By Teresa Ralli

Translation by Margaret Carson

I’ve seen Antigone (running cautiously from one column to another, as if hiding from no one). It was in the mid-eighties, during the early years of the internal war. An art gallery with a photography exhibit. Black and white photos showing brutal images from Ayacucho: soldiers in training, caught while leaping in a delicate balletic move, their chests splattered with the blood of dogs they had killed to prove their valor. I step forward: a photo of the arcade in the Plaza de Armas in Ayacucho, the image of a woman dressed in black, walking silently, quickly, almost floating, her shadows in contrast “under the midday sun.” She was Antigone.

It was as if she had travelled, in all her antiquity, across the centuries to take flesh once more in all the women I’ve seen fighting in my country. I had always known about her, about her bravery, yet my readings were very superficial. But what stayed with me was the impression of her act. It slowly turned into an obsession, a recurring image, always waiting for the right moment to emerge and turn into something real.

Antigone’s Shadow

Throughout those years we were developing other performance pieces within our group. In the first notebook I kept during this process, here in this first notebook, I wrote down these disconnected words:

/Antigone, starving, with short hair (I had never cut my hair before in my life; I always wore it long. Until now.)

/Antigone, her head shaved, builds her own prison on stage with adobe, with mud bricks, until she walls herself inside and glimpses freedom through a tiny window./ That image of using mud bricks to build something on stage filtered into another piece that all the group was working on (Contraelviento, [Against the Wind]) about violence in Peru).

I also have a drawing that I’ve copied into several notebooks, a drawing that I saw while we were in the midst of creating other theater pieces: it was a woman with short hair, dressed only in what we in Peru call a fustán, or a woman’s white petticoat. She was sitting on a chair, receiving a verdict, her back so strong that it was as if the weight of the world were upon her. And I said, that’s Antigone. This image filtered into another piece the group did in which all the women appeared wearing white fustánes (Hasta Cuando Corazón [How Long My Darling]). I recall that I was collecting different fustanes, anticipating the moment when I could use them in Antigone.

I think that ever since this obsession started, this question was always on my mind: Why do I want to do this play? Why do I want to perform this piece? It was only in February 1998 that I understood, after more than fifteen years of internal war, years in which we saw women in every corner of Peru crying, demanding, searching for their desaparecidos. When the brutality of all we had lived through dropped down on us like a black shroud, when we could no longer endure the oppression of silence, the pressure of a dictatorship that had made silence routine, that was when Miguel Rubio (the director of the group) and I decided to attempt our search for Antigone.

Studying the Text

We began to study Sophocles’ text, at first strange and distant to me. We had already given a name to this project: Antigone Huanca, which refers to a mountainous zone in Peru. Miguel asks me for Antigone’s tale or fable, retold in the third person. At this stage in our investigation, I feel that we are gathering strength to enter the studio, which waits for us, completely empty. Miguel keeps proposing more exercises: writing Analogs, reconstructing the genealogical tree of the entire family of Antigone.

The House of Labdacus, the family of Antigone, her father Oedipus, her mother Jocasta, her grandmother Jocasta, her grandfather Laius. Her brothers Eteocles and Polynices. All dead. The only one left, still alive, is the silent Ismene. Silent. I think of the curse on the House of Labdacus. Aren’t my people, perhaps, a House? With wise ancestors, the creators of so many marvels? With strong, warlike women? And when did the curse fall upon this House? When exactly did Peru fuck up? “. . . an ancient curse fell upon my father and mother, and misfortune, like the waves of the sea, will be passed along from one generation to the next.” It seems that we Peruvians are living through all the ravages of a curse, when we see that after one social upheaval comes another and another, and we forget yet again and allow it all to happen once more. Here, when people let out a cry of helplessness when faced by some misfortune, they often say, “It’s a curse!”

We immersed ourselves in Sophocles’ text. It was an extraordinary apprenticeship, difficult, rich in discoveries. I began to make the text mine. I couldn’t take parts out, mutilate it. We are a theater group dedicated to investigations in all languages, immersed in action as words, in creative collaborations as a premise for action. Now I confronted a monster, a text that seemed to be written for us, here and now. Discovering the music in each syllable, the importance of one word and not another, the structure of a thought put into words, the inner world of the characters expressed in each speech.

The exercise of sitting down in front of my colleagues and telling them the story of the House of Labdacus, starting with King Laius until the final moments in the life of Antigone, was essential for me. My gestures were minimal, just enough to tell the story. It was then that I began to value the action in the word, not only through its meaning, but also through its sound. I knew I could capture the attention of my listeners, first because the story itself was fascinating, and second, because they would become caught up in my words. Through this exercise, I appropriated the entire story, I made it mine. I knew everything that happened between the characters, and I began to fantasize about them. In our studio, we collected material, we pursued the text in thousands of ways; we were looking for a device, a convention; if we found one, we could tell the story. Would I, alone, be able to speak of so much life, so much conflict, so many feelings?

