No me toquen ese valse.

Summary: Video documentation of theater piece No Me Toquen Ese Vals (Don't Play That Waltz for Me), created collectively by performers Rebeca Ralli and Julián Vargas, and director Miguel Rubio of Peruvian Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani. In this play, two dead nightclub performers return to their favorite club in Lima, which has become a city of unrelieved destruction. The performers, characters Abelardo and Amanda, try to recapture their act, their identities, their audience and a grip on life. Rising from the mists of death, or perhaps from hell, the performers--he amid racks of drums and cymbals and she in a wheelchair--try to recover speech, coordination, a sense of each other, passion, even sex, but they never quite connect. Perus 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 Americas so called New Popular Theater, with a strong

Summary: commitment to grass-roots community issues, mobilization, and advocacy. Yuyachkani won Perus 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 theater, and to broader issues of postcolonial social aesthetics.

Credits: Miguel Rubio, director, co-creator ; Fidel Melquíades, technical director ; Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani, producer ; Rebeca Ralli, co-creator ; Julián Vargas, co-creator ; Felipe Herrera, sound ; Arturo Recuay, lights ; Jorge Ramírez, lights.

Credits: Rebeca Ralli, Julián Vargas.