Medium. Chile estalla en la distancia is the title of the documentary theatre presented from 11 to 13 July by Teatro del Barrio de Madrid (Calle Zurita, 20) about the social mobilisation against neoliberalism that preceded the arrival of President Gabriel Boric to power on 11 March 2022. Tickets for the show can be purchased at this link.
“All that was missing was a spark (any spark) that, by chilling the skin of Chile’s adolescents, who have been showing more historical sensitivity and political irritability than any other sector of society, would make everything explode”. This is how historian Gabriel Salazar reflects on the great social protest known as the “reventón” that took place in Chile in October 2019, two years before Gabriel Boric’s presidential triumph. There were massive demonstrations, pots and pans and fires with which the popular class expressed its rejection of the neoliberal model.
On Medium. Chile estalla en la distancia, five Chilean artists from different disciplines of theatre and living in Spain come together to try to reconstitute that explosion that took place in their country and that this group experienced from a physical distance. Faced with the impossibility of experiencing a revolution in the flesh on the other side of the ocean, they ask themselves if it is possible to find a “Medium” to tell the story of what happened there.
For months, the team collected materials such as accounts from people who lived through the episode, studied extracts from journalistic documentation, analysed photographs, chat conversations, e-mails or personal audios from friends and family. Added to this work was the intention to analyse how news arrives when there are thousands of kilometres between what is happening and those who receive the information, to consider whether social crises can be understood from the outside, what perspective and approach should be taken into account. The result is a scenic experience close to a theatre document that brings to the present a piece of Latin American resistance, as a reflection of the struggle of different peoples in different latitudes of the planet.
