The Arrabal Creative Team

“We wanted to find a language in dance parallel to what we were trying to do in music. I thought Arrabal was a fantastic opportunity to bring our music together with this choreography in a story that had some weight and that really represented Argentina.”

“I thought that it was important for me as an artist to tell stories that are specific to South America, and the desaparecidos are part of the tapestry of Argentinian political history and culture. Arrabal dramatizes an experience similar to what other countries in South America have gone through.”

“We lived very close to those things—I saw things in the streets when I was just a boy. When I was five years old, the military stopped a bus I was on. They yelled at all the men to get out, and then they pointed at me and said, ‘You, too.’ They made us line up facing a wall, and they searched us all for weapons. That’s what that time period was like. I remember it well… And since then in our country, at least until 2015, there’s been a struggle for human rights, and a struggle to bring to trial those responsible for these crimes against humanity.”

“There have been moments when I’ve said, ‘If I could just have the actors say one line I could solve a problem that otherwise I cannot figure out how to solve.’ But we’ve obeyed our rule not to include dialogue, although Arrabal has quite a complicated, muscular narrative. There’s a misperception that musical book writing is mostly about writing the scenes between the songs. The book writer’s primary job is to create the structure that supports the story. So, in this particular case, the story is told without words, but creating the structure, in partnership with my collaborators, has been the fundamental task. It’s been a challenge, but it’s been an enormouslysatisfying one.”