Plants, stones, and bats: The non-anthropocentric dramaturgy of Chilean director and playwright Manuela Infante

Abstract

This research exposition examines the work of Chilean playwright and director Manuela Infante, focusing on her trilogy Estado Vegetal (2017), Cómo convertirse en piedra (2021), and Vampyr (2023) as ecological dramaturgies where plants, stones, and bats function as non-human agents that reorganize theatrical composition. Drawing on feminist new materialisms and epistemologies of the South, the exposition shows how these works destabilize anthropocentrism and reveal extractivist inequalities from a Global South perspective.

From practice to ecology: Approaching a non-anthropocentric trilogy through dramaturgy

This contribution emerges from my doctoral research in dramaturgy, developed within the framework of Practice as Research. Rather than treating artistic work as a final product to be analyzed, this methodology considers artistic practice itself as a mode of knowledge production.

My research investigates dramaturgical procedures that challenge the conventional foundations of dramatic construction – character, linear action, and mimetic representation. This perspective is situated and methodological: by displacing the human as the organizing reference, it opens the possibility for alternative modes of composition. Within this context, the work of Chilean playwright and director Manuela Infante stands out for its consistency and radical approach. Her dramaturgies constitute one of the most sustained explorations of non-anthropocentric theater in Latin America.

It is important to note that Infante’s concern emerges in dialogue with the international perception of Chilean theater. Globally, Chilean theater has often been valued and recognized for its themes, particularly those dealing with dictatorship and its aftermath. Infante’s starting point, however, is different. Her focus is not primarily on themes, but on the discipline itself: on practice, on the problems of representation, and on the material and formal procedures that structure performance. It is from this shift – from theme to practice – that her investigation into a non-anthropocentric dramaturgy begins.

I share this same perspective, which also shapes my own doctoral research on dramaturgical procedures. For me, this is not only a methodological orientation but also a feminist stance: to speak from what has been excluded from hegemonic discourses, to engage with the non-human as a way of decentering human exceptionalism, and to reclaim practices that are both situated and decolonial. In this sense, the non-anthropocentric gaze is not only an aesthetic choice but also a feminist and political opportunity – an effort to displace hierarchies and open dramaturgy to what lies beyond the human.

The question of how to make – scenically and materially – a non-anthropocentric theater has been the starting point of Infante’s artistic research since 2017. Her work unfolds in a trilogy: Estado Vegetal (Vegetal State, 2017), Cómo convertirse en piedra (How to Turn into Stone, 2021), and Vampyr (2023). These pieces emerge from a dialogue with the so-called non-human turn in academia, particularly with new feminist materialisms, but also with epistemologies of the South that complicate and enrich this perspective.

This cycle can be understood as an experiment in ecological dramaturgy. Infante not only displaces the human from the center of the stage. She also organizes the scene as a performative ecosystem in which plants, stones, bats, performers, and technologies coexist and interrelate. Dramaturgy ceases to be conceived as a linear progression of human actions. Instead, it becomes a living system of interdependencies, where the vegetal, the mineral, and the animal provide their own organizational logics.

Theoretical framework: Agential realism, speculation, and ch’ixi as decolonial ecology

Karen Barad, from the perspective of agential realism, argues that matter, space, and time are not pre-existing entities but effects of intra-actions (Barad 2007). Barad rejects the idea of matter as passive or inert and instead proposes that matter acts – it responds, resists, and participates. The concept of agential cuts is crucial here: boundaries between human and non-human, subject and object, performer and device are not essential categories, but temporary divisions produced by specific performative configurations. This framework enables us to read dramaturgy not as representation but as a material practice where agency is distributed, where plants, stones, technologies, and bodies co-compose the scene.

Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui introduces an “indigenous episteme” that recognizes the agency of non-human beings – plants, animals, the dead, spirits – and articulates the notion of ch’ixi (Cusicanqui 2010), a coexistence of heterogeneous elements that never fuse but remain in productive tension. Ch’ixi challenges Western epistemologies that demand purity, linearity, and synthesis. Instead, it proposes simultaneity and contradiction as forms of knowledge.

From this standpoint, the non-human is not symbolic matter or metaphor but a co-existing agent in the production of meaning. When applied to Infante’s dramaturgy, ch’ixi enables us to understand how her works stage multiple ontologies without prioritizing the human perspective. This perspective does not automatically lead to ecological discourse, but it reveals how modes of relating to the non-human are always situated within power relations and historical asymmetries.

In this sense, Cusicanqui allows us to connect non-anthropocentric dramaturgy with the material conditions of the Global South: the very same entities that Western modernity extracts – water, minerals, land, species – are those that Infante’s dramaturgies bring to the center of the scene as agents. Thus, ecology becomes inseparable from colonial histories and extractive economies.

