 Welcome everybody back to Segal Talks here at the Martin E. Segal Theater Center, the Graduate Center CUNY in New York City, at the City University. It's the end of week four. We reacted fast at the Segal Center as we do often and we created a series so we could hear voices from artists and workers in the field of theater and performance and how they are experiencing the moment, what they are thinking, what is on their mind, how they influenced by the moment and what the future might bring, should bring, will bring and what is the way they deal with a situation that's unprecedented, especially of course also in New York City. While we are talking people are in hospitals under respirators, people are dying, we have more dead people than countries in the world or most of them, so something went really really wrong. We just had a call with South Africa where Basel Jones said things are looking kind of okay, the government is doing the right things, we trust them and so it's stunning things. We heard from India where 500,000 people left on foot New Delhi trying to get out, some prepared to walk a thousand kilometers. We heard from Egypt where the government offered $15 for an artist for the next three, four months as a support and they had to call into one national hotline where there is one phone number only and fill out ten pages. We heard from Germany and France where the situation is different, it's supported but everybody is missing what makes life life, when we know when we are live when the stone is a stone and white is white and black is black. We know that when we look at the stage and one of the artists, contemporary global artists who gives us meaning on stage, who reworks the classic but also reacted right away to his own country and to his situation in the U.S. where he studied his Guillermo cultural and from Chile his country went through tremendous changes, has seen many many things we have never experienced in America or in Europe, this might be closer to quarantine when he grow up then these things have changed there and they are changing again, so we are tuning in now to Latin America, it's been a while, we should have done it earlier, Lula Arias will come soon, we have contacted Sabin Berman from Mexico, Lula of course from Argentina, but Guillermo, welcome to Segal Talks. Thank you so much for having me. No really, it's a big, big, big honor to have you here, you have been at the Segal, you have been in New York, you actually also studied for a while at the Gwetsendau, I didn't even know that at the time you were here, you came to our events, you worked with Anche Urgal a lot who connected us also to you at the public with Oscar Eustis who's going to be on next week with Tony Torn together. Guillermo, where are you now and what time is it? It's the same time as in New York City, this is noon and I'm in Santiago Chile. So this is where you live, their home is at the moment? Yes, I've been staying here for the last year or so, yeah. So tell us a bit what's going on in Santiago de Chile? Well, maybe I should start with a dead, we're hitting maybe 180 this weekend and there are people diagnosed with the virus, it's hitting around 12,000, which is acceptable, I guess, because it means that the health system is not collapsing, but of course we're really skeptical about the numbers and we know that the health system is already a collapsed system. So ideas of collapse are, I don't know, everything is debatable right now. We have been under curfew for a while and under quarantine, which is different. The whole country is under curfew, meaning that you can't leave your home between 10 p.m. and 5 in the morning and also curfew means not on the street, not driving cars, nothing. Exactly, exactly. If you step out of your house you get the time by the police, but there's also different regions of sections of the country have been under quarantine, meaning this city has not been under quarantine as a city. Only different municipalities within the city have been under curfew and it's interesting phenomena because the illness arrived here, the virus arrived here through the upper class neighborhoods because it basically came here for people coming back from vacation in Europe. Of course not everyone goes to vacation in Europe, right? So the people who are right here got it first and then they passed it on to the people who worked for them. So now the curfew is being ended, I mean the quarantine is being lifted in the upper class neighborhoods and they are putting under quarantine the working class neighborhoods, which means that again all the people that got it from those rich neighborhoods are not getting it and that's different because it's a very segregated city and we have a whole different health system for the rich and the poor. So now we are really afraid that the working class health system is not going to be able to deal with the virus in those neighborhoods. So it would mean like in New York City terms upper west side could go out and no quarantine but Queens or Brooklyn or the Bronx there's quarantine people are not allowed to go out. Is that true? Is that right? Yes, exactly. In the upper west side everyone had private insurance and in Queens nobody had private insurance. So they have different set of hospitals and different set of doctors for different sort of neighborhoods in the city. Sorry, do you have health insurance as an artist? How is the situation among artists in Chile? Well it's pretty dire. The theater in Chile is always a semi-professional activity meaning that the people who do it go to university sort of career, I mean they started for four years in