Healing the Body Politic: 1968-2008. A Theatrical Reflection Across Time

FALL 2009 137 Healing the Body Politic: 1968-2008. A Theatrical Reflection Across Time1 Caridad Svich October 2nd , 1968: A meeting is scheduled between university students at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and representatives of the Mexican government. The goal is to resolve conflicts that had arisen after a cycle of violence and repression had been aimed against student and social movements that year. The government promised peace, but instead, on that night, 300 to 500 students and workers were killed in what would be called the massacre at Tlatelolco. The week after the massacre, the Mexican government arrested nearly 2,000 people on suspicion of involvement with students and workers who had protested. These 2,000 people were imprisoned without trial at three different cities. Two months later, most of those who were detained were released. However, nearly eighty others remained in prison without a trial until 1971 at which point all charges were dropped, the individuals were released, and the government decided they had made a mistake in arresting them in the first place. February 22nd , 2008: It is the fortieth anniversary of the worldwide cultural revolutions of 1968. It is the seventh decade of the nuclear age. What happened in Mexico City that night on October 2nd , 1968 — an event remembered by many south of our border but curiously little remarked on here in the north — seems almost inconceivable today. Our world, after all, has changed. Progress has been made. The tumult of the 1960s — the sexual, social and political 138 LATIN AMERICAN THEATRE REVIEW revolutions of the ‘Boom’ era — have forged a new US society where the politics of representation (if not its poetics) and categories of identity have been addressed and re-dressed consistently over the last forty years. Race is a construct. Life is an artificial post-modern performance.And the modernist notion of creation and action in the real world is discounted in favor of the ascent of the reality show in the age of positive disenchantment. But scroll through the physical and digital front pages of our news sources, and images from the conflicts and civil wars in Darfur, Kenya, Afghanistan and the ever-troubled Middle East, the so-called low-wattage repressive regimes alive and well in Cambodia and Belarus, and the unpredictable, seemingly progressive but yet to be determined neo-socialist coalitions forming amongst countries in South America, belie the instantlyachieved bright change tomorrow that seduces our wishful, collective imagination. Although enterprises of global connection, through significant advances in information and technology, have forged hybrid engagement and unity across borders and boundaries, division and disunity are visibly present in separatist actions on the political, cultural and linguistic fronts all over the world. The beautiful fervor of redemptive hope is one that most societies cling to in order to move forward. If the body politic in which we live in the US has been rent — through the red vs. blue divide, for instance, that deepened considerably during President George W. Bush’s administration — in what ways can it be transformed and healed? And are we in the US ready as citizen-artists to do the kind of healing that faces both the truth of politics, and the more ambiguous truths of fiction and art? Is it possible to truly shrug off the post post-modern embrace of artifice and the simultaneous importance it places on discursive re-articulation and simulation, which a great part of Western democratic culture has accepted psychologically, ideologically and imagistically, in order to reclaim the modernist affirmation of artistic force? The poetics of representation Simon Critchley argues in his book Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (London: Verso, 2007) that the new politics in order to be effective must be located at a distance from the state. Critchley identifies the politics of resistance as contingent upon the ethical dimension of the “infinitely demanding” call for justice. Operating outside the state’s terrain and borne out of new spaces outside its control, the kind of resistance that Critchley speaks of has to do with a consistently positioned FALL 2009 139 ‘outsider’ status that depends symbiotically on the state’s recognition of its outsider-ness...