Much has been made theoretically of contemporary documentary theatre's potential for revealing the complexities of historical reality, to draw in the audience to be a ‘co-producer’ of multiple realities that displace monolithic historical discourses,Footnote ¹ as well as to spur an audience into civic engagement through a better understanding of marginalized, previously muted histories.Footnote ² While the measurement of the effectiveness in select communities is scarce and limited, such works have primarily functioned to give voice to marginalized groups or to offer up alternative and often more complex accounts of historical events and political conflicts, although often the accounts remain one-sided.Footnote ³

It is within the context of art's potential to interact with socio-historical structures after historical trauma that I situate an analysis of Lola Arias's play El año en que nací (The Year I Was Born) (2012), one of many of what Arias has called ‘social experiments’ that are products of workshops with various groups who tell their stories onstage, whether or not they are actors by profession.Footnote ⁴ Quantification of the play's effect on Chilean society's ability to reconcile with its troubled past remains difficult to gauge; however, at the same time there is anecdotal evidence that El año en que nací has not only affected its participants/actors, but also allowed for renewed debate about how to view the history of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship (1973–1990) and its aftermath.

In addition to situating Arias's play within a tradition of documentary theatre that seeks to establish an alternative view of history, the present study also contextualizes El año en que nací within recent scholarship that seeks to explore the connections between contemporary theatre, historical re-enactments, politics and the public. Of particular note is Jennifer Thompson's dissertation, which synthesizes a wealth of theoretical perspectives that explore the links between performance, social and cultural institutions, and aesthetics. Thompson poses the productive question of ‘how to non-reductively conceptualize the dynamic linking political discourse, institutions, art making, and artistic agency; and … whether and how political resistance, engagement … can be meaningfully and substantially enacted in theatre’.Footnote ⁵ Her theoretical synthesis identifies processes in Chilean theatre during and after the Pinochet dictatorship that allow for pluralism in the context of historico-cultural institutions that would try to contain theatre's political implications.

Equally pertinent to this study are the works of Rebecca Schneider and Paola Hernández, who both rework the idea of the archive as Jacques Derrida analysed it in order to recast the concept of the archive and repertoire in Diana Taylor's work. Taylor's analysis defines the archive as stabilized in enduring texts and artefacts, and the repertoire or performance as a more ephemeral and momentary embodied memory which has the potential to keep, replicate and transform meanings.Footnote ⁶ Schneider questions what she sees as Taylor's binary separation of the archive and performance through exploration of ‘re-enactments’ of history, historical figures and politics, while Hernández does so within the context of Latin American documentary theatre. Both scholars assert, in their analyses of differing types of performance, that the archive can become part of the repertoire and that performance can revise the archive – that artefacts, texts and photographs of official and personal stories can be seen in a new light when performed.Footnote ⁷

This theoretical vein proves to be fruitful regarding Arias's play. By embodying positions vis-à-vis the dictatorship that belie the simplistic binaries that characterize the official history's account of what happened (in the media, government and conflicting groups), El año en que nací calls into question the narrative of polarization that presumably defined Chilean society before the coup: right versus left, capitalist versus socialist, and rich versus poor. In doing so, the performances of children of the generation of adults that lived the Pinochet years from distinct positions allow for the possibility of engagement of more sectors of society in re-enacted memories of selected events before and after the end of the Pinochet government. These events are intertwined with the cast's personal memories and re-enactments of their parents’ lives up to their present. Throughout the course of the play, the presentation of the past in the form of archival artefacts (texts, media reproductions, events, testimonies) and the performance of history serves first as a mirror to Chilean spectators of the present. Ultimately the performance of the official archive, with the added family stories that problematize the official sweeping generalizations and exclusions, provides an opening to refashioning history and breaks a reigning silence.

The silence in Chile regarding its traumatic past can be traced to the archive in the form of the media of the time and the dictatorship's own framing of the enemies of chilendad or national identity, as well as the impetus of politicians during the democratic transition for reconciliation. With widespread impunity for state-sponsored human rights violations committed at all levels of government during the dictatorships of the 1970s, and with transitional governments often eager to push for so-called ‘reconciliation’, societies of the Southern Cone in general have struggled to recover and have continued to suffer conflict and fears related to those years long after democratic transitions. Nowhere has this situation reigned so stubbornly as in Chile, where the country was forced to bow under the yoke of Augusto Pinochet during the years following his exit from the presidency: first as he remained head of the armed forces from 1990 to 1997 and also as part of an appointment of a block of sympathetic senators as he assumed a lifetime seat until 2001.

