Is Cosmo self-destructive? Not quite

in this Cosmopolitan article (that i couldn't finish reading), Michelle Stacey asks some weird questions for Cosmo:

Why are so many young women making their breasts public property? And who really ends up getting the best end of this deal — the girls who say all this flaunting makes them feel empowered and free or the men ogling them?

Maybe because they take all the goody goody Cosmo list of tips for real? but as this article on The Pursuit of Harpyness shows a valid feminist claim can fit a post-feminist discourse like Cosmo's by detouring it for a good old patriarchal usage.

Tu Ridi (1998)

Directors: Paolo & Vittorio Taviani

based on two short stories by Pirandello, the challenge of this tough Taviani feature is the construction and how it works for the viewer. I've seen it twice because for the first time it really puzzled me in the sense of "what the fuck was that?!?!" Some people say it was just some Taviani pretentious bullshit, badly picking some shitty stories or oh! it was so poetic, it was such an exquisite image blah blah blah. You can avoid this movie in so many ways because it is so goddamn uncanny. But here is my long-thought-analysis: its difficulty or beauty stays in its technique. What they do here is quite classic: deconstruction in two. The brothers are splitting everything into two, the movie, the stories, the characters, reality, time, location and so on. The splitting goes to the level of a spiraling infinite and can make you dizzy at some point. But it's a fascinating exercise and so damn simple after all. Of course, being used with some narrative styles that follow strict rules and conventions, being realism or hardcore experimental, this uncanny diversion explodes in your face and you don't know what hits you. Highly recommended.

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!

Silent as the Grave - what is all about

Based on: Rockaby, Breath and Not I by Samuel Beckett
With: Elinor Middleton, Joseph Cauthery
Stage design and costumes: Maia Oprea and Yi-Xing Hwa
A song by Trevonic
Dramaturgy: Olga Dimitrijevic
A performance by Mihai Lucaciu






Silent as the Grave can be understood as I, they, we, you are all ghosts within this performance. There is no I to whom the speaking, performing, acting, living can be attributed. Beckett’s work calls for an innacted performance that is unnamable, resistant to subjectivity, authority and identity. What we are trying to find here is a rhythm, in order to comprehend the process of relating to spectators and to see and hear the ghosts, so-called our characters. The spectator is encouraged to find the right fillings/feelings in our show, its intensity is increased through repetitions and denials/affirmations of the shared/ experience. The gaps and static moments in our show are to be filled by spectators that are to face the minimalist construction of the characters, their signs of loneliness, their index cards as narrators and especially their bodily dis/appearance. In an Artaudian sense, these small Beckettian extreme texts have an internal music that is to be discovered by the spectator. That specific sound of a rocking chair that is approaching and holding off the spectator is one of the strongest internal musical elements to be found here. Beckettian ghosts are deprived of money, but also youth, health, fortitude and even a body, as in Not I. Protagonists dry out along with the world they inhabit, the world of a freakshow, where lonely people are exhibited by a vicious Master of Ceremonies. Even their names disappear. Whether they have lived is also uncertain. What we are left with is a special type of respiration as in Breath: the breath of ghosts. Silent as the Grave becomes a schemata of respirations. Breath remains virtual and can achieve its materiality through the dynamic process of relating the audience, by accepting intentional performative correlatives, a game that the spectator is invited to play. By putting together three of the most difficult, extreme and controversial plays by Beckett, all these parts interact and give shape to a sideshow of ghosts. The three segments are not documentary records or something that exists or existed before, but a ghostly reformulation of an already formulated reality, which brings into your world as spectator something that did not existed before the performance. You answer to the call of the freakshow ghosts. Indeterminacies of the performance, its own gaps, and its long static moments are making way for a filling; they anticipate other gaps and various meanings from an active audience. They do not tell a lot about what is actually going on, that part that you are supposed to figure out yourself, in the exquisite position of being a spectator. What you should try here is to stick to your own interpretation as spectator and to try to get away safe till the end of the show. By focusing on the details, breath becomes an animating principle that fills out the details of the internal action of our lonely ghosts, but without reaching any conclusions. Each word and action has to be discovered step by step and this quest constructs the atmosphere of the performance. There is a process of sedimentation, where you accumulate knowledge about possible ghosts and experience. Behind this waiting and distant expectation, there is an active, inner, vibratory perceptibility. Our ghosts are immobilized, their voices become stronger because of stillness and absence. Timing, rhythm and musicality of the words are giving a style of breathing, in the same time giving you time to develop and create the shape of your ghosts. Words have the effect of the Chinese water torture, they are painful to be heard and they are difficult to be shared. The dilation and compression go one by one, our characters seem detached talking or hearing about someone else, they seem very affected talking about the same persons. These sensitive delimitations are hard to grasp but they give a special rhythm to the show. The effects of these short plays are like ebb and flow. Beckett’s schematas are shaping our ghosts but their recognition depends on how you react to it, how you are capable to pick up some of the falling pieces and put them together. Our performance comes to life during this process but its meaning is impossible to identify straightforward outside the performing space and remains virtual on paper. But exactly this possibility, this openness to meaning, can give dynamism to our show and like an ouija board for spiritism, can give voice to ghosts. By questioning different lines of forces, different perspectives on Beckettian lonely ghosts and the whole identity of an I in these three plays, the spectator sets the performance in motion and the results can be relevant only for yourself. This innacted performance gives you something and you give something back to it. As Malone, another Beckettian ghost, once said: Live or invent. The show unfolds its potential through a process of being part of the performance through invention. Through you, the spectator, this performance comes to a shape, to a form of life that is still fragile, even when the meaning can be no longer relevant. Because in theatre we are able to experience things that no longer exist and to approach things that are totally unfamiliar to us. At the end of the show, with the help of the confusing Master of Ceremonies, you can be puzzled: did you get a glimpse of her missing presence, did you understood what was going on there if something was actually going on, or better to say did you understood your reactions in the face of these three plays and your own loneliness? By negating the existence of the lonely characters on stage, you were affirming yourself as their companion for the walk, and through this symbiosis you are the only one who can affirm their existence. She is she and without you, she won’t exist, but on the other side, you won’t be real as you are now real without her, because now you can perceive and recognize your own reactions and feelings towards this boring show. And this is what it’s all about: becoming lonely with your own reactions after our show by being exposed to Beckettian forms of loneliness in an anti-Beckettian performance. Nothing more than a proposition.

Understanding Derrida: presence on stage

Dealing with performer’s presence on stage, one major problem comes into play. In Derrida's approach, presence is not reality but a reality effect, one that can be associated with charisma, a main tool in constructing systems of domination. By invoking actor's presence as a major tool in relating audiences, you are inevitably linked to a repressive status-quo. That was bothering me for a while and I couldn't see a way out. The answer arrived surprisingly from my last performance, through Jeanne Hamilton’s special being-on-stage. I realized it quite late and thanks to her I understood Derrida's point. Here it is: in order to cut the links with existing systems of dominance that are enforced by performance mechanism, a performance must find ways to deconstruct performer's presence. This is how we did it: in highly intense scenes where the performer’s self was "stretched and exposed" what we were involving was an explicit refusal of the performer to make a greater investment of the self in one procedure or another. By using the good old alienating effect, the emotional commitment in acting was distanced and demystified. The presence of the realist actor that comes from inside was left behind. What was still there was the intensity of the moment that was showed and not lived.


rehearsing what we called "the confession scene", Jeanne with one of her self portraits