Looking for a Convention

My first improvisation. June, 1998. Alone in the studio. I don’t think too much about it; my point of departure is the fundamental act of Antigone -- covering her dead brother with earth. How is it possible to bury such a large man? To perform the ritual, to spread earth over his body-- an act that today many would like to perform for loved ones who have disappeared. To cover their loved ones, tuck them into the warm earth, rock them to sleep, give them the dignity of a burial, define a space for them. I automatically define a space for her as well. It’s time to start asking questions. Who carries the story ahead -- in my story? Antigone? Tiresias? Why him? He’s also covered in dust, he’s come from many wars, a defeated soldier. Defeated? Yes, because he’s always known about everything, but hasn’t been able to change anything. What is the dramatic action? Does it start with the actress? What does she want to achieve, respond to, demonstrate?

As we searched for a way to tell the story, we created various versions, ranging from one where I sat and told the entire story (which Miguel liked the most), to another in which we built a radio broadcasting studio for a woman journalist who told the news about the war in Thebes. Miguel thought that Tiresias could tell the story. Yet I always knew that a woman should be the one to speak and tell everything. Who would take part in the dialogue? A group of students at MIT? Students from the Humanities Department of the Universidad de San Marcos, the university with the largest enrolment in Peru? Schoolchildren? A group of women displaced by the internal war? We began to investigate each character’s world, analysing what they said as well as understanding them within their relationships.

We worked in the studio for a long time, drawing closer and closer to the presence of Creon, Tiresias, Antigone. Searching for their energies.

Tiresias: a mystery. He has the key, he knows how he learned, how he began seeing with other eyes after he lost his sight. (It’s necessary to lose your sight to turn your vision inward.) Every age has its Tiresias; perhaps Tiresias is a journalist? A contemporary historian, watchful and vigilant, but powerless to take any action? Tiresias suddenly sees what he must say, he enters into a certain trance-like state. He smells, listens, perceives, feels. And we are ALL open to listening to a Tiresias; we all have a desire, perhaps hidden, to know the future.

Creon: severe, stiff, solemn, rigid (Hitler, Lenin, Mussolini?) But also devious, always doubting. But it’s to his advantage to doubt; it’s a calculated move. He’s an old tiger, the great antagonist. About this same time I find myself practicing a Noh dance. With a fan. The fan turns into Creon’s dagger, the Noh sequence becomes a structure in which I begin to make Creon walk, with solemn, slow steps, yet he’s still able to jump if it’s necessary.

I can find Creon in my reality today. I can identify Tiresias in my present world. Both are characters that send me to my reality.

And Antigone: what is she like? She originates in tranquillity. Light. Emphasis on the solar plexus towards the sky. A breeze on the back of her neck. Her gaze is slightly vacant, as if floating. Few signs of grief. Not the wildly excessive grief of the wives of dead policemen, whose photographs appear in the newspapers. She has kept her smile. There’s a madness in her eyes, but also determination. She has FAITH. Gestures connect her to a not-so-distant childhood: she wipes her tears away. She has an ideal. But also fear, expressed by her soft-spoken voice, even though she’s able to scream like crazy. Also, she’s a virgin: Antigone hasn’t been with any man. There’s a delicate obstinacy, a protectiveness, around her womb. That also is Antigone. She is a doe. And yet Antigone has a thousand faces.

In the studio: our exercise is to inhabit a situation and then step out of it and observe ourselves, turning around to “look” at the steps the character takes, how she or he approaches and then enters me again. It’s like watching a ghost come closer who “traps me once more,” and like a collision or an electrical shock, it “takes” me and I’m no longer the one who’s walking, it’s the character. I rehearse this action over many days. I, the actress, take the space, and in each zone discover someone, a world, and with a shout, a gesture, a word, suddenly I ENTER into another state, I am she, Antigone, or I am Creon, or I am Tiresias. I can feel my muscles change, my breathing, my backbone shifts automatically to allow the other to enter. My feet connect with the earth in a different way, as the weight of my body changes. It’s like an instantaneous trance, a rapture. Yet at a distance, I observe, because I understand what is happening.