college to become theater artists. So when they do it they do it professionally, they do it to the higher standards. But the reality of working in this theater is amateur meaning that people do it mostly on the side. They have a day job and they do it during the evenings when they are free to work after their day job. So there's funding of course from the government but that's not enough to sort of let people dedicate themselves fully to creating theater. So people teach and they of course wait tables as they do everywhere in the world. But of course wages are low and there's no jobs for everyone. So people who are who you see on stage working professionally are usually working under the poverty line because ticket sales, well tickets are really inexpensive and the wages you get from performing in theater are not a lot. So people never truly become sort of citizens in the complete sense of the world. They always sort of marginalize and sort of push into sort of a working class situation in which they can't abandon. So in a way this situation has shown that this situation in which we find ourselves now is not much different from the one we were living before. Now we're not allowed basically to show our stuff because theaters are closed but we were not making a lot of money then anyway. So people, the situation of theater just hasn't changed much. I don't know if I'm being clear there. It was died before and it's on its own now. So however, well there's a big story to this because this coronavirus crisis hit the country in Santiago, especially where most of the theater activity is in March, late March, early April. I want to say mid-March, right? But in the context of basically a social revolution, political revolution in the country which started in mid-October. So in mid-October massive protests started happening all over the country. Something that we have never seen before in Chile and it was a big revolt against neoliberalism and capitalism in its neoliberal form of course. And against the government because once the protests began sort of taking over the streets of most cities in the country, the reaction of the government was extremely violent. Immediately they declared a curfew and then they brought the military out to the streets to control the population, which was really shocking because we hadn't seen that since the time of Finochet in the 70s and 80s. So this was really sort of a nightmare come true. And the actual police began behaving in a very sort of criminal way, shooting the protesters and killing dozens and also taking the eyes out of people's faces. So for some reason we don't know exactly why. Maybe they received orders, maybe they didn't. But they started shooting their guns to the heads and faces of protesters and they took, I don't keep up with the count but I know that more than 400 protesters have lost their eyes and a couple of them have lost both eyes. So they aim at the head, they shoot at the head in order to take people's eyes out, most of the young people, which is really interesting because they're not killing them but they are maiming them, right? And for us we see that as a form of torture because during the dictatorship torture was really effective means of control, the protest and the political activity of the people opposing the dictatorship. And torture is a great sort of control scheme I guess because it terrorizes not only the person who's being tortured but all the circle, right? Family and friends become immobilized and actually it's really hard for them to go back to politics because the horror, the terror is so striking and so run so deep in everyone's conscience and body that you can't sort of rise again to fight. Right now they're not allowed to do that, they do it anyway in certain police stations but now taking out people's eyes serves that function, very similar to torture. Once a person loses their eye it sends shocks with shock waves of horror and young people think twice about going outside to protest again and of course they can't get away with it. No policeman has been sent to justice because of this kind of crime. So this happened, this started happening again in mid-October. Just last year, October 18th. So the government behaved very criminally, they couldn't control the protest, the protest didn't stop, they set up the curfew to control the population and to let basically the police and the military roam the cities and then the protest kept going and they became more intense in March because here in the southern hemisphere we have our summer break in February. So protest didn't go away but they just slowed down just a little bit but when people came back to, students came back to class in March, everything started sort of happening again. People taking over the subway system, people burning tires in every street corner, stopping traffic, stopping the economy basically, unions striking and marching towards the center of the city like a full-blown revolution. I'm talking about March and then this happens, the coronavirus happens. So the coronavirus stops the protests because people are not allowed to go out anymore and they don't want to because they don't want to get the virus. So it's very sad for the protest because we were, it was the one exciting thing that had happened in our country for a long time because we were being sort of, we had sort of a kind of a humiliating situation in which our country was underpunished sort of the laboratory of neoliberalism because during the 70s and 80s the government had a free range to impose all the neoliberal experiments in our country because they didn't have opposing parliament to deal