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?

playing with organs

A piece of Lacan for today: “The hysteric plays to the extreme with the feeling of elasticity” in a sort of mortal game with organs taken to their extreme function, organs which “should be called unreal,” evaginate or turn inside out in a process of “coming and going,” until extenuation. In Lacan’s reading these organs are terms of pleasure and pain. The hysterical body tries to get to the final point of extenuation through grand gestures, spontaneous and numerous, mixing cruelty with desire, aggression with caring, a multiple presentation of oppositions “an object of anxiety in the gestures of jouissance – the jouissance in which everything is there – presented, open, offered. Inaccessible.”

my artaud article in egophobia

my reading of Artaud's Here Lies. here.

update: footnotes are missing. and funny thing, this is a Vakulovski special, read the other post today

Balanescu Quartet at Urania – Budapest

This concert was taking place in relation to a Hungarian movie premiere, that I won’t talk about. Balanescu made the soundtrack and tours now with the movie. This was the firs gig ever with this new composition. Brand new songs, full of intensity and passion as Balanescu presented it in English before. He was so shy and modest on the mike. But him talking was a complete opposition to him playing. First of all, the outfit: a colorful long coat that looked too big and his typical hat. Already a character, his outfit comes as a necessary tool to hide an introverted self I guess, a hysterical identification to hide an absent body. But just for a moment. When he had his violin, everything exploded. He was not playing, he was dancing. He was changing faces, now sad, now laughing with a big mouth, now a small baby, now a huge monster, now growing, now getting small. Balanescu playing the violin is a Misha Katz conducting. And the music for all this process... a true project of corporeal transformation through sound. Balanescu’s spastic body puts up with his quartet a visual attack where sound is becoming the most real mark of his corporeality. It was explicitly materialized for audience in his struggle with his violin. For the spectator it was a tough experience of the entire nervous system. This is what I would call one of the last experiments to actively end the process of representation through sound. A la Merleau Ponty, Balanescu claims through his music “not the possible body which we may legitimately think of as an information machine but that actual body I call mine.” His body on stage expresses through sound first of all exactly this lively concreteness.

Notes on Frida Kahlo's diary

• Frida is going to a concert: she arrives late and the sound of her sumptuous jewelry covers the orchestra and everyone is looking at her box, the concert doesn’t count anymore. An Aztec goddess, Coatlicue, a deity wrapped in her skirts of serpents, exhibiting her lacerated hands, like trophies. Or maybe Tlazolteotl, the vulture that has to devour filth to keep the universe clean. Earrings are as big as cartwheels; her rings transform her hands into claws.always hiding her tortured body, shriveled leg, broken foot, orthopedic corsets

• always hiding her tortured body, shriveled leg, broken foot, orthopedic corsets
• under the spectacular finery of the peasant Mexican woman, who kept jealously the ancient jewelry hidden away, protected from poverty, only to be shown at the great fiestas.

• Laces, ribbons, long skirts, rustling petticoats, braids, flowery peasant blouses, garnet-coloured shawls, moonlike headdresses[1] - form of humour, great disguise, theatrical, self-fascinated form of auto-eroticism, a call to imagine the suffering naked body underneath and discover its secrets[2]
• Her clothes were a manner of dressing for paradise, of preparing for death.
• “Kahlo, disguised in many clothes, a Saint Joan of the liberating culture of the Revolution”[3] : dressing and undressing, wearing her clothes were ceremonial acts, laborious, regal, ritualistic
• “I am not sick, I am broken.”
• Fooling death, fooling around with death, in her language, death was: La Mera Dientona [old buck teeth], La Tostada [The Toasted One], La Chingada [the Fucked One], La Catrina [The Belle of the Ball], La Pelona [The Hairless Bitch], La Tia de las Muchachas [The Girls’ Aunt]
• Nietzsche: Whoever has built a new heaven has found the strength for it only in his own hell[4]
• proud and defiant in her denim cloths and proletarian, urchin-like cloth caps, together with Las Cachuchas [The Caps]
• internal darkness under midday light, fantasy within realism – influences on the art of Frida
• Defenderse de los Cabrones – lifetime slogan
• Broken spinal column, collarbone, ribs, pelvis, left shoulder forever out of joint, one feet crushed, handrail crashed into her back and came out through her vagina
• Naked and bloodied, covered with gold dust
• Pain destroys language, pain is indescribable (Virginia Woolf)
• Nietzche decided to call his pain Dog
• Frida as a speaker for pain[1]
• 32 operations
• from 1944 she wore eight corsets
• in 1953 – her leg is amputated
• her wounded back “smelling like a dead dog”
• loses her fetuses in pools of blood
• forever surrounded by clots, chloroform, bandages, needles, scalpels
• personal suffering transformed into art, an art that is shared, not impersonal
• a ribbon around a bombshell – Andre Breton about her art
• she loved Laurel and Hardy, the Three Stooges, Chaplin, the Marx Brothers
• beauty as truth and knowledge: Frida’s legacy to the marginal, invisible, faceless men and women, when only photogenic and shocking images merit a vision
• I am writing to you with my eyes
• sexual and political Mexican art- censored in US, in order to preserve their fake innocence, forget their dirty history: genocide of native Indians, rape and robbery of their land, Black slavery, wars against weaker nations, territorial annexations, robber barons, capitalist exploitation, urban violence – American culture is left without appropriate, lasting beautiful images of its own violence.
• The internal oneiric change is inseparable from external, political, material, liberating change: marriage of Freud and Marx. In Frida’s subversiveness that would be the marriage between Woody Allen and Groucho Marx.
• The more I loved her, the more I wanted to hurt her. (Diego Rivera)
• I cannot, I cannot! [F on socialist realism]
• Deep down, you understand me, you know I adore you. You are not only something that is mine, you are me myself. [love letter to Alejandro Gomez Arias]
• Her voice was deep, rebellious, punctuated by caracajades [belly laughs] and leperadas [four-letter words].
• Theatrical persona – practical and linguistic jokes
• Love for carpas and cantinas, joy in singing and enjoying Mexican music
• She could sing couplets like La Malaguena with a perfect falsetto.
• Friend with carpenters, bartenders, shoemakers, anarchists, servants
• She was using a lot of diminutives, charming the words – form of defense against arrogance and oppression, a form of anesthesia.
• F vocabulary: Chaparitta – small women, chulito – male friends, doctorcito, herself: Chiquita, chicuita, Friducha
• Like Diego, she was baffled by gringo faces and could not paint them, they looked like "half-baked rolls". On her American female imitators: they look like “cabbages”.
• Mr Ford, are you jewish? [F. to renowned anti-semite Henry Ford]

---

[1] Carlos Fuentes, p.12

---

[1] Carlos Fuentes, “Introduction” in The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait, New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1995, p. 7

[2] p.22-23

[3] Carlos Fuentes, p.11

[4] p. 24