Allende

“Allende” is a tribute to the person behind the politician who died in La Moneda on 11 September 1973, then President of Chile.

Jessica Walker, from an experimental and non-realistic approach, takes the music, language and symbolism of a symphony orchestra as her central metaphor to speak of the conflict between freedom and dictatorship. The set is dominated by twelve large lamps evoking torture rooms, and by a pile of shoes.

Far from making a strictly political work, Walker explores the human side of revolutionaries and torturers, of soldiers and of mothers searching for the disappeared, as well as the figures who surrounded Salvador Allende: his family, his lovers, contemporaries such as Víctor Jara and Pablo Neruda, and antagonists such as Augusto Pinochet.

Here Walker addresses a subject she lived through first-hand during her childhood and adolescence in Santiago de Chile. In September 2023, on the fiftieth anniversary of the coup, the Company took the piece to Chile and performed it on 11 September at the Parque por la Paz Villa Grimaldi.

“Allende” is the echo of an era, the evocation of memory and, above all, a song for peace.