Antigone Knocks on My Door

Two years earlier, in 1996, the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement seized the Japanese Embassy at about 7:15 one evening. It all happened on the block where I live. For four months and seventeen days I witnessed countless scenes, and from my balcony watched all types of characters pass by. For four months and seventeen days, when I went out of my home I could only walk to the left (after showing my pass); the seized Embassy was to the right. To the left, yellow tape cordoned off the prohibited area within which I lived. Every day, more and more journalists pointed their cameras in all sizes and models, waiting for any movement that would signal a change in the situation. Every day under my balcony, the families of the hostages: bringing bands to play on hostages’ birthdays; ladies with gigantic crosses praying for forgiveness; curanderos with maracas praying for an end to the ordeal; demonstrations; street children singing; televisions set up outside tuned to the final round of a soccer championship; journalists falling in love; women selling t-shirts about the Embassy takeover. But above all else, the windows of the mansion, the Embassy, the curtains which opened to reveal the face of a woman, a young girl, a rifle at her side. Placards early in the morning. At dawn, loudspeakers booming out military marches at an unspeakable volume (later we discovered that it was in order to drown out the noise of tunnels being built by the government.) And most importantly, every day during those four months, listening during the night and waking up each morning, startled, wondering: Did it happen? Did something terrible happen? Did they surrender? We lived as prisoners of anguish and misinformation. Watching the First Lady bring food rations every day, letting herself be photographed by the entire world -- humanitarian, opportunistically charitable -- and then immediately leaving, while the food sat there and baked in the scorching sun of Lima’s hottest summer. And suddenly, one day, the end, the bombs, the destruction, the soldiers’ cries of victory. Fujimori parked under my balcony, standing on the roof of a truck, his eyes welling with tears over the death of . . . two brave soldiers . . . without even mentioning that they had wiped out seventeen of the enemy (including the young girl with the rifle by the window) who had already surrendered. In the midst of the crowds clamouring to hear Fujimori - Creon, was Antigone perhaps among them, a small woman, trying to discover if her young brother was among the dead bodies?

Now we were searching, exploring, writing in the studio. Circling in on the atmosphere of the palace, on the sobbing Creon who would now, yes, free Antigone from the cave, on Tiresias who announced the catastrophe. Now all that we had lived through emerged in every gesture, every movement.

In the studio, I search for the image of the woman who narrates the entire story: the war in Thebes has just ended. Suddenly, a woman journalist appears to me, the women journalists, the ones I’ve seen for so long under my window. Afterwards, I feel that I, who live on the fifth floor of a building on the same block as the Embassy, am reporting what I see down there below.

Ismene’s Shadow

The moment arrived during the creative process when we had to bring Sophocles’ text closer to our own lives, to make it contemporary: we had to make our own version. We had a lot of scenic material, improvisations, character studies. Yet we couldn’t find a way to make these elements enter into a dialogue with each other through one actress. We invited José Watanabe, an extraordinary poet and screenwriter, into our group because his works already felt close to us. We showed him all our material, and from that point on, a new stage in our work began. We put the entire story on index cards and summarized the conflicts, which helped me to establish an order and bring together the improvisations. Then Watanabe proposed that we turn the cards into poems. My fantasy was always to use contemporary texts that spoke almost directly to my daily life, so taking up this proposal was a difficult challenge for me. The hardest point in our search for language was when we needed to answer the question, who was this woman telling the story? First it had been an actress, then a woman journalist, and now another possibility arose: who would be interested in narrating the story, in recovering this memory, who would be so heavily invested in it, in making each character live again? Who was still alive to tell the tale? Ismene. Deciding on this convention was a detonator.

It was at that precise moment that we resolved to get much closer to the Antigones of my country. To listen to them, talk with them . . .

We decided to interview women -- mothers, wives, sisters -- from the families of the desaparecidos in Peru. They were of all ages. Gisela, whose brother, a university student, disappeared in the early 90s when Gisela was 17 years old. We went from there up to mothers who were ten years older when we interviewed them, for example 60 years old. We did these interviews individually, and we personally invited each woman. The interviews took place in our house, in the theatre itself, on the stage where I was creating the work. First I sat on stage and told the woman I was interviewing about the story of Antigone, about what had happened over 2,500 years ago. Then I asked her to sit in my place and tell me her story.

Each story was hard, brutal. What all the testimonies had in common, I realized, was the way in which the women narrated how their lives had changed completely. One of these mothers, Raida Cóndor, later became president of the Committee of Family Members. The day I met her she was sitting serenely on the chair I would later use in the performance. In a very soft voice, she told her story to me:

“I was a woman who woke up early every morning to go to the market. I bought food and cooked it, I prepared my children’s meals, I washed their clothes. Sometimes I watched the news. That’s what my life was like. Then one day, my son didn’t come home. The moment I realized that they had taken my son from me and I wouldn’t see him anymore, my life changed. I had to learn how to read -- I couldn’t read -- and I went to school. I had to read legal documents, I had to start knocking on doors when no one opened them, I had to learn to speak, loud and clear.”

Her life, then, was transformed; that’s what she told me. And as she spoke her appearance, her whole image, all her gestures, had an incredible fragility. And yet she had an inner strength of such magnitude that she was able to change, at the age of 45 or 50, the entire horizon of her life with the sole objective of achieving justice for herself, her son, and for other mothers. I began to search through my memory, to confirm again that according to the existing image, the woman who fights for something must adhere to certain standards of behavior, that is, she must always be strong, she must always know what she has to do, she must always be moving forward. Reality is much more complicated than that. Within fragility there is often a hidden strength.

