Cuarto intermedio: A Dark (and Intermedial) Comedy about the Trials for Crimes Against Humanity

Abstract

This article offers a reading of the ideas of the ‘common’ and the ‘public’ in Cuarto intermedio: Guía práctica para los juicios de lesa humanidad, a multimedial lecture-performance written and acted by Argentine writer Félix Bruzzone and French lawyer and actress Mónica Zwaig, and directed by filmmaker Juan Schnitman. It was first performed in 2018 at one of the houses of writer Victoria Ocampo. The play formed part of a literature series organised by the Fondo Nacional de las Artes known as Literatura Expandida, a project that sought to blend disciplinary borders and explore the connections between different artistic fields. Cuarto intermedio is part of an emerging corpus of plays that rather than promoting interdisciplinary work, encourage the indisciplinary gesture. The latter constitutes a lack of respect, a sort of irreverence toward limits established between different territories and areas of expertise in favor of new and collective ways of being and doing. Far from any disciplinary parochialism and hierarchies of expertise and practice (including high art and popular culture), and yet keeping the scpecificity of certain languages and discourses, these plays promote the idea of contagion, the borrowing and exchange of formats, concepts and subjects from different fields. Cuarto intermedio is thus an invitation to create a ‘community of memory’ adjacent to the law, that is at the site of the Comodoro Py trials, but also one located at the boundaries (zones of both exclusions and contacts) of disciplinary frontiers.