Posted by Diana Taylor on April 01, 192003 at 09:44:55:
Staging Traumatic Memory: Yuyachkani
[From Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Forthcoming, Duke University Press, 2003.]
[Figure 1. Teresa Ralli in Contraelviento. Photo, Miguel Villafañe]
In her trance, an Andean peasant woman, Coya, sees two forces colliding, destroying everything. As a traumatized Coya speaks of what she sees, she transmits her anguish to her sister, Huaco, and their father, Papai. In her vision, an army tramples the population. The devastation is complete. The corpses have "disappeared" but, then, so has life itself: "ningún cuerpo quedaba sobre la tierra, y ustedes ya no estaban más conmigo." (There were no bodies left on earth, and you two were no longer near me.) Her father reminds the women that they need to seek the seeds of life. The task seems both terrifying and ludicrous: “I’ve witnessed so much death,” states Huaco, “and you’re asking me to go look for the seeds of life?”
Masked dancers from pre- and post- Hispanic performative traditions appear onstage and fight ferociously for influence over the peasants--dancing devils and spiteful archangels with trumpets like muskets, transformed into crazed figures of power. The archangels fight for ownership of the peasants’ souls in the “danza de la diablada” or Devil dance from the Fiesta de la Candelaria in Puno. These dances, performed annually for hundreds of years, tell a story as old as the Conquest, as recent as the criminal violence associated with Sendero luminoso, the “shining path.” The peasants die, but not before they have found the seeds of life. They throw some into the ground, and entrust the rest into the hands of the patient Equeco, the good-luck figure from Andean folklore who ends the play as s/he began: “these seeds were given to me by a woman, who told me a story….”
The play, Contraelviento (Against the Wind), was created by Peru’s leading theatre collective, Yuyachkani in 1989, at the height of the country’s most recent civil conflict. It recounts the testimony of an indigenous survivor of the 1986 massacre at Soccos, in Ayacucho.
“In Quechua, the expressions ‘I am thinking,’ ‘I am remembering,’ ‘I am your thought’ are translated by just one word: Yuyachkani,” the noted Peruvian commentator Hugo Salazar del Alcazar wrote in one of his many pieces on the Yuyachkani theatre group. The term “Yuyachkani” signals embodied knowledge and memory, and blurs the line between thinking subjects and the subjects of thought. The reciprocity and mutual constructedness that links the “I” and the “you” is not a shared or negotiated identity politics—“I” am not “you,” nor claiming to be you or act for you. “I” and “you” are a product of each other’s experiences and memories, of historical trauma, of enacted space, of socio-political crisis. But what is ‘embodied’ knowledge/memory, and how is it transmitted? And how does it differ from the ‘archival,’ usually thought of as a permanent and tangible resource of materials available over time for revision and reinterpretation? What is at stake in differentiating between these systems of organized thought, especially perhaps when thinking about trauma?
The transitive notion of embodied memory encapsulated in “Yuyachkani”— the “I am remembering/ I am your thought”—entails a relational, non-individualistic understanding of subjectivity. Coya, the indigenous survivor, recounts a vision of annihilation that is and is not her own. The “I” who remembers is simultaneously active and passive (thinking subject/subject of thought). Yuyachkani, a collective theatre group, sees itself implicated-- both as product and as producer-- in various modes of cultural transmission in an ethnically mixed and complex country. For the past twenty-five years, the group has participated in at least three interconnected survival struggles—that of Peru, plagued by centuries of civil conflict; that of the diverse performance practices that have been obscured (and at times “disappeared”) in a racially divided, though multi-ethnic, Peruvian culture; and that of Yuyachkani itself, made up of nine artists who for decades have worked together in the face of political, personal, and economic crisis. In adopting the Quechua name, the predominantly ‘white’ Spanish speaking group signals its cultural engagement with indigenous and mestizo populations and with complex, transcultured (Andean-Spanish) ways of knowing, thinking, remembering. Yuyachkani attempts to make visible a multi-lingual, multi-ethnic praxis and epistemology in a country that pits nationality against ethnicity, literacy against orality, the archive against the repertoire of embodied knowledge. In Peru, the urban turns its back on the rural, and languages (Spanish, Quechua, and Ayamara) serve more to differentiate between groups and silence voices than to enable communication. Yuyachkani, by its very name, introduces itself as a product of a history of ethnic co-existence. Its self-naming is a performative declarative announcing its belief that social memory links and implicates communities in the transitive mode of subject formation.
There is a continuum of ways of storing and transmitting memory that spans from the ‘archival’ to the ‘embodied,’ or what I have been calling a ‘repertoire’ of embodied thought/memory, with all sorts of mediated and mixed modes in between. The archive, as I noted in “The DNA of Performance,” can contain the grisly record of criminal violence—the documents, photographs, and remains that tell of disappearances. But what happens, Yuyachkani asks, when there are no photographs, no documents, when even the bones lay scattered by the wayside? The repertoire, for them, holds the tales of the survivors, their gestures, the traumatic flashbacks, repeats, and hallucinations—in short, all those acts usually thought of as ephemeral and not valid forms of knowledge and evidence. As I pointed to earlier in this study, there is a long tradition, which in the Americas dates back to the Conquest, of thinking of embodied knowledge as that which disappears because it cannot be contained or recuperated through the archive. Nonetheless, multiple forms of embodied acts are always present, reconstituting themselves—transmitting communal memories, histories, and values from one group/generation to the next.
