Performing Arousal: Precarious Bodies and Frames of Representation 9781350155633, 9781350155664, 9781350155657

Table of contents :
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Figures
Acknowledgments
Body and Arousal: On Social, Cultural, Scientific, and Artistic Experiment: Introduction
Part I: Pleasured Body
Chapter 1: Kokoschka’s Fetish: Violence, Puppetness, and the Female Simulacrum as Mediated Body/Object in the Central European Avant-Garde
Chapter 2: Dalí’s Dream of Venus: Sex, Surrealism, and Disability at the 1939 New York World’s Fair
Chapter 3: Blood and Desire: Collaborating through Arousal
Chapter 4: Getting Lippy with the Patriarchy: Contemporary Women Artists’ “Lip Art” 
Chapter 5: Transformation and Arousal: The Pleasure of Performative Indeterminacy in Persona Theatre Company’s Phaedra I—
Part II: Political Body
Chapter 6: Höch’s Weimar and Wilhelm: Rundschau’s Avant-Garde Reframing
Chapter 7: The Dissonance of Resonating Bodies and the Collisions of Reality Friction: Structures of Ambiguity in Christoph Schlingensief’s Bitte liebt Österreich
Chapter 8: The Sacrificed Young Woman: Necropolitics and Patriarchy in Koffi Kwahulé’s Bintou
Chapter 9: Pussy Riot’s Radical Acts: Transgressive Bodies in Performance and the Ghosting of the Russian Avant-Garde
Chapter 10: Body as Site for Feminist Theatrical Discourse: A Pedagogic and Performative Experiment with Arousing Images by Anuradha Kapur
Chapter 11: Both Sides, Now: Between Narratives of Decline and Gestures of Care
Part III: Abject Body
Chapter 12: The Knee, the Elbow, the Face: On Body as Abject in Vladimir Nabokov’s Visual Imagination 
Chapter 13: Trauma, Ethics, and the Puppet Body in Handspring Puppet Company
Chapter 14: “Upside Down”: The Rough Play of Narcissister’s Avant-Porn
Chapter 15: Queer Epistemologies in the Making of Queer Makishi: Visibility, Trans-position, and Devised Performance Practice
Chapter 16: Island Icarus: Signaling through the Flames as Critical Performance Design
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Performing Arousal

Methuen Drama Engage offers original reflections about key practitioners, movements and genres in the fields of modern theatre and performance. Each volume in the series seeks to challenge mainstream critical thought through original and interdisciplinary perspectives on the body of work under examination. By questioning existing critical paradigms, it is hoped that each volume will open up fresh approaches and suggest avenues for further exploration. Series Editors Mark Taylor-Batty University of Leeds, UK Enoch Brater University of Michigan, USA Titles Brecht and Post-1990s British Drama Anja Hartl ISBN 978-1-3501-7278-4 Drag Histories, Herstories and Hairstories: Drag in a Changing Scene Volume 2 Edited by Mark Edward and Stephen Farrier ISBN 978-1-3501-0436-5 Contemporary Drag Practices and Performers: Drag in a Changing Scene Volume 1 Edited by Mark Edward and Stephen Farrier ISBN 978-1-3500-8294-6 Performing the Unstageable: Success, Imagination, Failure Karen Quigley ISBN 978-1-3500-5545-2 Drama and Digital Arts Cultures David Cameron, Michael Anderson and Rebecca Wotzko ISBN 978-1–472-59219–4 Social and Political Theatre in 21st-Century Britain: Staging Crisis Vicky Angelaki ISBN 978-1–474-21316–5 Watching War on the Twenty-First-Century Stage: Spectacles of Conflict Clare Finburgh ISBN 978-1-472-59866-0 Fiery Temporalities in Theatre and Performance: The Initiation of History Maurya Wickstrom ISBN 978-1-4742-8169-0 For a complete listing, please visit https​:/​/ww​​w​.blo​​omsbu​​ry​.co​​m​/ser​​ies​/m​​ethue​​n​-d​ra​​ma​-en​​gage/​

Performing Arousal Precarious Bodies and Frames of Representation

Edited by Julia Listengarten and Yana Meerzon Series Editors: Mark Taylor-Batty and Enoch Brater

METHUEN DRAMA Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, METHUEN DRAMA and the Methuen Drama logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 Copyright © Julia Listengarten, Yana Meerzon, and contributors, 2022 Julia Listengarten and Yana Meerzon have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. viii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Series design by Louise Dugdale Cover image: I-Witness, photo collage from An Exorcism © Penny Slinger, 1977. All Rights Reserved, DACS/Artimage 2020. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-5563-3 ePDF: 978-1-3501-5565-7 eBook: 978-1-3501-5564-0 Series: Methuen Drama Engage Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www​.bloomsbury​.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgments

vii viii

Body and Arousal: On Social, Cultural, Scientific, and Artistic Experiment: Introduction 1 Julia Listengarten and Yana Meerzon Part One  Pleasured Body 1

Kokoschka’s Fetish: Violence, Puppetness, and the Female Simulacrum as Mediated Body/Object in the Central European Avant-Garde 13 Tim Butler Garrett 2 Dalí’s Dream of Venus: Sex, Surrealism, and Disability at the 1939 New York World’s Fair 27 Keri Watson 3 Blood and Desire: Collaborating through Arousal 41 Alissa Clarke 4 Getting Lippy with the Patriarchy: Contemporary Women Artists’ “Lip Art” 58 Lara Cox 5 Transformation and Arousal: The Pleasure of Performative Indeterminacy in Persona Theatre Company’s Phaedra I— 72 Avra Sidiropoulou Part Two  Political Body 6

Höch’s Weimar and Wilhelm: Rundschau’s Avant-Garde Reframing 89 J. Brandon Pelcher

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The Dissonance of Resonating Bodies and the Collisions of Reality Friction: Structures of Ambiguity in Christoph Schlingensief ’s Bitte liebt Österreich 102 Tony Perucci 8 The Sacrificed Young Woman: Necropolitics and Patriarchy in Koffi Kwahulé’s Bintou 117 Selim Rauer 9 Pussy Riot’s Radical Acts: Transgressive Bodies in Performance and the Ghosting of the Russian Avant-Garde 131 Julia Listengarten 10 Body as Site for Feminist Theatrical Discourse: A Pedagogic and Performative Experiment with Arousing Images by Anuradha Kapur 146 Indu Jain 11 Both Sides, Now: Between Narratives of Decline and Gestures of Care 160 Alvin Eng Hui Lim Part Three Abject Body 12 The Knee, the Elbow, the Face: On Body as Abject in Vladimir Nabokov’s Visual Imagination 177 Yana Meerzon 13 Trauma, Ethics, and the Puppet Body in Handspring Puppet Company 192 Dawn Tracey Brandes 14 “Upside Down”: The Rough Play of Narcissister’s Avant-Porn 206 Rebecca Clark 15 Queer Epistemologies in the Making of Queer Makishi: Visibility, Trans-position, and Devised Performance Practice 220 Johann Robert Wood 16 Island Icarus: Signaling through the Flames as Critical Performance Design 234 Dorita Hannah Notes on Contributors Index

251 255

Figures  3.1 Old Fashioned, 1969–77  5.1 Phaedra I— 10.1 Dark Things 15.1 Johann Robert Wood’s digital image collage from his devised short film Queer Makishi 16.1 Island Icarus/PhoneHome

52 80 155 223 235

Acknowledgments This book took its initial inspiration from the theme of the 2018 American Society for Theatre Research Conference: Arousal: Theatre, Performance, Embodiment. Questions concerning arousal in performance guided our conception of the seminar “Arousing Images in Avant-Garde(s): Precarious Bodies and Frames of Representation,” which we organized for the annual conference of American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) in March 2019. This seminar, which was supported by the travel grants from the Faculty of Arts, University of Ottawa, and the School of Performing Arts, University of Central Florida, laid the foundation for the current volume. Our book would not have come to fruition without generous support and labor of many academics, artists, students, and administrators. We would like to profoundly thank them for sharing their time, scholarship, and expertise. We are particularly grateful to our students Sage Tokach at the University of Central Florida and Aisling Murphy at the University of Ottawa, who spent countless hours helping us with style editing, working on the technical aspects of the manuscript, communicating with the contributing authors, and outlining the introduction. Our special thanks go to the Methuen series editors and Bloomsbury publishers. Enoch Brater and Mark Taylor-Batty, the editors of the Engage series, offered invaluable feedback that helped shape the collection. Anna Brewer, Senior Commissioning Editor at Methuen Drama, and Meredith Benson, Assistant Editor at Methuen Drama and the Arden Shakespeare, and Bloomsbury Publishing were enthusiastic about the project from its conception and supported it through the entire process. We are indebted to all of them for their insight and encouragement. Finally, we would like to thank our families for their unconditional love and lasting patience. Without their continuous support, this book would not have been possible.

Body and Arousal: On Social, Cultural, Scientific, and Artistic Experiment Introduction Julia Listengarten and Yana Meerzon

In Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, Judith Butler discusses the power of images to capture the precariousness of the human condition and the danger of arousal these images might invoke (2006). Drawing on this complicated relationship between arousing images and the frames of their representability, this book considers arousal as a mode of theoretical and artistic inquiry to encourage new ways of staging and examining bodies in performance across artistic disciplines, modern history, and cultural contexts. “Arousal” comes with several interrelated meanings; it denotes both one’s sexual excitement and the state of awakening, which can be interpreted literally, as waking from sleep, and figuratively, as being politically and culturally engaged. Looking at traditional drama and theatre, but also visual art, performance activism, and arts-based community engagement, this collection explores what constitutes arousal in a variety of connotations. It examines arousal as a project of social, cultural, scientific, and artistic experimentation, and it discusses how our perception of arousal has transformed over the last century. Addressing “what arouses” in relation to the ethics of representation and mediatization of bodies in performance, the book asks several research questions. What are the connections between arousal and pleasures of voyeurism in looking at a disfigured, racialized, or over-sexualized body? How does arousal help turn this body into a mediated object or the abject? How do context and frame of representation change from images of war, destruction, and terror, as depicted in the early avantgarde, to mediatized images of violence in contemporary culture? In response to these questions, the volume offers a multidisciplinary look at different performance practices and a range of theoretical, historical, and applied contexts, as well as global perspectives, to explore the relationship between arousal and the precarious body. The notion of precarity guides

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the book’s examinations of displacement, marginalization, and invisibility of the body in performance. Inspired by questions about identity crisis, belonging, and loss of self, the following chapters draw attention to the precarity of living in early- to mid-twentieth-century avant-garde and contemporary contexts, within one country and across continents. They employ contemporary postcolonial and feminist lenses to challenge the representation of the objectified and invisibilized body. Discussing the ethics and politics of representing precarity, the collection also addresses the semiotic and phenomenological materiality of the performing/performed body as a fetishized, racialized, idealized, fragmented, and displaced object. Building on and challenging existing scholarship on the role of the body in performance, the collection demonstrates how the body remains the most contested territory of signification and artistic experiment, and it underscores the power of a bodily speech act (Butler 2015) as a foundation of politically engaged performance. In Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Butler theorizes performativity and political impact of a public gathering generated by people who come together (intentionally or otherwise) to express their politics and will to act. As her point of departure, Butler uses J. L. Austin’s theory of performativity of a speech act and Hannah Arendt’s statement that politics requires both a space of appearance and bodies to appear within this space (Butler 2015: 155). For Arendt, bodily appearance is merely “a precondition of speaking” because only an act of verbal expression can be counted as political action (Butler 2015: 155). But, for Butler, the political authority of “we” originates in the “plural movement of bodies” (2015: 156), which come together and manifest as an assembly. People’s spontaneous and voluntary appearance in the public space serves as a nonverbal or bodily speech act (Butler 2015: 9); it asserts their right to appear and belong to this space, but it also leaves them vulnerable to authorities. “How is precarity enacted and opposed in sudden assemblies?” Butler asks (2015: 22). A bodily speech act informs the politics of the assembly: it allows our expressive will for freedom to be manifested in our time. Like the illocutionary power of Austin’s speech act, in which the action is performed by making a linguistic statement, the body that appears in the public space makes a political impact through its materiality and lived experience (Butler 2015: 10). Even before we talk, the physicality and the semiotics of our arrival into the space of visibility create the performative gesture of resistance and protest. Bodies “assert and enact themselves by speech or silence, by action or steady inaction, by gesture, by gathering together as a group of bodies in public space, organized by infrastructure— visible, audible, tangible, exposed in ways both deliberate and unwilled,

