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Forensic Performances: Searching for Justice in NAKA Dance Theater's BUSCARTE: Duet
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 February 2022
Abstract
This article uncovers the connections between the legal and scientific art of searching for human remains and theatrical performances. NAKA Dance Theater, a performance group based in Mexico City and Oakland, California, is at the centre of this intersection of art and forensics. Founded by José Navarrete and Debby Kajiyama, NAKA creates theatrical events to configure a claim for social justice where the official legal–scientific terrain has failed to protect victims of state repression. These artists advance a commitment to what I call forensic performances, and their investigative practices revitalize theatrical experience in a time of debilitated democracies. Forensic performances give theatre a role in violent societies where mass graves are woven into life: they carry out some of the work of investigative journalism, without its dangers. Theatre opens up a space to do a forensics that is orthogonal to a state forensics claiming a certain kind of reality and truth that is dangerous for democratic politics.
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Notes
1 BUSCARTE: Duet is one part of three phases. The other two include a collaboration with a community of Latina immigrant women living in San Francisco, California and a collaboration with transnational artists exploring forced disappearances.
2 I was invited by the artists to give feedback on this modified version for a Zoom audience.
3 See Reveles, José, Echale la culpa a la heroina /Blame Heroin: De Iguala a Chicago (Mexico City: Vintage Español, 2015)Google Scholar.
5 ‘Crearán comisión de la verdad por caso Ayotzinapa en México’. TeleSUR, 21 September 2018, at www.telesurtv.net/news/ordenan-crear-comision-verdad-normalistas-ayotzinapa-20180921-0010.html, accessed 25 October 2018. Also see Ximena Suárez-Enriquez, ‘La nueva Comisión de Investigación para el caso Ayotzinapa’, WOLA, at www.wola.org/es/analisis/comision-investigacion-caso-ayotzinapa, accessed 28 June 2018.
6 See Telemundo article with details of the identification of sixty clandestine graves after a year of searching for the missing students of Ayotzinapa.
7 Programme for NAKA Dance Theater's Still Unaccounted For at the Eastside Cultural Center, Oakland, California. Playbill, 2018.
8 According to a report by El Universal, an estimated 25,000 residents were forcibly disappeared between 2006 and 2016. See https://interactivo.eluniversal.com.mx/desaparecidos.
9 Diana Taylor discusses the performative dimensions of state repression in her book on forced disappearances in the 1970s in Argentina. The right-wing military's goal was to make people disappear via what Taylor calls the ‘theater of operations’: public spectacles in which residents were taken in the middle of the day and reappeared days, months or years later. The visibility of disappearance was key to visibilizing the maintenance of power. See Diana Taylor, Disappearing Acts (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), p. 98.
10 Latin American and Latino studies scholar Rosa-Linda Fregoso discussed the phenomenon of femicides with Latina immigrant artists after the performance For Those Who Are No Longer Here, a poetic action organized by artist Violeta Luna on 6 October 2018, at the Eastside Cultural Center in Oakland, California.
11 See Guadalupe González González, Fenomenología de la violencia: Una perspectiva desde México, coordinator Luis Herrera-Lasso (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 2017), pp. 126–42. This anthology provides an interdisciplinary focus to the study of violence in Mexico.
12 Public demonstrations in Argentina conducted by Madres de Plaza de Mayo, Abuelas and H.I.J.O.S – children of the disappeared – to claim justice pass on information from one generation to another as a way to remember the persons who disappeared in Argentina. The performers make their bodies conduits of knowledge as themselves saying that those disappeared persons are still here. The DNA of performance makes it possible for one person to present and represent victims of violence – political or otherwise – without surrogating the persons who came before them. See Diana Taylor, ‘“You Are Here”: The DNA of Performance’, Drama Review, 46, 1 (2002), pp. 149–69.
13 Building on previous work on the relationship between performance, trauma and memory, Diana Taylor identifies the traumatic meme as the visual staging (theatrical or otherwise) of victims of political violence that accrue significance across time and are contagious across spaces. See Diana Taylor, ‘Traumatic Memes’, in ¡Presente! The Politics of Presence (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), pp. 127–52.
14 Sayak Valencia, Capitalismo Gore (Santa Cruz de Tenerife: Melusia, 2010), p. 16.
15 Alicia Schmidt Camacho, ‘Integral Bodies: Cuerpos Íntegros: Impunity and the Pursuit of Justice in the Chihuahuan feminicidio’, E-misférica, 3, 1 (Summer 2006), at https://hemisphericinstitute.org/en/emisferica-31/3-1-essays/integral-bodies-cuerpos-integros-impunity-and-the-pursuit-of-justice-in-the-chihuahuan-feminicidio.html, accessed 1 March 2021.
16 Guadalupe González González, Fenomenología de la Violencia, pp. 126–42, here p. 140, my translation.
17 The Committee to Protect Journalists details the death of fifty-two journalists who have been killed in Mexico since 1992 because of activities related to their work.
