Harvard Performing Arts No. 0

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H A R VA R D P E R F O R M I N G A R T S

H PA IS A MAGAZIN E MADE WITH TH E STUDEN TS OF “CONTEMPORARY TH EATRE IN EUROPE” 2013 CLASS.

No. 0 Fall 2013 Jan Fabre Gob Squad Alvis Hermanis Martin McDonagh Thomas Ostermeier Pan Pan Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio

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Acknowledgements Martin Puchner and the Committee on Dramatic Arts, Elson Family Arts Initiative Fund, Holly Hutchison and all the artists and companies that provided us with the visual materials, in particular: Miet Martens and Margot Bloemen (Troubleyn/Jan Fabre); Valentina Bertolino, Istvan Zimmermann/Plastikart and Luca Del Pia (Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio); Eva Hartmann (Gob Squad Arts Collective); Johanna Lühr (Thomas Ostermeier/ Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz); Aoife White (Pan Pan); Elisa Bartolucci and Sandra Angelini (Motus).

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From Concept to Action: Create a Performing Arts Magazine

Welcome to the first volume of the “Harvard Performing Arts” Journal! What you see before you is the culmination of the Fall 2013 Contemporary Theatre in Europe undergraduate course. Throughout the semester, students explored major artists, productions, and questions occupying today’s European theatre scene. After weeks of production analysis, the course concluded with a workshop that was aimed at creating the prototype for a performing art magazine in collaboration with the students. Creating a magazine has been a way for us to approach the critical writing on performance and theatre from a visual and graphic point of view. Even more importantly, it was the occasion to work as a collective.

The commonality of experience was indeed a central topic of the class: we witness today how contemporary theatre and performing arts place ontological and political perspectives on notions of community at the center of their debate.

Although theatrical and performative practices always implicitly or explicitly address and produce communities, the same cannot be said about the way we, as scholars or students, approach the study of and the writing about theatre.

Students learned how to engage their critical minds creatively through organizing their own writings along with gathering pictures, drawings, videos and various materials related with the performance practices analyzed during the course. The essays collected here are concerned primarily with an aesthetic and political understanding of the theatrical event as an instance of cultural production, an affective experience, an effective way of creating a community, and a mode of re-activating the archive of past events.

Monica Nannini, graphic designer and art director of the journal “Art’o_culture and politics of Performing Arts”, based in Italy, joined us and worked with the students over an intense week. Her work on the broadest concept of this journal and in its smallest details has been truly invaluable.

This project would not have been possible without the support of the Elson Family Arts Initiative Fund, Martin Puchner, and the Committee on Dramatic Arts.

We are very proud of our students’ work and hope that you find it as exciting and insightful as we do.

—Annalisa Sacchi and Morgan Goldstein

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Index 3 Contributors

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repetition

6 The Power of Theatrical Madness: a Spectacle of Repetition & Transformation Mark Mauriello

16 Andy Warhol in Romeo Castellucci’s Inferno: Theatre as a Work of Art Camille Zumwalt Coppola

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reality

24 Did That Read? Theatricality and Universality in Castellucci’s Inferno Mariel Pettee

30 Delineating Artifice from Reality in Gob Squad’s Before Your Very Eyes David Manella

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body

38 Confrontational Theatre and Body Aesthetics Garrett Allen

44 From Doll to Independent: Body, Mind and the Changed Ending in Thomas Ostermeier’s Nora Katherine Price

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revolution/conservatism

54 Power, Freedom, and Theater: An Exploration of Relevance in New Interpretations of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House Allen MacLeod

62 “Preserve your memories, they’re all that’s left you:” The Politics of Nostalgia in Hermanis’ The Sound of Silence Madeleine Bersin

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violence

72 “Makes Blasted Look Like The Teletubbies”: The Violent Absurdity of McDonagh’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore Adam Conner

78 Violence, Danger, and the Audience in Tragedia Endogonidia Jacob Brandt

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Contributors

GARRETT ALLEN

M A D E L E I NE B E RS I N

JACOB BRANDT

ADAM CO N N ER

C A M I L L E Z U M WA LT COPPOLA

M O RG A N G O L D ST E I N (TF)

ALLEN MACLEO D

DAV I D M A N E L L A

M A RK M AU RI E L LO

MARIEL PETTEE

KAT H E RI NE P RI C E

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repetition

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The Power of Theatrical Madness: a Spectacle of Repetition & Transformation A lot runs through person’s mind while watching a girl sing a passage from Carmen ad nauseam and be slapped in the face repeatedly—from “doesn’t that hurt?” to “when will this end?”—however, at some point during the ten minute sequence, this repeated action transforms, and the viewer is transfixed. The repeated action transforms into monotony, into battle, into woe, or any other number of things. This one repeated action, as it continues on and on, morphs and interacts with the audience member in a way that both controls the gaze and allows one to impose a personal emotional and physical experience of the action, regardless of whether or not this is a conscious action.

This particular scene occurs about half way through Jan Fabre’s four and a half hour pageant of repetition and theatrical baggage titled The Power of Theatrical Madness, or De macht der theaterlijke dwaasheden in Fabre’s native Dutch. Only Fabre’s third work for the theater, the piece was commissioned for the 1984 Venice Biennale and premiered to an immensely polarized response. Many insisted that it was absurd, offensive, and certainly not theater. With performers who completed meaningless tasks over and over until they were physically exhausted and audience members openly invited to leave, grab a smoke or drink and come back into the theater at any

time, Fabre’s creation so shocked, confused, or alienated many of his audience members that almost as many left in a huff as stayed to experience the work’s marathon duration.1 Those who did stay, however, were presented with a spectacle of stark imagery, symbolic storytelling, and immensely visceral sequences of repetition. Thanks to these audience members, many of whom were ecstatic over Fabre’s challenging and unique work, Jan Fabre has become the poster child for the avant-garde in Antwerp, and this piece has become a historic work of post-dramatic theater.

The piece, which has been acclaimed, studied, and in 2012 was re-produced by Fabre and a new company of actors at ImPulsTanz, has become known for its extended sequences of repetition. These moments of repetition, however, are as varied as the responses to the work were when it premiered, from a sequence of seemingly endless running in place to what is perhaps the work’s most famous sequence: a young woman trying desperately to climb onto the front of stage, only to be pushed down by a fellow cast member at every attempt, taunted with the words “eighteen-hundred-seventy-six.” Throughout the piece, this tool of an action happening over and over again transforms from a simple act of repetition into theatrical events ranging from utter monotony to pure hope.

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Photo by Robert Mapplethorpe

BY MARK MAURIELLO

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Repetition as history One of the first large sequences of repetition is one that will reappear in different variations throughout the four and a half hours. The actors shout out the names, artists, years, and locations of famous theatrical productions, for example: “1898. The Seagull. Constantin Stanislavski. Anton Chekhov. Moscow Art Theater.” The multiple different productions mentioned here are repeated and weave together into a self-aware cacophony of theatrical baggage, nostalgia, and history. This kind of event will repeat at regular intervals throughout the performance, each time with a new selection of landmark performances, including Beckett’s 1953 Waiting for Godot, Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s 1976 premiere of Einstein on the Beach at the Avignon Festival, and Fabre’s 1982 This is theatre like it was to be expected and foreseen.

With this recurring motif, repetition is transformed into an awareness and recording of the inescapability of the history and form in which Fabre is working. Each time the performers begin a new sequence of shouting productions, Fabre is placing the work he is currently presenting in the context of the history of great works of theater that preceded it and reminding his audience to think about the work in relation to the productions they are hearing proclaimed.

Also, because this sequence repeats using different groups of productions, as the sequence is repeated the audience member begins to think about the grouping of the productions. When one of Fabre’s own productions is listed alone at the end, the audience is asked to consider which “group” his work may fit into. How does it compare to or stack up against the greats?

This repeated acknowledgement of the baggage of theater history also continuously reminds Fabre’s audience that they are watching a piece of theater.

Though much of what populates Fabre’s stage is obviously outside of naturalism or realism, this ritualistic repetition of theater history is ensuring that the audience is always thinking about the traditional expectations and connotations of a theater work, even if this is a post-dramatic piece. This fact is especially important when noting that this was one of Fabre’s very first works for the theater. Having previously been working predominantly as a visual and performance artist, it wasn’t until the 1980s that Fabre began directing companies of actors and producing works specifically for the theater. He was using a new medium and entering a new artistic lexicon, and clearly wanted the audience to be aware of the realities of his doing so. This example of repetition is about reminding and cementing a fact into the mind of the audience. In contrast, the other most overarching act of repetition proves to transform into an experience of the exact opposite effect.

Repetition as desensitization The first appearance of nudity in The Power of Theatrical Madness is in the work’s first “scene.” The performers begin in a horizontal line across the stage, backs to the audience, reciting productions and going through a repetitive series of movements—this dance will be discussed in greater depth later. After the dance has been established, one of the performers breaks this unison, turns to face the audience, and exposes her right breast. From that point on, the performers seem to be constantly dressing and undressing throughout the four and a half hour piece, sometimes in a step-by-step process led by one cast member. Just as Fabre’s repetition has the ability to remind and grow our awareness of some aspects of the performance, it is also employed to reduce our reaction to some events that occur again and again. In this, we see the act of repetition transforming into a power for desensitization.

When the first cast member exposes herself, the image, even to a prepared audience member, can be a shock. As the audience goes on seeing cast members’ exposed naked bodies and repeatedly watching them undress, however, desensitization builds and the viewer ceases to be distracted by the shock of the appearance of the nude human form. These repeated undressings, described in one review of the 2012 remounting as “slow and unerotic,” allow the spectator to eventually understand the naked body as something to be in critical and artistic conversation with, not just to have an extreme reaction towards.2 Much of Fabre’s work utilizes the nude human body, as it is a subject of great interest to him. In one interview, he describes the human body as “an incredible paint box, a laboratory, a battlefield.”3 This fascination with the realities of human animalism and corporeality is something that Fabre is training his audience to see by slowly dulling the societal or moral shock and shame associated with the body. Here, repetition makes the naked body something normal and ordinary, and allows the audience member to engage with the work in a way that may not be possible if one woman undressed once in the show.

Here, repetition does not build, but breaks down.

In addition to the effect it has on the audience, the desensitization that comes with the repeated act of undressing or revealing oneself is experienced by the performer who is repeating the act. It is highly likely that, for any cast mounting of this work, the repeated action allows for a transformation of the experience from something that may make the performer self-conscious or nervous into something he or she is comfortable with or may find liberating. Even if an actor has performed this show before, or appeared nude elsewhere, the first undressing in a new performance with a unique, new audience will certainly feel more charged than the later repetitions. We see repetition as an agent for desensitization extending to all involved in the performance, much as other examples of repetition will also affect both performer and viewer.

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Left: Jean Fouquet, “Madonna and Child” from the Melun Diptych (c. 1450). Right: photo by Robert Mapplethorpe

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Repetition as exhaustion While the repeated exposure of the body is making the audience aware of and comfortable with the body, Fabre further complicates corporeality by not simply presenting it, but testing it. He tests its limits.

As described by Luk van den Dries and Thomas Crombez, “Fabre feels most closely related to biology.

He shares a deep interest in the biological foundations of performing and performance processes with practitioners such as... Jerzy Gratowsky... he frequently tests the physical foundations of his performers.”4 He sets up a number of these tests in Theatrical Madness, often utilizing repetition to investigate how far the body can be pushed. There are a number of moments in which Fabre has, in an act against traditional notions of theatrical staging, left the duration of the action up to the abilities of his performers’ bodies—the action is set to play out until the performers are unable to continue.5 In one instance of this, the performers are again lined up across the front of the stage reciting productions. They run in place as fast as they can for as long as they can. By the end of the sequence, they are each drenched in sweat. Here we see the repetition of a single action transformed by Fabre into a tool to test and exhaust his performers’ bodies.

In addition to furthering Fabre’s biological interests, this act of repetition creates yet another perspective for the audience that further complicates their experience of the work. Here, the audience is able to see the performers as fellow humans, inevitably wondering if they are tired or what they must be feeling.

We wonder, “What are the physical and emotional effects this repetition is having on these people, our fellow humans and theatrical participants?” Fabre, through repetition, creates empathy between the viewer and performer in a work that, at surface, could seem to lack such capacity for connection.

This one powerful sequence of repetition also does not solely affect the audience, but has an ability to affect the minds and bodies of the performers as they recover throughout the remainder of the performance. Furthermore, though it may be difficult to research without speaking to one of Fabre’s actors, what would be likely to occur viscerally to the body and mind during this action would be a complex and extreme experience that the performers, though consenting, find themselves forced to endure. Fabre is affecting and manipulating his performers through repetition in a way that also allows the audience to empathize, thus injecting a moment of humanity into this potentially stark spectacle of repetitive imagery.

By using repetition here as a tool for exhaustion, he begins to play with a convoluted power dynamic and structure within the world of this work.

Repetition as persistance These moments of power struggle and humanity not only exist in interactions between the creator and the performer, but also between different performers during the piece. Fabre constructs situations that engender empathy and narrative in which the players interact with each other. In these scenes, the performers often utilize persistent repetition in the process of achieving a goal. In order to do something they want to or must do, they must try again and again. These sequences of goal-oriented repetition are the most memorable and compelling in the piece, as well as some of the most famous.

In a flurry, the line of performers at the front of the stage is pushed off into the pit. As quickly as they were thrown down, all of the company members scurry back up—except one. One woman is left in the pit, unable to climb back on stage, for she is repeatedly kept from her goal by the cast member who pushed her. She wants nothing but to get on stage, and proceeds to hurl herself up the side again and again, only to be violently pushed back down each time. The man wants nothing but to keep her off the stage, and uses his own body to ensure that she stays in the pit, all the while shouting “eighteen hundred seventy six.” They both act on their desires, come to a head, are neither successful, and repeat, using a number of tactics, from brute force to violence, to pleading, seduction, and taunting. This lasts for over 25 minutes. The woman is not successful in her goal until she convinces the man to let her up by answering his question: 1876, the premiere of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, when the house lights were turned off and theater became the art object it is known as today.

In the pushing sequence, the action is repeated because of the performers’ persistence to continue until they reach their goals. In another example of this transformation of repetition into persistence, four pairs of performers are seen upstage. In each, one wears a textured, reflective suit and is facing the audience, attempting to dance to the music being played, while the other, facing his or her partner, repeatedly moves the body back into attention stance, chastising and preventing movement. In another sequence, there are again four pairs, this time of men and women. Over and over again, the men carry the women downstage, lay them on the ground, and return upstage, while the women leap up, run, and jump into the men’s arms, only to once again be delivered downstage. In both of these examples, we again see two performers with opposing goals, led by persistence to repeat their actions for heavily extended sequences.

It is likely that these sequences of repetition are the most captivating (and thus memorable and famous) because they create a narrative for the audience. While other actions of repetition create an awareness or a dialogue amongst the artist, performers, and audience, this transformation of repetition 13

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into persistence and achievement creates a story, even if it may be largely imposed by the minds of the audience members. This attachment to the action through repetition engenders a connection and sense of desire for the audience. As described by Eirini Kartasaki in her article on theatrical repetition, “Desire derives from repetition’s promise that something will eventually happen. Repetition in some cases creates such a space of perpetual wanting.”6 What she is describing here relates to these Fabre sequences in terms of hope. Throughout the repetition, the audience is waiting for the performer to achieve his or her goal, and oftentimes, the audience member finds him or herself rooting for the success through persistence of one performer, hoping for a particular result.

The effects of this kind of persistent repetition are certainly also felt by the performers. In an interview, Fabre says of his performers, “It’s very important for the actors to believe that on stage they’re the heroes of an ancient tragedy.”7 With the physical commitment these performers are exhibiting, the emotional connection to their persistence must be just as great. It is imperative to the performance that they believe in their actions and are determined to persist. It is likely that this strong desire for success builds up as they repeat their actions, further blurring the distinction between whether these attempts at achieving goals are something the actors are performing or something that they are truly going through, though also happening to be on stage. Again, Fabre is antagonizing traditional theatrical rules and expectations by removing the story and given circumstances from the theater piece, leaving only the performer’s (or, perhaps, character’s) desires and actions. The rest is up to the minds of his audience.

Not all examples of persistent repetition have stakes that are as high as being continuously shoved off the stage you’re supposed to be performing on.

There is one sequence in which performers must clean up debris of shattered porcelain plates, and so, make repeated trips with dustpans from the pile of debris to two trashcans. Though the experience of this sequence is not as riveting or engaging for an audience member, it is still an act of persistent, goaloriented repetition in that it has a hope or expectation of closure and catharsis. Just as we anticipate and see the debris be fully cleaned, we assume the girl will get on stage, or someone will win the battle between dancer or restrainer, etc., whether we see it happen or not. This notion of catharsis is something that is not inherent in other sequences of repetition. For example, in the repeated running in place, the catharsis does not come as an assumed part of that moment’s story, but must be additionally inserted by Fabre after the sequence is over: he has his runners sit on the front of the stage, catch their breath, and smoke cigarettes—a response, but not a part of the same moment.

These sequences of repetition transformed into persistence are surely the ones with the most at stake for both the performer and audience member. They actively engage and bring in the audience and resonate with us through narrative and empathy. A final type of repetition at work throughout this piece also causes an intense experience in the viewer, but by conversely allowing him or her to disengage and perhaps soften his or her focus as opposed to sharpen it.

Repetition as monotony It is not always that an act of repetition tells a story of theatrical history or of persistence, creates a possibility for artistic statement or personal liberation, or tests the body to its limits. There are times when desensitization to a stimulus as a result of repetition doesn’t seem to break anything or go anywhere.

In these instances, we experience repetition transforming into monotony—though this is not necessarily as negative of a transformation as it may seem.

Unlike the repetition of persistence, which utilized different attempts and tactics, much of the repetition that eventually transforms into monotony features one action repeated over and over with near perfect precision. The audience is seeing the exact same action on a loop. Examples of this include the line choreography that opens the show. The first thing the audience sees is the backs of the performers doing the same synchronous physical movements again and again. Also this type of repetition is the aforementioned sequence of slapping and singing an excerpt from Carmen. Another example of monotonous repetition includes one performer cycling through a set of simple ballet steps in very slow motion. Facing upstage, she repeats the action of this very slow cycle ad nauseum, even while the rest of the show begins to develop and move on without her.

When repetition transforms into monotony, it is engaging, testing, and manipulating the audience member’s focus. In the beginning of a sequence, the viewer may be engaged in what Kartsaki describes as a “longing for the series to stop [mixed with] a kind of fear that it will stop.” However, because Fabre is stretching these sequences so long, the audience member, if engaged in a particular focus, is likely to even surpass this interaction with the action and enter a nearly meditative state. In other words, monotonous repetition leads to active anticipation and expectation, but after a while that feeling is numbed.

The audience member is able to disengage with the action and open up to a new way of seeing it that hinges into the realm of pure spectacle.

Throughout the piece, by presenting monotonous repetition again and again, Fabre trains his audience to improve their ability to allow for this sort of mental transformation, where, towards the end of the piece, a focused audience member is able to disengage with the realities of the action in a way that transforms it into 14

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the spectacle of repetition, washing over him or her as a beautiful artistic stimulus, much like an aesthetic experience of a work of art that a theorist like Walter Pater may discuss. In these moments, the monotonous repetition transforms into something greater than just the performers or the action itself—it becomes a largescale sensory experience for the viewer.

Though of course, while all of this is a part of the work, another part of the work is Fabre encouraging his audience to not focus, get up, get drinks, go to the bathroom, etc. What could be seen as sabotaging his own work can also be read as a generous and fearless action of giving over the reigns of the theater piece to the spectator. Furthermore, in typical Fabre fashion, this work also contained sequences using live animals—in one frogs, in another parrots. In these sequences, all hope for successful repetition goes out the window. Live animals cannot be controlled or expected to perform specific choreographed sequences, let alone repeat them. Fabre is constantly overthrowing theatrical traditions and expectations, even those that he uses and creates in his own work.

So then, what to make of this spectacle of repetition? We are left to wonder: what is this act of “theatrical madness” that is so powerful? Is it the act of repetition? That these famous productions, including, now, Fabre’s own work are continually repeated, performance after performance of production after production, honored and analyzed by lovers and theorists. Is it the fact that these repeated performances, unlike film, which was cementing its media and culture takeover in the 1980s, require real people and real bodies? Or perhaps it is the vast spectacle of possibilities of action and perception that exist in the theater; no matter how many times something is repeated, or in whichever manner, it is always new and always alive.

Jan Fabre was born in Antwerp in 1958. Fabre studied at the Municipal Institute of Decorative Arts and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp where he began his career as a visual artist. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Fabre began writing and creating work for the theater. His 1982 This is theater as it was to be expected and foreseen, garnered widespread attention for Fabre’s work, which led to the Venice Biennale to commission the work that would become The Power of Theatrical Madness in 1984. Since, Fabre has become the face of avant-garde theater in Belgium, as well as continuing producing works as a performance artist, opera maker, and choreographer. In 1986, Fabre founded his theater company, Troubleyn/Jan Fabre, which is still producing work in Antwerp, as well presenting Fabre’s previous works, including The Power of Theatrical Madness, across the globe. Fabre is also well known for his “Bic-art,” blue ballpoint pen drawings, inspired by Fabre’s personal interest in 4:00am, what he calls “the blue hour.” In 1990, Fabre covered an entire building in blue ballpoint pen. In 2002, his was invited to use the ceiling of the Hall of Mirrors in the Royal Palace in Brussels as a canvas, and so created his “Heaven of Delight,” by covering the ceiling in 1.6 million wing cases from jewel-scarab beetles.

In 1986, in Antwerp, Robert Mapplethorpe documented with a series of photographs the original version of The Power of Theatrical Madness.

Robert Mapplethorpe was born in New York in 1946.

