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Teresa Ralli is one of Peru’s major theatre practitioners.
She acts, creates, directs, sings, and participates in a vast repertoire
of both European and Andean performance traditions. She’s as comfortable
singing Brecht’s poems set to cabaret music, as creating and acting
in the one-woman Antígona, as participating in Andean performances
and pasacalles. An extraordinary actor, she has directed theatre workshops
for disenfranchised women throughout Peru. She collected material for her
Antígona by interviewing the mothers and widows of Peru’s "disappeared."
She has acted Antígona for the survivors of Peru’s "guerra
interna" (their version of a "Dirty War"), and has worked
with the country’s Commission of Truth and Reconciliation (get exact
name). A founding member of Peru’s most important theatre collective,
Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani, Teresa Ralli has participated in dozens of productions,
and worked with communities around the country. One of her main goals, as
she sees it, is to challenge her audiences to remember the many historical
and political struggles that most tend to forget, to put the past in dialogue
with the present, to see events as part of larger, cultural imaginaries.
"Perú es un país desmemorizado," (Peru is a de-memorized
country) she says, and the ‘de’ captures the violent refusal at
the heart of a country that does not recognize or understand the realities
of its many parts. Antígona, fragments of which are included here,
illustrates the ways in which she puts the many pieces together. The play
is ‘about’ Sophocles’ Antigone, about civil violence, about
gender and atrocity, about Peru’s decade of brutal internal war, about
Alberto Fujimori’s ruthless methods of suppressing unrest, about Peruvians
efforts to come to terms with their response to criminal politics. Each
of the pieces contributes to the rest, revealing layer after layer of tensions
generated by social trauma, witnessing, and resistance. Ralli’s "Fragments
of Memory" (included here), show how she approaches the problem of
addressing desmemorización.
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