My Life After

Lola Arias is a well-known Argentine writer and a theater and film director. Since her 2007 theater trilogy (Love is a Sniper [El amor es un francotira- dor], Revolver Dream [Sueno de revolver], and Striptease), Arias’s work has explored the interpenetration between the fictional and the real onstage.

In an interview with Elianna Kan (2014), Arias affirms, “For me, the dilemma between fiction and documentary doesn’t exist. All of my work is based on the art of storytelling where fiction and reality contaminate one another” (p. 64). Arias experiments with auto/biographical performance, playing with the unpredictable, incorporating personal objects and artifacts, videos, audio-recordings, and photographs to create documentary work that is both aesthetically experimental and socially engaged. As Arias’s theater has evolved over the last decade, so too has her vision of her work as a social experiment and live event, departing from what she views as the “fossilized” and “institutional” nature of repertory theater (Kan, 2014, p. 62) Arias’s interest in exploring performers’ personal histories onstage verges on ethnographic, and she even refers to her directorial work with actors as “fieldwork” (Scherer, 2011). At other times, she has referred to rehearsals as a kind of experimental group therapy, calling herself a “therapist-director” (Arias, 2016, p. 11). In an interview with Bertie Ferdman (2014), she reinforces this research component to her work when she describes her theater “as a way to analyze the past and be able to reflect upon it—a sort of investigative model of theater” (p. 32). Arias has also described her documentary theater as a time machine, a compelling metaphor for the ways in which she transports performers and spectators to the past through her work (Gardner, 2016; Sosa, 2014, p. 107).

A large subset of Arias’s theatrical work employs reenactment techniques.

For example, in her play What They Want to Hear, premiered in Munich in 2018, the Syrian archeologist Raaed Alkour reenacts episodes from the five years he spent in bureaucratic limbo as a refugee recently arrived in Germany. In Minefield (2016), Arias brings Argentine and Britishveterans of the MalvinasZFalklands War together onstage to reenact scenes of battle and other experiences related to the war. Scholars have begun to take interest in Arias’s use of reenactment techniques in her work. Jean Graham-Jones’s critical anthology of Lola Arias’s performance, Lola Arias: Re-Enacting Life (2019), provides an exquisite investigation of the primary documentation used in Arias’s varied performance work. Likewise, Paola Hernandez examines the practice of reenactment in Arias’s work in her book Staging Lives in Latin American Theater: Bodies, Objects, Archives (2021). While evidence of Arias’s fascination with reenactment can be found in early performances such as Studies of Loving Memory (2003), it is in My Life After that reenactment becomes a dominant technique in her work.

My Life After was choreographed by Luciana Acuna and featured music by Ulises Conti in collaboration with Arias and Liza Casullo. My Life After was originally one of the plays conceived as part of the Biodrama series, curated by Vivi Tellas, and premiered at the Sarmiento Teatro in Buenos Aires between 2002 and 2008. The premise of the series was that each of the plays should be based on the life of a real, living person (Tellas et al., 2017). Though ultimately not premiered as part of this series, the play’s focus on the autobiographical and the depiction of real lives onstage remains faithful to the original Biodrama premise (Hernandez, 2011, p. 120; Sosa, 2014, pp. 105-106). Premiered in 2009 at the Teatro Sarmiento in Buenos Aires, the play toured extensively throughout Europe and Latin America between 2009 and 2014.

According to Arias, the play is a portrait of a generation born under dictatorship, presented to audiences by six actors (Vanina Falco, Pablo Lugones, Blas Arrese Igor, Carla Crespo, Liza Casullo, and Mariano Speratti) whose parents held diverse roles under dictatorship, and in the play include a disappeared militant, a militant father killed in armed combat, a priest, an apolitical bank employee, an undercover police officer and torturer, and a couple in exile.

