On the occasion of the world premiere of ‘Oasis de la Impunidad’ in April 2022 at the Schaubühne Berlin as part of the ‘Festival International Neue Dramatik’ (FIND), writer Joseph Pearson spoke with director Marco Layera and dramaturges Elisa Leroy and Martín Valdés-Stauber about the background to the production.
– 9 June 2023
In his English-language “Previews,” Canadian author and historian Dr. Joseph Pearson provides unusual insights and background information on selected premieres and productions of FIND at the Schaubühne Berlin. This article was first published in English in »Pearson’s Preview« in April 2022. We thank the author for his kind permission to make his text available in German translation in the asphalt Echoraum.
“Oasis de la Impunidad” can be seen at the asphalt Festival on June 21, 22, and 23 in the Weltkunstzimmer.
One of the most memorable pieces at FIND 2019, which took place before the pandemic, was created by Chile’s Teatro La Re-Sentida: ‘Paisajes para no colorear’ (Landscapes that must not be painted). His unsparing examination of femicide and gender-specific violence was performed on stage by young Chilean women aged between 13 and 18. The raw emotionality of their performance sent a palpable shockwave through the audience.
A set diagram of state structures, capitalism, border groups, gender-specific violence, the body and the stage – this is the stuff that director Marco Layera’s theatre is made of. He returns this year with his fourth FIND production, which is also a world premiere: ‘Oasis de la Impunidad’. The play is a production of the Teatro La Re-Sentida and the Münchner Kammerspiele – in co-production with the Schaubühne and Matucana 100. I also spoke to the dramaturges Elisa Leroy and Martín Valdés-Stauber, who have worked together both in Chile and here in Germany.
Layera is affable and reserved, initially keeping his ideas to himself before articulating them vividly and very eloquently. He talks emotionally about ‘Paisajes para no colorear’ as the ‘most beautiful theatre experience’ he has ever had: ‘It was an important moment to combine artistic and social practice, to create, change and relate to a community.’
Following the completion of this theatre project and its close collaboration with young people, La Re-Sentida experienced a shattering political moment in Chile that began on 18 October 2019. This event is known as the ‘Estallido Social’, the ‘social eruption’. The protests began as a reaction to something as mundane as the increase in public transport fares in Santiago and expanded to combat the country’s slide towards privatisation and social inequality. Millions of people took to the streets and the government responded brutally.
Layera explains: ‘With these events, the mask was dropped in Chile. Everyone showed who they really were. It was also a challenge for me as an artist. With all this turmoil on the street – the body on the street as the protagonist – as an artist you ask yourself the question: what do you do now? Repeat the recipes and strategies of the past or utilise the impulses, the energy that drives you? But even if we were to start with the events in Chile, we were never interested in repeating what happened on the street. It would be impossible, even ethically reprehensible, to reproduce it semiotically or semantically. Since the masks had fallen, it seemed that everything had already been said openly. So we tried to make a more conceptual, abstract work with the body at its core.’
The events of the ‘Estallido Social’ will be remembered internationally because the Chilean police, the ‘carabineros’, were very violent. Human Rights Watch later reported that around 9,000 demonstrators were injured and 15,000 arrested between 18 October and 19 November 2019. Many lost sight in one or even both eyes due to the use of blank-firing weapons. There were also numerous reports of sexual abuse, homophobia and rape during detentions.
Marco Layera tells me: ‘From these protests, one of my stage colleagues still has the remains of a bullet in his leg. My left hand was broken …’
The events brought back memories of earlier brutal attacks by Chilean officers during the Pinochet dictatorship from 1973 to 1990. This led to a reckoning in Chile: the country voted in favour of a constitutional amendment and installed a new government, which has been led by the leftist Gabriel Boric since March 2022.
Teatro La Re-Sentida did not just want to draw on the experience of its own artists and launched an open call for applications. Of the 500 young people who applied, 200 took part in a theatre laboratory. They confirmed the findings of the human rights observers that the experiences of violence were not isolated cases, but rather systemic, common practice. Layera explains: ‘These young people were the protagonists of the social unrest and 80 per cent of them had experienced police violence. We also observed that this young generation no longer perceived the police as legitimate representatives of state authority. For them, the police were delegitimised in a way that was not the case for previous generations. All of this has to do with the fact that the security forces, military and police, were not reformed or reorganised after the dictatorship. They remained authoritarian.’
One area that was explored during the workshop was how it is possible for democratic societies to contain institutions that are responsible for the exercise of violence. Layera explains: ‘Practices that represent the extreme of barbarism are contained within democratic structures that exude civility. In an event like a protest, this barbarism manifests itself under the guise of civilisation. I can give you an example that illustrates this: a police officer standing in the front row of a demonstration is carrying a weapon. All police officers are required to wear name badges on their uniforms. But this officer had changed his name badge and renamed himself ‘Superdick’. How is this image to be understood? Someone who calls himself ‘Superdick’ is assigned a role that allows him to do whatever he wants with us civilians.’
‘And yet, can you imagine a society without law enforcement?’ I ask.
Layera replies: ‘We know that we need police forces. There is a relationship between this need and the fact that they are also enemies, part of a culture of fear and terror. All of us feel terrorised when a police officer approaches. When they stop your car, you know something bad is going to happen. The question is: Are there other practices that a democracy can develop to channel this violence differently? So that the police are not an alien caste? At the moment, hegemonic masculinity is the benchmark for a good police officer. And the implicit structure of the Chilean police – and I would even dare to say the police in the West in general – is racist, class-orientated and patriarchal.’
Dramaturge Elisa Leroy agrees with these observations and describes how this manifests itself on stage: ‘It’s very subtle, just implied. All the bodies on stage, both female and male, embody this hegemonic masculinity. You can see how they strive for it, how this idea is present, but also how it doesn’t exactly correspond with the bodies and remains imaginary. It is an aspirational, adulatory masculinity. Or a training for a masculinity that signifies power over others.’
The conceptual and abstract approach of La Re-Sentida is based on a miraculous mimesis, but not of the victims of street violence, but of an imitation of the perpetrators: the police, an imitation through which we can, in Layera’s words, ‘liberate ourselves, find catharsis and even atone for the sins of the police.’
When I ask how important the traditions of contemporary dance are for the production and how important it is to find a new language for dealing with the subject, I am told that it is no coincidence that there are two dancers on the set. They are not representatives of contemporary dance: one is a street dancer and the other a show dancer.
Another fruitful collaboration in the production is clearly that of the different institutions – both Chilean and German – and their cooperation to bring this international premiere to Berlin, as producers who acknowledge long-standing ties and express their artistic trust by producing this company’s show and including it in their programm.
Finally, Layera turns to me and says: “I believe all artistic processes are transformative. Everyone is affected by them in different ways. For me, ‘Paisajes para no colorear’ was very transformative, but there is also a transformation here. This work is also an atonement, a reparation. A very painful work. It evokes a persistent pain. When will this pain go away? When will there be justice in my country? There is a debt to be paid.”
