Mapuche Theatre Group El Katango

The Mapuche Theatre Group El Katango emerged in 2002, in the Patagonian city of Bariloche, in a context of great economic and political crisis in the country. The group is directed by the Mapuche theatre maker, teacher and researcher Miriam Álvarez, and was formed with Mapuche and non-Mapuche members in the framework of the Campaña de Autoafirmación Mapuche Wefkvletuyiñ (Mapuche Self-Affirmation Campaign, We Are Re-emerging), which questioned the stereotypical state criteria defining Indigenous identity (Álvarez Reference Álvarez2021; Cañuqueo and Kropff Reference Cañuqueo and Kropff2002).Footnote ² Initially named Mapuche Theatre Project, the company worked with people who were not engaged in theatrical activity: its first play was Kay kay kay egu Xeg xeg (The Water Snake and the Earth Snake, 2002). In 2007 the company was renamed the Mapuche Theatre Group El Katango. Katango (written with k as proposed by one of the grammars of Mapuzugun, the Mapuche language) means ‘cart’ and refers to the possessions and painful stories that the Mapuche bring with them as they travel; it evokes the survival of families in the countryside and the city (Cañuqueo Reference Cañuqueo and Kropff2010).

The Campaign and El Katango created spaces for the multiple ways of being Mapuche in the present, trajectories that strengthen the Mapuche resurgence as a pueblo (people, nation). The theatre deconstructed essentialised images – depicting rural locations and practices crystallised in the past, condemned to extinction – that had excluded a large percentage of the Mapuche population. Among other things, this made it possible to analyse the violent incorporation of Mapuche territory into the Argentine state and its consequences, including family dismemberments, forced displacements, confinement in concentration camps (Delrio Reference Delrio2005; Pérez Reference Pérez2016; Nagy and Papazian Reference Nagy and Papazian2011), the arbitrary disposal of people as slave labour for urban aristocratic families (Escolar and Saldi Reference Escolar, Delrio, Escolar, Lenton and Malvestitti2018; Mases Reference Mases2002) and the confinement of entire families in museums (Colectivo GUIAS 2010). These forms of subjugation fall under the United Nations’ definition of the crime of genocide, which includes attempts to eliminate entirely or in part an ethnic group or to destroy its reproductive capacity.Footnote ³ Even well into the twenty-first century, genocide as a founding event of the Argentine nation continues to be silenced and ignored in academic and political circles (Delrio Reference Delrio2010; Lenton et al. Reference Lenton, Delrio, Pérez, Papazian, Nagy and Musante2015; Pérez Reference Pérez2016; Trinchero Reference Trinchero2005). By working with the body, the stage and dramaturgy, El Katango aimed to recover stories silenced by official history and omitted by previous generations because of the painful burden they represent and the lack of social recognition of these experiences. El Katango works from the bodies of the group members and engages with family histories to access silenced dimensions of experience, such as the memory of ceremonial gestures performed wordlessly and transmitted in the intimacy of the family. By staging elements from a silenced past, El Katango generates forms that support Mapuche re-emergence and connects with audiences, which often include people who are Mapuche or in a process of Mapuche re-emergence (for example, city dwellers in a process of identity recovery).

From the Conquest of the Desert onwards, many surviving families were forced to leave their territories and migrate to the city. This generated a population in cities such as Bariloche that initially did not identify itself as Indigenous and that only in the last two decades has begun to be reconstituted as such in the city, although not all people of Indigenous descent are involved in this process. The process of invisibilisation of the Indigenous population in these urban spaces was shaped by structural racism in the region: in the distribution of land, it is Indigenous people who tend to be less permanent and have less access to public lands, while in the city they remain as others but are not recognised as Indigenous, with the rights attached to that official status. The members of El Katango were initially young people who grew up in the peripheral neighbourhoods of Bariloche and were in a process of identifying as Indigenous through their involvement in cultural practices. In the 2000s, these practices included a network generated by music bands and recitals in the barrios, and the production of fanzines and radio broadcasting material (Kropff Reference Kropff2004). El Katango connected with these movements by engaging with different generations and their urban experiences. While the first generations of Indigenous activism focused on recognition and reparation based on the handover of territories, the Katango generation emphasised the multiplicity of forms of Indigenous activism and on ways of being Mapuche in the city (Álvarez Reference Álvarez2021; Briones Reference Briones and Fuller2002; Kropff Reference Kropff2004). In this context, El Katango works internally with members of the group, while also inviting audiences in Bariloche and in rural areas to become sensitised to Mapuche trajectories through theatrical practice. El Katango makes visible and engages with a sector that had been left out of the early processes of recognition, including those who had to leave the territory and even hide their identities.

El Katango’s activism and theatrical artistic process questions hegemonic folklorising, essentialising and demonising discourses (Álvarez and Cañuqueo Reference Álvarez and Cañuqueo2018; Álvarez and Kropff Reference Álvarez and Causa2022; Kropff Reference Kropff2010), as even in the twenty-first century the Mapuche population is stigmatised in terms of the civilisation/barbarism binary. These discourses are updated by the mainstream media and by public officials and representatives of economic elites who enable dispossession and violence against Mapuche families and communities. For example, in the recent eviction of the Lafken Winkul Mapu community of Villa Mascardi (Río Negro province), it was argued that the community was preventing the development of tourism in the area.Footnote ⁴ To counter such imaginaries, the theatre group helps strengthen Mapuche social networks, embracing the multiplicity of ways of being Mapuche and investigating the experiences of people who live in the city. Among other strategies, the group leaves the traditional theatre circuits and the spaces usually occupied by the Mapuche political movement (such as assembly spaces or political demonstrations). In addition, it researches its members’ own memories in collaboration with historians and anthropologists (Kropff Reference Kropff2010) to recover experiences of forced displacement during the Conquest of the Desert, which is a key focus of El Katango’s production. Mapuche performance practices are traversed by the consequences of the genocide by the Argentine state against the Mapuche people, including the loss of territory and the drastic change in the way of life of parents and grandparents who moved from the countryside to the city (Di Matteo Reference Di Matteo2019). The genocide is approached from the urban experience and its relationship with the countryside and, taking this history into account, the performance practices of El Katango are representations of traces and furrows resulting from territorial dispossession that remain in Mapuche memory. In this way, El Katango (like Teatro en Sepia, as we will see) uses both history and the present to contribute to the reconstruction of the collective.

Compañía Teatro en Sepia

The Compañía Teatro en Sepia (TES) was created in 2010, at a time of economic recovery, expansion of employment, the incorporation of popular sectors through consumption and new ideological currents that opened fissures in the official discourses on nation-building. The aim of director and actress Alejandra Egido, a Cuban and Argentine director who works on the Afro-migrant and Afro-descendant experience, was to use the performing arts to break down the historical indifference that erased the presence in Argentina of the descendants of Africans enslaved in colonial times and of other Afro-descendants coming from post-colonial migrations. The work of TES became an element in emerging anti-racist debates in Argentina because the violence associated with the forced assimilation and erasure of Afro-Argentine and Afro-diasporic populations is not a finished process, but is replicated today in the projection of foreignness onto Afro-Argentine bodies. The dominant imaginary in Argentine society still has difficulties in recognising Afro-descendants as nationals alongside other Argentine citizens.

TES has produced eight plays, including Calunga Andumba, by Carmen and Susana Platero, Afro-Argentine playwrights who in the 1970s were pioneers in visibilising the Afro community; Afrolatinoamericanas: De voces, susurros, gritos y silencios (Afro-Latin American Women: Voices, Murmurs, Cries and Silences), by Alejandra Egido and Lea Geler, based on archive materials and texts by Afro-Latin American women; and No es país para negras (This is No Country for Black Women) by Alejandra Egido. For several years, Afrolatinoamericanas was the only play in Argentina written entirely by Afro-Latin American women. TES avoids exoticism and seeks to create a shared space of encounter with repressed narratives, which works with the body, the mind and the word to change the perceptions that erase Afro existence, and which connects with its audiences, for example by narrating the childhood experiences of one of the actresses, when in school other girls did not want to play with her because of racial prejudice. These experiences are made relatable to a non-Afro audience beyond the differences imposed by racist structures.

Among the groups that use art to challenge the denial of Afro presence (including groups such as Tertulia de Mujeres Afrolatinoamericanas), TES has been innovating by deploying artistic strategies that promote (self-)reflection. Through the staging of social issues, TES generates a space for public discussion, providing tools for the empowerment of marginalised populations through artistic reflection. The performances show that racism is not a barrier that can be jumped simply by opening up residency requirements or by the nationalisation of migrants, but is instead a set of relationships that structures Argentine society, that transcends the recognition of identity and is an integral dimension of the multiple inequalities that affect society.

One of the practices in the anti-racist repertoire generated by TES is the reconstruction of Afro-Argentine and Afro-descendant histories and trajectories. Immersing itself in archival material with the help of historian Lea Geler, TES reconstructed Afro-Argentine trajectories that were not ‘interrupted’ at the end of the nineteenth century, as the dominant narratives suggest, but continue into the present (Geler Reference Geler2010). The core of ‘white European Argentina’ is suspended and dismantled by the theatrical staging of TES, which re-embodies the histories and communities that were threatened with dismemberment in the construction of the white citizen body. For Afro-descendants, Afro-Argentines and Afro-migrants, the embodiment of these stories enables a space in which to articulate ways of feeling linked to their experiences of invisibilisation, thus strengthening the creation of communities. A theatrical poetics that works from the body goes beyond the representation of a predefined narrative: it locates these narratives in the body. The actresses’ bodies become a space where affects circulate that cannot always be registered in language, and that through the physical work of the actresses in creating these narratives, become present in gestures, movements and bodily sensations – which include laughter (Hurley and Warner Reference Hurley and Warner2012).

After an initial period of work on Afro-descendants in general, TES made a decision to focus on the experiences of Afro-descendant women, given the evident lack of images of these women in the public sphere. Lea Geler describes this moment:

As Geler argues, self-representation challenges the tendency to conceive of cultural resistance as a homogeneous way of confronting racist structures. The coming together of Afro-descendant voices and actresses on stage includes the diversity of trajectories and knowledges that migrants can add to the Afro-Argentine experience. This multiplicity includes people who arrived in recent Afro-Latin American migrations, generations of African migrants, and Afro-descendants with genealogies dating back to colonial enslavement (Anderson Reference Anderson, Dixon and Johnson2018). The exploration of the varied social trajectories and experiences of migrants help break down the particular forms of Argentina’s invisibilising racism, and also break down Argentina’s isolation – as a ‘white European nation’ – from the rest of Latin America.