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interdependent in forms both organized and spontaneous” (156). Bodily assemblies serve “as a political enactment . . . distinct from speech” (155); they make claims before “utter[ing] any words” (156). Bodily speech act can also be understood in terms of provocation and arousal, politically and artistically. To demonstrate the connection between the ways in which bodies and bodily speech act function in contemporary performance, this book takes several chronological detours. It analyzes instances of cultural and theatrical performance that belong to the early European avant-garde, focusing on the artistic (mis)representation of “ideal bodies” as spearheaded by experiments in genetics in the 1920s and 1930s, modernist avant-garde’s fascination with puppets that corresponded to the uncanny representations of the female body, Antonin Artaud’s contemplation of arousal and affect as a way of communicating the intensity of a tragic moment, and Dada artists’ reframing of violence and trauma to evoke scorn for corrupt political power. The collection examines “the explicit body in performance” (Schneider 1997) as manifested in art activism, explores performances of the body in postcolonial cultures, and considers the intersections of the live body on stage with object-driven or digital theatre practices. Grappling with the political impact of presenting aroused female and queer bodies, the book highlights conversation on borders and intersectionality. Borders—geographic, social, political, or private—demarcate both a sense of rupture and connectivity. In their geopolitical functions, borders map out a territory; they protect and unite the people who live on it, but they also separate one group from another. In their figurative dimensions, borders denote an internal split that situates anyone at the crossroads as a subject of intersectionality (Crenshaw 1989)—the condition that denotes ways in which race and gender, but also religious practices, class, and linguistic competence, interact to shape one’s social, economic, and political experiences. Intersectionality collides with what Sara Ahmed calls strangerfetishism, which begins with our recognition of the stranger as an alien (2000: 2). A product of the culture of fear, an anxiety of “being related to, and separated from, particular bodily others” (42), stranger-fetishism takes many forms, but it always comes back to our perception of the skin of the other as “a visual signifier of difference” (44). The skin is a “scene of the play of differences” and a border that envelops and keeps the other within (45). This book studies this deeply internalized sense of intersectionality, rupture, and difference, which foregrounds the materiality of every performative reenactment of arousal and reimagines the actor’s stage presence as a bodily speech act. For a considerable period of time, theatre and performance scholarship has studied the work of the body on stage. Recently, theatre scholars, acting

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teachers, theatre practitioners, and performance artists offered numerous methodologies of actor training, insights into making devised performance and physical theatre, and approaches to representation with the body at the forefront of their thinking and practice. In Theatre & the Body (2010), Colette Conroy explores the body as a paradigm or conceptual framework “for the understanding of human relationships with the world” (7). This collection uses Conroy’s statement as a point of departure and expands this conversation into interdisciplinary artistic practices and critical investigations. It acknowledges, but also challenges, the impact that the performance of arousal can make, specifically within political performance. Thinking of arousal as a mechanism of affect and body as an instrument of populist performance, if not manipulation of the masses, this book theorizes that bodies often perform/are performed as mediated objects, as well as racialized, marginalized, gendered, and queered entities—the subjects of arousal across cultural, geographic, and disciplinary borders. In this effort, the book echoes the special issue “The Body in Performance,” edited by Patrick Campbell for Contemporary Theatre Review (vol. 10 issue 3 [2000]) and republished in 2014 as an e-book, which discusses body in performance in the conceptual frames of (self-)censorship and representation, violence and rape, as well as the difficult questions of authenticity and mimesis on stage. Guided by similar perspectives in this special issue, but also by new questions concerning the ways the body functions as an object and a subject in cross-cultural and interdisciplinary performance spaces, our contributors present their critical considerations through the lens of twenty-first-century politics, theatre, performance, and cultural practice. The book is organized into three sections: “Pleasured Body,” “Political Body,” and “Abject Body.” The five chapters in Part One engage with avantgarde and contemporary practices in visual art, puppetry, performance art, and theatre to explore the performative possibilities of the pleasured body and rethink the representations of embodied desire in nonnormative contexts. Tim Butler Garrett’s chapter discusses the avant-garde’s fascination with female simulacra as objects of arousal. Using Oskar Kokoschka’s Alma Mahler doll as a compelling example of the fetishized, subjugated, and reviled female body created in the imagination of a male artist, Garrett argues that “female simulacra was . . . an exploration of male fears of emasculation, feminization, and what constituted male identity” (Garrett 25).1 Keri Watson’s chapter, “Dalí’s Dream of Venus: Sex, Surrealism, and Disability at the 1939 New York World’s Fair,” focuses on the problematic representation of female bodies in Salvador Dalí’s work. Watson examines how hypersexualized, tightly corseted, disabled female bodies, sculpted or painted by the Spanish surrealist for this event, reflected male fears of castration and disability but were also meant

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to encourage the voyeuristic masculine desire and affirm white, able-bodied heteronormativity. The next three chapters consider how contemporary women artists participate in a radical reimagining of sexuality, arousal, body, and gender to manifest women’s empowerment and challenge sexist and racist assumptions about the female body in visual and performance art. In “Blood and Desire: Collaborating through Arousal,” Alissa Clarke discusses the feminist work of British counterculture performance artists Penny Slinger and Amanda Feilding, arguing that their fearless, at times harrowing, sexually explicit acts and images, which intertwined the visceral with the intellectual, the transgressive with the spiritual, offered an alternative model of collaboration and embodied gendered self-sufficiency and self-determination. Lara Cox’s chapter interrogates the notion of “lip art” through the examples of three contemporary women artists: Agnieszka Polska, Zineb Sedira, and Ellen Gallagher. Cox examines how these artists, in their liberatory artistic practice, confront the objectifying sexual gaze in the cultural contexts of postcommunist Eastern Europe, postcolonial Britain and France, and racially divided contemporary America, and perform their identity by reclaiming the eroticism of their lips. The section concludes with Avra Sidiropoulou’s exploration of pleasure for performer and spectator in a transformative moment of shared sexual tension and fleeting exchange of gazes. Reflecting on her production of Phaedra I— at Athens-based Persona Theatre Company, she discusses how the production’s interplay between the corporeal body and its digital counterpart, “between live and digital presence and absence” (Sidiropoulou 74), reinvigorated the performance of arousal for the performer and heightened the experience of pleasure for the audience. Part Two of this volume discusses body and arousal as not only “the raw material to be ordered by politics, but the battleground on which, and the weapon with which, politics is fought” (Pelcher 89). J. Brandon Pelcher examines Dada performances, including their photo montages, in the framework of violence, trauma, (re)framing, and representation. Focusing on the impact of Weimar Germany’s politics on the work of Dada artists, he demonstrates how their reframing of precarious bodies and bodies in power aroused condemnation and performed critical interventions against “politically authorized violence” (90). Tony Perucci continues this conversation about body and arousal in political contexts using Christoph Schlingensief ’s performance intervention Bitte liebt Österreich as his case study to interrogate the idea of framing and truth in performance. Discussing performances that not only mobilize the collapse of reality but also implicate spectators in (re)making this reality, he traces his argument

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to the radical theatre of the 1960s and argues that this form of performance which he terms “reality frictions” orchestrates each body to join in making or remaking performance as politically aroused and engaged. Questions of necropolitcs, post-traumatic memories of colonialism, and Marronage “poetics of detour” (Rauer 117) are at the center of Selim Rauer’s chapter on the body as “a border-space” (125). Rauer argues that in Bintou, a play written by Ivorian writer Koffi Kwahulé, the body of the young woman—the virgin— is “perceived as a spiritual and carnal space on which patriarchy can exert an exemplary hegemony” (125); her body is exploited as “an inexistent bodyreality that becomes a space of projection of desires and symbols” (128). The next two chapters offer examples of radical feminist practices that draw attention to the precarity of women artists as political activists. Julia Listengarten’s chapter explores performances of the political and politicized female body, discussing the transnational work of the Russian performance art group Pussy Riot. Calling Pussy Riot’s performances radical acts that reveal “the invisible and silenced, . . . revolt against systems of power, . . . upset existing frames of representation, and . . . arouse confusion, anger, shock, and condemnation” (Listengarten 132), Listengarten underscores the possibility of the body’s becoming “a powerful focus of transgression and critical investigation” (137). She also traces historical analogies between the Russian avant-garde and Pussy Riot’s provocations and considers how Pussy Riot uses the female performer’s body to “blend cultural iconographies, break down geographic borders, and draw parallels between different histories of oppression” (142). In the next chapter, “Body as Site for Feminist Theatrical Discourse,” Indu Jain analyzes body and arousal as a pedagogical and performative experiment, which defines the work of Indian feminist theatre director Anuradha Kapur. Comparing Kapur to Antigone, as the theatre director negotiates her beliefs in “progressive feminism and sexual politics within institutional spaces” (Jain 146), Jain posits that Kapur’s artistic project is “to excavate as well as liberate history through performers’ bodies” (151), specifically the bodies of women. This project informs Kapur’s pedagogy, which she turns into an act of resistance to “generate hope and spearhead the crucial questions of agency, equal rights, and the politics of responsibility” (Jain 150) in today’s India. Alvin Eng Hui Lim’s chapter “Both Sides, Now: Between Narratives of Decline and Gestures of Care” closes this section. It looks at the increased precarity of aging bodies, “inequality, insecurity, and risk in later life in terms of health, social connections, and financial security” (Lim 160). In discussing Both Sides, Now, a community-based performance project from Singapore, Lim engages with Elinor Fuchs’s notion of “decline narrative,” which can signify “a process of being vulnerable,” and demonstrates how Augusto

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Boal’s theatre practice, specifically his call for spect-actors, can be helpful in arousing “communal gestures of care and concern” (Lim 162). Part Three of this volume consists of five chapters that address (whether directly or indirectly) Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject. Yana Meerzon’s contribution discusses abject body as otherness and strangeness that can be both seductive and repulsive and that can “arouse our desire to cross the border between I and the Other but also prevents us to become one with this other self ” (Meerzon 178). Meerzon’s case study is the dramaturgy of the RussianAmerican writer Vladimir Nabokov, which reflects his personal trauma of exile. In his dream-like and often irrational theatre, Nabokov “de-automatizes our perception and introduces drive for the abject as a strategy to experience his work” (Meerzon 181); the characters of his exilic plays often emerge as fragmented and distorted shapes, the disjointed automata of loss and displacement. Dawn Tracey Brandes shifts the discussion of the abject to the ethics of performing trauma in puppet theatre. Looking at the work of South African Handspring Puppet Company and their project Ubu and the Truth Commission, Brandes considers puppetry an art form that can “enable a theatrical engagement with trauma that neither fetishizes the survivors nor deindividuates their suffering” (Brandes 203). Trauma—“whether physical or psychic—always contains an element of theatricality” (195), often encouraging a voyeuristic gaze, if not arousal and fetishism. Puppets, however, “resist this kind of bodily arousal . . . functioning as ‘metaphors’ rather than flesh and blood human beings” (Brandes 196), while their performances can arouse profound ethical responsibility in the audience. The following two chapters challenge the audience’s fascination with a fetishized body, often a product of the white heteronormative fantasy and desire. Rebecca Clark investigates the interplay between live and embodied inanimate objects in their relation to arousal by introducing Narcissister, “a Brooklyn-based artist, photographer, and ‘avant-porn’ burlesque performer, whose work probes the erotics of the inorganic and the arousal of abstraction” (Clark 206). Contemplating the balance between performing a burlesque act and playing a sex doll, Narcissister investigates arousal as a source of the comic and of the uncanny—bringing us back to Garrett’s discussion of Kokoschka’s doll. Exploring analogies to the sex doll and a Barbie doll in Narcissister’s performance, Clark asks “what this work by a masked, mixedrace woman can tell us about the pornographic titillation of abstraction and the self-enjoyment of the object” (207). Next, Johann Robert Wood reflects on creating his solo work Queer Makishi, reframing the discussion of a fetishized body to employ the lenses of queer epistemologies and transposition to challenge the conception of “the Black body as merely a grotesque spectacle with little to no difference than seeing a puppet or an animal for

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entertainment” (Wood 222). He positions his argument in the framework of autobiographical theatre, in which “my body [becomes] discourse—a way of thinking . . . a point of tension between myself and other bodies— myself and the world” (226). The internalized intersectionality that we introduced defines Wood’s bodily speech act, revealing how he “wrestle[s] with mixedness, not to ‘transcend’ or ‘eradicate,’ but to make visible a Crenshawian ‘intersectionality’ that emphasizes the ontology of being both Black and biracial” (Wood 222). Dorita Hannah’s closing chapter, “Island Icarus: Signaling through the Flames as Critical Performance Design,” points to the connections between the ideologies of the early European avant-garde and contemporary political performance and analyzes her own multidisciplinary work that weaves together reality (a tragic act of Omid Masoumali’s self-immolation), immersive performance experiences, and site-immersive and site-specific video installations. “Drawing links between the drastic gesture of selfimmolation and Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty,” Hannah expounds on Artaud’s vision of the precarious body as an arousing image and contemplates the complicated trajectory “from ‘presentational’ protest action to media dissemination of its ‘representational’ images and the eventual ‘re-presentational’ form as performative exhibit” (Hannah 244). *  *  * In 2021, nearly three years since we started working on this collection— and more than a year into the Covid-19 pandemic—we have developed a heightened awareness of vulnerability in our physical world, but also in a digital space of cyber-bodies. The novel coronavirus made clear how easily the spaces of our usual habitat—physical and digital—can be compromised and how this can affect our feeling of safety (or danger) in daily life. Digital communication became the only way to connect. Grateful for being able to collaborate with our contributing authors via Zoom or email, in the absence of live performance events or communal gatherings, we treasured our conversations about the aesthetics and politics of performance, the materiality and the semiotics of the body on stage. This book has become our celebration of a living body in performance on and off stage, in the form of installation or protest, community engagement, or dramatic play. It is also an invitation to consider the potential of arousal— aesthetic and otherwise—for creating new communities, for rebuilding old ones, and for thinking and acting together against prejudice, the danger of misrepresentation, and violence on the precarious body.

Body and Arousal

Note 1 All the citations by the contributing authors in this introduction come from their respective chapters in the current volume.

