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.”
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 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 Lacanianextimacy, 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.
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: "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."
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.