Finally, TES challenges perceptions of Argentineness, since among the Afro-descendant actresses some would be classified, according to dominant perceptions, as ‘Argentine’: that is, blanca (white). Their presence informs the public that phenotype is not the condition of Afro-descendant ancestry, sociability and cultural belonging, or what Geler calls ‘being socially black’ (Geler Reference Geler2016). At the same time, being phenotypically white but socially Black unsettles ideas of citizenship and nationality that aspire to Europeanness, insofar as the apparent contradiction affirms Afro existence, in its diversity, as part of Argentine citizenship. In short, the staging and the texts produced by TES generate a bridge between the historical archive, the experiences recorded by first-hand social research and the current realities of the actresses (Geler, Egido, Recalt and Yannone Reference Geler, Egido, Recalt and Yannone2018). All these sources comprise a scene that presents the multiplicity of Afro experiences.

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In the next section, we describe the staging practices of the two theatre groups, including their explorations of gesturalities and bodily and discursive performances, which construct particular forms of theatrical poetics. These practices go beyond contesting representations (although they do this too), as they open spaces for activating Afro-descendant and Indigenous ways of life that invite their audiences to rethink the social fabric and challenge the Europeanising mandate. Forms of difference are not just meanings that can be constructed and refuted in discourse; they are systems that assemble and define access to space and living conditions (Crenshaw Reference Crenshaw1991).

In a scene from TES’s No es país para negras, an Afro-Argentine woman narrates a racist question from a schoolmate about the colour of her genitals, followed by laughter. This shared moment reveals the dehumanising impact and invasion of privacy, but also the absurdity of the question. By processing this experience through laughter, both individually and together with the audience, racist habits are challenged. The scene works through affect, connecting the Afro bodies on stage with those of audience members, whatever their racialised status.

Similarly, the work of El Katango in Tayiñ kuify kvpan (Our Old-Ancient Ancestry) sensitises Mapuche and non-Mapuche audiences by means of an invitation – not offered from a position of moral-intellectual authority – to share in and become aware of Mapuche people’s concrete experiences of the expropriation of their lands (Álvarez and Kropff Causa Reference Álvarez and Causa2021). When two Mapuche women in an urban setting discuss returning to their homelands and one of them suggests that there is no one there anymore, the other tragicomically responds that all the dead people of their families are there and generates a pause that gives the audience time to process this statement, which is not fiction but a reference to places their audience knows well. This subtle yet powerful scene sums up the violence of displacement to the city and the appropriation of land by settlers backed by the police and the local state. The presence of a Mapuche actress and the authenticity of the story reinforce the invitation to become aware of the experience of the violence used to dispossess Mapuche families of their land decades ago, as an ongoing event and not just a fact of the distant past.

The scene is also a shared affective exercise, transmitted to the audience, an invitation to get involved in the story and to dismantle the systems that generate this violence. This transmission takes place both in terms of rights, which can be discussed and articulated, and in terms of affects that flow from the actresses’ bodies to the audience. In both theatres, affect promotes a communality, an invitation to generate a common social matrix that is non-racist and non-expropriating.

Theatre is a particularly important form of creation for thinking about and challenging how racism is produced and reproduced in everyday interactions, how it operates on bodies and what effects it has on them. The stage is more than a space of representation, it is also a space from which to rearticulate forms of life and experiment with new forms. Both directors aim to unpack constructions of ‘barbarism’ and ‘absence’ and show their effects on the distribution of acceptable bodies and actions in urban and rural spaces.

Traces of Ancestry

Tayiñ kuify kvpan represents the intersections of ethnicity, territory, gender and class, but also adding the dimension of age, on the assumption that in all complex political processes more than one category of difference is involved (Hancock Reference Hancock2007). Tayiñ kuify kvpan emerged from a theatre workshop for Mapuche youth in Bariloche that explored forms of identification as Mapuche among young people.Footnote ⁶ Participants brought up the theme of ancestors, lineage and personal connections with the dead, including dream practices. Miriam Álvarez and the young people then explored the bodily gestures performed in Mapuche ceremonies, such as jejipun (prayer ceremony) and purun (dance). As there were fragmented memories of these gestures within the group, an activist from an older generation was called in to share her knowledge and experience. With Álvarez’s guidance and attention to corporeality and gestures, an intergenerational space for the transmission of knowledge was generated. Stories were reconstructed based on orality and we also sought to reconstruct aspects of the gestures that the young people, non-professional actors, brought to the stage. Research and the reconstruction of senses of belonging were intertwined in the making of the play.

The resulting mise-en-scène is structured in six frames of non-linear action, thus distancing itself from what Bertolt Brecht calls Aristotelian dramaturgy, characterised by a beginning, middle and end, which together form an organic dramatic structure. The performance begins when the audience enters the auditorium. Two of the characters are already on stage: two old people who represent the spirits of the past, the dead who continue to accompany the living today. Sitting to one side, the old woman knits, while the old man lies dead in the middle of the scene. Then, once the audience is in their seats, tableau one begins, with two young women bringing clothes and food to the alwe (spirit). After they have set everything down, the old man stands up, takes the clothes that have been left for him and begins to walk until he meets the old woman, who represents another spirit.

