Camping in Bucharest

Selling carpets in Bucharest, around 1925

Camp has to do with posing. Maybe it is about the French origin of the word, maybe it is about the theatrical element of posing for an old photo or for a painting. Camp bodies express excess, dolce far niente, non-productivity, they escape the capitalist logic of production, of efficiency, of giving all you got, of dying on stage. It is always about something more, something in excess, something that goes beyond the expectations. I remember the perfect example: Odin actors were studying not photos but paintings to increase the theatricality of their movement on stage, to go beyond the every-day-life energy, to dilate their bodies. The reason was that there is an inherent excess there, the painted models have to stay for a long time in one position that cannot be efficient in a daily situation. A Camp situation. The same situation with our two characters from above: posing for a nice photo, they are acting excessive and they produce a nonchalant theatricality. A beautiful example of Camp. Bucharest style.

Pedar (1996)

director: Majid Majidi

Yesterday morning we watched an Iranian movie, Father (Pedar), directed by Majid Majidi in 1996. Looking around on the net afterwards I was surprised to only find positive and extremely praising reviews, since my experience of the movie was quite the opposite. The story is set in contemporary (I guess) Iran, and the overtly Oedipal plot revolves around 14-year old Mehrollah who goes away to work in order to support his widowed mother and three sisters, only to find her hastily remarried to the local policeman upon his return. Unwilling to accept the new man in his mother’s life as a father, in fact, unwilling to accept a man other than himself in his mother’s life, he unrelentlessly goes about harassing her and the new husband, with male ego outbursts that the director seems to admire as heroic, but that end up being pretty annoying for the spectator who does not have much investment in patriarchy. The storyline doesn`t have much else going for itself, it`s a back and forth between the policeman and Mehrollah`s masculinities, climaxing with the boy managing to steal the policeman`s gun (his gun, get it?) and making a run for it. In the end, quite predictably, the two are brought together by their constant chase and the cheesy ending suggests that Mehrollah will finally be able to accept the policeman as a father figure.
Now, this movie could have been done in a way that is actually meaningful and interesting, given that the theme offers a lot of room for giving depth to the characters and their circumstances. However this movie is made from a normative male perspective, anchoring itself in its biases and conditions uncritically, and presenting them to us as if they were universal values we should understand and sympathize with. Why should I be moved by a deeply patriarchal story in which the crisis is triggered by the absence of the father (an absent presence metaphorically, and literally in the photo that the boy is sporting around) and is solved by finding another male to fill in this position? The character of the mother is completely subdued, she is given very few articulate lines (her token appearances are marked by gasps, cries and tears), and seems to exist only as a pretext for more male existential angst . To be fair, the mother is not presented without a certain degree of condescending compassion, but her gestures and feelings are not conferred with the heroic, tragic dimension that her sons` are. For whom, of course, the challenge is even greater now that she is married to the representative of a very phallic institution, the police, that requires Mehrollah to bring out the big guns of his alpha male kit. In the end, it seems to me that this is movie is a game of whose dick is bigger, an obsession that is apparently not restricted to Western patriarchy.

Who is The Rapeman?

Elena pointed me this short notice on feministing.com so I've done a little research.

So, who is actually The Rapeman? on imdb.com at the trivia section we find out that the cartoons are based on "humorous Japanese manga (comic book) series, written by Keiko Aisaki, a woman." Like that can justify its content or make the male viewers safer in their pleasure of watching some nice rape scenes. It appeared from 1985 to 1992 in 13 volumes. Exploring its good marketability, Pink Pineapple produced nine Rapeman live action feature films between 1993 and 1996 and it was rapidly transformed into a cult manga/film fetish in the US.

The Rapeman is a classic super hero with a twist: a shy high school teacher by day he does "great justice" by night and of course has a motto: "Righting wrongs through penetration". His cases are solved by one method in making justice - rape and the "villains" are, picking randomly, a gold digger girlfriend, a boyfriend stealer, a lesbian wife, etc. Even more outrageous, if in the middle of a rape scene, the woman becomes unresponsive or expresses enjoyment, he uses special techniques such as "M69 Screwdriver" or "Infinite Loop" to apply more pain to the villain.