Focusing on Yuyachkani’s political performance practices, this chapter teases apart several interconnected questions central to performance studies, Latin American studies, and psychoanalysis: what is at risk politically in thinking about embodied knowledge and performance as that which disappears? Does trauma, whose very nature “precludes its registration,” leave no trace because “a record has yet to be made”? Whose memories “disappear” if only archival knowledge is valorized and granted permanence?
Thinking about the interconnections between atrocity, embodied knowledge, and subjectivity proves urgent for the many populations in the Americas that have experienced centuries of social trauma. Approaches to memory and trauma that privilege the individual ‘subject’ fail to do justice to the accumulative and collective nature of the trauma suffered by illiterate and literate communities alike, transmitted through embodied performances. The archive and the repertoire are culturally specific—while the systems may help us understand cultural memory throughout the hemisphere, the content in each will not usually be transferable.
Yuyachkani’s work has drawn on Peru’s archive and repertoire not only to address the country’s many populations but to elucidate the multiply constituted history. Some dance, sing, speak, or otherwise perform historical memory, while others access alternate sources—literary and historical texts, maps, records, statistics and other kinds of archival documents. Nonetheless, contradictions abound. How can a group, made up predominantly (but certainly not exclusively) of urban, white/mestizo, middle class, Spanish-speaking professional theatre people think/dance/remember the racial, ethnic and cultural complexities and divides of the country without minimizing the schisms or mis-representing those who they are not? Who exactly is thinking whose thought? Thought and remembrance, as the name ‘Yuyachkani’ makes clear, are inseparable from the “I” and “you” who think them. As a group made up predominantly of Limeños, does Yuyachkani have access to the memories of the Andean communities? Can it celebrate their fiestas or perform their rituals? Can Yuyachkani tell their story of accumulative social trauma? How to avoid charges of cultural impersonation and appropriation?
One obvious response to this danger of cultural trespassing that threatens practitioners lies in simply turning one’s back on the rural indigenous and mestizo populations and tacitly accepting that performance is a European practice carried out by and for white urban audiences in the Americas. The indigenous and mestizo practices, one can argue, belong to a self-contained, parallel circuit of cultural (and economic) transmission—oral, mythic, calendar-based fiestas, rituals, and festivities. Theatre practitioners, then, might decide to stick to European repertoires and archives. There are all sorts of staging, lighting, and acting traditions, methods and theories of professional training to choose from. By sticking to this pool, practitioners might either want to distance themselves from the ‘non-educated’ elements of the population, or signal their fear of appropriating artistic languages that are not their own. Why not do Brecht, still the most honored theatre practitioner in Latin America and—ironically--the world’s greatest borrower? After five hundred years of colonialism, many Latin Americans, especially those from middle class, urban backgrounds and education, are far more familiar with ‘first world’ cultural materials that are readily available through the media and publishing circuits than those ‘non-reproducible’ performances from their own countries. Some acts of appropriation are safer, and potentially less offensive, than others. Class, racial, and linguistic affinities often supercede bonds that grow out of geographical and national interconnectedness.
If, conversely, one acknowledges that indigenous and rural mestizo populations also have deep performance traditions that make up part of the rich repertoires of the Americas, then how do artists from all ethnic backgrounds approach their multi-ethnic, transculturated traditions? Can they draw from these diverse cultural backgrounds with the same ease with which contemporary European practitioners draw from their recent and distant past? Is this, or any, “borrowing” unburdened by the political, historical, or aesthetic baggage of ‘value’ attached to ‘style?’ Do criollo (European Americans) or mestizo performances that include indigenous elements in their work risk turning them into exotic, folkloric add-ons? Performing “Indian” often reveals some kind of romantic notion of authenticity in festivals, pageants, and national spectacles. It’s not difficult to see the dangers of separating performance practices from the people who perform them and from the ideological framework that gave them rise. How can a theatre group such as Yuyachkani dream of avoiding all the representational pitfalls?
Thinking about how performance participates in and across these networks of social memory might allow us to consider cultural participation more broadly. While criollo, middle-class Peruvians share innumerable artistic traditions with Europeans, they also clearly participate in the reality of Peru’s social, racial, linguistic, and political cacophony. The very categories—‘criollo’ and ‘Indian’—are a product of that conflict, not its reason for being.
