Liminal Stages: where art and life intersect (Yuyachkani. ..

beyond the theater)

Ileana Diguez
I must respond with my life for that which I have lived and understood in art so that all that has been lived and understood do not remain without action in life (Mikhail Bakhtin, Russia, 1919) The experience has been for life, a touching force and humanity. Last night at the vigil, we walked with detainees and missings young relatives and then we arrived at the porch of the church where I staged Rosa Cuchillo in the presence of 500 people, most of them women who had come from all communities. We felt that our life and our work made sense, everything we had learned, collected, felt, expressed during this time was for this, to arrive here to accompany in hope all these women with big and watery eyes (Ana Correa, Lima, 2002). To cross these texts involves an exercise of memory that only wants to provoke ... The site where writing and life, art and simple human experience cross, is the most fascinating and abysmal limit. No theoretical or aesthetic construct will provide experiences so deep. I have been wondering a long time where this site of critical and theoretical reflection on art and life might lie. How can a critic or a theatrical researcher address the current and complex processes of theatrical writings. How to look, to document, to reflect and to account for both the risks and human experiences that are involved in the artistic processes. I admit that when I arrived in Lima, driven by the search for new materials and experiences for my research, my idea of border or liminal space was an aesthetic point of view, a transdisciplinary obsession. There would be nothing new to consider today that taxonomies and definitions long since closed- ceased to correspond to an art that transcends the boundaries of gender and feeds itself on hybridizations; but it is a viewpoint that needs to be sustained in the field of theoretical studies in which there has talked about representation as an area of dislocation since the eighties, and where academic studies are still developing and considering theater as a closed semiotic system. Although I approached the border as a conceptual space where multiple architectonics are configured as an complex area where life and art, ethical status and aesthetic creation intersect, it was in Lima, while attending the public confrontations of the last work by the group Yuyachkani in its thirty-three years of existence, listening to Miguel, Ana, Teresa, Dbora, Rebeca, Julin and others who generously shared their stories and time, where I experienced the most complex dimension of the liminal. Of those days I want to maintain the experience, the feeling of being overwhelmed by an ethical-aesthetic act that I still feel as ineffable. The task of a critic can be sad when he/she tries to translate words or to measure their own artistic experience through set phrases.

I have considered the idea of the liminal a term with which I refer to the views of Victor Turner and Rocco Mangieri an idea that is associated with concepts of hybridization concepts (Canclini), pollution, border (Lotman and Bajtin), ex-Centris (Linda Hutcheon), complexity and transversality. And now I would add the term invertebrate, less known in the academic field, but disturbing because of its sharp poetic intuition. In my recent writings I tried to narrow the scope of the liminal to a crossdisciplinary space where theater, performance, visual arts, action ... intersect. And although I associated the liminal with exile, the deterritorialized, mutable and transitory, processual and inconclusive, presentational rather than representational; in the practical analysis of the theme I was still too fascinated by theoretical abstraction. If I learned, confirmed and experienced anything during this tour through three South American cities, it was to conceive of the liminal as situation, as a way of being, both in life and in art, as a space where the human and social conditions, an individual and his environment come together; as a place of intersections both internal and in relation to others; as an act of presence in a medium of representational practices. I am seduced by the border and its real condition of risk, exposure, transgression, fragility, contagion and viruses. In 1991 Miguel Rubio noted the existence of a theater of borders and boundaries that are difficult to classify of multiple disciplines and boundaries within dance, the visual, sonorous and spatial arts, a language of strongly visual impressions that are imposed on the spectator (2001, 100). Rereading Notes on theater, I find that the best reflection always comes from the theatrical fact and its practitioners, the teatreros. The liminal is not an innovation imposed by theoretical thinking, it is an older concept that attempts to realize experimental practices or at least not traditional practices, that have marked the theatricality in Latin America with ever greater determination in recent years. Taking up Miguels line of thought, I think that Latin American theater shifted towards more visual writings in the late nineties, which are influenced by investigations concerning evocative, actionism and installation territories, which made inroads into processes that involve subtle critical and conceptual questions about the creator, art and its context. In this regard I would mention a few references, among which is undoubtedly Yuyachkani, but also La otra orilla, in Lima; Mapa Teatro, in Bogot; Perifrico de Objetos, in Buenos Aires; Teatro da Vrtigem, in Sao Paulo, among others. And we do not reach these writings by means of trends or from a need to be in tune with the aesthetic practices of the post. Perhaps we should think of these discourses and strategies in dialogue with their scenic cronotopas; remembering that, social, economical and political scenarios of this continent began to be more outrageously unsustainable, more cynically theatrical, more pragmatic and mediated, during the nineties and towards the end of the decade. Also during these years, visual artists retook performative strategies that stemmed from the theater and arts of the sixties. I think that reflection on the liminal stages, where life and art intersect today as well as social activist groups that use artistic strategies to perform in public spaces, should have a significant presence in academic discourse. In cities like Lima and Buenos Aires, where intense shocks have deeply affected the way of life over the past twenty years, public interventions from groups such as Sociedad Civil, El Roche, Per Fbrica, La Perrera, Integro (in Lima) and Grupo Accin Callejera, ETC and Ejrcito de Artistas (in Buenos Aires), have had an undeniable impact on community processes that are committed to

