Ernest

The actors explain that they have to put on a play that, in the end, they cannot perform. The scene lacks scenery, there are only bodies and voices immersed in an impossible narrative desire. At one point, the stage goes dark and only phrases that question what is being said can be heard. Then the actors remain motionless.

All this happens in the play Ernesto, based on the text of one of the oldest and most unknown works of Chilean theater, written by Rafael Minvielle, a Spaniard living in the country, and premiered in 1842. It is a romantic plot that embodies the libertarian and liberal European ideal: Ernesto is a young Spanish soldier sent to Latin America to stop the insurrection of the colonies, but he leaves the royalist ranks, travels to Chile, takes party for liberal utopia and fight for American independence. Later he returns to Spain to reunite with his family and marry his beloved Camila, his cousin and fiancée since childhood. But his people consider him a traitor and Camila, obedient to her father, renounces the marriage.

The applauded Teatro de Chile company, with dramaturgy and direction by Manuela Infante, offers an absolutely free and new reading of this text that aims to question what ideals are spoken of in the country's historical imagination and how that imagination is dismantled.

“The Chilean and American independence project was driven by liberal and enlightened ideas collected from foreign social and cultural processes,” explains Infante. "This project of a 'modern' nation was fundamentally built through - and in discourse - deploying all the power of the word as an edifier of reality. A discourse that builds - when it imagines - a new independent country, which, likewise, will never cease to seem partly imaginary, partly dependent."

Such ambivalence is the source from which this experimental and risky version of the Teatro de Chile company takes off, which offers a radical questioning, without fear of the tautological or of disturbing the viewer perceptually and mentally. “Ernesto intends the sensation of struggle or failure that arises when the text and the body, reason and emotion, the real and the imaginary, the idea of ​​freedom and subjection are put in dialogue,” concludes Infante.

Dramaturgy: Manuela Infante, Teatro de Chile, based on the play by Rafael Minvielle (1842)
Direction: Manuela Infante
Cast: María José Parga, Juan Pablo Peragallo, Héctor Morales, Jorge Arecheta and Gabriel Cañas.
Comprehensive design: Claudia Yolin