“The people called Indians” are a product of naming. It is through this performative invocation by the colonist that “Indians” enter the world stage. The archive, like the repertoire, is full of scripted performances—some that disappear, some that evoke, some that invent their object of inquiry. The naming of the “people called Indians” both conjured up and disappeared a people—the many ethnic groups suddenly lumped together as “Indian.” The same ‘scenario of discovery’ created the ‘white’ conquerors. The ‘criollo’ colonizers proved a mixed group indeed—including converted Jews (conversos) and free and enslaved Africans.
These antagonistic positions have been polarized and cemented into the social imaginary as biological ‘fact.’ This way of thinking of lineage and tradition would certainly insist on keeping the various circuits of memory and transmission separate—to each their own. But there is a competing imaginary—that of the nation state, conjured into being in Latin America during the 19th century. National identity, theoretically, supercedes regional or ethnic difference. This model assumes that ‘Peruvians’ (for example), are a product of, and participants in, mutually constituting historical and cultural processes. However, the national imaginary is shaped not only by what it chooses to remember, but also by what it chooses to forget, as Ernest Renan observed over one hundred years ago. Peruvians participate by forgetting, not just by remembering. Therefore it’s not a question of if, but rather how, they participate.
II "Yuyachkani," Peru’s internationally acclaimed collective theatre group actively stages Peru’s social memory. It is a product of a complicated national, ethnic, linguistic, cultural memory and thought. Actors Teresa Ralli, Rebeca Ralli, Ana Correa, Débora Correa, Augusto Casafranca, Julian Vargas, Amiel Cayo, the director Miguel Rubio, and the technical director Fidel Melquiades (most of whom have been in the group since it started in 1971) got to know each other as members of “Yego,” a group of “committed theatre” practitioners. When they decided to form a group, Teresa Ralli recalls, “the first thing we had was the name. We called ourselves Yuyachkani before we had even worked on a play.” Now, they have their own 200 seat theatre and work space, Casa Yuyachkani, and have worked together close to thirty years, a momentous achievement, given the severe economic and political hardships they have faced. Only a few other Latin American collectives—most notably La Candelaria and T.E.C. from Colombia, Galpão from Brazil-- boast similar accomplishments. [Figure 2, Patio, Casa Yuyachkani. Edmundo Torres, their long-time mask maker, dances the role of the China diabla, July 1996. Photo Diana Taylor]
This group of nine members has made visible a series of survival struggles culminating in the recent atrocities associated with Sendero luminoso (Shining Path) that left some 30,000 people dead and 80,000 homeless. Perhaps as daring, however, Yuyachkani has insistently re-membered Peru as one, complex, racially, ethnically and culturally diverse country. “Perú es un país desmemorizado,” (Peru is a de-memorized country) says Teresa Ralli, and the ‘de’ captures the violent refusal at the heart of a country that does not recognize or understand the realities of its many parts. The white, westernized Lima, built with its back to the Andean highlands (which has been called the ‘mancha india’ or the ‘Indian stain ), affords Yuyachkani one of the spaces to stage this re-membering for urban audiences. They perform throughout the city, staging ‘public acts’ on streets, in schools, on the steps of the national Cathedral, in orphanages, cemeteries, and government buildings. They also stage street performances in non-theatrical spaces throughout the country, starting conversations, participating in protests and celebrations. Recognizable characters from traditional and popular culture—musicians and masked figures on stilts—parade through the streets inviting spectators to join in. These parades, as Ana Correa describes them, end in a fiesta in which participants start talking and getting to know each other. Drawing from Western models (Brecht’s political theatre) and Boal’s ‘theatre of the oppressed’ as well as Quechan and Aymaran legends, music, songs, dances, and popular fiestas, Yuyachkani asks spectators to become participants in Peru’s rich performance traditions. Thus, their work asks spectators to take seriously the co-existence of these diverse ethnic, linguistic and cultural groups and to bear witness to Peru's history of extermination and resistance, alienation and tenacity, betrayal and remembrance.
When Yuyachkani began working in the early 1970s, the members of the group saw themselves as politically “committed” popular theatre practitioners. Popular theatre the late 60s and early 70s, with its by the people for the people ethos, challenged the systems that placed “Theatre” with a capital “T” and “Culture” with a capital “C” in lofty, aesthetic realms, beyond the reach of working class people and racially marginalized communities. Popular theatre groups in Latin America and the U.S. (Bread and Puppet, San Francisco Mime, Teatro Campesino to name just a few) tended to work as ‘collectives.’ The members of Yuyachkani, for example, meet every morning at their “Casa Yuyachkani” and work on developing new material and ideas. They have lunch together in their communal kitchen, and meet again in the afternoon to rehearse or warm-up for an evening performance. Like all collective theatre, they rejected the playwright and “star” driven theatrical models that dominated high-brow and commercial theatre. They took the theatre out of elite spaces, staging free performances that had to do with the real life economic and political conditions of working people. Political and economic issues took precedence over aesthetic concerns. They toured their shows to rural communities that never really had access to theatre, and involved spectators in many aspects of the productions. Working under the Brechtian influence, popular theatre in Latin America was closely linked to strikes and other class/labor struggles.