memory reconstruction. Memorable examples can be identified such as the huge collective action of washing the flag in the Plaza de Armas in Lima, in 2000, organized by the group Sociedad Civil; and the escraches that have been helping members of Hijos in Argentina to advance since the nineties, which through its formation has united many groups. These actions can not be considered as mere artworks. Indebted to what I lived and heard during times these I can consider them nothing less than committed and ethical acts. In Lima and Buenos Aires, participants of these actions insisted on separating themselves from the protected zone of art, in order to emphasize the design and implementation of the actions as public and participatory rituals. This particular method of mixing art and life in this part of the world and of incorporating actions committed to life in art, has been sustained by Yuyachkani over many years. I think that the group arrived its most recent projects by means of questioning the way to exist in life, as in locating another way to accompany and participate in the collective process of memory reconstruction that the country has been living out in recent years. The search for new mediums synthesized in Hecho en el Per, was a complex dialogue with an environment that routinely appealed to the theatricalization of political posturing. If we live an ever-increasing interventionist reality that shows us all a distorted, surrealistic and pathetic reality, theater becomes sterile, small, Teresa Ralli pointed out. To delimit the presence of actors, in a situation of non-representation, to the space of a glass cabinet located in one of the most central and public spaces in the city, to rehearse disturbing ways of seeing and positioning oneself with regard to what was happening in the country, was a resource that required reflection on the complex spectacle of a polis. In keepingg with the amazing images displayed in the media, the bizarre glass cabinets created by each actor and viscerally maintained for six hours, were the broken mirror, the freak of a reality that could no longer be approached from traditional stages or observed from the comfort of a seat. The new spectators could then be the passers-by of the central public road, confirming metaphors and parodies of their own archetypes, myths and realities behind the glass. I think of the liminal as a condition of life and creation in the processes and works of Yuyachkani. From the perspective of the art, Hecho en el Peru, vitrinas para un museo de la memoria (July 2001) was explicitly a border experience, intersecting installationist devices, plastics, dramatic, radicalization of mediums, an inquiry into new ways of communication. Perhaps their precedents began to take shape in 1994 when they were inmersed in the creative process of Hasta cundo corazn and they considered theatricality from the scenic action as a kind of writing in space (192) located at the edges, within the limits of theatrical genres (193). Now, I consider Hasta cundo corazn (1994) a foray into hybrid territories, a sort of visual poem, a dance of disequilibrium by bodies on the verge of a real evacuation. From the perspective of life and ethic action to privilege this dimension that is never separate from aesthetic creation, at least in this group I think that in civic and cultural memory in Peru each word in history and in the Peruvian culture should be remembered as well as the humane and responsible work of Yuyachkani that accompanied civil society and rural communities in the preparation and implementation of the Audiencias Pblicas de la Comisin de la Verdad y Reconcialicin; by touring towns and villages to stage Adis Ayacucho, Antgona and Rosa Cuchillo, a feeling emerged that the boundaries between social reality and its characters had been erased. Some time later, one morning in July of this year, I similarly experienced the erasure of borders: looking the photo of Mam Angelica in the old Chorrillos

