Survey
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
YUYACHKANI AND POSTWAR PERU / 395 Resisting Amnesia: Yuyachkani, Performance, and the Postwar Reconstruction of Peru Francine A’ness “A present without memory condemns us to a poor future. To believe that today owes nothing to yesterday allows us to think that we have no responsibility to tomorrow. On the contrary, memory and imagination complement each other since they allow us to represent what has already passed and what one day might occur.” —Miguel Rubio1 “Is there a golden mean, some ‘proper’ degree of collective memory appropriate for bearing in mind the cruelties and lessons of a troubled past, while not so consuming as to stifle the possibility of reconciliation and growth?” —Henry J. Steiner2 During early April 2002 in Huamanga and Huanta, two small towns situated high up in the mountains of the Andes, a commission gathered for the first time to begin the task of hearing the testimonies of victims or witnesses of Peru’s internal war. Located at the heart of the province of Ayacucho, the two towns—like many others in the area—for sixteen years had been caught in the crossfire between members of the Francine A’ness is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at Dartmouth College and specializes in contemporary Latin American theatre and performance. She has published essays in Loss of Communication in the Information Age and Lucero: A Journal of Iberian & Latin American Studies. She directs Spanish-language theatre and is currently working on a book about Mexican playwright and director Sabina Berman. I would like to thank Jean Graham-Jones, Harry Elam, and two anonymous TJ readers for their careful reading of this essay as well as the invaluable feedback that they each gave me throughout the revision process. I would also like to thank Diana Taylor, for introducing me to the work of Yuyachkani, and Teresa Ralli, for inspiring me to write this piece during her visit to Dartmouth College in March 2004. 1 Miguel Rubio is a founding member and the permanent director of the Lima-based theatre collective Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani. The quotation above is taken from the program notes to the group’s 2003 performance installation Hecho en el Perú: Vitrinas para un museo de la memoria (Made in Peru: display cases for a museum of memory). It is cited in Emilio Carballido, “Hecho en el Perú: El trabajo más reciente del Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani,” Tramoya 71 (April–June 2002): 82. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 2 Henry J. Steiner, Truth Commissions: A Comparative Assessment (Cambridge: World Peace Foundation, 1997), 1. Theatre Journal 56 (2004) 395–414 © 2004 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 396 / Francine A’ness Maoist guerrilla group Shining Path and the military and paramilitary forces sent to combat them. While the atrocities committed by Shining Path against the local populations had made newspapers around the world, less had been heard about the “dirty war” waged against them (and against anyone considered to be in collusion) by the government’s forces of counterinsurgency. Excessive crimes against humanity, most of which still remained unpunished, had been committed by both sides, leaving the local people in a state of constant terror and suspicion. For years, in spite of repeated appeals to the judicial system, nothing had been done for the victims of this terrorism and their families. The June 2001 ratification of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) by the transition government of Alejandro Toledo marked a turning point in the country’s willingness to confront its recent past and put an end, once and for all, to the politics of impunity and amnesia that had prevailed under the authoritarian government of former president Alberto Fujimori.3 Of the more than 30,000 dead, 80,000 displaced, and 6,000 disappeared during a war that wreaked havoc in Peru from 1980 until 2000, the vast majority of the victims were not only from the mountainous region of Ayacucho but were either indigenous (and Quechua- or Aymara-speaking) or poor peasants of mix-raced descent. Arriving mainly on foot, the victims or, in their absence, their families and friends, descended upon Huamanga and Huanta from various neighborhoods and surrounding villages to testify before or simply attend the hearings of the TRC. Some carried black and white photographs of loved ones, iconic reminders of the individuals whose whereabouts they came to demand or murders they sought, not without fear, to report and denounce. A birth date or age carefully recorded beneath underscored how young so many of the dead and disappeared were. Others carried the years of suffering in the lines upon their faces and in the bundles of grief they clutched close to their hearts. Also walking among the crowds, in solidarity, were three actors from the Lima-based theatre collective Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani. Yuyachkani, one of Latin America’s most highly respected and impressive theatre collectives,4 had come to the province of Ayacucho not only to continue a thirty-year 3 For an excellent analysis of the rise of the insurgent group Shining Path and various governments’ responses to it, see Peruvian historian Nelson Manrique’s El tiempo del miedo: La violencia política en el Perú 1980–1996 (Lima: Fondo Editorial del Congreso del Perú, 2002). For a US missionary perspective on the dirty war, see Kristin Herzog’s Finding Their Voice: Peruvian Women’s Testimonies of the War (Valley Forge: Trinity Press International, 1993). The Peruvian Human Rights Commission (Comisión de Derechos Humanos) has also published a book documenting for posterity the widespread occurrence of forced disappearances in Peru: Memoria para los ausentes: Desaparecidos en el Perú (1982– 1996) (Lima: Prensataller, 2001). 4 I regard Yuyachkani as one of Latin America’s most impressive theatre collectives for their more than thirty years of uninterrupted work in popular theatre and community-based collective creation. The group, whose work lies at the intersection of critical ethnography and performance, has been committed to political and cultural change in Peru since its inception. When violent civil war drove many Peruvians abroad, Yuyachkani’s members chose to remain in Peru and turned their independent cultural center, La Casa Yuyachkani, into an experimental laboratory. From this space they worked with different theatrical modes and narrative structures to explore the effects of social fragmentation and political terrorism on the individual. They also developed a whole range of techniques and projects that could be used throughout Peru and within diverse communities, urban and rural, in the country’s postwar rehabilitation. YUYACHKANI AND POSTWAR PERU / 397 commitment to political theatre and social activism, but to honor an agreement the group had established with the TRC eight months earlier. At that time, they had agreed to perform outreach work in the communities where public hearings were to be convened by the Commission and lend the power of performance to the arduous task of reconstructing and remembering the traumas of the war. For this purpose, the collective had adapted selections from their war-related repertoire, developed a series of workshops, and prepared a number of site-specific social interventions and streetart installations. On the one hand, it was hoped that the group’s presence would raise awareness of the Commission’s purpose and facilitate public access to its community hearings.5 On the other, it was thought that the semiotically rich and evocative power of theatre, when combined with the ritual nature of the event, might help mark the postwar transition, dignify its victims, honor the dead and disappeared, and thus prompt people to come forward and speak publicly to the Commission without fear. It is this process that I explore here. The creation of a truth and reconciliation commission as one way to deal with collective trauma is a relatively recent phenomenon, although its roots lie in the post– World War II international human rights movement. Since the first truth commission was established in Argentina in 1983, many more have followed in countries as diverse as South Africa, the former East Germany, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Uganda, and Sri Lanka. In Latin America specifically, as the region has emerged from decades of dictatorship and authoritarian rule, a range of truth commissions has been established by the transition governments of their respective countries to respond to the human rights abuses of their predecessors. For example, in addition to Argentina and Peru, Chile, Brazil, Uruguay, Guatemala, and El Salvador have all experimented with a truth commission of one sort or another. Nevertheless, while truth commissions share certain commonalities, they are not all the same. Henry Steiner reminds that the designation “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” is a generic term for a type of governmental organization that “takes many institutional forms, serves diverse functions, includes varying membership, and enjoys a range of powers and methods.”6 This power, which is afforded to the commission by the state, varies widely but is always directly linked to the successor government’s desire (real or perceived) and actual ability to make (or not) a radical break with the former regime. Despite these relative differences, all truth commissions have at least some traits in common. They are all official organs that are generally but not always staffed by citizens.7 They are all instituted for a circumscribed period of time to examine and register the gross violations of human rights and abuses of state power committed by a former regime.8 Usually, the victims of state crimes testify before the commission during formalized hearings that may either be public—as was 5 The entire initiative was funded by the Servicios Rurales Educativos (Rural Education Services), or SRE. 6 Steiner, 3. 