with. So after that we were basically very passive, we didn't quite rebel as a country and that was really, really actually sad. We didn't until we have a sense of collective drive or even ambition. There was a sense of shared sadness I guess for being completely submitted to this horrible system. So now basically people were taking over the streets and there was a sense of collective action. We're finally taking over, we're finally doing something for ourselves and that's when the coronavirus hit. So the protest is over and the government which is basically ready to give up and maybe sort of to call elections or to have the president resign, they take back control and they set up a new curfew but not now not because of protest but because of the coronavirus. So for us it's a weird thing because curfew of course we knew before from two months ago when we were protesting. So this is a new kind of curfew. We know actually we have some sort of experience in this because we were sort of trapped in the houses two months ago. So in October you had a curfew? Yes, yes. Tell us about the curfew. Yeah and now it's a new curfew. Was it the same time, 10 o'clock till five? Yes, well sometimes it started earlier during the protests, maybe sometimes at seven or eight or even at nine. It was the most strange thing because in the summer the sun goes out around I want to say nine, nine thirty. So when the curfew starts at seven you're basically are trapped in your house with full daylight and during a heat wave not able to go out. Very strange as the military tracks twist across the city and military helicopters try over your house. It's eerie and you feel of course it's very dystopian. You feel you feel like you're basically in the middle of a sort of science fiction film or something which is something that is very common now. We all feel like some sort of fictional dystopia. I don't know for me it was really easy to see the helicopters, the sound, the way they fly low in order to sort of make sure you hear the rumble and you feel like everything shaking inside your house. It's a show of power. It's a relief in a way because you see the system showing its true colors. Everything becomes very clear and transparent. So in a way it's a moment of honesty for everyone involved. Yeah. So I keep thinking about people wanting to go back to normal but for us here normal was a revolution. So when we say we want to go back to normal we want to go back to the normalcy of revolution because that revolution as complicated and difficult and bloody as it was it was a revolution about collective action and a sense of future and even optimism. It is really stunning to hear and to take that all in and did you participate? You was a director and playwright. Your work has been shown. It was at the public theater in New York and Berlin and so many countries around the world and you say you still have of course a hard time in Santiago to be produced but you as an artist how were you involved in that revolution? What did you do as an artist? Well as much as we could and I'm speaking collectively because well what happened immediately after this revolution started was that theaters closed because you couldn't go to the theater because the theater was basically I mean the city itself was closed. You couldn't go anywhere and the police were everywhere and then the curfew happened so theaters were closed immediately and theater artists were immediately sort of paralyzed and there was a collective realization that it was impossible to do theaters theater in these circumstances. Not only because it was ethically complicated to drag people into sort of this bourgeois sort of activity of being in protected closed doors, engaging in some sort of a version of high culture and while outside there's some revolution in which people are dying of course that's that was impossible for us to do even if we wanted to do some such thing but also because the revolution had the effect of immediately challenging our way of doing theater or aesthetic or subject matter everything so I think there was a collective understanding that the only thing that we can do right now is just stop everything and go out to the streets to protest and to join the movement. There was a realization that we're not going to be opening new shows anytime soon maybe in six months or a year so we might as well engage with this and see what it does to us and maybe we can make a play a show a performance piece out of this in a year from now after we are able to digest and come up with something worthwhile so basically join the protest there's a routine in which you go every day or you go every Friday you join you get you I guess the most common experience is to just breathe a lot of tear gas cry a lot with that tear gas realize that it's basically a chemical weapon see the violence engaging social media and see every single videoclip in which they show you the complete violence in which the police is engaging the radical violence that they are using against the people so we we did this thing which we went out joined the protest do whatever we could and then go back home and spend hours on social media seeing what other people were doing and exposing ourselves to extreme violence and when we when I say extreme violence is basically um police cars for example not even thinking anymore about sort of keeping some sense of um dignity or some sense of uh legality to what they were doing and basically um pressing the gas and just running the cars against the crowd and just have people sort of fly hitting people and just having people fly in the sky fly up after being hit by