La eterna evocación de la ausencia traumática: Bicicleta Lerux e Instrucciones para abrazar el aire de Arístides Vargas

Abstracts: Arístides Vargas creates presence from absence in Bicicleta Lerux (2006) and Instrucciones para abrazar el aire (2012), two plays that evoke Argentina’s disappeared during the last civic-military dictatorship in Argentina (1976–1983). Produced in the early twenty-first century, at a time when Argentine theater recalling the “Dirty War” proliferates, the dramatic action in both plays revolves around two characters based on real people who were disappeared during dictatorship: Vargas’s friend and theater actor, Alfredo Leroux, and the granddaughter of one of the founders of Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo , Chicha Mariani, respectively. The plays reenact the fragmentary, imaginary, metaphorical, and theatrical presence of the disappeared and lend testimony to their memories.