Posted by Victoria Melnikova on May 21, 192003 at 14:11:46:
Victoria Melnikova
Professor Taylor
Stages of Conflict
2 May 2003
Two Latin American Antígonas: Performance of Resistance and Remembrance
The myth of Antigone as narrated by Sophocles in his play by that name has dominated the Western imagination for over two thousand years. It has generated a multiplicity of interpretations and compelled hundreds of its readers throughout the centuries to write their own versions of the myth. Many of these revisionary efforts concentrate on the metaphysical aspects of Sophocles’ play, while other authors are more concerned with the relationship between kinship and the state, or power and resistance, thus situating their adaptations of Antigone within a sociopolitical context. A number of playwrights locate their Antigones within a specific framework of the politics of war. Unburied bodies, the crimes against humanity are the leitmotif of such versions, hence the numerous renditions of Antigone, for instance, during the Second World War.
Latin America has also produced its own Antigones, although these have been largely neglected by the Occidental commentators of Sophocles’ tragedy and its subsequent versions. In this essay I am going to examine two adaptations of the classical play -- Antígona furiosa by the Argentine playwright Griselda Gambaro and Antígona written by José Watanabe in conjunction with the Peruvian theater group Yuyachkani.
Both versions have a highly politicized agenda and inscribe themselves into the context of atrocities committed by the Argentine and Peruvian governments against their own people. In Sophocles’ times, the denial of burial to an enemy was not an unusual punishment. Yet, even in ancient Greece Creon’s measure would be viewed as extreme, since “in no case were [the corpses] left unburied and exposed near human habitation for a prolonged period of time” (Blundell, “Essay” 78). However, the desecration of the dead became notoriously common practice in the 1970’s and 1980’s in some Latin American countries, where thousands of their citizens were “disappeared” at the slightest suspicion of being a threat to the ruling regime.
Dealing with the same reality, Gambaro’s and Watanabe’s plays are about defiance and the mourning of the victims of genocide. Their protagonists break the silence in order to combat the erasure of history by performing the absence. There are clear parallels between their Antígonas and the movement of the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, who staged public protests in an attempt to make the military government accountable for the disappearance of their loved ones. Both Yuyachkani’s Antígona and Gambaro’s Antígona furiosa are also concerned with the role of the witness in atrocity. However, in spite of all the similarity of their projects, Gambaro and Watanabe adopt different stances in their treatment of the topic.
Griselda Gambaro’s one-act Antígona furiosa was written and premiered in 1986, in the wake of the Argentine Dirty War. Gambaro borrows the major elements from Sophocles’ play, but not without introducing a number of significant variations. Now the action unmistakably takes place in Buenos Aires, and the set of characters is reduced to three -- Antígona, Corifeo and Antinoo, the last two representing the Chorus. The antagonistic relationship between the figures of power and resistance is highly gendered. While the Greek play is pervaded by ambiguity as to who is the real protagonist of the tragedy, Gambaro unequivocally solves the dilemma in favor of Antígona. The final scene of Creon’s suffering is eliminated, which makes the theme of Antígona’s mourning for her dead brother and all the other victims of torture and repression whom he represents, come to the fore. Even in the times of Sophocles, everything associated with the burial rites belonged to the realm of the feminine. Furthermore, the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, whose image Antígona conjures up, act from their position of womanhood, more specifically, motherhood, even though some commentators have questioned which gender identity the Madres are actually performing. Yet, perhaps, most importantly, Antígona’s claim to the role of the sole protagonist, who above all challenges the official history, is critical in view of the gendered character of the Dirty War. From the very beginning, the Junta cast itself as a strictly masculine “body.” The feminine image of the Mother Patria, as Diana Taylor asserts in her analysis of the community building project undertaken by the Junta, was “both the justification for and the physical site of violent politics” (“Fighting Fire” 26). At the same time, “real women were written out of the narrative. Even traditional notions of a woman’s domestic ‘sphere,’ a nonpolitical space, ‘disappeared’” (Taylor, “Performing Gender” 282). Thus, the emergence of the female protagonist in the aftermath of the Dirty War, who makes herself visible and audible as she refutes its very practices, is of paramount importance. Gambaro’s Antígona claims a space in history not only for her dead brother Polyneices, but also for herself.