a car so we're exposed to that with a sense of responsibility because we can't sort of we can't look away we have to engage by sort of engaging with the violence it's kind of a citizen's duty to do so um and um wait and think I'm trying to figure out if theater is possible after this if it's possible at all this is amazing the same police that uh executed that state power represented and killed people to eyes out they are now on the street trying to manage the curfew right they are the same same uh same soldier same policeman it's uh incredible it's unimaginable and it also puts a lot of what we experience also in in perspective how do you as a as a human as Guillermo uh how do you feel at the moment what's what's going on what's going on in your mind how do you feel well I think um I feel very not creative at all I think um I think at some point I thought maybe this was going to be a fertile moment to just imagine theater or some sort of art for the future something original to say about this going on but um soon enough I realized that it wasn't possible the the the fear for the future the the acknowledging the the criminality of um people in power all over the world is so overwhelming that um that um I feel like I've been pushed into a corner which I I can only sort of um think trying to inform myself to just trying to grasp understand what's going on but I've been sort of pushing to sort of um um facility and a sort of kind of a abject facility which I'm completely sort of ashamed of my situation um I I'm not engaging much with people um um I thought there was going to be at the beginning a lot of um conversations and zoom parties um every evening but I haven't been doing that at all I think it has a it's a more um an experience of being um alone worrying about the future and trying to um imagine a future of dystopia not because I wanted but because I think um it's always better to anticipate the worst rather than to hope for the better I'm not always like this but I I I've been sort of um pushing to that extreme so um yeah so I keep I keep thinking about um the moment in which they say oh listen um um uh political rights yeah we're not doing that anymore because we're in a state of emergency uh you know um you know what television yeah we're not going to be doing that anymore because we need to sort of allocate the resources to somewhere else supermarkets yeah only one but run by the government we're not doing supermarkets anymore gas yeah just bikes we're doing bikes now so I anticipate a situation in which we're going to slowly and and very bored walked into sort of a state of um or of um poverty disconnection and a new kind of civilization that I I don't know um what it's going to look like I guess that that's one version of it on the other version of it is just um um some sort of us uber capitalist system um even more authoritarian but the one we already know do you feel your government listened at all to the street protests are there signs now where you feel I mean it was as you said it looked like elections would happen now with the corona which is so strikingly similar to authoritarian rule imposed by an authoritarian government but do you feel now there is perhaps some trust that could be put into the government is there anything where you're saying yes maybe something will change for the better how it is does it exist or do you feel it is hopeless no I think that they are they are as criminal as they were before um criminal in a very sort of um cool way because the same guys who were killing you actively sort of sending out people to kill the protesters are now saying um we're we're here to protect your health so you don't die please stay at home so that's very I don't know extreme whitewashing um to the point in which it's almost um laughable but I think the changes come from the um sort of a changing the people how people see their power for example uh when this crisis started they wanted to keep the shopping malls open and immediately all the the people who work in retail at those shopping malls the the employees basically stepped stepped out of the of the stores and they started clapping uh protesting and that was um very striking because those retail workers um never ever protest so I think that they got from um sense of um encouragement from the revolution before so in a way that way of resisting the system was applied to what happened next which was the coronavirus crisis so I expect more of that um for the future and again all the people who were protesting uh five months ago are can't wait to go back to the street again so after this coronavirus situation is over lifted the vaccines are arrived whatever people are going to be um killing the streets and protest by protesting by the millions so the the last protest we have was um International Women's Day on March 8th I guess it was the march happened a day before um a million and a half people women march in the streets protesting the government and and asking for justice and asking for the stop stopping the violence against women so that's that's the strength of the movement and that's not going to go away at all and by the way I should add that the woman did accomplish something that um there's going to be an election to um write a new constitution it's going to be an election to vote for or against um writing a new constitution for the country and that's a big deal um and that's happening in October so whatever happens well the they were originally set for April but now they moved it to October because of the virus so that's happening whatever happens there's going to be a new constitution in Chile and there's going to be um a very new world and a very new country um but um um yeah you know you know how it is you can be optimistic and pessimistic at the same time and make that kind of um your um identity um as a theater artist um with the work you um you put up the work you imagined uh is a symbolic way is a way of of a real way uh on stage um it's portraying the world but perhaps also was the call to change it as Milo Rao said that what you view and others are doing now um do you feel the revolution but perhaps also the corona now is something changing inside your your thinking about your practice or do you feel have your too much ostomizes I feel I'm just hit by a bus I can't really put it into words it but do you feel there's an adjustment that things might be approached differently when when this is over and it will be over things nothing lasts forever so for the good or for the bad but this will be over yeah is there something that well something interesting happened because we I was doing with with a lot of people my generation and younger we were doing these political plays for a long time into we're sort of foreshadowing the revolution yeah to the point in which we were becoming um boring right because we're repeating this message over and over again this guy's going to fall down on us but the system is completely unfair we have no justice we are under a dictatorship under other name we were going on and on and on about this um some people were maybe um saying with some sort of uh justification why didn't you stop it move on to some other subject matter you know because that's all news um the country moved on you know and we would never shut up um and we became even more radicalized as we as as as years went by and then this revolution happens we were sort of um vindicated in a way but revolution stole our immediately stole our thunder because it was so big and it was so such a popular movement that our theater became immediately old because we were seeing the future and sort of again announcing the announcing the revolution but when the once the revolution arrives um you can't see the future anymore you become part of the past the people who announced it but we are not um um for seeing anything and i'm talking about our subject matter and also about our aesthetic as well so we were we're completely stunned yeah a big boss hit us but at least we had the revolution and the revolution had like a sort of beautiful um artistic component people doing graphic arts were just covering the city and sort of the most beautiful art graphic art graphete that you've ever seen um there were performance everywhere there was music on the street it was just beautiful but we were stunned anyway and then something really interesting happened which was not a feminist group from Valparaiso called Las Tesis creating created a piece of performance uh called El violador it is to or the rapist uh is you which is something um that was performed by group of um i want to say a hundred women 200 women on the streets and everywhere and the performance was so successful that it was repeated all over the world including a new york city and most cities in the u.s and europe but i'm talking about everywhere in the world and and this was a piece of performance alright basically it was um a dance in which um i can't really do it right now but it's basically i don't i wouldn't know how to do it but it's basically uh they repeat that um a little speech with um some sort of um sing song as they move their um their arms and legs representing um different situations of oppressions of oppression and then sort of um fighting back against authority talking about about the way they use their body but it's one of those um sort of um short dance pieces that um you can learn rather easily and that you can do on the streets and it's and it's for for women right for women to to perform as a group and this was really interesting because as they explained later this group made out of um women they were preparing a play in which they were um going to use this little choreography but then since the revolution started they couldn't do it so they took that little choreography to the street and then it got fire and then it was done by people all over the country and then all over the world and it's and it has a very sort of strong political content because they are accusing um men of actually um being the rapist but not only men but the state with capital letters and the police of being the actual rapist uh not only in the sense of the actual rape but also in the sense of sort of um raping um society as a whole with um with oppression and this was done collectively it's incredibly strong it's incredibly catchy it's incredibly beautiful it's incredibly theatrical and once we saw that we saw the theater of the future this is it this is what we were sort of hoping for um this is here to say theater right um a theater that doesn't happen inside the um our conventional theaters it's for everyone to be done it has a striking political statement and it's done by the people and it's beautiful and it's joyful and it's political and it's um and it's done by women so it was um basically the most hopeful and beautiful beautiful thing that I've seen um coming out of this so I think that's sort of the future it's not maybe not done by me maybe um my role is to go back to my old ways and trying to find a way from there but at least uh I know that uh some people are taken over in the most creative and beautiful way a more interesting way so again that thing is now dormant but I expect it to come back looking back I mean you did the great piece