Honours Progress Report
The progress of the Honours Research Project undertaken entitled “le petit mort” is difficult to quantify in words, particularly those that are articulated in a written form.
For me, an awakening or realisation has occurred which has transformed the work from its original beginning point stemming from the question “How does the notion of presence in performance make present a past, memory, or trace and how does this signify an absence which might be conveyed to others?”.
This was formulated on a hypothesis that performance might be considered a death of sorts in its ephemeral nature. And thusly, alludes to a physical, corporeal mortal body that is marginalised by the triumvirate of Western science-technology, Christian religion and late-capitalist culture in an artificial immortality via the image. Hence the title translated into English from the French as “the little death”.
A juxtapositional counter-point of departure or reference began the research by incorporating the event of New York City’s World Trade Centre’s Towers terrorist attacks on September 11th 2001. Due not only to just a personal but what might be described as a collective fascination with traumatic images that at once discloses or reveals –and yet veils and conceals- a repressive fear of death. Thus a sociological analysis might be enacted and documented as a problematic relation that bleeds from the personal into contemporary political-cultural ideologies.
In conjunction with sculpting a proposal, references were sourced beginning with literature that grappled with these subjects such as Peggy Phelan’s article “Seeing the Invisible – Marina Abramovic’s “The House with the Ocean View”in Adrian Heathfield’s “Live: Art and Performance”, Bert O.States “Performance as Metaphor” in Theatre Journal 48.1 (1996) pages 1- 26, Christine Poggi’s “Dreams of Metallized Flesh:Futurism and the Masculine Body” from the journal “Modernism/Modernity 4.3 (1997) pages 19-43 and Antonin Artaud’s “The Theatre and Its Double” – a veritable mystical performance bible.
Pursuing these notions simultaneously extended in opposite ways.
Firstly, what might be deemed as an away or outward movement from me into the domain of culture. That is to say towards the general, and this included the role of art – performance- in society as a sacred ritual evoking religious spirituality- its reverence and fervour.
Secondly, a return, folding, back in on itself motion, due to the desire for definitions to be contained within prescribed, scrutinized borders (whether physically or in language) and the threat experienced upon breaching these boundaries resulting in a sense of identity- whether masculine or feminine- ill at ease, threatened in chaos, crisis or war.
Thereby it was concluded that ultimately what was at stake is, power manifesting itself in subjectivity, and one that is particularly vulnerable; me; and our narcissist tendencies to placate the ego, the driving, maddening desires of the Id and power plays of the authoritative Superego which manifest themselves in pathological neurosis and psychosis.
Once upon this path an awareness of the relevance in psychoanalytical concepts was apparent whilst pursuing philosophical lines of thought. In particular, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s writings on the role of art in culture (specifically the early Greeks (Homer) repetition of violent images and their pleasure in destruction); fellow-German Carl Schmitt’s notion of the political, being either friend or foe – enemy; that of the father of psychoanalysis- Sigmund Freud from Vienna’s concept of the compulsion to repeat a traumatic event that has been experienced as if one were an absent witness and thus remember in order to forget; his French psychoanalytical protégé Jacques Lacan and his positing of subjectivity models as “proper” and a mobius strip; and Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of rhizomatic inter-connections, territorializations and becomings.
From here a phenomenon had been identified; the aestheticization of violence in culture by repetition.
Upon following this trajectory it was evident that the time had finally come to address the Christian Holy Bible as an artefact of a cultural birth or beginning, and the use of technology and the image in war – particularly the geo-political wars of the 20th Century not only in its sheer, physically brutal force but also in its mental or psychic propaganda.
And the abuse, emotionally?
A given.
It was about this time it was realised that the research had begun with a stereotypically naïve Honours Student perspective and that one had “bitten off more than one could chew” (let alone swallow!) and that it was actually a PhD length research project requiring at least 3 years (if not a lifetime) or as the supervisor of the project Barry Laing succinctly put it “Well there is your next 500 performances…!…”.
Whilst in discussion with aforementioned supervisor, it was brought to my attention that what I had proposed within the timeframe was “unreasonable” – not too mention “unmanageable”- and that I should refer to the work of Slavoj Zizek – in particular the book “Welcome to the Desert of the Real” in which he transposes psycho-analytical and philosophical-political concepts as well as elements of contemporary pop culture such as film and advertising onto the geo-political stages with events like the September 11th 2001 terrorist attacks on the Twin World Trade Centre Towers in New York City.
