Claudio Di Girolamo, stage designer, painter, director and cultural advisor, at his home in Santiago (Chile). Sofia Yanjari
At 93, Claudio Di Girolamo, one of the most important managers of the Chilean theater scene of the past seven decades, is “running a marathon”. He’s not wearing shorts or sneakers, but he’s in a hurry. “I still don’t have anyone to give the Poststick to,” he laments on a rainy afternoon in the living room of his home in uptown Santiago. Remember how legendary actors Alejandro Flores and Américo Vargas did the same to their generation, giving them audiences in theaters that didn’t exist before. Today that is no longer possible, because “theater is only political and the political is always a pamphlet.” He accuses the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990) of having interrupted the creative process, since the return to democracy “progressed very slowly”.
Born in Rome, Di Girolamo prays every morning but doesn’t go to mass. The religious art veteran defines himself as a Catholic, although he doesn’t believe the Virgin Mary is the Mother of God. Recently he read the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic and was fascinated by the version that is much closer to his faith: Father-Mother, Creator of the Cosmos… “It’s something different. “It does not represent a contrast between earth and sky,” emphasizes the ninety-year-old enthusiastically, thereby demonstrating his intact ability to marvel.
It is precisely the cosmos that occupies him these days. What is beyond. The latest discoveries. The cultural scientist is fascinated by science: “Those who say that everything is possible are not the crazy artists, but the scientists.” he revisited the room of his own home. And found that there was almost nothing left; the works of his long career had taken the place. Also, the mice ate them even though you set traps. That’s why a few weeks ago he donated his more than 3,000 plays to the archives of the Catholic University Theater School, an institution with which he maintains an affective bond because it was the first one he worked for when he arrived from Italy at the age of 19 years.
Behind each of these 3,000 works lies an anecdote that Di Girolamo knows how to tell with the precision of a historian. María de la Luz Hurtado, researcher and director of the program in charge of the archives, exceptionally brought some pieces from the Campus Oriente university center to the meeting at the artist’s house, where they are carefully preserved.
Di Girolamo travels back to the Second World War with some delicate sketches he made for La macchina infernale while he was studying at the School of Fine Arts in Rome (1944-1948). The grandson of a man who ran away from home to join the company of Eleonora Duse, the great Italian theater diva of the turn of the century, recalls crying “hysterically” when he first heard a bombardment. Also Christmas with ordinary pots – one evening when the refrigerator was empty, his mother set the table and let him and his brothers draw what they wanted to eat; a game that fortunately made them forget about hunger, the hiding places in the basement, the blankets on the windows … Even as he eventually got used to it, to the point that he and his brother Vittorio sat down on beach chairs to count how many planes they saw flying across the sky.
Sketches of the set for “La Macchina Infernale” drawn by Claudio Di Girolamo at the Art Academy in Rome (1944-1948). Sofia Yanjari
More documents appear. He already drew some of them in Chile, the country to which he came without knowing what a democracy “in search of peace and bread” was. They are from the play Los Condenados for the Catholic University’s Teatro Ensayo, performed at the Municipal de Santiago. He learned a lesson from this experience. The audience was so impressed by the “pretty” of the scenery that they ended up with “trauma”. “The landscape was too full of character. I understood that I had to be in the service of the work. “The protagonists are the actors, the stage design has to help them,” emphasizes the son and father of artists.
In this chapter of his life, he uses the correction of a well-known fact: he did not found the Teatro Ictus – his next professional step – in 1958. It was Mónica Echeverría and Paz Yrarrázaval, he clarifies. There he worked for decades with a group of students who had emigrated from the UC Rehearsal Theater. They presented works classified as avant-garde and filled the rooms Saturday after Saturday. “The dictatorship was good for Ictus because it forced us not to do pamphleteering, they forbade us to do it. People asked us how do you do it? “We have learned to say without saying it and not by saying it,” he emphasizes.
The members of the company turned 30, 40 and 50 years old on stage. According to his account, Di Girolamo suggested opening a second branch of the theater for young people, but received no support and left the theatre. Leaving Sala La Comedia was not easy. Evidence of this is the love letter he wrote to the place on parting, which he read in an issue of the Cádiz Festival:
Over the years, forgive me, I felt like I was making history with you. Some of those who were first in their seats keep coming back. In them I see the passage of time. His first gray hairs remind me how much I owe you and how much you took from me. You gave a place to my illusions and my hopes. You managed to entangle my life with you. That’s why I love you. But I also hate you because by holding me back you tamed me a little, you forced me to stay, to settle down; You tried to convince me that I can’t live without you. Maybe it’s true; But I have to be honest with you, especially today. I’ll have to leave you sooner or later; or you will leave me The “comedy” will continue for me somewhere else; for you, here, with others.
Pieces by Claudio De Girolamo: manual program of the work Martín Rivas, Teatro de Ensayo UC (1954); Manual for the work La Princesa, Ictus (1961), poster for the work Variations for Percussion Dead, Ictus (1964); and the draft of a proposal for the poster of the X° Iberoamerican Theater Festival of Cádiz (1995).sofia yanjari
In search of new blood, Di Girolamo founded the Teatro Dos Workshop. “I do theater and I have to have my finger on the pulse in order to be able to conduct a dialogue,” he says. Is this dialogue taking place today? “To understand an idea of contemporary theater it has to take a certain amount of time, and now nothing is permanent. We live in a market society.” This idea of the ephemeral has occupied him for some time. Not as an adjective, but as a subject. He sees the impermanence he speaks of in every moment he reviews his life or the 50 he claims to have. He would marry them all. He is unwilling to choose whether he prefers the position of set designer, director or cultural adviser – a position he currently holds in Gabriel Boric’s government. He identifies as curious.
“I was born and will die because I am curious. As for death, I’m curious to know what’s there. It defines this process but is not definitive. And don’t tell me I’m talking about eternal life because I’m religious. I know this doesn’t end, but it changes. Why are you so convinced? “Because we’re so young we don’t have eyes to see everything else, we don’t have wings to see beyond,” he says, before returning to a reflection on the universe. A painting hangs behind his back in which he wanted to capture “the most original”. It is a broken marraqueta – “the bread…give us this day our daily bread” – that flies in the depths and darkness of the cosmos. He painted it in 1988: “Before I felt it, but now I understand what it means.”
Claudio Di Girolamo in the living room of his house in Santiago. Sofia Yanjari