Latin American Theater: Gossip and Gossip Stories

It was police violence with a system: Targeted shots on the heads of the protesters and tear gas fired from a very short distance caused severe eye injuries to 352 people in Santiago de Chile in autumn 2019. During emergency operations, the ophthalmologist Carmen Torres found more than 60 bullets of live ammunition in the skull bones of the young, now partially or completely blind people who had taken to the streets against price increases and for social justice. One of the most important voices of contemporary Latin American theater, the author and director Manuela Infante, makes these targeted attacks the starting point of her dark, irritating text and sound performance at the Schauspiel Bochum: “Noise. The rush of the crowd”.

The solo, played rousingly and voiced by actress Gina Haller, is political, but far from being agitatory political theater. It’s poetic to the point of kitsch. And it develops its own narrative logic that cheerfully declares war on hegemonic discourses and narrative styles.

A mixer with three loop pedals is the only player on the stage, which is covered with foggy and cloudy foils and dimly lit by three street lamps. With this, Haller, supported by sound designer Diego Noguera, takes on self-generated noises, chants, text passages and catchphrases on an equal footing and throws them back alienated. As a babble of voices. As music. As a carpet of sound from a night in a state of emergency in Chile, Lebanon or the USA. As a dialogue with yourself.

Infante asks who decides what is relevant information and what is gossip?

Infante’s text resembles a search movement and is not easy in it. He jumps from scene to scene and Haller jumps from one roll sketch to the next, from the affected rescue dog owner on the plane to tourists in the jungle, to the harrowing diagnosis at the ophthalmologist, to the demo dog and mascot Negro Matapacos, to the campfires of the protesters 2019, which history already proves right today. The democratically elected constitutional convention met for the first time last Sunday in Chile. The abolition of the constitution from the Pinochet dictatorship was one of their central demands.

Infante staged a kind of silent post scene of rumors that was taking on an increasingly political dimension: First, Haller, as a newscaster, reported that two missing people had been found dead in Chile. Seconds later she’s a kid parroting the news, then a teenager, then an old lady, and strange things happen. The information becomes more imprecise on its way, but seems to be approaching a possible truth. The two could have been murdered to prevent their photos of human rights violations from being published at the demonstrations.

The idiosyncratic form of the evening is based on a fundamental, theoretical question, as always Infante’s work. Her play “Estado Vegetal”, for example, with which she won the Stückemarkt of the Berlin Theatertreffen in 2019 and thus also the contract for “Noise”, was an attempt to explain in a similarly branched way how plants grow, based on philosophical and neurological approaches. An accident was negotiated between Baum and motorcyclists, who have since been in a similar “vegetative” state.

The premiere in Bochum also calls for a change of perspective. Infante sees the term “noise” as a category for the devaluation of certain information. With the subject, she is not only up-to-date for the history of her home country. Nobel laureate in economics, Daniel Kahneman, has researched the phenomenon over the past ten years and has just published a book on it. Who decides what is important in a society – and what is dismissed as unimportant, as noise, as noise, as gossip? Infante counters the hegemonic notion of relevant information, as it is reflected in government-related reporting or historiography, with the subversive noise and rumble, the rumor as something positive. As a quasi-democratic expression of a decentralized, networked crowd. The image of the people-friendly and intelligent crowd, which evokes “noise”, seems rather naive by the next morning at the latest and is historically not tenable. For the one and a half hours of the coherent, meandering stage essay, however, you can be charmed by it.