Experiments on Broadened Writing and Sheet Music in the Argentinian Group Efimerodramas: Toward the Unstable, the Indeterminate, and the Destabilization of Hierarchie

Abstract

This article tackles the creative process of Argentinian theater group Efimerodramas between 2017 and 2019 in Córdoba, Argentina, by studying the tension existing between a method of dramatic creation and the art of performance. In a contemporary scene characterized by crosses and hybrids, the reader is introduced to how a proposal for broadened writing, structured around the idea of a “central guide sheet”, leads Efimerodramas to generate durational performative actions, whose defining characteristic is an inability to be controlled, and, therefore, the subsequent weakening of the tropes of theatrical authority. In this way, the decentering that is produced upon the hierarchy of elements in mise-en-scène impinges on the word (which is transformed into absence), while the characters (which have already been discussed by the original method) incur a similar fate and representation is denied. The work that results from the use of the central guide sheet generates types of a complex, self-ordered nature, which we propose as a way of perceiving and talking about the world. Far from the authoritarianism of a scene that knows itself to be the possessor of a truth awaiting transmission, with processes of group creation in which authorship is shared, these are small gestures of rebellion in the darkness of the current world.