Around this time- April- May; I began to become concerned that I was indeed being bogged down within an impossible quagmire of sourced references that was only amounting to a chaos and confusion akin to the currently down-ward spiralling state of Iraq.
And so, I entered the studio to commence constructing practical material for performance.
With the locus of the work on “performance as a death”; the influence of the Artaudian post -World War II Japanese dance form, butoh, with its strong physicality playing between beauty and grotesque monstrosity and its philosophy of the artist not making the work, but the work making the artist would be inevitable. And so, I sought to evoke the model of the mobius strip and to be open but acutely aware to the possibilities of material that INSISTED they be incorporated.
By tracing the present to the past in memories of experience that inhabit the performing body as words or movement, I found myself re-visiting material to develop.
The first being the motif of a chair as a central point or fulcrum in which circular movements revolved as if an eternal return of the same repetitions but with difference. This movement evoked the “terrorist” inmates of Guantanomo Bay as well as an attention on masculine-phallic sexuality. Evolving into a mobius strip-figure 8 patterns and gradually accelerating, the Bert O. States article “Performance as a Metaphor” and illusory transitivity from Wittgenstein’s language games theory was incorporated. The idea of the alphabet as a continuous mobius strip in which all the letters related to each other, entirely, and thus words and the meaning of language.
The language of letters in words evoked Artaud and his obsession with thought or a mind-body split and his insistence of theatre as a violent instrument in bridging the meta-physical gap between the two. One that evoked a “cruel” psychical, physical and emotional transformation through his concepts of “Affective Emotional Athleticism” with the breath and body as sacred, primal hieroglyphic. It also brought into consideration the existence of a god-almighty creator and in Artaud’s case one that might be Gnostic. The duality in the notions of “good” and “evil” and “Self” and “other” insisted the connection to the Christian Holy Bible. The state of a religious-holy war manifested in the “clash of civilizations” equating American Economic and Cultural Imperialism to the Crusades and 9/11 as jihad made it apparent the beginning of this had to be interrogated.
Fascinated since childhood, despite being agnostic bordering on the irreligious (Church of England-Anglican-United-Whatever) I have always obsessed with the possibility of a god and death. A god, a father, who possibly forsaked his son, a sacrifice for “our sins of the flesh” in the violent crucifixion image of the disputed “mad” prophet Jesus Christ and if so, might HIS? presence in images of death and destruction be glimpsed. For is this not the same god whose vengeful wrath began with “The Fall” of man due to a serpent “more crafty than any wild creature that the LORD God had made” and a woman whose “eyes would be opened” and “be like gods (plural) knowing both good and evil” and that she “saw that the fruit of the tree was good (like a certain almighty god who “in the beginning of creation…saw it was good…”…)…pleasing to the eye and tempting to contemplate…the eyes of both…were opened…and they were naked ”. Banished from Eden’s garden that was “pleasant to look at” and driven into a world as a castaway that “will certainly die” and suffer with increased labour and groaning in which one shall bear children after being “eager for your husband, and he shall be your master”. Yet this is the “help (yikes!…what?…) of the LORD…brought a man into being”. And thus mortal life begins with Eve being “eager” for Adam her “master”, subsequently giving birth to Cain and death with the murder of Abel, his younger brother.
The rest is history.
So, “In the beginning of creation… When all things began, the Word already was (OR The Word was at the creation). The word dwelt with God, and what God was, the Word was. The Word…was with God at the beginning…children…not born of any human stock, or by…fleshly desire of a human father, but the offspring of God himself. So the Word became flesh…” created in man as “his likeness…the image of God…”.
Who’s word is word?
A word that passes through the Old Testament and is re-modelled in a New Testament of inter-textually collaged Gospels according to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. This Word that was at the beginning of creation and finds itself snaking, a winding way onto the tips of contemporary tongues in mouths that realise The Fall of man project in “knowing good and evil” and obfuscating meaning in obscure terms such as “collateral damage” and “repetitive administration”.
This collage technique evokes the spirit of African arts in its heterogenous materials, the “libre mundi” – a book of the world, Constantin Stanislavski’s “peasant spectacles” in a montage of scenes from Tolstoy, Turgenov, Chekov and Gorky, Fillipo Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto advocating “parole in liberte” – words in freedom, and following from the Futurists, Dadaists, Surrealists, Poland’s Jerzy Grotowski, East Germany’s Heiner Mller and his “synthetic fragments”, the United States’ Joseph Chaikin, Charles Marowitz, Wooster Group and Great Britain’s Forced Entertainment is me.
