Performative memories in contemporary political theater

Abstract

In this paper we reflect on the implications of the traumatic memory in relation to Argentina's recent past, understanding this within the coordinates of theatrical language. We introduce and develop the concept of “performative memories”. This perspective allows us to recover the concept of performativity according to John Austin, among others, in relation to the performance, as stated by Diana Taylor (2012), since she understands performances as vital acts of transference, transmitting social knowledge, memory and sense of identity from the repetitions of certain actions. We think in which way theater, while being an instance that is always built from the present of actions and vocalizations, creates dissimilar, private and public, personal and collective memories of the dictatorship, using aesthetic procedures that appeal to rhizome fragmentation, intertext and palimpsest in its textualities. We inquire into what means to "act memory itself" in those pieces in our corpus, in which the autobiographical and documentary components acquire a determinant feature.