As a result of this, and the time limitations on the Rettig Commission's investigation of crimes under the shadow of the dictator's lingering power, Chilean society remained repressed, with deep schisms emerging at times of national tension. Each 11 September, peaceful demonstrations by both supporters and victims of the Pinochet regime commemorating the dictatorship turned into riots by those who supported Pinochet or those victimized by it.Footnote ⁸ At first, this would fit the historical narrative of a polarized society with unresolved extremes, which surely is part of the unrest that has led to the present-day vote to rewrite the Chilean Constitution. However, the student protests, which began in 2006 demanding more investment in public schools and spreading to university students in 2011 against for-profit higher education, raised questions not only about unresolved political schisms, but also about the neo-liberal economic order that the dictatorship had put in place. Rather than simply reverting to the binary schisms of the past, Arias's work opens up multiple poles and perspectives, thereby enabling a re-evaluation of the dictatorship and aftermath that allows for more focus on the present – this during a time of emergent social upheaval.

When El año en que nací was first performed in Santiago's Festival Teatro a Mil in 2012, Chile was fast arriving at what some scholars have called the end of the Chilean consensus, the governing framework instituted after the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, to which successive Concertación governments adhered well into the second millennium.Footnote ⁹ Alexander Wilde has shown that the appearance of consensus in the decade succeeding the democratic transition was perhaps aided by a parallel silence and distrust in social relations:

For Andrea Aravena and Manuel Antonio Baeza, the distrust is tied to a deteriorating concept of collective and individual identity related to a discontent with elitist politics, and lends to the weak associations and social distrust among the population.Footnote ¹¹

Successive governments, beginning with Patricio Aylwin's in 1990, had sought to pursue only reforms that could achieve consensus in a Congress still under the yoke of the 1980 Constitution and the negotiated transitional framework that assured that the pinochetistas would hold in place the neo-liberal models implemented during the dictatorship. Concertación governments thus prioritized political stability by enacting a top-down consensus detached from grass-roots participation; as a result, the privatization policies enacted during the dictatorship remained.Footnote ¹² This strategy was accompanied by a demobilization of the movements that had arisen during the 1980s who had served as an impetus to force the dictatorship to hold the 1988 plebiscite that would remove Pinochet from the presidency.

Scholars of differing disciplines have attributed the depolitization of civil society to various factors which can be reduced to the intertwining of political decisions based on trauma and the realities of the country's imperfect democracy. Through a political-science lens, the political repression, economic crisis and shock therapy of Pinochet's neo-liberal restructuring decimated the organized-labour movements fomented by his predecessor.Footnote ¹³ From a socio-psychological perspective, the effects of that same political violence and radical market restructuring provoked the ‘privatization, withdrawal, and individuation of Chileans’ behaviour during the democratic transition, – a phenomenon that was then passed down to the next generation.Footnote ¹⁴

The limitations of Chilean democracy in the decade following the dictatorship left in place a vision of a Chilean society that had splintered into extremes during the years leading up to and during the presidency of Salvador Allende, a vision exacerbated by the military junta's oppositional, nationalistic rhetoric that opposed the corrupt, foreign Marxist to true chilenidad, defined by Western culture, Catholicism and Hispanic heritage.Footnote ¹⁵ This opposition also existed overwhelmingly in Chilean media before the 1973 coup that brought the junta to power, asserting that by the time the UP (Unidad Popular; Popular Unity) assumed power in 1970, the political press had significantly increased in importance. For example, Patricio Dooner, who, toward the end of the dictatorship published exhaustive studies of the print press on both left and right, shows the extreme polarization of both popular and more journalistically respected media, which traded in the Manichaean stereotypes of communist or socialist versus capitalist, the poor and exploited versus the rich and exploiters, fascist versus communist, as well as in misogynistic and vulgar barbs in the popular press. These outlets were linked specifically to more rigid elements in Salvador Allende's UP and the then newly formed right-wing Frente Nacionalista (Nationalist Front). Alongside the traditional media there emerged several publications at the extreme ends of the political spectrum that were oriented toward political confrontation, which created an ‘ideologically monopolized’ environment that seeped into the collective consciousness of large sectors of the population.Footnote ¹⁶ A revival of oppositional media after the junta's 1980 Constitution allowed for intermittent openings for dissent in the junta's attempt to portray itself as ‘democratic’ by allowing for the founding of new media.Footnote ¹⁷ A succession of Concertación governments opted for the neo-liberal media model of media conglomeration and entertainment-heavy content, identified with the ideology of consumption and amenable to transnational investment, which aided the depolitization process.Footnote ¹⁸

