Lunes 30 de Diciembre de 2019

A grand finale with Atlas des Kommunismus

At a packed San Martín Theatre, the high-flying production by Argentine director Lola Arias brought the 12th FIBA to an end.

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Those who have already seen a play by Lola Arias must have found Atlas des Kommunismus original, interesting and touching. Now, those who have never seen any of her works… what did they think? What this young Argentine director and playwright does is unique, and that is why her works tour the length and breadth of the globe. So FIBA enjoyed a grand finale at a San Martín Theatre filled to capacity.

Atlas...takes Arias’s explorations throughout the last 10 years a step further: a biodrama in which a group of people tell stories about their lives in relation to a specific topic, through a variety of formats: acting, oral narration, live music. First, Mi vida después dealt with the “children of the Argentine dictatorship”; then Campo minado explored the world of Malvinas war veterans. This time, Arias tackles the history of the Russian Revolution through the account of seven women and a man between 10 and 86 years who experienced, directly or indirectly, the conflict between the two Germanys and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The staging of this piece, produced by Berlin’s Maxim Gorki Theater, already represents the conflict in question as the play has two audiences: the conventional one, sitting in the orchestra seats of the Martín Coronado hall, and an audience opposite on stage. In between these two, a big screen moving up and down like a wall or jail bars. The actors are there, in the middle, pulled by two ways of looking at the world.

The lives and stories are appalling at times, like Salmonea’s for instance. She tells us that she was part of the Stasi, the East German secret police, dedicated to conducting surveillance on citizens (a great movie called The Lives of Others illustrates how the Stasi operated). Or Mai Phuong Kollath’s, who came from Vietnam, to become an accountant and earn money, and ended up working as a cook for 5 years, unable to establish contact with people other than fellow Vietnameses. There is also the story of a punk singer who was arrested for offending the nation with her lyrics; a Gorki Theatre’s actress, a Jewish translator who was a young communist pioneer; an LGBT activist; a political activist working with refugees, and a 10-year-old girl who doesn’t know why she is there, all she wants is to be an actress. And in the end of the play, she asks, “Why is it called Atlas des Kommunismus?” Some agree with the title, others don’t, because what they actually wanted was a kind of “socialism”. But everyone agrees that the result was “a dead end leading to a wall”. The drums are playing and the actors, with megaphones, are singing out loud.