ARCHIVES 2016 / La Dictadura de lo cool

Subtitled “We conform to our nonconformism,” the new show by La Re-Sentienda is about a social group they consider to have reached a dominating position today: the Bobos (for Bourgeois bohemians). Chilean director Marco Layera, aware of belonging to that group, questions the potential and integrity of this group that has become a social class defined by its total acceptance of capitalism as a lifestyle and a means of communication, in its relationship to the world and the market, while claiming to be the heir to so-called counter-cultural values. In order to study this inherent paradox, he and his company have decided to use the realm of fiction: on the evening of 1 May in Santiago de Chile, as protesters are taking to the streets in ever greater numbers, members of the capital's cultural elite gather at a friend's. They're there to celebrate his appointment as Minister of Culture. However, disillusioned by the situation, he locks himself in his room and refuses to join the celebration. All he sees now is the hypocrisy of his friends, a world of art that has become self-satisfied and smug and is blatantly incapable of engineering real change of any kind. From this elitist circle, the play, with its contradictory and provocative title, then goes looking for actual centres of radical resistance where a true alternative model to capitalism and conformity exists.

Marco Layera
While studying law, philosophy, and criminology at the University of Chile, Marco Layera also studied acting at the drama school La Matriz in Valparaiso and at the school Imagen. In 2007, he founded the company La Re-sentida, which employs young Chilean actors who share his conception of art in general and drama in particular as tools of political thought, necessarily innovative and subversive. With them, Marco Layera has performed in many theatres and festivals throughout the world, and in particular in Europe. He has also created works that question current scenography techniques within the framework of two different projects, “Elencos ciudadanos” (“Citizens Elencos”) and “Laboratorios de montaje” (“Editing Labs”). A recipient of the Eugenio Guzmán award from the University of Chile, he has written articles for the magazine Apuntes, published by the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, and for Alias, a supplement to the newspaper Il Manifesto. After Simulacro (The Simulacrum) and Tratando de hacer una obra que cambie el mundo (Trying to create a play that will change the world), a cheerful play designed to bring people together, Marco Layera and his actors questioned the legacy of Salvador Allende by reenacting the final speech he gave during the coup led by General Pinochet in La Imaginacion del futuro (The Imagination of the Future), which played at the Festival d'Avignon in 2014.

 “Bobos”
In France, the phrase “bourgeois bohème” first appeared in 1978, in Claire Brétécher's bande dessinée Les Frustrés. In 2000, American writer David Brooks published Bobos in Paradise, a portmanteau of “bohemian bourgeois;” the neologism is immediately used in and popularised by the French translation by Agathe Nabet and Marianne Thirioux, published that same year under the title Les Bobos. Characterised by their relaxed lifestyle and relationship to consumerism, this social class is made up of educated and well off people who combine capitalist behaviours and left-leaning values.