Regardless, the practical material now had a beginning with the so-called beginning of a Christian God creating and dominating the world.
I began filming alone with the idea of capturing my body; naked, speaking a perplexing alphabet, dismayed, yet chuffed on learning, singing, shouting, screaming this “ABC” song of letters in words and a terror in this birth of being, a body within a language-inspired by Comedy Central's "Crank Yankers" character "Special Ed". Ending in a maddening triumphant exaltation. Celebrating learning this knowledge by rote and making meaning from abstractions in symbols and sound until finally the terror of being born to scream the sound of the voice’s static white noise, in a white void, on a blank perfect screen, as if a desert landscape - to project images, after images acting like uncanny ink blots. The absent past projected onto the present of desire awaiting an unknown yet somehow familiar future.
This then became interspersed with an annoying camp, comedic voiceover introduction, as if a commercial television advertisement, influenced by the ridiculous absurdity of Forced Entertainment.
Book-ended by a tall, thin, tree-like white constructed metal object with a cardboard sign stating the bleeding obvious - “Welcome to the Desert of the Real” – scrawled in homage again of Forced Entertainment and a red pulpit for sermonising (whose need became apparent upon subsequent researching of the Bible in the story of The Fall in conjunction with British poet Ted Hughes’ “Crow” whose work has powerfully resonated since I first read it, in particular “Apple Tragedy”) a “satisfying” mis-en-scene whose aesthetic qualities was reminiscent of a Samuel Beckett -Societas Rafaello Sanzio- Robert Wilson meets Grotowski’s “Poor Theatre” had been created.
.
This “Apple Tragedy” of Ted Hughes’ poem is appropriated to take place in a public bar (The Garden of Eden), where God relates the “new game” he has invented to the serpent.They then start drinking apple cider and get drunk with Adam and Eve, seducing each other, until everything starts going awry-well, to hell.
Movement was developed for the serpent by equating “The serpent…more crafty than any wild creature that the LORD God had made.” with a repetitive endurance piece previously performed based on the slimy, snake-like personality of influential Sydney media mogul Alan Jones. Legless and only travelling raised on forearms, images of paraplegics or war-victims were also evoked before decaying into the slithering of the snake in film director Shohei Imamura’s “Japan” segment of the film “11’09”01”.
After the study of a murder of crows on the Victoria University Footscray Park campus, I visited Melbourne Zoo as an assignment for an improvisational acting class with Ranters Theatre’s Adriano Cortese and observed birds. Here a peculiar madness was identified in their lack of freedom. One, which seemed, somehow to concur with the poem’s predicament and existence, being in language.
The discovery of god appearing before Abraham to relay how his covenant shall be kept through the circumcision of the flesh of the foreskin of the PENIS! in the Christian Holy Bible was appropriated as well as the projection of his future as father with his wife (whose name Sarah just happens to coincide with my first “true” love who has been residing in New York City since 1997)and that they would be the parents of all nations.
A desk was now placed with the chair; a place tabled for surgery upon the body as well as reading and writing of language upon it with a white sheet evoking Renaissance paintings.
Personal writings from Artaud to his lovers Genica Athanasiou and Cecille Schramme were appropriated for a static, frenetic reading with the intention to introduce a confessional factual-auto-biographical element in stillness.
The footage was edited together for presentation to the supervisor of the project Barry Laing.
It was at this time the footage was also viewed by master director Ben Cittadini who would become known as “The Phantom-(…the ghost who walks…directing without detecting his presence…”) who offered his services in order to develop the work with a different perspective.
Our first meeting was one of much trepidation on my part, for such is the esteem held in regard to this man borne of Italian blood. We discussed my intentions and the content of the work and its concepts. Concluding that a linear narrative would not indicate how the past remains present in future actions. Thus, it became apparent shifts should occur, constantly by utilising improvisational impulse techniques with the modes of being thus far; serpent-crow-me-Craig-man-mad-god-son.
In approaching the work this way, it would keep the performance, alive and fresh in the moment whilst perpetually revealing a past that is haunting this now, currently happening, being propelled into the future.
The text has to be re-learnt.
These states were proposed as a certain shape shifting.
It was suggested I find an action to play at the audience- “I want them to carry me”.