A result of the political impulse toward consensus policies and the depolitization of society is the persistence of previously formed assumptions about Chilean polarization. As Daniela Jara has noted in her work with those who grew up during the dictatorship, the arena of official memory was distorted by Manichaean categories of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ people, with no consideration given to the specific circumstances of their lives.Footnote ¹⁹ Therefore official memory was defined only primarily by media, political and human rights organizations, with meaning specific only to their own agendas. Both Jara and Cornejo et al. note that silence marks the memories of the second and third generations, leaving them with fragmented memories that seem threatening and configuring autobiographical stories of the following generations within a family logic of those responsible for the trauma and those who were its direct victims.Footnote ²⁰

This backdrop of a polarization frozen in time by silence and false consensus highlights the risk that Arias, who grew up in Argentina during that country's dictatorship (1976–83), has taken in uniting a diverse group of young Chilean adults who had grown up during the dictatorship and whose families were situated in a variety of political postures vis-à-vis the military regime of 1973–90. The cast, half of which had no prior acting experience, includes four children whose parents were leftist militants: Alexandra Benado is the daughter of a militant with the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR) and who was killed by the military, who then fabricated a story about how she died; Ana Laura Racz's mother, a messenger for MIR with a mysterious handler with whom she was romantically involved; Soledad Gaspar's parents, who belonged to the Frente Patriótica Manuel Rodríguez (Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front – FPMR), known as the group which would later attempt an assassination of Pinochet, although Soledad's parents lived in exile in Mexico; and Fernanda González, whose parents were also FPMR members. Three cast members have fathers who were part of the army or police: Ítalo Gallardo, the son of a marine who entered the service of Pinochet's military; Leopoldo Courbis, whose father was a highly placed intelligence official in Pinochet's government and a bodyguard in Allende's; and Viviana Hernández, the daughter of a carabinero (referring to the national police) who killed a militant after the dictatorship. Two sons represent the intelligentsia; Alejandro Gómez's father was a journalist for a newspaper formed, in part, to support Salvador Allende's Popular Unity, and was taken prisoner by the Pinochet regime; and Pablo Díaz's father was a leader of Patria y Libertad (Homeland and Liberty), an anti-Allende, anti-communist group in whose weekly newspaper Pablo's father published articles and for which he participated in an earlier failed coup against Allende. One cast member, Jorge Rivero, is the son of a businessman and ardent Pinochet supporter, and one, Nicole Senerman, is from an apolitical upper-middle-class family that spent part of the dictatorship avoiding the curfews by renting an ambulance to attend parties, and part living the ‘American Dream’ in the USA. Each story is illustrated with documents, pictures, toys and other artefacts projected to the audience, as the cast was required to research their families by asking their family for pictures or items charged with memories from the time of the coup.