However, Antígona’s recuperation of her voice is fraught with pitfalls. In order to recover her presence through performance, she resuscitates herself from the dead by untying the rope from around her neck. Thus, the play begins exactly where it ends. Its closed structure could symbolize the circular movement of the Madres around the Plaza de Mayo, whose “mourning […] does not end with the performance of it” (Wannamaker 78). It could also point to the futility of Antígona’s efforts to escape a violent death. Indeed, the implacably deterministic tone of the play is quite patent. Its characters are already familiar with the script. Corifeo knows what will happen next: Hemón “vendrá a pedir por ella,” (206), “aprovechará para una frase maestra” (206). They staged and will continue staging the same myth ad infinitum, the tragic outcome never changing:
ANTIGONA. […] “Siempre” querré enterrar a Polinices. Aunque nazca mil
veces y él muera mil veces.
ANTINOO. ¡Entonces, “siempre” te castigará Creonte!
CORIFEO. Y morirás mil veces. (217)
In his study of Antigones, George Steiner, dwelling on the reasons for the obsessive recurrence of Greek myths, that of Antigone among them, in the art and thought of the Western man, alludes to the accepted belief that myths perpetuate in collective remembrance and recognition because they “encode certain primary biological and social confrontations and self-perceptions in the history of man” (300-301). He also suggests that “myth embodies the potential of finality while postponing, through ambiguity, error, and conflict, its fulfilment. In myth there is always an ‘awaiting’ of meaning, messianic or anti-messianic” (303). The disturbing question that arises is: if viewed from this perspective, would the endless repetition of Antígona’s performance mean that violence and repression are perpetual, and there is no salvation from their eternal return? In Antígona’s staging of the conflict between conscience and an oppressive state, its repetition according to the same script annuls the possibility of the “awaiting” of meaning, in this case clearly anti-messianic; the finality of the myth is not postponed, but rather exposed from the very beginning (the play opens with Antígona hanged). Yet, the show of violence is still going on, continuously staged by those in power. The ludic tone of Gambaro’s play seems to suggest that any attempt to rebel will be mocked by the rulers. In Antígona furiosa, the protagonist’s repetitive cycle “life-death-resurrection” is opposed to the immutable character of power. At the end of the tragedy, Creon, speaking through Corifeo, acknowledges his fault. He also acknowledges his impunity: “Mío fue el trono y el poder. (Vergonzante) Aún lo es…” (216). Creon’s fate is a straightforward reference to that of the Junta generals, many of whom managed to get away with their crimes even after the trial. In a burlesque manner, Antinoo clarifies the nature of their punishment: “¿A qué llama prisión? ¿Pan y agua los manjares y los vinos? ¿Las reverencias y ceremonias?” (216)
The limitations of Antígona’s defiance mirror those of the Madres movement. The Madres staged their protest within the constrictions of the patriarchal order, and, as a consequence, replayed the role that the latter allots women -- that of the “disappeared,” figuratively and sometimes literally. According to Taylor, “the Junta’s narrative had a linear progression while the circular, repetitive nature of the Madres’ demonstrations suggested […] that they weren’t going anywhere” (“Performing Gender” 301). The Madres’ self-abnegation echoes that of Antígona. Commenting on the determination of the latter to bury Polyneices by covering him with her own body and serve him as his body and coffin, Taylor argues that Antígona’s
readiness to give herself up -- body and soul -- for her brother reaffirms the erasure of “feminine” individuality and specificity in Western culture, in which individuality has been equated with masculinity. […] The feminine, once again absent of subjectivity, is no more than the vessel, the object (coffin or earth) housing male individuality. She too must sacrifice herself so that society might live (Disappearing Acts 220).
