Archives: Festivals

The eighth version of the Santiago Off International Festival took place between the 17th and 26th of January covering, as usual, different cultural spaces of Santiago and other districts of the country with the presence of more than 60 national and international artistic shows in addition to the traditional Escuela Off and the important Producers Meeting. This year the calling was to think about, how do we join forces to become part of the cultural discussion in Chile. The importance that the circus has in the history of our country was the main idea in the calendar of the Festival, with an important presence at the Escuela Off through educational activities related with the professionalization of this segment in different fields. Participating at the festival were the Director of the Canadian Circus, Alain Veilleux, and other groups such as the ONG Circo del Mundo, and the Festival and Open Fair of Contemporary Circus, CHIRIVARI.

The fourth version of the Santiago Off International Festival took place between the 19th and 24th of January of 2015. In this version, the festival is supported by IBERESCENA and was awarded with a competitive national fund, allowing to add to its activities a Latin-American theater season that had the participation of Uruguay, Argentina, Mexico, Spain and Brazil; “Escuela Off” is created which theme in 2015 was “the body”, giving 2 long-length seminars and 5 national and international workshops in charge of renowned teachers in the area; and, for the first time, a dramaturgy line is implemented, developing the season of dramatized readings “La Rebelión de las Voces”. New cooperation networks were added, like the independent music network “Enjambre”, the music festival MFEST, the itinerant performing space EL ARIETE and the extension center of the theater department of the University of Chile. A total of 45 national shows of theater, Dance and performance, 7 international shows and 9 music bands are presented: a total of around 2.000 artists and cultural agents working collaboratively in the execution of this proposal that reached an average of 18.000 spectators.

The third version of the Santiago Off International Festival, took place between the 20th and 25th of January of 2014. Applying a perfected production model based on the experience obtained on previous versions, the event proposed the introduction of new running policies, associating new performing spaces, new artistic disciplines (Circus Arts / Visual Arts), and promoting extension activities in five districts of Santiago. These extension activities were also replicated during the year 2014 in various centers related to the event as a continuous mechanism of dissemination, promotion and to form audiences. The festival boosted and enriched the cultural offer of the summer, as it made available to the community, in an affordable way, a large billboard that aimed to gather in one event, proposals about the development of new artistic languages. It was established as an occasion of associativity for independent arts, developing an addition of efforts that lead to the massive meeting of these contemporary languages with the popular audience, being able to encourage and promote the effective growth of our cultural diversity and citizen participation in it.

The second edition of the Santiago Off Festival took place between the 21st and 27th of January of 2013 at the Centro Cultural Estación Mapocho dependencies, adding in this opportunity new exhibition places among which stand out Teatro Ladrón de Bicicletas, Centro Experimental de Arte La Casa Rodante, and Sala Acevedo Hernández of the UCINF, making available for the community a considerable music billboard, theater, forums and open classes of various artistic disciplines. The festival achieves an international character by having the presence of the “L’Autri-chienne” show, production corresponding to the French group Pantheater, and the intervention of New Butoh Space Dance in the Tube, in charge of the Japanese master Tetsuro Fukuhara.

The first edition of the Santiago Off Festival 2012 presented free of charge activities, interceding to conform a new alternative of encouragement for cultural activities and 4 workshops, 4 talk tables and presented 6 plays and 7 music bands. In four days of activities the festival took in a total of 6.500 attendees and around 20.000 visits on social networks and its web site.

We see this new world context as an opportunity to find new spaces, media, platforms, educational occasions, visualization, ratification, circulation, internationalization and advertising for national artists and creators. That’s how the tenth version of the Santiago Off International Festival proposes a new line of digital scheduling, that embraces audiovisual creations or from a remote format, born in the context of being confined during 2020, as well as audiovisual recordings of international plays that couldn’t travel because of sanitary reasons.

The nineth version of the Santiago Off International Festival continues with the task of pointing out the value of cultural diversity, rejecting openly the monopoly that has taken over of the infrastructure and the cultural schedule, operating from a market logic that looks down on equity and pluralism of artistic and citizen expressions. This is why one of the central ideas of the 2020 version was to express an ideological and curatorial link, coherent with Chile’s social demands, installing performing arts as a fundamental movement for a paradigm change, initiated with the rebellion in October.

The sixth version of the Santiago Off International Festival took place between the 19th and 28th of January of 2017. The schedule considered 43 national companies in six regions of the country, 11 international companies from Latin-America, Spain and France, 10 music bands, another gathering of the dramaturgy season La Rebelión de las Voces with dramatized readings texts from 6 authors; as part of the Escuela Off, 2 educational seminars, one day of theatrical edition, 4 international workshops, 5 management seminars and 5 master classes.

The seventh version of the Santiago Off International Festival took place in January of 2018 for 10 consecutive days in 4 regions of the country. Considering a circuit of public rooms, independent, universities, municipal cultural centers and of international cooperation. The activities developed under the perspective of the memory, commemorating 30 years of the return of democracy and looking with a critical eye the country built since then. The scheduling was separated in eight themed seasons that represented the following different perspectives: Memory and Events, Mapuche Memory, Memory and Environment, Memory and Family, Memory and Perception, Memory and Biography, remembered classics, Memory and Career Path.