'The Final Rehearsal' by Peru’s Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani, was presented as a part of the 7th Encuentro of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, held in August of 2009 in Bogotá, Colombia, under the title 'Staging Citizenship: Cultural Rights in the Americas.' This 10-day event brought together activism, scholarship, and art around the themes of legacies, memories, struggles, and frontiers of citizenship. In an old theater, which was also once a cinema hall, a group of artists craft an homage to a legendary diva whose life story parallels the history of twentieth-century Peru. Time is pressing, both literally and figuratively: on the tightrope of the present rest the specters of the past and the imminence of the future. The reality of the stage, which has the virtue of being at once physical and illusory, allows seven performers to interweave and embody the escapades of an artistic group and the imaginary travails of two key figures from the modern Peruvian tradition (writers César Vallejo and José Carlos Mariátegui) along with the apocryphal biography of a popular exotic singer (Yma Sumac). A collective creation by Yuyachkani with texts by Peter Elmore, this performance casts a ludic look back on twentieth-century Peru. It proposes a mode of theatricality grounded in a writing of signs and sensations that values and regards the relationship between actor and spectator as a form of convivencia, or coexistence. An experience that goes beyond the simple facts it narrates, it invites the audience to become a creator who can confront what the stage puts forward in accordance with his or her own sensibilities.