Thus, both Antígona and the Madres find themselves, using Taylor’s expression, “trapped in a bad script” (Disappearing Acts 220).
Perhaps conscious of the limitations of such discourse, Gambaro explores ways of endowing her protagonist with more power. In Sophocles’ play, we never actually see Antigone burying Polyneices. The Guard brings her to the palace, reporting to Creon that he saw her bury the corpse. Then, Antigone claims her authorship of the act by admitting, or rather, refusing to negate, her transgression: “I don’t deny it; I admit the deed was mine” (38). This leads Judith Butler to a conclusion that in the play the act is delivered through speech acts: “the only way that the doer is attached to the deed is through the linguistic assertion of the connection” (7). This is not the case in Gambaro’s version of Sophocles’ tragedy, where Antígona actually performs the burial ritual on stage. The stage directions indicate: “Ceremonia, escarba la tierra con las uñas, arroja polvo seco sobre el cadáver, se extiende sobre él” (202). The potentially ambiguous relationship between the verbal assertion of the act and its physical completion is thus eliminated. Antígona not only relates her transgression, but also makes it visible through performance. This scene underscores Antígona’s gain of agency, achieved through her defiance of the authorities by means of both language and body. It is also a projection of the desire of the Madres to give their children a dignified burial.
Another technique that Gambaro employs to empower her heroine is ventriloquism. Antígona appropriates the male discourse, primarily that of Haemon, her fiancé, who condemns Creon twice -- both as a king and a father. It must be noted that due to the very nature of her transgression, Antígona, just as her Greek prototype, takes on the male role, adopting Creon’s rhetoric. In spite of the empowering potential of this strategy, it results, however, in “a sacrifice of autonomy at the very moment in which it is performed: she asserts herself through appropriating the voice of the other, the one to whom she is opposed” (Butler 11). Butler further observes that Antigone’s repeating the defiant act of her brother “situates her as the one who may substitute for him and, hence, replaces and territorializes him” (11).
Likewise, the appropriation of Haemon’s discourse by Gambaro’s Antígona is both empowering and problematic. On the one hand, she can now “have access to an entire cannon of ‘masterly saying[s]’ and make them [her] own - not as an echo but as a subject with agency who uses the words for [her] own needs” (Taylor, Disappearing Acts 221). Yet, again, the use of a male voice as a means of endowing herself with more authority reaffirms the gendered power structure of the patriarchal society, whose confines Antígona cannot surpass. Furthermore, Haemon’s self-sacrificial renunciation of his father’s authority is not devoid of weaknesses. The subversion of the chronological lineality in Gambaro’s play allows Antígona to lament her fiancé’s suicide, which is supposed to take place after her own: “Hiciste doble mi soledad. ¿Por qué preferiste la nada y no la pena? La huida y no la obstinación del vencido” (216). Mourning has remained a feminine function (cf. the Madres -- a movement comprised of women), therefore Haemon does not have the agency to assist Antígona and rescue her from the ordeal that she is going through as she is trying to bury her brother. In addition to Haemon’s speech, Antígona also appropriates his fury, which eventually leads her to self-destruction. She confesses that she was born to share love, not hatred, but her options are reduced to the latter and silence: “[…] el odio manda. (Furiosa) ¡El resto es silencio!” (217) Outraged, she espouses hatred and kills herself in an inrush of fury.
While Gambaro does not see any viable alternatives for her Antígona to overcome the limits of representation imposed on women and escape the circularity of her self-sacrifice within the patriarchal structure of the Argentine society, she does examine some of the factors that made the Dirty War possible and promoted the erasure of the gruesome historical facts. Among these is the role of the spectator in atrocity. An essential feature of all Athenian tragedies is the chorus, which, without necessarily representing the whole society, has a collective identity and whose function is to show the effects of the main actors’ words and deeds on the larger human community. In Antígona furiosa the chorus consists of two porteños, Corifeo and Antinoo, who are observing Antígona’s drama. Witnesses to her ordeal, they even perceive the unjust nature of Creon’s measures and the illegality of his punishment:
CORIFEO. La condenaste injustamente.
