Aliados and its theatrical creation

Memory is one of the great contemporary issues. The collective memory in regards to recent events, like individual memories – questioned daily since the social revelation of Alzheimer’s disease and illnesses connected to neurological degeneration – raises extraordinarily sensitive issues: manipulation, interpretation, voluntary or involuntary forgetfulness, archives and conservation technologies, corruption, destruction, approximation…

Sébastián Rivas and Esteban Buch’s project is fascinating in the sense that it takes a trivial event from the margins of history and sets in motion the political and human parameters of a period not long ago – yet already a bit forgotten – that can be associated with several moments in history and to the events of today.

Sebastian Rivas & Antoine Gindt © Philippe Stirnweiss

Based on the relationship of a short “courtesy meeting”, two of the principal protagonists of the political and ideological history of the 1980s are confronted with their failing memory and the established facts as they were recorded and commentated and as we rediscover them today with the benefit of hindsight. The distortion creates the tension necessary for a strong dramatic argument, relayed by musical, theatrical, and technological means that demand an interpretation.The Chilean dictatorship, Thatcherism, the Falklands War, the context of the Cold War and the partition of the world 30 years ago are the background for Aliados. From this hyper-reality, this comparison between the performance – inevitably out of touch, lighter and cheerful – and a documentary leads us a broader reflection on our position as witnesses or actors of history.

To stage this performance I asked the filmmaker Philippe Béziat to be very active in the production. What better means than audio-visual capture to denote “real-time”? It enables virtuosity, flexibility, and the inclusion of historical images and the capture of theatrical situations.

Our objective is to intertwine intimately and simultaneously the stage and its filmed extension, making this ambiguous zone of the memory between reality and fiction tangible. To create, using these means, a hybrid object to be sought between lyric theater and cinema.