Los Teatros del desierto: produccion del espacio durante el ciclo del salitre Chile 1830-1979
- Autores: Luis Alberto Prado Díaz
- Directores de la Tesis: Antoni Ramón Graells (dir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) ( España ) en 2012
- Idioma: español
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Horacio Capel Sáez (presid.), Marta Llorente Díaz (secret.), Francesc Foguet i Boreu (voc.)
- Materias:
- Enlaces
- Tesis en acceso abierto en: TDX
- Resumen
In the last decade of the 20th century, profound social and urban changes took place in the ports of Iquique and Pisagua, in northern Chile. This meant the advent of a new mindset which was modern, liberal and marked by relations imposed by the capitalist model. They were new cities, different from the Spanish-colonial root, without foundation date or military-management strategy. They arose without links to the past, organized by a new institution formed by liberal politicians, business people and enlightened businessmen, and with the sole purpose of fulfilling the role assigned by modern technique of commercial nexus and services in the product flow of nitrate explotation. It is there, where a theater that hosted the aspirations and social conventions of the ruling class was built. It was the economic boom of the nitrate cycle, where opulence was the attitude that characterized the society at that time, promoting the construction of buildings that recalled the great European theaters, hosting the refinement of social events and lyric-dramatic singing entertainment. Thus the nitrate towns joined the route of the major theater companies in their journey through the world, giving both European immigrants that settled in these desert land and locals, representative of the ruling elite, to reproduce the social and cultural European world. So the theaters were prominent landmarks of the city, as a testimony of that time, and showing the golden past of the nitrate economic boom period. In parallel, the emergence of the working class and social crisis, marked the social and cultural process of the boom phase of nitrate cities with special features. It was on the opposite scenario where another phenomenon emerged, linked with socio-spatial transformations associated with the industrial era, the development of the working class. A process that spread from Europe to America by the cities that were adhering to the industrialization process. The massive concentration of workers in the nitrate offices was the substrate for the origin and expansion of the labor movement that was born in the struggle for its social demands. It was also the basis for the development of guild and mutual associations which were accompanied by illustrated movements that saw in education and culture, the solution to overcome the state of deprivation in which they lived. Thus, the forms of social organization and representation, with the spread of theatrical performances, with operettas and farces, with philharmonics and estudiantinas. It is there where an inner transgressive theatrical endeavour arose, and moved away from conventional buildings of the ruling class and stuck to the mutual and philanthropic societies, building a testimony that was highlighted not by material but by their works. In this definition of context, the crisis that marked the end of the nitrate cycle indicated the decline of the bourgeois theater which disappears with the ruling classes that leave the cities and nitrate offices. However, the theater that emerges is reinvented and represents the middle and lower classes. Until that time, these classes were away from the stage. This process will be supported by the welfare state promoting the creation of new spaces for performances, and by the strengthening of a national theatre. The hypothesis raised focused the study on the imaginary of modernity and its catalytic spread, of improvement by the sake of improvement. At the same time, the partial vision that triggered modern thinking validated the idea of a bounded world of relationships, ignoring the multiplicity of processes that constitutes it. The history of theater in Chile is related to the social history of the process of the occupation of space, inseparable, like all processes in space and time, of the multiple existing links between political, economic, and cultural factors that are expressed in a spatial taxonomy of accumulation, production and space occupation.
