In 1907, in northern Chile, three thousand six hundred workers from the saltpetre mines of La Pampa were shot down by the national army in the harbour at Iquique, where they had come to demonstrate. The heroism of these early revolutionaries was related in La Cantata Santa Maria de Iquique, a long complaint written by Luis Advis in 1969, a year before the election of Salvador Allende. In the Marxist didactic tradition, this cantata alternates spoken descriptions, songs of the partisans and lamentos inspired by traditional Andean music. In Los Diablos azules, Charlotte Bayer-Broc has made her own adaptation. She began by playing the role of a grieving and solitary Madonna walking through a mining town. In this desolate setting reminiscent of a Western, the dual is between memory and forgetting, between the fragility of the voice and the immensity of the desert. The place is wrenched from its museumification, the struggle is revived, and the solitude is peopled with the songs of yesteryear and tomorrow. It is only when she has brandished a flag of peace that is always already stained with the blood of the workers that the heroine can, like those strikers of the early 20th century, go down to the harbour, where other women are waiting for her, ready, together, to spread the news of grief. As the story takes a tragic turn, as the workers are locked up in the school where the army will execute them, another community takes shape, that of these four storytellers, these camp divas. Bonded by the tragedy of history and the feeling of infinite loss, they become at once a chorus of traditional lamentations and an unlikely girls’ band, together articulating the promise of new forms of struggle. Olivier Cheval