Choreographing the Security Apparatus
In October 2019, millions took to the streets across Chile to protest structural inequality, privatization, and constitutional abandonment in what was historicized as the Estallido Social. The state apparatus responded with brutal martial discipline: over four hundred individuals suffered deliberate projectile-induced ocular mutilation, thousands were detained in makeshift barracks, and curfew siren horns chilled metropolitan centers.
Rather than enacting a didactic victim narrative, Marco Layera and the fierce ensemble of Teatro La Re-sentida undertake a forensic, terrifyingly visceral autopsy of the persecutors themselves. Eight performers—garbed in distorted tactical police riot equipment, training fatigues, and anonymous black masks—conduct a relentless ritualistic drill. They examine how human bodies are systematically stripped of empathy, de-individuated, and transformed into instruments of calibrated state suppression.
The stage is a sterile white arena flanked by surgical fluorescent floodlights and pulsating industrial drone scapes created by Münchner Kammerspiele's sonic engineering division. Through frenetic micro-movements, uninhibited grotesque pantomime, and hyperventilating stamina, the company stages the terrifying internal psychological machine of law enforcement: its absurd self-righteousness, repressed desires, and bureaucratic impunity.
“We do not bring this play to Kerala as museum theatre; we bring it as a mirror to every state that uses baton, surveillance, and pellet cartridges against public conscience. When security becomes religion, violence becomes liturgy.”
Co-produced with Germany's renowned Münchner Kammerspiele, Oasis de la Impunidad interrogates the historical continuum running from South American dictatorships to modern technocratic democracies. How is police immunity guaranteed by institutional silence? Who cleans the blood from the courtyard once martial law recedes?