This variety in stories and familial situations is just one creative decision that allows for the weakening of the binaries that have characterized the archive created by the media polarization prior to the dictatorship and the junta's portrayal of the enemies of Chile, left in place by consensus politics of post-dictatorship governments, and the focus on human rights violations of direct victims. A key strategy is Arias's insistence that the actors deliver the fragmented stories of their parents and eventually their own, without over-emoting. Alejandro Zambra describes the actors as mixing ‘the public and the intimate without fear of looking frivolous or judgemental, unmoved or resentful’.Footnote ²¹ The performative backdrop sets the stories within the historical context of major events during the dictatorship: the coup; exile; Pinochet's initial decrees abolishing democratic institutions; the power outages of the 1980s; the military raid on a house of militants that resulted in the murder of Alexandra's mother; the crowning of Miss Chile, Cecilia Bolocco, as Miss Universe; a visit by Pope John Paul; and Pinochet's 1998 arrest. The presentational style of performance, without a direct appeal solely to one side of the binary (the dictatorship) or the other (its victims), allows the public an opening to consider the complexity of post-dictatorship Chile through the eyes of succeeding generations. During the embodiment of societal events, the cast act out key moments of their parents’ lives, as well as events during the dictatorship and its aftermath, and takes on roles from other cast members’ lives, allowing themselves to be possessed, so to speak, by the other. In the process, Arias weaves the conflictive past with the conflictive present, deterritorializing the binary oppositions that had defined the Chilean conflicts of the 1970s and opening the closed ideological field to more nuanced perspectives by bringing discourse down to the personal in key moments. Arias's skilled weaving of present with past, while still employing a chronology of historical events, contains moments, such as Alexandra's, where the historical merges with the personal. The past interrupts the present, as in the scene near the end (‘The Democracy Game’) where each actor relates an event related to the dictatorship that is ongoing and that influences their lives now. The present, in turn, interrupts the past by adding nuance to parental positions, or what Schneider has aptly called ‘fugitive moments’ of re-enactments, which, in this case, weaken the vision of a polarized Chile of yore, on the verge of civil war. According to Schneider, these moments not only serve to question the past, but also open up possibilities for the future by playing with time as ‘malleable material’ that can be manipulated in re-enactments as political material: ‘Might the past's fugitive moments not only remind us of yesterday's sense of tomorrow, but also compose the sense again and offer, without expiration date, a politic of possibility?’Footnote ²²

The play begins with mimicking, to a point, the oppositional explanation of democracy's end. As the individual cast members introduce themselves, they juxtapose the date of their birth with a historical event that reflects opposition, thereby firmly linking the personal with the national, beginning with Alejandro, born the year Salvador Allende nationalizes Chile's copper industry (1971), and ending with Fernanda, born the year Patricio Aylwin is elected (1989) and the transition begins. What immediately follows clearly sets up the opposition between poles of left and right, socialist and capitalist. Alejandro begins with a narrative of his father, an intellectual and anti-clerical journalist for a pro-Salvador Allende daily, whom he describes as authoritarian, pleasant, hard-working, sexist and a Stalinist, imprisoned and tortured during the military regime. Immediately following is the opening story of Pablo, who is the godson of Augusto Pinochet's family lawyer and whose father was a co-leader and journalist for an ultra-right paramilitary group, the Frente Nacionalista de Patria y Libertad (Homeland and Liberty Nationalist Front), and one of the conspirators who proposed the tanquetazo, an army regiment's failed coup attempt against Allende on 29 June 1973. Thus begins a performative tour through individual and national histories. The fact that both men are journalists is symbolic of the idea of the archive's history created in preceding Chilean media and political rhetoric before, during, and after the coup, and would lead one to believe that the play would repeat the same history. The two stories are then followed by a recording of Radio Cooperativa reporting the bombing of the Moneda presidential palace and the first military decrees interspersed with cast members’ accounts of where their parents were and what they were doing on 11 September 1973, the day of the coup.

The background to the collapse of traditional oppositions consists of historical performances that symbolically re-enact the dictatorship from the fall of democracy to the aftermath of the junta's departure. Some performances are light-hearted, some dramatic, but focus more on democracy's tragic fall and its continuing effects on all sectors of society, rather than on one side or the other in the polarized version of official discourse in media and history. Here it is useful to recall Diana Taylor's concept of the scenario, the performance that includes what the archive leaves out and provides the frame that activates the social dramas of the individual actors by including the setup, action and gestures. For Taylor, the scenario is generative of a critical distance between social actor and character, creating a space for parody and resistance,Footnote ²³ in this case resistance to the binary simplicity of the archive. In reactivating a historical event, the scenario forces the spectators to locate themselves within it – in Arias's work, within the multi-perspective personal stories told by the actors: ‘performance makes visible (for an instant, live, now) that which is always already there: the ghosts, the trope, the scenarios that structure our individual and collective life’.Footnote ²⁴ The efficacy of performance derives from the ways in which they hook into public fantasies: It is ‘an invocational practice, provoking emotions it claims only to represent and evoking memories and grief that belong to some other body’.Footnote ²⁵