References Ahmed, S. (2000), Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality, London and New York: Routledge. Butler, J. (2006), Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, London and New York: Verso. Butler, J. (2015), Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Conroy, C. (2010), Theatre & the Body, London: Palgrave. Crenshaw, K. (1989), “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989(1): 8. Schneider, R. (1997), The Explicit Body in Performance, London and New York: Routledge.

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Part One

Pleasured Body

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Kokoschka’s Fetish Violence, Puppetness, and the Female Simulacrum as Mediated Body/Object in the Central European Avant-Garde Tim Butler Garrett

The history of men’s interactions with female simulacra tracks uncomfortably closely to that of their perception and treatment of real, living women. When we discuss arousing images and precarious bodies, we find ourselves referring to arousing images for the delectation of the male gaze, and the precarious bodies are almost invariably female—the man as the subject, the woman as the object.1 To understand the development of this phenomenon, we must look to its roots in the art and culture of fin de siècle (turn of the century) Europe, where a fascination with objects and the body as object became key interests of modernist and avant-garde art and theatre practice. This chapter examines some of the key figures in this modernist engagement with female simulacra as objects of arousal—distorted, uncanny representations that were alternately idolized and reviled. Urban centers all over central Europe spawned their own theorists and practitioners who contributed to a pan-European modernist avant-garde movement. This study particularly focuses on ideas that developed and flourished in Vienna, which, at the turn of the century, was a crucible of art and culture, where ideas around psychology, sex, gender, performance, and the puppetesque were bubbling to the surface.2 While drawing on the constellation of Freud, Weininger, Klimt, and others, this study has a locus in the strange and revealing case of Oskar Kokoschka and the simulacrum of his lover, which became a performing object—a work of art which illuminates much about the era’s conflicted attitude toward women, objects, and power.

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Oskar Kokoschka’s Fetish Oskar Kokoschka (1886–1980) was an Austrian artist and writer who began his career as part of the Wiener Werkstätte, a protégé of Carl Otto Czeschka, and contemporary of Egon Schiele. Having already gained notoriety for his visual art, he courted further controversy with what has been called the first expressionistic drama: his play Murderer, Hope of Women (1909), followed by the very puppetesque Sphinx and Strawman (subtitled “A Comedy for Automatons”). Fêted by the founders of the Vienna Secession (the group who had broken away from the art establishment in Vienna), Kokoschka and Schiele represented the next generation of radical Viennese art as it moved from symbolism into expressionism. Perhaps an even greater accolade was that in 1912 he had become the lover of Alma Mahler. Alma exerted a powerfully attractive force on a number of key figures in Viennese and central European modernism—among them Gustav Klimt (her first kiss), Alexander Zemlinsky (her first lover), and Gustav Mahler (her first husband). Oskar and Alma’s union inspired some of his best work, and it was reluctantly that he left her to fight on the Eastern Front in 1915. Alma, however, soon found solace with one of the founders of the Bauhaus (and another old flame), Walter Gropius. Kokoschka, who had been shot in the head, took a bayonet to the lung, and was missing (presumed dead), spent an anguished year convalescing before returning to Vienna to find that the love of his life had moved on. What happened next could be interpreted in several ways: as the product of a mental breakdown; as an early piece of performance art; and perhaps as the (erotic) culmination of the artist’s fascination with simulacra. Put simply, Kokoschka’s response to his lover’s desertion was to commission a life-size replica doll of her. In 1918, he was put in touch with a doll maker in Berlin—Hermine Moos—and over the course of the next year, carried on an increasingly detailed correspondence with her over construction methods, materials, and appearance, sending her not just written notes but also paintings of Alma and scraps of fabric such as a swatch of silk he felt best approximated the feel of his ex-lover’s skin. That Kokoschka should have had this belief—that he could somehow replicate Alma, or even create an idealized version—should perhaps not be so surprising; it was quite congruous with the prevailing culture that idolized puppets, robots, and other simulacra. Kokoschka’s doll (or “the fetish,” as he called it), the replicate of Alma, was arguably somewhere between a doll and a puppet. He purchased haute couture clothes for it and had a maid change its attire regularly. Had he left it at that, one might see it as simply an intensely private act, a form of

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play therapy with a “transitional object” (Winnicott 1953). But Kokoschka was not content to keep his fetish private; it was resolutely a performing object. He would take the Alma doll to the opera with him and throw parties in its honor. Whether this was always the plan, we do not know. In the design and construction phase of this object, he exhibited almost a mania. He seemed to truly believe that the doll would be a replica of Alma down to the smallest detail; indeed, he writes that it is in the detail that the distinction between ideal form and grotesque monstrosity is found (Smith 2013: 122). But this dream of perfection required more than the technology or craft of the era could give. When the completed Alma doll finally arrived from Berlin in its packing crate, Kokoschka was in an ecstasy of anticipation. Like a child who realizes that the toy was much more alluring before it was opened, Kokoschka’s expectation and imagination were so powerful that he was almost inevitably disappointed with what he unwrapped. Like a dream upon waking, the erotic mania that had animated the doll in his imagination evaporated. But here, Kokoschka’s artistic impulse took over, and his relationship with the doll took on a performative aspect. If Kokoschka’s doll could not be the “high” perfect simulacrum he had hoped for, then it would be the “low”—the humorous, grotesque puppet, unsettling in its failed attempt at mimicking life. As well as appearing as his consort in public, through the early 1920s, the doll was featured in a number of Kokoschka’s drawings and paintings. Kokoschka’s fetish, his private act “staged” for a circle of friends, writers, and critics—indeed, a whole city—became an emblem of the era’s fascination with simulacra. Kokoschka’s “madness,” his work of art and creation of this performing object, did not emerge in isolation; he was a product of his time—of the milieu in which he was creating art. Indeed, as a great artist, he was in some senses not just a product but a distillation of his time. The following section examines the antecedents of Kokoschka’s doll and the ways in which the metaphor of the puppet could come to be used as a device to define and subjugate. The section “Between Misogyny and the Sphinx” explores the cultural context of the doll: the growing misogyny in Vienna, the varied depictions of female simulacra in the city, and the influence of Freud’s ideas about symbolism and the psyche. The section “Puppet or Castratrix” posits that there were two frames of representation operating in the culture, and a Freudian fear was at the root of the strategy to disempower women and frame their bodies as precarious. The conclusion looks at the “afterlife” of Kokoschka’s doll, discussing its re-emergence in the work of the surrealists and Hans Bellmer, as well as Kokoschka’s belated recognition of the meaning and impact of his experiment with the simulated Alma.

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From Kleist’s Graceful Object to Pygmalion’s Idol Since Heinrich von Kleist’s influential essay of 1810, “On the Marionette Theatre,” artists and writers had been inspired by the idea of the figure that embodied perfection. The central message of Kleist’s essay is that there is a transcendental state of “object-ness” for which the performer (the enlightened performer, at least) strives. It is an elusive but worthwhile goal because the lack of self-consciousness, which is at its core, will lead to a state of “grace.” This state of grace “appears to best advantage in that human bodily structure that has no consciousness at all—or has infinite consciousness—that is, in the mechanical puppet, or in the God” (Kleist 1989: 26). This elevation of the puppet and the object gained pace as romanticism transitioned into modernism, from Villiers de L’Isle-Adam’s Eve of the Future Eden to Offenbach and Barbier’s The Tales of Hoffmann; the plays and essays of Hofmannsthal, Bahr, and Schnitzler to the avant-garde figurentheater of Richard Teschner. Kleist’s essay had instigated a mode of thought that led to the body becoming a site of much meaning, projection, and fevered debate in the fin de siècle. For the Viennese architect and theorist Adolf Loos (1870–1933), the body was a performing object, an object with which different peoples in different times have performed their identity and continue to do so. For a great many artists and practitioners working in the avant-garde, the body, rather than the text, became the starting point and principal means of theatrical expression. The English director and theorist Edward Gordon Craig (1872–1966), who felt more at home in central Europe, went even further and proposed that the future of theatre was the übermarionette—either a literal puppet or a puppetesque actor, who was in some ways just one of the stage objects to be manipulated by the director as puppet master. As the fascination with mediated bodies/objects grew, stages across European capitals were filled with “living doll” shows, puppetized humans, and performances of simulation. For the modernists, it was the ideal trope to rejuvenate theatre and art. But the presentation of the body, particularly around the issue of gender and sex, still aroused a great deal of discomfort and fear. While Kokoschka’s performance with his doll was certainly the most radical and avant-garde response of its type, the general dynamic of the “relationship” was not without precedent and, in some ways, was emblematic of the apprehension and animosity wider society felt toward the newly empowered woman. The linking of bodies and objects (the making of the human body more like an object), and its reflection—the fascination with puppets and the animation of objects, which had provided such inspiration to theatre makers and theorists at the turn of the century, now assumed a darker connotation. The figure of

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the puppet could express two seemingly contradictory metaphors: that of the figure who has attained freedom (the “high,” characterized by Kleist as “grace”) and that of the subjugated, controlled figure (the “low,” and perhaps the more common use of the puppet metaphor, as in “puppet government” or “pulling the strings”). When this puppet metaphor was applied to women, it began to function—by accident or by design—as a means of subjugation, and a strand of the modernist avant-garde emerged which seemed to suggest this subjugation was a natural and desirable state of affairs. This curdling of the puppetesque ideals of Kleist and the avant-garde who followed him found particular resonance in the story of Pygmalion, a male creator who sculpts, controls, and fetishizes a female simulacrum, Galatea. Pygmalion, disgusted by the existence of prostitutes—not, it seems, out of concern for their well-being, but because they are shameless in their sexual appetites and exploitation of these appetites—sculpts his ideal woman from ivory. He falls in love with this “ideal,” and such is his devotion that Aphrodite, the goddess of love, animates his statue and makes her real. That this story should assume archetypal significance in relation to the avant-garde, and the way it processed that era’s conflicted feelings about women and power, in part stemmed from the changing status of women in the nineteenth century. In ever-greater numbers, women were pushing back against a patriarchal and religiously and politically conservative culture. While there were many men who supported this, there was also great resistance to women’s emancipation. The art of the era reflected this with increasing numbers of strong female characters in novels, plays, and visual art, except most of these “strong” women could not be strong in a traditional, uncomplicatedly heroic way that male characters got to be; the “strong” woman of the age was a “femme fatale.” Perhaps the most famous of these figures was Salome, the title character in Oscar Wilde’s 1891 play, which was a touchstone for the decadent imagination. Wilde had been inspired by Gustave Moreau’s painting, and the figure of Salome as temptress, man-eater, and emblem of unbridled female sexuality became a favored subject of Munch, Von Stuck, and other modernist avant-garde artists. Salome’s “Dance of the Seven Veils” (invented by Wilde) chimed with the new movements in dance, which emphasized expressiveness over virtuosity. The modernist avant-garde pioneered these antithetical frames of representation of women. On one side, woman is a puppetized (and idolized) being, like Galatea—a docile object who is essentially the creation of the man she is with. On the other, she is the femme fatale, a mysterious, alluring but sometimes deadly creature, a sphinx-like half-woman-half-beast, a heady mixture of the rational and the irrational. Nadine Sine notes how Edvard Munch’s self-portrait of 1903, which adopts the composition of a Salome/

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Judith painting, “clearly equated the images of Salome and the victim of her irrational, lustful revenge with those of contemporary woman and man (himself). He betrayed his own fears thereby and, it would seem, the fears of a great many men at the fin de siècle” (1988: 18). Kokoschka, enfant terrible of the Viennese avant-garde, tried to outmaneuver this male fin de siècle fear by casting himself as Pygmalion to Alma’s Galatea, by making a simulacrum of Alma that he could control and abuse—a passive object which would never hurt him. This element was perhaps a private performance, but it inevitably also functioned as a public one. Whether it was his intention or not, his performance with the Alma doll implicitly conveyed the message that he was the one in control; he was the puppet master. By performing with the simulated Alma, symbolically removing her agency, he was challenging the emotional and sexual agency of the real Alma, whose lifestyle marked her out as an emancipated woman. That Alma did not conform to the conservative notions of what a woman should be—that she could choose to discard one lover and take another— incited in Kokoschka a response that was echoed by society as a whole when a woman dared to step outside the frame of representation it had allocated her.

