Millaray Lobos stages the Chilean version of “Unwritten Letters”, a project by the Frenchman David Geselson. The play stars Rafael Contreras, Víctor Manuel Valenzuela, Javiera Mendoza, Paloma Toral and Millaray herself.
Unwritten letters
This proposal was created in 2016 by David Geselson in France, and has toured the United States, Belgium and Portugal. Millaray Lobos García (“Locutorio”) is in charge of creating and directing the Chilean version.
The project of making “Unwritten Letters” in Chile was born from a long friendship between Millaray and Geselson.
Among the letters are affiliations (to the father, mother, son, daughter), love, mourning, and letters to return to a place.
The letters are a writing in relation to another. In “Unwritten Letters”, this inner writing arises from encounters between sender and clerk.
Local version
“One could find an echo to the undisclosed spaces of words, which are put into words, with what has happened in the country in the last couple of years, in which many things amputated from our imaginary, placed in a space of taboo , secretly, they begin to manifest and become spaces of vindication. There is also the emotional dimension that those letters contain. We should not forget that we have a space of emotions that we share as human beings, because in these times in Chile, and also everywhere, radicalizations can come, ideologically closed positions that can make us forget that background of common humanity ”, affirms Millaray Lobos .
“Unwritten Letters” was born from an open call to people who wanted to relate a letter that, for some reason, they were not able to write. During 2020, between confinements, the team of interpreters / scribes received, one by one, more than thirty people by videoconference in meetings that generated thirty letters.
About fifteen of them, along with others translated from the French corpus, will be shared with the public at the Teatro la Memoria.
“All the letters were sent to people to validate them, or not, and to validate the fact that they could become public,” says Millaray.
“We are all going to be on stage, since the idea is to unveil a procedure, a way of doing it. Ángela Acuña will be in music and Guillermo Ugalde in sound and regie. Another important accent is that there is a kind of circulation of intimacy, there is an aesthetic transformation also because it is important to mention that this is not a therapy. There is an unspoken word that was put into the hands of someone who wrote, ”says the director.
“The atmospheres are going to have to do with the tones of the cards; there are more joyful, more dramatic, there are some tremendous letters of abjection, there are some with nostalgia … The invitation is that the imaginary of each one can welcome and awaken those places that we all share and that are what the letters reveal, places of great sadness , of great losses, of loves, of hopes ”.
Millaray Lobos
I study at the University of Chile, La Sorbonne Nouvelle and the Conservatoire National d’Art Dramatique de Paris. He has worked in European and Chilean theaters and creation centers, with artists such as Eric Lacascade, Galin Stoev, Jaques Nichet, Alfredo Castro, Cristián Plana and Alexandra Von Hummel. Millaray Lobos has participated in films such as “Some Beasts” and “Nobody Knows I’m Here” (awarded at the Tribeca Film Festival). He has taught at the Universities of Chile, Católica, Andrés Bello, Mayor and at the schools of the Théâtre National de Bretagne, the Center Dramatique National de Normandie and the Théâtre National de Toulouse. Linked to the Teatro la Memoria in Chile, she also works as a stage playwright and director together with the choreographer Mathieu Guilhaumon and the philosopher Andrea Potesta. She has been a guest director at the European Dramaturgy Festival, the Municipal Theater of Santiago, the Chilean National Ballet, the Center Dramatique National de Normandie and the Théâtre National de Toulouse, among others.
Unwritten letters
Original design: David Geselson
Creation and direction in Chile: Millaray Lobos García
Performer authors: Rafael Contreras, Millaray Lobos García, Víctor Manuel Valenzuela, Javiera Mendoza Paloma Toral
Production: Academia Nómade, in complicity with the Compagnie Lieux-dits, Paris.
Cello performer: Ángela Acuña
Sound: Guillermo Ugalde
Memory Theater
September 2, 3, 4, 9 and 10 7:00 p.m.
Pay what you can: $ 3,000 / $ 5,000 / $ 10,000
Recommended age + 14 years
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