Struggling with the difficult problem of becoming a shape shifter was akin to learning percussion in which one must separate yet integrate multiple actions simultaneously.
The idea of forming this language and finding it in the physicality of the mouth and tongue was introduced. To receive letters from an improvisational impulse that comes from the gut.
“First the belly. It is the belly that silence must begin…on the spot of hernial obstructions, the place where surgeons operate…It is in the
belly that the breath descends and creates its void from which it hurls it TO THE TOP OF THE LUNGS…Now, from the void of my belly I have reached the void which menaces the top of the lungs…the void on the belly…brought forth in me the image of that scream armed for war ( the war I want to make comes from the war that is made on me.), that terrible subterranean cry.
For this scream I must fall…”
This is a Masculine, NEUTERed (“heavy and fixed”), attempting “a terrible feminine (“thundering and terrible, like the baying of an incredible mastiff, squat as the cavernous columns, dense as the air that immures the gigantic vaults of the underground cavern.
I cry out in the dream,
But I know that I am dreaming,
And over BOTH SIDES OF THE DREAM
I make my will prevail.
…
But with this stricken scream, to scream I must fall.
…Into a tunnel and…I can never get out.
Never again into the masculine.” )The cry of the revolt that is trampled underfoot, of anguish armed for war, of the demand for justice.
It is the groan of an abyss that is opened: the wounded earth cries out, but voices are raised, deep as the bottom of the abyss, voices which are the bottom of the abyss crying.
…
It is the scream of the wounded warrior who brushes past the broken walls with a drunken sound of glass.
I fall.
…but I am not afraid,
I give up my fear in the sound of rage, in a solemn roaring.”
From Artaud’s “Theatre of the Seraphim”.
What is this “heavy and fixed”, threatening, ominous, sensual, sexual, mad retarded feeling, I cannot clasp, grasp, come to grips with?
I struggle to find the beginning, this beginning, the first words-“this is a fucking sad story”-which are not mine, which I thought had ended or closed and have now been cracked apart, wide open. Like a wound. THE PHANTOM remonstrates me “WHY THE FUCK IS IT A SAD STORY…AND WHO GIVES A FUCK…WHO WOULD?…WHY GIVE A FUCK ABOUT YOU?…you cannot assume how we are going to feel…”
This is really starting…to really hurt.
Really.
I thought it was before, alone.
Now, it is just humiliating.
A challenge requiring real courage and will of engagement.
This is now the work.
And it is just the tip of the ice-berg of this process.
The action changes - “I want you, the audience, to thank me…”- it is suggested with a sense of wonder…no, THE PHANTOM replies, “try shame, because you think you will save us, all the audience, that you want to save everyone a lot of time, but then again, what the fuck would you know?”
My confidence is shattered and my faith is in doubt.
I am falling.
I fall.
Into despair.
Kiekergaard’s sickness unto death.
The Phantom Ben Cittadini is seemingly frustrated with his energy thwarted by my tired lethargy.
What is this listless unwillingness?
Where is the energy?
Its intensity?
Drop into it
Just be.
Let all that other shit go.
Forget habits.
Remember to break rythms.
Stop moving and speaking as a just- doing-something as a distraction, from fear.
Do not feel there is a need to fill the void.
It is not empty with nothingness.
LET IT EXIST.
For in it, you will find yourself, as a mirrored reflection of us.
All.
Do. Not think.
Do not be afraid.
We get there.
I .DO.
Now, for a second act.
Something is insisting itself- in its non-existence.
Artaud’s short play “Jet de Sang”(Spurt of Blood”).
A second act is discussed to a point of stillness.
Prior images are suggested, summoning fucking gyrations, a birth, a cosmic soup, finger tips showering the body, sensual, sexual kissing, sucking, a scream that might be silenced, a metamorphosis- Kafka’s bug, Roger Callois’s praying mantis, a figure blinded with hands that want to touch and not see, a fascist drawing a long bow whilst slitting throats, a dead madman grasping, clasping at what?…things, symbols, letters, words, language, numbers, names, ideologies, vacant, absent, invisibilities, subjects, objects, projects, voids, worlds, people, places, concepts, the dead, the dying, spirits, gods, atoms…all twisted beyond , meaning, understanding, knowledge, comprehension, but connected in a thread the shape of a mobius strip.
