staging death

In Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead there is an interesting line: "You can't act death. The fact of it is nothing to do with seeing it happen – it's not gasps and blood and falling about. It's just a man failing to reappear." Alfred Hickling uses it as a contradiction to an event at the Liverpool Shakespeare Festival last week, the so called Stage-death contest, organized by Lodestar Theatre Company. I have thought about it quite a lot, probably because I used death in most of my performances. What was the driving force for such an unconscious decision? I have to admit that death is everywhere and nowhere, one of the most used conventions in alternative theatre and one of the most life-affirming technique but the question is: what is behind it? Used as a convention, death becomes a Brechtian comment. If it is just a form of affirming life on stage, as in Judith Butler’s amateur theatre act of playing dead-of-AIDS gays, then the act in itself is full of hysterical creative energy, the dead is not actually dead, is just an identification for the living. The focus in many cases is on the impossibility of representing death, just like in Tom Stoppard comment: it is not death that we see on stage but just a form of avoiding its representation. Because we know actors are not dead: we can feel their breath and their aliveness. They are showing us something and their staged death is not in vain, it comes with a reason.
But back to the stage death contest: the basic requirement was to turn up and expire for as long as possible. The proposed scenarios included Death By Chocolate, Death By Liposuction and Death By Misadventure. Marks were awarded for overacting, self-indulgence and shoddiness of costume. I have no idea who won. And to close this post I found a photo on flickr with a theatrical sketch from Brazil where thousands of mothers loose their children to armed violence. Few of these mothers staged a performance for the Hummingbird Project in connection with the Social Communication Programme, Urban Outcries. This is from their show, staging the death of their children: