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HACETE AMIGO!
Batato Barea. Walter Barea (Junín, Buenos Aires Province, 1961 – Buenos Aires, 1991), Billy Boedo or simply Batato. ‘A literary drag-clown is how I define myself, if I really have to give some idea of it,’ he said somewhere around 1989. His figure forever shaped the explosive artistic renewal after the return of democracy. He was a member of various underground groups in post-dictatorship Buenos Aires, such as Los Peinados Yoli (Yoli Hairdos) and El Clú del Claun (The Clown Club) or the ‘power trio’ he formed with Alejandro Urdapilleta (Montevideo, Uruguay, 1954 - Buenos Aires, 2013) and Humberto Tortonese (Buenos Aires, 1964). Deriving from clown techniques, his menacing, transgressive style questioned discipline and heteronormativity and erased the boundaries between art and life. The fresh air that Batato breathed into Argentinian theatre was closely bound up with his anti-theatrical spirit. He did not hold with rehearsals, pre-written scripts, realistic acting methods; in other words, all the foundations on which the edifice of independent, official, commercial theatre had been erected. ‘Theatre doesn’t interest me in the least,’ he once remarked. Batato designed his own jewellery for his plays out of pop bottle tops, built his sets and costumes from rubbish and sewed the costumes with his mother. He died of AIDS in 1991, aged 30. The most important gallery in the Rojas Cultural Centre was named after him. We are grateful to Seedy González Paz for assembling and preserving the archive we share here today.