Mapplethorpe is well known for his large-scale, black and white photography. Most famously, much of his subject matter included erotic male and female nudes, including documentation of the homoerotic BDSM scene in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Throughout his career, Mapplethorpe’s work inspired controversy and reexamination of principles, including his 1986 exhibition “Black Males” and it’s accompanying book “The Black Book,” which were criticized for their homoerotic depictions of black males. In 1989, his solo exhibition “The Perfect Moment,” as a result of erotic and homoerotic images and self-portraits, was the center of a large-scale controversy over censorship of art that was being publically funded. Mapplethorpe died in 1989 at the age of 42, though his legacy and artwork live on and inspire today.

Endnotes 1. Though it wouldn’t be his longest. Fabre’s 1982 This is theatre like it was to be expected and foreseen clocked in at about eight hours.

2. Barbara Freitag, Polishing up an old gem Jan Fabre’s classic “The Power of Theatrical Madness” at Vienna’s ImPulsTanz. Also a kind of theatrical quiz, four and a half hours long. (Vienna Press).

3. Dorothy Semenowicz and Catherine Tórz, Man is a Beautiful Animal: Interview with Jan Fabre (Poznana, June 30, 2010).

4. Luk van den Dries and Thomas Crombez, Jan Fabre and tg STAN: Two Models of Postdramatic Theater in the Avant-Garde Tradition (Contemporary Theater Review, Vol. 20(4), 2010), 427.

5. Arnd Wesemann, Jan Fabre: Belgian Theatre Magician, (The Drama Review 41, 4 (T156), 1997), 42.

6. Eirini Kartsaki, Repeat repeat: Returns of performance in the work of Lone Twin Theatre (Choreographic Practices 3, 2012), 127.

7. Semenowicz and Tórz.

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Andy Warhol in Romeo Castellucci’s Inferno: Theatre as a Work of Art In a personal statement on his artistic philosophy, the internationally acclaimed theatre director Romeo Castellucci declares his distaste for theatre itself: “Theatre, and any art form that does not come to terms with its own factual possibility of not being there does not interest me.”1 Theatre, Castellucci implies, has failed to justify its existence. Because so, it seems less significant than other, already theorized mediums. More than this, Castellucci claims, theatre simply does not hold theoretical significance because it most often uses conventions, seemingly blindly, with long-antiquated premises. The theatre medium, he says, holds onto a “by now faceless past that already did not exist by the time of Baudelaire who was theorizing, for that reason, the idea of shock in art.”2 Trained as a visual artist, Castellucci is obviously influenced by a history of meta-commentaries and deconstructive thinking in modern art, compelled to justify his theatre medium both in relation to other art forms as well as to the broader world.

Castellucci’s philosophy coincides with attitudes prevalent in both modern art and contemporary theatre scholarship. In the Introduction to Postdramatic Theatre—a seminal text on contemporary European theatre—Hans-Thies Lehmann discusses the need for

theatre to rethink its identity within a now longstanding, global environment of mass media.3 Unlike other art mediums, Lehmann suggests, theatre has consistently failed to establish its relationship to everchanging cultural contexts. Influential art historians from Clement Greenberg to T. J. Clark have similarly emphasized the need for art forms to justify their own existence both in relation to other mediums and to the greater socio-economic contexts to which we all belong. The identity of theatre today, then, is a relevant and pressing topic for both theatre and art historical studies and one with which Castellucci’s interests align. This essay will focus on one of Castelluci’s productions, Inferno, originally performed in 2008 at the Festival d’Avignon as one of his performances in which the tradition of theatre is explicitly addressed. Inferno incorporates loud signifiers of history: it purportedly performs one book within the historical Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri—a text at the heart of Italian, and even European, identity. Moreover, Castellucci’s performance of this text occurs within the historical Honour Court of the Pope’s Palace. Established out of a text and theatre space that both literalize history, the performance can only occur as and in this history; tradition, history become 16

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BY C A M I L L E Z U M WA LT C O P P O L A

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central aspects, or even subjects, of the play. From the start, the spectator watches the performance literally struggle against these historical frameworks: a figure enters the stage and proceeds to climb the historical walls with his bare body. Tensions between tradition and non-tradition challenge the spectator throughout. The convention of scenes remains, but only as sequences of movement and set, intuitively categorized into distinct groups. Figures appear on stage, but only, with the exception of the last sequence, as “performers” in contemporary clothing rather than characters with names and invented personas. The spectator follows and participates in an evolution, a plot, but with no dialogue or explicit characters, this plot evolves as a series of experiences rather than learned events.

This essay will focus on the last sequence of the play, when the only explicit character appears: a figure resembling and behaving as Andy Warhol emerges from a burnt and crumpled car. Why would the director choose to include this character at the last portion of the play, departing so saliently from the performance’s previous vocabulary? What does this reference to another work of art reveal about the theatre medium itself? In this essay, I will argue that, through this Andy Warhol sequence, Inferno shows how the traditional theatre, as Castellucci defines it, allows a realm of abstract, universal concepts to transform an audience’s reality.

Castellucci’s attitude toward traditional theatre is a kind of iconoclasm, for he believes that theatre should amplify its inherent struggle against history.

As he discusses in a personal statement, the theatre, to him, typically destroys and struggles against the set of traditions that conventionally define it.4 Inferno illustrates this characterization of theatre, its plot and subject only constituting a struggle to destroy familiar theatre elements. Lacking explicit characters or references to the text, only bodily movements and theatrical effects track the progression of the show, confusing the spectator’s conventional viewing experience. The plot, in other words, exists as a changing and ever-complicating viewing experience. The traditional theatre venue, as Inferno or Castellucci defines it, may be found in these tensions between familiar and unfamiliar viewing experiences as whatever nontraditional elements rub up against.

For example, Castellucci’s performance retains the “rehearsal process” long conventional to the practice of theatre. However, Inferno blatantly reveals this rehearsal process and thereby the play’s fabrication.

The rehearsal process becomes an actor in the play, present during the performance through its traces both physical and inferred. After the initial figure has climbed the performance space’s ancient walls at the start of the play, the spectator shifts attention to a basketball hoop hanging on the walls below, stage center and at human height. A young performer in contemporary clothing walks onto the stage, encounters

this hoop and then a basketball that rolls onto the set.

The spectator watches as the child inspects the objects as if for the first time and then decides to throw the ball into the hoop. The performer, rather than a character, encounters the props as they are, frustrating any latent representation of a space or experience beyond the immediate performance and its making.

Through this sequence, then, the spectator struggles between two opposing experiences. She cannot decide between whether this is a “real” or “fabricated” event. The basketball hoop on the theatre wall announces the constructedness of the show, and therefore its previous rehearsal, but the performer’s seemingly improvised interaction with the objects and his “real” identity confuses the audience’s interaction with the show. Inferno, in other words, both includes and signals a rehearsal process. By explicitly admitting its own rehearsal, however, the play simply confuses an already confusing relationship between the “real” and “fabricated” experience of the theatre.

Though shifting the presentation of the rehearsal process, it does not fundamentally change. Its reveal only affirms it as a theatrical norm. This struggle against the rehearsal process convention is one such “iconoclasm” inherent to theatre that Inferno accentuates and performs.

The text, privileged theatre space, actors, scenes, plot, representation, audience, director and stage: all are part of the “immense archive of traditions” for the theatrical form that Inferno treats unconventionally and calls into attention. More specifically, Inferno performs each of these traditions in more heightened form; the play accentuates each of these encounters’ both “fabricated” and “real” elements. In so doing, Inferno exposes what Castellucci describes as the essential paradox of art, or of theatre in particular: Art, instead of eliminating the deceit of visual reality, reproduced it while uselessly attempting to overcome it.

But how could it be possible to reproduce the world without having in our hands the same constitutive elements, which include our hands? This was the paradox that stifled in a contradiction the art the most similar to existence: theatre.5

Castellucci’s directorial decisions are organized around this logic—that the theatre must destroy tradition, but somehow only by accentuating its essential paradox as both a real and fabricated event.

In his time, Andy Warhol enacted a similar “Castellucci” performance; throughout his life and career, Warhol frustrated the distinction between real and fabricated event for the public. Warhol’s career encompassed material artworks as well as an art production facility, which he named “the Factory,” as well as, and probably most importantly, his persona. The persona aspect of Warhol’s career is particularly addressed in the 2010 “Andy Warhol” special edition of 19

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the premier academic journal for modern and contemporary art historical research, October. In this special issue, scholars Jonathan Flatley and Isabelle Graw, among others, emphasize the importance of interpreting Warhol’s career, in all its various components, in terms of affect or as a larger performance. Flatley, for instance, examines Warhol through the lens of his habit of collecting and his complexly performed statements like, “I like everything.”6 This angle on Warhol’s career puts the criticality of his production into question. Did Warhol carefully conceive, fabricate his life’s work? Or, was Warhol so firmly and extremely entrenched in his own culture that he only affirmed and celebrated the then-contemporary norms, an extreme product of his context? According to these most recent interpretations of Warhol’s work, Warhol’s career was both a real and fabricated performance. The public recognized him and his work as a privileged, creative act, but yet experienced them, at the same time, in and as real events.

Warhol, in other words, disoriented a public’s understanding of real and performed events or, rather, made this disorientation inherent in every performance or act explicit. He, and the material and events associated with him, produced similar effects as Castellucci’s performance, but decades earlier. What happens to Warhol’s work, and Castellucci’s performance, when Warhol is brought into Inferno, the space of the stage? The sequence begins when a figure resembling and behaving as Warhol emerges out of a burnt and crumpled car. The spectator watches this figure inspect his body, brushing off ash or dust from his arms and legs as if coming back into his body and rediscovering his existence. He slowly lifts his head and stares at, then inspects, the audience, the stage, the lights. As if fully reborn into his body, this Warhol leans back onto the car in that empty, nonchalant, very Warhol way. He claps slowly, almost ironically, pulls up the Polaroid camera strung around his neck and then photographs the audience.

This scene suggests that Warhol has been reborn on the stage, the figure coming into his own body as Warhol. However, to rebirth Warhol is to, in part, rebirth both a “representation” and a “reality.” As this Warhol inspects the audience, Inferno signals a real, live event. But as the only explicit character within the play, the scene also marks a “representation.” The entire Warhol sequence therefore furthers Inferno’s project to confuse real and representational experiences. One could also argue that the play literally rebirths Warhol on the stage. If the original “Warhol” includes his entire production—every commodity art object as well as every commodity “representation” of Warhol’s career—then a replication of Warhol in this play is, in fact, “Warhol” itself. Inferno therefore shows its own representational technique to be a form of manufacture. Like machines, like Warhol, a play replicates again and again with each performance. A play

replicates its own previous performances as well as the also real-representational experiences that occur beyond the physical theatre space. The actor herself becomes simply a copy of what has come before, eliminating any artistry or originality previously associated with the theatre or the work of art.

After the “rebirth” of Warhol, the figure walks purposefully to a circular track on the stage’s floor and places his Polaroid camera upon it. The circular track then begins to move, spinning the camera round as the Warhol figure drops to the ground and rolls along with it— yet another ambiguous Warholian and Castellucci-like gesture. After some time performing this rolling choreography, he walks back to the wrecked car, and climbs its surface. As soon as he reaches the car’s roof and stands upon it, seven televisions light up at the top-most windows of the ancient walls behind him. Each television shows a single letter, together spelling the French word for “stars,” “Étoiles.” Suddenly, Warhol forces himself to fall backward, and as he does so, a television also falls and crashes, into pieces, on the ground. But he then stands again, climbs again, and falls backward, performing the same suicide. He does this four times, eliminating televisions and their letters, until only “toi,” “you,” remains.

The last sentence of Dante’s Inferno reads, “Thence we came forth to rebehold the stars.”7 If this last sequence of Castellucci’s play corresponds to the final portion of Dante’s poem, then this sequence both literally enacts and represents its parent text.

The word “étoiles” represents or signifies the “stars” mentioned in the text, but also literally recreates the text on stage. The word can also refer to Warhol as a “star” or the stars literally above the audience in the open-air theatre. As Warhol falls, a falling “star,” so do parts of the literal “stars.” With Warhol’s fourth selfinitiated death, the play also temporarily “kills” itself; the play ends as Warhol dies this last time. The spectator has journeyed from a performer’s ambitious climb up the theatre’s ancient walls to Andy Warhol’s deaths. If this play tells the story of Inferno, then the Dante character has transformed into Warhol. This protagonist, we have seen, tells the story of the production itself, struggling to break through and define itself against history. The director has thus equated his production with Warhol at the end of the play, suggesting that, through the play, he has adopted or recognized Warhol’s production model as the same as his own. The theatre, this comparison suggests, only copies, manufactures, both fabricating and existing.

The director who is also Warhol, the theatre, and the performance must kill themselves, ending the play both literally and representationally, to form “toi”—a pure representation, a word, whose literal form exists only as the audience before the stage. The theatre thereby literally rebirths the audience, who may enter back into “reality” with new phenomenologies. For, 20

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through the shuttling between real and representational experiences, a new, abstract way of understanding is formed. Or, as Castellucci puts it, “it doubles language in order to create a certain form of doubleness, experiences of transcendence—a way of moving beyond.” By recreating Warhol, Inferno shows how real and representational experiences have and do occur in the space outside of the play’s literal venue.

The abstract realm of experience produced in the shuttling between real and representational encounters can now enter the spectator’s “reality.” Knowing how and that reality and representation always coincide, they may reenter the world to “rebehold the stars.”

Castellucci has been the director of the Theatre Section of the 37th Venetian Biennale in 2005, which was called “Pompei. The novel of the Ash”, and concentrated on the re-definition of the problem of representation; a re-consideration of the role of the spectator and an opening towards the emerging theatre forms and works that are not included in the traditional theatre frame. In 2007 Romeo Castellucci was nominated “Artiste Associé ” by the artistic direction of the Festival d’Avignon for the 62nd edition in 2008. Here he presented the powerful trilogy Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy. In 2010 he started the new project which has led to: On the concept of the face regarding the Son of God and The Minster’s Black Veil. In 2012 he completed this project with The Four Seasons Restaurant. In 2011 he produced Richard Wagner’s Parsifal at Theatre La Monnaie – De Munt in Brussels. Romeo Castellucci’s awards include special UBU prize for the resistance, following the exclusion of the company from the public contributions for the experimental theatre by the Ministry for Tourism and Arts of the Republic of Italy (1996), another UBU prize—for Julius Caesar, Genesis, Tragedia Endogonidia, Europe Theatre Prize-New Theatrical Realities (2000), Golden Mask prize for Oresteia at the Festival of the Americas Theatre in Montreal, and prize the best International Production for Genesis at the Dublin Theatre Festival. In 2002 Romeo Castellucci was appointed Knight of the Order of Arts and Literature by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of France. In 2010, his trilogy dedicated to the Divine Comedy was named the best play and one of the ten most influential cultural events in the world for the decade 2000-2010 by Le Monde. In 2013 he was the recipient of the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement for the Theatre sector of the Biennale di Venezia.

Endnotes 1. Romeo Castellucci, The Iconoclasm of the Stage and the Return of the Body: The Carnal Power of the Theater, trans. Gloria Pastorino, [37].

2. Castellucci, The Iconoclasm of the Stage, [38].

3. Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby (New York, NY: Routledge, 2006), [16].

4. Castellucci, The Iconoclasm of the Stage, [37-38].

5. Castellucci, The Iconoclasm of the Stage, [38].

6. Jonathan Flatley, “Like: Collecting and Collectivity,” October, Spring 2010,[71-98].

7. Dante Aligheri, Dante’s Inferno, trans. Sean O’Brien (London: Picador, 2006).

Romeo Castellucci was born in Cesena in 1960. He earned a degree in scenic design and painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna. In 1980 he started working as a theatre director. Together with Claudia Castellucci and Chiara Guidi, he founded the Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio in 1981. After his first productions (including Santa Sofia-Khmer Theatre in 1986), Romeo Castellucci and of the Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio’s interest moved to the Middle Eastern cycle, including Inanna’s Descent (La Discesa di Inanna, 1989), Gilgamesh (1990) and Isis and Osiris. This was followed by the European classical cycle, with Hamlet. The vehement exteriority of a mollusc’s death (1992) after Shakespeare, Oresteia (an organic comedy?) (1995) after Aeschilus, and Julius Caesar (1997) after Shakespeare. After Genesis. From the museum of sleep (1999), Romeo Castellucci’s interest shifted to musical theatre with the concert for voice and sound instruments, Journey to the End of the Night (Voyage au bout de la nuit, 1999), adapted from Louis Ferdinand Céline's work, and Il Combattimento (2000), by Claudio Monteverdi and Scott Gibbons. In 2001, Castellucci thought over the foundation of the model of Greek tragedy by engaging it with the structure and frame of the contemporary condition, now so far from shared myths and common rites.

In 2002 Romeo Castellucci designed Tragedia Endogonidia, a cycle of eleven episodes. It was based on the concept of open performance, destined to change over time like a body and demand a summing-up of dramaturgy, economy, distribution and theatrical organisation.

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Did That Read?

Theatricality and Universality in Castellucci’s Inferno

Photo by Luca Del Pia

BY M A R I E L P E T T E E

The theater of Romeo Castellucci and his Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio company, as exemplified in their 2008 staging of Inferno1, attempts to assert itself as one of the most universal and overarching forms of art to which humans can relate. Impossibly and endearingly ambitious, this goal makes works such as Inferno that much more compelling to observe. Submerged in a hauntingly mesmerizing soundscape and presented with stage images that seem at once shockingly modern and yet profoundly ancient, the spectator is immersed in a lush, sensory world in which time, age, and history melt effortlessly together like pools of wax.

Such a bold staging, however, with its dearth of spoken language and propensity for striking yet unexplained tableaux, calls into question the outer limits of scope for any theatrical endeavor, let alone one such as this that constructs its own archetypes just as often as it plays upon those that have been previously established. To what extent can Castellucci really represent the entire nature of human suffering to a diverse audience? Can certain theatrical structures or events really “read” to almost anyone, regardless of age, gender, or societal context? Inferno digs into the fertile subject of the fundaments of human communication by countering moments of symbolic drama

with real, unadorned human feats. Though various audiences will inevitably have different experiences with the piece, Inferno still retains a steady grip upon its spectators as a work of spectacle and as a work of art.

The descent through Hell along the path to Purgatory and Heaven might wind differently for each viewer, but Castellucci’s Inferno casts the spectator as his or her own Virgil, allowing each to navigate the sea of images before them in their own way while always feeling the magnetic pull of Inferno’s silent power and precision.

The very premise of the project of Inferno immediately distinguishes itself as one concerned with painting broad strokes of the human experience, for Dante Alighieri’s celebrated Divina Commedia seeks to characterize concepts as vast and weighty as Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. Commonly held as the most foundational work in Italian literature and certainly among the most important pieces of Medieval literature in the world, Alighieri’s epic poem manages to braid classical tropes of life and death with innovations of form together in its nearly fifteen thousand lines. Only a director with something astounding to say would dare to stage such an adaptation with hardly any spoken dialogue, yet, in interviews, Castel25

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lucci seems drawn to it because of the sheer impossibility of the act:

palace was particularly significant in history as the seat of power for the Avignon popes in the fourteenth century, before the return to Rome, and thus it carries with it the senses of grandeur and sanctity as well as of novelty, innovation, and rebellion.

The staging of Inferno takes full advantage of this backdrop of historical, religious, and artistic significance by infusing its staging into every cranny of its facade, notably during the spellbinding sequence in which one male actor gingerly ascends the rocky exterior of the courtyard wall. His toes curl to grip each shallow ridge of the facing as he slowly shifts his weight and shimmies along the vast landscape of stone, resulting in a slow and treacherous journey up to the top. At one point, he settles over the rocky skeleton of a rose window, spreading his limbs out as far as he can stretch, forming a distinctively familiar image of Da Vinci’s beautifully-proportioned Vitruvian Man. The Vitruvian Man constituted the ideal of the male body for the artists of the Renaissance, yet it still strikes a universal chord in today’s viewers, who can appreciate its mathematical simplicity and elegance. One might even argue that there is an innate principle guiding humans to appreciate these perfect proportions—studies have shown that most people prefer rectangles that exhibit the Golden Ratio, for example—and therefore this image strikes us on both a level of surface recognition of the Vitruvian Man as a cultural artifact as well as on a deeper, intrinsic level of beauty. Seated at the bottom level of the stage, one has the sensation of being trapped at the bottom of an impossibly deep well, looking up at the stars with the longing that comes from knowing one can never even dream of reaching the top. The vertical depth of the staging therefore works masterfully in favor of the show, for it plays upon the primitive impact of feeling vast vertical space above one’s head, much like how Gothic cathedrals would strive to achieve greater and greater heights with their vaulted ceilings and flying buttresses in order to inspire awe and wonderment in the worshipping population in attendance.

The effect of being outdoors and yet still trapped within the confines of the palace walls, too, further reinforces the sensation of Hell as a world in which we constantly dwell with other people. When the entirety of the sky is above us in our everyday lives, we are not typically as aware of its expanse, and yet in Inferno, Castellucci’s staging masterfully emphasizes the vertical square of sky above the spectators’ heads. It is as if the stars themselves are a crucial element of his design—forever looming above us, tempting us, and yet the actors and audience remain permanently on the ground level. Only the exception of the climbing actor makes the spectator aware of his or her state by comparison, and yet that actor, too, is restrained in his abilities. Not only can he never actually breach the confines of the palace walls, but his feat is also marred by the presence of a black safety harness which,

I knew this was a very dangerous undertaking, and this danger inspired me. For Italians, Dante is the father of the mother tongue. The Divina Commedia marks the birth of the Italian language. The holy dimension of this work, which makes it so dangerous, also interested me very much. It was not so much a question of representing Dante, but of being Dante today.2

Though encompassing an epic work such as La Divina Commedia might seem insurmountable to some, to Castellucci, it is crucial that we continue to explore the classics because of their unique relationship to concepts such as the universal and the individual: A spiritual connection exists between us and the classics; through them it’s possible to reconnect with the individual and with the universality of the individual, it is also possible to find the familiar as well as real solitude.3

Also essential to Castellucci’s radical envisioning of the piece was the concept of La Divina Commedia as the first truly meta-linguistic work, or the first piece in which the poet himself is inside his own fictional representation. We see this reflected in the piece when Castellucci first enters the stage at the top of Inferno and declares, without pomp or inflection, “My name is Romeo Castellucci.” He then dons a padded black suit and silently lets three trained German Shepherds sink their teeth into his limbs and tug viciously for a few minutes, snarling and growling, until a short whistle snaps them back to reality. Castellucci therefore makes explicit his goal of not translating Dante for the modern era, but rather imagining what it means to be Dante, not only as the subject of this transformative journey in the text but also as the poet and crafter of a work that has come to define such fundamental concepts as Heaven and Hell for all of Western artistic and literary culture.

