Argentine theater director/playwright Lola Arias’s celebrated production Minefield, the concluding performance of Out There 2019, examines the 1982 Falklands War through the eyes and intense memories of six men—three British and three Argentine—who fought against one another on a small set of islands more than 35 years ago. Minefield has toured the world, selling out in more than 30 cities internationally, and last year Theatre of War, the film Arias made featuring the men from Minefield, won accolades at the Berlin International Film Festival. Walker Director and Senior Curator of Performing Arts Philip Bither caught up with Arias in her home in Buenos Aires just before she departed for the North American debut of Minefield. In their wide-ranging conversation, Arias discusses her childhood memories of La Guerra de Malvinas (as Argentines call the Falklands War), her interdisciplinary artistic practice, the process of combining theater and real life, the illusive nature of memory, and making non-heroic, female-directed art about war.
Philip Bither (PB)
I would like to start with just a question about your own personal memories about the Guerra de las Malvinas, and how that differs from a country like the US where people know very little about it.
Lola Arias (LA)
I was born in 1976, the year the military dictatorship started, and I was five years old when the war took place. I was in the last year of kindergarten. We used to do simulations of a war attack in school, and we had to hide under the tables because there was the absurd fantasy that England was going to attack Buenos Aires. I also remember my sister writing letters to the soldiers, because in school kids were writing letters and sending chocolates to the soldiers. At the time, in 1982, the military dictatorship was losing power, so in fact, the war was waged to regain popularity. Somehow, the whole society was supporting the war and doing all kind of things for the soldiers. There was a feeling of “we are all together,” which had been lost after years of dictatorship and murder and disappearances and so on.
PB
Was there suspicion that the dictatorship was just attempting to prop up its popularity and support?
LA
That was the main thing. They did it to regain popularity. In England, Margaret Thatcher was facing a big crisis because of the fights with the miners, so she was fighting to impose what was called afterwards Thatcherism, which was destroying the unions and pushing through massive privatization and neoliberal…. sometimes I don’t find the English words.
PB
The whole neoliberal worldview?
LA
Yes, the neoliberal worldview that had to be imposed, and the war was the way to make it possible, in a way, because she gained popularity that allowed her to win a second mandate in 1983. So this war was very important in both countries. On the Argentinian side, after we lost the war, it was like the final strike to the dictatorship. On the British side, it was a way to gain popularity and be reelected. So it was very influential in both countries, even though it was only a two-month-long war, and it was a small war that happened on an almost-deserted islands with two thousand inhabitants. So the meaning of it was more political and symbolic for both countries than the actual impact of the war in terms of casualties or global impact on the rest of the world.
PB
Because of how small and, for much of the world, inconsequential this conflict was, did you feel that it was particularly well-suited to use for theater looking at the general banality of war itself?
LA
The fact that it’s so small and unknown for the rest of the world—and irrelevant—makes it even harder,
PB
You’ve talked about the work being as much about the elusive nature of memory and the notions of time as it is about the brutality of a war experience. How does memory serve as a tool for you? What you are investigating in that realm?
LA
The whole project started with one question: “What is the memory that stayed in your mind until today?” I don’t want you to tell me the whole story of the war; I just want to you to tell me the memory that stays in your mind. The image you can’t get rid of. The ghost that is following you. The flashback that comes to your mind. And this—trying to find this image, this strong memory—was the most difficult part, because some people get used to speaking about the war and they start to rely on anecdotes they always tell. When you have been in a war and everybody asks you, “Ah, how was the war? What did you do?,” you start to tell the same story because you also want to protect yourself and not be confronted with things you don’t want to be confronted by. So going back to this deep memory was a big part of the process of trying to find out what is the most painful thing that comes back, and then we tried to build up their stories from there. This kind of digging into their past, of course, brought up many other things. And the fact that they were doing this process together was also very special because during the process of rehearsal they started to remember things that they had forgotten, just because they had the others there.
PB
Can you share an example?
LA
I asked all of them to write in a diary during the rehearsals so they could reflect on what are they going through. I remember Marcelo [Vallejo] wrote in his diary once, “I am in a rehearsal. I hear the voices of the British people saying, ‘Give back your weapons.’ Weapons and helmets, weapons and helmets. And I realized the sound of this voice brings me back to the end of the war, and I’m going back to what I felt when I had to give back my helmet and my weapon, and I felt lonely and lost and [asking] what did I fight for?” The fact that they had to hear voices again, the voices of the others, of the enemies, in a language that most of them don’t even understand, was bringing back real memories that were somehow hidden. On one hand it was very beautiful, but it was also often very complicated because some memories were traumatic for them, so we also had to have a psychologist who knew how to intervene when there were issues that were difficult to deal with.