I was surprised to see after a quick search that all information that I could find is presenting the character in a positive light (except the feminist page from where I've started which doesn't say much after all). What for me is ultimately wrong, not having any doubt about it, it is read in a most sincere misogynistic way possible as fun and even ethical. As one guy says "once you get past that whole raping women thing he’s actually a really good guy." That is exactly the issue, how can you pass the "raping women thing"? Considered by its fans more like an intelligent twist on the classic superhero boring narration: " Only in Japan would this type of production be made - and thank God for it. RAPEMAN is a strangely fun and "charming" super-hero" mentioning again that the rape is always done for a good cause. One negative point noted by another reviewer: "Hard-core sleaze fans will probably be disappointed as RAPEMAN isn't nearly as "rough" as some of the older pinku material, but there is some nudity - and there's something that's hard to nail-down that makes this one a big winner in my book. I think the combination of light comedy and strange concept works..." or can it be that straight forward misogyny is simply entertaining? Another guy: "The plot of "Rapeman" may sound offensive for some viewers...In fact it's surprisingly funny and humorous. A perfect flick to cheer somebody up!" Somebody, anybody? If you are a rapist, i guess this is some really good fun.
Rapeman has the effect of even changing the whole concept of rape, you might become rape friendly after watching it: "Most people find the subject of rape a very strong, criminal and evil part of life. And they have every right to believe that way. Then there are other people who think rape can be used as a means of justice, a way to avenge rights and honor. Well, before this movie I always thought Rape was a weird touchy subject. Obviously there's some whacked out nut cases out there, hurting people and families for their own sick pleasures and some of these sickos will actually commit murder. But I also believed that the act of rape can be a desirous outcome for certain people. Well, the latter is tackled somewhat in a movie I'll most likely never forget."
By reinforcing some good/evil dichotomies and the cliche of punishing the evil ones, rape becomes a just method for bringing peace and order. Here is another fan: "People are getting hurt, and that is not right. Rapeman stands for justice, honor and peace. He will not stop until the bad guys get what's coming to them! The movie is believe it or not, warmhearted. It's full of humor, and has some nice sex scenes...they are actually rape scenes but they don't play out like rape. Which for me makes the movie that much better. I wouldn't be down with this if the rape scenes were reminiscent of Irreversible. It take an incredibly serious subject and makes it seem OK....for 75 minutes anyways. It's definitely one of the most enjoyable movies I've seen in a while. And I'm definitely looking forward to the sequels. Yup, that's right! 9 outta 10 for the amazing Rapeman." When rape is done for a good cause, hurray! Well, I don't really think so.

Cultural mise-en-abyme

Getting lost in Kristevan abjection and thinking a lot of my own limits of the abject, I ended up with a melancholic feeling about US. Last night I had a long conversation in a Thai-Hungarian restaurant about facing other cultures and what is going on in the process. My argument was that the most difficult shocks are those when you are not foreign to the culture but you have a sort of mise-en-abyme by confronting your own lack of cultural limits. It was exactly what I felt in US: on one hand I was so familiar with everything that I saw and touched but on the other hand it was so strange and uncanny. I wasn't sure of my own subjectivity and its abject limits. Being in and out of a culture that you think you know hugely disturbs. My dear friend, Jeanne, writes here a very interesting entry on her return to Memphis. No wonder that today I had an earlier post on Burroughs' vision of America.

Thanksgiving Prayer - William S. Burroughs

Always good to remember Ol'Bill's words of advise. Not as good as the Gus van Sant classic version, but with some interesting footage.

"Thanks for the wild turkey and
the passenger pigeons, destined
to be shit out through wholesome
American guts.


Thanks for a continent to despoil
and poison.

Thanks for Indians to provide a
modicum of challenge and
danger.

Thanks for vast herds of bison to
kill and skin leaving the
carcasses to rot.

Thanks for bounties on wolves
and coyotes.

Thanks for the American dream,
To vulgarize and to falsify until
the bare lies shine through.

Thanks for the KKK.

For nigger-killin' lawmen,
feelin' their notches.

For decent church-goin' women,
with their mean, pinched, bitter,
evil faces.

Thanks for "Kill a Queer for
Christ" stickers.

Thanks for laboratory AIDS.

Thanks for Prohibition and the
war against drugs.

Thanks for a country where
nobody's allowed to mind the
own business.

Thanks for a nation of finks.

Yes, thanks for all the
memories-- all right let's see
your arms!

You always were a headache and
you always were a bore.

Thanks for the last and greatest
betrayal of the last and greatest
of human dreams."

cleaning the bathroom

Yesterday I had a nasty surgery and after taking a shower I realized that my shower was full of blood, the white tiles on the floor also. During cleaning the long blood lines in a very meticulous way I realized that this is how the scene from Psycho looked like if it was not black and white. And then I realized that this memory becoming so real to the point of embodying it, put on the same level the killer and the victim. What if Norman Bates actually killed his mother and he was impersonating the mother at the same time? How that cleaning of the bathroom would have looked like? Probably like mine

Salome dream

Oscar Wilde as Salome

I woke up this morning with one of the most weird dreams about a performance. It was something related to Salome by Oscar Wilde, a play I haven't thought about it for a while. Salome was played by an actress that i've worked with before, i won't tell her name for superstition :) I haven't seen anything of the show, just setting up the stage and trying to rehearse a bit, fixing the lights and so on. The location was important: it was set up in a Turkish bath, something similar to Rudas Furdo, but bigger, with some stone stairs in the middle of the main pool. The stairs were 5-6 meters high and they were old, shaking and falling. We were struggling to rehearse but the stairs were keep falling, we couldn't find the right ones to use. It was a relocation of an already made performance but the new elements, the water from the bath and the shaky stairs were changing the story and I was thinking how can I deal with it to support my own staging. I still don't know how this staging was made but it was connected strangely enough to Hedda Gabler. My hysterical ghosts again...

Jingle Bells / Shotgun shells / Granny's on the run...

1956 Grandpa shows grandma how to shoot a gun

To quote an old movie from the 50's, I guess when you're looking down the barrel of a shotgun, everything else looks out of focus.