house where the Yuyanapaq photography exhibition was presented by the Comisin de la Verdad y la Reconcialiacin, I echoed the words of Ana Correa the day before when she told me how Mam Angelica had inspired her work Rosa Cuchillo. That morning, Angelica Mendozas photo showing the message written by her kidnapped and disappeared son was combined in my mind with the image of Ana, Rosa Cuchillo invoking life from her market stall in the presence of thousands of mothers who could no longer recover their children. Now that I am writing, I feel that to occupy the border is to be able to live at that boundary that prevents you from knowing from where you look, from where you hear, from where you write. I also remember an annotation in my yellow notebook: Yuyanapaq: To remember / Yuyachkani: I'm remembering. In those days during July I had the privilege of attending public rehearsals of the most recent work: Sin ttulo, tcnica mixta. What had begun as a new play about the historic war against Chile, became influenced by real events: the final report of the Comisin de la Verdad and the memorable speech by Salomn Lerner. We started to make a play and suddenly the country began to gallop all over us, again I transcribe bits of the conversation with Teresa. Rgeality burst into the theater and exploded it. The common room of the Yuyach in the emblematic red house of Tacna 363 began to be dismantled, to resemble a large shed- collage-gallery that might be crossed by wagons. The transgression and dismantling of thei own space could be read as a sign of everything that shifted, once again, in the work of this group. If we were to succumb to the challenge of taxonomies and we were tempted by the encounter with the phrase that best brings us closer to the poetic nature of Sin ttulo, tcnica mixta, I think that I would reiterate Miguels conceptualization of the scenic action as writing in space, which feeds on artistic pollutions and it presents fragmented material that spectators must then edit. On the other hand, I would appeal to the idea of a theatrical installation which assumes the visual installation, but arranged in a space where it is not only shown, but also intercepted, modified and implemented. They are no longer fixed glass cabinet connected to the trace of footprints and pauses of every visitor, now there are planks, wagons and mobile platforms in which presences and iconographies of recent or legendary memory are installed and pulled by students in the manner of popular processions to circulate around a space that becomes unpredictable for the audience who is no longer protected by security zones. The fact that these are young people driving and moving the wagons, artisansceneshifters trying to reconstruct the fragmented puzzle of memory, representative of another metaphor that Yuyachkani displays here. The space where this series of actions is developed is a kind of environments, a large collage, where glass cabinets are jumbled with books about the history of Peru, fragments of the speech by Salomon Lerner, photos and photocopies with images of historical and recent events, actressess notebooks, pieces of letters, costumes, puppets, masks and other objects that will be used by the actors or that will form small niche-installations to articulate a collective memory. A sort of gallery where times and presences follow one another, without museistic vocation, in which memory becomes a living record that passes through the body and the critical positioning of each actor in a dialogue that retrieves textures, materials and objects from some of their previous creations. The parodic characters of the street action El bus de la fuga, now appear in a reworking bound by this new spatiality. The different situations involving women that have been developed along the series of actions, revisit and develop some of the images already raised in Hecho en el Peru.