What is crucial to note here, and what is of utmost importance to Arias, is that not all of the actors in the play were directly affected by the violence of the dictatorship. Arias (2016) makes clear that she was not interested in staging only the story of militant parents, and she did not want to tell the audience a story they already knew (p. 10). She explains that she wanted to stage the stories of the children who are writing the stories of their parents (p. 11). In an interview, when asked if performers could ever be replaced and played by other actors, she responds, “No, there is no replacement. Nobody can do another’s ‘role.’ If a performer changes, the content changes” (Ferdman, 2014, p. 32). Arias’s conviction here is thought-provoking because she seems to suggest that what is essential to creating the message, the sense of realness, and the affective power of these documentary works is this autoZbiographical component. Below I analyze how Arias’s insistence on the autoZbiographical in reenactment practices onstage creates highly charged affective identification between performers and past events, and between performers and audiences. Her work derivesThe Body as Time Machine 259 its power from the intimate connection and the authority of eyewitness generated when actors re-embody their lived pasts or their memories of their parents onstage, particularly in the context of past trauma.

My Life After is structured into a prologue and three chapters: “The Day I Was Born,” “Remakes,” and “What I Have Left.” The first chapter offers historical contextualization of individual actors’ stories. In the first scene, one of the actors draws the years of the actors’ births on the floor in chalk, and one by one, the actors move to stand next to the year corresponding to their birth. Mariano begins by declaring: “1972. A plane crashes in the Andes with Uruguayan rugby players onboard, to survive they eat the other dead passengers. Three days later I’m born.

My dad loves cars and politics” (Arias, 2019, p. 47).² The second chapter, called “Remakes,” is where most of the examples of reenactment take place in the play. It is interesting to note that Arias adopts the English word “remake” as the title of this chapter to describe what the actors do in this chapter. While the word “reconstruction” exists in Spanish, there is no good translation for “reenactment.” “Remake” captures the essence of reenactment nicely, as an active attempt to redo something (Brownell, 2009). The term also evokes the cinematic as it is commonly used to describe the reproduction of a film or television series based on an original. Here too, this usage resonates meaningfully with Arias’s work, which not only incorporates video and multimedia but consciously employs a filmic gaze through the presence of cameras onstage and the directorial roles assigned to actors.

In the third chapter, actors present the personal objects they have inherited from their parents. Mariano listens to a cassette tape with a recording of the voice of his disappeared father. In the recording, it is possible to hear the father talking to Mariano when he was about three years old. During performances, this scene is one of the most powerful, as Mariano’s son Moreno, who was about four years old when the play premiered, is onstage with him, listening to the recording of his father and grandfather, in an act that brings together all three generations. Other examples of personal objects presented during this chapter are books written by Liza’s father, an intellectual and militant who was forced into exile; a turtle that belonged to Blas’s father; legal documents pertaining to the case against Vanina’s father’s regarding the illegal appropriation of her brother; and the last letter that Carla’s father wrote to her mother before he was killed in an armed confrontation. In the last chapter, there is also a scene titled “Fastforward/ Autobiographies,” in which actors once again recontextualize their personal stories, this time juxtaposing individual experiences to concrete events occurring between 1982 and 2014.

And in the last scene, the actors take this juxtaposition further, predicting their future deaths one by one. So, for example, Liza announces, “I die of an overdose on January 13th, 2042, in the middle of a gig with my rock band, The Sleepwalking Dogs. Argentina will be a modern, tropical country” (Arias, 2019, p. 75). The mirroring that takes place between the first scene of the play, “The Day I was Born,” andthe last, “The Day I Died,” creates a continuum between past, present, and future experience and highlights the role of fantasy throughout this continuum, present in the reenactment of the past and the ^re-enactment of the future. First coined by theater director Nikolai Evreinov, the term “preenactment” refers to a kind of “theater therapy,” which, according to Inke Arns, allows people to experience through theater what they would otherwise be unable to access in real life (Arns, 2020, p. 153). Over the course of the play, performers go from reenacting their pasts to preenacting their imagined futures, a shift that over the course of the performance asserts the performers’ agency as a generation and invites us to consider how this playful treatment of time both reinforces and collapses the distance between past, present, and future.

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Source: Agnew Vanessa, Tomann Juliane, Stach Sabine (eds.). Reenactment Case Studies: Global Perspectives on Experiential History. Routledge,2022. — 366 p.. 2022

My Life After

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