A Prayer Form of Performance: Lemi Ponifasio on Love to Death (Amor a la muerte)

Love to Death (Amor a la muerte)’s creation was sparked by an event: the 2018 murder of 24-year-old Camilo Cantrillanca. One of Chile’s Indigenous Mapuche people, Catrillanca was wrongfully killed by an officer of a national anti-terrorism unit, and accompanying officers erased body camera footage to cover up the malfeasance. Catrillanca lived in a community that in 2003 had declared autonomy from the Chilean state and was subject to a heavy military presence. The death of Catrillanca, the fourth Mapuche killed by the police since 2002, spurred protests across Chile.

Yet this instance is just one in the Mapuche people’s long, complex struggle to survive and thrive on the land now known as Chile. The Mapuche lived autonomously in the southern region of Araucanía, where Catrillanca lived and died, until the Chilean government invaded and ultimately annexed their territory in 1882. Mapuche land was pillaged, seized, and sold. Thousands were killed, and many survivors scattered to urban centers to find work. The region still has Chile’s highest proportion of Mapuche—and is the country’s poorest. 

The policies of Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship (1973–90) further harmed the Mapuche. Pinochet prohibited communal land use and privatized all territory. He encouraged industrial logging on Mapuche lands with policies and incentives that continue to displace and disrupt the  inhabitants. His Anti-Terrorism Law, designed to crush opposition, is still used to prosecute Mapuche dissidents.

The 1990 return to democracy did not, as hoped, improve the Mapuche’s lot. Tension and violence between Mapuche organizations and agents of government and industry have only intensified. Chile’s mass demonstrations in 2019, borne out of long-held frustrations with a rising cost of living, low wages, poor health care and education, and stark inequality, heralded real change: in 2020 Chileans voted to revise the dictatorship-era constitution, and in 2021 they elected to the presidency 35-year-old leftist Gabriel Boric, who vowed sweeping reform. The constitutional revision process signaled as much for the Indigenous population: the assembly had strong Indigenous representation (including its first president, Mapuche linguist and activist Elisa Loncón), and its draft enshrined Indigenous rights, self-governance, and representation.

Yet these aspects of the constitution raised particular skepticism from the populace, sharpened by right-wing propaganda. In September 2022, following rampant misinformation campaigns, Chileans rejected the draft, seen by many as too left-leaning. Relations remain chilly between Boric’s government and the Mapuche; conflict in the south has deepened.

This is the backdrop to both Catrillanca’s murder and Love to Death (Amor a la muerte). It is the backdrop to Lemi Ponifasio’s ongoing collaboration with the Mapuche community in Araucanía, since 2014. But Love to Death (Amor a la muerte) is not about history, politics, or even Mapuche culture. Rather, the performance, featuring two Chilean women, is a reckoning with grief and a ritual for survival. It is a spiritual act performed not just for this loss, but for all those before and all those to come. The space created does not ignore reality, but focuses on the broader expanse we occupy, the land that participates in our renewal. Ponifasio’s staging taps the capacity of voice and body to exorcize, mourn, resist, and heal, and of light and sound to cultivate necessary meditation.

Ponifasio sat down for a conversation in January 2023, shortly after performances at Chile’s Santiago a Mil International Theater Festival.

Alexandra Ripp

It’s wonderful to have the chance to talk. I saw your piece in Santiago a Mil in 2016. I was excited to see the video of the newer work and learn that you have an ongoing collaboration with the Mapuche people. How did your MAU Mapuche project evolve?

Lemi Ponifasio

When I first came to Santiago to perform, we had lunch with Carmen Romero, the director of the Santiago a Mil Theater Festival. Carmen asked me, “What are you doing next? What would you like to do with us?” There were people protesting on the street, so I asked, “Who are those people and what’s happening there?” She said, “They are Mapuche,” and I said, “OK, I’ll work with them, because I don’t know what they’re trying to say.” I found out that maybe a few weeks before, the police had killed a young Mapuche man. We started to talk with Carmen and now have continued this project through many different phases.

First, we went down to the south, where a lot of the trouble’s at, and looked at communities, talked with people, got a sense of what they meant by “community,” and just were together with people. I don’t go to communities to make art. I go to think about something differently.

This is also where I met Elisa Avendaño Curaqueo. Elisa came in the last five minutes of this workshop I was making. She’s a very tiny woman, but she looked like she had power. All the young people were kind of like, “Who’s this?” She was talking to them, and then I said to her, “Sing.” And when she sang, I realized, “Ah, that’s the dimension that these young people need to make their way towards.” It’s not so much about Mapuche culture for me. It’s about the consciousness of a people.

My friend in Santiago, Elisa Loncón (inaugural president of the Constitutional Convention)—this other special woman, another Elisa—I asked her to come and see what I was doing. Carmen sent me to meet with Elisa Loncón when I first decided to make this project. It’s been really good. The relationship with everyone is ongoing, and we have future projects. It’s more than just making theater. It’s about what aspects of life you create to make people feel like what they can imagine or what they think can make a difference.

