I am very happy to be in Oslo receiving this recognition. Thank you to the Ibsen Prize jury for having focused on a woman who comes from Argentina at this time when the far-right government of Javier Milei is determined to destroy education, public health, national industry, art and cultural institutions, and pushes thousands of people to live below the poverty line. I have to say that this award came to me at a time when I was trying to do the most difficult project of my career, and it gave me strength and hope. And it left me wondering why I spent my life in this strange profession.
I grew up in the center of Buenos Aires, in an office building. In that neighborhood there were no children or trees to climb. On the fifth floor of San Martin Street, we did theater with my younger sister for an exclusive audience of two: mother and father. When I was sixteen, a friend with whom we had a music band asked me if I didn’t want to go study theater. And I went by chance, following her. She left immediately. I never stopped.
The first play I wrote and directed was called The squalid family and it premiered at the theater of the University of Buenos Aires. As the ceilings were leaking, it began to rain on the stage and in the audience, where the spectators were. Then, the first review of my work said: “Something extraordinary happened at the Rojas Cultural Center, it was raining on stage.” That first criticism taught me that theater is what happens here and now, and that is why it is impossible for it to be impermeable to the outside, to what is real. Since then, my fictional theater became contaminated with reality.
After several works of fiction, in 2009 I wrote and directed My life aftermy first non-fiction work with people of my generation, who reconstructed the Argentine military dictatorship of 1976 from a personal archive. Since then I have written and directed many others starring war veterans, people raised in the GDR, young refugees, older people and their caregivers, people struggling to have or not have children, sex workers, people who were in prison. And in each of these projects I discovered that theater was the possibility of entering other people’s lives, of reconstructing the past and reformulating the future, of finding different ways of thinking about questions for which I had no answers.
Theater was that invented territory where former war enemies, people who supported or fought against the GDR, children of repressors or victims of the Argentine or Chilean dictatorship, could confront their stories and share pain or coexist in dissent. Perhaps theater is that sounding board where you can hear what is difficult to hear in the real world. I remember that in Atlas of communismSalomea, who had spied for the Stasi, and Jana, who had been imprisoned for composing punk songs, confronted each other until they both took off their headphones: one had lost her hearing from listening to other people’s conversations so much, the other from listening to so much punk. .
After years of working on other people’s lives, I think the biggest challenge is learning to listen, taking time to receive the words I want to hear and those I don’t, letting images arrive that I could never have imagined from my desk. And let all those voices speak through me, be the channel, the medium. Belarusian writer Svletana Alexievich says she is an “early writer.” I feel very close to that.
Directing is looking and listening. It seems simple, but it takes a lot of work. Really look and let the people on stage look at you, open before your eyes like a book that you are reading little by little. There is no method except spending time together, because time is the currency of trust. Sometimes, in the rehearsal room, I have the feeling that I am disappearing inside other people, because from looking at them and listening to them so much I become them. All the memories they told me, even those that were not part of the final text, are in me. They say I have a bad memory and I forget things. Maybe it’s that I carry a lot of other people’s memories.
From fiction to non-fiction
When I moved from fiction to non-fiction, they often told me that what I did was not theater, because I did not work with professional actors, or that I was not a playwright, because I simply edited other people’s testimonies. Perhaps it was I myself who created the illusion that these works are not literature, but pieces of life. But I regret breaking the spell: every word has been written and rewritten for hours; Every silence and gesture of the protagonists has been rehearsed to the point of exhaustion.
It is said that theater is a living art, but I would also say that it is a dying art. Some documents will later remain from each of these works, but nothing about what really happened on the scene. Maybe that’s why I write about living people, and the text is rewritten over the years. I like to think that these works do not live for posterity, but rather mature, age and die, like their protagonists.
Sometimes I think that my works are full of ghosts because in them live all the fallen in the war, the people who died in prison, those who were shipwrecked crossing the Mediterranean, the murdered transvestites, the missing fathers and mothers… And those Ghosts hold our hands in the darkness and allow us to invoke them. I remember that Marcelo Vallejo, one of the protagonists of MinefieldBefore each performance, he put on a T-shirt with the photo of his friend Sergio, who died at his side during the war. He dedicated each of the performances to him. Perhaps theater is also a ritual to meet our dead.
See yourself from outside
Many times they ask me: but what happens to the protagonists of your works when the work is finished? Life is no longer the same: they have rewritten the story of their lives and shared it with the world. They have created a distance that has allowed them to see each other from the outside. But life goes on. And what will come? All my works reconstruct the past, but in reality they ask about the future. Being able to imagine the future is a privilege of those who do not have the challenge of surviving every day. Perhaps these works are an attempt to imagine possible futures.
I would love for the 108 protagonists of all my works to be with me tonight, because they taught me to think from new perspectives. But fortunately I am accompanied by the six protagonists of The days outside.
And I want to end by especially thanking the seven women producers, playwrights and researchers who have supported my work for many years, and who are the ones who do the hardest and most invisible: Sofia Medici, Luz Algranti, Lucila Piffer, Laura Nicolas, Bibiana Mendes, Mara Martinez, Gema Juárez Allen. They are the ones who help me think, create, make it possible. And of course to all the artists who accompanied my work: set designers, musicians, lighting artists and others who compose each work with me. Also thank my partner Alan, who has supported me with his love for many years and gives me feedback on everything I do (even this very speech that I am reading) and our son Remo, who taught me how to be a mother without stopping. be an artist And to my sister Lucía, who is my accomplice since the beginning of this adventure of living.
Now you can see that there are many people behind my name. Because in the end, theater is a somewhat far-fetched way to expand the family. And spending time with people imagining things in a place without windows.