And thus, this is the 1st semester Honour’s Research Project “le petit mort” Progress Report thus far.
nothing, something, everything, anything
I have had a revelation of Artaud
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For me, an awakening or realisation has occurred which has transformed the work from its original beginning point stemming from the question “How does the notion of presence in performance make present a past, memory, or trace and how does this signify an absence which might be conveyed to others?”.
This was formulated on a hypothesis that performance might be considered a death of sorts in its ephemeral nature. And thusly, alludes to a physical, corporeal mortal body that is marginalised by the triumvirate of Western science-technology, Christian religion and late-capitalist culture in an artificial immortality via the image. Hence the title translated into English from the French as “the little death”.
A juxtapositional counter-point of departure or reference began the research by incorporating the event of New York City’s World Trade Centre’s Towers terrorist attacks on September 11th 2001. Due not only to just a personal but what might be described as a collective fascination with traumatic images that at once discloses or reveals –and yet veils and conceals- a repressive fear of death. Thus a sociological analysis might be enacted and documented as a problematic relation that bleeds from the personal into contemporary political-cultural ideologies.
In conjunction with sculpting a proposal, references were sourced beginning with literature that grappled with these subjects such as Peggy Phelan’s article “Seeing the Invisible – Marina Abramovic’s “The House with the Ocean View”in Adrian Heathfield’s “Live: Art and Performance”, Bert O.States “Performance as Metaphor” in Theatre Journal 48.1 (1996) pages 1- 26, Christine Poggi’s “Dreams of Metallized Flesh:Futurism and the Masculine Body” from the journal “Modernism/Modernity 4.3 (1997) pages 19-43 and Antonin Artaud’s “The Theatre and Its Double” – a veritable mystical performance bible.
Pursuing these notions simultaneously extended in opposite ways.
Firstly, what might be deemed as an away or outward movement from me into the domain of culture. That is to say towards the general, and this included the role of art – performance- in society as a sacred ritual evoking religious spirituality- its reverence and fervour.
Secondly, a return, folding, back in on itself motion, due to the desire for definitions to be contained within prescribed, scrutinized borders (whether physically or in language) and the threat experienced upon breaching these boundaries resulting in a sense of identity- whether masculine or feminine- ill at ease, threatened in chaos, crisis or war.
Thereby it was concluded that ultimately what was at stake is, power manifesting itself in subjectivity, and one that is particularly vulnerable; me; and our narcissist tendencies to placate the ego, the driving, maddening desires of the Id and power plays of the authoritative Superego which manifest themselves in pathological neurosis and psychosis.
Once upon this path an awareness of the relevance in psychoanalytical concepts was apparent whilst pursuing philosophical lines of thought. In particular, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s writings on the role of art in culture (specifically the early Greeks (Homer) repetition of violent images and their pleasure in destruction); fellow-German Carl Schmitt’s notion of the political, being either friend or foe – enemy; that of the father of psychoanalysis- Sigmund Freud from Vienna’s concept of the compulsion to repeat a traumatic event that has been experienced as if one were an absent witness and thus remember in order to forget; his French psychoanalytical protégé Jacques Lacan and his positing of subjectivity models as “proper” and a mobius strip; and Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of rhizomatic inter-connections, territorializations and becomings.
From here a phenomenon had been identified; the aestheticization of violence in culture by repetition.
Upon following this trajectory it was evident that the time had finally come to address the Christian Holy Bible as an artefact of a cultural birth or beginning, and the use of technology and the image in war – particularly the geo-political wars of the 20th Century not only in its sheer, physically brutal force but also in its mental or psychic propaganda.
And the abuse, emotionally?
A given.
It was about this time it was realised that the research had begun with a stereotypically naïve Honours Student perspective and that one had “bitten off more than one could chew” (let alone swallow!) and that it was actually a PhD length research project requiring at least 3 years (if not a lifetime) or as the supervisor of the project Barry Laing succinctly put it “Well there is your next 500 performances…!…”.
Whilst in discussion with aforementioned supervisor, it was brought to my attention that what I had proposed within the timeframe was “unreasonable” – not too mention “unmanageable”- and that I should refer to the work of Slavoj Zizek – in particular the book “Welcome to the Desert of the Real” in which he transposes psycho-analytical and philosophical-political concepts as well as elements of contemporary pop culture such as film and advertising onto the geo-political stages with events like the September 11th 2001 terrorist attacks on the Twin World Trade Centre Towers in New York City.