Inferno, the first of a trio of Castellucci’s productions, was originally performed at the Festival d’Avignon in France and was clearly staged with a heightened sense of scale in mind. The setting of the Cour d’Honneur in Avignon’s famed Papal Palace is that of the facade of a towering stone masterpiece of architecture dating from the 14th century with seating for 2,000 spectators and a mostly bare stage dominated by several stories of gaping windows and echoing hallways tucked barely out of sight. Several centuries have not dulled the simple impact of the palace walls’ sheer size in comparison with the human form. This contrast is highlighted by the relatively bare and glossy black stage which, though eventually to be populated by dozens of people, at first is distinguished only by a small, flimsy basketball hoop hung cheekily above one of the ancient archways. The 26

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though subtle, makes his climb and eventual success feel somewhat inevitable rather than miraculous.

What, then, is more deeply felt on a universal level —a symbolic image that can resonate in any culture, or a real event that stirs some instinctive calling in each of us to feel moved, disgusted, comforted, or afraid? Castellucci toys with this question quite a bit in his approach to staging Inferno, for it lies at the heart of the concept of universal imagery. When considering the fundamental building blocks of a spectator’s emotional reaction to a piece, should their inherent genetic makeup and biological response be given more weight or are their experiences with art more strongly shaped by the stories they have learned throughout their lives and can apply in different ways?

Inferno engages actively with images that feel so universally understood, words become redundant. As Castellucci himself stated in an interview:

symbolic stage moments such as these, the audience is never under the impression that he or she is actually witnessing a real, visceral, or dangerous event. For Castellucci, “There is no hierarchy of roles… everyone and everything, including technology, participates in the same way. [His] preoccupation is to provide a wave of feelings which are able to touch the spectator simultaneously through all elements onstage.”5 With moments such as these, each witness is asked to extrapolate from the somewhat abstracted pictures of reality presented.

Such moments of symbolic stage pictures, however, can only reach so far in terms of universal appeal and understanding. Enter Castellucci, ready to attempt a radically stripped-down version of Alighieri’s Inferno using non-actors of a wide range of sizes and appearances. These actors are not playing characters or even heightened versions of themselves. Rather, they are utterly anonymous and exhibit no qualities or talents that might distinguish them from the audience members watching them on stage. This mutuality, complemented by Castellucci’s use of reflective mirrors showing the audience’s faces back to them, establishes a significant connection between viewer and performer, for they are both witnesses to each other.

This connection gives a basic, instinctual hit, much like a baby or animal recognizing its reflection in a mirror for the first time. Castellucci frequently capitalizes on the power of the body as a communication tool:

I don’t believe that the theatre should address historical contingency. I don’t want to talk about social issues and I don’t want to denounce injustices. It seems like too simple a scheme to me. However, my theatre is produced in this time, in this latitude, in this language, so it undergoes all the consequences of reality. But everyday life is not my objective, nor is it my point of departure. I like to think about more universal structures, which would be able to speak to a Chinese person or to a Brazilian person.4

While it is certainly difficult and problematic to try to generalize too strongly about the manner in which an audience can ingest art, if we allow ourselves to believe that there exist universally-legible images or theatrical events, as Castellucci would seem to support, we must therefore imagine that there is some underlying structure to the way in which humans learn to perceive and interpret the artistic world.

I will now attempt to break down the structure of Inferno as defined by symbolic and real actions in hopes of shedding light upon Castellucci’s perspective on how most effectively to convey a universal message, beginning with explicitly “staged” moments of theatrical magic. The crucial element of these moments is that they suggest but do not consist entirely of a tangible, real action from the actor or actors. The spectator is never under the illusion that such events represent a real danger to the actor, for example.

Much like in the tradition of Noh theater, these selected instances rely heavily upon deliberate movement, simple and traditional gestures, and character archetypes to work most effectively. These events are numerous throughout Inferno, yet some of the most substantial include the long sequence of slashing the throats of the many souls wandering a kind of River Styx, the blinding orange glow darting from window to window accompanied by sound, and the aforementioned climber scaling the face of the palace. With

The body is the simplest form of communication, in the sense that even an animal understands you since it's in a position to see you, hear you, and smell you. The body is the point of departure and probably also the point of arrival, after having completed an ellipse, after having also passed through and shaken the body of spectators.6

His reimagining of Inferno relies significantly upon various moments of “reality,” usually grounded in the body or movement, that seem to transcend the world of the stage for a few delightful minutes. In this world, reality is merely what you make of it rather than something objective—even if we see safety harnesses and other props, it is still thrilling and terrifying to watch someone climb to the top without a belayer.

By witnessing the “death of the author” in Castellucci’s initial declaration and subsequent staged mauling, the audience gains the agency that Castellucci once had over his piece. He acknowledges that his power to guide the narrative arc falters once his work is finally performed, and instead chooses to embrace this inevitable failure: I like to take the body of the spectator into consideration. The status of the spectator interests me much more than the status of the actor. Every show is different and is based on a different geometry, so it presupposes a different kind of spectatorship. However, I can’t 28

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anticipate what the spectator will think. What happens in the spectator’s mind is not my business. Theatre is an individual epiphany, so I have no control over the audience’s reactions. I am not an inventor of forms, one cannot invent forms. I arrange and organize what is already there, what already belongs to the spectator.7

ments that transcend cultural boundaries may make it nearly impossible to describe such a broad topic using only one intellectual perspective. As all art-makers are concerned with their audiences and the relationships that emerge between their works and their audiences, we must also spend time considering the implications of real vs. staged action in a theatrical context and whether or not either actually advances Castellucci or the art world in general toward a goal of more universally-applicable works.

Thus, for Castellucci, it is suggested that though theater is a deeply personal experience to watch, it is in some ways more effective to rely upon the innate human reactions to things like implied bodily harm or, at the most basic level, the body:

Endnotes 1. Inferno. Adapted from Dante Alighieri. Dir. Romeo Castellucci. Palais des Papes, Avignon, France. July 5th, 2008. Performance.

2. Castellucci, Romeo. Interview. “The Universal: The Simplest Place Possible.” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Vol. 26, No. 2 (May, 2004).

3. Castellucci. “The Universal: The Simplest Place Possible.”

4. Castellucci. “The Universal: The Simplest Place Possible.”

5. Laera, Margherita. “Comedy, Tragedy, and ‘Universal Structures’: Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio’s Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso.” TheatreForum. http://www.academia.edu/357573/Comedy_Tragedy_and_Uni versal_Structures_Socìetas_Raffaello_Sanzios_Inferno_Purgatorio_Paradiso.

6. Castellucci. “The Universal: The Simplest Place Possible.”

7. Castellucci. “The Universal: The Simplest Place Possible.”

8. Castellucci. “The Universal: The Simplest Place Possible.”

9. Castellucci. “The Universal: The Simplest Place Possible.”

…It is one of the greatest works of art, because it really is a work of the imagination, not only of the author, but also of the reader. A flowing river of sounds, images, and feelings take place in the Beyond. It is a place that doesn’t exist, and where anything can happen. The Artist thus takes on this unprecedented responsibility of creating new worlds that don’t actually exist.8

Inferno is littered with events that do feel real to an audience, however, regardless of whether or not stage magic was actually used or was merely very well hidden. The haunting image of small toddlers playing innocently in a one-way mirrored box, for example, plays strongly upon human instincts to care for one’s young in addition to emphasizing tropes of innocence and playfulness within Inferno. By witnessing real children having real reactions to their environment of toys and games, blissfully unaware of those analyzing their every step and of the looming and mysterious black fabric that slowly moves to cover them up, Castellucci taps into a deep attraction and fear within our genetic code. Unlike the obviously staged moments described above, so-called “real” events may perhaps be most effectively designated by whether or not the audience is aware of any theater magic that goes into pulling off the effect. When the young boy spray paints “J E A N” onto the side of the palace, for example, the effect of defacing such a monumentally holy structure reads to the audience even though the paint was surely not actually spray paint.

Though we might never know which method is more effective in getting audience members to think critically about how they ingest art, seeing the work of Inferno alone has provided me with much substance to think about concerning writing, the fundaments of human communication, silence, and reality vs. theatricality. Perhaps the strongest element of Castellucci’s Inferno is that he does not feel the need to pick sides on this debate, though it does not waver in its belief in the power of the universal, for Castellucci himself feels strongly about it: “Being universal, it belongs to me, because it resonates in me…Theatre doesn’t happen just because there's a written text, it’s not automatic. What counts is the spirit, the emotion.”9 The nuances of human communication and its core ele-

Le Festival d’Avignon. Since 1947, the labyrinthine stone walls and slender streets of Avignon’s inner walled city have borne witness to one of the world’s most highly-esteemed contemporary art festivals. Each summer, the oppressive July heat of southern France provides the timeless backdrop for hundreds of unique performances in venues ranging from small, obscure dance studios to the stunning open-air Honor Court in the historic Papal Palace, which seats up to 2,000 spectators. It was in this palace that Jean Vilar directed Richard II, launching the Festival. Today, over 130,000 visitors attend the Festival each summer, traveling from all over the globe to witness some of the roughly 40 main stage productions or to see the hundreds of other shows that have emerged as part of simultaneous fringe festivals such as “Avignon Off.” Though known primarily for its heritage in avant-garde and experimental theater, dance, and performance art, the Festival d’Avignon has grown into a hub for the entire contemporary art world, including poets, writers, filmmakers, visual artists, and musicians. It boasts a budget of 12 million euros per year for its productions, allowing it to attract nearly 4,000 renowned professional artists each year.

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Delineating Artifice from Reality in Gob Squad’s Before Your Very Eyes

BY DAV I D M A N E L L A

Founded in Nottingham, England in 1994, the Gob Squad performance collective has remained for two decades a leading force in creative collaboration, experimental theatre, and multidisciplinary performance art.2 Already students of performance technique at the time of Gob Squad’s founding, Gob Squad members have been heavily influenced by two threads of creative form—1) British pop culture and video art and 2) Hans-Thies Lehmann’s concept of “postdramatic theatre,”3 which defines performance tendencies that move away from strict representations of text, character, and plot and instead invite spectators to engage in shared considerations of broader social issues. Consistent with this break from traditional notions of dramatic staging, Gob Squad—now a group of seven members—devises all of their own work without any director or “final arbiter.”4 After developing a rough sketch of each project, Gob Squad invites guest performers, videographers, and technicians to collaborate with them. Now committed to producing both theater and film, Gob Squad stages and presents their work in

a wide range of site-specific locations, including houses, shops, hotels, transportation stations, or directly on the streets. Since their founding, Gob Squad has toured to all continents excluding Antarctica.5 Gob Squad company members identify their primary subject of interest to be “reality”—that is real people, real places, real time, and real consequences.6 Nina Teklenburg argues that this consideration of reality includes an examination into systems of artifice that cloud our awareness of everyday life.

Take, for example, Gob Squad’s The Great Outdoors (2001). By means of video technology, live recordings of a city and its people are projected onto a screen in a black box theater for audiences to observe.7 Here, interactions between subject and spectator are mediated through a lens of virtuality, which Gob Squad maintains to be natural in our contemporary cultural vocabulary.8 Or consider Effortless Transaction (1996), in which Gob Squad members transform a furniture shop into their stage, performing as sale assistants who use song, dance, and direct customer contact to advertise 30

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While the most important topic in Gob Squad’s work has always been the inclusion of people, places, things, and behaviors from everyday…they take an additional step…In a digitized world in which reality has become relative, Gob Squad makes an accordant move: their work reveals “reality” to be charged with more than what is at first evident. In contrast to many of their artistic forerunners, Gob Squad’s performances stress the entanglement of everyday life with the mediated, the virtual, and the fantastic… They produce…an arts practice that—in a highly pleasurable and playful way—shows that there is no such thing as “pure” life beyond the artificial, mediated, and staged.1 —Nina Teklenburg

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their sale items.9 This exhibition reveals a sense of theatricality inherent to consumerism that artificially manipulates consumer preferences and choice.

With Before Your Very Eyes10 (2011), Gob Squad takes their investigation of artifice a step further, presenting life not just to be interrupted by instances of fantasy but also as a performative construction in and of itself. In Before Your Very Eyes, a large rectangular room sits at the center of the theater space. Its walls are erected with two-way mirrors, such that the audience can look into the room but performers inside can only see their own reflections. Performing inside this room are not Gob Squad company members but rather a group of several eight to fourteen year olds.

Over the course of an hour and half, these children enact the journey from life through death, trying on different clothes and behaviors to simulate the process of aging.

Perhaps most important to our consideration of Gob Squad’s intent is their choice of artistic medium.

Gob Squad’s multi-media repertoire includes live film, improvisation, and site-specific performance—all arguably more in touch with reality than a rehearsed and staged theatrical production. For their artistic representation of “real life” in Before Your Very Eyes, however, Gob Squad selects the latter artistic channel. The company devised, scripted, solidified, and rehearsed the piece prior to its staging and then performed the piece in extended runs at various theaters and festivals.11 From the beginning of the piece, the company and their child actors acknowledge the theatricality inherent to their performance. Following a short pre-show, in which the children dance and interact in the room, a voiceover explains the logistics of the playing space and delineates the roles of performer and spectator: “Hi kids…I just wanted to let you know they’re all here now. Everyone is sitting down and they’re all watching you. They love to watch you play. So if you’re ready, we can get things started.” Soon after, the theater goes dark except for projected subtitles that read: “Gob Squad proudly present real live children. A rare and magnificent opportunity to witness 7 lives lived in fast-forward before your very eyes. Starring Tasja, Zoe, Robbe, Aiko, Fons, Ramses, Maurice.” The voiceover labels the child actors as a distinct entity from the audience of non-performers watching them.

This classification is heightened with the introduction of each child individually. By “starring” in the piece, each child performs a character—even if that character is based off each child’s own self. Further, the voiceover frames the presentation as something artificial; it can be started or stopped in response to a direction or command.

Staging choices reveal this artificiality to be an extension of real life rather than a substitute for it. In the piece, characters do not naturally progress from age to age. Instead, they construct age as something to be per-

formed. To adopt a new age, characters change costumes and makeup. Baggy shirts, dark makeup, and an overall punk aesthetic symbolize teenage years; neckties, formal jewelry, and drawn-on facial hair mark the shift to middle age; and grey wigs, sweater vests, and painted wrinkles morph the middle-aged into the elderly. These transitions are not hidden as stage magic but are rather made deliberate and explicit; each is choreographed as part of a larger movement sequence and the children face the mirrors—and accordingly, the audience—as they costume themselves.

The children confirm their new ages through mere speech acts: “I’m 19 now…I’m 45…I am 77.”

They then define each age by the activities and behaviors associated with it. Take, for example, the performers’ description of age 45: I can buy a motorbike and deny I’m in a midlife crisis…I can fart and pretend it wasn’t me. I can go to the doctor every day for minor discomforts. I can say ‘In my youth.’

I can play Playstation and say that I’m doing it for my children. I can call my boss and say I’m having a bad day.

I can take sleeping pills and I can use a calculator to solve an easy sum. I can put fruit in a bowl…just for show…I can be young for one night with my friends…I can say “I’m about to have a burn-out”…I can start and end relationships.

Similarly, a voiceover provides the children with precise instructions on how to act certain ages: Zoe, you’re the hostess. It’s your fortieth birthday. You never thought this day would come…Take the plate of homemade sushi…Stand in the middle and look at it embarrassed…Maurice and Ramses, stand at the back next to the television. Ramses, take the wine. Talk to Maurice about the wine. Impress him with your knowledge. Maurice, look impressed. Agree with him. Think, what a wanker.

These descriptions of mid-life ignore any biological qualities of age and instead represent this phenomenon as a social construct that the children must engage. Beyond the initial frame of a performance piece, the characters themselves behave as actors—playing child, teenager, adult, and senior. Within each of these age categories, the children have specific roles to perform—employee, friend, parent, hostess. The instructions and descriptions of these roles make explicit their inherent performativity; each requires a certain type of behavior that comes to be associated with the respective role.

Perhaps most telling, the actors stand in a single horizontal line as they describe each age, sharing the text with one another. These moments represent aging as a universal experience, open to the participation of anyone willing to comply with its structural requirements. Such an emphasis on performance draws 33

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into question society’s understanding of human maturation. If children can dramatize adulthood, and if this requires adherence only to theatrical direction and design, is maturation primarily a biological or a culturally manufactured process?

Compounding this consideration of age and aging, the performers communicate with videos of their earlier selves, projected on a television set at the back of the room and on larger screens next to either side of the playing space. These conversations mirror the tone of the aforementioned dialogue; the actors discuss changes in their behavior and activity as facilitated by their newfound maturity. This dialogue, and the mere concept of communicating with your younger self, functionally divides the self into different characters: the child, the teenager, the adult, and the elder. Again, this choice frames the process of aging—and life—as a constant attempt to fit social molds rather than as a natural progression unique to every individual.

Brecht maintains that art should mirror reality12 and that this relationship requires an acknowledgement of the illusion inherent to both art and life: “There is nothing natural in art when life itself is something artificial.”13 For Brecht, this search for illusion proves primarily political, initiated in order to understand the larger social forces that structure society in ways that mandate or manipulate certain behaviors, attitudes, and activities from citizens.14 When staging plays about these forces and structures, Brecht sought to expose the artifice of performance; he made visible the technical instruments used in the productions, placed the audience in such a way that they were aware of one another, and directed actors to make clear that they were in fact acting.15 Brecht hoped that these techniques, labeled the “alienation effect,” would induce spectators to reflect on the systems of power and control structuring their own lives.16 Nina Tecklenburg, one of Gob Squad’s collaborating artists, recognizes the company’s incorporation of Brechtian techniques but argues that the intentions behind such deviate from Brecht’s own. Whereas Brecht tried to understand broader social and political forces, Gob Squad focuses their analyses on the individual and the self. And whereas Brecht deployed illusion to expose “reality as something factual,” Gob Squad seeks to discover systems of artifice within the everyday.17 Before Your Very Eyes epitomizes this application of Brechtian technique. The audience remains quite literally distanced from the actors, who are enclosed in a box-like structure at the front of the performance space. Gob Squad describes these children as “insects in a jam jar”—specimens whose purpose is to be observed as part of a larger critical analysis of aging and life.18 In representing the journey from birth through death, Gob Squad does not just create a single dramatic illusion but rather uses voiceover to draw explicit attention to the different mechanisms by which the char-

acters will mature. These mechanisms include costumes and makeups to symbolize distinctive ages, stage directions to mandate the specific behaviors required in adopting assorted life roles, and video footage to provide a means for the audience to compare the characters’ various stages of their lives. As the audience watches the actors construct a representation of real life, they are left to consider systems of artifice in their own lives. Do we progress naturally through ages, professions, and relationships, or—like Gob Squad’s children—do we just perform socially defined roles?

Endnotes

Founded in Nottingham, England in 1994, Gob Squad is a group of seven UK and German artists. Committed to producing both theater and film, Gob Squad stages and presents their work in a wide range of site-specific locations, including houses, shops, hotels, transportation stations, and directly on the streets. Working with outside performers and technicians, Gob Squad seeks to explore the point of intersection between theater, media, and real life. Before Your Very Eyes is a collaboration with CAMPO, and the last part of a trilogy of theatre works with children, made for an adult audience. The first part was Josse De Pauw’s üBUNG, followed by Tim Etchells’ That Night Follows Day. 34

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1. Tecklenburg, Nina. 2012. “Reality Enchanted, Contact Mediated: A Story of Gob Squad.” The Drama Review 56.2: 8-33. 9-11.

2. Ibid., 10.

3. Barnett, David. “Post-dramatic theatre.” Bloomsbury Publishing. http://www.dramaonlinelibrary.com/genres/post-dramatic-theatre-iid-2516 4. Tecklenburg, “Reality Enchanted, Contact Mediated,” 11.

5. Gob Squad. “About Us.” http://www.gobsquad.com/about-us 6. Boyle, Michael Shane. Interview with Gob Squad’s Sean Patten and Bastian Trost. 2012. “Revolution Then and Now.” Theater 42.3: 31-41. 33.

7. Tecklenburg, “Reality Enchanted, Contact Mediated,” 21.

8. Ibid, 11-12.

9. Ibid., 13 .

10. Gob Squad. “Before Your Very Eyes.” Vimeo video, 1:12:20. November 1, 2013.

11. Carter, Francesca. 2012. “Yes, it’s child play.” The Weekly Review. http://www.theweeklyreview.com.au/lifestyle/culture/culture/5525-yes-it-s-child-s-play/#.UnvJEpTwLKo 12. Brecht, Bertolt. 1964. Brecht on Theatre; the Development of an Aesthetic. Translated by John Willett. [1st] ed. New York: Hill and Wang. 29.

13. Brecht, Bertolt. 1943. Journals. qtd. in Mitchell, Rick.

2003. Brecht in L.A.: A Play. Bristol, U.K.: Intellect.

14. Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 184-89.

15. Ibid., 90-99.

16. Kellner, Douglas. “Brecht’s Marxist Aesthetic.” Illuminations. http://www.uta.edu/huma/illuminations/kell3.htm 17. Tecklenburg, “Reality Enchanted, Contact Mediated,” 14.

18. Gob Squad. “Before Your Very Eyes.” http://www.gobsquad.com/projects/before-your-very-eyes

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Confrontational Theatre and Body Aesthetics res over the past 30 years with Troubleyn, the company he established in 1986.4 In 2004, he directed and co-choreographed an internationally acclaimed solo performance with dancer Lisbeth Gruwez called Quando l’Uomo principale è una Donna (When a Leading Man Turns Out to be a Woman). This performance explores aspects of gender, sexuality, and the body, which are recurrent themes in Fabre’s work.

