Los días afuera focuses on people who were formerly detained at the Ezeiza women’s prison in Buenos Aires. The show is accompanied by a screening of your film REAS, which was released this year in France. Can you explain their origins and how these two works presented at the Festival d’Avignon interact with each other?
The film and the play are two parts of a diptych born in 2019 in prison, where I led theatre and cinema workshops. The idea of creating an artistic project with those women about their experience in the prison system had begun to take shape, but the pandemics put our work on hold. No one—not even families—could enter the facility anymore. We adapted and shot the film REAS in an abandoned prison with fourteen former inmates. We chose the form of the musical documentary so that they could show their everyday lives on the inside through very poetic song-and-dance numbers. At the same time, in 2023, I was contacted by the Festival d’Avignon. It became clear to me that we had to continue this experience on stage. Whereas the film focuses on the time of imprisonment, Los días afuera is a play which is mostly about what comes after. What happens once you go home? How about the return to society? To embody those questions, we worked with the six protagonists of the movie: Yoseli, Nacho, Estefanía, Noelia, Carla, and Paula. Everything that happens on stage is drawn from their stories. In my opinion, live performance was a necessity for this project. Because the film alone captures a performance, a testimony, but it travels without the people who made it: it is, in a way, fossilised time. It does not benefit its actresses and actors. With this play, those people who were denied their freedom can venture into the world and express themselves directly in front of an audience. Many of them had never crossed the sea, or flown on a plane. Today, they’re performing on one of the largest stages in Europe. They’ve worked every day to reach this level of excellence, and the result speaks for itself.
With a Broadway set under construction, a car, voguing, and cumbia tunes, how do you manage to blend music hall and documentary to tell the story of life after prison?
Using the codes of music hall allows us to depict the world of incarceration without reproducing the stigmatisation that goes along with it. Through these songs inspired by the stories of the protagonists, we create a polyphonic work which blends all their experiences. I started by conducting many individual interviews to identify powerful scenes that actually happened. Then, music came to provide a framework for those stories and open a breach into reality. Music gives you the opportunity to shift into fantasy for a moment, even in the middle of a tragic dialogue. Therein lies the strength of musical theatre: a burst of energy which reveals the facts while allowing for some creative interpretation on the part of those who lived through them. Yoseli, Nacho, Estefanía, Noelia, Carla, and Paula are not experts on detention conditions in Argentina; they have experienced them firsthand, in their flesh. Music and dance allow them to reclaim and share those experiences. The music says a lot about the protagonists and the situations, like the pop song that plays when Yoseli dreams of visiting Paris, or the cumbia we use to explain the complex relationship between the inmates and the prison administration. To accompany the actresses, some of whom play music, we have musician Inés Copertino. Most of the protagonists already had a very strong relationship to music before we started working on this project. Nacho and Estafanía had formed a rock band together. Art was already a way to resist, to survive in prison. We added voguing thanks to Noelia, a transgender sex worker. She discovered that dance in a park she used to go to, and it was a revelation. Today, she’s one of the key figures in the ballroom scene in Argentina. Voguing appears as a dance of empowerment, a demonstration of the beauty that resides in each and every one of us. It’s also become a symbol of queer culture, which continues to inspire many artists. In our project, that influence was a key to understanding the new social relationships that developed in prison. There are no cisgender men there, but the world keeps spinning. In prison, they recreated a whole society, full of mutual aid and solidarity, humour and resilience. It’s very interesting and we still have a lot to learn from that experience to respond to violence with humane means.
What does this creation teach us about women and transgender people deprived of their freedom? How can art not only give them a voice, but something to look forward to?
The number of women in prison has doubled over the past ten years, and the same is true for transgender people. This is not by chance: it’s the result of a political choice. With law 23.737, the authorities have decided to hide behind scapegoats to give the appearance of fighting drug trafficking. That’s a fact: in women’s prisons, most of the inmates are drug mules. They’re often already marginalised due to their economic situation, but also due to the violence and abuse to which they have been subjected. For transgender people, one should not forget the discriminations that prevent them from accessing regular jobs. We’re talking about people who spent five years in prison for two kilograms of cocaine, while drug lords go unpunished. It is those with no other options who end up in prison, particularly women. Even though they do not pose a direct threat to society. On the contrary, they are often single parents and the breadwinner for their family. The consequences on their individual paths and on that of their loved ones are terrible. Yoseli was only 22 years old when she was imprisoned. She’d just started nursing school. How can you make up for those five years? Carla had to leave three children behind. She was their sole caretaker. They were traumatised by that separation. That’s why art is primordial. It allows them to rewrite their destiny. This project leaves no room for miserabilism. Everything in it is poetry, discipline, and humour. It emphasises the importance of working with the voice and the body. A body that has been constrained, imprisoned, monitored. A voice that has been stifled. And all of a sudden, dance becomes a movement, a force that allows them to reclaim the space. When they are on stage, something beautiful opens up inside them. They become actors of their own emancipation and power. These are suspended moments it is important to share with the audience.
Interview conducted by Julie Ruocco (January 2024) and translated to English by Gaël Schmidt-Cléach