Premiered in Buenos Aires in 1995, Heiner Müller’s Máquina Hamlet (Hamletmaschine) means the projection of El Periférico de Objetos to international stages. This project springs from the desire to stage a classic (Hamlet) in a “Periférico key". Ignorant to the company’s need, Müller had already written that text, Hamlet Machine, which provides the necessary text scaffolding to enable the scene to address the group’s core themes. Through Müller’s work, El Periférico de Objetos creates one of the most radical and revulsive pieces of the Argentine scene. In Máquina Hamlet the puppet tableau becomes stage, the group’s iconic puppets are left behind in order to introduce a new scale: it is the turn of anthropomorphism. Objects here are human sized, and the dialectics find a new fold. The first scene shows a still image where actors and puppets mix, with the same features and clothes, they are the same: identical looks, identical sizes. What is the limit between object and subject? No borderline seems to stand between them. A puppet is dismembered and displayed as an art object, several puppets are beaten and punished to death. But nothing reveals that the punished and dismembered are actually objects. The limit is erased and thus the show unleashes unprecedented stage violence: we stand witness to the repeated execution of subjects by the hand of objects, and in the final scene (where, through a crafted mise-en-abyme, the theater is set on fire) we witness the destruction of the human race: the only possible way out of the labyrinth. Meanwhile Hamlet (the artist, the thinker, the machine) watches everything from his immaculate black suit. The artist, the intellectual, says Müller, holds the privilege of disgust. And El Periférico de Objetos assumes this privilege to address its own creation. They make a manifest out of this work: we no longer attend a work of fiction, but fiction gives way to self-referential discourse that accounts for the state of Art. Thus, the group takes the center stage of political discussion.

With
EMILIO GARCÍA WEHBI
ANA ALVARADO
ALEJANDRO TANTANIAN
ROMÁN LAMAS

Text
HEINER MÜLLER
Translation
GABRIELA MASSUH
DIETER WELKE
Dramaturgy
DIETER WELKE
Assistant to the director
MAGDALENA VIGGIANI
Off voices
ALEJANDRO TANTANIÁN
ROMÁN LAMAS
Stage photography
MAGDALENA VIGGIANI
Puppets and object’s design
NORBERTO LAINO
Choreography
FELICITAS LUNA
Puppets and objetcs
NORBERTO LAINO
Costumes
ROSANA BÁRCENA
Original music and sound treatment
CECILIA CANDIA
Lighting
JORGE DOLISZNIAK
Set and space design
EL PERIFÉRICO DE OBJETOS
Directed by
EMILIO GARCÍA WEHBI
DANIEL VERONESE
ANA ALVARADO


Teatro Callejón, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1995.

Fotos Guillermo Arengo, Magdalena Viggiani