Taste of Tufts: Noe Montez explores memory and theater in post-conflict Argentina

Assistant Professor of Drama and Dance Noe Montez examined the use of theater in exploring post-conflict memory in his lecture last Friday, the latest in the Experimental College’s weekly series “A Taste of Tufts: A Sampling of Faculty Research.” According to Cindy Stewart, Assistant Director of the ExCollege, memory has become an inadvertent theme of the lecture series.

In particular, Montez looked at the way in which archival materials work to manipulate memory in Argentina regarding the so-called Dirty War. His talk focused on 2009 play “Mi Vida Despu?s (My Life After)” by Lola Arias, which explores the familial and historical experiences of the actors born during the Dirty War.

The Dirty War refers to the period in Argentine history from the mid- to late-1970s until the early 1980s. During this time, the country’s conservative, military-run government engaged in state-based terrorism, known as “El Proceso de Reorganizaci?n Nacional” — Process of National Re-organization — or “El Proceso”, against the country’s leftist groups.

“The nation still confronts the legacy of the Dirty War,” he said. “The very worst of the Dirty War involved the kidnapping and torturing of around 30,000 individuals — many of whom were drugged and flown in planes over Argentina’s Rio de la Plata or the Atlantic Ocean where they were thrown in.”

Montez added that the government often took the children of these individuals and other implicated families and placed them with conservative families who raised them as their own. To this day, many of these displaced children are just learning of their pasts and reconnecting with their birth families. Montez also discussed the government’s control over the documentation of the Dirty War.

“Another important and often overlooked part of the dictatorship was the effort to control historical narratives through control over documents that would eventually become archival materials,” Montez said.

This was done by falsifying or disposing of documents that implicated government leaders in the crimes it committed. Similar propaganda was distributed by way of the media, Montez said, explaining that magazines and other forms of mass media included pro-government messages.

“The military was so fervent in destroying any potentially socialist messages that they even ordered the burning of all films by the Marx brothers,” Montez said.

The implications of these activities are now becoming clearer to scholars.

“Archival material ideally function[s] as objective keepers of the past ... but in contemporary [Arentine] theater, artists, human rights activists, and scholars have spent the better part of the 21st century challenging the archives’ objectivity,” Montez said.

Montez explained that these individuals question whether the process of collecting historical materials in Argentina has created an inaccurate representation of the country’s history of violence.

“In light of these observations, which voices have been privileged, which voices have been suppressed?” Montez asked.

According to Monte, “Mi Vida Despu?s” has gone on to play around the world. The play explores these same themes of memory and the subjectivity of history.

“[It is] a work that is deeply invested in just how malleable and deeply subject to interpretation that archival materials can be,” he said.

Arias’ work, as Montez explained, is a devised piece of theater, meaning that the playwright and the cast wrote it collaboratively. The play portrays the reflections of six actors who were born during the period of the Dirty War, whose memories of this violent time were greatly shaped by their families’ stories and materials such as photographs and home movies.

The actors often tell these stories as if they were their parents, while other times they act as themselves. According to Montez, the play describes the experiences of a wide range of individuals, from a priest to a member of a leftist guerilla group, the Montoneros. He later added that the play’s content changes depending on the cast of performers as they cycle in and out of the show.

“She refers to her piece several times as a remake — something that remakes and relives the past, but also something that remakes what the future could,” Montez said of Arias’ approach to her play.

To demonstrate how Arias achieved this effect, Montez shared various clips from the play that were found on YouTube. One scene depicted an actress talking about her family as articles of clothing fell upon her in a pile. According to Montez, much of the clothing worn or used in the show was sourced directly from the actors’ parents’ wardrobes to make the experience as realistic as possible.

“When I first saw this piece in the summer of 2010, I was frankly struck by its audacity and later moved to raise further questions of how it constructs memory,” he said.

He described a scene in which a picture of one of the characters’ father, a policeman, was shown on screen through a projector and analyzed by the actor, who drew on it with a dry-erase marker. The use of multimedia in the play fit in Montez’s greater research project examining how multimedia is being used in theater overall.

“The performance is going out of its way to call to attention the ways in which the actors onstage and off are interpreting archival materials and frankly manipulating it to contest what we seen with our own eyes,” Montez said.

Montez said that these interpretations made by the actors are perhaps of greater importance to Arias than the actual archives themselves, given the history of falsification. He noted how Arias’ work plays into scholar Marianne Hirsch’s idea of post-memory, or the transmitted memories of the second generation to a traumatic event, and scholar Alison Landsberg’s idea of prosthetic memory. Prosthetic memory is a new form of collective memory imparted to individuals by mass culture such as movies and television.

“Landsberg notes that an increase in films, performances, museums and other forms of mass media that pass historical information viscerally rather than intellectually transform history into personal memories by creating an experiential relationship to a past that the individual didn’t encounter,” Montez said.

Montez concluded that while experiences like those featured in Arias’ play might not be pure expressions of what happened, they remain accurate displays of people’s lives.

“It might be that for memories to catalyze action, to become the grounds for politics, they need to be visceral, painful and scarring,” Montez said. “Arias’ work is one of many in Argentina that is working to remake history. In doing so, she offers new possibilities of healing from the trauma and ongoing aftermath of Argentina’s dictatorship.”