From this beginning, the play is structured around the relationship between the living and the dead. The dead are old people and the living are represented by two young women who have suffered encroachment on their lands, dispossession and poverty. A later tableau features an old woman who saves herself from the army’s incursions into her land, but now wanders disoriented. Although she refers to an historical event (the late-nineteenth-century Conquest of the Desert), she is not located in a time that can be considered the past, nor is she included among the dead, but among the living. She is a liminal character who places the genocide and its effects in an on-going present. Her liminality is a bridge between the past and the present, breaking with linear temporality. The experience of this character in the play articulates with Nawel gvxam (Story of the Tiger), a traditional Mapuche tale that narrates the return home after the Conquest of the Desert war. The story is told by an old woman, the protagonist, who escapes the invasion and then meets a nawel (tiger) that does not attack her, but helps her, and whom she calls futa lamgen (big brother) (Golluscio Reference Golluscio2006). In the play, two characters appear who encourage the old woman to follow the nawel. Next there appears a younger woman, who addresses her as abuela (grandmother) and cares for her (see Figure 6.1). She recounts that many local people, including her own mother, have – like the abuela – been violently displaced from their territory and forced to move to the city.

Figure 6.1

Scene from Tayiñ kuify kvpan with Lorena Cañuqueo and Sofía Curapil, on stage at the Escuela de Arte Municipal La Llave, Bariloche, Argentina, 2004

(photograph by Matías Marticorena, © Archivo de la Campaña de Autoafirmación Mapuche Wefkeletuyiñ, Estamos Resurgiendo, by permission).

The theatrical staging sought to elicit a certain aesthetic identification in the Mapuche spectators, taking into account a process of self-recognition. As we will analyse in detail, the staging constitutes a Mapuche corporeal repertoire by means of a metacultural operation, defined as any cultural action that, while being performed, reflects on culture itself (Briones Reference Briones1998): that is, a set of practices that begins to be called and understood as ‘culture’. The aim was to stage organised forms of behaviour through gestures that were identifiable for the Mapuche audience: the palig (a Mapuche game), the jejipun (a Mapuche prayer ceremony), the use of traditional dress such as the headscarf for women and the headband for men, and the use of the Mapuche language, Mapuzugun. The work reconstitutes a Mapuche corporeal repertoire elaborated in the 1990s by Mapuche activism that, through a metacultural operation, sought the resurgence of these practices, which had been silenced by decades of state persecution and Christian evangelisation.

Afro Screams and Silences

In 2012, when Teatro en Sepia premiered the play Afrolatinoamericanas: De voces, susurros, gritos y silencios (see Figure 6.2), a transition took place: the company became feminist and dedicated itself to the experiences of women of African descent, no longer the Afro community in general. The play resulted from an invitation from the Museo de la Mujer Argentina in Buenos Aires in the year of the bicentenary of independence. As part of the celebrations, the museum planned events that showcased women’s participation in Argentine history. But the initial programme included only the experiences of white European-descent women and did not recognise the role of Afro women in the struggle for independence. So the members of TES decided to test the relationship between Black women and the Museo de la Mujer as a feminist space. The idea was to work with two time periods: the historical past and the present day, highlighting the continuity of Afro issues and struggles.

Figure 6.2

Poster advertising Afrolatinoamericanas: De voces, susurros, gritos y silencios for a performance run in 2013

Figure 6.2 long description.

Figure 6.2 Long description

The women standing wear sleeveless dresses cinched below the bust, along with leggings and headscarves. The woman kneeling wears trousers and a top with a shawl draped around her shoulders. The text at the top of the poster provides the title of the play and the names of the playwrights and director; further down are the names of the actors and a brief summary of the play; at the bottom are the sponsors' logos, performance dates, and venue details.

(© Alejandra Egido, by permission).

A starting point for the production was the figure of Sarah Baartman, an African woman of the Khoikhoi ethnic group who in 1810 was forcibly taken to Europe and made to exhibit herself naked as a public attraction because of her prominent buttocks (Geler Reference Geler2012). It was decided that the actresses, all of them Afro, would go on stage with their faces covered, demonstrating that, in the social imaginary, Black women are considered as bodies, without faces or heads.

The rehearsals were moments of collective construction between Alejandra Egido, historian Lea Geler and the non-professional actresses (Geler Reference Geler2012). The scenes drew on historical materials and contemporary texts by Afro-Latin American women playwrights, some of which directly allude to a situation of Afro ‘resistance’ or to historical events in the Afro community. Texts were selected that overlapped the historical past and the present, showing the resonances between these moments (an operation already described for El Katango). The performance included personal and contemporary testimonies of the performers delivered through video, as commentaries on the historical and literary texts.

An ecclesiastical legal text recovered by historian Florencia Guzmán structures the plot of the play. This text refers to an early-nineteenth-century divorce trial in Córdoba, Argentina, in which a Creole woman asks the Church to annul her marriage. The woman argued that ‘her husband has adulterated the marriage bed, and gives himself to every Black and brown woman who enters his service, whether by purchase or agreement, thus squandering the dowry of his children on enslaved children’ (Guzmán Reference Guzmán, Celton, Ghirardi and Carbonetti2009: 412). Although the wife brought the enslaved women to give testimony at the trial, where they attested to the violence, including rape, that they suffered at the husband’s hands, the Church’s final verdict, with which the play closes, was that it did not consider that the evidence given was ‘sufficient grounds to authorise the separation of the spouses’ (Guzman Reference Guzmán, Celton, Ghirardi and Carbonetti2009: 419). The husband’s violence was not seen as a problem.

