Traumatic Memories and Enduring Fantasies of Stifled Absence: Bicicleta Lerux (2006) and Instrucciones para abrazar el aire (2012) by Arístides Vargas

Abstract

Arístides Vargas imbues various missing people from the last Argentinean Dictatorship with stage presence in two of his plays from the twenty-first century, a time when Argentinean Theater recalling the Dirty War proliferates. The dramatic action in both Bicicleta Lerux (2006) and Instrucciones para abrazar el aire (2012) revolves around two latent specters that represent real missing people: 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 fragmentary, imaginary, metaphorical and theatrical presence of the “disappeared” arises from their friends’ and family’s disturbing memories of their absence, coupled with their continually disregarded trauma symptoms.