As I have argued elsewhere, there are some fundamental limitations and built-in contradictions to “popular theatre,” no matter how important and laudable the projects have been in general. Popular theatre at times presented an over-simplified and programmatic view of conflict and resolution. In Latin America and elsewhere, popular theatre was often animated by Marxist theories. Progressive, at times militant, university students and intellectuals instructed the disenfranchised how to improve their economic lot or lead a more productive life. Because Marxism privileged class, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist struggles at the expense of racial, ethnic, and gender conflict, its implementation in popular theatre groups in Latin America ran the risk of reducing deep-seeded cultural differences to class difference. In Peru, and other countries with large indigenous and mestizo communities, the “proletariat” in fact consisted of indigenous and mestizo groups who lived on the margins of a capitalist society for various reasons—including linguistic, epistemic, and religious differences not reducible (though bound into) economic disenfranchisement. A call for solidarity organized around anti-capitalism allowed for rampant, unthinking trespassing on cultural, ethnic, and linguistic domains. Furthermore, the “popular,” as understood by some of its activists, became entangled with fantasies of a simple, pure world existing somewhere beyond the grips of capitalism and imperialism. The less the practitioners truly knew the communities they were engaging, the more the discrepancies in power and the lack of reciprocity threatened to place them in positions of moral superiority reminiscent of religious proselytizers.
These problems plagued the initial endeavors of Yuyachkani. The marginalized groups they were addressing in their own country had their own languages, expressive culture, and performance codes that the group knew nothing about. Miguel Rubio recalls how during that first play, Puño de Cobre (1971) in which they performed for miners, the actors dressed in jeans and played a variety of roles and characters. After the performance, one miner commented: “Compañeros, that’s a nice play. Too bad you forgot your costumes.” Unlike some of the other popular theatre groups of the period (both in Latin America and the U.S.), who set about to enlighten an exploited population, Yuyachkani realized that they needed enlightening: “Much later,” Rubio continues, “we understood why the miners thought what they did. We had forgotten something much more important than costumes. What they wanted to tell us was that we were forgetting the audience that we were addressing. We were not taking their artistic traditions into consideration. Not only that, we didn’t know them! The miners came from rural areas rich in cultural traditions. They were right. How could they imagine a play about them that did not include their songs, or the clothing of the women who so proudly conserve their traditional dress, or the figures who tell stories as they dance?” This became the beginning of the ongoing education of Yuyachkani. Their theatre no longer became “about them” but about a more complex reflection on Peru’s ethnic and cultural heterogeneity. They added members from these rural communities to their group; the actors learned Quechua; they trained in indigenous and mestizo performance practices that included singing, playing instruments, dancing, movement and many other forms of popular expression. They expanded the notion of theatre to include the popular fiesta that emphasized participation, thus blurring the distinction between actor and spectator. Performance, for Yuyachkani as for other popular theatre groups, provided an arena for learning—but here it was Yuyachkani learning “our first huaylars, pasacalle, and huayno dance steps [;] between beers and warm food, we started to feel and maybe to understand the complexity of the Andean spirit” (in Cotto116). Performance did indeed offer enlightenment and inter-group understanding—but Yuyachkani admits to having taken the first steps in learning about rural populations by participating in their cultural practices. According to Hugo Salazar del Alcazar, this was the first phase of Yuyachkani’s development, which focused primarily on political issues.
Since those beginnings, Yuyachkani has continued to train in various linguistic and performance traditions to offer a deeper vision of what it means to “be” Peruvian, one that reflects the cultural, temporal, geographical, historical and ethnic complexity of that articulation. There are many tenses involved in 'to be,’ and various ways of situating the ‘pre-’ and ‘post-’ markers depending on who is doing the telling. For Yuyachkani, this performance includes the layering and juxtaposition of the diverse traditions, images, languages, and histories found in the country. Poised between a violent past that is never over and a future that seems hopelessly pre-scripted, their performances re-present images and scenarios that live and circulate in a variety of systems and forms—from the media, the children’s stories, martial arts, silent movies, to indigenous myths. [Figure 3, Debora Correa in Los músicos ambulantes. Photo: Miguel Villafañe. Figure 4, Ana Correa, Augusto Casafranca, Teresa Ralli, Debora Correa in Los músicos ambulantes. Photo: Miguel Villafañe. Figure 5, Teresa Ralli in Los músicos ambulantes. Photo: Miguel Villafañe.]
