The body as archive: performativity, displacement and memory in two theatrical works

Abstract

This article explores how two works from the book Migrant Theatre: Caminantes by Percy Encinas, and Duo Domo by Julia Thays (2023), represent the migrant body as a living archive of memories, displacements and resistances. In contexts of civilizational collapse and radical exclusion—such as those staged in both plays—the body becomes a medium where both the traumas of power and the possibilities of symbolic reappropriation are inscribed. Methodologically, this work is based on a textual and performative analysis of two selected plays from the volume, approached from a theoretical-critical perspective.
Using an interdisciplinary framework that draws on Diana Taylor’s studies of performance and the body as archive, Judith Butler’s theory of performativity, and Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics, the essay analyzes how migrant and displaced bodies are not mere victims of circumstance, but active carriers of cultural, political, and affective repertoires. Bodily actions—such as singing, silence, wounds, and rituals—act as mechanisms for inscribing and transmitting a collective memory denied by dominant systems. Within this framework, the theatrical scene is configured as a space for the reappropriation of
the body as a living archive, capable of resisting oblivion, challenging institutional violence, and proposing other forms of community and meaning. This work does not address stage performance. The essay concludes that Teatro Migrante unfolds a political poetics in which the body is a site of conflict, but also of possibility