ANTINOO. ¡Eso!
CORIFEO. ¿Qué abogados tuvo? ¿Qué jueces? ¿Quién estuvo a su lado?
ANTINOO. ¿Su padre?
CORIFEO. ¡No tiene!
ANTINOO. ¿Su madre? (Seña rápida de negación del Corifeo) ¿Sus hermanos?
(Idem) ¿Sus amigos? La agarró y decidió: a ésta la reviento.
CORIFEO. Y nosotros decimos: ¿Cómo? ¿Precisamente ella condenada? No
toleró que su hermano, caído en combate, quedara sin sepultura. ¿No merece esto recompensa y no castigo? (207)
Yet, both men, far from defending Antígona publicly, try to avoid any responsibility involved in the act of watching. In Sophocles’ tragedy, the guard, reporting to Creon that Polyneices’ corpse has been buried, vehemently asserts that not only did he not do it, but also that he did not see who did it. As Butler posits, “he is aware that by reporting that he did see the deed, his very reporting will attach him to the deed, and he begs Creon to see the difference between the report of the deed and the deed itself. But the distinction is not only difficult for Creon to make, it survives as a fatal ambiguity in the text” (7). As Antígona is performing the burial of her brother in Gambaro’s play, Corifeo, afraid that the very act of witnessing the scene may somehow implicate him in the “crime” in the eyes of the authorities, advises his friend: “Mejor no ver actos que no deben hacerse. (Apartan la mesa)” (202). Antinoo is also unwilling to watch Antígona’s progression to disappearance and death and to see it as a result of the criminal politics of the military dictatorship: “Yo no quiero ver. ¡Ya vi con exceso!” (206) Corifeo and Antinoo, representing a large segment of the Argentine population, are thus reluctant witnesses of the atrocities committed during the Dirty War. They “didn’t know and they didn’t want to know, for not knowing became the source of their sense of well-being” (Taylor, Disappearing Acts 213).
The two porteños come up with various excuses for their passivity. They allude to their impotence in the face of destiny, symbolized by the curse over the house of Labdacus/Argentina: “Ya estaba decidido. ¿Qué podía cambiar?” (209) They don’t question the dictatorship’s actions, adhering to the comfortable, albeit evidently false, belief that these are governed by logic and the norms of justice: “El castigo siempre supone la falta” (211). The two men stage a buffoonery in order to downplay the tragic nature of the drama. They “comfort” Antígona, telling her: “descenderás libre y viva a la muerte. ¡No es tan trágico!” (210) Besides, Corifeo and Antinoo detach themselves from the brutal reality by isolating it as fiction, more specifically, theater. Indeed, when Antígona appears at the opening of the play, with a crown of withered flowers on her hair, they mistake her for Ophelia. The cage, which represents Antígona’s cell and which she does not exit throughout the duration of the performance, symbolically functions as her stage.
What Corifeo and Antinoo fail, or refuse, to notice, is their progression from being the “mere” spectators to becoming the actors in, if not the very authors of, the atrocity. The figure of Creon is represented by an empty polyester shell, worn or manipulated by Corifeo when the latter is impersonating the king. It undermines the tyrant’s individualism, at the same exemplifying its self-destructive nature: “quien cree que sólo él piensa o habla como ninguno es puro vacío adentro” (208). As it objectifies the ruler and turns him into a puppet, the absence of the original Creon “questions his very ontological status thereby weakening his position considerably” (Scott 101). The presence of Creon’s shell indicates that in the contemporary Argentine society, a space for violence and repression was indeed created. Yet, the tyranny would not have been possible without somebody filling that void. Corifeo, who acts for and eventually through Creon, and his friend Antinoo, who does not fail to mimic Corifeo, become accomplices in the tragedy. Perhaps, Gambaro is censoring those of her countrymen who chose to ignore the reality of torture and disappearance, which for her equals siding with the oppressor.
