Chilean director Malicho Vaca Valenzuela (nicknamed ‘Malicho’ by his grandmother) is performing at the Festival d’Avignon for the first time, while this year’s guest language is Spanish and he is only the third director from Chile to be featured.
Malicho puts on one of the most creative shows at this 78th edition of the Festival, in spite of its seemingly minimal stage set-up. A giant projection screen is set up in the background. In the courtyard, in front of this screen, a small desk with a laptop and a microphone await Malicho, who enters the stage from the garden side. The virtual desktop of his computer is projected onto the screen, with an archive photo as wallpaper and the icons of folders, images and videos arranged in a row.
Throughout the show, Malicho’s voice-over gives life and rhythm to his story. The starting point is the global lockdown we all experienced in 2020. Starting with this global event, the Chilean director takes us to the heart of his neighbourhood in Santiago, where he was confined. Unable to go out and explore it physically, Malicho embarked on a “virtual urbex” using Google Maps and Google Street View.
Thanks to these digital softwares, he shows us photo archives of his neighbourhood: the hospital where he was born, the street where he lives, the revolution square where he demonstrated. So it’s a twofold exploration: both spatial, building an intimate and political cartography of Santiago; and temporal, delving into the past and memories through archives. Working as a true “archaeologist”, the director has found hundreds of poems signed “JRC” inscribed on plates, whose meaning he recomposes by “collecting” them and reading them to us.
Malicho punctuates his narrative with benign, almost naïve questions. “Who determines where to put these things?”, he says, as he observes the detail of a tiled floor with the star of the Chilean flag in the corridors of a hospital. “How many lives and deaths have passed through this place?”, “Where do all the memories in this building go?” In all, 87 questions are gently raised by his tender voice, in a style that is as close to a podcast as it is to ASMR.
“Reminiscence” evokes a deep, distant, buried memory that needs to be brought out into the open. For the artist, the images and archives he gathers are like a “collage of collective memories”. The notion of collage is at the heart of his work, with simultaneous editing of photos, videos, notes, maps and so on. Filming on a computer screen has become its own film genre (the “desktop movie”), widely used in documentary and experimental cinema over the last ten years.
The destkop movie is a video in which we can see the software interface of a computer, in other words, a film that takes place in and through this interface – rather than through the lens of a camera. Reminiscencia is, to our knowledge, the first (or one of the first) live performance works to incorporate the desktop movie form into theatre. Malicho’s piece is halfway between autobiography, essay and documentary. Video archives of Malicho himself, documenting his youthful involvement in the social movements of 2006 and 2011, deepen this sensitive autobiographical vein, painting a portrait of the director while bringing us closer to him as he reveals himself. Not forgetting moments of music and humour that allow him to play down the heavier moments of the show.
“Is it possible to map a memory?” is the central unanswered question that Malicho addresses in the play. His achievement lies in the fine and fertile interweaving he achieves between intimate and collective histories, between his family and the political hopes of the Chilean nation. Malicho’s performance is transformed when he visits his family’s street and introduces us to his grandparents through archive videos.
From the very beginning of the play, Malicho focused on the smallest details in the images he collected (“The real secret of this photo: a bride”, the hidden Chilean star in some images). This second, more sensitive part continues to explore the central question of our memory and the memories we retain. From anonymous love poems, he tenderly films his grandparents, one of whom is losing his memory, but remembers the words to a song that they listen to over and over again thanks to the five radios that Malicho’s grandfather keeps alive. “Why can my grandmother only remember snatches of songs? Faced with this unsolvable question, the director opposes sharing and complicity.
The finale of the show takes us back to its beginnings, with Malicho inviting the audience to sing the beautiful song ‘Sin ti, no podré vivir jamás’ (the first words of which he writes on a notepad) from Los Panchos, as we revisit the wallpaper on his laptop: Malicho as a child, his cousin and his grandmother. It’s a moment of communion with the audience, opening the show on a lighter note and rounding off an accomplished journey for the theatrical revelation of this year’s Festival d’Avignon.
FRENCH SUMMARY
Venu du Chili, le metteur en scène Malicho Vaca Valenzuela (dit « Malicho » comme le surnommait sa grand-mère) présente propose l’un des spectacles les plus inventifs de cette 78e édition, malgré un dispositif scénique des plus simples en apparence.
Au lointain, un grand écran de projection est installé. À cour, devant cet écran, un petit bureau avec un ordinateur portable et un micro attendent Malicho, qui arrive sur scène à jardin. Sur l’écran est projeté le bureau virtuel de son ordinateur : on voit une photo d’archive en fond d’écran et les icônes des dossiers, images et vidéos rangées.
« Réminiscence » comme une mémoire profonde, lointaine, enfouie qu’il s’agit de faire éclore au grand jour. Pour lui, les images et archives qu’il rassemble sont comme un « collage de souvenirs collectifs. Tout au long du spectacle, la voix-off de Malicho incarne et rythme son récit.
La pièce de Malicho est à mi-chemin de l’autobiographie, de l’essai et du documentaire. Sans oublier des moments musicaux ou d’humour qui lui permettent de dédramatiser les moments les plus lourds du spectacle, où il évoque les espoirs déçus des mouvements sociaux et la perte de mémoire de ses plus proches.
« Peut-on cartographier un souvenir ou une mémoire ? » est la question centrale que Malicho pose dans la pièce et à laquelle il tente de répondre. Sa réussite tient à l’entrelacement fin et fécond qu’il réalise entre l’histoire intime et collective, entre sa famille et les espoirs politiques de la nation chilienne. La révélation théâtrale de ce Festival d’Avignon.
Festival d’Avignon
Gymnase du Lycée Mistral, Avignon, France
Until 21th of July 2024
Distribution
With Rosa Alfaro, Malicho Vaca Valenzuela, Lindor Valenzuela
Text, creation, direction, dramaturgy and video Malicho Vaca Valenzuela
Production
Production Ébana Garín, Luis Guenel, Roni Isola
With the support of the Institut Français du Chili for the 78th edition of the Festival d’Avignon
Photo credit : Christophe Raynaud de Lage / Festival d’Avignon