YUYACHKANI AND POSTWAR PERU

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Resisting Amnesia: Yuyachkani,

Performance, and the Postwar
Reconstruction of Peru
Francine Aness
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 Perus internal war. Located
at the heart of the province of Ayacucho, the two townslike many others in the
areafor sixteen years had been caught in the crossfire between members of the

Francine Aness 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
groups 2003 performance installation Hecho en el Per: 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 Per: El
trabajo ms reciente del Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani, Tramoya 71 (AprilJune 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) 395414 2004 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

396 / Francine Aness

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 governments 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 countrys 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 Americas 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 Manriques El tiempo del miedo: La violencia poltica en el
Per 19801996 (Lima: Fondo Editorial del Congreso del Per, 2002). For a US missionary perspective
on the dirty war, see Kristin Herzogs Finding Their Voice: Peruvian Womens Testimonies of the War
(Valley Forge: Trinity Press International, 1993). The Peruvian Human Rights Commission (Comisin
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 Per (1982
1996) (Lima: Prensataller, 2001).
4
I regard Yuyachkani as one of Latin Americas 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, Yuyachkanis 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
countrys postwar rehabilitation.

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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 groups presence would raise
awareness of the Commissions 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
governments 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 publicas 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 countrys 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 Aness

the case in Peru and South Africaor private.9 The creation of a truth commission,
then, as one way of dealing with a countrys traumatic past, sends a clear and very
public message about a new regimes 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 governments 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 commissions proceedings eventually become
public documents. Some final reports, such as the report from Argentinas TRC, Nunca ms (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 commissions
work addresses some of the most politically and morally sensitive issues facing a country as a whole
(Steiner, 45).
10
For a detailed description of the work performed by Perus 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.

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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 groups 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 TRCs 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 Commissions 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 countrys 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 poorthe haves and the
have-notsremains vast. The groups close readings of the work of Peruvian social
anthropologist Jos Mara 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 Yuyachkanis early militant theatre is Puo 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 Aness

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 countrys 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 collectives 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, Yuyachkanis 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 itdonning masks,
setting the action in the distant past, translating the contemporary world through
allegory and myth, and using song and dancethey 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 msicos 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 Yuyachkanis work is informed by a number of key sources. Diana Taylor details
the groups 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), 190211. 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), 31024. 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

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The collectives 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
groups 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 groups 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 groups 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 populationscoast/
mountain, European/Indian, Spanish-speaking/Quechua-speaking, literate/illiterate,
victim/agentxenophobic assumptions that have prevented most Peruvians from
ever knowing or fully understanding each other.
Another key component of the collectives philosophyand one that is also alluded
to in their Quechua nameis 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 Yuyachkanis 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 Andrs 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 aproximacin al teatro peruano de los 80 (Lima: Centro de
Documentacin y Video Teatral, 1990).
19
Taylor, Yuyachkani: Remembering Community, 311.
20
Ibid.

402 / Francine Aness

continuum. Memory of the past provides the roots of a cultures 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 theatres potential to engage multiple temporalities simultaneously that
lies at the heart of Yuyachkanis plays and performances. In the collectives 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 groups 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 groups later work with Perus postwar Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Yuyachkanis 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 Perus 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 Per, 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

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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 Adis Ayacucho, Alfonso Cnepa, 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, Cnepa 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 Cnepas 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 Adis 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 characters 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
identityhis name, genealogy, and life storybut also the dignity and agency denied
him by his disappearance and assassination. Therein lies the pieces efficacy. Through
theatrical convention, Cnepa 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 disappearanceas a tactic perfected by
counterinsurgency forces throughout much of Latin America in the 1970s and 80sis
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 Cnepas testimony, the spectators are placed in a position of latent
political agency through a symbolic transfer of knowledge.
The story of Alfonso Cnepa 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 Aness

name represents Truth, Light, and Good.23 Like Osiris, Cnepa 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 victims 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 resignifyingin
the presentits contested parts. Cnepa, therefore, does not just reference the
disappeared of Perus 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
countrys 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 Cnepas body and voice a symbolic role in the
postwar process of reconstruction.
On the day that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was officially created,
Casafrancadressed unmistakably as Cnepawas present among the crowds that
had gathered in Limas 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
Cnepa, began to recite the letter that, within the context of the play Adis Ayacucho, he
had intended for a previous president of Peru:
Dear President: I, Alfonso Cnepa, 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 countrys 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 Cnepa 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 Cnepa 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 expectationbut the historical moment (the mid-1980s) during which the
plays action takes place.

23
Realization of the similarity between the story of Alfonso Cnepa and the myth of Osiris arose
during a conversation with Katie Louise Thomas at Dartmouth College.
24
Quoted in the program notes for Yuyachkanis OctoberDecember 2003 theatre festival, La
persistencia de la memoria, 111.

YUYACHKANI AND POSTWAR PERU

/ 405

Historically, the 1980s were the most violent years of Perus 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 representativethat is, the presidentwas a futile and
potentially dangerous gesture. In the play, Cnepa 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 Perus 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 Cnepas defiant
spiritso unmistakable in his simple white ski mask with bold black lines to highlight
his eyes and mouthemerged 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.
Casafrancas Cnepa 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 Yuyachkanis 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 Adis Ayacucho. In Rallis Antgona 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 Perus
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 Antgona
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 Perus
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 Jos Watanabes poetic adaptation of
the Sophoclean tragedy; the way in which each of the women delivered her storythe
tone, each gesture, the silent pausesalso 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 Antgona 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 Aness

In Antgona 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, Oedipuss 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 genretragedybut from the endless
repetition of the text and the audiences 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 Cnepa, 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 Antgona 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 burialthe 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 havent
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 Commissions 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 Adis Ayacucho and Antgona on tour and performed them in the villages
and towns of Tingo Mara, Hunuco, Ayaviri, Sicuani, Abancay, Chalhuanca, Vilcashuamn, 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 Cnepa 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 Cnepa joined them on the street and
performed excerpts from Adis 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 Antgona 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 Yuyachkanis 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.
Correas persona, Rosa (Huanca) Cuchillo, is interesting in that she acts as a
powerful female counterpoint to Casafrancas Alfonso Cnepa. Whereas the points of
departure for the creation of the protagonist of Adis Ayacucho (and to a lesser degree
Antgona) 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 Melquadesthe groups
resident set designercreated to welcome those coming to give testimony before the

27
28

Ralli, Fragments of Memory, 36364.

Miguel Rubio, Persistencia de la memoria (program notes), 3.

408 / Francine Aness

commission: Kay Pacha (our world), Uqhu Pacha (the world below), and Hanaq Pacha
(the world above).
Correas scenic rendition of Rosa Cuchillo was also heavily inspired by the real-life
story of indigenous community human rights activist Anglica Mendoza, a woman
from Huamanga whose son Arqumedes 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 Mam Anglica, 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 Anglica 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 womanfull 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 Mam Anglica, 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 Yuyachkanis 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 groups work with the TRC in Huanta and Huamanga (Lima:
APRODEH [Asociacin Pro-Derechos Humanos] and Unidad de Audiencias Pblicas de la Comisin
de la Verdad y Reconciliacin, 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

Cuchillos stage there are only two objectsa 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, Melquades 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 Adis Ayacucho, is
inspired by the funeral rites enacted for a disappeared person by certain Andean
communities. The simple yet stark outline of a peasants 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, Melquades 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 Qrhuaman, a winged deity from Incan mythology,
waves two large Peruvian flags. As if they were her wings, Melquades 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 Cnepa, Rosa
Cuchillo, the Ayarachi woman, and El Tambobambino, combined with Melquadess
symbolic use of space, temporarily transformed the streets of Huamanga and Huanta
into the self-conscious site of ritual encounter.

31

Fidel Melquades, quoted in Persistencia de la memoria (program notes), 4.

410 / Francine Aness

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 cultures 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 dramathe 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 Perus dirty war was presented for both the audience and the active
participants involved. In the Commissions community hearings each witness was
asked to stand before a microphone and give testimony in a way that adhered to the
events 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 occurreda legal tribunalgenerated 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 Turners 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, Yuyachkanis 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 groups 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 groups 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 peoples 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 Yuyachkanis 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 Yuyachkanis work with the TRC in the video Alma
viva que florezca la memoria.
38
Magaly Muguercia, Cuerpo y poltica 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 Aness

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 Cnepa, 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 Cnepa,
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 Brechts 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 audiences 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 Yuyachkanis community work with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission culminated in a remounting of the groups most powerful war-related memory
plays. In Lima, from October until December, audiences could watch Contraelviento
(Againstthewind) on Tuesdays and then on Wednesdays see Antgona. On Thursdays
the group performed No me toquen ese valse (Dont play that waltz for me), and on
Fridays Casafranca once again appeared to tell the tale of Alfonso Cnepa in Adis
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),
2829.

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 groups 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 mothers 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) Yuyachkanis 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.
Yuyachkanis 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 Perus 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 countrys 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 latters 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 Aness

trauma recognizes that, although it is not his/hers, the events of the past, of others, are
and can still become inscribed into ones 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 Yuyachkanis relationship to the victims of Perus 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, 913.