Ian Bogost, in Alien Phenomenology (2012), defines speculation as both a poetic and operational practice that attempts to approach the experience of the non-human without reducing it to human terms. For Bogost, speculation is not about projecting meaning onto things but about letting things operate, allowing their behaviors, capacities, and material properties to reorganize thought. The question is not what a plant means, but what a plant does – what procedures, rhythms, or temporalities it introduces.

In Infante’s dramaturgies, speculation becomes a compositional method. The aim is not to represent plants, stones, or bats through human psychology or metaphor, but to suspend interpretation and follow the logics they propose:

• vegetal ramification (branching, proliferation)
• mineral sedimentation (layering, accumulation)
• renewable exhaustion (endless cycles of energy and labor, as staged in Vampyr).

Speculation thus transforms dramaturgy into a field of experimentation: the stage becomes a site where non-human behaviors reorganize theatrical composition. Taken together, these theoretical frameworks enable a dramaturgical shift:

• from representation → to intra-action
• from narrative → to entanglement
• from character → to figure, resonance, and interface
• from linear time → to material temporalities

Estado Vegetal: Ramification as diffractive dramaturgy

Estado Vegetal (Vegetal State, 2017) inaugurates the cycle with a polyphonic narrative that begins with a specific event: the accident of a motorcyclist who crashes into a tree and falls into a vegetative state. From there, the play unfolds through multiple ramifications, like branches of the same tree. Each ramification is embodied in a different voice or figure: Raúl, Niña, Eva, Madre, Nora, Joselino, and Manuel.

These voices, all performed by actress Marcela Salinas, do not construct a unified narrative. Instead, they layer perspectives and tensions between human and vegetal life. Each figure contributes not only at a fictional level but also at a symbolic and conceptual one. The looper, a central technological device, allows the performer to record and replay her own voice live, generating interactions between echoes of herself. This creates a polyphonic interplay. It is not a dramatic dialogue between distinct characters with clear motivations, but rather a spectral dialogue with fragments of her own voice.

Paradoxically, the looper enables dialogue while exposing its impossibility. Voices repeat, distort, and lose narrative coherence. They become sounds, rhythms, and textures. Words dematerialize into echoes that resonate conceptually and symbolically.

In this sense, Estado Vegetal reconfigures character into figure, surface, and interface. The performer is not only interpreter but also dramaturg: she embodies the conceptual framework of the piece, articulates the interaction with technology, and functions as the interface connecting text, performance, and device. Recurring words – “tree,” “root,” “trunk” – migrate across figures, acquiring new meanings. Time itself becomes erratic and ramified, closer to phototropism than to dramatic causality. The work does not represent the vegetal; it materializes a vegetal logic.

Cómo convertirse en piedra: Mineral temporality

In Cómo convertirse en piedra (How to Turn into Stone, 2021), the proposal takes shape through categories of the mineral: accumulation, sedimentation, layering. One of the central scenic procedures is superposition – of voices, bodies, objects, and concepts. A semantic field emerges around crystallization, memory, and history, expanding into themes of ecological exploitation and human violence.

Stone resonates throughout as word, image, and symbol. It is the mineral violently extracted by mining industries. It is a weapon against women, evoked in a lapidation scene. And it is a constitutive element of human life itself: bones and teeth are also mineral. Paradoxically, the stones on stage are represented not by hard objects but by large soft cushions, manipulated by three performers who carry, stack, and reorder them. The body and voice of the performers become surfaces where meanings rebound. The looper again transforms voice into echo, reverberating as if inside a cave. Dialogue dissolves into collision. Voices do not answer one another; they bounce, reverberate, and accumulate. The result is not narrative progression but layers of sound and meaning.

In this sense, the piece elaborates not only a reconfiguration of character but also a reconfiguration of time. The voice/echo interface generates a geological temporality: dilated, layered, sedimented. Instead of linear progression, meaning is created vertically through accretion.

This layering is illustrated in a striking fragment of the text:

A: Inside that pit were all the women.
N: This was a real stoning.
R: They are calling them sterile material.
A: I am not sterile.
N: Where are the exhumed bodies right now?…
R: Sit down, madam, please.
N: What is the link between sterile material and maternity?
A: Why were they stoned?
N: That is the issue!

The semantic field of “stone” expands into pit–stoning–sterile material–exhumed bodies–death. Gendered violence intersects with dictatorship-era exhumations. Meaning is produced not by a central theme but by resonances that accumulate across bodies, voices, and stage surfaces.

Thus, Cómo convertirse en piedra materializes stone time, a dramaturgy of echo and sedimentation, where meaning emerges through vertical accumulation rather than causal progression.