UPDATE: Yes! They are my "real" grandparents! 1956 is the year when my father was born, their first son.

I Not I

Image: I, Not I by Micky Donnelly, oil on canvas, 2006

Last week I went to Cluj for an amazing conference called "Action Research and Feminism." There were two presentations that I gave, one of them being connected to my staging of Beckett's Not I, part of Silent as the Grave show. Here is what I had to say:


In Not I from 1972, a woman's mouth is isolated on the stage, locked in place with the rest of her face and body shrouded in darkness. She is identified only as "Mouth." Through a torrential stream of monologue, we discover that the woman – nearing seventy years of age, possibly even dying – has remained silent most of her life, since being thrust prematurely into the world. Her sudden flood of language is a manifestation of the "buzzing" in her head, an almost involuntary act, an autobiographical stream of babelogue with the "half the vowels wrong." Significantly, she refuses to adopt the first-person pronoun, insisting on referring to the subject of her story as "she". Like many of Beckett's characters, Mouth's hysterical need for acting out, keep talking defers the act of self-identification, the awareness of "I" that denotes accountability among the ruins of a fallen world.

Whereas Krapp's taping is accumulative and entirely self-focussed, Mouth is continually revising her narrative, the perfect or ideal form of which would omit her altogether. When her "vehement refusal to relinquish third person" suffers from a moment of confusion, she cries out, "no! . . she! . ."

Mouth becomes invested with an almost hallucinatory sense of intensity and carnality; her flickering movements the living synecdoche for an absent body. The longer we watch (and listen to) Mouth talk, laugh, and scream, the more we perceive other bodily elements as well, from the opening of the eye to the clenching of the fist. Like ghostly overtones to live music, these almost subliminal transformations arise from the interplay of material and instrument, and in Not I Beckett achieves a remarkable collusion of speech and form. Mouth is intimately connected to the words spewing forth: her very contours and motions subordinated to the demands of articulation, she provides a physical embodiment of language. To fall silent – to shut, to close up – would seem a kind of suicide, further underlining that Beckettian compulsion to break the silence with a constant stream of language, despite the futility of communicating anything meaningful.

Performing the part of Mouth is a real challenge: besides having to deliver a winding monologue whose pacing is everything, the actress must endure the physical discomfort of being literally locked in place, including a head restraint, so that only her mouth remains always visible. Body on stage becomes present through absence of the whole body, we can see and hear only the mouth. Actress’s absent body expresses lively concreteness and escapes becoming a “representable object… for the abstractive gaze” of the spectator. Hugh Kenner has suggested that Beckett may be recalling one of the unusual conditions to the license granted to Ireland's Abbey Theatre in 1904: besides being prohibited from staging exhibitions of wild beasts, the managers were not "to allow women or children to be hung from the flies or fixed in positions from which they cannot release themselves." When the play premiered in New York, Jessica Tandy was puzzled and asked Beckett whether the woman had been raped in the field. Beckett was startled: "How could you think of such a thing!" There is no need to invent external incidents to justify, as it were, Mouth's dilemma. Existence is trauma enough, and a narrative can be a consolation only in the form of disappointment.

The too many contrasting views on Beckett, on the effect and functioning of his plays in theatrical contexts, were provoked also by two burning issues that he explores in what he calls the “stage texts”: spectatorial gaze and gender issues. His plays and their theatrical interpretations still generate heated debates, especially on the grounds of their poststructuralist complexity and their feminist potential. Beckett raised difficult questions about gender relations, social conditions and dilemmas facing women, disability, age, affectivity and lack of affectivity. He never provided any answers, he didn’t give any hints how spectators should live their lives. He did not proposed political actions, policies or social measures. But these plays have a potential to inspire social change and to challenge us nowadays. Beckett’s plays bring new perspectives to feminist issues today and present contrasting views on inequality.

Adrienne Rich used the concept of re-vision to symbolize the act of looking back at old texts from new critical directions by raising fresh questions. According to her, re-vision is for feminists “more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival.” Through re-vision we can look at Beckett’s texts for a way to broaden horizons, rewrite, reinterpret, criticize and restage them. Many interpretations of Beckett are put on stage everyday but Beckett’s potential is still to be rediscovered. By using the easiest strategy to relate to his characters, stage situations and his clichés nowadays we just rely on the values that we already agreed on. Each time a superficial canonized staging of Beckett is done by well-meaning actors, directors and producers another nail is hammered into his theatrical coffin. That won’t be problematic if these performances won’t overshadow outstanding elements in his plays and a strong critical voice. By seeing Beckett as a tool for social change an uncomfortable question has to be asked: is Beckett actually the finest tool for questioning inequality and patriarchy? Or would it be better to leave this task to human rights organizations, the UN, academics or feminists? Can we actually revision his characters as relevant mouthpieces for feminist slogans? Re-vision contributes to feminist epistemologies and critique of surrounding inequality; it offers a confirmation that the world around us can be changed. Re-visioning Beckett offers new types of subjectivities and new theoretical frameworks. According to Rich, re-vision is an inevitably collective action and can establish new frameworks in understanding reality.