Around this time- April- May; I began to become concerned that I was indeed being bogged down within an impossible quagmire of sourced references that was only amounting to a chaos and confusion akin to the currently down-ward spiralling state of Iraq.
And so, I entered the studio to commence constructing practical material for performance.
With the locus of the work on “performance as a death”; the influence of the Artaudian post -World War II Japanese dance form, butoh, with its strong physicality playing between beauty and grotesque monstrosity and its philosophy of the artist not making the work, but the work making the artist would be inevitable. And so, I sought to evoke the model of the mobius strip and to be open but acutely aware to the possibilities of material that INSISTED they be incorporated.
By tracing the present to the past in memories of experience that inhabit the performing body as words or movement, I found myself re-visiting material to develop.
The first being the motif of a chair as a central point or fulcrum in which circular movements revolved as if an eternal return of the same repetitions but with difference. This movement evoked the “terrorist” inmates of Guantanomo Bay as well as an attention on masculine-phallic sexuality. Evolving into a mobius strip-figure 8 patterns and gradually accelerating, the Bert O. States article “Performance as a Metaphor” and illusory transitivity from Wittgenstein’s language games theory was incorporated. The idea of the alphabet as a continuous mobius strip in which all the letters related to each other, entirely, and thus words and the meaning of language.
The language of letters in words evoked Artaud and his obsession with thought or a mind-body split and his insistence of theatre as a violent instrument in bridging the meta-physical gap between the two. One that evoked a “cruel” psychical, physical and emotional transformation through his concepts of “Affective Emotional Athleticism” with the breath and body as sacred, primal hieroglyphic. It also brought into consideration the existence of a god-almighty creator and in Artaud’s case one that might be Gnostic. The duality in the notions of “good” and “evil” and “Self” and “other” insisted the connection to the Christian Holy Bible. The state of a religious-holy war manifested in the “clash of civilizations” equating American Economic and Cultural Imperialism to the Crusades and 9/11 as jihad made it apparent the beginning of this had to be interrogated.
Fascinated since childhood, despite being agnostic bordering on the irreligious (Church of England-Anglican-United-Whatever) I have always obsessed with the possibility of a god and death. A god, a father, who possibly forsaked his son, a sacrifice for “our sins of the flesh” in the violent crucifixion image of the disputed “mad” prophet Jesus Christ and if so, might HIS? presence in images of death and destruction be glimpsed. For is this not the same god whose vengeful wrath began with “The Fall” of man due to a serpent “more crafty than any wild creature that the LORD God had made” and a woman whose “eyes would be opened” and “be like gods (plural) knowing both good and evil” and that she “saw that the fruit of the tree was good (like a certain almighty god who “in the beginning of creation…saw it was good…”…)…pleasing to the eye and tempting to contemplate…the eyes of both…were opened…and they were naked ”. Banished from Eden’s garden that was “pleasant to look at” and driven into a world as a castaway that “will certainly die” and suffer with increased labour and groaning in which one shall bear children after being “eager for your husband, and he shall be your master”. Yet this is the “help (yikes!…what?…) of the LORD…brought a man into being”. And thus mortal life begins with Eve being “eager” for Adam her “master”, subsequently giving birth to Cain and death with the murder of Abel, his younger brother.
The rest is history.
So, “In the beginning of creation… When all things began, the Word already was (OR The Word was at the creation). The word dwelt with God, and what God was, the Word was. The Word…was with God at the beginning…children…not born of any human stock, or by…fleshly desire of a human father, but the offspring of God himself. So the Word became flesh…” created in man as “his likeness…the image of God…”.
Who’s word is word?
A word that passes through the Old Testament and is re-modelled in a New Testament of inter-textually collaged Gospels according to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. This Word that was at the beginning of creation and finds itself snaking, a winding way onto the tips of contemporary tongues in mouths that realise The Fall of man project in “knowing good and evil” and obfuscating meaning in obscure terms such as “collateral damage” and “repetitive administration”.
This collage technique evokes the spirit of African arts in its heterogenous materials, the “libre mundi” – a book of the world, Constantin Stanislavski’s “peasant spectacles” in a montage of scenes from Tolstoy, Turgenov, Chekov and Gorky, Fillipo Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto advocating “parole in liberte” – words in freedom, and following from the Futurists, Dadaists, Surrealists, Poland’s Jerzy Grotowski, East Germany’s Heiner Mller and his “synthetic fragments”, the United States’ Joseph Chaikin, Charles Marowitz, Wooster Group and Great Britain’s Forced Entertainment is me.