Between Misogyny and the Sphinx Vienna, at the turn of the century, was at the forefront of artistic and cultural trends of the era, yet it also contained the seeds of much of the worst that was to come in the twentieth century. Otto Weininger’s 1903 book Sex and Character built on earlier misogynist texts such as Möbius’s On the Physiological Deficiency of Women (1900) but introduced even more insidious elements—principally, the conflating of Jewishness, femininity, and moral decay. The book had a great impact in Vienna and beyond (some years later, the Nazis enthusiastically adopted certain elements of the book’s antisemitism), enhanced by the author’s suicide at the age of twenty-three. The turn of the century saw advocates of intolerance emboldened to the extent that an individual could claim to be a misogynist or an anti-Semite as if it were a perfectly reasonable or uncontroversial position to hold. As Ilona Sármány-Parsons suggests, the modernist avant-garde had not always been misogynistic; a distinction must be made between the younger Viennese artists and those of Klimt’s generation who did not fear women because they “had not experienced a sexual identity crisis, unlike the succeeding generation of expressionists” (2012: 226). Indeed, SármányParsons locates the advent of misogyny in Vienna as being 1905 or later, in large

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part because of “the remarkable influence of Otto Weininger.” Kokoschka and Schiele were in the insecure position of being “psychologically unbalanced adolescents, yet already recognized as prodigies” who “were exposed to fashionable sexual theories and whose artistic works were saturated with the then-popular misogyny” (Sármány-Parsons 2012: 227). The creation of the Alma doll might charitably be explained as a consequence of heartbreak or erotic mania, but the treatment of the doll which followed was marked by motifs of control, violence, and, undoubtedly, misogyny. By simulating Alma’s body and manipulating it, Kokoschka effectively rendered this body (and, by extension, Alma’s actual body) “precarious.” This reached its apotheosis in the coda to the story of the doll. One morning, the police were called to the street on which Kokoschka lived and were soon knocking on his door with questions about a bloody, mutilated, headless corpse found dumped outside his property. As it transpired, the corpse was actually the Alma doll, soaked with red wine and missing its head. At a raucous party the night before, a final act of violence had been enacted upon it, and the final vestiges of the spell seemed to have been broken. This turn-of-the-century misogyny was not unique to the young artists of Vienna. In Italy, the Manifesto of Futurism (1909), the key document of the Italian modernist avant-garde, took the ideal of the body as object and pushed it further, imagining the “creation of mechanical man with interchangeable parts. We’ll liberate him from the idea of death, and hence from death itself: a supreme definition of logical intelligence” (Marinetti 1909). This “logical intelligence” (a supposedly masculine attribute) stood in stark contrast to the feminine and Semitic weaknesses, as delineated by Weininger. As an unequivocally protofascist text, it also promised to “demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice” (Marinetti 1909). Vienna’s milieu encompassed conflicting ideologies and symbols; the “new” misogyny stood in stark contrast to the depictions of women which filled the city: heroic statues, suffering statues, eroticized statues—and in particular, sphinxes. The sphinx belongs in the category of female archetypes of ancient Greece, which also includes the Gorgons, harpies, Echidna, and the Erinyes: malevolent, dominant, castrating, hybrid-animal women. The hybridity is key; there is the good, human, rational part, and the bad, instinctive, irrational animal part. The implicit message of the myths is that “good” women are controlled in their behavior, submissive to men, maternal, and nurturing rather than sexually aggressive, whereas “bad” women are challenging, sexually autonomous, and animalistic. As Richard Caldwell notes, “it should be recognized that it is always the upper part which is human, while the lower is usually some animal with phallic associations”

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(1993: 153). Yet the sphinxes of Vienna do not necessarily reproduce this value judgment; indeed, what the statues depict are creatures unashamed of their sexual nature and strength. The ortgeist (spirit of the place) shapes the art and thought of that space and era in subtle but discernible ways. Sigmund Freud’s concepts of eros and thanatos (the sex drive and the death drive) and the uncanny (the feeling of unease at something that appears recognizable but is then made strange) were developed in a metropolis full of simulacra. In 1919, Freud captured the zeitgeist (and the ortgeist) with the publication of his essay Das Unheimliche, although, as Nathan Timpano notes, many of the painters and playwrights of turn-of-the-century Vienna were arguably the first to explore the idea through their use of puppets and dolls (2017: 168). The trauma of the war, the end of the empire, and the Spanish flu, which decimated the population, altered the face of Vienna, and the city must have appeared in many ways unheimliche (unhomely and uncanny). Who can say what the daily exposure to a multitude of sphinx statues might have on the unconscious of a man developing theories of personality, libido, male and female sex roles, and much more? For Freud, the art, mythology, and culture of ancient Greece provided a template—an inventory of archetypes—for the human psyche. The artistic milieu of Vienna in that era was greatly inspired by antiquity, from the historicism of the architecture on the Ringstrasse, with its Hellenistic Parliament building and statue of Pallas Athene in front, to the paintings of a succession of Viennese artists, including the hugely popular Hans Makart, whose style then influenced Klimt. Gender roles in antiquity bore great resemblance to those of the turn of the century, at least as far as the expectations and limitations imposed on women went: a respectable woman was essentially a second-class citizen, passive and without sexual agency. Yet so many of the neoclassical representations of women that proliferated in Vienna were of sphinxes and other sexually dominating females. While the religious and conservative culture prized submissive, dutiful women, the art and statuary of the city were transmitting a more subversive message: they were championing not the demure maiden or the nurturing hausfrau, but the femme fatale.

Puppet or Castratrix What the fin de siècle in fact witnessed were two competing narratives about the nature of gender, two frames of representation of women, and two frames of representation of precarious bodies. On one side were those who felt threatened by the unbridled sexuality of the newly empowered women; their

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strategy was to do everything they could to disempower this archetype, and part of the way this would be achieved was through the representation of women’s bodies as precarious bodies. Kokoschka’s Alma doll was, on some level, an attempt to disempower (in effigy) the body of the real Alma. On the other side were those who recognized the innate power of women and the fact that all bodies can be precarious. It was doubly threatening to the misogynists that not only might a woman’s body no longer be viewed as precarious but that a man’s body could appear as vulnerable and submissive. Indeed, there was a section of decadent avant-gardists for whom this frame of representation—dominant female, submissive male—was deeply arousing. Klimt reveled in portraying women with sexual agency—women who dominated and symbolically castrated men. But prior to Klimt, Vienna and the wider Austro-Hungarian Empire had already produced a figure who crystalized and eroticized this arousing image of the dominant woman. Leopold von Sacher-Masoch is now chiefly remembered for his short story Venus in Furs (1870), which was part of a longer series of novels setting out his view of human life and progress. Sacher-Masoch stands as almost a mirror image of Otto Weininger; where Weininger was a Jewish anti-Semite who denigrated women and everything he supposed the feminine represented, Sacher-Masoch was a gentile philoSemite for whom the dominant woman was life’s ideal. In Sacher-Masoch’s oeuvre, as in his personal life, the dynamic of the dominant woman and submissive man was a recurring theme. To this day, Wanda from Venus in Furs remains the prototypical sadomasochistic woman with a whip, and Sacher-Masoch’s name was co-opted by Richard von KrafftEbing (the groundbreaking psychologist and author of Psychopathia Sexualis [1886], which first described and named a number of “deviant” practices) to denote one who gets sexual or emotional pleasure from the reception of pain or humiliation. For Krafft-Ebing, masochism was a psychopathology; if so, it was a form of madness shared by increasing numbers of modernist and avant-garde artists and writers. Klimt’s Judith and the Head of Holofernes (1901) rejoiced in its presentation of the biblical heroine as a dominant, triumphant, femme fatale. As Klimt’s contemporary Felix Salten noted, this Judith was a figure “with sultry fire in her dark glances, cruelty in the lines of her mouth, and nostrils trembling with passion. Mysterious forces seem to be slumbering within this enticing female, energies and ferocities that would be unquenchable if what is stifled by bourgeois life were ever to burst into flame” (Salten, cited in O’Connor 2015: 52). Interestingly, the painting was often mistakenly called Salome, even though the contexts of the original stories are quite different. Klimt’s framing

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of the decapitation as an erotic act ties the two together in the imagination of the viewer. Freud’s analysis of the story of Judith came to a similar conclusion: “Beheading is well-known to us as a symbolic substitute for castrating; Judith is accordingly the woman who castrates the man who has deflowered her, which was just the wish the newly-married woman expressed in the dream I reported” (Freud, cited in Sine 1988: 25). The femme fatale so beloved of the modernist avant-garde was, at its core, a castratrix, striking at men’s bodies, genitals, and sense of themselves. Freud introduced the idea of castration as an elemental male fear into his topography of the human psyche, but in doing so, he was drawing on much older myths and symbolism which spoke of men’s fears about the precariousness of their bodies. Looking back to the example of ancient Greece (as Freud did), we find that, alongside the normative depictions of women as docile and compliant, there are notable examples of women who have achieved sexual agency, women who are ribald, and women who are literal or figurative castrators. The Adonia festival, for instance, was female-led, and the sole participants were women, with the principal theme being the adoration of the beautiful youth Adonis and the mourning of the loss of his genitals in an attack by a wild boar. It has been suggested that groups of women celebrating the Adonia were responsible for the great herm mutilation of 416 BCE, when a great many of the phallic wayside markers of the Athenians were symbolically “castrated.” As Fredal notes, the Adonia “re-enacts a story of female license, female power and female participation in male self-definition” (2002: 602). In Greek mythology, the Gorgons are just one of a number of female monsters for whom castration is a recurring motif, including “the Erinyes who . . . were described by Aeschylus as concerned with emasculation and its symbolic equivalents, such as decapitation and blinding. . . . Like Harpies, Gorgons, and Erinyes, the Echidna and Sphinx are also threatening figures of female malevolence” (Caldwell 1993: 153). Kokoschka’s decapitation of his Alma doll therefore assumes further significance. He was not just destroying his “fetish”; he was, in some sense, emasculating it, to avert the idea in his psyche of a castration happening to him. By enacting this symbolic castration, he was inverting the dynamic that has been so commonly depicted: a castration perpetrated by a woman upon a man.

Conclusion: The Legacy of Kokoschka’s Doll With the rise of fascism in Europe during the 1930s, the ethos of the progressive modernist avant-garde was essentially extinguished, though an uncomfortable truth was that certain aspects were cannily adopted by the

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Nazis, whose project was in some ways the logical conclusion of the modernist love affair with technology, the mechanical, and the theatrical power of a puppet master in charge of a grand spectacle. The Nazi engagement with the puppetesque elements of art and the avant-garde is too big a subject to cover in a few lines, as is Adolf Hitler’s ambivalence about the art he was exposed to as a young man in Vienna in 1908. The most psychologically revealing example is one of those very credible rumors that emerge during wartime, for which there is ultimately no solid proof. The Borghild Project was said to be the work of Himmler—an attempt to make an artificial woman using the latest technology that would act as a sex doll for Nazi troops. The apparent reasoning was that venereal diseases, acquired from prostitutes in conquered countries, were having a discernible effect on the health of the soldiers. What really carried conviction was that it seemed emblematic of the Nazi love of eugenics, technology, and the warped quest for perfection. The factory producing the dolls was apparently destroyed during an Allied bombing raid. Whatever the veracity of the story, it does seem to be the case that the first modern sex doll was a German invention: the Bild Lilli doll, released in 1955. Though not a full-sized sex aid, she was marketed in red-light districts as a novelty sex doll and is generally believed by doll experts to be the inspiration for Barbie. Barbie’s creator traveled through Germany in the 1950s and bought several Lilli dolls, seemingly unaware of the original intention for them, and essentially copied the design to make the first child’s toy doll with breasts, an hourglass figure, and a sense of sex appeal. The seeds of puppetesque ideas, nurtured in Vienna at the turn of the century, continued to bear fruit; Freud’s 1907 study Delusion and Dream in Jensen’s Gradiva, concerning a young man in whose story Freud discerns an unmistakable Pygmalion motif, was an inspirational text in the founding of surrealism. In Gradiva, the study’s Galatea figure, the surrealists found “a figure epitomising the intermediate realm between ‘dream and reality’” (Bredekamp 2017: 121). The Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) described the “modern mannequin” as exemplifying the key surrealist notion of “the marvelous,” keying into the same unsettling yet arousing feelings Freud had identified, produced by the simulacrum’s uncanny mix of eros and thanatos (Breton 1992: 88). The 1938 Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme saw André Masson, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, and Salvador Dalí concoct a work called Mannequin Street, which featured female mannequins in various situations representing erotic subjugation, with Man Ray going so far as to claim that, beyond the erotic intent of the artwork, the artists had also “violated” the mannequins (Kachur 2001: 41). That he should feel emboldened enough to make this outrageous statement or proud boast suggests that the misogyny of the Pygmalion motif

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had thoroughly suffused the movement. Indeed, the group said of themselves that they were “all like Pygmalion” (Kuni 1999: 194). If Mannequin Street had been intended to shock, arouse, and disturb through its use of female simulacra, then the work of a German artist who had recently moved to Paris and was enthusiastically embraced by the surrealists would prove even more uncanny and provocative. The dolls and doll photographs of Hans Bellmer (1902–75) depicted articulated dolls in various stages of completion. Many of the pieces veered toward the abstract, but all exuded a sexuality which some read as aggressive and some as uncomfortably passive. The inspiration for the dolls came from two sources in particular. As a young man, Bellmer had read the published letters of Kokoschka and had been fascinated by his description of the closeness of his relationship with the Alma doll. This intersected with Bellmer’s own erotic awakening in 1932, when he conceived an infatuation for his (much younger) cousin; that same year, he first saw a production of Hoffmann’s The Sandman, and the simulacrum Olympia became a talismanic figure for him. In another interesting intersection, The Sandman, with its uncanny doll and motifs of castration, had also been a major inspiration for Freud’s essay The Uncanny. The Kokoschkian and Freudian overtones to Bellmer’s artistic and erotic journey are almost overwhelming; in a Freudian analysis, Bellmer’s dolls were quite obviously fetish objects and, like Kokoschka’s doll, a substitute for an unattainable lover. Bellmer claimed his doll artworks were his way of opposing fascism, and, indeed, they powerfully reflect the way that the Nazis distorted the bodyfascination of the modernist avant-garde. Yet, his doll works also seem to revel in the distortion, violence, and objectification. Bellmer’s intention seems to be arousal, but to what end? As Susanne Baackmann so cogently asks, “Is Bellmer critically exposing society’s fetishization and exploitation of the female form or is he repeating and thereby affirming it?” (2007: 2). The same question might be asked of Kokoschka’s oeuvre, since, like Bellmer, he exemplified the modernist directive that the artist’s life and work should be part of a continuum. Yet, to judge a movement by the way in which its key ideas are put to use by diverse individuals and groups within the movement is to misunderstand or misrepresent the essential aspects which impel the movement. The modernist avant-garde love affair with puppets and, in particular, female simulacra had the capacity to be used for good or ill: to imaginatively enter into, to celebrate—or to objectify and subjugate. Ultimately, Kokoschka’s “madness” was also his “therapy.” As Bonnie Roos incisively notes, in the paintings which followed his performance with and destruction of the Alma doll, the works began to “betray a more subtle

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discomfort with the traditional masculine persona of Pygmalion as Kokoschka increasingly portrays himself as doll-like. They reveal that Kokoschka came to find himself a feminized object, even as his artistic gaze often disempowered and objectified the women who inspired him” (Roos 2005: 292). At the heart of the modernist engagement with female simulacra was a disquisition on the nature of woman and, buried more deeply, an exploration of male fears of emasculation, feminization, and what constituted male identity. The objectification of women—the “making precarious” of women’s bodies— was a desperate attempt to forestall the realization that a man’s body and self can equally be objectified and discovered to be precarious. The struggle within the avant-garde was for control of the narrative: the frame of representation. It was to the detriment of the movement, and therefore to the power of the art and ideas that it could offer to the world, that control of the frames of representation rested, for the most part, and for so long, in the hands of men.