The Mouth is not only a simple I, because she is directly and intimately related to her being as she, alongside other women into this world. There is a continuum in a not-I-but-she-centered vision of the world: her subjectivity is attached to other women. Following Braidotti and contrary to Lacan, her ex-centricity vis-à-vis the system of representation points to another logic, another way of making sense: the-she-in-I is not silent, she is part of a symbolic referential system by and of women. She is not stepping out of patriarchy, she does not escape its logic, she uses language not as a spatial structure that can be avoided or bypassed but in process within it. There is a project in Beckett’s play of defining the content of she-in-I by disengaging the traps of a constructed feminine in the sense of a dark continent or femininity as masquerade. She-not-I grows in relation to other shes, an attempt of redefining the subject. Being-she becomes an ontological precondition for a conscious becoming of the subject: getting back to Rich, one has to start with the body and the bodily roots of subjectivity, or at least with a mouth, I would add.

And this is exactly the point where feminism comes in via Braidotti: its values cannot be reduced to yet another theory – a dogma for general consumption. Feminism plays with women’s ontological desire to be women subjects: to transcend the traditional vision of subjectivity as gender-free, to inscribe the subject back into her corporeal reality which in our case starts with a mouth. Beckett’s play gets involved in the feminist theoretical project exactly at this point, as an attempt of redefining a corporeal subjectivity.

Beckett’s play rests on the same historical negation as feminist theory: disqualification and exclusion of women and their experiences. The next move after acknowledging the denigration is a discursive leap towards a redefinition of women through feminism as a movement of thought and action. But to make any sense at all of this redefinition of subjectivity and corporeality a political practice and collective acting out is required. Only at this level, re-vision can function as offering new frameworks in understanding reality. By moving it from page to stage, Beckett’s text puts into question the theatrical frame, and the body staged within it. It becomes exemplary of the critical operations of certain feminist performance practice, especially the theatrical project proposed by Helene Cixous. The reframing of Becket’s text focuses on the hysterical refusal to enter the patriarchal Oedipal discourse. Mouth’s anxiety to "get the story straight" is particularly intense because its inability to give complete and logical accounts; like a hysterical narrative it is full of gaps and blockages. Not I plays with a spiral of identifications, where the interference effect of multiple voices undermines a search for the narrative referent and announces a multitude of referents, going further to the spectator in a performing situation. This play follows Cixous’ theatrical proposal of “going beyond the confines of the stage,” in an excessive break with narrative closure. The Mouth is the paradigm of a theatrical gesture that disrupts the realist narrative and deferral the reinscription of the dominant discourse. Her desire goes beyond a realist representation which can silence her, fragmenting identification processes and coherent unified identities. The spectator is forced to face difficulty in identification with possible characters through an effort towards “the instability of the text’s point of address…insisting on performance as address” because here we have also the missing body which cannot be entirely given over to spectacle. Paradoxically, Not I is first of all a potential single gesture a la Cixous: “a single gesture is enough, but one that can transform the world.”

about opening the rehearsal

I am interested how artists explore their secret practice on their blogs and how they write about the process behind the curtain. Because somehow this blog is a fascinating exercise for me which i do not understand completely. What I know is that it brings satisfaction by pinning down important bits-and-pieces of my every-day-life which i encounter and which are worth to talk about and most of all, my theatrical explorations . To my surprise, the blogosphere is full of directors and actors that are exploring their stage practice online. But the most extreme act so-far is made by The Ontological-Hysteric Theatre in New York (the name is not an accident for this type of exposure!). They are rehearsing a new show, Astronome – A Night at the Opera and the rehearsals are streamed online until the show opens. Of course, bloggers were excited by the project (in US at least), one guy puts it very simple: "Watch Foreman, his cast and his crew create a new work before your very eyes. You want the theatrical process available through the internet, you've got it."

But what is behind this Ontological-Hysteric Theatre? Well, it was founded in 1968 by Richard Forman. He explained later how he started: "They were normal bourgeois theater, domestic triangle situations. That's why I called my theater "Ontological-Hysteric," because the basic syndrome controlling the structure was a classical, boulevard comedy syndrome, which I took to be hysteric in its roots." The Ontological-Hysteric Theater puts together elements of the performative, auditory and visual arts, philosophy, psychoanalysis and literature for an unusual theatrical mix thrown on stage. They engage openly with what John Keats famously described as “negative capability” (or what i would call the creative element of hysteria) - i.e. "when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." He seeks to make work that unsettles and disorients received ideas and opens the doors for alternative models of perception, organization, and understanding. From their webpage I found out that in 2005 Foreman began a second chapter in his work with the introduction of the digital video and film media as dominating forces in his redefinition of ontologically hysteric theater.
But back to blogs about rehearsals: one of the most interesting examples is the Hey Mathew blog, which goes into very intimate details of the rehearsal process of a new show. For me, rehearsals are the most private element of the staging process, I don't like people around when we start them and I rarely talk about them to externals. But on the other hand I am very interested in what is going to change in the staging process if you make it very transparent and like the New York theatre you open it to basically everyone in the world. What can be the effects on the performance? What are the effects on future spectators, actors and the director? Chris Wilkinson's article suspects these new methods of being just another marketing tool. By not ignoring the commercial aspect of opening the rehearsal room, there are also other external reasons for these methods. One of them is survival and I can give one example: during state socialist Romania strong censorship was making uncertain any performance that had a political perspective. Because censors were usually stopping the performance before the premiere one mechanism of making it work for some audience was to have open rehearsals for as long as possible. That affected the staging process of course.
A direct effect of opening the sacred space of rehearsals for public can be the subversion of director's authority and old-school dictatorship, so popular in Eastern Europe theatre at least. But on the other hand, it can work or not work from project to project and from company to company. Actors are very important at this point: if they see it as a form of agency and creative booster in the creative process and relation to the director. If they get scared and don't feel like working at all with a webcam transmitting live nearby, it can be a huge mess. Personally, I would try it at some point, depending on the team and also on the concept of the performance. If the full opened rehearsal can become part of the main concept for the show it would be great. I am reflecting on the idea of such a project.

Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971)

director: Roy Ward Baker

Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde is one of the goriest Hammer production. Set in a Victorian London with all the right ingredients including thick fog and English accent, the story goes in a very interesting direction.

We can understand the whole thing as a sexual difference story: Dr. Jekyll is a pheminst (a term introduced by Braidotti to name men interested in feminist discourse, being fascinated, puzzled and intimidated by feminist writing. They get in the discoursive game with a perversily provocative purpose: to claim the phalus once more, this time from within the feminist discourse.) This movie shows exactly this dark side of exploring sexual difference in order to "understand" women and to see "what is a woman".

In order to find an answer to his scientific research of what is a woman and what makes her immortal, in order to become immortal himself, Dr. Jekyll gets involved in some "queer business, sergeant - very queer."

His scientific interest in what makes sexual difference takes place in a very empirical way: he manages to find in his subjectivity something more than his subjectivity itself, a strange body at its very center: "Put a woman in your life and one day… you'll wake up and look in the mirror and see a changed man!" This is exactly the Lacanian extimacy, the stranger as an expression of the innermost intimacy (a woman in Dr Jekyll's case) or the Freudian das Ding. Dr Jekyll moves around the thing that is "in itself more than itself." The distance between the subject and das Ding is needed because as Zizek says das Ding is "too hot to be approached closely" and because of getting too close to das Ding "love for the neighbour necessarily turns into destructive hatred." Das Ding is not universal and has a particular place in the life of the subject and in Dr Jekyll's case appears from his interest in exploring and reinforcing a fixed dichotomous sexual difference from a clear masculine positionality. His interest in femininity and its secret for immortality, the object petit a, that is never shown on screen but its extraction is fatal, brings the horror and death of female characters. Getting back to Lacan, the motto for this movie can be: "I love you, but there is in you something more than you, object petit a, which is why I mutilate you."

One obsessive line appear in this movie:"You've got to do bad to do good, ain't ya?" But what does it mean? Even if it seems a simple horror B movie unimportant part of bad dialogue, it's meaning can move us further in the main argument: it is exactly the Lacanian thesis that Good is only the mask of a radical absolute Evil. This mask is "the indecent obsession by das Ding, the atrocious, obscene Thing." (Zizek) Good is just another name for Bad, a Bad with no particular, pathological status. Das Ding becomes indecently present, obsessive, a traumatic body, making Dr. Jekyll free from a pathological attachment to a particular worldly sexual difference that he imposes on his understanding of the world. Good is only a way of keeping a distance towards the evil Thing, a distance that makes it bearable. This particular distance is broken in this story.

What can I say after watching this movie, besides a personal increase of attention on deep obssesions and hidden das Dings, is just beware pheminists working on sexual difference, you never know when they might kill.

IKEA products make you gay

Tony Grew wrote an interesting article about IKEA's new catalogue in Poland and some local reactions. You never know when the catalogue is printed in your country and how people will react on it. But Poland is ridiculous at this point. I am boycotting any Polish products because of their boycott and I think I will buy some IKEA items next week even if i don't need any but just to piss off the Catholic church:

Catholics in Poland are boycotting IKEA because its catalogue features pictures of same-sex couples. National newspapers and news websites have covered the story and the concerns of some religious people that the Swedish company is "trampling" on Christian concepts of family.
"I would not like to cease doing shopping in IKEA but if the firm does not stop promoting homosexual relationships, I will, unfortunately, feel compelled to do so and I will notify about it all the people I know so that they do the same," one Catholic woman wrote.
IKEA has defended its advertising and has refused to respond to the boycott.

"Homosexuality is one of the essential elements of living in contemporary society," said IKEA spokesperson Karolina Horoszczak.

The boycott is being led by Fronda.pl website: "Treating single-sex relationships on a par with married couples is impermissible," said Grzegorz Górny, the editor-in-chief of Fronda.

"IKEA's publication is a promotion of a particular style of living, which does not deserve public propagation. This is connected with the strategy of accustoming people to homosexual relationships and then of legalising such relationships. This is done to establish their picture in society as equal and then to legalise them."

