Interview with Luis Peirano.

Marcial Godoy Anativia: Thank you for being here with us, Luis. Could you introduce yourself, please?

Luis Peirano: Of course, with pleasure. My name is Luis Peirano, and I’m from Perú - born in Perú, and I live in Perú. I’m a sociologist by trade, and my vocation is theater. I have carried forward with these two passions, which are the social studies with a theatrical implementation, and each time more reflecting on what the theater can do. So, performance studies, you ask me, a re very important, in first place because they have … Performance has always existed, it comes from… the word of the concept is interesting as a novelty. The award itself is made, say, to the existence of the word, because including that theater men dominated pre-theatrical forms, we can say that that qualifies as performance examples, no, and they are those who have brought more attention from those who are interested in studying these peculiar forms of representation, studied and revisited behavior, with all communities, even those who dare not a theatricality in the most western and conventional, right? Then, performance studies have really helped us to include inside in what is the great world of performance, ways they have, they are considered unworthy of, say, be spoken of as theater, unworthy of theatricality. And besides, we were prompted to visit and recall, then, for example, part of which is the recovery of identity, the core of the native communities in the Andes have been made thanks to the study of performance, and many groups that were theater groups if they turned up the recovery of cultural forms prior to the existence of the theater, as known in the Western sense, after the conquest.



Marcial: Can you talk a little bit about the institutional forms that these ideas take in the context in which you work, if there are departments, how you see the field at an institutional level.

Luis: Yes, it doesn't exist in explicit terms but evidently many of the social science departments such as the communication departments and the humanities departments, in the broad sense of the term, have incorporated performance studies In a way, its not easy to find in Perú a division of a department, of faculty or a group that qualifies exclusively as performance studies But its very easy to find in each one of these departments people- professors, students - interested, in performance studies.

Marcial: And, could you elaborate a little more on the ideas that you've been working on surrounding performance about which we started this interview?

Luis: Yes, of course, if you ask us what is the work of theater, in the most conventional terms, that has represented the Anders, including Perú, from Colombia, to the north of Chile and Argentina, probably there would be a consensus in saying it is “The Death of Atahualpa”. But “The Death of Atahualpa” not only in the terms in that it could have been written by someone literate, by a man of letters, or by a playwright, like Peter Shaffer, no? These are forms, almost, I’d say, apparently improvised, and in some cases very connected to what we could call a traditional gathering, a form of community representation, which is associated, curiously, to this representation of the arrival of the Spanish, the capture of the Inca, and the death of the Inca, it’s associated to some other type of festival, including religious, no? And, because of this, the anthropologists have made their feast, they have made millions in Perú, for example, the Inca and the Coya, no?

Marcial: And can you tell me who has contributed to the development of these ideas in Perú, on one side or the other, what thinkers outside of peru have had an important impact, let’s say, on local conversations?

Luis: Yes, of course, in Perú, anthropologists, more specifically, the remadores, very much in the lineage of Victor Turner, similarly the work of Schechner has also been important. This, for anthropologists, Schechner is the establisher of the discipline, and for some men in theater, traiter, in the sense for doing less and less theater and each time more anthropology, even when in reality, there is a divorce in Schechner between what he says and what he does, because the last time I saw Schechner, when he spoke in New York, the line between theater work and performance is blurry, no? In reality, there is an incredibly rich, constructive dynamic in this field, no?And what they have brought to this, curiously, is obvious in Yuyachkani, the Peruvian theater group that works very much in the space of performance. And this, distancing themselves from the conventionalism of, let’s say, Aristotelian or Brechtian theater, without abandoning their political and social commitment, recovering elements from [indigenous] communities, but obviously venturing on [lanzándose en] a creative adventure.

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