In this connection, it would be interesting to analyze what kind of relationship Gambaro is attempting to create between the audience and the performance. The playwright applies some Brechtian methods, such as legal discourse, an actor-character separation, and the rupture of the chronological lineality, in order to create the necessary distance between the two. The metatheatrical self-referentiality of the play and its use of the grotesque also contribute to creating the Verfremdungseffekt, aimed at increasing the audience’s capacity to reflect critically on what is being enacted before it. Therefore, I find Silvia Pellarolo’s comment that Gambaro “intenta que el público se identifique por distintos motivos, con las diferentes fuerzas sociales que aparecen retratadas en escena” (82) rather problematic. It is true that the audience is likely to sympathize with Antígona, whose exceptional heroism and self-sacrifice, for the majority of people, would still categorize her as “the other.” Some spectators might recognize their own behavior in the numbness of the two porteños to Antígona’s suffering. Yet, the identification with any of the characters in this play could be potentially disempowering, since all of them, including the ones they impersonate, are either victims or victimizers. While Gambaro does not want her audience to remain completely detached, as Corifeo and Antinoo do, she is also trying to preclude what Augusto Boal condemns as “esthetic osmosis” (113).
Albeit Griselda Gambaro modifies Sophocles’ drama significantly, one of its major themes -- the confrontation between an individual’s quest for justice and institutional power -- still occupies the central position in her play. J osé Watanabe situates his reworking of the story within a similar context of political repression in Peru, where tortures and disappearances also used to be common practice. Yet, this piece, written by Watanabe in collaboration with Peru’s leading theater collective Yuyachkani and acted by Teresa Ralli, one of its members, views the events of the Greek tragedy through a different lens. Yuyachkani’s one-woman Antígona was first staged in year 2000, i.e. 14 years after the premier of Gambaro’s Antígona furiosa. This time difference, as we are going to see, has proved critical in Yuyachkani’s interpretation of Sophocles’ tragedy.
The performance starts as the actress, emerging out of the darkness, begins to narrate her story. She acts out the various characters of the familiar play, without giving away her relation to these events. It is not until the last scene that her identity is revealed: “yo soy la hermana que fue maniatada por el miedo” (21). Ismene, the underdog of Sophocles’ drama, has been finally given a voice to tell a story that is her own and to bear witness to the past atrocity.
Sophocles’ Antigone, who despises her sister for weakness and disloyalty, repudiates Ismene. Declaring herself “the last of [the] royal house who remains” (59), she chooses to ignore Ismene’s existence. Similarly, Ismene is often absent in the numerous re-writings of the tragedy. In the majority of other cases, the contrast between the two sisters continues to exemplify the opposite views on the role of women in politics and public life in general: the prudent and fearful Ismene belongs to the domestic sphere, while Antigone, at the cost of her own life, heroically breaks the boundaries of the private space allotted women. When not completely despicable, Ismene largely remains a pitiable figure of secondary importance. Some of the recent feminist movements, which glorify those women who dare to act and to rebel against male despotism, obviously, have not contributed to Ismene’s rehabilitation.
In his study of Antigones, George Steiner examines a few reevaluations of Ismene’s character. Some playwrights and commentators have emphasized the highly moral, reasonable and life-asserting nature of her conduct. A number of critics, Weinstock and Davie among them, have gone as far as to attribute heroic qualities to Ismene. From Steiner’s analysis, it follows that the only attempts to reshuffle the dramatic weight of the two female characters in favor of Ismene in their versions of Antigone were made by Anouilh and Ritsos. Anouilh’s Ismène, spurned by Antigone, “assures Créon that tomorrow it is she who will steal from the city to bury Polynice” (Steiner 147) as she leaves the stage. Yannis Ritsos has Ismene recall her now dead sister and express her contempt for Antigone’s “rigid frigidity” (120) and “cunning and impudent magnanimity” (120). In both versions the effort to cast Ismene as a protagonist (or, in Anouilh’s case, as a potential protagonist), rests on the assertion of what appears to be an inherent conflict and competition between the two sisters. Ismene assumes a more active role at the same time as she condemns Antigone’s arrogance and reclaims her own subjectivity.
