THEATER
Bayless, Pamela
THEATER Walking a tightrope in Chile Pamela Bayless Since the military overthrow of Salvador Allende's government in 1973, a cultural blackout has stifled the media and the arts in Chile. All...
...And when Ictus attempted to rent an 8,000-seat theater to give a special performance of the play for construction workers, bureaucratic barriers arose to prevent the performance which, the government claimed, could have had a "multiple effect...
...In the play, three construction workers labor in an industry where the work force has been cut by 40 per cent in a single year...
...We say we are not against those (the upper class), but we are in favor of these (the workers)," Claudio Di Girolamo, a director, scenarist, and founding member of the group, explains about the strategy of the play...
...While threatened with dismissal and even prison by an uncaring, upper-class supervisor, the three struggle to keep odd jobs on the side and invent grandiose money-making schemes...
...The battlefield is the field of theater...
...At the time of the coup, Ictus was producing an hour-long television show of social satire called "La Manivela" (after the starter crank on old automobiles...
...Six radio stations have lost their licenses...
...Audiences at Washington's Kennedy Center and New York's La Mama theater got a glimpse of problems within Chilean news media today when Ictus presented How Many Years in a Day...
...A capricious film censorship board bans Fiddler on the Roof for its "clearly Marxist" content, but permits showings of the strongly anti-fascist Seven Beauties...
...Law 1281 empowers the government to close down any medium for up to six days if it publishes, broadcasts, or performs anything which could "create alarm or disgust in the population...
...The government has also used Ictus to its advantage...
...Soon after the coup, Ictus began having trouble financing the show...
...All publications with a Marxist orientation have been banned as subversive...
...And it appears that the struggle to keep confrontation alive has paid off...
...that is where the greatest duties are...
...Their first university generation has recently graduated...
...We hope to destroy a fetish of man, but not to destroy the man...
...In the last ten years, however, Ictus has created and produced contemporary works for both theater and television...
...They mounted the play in a circus tent in a wealthy section of Santiago, despite prohibition of the "irreverent" work — which satirized the military government, politicians, and human rights problems — by the mayor...
...reached one million viewers weekly — one out of ten Chileans...
...Leaning toward the latter, the television journalists managed to mirror some of Ictus' own frustrations as one-time TV performers...
...But its critical stance remained unchanged...
...of three officers charged in the Orlando Letelier murder), and a publishing house have closed...
...Within a week, unknown arsonists burned down the tent and brought the production to a close...
...That's where the greatest duties are, not the greatest rights...
...No other theater has recently dared as much as Ictus, with the possible exception of a Catholic Church-sponsored group that presented a play in 1977 about the disillusionment of unemployment...
...Ictus continues to perform with high professional standards while retaining a political commitment that is less outspoken than it is subtly audacious...
...When the Chilean news agency Orbe awarded Pedro, Juan y Diego its prize for best Chilean play of 1976, the agency was taken over by the government and the prize was withdrawn...
...As Hamlet said, theater is a mirror to recognize the good and the bad, a task of clarification...
...Other artists have since fled the country...
...Surviving in the midst of this cultural repression is Ictus, a five-member theater collective specializing in social criticism...
...We have to do more things with great carefulness...
...The group relies on humor as well as indirection to maintain its balance on Chile's precarious political tightrope...
...One group with deep roots in the Chilean working class, Inti-Illimani, now performs the "new Chilean song" in exile and tours Western Europe and the United States to build support against the military regime...
...The Pinochet government permitted Ictus to survive as a theater group — its playhouse, La Comedia, seats only 180, a minor threat when compared to a million television viewers...
...The treatment of such outspoken individuals as musician and director Victor Jara, who overstepped the government's bounds and was brutally tortured and killed in the National Stadium, stands as a warning for artists who remain...
...The program 'The battlefield is the field of theater...
...But, although self-censorship replaced military censors in 1975, Sharim maintains "the rules of the game are very clear — clarisimas...
...About fifteen other professional theater troupes exist today in Santiago, but most stay out of trouble with revivals of classic plays or plays which have no direct link to contemporary Chile...
...The group, whose name is taken from the Greek fish symbol of the early Christians, was formed twenty-four years ago to attempt a return to the origins of Western theater...
...But what counts is what people are doing in Chile today...
...when members looked around for another channel, they found they had been blacklisted...
...Television stations are controlled by the government and the government-controlled state university...
...Two former members of Ictus tried in 1977 to stage a work by the famed Chilean poet and playwright Nicanor Parra...
...Foreign visitors are brought to productions to prove that no cultural censorship exists in Chile...
...Through laughter," says Girolamo, "you leave the spectator without his defenses, then you give him what you want...
...In June, Ictus made its United States debut in the first Theater in the Americas festival...
...A few Chilean artists with strong leftist convictions were out of the country at the time of the coup...
...Government harassment of Ictus has continued...
...Ictus has just returned to Santiago to realize a dream — now allowed to re-enter television, the collective is in the process of forming its own production company...
...People on the outside think that those who stay here are pro-government," says Girolamo, who came to Chile from Italy in 1948...
...The cultural blackout has been produced deliberately to give the government time to create their own cultural bosses," Girolamo contends...
...seven daily newspapers, fifteen magazines (including a newsweekly that recently dared to suggest the extradition Pamela Bayless, a free-lance writer in New York, visited Chile last year on a grant from the Columbia University Journalism School...
...Nissim Sharim, a director and actor in the group, believes humor provides a necessary sense of distance: "We don't go directly toward change...
...It is done in front of others, and they confront themselves with us...
...As a news team facing summary dismissal, the collective presented an absorbing debate between the value of emigration for professional freedom and remaining and coping with the constraints imposed by Augusto Pinochet's six-year dictatorship...
...A recent play, Pedro, Juan y Diego, dealt with the scandalous conditions under which Chilean workers suffer and with the society's ever-widening class differences...
Vol. 43 • September 1979 • No. 9
