Conclusion: The Afterlives of My Life After
The notion of “staying power” in this play reinforces the proposal that recurring performance constitutes a kind of material archive, undoing the binary between the performance and what has historically been considered an official (scientific, textual, Western, patrilineal) archive, a binary that has been critically examined and scrutinized by scholars such as Joseph Roach (1996), Diana Taylor (2003), Rebecca Schneider (2011), and others.
Centrally concerned with reenactment and the reiteration of performance, My Life After brings together multiple archives and in itself can be considered a living archive, having been performed at more than 30 venues worldwide between 2009 and 2014. In the context of the play, the “remakes” constitute a primary archive, achieving “staying power” through their repetitive function, and this archive exists in dialogue with a legal archive, a biological archive, and an archive of inherited personal objects onstage that evolved and transformed over the course of the staging of the play, from 2009 to 2011. Katherine Johnson, too, draws our attention to the potential of the archive to have implications that outlive its reenactment: “Recognizing the capacity of performance to function historiographically—to record and relate aspects of the past in, on, and through the body—carries significance for and beyond reenactment” (2020, p. 172). For example, the father of Vanina Falco, one of the performers, was a policeman and torturer who during the dictatorship had illegally appropriated a baby boy born to a mother held in a torture center. The little boy was raised by Vanina’s mother and father as if he were their biological child, but he started questioning his identity in his twenties, and learned after taking a DNA test that he was the child of a mother who had disappeared. Vanina’s father was subsequently charged and found guilty of illegally abducting him as a baby. In 2009, when the play premiered, Vanina read from legal documents pertaining to her father’s case onstage and lamented to the audience that, according to the law, she was not allowed to testify against her father because he belonged to her immediate family. Her testimony in the context of performances of My Life After, however, helped lawyers to make the case that she should be able to testify in court since she had already testified in public to audiences in the theater (Arias, 2016, p. 12). In 2012, Vanina’s father was sentenced to eighteen years in prison for his crimes.Remarkable here is how the legal archive transformed and developed over the course of and in response to the ongoing performances of the play from 2009 to 2014. In the case of Carla Crespo, she finds out during this period that her father’s remains have been identified in the mass grave. Here the genetic archive provided new evidence and subsequently changed the play as well (Arias, 2016, p. 12). There are other examples of how actors’ lives modified the play between 2009 and 2014, but suffice it to say that the intersection of specific archives (legal, genetic) with the recurring performances, both within the context of the play (“remakes”) and at different theater venues while the play was on tour, reinforce the idea of the play as a living and evolving archive.
Arias redeployed the concept of My Life After to create the play The Year I was Born, premiered in 2012 at the Festival Teatro a Mil in Santiago, Chile. The Year I was Born is based on the same premise of actors (in this case Chilean) reenacting the stories of their parents, drawing on experiences of both those who were and those who were not affected directly by Chilean dictatorship. The Year I was Born toured extensively from 2012 to 2014, premiering in over 15 theaters across Latin America, Europe, and the United States, and as a performance of a performance, it can also be considered a kind of reenactment, at least of the original concept of My Life After.
While Arias is able to transpose the concept of the play to another context, in a sense asserting authorship through this conceptual reenactment, performers onstage reenact their own stories and the experiences of their parents onstage and in doing so create new content. Though it lies beyond the scope of this analysis, the conceptual transposition of Arias’s play to another national context invites us to consider how reenactment practices in the context of artistic production intersect with techniques of adaptation, the concept of authorship, and notions of the archive.Lola Arias’s play My Life After introduces a broad range of reenactment practices in the context of theater and in dialogue with the fields of autobiography and documentary theater. Her work generates significant interest among scholars of performance and reenactment because of a joint concern with concepts of memory, repetition, and the archive. Through experimental narrative techniques, role-playing, and the incorporation of personal objects, photographs, recordings, and videos, Arias pioneers creative forms of reenactment, blending mimetic and nonmimetic styles, alternately distancing and closing the gap between past and present. Her choice to work with actors performing their own lived experiences and the experiences of their parents onstage in the post-dictatorship context introduces a generational and auto/biographical dimension to the work that creates affective resonances that are powerful, multilayered, and linked in complex ways to individual mourning and discourse on the politics and ethics of representation in Argentina’s post-dictatorship period.