They met in 1962 and became a couple 12 years later. Teresa Ramos was studying biology and chemistry when she helped set up a theater group, together with other students from both her and the math degree course. Their first meeting was on April 20 in the same year the Football World Cup was held in Chile. It was not until prolific director Pedro de la Barra joined as leader of the project in May that year that Teatro del Desierto - as the company was known then - started to make its mark on the local scene.

This was the beginning of the Big North’s most important period of theater.

Their first pieces - the plays Pacto de medianoche by Isidora Aguirre and El pastel y la tarta, an anonymous farce from the fifteenth century - were premiered on August 25,1962. The audience’s reaction convinced the group to become professional: in March 1963, a theater area was created in the Cultural Extension Department at the University of Chile. In 1964, they obtained permanent financing from the university and came to have a cast of 28 contracted actors and three annual premieres. This cultural group provided the city not only with a cast, but also created directors and technicians and inspired playwriting in Norte Grande.

“I used to make a very intuitive type of theater, which Ismael Márquez Huerta taught me at school in Copiapó”, remembers Ángel Lattus, who joined the company after being brought in as an understudy for the play La princesa Panchita. His performance meant he was recommended to Pedro de la Barra. “I’ve been acting since I was a child; at home and with my neighbors in the area where I used to live. After school in Copiapó, I studied to be a rural education primary school teacher. In the countryside, I taught theater to my pupils, their parents and high school graduates. Then I went to Vallenar, Copiapó and Antofagasta in 1962, but I didn’t have much knowledge”, says the actor.

That is how the great Pedro de la Barra became his mentor. “He completely changed my life. He taught me to look at things differently: to see people’s essence and their defects and virtues. He whetted my appetite for learning the facts about human beings, for reading more, for research and for finding out about people and portraying them. Above all though, he taught me to love the theater more than anything else”.

For her part, Teresa learnt to be rigorous from De la Barra. “Theater needs to be created responsibly. Each time we’re doing a play, we need to believe we’re putting on the best production in the world. ‘Let’s not be so provincial about it’, we used to say to ourselves. We had to believe that the play we were rehearsing was the best in the world. We had a distant goal that we were trying to achieve”.

In 1968, Teresa Ramos traveled abroad to further her studies. First, she went to the Jean-Laurent Cochet academy in Paris, where she encountered and actively took part in the French riots. Then she traveled to England, where she took part in public interventions, finally traveling to the United States to study theater directing at Florida’s Technological University.

Although they were in the same company, Ángel and Teresa were not close friends. However, this didn’t stop Ángel from being put in charge of collecting the money for Teresa’s wedding present. It wasn’t until 1973 though that they became closer, with the push they needed coming from the play 25 años después by Brazilian Marcos Vianna, in which they played a couple living through the horrors of the dictatorship a few months after the military coup. They got together the following year.

The north is the south

They don’t know exactly how many plays they’ve been involved in. Teresa says that when she was updating her CV a while ago, she wrote down 24 as a director, “although, if we’ve been in theater for more than 58 years and at one point we were premiering three plays a year, it must be more than a hundred”. Among her favorites are Nuestro pueblo, La reina del Tamarugal and Yerma, as well as the ones based on the plays by Hernán Rivera Letelier, such as La reina Isabel cantaba rancheras and Los trenes se van al Purgatorio. Ángel mentions La pequeña historia de Chile by Marco Antonio de la Parra, which was directed by Teresa. It was De la Parra himself who described the 27 years that Lattus ran the University of Antofagasta Theater (the group’s successor, founded in 1962, which he directed between 1978 and 2005), as the “golden era” of Antofagasta theater.

Since Teresa travelled to Europe and North America, Ángel didn’t want to get left behind and visited Europe, Latin America and Asia. “I never imagined I’d get to go to so many different places. Me, a kid from the pampas who hadn’t even been to Taltal, Mejillones or Tocopilla and who only left Copiapó for the first time when I was 12. I never dreamt that I’d leave the country and go to Argentina or beyond. I’m only missing Africa. The reward from theater is knowledge of the world, of my environment, from what is closest to what is furthest away. That’s priceless. When I talk to young people, I always say that you need to have a knack for theater. Theater doesn’t give, but it knows when to provide”, Lattus says.

They’ve been producing the Teatro Zicosur International Festival (FITZA) since 1999 with both Chilean plays and ones from Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina and Uruguay. This event attracts a large audience and is held at four venues throughout the city. They confirm that the opening event in the Parque Croacia usually attracts around 6,000 people. “There’s definitely an audience in Antofagasta; what’s missing is a willingness to provide resources to keep the activities going. There isn’t enough support, either for theater to maintain itself or, at the same time, to support the city’s other cultural activities”, says Teresa Ramos.

The 2021 version of FITZA will be completely virtual due to the Covid pandemic that has hit the region hard. Although Teresa admits that it’s very different watching a play without being surrounded by other people, they have reached a larger audience by broadcasting plays online.

For Ángel, this format is here to stay. “When the pandemic’s over, I think theater’s going to be restructured; we’re going to have to win audiences over again so they go to watch plays at venues in person, because watching plays at home, like we’re doing now, is far too convenient for people. It’s something to think about; we’re going to have to reinvent ourselves in order to attract audiences again”.