\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\t Ten years after Minefield transformed the Malvinas War into a haunting piece of documentary theater, Argentine playwright Lola Arias is still asking the same question that started it all.<\/p>\n
What does war do to the people who survive it?<\/p>\n
On a call from Berlin, Arias told the Herald that the play \u2014 which returns to Argentina as part of the celebrations for the Buenos Aires Herald\u2019s 150th anniversary \u2014 was actually sparked by a British invitation. In 2012, the Battersea Arts Center in London asked her and other artists to participate in a series called After a War aimed at reflecting on the 100th anniversary of World War I.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cAs an Argentine woman raised in the 1980s, I started to think, what\u2019s my relationship with war? And then Malvinas came up.\u201d<\/p>\n
Two years later, Arias premiered Minefield at the 2016 London International Festival of Theater. Featuring six war veterans from Argentina, the UK, and Nepal, who revisit their war experiences in a documentary\/musical setting, the play was an instant hit and toured in almost 40 cities around the world.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The play will run in Buenos Aires in November at the Coliseo Theater, produced by Daniel Grinbank and the British Council.<\/p>\n
It has been 10 years since Minefield, a work of documentary theater that deals with actual people\u2019s lives and memories of the war. How do you incorporate the passing of time into an ongoing play?<\/p>\n
The play was rewritten over the seven years the play toured \u2014 the last show was three years ago. Not a major rewrite, but new thoughts, memories, and details were added. The main change in recent years was that Lou Armour, one of the veteran English actors, left. We replaced him with another veteran who is also an actor. Obviously, the play bears witness to the passage of time because it\u2019s impossible for a play about life itself not to reflect on time and its impact on people\u2019s lives.<\/p>\n
The Malvinas issue, on the other hand, feels kind of stalled in political or diplomatic terms, where the only fresh perspectives seem to come through art. Have you noticed any new approaches?<\/p>\n
I was always very clear that sovereignty was never the central theme of the play. The play explores how war affects a group of men\u00a0over time \u2014\u00a0they are now around 60 and went in to combat at 19 or 20. Another topic is this idea of whether the enemy exists. Whether it is possible to hear the pain of others or to understand the position of someone you were about to kill on a battlefield.<\/p>\n
The political issue of sovereignty appears as a point of disagreement. I think the play is more a reflection of what war does to people. Not only to the protagonists or the veterans, but also to society. That\u2019s what makes it still relevant for so many people. Everyone has a memory, a connection \u2014 emotional, lived, or experiential \u2014 to Malvinas.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In Argentina, Malvinas means something to everyone. It might be because they lost someone there, because they witnessed the war, because they were afraid the war would reach them, or because they were filled with hatred toward a country led by a demented mind like [former UK Prime Minister Margaret] Thatcher\u2019s.<\/p>\n
I think the play focuses much more on our responsibility toward those who went to war. Whether we are capable of understanding the situation they were in, empathizing, and taking responsibility for what they went through for us.<\/p>\n
Minefield Minefield addresses the ultimate notion of enemy, which is the enemy in combat. How do you think that might resonate in a polarized society, supposedly immersed in a \u201ccultural battle,\u201d like the one Buenos Aires is today?<\/p>\n
The play explores the idea that we can coexist in disagreement. We don\u2019t need to agree in order to relate to someone else\u2019s pain or loss \u2014 and I think that\u2019s incredibly valuable. Being able to listen, to be present, to coexist with that disagreement in order to try to create a space for connection.<\/p>\n
The play can be interpreted as an important space in political and social terms, as it is a neutral territory where former enemies meet again. A communal place where we can say, \u201cWe have to be able to listen to each other, even in disagreement.\u201d<\/p>\n
One of the veterans, Marcelo Vallejo, was very outspoken about how he came out of the war full of hate, an emotion that seems to be ubiquitious these days.\u00a0<\/p>\n
What Marcelo recounts is very interesting because he says that this hatred was also manufactured by other people who set up a certain narrative. He thought the Gurkhas had beheaded everyone, and he wanted to destroy them. But Argentine media were the ones who spun that idea. In reality, the Gurkhas didn\u2019t even engage in combat.\u00a0<\/p>\n
That hatred was manufactured \u2014 a phenomenon that echoes the hatred created by social media. It was also xenophobic, because it focused on the part of the army that wasn\u2019t British.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s when you realize that hatred is something fabricated by parties interested in creating a [specific] narrative. You have to be able to understand that this isn\u2019t real.<\/p>\n