18 For detailed accounts about the development and use of forensic anthropology as a field see Angi M. Christensen, Nicholas V. Passalacqua and Eric J. Bartelink, Forensic Anthropology: Current Methods and Practice (Amsterdam: Academic Press, 2014); and Robert B. Pickering and David Bachman, The Use of Forensic Anthropology, 2nd edn (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2009).
19 Adam Rosenblatt, Digging for the Disappeared: Forensic Science after Atrocity (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), p. 16.
20 ‘Forensis’, Oxford English Dictionary, at www.oed.com, accessed 12 April 2018.
21 See www.etymonline.com/word/forum#etymonline_v_11832, accessed 16 March 2020.
22 I thank Georgia Frank and Jill Frank (no relation), for their insights on the Aristotelian use of forensic rhetoric.
23 Peter O'Connell, The Rhetoric of Seeing in Attic Forensic Oratory (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2017).
24 Their investigation took place from September to November 2014 and in January 2015.
25 The performance and discussion were produced by Joe Goode Performance Group in San Francisco, California.
26 My translation. A full recording of the conversation can be found at www.facebook.com/watch/live/?v=2955975941189144&ref=watch_permalink.
27 Julie Ward examines artists’ use of performances to guard truth. See Julie Ward, ‘Making Reality Sensible: The Mexican Documentary Theatre Tradition, 1968–2013’, Theatre Journal, 69, 2 (2017), pp. 197–211. Julie Salverson also examines the connections ben truth telling and performance, but in a Canadian context. See Julie Salverson, ‘Change on Whose Terms? Testimony and an Erotics of Inquiry’, Theater, 31, 3 (2001), pp. 119–25, available at Project MUSE, at muse.jhu.edu/article/34187.
28 Diéguez evaluates theatricality, and its liminal condition, on and off the theatre stage across Latin America to understand the how and on what terms aesthetic encounters are deployed as discursive practices in situations where repressive governments have failed to secure justice. See Ileana Diéguez, Escenarios liminales: teatralidades, performatividades, y políticas (Mexico City: Toma, 2014).
29 See Sallie Hughes, ‘Democracy in the Newsroom: The Evolution of Journalism and the News Media’, in Roderic Ai Camp, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Mexican Politics, Oxford Handbooks Online (Oxford University Press, 1 May 2012), accessed 13 March 2020.
30 Muxe is a third-gender term used and accepted in the Zapoteca indigenous community in Oaxaca, México. See Marinella Miano Borruso, Hombre, mujer y muxe en el Istmo de Tehuantepec (Mexico City: Plaza y Valdés, 2002).
31 The hazmat suits were incorporated in the version I saw on 6 June 2019 at the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City. However, other versions of this performance do not include these persons.
32 I am grateful to fashion studies scholar Denise N. Green for prompting me with insightful questions about the significance of the forensic clothes and their materiality.
33 Jersy Limon, ‘Time in Theatre’, in Bryan Reynolds, ed., Performance Studies: Keywords, Concepts, and Theories (New York: Palgrave, 2014), pp. 215–26.
34 Other seminal historical accounts on the development of forensic practices place an equal emphasis on visual aesthetics. See Thomas Keenan and Eyal Weizman, Mengele's Skull: The Advent of a Forensic Aesthetics (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012).
35 I watched the performance live on two separate occasions, but I reference a recording of it for this text.
36 Diana Taylor maintains that to have someone's image represented in a theatrical or performance or activist demonstration is in itself evidence of the fact that they were here – because the state was determined to erase persons’ photographs too. Evidence of their body vis-à-vis the photograph needed to be destroyed in order for their presence to be annihilated. The photograph becomes key to preserving a person's presence.
37 Victoria Fortuna, Moving Otherwise: Dance, Violence, and Memory in Buenos Aires (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), p. 171.
38 André Lepecki, ‘Choreopolice and Choreopolitics: Or, the Task of the Dancer’, Drama Review, 57, 4 (2013), pp. 13–27.
39 Ann Cooper Albright primarily discusses dancers’ mobilization of cultural representations (gender, class and racial identities) through choreography, and I see a potential in thinking about legal ideologies as part of their negotiations. See Ann Cooper Albright, ‘Introduction: Witnessing Dance’, in Albright, Choreographing Difference: The Body and Identity in Contemporary Dance (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1997), pp. xiii–xxvi.
40 Political philosopher Giorgio Agamben affirms that a commitment to the use of one's body is a political affirmation. He states, ‘in the using of something, it is the very being of the one using that is first of all at stake’. Giorgio Agamben, The Use of Bodies, trans. Adam Kotsko (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), p. 30.
41 See Elizabeth Dillon Maddock, New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649–1849 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).
42 In advancing a focus on choreography and dance, I am not suggesting that these practices (aesthetic or otherwise) are always liberatory. Rachmi Diyah Larasati demonstrates how an oppressive regime can commodify court dances to promote a national identity while it suppresses, disappears, persecutes and kills (mostly female) citizens associated with those dances. See Larasati, Rachmi Diyah, The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-genocide Indonesia (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2013)Google Scholar.