What is visible in the gestures, actions and props are principally the images of the fall and degradation of democracy on the one hand, and the destabilization of the binary oppositions that presumably cause it. One example of the re-enactment occurs when the cast members take turns climbing a stage ladder to each read one of the dictatorship's edicts following the coup, presumably from the 1,200 collected volumes of 12,000 decrees bought by Jorge's unemployed father, a small businessman who spent a decade of the dictatorship unemployed due to its neo-liberal economic policies, but who remains an avid supporter of Pinochet. With each decree read, the cast member on the ladder jumps off the ladder, reflecting one by one the piece-by-piece dismantling of democracy with the edicts ranging from the establishment of the junta and of a state of emergency, to the dissolution of political parties, the empty promise of human rights observance except when there is a state of emergency, and finally the lives that went down with it. This circular representation focuses on the trap from which society has not yet escaped. The audience has lived this reality or, in the case of younger members, the fragments of it remembered or told in family stories, and now relives it as the context in which Arias's play creates an alternate archive much more complex than the official one. As each actor jumps from the ladder, it is almost as if democracy itself is committing suicide, which reveals the only choices the actor's parents had in the face of what was happening. The parody lies in the exaggerated support of Jorge's father, who would collect the complete ‘works’ of Pinochet. A tremendous irony results from the fact that a man whose career was destroyed by Pinochet's neo-liberal policies is the only parent who, in the present, wishes the dictatorship had killed more. Such irony relativizes the intransigent polarization of the official story by creating a defamiliarizing wonder at how a man so negatively affected by the dictatorship could still support it: as a businessman who worked for companies bankrupted when Pinochet opened Chile to importation, he spent ten years unemployed. Thus the opposition between rich, exploiting capitalists and victimized workers momentarily collapses.

In another scenario it is the transitional governments that are implicated in society's post-dictatorship predicament of the future in the re-enactment of the power outages that occurred in the 1980s when militant groups sabotaged Chile's electrical grid. Each actor tells what they were doing when the power went out but have only the time it takes for a lit match to burn out to tell the story. The scenario is a particularly striking example of how the play's performative elements reflect the rush to limit and bury memory enacted by successive transitional governments eager for reconciliation, beginning with the limits placed on the Rettig Commission's work, and how it is impossible to separate the events of dictatorship and post-dictatorship. The actors struggle to include their stories before the flame burns out; one actor's match expires before the story can be told at all, and an actor whose family was in exile during the outages has no right to tell a story, as her match is extinguished by a fellow actor. The symbolism of the post-dictatorship events in the rush to the false consensus is a poignant reminder that repression does not disappear with the advent of the transition, but rather morphs into something different. The performance reflects not so much the past power outage, but the repressed memories of the present that keep the country mired in the archive's binary. The scene represents one of Schneider's ‘fugitive moments’ where the past predicts the present and draws attention to the possibilities created by the performative questioning of silence and the simultaneous breaking of it.Footnote ²⁶

Finally, the same parallels between past and present are re-enacted in the scenario where Alexandra takes the role of her mother, an activist in the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria who returned to Chile to enact Operación Retorno (Operation Return), which had planned an attempt to disrupt the dictatorship with armed resistance. In perhaps one of the riskiest re-enactments, Alexandra tells her mother's story as other actors play the parts of her fallen comrades or the police who kill her, undress her and drag her naked body into the street for pictures that would end up on the front pages of the national press in a falsified story. Immediately after the burial, the group quickly and matter-of-factly clear out items brought in for the scene, bring in new props, and sit down to eat and discuss Pope John Paul II's 1987 visit to Chile amid escalating protests and political violence, as if the previous violent scene never occurred. The scenario is the most impactful of the play in underscoring repression in the face of the banality of omnipresent violence and forcing the audience to see its own reaction to the long dictatorship. While re-enacting the scenes of key moments, the play includes the violence and the hardships of dictatorship for those involved but is devoid of attempting to offer a definitive reason for why they happened, thereby inviting the audience to re-evaluate previous assumptions.

