Disorderly Conduct: The Violence of Spectatorship in Griselda Gambaro’s Información para extranjeros (1973)

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.

Cuando nadie puede abrir la boca, ¿por qué se va a gritar gratuitamente?

Griselda Gambaro, Informatión para extranjeros