Mexican actress Marina de Tavira says one day her brother-in-law, author Emiliano Monge, put a book in her hands and it was a revelation. It was about work. Antigona González Written by Sara Uribe, published in 2012. This is the story of the search for a missing brother, Tadeo, in Tamaulipas, one of the states with the highest number of missing persons in Mexico. “Antigona, a young woman who is one of the few Greek female characters who imposes herself on the system, who cries no in the face of what she perceives as injustice, fascinated me and made me study her closely,” de Tavira says. “It was always a concern for me to do something with Antigone in the theater,” he says. Uribe’s book was like a revelation, inspiring her to make that dream a reality. “This is Antigone I must do,” he thought to himself.
It’s a frigid autumn afternoon in the Juárez neighborhood of central Mexico City, with a brief period of frost. Marina de Tavira met her sister Cecilia for a rehearsal at El Milagro Theater. Antigona González. This is the first time the two have worked together, and they were able to combine the actress’s talent with the embroidery craftsman’s skills. Marina is in charge of delivering a powerful monologue on stage, and the pictures and letters embroidered by her sister are reproduced on the giant screen behind her, creating a delicate and time-consuming work that adds tenderness to the heartbreaking story.
Uribe’s work is a rewriting of the classic myth of Antigone, but placed in the context of Mexican violence and disappearance. Through a chorus of poems, testimonies, and accusations, the author transforms Antigone into a collective figure, a woman searching for the body of her missing brother, like many who travel the country crying out for justice. This work is a collage of the voices of those searching, the voices of the disappeared, and the voices of inaction, revealing the social scars of a country marked by impunity. Reproducing all these voices on the floor, the soundtrack of the insult, is Marina de Tavira.
“There are nights when I dream that you are thinner than ever,” says Antigone in Tavira’s voice. “You walk alone at night through the streets of a strange city. You look for me in the dark, because you feel that I am following you,” the woman says in one fragment of a desperate monologue. Antigone is convinced that her brother is dead and demands only one thing in addition to justice. The closest thing she has to peace is when she gets a phone call one morning telling her that Taddeo’s body has been found. Because life had swallowed her up. She has to keep a daily routine, pay taxes in a lazy state, and attend classes. Because “the fact that a brother disappeared is not a ground for incapacity,” and “life does not stop its course by personal catastrophe.” In the classroom, the teacher takes a roll call of the students. “Present, present,” they repeat. But all she could hear were “Tadeo González, absent.”
Tavira said during a rehearsal break that Uribe’s work followed her like an obsession. “It took many years for this project to materialize and for me to take the plunge. To begin with, being on stage alone is something I had never done before. It’s not really theater, I call it stage poetry,” she explains.
He said Sara Uribe wrote the play for Sandra Muñoz, a director and actress from Tamaulipas, just after the murder of 72 Latin American immigrants by members of the Los Zetas cartel at a ranch in San Fernando, Tamaulipas. The victims were kidnapped and executed after refusing to work for a criminal group or pay extortion money. The crime was discovered after one of the migrants managed to escape and alerted authorities. The San Fernando Massacre was one of the bloodiest incidents of violence in Mexico.
“Over time, this work has become an exemplary text. It is a very current reflection. We are talking about more than 100,000 missing people, whose bodies have not even been found,” the actress commented. “Sara Uribe said, “This is a piece that I wish I hadn’t written, that I wouldn’t have had to continue to perform, that we could have read this piece right now and said, ‘No, this is over, it’s no longer valid.’ But it has become more real. Personally, I believe that the only thing I can do is speak out. For me, making this work is not an artistic challenge, but the possibility to speak out loud and lend my voice to my body, ”explains De Tavira. “I feel like we need to talk about this. I feel like we need to speak out about what, from my point of view, is the cruellest, horrifying, greatest national tragedy,” he says.
Ms de Tavira said she was working on a play with director Sandra Felix when he told her he had seen a display of embroidery made by searchers. This is a common practice among groups of mothers, daughters, wives, and sisters who search the country for relatives. “We started doing a thorough investigation because there is a whole movement around people who come together to embroider and find in that action camaraderie and solidarity, a place where they can put their words and their faces,” says the actress. “Embroidery has become a job for people who search,” he added.
That’s when I decided that embroidery works would be effective in matching the production. Then Cecilia de Tavira joined. She was in charge of researching this task: embroidering text and images that the searcher, the searcher, would reflect on the work. “Embroidery is part of the work of memory, trying to make visible things that have disappeared, and embroidery is the language most used to name them,” she explains while her sister finishes writing her essay. Cecilia de Tavira specializes in textile work, embroidery, and is currently preparing a children’s book to teach children the importance of this craft. “Embroidery is something that comes from femininity because it is very familiar to women and is closely related to all care activities. Women can speak and listen, so it is a common work in women’s communities. So embroidery is what makes this generation’s community possible,” she explains.
They survive their idle lives by embroidering the faces and names of their relatives so they won’t be forgotten. Cecilia read Uribe’s text and analyzed how he could create images to accompany her sister’s monologue. He rescued phrases from text, but he also created faces. He had to go with the times, and rehearsals had already begun, so he worked on everything in two months. There were 104 images embroidered on paper, which were photographed and converted into videos. “For this piece I did a visual research. Suddenly portraits of searchers, shoes and backpacks appear, but they are all real archival images. I don’t want to appropriate their words; I just share their work in embroidery,” he admits.
De Tavira says it was a tough job. Not only because of the work, but also because of the stories of women who have fallen into despair. “Embroidery is part of the wound. When the needle passes through the support, it creates a wound, but then it comes back and repairs it. In other words, there’s a sense of repair. I think that’s endearing. That’s why embroidery has been used in so many social struggles to create memories. Embroidery is a form of visual language that women have used to communicate, to save history, to make grievances,” she explains.
Produced by the independent theater company Incidente Teatro, the sisters’ work will be performed in a program of 16 performances on the stage of El Milagro in Mexico City’s Juárez district starting November 15th. Organizers say this is an opportunity to reflect on the pain that is ravaging this country. “I believe deeply in the power of theater,” says Marina de Tavira. “This is a mirror in which we see ourselves as a society, as a human being, as a collective, and in that sense it raises consciousness,” he says.
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