Your Desire in Fragments - Chile

The subtitle of Chilean playwright and director Ramón Griffero’s 2003 play Your Desires in Fragments reads “Conceptual Irruptions/Textual Poetics for a Poetics of Space.” That subtitle encapsulates in many ways Griffero’s dramaturgy, which creates texts that are frequently open-ended, providing for multiple interpretations, and volcanic, in which new characters, themes, directions surge from below in the midst of scenes, disrupting where we thought we were. In his book The Dramaturgy of Space Griffero posits that human society conceives of space primarily in terms of squares and rectangles but those forms don’t occur naturally in the non-human environment. As both playwright and director Griffero incorporates the circle not the square. In Your Desires in Fragment,s with characters such as YOU, SHE, ONE, HE and THAT ONE; thoughts, emotions, relationships are constantly fragmented yet simultaneously fluid. For Griffero theatrical discourse is multi-layered and multivalent. Past, present, and future exist simultaneously, not as a linear progression. Ideas, dreams, and desires are actualized by scenic images that provide a visual counterpoint to the words that spoken. As we move through the galleries in You’s “Internal Museum” we encounter a world where both characters and locations are constantly circling back on each other, reconnecting and recapitulating what has gone before as a spur to both present and future action. Words and phrases spoken by one character in one context are repeated by another character in a different context, the unfulfilled plans of a character in one scene are carried out by another character in a different scene, and, in Griffero’s own staging of the play, physical gestures are refracted throughout the production, constantly reappearing and echoing what has gone before or as multiple actors mirror each other’s gestures, whether they are part of the scene in question or not. With material of this sort the theatrical translator’s task becomes one not of precise definition, but rather of imprecision where the text’s ambiguities and circularities are laid bare and left open as a springboard for the creative energies of the collaborators approaching it in the target language’s theatre and, ultimately, for the audience to complete.