Intergenerational Archives of Performance
In the last scene of the “Remakes” chapter, titled “My Grandfather, My Father and Me,” Pablo appears onstage holding some boots and proceeds to explain that although he, his father, and his grandfather were all veryThe Body as Time Machine 267 different, one thing they had in common was their love of dancing Malambo.
Pablo tells the audience, “These are the boots my granddad wore. They were passed down to my dad and now they’re mine. When I put on their boots to dance, it’s as if all that time hasn’t passed and my granddad, my dad and I have come together in the same body” (Arias, 2019, p. 67). Pablo then dances Malambo among the clothes. This scene is unique because the reenactment it depicts is one that is concerned with reembodying past performances instead of past historical events. In her analysis of My Life After, Pamela Brownell (2009) identifies pure performance as one of the four levels of performance of the past presented in the play, along with first-person testimony, remakes, and representation (p. 5). Of all of these performative practices present in the play, the pure performances exemplified by the dance scenes, choreographed by Luciana Acuna, and the music scenes, written by Ulises Conti and performed by actors live onstage, have received the least amount of scholarly attention. Expanding the range of practices of reenactment in the play, Pablo’s performance of Malambo belongs to a large subset of reenactment practices dealing specifically with re-performing art. As Schneider notes, “The practice of re-playing or re-doing a precedent event, artwork, or act has exploded in performance-based art alongside the burgeoning of historical reenactment and ‘living history’ in various history museums, theme parks, and preservations societies” (2011, p. 2). My Life After showcases examples of both historical reenactment and reenactment of precedent art.In Pablo’s performance of Malambo (performed by his father and grandfather in the past), he professes that he is using the same boots his grandfather and father used to dance Malambo, and he tells audiences that when he dances Malambo, he feels like “it’s as if all that time hasn’t passed and my granddad, my dad and I have come together in the same body” (Arias, 2019, p.
67). In using original clothing and achieving this sense of collapsing time, Pablo reminds us that his performance is a reenactment of past performances. But what is the significance of this scene in the context of My Life After? It certainly responds to Arias’s wish to present stories of actors whose parents both were and were not affected directly by the dictatorship. But more importantly here, I think that what this reenactment of precedent art does in the play is draw attention to the question of bodily memory/ performance as archive. Schneider writes, “Might a live act even ‘document’ a precedent live act, rendering it, in some way, ongoing, even preserved? An action repeated again and again and again, however fractured or partial or incomplete, has a kind of staying power—persists through time—and even, in a sense, serves as a fleshy kind of ‘document’ of its own recurrence” (2011, p. 37). Pablo himself refers to the sensation of his body coalescing with that of his father and grandfather through the re-performance of Malambo. In Pablo’s case, the archive generated is an intergenerational one, a “fleshy document” linking bodies belonging to three generations in a reiterated performance.More on the topic Intergenerational Archives of Performance:
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