Vampyr: Diffractive hybridity and critique of “green” energies

The third piece, Vampyr (2023), centers on the figure of the vampire as a non-human creature through which themes of ecological devastation, labor exploitation, and precarious humanity are explored. In this work, the notion of uncharacterbecomes central. I use this term in dialogue with Jean-Pierre Sarrazac’s concept of l’impersonnage (Sarrazac 2006), which designates figures that resist psychological depth, coherence, or narrative continuity. Rather than assuming Sarrazac as Infante’s theoretical source, I draw on his concept as a lens to better articulate the operations taking place onstage. In Vampyr, the performers do not embody characters in the traditional dramatic sense; instead, the vampire is distributed across two performers who continually shift into other figures – wind farm workers, environmental scientists. Their bodies function as interfaces rather than vessels of interiority, producing constant metamorphosis and dissolving the boundaries between identities, agencies, and species.

The piece adopts the form of a mockumentary, combining factual data – the Chilean blood-feeding bat, barotrauma deaths at wind farms – with fictional reports and testimonies. References to popular vampire lore abound but are resignified in a local key: the Chilean Vampyr is not aristocratic, but precarious. Condemned to endless night shifts and long commutes, this Vampyr’s condition of being “neither alive nor dead” stems from labor exhaustion.

Rivera Cusicanqui’s notion of ch’ixi illuminates the paradox: the Vampyr is human and non-human, alive and dead, exploiter and exploited. Circular temporality recalls both the erratic flight of bats and the fatigue of endless labor.

The sharpest critique is directed at the rhetoric of “green energy.” Infante emphasizes the paradox of the renewable: how can energy be considered infinite, eternal, endlessly replenished – like the vampire itself – without asking at what cost? What lives, what territories, what species are sacrificed so that others may benefit from this supposedly clean source? In this sense, the vampire becomes a metaphor for the contradictions of renewable energy: like the undead, it promises endless vitality, but it survives only by draining the life of others.

What the global North celebrates as a sustainable solution appears in the South as new forms of violence: mass deaths of bats, exploited workers, devastated ecosystems, and sacrificed territories. Thus, Vampyr reveals how green rhetoric functions as a new colonial device that displaces ecological and human costs to the global South. The metaphor of the vampire expands: not only as a bloodsucker but as the image of a system that drains the lives of humans and non-humans alike in the name of sustainability.

Ecological Storytelling: Dramaturgy as ecology

The trilogy displaces central categories of classical dramaturgy and aligns with an Ecological Storytelling:

• Character → figure, surface, interface.
• Time → vegetal ramification, mineral sedimentation, animal circularity.
• Action → echo, resonance, accumulation, diffraction.
• Representation → speculative, poetic, ethical.

In this dramaturgy, plants, stones, and bats are not themes. They are compositional principles. This is not environmentalist or didactic theater. Infante does not represent “nature.” She lets the non-human structure dramaturgy itself. The stage becomes a multi-species entanglement. Temporality is reshaped by non-human logics. Spectators are invited to spectate ecologically, decentering the human perspective.

Ecological Storytelling is both ethical and political. It is ethical because it relates to the non-human on its own terms. And it is political because it exposes how discourses of sustainability often conceal extractivist inequalities. Through epistemologies of the South, particularly Cusicanqui’s ch’ixi, Infante’s dramaturgy emerges as a decolonial ecology rooted in specific histories and territories.

Conclusion

Plants, Stones, and Bats allows us to understand Infante’s trilogy as a dramaturgical ecology situated in the Global South:

• Plants ramify the narrative.
• Stones sediment memories.
• Bats embody ecological and labor tensions.

These dramaturgies offer new ways of imagining and inhabiting the world in times of ecological crisis and precarious living. They are aesthetic, ethical, and political practices. They compel us to rethink our relation to the non-human, to uncover the hidden costs of so-called “green” modernity, and to imagine more-than-human futures.

References

Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.

Bogost, Ian. 2012. Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Infante, Manuela. 2017. Estado vegetal. Manuscrito no publicado.

Infante, Manuela. 2021. Cómo convertirse en piedra. Manuscrito no publicado.

Infante, Manuela. 2023. Vampyr. Función de estreno, Matucana 100, Santiago de Chile. Obra no publicada.

Lehmann, Hans-Thies. 2013. Teatro posdramático. México: Paso de Gato.

Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia. 2010. Ch’ixinakax utxiwa: Una reflexión sobre prácticas y discursos descolonizadores. Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón.

Sarrazac, Jean. 2006. “El impersonaje: Una relectura de La crisis del personaje.” Literatura: teoría, historia, crítica 8(2006): 353–369.

Sarrazac, Jean-Pierre, director. 2013. Léxico del drama moderno y contemporáneo. México: Paso de Gato.