In this work, Fabre continues his reputation of producing shock as well as the deliberate use of the performer’s body as metaphor. Contemporary theatre-makers utilize many different techniques in order to create a moving experience for the audience. In the case of Quando l’Uomo principale è una Donna, the nudity of lead performer, combined with the choreography, is a catalyst for spectator shock and shame. When a Leading Man Turns Out to be a Woman is a performance that both confuses the audience and demands attention, questioning their preconceptions and instilling uncomfortable feelings. However, Fabre uses seductive means of confrontation to cause the audience to think, ponder, and come to a realization.

There is an ease and fluidity to the performance and, though it is shocking, it allows the audience to gradually transition into a new perspective rather than un-

Contemporary postdramatic theatre-makers investigate the creation of images in action; that is, art as a vehicle in the exploration of thought, idea, event, and conception. Developed in 1999 by Hans-Thies Lehmann, the theory of “postdramatic theatre” refers to a movement of theatre as “more presence than representation."1 By rejecting Aristotlean dramatic representation and illusion, actors and spectators can examine deeper issues without the previous dramatic limitations of character, plot, and text. A theatre transcending traditional drama incorporates all components of mise-en-scène in a non-hierarchical structure to create a unique performance aesthetic. A large aspect of this theory of theatre is its ability to move the spectator while remaining true to, but not over-representing, the text.2 Jan Fabre, a multidisciplinary artist from Belgium involved in theatre, choreography, directing, playwriting, sculpture, video, and installation work, is one of the recent practitioners in this theatrical theory.

Fabre produces boundary-pushing and shocking work about “chaos and discipline, repetition and madness, [and] metamorphosis…”3 A graduate of the Municipal Institute of Decorative Arts and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Fabre has produced works in many gen38

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BY G A R R E T T A L L E N

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dergo a violent alteration. This change of perspective and realization is brought though a unique and self-reflecting experience.

Quando l’Uomo principale è una Donna was created

by Jan Fabre and dancer Lisbeth Gruwez in 2004.

This performance begins with around eighteen hanging metal pieces positioned above bottles of olive oil.

Gruwez sits on a stool, facing away from the audience.

She then rises and begins to explore the space, hanging each of the bottles in the metal contraptions. The bottles begin to drip slowly and create tiny pools of olive oil that fills the space in its scent. Gruwez walks back and forth across the stage; the only sound is her singing the Italian pop song, Volare. She lights and smokes a cigarette as she moves around the space.

Wearing black pants and a suit jacket, Gruwez seems to channel James Bond and performs a masculine, but gentle, dance of hip thrusts and strong, slow, large but direct movements.

Eventually, Gruwez approaches the front of the stage and begins to make a martini. Throughout this activity she “performs” for the audience, doing bartending tricks while singing. She sheds the jacket, her nipples covered with a piece of black tape across her chest that seems to act as a censor. Her dancing becomes faster and more direct as she rolls and leaps deliberately around the stage, drifting away from this macho-masculine beginning. As she dances, 80’s synthetic pop music plays. She removes silver balls from the crotch of her pants, which she starts to juggle and play with. She puts them in front of her crotch and thrusting her hips towards the spectator. Throughout these sections the spectator sees gender become fluid as Gruwez changes from a masculine figure to an androgynous—feminine mixture. She then takes off her pants and opens the hanging bottles, covering the stage in olive oil, before stripping off her underwear and taking the tape off of her breasts. She then immerses herself into the olive oil covered stage and caresses herself, coating her body, breasts, and vagina with oil. Gruwez starts an intricate and acrobatic dance consisting of rolling, sliding, and twisting while her androgynous body glistens. Her body contorts itself effortlessly and fluidly even through the difficulty of keeping control in the slippery olive oil.

After fifteen minutes of this physically grueling dance, Gruwez stands and slowly opens a jar of olives suspended along with the bottles, causing them to fall and roll all over the stage. She then sets a wreath on her head and poses as if she is a sexless, genderless deity, her muscles contracting with her breathing and glistening under the lights. Now, walking towards the audience, she reaches into her vagina and pulls out an olive with which she has been dancing with allalong.

She picks up the martini that she was making earlier in the performance and drops the olive in it. After taking a sip she smiles and exclaims, “Perfect,” and the lights go out.

Gruwez fluidly transitions from masculine to feminine, human to creature, and ends in a realm that we, as a society, have not defined. The unconcealed nudity and actions of blatant sexuality for a prolonged period of time introduce the audience to the ideas of gender and the body as an important aspect of this production. The “in your face” aspect of this performance was evident in the varying audience reactions and reviews.

Fabre and Gruwez do not hold back in any part of this performance. Gruwez bares all to the audience, showing every inch and position of her body.

In a review of the piece Alec Kinnear concludes, “I have to say I am disappointed. Not to have seen the show—for if you are not offended by the naked and sexual female human body, you will rarely see a more pure display—but that at the end of the path, Fabre leads us holding nothing but those wild impressions.”

While Kinnear highlights the value of “falling away of shame from the female body,” he thought that, “…the show seemed like straight provocation, exploitation of Lisbeth Gruwez and the audience” and that Fabre executed “art porn” simply to shock without evoking any deeper meaning.5 Kinnear is correct that we did see a naked woman touching herself and possibly being perceived as displayer herself as a sexual object and there is validity to the argument that this performance was simply intended to shock and create an uncomfortable feeling in the audience. Kinnear continues suggesting that a collective piece with many dancers would create a performance that is rich and clear in meaning and symbol.6 However, the beauty of this piece comes from the independence of performance, making it a celebration of the bodily perfection and skill of Gruwez and her solo appearance on stage strengthens that. With a group of dancers, one would be able to distract themselves and watch with a soft focus rather than a hard focus on her and this complex performance. Spectators, especially ones who choose to attend theatrical performances like this one, are well-enough informed to see that this is not just a depiction of “porn” for exploiting and shocking the audience. They know that Fabre is an artist who spends a lot of time developing meaningful work.

However, reactions like Kinnear’s were the minority. The New York Times and other reviews raved about this performance and it gained enough popularity to bring it back with Korean dancer Sung-im Her replacing Gruwez.7 Many of the professional reviews lack analysis or even reactions to the nudity other than stating that it existed; however, personal blogs and articles give insight into the feeling of the audience. In a review by T. Nikki Cesare, she remarks, “Throughout Quando l’Uomo binaries are presented and then tossed away—sometimes even rolled away, much like the chiming metallic orbs Sung-im plucks from her trousers in the first third of the piece. Gender becomes something negotiable, something to dance with, something to name…and something easily discarded.

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Sex, on the other hand, might be more constant.”8 She saw this performance as taking a possibly objectifying experiment on the female body and turning it into affective and autonomous bodily experience.

Throughout her review Cesare notes some of the reactions of the audience. She says that as the nudity came, so did gasps from the audience.9 Though there was the shock that Kinnear mentions, the audience did not stop at a wild impression, but continued to a deeper contemplation about the body. Critic Anna Kisselgoff summarized the performance saying, “it was a relief Sunday to see a nude woman soaked in olive oil thrash through a brilliantly impudent solo.”10 This “relief ” might be due to Kisselgoff ’s appreciation for the beauty and natural quality of this performance. Nudity is not new to the stage and to some, this further exploration of brought immediate praise to Gruwez’s natural beauty and skill. Once the bottles spill olive oil and Gruwez starts to dance in it, it seems to continue forever. The audience has an extended period of time to process and, as fluidly as Gruwez shape-shifts, transition into a new perspective: from shock to awe. When watching this performance, the provocative touching of her vagina and twisting of her nipples makes one feel uncomfortable because the naked body is not one that is openly shared. However, as the dance continues, we see Gruwez less as a sexual being and more as a beautiful, strong, controlled higher being who executes a difficult dance with ease. All audience members had preconceptions and ideas of the body coming into this performance, which supports this range in reactions from praise to shock. It also shows the complexity of the work that Jan Fabre creates and, at least, the achievement of a further contemplation about these topics of the body and sexuality.

Fabre stated that Quando l’Uomo is homage to the work of Yves Klein.11 More specifically, it uses the ideas of the body as art that Klein did using the female body as a paintbrush in his the anthropometric acts during the 50’s.12 However, in this case, Fabre puts a face to this and further explores these ideas of the sexuality, gender, and nudity of an individual body. While Klein’s paintings are without identity—we just see an imprint of a body—we can identify Gruwez and follow her, as an individual, through this journey. She can communicate to the audience through her body rather than just being a tool that Fabre uses. In addition, there is no product left behind. Gruwez owns herself and it is her strength and risk, not that of anyone else. Though there is no explicit message Fabre wants the audience to see, one can use his general ideas about beauty, art, and the body to infer his artistic values. In an interview, Fabre responds to a question about beauty and art in contemporary Europe by arguing:

lates images of the human body. Think about women, for example. In advertisements for menstruation products the media always use blue liquid instead of red liquid. So that means today even in 2010 we still cannot accept the blood of menstruation, and regard it as something negative. Yet researchers have found that menstruation blood is in fact very fertile. This is a case of the media, or the power behind the media, manipulating our bodies. So all of my work goes against this kind of manipulation.13

This statement is incredibly important and applicable to this piece. In this performance, we see a woman pulling metal balls out of her pants and putting them by her crotch to mimic male genitalia. She then strips naked, rolls around in olive oil, spreads her legs and exposes herself to the audience, acknowledging herself as naked and showing that to the audience by rubbing her own genitalia. Fabre forced the audience to make decisions about the manifesting discomfort.

Should one keep watching? Where should one focus while watching her slide around? Is it wrong to be disgusted or shocked by a naked woman? The spectator is forced to be in this position for the rest of the performance and thus the audience experiences a sense of shock but also witnesses the beauty and perfection of body and movement.

The program notes for a performance at the Alexander Kasser Theater at Montclair State University say Fabre’s intention is to, “see the whole pieces as a ritualistic preparation for the highest leap, which takes us back to the matriarchy.”14 Gruwez and Sungim both take a risk, but also a stand, with each performance as they strip down and fully bare all to the audience. Though not uncommon, the intensity that Fabre brings pushes this conception of beauty. There is a danger in the dancer’s actions as she throws herself across this oil drenched floor. She fully challenges every part of her body with this complicated and demanding performance, which we can physically see in her exhaustion towards the end of the performance.

Fabre calls his group of performers in Troubelyn “warriors of beauty” and this performance truly fights and pushes a conception of beauty.15 The transformation of man to woman to animal to genderless god reveals Fabre’s intention to show the ultimate beauty of the body. As co-choreographer for this piece, Gruwez’s movements were so precise and skillful. She didn’t play a man, she was a man. As she strips, one can see the flawlessness of her body and her strength and power. While she is gliding across the olive oil drenched stage, the audience can either see something pornographic and erotic or they can see the skill and perfection of the performer. Gruwez stripping away this conforming identity of gender into a fluid and free being gives the audience a point of self-reflection. The shock makes the audience think and immerse themselves into a sensory experience where

They are constantly under attack. Look at the way politicians think about society, look at the way the media manipulates images of beauty and art, or manipu42

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12. Cesare, T. Nikki . “dirty martini.”

13. Maerkle, Andrew . “Insomniac. Mystic. Anti-Christ.”

ART iT. N.p., 17 June 2010. http://www.artit.asia/u/admin_ed_itv_e/Q50M9nkh4mi8oDFzNWTB. 14. Cesare, T. Nikki . “dirty martini.”

15. Maerkle, Andrew . “Insomniac. Mystic. Anti-Christ.”

16. Semenowicz, Dorota, and Katarzyna Tórz. “European Culture Congress/Europejski kongres kultury.” Man is a Beautiful Animal: Interview with Jan Fabre. N.p., 30 June 2010. http://www.culturecongress.eu/en/theme/theme_lost_in_culture/fabre_intervie.

17. Semenowicz and Tórz. “European Culture Congress/Europejski kongres kultury.”

18. Semenowicz and Tórz. “European Culture Congress/Europejski kongres kultury.”

they question society and its ideas of the body.

The body is beautiful. Fabre notes that he and his “warriors of beauty” are in a constant search for the “terra incognita” which is, “the places where they lose all points of reference, and even themselves, in order to discover their roots, and enter a new plane of consciousness.”16 Finding “terra incognita” is synonymous with the search for beauty. There’s this Flemish word, ‘redeloosheid ‘ (meaning un-reason) which encompasses both reason and its opposite. This un-reason comes from the inside—it’s the domain of unbridled anarchy, passion and love.”17 Does this search for “unreason” include the spectator? Fabre explores the existence of beauty outside ideology, aesthetics, and physical manifestation. He sees it as, “harmonious, vibrating sequence, independent of all ethical or aesthetical guidelines.”18 By watching this performance, Fabre introduces the spectator to how he sees people as an aura or network of energy that is not bound to our physical form. Fabre and Gruwez make a commentary about the aesthetics of the body, but there is also an exploration of a deeper layer. This layer is that of the soul, the core of our being. The ability of Fabre to incite such thought about these topics shows the power of confrontation and its ability to move the spectator. By showing the body in a non-conventional way, the audience is both moved and introduced to this idea of un-reason and a deeper examination of the body and soul.

Lisbeth Gruwez, born August 11th, 1977, is a dancer and choreographer from Belgium who specializes in contemporary dance. At the age of six, she began taking classical ballet and, in 1991, she entered “Stedelijk Instituut voor Ballet” in Antwerp. She then joined P.A.R.T.S in Brussels for two years of training before starting her career at Ultima Vez. In 1999, after dancing with Ultima Vez for a year, she left to work with Jan Fabre where she performed As Long As the World Needs a Warrior's Soul (2000) and Je suis Sang (2003).

In 2001, she appeared in Pierre Coulibeuf’s film about Jan Fabre called Les Guerriers de la beaute. Her next work with Fabre was in 2004 where she co-created, co-choreographed, and performed a solo dance piece Quando l’Uomo principale è una Donna (2004). In 2006, with musician and composer Maarten Van Cauwenberghe, she founded a company called Voetvolk. She and Cauwenberghe are artists-in-residence in the Fabre’s company, Troubleyn. Gruwez won the award for Best Female Actress at the Flanders Film Awards for her lead performance in Caroline Strubbe’s film Lost Persons Area in 2010. Since its founding, Voetvolk has produced five performances—Forever Overhead (2007), Birth of Prey (2008), HeroNeroZero (2010), L’origine (2011) and It’s going to get worse and worse and worse, my friend (2012)—and is currently working on a new creation set to premiere in June 2014. In addition to dancing and choreographing, Gruwez is a painter and had an exhibition at the Hasselt Triennial Art Festival in 2012.

Endnotes 1. Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Postdramatic Theatre. London: Routledge, 2006. Print. 85.

2. Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Postdramatic Theatre.

3. “Theatre Maker.” Jan Fabre. N.p., n.d. http://janfabre.be/troubleyn/about-jan-fabre/theatre-maker/.

4. “Theatre Maker.”

5. Kinnear, Alec. “Jan Fabre and Lisbeth Gruwez: Quand l’Uomo principale è una Donna.” La Vie Viennoise, 21 Dec. 2004. http://uncoy.com/2004/12/jan-fabre-and-lisbethgruwez.html.

6. Kinnear, Alec. “Jan Fabre and Lisbeth Gruwez: Quand l’Uomo principale è una Donna.”

7. Sulcas, Roslyn. “A Solo Work Gives Its Dancer Some Time to Drink on the Job.” The New York Times, 23 Oct. 2006. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/23/arts/dance/23fabr.html?_r=0.

8. Cesare, T. Nikki . “dirty martini.” Obscene Jester: The Performance Art Blog. N.p., 23 Oct. 2006. http://obscenejester.typepad.com/home/2006/10/dirty_martini.html.

9. Cesare, T. Nikki . “dirty martini.”

10. Kisselgoff, Anna . “In Lyon, Olive Oil, Ataxia and a Jester on the Run.” The New York Times, 28 Sept. 2004. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/28/arts/dance/28lyon.html.

11. “Quando L’Uomo principale è una Donna .” Jan Fabre.

N.p., n.d. http://janfabre.be/troubleyn/performances/theatrography/quando-luomo-principale-e-una-donna/en/ principale-e-una-donna/en/.

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From Doll to Independent: Body, Mind, and the Changed Ending in Thomas Ostermeier’s Nora termeier’s desire to appeal “to a younger and more populist audience,” his modernization of the work and portrayal of Nora’s development are logical.4 Essentially, they act on the idea that while the ending of Ibsen’s original play would have been shocking to audiences of the time period in which the play initially premiered, current audiences are not shocked by a woman leaving her husband. They are, though, shocked by murder. And in order to understand why a murder such as this is justified to Nora, one must understand how she has been wronged, and how she eventually strives to overcome this wrongdoing. In this paper, I will discuss Nora’s existence as just a body while she lives in Torvald’s realm.

Later, I’ll investigate the instances in which we see the workings of her mind, and how they lead to the final shocking ending. By looking at the transition of Nora from body to mind in this production, it is possible to explain the drastic changing of the ending and see this new Nora not just as a woman walking out on her husband, but rather as a woman who must kill in order to seek the mental freedom she grows to desire.

Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House is classically associated with its bold statements regarding gender, as it comments daringly on the role of women in both the family and society.1 Furthermore, the play shockingly ends with the protagonist, Nora, leaving her husband Torvald to lead a life on her own due to the fact that she “do[es] not love [him] anymore.”2 This ending was particularly shocking given that the play premiered in 1879. The work was revived and modernized, though, in Thomas Ostermeier’s adaptation of the piece. Simply entitled Nora, the piece appeared at Avignon in 2004 and commented even further on the role that Nora herself plays as a woman living in a man’s world. Specifically, this work makes the ending even more shocking by changing it to one in which Nora not only leaves her home and family, but also shoots Torvald due to her rage at his abuse of her. This emphasizes that it is not just that Nora no longer loves Torvald. Rather, she despises him for the ways in which he has wronged her and thinks he must die so that she can escape the confines in which he has placed her.

In order to reach this culmination point, Ostermeier expertly shows Nora’s transition from being merely a female body, or a “doll,” to being an individual mind capable of thinking and acting alone.3 Given Os-

The production Ostermeier’s Nora is a modern update of a classic.

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married to Torvald, who has just been promoted to manager of the bank. As the truth comes out that Nora has forged her father’s signature to obtain a loan, Nora is forced to recognize that she is not content with her marriage or the role she plays in the world in which she lives. While it has already been stated that the revised script takes liberties, especially with the changed ending, the production as a whole is contemporary. Nora and Torvald, the main characters of Ibsen’s original work, are brought into the modern day as a young and rich power couple, flashing their newest technology gadgets about and roaming around their incredibly up to date home.

The modern feel of this production is only emphasized further by its design elements. The set design,

by Jan Pappelbaum, is an incredibly glassy, upscale two-story house that features an aquarium at its core.5 The set also rotates to feature the outside of the house, which is notably used in the final scene of the play. The light and sound designs of the production are also quite stunning. Lights bring certain scenes to life, such as when a violently wild strobe light roams the stage during the shooting sequence described later in this paper. In addition, aggressive pop songs by everyone from Annie Lennox to the Neptunes blare from a stereo onstage.6 In this manner, Ostermeier very literally transports the original play from its initial setting to a modern, accessible, and relatable society. It is from this contemporary setting that he is able to demonstrate Nora’s movement from solely a body to an individual mind.

suggestively and kisses him to get what she wants, and she consequently succeeds in landing Mrs. Linde the job. In another instance, when trying to convince Torvald that Krogstad should maintain his post at the bank, Nora undresses herself and seduces Torvald in order to try to sway him. While it could be said that in these cases, Nora’s body gives her the power to manipulate, it is quite in fact the opposite. Ostermeier is instead showing that since Nora’s words alone are not enough to get her what she wants, she must use her body. She must fit into the role of a mindless doll—a being that is beautiful without having any legitimate thoughts—and actively engage in this role in order merely to communicate with her husband.

Yet interestingly, Nora’s body is also deemed to be of use to others besides just her husband. In Ostermeier’s production, her body is a prominent component of the conversations she has with both Krogstad and Rank, and her physical encounters with each overshadow the conversation that takes place. This demonstrates that it is not just Nora’s husband who deems her body her only notable quality. Rather, it is the world in which Torvald has placed her, and how he has presented her to both his friends, like Rank, and colleagues, such as Krogstad, that have made her into this doll-like figure. Nora’s body is something that is available to all of them equally, while her words are usually lost on them.

For example, the panty hose sequence between Rank and Nora is quite drastically sexualized in Ostermeier’s production, when compared with the stage directions in Ibsen’s original work. In the original, Nora merely tells Rank to “look at those” silk stockings.8 It also calls for her to “hit him lightly on the ear with the stockings;” there is no mention of this becoming a sexualized scene, or even for Nora to try on the pantyhose.9 In Ostermeier’s version, however, as Nora seductively slides on the pair of panty hose, Rank strokes her leg. Nora slaps him with the pantyhose, but she does not outright tell him to step away from her.10 She merely engages in a playful action that is almost sexual in and of itself, rather than using her words to fight back. Nora here again fills the role that has been assigned to her—that of a wordless doll that exists for the entertainment and enjoyment of others, and which is not capable of fully expressing her thoughts aloud.

In another instance in Ostermeier’s adaptation, Nora again fulfills her role of simply being a body when we see Krogstad threaten to deliver to Torvald the letter telling of Nora’s treacherous actions. In this moment, it is apparent that Krogstad thinks that the strongest way to threaten Nora would not be merely by using words, but instead by threatening her body as well. Krogstad demands that Nora’s “husband must make a place for [him]” at the bank, and Nora claims that “he will never do” such a thing.11 In Ostermeier’s production, Krogstad holds a letter that states that

Nora as a body For the majority of the play, Nora is seen to be not a mind, but simply a body. Her body is the physical manifestation of what the men in her life, particularly her husband Torvald, see as her “doll”-like nature— beautiful to look at and capable of being idealized, but with no worthwhile thoughts to be had.7 Nora’s body is something that can be used in her own power in some situations, as in the ways in which she is able to get Mrs. Linde a job or encourage Torvald to allow Krogstad to maintain his post at the bank. Yet it also serves as a symbol of repression in a number of ways.