7 Ibid. 8 This recording of a country’s traumatic past may occur in tandem with other types of national responses to the recent past, ranging from amnesty to prosecution for the perpetrators, and from public recognition to reparation for the victims. 398 / Francine A’ness the case in Peru and South Africa—or private.9 The creation of a truth commission, then, as one way of dealing with a country’s traumatic past, sends a clear and very public message about a new regime’s commitment to change. Only time can tell whether that commitment is real or only largely symbolic.10 Managing a truth commission in Peru would be no easy task. In the mountainous province of Ayacucho, where pockets of Shining Path are still active and linguistic and cultural barriers abound, the collecting of testimonies from trauma survivors by the TRC would prove doubly difficult. Not only was the region scarred by war, but also marked by centuries of colonialism and government neglect. High levels of poverty existed, illiteracy was widespread, and the social structures that dominated remained highly stratified and divisive. What is more, the TRC had come to the region as a representative body of the State, a State that, until recently, had often operated as an enemy of the people. Not only were the Peruvian government’s forces of counterinsurgency guilty of many of the crimes the Commission sought to uncover, but other representative state institutions until now had done nothing to prevent or punish the violence. How could the Commission show itself to be different? How could it make a clear distinction between the “then and they” of war and the “now and us” of peace? Who could penetrate the reticence and peel away the layers of distrust and fear that, over centuries, had sedimented into walls of silence around many of the communities in question? According to Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, “Trauma survivors live not with memories of the past, but with an event that . . . has no ending, attained no closure, and therefore, as far as the survivors are concerned, continues into the present and is current in every respect.”11 It is present in the form of nightmares and flashbacks and when, as has been the case in Peru, amnesty laws have allowed the perpetrators of their crimes to go free, it is present in the form of chance reencounters and daily reminders. Felman and Laub remind their reader that, in order to recover from a trauma and regain a sense of normality and closure, an individual needs to reconstruct a narrative history of the event and transmit this story to someone else, to “literally transfer it to another outside oneself and then take it back again, inside.”12 The recounting of a traumatic past, however, is difficult at the best of times. In order to speak about the traumatic event a victim needs to feel safe. She needs to know that 9 Some commissions hear the testimony of the perpetrators as well or lead investigations into alleged criminal conduct. The oftentimes graphic reports of a commission’s proceedings eventually become public documents. Some final reports, such as the report from Argentina’s TRC, Nunca más (Never again), achieve widespread circulation and acquire bestseller status. Others, such as the full report from Brazil, reach a limited audience and are quickly buried. According to Steiner, as the reports produced by truth commissions often implicate high-ranking individuals of the state, a commission’s work addresses some of “the most politically and morally sensitive issues facing a country as a whole” (Steiner, 4–5). 10 For a detailed description of the work performed by Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, including the final report, see its official website at http://www.cverdad.org.pe. 11 Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crisis of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), 69. 12 Ibid. YUYACHKANI AND POSTWAR PERU / 399 what happened in the past has come to an end and, moreover, that the listener before whom she testifies is someone who will listen and in whom she can trust.13 To help resolve some of these problems, the Commission had turned to Yuyachkani. The group’s principal purpose would be to serve as mediator between the Commission and the rural populations, and as a conduit to the public hearings. This they would achieve by first visiting and performing in the communities that would be on the TRC’s itinerary, then using performance to transform ordinary public space temporarily into a place for ritual reflection and healing. The first round of performances would inform people about the Commission’s purpose and encourage them to attend the later hearings. The latter acts, created in conjunction with the actual hearings, would serve to highlight the transition between the previous period of crisis and the new democracy in a way that was participatory for the community and, thus, potentially transformative at the personal level as well. Yuyachkani is a veteran theatre group whose members, for over thirty years, have committed themselves to thinking and performing Peru in all its complexity and ethnic diversity. This has been no easy task. Cultural diversity in Peru is not only a question of race, ethnicity, and class but also of radically different worldviews or cosmologies. The indigenous communities of the highlands have their own mythologies and collective structures, their own conceptions of time, and their own systems of value and belief. Their experience of colonization has been radically different from the experience of the whiter-skinned criollos of the cities (especially the country’s capital, Lima), and as modernization is something that only a relatively small percentage of the country has enjoyed, the gap between the rich and the poor—the haves and the have-nots—remains vast. The group’s close readings of the work of Peruvian social anthropologist José María Arguedas not only inspired them to problematize Peruvian identity but taught them ways in which to mediate (in effect, translate) between radically different cultures that were brought together, often by force, and now make up contemporary Peru. Following the politically engaged and often militant social realism of their early work (typical of the theatre collective movement in Latin America in the 1960s and ’70s in general),14 the group gained national prominence in the 1980s for the ways in which it creatively combined cultural imaginaries from different ethnic regions of Peru (most notably the indigenous areas of the Andes) with both classical and contemporary theatrical traditions from around the world.15 This fusion of local and global performance modes and symbolic languages gave birth to a syncretic and transcultural form of theatre that was ideal for representing a more coherent, critical, and representative 13 For more information on the psychoanalytic study of trauma, memory, and recovery, see Cathy Caruth, Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Richard J. McNally, Remembering Trauma (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003); and Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Books, 1992). 14 A good example of Yuyachkani’s early militant theatre is Puño de cobre (Copper fist), which was inspired by and performed within the context of the 1971 miners’ strike. 