Interweaving Narratives of the Past(s). Multidirectional Memories in Yael Ronen?s Postmigrant Theatre

PEREYRA, SOLEDAD

Valletta

Conferencia; Interweaving Cultures: Theory and Practice; 2017

School of Performing Arts, University of Malta

Although the origins of the so-called ?postmigrant theatre? are to be found in contexts related to immigration processes, later interventions by Shermin Langhoff persistently use the term in a more abstract sense. According to Langhoff, this postmigrant theatre should no longer be exclusively associated with biography and place of birth, but rather considered as a reverberating box coming from a globalized and diverse urban society (Langhoff apud Donath, 2011), which nowadays builds identity narratives that extend beyond origin. One of the most successful authors and directors in postmigrant theatre, Yael Ronen (born 1976), works on her pieces using a collective method. This merge not only creates signifiers in the performance, determining the Inszenierung (Fischer-Lichte, 2004:327), but is also previously involved in the process of dramatic writing. This type of composition process favours the interweaving of individual traumatic memories, which are displaced and suspended at the performance, into a multidirectional memory (Rothberg, 2009:13), which brings about a new symbolic configuration of the recent past. Following this line of thought, the present study examines two works by Ronen: Common Ground (2014) and The Situation (2015). After presenting a global analysis of these plays, we discuss which individual memories from the recent past were reconfigured by these two plays into a multidirectional memory. Finally, we will pose this question: Which theatre-ideas (Badiou, 1995) emerge when postmigrant theatre does not give priority to migration or territorial displacement but rather to how different narratives of the past are interwoven in globalized space and in times to come?