Regardless, the practical material now had a beginning with the so-called beginning of a Christian God creating and dominating the world.
I began filming alone with the idea of capturing my body; naked, speaking a perplexing alphabet, dismayed, yet chuffed on learning, singing, shouting, screaming this “ABC” song of letters in words and a terror in this birth of being, a body within a language-inspired by Comedy Central's "Crank Yankers" character "Special Ed". Ending in a maddening triumphant exaltation. Celebrating learning this knowledge by rote and making meaning from abstractions in symbols and sound until finally the terror of being born to scream the sound of the voice’s static white noise, in a white void, on a blank perfect screen, as if a desert landscape - to project images, after images acting like uncanny ink blots. The absent past projected onto the present of desire awaiting an unknown yet somehow familiar future.
This then became interspersed with an annoying camp, comedic voiceover introduction, as if a commercial television advertisement, influenced by the ridiculous absurdity of Forced Entertainment.
Book-ended by a tall, thin, tree-like white constructed metal object with a cardboard sign stating the bleeding obvious - “Welcome to the Desert of the Real” – scrawled in homage again of Forced Entertainment and a red pulpit for sermonising (whose need became apparent upon subsequent researching of the Bible in the story of The Fall in conjunction with British poet Ted Hughes’ “Crow” whose work has powerfully resonated since I first read it, in particular “Apple Tragedy”) a “satisfying” mis-en-scene whose aesthetic qualities was reminiscent of a Samuel Beckett -Societas Rafaello Sanzio- Robert Wilson meets Grotowski’s “Poor Theatre” had been created.
.
This “Apple Tragedy” of Ted Hughes’ poem is appropriated to take place in a public bar (The Garden of Eden), where God relates the “new game” he has invented to the serpent.They then start drinking apple cider and get drunk with Adam and Eve, seducing each other, until everything starts going awry-well, to hell.
Movement was developed for the serpent by equating “The serpent…more crafty than any wild creature that the LORD God had made.” with a repetitive endurance piece previously performed based on the slimy, snake-like personality of influential Sydney media mogul Alan Jones. Legless and only travelling raised on forearms, images of paraplegics or war-victims were also evoked before decaying into the slithering of the snake in film director Shohei Imamura’s “Japan” segment of the film “11’09”01”.
After the study of a murder of crows on the Victoria University Footscray Park campus, I visited Melbourne Zoo as an assignment for an improvisational acting class with Ranters Theatre’s Adriano Cortese and observed birds. Here a peculiar madness was identified in their lack of freedom. One, which seemed, somehow to concur with the poem’s predicament and existence, being in language.
The discovery of god appearing before Abraham to relay how his covenant shall be kept through the circumcision of the flesh of the foreskin of the PENIS! in the Christian Holy Bible was appropriated as well as the projection of his future as father with his wife (whose name Sarah just happens to coincide with my first “true” love who has been residing in New York City since 1997)and that they would be the parents of all nations.
A desk was now placed with the chair; a place tabled for surgery upon the body as well as reading and writing of language upon it with a white sheet evoking Renaissance paintings.
Personal writings from Artaud to his lovers Genica Athanasiou and Cecille Schramme were appropriated for a static, frenetic reading with the intention to introduce a confessional factual-auto-biographical element in stillness.
The footage was edited together for presentation to the supervisor of the project Barry Laing.
It was at this time the footage was also viewed by master director Ben Cittadini who would become known as “The Phantom-(…the ghost who walks…directing without detecting his presence…”) who offered his services in order to develop the work with a different perspective.
Our first meeting was one of much trepidation on my part, for such is the esteem held in regard to this man borne of Italian blood. We discussed my intentions and the content of the work and its concepts. Concluding that a linear narrative would not indicate how the past remains present in future actions. Thus, it became apparent shifts should occur, constantly by utilising improvisational impulse techniques with the modes of being thus far; serpent-crow-me-Craig-man-mad-god-son.
In approaching the work this way, it would keep the performance, alive and fresh in the moment whilst perpetually revealing a past that is haunting this now, currently happening, being propelled into the future.
The text has to be re-learnt.
These states were proposed as a certain shape shifting.
It was suggested I find an action to play at the audience- “I want them to carry me”.
Struggling with the difficult problem of becoming a shape shifter was akin to learning percussion in which one must separate yet integrate multiple actions simultaneously.
