Mariana Eva Perez: Project Description

My project analyzes theater plays of the Argentine post-dictatorship, particularly their intertextual play with testimonies, its dramatic function and the truth effect that it produces.

Testimony, the privileged narrative of the experience of state terror, appears as intertext, in more or less explicit ways, in numerous theatrical works. Testimony has become an object of study within the field of memory studies since the explosion of narratives of the Nazi genocide. In Argentina, the term "testimony" has an extended and ambiguous meaning: court statements, complaints raised before national and international organizations, media interviews, autobiographical narratives of both survivors and relatives of the disappeared are all read as “testimonies”.

Furthermore, the project investigates the fantastic dimensions present in both testimonies and in theatrical plays. The hegemonic narrative during the immediate post-dictatorship years, known as “Teoría de los dos demonios” (“Theory of the two devils”), insisted on the arbitrariness and sadism of the disappearing power. By dissolving the historical dimension of the facts, it hindered a rational approach and favored the spread of terror. The testimonies that were inscribed in the narratives “of the two devils” operated as a certification of truth. Does the intertextual play with testimony in theater produce the same effect, or can it, on the contrary, open up a space for critical reception? This question leads to the analysis of the dramaturgical procedures to which testimonies are subjected. The specificity of the dramatic word requires that every story of the past is at the same time an act in the present. It is not just the testimony but the act of testifying itself that is put on stage. In this respect, I analyze the production and subsequent representation of these texts as part of the struggles for the memory of the recent past.