Abstract

This article studies the artistry of Los Diablos Rojos de Víctor Jara, a dance-music troupe formed in 2009 to pay homage to the singer-songwriter on the day of his funeral. Since then the troupe participates in annual events in commemoration of the detained and killed by the military dictatorship, and sporadically in other social manifestations. Our first objective is to explain the appropriation and transformation the troupe makes of the "loose devil," a character of the La Tirana festival. We consider aspects such as clothing, choreography, musical repertory and gender roles. The second objective is to analyze the choreographic and musical aspects of their performance. Unlike approaches to these kinds of performances from the social sciences, which often study them as acts of memorialization or social activism, our goal, as arts researchers, is to highlight the fact that the people behind the troupe are professional artists, with artistic motivations, preoccupations and objectives. To underscore this aspect, we analyze seven songs by Víctor Jara that constitute part of the troupe's dancemusic repertoire.