. They are detectives of their parent’s life .

Wir sprachen mit Lola Arias, der Regisseurin von „Mi vida despues“.

TaK: Did you know that the small country Liechtenstein exists before you received the invitation to come here?

Lola Arias: No. I never heard about it before. People told me that it is a Principality. So I imagine only queens and kings walking around …

TaK: You have been at European festivals with several of your projects. What are the main differences between the audience in Argentina and Europe?

Lola Arias: When we did MI VIDA DESPUÉS in Europe people were shocked because of the tragic and absurd stories of our country. People were asking once and again if they were REAL. They couldn’t believe that this REALLY happened.

In Argentina the audience knew these stories before. They heard many times stories about the time of the dictatorship: people who disappear, people who went to exile, people who worked in the secret service, people who kidnapped the babies of disappeared people …They were not surprised by the stories but they were very surprised by the way of telling them. They were surprised to see young people from my generation thinking about the past, doing remakes of past events, asking questions about History from a very subjective point of view. They were to be able to laugh about these stories. They felt that it was not another melancholic, pathetic or demagogic play about the dictatorship but a play with humor, intelligence and irreverence.

TaK: In “Mi vida despues” people are on the stage together whose parents were at war with one another during the dictatorship in Argentina. How did that influence the rehearsal work?

Lola Arias: This was one of the most controversial aspects of the play. I knew from the beginning that I wanted a mixed cast, not only the daughters and sons from the victims of the dictatorship. I wanted also the daughters and sons from the oppressors, from the ¨normal people¨ who pretended that nothing was going on, from the people who collaborate in an indirect way, like the priests who supported the military regime.

When I announced the cast, one of the actors whose father disappeared told me “I don’t want to be on stage with the daughter of a policeman who tortured people.” But then he met her and he realized that she was not idealizing the father or agreeing with him, that she was only his daughter. There is not only love and continuity between father and son but also painful relationships, contradictions and disagreement.

During the play, the actors whose parents were from different parties, ideologies or even enemies became a close team of reconstruction. They are all trying to solve enigmas from the past through photos, memories, documents. They are detectives of their parent’s life and every story helped them to understand something from their private story and from Argentinean History.