ERNESTO

January 2010
Sergio Aguirre Room
Theater School of the University of Chile
Santiago, Chile

Ernesto, by Rafael Minvielle, premiered at the Teatro Santiago in October 1842 and is considered by many to be one of the emblematic works and precursors of the Romantic movement in Spanish drama.

Its protagonist, Ernesto, is a young Spanish soldier who, having been sent to Latin America to forcibly suppress the uprising in the colonies, abandons the royalist ranks, travels to Chile, and, fired by the liberal utopia, fights for American independence. Some time later, he returns to his homeland, hoping to reunite with his family and marry his beloved Camila, his cousin and fiancée since childhood. However, in Spain, Ernesto is considered a traitor, and Camila, obedient to her father's command, must renounce her marriage to him.

The Chilean and American independence project was driven by liberal and Enlightenment ideas gleaned from foreign social and cultural processes. This project of a "modern" nation was fundamentally constructed through—and in—discourse, deploying the full power of the word as a builder of reality. A discourse that constructs—when it imagines—a new independent country, which, likewise, will never cease to seem to us partly imaginary, partly dependent.

Minvielle's text advances Enlightenment, modern, and positivist ideals through the use of a romantic literary style and story. A kind of aesthetic ambivalence is experienced in the text, a continuous duality between the rational and the romantic that serves as a starting point and structural axis for constructing a performance that seeks to question the modern project—especially the Chilean one—based on the ambivalences inherent to it, the negotiation of which still constitutes our daily lives today. ERNESTO aims for 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 that of subjection, are put into dialogue.

@Créditos

Credits

Playwright
Manuela Infante
Teatro de Chile

Based on the play by Rafael Minvielle (1842)

Directed
Manuela Infante

Cast
José Miguel Jiménez / Jorge Arecheta [2011]
María José Parga
Juan Pablo Peragallo
Nicole Senerman / Héctor Morales [2011]
Claudia Yolin / Gabriel Cañas [2011]

Complete Design
Claudia Yolin

Production
Teatro de Chile

Co-production: Chilean Theater and Santiago a Mil International Theater Festival (FITAM)

Trailer

See full play

mail

2025