Lola Arias: Re-enacting life

Re-enacting Life documents the work of the multifaceted Argentine theatre artist Lola Arias, whose work crosses generations, countries, genres and performance sites. The edited collection brings together playscripts, synopses, interviews, questionnaires, notes, photographs, floorplans and other primary documentation of Arias’s varied performance work, which today includes nearly thirty plays, installations, audience and artist performances and curated events. Also included are the voices of some of her many collaborators and spectators, in the form of reflections and essays written by artists, art historians, and performance and media scholars., many of whom belong to Arias’s own generation.

L O L A  A R I A S (Buenos Aires, 1976) is a writer, theatre and film director and performer. She collaborates with people from different backgrounds (such as war veterans or migrant children) in theatre, literature, music, film and art projects. Her productions play with the overlapping zones between reality and fiction. Her latest theatrical projects are What They Want to Hear (2018), Atlas of Communism (2016) and Minefleld (2016), the last of which brings together Argentine and British veterans of the Malvinas / Falklands War to share their experience of the conflict and life since. Her feature film Theatre of War (2018) was selected for the 68th Forum of the Berlinale Film Festival and has screened in numerous film festivals all around the world. Arias’s theatrical productions and installations have been shown at festivals such as LIFT (London), Under the Radar (New York), Festival d’Avignon, Theater Spektakel (Zurich), Wiener Festwochen (Vienna), Festival Theaterformen (Braunschweig/Hanover), Spielart Festival (Munich) and the Berlinale, as well as in museums and venues such as the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), Parque de la Memoria (Buenos Aires), REDCAT (Los Angeles), Théâtre de la Ville (Paris), the Gorki Theatre (Berlin) and the Royal Court Theatre (London).

J E A N  G R A H A M – J O N E S is the Lucille Lortel Professor of Theatre at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center.