15 Although middle-class and predominantly white, each member of the collective learned Quechua, and the group often traveled to and lived among the communities whose symbolic worlds had inspired its work. 400 / Francine A’ness idea of Peru.16 It also allowed Yuyachkani to use theatre not only to educate Peruvians (including themselves) about each other but also to celebrate in music, dance, mask, and mime their country’s multiethnic social fabric. By the late 1980s that same social fabric was beginning to rip apart at the seams, as interethnic conflict spread from the country to the city and violence became endemic. The group members, always politically committed, suddenly found themselves struggling to represent the world around them and ethically questioning their civic role. What could theatre do to compete with the spectacle of war that was saturating the media and spilling onto the social stage of the streets? How should they, as individual theatre practitioners and as a group, respond to the widespread violence? What social and political function could Yuyachkani serve? The collective’s festive theatre of the 1980s, much of it performed outside in the streets and plazas, was no longer tenable.17 The pervasive violence, constant disappearances, discovery of mass graves, frequent power outages and bombings, and the general disintegration of the nation into warring factions and enclaves of fear, demanded a new form of representation and a renewed social response from the stage. Amidst such volatility, “imagining Peru” with any coherence seemed an almost impossible task, but if hope for the future were to remain, Yuyachkani’s members believed it was their ethical obligation to try. Therefore, unlike many other Latin American theatre collectives of the Left which by this time had disbanded or whose members had been forced into exile, Yuyachkani changed its focus and began to experiment with a range of performance pieces and social interventions that directly responded to and interrogated the surrounding violent world. Working sometimes as a group, sometimes on individual projects, they mined nonnaturalistic performance modes for their political potential. Their aim was to not only denounce but, moreover, to defamiliarize the violence they were living. By defamiliarizing it—donning masks, setting the action in the distant past, translating the contemporary world through allegory and myth, and using song and dance—they were able to expose the absurd and dehumanizing effects of the violence in a way that rendered it coherent and viewable.18 16 In “Fragments of Memory,” Teresa Ralli, a founding member of the collective, describes Yuyachkani as “a theatre group dedicated to investigations in all languages, immersed in action as words, in creative collaborations as a premise for action.” “Fragments of Memory,” in Holy Terrors: Latin American Women Perform, ed. Diana Taylor and Roselyn Costantino, trans. Margaret Carson (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 357. 17 A key play from this period is Los músicos ambulantes (The traveling musicians), which presents a utopian vision of a harmonious and multicultural Peru. It was the national and international success of this piece that enabled the group to construct its own theatre and found the Centro Cultural Yuyachkani. 18 My overview of Yuyachkani’s work is informed by a number of key sources. Diana Taylor details the group’s trajectory, discusses their philosophy, and masterfully analyzes the ways in which they have utilized performance to represent traumatic memory in a chapter entitled “Staging Traumatic Memory: Yuyachkani,” in her latest book, The Archive and the Repertoire (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 190–211. An earlier version of the essay, entitled “Yuyachkani: Remembering Community,” appears in the book Performing Democracy: International Perspectives on Urban Community-Based Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 310–24. A collection of multimedia resources related to Yuyachkani can be found in the web archive of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at http://hemi.ps.tsoa.nyu.edu/cuaderno/yuyachkani/. Another good YUYACHKANI AND POSTWAR PERU / 401 The collective’s name, Yuyachkani, is a Quechua word that means “I am thinking, I am remembering, I am your thought,” and it is this idea of memory as a dialogic site for reflection and inter-/intracultural understanding that has been central to the group’s philosophy since its inception. Diana Taylor, who has written extensively about the group and elegantly tracked the development of their work over the last thirty years, proposes that the adoption of their Quechua name immediately signals the group’s “cultural engagement with the indigenous and mestizo populations [of Peru] and with complex, transcultured (Andean-Spanish) ways of knowing, thinking, remembering.”19 To this end the group’s nine members have taken the time to learn Quechua and interact at length with and perform for the various ethnic groups whose performance traditions and oral narratives have inspired their work. They have also learned how to play traditional musical instruments and studied various regional dances and ritual celebrations. They have done all of the above without turning their backs on foreign theatrical traditions and modes of performance, to the point that the weaving of what comes from without and what comes from within is impossible to tease apart. Taylor describes the theatre of Yuyachkani as both “transcultured” and “transculturating” in that it is as much a consequence of intercultural encounter as it is an active force in the ongoing process. This process, however, is never appropriative, nor is it designed as a melting pot for difference. Their multicultural repertoire is not an apolitical pastiche, nor is it a folkloric parade of national types. As Taylor rightly asserts, “Yuyachkani bring [the] forgotten world of Peru back into the picture but they do so not to represent or ‘speak on behalf’ of them in a paternalistic way. They include indigenous and rural mestizo myths and performance practices to learn from, celebrate and incorporate into their attempts to understand the complex nature of Peru and the sociopolitical pathologies it has produced.”20 Central to their work is a belief that the violence of recent years is no aberration but the result of deep-rooted prejudices, social and political neglect, and cultural ignorance. And for this reason, indirectly or directly, their work continually asks audiences to consider who or what is Peruvian and challenges them to think beyond the traditional binaries and facile stereotypes that have defined the country and its various populations—coast/ mountain, European/Indian, Spanish-speaking/Quechua-speaking, literate/illiterate, victim/agent—xenophobic assumptions that have prevented most Peruvians from ever knowing or fully understanding each other. Another key component of the collective’s philosophy—and one that is also alluded to in their Quechua name—is the power of memory. For Yuyachkani, the past is not something that must remain silenced or superseded by the present and the future, as if each temporal phase existed independently and successively along an inexorable introduction to Yuyachkani’s work and one that chronologically tracks their development as a collective is the 2001 documentary film La persistencia de la memoria (The endurance of memory), directed by Andrés Cotler. The late Peruvian theatre historian Hugo Salazar del Alcazar wrote some of the earliest critical essays about Yuyachkani and their position within the world of Peruvian theatre; see, for example, his book Teatro y violencia: Una aproximación al teatro peruano de los 80 (Lima: Centro de Documentación y Video Teatral, 1990). 19 Taylor, “Yuyachkani: Remembering Community,” 311. 