Nora’s body is portrayed as the antithesis to her mind.

Nearly all the men she meets, including the family friend Rank, and Krogstad, to whom she owes her debts, take advantage of it. Finally, it is primarily shaped and controlled by her husband, Torvald. In this section, I will discuss these different roles of Nora’s body in Ostermeier’s production in order to show how it prevents her from being treated as an individual with agency.

It could seem that Nora’s body gives her power in Ostermeier’s production. Nora wants to get her friend Mrs. Linde a post at the bank, which Torvald manages. The best way Nora knows how to do this is to use her body and her sexuality: she touches her husband 46

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Nora used a loan from him, and that she falsified her father’s signature in order to obtain the money. While the fear of this knowledge being shared with Torvald is alarming, this word-oriented threat must be augmented with a threat to Nora’s body as well, since that is the domain in which she is deemed to exist.

Krogstad violently pulls Nora up off the ground, then pushes her down on the sofa and pounces on her, miming the actions of what appears to be a rape sequence. Krogstad tries repeatedly to kiss and thrust himself onto Nora, who attempts to get away from him.12 Ostermeier makes clear here that the most obvious way for a person to try to harm Nora, then, is by harming or abusing her body. Furthermore, since Torvald prizes her body so much, the scarring of her body

by Krogstad would also represent a form of revenge against Torvald.

Torvald is ultimately the one who is blamed for forcing Nora to fulfill this role of a doll and thus of “wrong[ing]” her.13 He is portrayed as being the most invested and most aware of Nora’s body throughout this production, in order to emphasize that it was he who placed her in the realm of being just a body. Torvald finds Nora’s body aesthetically beautiful; moreover, he idealizes it. He is “fantasizing” when he, for example, “reveals that he has a fantasy about ravishing his virginal child-woman—but only after the wedding.”14 Torvald makes her again into something that he dreams her to be. Because Torvald sees Nora as something that is his property and within his control, she is something that he can fantasize about, and even alter so that she truly is his fantasy.

Torvald believes that “his wife is just his property to show off in the public…a plaything and a doll to play with as a pastime.”15 He strives, then, to maintain control of her being so that she is the perfect image of what he imagines her to be. For one, as the economic provider of the household, Torvald provides Nora with money that he deems to be for her maintenance of the home and of her body, even though secretly she uses this money to pay off her debts. Yet furthermore, he dictates what she can and cannot do to her body: for example, he implies that she cannot eat sweets when he asks her if she has “been nibbling sweets” or “taken a bite at a macaroon or two.”16 Nora’s body is something that Torvald can both idealize and have control over in order to realize his fantasies, and he forces her to act out this role—of a perfected body— to keep her place in his household.

Thus, Torvald does indeed “wrong” Nora.17 He places her in the realm of being just a body, and in doing so, he eliminates the possibility of her being able to use her mind. Furthermore, because he maintains control over her body, she has even less agency over the one thing that is deemed important for her to use. It is clear in this production that Nora is indeed made into a doll

by Torvald—she is merely an attractive and perfected body that is used and shown off to others without being

given the chance to learn and grow for herself. Being confined to this position, though, does not prevent Nora from occasionally having thoughts of finding a new life in which she is more than just a body.

Nora as an individual mind At the beginning of the play, Nora is presented to us merely as a trophy wife. However, as the play develops and her conflicts become more drastic, we see a shift in her personality. The Nora of the beginning—one seen to be shopping and neatly dressed—shifts to become one capable of defying her husband, having violent interactions with her children, dancing manic sequences, and finally, shooting her husband and leaving the home.

Ostermeier’s desire to present Nora as a real person having a genuine transition is apparent, and it is characterized with the director’s signature use of occasionally violent acts.18 Ostermeier has claimed that to him, realism “is a view of the world with an attitude that involves an alienation born out of suffering an injury…man realizes himself in pain, if he does not lose himself in dreams or lies.”19 In watching the transition of Nora, we see a perfect example of what Ostermeier believes to be realism. Nora realizes her pain at existing solely as a body, and upon this painful realization, turns into a violent and more aggressive version of herself. Notably, this spontaneous new Nora is one that acts on her thoughts and feelings rather than repressing them.

In Act 1, we see the impulsive, daring side of Nora that emerges when she defies Torvald. Not only do we learn that Nora forged her father’s signature to acquire a loan so that she could pay for Torvald to travel and recover from illness, we learn that she still gains pride from this one bold action she has taken. As she calls out that “it was [she] who saved Torvald’s life,” and “procured the money,” she stands center stage and proclaims to the audience boldly.20 This is the strongest Nora we see in the first act. Furthermore, when she sees her strength and reminds herself of the power of her mind, she is able to break the rules further—to eat a truffle, something that her husband forbade her to do. Here, she notably is defying Torvald by potentially altering her idealized body, and by acting on an impulse that Torvald has explicitly told her to ignore.

We see another moment of Nora’s active mind in the middle of Act 1. Ibsen has included a moment in which Nora is said to play with her children. The stage directions in the original script state that: She and the children laugh and shout; and romp in and out of the room; at last Nora hides under the table, the children rush in and out for her but do not see her; they hear her smothered laughter, run to the table, lift up the cloth and find her. Shouts of laughter. She crawls forward and pretends to frighten them. Fresh laughter.21

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which we see this occur, and it is a somewhat jarring moment. The interaction between mother and children is loud, boisterous, and seemingly out of control.

As stated earlier, Nora’s body is idealized; yet here, her activities—and her thoughts on appropriate play—are most definitely not idealized. Nora and her children play with toy guns and enact a full-on shootout sequence. The setting is of the darkened living room and features a roving blue light, turning the scene into one of chaos and unexpected violence as they pretend to shoot each other, using water guns as props.22 Here, then, we witness the first shift of Nora’s mind from thoughts on pleasant and trivial activities such as shopping to thoughts of violence, power, and strength.

As the play progresses, Nora’s mind shifts to an even more violent realm, and this is usually brought upon when she is being confined once again to her doll-like state. One striking example of this is her dancing sequence in Act 2. In order to distract Torvald from opening the letter that would cause her perceived ruin, she says she must practice her dancing before attending a party. Her way of having an effect on Torvald is, once again, by using her body, yet here, her mind becomes involved as well. Nora is portrayed here in an honest and authentic way, as opposed to a doll-like one, as she “demonstrates her humanity (as opposed to her ‘dollness’) not through song but through dance.”23 Nora screams the lines going into the dance, and her dancing is accentuated by the use of crazily erratic movements. She eventually moves to the aquarium, and she works so hard that she makes herself bleed. At the end, the recording gets stuck, and Nora repeats the same movements over and over, losing control and losing the doll-like sense of calm that she is perceived always to have. This entire sequence is eerily watched by both Torvald and Rank.

Neither man tries too hard to intervene; even when Nora is covered in blood, the two men leave her to keep going, seeing the start of her mental emancipation merely as a moment of entertainment and amusement acted out for their pleasure.24

band in order to seek out a new life and educate herself.

In Ostermeier’s version, however, all of the actions and stakes in this moment are heightened and modernized. Nora’s actions, which we distinctly recall in Act 1 were of extreme pride to her, are turned into something for which she can be physically attacked. In Torvald’s speech defaming her, he pushes her onto the sofa in a moment in which his anger is juxtaposed with his need to dominate her. In addition, he physically slaps her. In this manner, Torvald’s speech is given an urgent sense of drive: Torvald clearly knows what he is doing, namely abusing both Nora’s body and mind simultaneously in order to punish her for her actions. As he always has, he associates her actions not with her own mind, but with her body; thus her punishment is mostly aimed towards hurting her physically.

The lines of the play stay almost the same in Ostermeier’s version up until nearly the end, but there are some differences. Nora claims that she has been made into a doll, and while in the original play she says that both her father and Torvald have done this to her, here, it is merely Torvald’s wrongdoing. This has been evident through the manipulation of Nora’s body by Torvald throughout the play, and this changing of the lines emphasizes this. However, one notable line stays the same: Nora tells Torvald that sacrificing one’s honor for the one he or she loves is “a thing hundreds of thousands of women have done.”27 Clearly, she has sacrificed her potential to grow as a mind so that Torvald could live out his own fantasies of her as solely a doll. Yet upon seeing that Torvald would not sacrifice himself for her, she fully abandons the role of doll, or body, that she has adopted up until this point. It is Nora’s final actions that show her full transition from body to mind in Ostermeier’s adaptation.

Nora has left, presumably to pack her things and leave her husband, as she does in the original play. When she returns, though, she shoots Torvald, and the song she earlier danced to plays. Nora does not merely shoot him once; she shoots him multiple times, and with a look of patient calm on her face. Her moves are totally calculated, and she is completely mentally aware of what she is doing. After shooting Torvald, Nora emerges to slam the door and walk out of the house.28 Yet, while Ibsen’s original version calls for Torvald to end the story, we are here presented with the image of Nora finally outside the realm of the home. The stage rotates in order to present the audience with a final image of Nora leaning against the wall, reflecting on her actions, and on her new freedom. A song with the lyrics “I don’t love you anymore” plays, accurately describing Nora’s feelings about Torvald. In this version, though, it is not just that Nora does not love Torvald anymore, it is that she despises him for the ways in which he has wronged her.

Her shooting Torvald and physically leaving the home demonstrate that she knows that now, she must educate herself on her own terms rather than sacrificing herself and filling the role that he has created for her.

The closing sequence The traditional ending of A Doll’s House features a sequence in which Torvald finally reads the note that Krogstad has left him. In it, the perceived atrocities that Nora has committed are detailed. Torvald engages in a long, drawn-out rant about how disappointed he is in her, but claims that “it must appear as if everything between [them] were just as before—but naturally only in the eyes of the world.”25 He retracts his nasty words only moments later when he receives a new letter, claiming essentially that everything can return to normal and that Krogstad will forget the whole ordeal—essentially, that they “are saved.”26 Yet Nora, in this moment, realizes that this is not the way that things can be; her life cannot go back to the normal that it was.

The sequence culminates with Nora leaving her hus50

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18. Carlson. Theatre Is More Beautiful Than War: German Stage Directing in the Late Twentieth Century.

19. Carlson. Theatre Is More Beautiful Than War: German Stage Directing in the Late Twentieth Century.. 166-167.

20. Ibsen. A Doll’s House. 14.

21. Ibsen. A Doll’s House. 23.

22. Nora.

23. Moi, Toril. “First and Foremost a Human Being: Idealism, Theatre, and Gender in A Doll’s House.” 268.

24. Nora.

25. Ibsen. A Doll’s House. 71.

26. Ibsen. A Doll’s House. 71.

27. Ibsen. A Doll’s House. 78.

28. Nora.

Conclusion It is important to note that to Ostermeier, the original play A Doll’s House is more about Nora than about anyone else. His changing of the title simply to Nora but maintenance of the story and most of the original text demonstrate that his piece is a story about Nora’s transition from body to mind. In order to achieve this transition, she must eliminate the person that has both assigned her to and confined her to the role of simply a doll—namely, Torvald. Thus, Nora killing Torvald represents the culminating moment in which we see Nora as an individual with full agency.

Overall, Ostermeier’s adaptation of Ibsen’s iconic work A Doll’s House both modernizes and makes more extreme the original. By setting the story in the present, the content—and the struggle of Nora herself—is made more accessible. Furthermore, Ostermeier has determined what he wants this story to be about: namely, Nora and her struggle to become an independent human. By expertly demonstrating Nora’s role as merely a body while occasionally giving the audience glances into her mind, his drastic changing of the ending is not only still shocking, but also seems quite justified on Nora’s part. Thus, Ostermeier turns this into a work that is solely about Nora and her ultimate acquisition of freedom as an individual mind.

Thomas Ostermeier grew up in lower Bavaria and studied direction at the Ernst Busch University for Dramatic Arts in Berlin. His first directorial work, Recherche Faust/Artaud, attracted much attention in 1996 and launched his professional career. From 1996 to 1999, Ostermeier served as director and artistic manager for the Deutsches Theater Berlin’s secondary stage, and he began receiving invitations to produce guest plays. Since 1999, he has been part of the artistic team as resident director and member of Artistic Direction at Berlin’s Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz. In 2000 he won the European Theatre Prize, and in 2002 he was awarded with the Herald Angel Award for The Girl on the Sofa at the Edinburgh Festival. He also received the honor of being appointed “artiste associé” for the management of the 2004 Festival d’Avignon. In May 2010, Ostermeier was named as president of the German-French Council of Culture, and he received honors from the Venice Biennale in 2011. His production of Hamlet was named “Best International Production” by Chile in this same year, and the same production was honored in the 18th Istanbul Theatre Festival in 2012. Ostermeier’s productions have toured to numerous cities around the globe, and he remains one of the most influential European theater directors worldwide.

Endnotes 1. Moi, Toril. (2006) “First and Foremost a Human Being: Idealism, Theatre, and Gender in A Doll’s House.”Modern Drama vol. 49 (3) 2. Ibsen, Henrick. (2001) A Doll’s House. 77. Hazleton, PA: Pennsylvania State University, Penn State Electronic Class Series. http://www2.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/jimspdf.htm. 3.

Ibsen. A Doll’s House. 74.

4. Carlson, Marvin. (2009) Theatre Is More Beautiful Than War: German Stage Directing in the Late Twentieth Century. 161.

Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Project MUSE. http://muse.jhu.edu/.

5. Fisher, Philip. (2004) A Doll’s House—Nora. British Theatre Guide.http://www.britishtheatreguide.info/reviews/nora-rev.

6. Isherwood, Charles. (2004) A Nora Who Goes Beyond Closing Her Prison’s Door. The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/11/theater/reviews/11nora.h tml?_r=0.

7. Ibsen. A Doll’s House. 74.

8. Ibsen. A Doll’s House. 44.

9. Ibsen. A Doll’s House. 45.

10. Nora (2004) Directed by Thomas Ostermeier. [video: AVI File] 11. Ibsen. A Doll’s House. 50.

12. Nora.

13. Ibsen. A Doll’s House. 74.

14. Moi, Toril. “First and Foremost a Human Being: Idealism, Theatre, and Gender in A Doll’s House.” 264.

15. Yuehua, Guo. (2009) Gender Struggle over Ideological Power in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Canadian Social Science vol.5 (1). 82.

16. Ibsen. A Doll’s House. 74.

17. Ibsen. A Doll’s House. 74.

Anne Tismer played the role of Nora in Thomas Ostermeier’s production of Nora. She is a renowned performance artist and founder of the Ballhaus Ost, a production and performance venue for free theater and performance art projects in Berlin. Though Tismer did not plan originally to work as an actress–she initially was studying to be a diplomat–she has made quite a name for herself in European theater. She had her theatrical debut in the Theater Drachengasse in Vienna in the 1986/87 season. She then moved on to work at the Theater Bonn. After this experience, she was asked to work with the Stadttheater Freiburg under the direction of Jürgen Kruse. Tismer became his muse and worked with him on a number of productions.

Her next big break was Nora. She commanded her role as Nora in this production, coming off as a humanized yet still eccentric protagonist. Tismer’s acting credentials as well as her theatrical activism and leadership in Berlin make her a notable figure in the European theater world.

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Power, Freedom, and Theater: An Exploration of Relevance and Text in New Interpretations of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House

BY ALLEN MACLEOD

become “a human being”? And I answer most decidedly: No, absolutely not! There is not, in her pretentious effort of justification, full of empty Bjørnsonian expressions, a single point which justifies her action, and the transformation of her character, which the playwright forces to happen, is so untruthful, unattractive and unmotivated, that we are surprised that a playwright like Ibsen will admit paternity.1

Photo by Ros Kavanagh

Ibsen’s A Doll’s House is a piece—it is fair to say—that is well-known to the world; that is to say that, although it does not reach the lofty heights of Shakespeare, it is a text known to those with a knowledge of theater history to be influential. In late 1879 Ibsen released the text (and its performance) to the public of Denmark—and shortly after to the rest of Europe— to high praise, shock, and revulsion. Although many admired the piece for its craftsmanship, a large faction disapproved of its final scene (which, famously, Ibsen, himself, rewrote to appease the cast of its German premiere), which it considered largely unrealistic.

Of the original National Theater production in Denmark, critic M.V. Brun of Folkets Avis wrote:

Of course a modern audience would have a more difficult time sympathizing with this sort of shock.

Whereas in the late 19th century it was singularly uncommon for a wife to leave her family, in the 21st century it is an everyday phenomenon; and although contemporary viewers may understand that within the historical construct of the text it would have been a startling action, there is nevertheless the very real possibility for a distinct sense of dissociation. The issue at the plot’s center—the forging of a signature on a bond—in the 21st century similarly loses the sense of gravitas it held at the time of the play’s conception.

With a tremendous emotional core, if not a somewhat outdated premise, it is no surprise, then, that A Doll’s House has lent itself quite well to contemporary and experimental dramatic interpretations. There is a

…all the enjoyment he offers us in the first acts, evaporates in the third, and we are left there in the most embarrassing ambience, almost revoltingly affected by a catastrophe, which in the crassest way breaks with the common human qualities to celebrate the untrue, the in every aesthetic, psychological and dramatic respect distressing. I ask openly: is there a mother among thousands of mothers, a wife among thousands of wives, who would act as Nora acts, who would leave husband and children and home so she herself first and foremost can 55

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real struggle, however, between remaining true to the text (if, indeed, the creator of the dramatic piece wishes to produce a textual piece) and addressing the issues of one’s own time. How does one reconcile the two when the constraints of the plot so clearly contradict modernity (the gravitas of forging a bond, for example)? Do the demands of relevance necessitate textual alteration, or is it possible to reflect one’s own time in a piece from the late 19th century without changing a word? Thomas Ostermeier (then) of the Schaubühne and Gavin Quinn of Ireland’s Pan Pan Theatre take opposing approaches to their adaptations of Ibsen’s work, both in service to what they deem “relevant.” The stark, in-yer-face violent realism of Ostermeier’s Nora blatantly contradicts the bubbly, pop, new-age (and, in its oral, presentational exposition, almost Brechtian) staging of Quinn’s Dollhouse.

What they each have to say is different, yet both have been met with critical acclaim; have been labeled “relevant” and “new.” Also of importance, they are both accepted as versions of A Doll’s House, and not considered new pieces. In this article I hope to examine not only the ways in which the directors of the two pieces have acted to “update” or “modernize” the classic text, but also how pertinent those updates are to their resonance with modern audiences. It is often stated when speaking about A Doll’s House that “things haven’t changed as much as they seem” between 1879 and the present day. But judging by the reception these two productions have received, I might argue that things have, indeed, changed. The emotional crux of the show—a wife coming to the realization that she can no longer live solely for her husband’s entertainment—remains, but the context for her realizations, the society in which she lives within the world of Nora and Dollhouse, is fundamentally changed from Ibsen’s original—not by the words of the performances, themselves, but by the very acts of trying to appeal to contemporary audiences and attempting to address contemporary issues. These pieces are truly in the modern tradition of Director’s Theater, and the respective directors have, in presenting Ibsen to a new generation, immersed Ibsen in that generation.

Without the updates, then, perhaps A Doll’s House is not as relevant as some propose.

From the very first moment, we get the sense that Nora will not be the typical A Doll’s House. Ostermeier makes a point of visually establishing a markedly contemporary atmosphere. His set is a beautiful ultramodern home, furnished with transparent glass walls, new-age furniture, an enormous flat-screen monitor, and a large fish tank. So beautiful is the set that one almost has trouble believing the financial issues Nora and Torvald discuss in the opening scene of the show.

Though, perhaps, this strays the tiniest bit from the text’s intent, it allows Ostermeier to offer a critique of contemporary consumerist culture, a thread that runs throughout the show. The first scene of the piece,

which in the original text involved only Nora and her Porter, now portrays Torvald and his children. He holds a digital camera while they, dressed in business wear, pose for pictures. His maid, in jeans and a tee shirt, waits patiently while his daughter spins and smiles for the camera on a glass table. It is an exercise in vanity—the set, the pictures, the contrast in clothing, the disregard for furniture (certainly a glass table, if money is an object, is no place for a child to stand).

The audience is immediately made aware that the family is well off, and that they enjoy participating in the activities their wealth allows them. It is thus no surprise when Nora bustles in wearing a fur coat and carrying several brightly colored bags. She tips the porter (handsomely, by his reaction) who carries in a Christmas tree. Again, it is difficult to believe that this is the first Christmas they could afford gifts.

Throughout the show, in contrast with the text, Ostermeier presents us with these shows of wealth: more picture-taking later on (this time of Nora, herself); Torvald’s expensive cell phone and laptop; Nora’s brightly colored champagne drinks. But perhaps Ostermeier is trying to say that the modern Nora would have to take place under these conditions; that wealth such as that enjoyed in this production breeds men such as Torvald. In many ways the men of the production are the representatives of capitalism—whereas Nora strives for independence and freedom, they strive for money, social power, and sex.

While the original A Doll’s House was, indeed, a commentary on the lives of the bourgeois, Torvald and Nora’s upgrade to “the wealthy” points to the problems of 2002 Europe. It is clear that text and anachronism are not issues for Ostermeier. Although he uses much of the original text, he is certainly not beyond altering it, indicative of his philosophy of “Capitalist Realism,” which informs much of his vision for the show: Capitalist realism was based on the aesthetic of ‘Anything Goes’ (in English in original), “where every reading and interpretation is allowed… where the self-determination of an essential kernel within a subjective individual no longer exists, when all can be deconstructed.2

His modus operandi also allows for the violent realism that so defines Ostermeier’s work. Over the course of the performance we witness Nora transform from an energetic mother and housewife to a woman who suffers dangerously physical nervous breakdowns (a bloody Tarantella) and is (somewhat easily, it seems) driven to homicide. The ending to the work has famously been changed, and it is only because he is striving for this particular end that Ostermeier is able to integrate and make believable such an impressive transformation. The transformation, itself, has its roots in Ostermeier’s definition of realism: Realism is not the simple depiction of the world as it appears. It is a view of the world with an attitude that in57

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volves an alienation born out of suffering and injury.