I’ve looked at these women with eyes that are perhaps deep within my soul. I’ve listened to each of their words as if they were making a confession to me. And maybe that’s what it was like after so many years of demanding justice: they had turned their demands into a role as well, one they play tirelessly. This time we were alone, she and I. Each one of her brief gestures spoke to me so deeply of her life. And the best homage I could give her would be to feel all the memories inscribed on their bodies and thus confer them unto Antigone.

That’s how another image of Antigone was born. Not the strong Antigone who has appeared throughout the history of Antigones. There have been warrior Antigones, furious Antigones (there’s a version called “Antigona Furiosa” by Argentine dramatist Griselda Gambaro). Antigone, it’s believed, is strong; she will stand firm until the end. My Antigone is fragile; even her voice breaks, a soft voice not used to confronting others or making demands. Out of this fragility (which she’ll never lose), a limitless strength and determination emerges.

Objects

The loneliness in the workspace can be dreadful. Luckily for me, objects exist, my partners, which keep me company, have meaning for me, reveal secrets to me. I hide behind them when things don’t flow. From the time I began working on Antigone to the end, I enclosed myself in a space that was well-supplied with objects; some I struggled to keep while others I abandoned along the way; others were transformed. A cane for Tiresias, a blindfold for his face, Creon’s three-piece suit and his insolent fan, Tiresias’ dark glasses and epaulettes when he seemed like an aged gladiator who had survived a thousand wars. A large piece of cloth, like a shroud, that for me represented Antigone’s territory; even after it disappeared I felt it still defined territories. A diaphanous, gigantic curtain, like those used in hospitals, crossing the stage and creating small spaces, balconies, living areas, between its panels, its translucency allowing the audience to “peek inside.” A large wooden cup for Antigone to pour the three libations. And a mask, which I carried onto the stage and wrapped in a gauzy fabric on the first day. I’m not sure why, but this mask always had to be with me. Perhaps it represented “the Greek” for me. By the end of the process, this hidden mask would find the meaning it had been looking for all along. It was Polynices’ death mask, kept safe by Ismene, which would finally allow her to perform a symbolic burial. And from the beginning up to the present, the chair. It is my tomb, my bridal bed, the balcony, the characters I look at as they sit there, it is my dead brother, an explosive rage, the caress of a remembered love, the blindfold inherited from Oedipus that covers Antigone’s eyes, it is Antigone’s senseless body, which Haemon gently embraces around the waist, it is a savage dance in the implacable presence of death. And, above all else, it is waiting, waiting, waiting. My partner in the loneliness of this empty space.

The Process Ends, the Journey Begins

When we first performed the work in February 2000, the Truth Commission hadn’t yet come into existence, but the downfall of the dictator Fujimori, along with his notorious assistant Montesinos, had already begun. Slowly, years and years of deception, crime and corruption began to unravel. This was before the newspapers started reporting all that would happen later. For me, the end of our road was clear: we wanted to perform Antigone because it was only through a story that happened 2,500 years ago that we could talk about what was happening to us at that moment. We had to recognize, all of us, as citizens, that we had maintained a “despicable silence” before thousands of corpses spread throughout all of Peru. The bodies had been silenced, yet they waited to be buried so that they could rest in peace. As our tradition tells us, those who are not buried are doomed to wander without rest, “haunted spirits, who look in sadness or anger at their own bodies.”

Antigone’s act, her attempt to bury her brother, was now symbolically completed by Ismene’s act which, though perhaps late, was still necessary and urgent. We Peruvians were all Ismene; we all needed to start making that symbolic gesture to complete the burial. Some might believe that “to bury” means to cover, forget, conceal. Maybe. However, in its most important sense, a burial is an acknowledgment that someone is there, because you put a name on the grave of the person you bury and say, he or she is there. And then both of you can rest in peace. You come and visit, and you remember that person in a place where slowly, as time passes, traces of pain will be washed away, only leaving memory, now put in its proper place. Those who haven’t been able to bury their dead have been stripped of their right to determine a site, to name the absent one, to enact the necessary farewell. For almost twenty years, half the country lived in that reality. Antigone, the performance, arrived as a necessary act of cleansing.

Now she travels all over Peru. In Huanta, a city in the province of Ayacucho, I perform outside one night because the theatre isn’t working. During the performance I look at the sky and see the stars above me. And I feel Antigone’s energy and her message reaching the people of this battered city in Peru.

I only wish to add that from the start up to the present, there hasn’t been a day when I haven’t lit a candle to my ancestors, nor a day when I haven’t prayed for my dead; I always feel they are with me.

[Teresa Ralli, as Ismene, finally buries her dead. Antigona. Photo courtesy of Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani]

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