Silence, sound, rhythm, performance and storytelling: The lyricism of Chile’s Violeta Parra

Violeta Parra (1917–67) was a Chilean cantora (‘a female singer of the people’), folclorista (‘folklorist’), cantautora (‘singer-songwriter’) and compositora (‘composer’), who promoted and performed rural practices of music, poetry and visual crafts as a portrait of self and a mirror of society. The focus of this article is threefold (1) to analyse Violeta Parra’s translating poetics approach to messaging by exploring her different art forms from sound-text to stage performance; (2) to highlight her significance as a social voice of the working class and Indigenous people as well as the folkloric aspects of her work using both textual and non-verbal modes of vernacular expression and (3) to explore the complementary nature of music, poetry and dance as different languages to represent Parra’s world-view, culture, experience and life in general, as these different artistic expressions inform one another and converge in new perspectives by their messaging format.