Rethinking the Escalante Re-enactment as Theatrical Incarnation of the Disappeared

This visual essay examines the Escalante Massacre Re-enactment by Teatro Obrero in the Philippines, exploring how the notion and practices of incarnation in religious devotion can explain the scenographic choice of filling up the stage with the actors’ bodies rather than emptying it. Whilst this is an impossible politics of appearance that cannot bring back the disappeared, the essay demonstrates how these performative remembrances interrogate this impossibility through their insistent re-enactment of a traumatic experience. The essay argues that this theatre then becomes a site and process of making the disappeared appear, a ritual of commemoration and tribute, and more importantly an act of faithful and militant commitment ‘that won’t quit’. The re-enactment’s roots in practices of incarnation manifest even more strongly in its current form, embedded in the religious aspects of the commemoration which persists in repressive conditions.