20 Ibid. 402 / Francine A’ness continuum. Memory of the past provides the roots of a culture’s collective identity, an identity that, in Peru, has been forged by the often violent encounter between indigenous, colonial, national, immigrant, and multinational imaginaries. It is an awareness of theatre’s potential to engage multiple temporalities simultaneously that lies at the heart of Yuyachkani’s plays and performances. In the collective’s work, the past always animates the present and, likewise, compromises the future. Each moment in time is inextricably linked, and the stage becomes the site where the relationship between these multiple temporalities gets embodied and dramatized. Only in the present can the past be experienced and the future imagined. The present is, in the words of Miguel Rubio (the group’s permanent director), the space where the waters of the past and the future flow turbulently together.21 In the present, memories are formed and make sense, and there they compete for the coveted role of shaping the future. The stage, then, becomes a living canvas upon which the contested past can be re-presented and assessed from new perspectives, and where futures can be imagined, envisioned, and rehearsed. In 1988, to express a growing concern about human rights abuses in Peru, Yuyachkani founded the theatre festival Teatro por la vida (Theatre for life). Eventually, the festival would develop into an important Pan-American initiative by theatre practitioners against state-sponsored violence. In association with the Peru-based Association for Human Rights (APRODEH) and over a period of fifteen years, Yuyachkani convened five Theatre for Life festivals in Peru with the specific aim of using theatre to publicize the widespread and systematic human rights violations of many Latin American governments. During the first Festival, which was held in Lima in 1988 and coincided with the fortieth anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the participating groups attempted to raise awareness of the pervasiveness of forced disappearance and extrajudicial executions by paramilitary death squads.22 This work with Theatre for Life can be seen as a training ground for the group’s later work with Peru’s postwar Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Yuyachkani’s critical inquiries into the violence and its effects, and their attempts to creatively embody them, have led to the creation of an impressive series of war-related performance pieces that, over time, have coalesced into an enduring repertoire of original plays that track Peru’s passage through a violent civil war and beyond. One interesting phenomenon to develop from this repertoire is the emergence of a series of characters that have acquired the power to transcend the fictive contexts for which they were originally created, and engage in activist interventions of their own. It is this ability to travel, to transcend the physical space of the theatre, and to speak to audiences from a whole host of social and cultural backgrounds that has transformed 21 Carballido, “Hecho en el Perú,” 82. The transition to democracy in many Latin American countries and the belated creation of various local commissions for truth and reconciliation transformed the cultural and political landscape across the continent. These changes demanded an ever-evolving approach to the problem from those theatre groups still committed to the fight for justice and social equality. Subsequent Theatre for Life festivals dealt with related issues and progressively included the work of more regional and national theatre groups. 22 YUYACHKANI AND POSTWAR PERU / 403 these characters into such useful emblems of and spokespeople for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. A case in point is the protagonist of the 1990 one-man show Adiós Ayacucho, Alfonso Cánepa, who was resurrected in 2002 to perform a central part in the postwar process of truth-gathering and reparation. In the original play, based on a short story by Julio Ortega, Cánepa is an indigenous farmer who, when the play begins, has just been murdered, mutilated, and disappeared by a military death squad. Rising from the ravine where his body has been left to rot in anonymity, he decides to travel to Lima in search of his remains and his inalienable human right to a decent burial. While in the capital, he also plans to take a letter to the President denouncing the crimes of the State and demanding justice for himself and other victims like him. In a country where forced disappearances and mass graves have not been uncommon, this is an all-too-familiar story, and the ignominious nature of Cánepa’s death is as tragic as it is dehumanizing. Yet the play is neither macabre nor grotesque. Rather than attempting to compete with the media and approach the topic of violent death and disappearance through the explicit lens of documentary theatre, the story is communicated through a simple monologue and a contemporary dance-inspired aesthetic. In this way, there is little risk that the piece will further desensitize an audience accustomed to seeing and hearing about violence on a daily basis, or, conversely, retraumatize them by compounding the issue. In the manner of classical Japanese Noh theatre, in which the hero is the ghost of a recently deceased warrior who returns to tell his story, the protagonist of Adiós Ayacucho is clearly dead and his self-presentation highly stylized. He is, however, far from ghostly. There is an immediacy and vitality about the character that is hard to equate with death. Dressed in a white balaclava, reminiscent of those used in rural dances of the region, and the loose poncho emblematic of many Andean peasants, the actor Augusto Casafranca moves about the stage with the nimbleness and exuberance of an endearing clown. The character’s candid first-person account, delivered directly to the audience in the gentle singsong voice of a child, becomes both poignant and darkly humorous. Treating such a weighty topic in this way restores to the individual not only his identity—his name, genealogy, and life story—but also the dignity and agency denied him by his disappearance and assassination. Therein lies the piece’s efficacy. Through theatrical convention, Cánepa finds himself reappeared before an audience and in the highly ironic position of being able to speak publicly about his own death. His physical presence onstage underscores the absence of the real peasant body that his character references, just as his testimony fills with words a void left by his anonymous death and disappearance. The play also transforms the audience into the witness of a crime that is rarely seen. Forced disappearance—as a tactic perfected by counterinsurgency forces throughout much of Latin America in the 1970s and ’80s—is designed to instill terror by appearing random but remaining selectively invisible. Making the crimes of war visible, revealing them to be calculated, and denouncing the perpetrators, demystifies the machinations behind such acts. Furthermore, by becoming witnesses to Cánepa’s testimony, the spectators are placed in a position of latent political agency through a symbolic transfer of knowledge. The story of Alfonso Cánepa and his attempts to reclaim his bones for burial is also strongly reminiscent of the myth of Osiris, the Egyptian god of funeral rites whose 404 / Francine A’ness name represents Truth, Light, and Good.23 Like Osiris, Cánepa is dismembered in death, and his body parts are scattered across the land. But for both figures death is not the final chapter. In the performance and the myth, there is an attempt by those left behind to reconstitute the victim’s body in the name of Truth and thus provide a satisfactory passage into death. Both texts, then, symbolically portray the search for Truth as a process of re-membering, of reincorporating the body and resignifying—in the present—its contested parts. Cánepa, therefore, does not just reference the disappeared of Peru’s internal war in the form of a poetic eulogy; he turns victimhood into political agency. In this way, his journey to Lima becomes emblematic of the country’s own odyssey toward truth and justice. This odyssey would gain momentum during the postwar process at the beginning of the new millennium and involve the active process of collective re-membering. It is also a journey that the actor Casafranca would take back to Ayacucho to give Cánepa’s body and voice a symbolic role in the postwar process of reconstruction. On the day that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was officially created, Casafranca—dressed unmistakably as Cánepa—was present among the crowds that had gathered in Lima’s central Plaza de Armas. As they waited outside the Government Palace for the historic announcement that would initiate the postwar process, Casafranca climbed up onto the palace steps and, speaking into a microphone as Cánepa, began to recite the letter that, within the context of the play Adiós Ayacucho, he had intended for a previous president of Peru: Dear President: I, Alfonso Cánepa, the undersigned, citizen of Peru, domiciled in Quinua, occupation farmer, directs himself to you, the highest political representative of the Republic, to express the following: On the 15th of July I was arrested by the civil guard of my village. Placed incommunicado, I was tortured, burned, mutilated, and killed. I was declared disappeared . . . . As you well know, all national and international laws, as well as special declarations for Human Rights, recognize not only the inalienable human right to life, but to a dignified death with complete and proper burial. The most fundamental respect for human life presupposes a more basic obligation and one that exists as part of the military code of honor of any war: the dead, sir, are not to be mutilated. A corpse is the minimum entity in death; to dismember and scatter its parts, as occurs today in Peru, is a violation of natural and social laws. The country’s anthropologists and intellectuals have determined that violence originates in the System and the State that you represent. I tell you this as one of your victims, one who has nothing to lose, and I speak from personal experience. I want my bones, I want my body, complete and whole, even in death. In the end, I doubt that you will ever read this . . . .24 The context in which Alfonso Cánepa recites his letter to the crowd in front of the Government Palace and the context in which it is first recorded in the play are very different. In over eleven years much has changed. The pessimism, therefore, with which Cánepa ends his letter does not reflect the current moment (June 2001)—which, with the creation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, is filled with renewed hope and expectation—but the historical moment (the mid-1980s) during which the play’s action takes place. 