Latin America: Mi vida despues

Argentina - Buenos Aires

Under Argentina’s military dictatorship, “Operation Condor” and the “Death Flights”, the disappearing of opponents and the kidnapping of infants, were everyday events. The distinguished and internationally celebrated author, director and song-writer, Lola Arias, Argentina's 38-year-old alternative superstar, invites six descendants of that era on stage.

Together, four actors, a dancer and a musician—plus a young child—reconstruct the lives of their parents and, inevitably, the haunted history of their country. Dressed in their own clothes, they share their family albums and personal confessions, listen to old cassette recordings, read confidential documents, compare childhood memories, get angry and sad, laugh and dance.

Carla's father was a guerrilla with the People’s Liberation Army and Liza's parents were opponents in exile, while Vanina's father was secretly an officer at ESMA, the notorious “Auschwitz of Argentina”; moreover, the boy she had believed for thirty years to be her biological brother was actually the abducted child of two murdered opponents of the regime.

Which is how the history of a country gets condensed into the story of a family and how collective and individual fate come into alignment in this explosive, moving but also playful music-theatre spectacle which banishes the tyranny of memory with faith in the here and now, taming the ghosts of the past with the spell of this magical on-stage document.

* The play was written in collaboration with the performers, who also provided original material.
** The music was composed in collaboration with Liza Casullo and Lola Arias.