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Lola Arias
El año en que nací/The year I was born

In the foreground, a woman wearing a traditional Mexican shirt and jeans speaks into a microphone. An image of a woman's hands highlighting text in a newspaper is projected in the background.

Lola Arias, El año en que nací

Photo: David Alarcón

The experience shakes you to the core . . . . Recommended for all generations—history is more than learning dates.

—La Segunda

About

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?

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.

  • The performance is in Spanish with English subtitles.
  • Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes

About the Artist

Lola Arias(b. 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. Inher 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.

On a dark stage, people facing away from the camera take electric guitars and amps out of dingy lockers.

Lola Arias, El año en que nací

Photo: David Alarcón

Performance images

On a dark stage with a screen projecting a landscape in the background, a row of adults sit at individual desks, tabletops raised. They look at a man to their left standing at a microphone.

Lola Arias, El año en que nací

Photo: David Alarcón
Close up photograph of ten dingy, beat-up lockers, each with a paper sign marked with a different four-digit year between 1974 and 1989 taped to the front.

Lola Arias, El año en que nací

Photo: David Alarcón
On a dark stage with lockers barely visible in the background, nine people stand in a row, five of them gesturing with their arms.

Performance view, Lola Arias, El año en que nací/The year I was born, MCA Chicago, Jan 22, 2014

Photo: Nathan Keay © MCA Chicago
On a stage set with lockers and a wooden desk, a man and woman stand at spread out microphones. He plays an electric guitar and a bass drum.

Performance view, Lola Arias, El año en que nací/The year I was born, MCA Chicago, Jan 22, 2014

Photo: Nathan Keay © MCA Chicago
A performance still shows seven actors walking away from the audience toward lockers at the back of the stage.

Performance view, Lola Arias, El año en que nací/The year I was born, MCA Chicago, Jan 22, 2014

Photo: Nathan Keay © MCA Chicago
A man on stage speaks through a microphone with a row of adults seated behind him at individual desks.

Performance view, Lola Arias, El año en que nací/The year I was born, MCA Chicago, Jan 22, 2014

Photo: Nathan Keay © MCA Chicago
A performance still shows one actor watching a projection of what a seated actor draws at his desk.

Performance view, Lola Arias, El año en que nací/The year I was born, MCA Chicago, Jan 22, 2014

Photo: Nathan Keay © MCA Chicago
On a stage set with lockers and gym mats, a woman on a freestanding ladder talks through a loud speaker. She has thrown something in the air, and two men below her cringe, taking shelter under the ladder.

Performance view, Lola Arias, El año en que nací/The year I was born, MCA Chicago, Jan 22, 2014

Photo: Nathan Keay © MCA Chicago

Funding

Lola Arias: El año en que nací/The year I was born is generously supported by Lois and Steve Eisen and the Eisen Family Foundation. Support for the presentation is also generously provided by the Consulate General of Argentina in Chicago. Touring support is made possible in part by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Chile, and by the National Performance Network (NPN) Performing Americas Program. El año en que nací/The year I was born is a production of Fundación Teatro a Mil, Santiago, Chile (FITAM).

Major contributors of National Performance Network (NPN) include the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Ford Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts (a federal agency), the MetLife Foundation, and the Nathan Cummings Foundation. Performing Americas is a partnership between NPN and the Network of Cultural Promoters of Latin America and the Caribbean (La RED), with funding provided by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation.