- By Dan Veaner
- Entertainment
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Yuyachkani is a Quechua word that means "I am thinking, I am remembering." Using this name, and working to honor its meaning, the Peruvian theatre collective Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani (Yuyachkani Cultural Group) has been creating activist theatre since 1971, performing in reaction to, and in defiance of, politics in Peru. The group is comprised of seven actors, a technical designer, and an artistic director who have made a commitment to collective creation as a mode of theatrical production and to group theatre as a lifestyle. Yuyachkani members describe their collective as a "group that attempts to be united by dreams and utopias, by the adventure of creating -- why not? -- an alternative family that practices theatre as a way of life."
Antigona, created in the early 1990s, uses the cast of characters from the original Antigone—Ismene, Creon, Hermion, Tiresias, Haemon, the messenger, and of course Antigone herself—to tell the story of Peru’s “disappeared” during two decades of violence beginning in 1980, and how Peruvian women struggled to find and bury those family members lost to civil conflict. Yuyachkani developed this version of the story through interviews with families of the “disappeared” in Peru, and the text was written by Peruvian poet José Watanabe. Yuyachkani was awarded Peru’s national honors for Human Rights in 1999 and worked with Peru’s truth commission investigating crimes against humanity committed during the 1980s and early 1990s.
Antigona offers hope to witnesses and accomplices who were not brave enough to respond in the face of atrocity, with a message that the effects of criminal violence never truly disappear and that individuals always have the opportunity to take responsibility for the past. The play will be performed in Spanish with English supertitles.
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