Latin America: The School

Chile - Santiago

A key exponent of Latin America's new political theatre, a theatre of Memory and History, the dramatist and director Guillermo Calderón (b. 1971) makes his Greek debut with his most important work to date. The School (2013) follows the activities of a group of Chilean Leftists as they receive their training in the late nineteen eighties; their goal: to overturn the Pinochet regime.

Based on contemporary documents and eye-witness accounts, five actors take on the roles of the urban guerillas-to-be as they are initiated into the armed revolutionary struggle, its methods and practices. Like real Chilean apprentice guerillas, the actors wear masks so they will be unable to betray anyone if they are captured and tortured. But tensions rise behind the masks and passions flare... The School, like a Latin American answer to Bertolt Brecht's The Measures Taken (1930), sheds light on a dark chapter in the collective memory of the Chilean people and reflects on how we struggle, how we remember... or, more simply, what we are.