This is nothing new, IKEA had this sort of problems in US already: In 2007 the American Family Association (AFA) accused the Swedish furniture retailer of trying to force a liberal, "homosexuality-affirming" world view on US consumers through advertising. The association, who claim to promote "traditional family values," said IKEA routinely promote gay lifestyles.
The ad showed a gay male couple playing on the floor with their young daughter. As they lean back against their IKEA sofa, a voiceover says: "Why shouldn't sofas come in flavours, like families?"

Some Polish politicians are among the most homophobic in Europe.
A gay parent who is in a sexual relationship should have their children taken from them, according to a member of the governing Civil Platform party.
Stefan Niesiolowski, who is a deputy Speaker of the Polish parliament, told a TV audience in June that same-sex families are abnormal and described lesbian couples with children as a "serious pathology."
Former Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski and his twin brother, Lech Kaczynski, the current President, caused controversy within the LGBT community for their anti-gay stance.
The pair banned several gay pride marches in the country and on a state visit to Ireland at the beginning of this year Lech Kaczynski said that the promotion of homosexuality would lead to the eventual destruction of the human race.
Poland was widely mocked last year when it was revealed that Ewa Sowinska, a government-appointed children rights watchdog, said she would ask psychologists to advise if the Teletubbies' camp antics could affect children.
"I noticed [Tinky Winky] has a lady's purse, but I didn't realise he's a boy," she said. "At first I thought the purse would be a burden for this Teletubby. . . Later I learned that this may have a homosexual undertone."

Banksy's Pet Store and Charcoal Grill in New York

Banksy: "New Yorkers dont care about art, they care about pets. So Im exhibiting them instead. I wanted to make art that questioned our relationship with animals and the ethics and sustainability of factory farming, but it ended up as chicken nuggets singing. I took all the money I made exploiting an animal in my last show and used it to fund a new show about the exploitation of animals. If its art and you can see it from the street, I guess it could still be considered street art."

Two Romanian performances in Budapest

I went last week to two shows from a shabby theatre from Bucharest that i would never think of attending in a local situation. But my subject re-position, on the margins of Romanian culture, made me curious about what these awful Romanians with their horrible theatre culture have to say. Last week i had a great feeling: to be detached from a culture that is stuck in pre-1968 epistemology that is, first of all, vomited on stage.

But about the two shows and their complete opposition:

One was made without a director, specially fit for 2 old actors unable to move and get out of their emplois. The rest of the actors on stage were simply there, no acting involved, always ready to give a line or to create a situation for their two decrepit stars in order to produce the big joke that everyone in the audience was crazy about. Disgusting shite. The worst part besides the first-year acting school cliches was their usage of a famous Russian play that brings public for sure. One of my all time favourite plays with so many insights and dark complicated parts was transformed into a cheap slapstick comedy with no characters whatsoever, just 2 dead actors on stage, and dead in a Peter Brook way.

The situation changed for the next show: a Hungarian play staged by a Hungarian hysteric male director with a strong creative standpoint. Same company, that he was telling me about after the play: "Isn't it amazing that i manage to do it here?" The performance was a mise-en-scene in the most sincere way: in a Butlerian way, Bocsardi shows the fake of heterosexual matrix, nothing more than an act played by some actors who don't know what they act but they have to play for an audience with patriarchal expectations. Impossibility of representation, relation spectator-performer, end of narration, dilating the performing body, the character as abjection and many more ideas are explored in this small show. One of the best directors that I've seen for last years.
I wanted to read some reviews after the show and it was oh so predictable: Romanian critics crushed the show in their specific style, their Christian rightist instincts never lie. And they are true in pushing this show on the margins: it is definitely dangerous for their theatrical milieu. the most apprecieted part was the moment when the Actress has a long monologue on showing her love and affection for the Actor, the place where the matrix is shown just in order to be deconstructed and proven empty later. The critics got only this moment of expressing "noble feelings" in an old acting school way and that's everything they enjoyed in the show. That was for me the moment where I felt the tension in a special way: they started well they can't ended in this patriarchal manner. I was hoping that the show will go on. And it did. Just in order to show that it is just acting, that they can fool you, that there is nothing behind, the stage is empty, no essentialist oppressions are hidden there and are just shown, acted out, put on display, not lived. And the last scene worked perfect in this sense: the dead characters were all the time on stage in their coffins, they are killed once more by the actor, in a gesture that proves their emptiness, a lack of flesh, a lack of corporeality, just full body masks.

Damn right: Death to the characters!

Art is not for kids. Only in Australia so far

Raphael - Galatea

If you were not shocked by the kiddy porn depicted by the image above I am sure you can be shocked by what is going on in Australia right now.
Alison Croggon, a writer from Australia covers the case of the photographer Bill Henson. He provoked a huge controversy when he had an exhibition with some nude images of a 13-year-old girl. His work were confiscated by the Australian police and the debates were similar to the famous Romanian pink pony case. Even if, as in the Romanian case, New South Wales Department of Public Prosecutions recommended that no charges should be made and the Office of Film and Literature Classification declared the images "mild and justified" and gave them a PG rating some fucked effects are coming out now.

So, the Australian story continues: the Labor Party proposes some new laws in reaction to the case, with a generous purpose of protecting the kids from being indecently represented in the arts. It is not only about photographs but about the depiction of those under 18 in any medium – painting, performance, literature and so on. I hope Eastern European politicians won't get inspired and forbid all plastic toys, crosses, violent scenes and other evil ingredients in art. But seriously, the image of the child is used once more for other political purposes than protecting someone: control, surveillance and total censorship.

Jeanne is back

Jeanne is in Germany now and she has a blog. Check it out here. I always liked her style of writing and now she is here with some fresh and captivating stuff. I hope she won't get bored too quick...

There is also a post about Jehanne Complex, a post that is full of memories for me. It was really amazing to work on this performance, to construct it step by step, to talk a lot, rehearse and drink coffees together for hours and hours. And I really miss that type of chemistry. The post goes like this:

"Retrospective Thoughts on Jehanne Complex
2 November 2008
The repeated rehearsing of something does not lead to lack of catharsis with each performance. This I learned clearly. The throwing of everything up and down again. Giving. Self-obsession or self–entrenchment again and again. But, it is also investment FOR people, as well as a self-congratulations. (Initial inspiration and motives, in the end, are perhaps not so important.)
First scene: “My name is Jeanne, and I’ve just eaten a hamburger.” Black men’s suit, tie, shoes and skull cap with white button-down shirt. I carry a Burger King meal bag containing a whopper, French fries, a coke and a Heinz ketchup bottle. I walk around the stage, staring at the audience suspiciously, after closing the white curtains making up the stage’s backdrop. Meditative, Middle-Eastern-sounding music comes on and I remove my shoes and meditate. After I can relax and control my breathing, I emerge from my meditation and begin to unpack the meal bag. I spread a lot of ketchup over the whopper, set out the French fries and coke, and begin to eat. I always ate three big bites of the burger (it affected my digestion).
Second scene: Microphone “Close to the town where I was born, there is a tree known as the ladies’ tree. It’s a great beech tree, centuries old. In the shade of its branches, there is a spring. In the month of Mary, children decorate the branches of the ladies’ tree with garlands. They sit beside the spring and eat together. I did that with my friends, but I never saw or heard tell of dwarfs or any other creatures of the devil… God’s voices haunt me. They never do leave me in peace. They are constantly encouragin’ and pushin’ me.” The microphone has ghosts that trick me. I speak into one and the other one produces sound. My voice is manipulated and distorted…a sort of comedy.
Third scene: Shaving The legs, like a girl, then the face, like a boy. Jehanne was sexually ambiguous with no period bleeding and breasts, and a mission from “God”. I contemplatively shave one calf in silence…getting some shaving cream on my chin, I begin to rub it along my jaw. Gospel song of “Run on for a long, long time…” I felt like a hero preparing for battle. Like Jehanne before leading an army. But then, my tormentors arrive…"

Brecht – The Hardcore Machine at MU Theatre Budapest

A few words about Dunapart and the performing arts platform: a huge personal disappointment. An awful crowd, snobbish fancy dressed theatre goers and critics, talking some disgusting French, probably just for the beautiful intonations, claiming the last pantheon of being bourgeois: the experimental theatre.

I went to see one show that was so promising: Brecht the Hardcore Machine from Andras Urban Company, based on Brecht’s Buckow Elegies. It had its premiere last year in Berlin and it is supposed to represent a break with literary drama and post-dramatic theatre that is not performative enough for them and still too much based on texts. “This performance is not a play” they say. And I remember using the exactly same words two weeks ago about my Beckett trilogy. Not following a particular narrative, the performance approaches a young working girl that enters “the wonderful world of ideology and corporeality.”

And more they say: “Labour. Starvation. Sex. Power. Fun. Class struggle is not dead.” Not to mention the goody goody focus on the body of actors, very third theatre style. Very Barbaesque. Very exciting. The first feeling that something is fishy about this show was when I entered the small MU and I saw an awful exhibition a la bible belt post-feminism with pop art playmates spreading messages like “Dworkin and Queer are Dead”. Nothing to do with the show one might say. Not really I say. A show for me cannot exist outside the space of the performance, the artists’ usage of spectators with their breaths, their bodies, their nicely combed hair and their greedy eyes. And this public was just horrible. Together with the unfit space of MU for such a show.

Continuing with the show: beautiful ideas, generous attempts, ingenious solutions, hard working actors but a limited vision, a shitty director shitting his pants, not leaving the actors think with their bodies and dilate them just for the sake of some shitty fixed images, weak scenes and a personal gratification. And no hysterical creativity here. Trying to tell a retro-political revue they ended up with the most horrible clichés that made me feel embarrassed. But on the other hand, the commodification of Brecht is not new-fangled and it doesn’t have to be subtle all the time. Maybe the good news is that Brecht sells and is sold again and these guys proved it once again. Because as good ol’ Brecht said “What is theatre if not a night of good entertainment?”

Like Arpad Schilling after this bitter taste performance, I ended up dreaming of a theatre made in the forest where no one dares to come. Or like Tadeusz Kantor to secretly dream of all artists dropping dead.

again about organs

The femiblogosphere that i read exploded on this viral. The text says: “Becoming a donor is probably your only chance to get inside her.” More like a porn ad, it was made for the Belgian “Reborn To Be Alive” organ donor foundation. What looks like a necrophiliac joke of sexploitation phantasy produced some interesting reactions to the adolescent bloggers that couldn't get it. "Is she going to die or what? she looks pretty hot in this picture. i don't get it" they might say.

But they surprise the subversion by stupidity of this ad: the phantasy in front of their eyes is a phantasy of death, a deadly person who is not a perfect whole body, she is made of organs that are not so healthy after all. Her organs eat other organs in a mayhem-organ-orgy. And she depends on the generosity of some anonymous donors that gets only one image coming from The Realm of the Senses: the teenager pornconsumer dreaming about his jerking off organ being cut off and put inside her. The monstruous woman, aparently pop culturally appealing but hiding a vagina dentata, strikes again. Where are the good-old pin-up gals from the 50s?

Post-election American attitudes

Associated Press gives a report on post-election feelings in US. Not a pretty picture, but i guess many Americans don't feel so safe now when they don't have a president coming from a good trustworthy family of global weapon sellers. Here are some stories:

From California to Maine, police have documented a range of alleged crimes, from vandalism and vague threats to at least one physical attack. Insults and taunts have been delivered by adults, college students and second-graders.

There have been "hundreds" of incidents since the election, many more than usual, said Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate crimes.

One was in Snellville, Ga., where Denene Millner said a boy on the school bus told her 9-year-old daughter the day after the election: "I hope Obama gets assassinated." That night, someone trashed her sister-in-law's front lawn, mangled the Obama lawn signs, and left two pizza boxes filled with human feces outside the front door, Millner said.

Potok, who is white, said he believes there is "a large subset of white people in this country who feel that they are losing everything they know, that the country their forefathers built has somehow been stolen from them."

Grant Griffin, a 46-year-old white Georgia native, expressed similar sentiments: "I believe our nation is ruined and has been for several decades and the election of Obama is merely the culmination of the change.

"If you had real change it would involve all the members of (Obama's) church being deported," he said.

A black president is "the most profound change in the field of race this country has experienced since the Civil War," said William Ferris, senior associate director of the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina. "It's shaking the foundations on which the country has existed for centuries."

"Someone once said racism is like cancer," Ferris said. "It's never totally wiped out, it's in remission." If so, America's remission lasted until the morning of Nov. 5.

The day after the vote hailed as a sign of a nation changed, black high school student Barbara Tyler of Marietta, Ga., said she heard hateful Obama comments from white students, and that teachers cut off discussion about Obama's victory.

Four North Carolina State University students admitted writing anti-Obama comments in a tunnel designated for free speech expression, including one that said: "Let's shoot that (N-word) in the head." Obama has received more threats than any other president-elect, authorities say.

At Standish, Maine, a sign inside the Oak Hill General Store read: "Osama Obama Shotgun Pool." Customers could sign up to bet $1 on a date when Obama would be killed. "Stabbing, shooting, roadside bombs, they all count," the sign said. At the bottom of the marker board was written "Let's hope someone wins."

Racist graffiti was found in places including New York's Long Island, where two dozen cars were spray-painted; Kilgore, Texas, where the local high school and skate park were defaced; and the Los Angeles area, where swastikas, racial slurs and "Go Back To Africa" were spray painted on sidewalks, houses and cars.

Second- and third-grade students on a school bus in Rexburg, Idaho, chanted "assassinate Obama," a district official said.

University of Alabama professor Marsha L. Houston said a poster of the Obama family was ripped off her office door. A replacement poster was defaced with a death threat and a racial slur. "It seems the election brought the racist rats out of the woodwork," Houston said.

Black figures were hanged by nooses from trees on Mount Desert Island, Maine, the Bangor Daily News reported. The president of Baylor University in Waco, Texas said a rope found hanging from a campus tree was apparently an abandoned swing and not a noose.

Crosses were burned in yards of Obama supporters in Hardwick, N.J., and Apolacan Township, Pa.

A black teenager in New York City said he was attacked with a bat on election night by four white men who shouted 'Obama.'

In the Pittsburgh suburb of Forest Hills, a black man said he found a note with a racial slur on his car windshield, saying "now that you voted for Obama, just watch out for your house."

"The principle is very simple," said BJ Gallagher, a sociologist and co-author of the diversity book "A Peacock in the Land of Penguins." "If I can't hurt the person I'm angry at, then I'll vent my anger on a substitute, i.e., someone of the same race."

"We saw the same thing happen after the 9-11 attacks, as a wave of anti-Muslim violence swept the country. We saw it happen after the Rodney King verdict, when Los Angeles blacks erupted in rage at the injustice perpetrated by 'the white man."'

Dunapart

I'm taking part at Dunapart. It's a platform of contemporary Hungarian performing arts and there are some 30 performances within four days, mostly theatre and dance shows, numerous experiments which are crossing these borders. and most important, with English subtitles! It's time to get over Hungarian micro-realism. and, yeah, it starts this evening.

Silent as the Grave 8

Silent as the Grave 7

Silent as the Grave 6

Silent as the Grave 5

Silent as the Grave 4

Silent as the Grave 3

silent as the grave 2

Silent as the Grave at ICR

photos by Claudia Martins