Notes 1 The most striking counterinstance of this I have found is Daphne du Maurier’s short story “The Doll” (1937) (Du Maurier 2011), which features a young woman who cannot fully commit to a love affair with the narrator of the story because, it is revealed, she is infatuated, indeed in a sexual “relationship,” with a “male” doll. 2 For a wide-ranging survey of all the puppet- and doll-inspired work happening in theatres, cabarets, and galleries in Central Europe at the turn of the century, one can do no better than Harold Segel’s Pinocchio’s Progeny (1995). For a particular focus on the puppetesque in fin de siècle Vienna, Nathan Timpano’s Constructing the Viennese Modern Body: Art, Hysteria and the Puppet is unrivaled.

References Baackmann, S. (2007), “Prosthetic Illusions of Masculinity: Hans Bellmer’s Dolls and the Fascist Imaginary,” in J. Harris (ed.), Value: Art: Politics: Criticism, Meaning, and Interpretation after Postmodernism, pp. 181–219, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Bredekamp, H. (2017), Image Acts: A Systematic Approach to Visual Agency, trans. E. Clegg, Berlin and Boston: Walter De Gruyter. Breton, A. (1992), “Excerpt from the First Manifesto of Surrealism,” in C. Harrison and P. Wood (eds.), Art in Theory 1900–1990: An Anthology of

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Changing Ideas, pp. 432–9, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. (Original work published 1924) Caldwell, R. (1993), The Origin of the Gods: A Psychoanalytic Study of Greek Theogonic Myth, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Du Maurier, D. (2011), The Doll: The Lost Short Stories, New York: Harper Collins. Fredal, J. (2002), “Herm Choppers, the Adonia, and Rhetorical Action in Ancient Greece,” College English, 64(5): 590–612. Available online: https​:/​/ ww​​w​.jst​​or​.or​​g​/sta​​ble​/p​​df​/32​​50755​​.pdf?​​refre​​qid​=e​​xcels​​ior​%3​​A490f​​c1b42​​69a0​ e​​2911e​​e552c​​2cdab​​734 (accessed September 7, 2020). Kachur, L. (2001), Displaying the Marvelous: Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dali, and Surrealist Exhibition Installations, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kleist, H. von (1989), On the Marionette Theater, in M. Feher (ed.), Fragments for a History of the Human Body, pp. 415–20, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (Original work published 1810). Kuni, V. (1999), “Pygmalion, entkleidet von Galathea, selbst? Jungeselleneburten, mechanische Bräute und dad Märchen vom Schöpfertum des Künstlers sim Surrealismus,” in P. Müller-Tamm and K. Sykora (eds.), Puppen Körper Automaten. Phantasmen der Moderne, pp. 176–99, Düsseldorf: Oktagon. Marinetti, F. T. (1909), The Futurist Manifesto, Society for Asian Art. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.soc​​ietyf​​orasi​​anart​​.org/​​sites​​/defa​​ult​/f​​i les/​​manif​​esto_​​​futur​​ ista.​​pdf (accessed September 7, 2020). O’Connor, A. (2015), The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt’s Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Roos, B. (2005), “Oskar Kokoschka’s Sex Toy: The Women and the Doll Who Conceived the Artist,” Modernism/modernity, 12(2): 291–309. Sármány-Parsons, I. (2012), “The Image of Women in Painting,” in S. Beller (ed.), Rethinking Vienna 1900, pp. 220–63, New York: Berghahn Books. Sine, N. (1988), “Cases of Mistaken Identity: Salome and Judith at the Turn of the Century,” German Studies Review, 11(1): 9–29. Smith, M. (2013), The Erotic Doll: A Modern Fetish, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Timpano, N. J. (2017), Constructing the Viennese Modern Body: Art, Hysteria and the Puppet, New York: Routledge. Winnicott, D. W. (1953), “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena: A Study of the First Not-Me Possession,” International Journal of PsychoAnalysis, 34: 89–97.

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Dalí’s Dream of Venus Sex, Surrealism, and Disability at the 1939 New York World’s Fair Keri Watson

A mash-up of Antoni Gaudí’s Casa Milà (1906–12) and Minsky’s Burlesque Theatre, Dalí’s Dream of Venus opened at the New York World’s Fair on June 15, 1939. Designed by Salvador Dalí (1904–89) and located along the Amusement Zone’s main promenade, the pavilion offered fairgoers the ultimate escape from the day-to-day—a surrealist tableau of sculpture, painting, and performance. Stuccoed in globs of white and pink plaster, draped in red velvet, and decorated with protruding crutches, disembodied arms, and headless mermaids, Dalí’s Dream of Venus featured the continuous exhibition of seminude female performers. As a reviewer for The New Yorker exclaimed, “One of the best sights on the midway is the bewilderment of the cash customers in Dalí’s crazy girl show. They don’t know whether to be angry, amused, or excited” (Orr 1939: 40). What was the desired effect of Dalí’s spectacle? How did the performances he orchestrated shape audiences’ understanding of contemporary art, leisure, and spectatorship, and how did arousal contribute to the process of turning female bodies into mediated objects at the 1939 New York World’s Fair? Scholars who have explored Dalí’s Dream of Venus described it as making “manifest the contradictions and compromises that Surrealists brought with them to American shores” (Blyn 2018: 1). Curator Ingrid Schaffner proposed that it offered viewers “an episode of inspired insanity” (2002: 146), whereas art historian Lewis Kachur declared that it epitomized the ways in which “true Surrealism gives way to popular entertainment in the U.S.” (2003: 160). What has not been examined is the ways in which Dalí’s Dream of Venus combined sex, surrealism, and disability to support white, male, able-bodied heteronormativity. Disability is often conflated with gender, race, and class and, as theorized by disability studies scholars David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, acts as a “crutch upon which literary narratives lean for their

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representational power, disruptive potentiality, and analytical insight” (2000: 49). This chapter extends their premise to the study of visual artwork and examines the ways in which Dalí’s Dream of Venus orchestrated performances of disability, gender, race, and class to create moments of rupture and arousal. Drawing upon disability studies scholar Lennard J. Davis’s argument that representations of Venus are best interpreted as attempts by “male artists and critics to gird themselves against the irrationality and chaos of the body” (1997: 56–7), I contend that Dalí’s appropriation of classical representations of Venus both complemented and subverted the fair’s decorative program of idealized figurative sculpture. His pavilion’s iconography mobilized female bodies (live, sculpted, and painted) to personify Freudian castration anxieties, reassure visitors’ able-bodied positionalities, and provide a safe space for the voyeuristic exploration of heterosexual desire. Furthermore, his generous borrowing of tropes from the sideshow and burlesque theatre allowed for the containment and disabling of working-class female bodies. Ultimately, I conclude that Dalí’s Dream of Venus depended upon the hypersexualized and prostheticized female body to arouse voyeuristic male spectators, embody the male anxiety evoked by women and disability, and expose the ways in which gender, race, class, and disability intersected during the 1930s.

Mythology, Idealized Bodies, and Eugenics The 1939 New York World’s Fair attracted over 44 million attendees who came to see exhibits ranging from Norman Bel Geddes’s “Futurama” to Henry Dreyfuss’s “Democracity,” each of which promised an idealized look at the “World of Tomorrow” (Rydell 1984: 2). The future imagined by the fair’s organizers was made possible by advances in “transportation, communication, and living standards” and was underscored by the belief “that the United States would evolve into an ethnically homogenous society inhabited by ‘typical Americans’ living in nuclear families” (Rydell 1990: 968). As art historian Christina Cogdell and historian Robert W. Rydell have demonstrated, the “typical American family” envisioned by the World’s Fair organizers was conceptualized as able-bodied, native-born, white, and informed by eugenics—a social, political, and scientific movement that emerged in the United States during the late nineteenth century, gained momentum during the Progressive Era, and reached its peak of popular influence during the 1920s and 1930s (Cogdell 2004: 148; Rydell 1993: 39). Evidencing the hegemony of white heteronormativity at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, the Ford Motor Company and Federal Housing Administration co-sponsored a “Typical American Families Contest” that provided forty-

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eight native-born, white, able-bodied winners with a new car and free trip to the fair, and the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company sponsored an art contest in which Albert Wein’s Family Group, comprised of an idealized Anglo-American man, woman, and child, received honorable mention (Kevles 1985: 61). From displays that showcased streamlined consumer products and emphasized the ways in which standardized labor increased efficiency to dioramas of a future perfected through social engineering, the 1939 New York World’s Fair cultivated an environment in which bodies were measured and policed, and its sculptural decoration perpetuated capitalism’s privileging of able bodies, or what disability studies scholar Robert McRuer calls “compulsory able-bodiedness” (2006: 2). “Compulsory ablebodiedness,” a system that is intricately bound up with what feminist theorist Adrienne Rich conceptualized as “compulsory heterosexuality,” naturalizes and normalizes white, heterosexual, abled bodies and constructs nonwhite, queer, and disabled bodies as inferior and unnatural (1980: 632). As I will show, notions of “compulsory able-bodiedness” and eugenics informed the style, subject, and reception of the fair’s sculptural program, which ultimately served to naturalize the American body politic as white, male, heterosexual, and able-bodied and situate women, people of color, and people with disabilities as hypersexualized, abject, and other. The fair’s ideological agenda of eugenic and technological progress was visualized in dozens of sculptures scattered throughout the fairgrounds, the majority of which monumentalized the idealized bodies of classical mythology in white plaster marching boldly into a scientifically enhanced future. Despite worldwide economic depression and growing apprehension of fascism in Germany and Italy, the fair’s sculptural program consistently called upon classical mythological figures depicted in a futuristic and streamlined style to embody the fair’s tagline: “The World of Tomorrow.” As contemporary art critic Elizabeth McCausland noted, “An almost universal reliance on a mythological vocabulary and a representational manner of design” marked the decorative program of the 1939 New York World’s Fair (1938: 9). John Gregory’s monumental Four Victories of Peace (1939) depicted Athena, Demeter, Nike, and Hecate in white plaster as sleek archaic goddesses standing solidly together and offering visitors symbols of abundance: wheat, the wheel, wings, and wisdom. Paul Manship’s aerodynamic and allegorical statues in The Moods of Time (1939) visualized Apollo carrying the sun across the sky and Venus basking in the moon’s glow. Exhibiting the Greco Deco style, one that blended the linear precision and stiffness of ancient Greece with the smooth contours of Art Deco, these sculptures reminded the thousands of visitors who saw them daily of the beauty and perfection of the future as guaranteed by scientific

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and social engineering. From Carl Milles’s The Astronomer, a thirty-foottall white plaster sculpture of a modern-day Atlas holding a model of the planet Earth in the palm of his hand, to Leo Lentelli’s Golden Sprays, two eleven-foot-tall white plaster and gold leaf-embellished, classically inspired Venuses represented in exaggerated contrapposto that celebrated beauty and athleticism, the fair’s sculptural program relied on smooth white surfaces, crisply incised linear details, and idealized forms borrowed from ancient Greece and Rome, updated for a modern viewer. Only two of the fair’s 100 sculptures by thirty-three different artists represented Black figures. Bernard J. Rosenthal’s sculpture Time (1938) depicted what was described as a “Nubian Slave,” and Augusta Savage’s The Harp (1939) depicted twelve stylized Black singers that symbolized the strings of a harp and represented James Welden Johnson’s 1900 anthem Lift Every Voice and Sing. Both plaster sculptures were painted black. There were no sculptures of Native Americans, Asian Americans, or people with physical or cognitive impairments. As art historian Fae Brauer notes, during the 1930s, “the body became inscribed as the prime site of delectation through interrelationships forged between art and visual cultures, modern medicine, science, anatomy, anthropology, anthropometry, criminology, and eugenics” (2008: 4). The fair’s extensive employment of white mythological bodies was ideologically weighted, as eugenicists regularly employed the classical body to illustrate their belief that physical beauty and whiteness indicated superior health and intellect. For instance, the 1924 bestseller The Fruit of the Family Tree argued that if “men and women should select mates solely for beauty, it would increase all the other good qualities of the race” (Wiggam 1924: 279). Going even further, in his address to the second National Conference on Race Betterment, director of the Battle Creek Sanitarium J. H. Kellogg argued that the world needed a “real aristocracy made up of Apollos and Venuses and their fortunate progeny” (Maxwell 2009: 87). Perhaps the fair’s most startling visualization of this ideology was found in Gaetano Cecere’s 25-foot-tall Arno Breker-esque white plaster sculpture American Manhood, a modern-day Apollo which adorned the entrance to the Home Furnishings Building and depicted a man with a greyhound by his side. A conflation of eugenic ideals and modern design, American Manhood, with its smooth white surfaces, linear musculature, and Anglo-American facial features, embodied physical and intellectual perfection through “good breeding,” a concept underscored by its companion piece, American Womanhood, which depicted a contemporary Venus holding the hand of a young boy marching into the future to claim his place as a leader in the eugenically constructed “World of Tomorrow.”

