A relentless act of remembrance

Her parents were killed in an earthquake when she was a young girl, says the spectral lady in white, and thereafter her life seemed cursed. A war broke out in her village. Her daughter was abducted. Then a group of men attacked her, transforming her from the gentle Rosa Blanca (White Rose) into a blade-wielding Fury named Rosa Cuchillo, or Rosa the Knife.

“My village is still sick with fear,” Rosa Cuchillo tells the throng of vendors, old toothless women in black fedoras and infant-toting mamacitas who’ve gathered outside the central market here to watch her perform on a small black stage. By their solemn faces, it’s clear that many in this remote Andean mountain town understand her pain all too well.

But just as her spooky words and Kabuki-like gestures are becoming slightly sinister, Rosa the Knife reveals a deeper humanity. Voicing hope that justice someday may come to her beleaguered homeland, she opens a trapdoor and removes a steaming vase of bright yellow flowers, flinging their petals into the air in a shamanistic act of ritual purification. The crowd breaks into applause. Ana Correa, the actress playing Rosa Cuchillo, bows gratefully. “How beautiful,” an old man murmurs.

Beautiful, yes, as well as mysterious, disturbing, oddly humorous at times and eloquent in a way that goes beyond words, that employs a language of indigenous symbols, religious iconography, music, dance and Brechtian aesthetics -- all at once.

These are among the many calling cards of Yuyachkani (yew-yatch-KAH-nee), a 33-year-old Lima-based theater company that is Peru’s premier drama troupe and among the most fearlessly creative anywhere in this hemisphere. L.A. audiences can judge for themselves Oct. 21-24, when Yuyachkani will present Jose Watanabe’s poetic adaptation of “Antigone,” Sophocles’ classic tragedy about the abuses of power, at [Inside] the Ford. On Nov. 14, the company will perform another work from its repertory, “The Wandering Players,” an adaptation of the Grimm brothers’ story “The Bremen Town Musicians,” at the Los Angeles Theatre Center. Both productions are part of the third annual International Latino Theatre Festival, known by its Spanish acronym FITLA. (“Antigone” will be performed in Spanish with English subtitles.)

What L.A. audiences may only glimpse, however, is the high degree of social activism that Yuyachkani brings to its vibrant artistry. In a country still shellshocked by a brutal and bizarre civil war, Yuyachkani dares to confront Peru’s inner demons on the stage while ministering to their victims -- widows, orphans, Quechua Indians of the Andes region -- in the streets.

With a core company of four female and three male actors -- the sisters Ana and Debora Correa and Teresa and Rebeca Ralli; Julian Vargas, Augusto Casafranca and Amiel Cayo Coaquira -- plus a technical and support staff of 10, all under the leadership of artistic director Miguel Rubio Zapata, assistant director Fidel Melquiades and producer Socorro Naveda, Yuyachkani is a tightly woven collective. Deeply influenced by Asian theatrical traditions of space and movement, as well as by native Peruvian ritual choreography, Yuyachkani also has absorbed the avant-garde innovations of Western directors like Peter Brook and Jerzy Grotowski, who argued for a theater of passion and simplicity centered on the primacy of the actor.

Sophisticated but accessible, Yuyachkani’s style is a seamless mix of the cosmopolitan and the stubbornly Peruvian. It’s a muscular, athletic style in which the well-trained, if now mostly middle-aged, actors perform with the disciplined intensity of martial arts instructors, and a clump of burning sage or a snatch of an Indian folk tune can convey more than pages of dialogue. Words are used sparingly in a Yuyachkani show, and they may be in Spanish, Quechua or both -- without benefit of subtitles. “Knowledge in our country is not in the writing,” says Ana Correa, a Lima native whose mother was a Quechua Indian. “It’s in the hems of the women’s clothes, it’s in the design of the churches. It’s another tradition of transmitting culture.”

Operating out of a cavernous black box theater in Lima’s Magdalena del Mar district, the company favors dreamlike works that scramble time as well as technique. Narratives circle back on themselves. Past and present slide together; the Spanish conquest of the Inca empire sidles up to this morning’s front-page political scandal. Roman Catholic faith and pre-Columbian myth converge in striking stage tableaux that possess the incantatory fervor of High Mass. Call it postmodern baroque.

