MULTICANCHA

October 2010
Matucana 100 Esplanade
Santiago, Chile

Why does the weightlifter lift tons of weight every day, training for no pay, while the coalman doesn't even drag an extra sack? Why does rubberizing bags work, and climbing the Mont Blanc sport? Why are millions of dollars invested in cutting-edge technology to raise Olympic records by mere thousandths of a second? What is the point of this useless combat that is sport?

In sport, man experiences the fatal struggle of life, but that struggle is distanced by spectacle, reduced to its forms, freed from its effects, its dangers, and its shame. The sporting struggle is detached from normal life, just as the theatrical struggle is, and for that very reason it stands purely as a symbol.

The sports hero seems to celebrate having defeated his rivals, but he has conquered something much greater. He has defied gravity by climbing the mountain, he has controlled the unpredictable movement of the ball, he has challenged the capabilities of the machine that is his body by jumping higher, throwing farther, running faster: he has overcome the resistance of things. What emerges victorious, in reality, is a certain idea of man and the world, or rather, a certain idea of man in the world. Sport is the spectacle of the body par excellence, and modern sport is the spectacle of performance: it is the ultimate sign of a modern, Cartesian, industrialized idea of man.

For the past few months, Teatro de Chile has been training and competing in a creative process where the actor is merely a player, where the action is play, where creativity is solely tactical and strategic. The players are fixated on the objective, and their bodies form, deform, and reform in pursuit of it. Sport reveals itself as an empty drama whose catharsis promotes efficiency, rejecting the useless, the unproductive, the ambiguous, or the ineffective.

So, from the panting and exhausted player, the question inevitably arises: What would become of me and all this if I let myself lose? What if I throw in the towel? What if I quit, what if I give up, what if I don't perform? What profound rebellion would there be in that?

@Créditos

Credits

Director
Manuela Infante

Complete Design
Claudia Yolin

Sound Design
Cristobal Carvajal

Cast
Jorge Arecheta
Ariel Hermosilla
Deby Kaufmann
Yasna Kusanovic
Daniel Marabolí
María José Parga
Juan Pablo Peragallo
Nicole Senerman
Nicolai Stifel

Production
Cristián Carvajal
Héctor Morales
Constanza Moreno

Trailer

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