Against this background, as stories progress, they increasingly destabilize and lay bare the fallacies of the ideological categories that create the rigid oppositions of fascists versus communists, repressors versus repressed, socialists versus capitalists and poor versus rich. The photographs that mediate Leopoldo's family history first show his father, who finished his career as a highly placed intelligence officer for the dictatorship, guarding Allende and Fidel Castro, one of the first striking contradictions of the oppositions of fascists to socialists. This photograph is alternated with later pictures as an aide to a general assigned to ‘cleanse the police of Marxists’ because he's a real family man and presumed to be part of the right-wing faithful. When approached by a friend of the family whose colleagues were kidnapped, his answer showed not loyalty to the junta, but rather fear, as Leopoldo's father urged the acquaintance to think of his wife and children as he does his own and keep quiet. Here the family's archive, in the form of Leopoldo's photograph, contradicts the opposition between the repressors and the repressed, an opposition created primarily by human rights associations and commissions. The same occurs with Ítalo's father, who was only sixteen years old when he joined the army as a way to avoid poverty (he was nine years old the year of the coup) and is haunted by the possibility of shooting someone. He was trained by being placed in an empty pool and buried in rocks and animal manure and called ‘the shit of civilian life’: ‘That day, my father learns to obey.’Footnote ²⁷

From the left side of the binary, portrayed as degenerate and destructive of order and tradition by the junta, Alexandra's mother, member of the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria, is remembered through a book she kept of Alexandra's early life in a journal with an idealistic inscription: ‘For little Alexandra, from those who will love you forever. From those who always taught you the pathway to a better world, for you and for the millions of children that on this earth want to laugh and sing, and be one with you.’Footnote ²⁸ According to Elizabeth Jelin, when the law was restored in post-dictatorship Argentina, the victims were granted an abstract subject status that stripped them of their context and silences the ideological aspects of their struggles.Footnote ²⁹ Alexandra's family archival object restores a fragment of the ideology. Such an artefact presents a more ambiguous view of the demonized ‘terrorists’ in Pinochet's portrayal of cultural undesirables; it does not erase the violent acts of some militants, but rather places them within their ideological context. Alejandro's father, who was arrested and scheduled for execution at the Ministry of Defence, was recognized by some officers, who pretended to beat him and took him to a public jail, thus saving his life. The ‘demons’, depending on which side one takes, are thus humanized, and relativize the rigid categories that had defined them in the official media, political rhetoric and historical accounts.

As the play brings the stories up to the present and the actors bring their parents’ and their own lives up to date, the after-effects of the dictatorship on their parents’ lives include the difficulties of the presumed ‘winners’ who had associated themselves with the military regime. On the left, Alejandro's father died from Parkinson's disease attributed to his treatment in prison, while Alexandra's family continued to litigate to uncover the truth about what happened to her mother and her comrades. Ana's mother, who was a messenger for the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria, goes to therapy and talks continually about the past. Soledad's father, a member of Movimiento de Acción Popular Unitaria, is paranoid and convinced that people hack his email and listen in on his phone calls, so he raises the radio volume any time he talks of politics. On the right, Leopoldo's father, formerly a high official in Pinochet's police force, cannot talk to his family about what happened, takes sedatives, and spends his days sleeping and watching television, afraid to go out and run into someone who might remind him of his past. Pablo's father, whose portrait was opposed to Alejandro's leftist father at the beginning, is paranoid and thinks people are spying on him. The play makes no judgement as to each case, but rather simply lays out a picture of the ‘winners’ and the ‘losers’ which shows the emptiness of such terms in much of the deeply traumatized preceding generations, regardless of political affiliation.

