Antigone as a Spokesperson for Historical Memory Tragedy and Identity

Abstract

In the debate, always ongoing in Latin America, on the role of historical memory in the configuration of our collective identity, theatre acquires a fundamental importance for its ability to propose transformative readings of the present and the past that emphasise the processual character, in permanent reconstruction, of memory. If Griselda Gambaro’s Antigone furiosa, through allegory and parody, takes on the claim of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo until she herself becomes a disappeared person, Marianella Morena’s Antigone Oriental re-semantizes the sophochlean tragedy based on the real experience of former political prisoners, daughters and exiles of the Uruguayan military dictatorship. From the parameters of the so-called “documentary theater”, and from a profoundly moving experience, the latter puts theater in link with the notion of “history” through experience, document and testimony. The Theban heroine appears, in both cases, as the spokesperson of a counter-hegemonic memory, constructed by multiple voices: that of the absent, that of the survivors, that of the witnesses. Voices that question and deconstruct the institutional discourse of history, which unifies and totalizes the experience of the past. But at the same time it assumes a fierce struggle against the suppression of memory and against complicit silence, appealing to the same society that cries out “never again” and demands justice. The classic myth, traversed by a traumatic historical event, such as state terrorism in Latin America, unfolds new meanings and territorialized readings. We will investigate the ways in which both pieces address the problem of the disappeared, repression and institutional violence, as well as their aesthetic treatments and poetic conceptions.