“We had intended to stage a version of Brecht’s Three Penny Opera but we had not been able to find a point of entry. The ghost of Brecht prevented us from doing so. After a year of failed attempts and of trying various strategies to “Colombianize” the German text, we gave up for the time being. I then proposed La trifulca which I had written based on improvisations on the Opera and on the many burials of our national leaders: Jaime Pardo Leal, Jaime Bateman, Bernardo Jaramillo, Carlos Pizarro, and so on. I put forward a text that could act as an exorcism of these killings—a play that, through carnival, could mock death. It made use of Bakhtin’s analysis of popular festivals of the Middle Ages, the inversion of values, and most importantly the recovery of Death. From the Christian schema of birth, death, and resurrection, we jumped to the trajectory we had been living [in our own lives]: death, resurrection, and birth. La trifulca maintained Brecht’s use of the operatic as an expressive form with popular rock music. The ironic and carnivalesque character contributed to this re-encounter, in the middle of the ashes and massacres, of a utopia: still blurry, but possible.

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