However, it is when the cast attempt to line up from left to right according to their parents’ ideology, social class and race that the categories forming the binaries completely collapse. When disagreement starts, Ana introduces the idea that ideologies she has studied as part of the archive decide who is left or right and that assumption demands that the children of parents in the armed militant groups belong on the left (Alexandra, Fernanda and herself), while those of ultra-right groups, such as Pablo's father in the Frente Nacionalista de Patria y Libertad, would take their place on the far right of the line. Pablo, however, points out that his father fell out of favour with the dictatorship, since the group's nationalism was incompatible with neo-liberal capitalism. No one can agree on whose parents were rightist or leftist, who is rich or poor, and so on. Jorge's father, an ardent Pinochet supporter in the ideological line, ends up on the left in the social-class line, since he was bankrupted by neo-liberal policies, but on the far right in the ideological line. In these scenes are laid bare the schisms between ideology and action, and ideology and social realities, which the archive does not take into consideration. Some of the questions that arise are whether people are more leftist or rightist because they killed someone, whether people are more leftist because they die, whether those who worked for the dictatorship were following orders or were true believers, and whether one is more ideological when they act on their beliefs or simply express them. When lining up according to social class, arguments break out about what constitutes poverty, whether one has to go hungry or have a dirt floor, whether a parent had to be of the working class. In these scenes the sardonic humour found in the dialogue demythologizes the ideologies of the elder generations: the robbery of a print shop by Fernanda's parents is ironically referred to as ‘redistribution’ (recuperar y distribuir) and Jorge insists on moving farther to the right in the social-class line to avoid angering his right-wing father, who would not want to be considered as poor as a militant. From the views of the succeeding generations, then, there are no clear lines. The assumption of a pure relationship between ideology and reality is laid bare, thereby inviting the audience to re-evaluate their own positions on a non-binary plane.

By the end of the play, the picture left is one of a society in disarray with suffering of varying degrees in all quarters. In arranging the personal stories and historical events, Arias re-creates the historical events, where performance symbolically re-enacts the fall of democracy and the problematic present, while at the same time disrupting the archive's binary portrayal of Chilean society. She begins with the opposition created by official discourse, which is then weakened and dissolved in the dissolution of the binaries that have dominated in official accounts of the seventeen-year dictatorship, without trying to either equalize the trauma or pass overt judgement on who suffered more. However, the systematic violence and repression of the regime are not suppressed in the backdrop that informs individual stories. The variety of family stories, the lack of emoting in their telling, and the re-enactment of historical events into which they fit lay before the public facts that problematize the archive created by the political media, the dictatorship and human rights commissions without minimizing the harmful effects of this period in Chilean history, allowing the spectators to make of it what they will. In trying to recover their parents’ identities, the children of the dictatorship begin to dislodge themselves from the categories that have defined society and perhaps begin to choose the aspects of their lives with which they want to identify. The symbolic possibility also remains for their children's generation, as the children of one cast member make an appearance at the end. The play as a performance not only allows the public to identify with individual stories, but also permits a more diverse view of society through the eyes of succeeding generations, in a double movement that invites both identification and distance in the audience as well. Like the younger generations, spectators can begin to re-create the official story of the future.

While accurately measuring the play's impact on its audiences can only be speculative and inexact, there are some glimpses in audience reactions, as related by the cast and critics, of what could be a kind of societal release provided by simply the telling and hearing of one's story. This should not be interpreted as a kind of catharsis, but rather as a simple desire to speak, to tell one's story. According to Jorge, whose right-wing father was bankrupted,

Pablo Díaz, godchild of Pinochet's lawyer, speaks of his own terror at telling his family's story in the face of Chile's silence, and points to the incitement to reflection:

The actor also noted the intense public interest in the play as manifesting in full houses in every performance in Chile,Footnote ³² including politicians, Pinochet supporters, ex-guerillas and then president Sebastián Piñera's sister for the debut.Footnote ³³

