Memoria del teatro : mujeres de Yuyachkani.

Interview with Ana Correa and Teresa Ralli, members of Peruvian theater ensemble Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani, conducted by sociologist and Dean of the Universidad Católica's School of Communication Arts and Sciences, Luis Peirano, for Peru's TV Channel 7 show 'Memoria del Teatro.' In this interview, conducted in the context of the celebration of the International Women's Day, Peirano, Correa and Ralli discuss the role of women in Peruvian theater. Topics covered include women's role in society, the difficulty of making a living as professional female theater practitioners, and how the women artists' work with Yuyachkani provides them with a space for self-reflection about these roles, a creative realm where to play with and challenge them. For Ralli and Correa, theater has been a space for personal growth, aesthetic exploration, and social intervention. The artists discuss the interplay between their workshops with Peruvian women (dealing with issues of sensibility, bodily awareness, and memory), their theater performances, and their political activism in Peru, both in terms of the internal workings of Yuyachkani and with their audience. This program includes clips from 'La Primera Cena' (one of Yuyachkani's plays) and the Encuentro Nacional de Actrices (a conference/event that brought together various Peruvian female performers of Peru). Teresa Ralli also discusses her role in Yuyachkani's play 'Músicos Ambulantes, ' and the role women artists play in the creation and performance of her piece 'Antígona.' Peru's most important theatre collective, Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani (www.yuyachkani.org) has been working since 1971 at the forefront of theatrical experimentation, political performance, and collective creation. 'Yuyachkani' is a Quechua word that means 'I am thinking, I am remembering'; under this name, the theatre group has devoted itself to the collective exploration of embodied social memory, particularly in relation to questions of ethnicity, violence, and memory in Peru. The group is comprised of seven actors (Augusto Casafranca, Amiel Cayo, Ana Correa, Débora Correa, Rebeca Ralli, Teresa Ralli, and Julián Vargas), a technical designer (Fidel Melquíades), and an artistic director (Miguel Rubio), who have made a commitment to collective creation as a mode of theatrical production and to group theater as a life style. Their work has been among the most important in Latin America's so called 'New Popular Theater', with a strong commitment to grass-roots community issues, mobilization, and advocacy. Yuyachkani won Peru's National Human Rights Award in 2000. Known for its creative embrace of both indigenous performance forms as well as cosmopolitan theatrical forms, Yuyachkani offers insight into Peruvian and Latin American theatre, and to broader issues of postcolonial social aesthetics. Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics