France: disappearance of Chilean playwright Oscar Castro
Chilean playwright Oscar Castro (1947-2021), founder of the Aleph Theater, in Chile and France.
© MOYERSOEN - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https: //commons.wikimedia
Text by: Isabelle Le Gonidec
6 mins
Chilean playwright and comedian Oscar Castro died of Covid-19 on Sunday in France, where he had founded the Aleph Theater during his exile under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.
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The information came from Chile.
It was the Chilean government and the Teatro Aleph in Santiago de Chile who informed the public of the disappearance of the playwright who spent part of his career in France, exile requires.
"
Sad day for the theater
", reacted the Minister of Culture.
A sad día para el teatro con la partida de Óscar Castro.
Intérprete, director and manager that dedicó su vida al teatro en Chile y el extranjero, con un Compraudicable Compromise.
Un abrazo a su familia, amigos y las distintas generaciones que guió.
pic.twitter.com/0YV9f5tpxv
- Consuelo Valdés (@Consuelovaldesc) April 25, 2021
Founder of Teatro Aleph at the end of the 1960s in Chile, an avant-garde and experimental theater that claims to be Augusto Boal, Jorge-Luis Borges - from whom it borrows its name - and Fellini,
El Cuervo
(the Raven ) Castro writes and performs the pieces with his student friends. A funny, insolent theater that mixes music and dance, actors and neophytes. It is a period of effervescence and cultural ferment in Chile and the Aleph Theater is quickly becoming a benchmark for all Latin American theater.
Oscar Castro happily welcomes the election of Salvador Allende. “
The day of Allende's election, it was beautiful! He made his speech from the student federation. It was power within the very youth. It was a great day. A wonderful day!
A golden era begins for popular culture and for the company of the Aleph.
After the military coup of September 1973, the work of the troop was censored, several of its members arrested and tortured, including Oscar Castro. He was transferred to a detention camp in Santiago, before being sent into exile in France in 1976. There, he was welcomed by Ariane Mnouchkine and the Théâtre du Soleil, Jack Lang and other exiles from the intellectual or artistic community. Latin American. “
I was very lucky,
” he will say. He meets the photographer Robert Doisneau who will become the president of Aleph France, works with Pierre Richard with whom he sets up the cabaret-thriller
Meurtre à Valparaiso
, Pierre Barouh, the filmmaker Claude Lelouch, Luis Sepulveda, etc. A rich story told in the documentary
Exil-en-scène
by Marina Paugam and Jean-Michel Rodrigo who was dedicated to him.
In 1995,
he
founded the Théâtre Aleph in Ivry-sur-Seine
, in the Parisian suburbs, to reconnect with the Chilean experience.
Theater “
is my passion, my company, my family and my refuge.
It's my way of being in this world,
”explained the playwright, receiving the Legion of Honor, on the proposal of Anne Hidalgo, mayor of Paris in 2018. He was also Chevalier des Arts et Lettres (1992).
In the prison camp where he was held in Chile, he invented “cultural Fridays”, during which he staged one play per week with the prisoners.
In 2013, he was able to reopen the Teatro Aleph in Chile, thanks to the change of regime. President Michelle Bachelet, one of his former theater accomplices (a student she participated in the Aleph adventure) and her government lend a place to the artist to create a cultural place. "
Aleph thus reinforces a life story dedicated to boosting art, culture and creativity… When I was young, I believed that we could change the world… Today, I know that it is possible
…" , wrote in her message of support the president.
To change or at least to move the world thanks to art and culture, to make a theater engaged in life and as close as possible to the public; This was what Oscar Castro said, both in Chile and in France. Among his works,
The sad e increible historia del general Peñaloza y el exiliado Mateluna
(The Incredible and sad story of General Penalosa and the exile Mateluna), one of his most beautiful works and one of the most beautiful works on exile which will notably be performed at the Théâtre du Soleil. We can also cite
La noche
suspendida (The suspended night),
Hasta la vida
siempre
, an ecological fable and in the same vein The Water Carriers, on the importance of water. A work regularly presented in schools. Writer, director, actor, the jack-of-all-trades Oscar Castro has also made forays in front of the camera as he also starred in the Antonio Skarmeta film
Ardiente paciencia
(1984), in which he played the postman who carried the letter of the famous Chilean writer Pablo Neruda, in 1984.
“
We think that telling the hardest things is telling more the truth.
I think not.
You have to mix everything up
, ”he said in an interview with
France-Terre Asile
.
Mix everything, drama and laughter, humor and commitment.
Like this little video series that he recently offered,
Aleph resists
, until the end.
Aleph Resist - episode 11 https://t.co/abjwDW4m1S via @YouTube
- Oscar Castro (@oscastroaleph) February 4, 2021
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