This chapter attends to the body of work created by a generation of Argentine artists who came of age after the end of Argentina’s last military dictatorship (1976-1983).
I am particularly interested in a subset of documentary works by theater directors, filmmakers, and photographers in which performers/subjects reenact either their own experiences or the lived experiences of their parents.
My analysis draws on the productive overlap between approaches to autobiography, documentary theater, and reenactment studies. Here I focus specifically on Lola Arias’s 2009 documentary play My Life After as a case study that exemplifies a rich and diverse range of reenactment techniques employed by actors who (re)embody their own past lives and the lives of their parents onstage. Through her use of photographs, recordings, home videos, and personal objects onstage, Arias demonstrates a fascination with the material evidence of the past. At the same time, her use of experimental narrative techniques, role-playing, and humorous tone reveals a desire to explore nonmimetic forms of representation. The result is a complex and multi-faceted reenactment practice that blends styles and techniques and complicates assumptions and expectations of what it means for performance to generate an apparently real, authentic, or truthful rendition of the past. Arias proposes new approaches to understanding the politics of the archive and the relationship of the archive to bodies, truth, and performance. In the context of post-dictatorship Argentina, I explore how Arias’s use of the auto/biographical both reinforces and destabilizes the primacy of lived experience as the legitimate premise for reenacting a violent past.Some of the most remarkable examples of reenactment practices in Argentine cultural production can be found in photography, documentary film, and theater created in the first two decades of the 21st century, including the photographic works Archeologies of Absence (Arqueologlas de la ausencia) (1999-2001) by Lucila Quieto and Absences (Ausencias) (20062015) by Gustavo Germano; the documentary film The Blonds (Los rubios) (2003) by Albertina Carri; and many of the theatrical works by Lola Arias that are situated politically in the post-dictatorship context (My Life After [Mi vida despues], 2009; The Year I was Born [El ano en que nacl], 2012;
DOI: 10.4324/9780429445668-17
Melancholy and Demonstrations [Melancolia y manifestaciones], 2012; Minefield [Campo minado], 2016; and Stunt Double [Doble de riesgo], 2016).
These works employ techniques of reenactment differently and to varying degree, whether superimposing past and present images to create the fantasy of return of family members; juxtaposing “before” and “after” photographs to consciously draw attention to absent loved ones; reenacting a scene of disappearance, envisioned as an extraterrestrial abduction, using Playmobil figures to represent the disappeared parents; reenacting the multiple possible deaths of a father who was killed and disappeared during the dictatorship; or reenacting scenes of battle onstage. The above examples reveal a handful of the many forms that reenactment may take in fostering fantasy, commemoration, play, and the re-telling of history.In the context of documentary theater, I consider the ways in which Arias destabilizes the binary between classical, realist, “mimetic” forms of reenactment and stylistic, non-realist forms of reenactment through her artistic rendering of auto/biographical reenactments onstage.1 In My Life After, Arias employs playful and humorous modes of reenactment, in which performers display Brechtian distancing in their embodiment of past events, often narrating as they assume different roles and gestures onstage, eliciting laughter from audience members through their lighthearted yet nonetheless poignant reenactments of the past. Arias departs stylistically from mimetic realism, yet her work still generates a sense of the real that is powerful and inextricably linked to the auto/biographical ties connecting past event to present reenactor. This sense of the real cultivated in her plays results from the actors’ manipulation of onstage props and personal objects, including family photographs, old clothes belonging to their parents, audio recordings, video clips, legal documents, and even a pet turtle.
The concept of “the real” has gained significant interest among theater and performance scholars in recent years (Carlson, 2016; Forsyth and Megson, 2011; Hernandez, 2021; Lehmann, 2006; Martin, 2010; 2013; Stephenson, 2019; Ward, 2019).
In her groundbreaking account of theater of the real, Carol Martin notes that the term “identifies a wide range of theatre practices and styles that recycle reality, whether that reality is personal, social, political, or historical” (2013, p. 5). It encompasses a broad range of performative practices including “documentary theatre, verbatim theatre, reality-based theatre, theatre-of-fact, theatre of witness, tribunal theatre, nonfiction theatre, restored village performances, war and battle reenactments, and autobiographical theatre” (p. 5). It asks important questions: “What does it mean to be an instrument of memory and of history? In what ways is performance embodied kinesthetic historiography, and what end does this serve?” (pp. 10-11). Relevant to our analysis here is Martin’s clarification that “theatre of the real can be mimetic and plot driven, or not. Mimesis is only one possibility among many now that realism coexists alongside and in combination with many other approaches to representation” (pp. 11-12). Hans-Thies Lehmann (2006) also considers the real in hisThe Body as Time Machine 255 influential treatise on post-dramatic theater: “The postdramatic theatre is the first to turn the level of the real explicitly into a ‘co-player’—and this on a practical, not just theoretical level. The irruption of the real becomes an object not just of reflection (as in Romanticism) but of the theatrical design itself” (p. 100). Arias’s work showcases the real as a category that reflects an exclusive adherence neither to realist aesthetics nor to nonmimetic forms. The bodies and props inhabiting Arias’s stages may display a mimetic function in that they occupy the stage as originals, but their stylized reconfiguration onstage leads to a blending of mimetic and experimental forms of representation that complicate traditional divisions separating types of reenactment practice.