The idea of forming this language and finding it in the physicality of the mouth and tongue was introduced. To receive letters from an improvisational impulse that comes from the gut.
“First the belly. It is the belly that silence must begin…on the spot of hernial obstructions, the place where surgeons operate…It is in the
belly that the breath descends and creates its void from which it hurls it TO THE TOP OF THE LUNGS…Now, from the void of my belly I have reached the void which menaces the top of the lungs…the void on the belly…brought forth in me the image of that scream armed for war ( the war I want to make comes from the war that is made on me.), that terrible subterranean cry.
For this scream I must fall…”
This is a Masculine, NEUTERed (“heavy and fixed”), attempting “a terrible feminine (“thundering and terrible, like the baying of an incredible mastiff, squat as the cavernous columns, dense as the air that immures the gigantic vaults of the underground cavern.
I cry out in the dream,
But I know that I am dreaming,
And over BOTH SIDES OF THE DREAM
I make my will prevail.
…
But with this stricken scream, to scream I must fall.
…Into a tunnel and…I can never get out.
Never again into the masculine.” )The cry of the revolt that is trampled underfoot, of anguish armed for war, of the demand for justice.
It is the groan of an abyss that is opened: the wounded earth cries out, but voices are raised, deep as the bottom of the abyss, voices which are the bottom of the abyss crying.
…
It is the scream of the wounded warrior who brushes past the broken walls with a drunken sound of glass.
I fall.
…but I am not afraid,
I give up my fear in the sound of rage, in a solemn roaring.”
From Artaud’s “Theatre of the Seraphim”.
What is this “heavy and fixed”, threatening, ominous, sensual, sexual, mad retarded feeling, I cannot clasp, grasp, come to grips with?
I struggle to find the beginning, this beginning, the first words-“this is a fucking sad story”-which are not mine, which I thought had ended or closed and have now been cracked apart, wide open. Like a wound. THE PHANTOM remonstrates me “WHY THE FUCK IS IT A SAD STORY…AND WHO GIVES A FUCK…WHO WOULD?…WHY GIVE A FUCK ABOUT YOU?…you cannot assume how we are going to feel…”
This is really starting…to really hurt.
Really.
I thought it was before, alone.
Now, it is just humiliating.
A challenge requiring real courage and will of engagement.
This is now the work.
And it is just the tip of the ice-berg of this process.
The action changes - “I want you, the audience, to thank me…”- it is suggested with a sense of wonder…no, THE PHANTOM replies, “try shame, because you think you will save us, all the audience, that you want to save everyone a lot of time, but then again, what the fuck would you know?”
My confidence is shattered and my faith is in doubt.
I am falling.
I fall.
Into despair.
Kiekergaard’s sickness unto death.
The Phantom Ben Cittadini is seemingly frustrated with his energy thwarted by my tired lethargy.
What is this listless unwillingness?
Where is the energy?
Its intensity?
Drop into it
Just be.
Let all that other shit go.
Forget habits.
Remember to break rythms.
Stop moving and speaking as a just- doing-something as a distraction, from fear.
Do not feel there is a need to fill the void.
It is not empty with nothingness.
LET IT EXIST.
For in it, you will find yourself, as a mirrored reflection of us.
All.
Do. Not think.
Do not be afraid.
We get there.
I .DO.
Now, for a second act.
Something is insisting itself- in its non-existence.
Artaud’s short play “Jet de Sang”(Spurt of Blood”).
A second act is discussed to a point of stillness.
Prior images are suggested, summoning fucking gyrations, a birth, a cosmic soup, finger tips showering the body, sensual, sexual kissing, sucking, a scream that might be silenced, a metamorphosis- Kafka’s bug, Roger Callois’s praying mantis, a figure blinded with hands that want to touch and not see, a fascist drawing a long bow whilst slitting throats, a dead madman grasping, clasping at what?…things, symbols, letters, words, language, numbers, names, ideologies, vacant, absent, invisibilities, subjects, objects, projects, voids, worlds, people, places, concepts, the dead, the dying, spirits, gods, atoms…all twisted beyond , meaning, understanding, knowledge, comprehension, but connected in a thread the shape of a mobius strip.
And thus, this is the 1st semester Honour’s Research Project “le petit mort” Progress Report thus far.
nothing, something, everything, anything
I have had a revelation of Artaud
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posted by ROARAWAR FEARTATA & PoPoCCCCaTePeTL at 12:49 PM
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