Transcript Percepticide 2015

On “percepticide”
Gambaro’s Information for Foreigners
Source note
 Taylor, Diana. “Percepticide.” Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of
Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “DirtyWar.” Durham
and London: Duke UP, 1997. 119-138.
Percepticide: definition
 “percepticide” refers to a form of willful blindness that
Taylor calls “just looking”
 “What do we learn to focus on? What are we trained to
overlook?” (121)
 “The triumph of the atrocity was that it forced people to
look away” (122)
 percepticide is the opposite of witnessing: it is an active
refusal (out of apathy, or out of fear) to bear witness
Key Idea
 Theatre is not just a force for good and activism and witness
in the world – it does not automatically summon a witness. In
fact, it can often discourage witnessing.
 Often throughout history, theatrical spectacles in the public
sphere have been used as a diversionary tactic, to get us to
look away from what is really happening.
Theatre and terrorism
 “dealing in disappearance and making the visible invisible
are […] profoundly theatrical. Only in the theatre can the
audience believe that those who walk offstage have
vanished into limbo.”
 “So the theatricality of torture ad terror […] does not
necessarily lie in its visibility, but rather in its potential to
transform, to recreate, to make the visible invisible, the real
unreal” (Disappearing Acts 132, my emphasis).
 The question then becomes: how might we use
theatre to counteract this process of percepticide? Can
theatre become a witness to its dark side?
How does Griselda Gambaro
stage “percepticide”?
 Gambaro focuses first and foremost on the audience!
 “The looking, not the violence, is central. […] It strips us of
our traditional invisibility as spectators” (Taylor, “Griselda
Gambaro…” 170)
 This is why “metatheatre” is so important in Information for
Foreigners…
 Our choice, as spectators – to see, or to look away º becomes
the ultimate subject of the play!