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The fair’s sculptural program visualized the myth of the typical American family and supported art historian Mary K. Coffey’s assertion that “the classical body as the normative image of whiteness strengthened the conceptual link between whiteness, the national body, and physical fitness” (2006: 248). This imagined body politic, however, ignored the lived experience of actual Americans, as the 1930 census showed that 14 million (11.4 percent) of the US population identified as nonwhite (U.S. Census Bureau 1930). Furthermore, as evidenced by the recently completed 1935–6 National Health Survey, one in six Americans had “some chronic disease, orthopedic impairment or serious defect of hearing or vision” (Weisz 2011: 445). Instead of acknowledging the embodied reality of hundreds of thousands of people, the fair’s sculptural program—full of tall, wellmuscled, white plaster bodies—reflected and reinforced the 1930s obsession with whiteness and bodily perfection. With the exception of small displays hosted by the Disabled American Veterans of the World War, the National Association of the Deaf, and the New York Association for the Blind, as well as the people with dwarfism employed by Morris Gest for his popular “Little Miracle Town” and those with extraordinary physical characteristics working in the “Strange As It Seems” freak show, the World Fair Corporation did not seem interested in employing or accommodating those with physical or cognitive impairments. Similarly, employment opportunities for Native Americans, African Americans, and Asian Americans were restricted to those costumed as “natives” in “Frank Buck’s Jungleland” and other “Native Villages.” Furthermore, the fair organizers charged the Welfare Department, which also dealt with “inebriated guests, delinquent minors, and prostitutes,” with providing assistance to visitors with disabilities (Weglein 2008: 569), and “[visitors to the fair] were afraid to shake hands with the blind workers” (Jennings 2016: 81–2). The 1939 New York World’s Fair predates the passage of the Civil Rights Act by twenty-five years and the Americans with Disabilities Act by fifty-one years, but the neglect of any real consideration for the needs or desires of people of color or those with physical or cognitive impairments indicates the extent to which people of color and those with disabilities were systematically excluded from the fair’s conception of “The World of Tomorrow.”

Sex, Psychology, and the Avant-garde The development of eugenics as a racist and ableist ideology paralleled that of both psychoanalysis and the historical avant-garde, which, as theorized by the Comte de Saint-Simon, situated artists as “the first of three

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sets of ‘troops’ involved in guiding society” toward utopia (Knopf 2015: 1). Unified by their rebellion against the status quo and desire to create a better future, eugenicists, psychiatrists, and artists alike published articles and manifestoes during the first few decades of the twentieth century that argued for revolutions in the ways in which the human body and mind were understood and aesthetically represented. “Attempting to provoke change in people’s beliefs by bypassing the protective cocoon of logic to penetrate more deeply into their psyches,” eugenicists, psychiatrists, and avant-garde artists challenged mainstream assumptions about the identity, the body, and the formation of the self (Knopf 2015: 7). As Caroline Evans notes, “Although the avant-garde had a vested interest in the dissolution of the self, it did not have a monopoly on it. At the same time, other, conservative, discourses, such as criminology and psychiatry (which amounted to a social hygiene movement) also reformulated questions of identity” (1999: 5). Sigmund Freud believed in phylogenetic memory, a eugenic theory that stated that acquired characteristics were inherited, and Dalí conceived of himself as a visionary who tapped into the collective unconscious to create startling art that would move the world toward a liberated utopia (Slavet 2008: 39). As Dalí wrote, “Any individual gifted with a sufficient degree of paranoia can— according to his desire—see the form of an object taken from reality change successively” (Greeley 2001: 469). The Freudian psychology that Dalí depended upon in the formulation of his evolutionary-informed, surrealist dream would have been legible to contemporary American audiences familiar with Freud through the influential writer and father of American psychology, William James, and the popularity of Dale Carnegie’s bestselling self-help book How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936). Freud visited the United States and helped create the American Psychoanalytic Association in 1911, and by the 1930s, psychoanalytic institutes had been established in every major American city from New York to Chicago, Boston, and Baltimore (Gifford 2008: 640). Freudian psychoanalytic themes were visualized for American audiences by exhibitions of surrealist art at the Brooklyn Museum in 1926, the Wadsworth Atheneum in 1931, and both the Baltimore Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art in 1936 (Eggener 1993: 33). Popular newspapers and magazines including the New York Times, New Yorker, Newsweek, and Life regularly covered the surrealist movement and remarked on its compelling visualizations of Freudian principles (Eggener 1993: 31). Dalí’s popularity and status as an avant-garde artist—he graced the cover of Time magazine in 1936—made him an ideal contributor to the 1939 New York World’s Fair, and the iconography of Dalí’s Dream of Venus, which adhered perfectly to the fair’s mythological theme by including numerous

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representations of Venus in her many guises, was generated by his paranoiaccritical method. Dalí’s technique, developed during the 1930s as a way of inducing a paranoid hallucinogenic state, recording it visually, and then establishing connections between seemingly unrelated concepts or images, was influenced by Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) and resembled Freud’s method of free association (Jenny and Trezise 1989: 105). While in a paranoiac-critical state, Dalí drew his unfiltered thoughts as they came to him, thereby creating startling juxtapositions resurrected from his unconscious. As a result of this method, Dalí’s Dream of Venus performed literal enactments of Freudian psychoanalysis: women swam in a fishbowl surrounded by floating objects of free association; a nude Venus slept on a 36-foot-long bed beneath a mirror while her dreams were visualized as a large-scale version of Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory (1931), itself a visualization of phylogenetic memory; a male mannequin with a birdcage for a torso—a pastiche of René Magritte’s The Therapist (1937) sat at the foot of Venus’s bed presumably analyzing her dreams; and a life-size papier-mâché man-leopard covered in shot glasses—a recasting of Dalí’s Aphrodisiac Jacket (1936) and a visualization of latent sexual desire—stood watch nearby. Viewers experienced this pastiche of art and psychotherapy in three dimensions as they walked through Dalí’s funhouse-like pavilion. Dalí’s physical enactment and embodiment of psychoanalytic theory called specifically upon the Oedipus complex and its associated castration anxiety to convey meaning (Buchloh 2014: 57). In Freud’s theory of castration anxiety, as elucidated in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920), the Oedipus complex is characterized by a death wish for one’s father and erotic desires for one’s mother and develops out of the fear that the father will destroy the child’s phallus (Jonte-Pace 1996: 61). Fittingly, Venus is frequently associated with the Oedipus complex and castration anxiety in her various roles as daughter, lover, and mother. She is simultaneously the daughter of Jupiter (the chief Roman deity and god of the sky and thunder) and born of the sea foam emitted from the castrated testicles of Caelus (a sky god) who had been disabled and made impotent by his son Saturn (a god of generation who not only cut off his father’s testicles and threw them into the ocean but also devoured his own children out of fear that they would castrate him). Venus is the consort of numerous mortal men and gods, including Mars (god of war), Vulcan (god of fire), and Jupiter (god of the sky and her father), and she is the mother of Cupid (god of love), Hermaphroditus (god of hermaphrodites and effeminates), and Priapus (god of fertility known for his exceptionally large and permanently erect phallus). She is even imbricated in the castration anxieties of Psyche, her son Cupid’s lover (Gollnick 1992: 52). Venus is connected to eugenic ideals and notions of disability, as well. Freud viewed

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castration as the “formulation for the cultural construction of disabled bodies as lacking” (Wilton 2003: 369), and, as Davis notes, “The Venus tradition involves castration at its very origin” and is based on “the idea of mutilation, fragmented bodies, decapitation, [and] amputation” (1997: 61). From the armless Venus de Milo to the headless and armless Nike of Samothrace, the broken body of Venus has come to represent beauty, perfection, and, ironically, wholeness, even though a number of recovered antique sculptures of goddesses are headless, armless, or otherwise amputated. While statues of gods come down to us in fragments as well, the proportion of effaced statues of goddesses is higher, leading Davis to posit that “vandals, warriors, and adolescent males amuse[d] themselves by committing focused acts of violence, of sexual bravado and mockery, on these embodiments of desire” (1997: 58). Whether or not this is the case has yet to be determined; still, classical sculpture was consistently employed by eugenicists to represent the physical manifestation of their principles, and Venus, as the goddess of love, sex, beauty, and fertility, made an ideal symbol for the movement. As I will show, Dalí’s Dream of Venus exploited Venus’s multiple positionalities to construct her simultaneously as a hypersexualized eugenic ideal, symbol of disability, and synecdoche for both libidinal desire and castration anxiety.

Venus in Her Many Guises Like the rest of the fair’s idealized sculptures, Dalí’s pavilion consistently called upon Venus as symbol of ideal beauty. On the exterior of the pavilion, a 25-foot-tall photostat enlargement of the central Venus figure from Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (1485–6) was pasted above the entryway, and living incarnations of Venus, played by young female models clothed in gold and turquoise bathing suits posing above the doorway, formed living pedimental sculptures and called out to passersby like Homeric sirens. A niche on the side of the pavilion was plastered with an enlarged print of Leonardo da Vinci’s St. John the Baptist (1513–16) with the face of the Mona Lisa (1503–6) collaged onto it, and, inside, another living Venus, in imitation of Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus (c. 1510), reclined on a bed covered in white and red satin adorned with flowers and ivy. White female models dressed in corsets, fishnet stockings, and garters played the roles of Venus’s attendants, sea nymphs swimming in a room-sized aquarium filled with typewriters and telephone receivers—perhaps an allusion to Peter Paul Rubens’s Nereids Lamenting the Dead Body of Leander (1603–4), in which sea nymphs mourn the death of Leander by calling out to Venus after she drowned Leander to prevent him from rendezvousing with one of her virgin priestesses. Updated

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for a modern audience, Dalí’s Nereids use modern-day telephones as they engage in a fruitless reenactment of grief and frustrated desire. Taken together, Dalí’s appropriation of Botticelli and Leonardo on the exterior of the pavilion and restaging of Giorgione and Rubens in its interior situated him within the history of classical Western art and complemented the wider fair’s mythological and technological themes. At the same time, Dalí’s many Venuses recalled the fragmented bodies of classical sculpture and engaged with the anxiety that surrounded physical disability between the world wars. As national political and economic tensions mounted during the 1930s, many feared a Second World War was imminent, and the physical traumas, including death and dismemberment, that marked the Great War were still evident in the prosthesis-adorned bodies of actual war veterans. This, coupled with an economic depression that led many women to join the workforce, created a scenario in which the double threat of castration (the fear of the loss of bodily integrity via war and the loss of economic use-value via unemployment) penetrated the daily lives of men. At once a eugenic ideal and the embodiment of castration anxiety and disability, Venus provided an ideal symbol of male anxiety over war, women’s suffrage, and the Great Depression. Reassuring white male dominance and physical virility, Dalí’s Dream of Venus assuaged masculine castration anxiety by removing the female emasculating threat and returning the workingclass female body to the confined space of sexual spectacle. Beyond simply alluding to disability or interrogating the stability of the Venus figure as a symbol of wholeness and aesthetic integrity, however, Dalí literally disabled many of his pavilion’s female bodies: he sculpted mythological mermaids and echidnas without heads, he decorated the pavilion with amputated arms and crutches, he created columns out of disembodied legs, he cut Botticelli’s Venus out of her painting and collaged her onto the exterior of the building, and he pasted the face of La Gioconda onto a man’s body. Whereas the fair’s primary sculptural program celebrated white idealized bodies, Dalí’s pavilion dismembered and prostheticized them as a means of containing female sexuality. This disabling and reconstructing was emphasized through costuming; Dalí’s Venuses were dressed in transparent lace-up corsets, red mesh halter tops that suggested the silhouette of lobster’s claws, and crimson hairnets that evoked their eminent capture. Corseted in these shell-like costumes, the female, working-class bodies of Dalí’s dream were restricted, tied up, and kept in bondage as hypersexualized lobsterwomen who both embodied and reassured the male fears of castration, impotence, and disability. As art historian Nancy Frazier puts it, “The lobster threat was correlated not only with acts of emasculation of the son by the father but also with female envy of male genitals” (2009: 19–20). The female lobster, a sea

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creature whose exoskeleton operates as a protective prosthesis, must shed her shell and move into a male lobster’s habitat to mate. During the two weeks that lapse between mating and the regrowth of her shell, the female lobster is trapped in the male’s cave, vulnerable to death and dismemberment by her partner. Discourses on sexuality often “support the normative image of sexuality as heterosexual, reproductive, and above all autonomous” (Shildrick 2009: 70), but, as Michel Foucault notes, “Discipline sometimes requires enclosure” (emphasis is in the original) (1995 [1977]: 141). By visualizing Venus as a lobster trapped in a tank with an armored shell and prosthetic pincers, Dalí simultaneously repaired the goddess’s disfigured body and rendered her dependent on an imagined and potentially dangerous male lover/spectator. Surrealists were obsessed with the “body as armor,” which they saw “as a prosthesis that served to shore up a disrupted body image or to support a ruined ego construction” (Foster 1991: 67–8). Prostheses, whether literal or metaphorical, are developed to solve “the ‘problem’ that disability” poses to society, and Dalí’s use of prostheses confirms his interest in fixing and containing the female body—a body that at once arouses and threatens male heterosexuality (Mitchell and Synder 2000: 47). To make clear the connotation, visitors entered Dalí’s cave-like pavilion by passing between monumental columns sculpted to resemble a woman’s disembodied legs. In this way, the audience physically enacted a return to the womb whereby they confronted their insecurities through simulated psychoanalysis, witnessed the disabling of Venus and her containment through prostheses, and were reborn/reassured of their hegemony as white, able-bodied, heterosexual men through their voyeuristic consumption of the erotic spectacle of her dismemberment.

