who we want to be as a society.
Mass media and ideological apparatuses of the state come together to talk about Chile’s economic progress and our war heroes, consolidating in this manner the identity discourse of a “winning nation”, where the construction of identities is based on “consumption “and not the collective memory of our country.
Hence the need to look towards the unofficial memory, the one we have forgotten and do not want to see, the one which speaks of a fractured and violent country, the one we must learn to recognize and integrate as part of our identity.
Identity is what its assumed as part of being, but is also what it excludes, what is omitted, what is not said.
We do intend to shadow the fairy tale of our national history, but we believe that we can obtain lessons, just as profound, looking at the dark areas that this fairy tale has hidden or disguised, as the Mexican historian Hector Aguilar points out: “In the way we were more unfortunate, there could be greater lessons then in the moments that made us happy, for the simple reason that the awareness of our limits is more pedagogical than the celebration of our success”.
This is a unique opportunity for reviewing our history, and accessing our identity, we feel an urgent need as a company to encourage critical thinking, creating a performance that encourages awareness “open and plural” about our cultural, social and political reality.
Simulacrum doesn’t express anything in a strict sense of narration, it is a fragmented play, it is the complete escape of an integrated story. It’s structure and velocity quote the cultural scene of our times. It is fragmented in the sense of a incomplete whole, a sum of elements that speak of an inability to grasp Chile. The different scenes form a mosaic in movement, reproducing the form of television zapping, the instantaneous, the immediate, pieces of an identity that dose not exhaust but transforms. The paroxysm of national folklore, the son of a disappeared prisoner that cannot enter the soccer stadium to see his team because his father was tortured in that place, the kid that through rocks on cars from the catwalks of motorways, the actor that has no talent, the recipe of a traditional Chilean meal, a panda bear that has no opinion, a Peruvian immigrant that dies with a plasma TV in his hands, an actor that wants to be subversive, a woman that urgently needs to feel Chilean, a casting that looks for actors able to interpretate “a tragedy of the poor”, the vulgar comedians, a worker that requires a cultural fund to fix his childrens teeth, actors that question the role of theatre. Simulacro is an authorial and fresh play that aside from entertaining will provoke the audience to reflect amidst the limit of humor and cruelty.
Direction: Marco Layera
Playwright: La Re-sentida
Cast: Carolina Palacios, Pedro Muñoz, Benjamín Westfall,Nicolás Herrera, Marco Layera
Set design: La Re-sentida
Head technician: Victor Cosmelli, Pablo de la Fuente
Production: La Re-sentida
Duration: 75 min.
Premiere: 2008
