Representations of the Chilean dictatorship 50 years later: Playscripts and psychosocial trauma

Abstract

In 2023, Chile commemorated the 50th anniversary of the coup d'état that installed a bloody civil and military dictatorship that lasted 17 years, whose psychosocial and political consequences are still felt today. In the run-up to this commemoration, we asked ourselves the question of how the dictatorship has been represented in the theater scene over the last 50 years: what have been the themes and characters; what role has theater played in relation to the dictatorship; how the Chilean theater scene has represented the scene of the traumatic that the dictatorship installed.

We thus developed a research, positioned in 2022, with the objective of analyzing how the Chilean civil and military dictatorship has been represented and symbolized in the Chilean theater scene since the coup d'état to date. After compiling from diverse sources a large number of plays premiered during 50 years, a corpus of plays was selected, which were grouped by decades, considering the date of their premiere. The playscripts of each group of plays were analyzed in an attempt to reconstruct recurrences and diversities in their representation of the dictatorship along three axes: the privileged theme brought to the stage; the playwriting strategies implemented; and the psychosocial meanings of what was represented. In this paper, we present the first results of this research and its projections.