23 Realization of the similarity between the story of Alfonso Cánepa and the myth of Osiris arose during a conversation with Katie Louise Thomas at Dartmouth College. 24 Quoted in the program notes for Yuyachkani’s October–December 2003 theatre festival, La persistencia de la memoria, 1–11. YUYACHKANI AND POSTWAR PERU / 405 Historically, the 1980s were the most violent years of Peru’s dirty war, and it was during this time that the majority of the forced disappearances and extrajudicial executions occurred. As the State was responsible for many of these crimes, to seek justice from its maximum representative—that is, the president—was a futile and potentially dangerous gesture. In the play, Cánepa fails to deliver his letter. It lies discarded by the President and trampled underfoot by the crowds that have gathered to see him speak. The year 2001, however, marks a different moment in Peru’s history. At that time the State was inviting witnesses to come forward and testify, and pledging reparation for crimes committed in its name. In this renewed context Cánepa’s defiant spirit—so unmistakable in his simple white ski mask with bold black lines to highlight his eyes and mouth—emerged as a powerful emblem of resistance and a visible symbol of hope. His beyond-the-grave odyssey and ironic presence (he is living and dead, fictive yet also real, made possible by the not-real yet not not-real nature of theatre) link the legacy of the disappeared to those who search doggedly for their loved ones’ remains and demand to know the truth about what happened to them. Casafranca’s Cánepa is an evocative and very vocal link between the past and the present. His performance is an example of what Diana Taylor has referred to, in discussing Yuyachkani’s work, as a form of “embodied knowledge and memory and blurs the line between thinking subjects and subjects of thought.”25 He very clearly personifies the memory of those whose absence requires that others speak on their behalf. What is more, his ironic presence vividly reminds others that they must continue the work of truth gathering and collective remembrance that is necessary for change. In 2000, Teresa Ralli, a founding member of Yuyachkani, premiered a one-woman adaptation of the Greek tragedy Antigone, a play that, in 2002, would play a central role for the TRC in Peru along with Adiós Ayacucho. In Ralli’s Antígona the eponymous character is not resurrected simply to provide a dramatic foil to the State and an eloquent voice of resistance. Instead, the text and the manner in which the character is embodied again become a means to remember both the living and the dead of Peru’s dirty war. The dynamic relationship between the living and their dead is shown to be not only life affirming but pregnant with latent political potential. Initially Antígona was inspired by a black-and-white photograph. In it a woman, dressed in the black clothes of mourning, is seen hurrying across a deserted plaza in the Andean regional capital of Ayacucho. To Ralli, the photograph conjured up the image of Antigone, also alone and in mourning, hurrying across the battlefield to the body of her dead and exiled brother, determined to give the corpse a proper burial. Shortly after seeing the photograph, the group, intent upon paying respects to the dead and honoring Peru’s own Antigones, invited women whose husbands, sons, and brothers had been killed or disappeared during the civil war to come to La Casa Yuyachkani in Lima and share their stories. Their testimonies not only inspired José Watanabe’s poetic adaptation of the Sophoclean tragedy; the way in which each of the women delivered her story—the tone, each gesture, the silent pauses—also became raw material for the hours of physical experimentation that Ralli carried out in her aim to symbolize and embody their collective memory. The play is dedicated to them.26 25 Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 191. The full text for Antígona can be found in the web archive of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at http:www.hemi.nyu.edu/cuaderno/yuyachkani/antigona.html. 26 406 / Francine A’ness In Antígona Teresa Ralli assumes all six roles and negotiates, without pause, the twenty-four poetic monologues that complete the script. She does this with minimal props and without ever leaving the stage. Dressed in a simple beige outfit (threequarter-length pants, sleeveless top, and a tunic) that she manipulates freely to facilitate each change in role, Ralli alternates between telling and performing the tragic tale of Antigone, Oedipus’s ill-fated daughter who defies the King, her uncle Creon, by attempting to bury her brother, the traitor Polyneices, in spite of a decree that, under pain of death, forbids burial. The story is familiar to all. It is an ur-myth that has endured for over 1,500 years and is still repeatedly resurrected, adapted, and performed around the world, especially in times of social unrest and civil war. Throughout the play there is no acknowledgment of the audience. The drama has already begun, in medias res, and there is no stopping it. Its implacable momentum is derived not just from the inevitability of the genre—tragedy—but from the endless repetition of the text and the audience’s foreknowledge that accompanies it. We know the story: it will end badly, it always does. The focus then shifts to the novelty of this particular version and the fact that all six characters are interpreted by one actor, a woman, Teresa Ralli. What is more, there are no explicit cultural or gender markers to highlight each character. Her body is wrapped in such a way as to render it androgynous, allowing Ralli to portray both men and women with relative ease. Finally, unlike Alfonso Cánepa, who is clearly Andean, all cultural codings or obvious markers of “Peruvianness” have been removed. This is a story that could happen anywhere and in fact has. Yet the nonspecificity of this version functions as a type of coloring-book Antigone. Ralli provides the bold black outlines of the characters and their relationships to each other, but it is up to the spectators to color in the specifics and thus render it their own, as a story that metaphorically belongs to all Peruvians. What is curious about Antígona is that the protagonist is not the eponymous heroine, as is the custom, but her surviving sister, Ismene. By the end of the play, the audience realizes that it is she who has recounted the preceding event. Ismene, therefore, is the living witness and thus emblematic of the postwar period itself. Although she did not act with her sister, it is only through her that we are able to hear the story of those who have died. Placing the witness center stage in this way again sends a powerful message to those who watch, since it draws attention to the gaze of the one who looks on and indexes the limits of action and inaction. It sends a clear message to the audience that survival is nothing to feel guilty about. It is never too late to choose action over inaction, speech over silence. The final image of the play is unforgettable. Coming, for the first time, to a moment of stasis, Ralli bends to lift a small white mask from a wooden box at her feet. It is Polyneices’ funerary mask, which Ismene, in the absence of her dead sister, now appropriates to perform a symbolic and belated burial—the same burial she was too afraid to perform alongside her more valiant sister. Placing the mask upon the ground, she then lifts the wooden box above her head. As she does so, a stream of sand flows from holes in the bottom of the box and sticks to her now-sweating body. The image is not only a stunning and most powerful symbol of burial, but also an act of purification, one that a war-torn country requires in order to heal. Ralli describes their adaptation of the Antigone myth in the following way: YUYACHKANI AND POSTWAR PERU / 407 [W]e wanted to perform Antigone because it was only through a story that happened 2,500 years ago that we could talk about what was happening to us at the moment. We had to recognize, all of us, as citizens, that we had maintained