The tension between the white mistress and her husband unites her with the enslaved Afro women who also denounce the master’s abuses. But the scene also presents the frictions between these women. While the wife protests at her wounded honour, the Afro women were subjected to enslavement, sexual abuse and the jealousy of the wife. Their positions cannot be equated, an understanding that indirectly challenges the role of white feminism in the present day and shows why an anti-racist feminism is relevant. In rehearsals, actresses improvised around life in a colonial house and the place of women, whether mistresses or enslaved, and improvisations also drew on feminist texts such as Gloria Anzaldúa’s La frontera (1987) to bring in themes of dissident feminisms, classic feminism and sexual diversity in a context in which mass feminism in Argentina did not take into account Black and intersectional feminism. The play opened up this discussion in Argentina: Egido sums up the staging of the play as ‘a thump on the table’, put together with urgency and little time. The play was a simultaneous intervention into white feminism, which did not consider racialised differences, and into claims by the Afro movement that did not consider gendered differences and put women between brackets.

At the same time, in order to unsettle the association of Afro people only with colonial times, scenes based on historical texts were superimposed with contemporary accounts given by the actresses. For example, in a scene where the character of Josefa Tenorio, an enslaved Afro-Argentine military woman, reads aloud a letter she addressed to General San Martín – hero of Argentine independence – asking for her liberty, her monologue is interrupted by a present-day video of the performer, an Afro-Argentine actress, in which she narrates the obstacles she faces in finding a job as a dental hygienist because of her skin colour.

While making visible the Afro contributions to the formation of the Argentine nation in the shape of a military woman – a heroine of independence who still did not win her freedom – the scene also reveals the current situation of Black women in Argentina, where the descendants of enslaved women continue to fight for recognition as Afro and Argentine, in a country that alienates them, and to carry forward the anti-racist struggle for the right to dignified work. The strategy of superimposing the past and the present emphasises the non-fictional character of the work and refutes assertions that Argentina ‘is not racist’.

Dissident Afro and Mapuche Corporealities

The Mapuche and Afro-descendant bodies staged in the work of El Katango and Teatro en Sepia both result from a colonial experience, in which, as Yuderkis Espinosa observes (Reference Espinosa Miñoso2020), ‘the gender order is always racialised and geopolitically mediated’. The theatre groups do not describe a generically embodied coloniality – as, for example, in Walter Mignolo’s (Reference Mignolo2012) analysis – nor even the imposition of sex-gendered categories (Lugones Reference Lugones2010), but rather specific traces of the experience of actresses, drawing on oral history and personal archives. Both historical reconstruction and reflection on the present are embodied. We think of corporealities in terms of their material and symbolic dimensions, and as objects of discipline and reproducers of social structures, but also in terms of their capacity to affect and be affected beyond these structures.Footnote ⁷ When Afrolatinoamericanas intersperses narrations of the past with actresses’ current experiences, or when Tayiñ works with a character who survives the nineteenth-century Conquest of the Desert and arrives in the present where she continues to escape military violence, it not only demonstrates the racism of the dominant society, but also highlights the fact that the violence continues.

Taking the body as a space of memories and as a space capable of regenerating Afro and Mapuche lives is a shared focus for both theatre groups. Theirs is not a didactic intervention that explains colonialism, enslavement or genocide in a simplified way; instead they open a space for exploration, first in the intimacy of the groups and then with audiences. For both groups, the creative process starts by investigating the material effects of these forms of racism as they are manifested in present-day structures of expropriation of bodies and territories in Afro and Mapuche communities, with attention to the multiple affective impacts of those processes. By resorting to humour or generating scenes that ‘leave the audience frozen and mute’, in Egido’s words, or by ‘moving and unlocking memories through evocations and dreamlike scenes’, as Álvarez puts it, the directors question social structures without having a predefined direction or expecting a single response.

When reconstructing corporealities, particular attention must be paid to how they express power relations. In the Mapuche case, the memories of military campaigns and forced displacements form an indispensable part of any ‘Mapuche poetics’, while in the Afro case the discourse of absence that erases current presences is a necessary referent for the work of making visible a diverse experience, but emphasised in a gendered way. In Egido’s words: ‘TES revealed the fact that Black women were not only characters of the colonial era, but that we are part of today’s society, of today and now.’ We cannot only refer to an ‘ancestral’ Mapuche corporeality or to an Afro woman secluded in the past, because the marks left by the construction of the nation on these territories and bodily repertoires are significant elements for the political work of both theatre groups.

