Abstract
Informatión para extranjeros (1973) by Griselda Gambaro is a play that fragments the theater experience into small pieces that portray violent acts taken from Argentine and international newspaper accounts. Gambaro’s play is an avant-garde example of a theater that violently and unconventionally wants to show its spectators (and readers, in the case of this play) the worldview that it has discovered. Gambaro creates this alternative theatrical experience by stating that the play be performed in a space that is not a theater. The spectators move through the different rooms of a house, each accommodating a different violent episode. In this way, the role of the audience is changed from one that is physically detached to one that is intermingled with the action and the actors. Each group of spectators receives a guide who, like the Mendigo in Estorino’s La dolorosa historia, leads them through rooms to watch violent kidnappings and episodes. The audience becomes what Milanés was: spectators traveling from scene to scene, unwilling witnesses forced to see violent images and memories. The foreigners that are alluded to in the title are all of the spectators (and readers) that come to Informatión, thus stating that no one is familiar with the material in the play. Spectatorship, for Gambaro in Informatión, becomes an experience of estrangement, of “foreign-ness.” As foreigners, the spectators are drawn into the action unfolding before them but always with a level of detachment that allows them to question these violent scenes.
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Cuando nadie puede abrir la boca, ¿por qué se va a gritar gratuitamente?
Griselda Gambaro, Informatión para extranjeros
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Susana Tarantuviez, La escena del poder. El teatro de Griselda Gambaro, Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 2007 (332).
Griselda Gambaro’s theater is the subject of hundreds of articles and numerous books. Diana Taylor is one of the most well-known scholars of Gambaro’s drama, though the Marguerite Feitlowitz’s Introduction to the English translation of three of her plays stands out as a study. Also, the recent publication of Susana Tarantuviez’s work on Gambaro’s theater is an important addition to this growing body of scholarship. See Diana Taylor, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War,” (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997)
ed. Diana Taylor, Canadá: Girol Books, 1989) and Theatre of Crisis: Drama and Politics in Latin America (Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 1991).
Marguertite Feitlowitz, “Crisis, Terror, Disapperance: The Theater of Griselda Gambaro,” In Information for Foreigners (Illiniois: Northwestern University Press, 1992).
Susana Tarantuviez, La escena delpoder. El teatro de Griselda Gambaro (Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 2007).
Despite its difficult history of representation, Informatión has been the subject of much research and discussion in academic circles, especially in the US. Some names that stand out as most important in reference to this play are Jason Cortés, Myriam Yvonne Jehenson, Mady Schutzman, John Fleming, Rosalea Postma, and Dick Gerdes. Jason Cortés, “La teatralización de la violencia y la complicidad del espectáculo de Informatión para extranjeros de Griselda Gambaro,” Latin American Theatre Review 35.1 (2001): 47–61.
Myriam Yvonne Jehenson, “Staging Cultural Violence: Griselda Gambaro and Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’,” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 32.1 (1999): 85–104.
Mady Schutzman, “Calculus, Clarivoyance, and Communitas,” Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 10 (1999): 117–33.
John Fleming, “Argentina on Stage: Griselda Gambaro’s Information for Foreigners and Antígona furiosa,” Selected Proceedings: Louisiana Conference on Hispanic Languages and Literatures, ed. Joseph V. Ricapito (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994).
Rosalea Postma, “Space and Spectator in the Theatre of Griselda Gambaro: Informacion para extranjeros,” Latin American Theatre Review 14.1 (1980): 35–45.
Dick Gerdes, “Recent Argentine Vanguard Theatre: Gambaro’s Informatión para extranjeros,” Latin American Theatre Review 11.2 (1978): 11–16.
Griselda Gambaro, Teatro 2. Dar la vuelta. Información para extranjeros. Puesta en claro. Sucede lo que pasa (Buenos Aires: Ediciones de la Flor, 1987) 68.
Griselda Gambaro, Information for Foreigners: Three Plays by Griselda Gambaro, ed. and trans. Marguerite Feitlowitz (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1992) 67.
Antonin Artaud, Theater and its Double, trad. Mary Carolina Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958) 96.
Idelber Avelar, The Letter of Violence: Essays on Narrative, Ethics, and Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) 3–4.
Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York, HarperCollins Publishers, 1974) 3.
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985) 4.
Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964) 190.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1977) 7–8.
Copyright information
© 2010 Katherine Ford
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Ford, K. (2010). Disorderly Conduct: The Violence of Spectatorship in Griselda Gambaro’s Información para extranjeros (1973). In: Politics and Violence in Cuban and Argentine Theater. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230105225_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230105225_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-37768-8
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-10522-5
eBook Packages: Palgrave Media & Culture CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)