Loose mares

April 22, 1973. Santiago. Gay, transvestite and transgender people take to the streets. For the first time in Chilean history, they publicly demand respect, equality and the right to their own identity. A few months later, a military coup would begin seventeen years of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship.

Fifty years later, Ernesto Orellana and Teatro SUR return to an event that for decades remained on the sidelines of official history. If this sounds like a harbinger of a stable documentary theatre — nothing could be more wrong.

Yeguas Sueltas is cheeky, overdrawn and campy. Documentary archives and testimonies meet here with corporeality, theatrical excess and queer aesthetics. History is not politely reconstructed — it is taken over, played out anew, and told in the language of people previously excluded from the official narrative.

The title itself is such a gesture. Yeguas Sueltas refers to the derogatory term used by the press at the time to describe the participants in the protest. Teatro SUR takes the language of contempt and turns it against those who have tried to ridicule and silence the queer community with it.

The stage features, among others, transgender actresses and transvestites. Their contemporary experience meets the history of half a century ago, and the theater becomes a place where memory need not be either monumental or devotional. It can be loud, carnal, funny, provocative. She may have too much makeup and definitely not intend to apologize for taking up space.

The premiere of Yeguas Sueltas took place in 2023, on the 50th anniversary of the military coup. Since then, the show has been watched by more than 25 thousand people in Chile.

Ernesto Orellana Gómez — Chilean director, playwright and theater researcher. Founder of the Teatro SUR collective, whose work focuses on the history, memory and experiences of the queer community in Latin America. Author of the concept of “theater of sexual dissidence”, combining documentary theater, performance and archival activities with reflection on the politics of memory and the rights of LGBTQIA+ people. His performances have been presented at the most important Chilean festivals and abroad.

For fifteen years, Teatro SUR has been creating performances dedicated to the memory, identity and rights of the queer community. The team uses theatre as a space for social dialogue, exploring the mechanisms of exclusion and ways of representing non-heteronormative people in contemporary culture. The productions of Teatro SUR have been presented at festivals in Chile, Germany, Estonia, Ecuador, Cuba and the United States, among others.

Fig. Charlie de Ferrera