UNITED IN BLOOD Comes to Teatro Paraguas in September

Teatro Paraguas presents United in Blood: The Revolutionary Music and Poetry of Chile, opening Friday, September 8th at Teatro Paraguas in Santa Fe and continuing for nine performances over three weekends.

United in Blood is a fully staged performance celebrating the artistic, social and political vision of four of Chile’s most beloved musicians and poets: Pablo Neruda, Victor Jara, Violeta Parra, and Gabriela Mistral. Though not all four knew each other, several of them did, and they are all intimately connected through their shared passions, political sensibilities, and deep concern for humanity.

Gabriela Mistral, who in 1945 became the first Latin American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, had a personal and lifelong influence on Pablo Neruda, who won the Nobel Prize himself in 1971 and is widely considered one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. Violeta Parra, an amazingly versatile musician and visual artist, reinvented Chilean folk music in the 1950s and 60s and, similar to Mistral with Neruda, had a profound influence on Victor Jara. Jara became known internationally in the 60s and 70s as a folk singer and songwriter and, together with his friend Neruda, was one of the main Chilean artist-activists associated with the election in 1970 of the socialist president Salvador Allende.

In addition to celebrating these artists, United in Blood specifically commemorates the 50th anniversary of the September 11th, 1973 coup d'etat that ended Allende’s short presidency and resulted in Augusto Pinochet's nearly 20-year military dictatorship, as well as the deaths of thousands of dissidents, Victor Jara and Pablo Neruda among them.

Through song, poetry, dance, and instrumental music (including charango, guitar and flute), the production explores roots, love and loss, the essential role of art and free expression in society, and takes an impassioned stance against fascism and indifference in our time, honoring Jara's example that we must never stop working for our "right to live in peace.”

Songs and poems will be performed in the original Spanish, with English translations either performed or projected above the stage.

The ensemble includes Cristina Vigil, Jeni Tincher, Jojo Sena de Tarnoff, Miranda Arteaga, Monica Arteaga, Paola Vengoechea Martini, Roxanne Tapia, Argos MacCallum, Jonathan Harrell, James Stake, and Mario Reynolds on Charango (traditional Andean stringed instrument). 

United in Blood runs September 8-24: Fridays and Saturdays at 7:30pm, Sundays at 2:00pm. Tickets are $25 general admission and $15 limited income. Call 505-577-2679 or go to www.teatroparaguasnm.org for reservations or further information. Teatro Paraguas is located at 3205 Calle Marie in Santa Fe.

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