Dancing the word, shouting the silence: approaches to the figuration of violence in Patricia Zangaro's dramaturgy

Abstract

This paper deals with the different figurations of violence in Patricia Zangaro's dramatic textuality. Since the 1990s, this Buenos Aires playwright has organised her writing around a constant violence of language. This discursive action is projected both onto the corporeality and the voice of the characters. The scenic word acquires a complex flesh in which what is pronounced coexists with what is decided to be silent and what is shouted, with a consequently imposed suffocation. For the study of the above, we propose a casuistry made up of two texts in which the scans between word and silence stand out. Última luna (1998) and Tango (2008) are part of the aforementioned series and focus on the relations between power, gender and violence. In the first case, the return to the myth of the captive anchors in the desert space a metaphor of disappearance and death, but also of memory. In the second, the dance is choreographed through the fragmentation of the speeches and the immobility of the bodies. The author's poetics assembles a cartography of meaning against violence through a writing that unmasks different relations of domination.