This inspires writing which seeks revenge on the blindness and stupidity of the world. The individual suffers, even if the subject is only constructed and without a core. Man realizes himself in pain, if he does not lose himself in dreams or lies. The basis of realism is the tragedy of everyday life.3

‘presence’ and internatity, as well as externally, transmitted tensions.”5 For a brief moment the play’s conflicts adopt the physical medium and spell themselves out through Nora’s frenzy, perhaps suggesting that Ostermeier felt what the text called for was simply not enough to convey the intensity or immediacy the moment requires. It is logical—Rank and Krogstad have treated her as commodity, as pure body; her stress manifests itself as such. But it only lasts for a brief moment. It quickly ends, and the dance becomes only another lapse in Nora’s façade, this time significantly more intense than the last.

Her fourth traumatic event—the one that pushes her over the edge—is, of course, Torvald’s discovery of Krogstad’s letter. Although Ostermeier never uses Torvald in quite as brutal a manner as he does Krogstad, his intense physicality and constant shouting draws and solidifies a parallel between the two.

The difference, however, is that whereas Nora firmly rejects Krogstad’s sexual advances, with Torvald she (at least feels that she) has little choice but to submit when he desires intimacy (which, in Ostermeier’s version, is often). However, he is no different than Krogstad—a towering force of capitalism in his constant obsession with social status and sex. This is a man that, for eight years, she told herself she loved.

And yet to see him act in this way, to become a Krogstad at the discovery of something she did out of love for him (and despite all the love they supposedly shared), permanently snaps her out of her marital illusion. She is disgusted that she would have ever been intimate with him. She has been his “Barbie” (Ostermeier substitutes the word for “doll”), not only played with, but also commoditized. Used.

Of course, all of these episodes lead up to Ostermeier’s dramatically altered ending, with which, in another show of Capitalist Realism, he hoped to incite the same shock in modern audiences that Ibsen’s original brought about in the late 1870s. The question then becomes whether the new ending shocks for the same reason as Ibsen’s. I would argue that the two acts—leaving one’s family and murdering one’s husband—have entirely different implications. In 1879 the shocking element of Ibsen’s text was that a woman (a “mother” and a “wife,” as Brun said) would ever leave her family; that it would betray her “womanly instincts.” It is a much more of a leap to think that someone would betray her human instincts to kill another person. Whereas in Ibsen’s text Nora’s decision is a logical and measured one, a planned attempt to try to become a “reasonable human being,” Ostermeier’s Nora makes a split-second decision and shoots Torvald more out of spite and a desire for revenge than out of a desire to be free (although she does gain that, as well, to some extent). In this sense his murder, and the “death” that we, the audience, experiences, is not only the death of Torvald the man, but Torvald as representative of capitalism. We are shocked that

The first moment we encounter Nora is at the very beginning of the piece when she returns with Christmas presents for her children. She is energetic, jovial even, and her interaction with her husband gives no indication that something may be amiss. However, with each traumatic event that she faces she becomes more and more unstable. The first of these events is the first interaction she has with Krogstad, for whom she ceases a foreshadowing mock gunfight with her children. When he has left she shows signs of the stress the encounter has incurred: lost in thought, she absent-mindedly tries to kiss her Christmas tree as if it is her husband. She recoilils at its brambles, stating, “The tree shall be splendid! I will do everything I can think of to please you, Torvald!—I will sing for you, dance for you…”4 The incident is a small foreshadowing of her eventual displeasure with the real Torvald, certainly. Similarly, at the beginning of act two she sits and, almost trancelike, muses about her worries—that if she leaves to go to the ball something will happen at home to compromise her situation. Suddenly, as Mrs. Linde enters, she explodes into a ear-piercing scream.

Her second (and third) traumatic events come in the form of assaults—both Rank and Krogstad accost her sexually. She rejects their advances. Krogstad’s is significantly more violent than Ranks; it becomes clear he intends to rape her when his assault is stopped only by Nora’s attempts to bite his face. They erupt into a very physical shouting match, and he leaves, but not before informing her that he will send her husband a letter detailing her crime. Afterwards Nora stands silently on the top of the staircase and holds her hands to her head, palms out and fingers spread. In this moment she physically becomes Torvald’s “little squirrel,” or perhaps his lark with feathery plumage. She tries to ground herself, tries to convince herself that things can be normal, that can still be the person her husband desires. But, as made clear by the wild “Tarantella” she performs in the next scene, it is too late; she has already started changing.

Her Tarantella is a strange combination of a wild dance and a mental breakdown: she flails and jumps about the stage, but from the look on her face it is clear her mind is not active in its execution (to the point where she does not realize she has cut herself).

She is pure physicality. In this moment of frenzy—and perhaps only in this moment—Ostermeier achieves post-dramaticism. Nora, here, has an almost auto-sufficient physicality, which Lehmann describes as being “exhibited in its intensity, gestic potential, auratic 58

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Nora would engage in the violent behavior we had, until this point, only seen from the capitalists, themselves. Nora has escaped, but also compromised on, something completely different in Ostermeier’s work.

The slamming of the door does not signify total freedom, but the start of a new type of imprisonment.

The show ends not with her departure, but with a scene of fear. She slumps against the wall outside, head in her hands. In killing her husband, she has engaged in the same capitalism of power that repressed her throughout the work. It seems, perhaps, that it is impossible to escape from underneath its thumb without using its very means. Of course, Ostermeier has an explanation:

sporadic character in a world of rigidity and preparation. The text has been pared down in a new translation written by Quinn: I wanted to make an adaptation which would show the clunkiness of the play, and the awkwardness of plays in general, but which also had a certain lift of—where the actors would have a different idiom from one another, not all sound the same. Yet where you could increase their vocabulary where you felt it necessary.7

It is a mildly absurdist take on A Doll’s House—a few modern jokes are sprinkled throughout the text; Nora works for a phone sex hotline to pay off her debt to Krogstad; the fancy ball has been turned into a costume party full of superheroes. However, even with all of these updates, the true modernism, according to Quinn, comes from Nora’s characterization. Similar to Ostermeier’s production, Dollhouse’s Nora suffers from a series of what one reviewer called “trite musical reveries, nervous tics, and grossly repetitive gestures… a growing list of syntax errors.”8 Piece by piece, over the course of the production, the audience sees Nora’s bubbly demeanor challenged, pressed by the circumstances into which she is (and has been) placed. Spontaneously, she erupts into a screeching laugh or song (“On My Own” from Les Mis or “Close to You” by The Carpenters) or begin to imitate a baby or make popping noises with her mouth. At one point, caught in an intense emotion, she repeats the same line over and over, resembling a garden sprinkler as she jerks back and fort. Her Tarantella is, perhaps, the ultimate manifestation of her cracking demeanor—it is full-bodied, intense, and uncontrollable. She flails about the stage with a tambourine, the legs of her pants flapping in her wake. “I can’t do it any other way,” she proclaims when Torvald asks her to slow down. She is out of control, almost at a breaking point.

At the same time Quinn’s Nora shows a resistance to change not found in Ostermeier’s work. Whereas Nora is about a woman who, bit by bit, comes to realize (and acknowledges her realization of) the horror of her dystopic society in which she lives, Dollhouse follows a character who, until the third act, resists her realization at all costs, to the point where her suppressed stress manifests itself in the aforementioned physical mannerisms. She is truly delighted by how powerful Torvald is (she says as much herself), and, in fact, for the first two acts of the play she is delighted, in general. “I’m so happy… to hell with everything!” she shouts. Perhaps her entire character, the whole of her carefree energy, is, again, a manifestation of the challenge incurred by the conditions under which she has lived for the past eight years. More likely, however, it is a dramatization of the almost impossible levels of enthusiasm required if Nora wishes to maintain her “amicable” life with Torvald. She manages to maintain this incredible energy even to the end of the second act. When her Tarantella ends, and it finally appears

…people are quite upset with the ending. They say: ‘Our Nora, as we know her, gets out and is free. Your Nora is not free. She kills and is a victim at the same time as she's a murderer.’ This is not to be taken as a recommendation of how to solve your problems! It’s just that it was very shocking to society at the end of the 19th century that a woman should leave her husband and children.

We can’t nowadays have the same moment of shock when two thirds of families split up.6

Can it be said, then, that what makes the production relevant is truly what made A Doll’s House relevant to the 1870s? It would seem that a strong indictment of modern capitalism, a sense of violent realism, and a purposefully shocking ending create its relevance to the modern age.

Like Ostermeier’s production, in the first moments of Pan Pan Theatre’s production of Dollhouse, the audience gains an understanding that this will be a different sort of A Doll’s House. Before Nora speaks a single word, a maid comes onto the stage and explains the act and what the author is trying to convey. Such an explanation happens at the beginning of each act.

The set is bright pink—a physical manifestation of the bubbly, energetic, almost-fake demeanor we find in Nora; cardboard cutouts of the actors line the back of the stage, flanking a large abstract painting that, perhaps, is a woman’s naked form. When Nora finally enters, she skips in, loudly singing “Sleigh Ride,” baubles scattering from the various boxes and bags she carries. As she stops, she pours the baubles out of one particularly large box across the stage. She plays giddily with the toys she has bought for her children, from remote control racecars to play helicopters.

Aside from Nora, who struts and scampers across the stage—literally a “little squirrel,” or perhaps a wind-up-toy—the actors often deliver their lines facing the audience and without looking at each other.

There is not so much a woodenness to them as there is a stillness and an uncanny deliberateness—when they do move, it is unmistakably rehearsed, often accompanying a line delivery or a light cue. Their performances cast light on Nora, the one truly vibrant, 60

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she may arrive at a contemplative moment, counting her “hours to live,” she is called by Torvald, and her verbal response an body language are so exuberant as to leave little doubt that she still wants to be “his little squirrel.” She still has the utmost hope in the self-sacrificial “miracle” she believes will happen when Torvald reads Krogstad’s letter.

Indeed, unlike in Ostermeier’s work, Quinn’s Torvald is calm, collected, and—it seems—annoyed at most times. Whereas Nora’s Nora was Torvald’s object, his sexual commodity, most of the time Dollhouse’s Nora seems more someone Torvald tolerates than adores (although he does proclaim it). He is not the bastion of capitalism, nor the terrifying, violent force of Ostermeier, but he also does not quite show the genuine care (until, perhaps, the very end) that Ibsen’s text would suggest. Krogstad, similarly, is calm and mildmannered. Aside from a singular outburst, he comes off more the poor soul who desperately needs his job back than he does a dishonorable and conniving (and certainly nowhere near Ostermeier’s portrayal).

Although Quinn may argue that a wife leaving her family, though perhaps not as risqué as in the late 19th century, is still quite traumatic, even today (and doesn’t need changing), even through these character interactions it is quite clear his production is trying to be “contemporary” and “relevant.” There is a definite attempt to eschew the naturalism of the text; it is, indeed “clunky.” But the method of presentation serves both to highlight the text, itself, as well as to highlight the “awkwardness” of naturalism. With little in the way of mimetic acting, the words of the text are highlighted for the audience. The explanation of the text before each act stresses its importance. In a way, the actors are all “dolls” of the text, itself—their motions dictated by stress words or changes in lighting, their lines direct and straight out to the audience, more statements of fact than declarations of intention or expression of emotion. There is less than one would think separating the actors on stage from their cardboard cutouts surrounding it. Nora, alone, varies in her action, and yet as she continues on her journey she finds herself more and more urged to break from her frantic, “squirrelly” pattern. By the end of the show—the final scene not present in Ostermeier— Nora lies on the floor with Torvald, motionless, devoid of the energy with which she started the show.

The cardboard cutouts, moved during the act to assume the same position, surround them. She has finally come to know what she truly wants, but, with this realization, as long as she remains in that household she will be, in essence, reduced to the same status as the other characters: deliberate and constrained. When she leaves, she not only leaves Torvald and his abuse, but the construct of the theater, itself. She is truly free, more so than Nora as she exists in text. Like Ostermeier, Quinn has changed the text —his new translation has allowed him to add lines here and

there (and, more importantly, Nora’s “syntax errors”), although the structure of the Ibsen does remain. While his production delivers the emotional shock of the original ending, it is very clear by the altered text and the affected acting that there was still a need to “update” the production with a commentary on modern theater.

Although both Ostermeier and Quinn claim that A Doll’s House is still relevant, that may not be entirely the case. Both felt the need to add some sort of commentary—Ostermeier’s stark, violent realism and Quinn’s pop theatrical commentary. How, then, can either make such a claim? Like the Nora of Dollhouse, Ibsen’s text, then, only holds relevance as far as it is adapted to a particular audience—it holds little relevance in itself.

It would seem that modernity necessitates some form of textual alteration, some sort of interruption from Ibsen’s text. Its plot and its characters, otherwise, are simply too specific to the time of its writing.

Endnotes 1. Brun, M. V. “A Doll’s House, Play in 3 Acts by Henrik Ibsen.”

Trans. May-Brit Akerholt. Folkets Avis [Copenhagen] 24 Dec. 1879. National Library of Norway, 16 Nov. 2009.

2. Carlson, Marvin. “Thomas Ostermeier.” Theatre Is More Beautiful Than War: German Stage Directing in the Late Twentieth Century. 160-80. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009. Project MUSE. http://muse.jhu.edu/.

3. Carlson. 166.

4. Ibsen, Henrik. A Doll’s House. University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 2010. 29.

5. Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Physicality. Postdramatic Theatre.

London: Routledge, 2006. 95-97. Google Books. 95.

6. Kalb, Jonathan. “Nora the Killer Doll.” The New York Times 7 Nov. 2004. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/07/theater/newsandfeatures/07kalb.html?_r=0 7. Keane, Caomhan. “Pan Pan Theatre Gives Ibsen’s A Doll House Such a Personal Touch.” The Independent, 8 Apr. 2012.

8. Murphy, Clare. “A Doll House, Revisited”. Critical Mass Blog, 12 Feb. 2012. http://www.criticalmassblog.net/2012/?p=2096

Pan Pan Theater was founded in 1991 in Dublin, Ireland, by co-directors Gavin Quinn and Aedín Cosgrove. Devoted to creating and implementing new ideas of performance, Pan Pan’s philosophy stems from a focus on the individual and the desire to innovate. It sees convention of any nature—including psychological and physical—as barriers and limits to true performance. Through experiments with new theatrical forms, as well as with time, space, and music, Pan Pan strives to find what it calls “the individual step” in both intrepid new works and vivid, innovative expressions of classic texts. Its work is primarily characterized by authenticity of performer, humility of purpose, and a depiction of the world as a place of chaos and disorder full of oppositions, conflicts, and complexities of existence. Constantly changing, adapting, and challenging the patterns and conventions of its own work, Pan Pan has received numerous awards, both local and national, for its thought-provoking, creative, and unique productions.

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“Preserve your memories, they’re all that’s left you:” The Politics of Nostalgia in Hermanis’ The Sound of Silence

BY MADELEINE BERSIN I’ve always said that my obsession is memories, the past. All my theatre works are based on memory. They have one common idea: that the past was better.1 —Alvis Hermanis Time it was, and what a time it was, it was A time of innocence, a time of confidences Long ago, it must be, I have a photograph Preserve your memories, they're all that's left you.2

In 2006, in collaboration with his company of actors at the New Riga Theatre in Latvia, Alvis Hermanis set out to create a theatre piece about the 1960s. Hermanis “chose twenty songs from the Gold collection of Simon and Garfunkel songs,” gave them to his company, and asked each actor to create twenty wordless “miniature stories,” each set to one of the twenty songs. Hermanis curated a selection of these “theatre clips,”3 spliced them together, and polished them with his company; the finished product was called The Sound of Silence, or the concert of Simon and Garfunkel in Riga in 1968, which never took place.4 The piece tracks the life and times of a group of young people living in Riga in 1968. As Annalisa Sacchi has described it, “the theatrical scene re-creates the interior of a sort of hippie commune or squat of the 1960s, with such precision that, at first glance, it appears philologically reconstructed.”5 The set is a long, rectangular box that represents four of the commune’s rooms, but these rooms do not have walls; the audience simultaneously witnesses the events occur-

ring in all four rooms at once. We watch as the characters, all clad in period-perfect clothes, shoes, and hairstyles, are galvanized to explore love, sex, drugs, art, literature, and freethinking by the music of Simon and Garfunkel. Subsequently, we watch reality seep into this tiny utopia, as the responsibilities of marriage, parenthood, employment, and addiction bear down on the exuberance of the characters; ultimately, one of the members of the commune commits suicide. This story, like the “theatre clips” from which it was constructed, is told without words. The only sounds are the sounds of silence and the music of Simon and Garfunkel.

In its totality, The Sound of Silence traces the transition from idealism to disillusionment among a group of people growing up in a year of enormous social, cultural, and political change: 1968. Perhaps surprisingly, however, Hermanis claims to have been deliberately “avoiding politics” in creating the piece.6 “If you are doing such stories [as The Sound of Silence, which are] about real people,” he claims, you don’t have to think 62

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—Simon and Garfunkel, “Bookends” (1968)

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about politics. They will exist anyway.”7 Hermanis avers that in treating the lives of “ordinary people,” politics need not be discussed, not only because politics barely broach the bubble of “ordinariness” within which his subjects reside, but also because political discourse and action will continue to exist outside the bubble of the theatre regardless of whether or not they are discussed within it.

I will read Hermanis’ statement in a different way by suggesting that the politics existed anyway within The Sound of Silence and within the New Riga Theatre, where it was first staged. First, I will show that, working with extant definitions of “political theatre,” The Sound of Silence would not seem readable as such.

Then, however, I will unpack Hermanis’ recruitment of nostalgia as an aesthetic influence on the creation of The Sound of Silence and as an emotional experience Hermanis sought to engender in audience members at the New Riga Theatre. In The Sound of Silence, nostalgia is a mode by which characters and spectators alike are rendered backward-looking and thus unwilling to or incapable of considering their own political presents. Ultimately, I will claim that the active refusal to contend with politics that would have been literally banging down the door of a hippie commune in 1968 Latvia is in itself a political stance. As engineered by Hermanis, The Sound of Silence’s disavowal of politics through nostalgia, I’ll argue, is a political act in a political theatre.

In his 1975 essay “On Political Theatre,” Michael Kirby wrote that “theatre is political if it is concerned with the state or takes sides in politics. This allows us to define ‘political theatre,’” he continues, as a performance event that is “intentionally concerned with the government, that is intentionally engaged in or consciously takes sides in politics.”8 In The Sound of Silence, the only suggestion of any interaction with politics defined as such occurs in the moments when the characters have difficulty accessing the Simon and Garfunkel music that colors their days and must listen to it furtively when they do succeed in accessing it.

The Sound of Silence opens, for example, with two women fumbling in the dark, eventually locating a (perfectly period-appropriate) music-playing device, bopping along happily to the first few phrases of “The Sound of Silence,” being interrupted by static and voices and, eventually, being forced to locate a new device on which to listen. This action is repeated numerous times before the women eventually give up.

Shortly thereafter, another woman secretly invites men to her apartment to listen to “Mrs. Robinson.”

When she becomes concerned that the men have become too visibly affected by the music, she forces them to leave, hiding her music-playing paraphernalia in a suitcase. In a third scene, a group of the young characters attempt to pick up a radio station that is broadcasting Simon and Garfunkel with outmoded metal equipment; the assay quickly devolves into a messy tangle of wires and bodies in uncomfortable posi-

tions, and only brief snatches of the songs can be heard.

Within the piece, there is no explanation as to why Simon and Garfunkel are elusive or why their music must be listened to in secret. What’s more, the characters do not seem immensely troubled by these conditions; when they are unable to find Simon and Garfunkel through conventional means, they find them in jars, in books, and in each other; throughout the piece, music emanates from these unconventional fonts.

Despite the “chilled” attitude inside the invented commune, however, a puissant political climate would have enveloped it if it had in fact existed in 1968. As Jeff Johnson has pointed out, the pleasurable listening experiences of the young people in The Sound of Silence are being interrupted by “a repressive Soviet regime capable of restricting if not banning access to the music” altogether.9 Indeed, Latvia was occupied by the Soviet Union in 1968. According to a pamphlet published by the Latvian government, the post-World War II Soviet occupation of Latvia, which lasted from 1944 through 1991, “is best characterised as a colonisation, a term that includes both Sovietisation and Russification.” Latvia was “completely isolated from the outside world and its sphere of influence,” the pamphlet remembers. “The once flourishing cultural, social, political and economic contacts with the West were cut off, and the country was forcibly oriented toward the East.”10 In 1968, then, Latvia had been robbed of its independence, its national and cultural identity, and its ability to engage with contemporary western culture.

Under strict adherence to Kirby’s definition, The Sound of Silence cannot be considered political theatre.

Though historical contextualization explains the commune’s limited access to Simon and Garfunkel, paragons of American music culture in the 1960s, and The Sound of Silence’s subtitle, “or the concert of Simon and Garfunkel in Riga in 1968, which never took place,” this context is not given within the piece, much less linked to the difficulty of accessing Simon and Garfunkel in the commune nor the characters’ clandestine approaches to consuming their music.11 If, as Kirby claimed, political theatre is theatre that directly and purposively engages with governmental and political action, mild annoyance at difficulty in acquiring music and its somewhat surreptitious consumption cannot qualify The Sound of Silence as a political performance piece because they are de-contextualized. Barring spectators with prior knowledge of Latvia’s political situation in 1968, these standalone events are unknowable to audiences as a reaction to political and cultural repression.

What’s more, all three scenes of interrupted cultural access are effectively shrugged off by the characters in the commune. There is very little urgency to their desire to hear the music or hide the fact that they’re listening to it when they do; they’ll try (and fail) to listen to “The Sound of Silence” again (and 64

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again) later, and their attempts to hide this activity is and will be token and unprompted by external factors.