Dalí’s Burlesque Sideshow Composed of undulating lines and sea motifs, Dalí’s Dream of Venus appears to play id to the fair’s ego, but its pastiche of the fair’s mythological and eugenic symbols reinforced normative gendered roles and provided a socially acceptable space for the voyeuristic containment and consumption of sublimated sexual desire. To achieve this aesthetic sleight of hand, Dalí borrowed tropes from the lowbrow popular entertainments of the sideshow and burlesque theatre. Dalí’s Dream of Venus was pitched to the World’s Fair planning committee as an “old type ‘funny house’ but with each attraction translated into terms of surrealism,” and it made ample use of mirrors, mazes, and masquerades to distort conventional perceptions and startle viewers (Schaffner 2002: 38). Following the tradition of sideshow carnival

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barkers, swimsuit-clad models stood above the entrance, called out to passersby, and held bamboo fishing rods to “reel in” customers. Dalí’s use of topless performers and live swimming showgirls (he employed seventeen working-class white women) even led critics to compare it to a burlesque “nudie tank show,” and, by costuming his models to resemble lobsterinspired sea nymphs, Dalí referenced both burlesque nudity and enfreaked them to resemble sideshow performers (Green 1939: 53). Specifically, Dalí’s lobsterwomen recalled the popular “Lobster Family,” a group of sideshow performers with ectrodactyly (a condition in which the fingers and toes are fused together to form “claw-like” extremities), and his headless mermaids referenced the sideshow’s interest in hybrid-animal/human acts such as the “Headless Woman” and “Miraculous Mermaid.” The Venus theme often was associated with both the sideshow and burlesque: Saartjie Baartman was forcibly exhibited at Piccadilly Circus as the “Hottentot Venus” during the late nineteenth century, the armless sideshow performer Frances O’Connor was billed as the “Living Venus de Milo” in Tod Browning’s classic 1932 film Freaks, and “Venus in a Clam Shell” was a popular act at Minsky’s Burlesque Theatre. Following the sideshow’s interest in transgender performers (“Josephine Joseph” being among the most popular) and the burlesque’s Pansy Craze of the 1930s (during which drag queens, known as “pansy performers,” experienced a surge in popularity in Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco), the exterior of Dalí’s Dream of Venus included a photostat of Leonardo da Vinci’s St. John the Baptist with the face of the Mona Lisa collaged onto it. Already an androgynous figure in Leonardo’s painting, St. John the Baptist was transformed by Dalí into a drag performer masquerading as La Gioconda. St. John’s muscular arm recalled sideshow strongmen, and the Mona Lisa’s enigmatic smile kept viewers guessing in this burlesquesideshow performance of gender and sexuality. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, Dalí’s Dream of Venus was not located in the Contemporary Arts Pavilion, but in the “Great White Way,” as the Amusement Zone was curiously and pointedly called, an area of the fair that fulfilled the role of the sideshow and presented its presumed white visitors with everything from the “Strange as It Seems” freakshow (complete with a Bearded Lady, Petrified Man, Lobster Family, and Pygmies from Batwa) to “Frank Buck’s Jungleland” (where viewers could see “Native hunters” and “exotic animals”) and “Billy Rose’s Aquacade” (a display of hundreds of synchronized swimmers and high dive acts). Dalí’s Dream of Venus, like these other lowbrow spectacles, simultaneously titillated and reassured viewers while underscoring the narrative of civilization and progress (the ideological underpinnings of both eugenics and the 1939 New York World’s Fair) that maintained audience members’ positions of privilege (Frost 2005: 8–9).

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Conclusion Dalí’s generous borrowing of tropes from the sideshow and burlesque allowed for the display and disabling of working-class female bodies, and his appropriation of the classical trope of Venus, with its connotations of high art and eugenics, fit well within the fair’s larger mythological decorative motif. Although Dalí’s Dream of Venus may at first appear to upend normative expectations, it blended high and lowbrow culture and combined sex, surrealism, and disability to reassure white able-bodied male visitors of their privileged positionality and provide a societally sanctioned space for the voyeuristic exploration of heterosexual desire. Venus is often employed to titillate and control, and this chapter has shown how Dalí’s Dream of Venus depended upon the hypersexualized and prostheticized female body to arouse voyeuristic white male spectators, embody the anxiety evoked by women, people of color, and disability during the interwar period, and expose the ways in which class, gender, race, and disability are conflated in art and popular culture. During the 1930s, evolutionary theory formed the “ideological foundation upon which modernists in almost every field constructed their work, arguments, and perceptions,” and, although aesthetically different, the embodied identities performed by Dalí’s Dream of Venus and displayed in the fair’s decorative program each demonstrated the pervasiveness of racialized able-bodied bias at the 1939 New York World’s Fair (Cogdell 2004: 5). With its interest in classical figuration, sexual desire, prosthetics, and bawdy entertainment, Dalí’s Dream of Venus translated surrealism into an art style that was easily understood by American audiences, and rather than a radical rethinking of normative heterosexual desire, it consistently offered up a reinforcement of castration anxiety through the glorification of the fetish object (the disabled working-class female body). Perhaps this, more than anything else, helps to explain Dalí’s mass appeal and enduring popularity.

References Blyn, R. (2018), “The Dream of Eros: Surrealism on the Midway, 1939,” The Space Between: Literature and Culture, 1914–1945, 14: 1–14. Brauer, F. (2008), “Making Eugenic Bodies Delectable: Art, ‘Biopower’ and ‘Scientia Sexualis’,” in F. Brauer and A. Callen (eds.), Art, Sex and Eugenics: Corpus Delecti, pp. 1–34, New York: Routledge.

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Buchloh, B. (2014), “The Dialectics of Design and Destruction: The ‘Degenerate Art’ Exhibition (1937) and the ‘Exhibition Internationale du Surréalisme’,” October, 150: 49–62. Coffey, M. C. (2006), “The American Adonis: A Natural History of the ‘Average American’ (Man), 1921–32,” in S. Currell and C. Cogdell (eds.), Popular Eugenics: National Efficiency and American Mass Culture in the 1930s, pp. 185–216, Athens: Ohio University Press. Cogdell, C. (2004), Eugenic Design: Streamlining America in the 1930s, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Davis, L. (1997), “Nude Venuses, Medusa’s Body, and Phantom Limbs: Disability and Visibility,” in D. Mitchell and S. Snyder (eds.), The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability, 51–70, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Eggener, K. (1993), “‘An Amusing Lack of Logic’: Surrealism and Popular Entertainment,” American Art, 7(4): 30–45. Evans, C. (1999), “Masks, Mirrors and Mannequins: Elsa Schiaparelli and the Decentered Subject,” Fashion Theory, 3(1): 3–31. Foster, H. (1991), “Amor Fou,” October, 56: 64–97. Foucault, M. (1977), Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. A. Sheridan, New York: Vintage. (Original work published 1975) Frazier, N. (2009), “Salvador Dalí’s Lobsters: Feast, Phobia, and Freudian Slip,” Gastronomica, 9(4): 16–20. Frost, L. (2005), Never One Nation: Freaks, Savages, and Whiteness in U.S. Popular Culture, 1850–1877, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gifford, S. (2008), “The Psychoanalytic Movement in the United States, 1906–1991,” in E. R. Wallace IV and J. Gach (eds.), History of Psychiatry and Medical Psychology, pp. 629–56, New York: Springer. Gollnick, J. (1992), Love and the Soul: Psychological Interpretations of the Eros and Psyche Myth, Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Greeley, R. (2001), “Dalí’s Fascism; Lacan’s Paranoia,” Art History, 24: 465–92. Green, A. (1939), “Expo Attraction: Dalí’s Dream of Venus,” Variety, June 21: 53. Available online: https​:/​/ar​​chive​​.org/​​detai​​ls​/va​​riety​​134​-1​​939​-0​​6​/pag​​e​/n15​​7​/ mod​​e​/2up​​​?q​=dr​​eam​+o​​f​+ven​​us (accessed September 1, 2020). Jennings, A. (2016), Out of the Horrors of War: Disability Politics in World War II America, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Jenny, L. and T. Trezise (1989), “From Breton to Dalí: The Adventures of Automatism,” October, 51: 105–14. Jonte-Pace, D. (1996), “At Home in the Uncanny: Freudian Representations of Death, Mothers, and the Afterlife,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 64: 61–88. Kachur, L. (2003), Displaying the Marvelous: Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dalí, and Surrealist Exhibition Installations, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kevles, D. (1985), In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity, New York: Knopf.

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Knopf, R. (2015), Theater of the Avant-Garde, 1890–1950: A Critical Anthology, New Haven: Yale University Press. Maxwell, A. (2009), “Eugenics and the Classical Ideal of Beauty in Philip K. Dick’s ‘The Golden Man’,” Science Fiction Studies, 36: 87–100. McCausland, E. (1938), “Preview: World’s Fair Murals and Sculptures,” Parnassus, 10(7): 6–9. McRuer, R. (2006), Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability, New York: New York University Press. Mitchell, D. and S. Snyder (2000), Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Orr, C. (1939), “Around the Fair: Foreigners and Natives,” New Yorker, July 15: 40. Rich, A. (1980), “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 5(4): 631–60. Rydell, R. W. (1984), All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rydell, R. W. (1990), “Selling the World of Tomorrow: New York’s 1939 World’s Fair,” Journal of American History, 77(3): 966–70. Rydell, R. W. (1993), World of Fairs: The Century-of-Progress Expositions, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schaffner, I. (2002), Salvador Dalí’s Dream of Venus: The Surrealist Funhouse from the 1939 World’s Fair, New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Shildrick, M. (2009), Dangerous Discourses of Disability, Subjectivity and Sexuality, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Slavet, E. (2008), “Freud’s ‘Lamarckism’ and the Politics of Racial Science,” Journal of the History of Biology, 41: 37–80. U.S. Census Bureau (1930), “Census of Population and Housing,” U.S. Department of Commerce. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.cen​​sus​.g​​ov​/pr​​od​/ ww​​w​/dec​​​ennia​​l​.htm​l (accessed January 27, 2021). Weglein, J. (2008), Guide to the New York World’s Fair 1939 and 1940 Incorporated Records, New York: New York Public Library Manuscripts and Archives Division. Weisz, G. (2011), “Epidemiology and Health Care Reform: The National Health Survey of 1935–1936,” American Journal of Public Health, 101(3): 438–47. Wiggam, A. (1924), The Fruit of the Family Tree, New York: Bobbs-Merrill. Wilton, R. (2003), “Locating Physical Disability in Freudian and Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Problem and Prospects,” Social and Cultural Geography, 4(3): 369–89

3

Blood and Desire Collaborating through Arousal Alissa Clarke

In 1970, artist and LSD proponent Amanda Feilding (1943–) drilled a hole in her head to access a state of bliss.1 Meanwhile, feminist sex positive artist Penny Slinger (1947–) sought ecstatic liberation through self-exorcism. Echoing the emphasis in the long 1960s on the revolution of the self, both artists pursued joyful self-transformation via radical means. Slinger’s surrealist, sexually transgressive photo-collage series, An Exorcism (1969– 77), dissects her experience of gender while mapping a passionate history of intimacy and betrayal between the artist and her lovers, Peter Whitehead and Susanka Fraey. It was first published as a book and exhibited at the Patrick Seale Gallery and Mirandy Gallery in London in 1977. Atmospherically suggestive of a gothic romance and mystery psychodrama starring the three lovers, the viewer follows Slinger’s sexual and emotive journey as a spiritual pathway of self-discovery toward ebullient feminist rebirth. Feilding also perceived her “destiny” as determined by this “auto-sculpture” of her head, which “expanded my consciousness” by “enlarging the area of contact between bloodstream and braincells” (Feilding 1978). Despite the oft-cited ability “to get permanently high” through trepanation (Mellen 2015 [1970]: 15), Feilding experienced a gentler pleasurable release: “a ‘relaxing’ . . . like the tide coming in, a lifting” (Speed 2016). Feilding and Slinger’s determined pursuit of these liberating pleasures and their desire to disseminate them were fueled by the arousing heat of making important new discoveries and modes of representation. Indeed, focused on raising awareness of the benefits of the process, Feilding’s actions were captured by “a self-portrait of an auto-sculpture” (1978): her notorious fifteen-minute art film, “Heartbeat in the Brain” (1970). It was screened at galleries, including the Suydam Gallery in New York in 1978 and the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London in 2011. The Suydam screening was part of Feilding’s “Special Project Exhibition” of stills from the film at P.S. 1 (now affiliated with the Museum of Modern