villa about the the villa or the museum of torture you know should how foot format should take it's a wonderful uh discussion on how to think and how to think about things at the different perspective but also then you did never where actually actors were rehearsing check if I died a revolution is on the street but a play like never where it deals with revolution do you could you write that again right now or do you feel something uh is different yeah something is different because uh the inspiration for never was um a problem with the ethics of doing theater something that I've talked about this here before in a country so violent and so um with so much inequality and oppression as Chile it's really difficult to get away with um charging a lot of money and doing a play in sort of beautiful theater every aesthetic sort of preoccupation or concern or maybe um engaging in this um collective act of going to the theater to some sort of cultural enjoyment and it's uh rather shameful or could become rather shameful so I wrote a metaphorical play never in which um uh Tchaikov's widow um Olga Kanipa was basically rehearsing a play while outside the outside the desire was killing people during the 1905 revolution and some peace but so just to just to again to play with this idea of um performing something while outside people are being killed uh and the play was really successful for me as a writer and director because I think I engage the subject and the way that I wanted to but for that to happen for that um idea to sort of work theater has to be happening so when I did this play theater was actually happening people were sort of um going to the theater and feeling the seats of the house right now there's no theater so there's no um um there's no um bourgeois theater getting away with an aesthetic concern and ignoring what's going on the streets so I guess now the equivalent of this completely sort of um bourgeois engaging with sort of an escapist um art or duty is I guess staying at home and watching I don't know television or quality television which I guess it would be a little a little bit unfair because it's not like we have a lot of options other than that but um I guess a play like that um has lost um traction because of the fact that we actually don't have theater now and we won't have for a while how do you spend your day tell us a bit how do you when you get up what do you what do you do now and in as a writer such a brilliant mind and director and you went through the revolution our theaters were closed now it's closed again there's curfew so how do you how do you pass a day well I most of the day is taken care of um of a toddler that's it I take care of the toddler all day and then at night I have two hours for myself in which I basically um check the internet and try to write a little bit and and then my mind completely um goes and then I have time for some email and that's it I'm not watching movies I'm not reading I'm not doing anything other than sort of um reading the news reading what's going on with with the pandemic and trying to catch hopefully use about the possibility of treatment or vaccine and I have tried to catch bits of um the show viewing shows that they are putting up on the website that's that's been my my um my biggest um sort of um moment of pleasure and I am teaching a couple of classes in the university I'm teaching a class in theater directing and also a class um a writing class writing classes I think more tolerable but the situation of teaching over a screen is um it's fine I mean people are willing to make it work but it can last is um I don't know 30 minutes after 30 minutes you start losing your engagement and your concentration so it's not truly productive and I think the same uh and the directing class is just um I don't know I think it's underwhelming because um of course they're practical class you have to be actually engaging with students and directing on stage and making them direct on stage because most mostly it's just in theater and this doesn't film but we're not doing much directing we have tried to direct uh over skype a little bit which feels um current because a lot of people are doing performance even plays on skype and um zoom what do you think about that doing plays and performances on skype and zoom well well I guess people have been doing it here really successfully I guess so they did a couple in which they they um they sold 1000 tickets for one and then 500 tickets for the other one which is unprecedented and they were charging I want to say the five dollars which is a lot of money so um it was successful and people are seeing this as a sort of a fine alternative to not working and some people are even looking into developing this um online play thing as a exploring possibilities for it right maybe it's the sort of a zoom conversation is just um the first stage and maybe they're going to come up with something really interesting I'm not interested in that myself I'd rather do I rather do um radio plays or something like that but um I my criticism is that the people who are um succeeding on this are people who were already well known and really well established so people who are already famous maybe are people who are can sort of invite a lot of ticket sales they can get a lot of ticket sales because they are already famous so in a way the people who were already well positioned in society in theater are getting the most out of this movement and the people who were doing um theater um struggling and not really well known I'm not going to get much um economic reward out of this so um I think it's going to play out I think it's um