The Richard Bauman Lecture

Indiana University Departments of Communication and Culture, Theater and Drama, American Studies, CLACS, Spanish and Portuguese, Anthropology, Folklore, and the Americas Series are honored to present

Trauma as Durational Performance: A Walk Through Villa Grimaldi with Pedro Matta
Diana Taylor
Professor, Performance Studies and Spanish
New York University
Thursday, November 5, 2009
6:30 p.m.
Morrison Hall, Room 007
A reception will follow in the upstairs lobby of the Classroom Office Building
(800 East Third Street)

Petro Matta, a survivor, gives visitors a walk through Villa Grimaldi, an infamous Chilean torture camp. His reiterated acts of walking, of showing, of telling, of leading people down the paths characterize trauma and the trauma-driven actions to channel and alleviate it. For him, as for the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, the ritualized tour offers both personal consolation and revenge. Memory is a tool and a political project—an honoring of those who are gone, and a reminder to those who will listen that the victimizers have gotten away with murder. Using a ‘guided’ visit she had with Matta, a survivor of a former concentration camp in Chile, Professor Taylor’s lecture will focus on how trauma is transmitted through embodied practice.


Diana Taylor is University Professor and Professor of Performance Studies and Spanish at New York University. She is the author of Theatre of Crisis: Drama and Politics in Latin America (1991), which won the Best Book Award given by New England Council on Latin American Studies and Honorable Mention in the Joe. E. Callaway Prize for the Best Book on Drama, of Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’ (1997), and most recently The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Duke University Press, 2003), which won the Outstanding Book award from the Association of Theatre in Higher Education, and the Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize from the Modern Language Association.