"Like Chekhov's characters". Intersections between Theatre and Photography II.

Abstract

During the last years, a series of Argentine theater publications have compiled different texts and stage experiences. In general, our hypothesis is that these are intermedial formats that seek to bring into play relations between the word and the image with the purpose of activating the performance experiences (already happened and transformed into archival materials) and the texts (virtuality always upgradable in the act of reading and also, potentially, in future stagings) in a new experience (both literary and visual) beyond the staging that gave rise to it.  On this occasion we will discuss Melancolía y manifestaciones [Melancholy and Manifestations] (2012), published jointly with Mi vida después [My Life After] (2009) and El año en que nací [The Year I Was Born] (2012) in the compilation Mi vida después y otros textos [My Life After and Other Texts] (Arias, 2016).  It deals with the documentary theater trilogy in which Lola Arias works on the experience of the dictatorships of Argentina and Chile between the 70s and 80s, focusing on the perspective that the generation of children born in that context have on their parents. The project as a whole sought to reflect about the official history, review and declassify its archives; but it also thought about another version of the story, beyond the version transmitted by the generation of parents. Widely studied internationally, those shows and their subsequent publication emerged in a context, expanded for over a decade now, of renewed reflection and experimentation on the subject in particular and on the documentary genre in general. This is why it is an object of special interest to those who approach these perspectives.