in my case I can't engage again more than 30 minutes with the screen so I think uh it might get old pretty soon but I'm not going to say bad things about it because I don't want to stop sort of legitimate sort of things that theater artists might be exploring for artistic reasons and economic reasons so when you write in those two hours at what time is it and what are you writing about well I have um I have assignments I'm um I'm writing for film and television so you did the Pablo Neruda screenplay right uh this is your latest film yeah so you write on commissions at the moment yes and I'm and I'm writing a script for myself because I want to direct a film in the near future whenever this comes back if it does and I want to um develop another play with my company because um in my company everyone is going a little bit crazy right now for obvious reasons you can do so much yoga online before it gets um um not fun anymore so we're putting together a play um which is going to be um a sequel to a play with it before which is called um at the Luna we did a play in which we we are basically trying to um free a friend of us who is in prison right now and this is reality um so we did a play to try to um convince the authority the authorities to give him um but to reason um to basically to start a new sort of um trial or maybe get a sort of um a pardon from the government we have failed so far with the first play with it in collaboration with um how theater in Berlin um it's a well international production called Mataluna which is the last name of this friend of us who is in prison right now and now we're doing a new play about him because we'd really really want to release him he um he has called me a couple of times from prison he's very scared because he is um of course in a sort of very dangerous situation because as we now um prisons have been um completely devastated by this virus so he's very afraid that he's going to get it and also in two years prisoners have been state staging um riots inside prisons to be released and or to have um access to to some sort of um medical care so he's afraid that he's going to get involved in some sort of riot and then he might get the virus as well so he has called me twice in the last um month I guess and um we're doing another play for him in order to release him um this is uh for us as well and we don't know how what form it's going to take maybe we're going to film it and maybe show it online if we need to show it before this um the situation is over so that's that's that's part of the work but that's um that's um um I just tell you just more uh meeting than writing do you feel uh in chile kind of how is the situation you feel isolated are your contacts to latin americans colleagues in other countries or to europe or america do you feel people pay attention to the situation um yes before before um this um I mean during the revolution I got a lot of emails and a lot of attention from other from other people there was a theater festival here a lot of people came to see the protest and to see the theater and I gave a couple of interviews to um international um websites including how around telling about the situation in chile and a lot of friends wrote to just find out what was we're going on there was a lot of concern and I was really pleased by that and I realized how connected we are but now that we all have um coronavirus and we're going to the same situation I realized that there's um there's um a situation in which one doesn't have to explain anything to anyone because this um situation has um unified in such a way unified unified us all in such a way that we don't need to explain to each other anymore what's going on so um I've been talking with friends in Europe and we don't even talk about the virus we go immediately into personal stuff or other stuff because we don't need to to tell each other yeah I've been I've been at home trapped for six days today I'm going to take a walk I don't have food or I've been eating too much I can't watch um tv anymore it's making me sick um you know that kind of conversation it's just taken for granted because we're going through the same so we just go into sort of a more real stuff and also I guess we we try to keep up um a sense of um humor as well because it's it's um basically the only thing we have left so we might as well use it yeah yeah yeah this is uh incredible I hope that one day you will actually get your own theater have your own building and that you can work in a good way that their support for the for the artists I mean you say you work with students you teach in this moment now what do you what do you tell the artists and what do you tell your friends what is advice how to get through this or what to keep in mind well I tell them two things one that um um we already experienced the death of theater in Tilia because after the coup happened in 1973 uh there was a curfew for years and theater was basically killed and for some reason theater survived and then it became a thing mostly through um street performance in the 80s and then it became a big thing in the mid 80s and the and the 90s and theater came back and it did wonderful beautiful things so theater has a way of surviving the most dire sort of um situation so I basically when I talk to people who are in their early 20s or even younger than that that they're going to go through the death of theater and they are going to revive it themselves and they're going to be talking about the revolution and about the coronavirus for 40 years in their theater and it's going to transform it completely and it's going to be born from them because