PB
You also had quite a long development process. Was that because you knew this was going to be a difficult process for the men to go through?
LA
Yeah. This is how I usually work, so that’s the problem. Sometimes people want to invite me to do a piece, and they say, “Well, we have six weeks of rehearsal and then you can show your thing,” and I’m like, that’s not how it works, because I really need a lot of time to get to know the people, to interview them, to build this trust between us so they feel free to speak about things, and then I can write about it. So all this takes a lot of time.
PB
Your bio states that you “examine the overlapping zones between reality and fiction.” Does that relate to the men’s memories, of how close they were to the reality of what really happened? Or does it not matter?
LA
I think you try to dig as deep as possible into the memories and go beyond the anecdote to find the parts that are missing. But at some point you have to know that we are all writing the novels of our lives, and we are all making up things and adding details that never happened. And we don’t even know at some point in our lives which are the details that we added over years or what really happened.
Also, the piece talks a lot about these moments when the men are discovering something they’ve forgotten; they are coming back to a memory and completing the memory. And each of them has a different way to recall and tell the story. Sometimes people think that they just came to rehearsal and told their stories, and all I just did was edit—like cut and paste, as they say. But we worked a lot on every text, which is, of course, very written and very condensed. We worked a lot on the images, and so on. And it somehow became a text, a fiction, a story.
PB
So is that what you mean when you talk about co-authoring the piece with the men? You seem to bring so much of your own aesthetic and artistry into your works. But how does that process of co-authoring, of co-creation, work? And how do you find that balance between your own shaping and directorial or writing impulses and the men’s own stories?
LA
It’s a constant negotiation, because I am a writer. I come from fiction. I studied literature. So writing is part of the way I understand reality. I write it to just be able to deal with it. So the fact that I work a lot with the text means that I am finding, as the author and the director, text that is interesting and is condensed and so on. This takes a lot of time. People sometimes think that a writer in a documentary piece has nothing to do, or that it’s just based in editing, but I completely transform images and phrases to be able to tell it in sharp and strong ways.
So usually I do a lot of interviews, I write, then I give it back to them. They’ll try the text, then we speak about it, then sometimes we have big discussions about one phrase or even one word that can trigger something that you don’t know. And it’s a constant work of writing, them trying the text, me writing, doing it again, and so on. This is the way we collaborate because they have their own opinion and they have to say text that they feel represents them. They cannot be on stage just saying the text because it’s their own experience. But on the other hand, they know that every line they say, it was written by me. So this is a very complicated thing.
PB
You’ve talked about the uniqueness that
LA
Yeah. The main problem is that people don’t understand that documentary theater is not just a trend. It’s a genre. I mean, people don’t ask documentary filmmakers, “Why you don’t use actors?”
Theater is an amazing place where you can produce these kind of encounters between different parts of society. And I think, for example, for the veterans, most of them are military people, some are not because they were civilians who went to war on the Argentine side, but to be able to meet with the civilian population and tell their stories and have this encounter where they are being heard and being taken into consideration, it’s not the same as having an actor standing in for them. If they would have been part of the process and then there is an actor taking their role, what do they gain from it in terms of recognition, being heard, empowering people?
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Lola Arias, Minefield Photo: Gustavo Gavotti
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Lola Arias, Minefield Photo: Gustavo Gavotti
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Lola Arias, Minefield Photo: Gustavo Gavotti
I think it’s political act to decide to just have these people on stage and not actors because they are the ones who are getting all this feedback, all this love, all this recognition. And this is the most political thing about doing the documentary theater. People perform and through this performance they get something and they understand something about their own experience, and they find other ways to communicate with their own past and understand that the audience itself, in a way, can have this encounter with people they would normally not meet. And that’s what makes it so exceptional, and that’s why people stay after the show and want to talk to them and tell them, “Thank you, thank you,” because they understand that it has been very challenging for them to go through this whole process of creating a piece, being on stage, and so on.
I believe that also, in an era of digital and virtual connection, theater is a place where you have to be, where you have to remain involved. Otherwise it doesn’t happen. It’s one of the few places, like church, where you actually meet.
