Paisajes para no colorear

‘Theatre enables the viewer to reflect on reality. It always surprises me when people are shocked by a performance. How can you be shocked by what we do, when reality is many times worse?’

Director and theatre maker Marco Layera grew up in Chile under Pinochet’s dictatorship. With his own company, La Re-sentida, Spanish for ‘resentful’, in recent years he made a series of socially critical, darkly humorous pieces which place ideological question marks around contemporary Chilean society. 

In Paisajes para no colorear nine teenagers between 13 and 17, take to the stage to portray reality: to report, comment and play out in real-life situations the things they are confronted with on a daily basis as teenage women in contemporary Chile. What moves them and what issues do they encounter in the limbo between childhood and adulthood? The message about their daily reality is clear. It is a sample card of repression: abuse inside and outside the family, sex, pregnancies and abortions, structures of patriarchal oppression, murder and manslaughter. 

In this piece they draw on their own stories and on those from around 140 other girls and young women documented by a team of the Theater Company La Re-Sentida during a process of interviews and workshops that lasted almost one year: a type of empirical field research which the collective and the selected performers have dramatised and shaped into the play’s text. Here too the multidisciplinary form, incorporating dance, film and projection, music and performance, leads to dynamism, rhythm and power.

Paisajes para no colorear points an accusatory finger at the stifling traditions of the (South American) Catholic Church and the old-fashioned role models imposed on girls at school and at home. But it is also the scream of a new generation of girls and women who have gained a voice for the first time and demand to be heard and respected. That makes it primarily a hopeful show, now that these girls are in open rebellion, refusing to conform any longer to ingrained ideas and putting forward their own vision of the future. If it’s down to these girls, customs between men and women, between the different generations and institutions are to be examined and there is space for an open, empathic society based on solidarity. It is, Layera says, ‘a generation I fervently believe in’. Theatre in its most confrontational and disconcerting form, one which continues to reverberate.