Yuyachkani is a group marked by the strong presence and energy of its actresses, and this remarkable fact is demonstrated in their most recent work. The visual beauty and symbolic- ethical resonance reaches paradigmatic moments in the empty hikers bag sculped by Teresa Ralli, and the extraordinary documentation of ashninka and andean women made by Ana and Dbora Correa. The elaborate visual design and dignity, with which two of the most overlooked situations of women in those years of violence are recovered, will be one of the most powerful and transcendent visions that an artistic experience has granted me. Sitting on a platform, the ashninka woman embodied by the elevated presence of Ana Correa, bears the kushma photos taken by Vera Lentz in communities enslaved by Sendero Luminoso. On the other wagon, the magnificently dressed Andean countrywoman embodied by Dbora Correa, carries in her clothes the testimonies of the extermination campaign and mass sterilization; after that, she is traversed by a fusion of rock and quechua while she performs various Andean dance steps. Both actions are powerful and transcendent metaphors of resistance, especially because we know that during all those years of conflict, women represented the toughest form of survival of the Peruvian ethos. No history lesson, no verbal text would be as powerful and suggestive as this gallery of presences: theatrical documentary constructed from ethical commitment. In this dialogue with memory, in the will to crossover, I see the image of that sewn flag, woven from clothes, which is symbolically hoisted to diminish the boundaries of fiction. Beyond the connotations suggested by its texture, that flag is already an object resignified in the creations of Peruvian visual artists from the nineties. At that staged action about Yuyach I perceived the presence of that other flag one of the first among many actions that would shake the Peruvian civic conscience configured in the work of Eduardo Llanos (1993). Reworking scattered fractions of the nation this flag, sewn from various types of clothing, from military uniforms, underwear and ordinary dresses, was conceived as a tribute to the Peruvian woman who washes the dirty linen of the country: Lavandera Nacional is the title of the work that (July 2004) is now part of the exhibition Sobre hroes y patria, in the Gallery Pancho Fierro in Lima. Sin ttulo, tcnica mixta announces with its name a contamination of the resources of visual arts. Beyond theater and the performative, the environments, collage and installation hybridizations, this work is primarily a pointed and risky transit through fields and mediums that are masterfully articulated and reinvented. Challenging prejudices, experiments and radicalism, Yuyachkani performs between action and inaction, representation and presence, theatricality and installation performativity. They act mainly at the junction of the most pointed questions in order to hold people responsible for these devastating times. This combination of questioning and desolate testimonies amidst perverse situations caused by senderista extremism, the desperate actions of subversion, the irresponsible complicity of the government that only looks to its coffers and the indiscriminate executions of the armed forces, to open crossfire on civil and peasant societies that are victims of the most excessive violence, would be the only place from which to document and participate responsibly in the reconstruction of such a painful memory. One might think that there is more material for a scenic work because of the range of perspective spanning more than a century of Peruvian history, from the war against Chile to the present, CVR post-report. But this action, almost epic in dimension, is structured from the beginning as a complex drama, a subtle drama of the event, where paradigmatic moments that could not be articulated from the linear structure, are linked.

The edition in the collection of such fragments intersects with the personal editing process and retrieval of self and collective memory. Our condition as spectator is refigured by an intimate and ethical participation. At the end of this succession of actions, that fond exposure of memory, with the air rarefied by so much pain, I inevitably became an unexcusable human act. In a society of exhausted speeches, where the civilian population has explored representational resources and has used the body as a desperate means of expression for an environment that mediates all interventions, theatricality and life have to reinvent themselves every day to assume the same risk , the same fragility and the survival that mark the spaces where they are inserted. These notes started in Lima as the reflection of a crisis, of a theoretical unlearning, of a charming experience, of an experience that calls into question that which I thought I knew, and where the theater and life, spaces, faces and voices have already intersected. When the action from art is an action in life, perhaps the more transcendent aspiration can be that which Ana Correa suggested: experience in the theater allows us to be simply better human beings; any aesthetic or intellectual experience makes sense the way in which it expresses and modifies our to be in life. Mexico, August 2004. Ileana Diguez. Theatrical Researcher, CITRU.

