Jimena Márquez faces the great theatrical challenge born from her own biography

The pact of silence that is established as soon as the play begins seems to eliminate any possibility of producing a critical review of the dramatic event that we are going to witness. In some way it recalls the oath that Hamlet proposes to his friends after seeing the ghost of his dead father : Not to speak about what we saw, not to tell anyone what happened in that theater or on that night in Denmark becomes the fact that establishes the limit between truth and fiction.

Jimena Márquez 's Dismantling is one of those creations that forces us to rethink the coordinates of criticism. And this is not about the fateful concept of spoiler that reduces a film or a play (the same goes for a novel or a series) to its argumentative dimension, which implies being indifferent to its aesthetics, to the narrative procedures that are the ones that underpin its artistic validation. Jimena Márquez is on stage and the space proposes a kind of performative conference.

The Uruguayan actress, director and playwright wants to tell us about an episode that occurred in the theaters of Montevideo a few years ago , and to do so she uses the testimony of a large part of the Uruguayan theater universe. A screen brings us a series of interviews with actors and actresses from the permanent cast of the Comedia Nacional de Montevideo , with its director, Gabriel Calderón, and with artists such as Marianella Morena who has presented many of her works in Buenos Aires, focused on the same theme: talking about a man who became a protagonist of the theater scene in the eastern country based on some interventions he made when he attended the performances as a spectator and that threatened the very instance of representation.

This is all that can be said. If we leave aside the enunciative form that turns this performative lecture into a documentary, we can define El desmontaje as an attempt to bring the essay genre to the stage. What Jimena Márquez proposes is a reflection on theatre, specifically on the place of expectation, based on an event that acquires both an anecdotal and a structural category. The actress, who establishes a level of complicity with the audience, who has a great expressive and communicative capacity and who also risks thinking about the acting dimension of her work, appeals to discuss the ways in which an audience is constituted but also the forms of disciplining the scene, the possibility of giving an opinion on what happens on stage, of intervening, even of establishing a situation that can compete with or put into crisis the notion of fiction.

Acting is a political component here because it demonstrates its effectiveness as a mechanism of persuasion, as a strategy to build the plausibility of the story. At the same time, it tells us that this is the first time that he has dared to act, that his relationship with the theatre has always been through teaching, directing and writing after having failed the entrance exam to the Multidisciplinary School of Dramatic Art of Montevideo.

The Dismantling had a few performances at the FIBA ​​in 2023 and now the Club de Artes Escénicas Paraíso is integrating it into its programming in a successful curatorial decision because it is a material that awakens the imagination in relation to the modes of production and dialogues with the theatrical universe of Buenos Aires, with its dynamics and theoretical concerns, since it addresses a critique of a certain inertia that sometimes captures contemporary aesthetic production, on the routines into which any artistic practice can fall and on the lost risk, the absence of wonder that makes theater a predictable experience, almost a bourgeois consumption. But the Uruguayan author understands that when something is altered, the theater quickly recovers its mythical, ritual, devilish character, its capacity to become a social instance, its Dionysian condition where there are no longer differences between the audience and the stage.

Jimena Márquez uses these formulations with theatrical resources; her story generates intrigue, captivates, and motivates us to think about the habits of creation and expectation. At times she gets involved in the first person, she dares to confess, she recognizes herself as a witness to what she tells, while on stage she is the protagonist, although it is true that her role shifts and she ends up transforming into a sort of chorus that tells something that has already happened, that belongs to the past, as occurred in Greek tragedy where the fundamental situations developed off-stage.

The dismantling is a great account of the obscene (understood as off-stage) but reinterpreted in the instance of revelation. It is a material where we feel that we are participating in a conversation with the protagonist/narrator and at the same time author or chronicler who takes us as recipients and interlocutors. She is always looking at us, it is clear that she is speaking to us, that she is on stage to tell us a story and this updates the notion of spectator. It gives us an essence, an entity that does not quiet down in the darkness of the room.

The dismantling will be presented on Friday, March 7 at 8 p.m., Saturday, March 8 at 5 p.m. and 8 p.m. and Sunday, March 9 at 4 p.m. at El Galpón de Guevara