“We Are United, Not by Love, but by Fright": Re-mapping the Argentine Theater Scene During the Last Dictatorship

Abstract

The following article reflects on shared elements among diverse experiences in the Argentine theater scene during the last civic-military dictatorship through two lenses: an aesthetic lens and a sociological lens. With the latter, we advance an expanded cartography of scenic practices that took place in the city of Buenos Aires, as well as a conceptualization of “mapping,” a review of the theater histories that have legitimized a particular canon, and a handmade cartography that includes all the experiences. This new map includes varied experiences, confirming the hypothesis that—contrary to canonical sense— the practices of intervention, resistance, activist, and/or clandestine practices mostly took place in the same areas of the city as the theater that occupied the center of the field. Our second hypothesis concerns aesthetics and argues that metaphor is, perhaps, the most frequently shared resource among these counter-establishment practices. In theater, the use of metaphor has long been studied as a mode of indirect resistance during several twentieth-century dictatorships, but it is often thought that activism, unlike theater, resorts to more direct language. Questioning this assumption, we propose the hypothesis that the central theater in the field and activist interventions share the use of metaphor as a privileged aesthetic resource to avoid censorship and persecution.