El Katango seeks to generate a new poetics of theatre that narrates the Mapuche reality, while also aligning with specifically Mapuche perspectives on theatrical poetic procedures. To do this, the bodily repertoire that bears the historical marks of subordination to the nation was mobilised to generate self-identification among Mapuche people. Corporeality was elicited through attention to the habitual gestures that have been marginalised in Argentina and within the Mapuche movement itself, but that were repeatedly and wordlessly enacted in the families of the Katango participants, such as ceremonial gestures of gratitude before entering or drinking from a lake, gestures related to cultivating the land, or saying words in Mapuzugun in someone’s ear, almost in secret. Some gestures have gender dimensions, such as when women cover their mouths when they speak, as if hiding their words. Gestures and corporeality recovered in the workshops were then put on stage. For example, the performers worked on ways of sitting with the body folded in on itself, which are defensive postures, expressing traces of violence and the feeling of inadequacy in white European spaces. As Álvarez says: ‘Although attempts were made to forget and erase the moments of pain, they remained as furrows, as traces that seep into bodies, looks, ways of speaking and above all into memories.’

Miriam Álvarez (Reference Álvarez2021) uses Marcel Mauss’s concept of ‘techniques of the body’ precisely to refer to this set of bodily repertoires, which, as Ugo Volli (Reference Volli, Barba and Saverese1988) explains, are traditional acts that are culturally conserved and transmitted. There are many peoples who, while maintaining a certain dominance, have had their ‘techniques of the body’ erased by Western culture. More profound is the effect on dominated peoples, such as Mapuche and Afro people, who have been disciplined through daily violence, and this is precisely the material that El Katango and TES are beginning to explore. In our conversations, Álvarez suggested that observing techniques of the body can reveal gestures and corporealities, which can be integrated into narratives that show how dispossession leaves traces on the body. The aim is to reconstruct not only a scenic story, but also a ‘Mapuche way’ of installing the Indigenous experience on the stage.

In Teatro en Sepia, Afro women work on how they are interpellated by colonial sex-gender systems and the effects of this interpellation. The plays of TES address the invisibilisation of the bodies of Afro women in Buenos Aires, one of the most ‘whitened’ spaces in Argentina, and dramatise this to a non-Afro theatre-consuming public, which is astonished at their existence. TES’s work reconstructs histories and reconstitutes the social fabric to question Argentina’s racial structure. It also generates anti-racist practices: challenging stereotypes; contributing to forms of self-representation; and breaking social oblivion by presenting Afro-Argentine characters and actresses. These operations on stage encourage Afro audiences who go to TES plays to see themselves represented, and challenge white European audiences who, without knowing it, participate in the structures of invisibility.

Our analysis of the work of El Katango and TES on the embodiment of subalternity and the diverse ways this is expressed on stage and in Mapuche and Afro communities led us to identify two areas of common interest. First, the predominance of women in groups led us to pay attention to the operation of gender roles and, in particular, women’s roles within the (re)constructions of violated, colonised, racialised and subordinated lives. Second, we were struck by the spatio-temporal location of Indigeneity and Afroness in the national narrative and the challenges to this location from theatrical representations of experiences situated in other spatio-temporal frameworks, deemed relevant by the creators.

Regarding first the question of gender, some of the scenes in Afrolatinoamericanas address the hyper-sexualisation of Afro-Latin American women that has existed from colonial times, which had a particularly violent expression in exhibitions of humans in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe and which continues today, for example, in the frequent association of Afro migrant women with sex work. In this play, working between past and present, and between theatrical and audiovisual modalities, the creators tugged on the fibres of the connection between the Afro bodies on the stage and the white feminist audience that filled the hall of the Museo de la Mujer. The work gives voice to the dissident bodies of Afro-Argentine and Afro-Latin American women who are not usually found on stage or in museums, other than as historical objects. The play also engaged with debates within the feminist movement. It made clear that the oppression faced by Afro-Argentine and Afro-Latin American women cannot be explained on the basis of gender alone, as classical feminism does, but is a matrix structured by class, ethnicity, national identity and migration. According to Egido, the affective intensity that circulated in the theatre, generated by the play’s themes and the actresses’ embodied actions, became evident in a silence that ‘could be cut with a knife’. This indicates the effect on a feminist, academic, middle-class audience of being confronted with the reality of intersectional racism that members of the audience may ignore in their everyday lives.

In Tayiñ kuify kvpan, there are several female characters who, far from being similar or indistinguishable, present heterogeneous constructions of femininity. In addition to ethnic and gender differences, there is a generational dimension, with old and young people on the stage and in particular the third old woman, a liminal character with valuable ancestral wisdom. This character interacts with the nawel (the mythological tiger), performs the Mapuche prayer and communicates with the spirits. She escapes the army’s advance and manages to meet one of the young women in the city, to whom she gives advice. In other words, among all the characters, she is the one who empowers herself in a situation of extreme vulnerability, escaping in her slow and painful body, alone and without shelter. In this way, reference is made to different space-times, which are shown to be interconnected: the world of the dead with which the work begins, the ancestor who escapes from military violence by crossing fields and timelines, and the urban world of the young people who took part in the workshop.

