Helping you feel

Before Violeta Parra was Violeta Parra, before she longed for 17, when she was not even close to turning 17, the girl she was was traveling on a train with her brothers and parents. I was going from Santiago to Lautaro. But on the way he caught smallpox and upon reaching his destination made the entire town sick. Based on these real events, Helping you feel imagines Violeta's childhood, her daily life with the Parra family, her interest in music and her early closeness to death.

“It is close to a Batman Begins, we fantasize how we believe that Violeta encountered music and became something decisive in her destiny,” explains Juan Pablo Peragallo, director of the work written by Manuela Infante.

The montage shows how upon arriving in Lautaro, the family calls a doctor who misdiagnoses her and only recommends that she not speak so as not to infect her siblings. Mute Violet begins to speak in signs, while illness and death spread through the city, enriching some with the pain of many.

“Sign language is installed as a language of the play and not as a translation, because in fact there is no translation, in order to invite the hearing spectator to approach sign language and the deaf spectator to approach theater traditionally made by hearing people,” says Peragallo.

Music, humor, tragedy, politics, popular culture and death. In Helping you feel the themes dialogue with the interests of its honoree. The montage includes some of his songs and décimas, in a playful staging that has shadows, rear projections and games with paint.

This is the second time that Infante and Peragallo premiere a family work in contemporary language in which great figures of the national theater participate. Last year they presented The Heart of the Selfish Giant, with Amparo Noguera and Marcelo Alonso, and now they have Catalina Saavedra in the cast, playing Violeta Parra's mother.         

Original idea and dramatic structure: Manuela Infante and Juan Pablo Peragallo.Direction: Juan Pablo Peragallo
Cast: Catalina Saavedra, Natalia Valladares, María José Siebald, Gabriel Urzúa, Cristián Carvajal, Nicolás Poblete, and Julio Ojeda.
Sound design: Daniel Marabolí
Lighting design: Ricardo Romero
Set design: Gabriela Torrejón
Production company: Cristián Carvajal
Co-production: GAM