Notes: 1. I am referring to research that I am developing on theatricalities or liminal stages in Latin America, and it belongs to my doctoral studies in Literature at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma in Mexico. The visit to Peru was part of a research trip (July-August 2004) through three South American countries sponsored by the Program for Support of Graduate Studies at UNAM. 2. The architectural is a concept developed by Bajtn from the inversion of the Kantian idea. In brief, this is an individualized system in which the relationship between individual and time and space are addressed. 3. Here I adopt the phrase proposed by Lucho Ramirez to name performing sessions of the Baroque Concert under his leadership, in Lima. 4. Les Transversales is a project coordinated by the Thtre du Mouvement which arose as an ongoing investigation the relationships between movement, gesture, music, voice, speech, text, object, set design, space, lighting, new technologies, video ... 5. Under the name Invertebrados and with the support of Casa de Amrica in Madrid, Pablo Caruana organized a Festival-meeting that proposed to open a door to the most experimental performing arts in Latin America, that which has permitted inquires into bodies, theatricalities, performative arts, technologies, developing a new concept of scenic writing. The event took place from June 8 to the 26 2004 and was attended by designers such as Elena Crdoba and Oskar Gmez from Spain; Denise Stutz from Brazil and Hctor Bourges from Mexico. We are

interested in theoretical metaphor that is projected by choosing the word invertebrados. 6. Escrache from escrachar, is a word from the Argentine lunfardo, that means to show somebody up. Actions under the name escraches were built and developed by these groups during the nineties, to seek and to show the addresses used by people in situations of death, torture, missing persons or theft of children during the last dictatorship in Argentina. 7. I am referring specifically to the words of Gustavo Buntinx, during the meeting with several visual and performance artists, organized by Buntinx himself at the Centro Cultural San Marcos, Lima, June 24, 2004. Two weeks later, Carolina Golder from the Grupo Accin Callejera used similar phrases in Buenos Aires. 8. It would be naive to suggest that commitment to the memory reconstruction that the country experienced in recent years is an unprecedented task in the history of Yuyachkani. Those who have accompanied them throughout these years know that their way of living and doing theater is reconnected to the meaning of the word quchua which gives them their name. In any case, I am suggesting that these creators felt and looked for the necessity of new ways to create dialogue at a time when all representational speeches were in crisis. Reality had surpassed the most terrible fiction and art had to question such transgression. 9. These words are the transcription of fragments of a conversation with Teresa Ralli, Lima, July 25, 2004. 10. I use the word bizarre in its dual meaning. On one side in the hispanisation of the word bizarre as rare, strange; and secondly its significance in our language as courageous, bold. 11 The idea of scenic action is reflected upon in El ojo de afuera, Notas sobre teatro by Miguel Rubio, Lima-Minneapolis, 2001, pp 192 and 193. 12 I am paraphrasing a fragment of the text Persistencia de la memoria by Miguel Rubio, published in the newspaper that included the retrospective of Yuyachkani during the months of October to December 2003. 13 The present moment of Yuyachkani is a moment of rupture, Miguel Rubio confirmed to me in the last conversation we had in the house of Tacna, July 24, 2004. 14. Taken from the playbill of Hecho en el Per, vitrinas para un museo de la memoria. Lima, Centro Cultural Bellas Artes, July 2001. 15. From the introductory text to the exhibition Sobre hroes y patria, curated by Maril Ponte, exhibited at the Pancho Fierro Gallery, in downtown Lima, July 2004. 16. This text was written on the wall with charcoal next to the work Lavandera nacional by Eduardo Llanos. Sobre hroes y patria. Pancho Fierro Gallery, Lima, July 2004. 17. For further reflection on the topic of complex dramas or drama of the complexity, I suggest consulting the text by Jos A. Sanchez, Dramaturgias de la imagen, University of Castilla-La Mancha, 1994 and also, the actual text by Rubio, Notas sobre Teatro in the pages already indicated about scenic action.

18. More or less, these were the words of Ana Correa, the last words collected by this little device which records the voice without freezing it in a depersonalized footprint. Lima, July 25, 2004.