a “despicable silence” before thousands of corpses spread throughout all of Peru. The bodies had been silenced, yet they waited to be buried so that they could rest in peace. . . . We Peruvians were all Ismene; we needed to start making that symbolic gesture to complete the burial. . . . Those who haven’t been able to bury their dead have been stripped of their right to determine a site, to name the absent one, to enact the necessary farewell. For almost twenty years, half the country lived in that reality. Antigone, the performance, arrived as a necessary act of cleansing. Now she travels all over Peru.27 She travels all over Peru because, in the months prior to the Commission’s first public hearings, Yuyachkani received funding to visit the areas of Ayacucho that had suffered the worst violence during the war. During August and September 2001 the group took Adiós Ayacucho and Antígona on tour and performed them in the villages and towns of Tingo María, Huánuco, Ayaviri, Sicuani, Abancay, Chalhuanca, Vilcashuamán, Huanta, and Huancayo. The performances were part of an attempt to prime these communities for the appearance of the TRC, which would arrive to gather testimonies from the local populations eight months later. The tour traveled under the title “May it never happen again.”28 When the first public hearing of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was convened in Huamanga on 8 April 2002, Alfonso Cánepa appeared once again to lend his gentle but insistent voice and emblematic presence to the process of truth gathering and ritual redress. As people came to town to attend the TRC or offer their own personal testimony of loss, Alfonso Cánepa joined them on the street and performed excerpts from Adiós Ayacucho, a play many of the inhabitants would have already seen eight months earlier. With Casafranca in Huamanga were two other actors from Yuyachkani serving in similar symbolic roles. Teresa Ralli was there, not as Ismene from Antígona but in the white dress of an indigenous Ayarachi woman who, waving a large Peruvian flag, danced silently among the crowds. Ana Correa completed the group as the ghostly Rosa Cuchillo, a persona the actress had specifically developed for Yuyachkani’s collaboration with the TRC. Each of the actors in some form or another referenced the disappeared victims of the war and, as such, served as both the personification of an absent subject and as a powerful symbol of embodied memory. Correa’s persona, Rosa (Huanca) Cuchillo, is interesting in that she acts as a powerful female counterpoint to Casafranca’s Alfonso Cánepa. Whereas the points of departure for the creation of the protagonist of Adiós Ayacucho (and to a lesser degree Antígona) were photographs, Rosa (Huanca) Cuchillo is based, in part, on the eponymous protagonist of the novel Rosa Cuchillo, written by Oscar Colchado Lucio. In the novel, the protagonist searches tirelessly for her disappeared son even after she herself has died. Accompanied by her dead dog, Huayra, she takes her search to the three intersecting worlds of Andean mythology, the same worlds that would also be present in the “Tambobambino” installation that Fidel Melquíades—the group’s resident set designer—created to welcome those coming to give testimony before the 27 28 Ralli, “Fragments of Memory,” 363–64. Miguel Rubio, Persistencia de la memoria (program notes), 3. 408 / Francine A’ness commission: Kay Pacha (our world), Uqhu Pacha (the world below), and Hanaq Pacha (the world above). Correa’s scenic rendition of Rosa Cuchillo was also heavily inspired by the real-life story of indigenous community human rights activist Angélica Mendoza, a woman from Huamanga whose son Arquímedes Ascarsa Mendoza was disappeared on 12 July 1983. Over the last twenty years Mendoza, like Rosa Cuchillo, has searched for her son, becoming, in the process, not just an advocate for her own missing child but for all disappeared Peruvians. Her one-woman campaign, which gradually gained nationwide prominence, has raised her to the status of president of the National Association of Families of the Kidnapped, Detained, and Disappeared of Peru. Within her community, however, she is simply known as “Mamá Angélica,” and many of her words and speeches became part of the text that Correa used to create Rosa Cuchillo. According to Correa, as there are mothers like Rosa Cuchillo and Angélica Mendoza all over Peru, she aimed to create a character that not only fused the living and the dead but personified “the strength, the courage, the love with which people look to recover their disappeared relatives.”29 Dressed all in white, Rosa Cuchillo wears the traditional Andean dress of an Anacasina woman—full skirt, shawl, brimmed hat, and sandals. Her body and face are also painted white like those of the Ayarachi dancer performed by Ralli. Her movements are highly stylized and resemble the jerky articulations of a Kabuki dancer. Like the real-life Mamá Angélica, who turned her fear into resistance, Rosa Cuchillo refuses to die, even in death, and she passes through the streets of Huanta and Huamanga, staff in hand, like a living soul, greeting people along the way and sharing with them her testimony.30 Yet, through Correa, her memory (and that of other women like her, living and dead) is embodied and lives on. Each time she returns and walks among the living, she provides a vital and exemplary link between them and their dead. In the short video Alma viva: que florezca la memoria (Living soul: let memory flower), which chronicles Yuyachkani’s presence in Huanta and Huamanga alongside the TRC, there are scenes that show Correa as Rosa Cuchillo alternating between performing for and mingling with the crowds. At times she and her fellow actors march in demonstrations; at other times they stop and perform. When the actors walked, people from Huamanga and Huanta walked with them. When they performed, a crowd would gather to watch. The convergence of these symbolic personas with the people of Huanta and Huamanga not only blurred the line between fact and fiction, but also mediated between the present and the traumatic past they had come to collectively remember. The film includes scenes of Correa and Casafranca performing on small stages set up purposely in the main square of each town. The people who gather around to watch their performances form intimate circles of reflection. On Rosa 29 Ana Correa, speaking in Alma viva: que florezca la memoria, a fifteen-minute video directed by Ricardo Ayala that records the group’s work with the TRC in Huanta and Huamanga (Lima: APRODEH [Asociación Pro-Derechos Humanos] and Unidad de Audiencias Públicas de la Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación, 2003). 30 Ana Correa speaks movingly about her experience of performing Rosa Cuchillo in Persistencia de la memoria (program notes), 7. YUYACHKANI AND POSTWAR PERU / 409 Cuchillo’s stage there are only two objects—a static dove frozen in the position of taking flight, and a jar filled with water and red rose petals. Toward the end of her performance, Correa reaches into the jar and takes handfuls of rose petals, which she then throws into the air. She invites the audience to come forward and wet their hands in the water that remains. They crowd toward her, straining to put their hands into the jar and touch the water, almost as if it held holy properties. Some anoint themselves, while others seem content to simply touch the water and feel a part of a ritual event intended to be transformative and healing. Another moment in the video shows Rosa Cuchillo following a line of people carrying a chain of life-size paper dolls. On each of their white bodies there is a letter that collectively spells the word “DISAPPEARED” in Spanish. This two-dimensional and iconic representation of those who have been disappeared has become a familiar sight at human rights rallies from Argentina to Guatemala. It is one of the many symbolic yet life-affirming ways in which those who still search for their disappeared relatives display the absent bodies in whose name they continue to fight. Photographs, chalk outlines, candles, and empty clothes laid out are other forms of making visible the victims whose absence poses a challenge to representation. In addition to the presence of these three symbolic personas, performed during the evening vigil that preceded the hearings, Melquíades prepared an installation at the entrance of the buildings where the Commission was holding its hearings. The installation, called “El Tambobambino” after a traditional Andean funeral song, was designed both to welcome those coming to testify before the Commission as well as to honor their bravery. Three circles made up the installation. In the first circle lay a set of empty clothes flat upon a Peruvian flag. The hat was held down by a ring of white candles evenly