Equally intriguing are the hints of the bonds created between the actors themselves, and the actors and the audience, which reflect what Cecilia Sosa has situated within the ‘queering’ of mourning, the extension of co-ownership of trauma, whereby those with non-normative relations to trauma – i.e. those without blood ties and normative family relationships – may take part in a collective mourning of loss and trauma.Footnote ³⁴ While the actors and Arias herself acknowledge the sometimes extremely heated discussions among cast members that were written into the work,Footnote ³⁵ they appear to have sincere affection for each other, as evidenced by Ana, the daughter of a militant: ‘I love my castmates; we have told each other everything, from the silliest intimacies to the most profound family details.’Footnote ³⁶ Viviana, daughter of a carabinero (military police) and a military hospital nurse, found out that her disappeared father was not dead, as her family had told her, but in jail for killing militants. Her mother stopped speaking to her because of her daughter's attempt to enlist the help of audience members during rehearsals. After a performance, Viviana speaks of an audience member who approached her and offered to adopt her.Footnote ³⁷ Relationships between cast members, as well as the viewing public, thus expand well beyond what Jenin has identified as the ‘symbolic and political dominance of “familism,” and more recently the identification with the political activism and militancy of the 1970s’ in Argentina.Footnote ³⁸ For Jenin, this restriction of those who have a familial ‘right’ to speak excluded the broader society from a citizenship role in the formulation of memory and policy.Footnote ³⁹ It is as if by relativizing the oppositions that had defined the dictatorship and the archive's interpretation of it through binary structures, the right to speak has been deterritorialized from the distance created by binaries and redistributed on a more immanent plane that allows for communication less mediated by ideology and familial ties, where the participants and audience may actually hear each other. The tendency to view the dictatorship through the lens of the biological family and its position vis-à-vis the dictatorship gives way, through the dissolution of binaries, to rearranged filiations created not by ideology or family ties, but by experiences and after-effects that transcend ideological categories.

In the words of Jacques Rancière, the multiple perspectives allow for a redistribution of the ‘sensible’. He defines the ‘distribution of the sensible’ as ‘the system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it’.Footnote ⁴⁰ In this sense art is similar to politics in that both distribute bodies and movements and speech, and partition space and time and the visible and invisible: ‘This apportionment of parts and positions is based on a distribution of spaces, times, and forms of activity that determines the very manner in which something in common lends itself to participation and in what way various individuals can have a part in this distribution.’Footnote ⁴¹ Rancière distinguishes between aesthetic regimes of art and politics and representative ones: the former attempts to allow for forms of deviation, rupture and change by separating the ruptures from the representative context of history, prior interpretation and the mimetic reproduction of the latter.Footnote ⁴²

The shift from the ‘rational’ binary structure of history that occurs from representative aesthetics in El año en que nací – representative of the archive that explained the causes of the coup and of its questioning – creates the heterogeneity of possibilities for future art and politics unattached to ‘a party, an advanced group that gets its ability to lead from an interpretation of history’.Footnote ⁴³ This shift in the play that starts among the actors and spreads to the audience in no way would ameliorate the atrocities perpetrated by state, nor does it privilege any group's pain over another's. Rather it creates the possibility of an opening where a wider range of society's stories might be told and polarized groups might be more disposed to listen, thus creating the possibility for modification of the archival interpretation of history to date. In Chile, this basic first step of including the interstices of the binary ‘us versus them’ seemed to be missing, eclipsed by the political demobilization of Chilean society, the shadow of the Pinochet in politics long after he left the presidency, and successive governments’ need to create consensus. In creating an opening for and an acceptance of the conflicts that plague post-dictatorship Chilean society, El año en que nací draws in its audience and reflects how performance, in Taylor's words, ‘makes visible (for an instant, live, now) that which is always already there: the ghosts, the tropes, the scenarios that structure … individual and collective life’.Footnote ⁴⁴ In doing so it does not pretend to resolve the conflicts or to bring justice to its victims, but rather to model the reshaping of self and community that have been simplified by the official story.

There undoubtedly exists the possibility, based on reactions of audience and actors, of a reconsideration on a small scale of the ways to tell the collective story or stories of Chile's trauma through the creation of a pluralism of positions vis-à-vis the dictatorship in the face of forces that would simplify the conflict to two poles and exclude most non-political actors. Of course, the dissolution of binaries and the biological chains of ideology cannot undo the damage done to the previous generation, its paranoia and its need for justice. However, the model of the social in the play, on a wider scale, has the potential to prevent it from happening again by dissolving the accepted veracity of ideological poles, thereby making visible excluded perspectives that can influence future debates about the causes of and remedies for the after-effects of collective trauma.