As far as I am aware, by the time Steiner published his book in 1984, only Ritsos had imagined Ismene as the narrator of the story, hence the critic’s speculations on the new possibilities: “the motif of an aged Ismene, at peace with her monstrous begetting, perhaps reminiscing on the House of Laius as she knew it, is seductive” (148). Four year later, David Slavitt wrote a poem “Ismene,” in which he explored the theme proposed by Steiner. However, his Ismene is anything but at peace with her past. Dismissed even by “the dramatist-general Sophocles” (23) because of her ordinariness, she is not entitled to have a voice in order to express her “inconvenient” (23) griefs, hence the poem written in the third person. Indeed, her woes “will not fit in / the formula. Pity and terror must keep in proportion, / but nothing’s heroic here” (23). Yet, her sister being one of “those others” (23), it is Ismene’s face that “every morning stares back at our own” (24).
Slavitt’s interpretation approximates Yuyachkani’s rendition of the tragedy in that both versions shift their focus to the marginalized Ismene without exalting her or deflating Antigone’s heroic self-abnegation, which could once again turn the two sisters into antagonists. The Peruvian Antígona, however, is concerned with a very specific reality -- the aftermath of the period of political violence in Latin America. The issue is no longer the strategy of the struggle, as it is for Gambaro, but rather the process of dealing with the long-term effects of trauma. Ismene, who failed to act the first time around, is given a chance to tell her story as a witness and perform a symbolic burial of her brother. As Teresa Ralli, the performer and co-author of the play, confesses in her essay “Fragments of Memory,” “the performance arrived as a necessary act of cleansing” (10).
Unlike Antígona furiosa, Yuyachkani’s piece does not have a circular structure. The finality of the play is made evident as Ismene completes the burial by breaking Polyneices’ mortuary mask, covering the pieces with a cloth and pouring sand over it. The symbolic gesture can allow her to start coming to terms with her past. However, the conclusiveness of the ritual does not imply that Ismene’s suffering is over. Asking her dead sister for forgiveness, she says, “ya tengo castigo grande: / el recordar cada día tu gesto que me tortura / y me avergüenza” (22). Ismene will be reenacting her testimony over and over again, preserving a space for the dead in the collective memory.
As we have seen, Gambaro’s Antígona, Corifeo and Antinoo impersonate the figures that are missing in her rendition of the play. The Argentine playwright uses ventriloquism to create a critical distance between the actors and the audience and to experiment with various ways of (dis)empowering her characters. Somewhat similarly, the actress Teresa Ralli of the Yuyachkani group performs the parts of all the characters, but the mechanisms and effects of her ventriloquism are rather different. Her Ismene does not speak for Haemon and Teiresias in order to make her speech more cogent by appropriating male discourse. Nor does she impersonate Creon to convey the indeterminacy of the power structures or to expose the criminal complicity of some Peruvians with the dictatorial regime. In fact, Ismene herself is one of those silent figures whom Gambaro denounces in her play. Perhaps, some psychoanalysts might argue that Ismene acts for the heroic Antígona because of her subconscious desire to substitute the sister who spurned her, but the whole context of the play does not allow for such an interpretation. It seems that gendered discourse and the power apparatus are no longer the predominant theme in Yuyachkani’s production. Ismene’s performance is rather an apology for her non-participation in Antígona’s defiant quest for justice. At the same time, one may view acknowledging one’s own weakness as a manifestation of courage, and finding a voice to recount one’s memories as empowering.
