Gustavo Gac-Artigas

Gustavo Gac-Artigas

Gustavo Gac-Artigas is a Chilean American writer,^[1][2] playwright,^[3] actor, theater director^[4] and editor. Born in Santiago, Chile, he has lived in New Jersey since 1995. He is a correspondent member of the North American Academy of the Spanish Language (Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española-ANLE).^[5]

Biography

In 1968 Gac-Artigas traveled to Bulgaria to participate in the Democratic Youth World Festival and to Czechoslovakia invited by the government of the time to observe the changes introduced during the Prague Spring. Upon his return to Chile, he dropped out of college and embarked on a trip through Latin America performing in different countries with a documentary theater play called Poetry Mail which included poems by established writers, local writers and songs intertwined with current events from national and local newspapers. With Poetry Mail, Gac-Artigas traversed South America from his native Chile to Bogota, Colombia.^[6] In Colombia he worked with Enrique Buenaventura and Santiago Garcia and the Teatro La Candelaria in Bogotá.^[6]

In 1971 he returned to Chile where he founded and directed the experimental Theatre del Cobre (TEC)^[7] in the Cultural House of El Teniente copper mine during the government of Salvador Allende. TEC's last performance in Chile was at the Chuquicamata mine,^[8] in the northern part of the country with the play Freedom, Freedom, an adaptation by Gac-Artigas of Flavio Rengel’s play about a group opposed to the 1973 coup d'état. The presentation began on September 10, 1973 and ended with a forum attended by David Baytelman, manager of the mine,^[9] mineworkers, and some political leaders on September 11, day in which the group was supposed to continue their tour to present the play for the workers of the nitrate mine.

Gac-Artigas was arrested on September 11 in the afternoon, and three days later led to Rancagua, 2,000 kilometers south, where he was imprisoned in the public jail as political prisoner^[10] number 3245 on the list prepared by the Chilean National Institute of Human Rights. He was interrogated for three days, “with haste”—as the military used to call torture—by a lieutenant named Medina. Months later he was out of jail thanks to the intervention of the UN and was taken to Santiago where, with a deportation order, and a travel document issued by the Red Cross, he left the country for exile in Paris.^[11] There, along with Colombian actress Perla Valencia, he founded the group Théâtre de la Résistance-Chili^[12] (then Nuevo Teatro Los Comediantes) with which he toured the stages of Europe and participated in major international festivals such as: Nancy, Avignon, Ljubljana, Hammamet, Djendouba, Tabarka, Hammam Lift, Yverdon, Bern, Zurich and Stagedoor Festival^[13] among others.

In 1984 he tried to return to Chile, but on September 5 of that year his name appeared on a list of about 5,000 people forbidden from entering the country for representing “a danger to the internal security of the State”.^[14] This failed attempt forced him to wander, with his group, through Latin America, from Buenos Aires to Bogota crossing through Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador. He remained with his group in Colombia for one year performing in different parts of the country. After a hunger strike, he was sent back to Europe, to Rotterdam, and not Paris, because after one year out of France he had lost his political refugee status in that country. Between 1986 and 1989 he lived in the Netherlands, where he continued his theater work and with his group he participated in the Stagedoor Festival (1986) and the Latino Festival of Utrecht (1989). In 1989 he received the “Poetry Park Award” for his story “Dr. Zamenhofstraat.”^[15]

In 2018 his novel Y todos éramos actores, un siglo de luz y sombra [And All of Us Were Actors, A Century Of Light And Shadow] (2016)^[16][17] English edition translated by Andrea G. Labinger resulted finalist of the ILBA (International Latino Book Award 2018) in the category Best Fiction Book in Translation - Spanish to English.

Since 1991, Gac-Artigas has lived in the United States. In 1992 he was invited by the theater department of Texas Christian University as artist in residence to direct his work Discoverings.

He currently resides in New Jersey where he continues his literary work.^{[18][19][20][21]}

Works

Reception

Severo Sarduy, about his first novel, It Was A Time To Dream: “Imaginative writing of extreme theatricality and fiction (based on historical facts sometimes recognizable) that make text one halogen,^[48] Edith Grossman, about his second novel, "E il orbo era rondo": “I was really impressed by the superposition of different time periods, the interpenetration of the historical, the mythological and the surreal. A difficult but valuable book, closer to an epic poem than to a novel.”^[49]

About And All of Us Were Actors, A Century of Light and Shadow.

Gac-Artigas' works have been performed in 18 international theater festivals:

• World Festival of Nancy (France, 1975)
• Avignon Festival (France, 1975, 1980)
• Festival Ljubljana (Yugoslavia, 1980)
• Festival of Bern (Switzerland, 1980)
• Festival Zurich (Switzerland, 1980)
• Festival of Yverdon (Switzerland, 1981, 1983)
• Festival of Hammamet (Tunisia, 1982)
• Djendouba Festival (Tunisia, 1982)
• Festival of Tabarka (Tunisia, 1982)
• Hammam-Lif Festival (Tunisia, 1982)
• Carrefour de l’Europe (France, 1983, 1984)
• VII International Festival of Manizales (Colombia, 1985)
• Stagedoor Festival (Netherlands, 1986)
• Latino Festival in Utrecht (Netherlands, 1989)
• XXVII International Festival of the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña (San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1991)

References

Spanish Language Author, Chilean writers, Chilean Literature, Chilean poetry,