for me there's going to be a before and after this crisis but for them it's going to be the starting point and that fear is going to look completely different it's going to be awe-inspiring and it's going to be beautiful but it's only um only only them are going to be able to to do it so basically I guess I'm terrorizing them with assigning them a lot of responsibility you know basically you are the ones who are going to say the world uh they're going to say theater by by um inventing it again um but I uh I believe it I mean I I know I hope I have a role myself in that sort of rebirth but I think ultimately it's going to be the role of people who um were starting um writing this uh wave and so I if I understood this you cannot read um anything at the moment or but do you or if you do read what do you read do you listen to something is there something that where you connected to which perhaps even you before but now it's kind of a different or something new well this I think um so before I told you about my toddler situation so before this I wasn't I wasn't um um engaged with television at all and I did let my my kid watch um screens at all but since we're trapped now we are in order to save our sanity we're turning on the the the computer and watching um I don't know those videos for kids and I've been engaging with um television for children and it's just the most wonderful thing I thought it was just violence and horrible stuff but it's just beautifully done and and pure joy so I've been enjoying that really this is this is new and that's that's given me um a lot of uh optimism I get and respect for that sort of um uh creation I've been um I've been um following closely um the um US elections primaries and what's going on there which is a spectacle itself it's terrifying so that's um of course I read that the usual we expect the stuff like I don't know Jacobin and but current affairs and sometimes a paper of record but um I keep very engaged with what's going on in the US politically speaking and that gives me a sense of doom but also a sense of sort of um uh reality being actually living in reality and um I am also um also I am listening to um a lot of um um electronic music abstract electronic music from the 60s and 70s I think um there's a a sense of beauty beauty in in that sort of abstraction and also um there's a numbing quality I guess because uh it um is so overwhelming and so strange and so different from everything that is sort of uh has the quality of quieting your mind in in in a way that um no meditation has able to do for me yet so I guess that's my that's my work music and and my meditation music as well so yeah that's my my cultural consumption I guess and and of course no cable no television and no um no broadcast news at all incredible for my for my own science team that you also switch between children television and the ultra violent images from the revolution um you listened I guess Brian Eno and worked like this who said his music is as ignorable as it is interesting and that it balances it out and and it is yeah so Guillermo really you are one of the artists where we do say why we need to hear about it artists who've been on the right side of history right side of progressive justice and on the right side of also what's right and it's also you put your your body into the work as a puzzle lini said we all should be doing throwing our bodies into the lives when you stop doing theater but we're participating in the revolution and and really we all think about you you're part of our big global theater community and your work is extremely important and please do do know that chiller has been on the minds for many many reasons enough for every everyone to our audience I hope you will be able to listen in also next week as I said as far as we know we are the only institution theater institution New York and in the US perhaps also New York would produce as a new meaningful content every day and just hearing from Guillermo just why it is important that we that we hear and listen to these to these voices we have also significant artists as Guillermo for next week we have the great remedy company Stefan Daniel and Helgaard will be with us Guilleregis Jr from Haiti um we'll talk about the situation um there Jalila Bacar from Tunisia who's a great leader one of the most successful maybe most significant writers in the Arab world Peter Sellers will also join us and we'll talk about his work and life and how he gives meaning and then we have Oscar Eustace who runs the great public theater where he also did your work and Tony Torn who runs this tiny small theater out of his home his from his father a beautiful space so they both will give us views what's happening in New York City and their take on it so um can really thank you thank you listeners for taking time I know how busy these days are and how much content is out there and everything but I think for artists also like Guillermo it's good to know that people are listening that care and then we have um more questions that uh we'll keep with us again Guillermo thank you for coming uh on our uh uh Seagal talks thanks to a hull round at Emerson College in Boston for hosting us the uh and Vijay and Travis and the Seagal team May and Sanyang and Jackie and Andy who came on so thank you all and I hope to hear from you all soon again in Chile and I hope Guillermo will be back in New York one day I'll come and visit so all my best and really all my best wishes you're still healthy and and continue doing the good work thank you bye bye thank you so much I'm thinking a lot New York City good and everybody they're out there stay