For the past twenty years your stage works have defied expectations. How would you describe your approach? What is the driving force behind your work?
My main interests before I focused on theatre were, and still are, music and philosophy. Initially I never thought that theatre would allow me to explore both those fields. I read a lot of philosophy; it’s where I find inspiration, which I don’t find in stories or fiction. But with an academic approach to philosophy, there is no room for mystery.
Theatre is an art that embraces the complexity of the world, mysteries included. I like theatre for its complexity.
It is a form that can embody basic philosophical questions: What is reality? What is history? What is humanity? Through these questions, theatre allows us to probe mystery, to reach for the limit of what we can comprehend and acknowledge too that which we cannot comprehend. it touches mystery. It allows me to dance around things I can’t quite put my finger on.
A stage play is a way of experiencing the world on a small scale.
The themes in my work over the past twenty years are history, a postcolonial approach, feminism and the decentering of discourse and recognition of the non-human. All that is also nourished by the current political situation in Chile where the country, victim of extreme neoliberalism, has exploded. There is tremendous tension, but there’s a certain beauty in it.
Theatre for me is a device for thinking musically, not only with the intellect but also with the body.
You have stated that Estado vegetal was not a play about plants, but a plant-like play.
Seven or eight years ago I felt that mere criticism and a cynical worldview had become somewhat sterile politically. I believe we need to start practicing new political and economic models, and my work with the non-human affords such explorations in the theatrical arena.
My first problem was: What right do I have to speak for someone – or something- else, even if it has no voice? How do I avoid imposing my own human voice on the non-human? I decided to reverse my approach.
Instead of investing objects or plants with the power of speech, why not let them lay seige to me?
The non-human – animal, but also vegetal life and minerals – is organized by all sorts of surprising structures, providing us with millions of extraordinary models. The distributed organization of tasks in plants offers an alternative model of organization and governance that can help us redefine relationships, communities or, for that matter, the structure of a theatre project.
Generally speaking, in the theatre the lighting serves the actors and follows them. In Estado vegetal, on the contrary, it is the actor who goes toward the light, imitating phototropism, the growth or movement of plants toward light.
Using the specific features of plants – or of rocks – to rethink the world seemed to me to be more politically pertinent than theatre based on a traditional critical approach. It is not a play arguing in favour of a healthier ecology, or that makes demands on behalf of plants. It simply tries to imitate plants, to find that which is vegetal in us, and how that can help us imagine being other.
How did you create this performance?
We are a small group of women. We began by sharing books and articles we had read. Our task was provoked and nourished by the writings of the philosopher Michael Marder, who states that to recognize a valid « other » in plants is to also recognize the vegetal « other » within us, that human thinking is altered by its encounter with the vegetal world.
In fact, human beings are partly made of plant genomes. It is a matter of rediscovering our roots. We also worked with the botanist Stefano Mancuso, a pioneer in the field of vegetal neurology, an area of research that has shown that plants are cognitive (therefore intelligent) organisms that can « communicate » among themselves.
How is a plant organized? How does a tree behave? What about them can we reproduce or imitate? With my co-author, the actress Marcela Salinas, we worked by means of improvisations, a stream of consciousness that engages the body and speech. It is a very slow process, spread out over some months.
The really piece took shape when we began working on the concept of embranchment, a basic fundamental in plants, so that one character leads to another, thereby creating new ways of telling the story. That is a necessary step, because the Western critical approach is drawing to an end. In that respect, our work is akin to a feminist way of thinking.
The writer Ursula Le Guin noted that dominant traditional narratives came from hunters and stories of the hunt. What about gatherers, harvesters? That said, what would vegetal or post-human narratives be like?
