Accessing Traumatic Pasts through Play: Children’s Perspectives in Two Chilean Theatre Pieces

This paper examines Lola Arias’ El año en que nací (2012), and Gemelos by Chile’s La Troppa (1999), two theatre works which both approach the telling of trauma and representing experiences of life during dictatorship through the eyes of children. In both works, affective experiences of the dictatorship (knowledge difficult to document and discern in the official narrative) are communicated to the viewing audience by incorporating game playing and lightening tactics such as humor. Through moments of engaging in play, the incorporation of toys, role-playing, humor and laughter, a lightened mood of confronting serious social problems is suggested. I conclude that a ludic representation of trauma and violence may be one of the primary ways that the second generation approaches this charged, difficult to access history while negotiating with and evaluating post-memories and their society’s collective memory.