ABSTRACT
The transitive notion of embodied memory encapsulated in ‘Yuyachkani’ – the ‘I am remembering/I am your thought’ – entails a relational, non-individualistic understanding of subjectivity. Coya, the indigenous survivor, recounts a vision of annihilation that is and is not her own. The ‘I’ who remembers is simultaneously active and passive (thinking subject/subject of thought). Yuyachkani, a collective theater group, sees itself implicated – both as product and as producer – in various modes of cultural transmission in an ethnically mixed and complex country. For the past 25 years, the group has participated in at least three interconnected survival struggles – that of Peru, plagued by centuries of civil conflict; that of the diverse performance practices that have been obscured (and at times ‘disappeared’) in a racially divided, though multiethnic, Peruvian culture; and that of Yuyachkani itself, made up of nine artists who for decades have worked together in the face of political, personal, and economic crisis. In adopting the Quechua name, the predominantly ‘white’ Spanish-speaking group signals its cultural engagement with indigenous and mestizo populations and with complex, transcultured (Andean-Spanish) ways of knowing, thinking, remembering. Yuyachkani attempts to make visible a multi-
lingual, multiethnic praxis and epistemology in a country that pits nationality against ethnicity, literacy against orality, the archive against the repertoire of embodied knowledge. In Peru, the urban turns its back on the rural, and languages (Spanish, Quechua, and Aymara) serve more to differentiate between groups and silence voices than to enable communication. Yuyachkani, by its very name, introduces itself as a product of a history of ethnic coexistence. Its self-naming is a performative declarative announcing its belief that social memory links and implicates communities in the transitive mode of subject formation.
