Cristian Lopez appears as a young South American Football (that is, Soccer) player who gives many observations and personal perspectives on his life and activities in a poorer neighborhood on the periphery of Santiago. Marking off various areas of the intimate stage, Lopez makes lines in salt on the floor to represent a connection between the games of football/soccer and of life in his area of Chile. The title word “pichanga” has various meanings of which three seem to apply here. The main one is “a pickup soccer game,” but in Chile it may just as much refer to “a neighborhood soccer game.” A third meaning is metaphorical: “the cocktail of the poor” because it is often like food and drink (sustenance or useful for survival) to those in and from poor neighborhoods. Seeming much younger in his opening remarks, Lopez brings us to his childhood and the importance of football as a means of being “with it” and aspiring to be part of it. He uses a whistle, racks to represent players, facial and bodily action, and that salt as if he were playing in the area it encloses. Does this episode all turn out to be a dream? Perhaps Lopez’s most interesting sequence involves his constant peeling off of team shirts, each with a different name and number on the back. He places each shirt in different corners of the rapidly expanding salted “field” and in the salted circular center. What a game it is that he describes! Is an economic enterprise as well as a sporting one then on the floor? What does his quiet time tell us—or next a bouncing ball and finally his falling prostrate? After distributing plastic cups upside down on the playing area, what kind of arena is he playing in? When the lights come up, are they showing Lopez’s game has become something political? Lopez’s performance is so strongly emotional, visual, and adaptive to increasing meaning that it registers powerfully even if one does not know Spanish, his language. (There are a few tactical uses of English phrases.) I can only imagine how devastating Pichanga must be to Spanish-speakers in his audiences.