Indifference and manipulation in Argentina\u00a0 Arias began living between Argentina and Europe after her first documentary theater piece, My Life After, premiered in 2009. She moved to Germany permanently in 2019 due to the sustained institutional support for her artistic research. This was more difficult in Argentina, where political swings, she says, are an obstacle for long-term assistance.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Would you like to work in Argentina again?\u00a0<\/p>\n
Yes. What I want most is to work in Argentina again. But I\u2019m not getting much of a reception from state-run theaters. I love working in Argentina, but right now I don\u2019t see any institutional interest.<\/p>\n
We couldn\u2019t even manage to restage The Days Out There, which only ran for a month at the Alvear Theater and then toured Europe for a year and a half. We did 27 performances, and it couldn\u2019t be shown again in Argentina, because there\u2019s no political will to stage a play like that again. Nobody seems to think it\u2019s important to talk about what that play is about: the poverty, marginalization, and total helplessness experienced by more than 50% of the Argentine population, and the people who end up in jail are basically a result of that \u2014 a social disaster.<\/p>\n
You are also a filmmaker. What\u2019s your take on what happened with cultural policies in recent years? Like the situation with the Argentine Film Institute?<\/p>\n
It\u2019s heartbreaking. Destroying INCAA (the Spanish acronym for the Argentine Film Institute), striking down the Film Law, obliterating support for film production, and labeling artists as state parasites are all abhorrent actions committed by the government.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The level of manipulation is terrifying. I think that\u2019s what scared me the most about what happened in recent years. How artists were portrayed as people who were taking the bread out of people\u2019s hands, consuming taxes. It\u2019s insane.<\/p>\n
Themes and responsibility Settled in Berlin for the past 7 years, Arias has just premiered The Rape of Lucrece, A Casting, in Basel, Switzerland. The play, which focuses on sexual violence, reconstructs Shakespeare\u2019s poem The Rape of Lucrece \u2014 the story of a woman who is raped by the son of the king her husband works for. As they attempt to reconstruct it on stage, the actors begin to speak about their own connections to sexual violence.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Rape of Lucrece, A Casting How did you come across the subject for your latest work?<\/p>\n
Stories of sexual violence have been haunting me for many years. Either from people very close to me or people I\u2019ve worked with who ended up talking about sexual violence. Like those themes that follow you around until you decide to do something.<\/p>\n
What happened was that a student of mine in Bern, a survivor of sexual assault, did a project on the representation of rape in film. That confronted me with the problem of how sexual violence is represented and how we reproduce certain narratives by doing so in a particular way.<\/p>\n
That planted the seed for this work. I\u2019m also working on a second piece based on the same topic but with a different angle with my former student.<\/p>\n
Women, gender minorities, war veterans, and immigrants were all subjects of some of your work. Do you feel working with victimized social groups such as these carries any kind of responsibility?<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t usually think, \u201cI have a responsibility to work with this group because they are marginalized.\u201d My responsibility is different. Each of my works was born from a very deep desire to understand a problem and navigate it as an artist.<\/p>\n
I feel responsibility toward the people I work with. An artistic and ethical responsibility of representing them well. That the experience empowers them and gives them a new way to tell their stories, to understand what they\u2019ve lived through. To discover something about their own experience.<\/p>\n
* Editorial disclaimer: Although the UK refers to the territory as the \u201cFalkland Islands,\u201d Argentina strongly contests this name. The Buenos Aires Herald uses \u201cMalvinas\u201d to refer to the islands.<\/p>\n
(Cover photo: Cherie Birkner)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ten years after Minefield transformed the Malvinas War into a haunting piece of documentary theater, Argentine playwright Lola Arias is still asking the same question that started it all. What does war do to the people who survive it? On a call from Berlin, Arias told the Herald that the play \u2014 which returns to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":92,"featured_media":74270,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19122,19123,19124,149,19125,5426,19126,19127,3117],"tags":[19116,19117,19118,133,19119,12917,19120,19121,3112],"class_list":["post-74269","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-150-years","category-150th-anniversary-herald-founding","category-campo-minado","category-culture-ideas","category-lola-arias","category-malvinas","category-minefield","category-the-rape-of-lucrece","category-theater","tag-150-years","tag-150th-anniversary-herald-founding","tag-campo-minado","tag-culture-ideas","tag-lola-arias","tag-malvinas","tag-minefield","tag-the-rape-of-lucrece","tag-theater"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74269","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/92"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74269"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74269\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/74270"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}