What interests you about the figure of the vampire, which has appeared in some of your earlier works?

We wanted to reappropriate the myth of the vampire in the context of our own chaotic times. I was drawn to this hybrid being because it resists the categories of modern European colonial thinking. I’m not talking about the character in Bram Stoker’s Dracula—I mean the figure in the vampire myths that have existed in cultures of all kinds for a very long time. The people who lived in Latin America before the Spanish conquest did not believe in divisions such as nature vs. culture, human vs. animal, and civilized vs. savage, which were established by the colonial system to seize and exploit lands and peoples. The vampire appeals to me as a hybrid being who lays claim to a territory, a land, and a people and stubbornly continues to resist colonial divisions.

We drew on a book by the Peruvian anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena, who has studied the Indigenous cultures of the Peruvian Andes. These people speak two languages: that of the state, the economic system in which we live, and their own language, which comes from their ancestral culture. They do not exist outside the system but instead live in two worlds at once, which is subversive. The same is true of our vampires: they speak the language of the state, they understand eco-catastrophe and expert reports, but they are also live according to other laws.

Vampyr takes the form of a mockumentary that condemns the realities concealed by new energy policies. To address the idea of sustainability and renewable energy, is it necessary to think about exhaustion?

Absolutely. Not thinking about exhaustion leads to denying the idea of death. That’s why the vampire is such an interesting trope: it is condemned to eternal life. It’s an Elon Musk-type fantasy that envisions going on forever and never getting weaker. The powers that be have made us believe it would be better to be young and live forever, but that’s only because we’re more useful if we stay young and never rest. Vampyr is a play about energy and exhaustion. We need to have a serious conversation about energy—and not just to figure out where to get it. We emphasize the vulnerability of the two performers as creatures that depend on each other. This is an idea that becomes obvious when you abandon a human-centric view of the world and realize that we in fact live in an intricate web of forces and entities.

The idea of green colonialism is very strong in South America. Under the guise of the green transition, exploitation of nature and natural resources is being carried out in the same ways as before. Only the name of the system and paradigm have changed. Studies of bats conducted in Chile revealed that they were being harmed by wind turbines without it leaving any traces. An expert explained the concept of barotrauma to us, which is an injury caused by a rapid change in pressure. That became a metaphor for the state of our bodies, which are exploding from the inside due to the unseen impacts of green energy.

The play is very funny. What role does humour play in your work?

We’re a group that laughs a lot. There have been many tragedies in our country’s history, and we respond to these in the Chilean way, with pitch-black humour, cynicism, and irony. It’s cultural and very creative. That’s why our characters are so Chilean: during the creative process, we invoke the people around us during long improvisation sessions, making members of our families appear. We draw on our collective culture, part of which is our sense of humour, which for me expresses what is broken. When we laugh, it’s because we are on unfamiliar ground. That’s the political heartbeat of the play.

Vampyr is the final instalment of a non-anthropocentric theatre trilogy. How did you work with the performers to develop body language that is in part non-human?

For each play in the trilogy, the form of the work was influenced by the non-human world. In Estado Vegetal, the writing and performances drew inspiration from the behaviour and culture of plants. It’s a phenomenological approach, in the sense that we try to experience things from a non-human perspective, in order to rethink how we create theatre—the way we write, act, structure, and perform it. In Vampyr, the actors are in constant transformation. I speak to them via an earpiece during the play so that our approach is never set in stone. We try to simulate creatures that are a mix of animal and human based on an array of bodies that we developed, while moving from one to the other in a fluid manner. We sought to create a form of acting in which the performers are never just one thing.

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