This second phase of Yuyachkani’s development, according to Salazar, focuses more on the cultural debates around ‘lo nacional.’ The group studied José María Arguedas’ work on Andean myths and performances to understand the ancient traditions that persisted in contemporary cultural practices. A play such as Los músicos ambulantes (The Travelling Musicians, 1983), draws from the famous folktale, The Musicians of Bremen and Arguedas’ Todas las sangres, to tell a humorous and beautiful story of homelessness, social injustice, and the importance of working together. In an aesthetically rich performance full of masked figures, music, dance and comic routines, the little red hen, the mangy dog, the wily cat, and the limp donkey realize that for all their differences and incompatibilities, they’re better off together than apart. The play also works on different levels for different audiences. In one sense, the play is an important reflection on Peru’s racial make-up. The dog represents the criollo Limeño, from the barrios altos or poor sectors of the city. The hen stands for the Afro-Peruvian populations. The cat comes from the selva, or the Peruvian Amazon valley, while the donkey represents the cholo serrano, the mestizo from the Andes. These figures, all of whom have been persecuted, beaten and exploited, come together to rebel exuberantly against the patrón. The negotiation among them requires that they get to know each other—to recognize each other’s strengthens and what each contributes to the group. But it also requires that the group respect each member’s individuality. On this, more personal level, the play summed up Yuyachkani’s predicament at the time—how, as Miguel Rubio asks, does the group allow each member to flourish individually without threatening the existence of the whole? Yet, even for those who do not get the racial or personal subtext of the performance, the play is enormously appealing--sparkling with humor, energy, music and intelligence. This play rejoices in the fact of transculturation, for the only music these characters can create requires a bringing together of the various distinct elements and traditions. The music from the jungle harmonizes with that from the Andes, the coastal plains, and the Afro-Peruvian communities. The play’s national and international popularity enabled Yuyachkani to buy Casa Yuyachkani. Because this play is so well known, moreover, these characters can intervene in the national drama. When the economic situation in Peru gets particularly critical, the little red hen of the production (Ana Correa) performs an “acto público” by joining the line of
retired people waiting for social security monies to complain about being penniless. “Cómo como?” (How am I to eat?) she demands impatiently, as she clucks and struts about. And Teresa Ralli, the mangy dog, visits children at an orphanage.
[Figure 6: Ana Correa, right, in her costume from Los músicos ambulantes, participating in a public protest. Photo: Miguel Villafañe. Figure 7, Teresa Ralli, left, in her costume from Los músicos ambulantes, performs in an orphanage. Photo: Miguel Villafañe.]
Yuyachkani has developed more troubled plays to think through the civil violence and the apparent impossibility of respectful coexistence in a country torn apart by injustice and rage. Encuentro de zorros (1985) draws from ancient myths of “el zorro de arriba” and “el zorro de abajo” preserved both in Peru’s repertoire and archive. The legend of the two foxes was already considered ancient when it was first written in the 16the century Huarochirí Manuscript, and it was reworked in Arguedas’ famous “El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo” (1968). The foxes, symbols of change, appear in moments of extreme social crisis. In their first apparition, some 2,500 years ago, they met to decry social injustice. Their challenge, as they describe it, is to devour the world and create a new one. Yuyachkani uses the myth to again think through Peru’s geographic, ethnic and linguistic schisms—el zorro de arriba represents the populations from the Andean highlands, while the zorro de abajo typifies those from Lima’s coastal region who meet once again in the violent throes of mass migration due to Peru’s civil war of the 80s and 90s. Beggars, thieves, and drunken clairvoyants push a Mother Courage-type cart and offer a grim perspective on Peru’s urban landscape. Rather than a respectful coexistence, these characters show a world devastated by criminal violence, displacement, and unemployment. The world is turned upside down, “parents against children, children against parents, the living against the dead and the dead against the living.” Retorno (1996) shows the aftermath of Peru’s “dirty war.” People have been left stranded and disoriented; the villages destroyed, the harvest lands burnt. A re-envisioning of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Retorno stages the despair and isolation of those who have nowhere to go. There is no going forward, no going back, no home to return to.
Two of Yuyachkani’s best-known pieces-- Contraelviento (1989) and Adios Ayacucho (1990) combine moments from Peru’s remote and recent past to reflect on the transmission of traumatic social experience. Developed and performed during the conflict between the military and Sendero luminoso, these works specifically engage with the questions I posed earlier—how does the repertoire store and transmit social memory? Whose memories/traumas disappear if we privilege the archive over the repertoire of embodied experience/knowledge?
Contraelviento, one of Yuyachkani’s largest and most spectacular pieces, reenacts the testimony of an indígena survivor of a massacre in which peasants were forced off a cliff to their deaths. The performance stages one more traumatic repeat—Coya, in a trance, revisits the scene of devastation. Her body shudders as she re-experiences the intrusive image. An entire community has been annihilated by armed forces. The shudder harnesses various political moments: the unsolicited re-apparition of a traumatic event situated firmly in the past; the witnessing of an atrocious episode in the here and now; it is the here, now, and always of a violent history of the exploitation and extermination of indigenous peoples; it conjures up the vision of a future catastrophe. The body responds to and communicates a violent occurrence that may be hard to locate temporally or spatially.
Coya’s sister and father listen to her testimony. They all understand that a furiously approaching storm will scatter them. Huaco, raging against the violence she sees coming, joins the guerrillas, fighting fire with fire. Papai stays firm to his commitment to find the seeds of life by practicing ancient, invocational rites. Coya runs to the courts, hoping to find redress through the justice system. The judges--farcical, aged, bent figures with oversize hats who perform a vaudeville version of the pre-conquest comic dance of ‘los viejitos’ and speak broken English-- pretend not to understand her. Her language, represented as flute music, needs to be translated by Peru’s famous sell-out character, the Felipillo, translator to the conquerors. “This woman says that she comes from far away to tell us that her ancestors have told her that the Caporal is killing them…. She says too that everyone’s life is in great danger and that the seeds of life are being destroyed.” The judges dismiss her with a good beating—“if that woman can’t speak, it’s because she has something to hide.” This scene elucidates several points in my argument: the courts, an ‘archival’, document-producing system that in the Americas serves the interests of the powerful, cannot encompass or ‘understand’ pleas from the poor. [Official documents, records, and figures relating to genocidal practices hardly ever make it into the national archives.] Institutionalized circuits of memory and transmission keep the dominant sectors of the population walled off from the rural mestizo and indigenous populations. Expressions of trauma might just as well be delivered in a foreign tongue.
Contraelviento was performed at the peak of militarized conflict in Peru. “Disappearances” and mass murder had become common political practice in Latin America during the 1970s and 80s. How, Yuyachkani asked itself, can theatre compete with or elucidate the theatricality of political violence? Miguel Rubio sums up the challenge: “Nothing that you create on stage can compare with what is happening in this country.” Furthermore, the heightened spectacularity of political terrorism, as I argue elsewhere, forces potential witnesses to look away. It blinds the very spectators that theatre calls on “to see.” What role do artists have when, as Adorno asks, genocide is part of our cultural heritage?
In the most lyrical of forms, Contraelviento succeeds in posing the most urgent questions. How can indigenous and mestizo communities address genocidal policies and practices that are often not acknowledged by the national or international community? Through performance—the music, masked dances, and ritual incantations—the play suggests, atrocity be ‘remembered’ and ‘thought’ even when there are no external witnesses, and no recourse to the archive. Yet, these memories disappear when scholars and activists fail to recognize the traces left by embodied knowledge.
Adios Ayacucho takes the question of witnessing further—the dismembered victim of torture and “disappearance” is forced to act as sole witness to his own victimization. As the play begins, the members of the audience see a ramp displaying a suit of clothing and candles laid out in a funerary ritual. Only as their eyes become
accustomed to the dim light can they discern movement within a large black plastic bag behind the display. Little by little, a nameless, almost voiceless figure re-
constitutes himself and breaks out of the bag. As he tells his story, his voice becomes strong. He was tortured. His tormented body was cut into bits and discarded, in a garbage bag, by the side of the road. In this crime without an external witness, and with no survivors, no one but he himself can demand that justice be served. No documents, photos, or gravestones attest to his annihilation. Only his bones, shoved in plastic, serve as archival ‘proof’ of an event that left no other material evidence. Only through performance can ‘disappearance’ be rendered visible. Disappearance, as Latin American activists and artists know full well, becomes itself through performance. [Figure 8, Adios Ayacucho. Photo courtesy of Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani]
Yet while no external witnesses exist in Adios Ayacucho, the play affirms the vital role of what Dori Laub calls the “the witness from inside” or “the witness to oneself.” This witness from inside, though impossible according to Laub in the context of the Holocaust that “made unthinkable the very notion that a witness could exist” (66), because it allowed for no “outside,” no “other,” is nonetheless posited as the only hope for justice in the Andean context. The victim reconstitutes himself by finding his most of his scattered body parts. Little by little, he re-claims his human form. Finally he finds his face, finally he finds his voice that will proclaim the violence done to him and his community. He not only voices his denunciation, over and over again, but he determines to take a letter to the President of the Republic, outlining the violence he has suffered. This letter, finally, will make it into the archive, a testimony that even the President might acknowledge of the erasure of mestizo and indigenous populations. And, in a final act of personal reconstitution, the victim raids the tomb of the conqueror Pizarro housed in the main Cathedral of Lima, and helps himself to the bones he still misses. Better that the glorified national body be found wanting than it be preserved and fetishized in the face of violence against the population. This haunting image from Adios Ayacucho suggests the ways in which Yuyachkani layers its approach to representing violence. The clothes laid out in memory of the dead re-presents the missing body of the victim of disappearance, even as it echoes an ancient burial practice. These practices are alive; other bodies will perform them just as the man fits himself back into the waiting clothes. Andean performance practices, this shows, are not dead things, fading from view. Nor do they function in a parallel universe.