With regard to the issue of spatio-temporal location, the play by El Katango presents different territorialities and times in the same scenic space: the land of origin from which part of the Mapuche population was expelled at the end of the nineteenth century, the multiple spaces where people fled from military persecution, and the spaces of reunion in rural areas, which can also be found in the daily life of an urban neighbourhood. In the play, histories were interwoven, showing that the Mapuche are dispersed in their own lands and that it is the link with their ancestors that will allow the reconstruction of the Mapuche people, a heterogeneous, complex and diverse people. The mise-en-scène questions the hegemonic discourse, which restricts Mapuche existence to the countryside and to ancestors disconnected from the present and the city. In place of this, the play suggests a continuity of Mapuche life connecting the past and the present, the countryside and the city, and opening up a common space between young and old. In this sense, mobility evokes not only the distance between places but also their interconnection (Cañuqueo Reference Cañuqueo2015; Vivaldi Reference Vivaldi2016).

On the basis of these intersectional readings of the plays, we argue that both theatre groups challenge the dominant constructions of race, ethnicity and citizenship of the nation-state. Both groups also decentre dominant models of femininity, including those of mainstream feminism. Moreover, the Mapuche and Afro dissident corporealities present in the plays destabilise any image that freezes the possibilities of existence, while empowering the re-emergence of multiple forms of life for both peoples.

This opening of spaces for multiple ways of being Afro and Mapuche takes a step beyond the activisms of the 1990s that needed simply to assert existence. For example, as we have mentioned, in Afrolatinoamericanas at one point the actress appears in a film, with her face amplified on the screen above the stage, looking into the camera and directly questioning the audience. She explains that, as a person of African descent, she tells her perfume-buying clients to remember her, not by name, but as ‘the Black Woman of perfumes’. This moment both identifies forms of racism (customers see her generically as a ‘Black woman’) and ignores the invisibilisation of that racism in Argentina (by encouraging customers to label her in that way, without shame). The woman accomplishes the dual task of asserting herself as ‘Black’ and as a perfume-seller with a clientele that remembers her. She claims that racial identity as her own, making explicit how white Argentines perceive her and pushing them to recognise their own racism. The interaction creates a connection with the audience, as the actress interpellates the feminist and white European audience of the Museo de la Mujer. The artistic context both denounces and acknowledges as ‘normal’ the racist act of remembering a Black woman generically and without individuality as la negra. On stage the performers reclaim the power of representation, but also engage the audience as participants in dismantling racist structures in everyday life.

For its part, El Katango addresses the specificity of Mapuche urban experiences, which is an area that is difficult to reach for the type of Indigenous activism recognised by mainstream society. The young city-dwelling participants in Tayiñ’s creation workshop were not recognised and acknowledged as Mapuche in their daily lives in the early 2000s. El Katango asks: How can the experiences of urban people, descendants of genocide survivors, who are negatively racialised in the city be made public when Mapuche as an Indigenous political identity is still not recognised, and when some people may choose not to identify as Mapuche, because of the violence that affects those who identify as Indigenous? The play, as an artistic and political intervention, engages with this question by working with embodied memories.

Both directors work with bodies and with history to challenge interconnected structures of colonial, racist, patriarchal and class oppression. In this way they not only produce plays with novel themes in Argentine theatre, but also generate political interventions that invite audiences to be part of decolonial practices, as white middle-class feminists, as Afro people, as Mapuche people, as part of a colonising society. The stage is thus a meeting place, a space for experimentation, in which to reformulate a social matrix that is not only white European.

Anti-Racist Theatres, Interwoven Theatricalities

Given the context just described, a constant theme during our research was the search for traces of any Afro-Mapuche encounters, recorded in archives and social memories, and more specifically encounters that had been encouraged by theatrical productions. Except for references to barely visible Afro communities located in proximity to Mapuche territories, bereft of details about encounters and relations, we did not find any specific work.Footnote ⁸ Hence the directors’ desire to create plays that would stage such encounters, working in a mode of historical speculation that makes an informed reconstruction of archival gaps and ellipses in memories (Hartman Reference Hartman2019). With the premise of incorporating an Afro character in Álvarez’s work and a Mapuche character in Egido’s work, both creators wrote their outlines. The writing was individual, but took place in the shared framework of a writing workshop called ‘Clandestine Dramaturgy’ directed by David Arancibia, a Mapuche playwright based in Chile. During the process, the playwrights exchanged versions, provided information and commented on each other’s work. The collaborative work was called Entramadas (Interweavings) and emerged, in our words at the time, ‘as an urgent and necessary exchange of experiences between two forms of theatre that challenge the erasure of Indigenous and Afro-descendant narratives, gestures, bodies and experiences in Argentine theatre’.

The work that led to the writing of these proposals was preceded by collective reflection on the affective impacts of coloniality on racialised bodies described in the previous sections, some of whose modalities continue in the present. These forms continue to target Afro and Mapuche bodies in ways that have significant similarities. Both Afro and Mapuche bodies can

1. (1) be denied (i.e. their actual existence);

2. (2) be made foreign (Afro-Argentines are identified as foreigners from other Latin American countries and Mapuche are often identified as Chilean);

3. (3) be surveilled as ‘other’ bodies in the space of the city (both theatre companies work in cities that are thought to be white and where the non-white is marked as strange and dangerous);

4. (4) be recognised only within limited folkloric parameters (Afro people linked to a colonial image, women dressed in white with their hair covered; Mapuche people as rural and wearing traditional clothes), which evoke an illusory past (a harmonious colonial society where Afro people were street vendors and enslavement is invisible, and Mapuche people were in small, dispersed rural communities);

5. (5) be made hyper-visible in folkloric stereotypes (Afro people as happy and associated with dance and music, not with thought; Mapuche people linked to a stereotypical spirituality) or in images of criminality (Afro people associated with illegality; Mapuche people linked to violence and terrorism).