Read this way, Kirby seems to describe The Sound of Silence, with its free love, games of spin the bottle, poetry-reading, and even music listening when he writes,

The Sound of Silence is, as Annalisa Sacchi has shown, “not the reconstruction of a past time but rather, amongst the proliferation of authentic details and the galaxy of images that re-create an only ever dreamed of 1968, the capture of an essential impurity.”17 Hermanis looks backward to create a 1968 Riga that never actually existed—one in which it was possible to simply dismiss Latvia’s tense political climate. The commune in The Sound of Silence, then, is not a historical recreation of a slice of Riga in 1968, but a utopic bubble that could have (but, importantly, did not) exist within it.

It is important to note, however, that Hermanis does not deny or repress the political within the commune. Rather, he acknowledges and subsequently dissolves it, and the characters’ processes of finding and listening to Simon and Garfunkel songs throughout the The Sound of Silence well illustrate such treatment.

Though they experience difficulty in acquiring the means to listen to it and must, by necessity, listen to it in secret, they express no frustration and display no desire to change their cultural conditions. Instead, they live and let live by acknowledging what is happening outside their bubble and then allowing that knowledge to dissipate by moving on with their lives.

Hermanis’ own writing, too, reveals the calculated practice of a selective historiography that addresses and then methodically dissolves political engagement.

In discussing the process of creating The Sound of Silence with Bonnie Marranca, Hermanis said that he chose Simon and Garfunkel’s music because “it was very important to accent this romantic, poetic side of revolution. That’s why we didn’t want to use Janis Joplin or Jimi Hendrix. We wanted only this romantic movement.”18 Here, Hermanis allows that in 1968, political movements were occurring and artists were creating politically engaged works, and readily discloses that he simply chose not to work with materials related to that component of the past in creating The Sound of Silence.

Though it is possible, as Jeff Johnson does, to read such selectivity as betraying “a simplistic, secondhand, retro understanding of the period” and “a perverse reverence for the sixties and a penchant for the novelties that represent it,” I argue that Hermanis was, instead, making an informed political statement.19 Significantly, Hermanis has revealed that he and his acting company “dedicated [The Sound of Silence] to those few hippies [they] had in Riga in the sixties.” These hippies, Hermanis continues, told him that “for local KGB, they were much more irritating than political dissidents because if somebody was completely ignoring the KGB it was more dangerous than those who were fighting against the Soviet regime.”20 Disregarding the KGB, it seems, was a more powerful tool of resistance than actual political engagement. The power of repudiation, Hermanis has said, is “why we perform all about the aesthetic side of the six-

Although government and politics may be useful to man as a social animal, they are not inevitable or always necessary. Many activities – a couple making love, a card game among friends…etc. – are not inherently related to politics. There is no reason why theatre [that depicts them] should be.12

Kirby’s suggestion here is that activities that are not in direct conversation with politics should not be read as political. Between the lack of historical context for the instances of cultural repression it depicts and the non-exigent response to them on the part of the characters in the commune, The Sound of Silence cannot be argued for as a piece of political theatre when working strictly within Kirby’s conception of the genre.

I call, however, for an expanded definition of “political theatre” that can account for The Sound of Silence as such. I will move now to a discussion of nostalgia, the aesthetic tool deployed to political effect by Hermanis, despite his verbal dismissal of the political.

Hermanis willingly and proudly admits to being a nostalgic. “I’ve always said that my obsession is memories, the past,” he asserted in an interview with Bonnie Marranca. “All my theatre works are based on memory. They have one common idea: that the past was better.”13 Hermanis is often attacked for this view because Latvia’s recent past is not remembered fondly by most Latvians; it is, of course, marked by Soviet occupation and the iron grip of communism. To such criticism, however, Hermanis responds: “I am nostalgic not because of communism, but because it was my childhood, my youth.”14 He continues: I have no illusions, not at all, about th[e communist] system. But certainly I have nostalgia for the so-called ‘good old Europe.’ The performances which I am making are not so much dedicated to the Soviet past. They are more dedicated to the values of old Europeans in modern times, when people were spending a lot of time sitting and talking with each other, writing letters, doing things with their own hand. A different tempo. Deeper.15

In Hermanis’ nostalgic thinking, then, Latvia’s political past is acknowledged but deliberately ignored when Hermanis engages remembrances of the “good old Europe” of his childhood. Such selective historical disavowal is part of Svetlana Boym’s conception of post-Soviet nostalgia as “a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed.” Nostalgia is “a sentiment of loss and displacement,” she writes, “but it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy.”16 The 1968 of 65

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ties.”21 As such, Hermanis’ refusal to contend with politics can be read as a political statement and his staging of The Sound of Silence can be read as a political act.

As I have argued, though The Sound of Silence seems, outwardly, to naively ignore political realities in favor of a romanticized version of the sixties that is, as Johnson claims, “treacley—fun but empty,” Hermanis’ deliberate choice to ignore the politics of 1968 renders The Sound of Silence a political statement.22 Finally, I will argue for The Sound of Silence as a piece of political theatre by turning to the complicity that Hermanis’ work demands of its spectators. After all, theater cannot exist without an audience, and, as Michael Kirby wrote in “On Political Theatre,” the goal of most political theatre is “to reach an audience” and make “the spectators listen to and accept what is said.”23 If Hermanis’ political statement is that “politics are just superficial waves above the water” and are best battled by abjuration, his goal is to draw his audience into the world of the commune, where politics exist but do not provoke.24 Hermanis accomplishes this by facilitating experiences of individual and collective nostalgia among audiences of The Sound of Silence such that they focus on their own romanticized and “treacley” memories of and associations with the sixties instead of the political realities of the sixties or of the present.

In a scene from the first act of The Sound of Silence, a female resident of the commune picks up a transparent glass jar with a side glance to her non-functional tape deck. When she holds the jar up to her ear, the woman hears Simon and Garfunkel’s “Song for the Asking.” She appears wistful yet content as she listens to the song for a few moments and then shares the music with the other residents of the commune. Before long, every character on stage is holding a glass jar up to his or her ear, and the mellow guitar strums and soaring violins of “Song for the Asking” fill the commune and the New Riga Theatre. In this moment, Hermanis draws spectators into the world of the commune by provoking in his audience a simultaneously individual and collective act of looking backward. That the characters hear “Song for the Asking” through jars requests the collusion of individual audience members in the act of nostalgia. The empty vessels beg spectators to fill the jars with their own memories and associations with “Song for the Asking;” indeed, the motif of the receptacle has an extensive literary genealogy as repository for the subjective impressions of consumers on works of art.25 By citing Simon and Garfunkel, singer/songwriters who Hermanis chose for their resolutely non-political music, Hermanis attempts to ensure that the memories with which his audience members will fill the onstage jars will not be politically focused. Instead, they will recall the romanticized facets of the sixties with which Hermanis seeks to build the world of his commune in a mode uniquely personal to each individual spectator.

Simultaneously, however, this scene creates an ad hoc community out of spectators and onstage charac-

ters alike. Through the jar sequence, Hermanis creates what Sacchi calls “the spectacle of a dreaming collectivity.” By creating a situation in which his ideal spectators have unique experiences of the same nostalgic feeling at the same time and in the same place, Hermanis’ audience “share[s] the paradoxical memory not of the past that has been, but of a decantation of the past which constructs a communal memory.”26 Hermanis, in other words, draws his audience into the world of the commune by creating a sort of commune out of his audience. The audience and the characters are thus united in the “communal knowledge of myth,” as Sacchi puts it.27 Hermanis’ construction of a situation in which spectators are prompted to experience the same sort of apolitical nostalgia that inspired The Sound of Silence seeks political theatre’s goal of “conver[ting]” an audience to a certain perspective or mode of perception.

By providing circumstances under which spectators are likely to experience the same nostalgia than led Hermanis to create The Sound of Silence and then inviting his audience into the bubble of the commune, Alvis Hermanis, it could be said, precludes his audiences from the consideration of politics past and present. However, the choice to ignore politics, as I have argued, is in itself a political act, rendering The Sound of Silence a piece of political theatre.

In his essay “Commitment,” Theodor Adorno claims that between the poles of committed art, which directly engages a political issue, and autonomous art, which is apolitical, “the tension in which art has lived in every age till now, is dissolved.”28 In this essay, I have argued that through his employment of nostalgia, Alvis Hermanis created political theatre by refusing to engage with politics. The Sound of Silence, I think, lies between Adorno’s poles.

Endnotes 1. Alvis Hermanis and Bonnie Marranca, “The Poetry of Things Past,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance & Art, Vol. 32 Issue 94 (2010): 30.

2. Art Garfunkel and Paul Simon, liner notes to Bookends, Simon and Garfunkel, B0054YH8DY, CD, 2001 (1968).

3. Hermanis and Marranca, “The Poetry of Things Past,” 27.

4. Eliza Bent, “Letter from Latvia,” American Theatre (2009): 35.

5. Annalisa Sacchi, “False Recognition: Pseudo-History and Collective Memory in Alvis Hermanis’ The Sound of Silence,” Performance as Interpretation of History: 33.

6. Hermanis and Marranca, “The Poetry of Things Past,” 27.

7. Hermanis and Marranca, “The Poetry of Things Past,” 29.

8. Michael Kirby, “On Political Theatre,” The Drama Review: TDR, Vol. 19, No. 2, Political Theatre Issue (1975): 129.

9. Jeff Johnson, “Decadence and Didacticism: Hermanis, Toompere, and New Themes in Post-Soviet Baltic Theatre,” TheatreForum, Vol. 33 (2008): 73.

10. Staff Members of the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia, The Three Occupations of Latvia: 1940-1991, Occupa67

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tion Museum Foundation, Riga (2005): 36.

11. Bent, “Letter from Latvia,” 35.

12. Kirby, “On Political Theatre,” 129.

13. Hermanis and Marranca, “The Poetry of Things Past,” 30.

14. Ibid., 30.

15. Ibid., 32.

16. Svetlana Boym, “Nostalgia and Its Discontents,” Hedgehog Review, Vol. 9, Issue 2 (2007): 7.

17. Sacchi, “False Recognition: Pseudo-History and Collective Memory in Alvis Hermanis’ The Sound of Silence,” 33.

18. Hermanis and Marranca, “The Poetry of Things Past,” 27.

19. Johnson, “Decadence and Didacticism,”, 73.

20. Hermanis and Marranca, “The Poetry of Things Past,” 29.

21. “Alvis Hermanis.avi,” dir. Zana Maria Barau, YouTube video, posted by “goldenlove2012,” August 18, 2010, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGVQLvCMAiI. 22. Johnson, “Decadence and Didacticism,” 75.

23. Kirby, “On Political Theatre,” 134, 24. Hermanis and Marranca, “The Poetry of Things Past,” 34.

25. Wallace Stevens’ “Anecdote of the Jar” (1919) is the most directly related example, but John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1820) and William Carlos Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow” (1923) are also pertinent. Note that all three poems feature containers (jar, urn, and wheelbarrow).

26. Sacchi, “False Recognition: Pseudo-History and Collective Memory in Alvis Hermanis’ The Sound of Silence,” 34.

27. Ibid., 36.

28. Theodor Adorno, “Commitment,” New Left Review, Issue 77-78 (1974): 76.

Photo by Monika Pormale

Alvis Hermanis is a Latvian theatre director. He is currently the artistic director of the New Riga Theatre; Hermanis was one of the founders of the theatre in 1992 and has been artistic director since 1997. Hermanis was trained as an actor and worked in theatre and film before he turned to directing, and his background and education have had a lasting influence on his directorial style and ambitions. Where most contemporary European theatre is focused on the director, Hermanis advocates a focus on the actor. What’s more, Hermanis prefers stories about the lives of ordinary people to high-concept productions. Like many of his contemporaries, however, Hermanis’ work is associated with the genre of postdramatic theatre—little of his work follows Aristotelian models and much of it values the conveyance of feeling over linear narrative. Themes in Hermanis’ work include non-violence, apoliticism, nostalgia, and the passage of time; when asked to distill his approach to theatre, Hermanis said, “In Latvia, theatre is a place where you can cure your soul, where you can feed your spiritual hunger.” In addition to his work at the New Riga Theatre, Hermanis has directed plays in venues all over Europe and has toured his work all over the world. Hermanis has received many awards and much recognition, including the 2007 Europe Prize for new theatrical realities and listing on Swiss culture magazine du’s list of the ten most influential European theatre personalities of the past decade (2012).

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“Makes Blasted Look Like The Teletubbies”: The Violent Absurdity of McDonagh’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore

Photo by Craig Schwartz

BY ADAM CONNER

ined!”2—as the real Wee Thomas makes his first true appearance onstage.

Published in 2001, Lieutenant was one of many works by McDonagh meant to contrast outsiders’ opinions of life in Ireland: “he set out to undermine some of the major authorities of Irish society.”3 This is chiefly illustrated by McDonagh’s deep incorporation of violence into his literature. Scenes of gruesome torture and execution act as the proverbial bad car accident, keeping the viewer horrified, yet unable to turn away from the action. However, the use of violence within The Lieutenant of Inishmore becomes commonplace and ultimately manages to desensitize audiences to it, allowing them to see McDonagh’s broader commentary. After examining a brief history of Lieutenant, I will show how violence is highlighted both by critics and by McDonagh himself with the intention to initially shock but ultimately amuse.

Despite the fact that the majority of his work is set in Ireland, Martin McDonagh was born and raised in London. McDonagh’s parents, who were “workingclass Irish expatriates,” tried their best to give their children a authentic Irish childhood despite being away from their homeland: “McDonagh’s parents coped with their dislocation by trying to re-create the

Earlier this year, Martin McDonagh’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore celebrated the twelfth anniversary of its original London production by the Royal Shakespeare Company. The world has changed significantly since then, both in culture and politics—yet, due to the sharp increase in awareness of terrorism and violence since the events of September 11, 2001, Lieutenant has retained its strength of character. The play’s extensive use of violence within a darkly comic framework captivates audiences today just as mesmerizingly as it did just over a decade ago. Lieutenant spins the tale of Padraic, a bloodthirsty extremist deemed too unstable for the ranks of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), as he investigates the death of his cherished cat, Wee Thomas. Though Donny and Davey (Padraic’s father and neighbor, respectively) attempt to replace the late Wee Thomas with a shoeshine-laden decoy, Padraic soon learns that his actual cat is dead. He is later ambushed by three members of the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA), who have come to Inishmore to assassinate Padraic. Padraic kills them, but not before learning that one of them, Christy, murdered his pet, described as “[Padraic’s] only friend for fifteen years.”1 By the end of the play, Davey tallies the victims— “Four dead fellas, two dead cats…me hairstyle ru73

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world of home, living among other Irish families.”4 The young Martin was surrounded by the Irish, especially in his schooling: “most of the teachers were Irish priests, and where most of the pupils were of Irish descent.”5 He also would “spend many summer holidays returning to the west of Ireland to visit his parents’ families.”6 Later, McDonagh began independently forming his own attachment to Ireland through the arts. He began listening to punk music, specifically The Pogues, which rooted him in a somewhat anarchical train of thought without loosening him from his Irish heritage. McDonagh notes that he “was always coming from a left-wing or pacifist or anarchist angle that started with punk, and which was against all nationalisms.”7 This idea of a-nationalism is important, as McDonagh’s childhood coincided with the rise of the Provisional IRA (perhaps his inspiration for making the group’s presence known in Lieutenant).

Finally, in 1994, McDonagh began writing; utilizing “an exaggerated version of the speech he ha[d] heard [during] summer visits to Ireland…and drafte[d] seven plays in quick succession.”8 One of those seven was The Lieutenant of Inishmore.

Though it had an incredible impact on his career, The Lieutenant of Inishmore was far from Martin McDonagh’s first theatrical success. In fact, McDonagh’s road to fame began in 1995, six years before Lieutenant ever saw a professional stage. In that year, Irish director Garry Hynes found McDonagh’s scripts and immediately bought the rights to them. The former Artistic Director of Galway’s Druid Theatre, Hynes premiered four of McDonagh’s plays.9 In 1997, all four were in production in London, a feat only shared by one other quite famous playwright—Shakespeare.10 However, in 1999, despite his efforts, McDonagh failed to produce the fifth play of the group, Lieutenant, and immediately announced “that he will not produce any more plays until The Lieutenant appears.”11 After two years, an unyielding McDonagh got his wish in the form of a premiere of The Lieutenant by the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon.

A month before the first production of Lieutenant was set to close, the global climate changed with the terrorist attacks of September 11th, forever altering the way in which the world would receive the play. Suddenly, this very Irish, politically-specific show became a commentary on issues of international terrorism.

Lieutenant inherently invited controversy; September 11th stoked the fire. “The play was controversial even before its first performance…since it was rejected by both the theaters that had staged Mr. McDonagh’s earlier plays, the National and the Royal Court, before being accepted by the Royal Shakespeare Company,” wrote Benedict Nightingale in a 2002 article.

“Rave reviews seemed to justify the R.S.C.’s courage, only for Sept. 11 to raise new questions… for the producers who were competing to transfer the play to the West End have now apparently developed nerves.”12

The play did transfer to the West End, where it enjoyed an acclaimed run in 2002, before winning the 2003 Olivier Award for Best New Comedy. Apparently deemed suitable for American audiences in the wake of 9/11, Lieutenant was produced at the offBroadway Atlantic Theatre Company and subsequently Broadway’s Lyceum Theatre in 2006.

American audiences embraced the play’s more provocative elements, refusing to shy away from any equivalence to September 11th. “The most ripsnorting, hilarious comedy in New York right now milks laughs from torture and has a terrorist hero who cares more about his cat than his bombing and mutilation victims,” David Cote wrote in Time Out New York. “Ah, how far we’ve come since September 11.”13 Although concerned exclusively with British terrorism, McDonagh’s work has struck a chord worldwide.

Even before its premiere, Lieutenant garnered considerable attention. As they had done with his previous four plays, critics wrote about their fascination with the unique atmosphere McDonagh creates in his work– what Sean O’Hagan in The Guardian, described as “a world that is both utterly recognizable and disturbingly unreal, comical and cruel.”14 They were as excited about Lieutenant as they were for McDonagh’s first four plays; some anticipating it to be his best yet: “[it] crosses over into territory that is altogether more provocative, incendiary even, than his other plays.”15 The glowing feedback continued to pour in after the production finally launched in Stratford-upon-Avon. Critics in England universally praised McDonagh in the show’s early productions. Specifically, they cheered his ability to fearlessly tackle grave issues such as terrorism with humor: “[Lieutenant] proves that no subject is immune from mockery, and that satire is the best way of subverting political orthodoxy.”16 However, other critics were uncomfortable with the violent, calling Lieutenant “the most gruesome play I’ve ever seen”17 and nothing that “[it made Sarah Kane’s] Blasted look like The Teletubbies.”18 Due to the nature of the show, a transfer to the West End took longer than expected; at one point, McDonagh himself expressed doubts that his play would make it to a commercial theatre in England, let alone Broadway.19 Critics lashed out at West End producers, calling them “commercially insane, as well as spineless” while noting the play’s success at Stratford.20 As is plainly seen, the general public loved McDonagh’s new work. That isn’t to say, though, that the initial productions were unblemished. The production at Stratford suffered from technical issues as well as with the script itself. These issues were addressed in a review by Joan Fitzpatrick Dean, in which she first critiques McDonagh’s somewhat unmanageable stage direction, citing in particular the second scene, in which Padraic tortures a man who is meant to be hung upside down from the ceiling for the entirety of the encounter. She mentions this was omitted in Stratford: “…stage directions are so demanding that 74

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one of them…was not realized.”21 She also referenced some slight technical issues in the performance she witnessed. One of the most visually provocative moments, one in which Mairead, Davey’s sister, assassinates Padraic with a gun in each hand pointed at either side of his head, was robbed of its theatrical exclamation point when no gunshot rang out. Dean described the embarrassing moment: “the blood squib sprayed although no retort was heard.”22 Finally, she comments on character differentiation, alleging that the characters’ voices are too uniform to be realistic, despite their befitting costumes. Other negative reviews criticized McDonagh’s illustration of Ireland, denouncing it as inaccurate. In some case, the allegations were almost comically extreme: “One Irish academic proclaimed McDonagh to be as Irish as the Asian Chicken McNuggets at McDonald’s were Asian.”23 In most cases, Lieutenant has been met with rave reviews in nearly every country in which it is produced. The notable exception is a 2003 Irish production at the Dublin Theatre Festival. However, evidence points to the quality of that production contributing to its disappointment, rather than the content of the play itself. “Perhaps the most likely explanation for the play’s poor reception at the Dublin Theatre Festival was that it simply wasn’t as good a production as the version staged in Stratford,” Lonergan reasons.24 A 2006 production in Ireland by Galway’s Town Hall Theatre corroborates this notion and disproves any perceived Irish distaste for the play, as that incarnation of the show was well-received.

“The alteration in the public’s perception of global terrorism coincided with an enormous growth in the popularity of McDonagh’s play internationally. By September 2003, it had been translated into twentyeight languages and produced in thirty-nine countries,” Lonergan writes. “In many of these countries, the play was received as an explicit commentary on the ‘War against Terrorism.’”25 No matter where it goes, audiences seem to find meaning in Lieutenant.

Though reviews have ranged from raves to rants, one common theme has run through them all: violence. Its effective use is unmistakable; its impact, undeniable. Previously mentioned reviews comment on the presence of violence as well the pure volume of violent acts acted out throughout Lieutenant. Also mentioned was praise regarding McDonagh’s ability to successfully satire even the gravest of issues. However, perhaps the most poignant points of Lieutenant’s reviews are ones which highlight violence as a means of storytelling. Rather than overpower the play and its broader message, McDonagh manages to weave violence into patterns of lyrical dialogue to illuminate his points; it is this combination of “explicit brutal action and lines which sing with grace and wit” which elevates Lieutenant above violence for the sake of violence.26 The connection between language and violence is by no means unintentional. To further highlight the

play’s violence, McDonagh uses a heightened version of Hiberno-English, the dialect of English commonly spoken in Ireland.27 He maintains the complex verb placements and tenses that Hiberno-English uses, but exaggerates and poeticizes the language. The language itself then takes on its own violence in an effect similar to the way playwrights Harold Pinter and David Mamet use linguistics: to manipulate and exercise authority. Power comes not just from action, but from what is being said and not said—and how. McDonagh himself recognizes the influences: “‘I wanted to develop some kind of dialogue style as strange and heightened as [Mamet’s and Pinter’s], but twisted in some way.’”28 One of the most prominent examples of this language within the text of Lieutenant is the use of the word “feck.” This word, a stand-alone curse in Hiberno-English, is tossed back and forth between characters in the plot as a way of demonstrating frustration: “So who the feck is this fecking cat?”29 McDonagh’s rhythmic wording and syntax contribute to the propulsive nature of the language, which creates a violent effect through the very words being spoken.