One of Yuyachkani’s most recent productions is the extraordinary one-woman Antigona (2000), acted by Teresa Ralli and directed by Miguel Rubio. The spectators readily follow the well-known story as Teresa Ralli acts out the various figures—Antigone, Ismene, Creon, Heamon, Tiresias, the messenger—using only a chair as a prop on the otherwise empty stage. Her precise and eloquent movements transform her outfit, a simple tunic over a pant and bodice, into numerous costumes. With a clap of her hands she conjures up the various characters, pulling them out of the archive to incarnate Peru’s current woes. Unlike others, such as Anouilh or Griselda Gambaro, however, Yuyachkani does not invoke Antigone primarily to tell of a state divided against itself. As both Miguel Rubio and Teresa Ralli tell it, no doubt this too would have been their rendition of the play if they had developed it in the 1980s. In the late 1990s, the issues have changed. Now in Peru, as in other countries dealing with the long-term effects of trauma, people struggle to come to terms with their own strategies for surviving in a dehumanizing environment. Ismene, the sister who failed to act in defense of Antigona and her brother, becomes the narrator. “I am the sister whose hands were tied by fear,” she says at the end of the play, as she identifies herself. She re-enacts the story, not as an outsider, looking back, but as a witness who had blinded herself through fear. “This is my own story,” she says, as she belatedly assumes her role in the drama, apologizing to her sister and symbolically burying her brother. [Figure 9, Teresa Ralli, Antígona, photo courtesy of Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani]. Through performance, Ismene will complete the actions she could not undertake the first time around. Antigona offers hope to those witnesses and participants who were unable to respond heroically in the face of atrocity. She promises to remember every day, as she reenacts her story, again and again.
Yuyachkani based this production on interviews that Teresa Ralli conducted with the wives, mothers, and sisters of the ‘disappeared.’ These survivors tell of inadequate responses and failed attempts in the face of military might. Yet they continue to tell their story. In “Fragments of Memory,” a short piece that Ralli wrote about the process, she describes that as she listened to the women’s accounts, she felt the best homage she could offer was “to feel all the memories inscribed on their bodies and thus confer them unto Antígona.” In the performance, she included the gestures she associated with the women as a way of signaling the continuity of cultural gestures and behaviors. While the women might not identify with Sophocles’ Antigone, they would recognize this as their story. [Figure 10, Teresa Ralli, Antígona, photo courtesy of Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani].
Since the play opened in 2000, Ralli has started to work with Peru’s newly formed Truth Commission to work with women in rural areas. The fact that there is ‘no over’ in situations of social violence attests to the continuing effects of trauma, but it also offers survivors the opportunity to re-assert their capacity for intervention, no matter how over-due. In 1999, Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani won Peru’s highest honor for work in human rights.
These performance practices, whether drawn from age-old repertoires or marginalized traditions, allow for immediate responses to current political problems. Every response to political violence carries with it a history of responses, conjured up from a vast range of embodied and archival memories. For Yuyachkani, performance is not about going back, but about keeping alive. Its mode of transmission is the repeat, the reiteration, the yet again of ‘performance.’ The violence of the past has not ‘disappeared.’ It has reappeared in the violent response against the miners’s strike (1971), the massacre of Soccos (1986), in the displacement of local populations caught between Sendero and government forces, on the empty streets of Lima in the 80s and early 90s, torn and made strange by the violence. The remembering was always past, present, and seemingly future. As Rebeca Ralli puts it, their work represents the struggle for survival of the Peruvian people even as it represents their own struggle to survive both as individuals and as a group. “We put up with so much just to be able to live, just to be able to create.”
III Yuyachkani’s performances make visible a history of cumulative trauma, an unmarked and unacknowledged history of violent conflict. As in Adios Ayacucho, the attempts at communicating an event that no one cares to acknowledge need to be repeated again and again. For members of traumatized communities, such as the Andean ones Yuyachkani engages, past violence blends into the current crisis. As in Adios Ayacucho, trauma becomes transmittable, understandable, through performance—through the re-experienced shudder, the re-telling, the repeat.
The re-telling and re-enactment, however, pose problems of legitimacy. While the performances capture the ongoing nature of the violence against indigenous peoples, it complicates a historical accounting. What is time without progression? What is space without demarcation? What happens to a people’s concept of history when markers are few? There is no archive or, as in the case of Argentina, no photographs to back these claims of criminal violence. Here, violence is known only through a performative repeat.
The undifferentiated, reiterative nature of Peru’s traumatic history folds seamlessly with the Andean paradigm of memory (summed up in the Inkarrí cycle), which defies the fixity of a before and after. “Inkarrí’s dismembered body (whose severed head has been taken, variously, to Cusco, Lima or Spain) is coming together again, underground [….]. The lower world, region of chaos and fertility, becomes the source of the future, an extension of the belief that the dead return to present time and space during the growth season.” Faced with the consciously deployed strategy of colonial dis-memberment, the myths offer the promise of re-membering. “Perú es un país desmemorizado.” Who can say, after five hundred years of ongoing conquest and colonization, where the memory of trauma is situated, whether trauma affects ‘the subject’ or the entire collectively, if it is experienced belatedly or continually embodied, whether it resides in the archive or only in the repertoire, and how it passes from generation to generation? We only know from myths and stories that Peru’s indigenous populations see themselves as the product of conquest and violence. Violence is not an event but a worldview and way of life.
