Teatralidades y políticas de la memoria y el cuerpo: Patricia Ariza y Nohora Ayala (1995-2013)
The political tension that developed in Colombia since the 40s, between  conservative ideologies and, the divergency in the official liberal party and dissident liberal party, brought out a feeling of disagreement that collapsed when Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, leader of dissident party, was killed in Bogota on 9 April 1948. This event, well known as The Bogotazo, unchained violent protests, murders, assaults, harassment, terror and unrest throughout the country. As a result, in the subsequent years the liberal guerrillas were formed and over a decade the conflict ensued in  more than 200,000 murders in the country and thousands of rural migrants in the cities. Later, some leaders formed the communist guerrillas who perpetuated the armed conflict in the country, some of them are known today as FARC, the oldest group of guerillas in the world and the most powerful in Colombia,  and ELN. Actually, the FARC are in the final negotiation for peace in Havana, Cuba. This violent historical context has produced a staggering statistics of victims (Basta ya!, 2013),  in which the artists and activist dramatists, Patricia Ariza and Nohora Ayala propose  a new aesthetic  that questions the violent actions of the country from women’s perspective. Their theatrical productions are part of the Collective Creation in the Teatro La Candelaria, where the research is faced with the aesthetics of the scene and confronted with the deconstruction of reality counted, telling or testimonials. This dissertation examines six plays by Ariza and Ayala whose political and bodily liminalities deconstruct dominant ideas of history, while illuminating  the complex networks surrounding  the women and the Antigones produced by the country. I explore the materiality of  non-absent bodies (victims of forced disappearance) which exposes  the deterritorialization of dispossessed bodies. The  first chapter of the thesis discerns recent theoretical approaches to the concepts of  representation, theater, performance and political theatricality which I have found pertinent for my examination of the work by Ariza and Ayala. At the same time, I elaborate on the notions  of the body without organs and of dispossessed bodies in order to shed light on  the epistemological break between the material present body and dispossessed bodies of the disappeared.  In the second chapter, I analyze three plays by Patricia Ariza: Antigone (2006), Mujeres en la Plaza (2009) and Somma Mnemosyne (2013), which evince an exercise in artivism and engagement with the political history of Colombia. The third chapter presents three plays of Nohora Ayala: Fémina Ludens (1995), Piel (2010) and Rosas Secas (2012), where the body is part of a radical practice of questioning colombian historical memory. Finally, the concluding chapter examines the role of political and corporeal theatricality in engaging spectators’ critical participation in the work of Ariza and Ayala.
Liminality Political theatrics Non-absent corporealities Deterritorialization Dispossession Deconstruction