Above all, Yuyachkani is concerned with theater as an act of collective remembrance, a buffer against the fear and amnesia that keep individuals and societies from facing painful truths and dealing with their pasts. The company’s name comes from a Quechua word meaning “I am thinking, I am remembering,” and it is this acting-out of recovered memory that has made Yuyachkani not only a respected artistic entity but a potent social force in Peru, where many people would rather forget the past -- particularly the horrifying events of the last 20 years, when a guerrilla war between the Marxist rebels Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) and the federal government left 70,000 people dead or missing, and deep psychological scars. “It’s a very complicated situation that’s not going to be resolved in a short time,” says Teresa Ralli, who’ll be interpreting “Antigone” in Los Angeles. “Many people would prefer to guard their silence.”

That’s one reason why earlier this summer Yuyachkani felt compelled to return to this picturesque but poverty-stricken “capital of the Andes,” which served as ground zero for the war’s worst atrocities. By conducting a 10-day sabbatical of riveting stage performances, bold street theater and innovative workshops for actors and local residents, Yuyachkani was seeking to reconnect with its roots and excavate art from a place where it had been left for dead. “It’s like a personal encounter,” says Rebecca Ralli, “a homage to all the people who aren’t here.”

In the thick of it

It’s high noon at 9,000 feet above sea level, and the ferocious Andean sun is beating down on Huamanga’s picturesque central square, the Plaza de Armas. Along the sidewalks, peasant women selling homemade love potions brush by young men hawking cellphone cards. Near an equestrian statue of Simon Bolivar, the Great Liberator of South America, shoeshine boys are buffing loafers for a few soles. It all looks peaceful and normal, but here no one takes such things for granted.

Suddenly a man and two women appear at the plaza’s northwest corner. He carries a staff and wears a traditional Peruvian knit cap and a serape, while the women, swathed in black, walk solemnly behind, bearing huge bundles of flowers on their backs.

A small crowd gathers as the rustic trio -- in reality, the Yuyachkani actors Teresa Ralli, Vargas and Ana Correa -- halt before a metal plaque commemorating the victims of recent bloodshed, dedicated last July by Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. With the crowd watching intently, Ralli and Correa kneel and begin reverently swabbing the plaque with wads of cotton. Their action, haunting and hyper-real, is what art-world sophisticates would call an “intervention.” Yet that term seems too precious and academic to fit Yuyachkani’s purpose in this community on the edge of the modern world, where theater serves as CNN, town hall and prayer meeting all rolled into one.

“I was young, but there were many who died, many who suffered in this time,” says Fortunato Sosa del Villar, a local cook, watching the ceremony from a plaza bench. His 28-year-old brother was murdered by Shining Path in 1982, says Sosa, and it’s important to have actions like Yuyachkani’s so people won’t forget.

Call them Maoist visionaries or terrorist goons, Sendero Luminoso certainly had a flair for the dramatic. For more than two decades, Shining Path and the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, another rebel group, turned this region’s majestic mountain plateaus into a corpse-littered combat zone, an altiplano theater of cruelty and destruction. Later, the Peruvian government’s scorched-earth reprisals brought more death and misery.

Nowhere did the collateral damage fall harder than here in Ayacucho province, whose Indian name means “corner of death.” Back then, residents waited in terror every sundown for Shining Path’s nightly bombing attacks. Dogs with dynamite strapped to their backs were set loose in the streets. One time a booby-trapped donkey blew up. Sometimes the rebels would detonate a nearby electrical pylon and the region would be plunged into darkness.

It was all part of the orchestrated mayhem of Shining Path mastermind Abimael Guzman, a former sociology professor who dreamed of ushering in a communist golden age by reducing Peru to rubble. “Before, to speak of Ayacucho was to speak of violence,” says Huamanga resident Flavio Gutierrez, 40. “In the 1980s, the cultural and economic life was suspended.”

Yuyachkani’s professional relationship with this region began in the 1970s, when the company came to take part in an international theater festival. Since then, several of its most durable works have been inspired by the region’s travails, including “Rosa Cuchillo” and “Adios Ayacucho,” in which the spirit of a murdered campesino must journey to Lima to search for his missing bones.

The company also draws liberally on the region’s rich folkloric traditions in such works as “Los Musicos Ambulantes,” a parable about four aging domestic animals that run away and form a quartet rather than be put out to pasture or face the butcher’s block.

Yuyachkani’s return to Ayacucho last summer coincided not only with the troupe’s 33rd anniversary but with the one-year anniversary of the Truth Commission’s landmark report. “The war took place in the sierra, and the people most affected were the poor, the Indians,” while the rest of the country barely noticed, says Teresa Ralli. “These people have had killings, rapes, but they don’t remember at all, not as individuals and not as a society.”

The women at the Casa de las Misioneras Dominicas certainly remember the killings, the explosions, and the fear of being dragged away in the middle of the night. When they come to the women’s health clinic and community center on a side street off the Plaza de Armas, they usually speak of their physical pains, their concern for their children and their sadness over the past.