Yuyachkani, it seems to me, intervenes in this problematic in two fundamental ways—one having to do with the transmission, the other with the role and function of witnessing.
In regard to the first: Yuyachkani understands the importance of performance as a means of re-membering and transmitting social memory. Its use of ethnically diverse performance traditions is neither decorative nor citational—that is, Yuyachkani does not incorporate them as add-ons to complement or ‘authenticate’ its own project. The group’s commitment to enter into conversation with rural populations has led them to learn the languages, the music, and the performance modes of these communities. Rather than attempt to restore specific behaviors, i.e., recreating museum pieces that somehow dislocate and replicate an ‘original,’ they follow the traditional usage of reactivating ancient practices to address current problems or challenges. Moreover, Yuyachkani does not participate in the reproduction and commodification of ‘popular’ culture. Their texts do not circulate. Other actors or companies do not perform them. The only way to access their work is by participating in it—on the streets as bystander caught up in the action, in Casa Yuyachkani as spectator and discussant, or in the many workshops open to students from around the world. New, younger members are joining the group and they, too, are Yuyachkani. They will not act ‘like’ Yuyachkani, but ‘be’ Yuyachkani, adopting and adapting the character of the group itself. Their performances, just like the performances they draw from, are inseparable from them as people. The ‘I’ who thinks and remembers is the product of these collective pre- and post-colonial performances.
Furthermore, unlike groups that appropriate the performance practices of others, Yuyachkani’s work does not separate the performances from their original audiences but, rather, tries to expand the audiences. The productions are not about ‘them’ – the indigenous and mestizo ‘others’-- but about all the different communities that share a territorial space defined by pre-conquest groups, colonialism, and nationalism. Yuyachkani attempts to make their urban audiences culturally competent to recognize the multiple ways of being ‘Peruvian.’ In addressing Lima audiences, however, Yuyachkani feels it has to start “from zero.” The country’s theatrical memory, much like its historical, cultural, and political memory, has been deracinated. These performances remind urban audiences of the populations they have forgotten. Storing and transmitting these traditions proves essential, because when they disappear, certain kinds of knowledges, issues, and populations disappear with them. These traditions—the street procession, fiestas, songs, masked characters-- bring together criollo, mestizo, Afro-Peruvian, and indigenous expressive elements, each vital to the deeply complicated historical, ethnic, and racial configuration of the actual political situation. Performance provides the “memory paths,” the space of reiteration that allows people to replay the ancient struggles for recognition and power that continue to make themselves felt in contemporary Peru.
This brings us to a second point: Looking at performance as a retainer of social memory engages history without necessarily being a “symptom of history”—that is, the performances enter into dialogue with a history of trauma without themselves being traumatic. These are carefully crafted works that create a critical distance for ‘claiming’ experience and enabling, as opposed to ‘collapsing,’ witnessing. This performance event has an ‘outside,’ which is what, according to Laub, allows for witnessing. Yuyachkani, as its name indicates, hinges on the notion of interconnectedness—the “I” who thinks/remembers is inextricable from the ‘you’ whose thought “I” am. The ‘I’/’you’ of Yuyachkani promises to be a witness, a guarantor of the link between the ‘I’ and the ‘you,’ the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside.’ Yuyachkani becomes the belated witnesses to the ongoing, unacknowledged drama of atrocity, and asks their audience to do the same. For this reason, no doubt, Yuyachkani was awarded the highest national honor for Human Rights in 1999. The group’s practice points to a radically different conclusion than the one Adorno arrived at in “Commitment.” Representation, for Yuyachkani, does not further contribute to the desecration of the victims, turning their pain into our viewing pleasure. Rather, without representation, viewers would not recognize their role in the ongoing history of oppression which, directly or indirectly, implicates them. Who, Adios Ayachuco asks, will take on the responsibility of witnessing? The hope offered by Antigona is that the spectator, like Ismene, will say “I.” The witness, like Boal’s ‘spect-actor’ accepts the dangers and responsibilities of seeing and of acting on what one has seen. And witnessing is transferable—the theater, like the testimony, like the photograph, film or report, can make witnesses of others. The (eye) witness sustains both the archive and the repertoire. So rather than think of performance primarily as the ephemeral, as that which disappears, Yuyachkani insists on creating a community of witnesses by and through performance. The group counters the performance-as-disappearance model of colonialism that pushes autochthonous practices into the oblivion of the ephemeral, the unscripted, the understudied, the un-controllable. For many of these communities, on the contrary, when performance ends, so does the shared understanding of social life and collective memory. Performances such as these fiestas, testimony, and theatrical productions warn us not to dismiss the ‘I’ who remembers, who thinks, who is
a product of collective thought. They teach communities not to look away. As the name Yuyachkani suggests, attention to the interconnectedness between thinking subjects and subjects of thought would allow for a broader understanding of historical trauma, communal memory, and collective subjectivity.