AR

Right. And that’s the aim of all of your projects—or do you see this as distinct in some way?

LP

It’s the same. The problem of life is always a problem of culture, how you practice your life. What motivates the way we practice our life is our spirit. If our spirit is sick, of course our behavior is going to be sick. So, by making these performances or these activities, it’s about that transformation. In reality, you don’t go to the theater to distract yourself for an hour or two. I think people really are looking for a spiritual transformation. That’s why they go to the theater. But we don’t say it. It’s a normal practice of life. Spirituality means the frame through which you practice your life. I don’t want to sound like a hippie, but . . .

AR

Makes sense to me! So, you mentioned how you met Elisa, and then in the piece you also have Natalia García-Huidobro, who’s a Chilean flamenco dancer. I read an interview in which you said that you chose to work with them not because they represented some cultural form, but because of who they were. But they are masters of their own cultural forms, and we see them perform those. So I’m curious, when you entered the room with a flamenco dancer and a Mapuche composer-singer, if you had thoughts of how those forms would interact, or if that became clear to you in the process of making.

LP

I don’t pay attention to those things in the same way that I don’t pay attention to culture. Those are the things that make us different. I think we need to find in the arts and in the world right now what makes us unite. I can have a cup of coffee and talk about culture, but after the cup of coffee, we need to figure out how we are going to get on with the world together. Culture is nothing. If you want to learn about Mapuche culture, go to the Mapuche world. Don’t come to me. I’m here for a different thing.

As for Natalia, when I came here and started the project I Am Mapuche, the festival sent Natalia as my assistant to help with the translation. I had no idea that she was a dancer. But she really looked after Elisa, and I liked this bond: a woman from deep in the forest and a young woman who lives in Madrid for a lot of the time. They knew each other through the projects. I never knew that she did flamenco until we were in Rapa Nui, in Easter Island, waiting for the bus, and she started doing things. I said, “Where did you learn that from?” and she said, “Flamenco.” I don’t know anything about flamenco, in the same way that I don’t know anything about Mapuche culture. I just start with that, with not knowing anything, because that is the requirement of the arts—to take us to somewhere we don’t know.

With both of them, I just have to find what they can give me—what they are willing to give me—and then I make a performance from it. So I keep seeing Elisa, always with this drum, this beat. And then I see Natalia with this flamenco step, with this kind of a beat. I thought, “Oh, that’s very interesting, these two rhythms, two different beats of stomping in some way to wake up the ancestors.”

AR

It’s amazing that you found them by chance.

LP

Well, it’s like that always. You start with people you meet. The whole idea of creating, I think, is how to point people towards poetry in life. Not explanations of life, or meanings of life, or the political culture of life, but just poetry, an eternal dimension where you’re free. You don’t need anything; you don’t need anybody to prove anything. But we don’t have those moments so much.

AR

For sure. I think what’s so beautiful about the piece is that it is centered on a political event—you make reference to the murder of Camilo Catrillanca, and you show the names of other murdered Mapuche people on the wall—but you engender this cosmological setting. I wonder how you go about this balance. You work a lot with people around their day-to-day struggles, but you create this, as we were saying, spiritual dimension. You somehow weave what could be two different tones.

LP

I think that if you’re an artist, you are political because you are on the side of truth, the side of beauty, the side of the weak. You are on the side of those who are in disorder, who are not enjoying the heaven of your order. So I guess that makes it political. But the shouting of political statements is just noise. It’s not political. It’s violent. We don’t listen or hear anyone. So, for me, the creation of this poetic space allows people to come to some kind of self-realization of how they should be in the world. No amount of shouting I do will change anything. No theater piece is going to solve the problems of the world. But these are just moments that help us, that give our, how would you say, our consciousness fitness?

AR

Yes! It’s like the gym for your soul.

LP

Yes. Because we are so seduced by our feelings. But feelings are just an illusion of your consciousness. It’s just what you feel. That’s not the reality.

People say the work is very political because there’s the Chilean flag. But I think that under every flag, every label, we’re all the same. For me, the piece is really about the undressing, about putting away those things for a moment and then just existing in the cosmos. That’s where we are all bonded. That’s really what the piece is. It’s like a healing ritual of these two women trying to enact a ceremony about their lives and the world they’re in.

Since colonization, these women have been lamenting, crying for the loss of what is. For me, it’s really the loss of our consciousness, our acknowledgement of the existence of everything in our lives. Not just us humans and our kids, but also nature, mountains, culture, language, ceremony—the things that connect us eternally, that make us humble and part of the process of Earth, rather than just people who think the earth owes anything to us, you know?

