The Mexican actress Marina de Tavira says that one day her brother-in-law, the writer Emiliano Monge, put a book in her hands that was a revelation. It was about work Antigona Gonzalez by Sara Uribe, published in 2012, which recounts the search for Tadeo, a brother who disappeared in Tamaulipas, one of the Mexican states with the highest number of missing people. “Antígona, this young woman who is one of the few Greek female characters who asserts herself in the system, who shouts no when faced with something she perceives as an injustice, fascinated me and I studied her a lot,” says de Tavira. “It’s always been an unfinished business for me to do something with Antigone in the theater,” he says. Uribe’s book, like a revelation, pushed her to realize that dream. “This is the Antigone I have to do,” he said to himself.
It’s a frosty autumn afternoon in the Juárez neighborhood of central Mexico City, in the midst of a temporary freeze. Marina de Tavira met her sister Cecilia at the El Milagro Theater for rehearsals Antigona Gonzalez. It is the first time they have worked together and they do so by combining the talent of the actress with the skill of the embroiderer. Marina is in charge of developing the powerful monologue on stage, while behind her a huge screen reproduces images and texts embroidered by her sister, in a delicate and laborious work that adds tenderness to a painful story.
Uribe’s work is a rewriting of the classic myth of Antigone, but placed in the context of violence and disappearances in Mexico. Through a choral voice that mixes poetry, testimony and denunciation, the writer transforms Antigone into a collective figure: a woman who searches for the body of her missing brother, like many others who travel the country with their cry for justice. The work is constructed as a collage of voices, those of the seekers, those of the missing, that of indolence, which reveal the social wound of a country marked by impunity. It is Marina de Tavira who reproduces all these voices on the floor, which act as a soundtrack to the insult.
“There are nights when I dream that you are thinner than ever,” Antigone says in Tavira’s voice. “You walk alone at night through the streets of unknown cities. You look for me in the dark because you feel that I am chasing you”, says the woman in one of the fragments of her desperate monologue. Antigone is sure that her brother is dead and, in addition to justice, she asks for only one thing: the closest thing to peace for her is to be called one morning and informed that Tadeo’s body has appeared. Because life swallowed her. He must respect the routine, pay taxes in an indolent state, attend lessons, because “the fact that a brother disappears is not a reason for inability”, because “life does not interrupt its course due to personal catastrophes”. In class the teacher calls his students. “Present, present,” they repeat. But all he hears is: “Tadeo González, absent.”
Tavira says during a break in rehearsals that Uribe’s work followed her like an obsession. “It took me many years for this project to take shape, for me to have the courage to do it. For starters, it was being on stage alone, which I had never done. It’s not specifically a show, I call it a theatrical poem,” she explains.
Sara Uribe, he says, wrote the play for a director and actress from Tamaulipas, Sandra Muñoz, when the murder of 72 migrants, originally from Central and South America, had just occurred on a ranch in the municipality of San Fernando, Tamaulipas, by members of the Los Zetas cartel. The victims were kidnapped and executed after refusing to work for the criminal group or pay extortion. The crime was discovered when one of the migrants managed to escape and alert the authorities. The San Fernando massacre has become one of the most atrocious episodes of violence in Mexico.
“Over time it has become a paradigmatic text. It is a very current reflection. We are talking about more than 100,000 missing people, whose bodies have not even been found”, comments the actress. “Sara Uribe says that this is a work that I wish I hadn’t written and that I wish we didn’t have to continue staging, that I would like us to read it at this moment and say: ‘No, this is already finished, it’s no longer valid’. Yet it has become more current. Personally I think the only thing I know how to do is raise my voice. For me, creating this work is not an artistic challenge, it’s the possibility of speaking out loud, of lending my voice and my body to name absences”, explains de Tavira. “I feel like we need to talk about this, that we need to say out loud what in my view is the cruelest, most terrible, greatest national tragedy,” he says.
De Tavira says that while working on staging the show with director Sandra Félix, he told her that he had seen an exhibition of embroidery made by searchers, a common practice among these groups of mothers, daughters, wives and sisters who scour the country in search of their relatives. “We started to do an entire investigation, because there is a whole movement around people who are looking, who come together to embroider and who in that action find a bit of company, of solidarity, a place to leave those words, those faces”, says the actress. “Embroidery has become a chore for people to search for,” she adds.
It was then that she decided that embroidery work would be powerful to accompany the staging. And Cecilia de Tavira joined. She was responsible for the research on this task of embroidering the researchers, the texts and images they reflect in their creations. “Embroidery is part of the work of memory, of the attempt to make the disappeared visible, it is the most used language to name them,” she explains as her sister finishes her essays. Cecilia de Tavira dedicates herself to textile work, embroiders and is now preparing a children’s book to teach the little ones the importance of this technique. “Embroidery is very close to women, it is something that comes from the feminine, because it is closely related to all care activities. It is a job that is done a lot in women’s communities, because they can talk, listen, that is, embroidery allows this generation of community”, she explains.
These women embroider the faces and names of their relatives so that they are not forgotten, so that they survive indolence. Cecilia read Uribe’s text to analyze how she might have created the images that accompanied her sister’s monologue. He saved the sentences from the text, but he also created faces. He had to keep up with the times, he worked on everything in two months, because the rehearsals had already started. There are 104 images embroidered on paper, which were photographed and then converted into video. “For this work I did a visual investigation, suddenly the portraits of the seekers, the shoes or the backpacks appear and they are all real, archive images. I don’t want to appropriate their language, I just want to share their work with embroidery,” he admits.
De Tavira says it was hard work, not only for what it represented in terms of work, but for the stories of these women immersed in desperation. “The embroidery is part of the wound. When the needle goes through the medium, it creates a wound, but then it comes back and repairs it. In other words, there is a sense of repair. I think it’s tender and that’s why embroidery has been used in so many social struggles to create memory. It’s the form of visual language that women have used to communicate, to save history, to raise a complaint,” she explains.
The work of the two sisters, produced by Incidente Teatro, an independent theater company, will be visible starting from November 15th on the stage of El Milagro, in the Juárez neighborhood of Mexico City, with a program of 16 shows. It is an opportunity, the organizers say, to reflect on the pain that is breaking this country. “I believe deeply in the power of theatre,” says Marina de Tavira. “It’s a mirror in which we see ourselves as a society, as people, as a collective, and in that sense, it raises awareness,” he says.