PB
You often seem to use live music in your work. You used a band in a cathartic way in both The Year I Was Born (Out There 2014) and Minefield. Does it relate to your work as a singer and musician? Or do you find that when a band ultimately forms on stage it brings a certain kind of other power to the theater?
LA
Yeah. I love live music on stage because the band is doing something that’s not just performing or storytelling, but they are producing music which allows other ways of connecting with each other. Especially in the veterans’ piece it was very important because they didn’t understand each other and they didn’t share a common language but they had music as a common language. So they could play together without having to talk, they could understand each other through the music without having to exchange words. So that was a way, also, to create this bond between them.
PB
It’s interesting that The Beatles or punk rock might form as some connective tissue that they share. Even though it came out of the UK, it seemed like everyone knew those songs.
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Lola Arias, Minefield Photo: Tristram Kenton
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Lola Arias, Minefield Photo: Tristram Kenton
LA
Yeah, I chose The Beatles because I found it so, in a way, surprising that one of the Argentine veterans was playing in a Beatles tribute band.
PB
Oh, I thought that was one of the British guys.
LA
No. One of the Argentine veterans had a tribute band of The Beatles, so it was in a way funny. I thought, okay we have to work with this Beatles thing. And with the last song, the idea was to compose something that was coming from their own minds. I gave them a task: I wanted a text made out of questions, and it was mainly written by Lou [Armour] with the collaboration of the others. I asked them what are the questions you still would like to be answered? Like what are the questions that you’re still struggling with?
I think it’s a moment where you see these things they have been through, something that we, the civilians, the rest of the society, can’t understand. Because that’s the lyric of the song, “Have you ever been to war? Have you ever seen a friend dying? Have you ever visited a friend’s grave with his mother?” It’s all these things that they have been through that we haven’t. And it’s a moment where you also see there is anger in a veteran. There was an anger with society because they had done something for all of us that none of us will ever do, which was to put their life in danger for us, for the country.
PB
It seems like one of the many parts that could connect with veterans from other wars, like say in the US. I’m wondering if you’ll see or would like to see people who fought in Iraq or Afghanistan or other US wars.
LA
Yeah. I think it’s very interesting to do it in the US, in a country that, like England, fought all over the world. I mean, England, from 1914 on, fought every year in a different part of the world, every year in a different conflict. I’m sure you can say the same about the US.
PB
It’s like the perpetual war.
LA
PB
The range of techniques you use in your theatrical work and in this piece—live and recorded video, historical documents, texts, music—how do you choose which things to use?
LA
Over more than 30 years of doing documentary theater, of course there are some procedures that you start to develop: how to deal with documents, how to work with film footage, how to interact. For me, what is interesting about documentary theater is that you can bring these documents back to life, not like in a museum where you are somehow observing them or reading them or just being a spectator, but through performers really interacting with these documents. Transforming them, performing with past artifacts. It’s much more than just showing them. This idea of creating a live archive—through the stories but also through the documents, through the objects, and the unique poems—is very important in this piece. In a way, everything in the piece is an archive of these lives.
PB
Do you see the work you do in this kind of theater aligned with a people’s history movement or forms of a social history that became prominent in the ’60s, with the lives of everyday people telling a different kind of story than historians had done in the past?
LA
Yeah. I think of course there are these personal stories that become like a living archive of a time, which is also really creating a new narrative of a historical event. The fact that I am a woman also creating this archive of a war, it’s also something very unusual because it’s always men who tell the story of wars. I remember, for example, when I read Alexandra Svetlana Alexievich, this Belarusian writer who wrote stories of women who fought in the Second World War. It was the first time a writer could tell the story of women who really fought in the war. Then you realize that there is another way of telling the stories of these female combatants, that it’s, in a way, a story that does not deal with all this heroism, this kind of epic of war, I think that falls apart in this piece.
PB
Yes, agreed.
LA
And it falls apart because I didn’t want to tell an epic story of the war. I wanted to tell the story of a failure, of a disaster that was produced by this war. It was a big struggle because sometimes [the participating men] wanted or needed to be portrayed as heroes, even if they were not so aware of it. But they wanted to bring back this epic of war in different ways, not because they felt they did something amazing, but in a more unconscious way: as men, they were still carrying this idea of transmitting this epic of war. I think the fact that I was the one writing it— the fact that I was a woman writing these stories of men—created another narrative of the whole historical event.
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