Andrés Pérez Araya (1951-2002)

Andrés Perez was a actor, playwright, and chilean theater director, of great importance in his legacy of street and popular theater. Andres along with his university classmates resisted against the Pinochet dictatorship making political art, prohibited at that time, in the street with very very short works because they could not gather many people and then they had to disperse so as not to suffer repression. Today the national day of the Chilean theater is celebrated thanks to the legacy left by this important artist, of whom not much is taught in schools, but which owes so much, because he established a popular and spectacular aesthetic, opened the possibility to new theatrical experimentations stripped of the "politically correct" and resignifying the marginal, with a language and message that reached the masses in the neighborhoods, which can clearly be seen in his masterpiece "La Negra Ester". He fought for an artistic space in Matucana 100, a space that was stolen by the Chilean state, which plunged him into a deep depression until the day of his death when he became a kind of popular saint for all those who knew him since his work, artistic and political.