placed around the brim and interspersed with flowers. It was accompanied by an old worn jacket, dusty pants, and a pair of empty shoes. This image, which was also used as the central set piece for the play Adiós Ayacucho, is inspired by the funeral rites enacted for a disappeared person by certain Andean communities. The simple yet stark outline of a peasant’s empty clothes powerfully evokes the body of the absent individuals whose presence is invoked through an act of collective remembrance. This first circle, which is black, corresponds again to Ukhu Pacha, the world of darkness, a world inhabited and traversed only by the dead. In the second circle, which is red and corresponds to Kay Pacha, the living world, inhabited by humans and nature, a masked drummer (Casafranca) bangs a drum slowly but also insistently. The beat, Melquíades explains, represents mourning but also resistance. In the third circle, which is white and represents Hanaq Pacha, the world above of the gods, Correa, now dressed as Qörhuaman, a winged deity from Incan mythology, waves two large Peruvian flags. As if they were “her wings,” Melquíades explains, “she moves with the light energy of a spirit. She approaches the man and gives him air, she accompanies him, dances, turns, and plays the pututu [an indigenous instrument that the peasants of the Andes use to call a meeting].”31 Alfonso Cánepa, Rosa Cuchillo, the Ayarachi woman, and El Tambobambino, combined with Melquíades’s symbolic use of space, temporarily transformed the streets of Huamanga and Huanta into the self-conscious site of ritual encounter. 31 Fidel Melquíades, quoted in Persistencia de la memoria (program notes), 4. 410 / Francine A’ness According to Richard Schechner, ordinary secular spaces, such as streets and plazas, homes and gardens, can be made “temporarily special by means of ritual action.”32 Rituals, which he describes as “memory in action,” serve to mark transitions and are designed to be transformative.33 They either change people permanently, as in rites of passage, or temporarily, as in prayer and meditation. They can be secular or sacred but often, as is the case with theatre, the line between the two forms is intentionally blurred. Performing ritual actions, Schechner explains, often helps individuals get through difficult periods of transition and provides “a way for people to connect to a collective, even a mythic past, to build social solidarity, to form a community.”34 For Victor Turner, the anthropologist with whom Schechner collaborated and began developing his theory of performance, periods of crisis within a society can be conceptualized using the theatrical metaphor of the “social drama.” Turner argues that critical moments in a culture’s history can be divided into four distinct chronological stages: breach (in which the social order is compromised), crisis (as the conflict gets played out), redressive action (the post-conflict period of transition), and reintegration or schism (in which the old order is recovered or a new one begins). The period of truth and reconciliation that provides the historical context for this paper can be understood, I believe, as stage three in the acting out of a social drama—the redressive stage. It is a liminal moment, a moment “betwixt and between” periods of intense crisis and renewed stability. According to Turner, the redressive action that accompanies this period can range from “personal advice and informal mediation or arbitration, to formal judicial and legal machinery.”35 In order to pass through this phase a community must be presented with, what Turner terms “distanced replication and critique” of what led up to and formed a part of the crisis. This replication of the past, he proposes, may be in the “rational idiom of a judicial process,” or in the “metaphorical and symbolic idiom of ritual process.”36 In Huamanga and Huanta both idioms were present. The “idiom of judicial process” was staged by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and the “metaphorical and symbolic idiom of ritual process” was staged by Yuyachkani, whose long-term commitment to street theatre and alternative audiences had inspired them to seek ample ways in which to transform and resignify public spaces through performance. In both locations a “distanced replication and critique” of the crimes committed during Peru’s dirty war was presented for both the audience and the active participants involved. In the Commission’s community hearings each witness was asked to stand before a microphone and give testimony in a way that adhered to the event’s legal requirements. This retelling of the traumatic past was also aired live via cable television, and excerpts were transmitted daily on Peruvian national television. For both the person giving the testimony and the viewer watching, the context and form in which the retelling occurred—a legal tribunal—generated at least a degree of distance required for critique and reflection. In conjunction with this process, Yuyachkani 32 Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2002), 63. Ibid., 45. 34 Ibid., 77. 35 This reference to Victor Turner’s theory of social drama, developed in his book Dramas, Fields and Metaphors (1974), is outlined in Schechner, Performance Studies, 66. 36 Victor Turner, quoted in Schechner, Performance Studies, 65. 33 YUYACHKANI AND POSTWAR PERU / 411 took on the task of metaphorically re-presenting the past by creating stylized and symbolic personas that referenced both the dead victims and the living witnesses of the war. Their presentation of such figures was mediated in such a way as to generate a therapeutic and a critical distance between the events and their witnesses, both real and implied. Designed to be spaces of reflection and remembrance, Yuyachkani’s street theatre and site-specific art installation not only prompted members of the community to testify before the Commission but to understand the national importance of this very act. For the collective this outcome was the result of many months of preparatory work in each of the communities the TRC was to attend. It is clear that the group’s creative and culturally sensitive use of performance, combined with their awareness of its power to function as a form of secular ritual, served as a catalyst for collective mourning and remembering. Their performance pieces, like the work of the Commission and other human rights and community groups present, served to dignify the dead and honor the living. They also helped to remove the social stigma associated with victimhood and functioned, within the community, as symbolic acts of burial for the many hundreds of absent bodies the Commission came to witness. With reference to the group’s collaboration with the TRC, actor Casafranca concludes the following: Theatre exists wherever you create it . . . . It can be theatre in an enclosed space, or it can be outside in a nontraditional setting. I believe that at this point Yuyachkani is increasingly convinced that what is necessary is a theatrical dialogue with the people, with that audience that does not have access to traditional theatres. Theatre in an auditorium is one type of language, one type of audience. It is a different reality. There are, however, other types of theatre that can be produced outside in the market place, in the public plaza, in the schoolyard. I believe that [our work with the Commission] has been optimal because we have continued to awaken consciences. Many people came to us during the public hearings as if we were representatives of the TRC. They came to thank us for what we were doing in the street and then started to give testimony right there. It is clear that more than one group needs to record people’s experiences [with the war] thus providing a bridge to the Commission. In this way these people may, finally, speak the truth.37 After collaborating with the TRC and participating more generally in the postwar fight against amnesty and amnesia, there was a shared feeling among the members of Yuyachkani that all the work they had produced together as a group over thirty years was for this very purpose: to help a racially segregated and war-torn country to heal. Magaly Muguercia has described Yuyachkani’s theatrical practice as “corporeal.”38 The highly-trained body of the actor is the principal medium of artistic expression, and the body as subject/object is often the central prop and thematic focus of their pieces. When, as has been the case in Peru, that body has been racialized, segregated, disciplined, imprisoned, tortured, raped, and disappeared, a body-centered (as opposed to text- or stage-centered) performance aesthetic acquires a greater urgency. The 37 Augusto Casafranca shares his views about Yuyachkani’s work with the TRC in the video Alma viva que florezca la memoria. 