Instead, Ismene’s ventriloquism stems from the epistemic grid favored by Yuyachkani’s philosophy. In Quechua, the name of the group means several things: “I am thinking,” “I am remembering,” and “I am your thought.” According to Taylor, “the term ‘Yuyachkani’ signals embodied knowledge and memory, and blurs the line between thinking subjects and the subjects of thought” (“Staging Traumatic Memory” 1). She also maintains, “‘I’ and ‘you’ are a product of each other’s experience and memories, of historical trauma, of enacted space, of socio-political crisis” (“Staging Traumatic Memory” 1). Seen from this perspective, Ismene’s enactment of the roles of the other participants in the drama signals that she has appropriated the past history of her people and made it her own. Being simultaneously the knower and the known, she occupies a position that enables her to tell her own version of the official history. Instead of urging people to forget the past tragedies, which is what the authorities have tried to do, Ismene’s performance serves to preserve the social memory of cumulative trauma.
As was discussed earlier in this essay, in Antígona furiosa, Gambaro strives to alienate her audience from what is happening on stage in order to provide more room for critical thinking and to avoid the potentially detrimental effect of the spectators’ identification with the victim or the victimizers. On the contrary, the actress Teresa Ralli, embodying the collective history, states, “we Peruvians were all Ismene” (Ralli 10). Her performance, without eliminating a critical distance that would allow the spectators to reassess their experiences, relies precisely on the audience’s identification with her character as a means of healing the collective trauma. As opposed to all Greek tragedies, which place a high value on individuality, this is a story that in one way or another is relevant to all Peruvians. Like the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, who claimed to be the mothers of all the disappeared, Yuyachkani’s Antígona shifts the emphasis away from the kinship bonds between her and Polyneices. Her brother is no longer “pariente mío / sino muerto de todos” (4). Hence Ismene’s affirmation of the communal nature of her guilt: “La culpa que sentimos está en nosotros, tebanos, / […] porque nadie, ni el consejero más sabio, se atrevió a refutar la / orden de Creonte” (3). The only character who, in spite of speaking through Ismene, insists on her identity, is Antígona. Announcing her suicidal determination to bury her brother, she proudly identifies herself: “algún día todos dirán que fui la hermana que no le faltó al hermano: / me llamo Antígona” (9). Antígona’s marked individuality underscores the exceptionality of her deed. Years later, Ismene, speaking on behalf of her compatriots, does not seek justification for her former passivity, accepting her role in the tragedy. Instead, she encourages the silent Peruvian survivor to regain his/her voice and bear witness to the atrocity in order to expose “las turbulencias debajo del agua mansa” (15) that the king of Thebes/Peru’s government was trying to erase from the country’s history.
To conclude, Gambaro’s and Yuyachkani’s versions of Sophocles’ tragedy locate their Antígonas within the similar contexts of the nefarious political practices that were carried out by the Argentine and Peruvian governments, a fourteen-year gap between the two plays accounting for a number of differences between them. In fact, some of their major aspects, such as the choice of the protagonist, the portrayal of the witness, and the relationship between the performance and the audience, are dealt with in almost diametric ways. Nevertheless, both plays succeed in offering their own, as opposed to the official, version of the historical events, placing an emphasis on cultural continuity and collective memory. Gambaro’s Antígona furiosa and Yuyachkani’s Antígona create a repertoire of embodied knowledge, transmitting communal experience and validating the latter through performance. The Argentine heroine, countering Corifeo’s claim that “recordar muertes es como batir agua en el mortero: no aprovecha” (200), asserts that “los vivos son la gran sepultura de los muertos” (202). Teresa Ralli of Yuyachkani, in the process of rehearsing, interviewed women who were relatives of the disappeared and incorporated their gestures into her performance. She felt that the best homage she could give them was “to feel all the memories inscribed on their bodies and thus confer them unto Antígona” (8). In the reality in which the archive often fails to maintain the record of criminal violence, embodied acts function as the only means of recuperating and preserving collective memories and values.
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