Posted by Victoria Melnikova on April 06, 192003 at 15:20:44:
Carballido and Yuyachkani, at first sight, seem to use a different style and techniques. Carballido’s “I Too Speak of the Rose” is not overtly revolutionary, if at all. While it does address the problems present in the Mexican society, these are somewhat masked by the joyful tone of the play. On the contrary, in Yuyachkani’s productions, sociopolitical issues come to the fore undisguised. Yet, both the Mexican playwright and the Peruvian theater collective share the same basic concern, applicable to all of Latin America, - that of constructing and validating through performance a national identity that would be based on principles other than the old binary civilization/barbarism, which seems to be still at work in Latin America.
The very adoption of the Quechua name for their group by Yuyachkani, as Diana Taylor remarks, “signals its cultural engagement with indigenous and mestizo populations and with complex transcultural (Andean, Spanish) ways of knowing, thinking, remembering.” Their production of “The Traveling Musicians” deals, among other things, precisely with the complexities of the ethnic and racial diversity of the Peruvian population. In “I Too Speak of the Rose,” the Medium, a mestiza, i.e. a product of the interaction of the European and indigenous cultures herself, becomes a central figure, thus pointing to the Mexican culture as a result of an ongoing process of transculturation.
In this respect, it is interesting to note how the (re)positioning of characters may endow them, as well as the concepts that they represent, with the power they have never possessed. The Medium, who would ordinarily be a symbol of the Mexican self-hatred doubly for being a woman and of an Indian origin, gains importance by claiming central stage. Likewise, by making Ismene the narrator in Yuyachkani’s production of “Antigone,” the otherwise passive figure, standing for the Peruvians who were unable to respond with valor to social violence, assumes an active role through becoming a witness.
The epistemic systems that are prioritized by both Carballido and Yuyachkani are also similar. The Medium is the knower, but “she is not separate from what she knows, she is a subject, not an object, in a world of other subjects” (Taylor). The very translations of the word “Yuyachkani” - “I am thinking”, “I am remembering”, “I am your thought”, “blur the line between the thinking subjects and the subjects of thought” (Taylor). This prevents Carballido’s and Yuyachkani’s characters from standing in isolation from their source of knowledge, which could lead to the objectification, i.e. the denial of the humanity of and therefore annihilation, of the marginalized figures in their “historias” (the stories they perform/ national histories).