in Spanish with Hungarian and English surtitles
“The experience shakes you to the core…Recommended for all generations—history is more than learning dates.”
—La Segunda
El Año en que nací / The year I was born, by Argentinean playwright Lola Arias, started with a concept: artists born under a dictatorship reconstruct their mothers and fathers lives as they once were. With disarming sincerity, eleven performers born the 1970s and early 1980s during Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile retell their parent’s stories to each other using photographs, letters, cassette tapes, old clothing, anecdotes, and elusive recollections. Each of them remakes scenes from the erased memories of the past to use as portals to understanding an uncertain future: Who were my parents when I was born? What was my country like before I learned to speak? How many versions of past events exist, particularly those that occurred when I was too young to form memories?
Arias performs onstage with actors who share her history and her quest. Like stunt doubles, the actors don their parents’ clothes and try to represent the lives of those who wore them. Performer by performer, scene by scene, the stories collect and converge until we arrive at critical junctures—the overlapping zones of reality and fiction, the encounter of one generation with another, and the intersection of national history and private stories. Both playful and political, the explorations of El Año en que nací / The year I was born reveal complexity and dark secrets alongside the joy and humor of lives recovered.
Lola Arias (born Buenos Aires, 1976) is a writer, director, performer, and songwriter. She is the cofounder of Compañía Postnuclear, an Argentinean group of interdisciplinary artists. Her texts explore the boundaries between reality and fiction, using biographies and real documentation in a surreal or poetic way. She works with actors, musicians, dancers, children, babies, animals, and people who have never before performed onstage. In her work Striptease (2007), a baby occupies the center of the stage while the parents duel by telephone. In El amor es un francotirador (2007), the performers relate true and fictional love stories while a rock band plays live. Her projects with artist/director Stefan Kaegi are Chácara Paraíso (2007), involving Brazilian police officers, and Airport Kids (2008), featuring global nomads aged between 7 and 13. In 2010–12, she curated a festival of urban interventions, titled Ciudades Paralelas, in Berlin, Buenos Aires, Warsaw, Zurich, and Singapore. Together with Ulises Conti, she composes and plays music, and has released the albums El amor es un francotirador (2007) and Los que no duermen (2011).
Arias’s theater works have been translated into German, English, and French. Her works have been performed internationally at festivals including Steirischer Herbst, Graz; Festival d’Avignon; In Transit Festival, Berlin; We are here, Dublin; Spielart Festival, Munich; Alkantara Festival, Lisbon; and Radicals Festival, Barcelona.
Learn more about Lola Arias.
Text and directed by: Lola Arias
Artistic consultant: Paula Bravo
vidéo: Nicole Senerman
Music: Ulises Conti
Technical direction: Martín Montaner
scenography and light design: Rocío Hernández
Choreography : Soledad Gaspar
With: Paula Bravo, Leopoldo Courbis, Pablo Díaz, Ítalo Gallardo,
Soledad Gaspar, Alejandro Gómez, Fernanda González, Viviana
Hernández, Ana Laura Racz, Jorge Rivero, Nicole Senerman
“The experience shakes you to the core…Recommended for all generations—history is more than learning dates.”
—La Segunda
El Año en que nací / The year I was born, by Argentinean playwright Lola Arias, started with a concept: artists born under a dictatorship reconstruct their mothers and fathers lives as they once were. With disarming sincerity, eleven performers born the 1970s and early 1980s during Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile retell their parent’s stories to each other using photographs, letters, cassette tapes, old clothing, anecdotes, and elusive recollections. Each of them remakes scenes from the erased memories of the past to use as portals to understanding an uncertain future: Who were my parents when I was born? What was my country like before I learned to speak? How many versions of past events exist, particularly those that occurred when I was too young to form memories?
Arias performs onstage with actors who share her history and her quest. Like stunt doubles, the actors don their parents’ clothes and try to represent the lives of those who wore them. Performer by performer, scene by scene, the stories collect and converge until we arrive at critical junctures—the overlapping zones of reality and fiction, the encounter of one generation with another, and the intersection of national history and private stories. Both playful and political, the explorations of El Año en que nací / The year I was born reveal complexity and dark secrets alongside the joy and humor of lives recovered.
Lola Arias (born Buenos Aires, 1976) is a writer, director, performer, and songwriter. She is the cofounder of Compañía Postnuclear, an Argentinean group of interdisciplinary artists. Her texts explore the boundaries between reality and fiction, using biographies and real documentation in a surreal or poetic way. She works with actors, musicians, dancers, children, babies, animals, and people who have never before performed onstage. In her work Striptease (2007), a baby occupies the center of the stage while the parents duel by telephone. In El amor es un francotirador (2007), the performers relate true and fictional love stories while a rock band plays live. Her projects with artist/director Stefan Kaegi are Chácara Paraíso (2007), involving Brazilian police officers, and Airport Kids (2008), featuring global nomads aged between 7 and 13. In 2010–12, she curated a festival of urban interventions, titled Ciudades Paralelas, in Berlin, Buenos Aires, Warsaw, Zurich, and Singapore. Together with Ulises Conti, she composes and plays music, and has released the albums El amor es un francotirador (2007) and Los que no duermen (2011).
Arias’s theater works have been translated into German, English, and French. Her works have been performed internationally at festivals including Steirischer Herbst, Graz; Festival d’Avignon; In Transit Festival, Berlin; We are here, Dublin; Spielart Festival, Munich; Alkantara Festival, Lisbon; and Radicals Festival, Barcelona.
Learn more about Lola Arias.
Text and directed by: Lola Arias
Artistic consultant: Paula Bravo
vidéo: Nicole Senerman
Music: Ulises Conti
Technical direction: Martín Montaner
scenography and light design: Rocío Hernández
Choreography : Soledad Gaspar
With: Paula Bravo, Leopoldo Courbis, Pablo Díaz, Ítalo Gallardo,
Soledad Gaspar, Alejandro Gómez, Fernanda González, Viviana
Hernández, Ana Laura Racz, Jorge Rivero, Nicole Senerman
El año en que nací is a production de la Fundación Teatro a Mil-Chile