But now they are laughing, shaking their arms and wiggling their hips, as the Ralli sisters lead them through a series of breathing and movement exercises. For most of these women, nearly all Indian peasants, the two-hour taller de autoestima, or self-esteem workshop, is a rare break from lives spent cooking meals, lugging children and trying to survive another day. “It’s part of our dynamic as a group,” says Teresa Ralli. “Our [work] has always been very connected with the community.”

So it has. Not long after Yuyachkani formed in the early 1970s, a miners’ strike galvanized the troupe’s sense of purpose. “We went to interview the wives” of miners, says Rebeca Ralli, “and we began to know another world. We began to know this other culture.” Since then, Yuyachkani members have done extensive community outreach in Lima’s impoverished barrios, focusing on women and youth, and have supported groups like the National Assn. of Relatives of the Kidnapped, Detained and Disappeared of Peru.

Yuyachkani was born as part of the independent theater movement that swept Peru in the 1970s. Today, as a theatrical elder statesman, the company serves as a beacon for up-and-coming experimental theater artists in Peru, Ecuador and other neighboring countries. “At times we have many ideas in our hearts about theater, and Yuyachkani fortifies us,” says Edgar Palomino Medina, 26, of the Ayacucho group Antares.

While challenging its audiences and supporting its artistic allies, Yuyachkani stays on the attack against corrupt politicians, myopic ideologies and other false gods that men use to justify their misdeeds. In Ayacucho, it gave two performances of “Santiago,” a darkly dazzling phantasmagoria set in a war-ravaged village church where three survivors have come together: a mestiza woman, a white majordomo and the church’s Indian watchman. The plot centers on their efforts to resurrect the annual feast-day ceremony of Santiago, or St. James, the Catholic holy warrior whose image the Spaniards carried into battle, first against the Moors, then against the Incas.

Bathed in smoke and candlelight, “Santiago” examines the fateful moment at which veneration becomes fanaticism. “La guerra termino,” the mestiza cries out at one point, “pero cuando llega la paz?” “The war ended, but when will the peace arrive?”

The ancient Peruvians believed that time moved in endless recurring cycles. Lately, Peru seems on the verge of another crisis, with a shaky democracy and a highly unpopular president. Meanwhile, Shining Path remnants have become active again in the countryside. “The problem,” Correa says, “is that we keep repeating the cycle.”

A joyous celebration

Its 10-day sojourn is winding down, but Yuyachkani is gearing up for a Sunday fiesta of street theater that will cap its stay in Ayacucho before heading back to smoggy, foggy Lima. But before Yuyachkani can take over the Plaza de Armas, the municipal government first must hold its weekly Sunday flag-raising ceremony, an ominous affair full of goose-stepping soldiers and windy patriotic speeches.

Finally around 1 p.m., with an uproar of drums and the shuffling of sandaled feet, the celebrants burst onto the cobbled streets. Stilt walkers teeter overhead. Young female dancers weave in and out of the crowd, while Yuyachkani members perform on a half-dozen small outdoor stages. Cayo stands mannequin-like in a glass case identifying him as a “Genuine Native Peruvian.” Casafranca smilingly proffers tchotchkes beneath a sign detailing the large numbers of Peruvians who’ve been forced to flee the country’s erratic economy. It’s all very vanguardista.

But soon Yuyachkani’s actors shed their agitprop poses and reemerge in the brilliant plumage of traditional Peruvian carnival characters. Among the onlookers is Marfil Franke, a human rights activist who has worked in Lima theater and has known Yuyachkani for decades. “At the beginning they were very young, they were very radical,” she says. “Now their works are still very political, very Brechtian, [but] they are asking themselves more, ‘What is the cultural language of the Peruvian people?’ ”

As the noisy procession spins forward, Yuyachkani’s actors blend in with the carousing locals. Rather than making art imitate life, for 10 days Yuyachkani has made art into the very essence of life, even on the fringes of so much darkness and despair.

The war ended, but when will the peace arrive? As the revelers twirl around the statue of the revolutionary hero Bolivar, the question drifts off into the chilly Andean evening.

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Yuyachkani in Los Angeles

What: “Antigone”

Where: [Inside] the Ford, 2580 Cahuenga Blvd. East, Hollywood

When: 8 p.m. Oct. 21 through 23; 3 p.m. Oct. 24.

Price: $15

What: “The Wandering Players”

Where: Los Angeles Theatre Center, 514 S. Spring St., Los Angeles

When: 6 p.m. Nov. 14

Price: $15

Contact: (323) 461-3673 or www.fitla.org for festival schedule