La Chunga. Una ópera moderna. Performativity of the Artwork and the Artwork as Performance “in the Happiest Country of the World”.

Abstract

This paper proposes an analysis of the reception of La Chunga. A modern opera, by the composer
Carlos J. Castro, based on a play by Mario Vargas Llosa. The opera was released in Costa Rica in 1995, accompanied by an absolute “silence” by the critics. This “opera” embodies a sound and bio-political landscape. Performativity is an architecture, unique in the elected bodies, especially in that of Guadalupe Urbina. A Cultural icon by her own right.
The bodies chosen to “represent” the opera are “accomplices”. Only the score, the videotape and some photographs or notes on the work have survived. From them, an effort was made to glimpse that “locus-abyss” to which we are invited by Vargas Llosa and Carlos J. Castro, but not as a play or as an opera. This essay takes the risk of thinking of them as an abyss, gushing from a radio station that in their tropical music, pop-rock and romantic ballads, places the beings in a decrepit bar, where the “covenant” can be real, and where the bodies are, indeed, exchangeable meat and decadence.