These points were identified as ‘differentiated communalities’ in our meetings and in the process of thinking about the motivations and interventions of each theatre group.Footnote ⁹ On the basis of this process of collective reflection, Egido and Álvarez decided move towards theatrical creation.

Entramadas, which speculatively reconstructs stories of encounters and silenced lives, has been an important achievement, because even though each theatre group had been exploring how to stage their productions by combining political and poetic dimensions, working together allowed us to expand this differentiated communality and speculatively reconstruct Afro-Mapuche encounters (resonating with projects such as King Reference King2019). Specifically, it allowed us to represent Afro and Mapuche bodies in a single theatrical work and thus unite us in questioning white Argentina. We arrived at two theatrical creations, noted at the beginning of this chapter: Fuego amigo (Friendly Fire) by Alejandra Egido and Ñiküfnaqkechi waria (Silence in the City) by Miriam Álvarez. The plays bring together the stories of Mapuche and Afro women, referring to common experiences of oppression (such as forced displacement and forced labour) and common recourse to a sense of humour as a gesture of resistance. We observed that the stories of both collectives could be represented in both theatre groups, making visible that ‘we share more than we imagined’, as the creators put it. In the plays, Afro and Mapuche people meet and, despite not knowing the particularities of their respective stories, they resonate with each other’s experiences, not only empathetically but also because each recognises the traces of colonialism in the other’s history.

Ñiküfnaqkechi waria is a play that, at the time of writing, is still under construction. It seeks to question the silence with which both Mapuche and Afro-descendant populations were surrounded after the Conquest of the Desert, an experience linked with successive periods of loss of land and the ongoing dispossession of lands by criollo settlers. The women in the play turn to their memory, their ancestral ties and beliefs to give themselves strength to carry on. The joint work generates a common space on the stage that intertwines the experiences of violence and the forms of resurgence of both peoples, a path towards anti-racism and decoloniality that is taking shape as Afro and Indigenous struggles in the Americas are linked to one another (King et al. Reference King, Navarro and Smith2020). When we rehearsed and also when we discussed the theatre groups themselves, we found points of connection that generated a common matrix: the white Argentina that silenced both collectives, the forced mobilities, the violence on bodies and territories.

Thus, in the construction of Fuego amigo, as in Ñiküfnaqkechi waria, the idea was to represent forced displacements as part of the creation of a broader cartography (Dubatti Reference Dubatti2016). In Fuego, we see what the urban territory means for Mapuche and Afro-descendant people. In Ñiküfnaqkechi, rural territory takes centre stage, but here we also sought, through poetic procedures of expressionism and symbolism, to evoke a territoriality occupied by water. For Afro-descendants, this meant the Atlantic, the ocean crossing and ports; for the Mapuche, it meant water as a place of refuge, of healing and of memory. In one scene of Ñiküfnaqkechi, a film of a fast-flowing river is projected and at one point we see that it is carrying photographs, swept along by the current. This river represents water and fluidity in general and evokes a way of seeing Mapuche territory as ever-changing. When this scene, ‘Como dos gotas de agua’ (Like Two Peas in a Pod), was premiered at Manchester’s Contact Theatre in April 2022, the feedback from the audience was striking and included comments from Afro-Colombian artists who were not only moved, but also expressed the uniqueness of seeing two subordinate corporealities with so much in common in Latin America, who, nevertheless, do not usually participate together in artistic projects (see Figure 6.3).

Figure 6.3

Scene from ‘Como dos gotas de agua’ with Alejandra Egido and Miriam Álvarez, on stage at the Contact Theatre, Manchester, UK, 2022

(© Jami Bennet and Shawn Stephen, by permission).

Fuego amigo adds another contribution to this innovative encounter and the differentiated communality of these two plays with its feminist perspective and a futuristic projection. By fictionalising the stories of the protagonists (a Mapuche woman and a woman of African descent) and locating them in an imagined new social order in Argentina based on the realities of the pandemic, it metaphorically evokes the way the health crisis exacerbated existing tendencies while also underlining the corruption of the neoliberal order and highlighting the historical resistance of these subaltern characters in the face of a system in breakdown. The play’s protagonists are working together in a near-future scenario as technicians who have been hired to install sensors that measure the presence of viruses in the air at traffic lights. The job requires them to move around, and instead of having cars or motorbikes, they travel on horseback. With the trust that comes from spending long hours together working in a daily routine, they begin to share their personal stories with each other. The Afro woman tells how she was evicted from her home and ended up living on the street, possibly all as a result of racist exclusion from the labour market. The Mapuche woman recounts her eviction from a community school where she worked. It becomes evident that both women are extremely strong, capable of overcoming these circumstances. In contrast to the past experiences that they narrate, both women are electrical technicians and expert horse riders, which challenges the standard view of these activities as masculine. The play then shows them joining forces to bring a legal suit against the Argentine state, thus speculatively raising the possibility of historical and political reparation for colonised peoples. In the scenes depicting the lawsuit, the state’s responsibility for the exploitation of the bodies and expropriation of the lands of Afro-diasporic and Mapuche peoples as constitutive processes of the nation becomes evident.