The Brazilian company Polifônica presents Deserto, its stage reinterpretation of the life and work of the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño, at the Félix Petite theatre in Vitoria-Gasteiz on Wednesday 4 November at 19:30, according to Kulturklik. The performance forms part of the 51st International Theatre Festival.
Performer Rodrigo Bolzan brings the material to life, drawing on fragments from works including La universidad desconocida, 2666, El gaucho insufrible, Entre paréntesis and Bolaño por sí mismo. Sonia Díaz de Corcuera, the city's councillor for Culture and Education, described the piece as an expanded dramatic proposal in which theatre, literature, music, image and performance are woven together.
Why it matters
Deserto arrives in the Basque capital as a reflection on a question the production poses directly: what role does the artist, and poetic creation itself, play amid the violence of the contemporary world? Kulturklik reports that the show builds this collective reflection from Bolaño's poems, short stories, chronicles, lectures, interviews and autobiographical passages.
The project also carries a longer history. It was conceived by director and playwright Luiz Felipe Reis and began taking shape in 2015, the year that marked the 40th anniversary of Bolaño's literary debut in the anthology Poetas infrarrealistas mexicanos (1975). Nine years after that starting point, Deserto premiered in 2024 — a year that brought two anniversaries at once: four decades since Bolaño's first published novel and two decades since the release of his masterwork 2666.
A life told through displacement and exile
According to Kulturklik, the performance travels through the life of the writer it calls the leading Latin American author of the early 21st century, with particular attention to his final years, when he was already ill. It is in that period, the reporting suggests, that his most fundamental and recurring artistic and existential concerns come into view.
The biographical arc is one of movement and uprooting. Bolaño was born in Chile, passed through Mexico and settled in Spain, and his life was marked by displacement, exile, abandonment and a rejection of the system's rules, Kulturklik reports.
Bolzan is the sole performer named in the coverage, and the piece places him at the meeting point of several disciplines rather than within a conventional dramatic frame. The councillor's description of the work as "expanded" points to this layering of forms, with text, sound and image sharing the stage.
The research behind the production
Polifônica is a research and creation centre founded in Rio de Janeiro in 2014 by Reis and by the actress, performer and researcher Julia Lund. Kulturklik reports that the company has devoted itself to aesthetic and thematic investigation of what it terms stage polyphony and counter-scenes to the Anthropocene.
Taken together, these ideas are meant to encourage experimentation with different ways of approaching and responding to what the company calls Anthropocapitalism — the ecological, social and political disturbances generated by an ideological machinery it describes as anthropocentric, colonialist, capitalist and neoliberal.
Deserto extends that line of inquiry while widening the company's research into the faint boundary that both joins and blurs autobiography and autofiction, performer and character. The production also continues Polifônica's examination of the relationship between the tragic and trauma, violence and resilience, metamorphosis, regeneration and the affirmation of vital force — themes the company says it has explored across all of its previous projects.
The Vitoria-Gasteiz date follows earlier notices of the production in Spain, including coverage linked to Madrid's city council and to the Diario de Noticias de Álava, which reported the show's arrival from Brazil.
Viewers in Vitoria-Gasteiz can see Deserto at the Félix Petite on 4 November at 19:30; further dates on the company's Spanish run have yet to be confirmed in the reporting available.