38 Magaly Muguercia, “Cuerpo y política en la dramaturgia de Yuyachkani,” in Indagaciones sobre el fin de siglo: (Teatro iberoamericano y argentino), ed. Osvaldo Pellettieri (Buenos Aires: Galerna, 2000), 41– 61. 412 / Francine A’ness bodies onstage are not merely vehicles for the action or mouthpieces for the text but sites of struggle, where the individual of flesh and blood converges with a complex signifying system that is impossible to divorce from the social milieu constructing it. Yuyachkani represent the body that breathes and dies, bleeds and sweats, laughs and prays. It is the body that is tortured and disappeared, the body that walks miles in simple shoes to testify before a human rights tribunal, the body of individuals who collectively constitute a multiracial and multiethnic Peru but who so frequently have been regionally segregated and misunderstood. The body Yuyachkani represents and defamiliarizes on stage is also the body understood in sociological terms as a political stage, a stage upon which racial, ethnic, national, and gendered identities are inscribed or enacted. As racial identities in Peru are complex and highly contested and generate strong racist reactions, “performing Peru” can be laden with potential problems and with accusations of cultural appropriation or color blindness. It is telling, for example, that, in one sense, Alfonso Cánepa, Rosa Cuchillo, and the Ayarachi woman all perform in whiteface or, in the case of Casafranca in the “Tambobambino,” wear a mask. These choices, while aesthetic, also serve to complicate the dynamics of easy identification or disidentification on the part of the viewer. Admittedly, Rosa Cuchillo, Alfonso Cánepa, and the Ayarachi woman are all dead, but their white faces can also be seen as one way to avoid the problem of a white or mixed-race actor performing uncritically the category of “Indian.” Whiteface here has a double effect: on the one hand, it signifies the bloodless skin of a dead person, but, on the other, it defamiliarizes (in the Brechtian sense) the white skin of the actors, drawing attention to the racial drama at play on any Peruvian face. The former highlights the shared experience of death; the latter indexes the differences that divide the population. Susan Bennett reminds us that “Brecht’s foregrounding of the theatrical process and establishment of verfremdung in stage-audience communication operates in a context that questions not specific concerns, aesthetic or political, but instead those social relations which are generally accepted as universal or natural. . . . Verfremdung displaces the audience’s perception of stage events and looks for an interactive relationship.”39 The distance created provides a space in which the audience may reflect upon codes and how they signify: in this case, how racial identities in Peru are envisaged and what they signify. In 2003 Yuyachkani’s community work with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission culminated in a remounting of the group’s most powerful war-related memory plays. In Lima, from October until December, audiences could watch Contraelviento (Againstthewind) on Tuesdays and then on Wednesdays see Antígona. On Thursdays the group performed No me toquen ese valse (Don’t play that waltz for me), and on Fridays Casafranca once again appeared to tell the tale of Alfonso Cánepa in Adiós Ayacucho. Finally, at the weekend the group presented Santiago. The whole repertoire, which ran under the title La persistencia de la memoria (The endurance of memory), was accompanied by an eleven-page program in the form of a newspaper. On the title page 39 Susan Bennett, Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception (New York: Routledge, 1997), 28–29. YUYACHKANI AND POSTWAR PERU / 413 of the program at the top, where the date, edition, and place of publication customarily appear for any newspaper, was the following: “Year: zero; Edition: zero; 2003: Year of Truth in Peru.” Inside the program Miguel Rubio had compiled a detailed and moving description of the group’s extensive work with the TRC in the province of Ayacucho, including photographs and comments by the actors. The importance of bringing this experience back to the capital and sharing it with an urban audience in Lima cannot be underestimated. It allowed diverse experiences of the war to be linked, but it did so without conflating them. In the same way that the hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission were broadcast nationally, the performances compelled Peruvians whose experience of the war had been dramatically different to confront a reality and recognize it as their own. They obliged the people of Lima to recognize what had happened in the sierra and acknowledge how embroiled the authorities were in the atrocity. Hearing a mother’s testimony, watching her cry as she relives the pain of her loss, is much harder to ignore than a cursory statistic or report concerning forced disappearances and death. Seeing (or seeing for a second time) Yuyachkani’s war-related plays, when juxtaposed against the findings of the TRC, not only contextualized the plays firmly in Peru, but reduced the gap between disparate parts of the country that are not only physically but ideologically removed. When members of Yuyachkani performed the traumas of others, the memory of those traumas became a part of the actors, too. By embodying the memory of the war, Yuyachkani also made witnesses out of those who came to reflect upon and participate in their performances, thus implicating both their Andean as well as their urban audiences in the act of fighting amnesia. Yuyachkani’s performance pieces of the 1990s, combined with their more recent social interventions in collaboration with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, can be seen as a form of conscious mediation of memory, a collecting and collating of images, stories, testimonies, and icons associated with Peru’s recent past, and a poetic reworking of the same with the aim of providing an antidote to collective amnesia. Their work, whether taking place in a theatre or in a street, creates both a physical and conceptual space for active remembrance and community not just at the local and regional level but at the national level as well. It also encourages all Peruvians to recognize that the violence of the 1980s and ’90s is a chapter in the country’s collective history and not just the isolated trauma of those marked as victims. This mediation of traumatic memory from one generation to the next, or from one subject position to another, is similar to what Marianne Hirsch has termed “postmemory.” Although Hirsch developed the term to refer to how the memory of trauma gets transmitted within families from one generation to the other, in its broadest sense, postmemory can also refer to a space of “intersubjective remembrance” linked specifically to cultural or collective trauma.40 For Hirsch, postmemory (which is different from “survivor memory”) is a form of retrospective witnessing on the part of someone who, on the one hand, identifies culturally with the victim or witness of trauma, and who, on the other, has somehow inherited the memory of the latter’s traumatic experience. To engage with postmemory, therefore, means that the individual who inherits the 40 Marianne Hirsch, “Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 14, no. 1 (2001): 10. 414 / Francine A’ness trauma recognizes that, although it is not his/hers, the events of the past, of others, are and can still become inscribed into one’s own life story. Hirsch also underlines that doing postmemory is an ethical position from which to view the traumatic past of someone else in a way that resists appropriation, a description that seems to encapsulate nicely Yuyachkani’s relationship to the victims of Peru’s dirty war. Postmemory draws attention to how memories are mediated and transmitted, as do the performance pieces discussed in this essay.41 As Peru is a complicated multilingual and multiethnic nation, Yuyachkani believes that intercultural performance can help bridge some of the gaps that have kept the country and its various populations geographically separate and ideologically estranged. A desire to forget the recent past and move rapidly forward has been symptomatic of much of 1990s postdictatorship Latin America, and, in many countries like Peru, Guatemala, Argentina, Chile, and Brazil, instilling collective amnesia in the population by burying the past has become a political imperative. But if Peru is going to move beyond internecine violence and function coherently as a nation, the past, no matter how traumatic, must be incorporated into the present, reflected upon by the entire country, no matter how diverse, and function as a cautionary tale. Never again. 41 For a more detailed discussion of the theory of postmemory, see Hirsch, “Surviving Images,” 9–13.