Language therefore delivers a unique type of violence while also underscoring the play’s own theatricality.

The words spoken are exaggerated just enough that they feel artificial and help the audience take a step back to recognize the morality of the play, but still feel grounded enough to implicate those watching.

While Lieutenant contains plenty of violence against humans—four of the eight characters that appear onstage are slaughtered by the play’s end—it is actually the violence against the non-human characters that most drives home McDonagh’s points about brutality. While audiences become desensitized to murder after murder of people, the same jaded reaction does not apply when cats are killed. In The Guardian, Mark Lawson observes the RSC production: “A programme note reassures us that no animals have been harmed in the production.”30 The very necessity of such a note—for animals only, not humans—provides insight into the mindsets of those responsible for mounting the play. No one would balk at simulated violence against people, but pretend-cruelty against animals goes beyond conventional morality and must be explicitly neutralized. This real-life reaction mirrors that of Padraic within the play, as he does not think twice about torturing a drug dealer, but cruelty to his cat is an offense punishable by death. “Though [the] remote country house has been bathed in the blood of Padraic’s victims, it’s the fact that Wee Thomas was clearly murdered that becomes the focus of all concern,” writes Nobuko Tanaka in a 2003 review.31 Animal life is valued above human life; this is the fundamental absurdity of Lieutenant’s violence. As Lyn Gardner notes: “McDonagh is razor sharp on the absurdity of terrorists who quite happily torture and murder human beings, but are desperately concerned about the welfare of cats.”32 While present76

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5. O’Toole.

6. McDonagh and Lonergan. v.

7. O’Toole.

8. McDonagh and Lonergan. The Lieutenant of Inishmore. v.

9. McDonagh and Longergan. The Lieutenant of Inishmore. vi.

10. O’Toole.

11. McDonagh and Lonergan. The Lieutenant of Inishmore. vii.

12. Nightingale, Benedict. “What Does Realistic Mean on the Stage, Anyway?” The New York Times, January 13, 2002.

13. Cote, David. “‘The Lieutenant of Inishmore’.” Time Out New York, March 2, 2006.

14. O’Hagan, Sean. “The wild west.” The Guardian, March 23, 2001.

15. O’Toole.

16. Billington, Michael. “‘The Lieutenant of Inishmore’.”

The Guardian, January 3, 2002.

17. Clapp, Susannah. “Please sir, I want some gore.” The Guardian, May 19, 2001.

18. Lawson, Mark. “Sick-buckets needed in the stalls.” The Guardian, April 27, 2001.

19. Gibbons, Fiachra. “Playwright savages ‘gutless’ theatres.”

The Guardian, December 21, 2001.

20. Billington. “‘The Lieutenant of Inishmore’.”

21. Dean, Joan Fitzpatrick. “Performance Review: The Lieutenant of Inishmore.” Theatre Journal 54.1 (2002): 161-163.

22. Dean. “Performance Review: The Lieutenant of Inishmore.”

23. Greene, Gabriel. “Interrogating McDonagh.” Steppenwolf Theatre Company (Vol. 1), 2006-2007.

24. McDonagh and Lonergan. The Lieutenant of Inishmore. lv.

25. McDonagh and Lonergan. The Lieutenant of Inishmore. liii.

26. Clapp. “Please sir, I want some gore.”

27. McDonagh and Lonergan. The Lieutenant of Inishmore. xxv.

28. McDonagh and Lonergan. The Lieutenant of Inishmore. xxv.

29. McDonagh and Lonergan. The Lieutenant of Inishmore. 68.

30. Lawson. “Sick-buckets needed in the stalls.”

31. Tanaka, Nobuko. “Hotshot terrorist comedy just misses target.” The Japan Times, August 13, 2003.

32. Gardner, Lyn. “‘The Lieutenant of Inishmore’.” The Guardian, January 29, 2002.

33. Mikami, Hiroko. “Not ‘Lost in Translation’: Martin McDonagh in Japan.” http://dspace.wul.waseda.ac.jp/dspace/bitstream/2065/26868/1/003.pdf

ing scene after scene of over-the-top brutality, the play seems to suggest that violence actually has no point or efficacy. Mairead later underscores these observations about society’s dubious morality when she in turn kills Padraic, her betrothed, for killing her cat.

The chain of meaningless violence seems to have no end—and also no sense.

A 2003 Japanese production of Lieutenant at the Parco Theater emphasizes these notions about animal and human violence, even taking the step of renaming the play Wee Thomas, after Padraic’s cat. Director Keishi Nagatsuka wanted to present an apolitical translation of the play that concentrated mostly on its explorations of violence as meaningless and inane. “Since Nagatsuka had little interest in contextualizing the play in a particularly Irish setting, what the Japanese audience saw on stage was not political violence but the quintessence of violence, being crystallized into a very absurd question, ‘which is more important, a cat’s life or the lives of human beings?’” writes Hiroko Mikami. “While watching the play, full of dark and surreal humour, we wonder whether the ‘cat or human’ question is really absurd at all.”33 This challenging of the audience’s ethics through engagement and absurdity is what makes Lieutenant’s study of violence so effective. Audiences are both numb to and shocked by the violence onstage, and the effect is unsettling and powerful.

It may be too soon to label Martin McDonagh as one of the greats in Irish theater canon. For now, however, it is certain that he has made his mark on late 20th and early 21st century theatre through his colorful use of violence to illuminate the broader commentary within his works. Around the world, McDonagh has successfully desensitized his audience to his brutality towards his human characters. Through his masterful use of the Hiberno-English language, he has allowed audiences to see past images of torture and dismemberment to the satirical core of his work. McDonagh has uniquely critiqued the world’s most serious issues through violent absurdity, even in the face of events of the same nature occurring in real-time. What’s more, even after twelve years, McDonagh’s plays continue to enlighten and speak to the world in all their gory glory. Though critics have been quick to reject McDonagh’s newer work on the basis of its supposed departure from the authentic Irish experience, it is clear that, without the valiant effort on the part of his parents to give him a true Irish upbringing, McDonagh would never have been able to construct some of the most horrifyingly beautiful drama of the modern era.

Martin McDonagh was born on March 26, 1970. Born and raised in London, he was nurtured by two parents who moved to the UK from Ireland. They took Martin to their home country each summer to spend time with their extended families. During these summers, Martin learned about Irish culture, his interpretation of which is heavily displayed in his plays. In 1994, McDonagh wrote seven plays, the first of his career. Several of them were published and produced within a few years. Notably, in 1997, four of McDonagh’s plays were produced simultaneously, a feat only accomplished once before by William Shakespeare. McDonagh continued writing, premiering two other plays in the 2000s (The Pillowman in 2003, and A Behanding in Spokane in 2010). McDonagh also began writing for film, penning critically acclaimed works such as Six Shooter (2005), In Bruges (2008), and Seven Psychopaths (2012).

Endnotes 1. McDonagh, Martin and Patrick Lonergan, ed. The Lieutenant of Inishmore. Methuen Publishing, Ltd.: London, UK, 2009. 6.

2. McDonagh and Lonergan. 68.

3. McDonagh and Lonergan. xvii.

4. O’Toole, Fintan. “A Mind in Connemara: The savage world of Martin McDonagh.” The NewYorker, March 6, 2006.

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Violence, Danger, and the Audience in Tragedia Endogonidia busy road and the Parliament building in Strasbourg.

From the very first moment of the piece, the government is on trial; it is being watched by a captive audience. A tour bus pulls up behind the theatre, and a group of tourists get out and eventually get seated as an audience (facing away from us). This group of tourists watches the beginning of Psycho by Alfred Hitchcock, which is projected onto the wall of the Parliament building.

Already, in the first few moments of the piece, Castellucci engages his audience with the theme of violence. Psycho is one of the most famously violent films in the British film canon. We, as an audience, observe a separate audience watching and enjoying this movie for an extended period of time. Here, Castellucci is subliminally acclimating his audience to the idea of watching violence as a group of voyeurs.

As the Psycho portion of the piece draws to an end, dim lights rise on the inside of the theatre, revealing a group of heavily armed African women dressed in military uniforms, standing on an expansive mound of dirt and debris. These women go about daily activities, but there is a palpable tension in their facial expressions and body language. The women seem to be waiting for something awful to happen. At one point,

In her book A Director Prepares, Anne Bogart states, “Art is violent. To be decisive is violent.”1 Violence is, of course, an incredibly abstract and enigmatic concept that is hard to define. If we think of violence as behavior that is intended to hurt someone or something, Bogart says that art will, inevitably, hurt its consumer.

That is certainly the case with the Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio’s epic masterpiece, Tragedia Endogonodia, directed by Italian theatre director Romeo Castellucci. The piece is an eleven-part cycle staged in ten cities over the course of three years and serves as a rumination on the nature of tragedy in our modern age.

As a whole, Tragedia Endogonodia explores many themes, including religion, sex, and mortality. Often these ideas are explored using extremely violent and jarring staging; audiences may be offended, ashamed, or terrified by what they see onstage. Castellucci’s use of dynamic forms of violence creates a sense of impending danger that subverts the audience’s expectations of their roles as audience members.

Episode Eight of Tragedia Endogonodia, which was staged in Strasbourg, engages with the concept of violence indirectly, but even so creates a visceral response in the audience. The piece begins at dusk, and the back wall, made completely of glass, looks out onto a 78

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one of the women digs a hole and disposes of a large quantity of used feminine pads.

This portion of the show intensifies the dangerous tone of the piece. When we realize that we are in the same room as a group of armed women, we begin to question our own safety. We ask , “why do these women have guns? Will we be protected?” Also, the implicit knowledge that these women share works as a sort of reverse-dramatic irony. Furthermore, the grotesque introduction of blood gives us an intimate and carnal example of a substance commonly associated with violence. The audience does not know what kind of danger they are in, but they are made to feel that an unknown danger is imminent.

A while later, the women lie on the ground as one stands in the center waving a red flag like a harbinger of violence. She slowly lies down, the lights fade, and the women exit. When the lights return on the empty stage, we see that the outdoor audience that was watching Psycho is now watching us through the glass.

At this point we realize that we are the next act to of violence to be observed by a group of spectators, and now we have no military presence between us and the inevitable danger that is lurking around the corner.

At this point in the piece, a real tank drives into the theatre and menacingly points its cannon at the audience. After a long, dangerous pause, the tank turns to leave, but not before turning its cannon on the audience one last time as it exits the theatre. After preparing the audience for violence, this final gesture warns them that although they have avoided it this time, extreme violence is inevitable.

In this episode, Castellucci plays with our expectations of violence in theatre. By using Psycho, the military presence, and the blood, we are trained to expect violence in the piece. He allows us to safely watch the violence of Psycho, but condemns our voyeurism when he turns the tables and makes us the possible object of the tank’s violence. We are made to feel as if we’re in danger, and then we are mocked for it, leaving us unsatisfied, humiliated, and terrified.

Episode Four, staged in Brussels, also challenges our expectations and perceptions of stage violence, but this time, in a much more graphic manner.

This piece, much like Episode eight, first establishes a sense of danger in the space. The piece begins with a baby sitting alone in a large marble room built onstage. In the background, a robotic face begins to recite the alphabet to the baby. The child becomes visibly upset by the robot but is totally alone onstage, without anyone to help it.

The opening of Episode Four automatically makes audience members question their roles as spectators.

It is inherently upsetting to watch a child become upset and have no one to help him or her. This section of the piece makes us ask ourselves, “is this child in danger, and is it my duty to help it?” This uncertainty and discomfort gives way to loud sounds and flashing

lights, as a balding woman in Victorian dress comes and collects the baby. Now, the audience is meant to feel unsure of the baby’s fate. Although the baby is, in reality, totally safe, the world of imminent violence that Castellucci has established keeps us on the edge of our seats.

At this point, the lights return to normal and a police officer enters. He pours a bottle of fake blood on the floor, sets up a sort of crime scene, complete with evidence signs, and then strips down to his underwear and lies down in the pool of blood. Two more police officers enter and proceed to brutally beat the first man. The sounds of the beating echo unbearably through the marble space. The graphic violence lasts for a very long time. As the man is beaten, he becomes covered in the blood that is on the floor.

Again, Castellucci is playing with the audience’s perception of violence. When the police officer enters, the audience feels relieved to see a symbol of order and safety after just having worried about the baby’s wellbeing. This relief is quickly shattered, however, by the appearance of the stage blood. At its introduction, we immediately become aware that we have not escaped violence. By having the police officer set up his own beating, we as an audience know that the violence that will occur is totally artificial.

We see the blood being poured; we know this man is safe. Yet, once the man’s fellow police officers enter and begin to flog him, we are thrown back into a world of violence that is so brutal and realistic, it is hard to remember that what we are seeing is artificial.

The duration and graphic nature of the violence makes us forget that the brutality is entirely false.

When the beating finally ends, the beaten man sits in a chair near a microphone, dripping in fake blood, his face mutilated. He is pushed from the chair and put into a garbage bag by one of the police officers. The microphone is placed next to the garbage bag so that we can hear the man helplessly whimpering from within.

Throughout this piece, the audience shares the man’s sense of helplessness. Audiences are not normally expected to act as a performer’s savior. We bear witness to the baby’s discomfort, and the man’s brutal beating, and as audience members, we are helpless to the their plight. Because of the way in which the spectator-performer boundaries are normally constructed, we feel unable to help the performers; rather we can only watch them and hope that they will survive the brutality.

Funnily enough, we know that these performers will, in fact, be fine. Castellucci has demonstrated this fact to us by showing plainly the artificial mechanisms of the stage violence. And yet, somehow, we trick ourselves into believing the violence is real. Castellucci is manipulating his audience’s emotions by forcing the spectators to respond viscerally to events that we know to be false, and this forceful manipulation of the 81

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spectator’s emotions is a sort of act of violence against the audience itself.

Episode Eleven, the final chapter of Tragedia, ends the cycle back where it began, in Cesena, the home of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio. This final chapter uses hidden and obscured violence to manipulate the audience’s sense of space, time, and safety. The piece was staged in two theatre spaces, and the audience moved from one to another.2 In the first space, we see a boy in bed reading a comic book. In the filmed version of the piece, we can actually see that the comic book itself contains violent content. Castellucci has already carefully placed a clue to the violence that lies ahead. After the boy bids his cat goodnight, he goes to sleep. His mother and a maid (who briefly appears in Epsiode 4) enter variously and wish the boy goodnight. The lights dim, and when they rise again, the boy is gone, and nearly a dozen men in 1940’s film noir attire enter. The men are still for a long while. The disappearance of the boy and the body language of the men suggest that something tragic has occurred.

A man in a wet raincoat enters with a paper bag, and removes the head of the boy’s cat from it. The men in the room all react with grief and sadness as two of the men strip the boy’s bed and replace the bedding with red sheets.

This moment seems to suggest that the boy has somehow come to a tragic end, and yet we don’t know how or why. Given the reactions of the performers, we as an audience know something horrible has happened, but the specifics are unknown to us. Castellucci is again employing his brand of reverse-dramatic irony.

We as spectators have no idea what the actors know, but we can feel that it is dangerous and tragic.

Close to the end of the first section of the piece, there is another moment where a flat curtain obscures the stage apart from the actors’ feet and their shadows on the ceiling of the bedroom. In this section, we see the feet of three men surround the feet of a woman while another woman looks on in the distance. We hear the men goading the woman and see that they are removing her stockings and underwear.

Suddenly the four actors face forward, although we can still only see their feet. Blood drips down the inner leg of the assaulted woman as the first section of the piece draws to a close.

This first section of Episode Eleven instills a sense of danger and fear in the audience by emphasizing what the audience does not see. In this part, we don’t know what has happened to the little boy, but by allowing us to see the decapitated cat, we are led to believe that his fate is a gruesome one. We are also unable to see the nature of the sexual assault that occurs in the bedroom, but the blood on the woman’s leg implies that the woman is barren, and that there will be no future after the death of the boy. The violence in this part of the piece is as gruesome as our

own imagination allows, and not only are we fearful of this imagined violence, we are ashamed of what our imagination creates.

In the second part of the Episode Eleven, the audience is led into another space where the stage is obscured by a white screen. The audience watches a video of sperm swimming under a microscope for several minutes. Eventually, all of the sperm die, and as the microscope moves, we see thousands and thousands of dead sperm cells.

This video portion plays with the spectators’ sense of time. The video feels monotonous and unending.

Castellucci is forcing his audience to sit with death before the conclusion of the cycle. This sperm-genocide makes us as audience member feel that we are within death, that it is surrounding us, and that we cannot escape it. The image of the dead sperm cuts our humanity off at the source, demonstrating the inevitability of death.

When the screen rises, the stage has been transformed into a completely realistic forest. Men with dogs and flashlight are searching for something or someone. Thunder and lightning roar through the dark space, solely illuminated by the beams of the search party’s flashlights. Eventually, the men find what they are looking for: the boy from the first part of the piece.

He is cold, dirty, and hiding in the bushes. The men drag him out and beat him mercilessly. Then the man with the raincoat from the first portion of the piece emerges and brandishes a large hunting knife. With his back to the audience, he brutally stabs the boy multiple times. The man’s jacket obscures this violence, but the sounds and movements of the attack are incredibly real. Finally the man decapitates the boy, but when he reveals the boy’s head, it is the head of the cat. The man places the cat’s head in the bag and leaves the boy’s body as the piece ends.

This section of the piece seems to go back in time to show us the events leading up to the first part of the piece. However, much like in Episode Eight, Castellucci does not satisfy us with the answers we are hoping for. Seeing the boy’s head would at least give us some sort of closure about the brutal violence we have imagined, but Castellucci cruelly snatches that closure from us by replacing the boy’s head with that of the cat’s.

Rather than finding a resolution, we are thrown back into a cyclical nightmare of violence and danger.

Castellucci’s use of violence asks a given audience to consider the culpability of the spectator in the violent acts that they are observing. Are we meant to help the performers being violated? Should we allow ourselves to sit idly by as violence happens in our midst? When we know the violence is artificial, why are we still so viscerally affected by it? Castellucci turns the seemingly safe space of a theatre into a dangerous, nightmare of a world where the role of the audience is the opposite of what we are used to. We have stumbled into a world that we shouldn’t be watching, and we will be punished for it.

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Tragedia Endogonidia is an experimental cycle reflecting on the “tragedy of the future.” The point of departure was the Greek tragedy, constituting—according to the director—the “nature of theatre”, and its status as a “reference point” or the “Pole Star” of theatre. According to Socìetas, however, a modern tragedy has to be organized on new principles. The characteristic features of Tragedia Endogonidia include dispersion, focus on the feminine element, lack of chorus explaining the hero’s actions–it’s silence and tangibility which become the central figures of the show. The cycle is composed of eleven episodes made in different European cities (Cesena, Avignon, Berlin, Brussels, Bergen, Paris, Rome, Strasbourg, London, Marseille and again Cesena). The title of the project refers to culture and biology. It pertains, on the one hand, to the form of a tragedy, while on the other, to organisms which reproduce by fission (thus, the term endogonidia), so to small immortal beings. Therefore, the title is an oxymoron—it could be translated as “immortality of the end”—because the essence of the tragedy was based on the hero’s death.

In Castellucci’s words “Our times and our lives are completely detached from any concept of the tragic.

‘Redemption,’ ‘pathos,’ and ‘ethos’ are inaccessible words that have fallen into the coldest of abstractions.

Disasters and the massacre of innocents are everywhere referred to as ‘tragedies’, but this is an idea of tragedy that does not know how to distinguish these things from spectacle; nor how to think of them in terms of political crisis; nor how to gather them up on behalf of a metropolitan community, amongst people who are at the same time amassed and dispersed; who lack any common ground or mother language, who lack even ‘a people’: who lack these foundations that are the basis for the invention of tragedy. Turning again to tragedy doesn’t mean looking back; we have to break any legacy, not to follow it. The theatre I respect, now, is a theatre of commotion. This is a tragedy of the future. In conclusion, we need to think of tragedy as the only worthy opponent.”

Endnotes 1. Bogart, Anne. “Violence.” A Director Prepares: Seven Essays on Art and Theatre. London: Routledge, 2001. 45. Print.

2. Lyandvert, Maz. “Castellucci: Theatre of Remnants.” RealTime Arts. N.p., n.d. http://www.realtimearts.net/article/66/7791.

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Project Concept: Annalisa Sacchi, Visiting Lecturer Graphic design: Monica Nannini, www.spavisualdesign.it Editing: Morgan Goldstein (TF)

Credits Cover: Motus, Too Late!, ph. Valentina Bianchi Back cover: Motus, Alexis, ph. Valentina Bianchi pp. 4-5: Jan Fabre, The hour blue, ph. courtesy Troubleyn/Jan Fabre pp. 22-23: Romeo Castellucci/Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, Inferno, ph. Luca Del Pia pp. 36-37: Jan Fabre, Quando l’Uomo principale è una Donna, ph. Wonge Bergmann pp. 52-53: Alvis Hermanis, The Sound of Silence, ph. Luciano Romano/NTFI pp. 70-71: Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, S#08 Tragedia Endogonidia, ph. Luca Del Pia

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Harvard University FAS Faculty of Arts & Sciences Committee on Dramatic Arts Course of Contemporary Theatre in Europe (Dramatic Arts 168x) http://drama.fas.harvard.edu