In the year of the plebiscite, two months after Chile went to the polls on Oct. Chile fell in love with a prostitute and told the world its story. Before long, the member El Gran Circo Teatro was giving five performances a week throughout the country and taking its tale to festivals in London, Paris, Switzerland, Scotland, Ireland, Colombia, Argentina and Canada. International critics have also cited such influences as Charlie Chaplin and Groucho Marx.
Perez said his inspiration began in , with his return from Paris, where he had been working on a mask project at the Theatre du Soleil under Adriane Mnouchkine. In an outgrowth of his collaborations with other professional actors and directors and his experiments with clown techniques, Perez gave his actors the chance to search for their feelings and translate emotion into poetic expression.
Those who were promoting theater as a reflection of what was happening to us as a society allowed the public to judge with a critical mind. Historically, theater had been a weapon of opposition to the Augusto Pinochet regime, said Chilean professor Juan Villegas, chairman of the Spanish and Portuguese department at UC Irvine.
In , the year of the Pinochet coup, oppositional theater sprang to life, then gradually disappeared. Playwrights had to ask for permission to publish their work. The Chilean government did not censor the theater very much. They thought censorship would make theater the center of attention instead of neutralizing it, so from to , the economy did much better and, of course, protest diminished. In the beginning, the troupe rehearsed during afternoons and late nights in a drama-department warehouse at the University of Chile.
Simultaneously, the first musical chords were composed and the idea of its staging was born. It became a play from the desire to tell a story of Chile that was incidentally a love story. The three-hour performance is sometimes staged in a circus tent without a top. More often, it has been staged in parks and plazas.