With Catrillanca, I was trying to find a start. Why do we sacrifice our young people? This is what’s happening. Right in the middle of riots comes this murder. We’re performing the piece now at GAM (Centro Cultural Gabriela Mistral), and it’s the 50th anniversary of the coup by Pinochet. On the way there from the hotel, bullets and graffiti and violence are everywhere. For me, the theater is not so much about really opening our wounds. How do we create the ceremony to heal, to be at peace with things?

So, the piece is also very much about what it means to be a human being. We are not separate, special things in the world. We have to look at alternatives of how we will make our way in the next 50 years. Not every answer is in science or in policymaking or technology. For me, a big part of the answer is how we practice our lives. At the moment, much of the definition of “human” is the definition of the Western society: that you need to consume, succeed, compete. It’s a deforming of our relationship with each other and with nature, because the fundamental thing of capitalism is selfishness.

AR

I think that the image of Natalia under the tree is so striking because you get the feeling that she and the tree are reciprocal, that her relationship with the earth is not what you’re saying, of consuming and just leaving.

LP

I make a lot of noise in the theater, but sometimes I try to make the noise so people can be quiet, and think, and listen to something beyond themselves. It’s kind of an odd thing to say, but in that silent poetry, it’s just a tree on a woman. Life goes like that. You go this way and you come back. We all share this moment where we go back and lie down and be at home. And then the tree grows up and the whole thing starts again.

AR

As you mentioned, it’s the 50th anniversary of the coup, and throughout your process, it’s been an incredibly tumultuous time for Chile, from the protests starting in 2019, and then the election, the constitutional amendment, and now the anniversary. I don’t know how much you’ve been there as you developed the piece, but I’m wondering how events in Chile have affected your work—or not.

LP

This has been happening since 500 years ago, when the Europeans came to exterminate the Mapuche. This is really why they came. There was no other reason. They didn’t come to coexist. They came to take their resources and take their lives. So, there are worse things that happened in the past than today.

Nothing really has changed for the Mapuche people. They are still being arrested based on laws created by Pinochet. This is what this revised constitution was trying to change. The constitution itself is a fantastic visionary document. They had no choice but to write that way. I am privileged to have relationships with these people, and I suppose what they’re trying to achieve is probably the same as what we’re trying to achieve in the theater: to create a consciousness of the other side, of the existence of the other.

Right now in the world, it’s not just about sustainability. It’s really about how we can create a truly conscious, intimate relationship with the world, with nature, with the trees, with the whales.

AR

The first time you performed this particular piece in Chile was 2020?

LP

Yeah, we were making this work in the middle of the riots in Santiago, and we were performing at GAM, the central station for all the riots. It’s fascinating when you’re inside the theater, the performance starts, and you hear the violence outside.

AR

You developed the work further this past week, and then you performed it again. Have you made changes?

LP

A lot has happened: it was the beginning of the COVID, and that was a massive experience in the world. For me, it’s really about refining what we were doing, or trying to do, in that quite difficult time, and understanding more. Sometimes one can be reactive to a situation. It’s not a work, it’s a reaction.

This is a work that’s a prayer, almost. It’s not a work for dinner and date. You are really asking someone for what’s in their heart.

AR

I’m thrilled that the work is going to come to three U.S. venues. Is there something about this piece in particular that feels like a conversation that needs to be brought to other countries, or to the U.S. especially?

LP

I think we live now in a very simultaneous dimension of life. The performers are not isolated in some forest in Temuco (the region in Araucanía where Ponifasio works). So rather than people talking about them, I put them in front of the people. The good thing about performance is people can sit and listen to what energy, what consciousness, is transmitted into the space.

International connection is important right now because we all know we live on a very small planet called Earth, and we are all part of the answer. I don’t always choose to come to America, but Chile is part of your continent. And it’s good for the people I work with to travel and communicate their lives to the world. We need many, many versions of the world. We don’t have to make our work look like [theater designers] Bob Wilson, or [Jerzy] Grotowski, or [Robert] Lepage. We have our aesthetic, our language, our cosmovision of the world. So, of course, people might go, “Oh, what the hell is that?” But after a few times seeing it, you start to understand and become part of something.

AR

Is there anything else that you’d like U.S. audiences to know in this framing of you, what’s happening in Chile, the work, and how it’s all connected? Is there anything else that you want to say that I didn’t ask about?

LP

Well, it’s a report from this part of the world, you know? It’s not a political report or the weather report, but it’s a sense of these two women. They’re basically talking about their lives. Through the performance, you can see the world that they are dealing with—whether it’s the community, the oppression, politics, the Indigenous culture, the loss, the pain of violence. But like I said, it’s in this prayer form of performance.▪︎

Lemi Ponifasio: Love to Death (Amor a la muerte) is presented at the Walker Art Center March 31, April 1, and April 2, 2023. Get tickets and learn more here.

Copresented with Northrop.