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Art) entitled Trepanation for the National Health (1978). Reflecting emphasis within performance and conceptual art of the period on the overlap between life and art, she presented her subsequent decision to stand for British parliament in 1979 and 1983 as part of the artwork. The artwork’s title served as her platform (I Am My Own Laboratory 2018). Due to Feilding’s belief that trepanation should be available as a medical procedure via the National Health Service (1995 [1993]: 122–3) and concern that the film could encourage self-trepanation, Heartbeat in the Brain remains unreleased. It is accessible in part via Eli Kabillio’s 1998 documentary, A Hole in the Head, and Oliver Hockenhull’s 2018 documentary on Feilding, I Am My Own Laboratory. This chapter examines the artwork by piecing together the footage available in Kabillio and Hockenhull’s films, along with Feilding and her former partner Joe Mellen’s published reflections on Trepanation for the National Health (TNH). Writers for cult publications have perceived Feilding as operating on similar societal margins and so portrayed her explorations sympathetically. However, freakish curiosity and fear marked journalistic and populist representations of her actions until quite recently. In 1996, Feilding established the Foundation to Further Consciousness, later retitled the Beckley Foundation, to focus on conducting scientific research into psychoactive substances and campaigning for global drug reform. From 2016, her work received positive publicity through governmentally approved trials on LSD and psilocybin, conducted in partnership with University College London (UCL). This increased respectability has been accompanied by extensive enthusiastic profiles in UK-based and international news forums, with the New Statesman dubbing Feilding the “acid countess” (Chakelian 2019) and The Face celebrating her as the “doyenne of psychedelics” (Cartwright 2019). These profiles have embraced Feilding’s cutting-edge expertise in psychedelics, but also her apparent bohemian eccentricities, elite titled background (Feilding is the Countess of Wemyss and March, and the Beckley Foundation is situated on her landed family property), and previously more marginalized positioning. Yet, this doesn’t negate the transgressive power of Feilding’s earlier self-penetrative act. The shift in perception toward Feilding has been matched by the resurgence of interest in Slinger. Between 1969 and 1978, Slinger’s striking surrealist explorations through photography, painting, film, sculpture, and Xerox experiments challenged gendered and heterocentric norms, attracting extensive critical acclaim within the British art world. With an exuberant feminist sex positivity at their heart, and often centered around her (frequently nude) form, they advocated for the freedoms and joys found through generous excessive sexual pleasures that Slinger regards as

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“feminine” but could be adopted by any gender. However, as a consequence of Slinger’s deliberate withdrawal from the art world and fame, that significant first body of work has been almost completely absented from feminist art and British countercultural histories. Its rediscovery from 2009 onward, initiated by Manchester Art Gallery’s Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism exhibition, has been explicitly highlighted in the extensive recent exhibitions of her work and cinematically depicted in Richard Kovitch’s excellent documentary, Penny Slinger: Out of the Shadows (2017). Numerous news forums and art, new age, and scientific magazines have published profiles of Slinger and Feilding, and Feilding has contributed to academic medical publications on psychedelics.2 However, this is the first substantive academic investigation of An Exorcism and TNH. Reflecting Feilding’s own identification as primarily an artist (I Am My Own Laboratory 2018), this is also the first academic work to treat Feilding as such. Hence, it is not within the remit or interest of this chapter to consider the validity of trepanning as a medical process, which has been discussed extensively elsewhere, including by Feilding and Mellen. Christopher Turner stresses that “Feilding wasn’t interested in performing the operation as an extreme form of body art . . . because she believed it would have a life-changing effect on her” (2007/8: 65). Yet, clear comparisons can be drawn between TNH and Orlan and Marina Abramović’s life-changing body art practices. Recognizing the important contribution that Feilding offers to the field of contemporary body art and that Slinger’s work has made to feminist sex positive art, this chapter seeks to build on this necessary resurgence of interest in Feilding and Slinger’s innovative practice. The creative processes surrounding An Exorcism and TNH can be fruitfully viewed through Ara Osterweil’s depiction of the “alternative models of affective labor and creative collaboration” evident in the American underground film and art world of the 1960s and 1970s, which were rooted in “queer modes of friendship, work, sex, and intimacy that were as historically significant as the radical articulation of bodies taking place” within the artwork (2014: 15). Slinger and Feilding’s loving and labored connections through blood and desire with a tightly interwoven series of lover-collaborators provide a fascinating example of how such alternative models of collaboration were mirrored by the British counterculture. Aided by documents from De Montfort University’s Peter Whitehead Archive3 and interviews with Whitehead, Slinger, and Feilding, conducted by myself and others, this chapter will examine the collaborative processes and interactions surrounding An Exorcism and the film and exhibition from TNH. It will demonstrate how these collaborations were led by fearless female experimentation and direction of their own transgressive images, which

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have frequently been absent from histories of the British counterculture. It will highlight some of the ways in which Feilding and Slinger were working with similar concerns to other contemporaneous artists, who have received greater critical attention, and anticipate the practice of later artists. It will argue that Feilding and Slinger’s experiments facilitated groundbreaking representations of alternative states of being, gender, sexuality, and arousal.

Lover-Collaborators Feilding and Slinger’s lover-collaborations embodied the “new forms of relationality and resistance,” aligned by Osterweil, with these alternative models of collaboration (2014: 11). Dutch guru-figure and initiator of the modern trepanning movement Bart Huges guided fellow trepanation enthusiast Joe Mellen, as well as Feilding’s experiments into the expansion of consciousness via LSD and then self-trepanation. Feilding’s curiosity about this expansion was interwoven with the “great love affair” that she had with the married Huges in 1966 (Turner 2007/8: 65). Brought together by closely shared motivations, Feilding then began an openly overlapping relationship with Mellen. The two raised a fledgling pigeon, “Birdie,” in 1969. Birdie treated Feilding as first “his mother and then his mate” (Feilding cited in Perry 1998: 116), becoming the third collaborator in the mix. Yet, prior to all of this, according to the avant-garde documentarist Peter Whitehead, Feilding was Whitehead’s lover. Whitehead was later intensely enticed by Mellen and Feilding’s trepanation experiments. This intensity was equally evident in Whitehead’s relationship with Slinger. Slinger’s girlfriend, Susanka Fraey, was also drawn into that impassioned exchange. As this section outlines, these intense interwoven relations blurred sex, love, and labor, fueling innovative resistant artistic practices. As has been frequently stressed before, “the early counterculture, for all of its exuberant, visionary idealism, was the ‘territory of men’” (LemkeSantangelo 2009: 2). Peter Whitehead’s behavior seems to epitomize that territory and its territorialization of the female body. In interviews, books, and films, he reveled unabashedly in the role of phallocentric voyeur and repeatedly highlighted his dedication to a lifelong pursuit of an enthralling muse (Whitehead 1997). This pursuit underpinned Whitehead’s explanation of the overlap in themes between An Exorcism and the autobiographical, Freudian, rape-revenge fantasy pop-art film, Daddy (1973). Daddy was created with his next lover-collaborator, French artist Niki de Saint Phalle, and involved a performance by a further lover-collaborator, Mia Martin (Clarke 2019). Whitehead described these relationships, saying, “[I] lived

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everything with Penny before I went to Niki, and then I lived it all out with Niki before eventually collapsing and ending up with Mia. So one way or another I was being initiated .  .  . by these creative goddesses” (2016a). Whitehead’s heterocentric, romanticized depiction of love places the idealized female Other on a pedestal as muse. Yet, his emphasis on being initiated by these women begins to reorientate the perceived power dynamic in these artists’ relationships with Whitehead and suggests its reorientation in other comparable countercultural lover-collaborations. It also highlights a mutually invigorating overlap of sexual and creative motivations and reflects Whitehead’s fascination with finding points of confluence with his lover-collaborators. As theatre director and performer trainer Phillip Zarrilli explains ensemble creative processes: “we are first and foremost sentient beings who can and do have an effect on one another simply by being in/sharing a space and process together” (2013: 371). That effect was felt by Whitehead when just sharing space with his future lover’s practice. Hence, he portrayed his interest in Slinger as first awakened by seeing her work on display in 1969 in the ICA in the Young and Fantastic exhibition curated by Roland Penrose. That interest deepened into arousal when the two met, which Slinger attributes to “getting their inspiration from a similar source,” describing how “we melded everything about ourselves really, we had such a vision to co-create” (2016). The seeds of An Exorcism stemmed from a co-creative desire to produce two sets of interwoven collages (one by each lover-collaborator), which never came to fruition. However, that shared vision provoked arousing inspiration, generating interwoven creative projects for Slinger and for Whitehead via Daddy. Similarly, Feilding and Mellen mutually supported one another’s perforations, and while Feilding produced TNH, Mellen wrote his cult autobiography, Bore Hole.4 Such exciting cross-fertilization is embedded in Slinger’s predilection for collage, which “take[s] elements that are familiar, but you recombine them in a way, which is unsettling and unfamiliar,” creating a “relationship between things that opens you up into a new world” (Slinger 2016). Feilding’s Heartbeat in the Brain similarly adopts careful and surprising recombinations of images. Footage of hair shaving and drilling are interwoven with those of the fledgling pigeon, Birdie, “nestling against her cheek” and “soar[ing] into the sky symbolising . . . freedom and release” (Blackwood 1983). This juxtaposition dislodges a fetishized focus on her bloodied form and underscores the intent of the film. Both Feilding and Slinger utilize what James M. Harding describes as the collage’s “highly self-conscious or metacritical technique of radical juxtaposition. Its signature gesture is that of disrupting conventional meanings by an act of recontextualization that juxtaposes seemingly incongruent objects, images, ideas, or performative acts” (2012: 23). Just as Harding associates this

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form with feminist avant-garde practice, so Slinger and Feilding deploy it to produce a radical aesthetic embedded in transgressive images that play with and explode gendered and specied expectations. It enables them to recreate and represent their bodies on their own terms.

Women at the Helm In The Explicit Body in Performance, Rebecca Schneider pointedly argues that “when women as active agents picked up the avant-garde tradition of transgressive shock, as they began to do with a certain en masse fervor in the 1960s, the terms of transgression necessarily shifted. Female transgression presented a structural impossibility—almost a double shock. After all, men [are allowed to] transgress, women resist” (1997: 4). Slinger’s sexually explicit and sometimes harrowing images overtly delight in that double shock, while the shock of Feilding’s images is a by-product of her singleminded, self-administered pursuit and promotion of a modified skull. Just as Whitehead emphasized employing the camera as a microscope, sometimes on himself (1997), Slinger and Feilding’s transgressions involve sexual, intellectual, artistic, visceral, spiritual, and psychological penetration and revelation, enabled by a fearless embrace of embodied risk and precarity. It is unsurprising that Slinger literally walks a form of tightrope nude in a number of images in An Exorcism. Tracing the agonizing disintegration of her lover-collaboration with Whitehead in An Exorcism, Slinger explains, [I] wanted to turn my inside out and spread my guts on the floor for my inspection and that of others, no holds barred, so that they could move out of the shadows and into the light to be fully exorcised. I wanted to show that it was okay to feel these things, to let others know that they were not alone in these kinds of experiences. (Cited in Stief 2016: 331)

In an eviscerating image marked “Primal,” Slinger does just this, with her mouth frighteningly agape and the skin on her torso replaced by an overlaid pink rib cage through which a large serpent bursts and weaves, and her entrails ooze out into her crotch. Positioned both as an exploded Eve ripped asunder by the deceptive satanic male and as a painful adoption of phallic womanhood, the head of the serpent glides around the entrails and priapically replaces Slinger’s genitalia. Slinger’s powerful dissection of her experiences eclipses her lover-collaborator.

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These resistant forms of relationality place women at the helm. Thus, Whitehead is similarly eclipsed by Feilding. He is replaced by her next lovers, Bart Huges, Joe Mellen, and Birdie, and all are swayed by her compelling presence and actions. In 1962, Amanda Feilding was an art student and, according to Whitehead, his lover. Strikingly portrayed as a mysterious femme fatale, sculpting multiple white birds of prey and constantly unseating Whitehead’s expectations, Feilding makes a memorable impression in Whitehead’s fictionalized 2014 autobiography, Fool That I Am .  .  .. She continues to destabilize and entice Whitehead via other means five years later. After fascinatedly filming her then lover-collaborator, Mellen, talking about his third of four attempts at self-trepanation, Whitehead notes in his diary that Feilding is determined to produce her own borehole. He excitedly declares that he will “film the whole process. It will be the film of the century” because “LSD and trepanation . . . must certainly be part of the new crusade” (Whitehead 1967). While an over-inflated interpretation, the impact of trepanation on countercultural thought should be highlighted and Feilding’s presence at the center of this “crusade” underscored. In 99 Balls Pond Road: The Story of the Exploding Galaxy, Jill Drower, a member of this titular psychedelic, interdisciplinary, London-based arts collective, points to the counterculture’s wholehearted pursuit of “altered state[s] of consciousness,” often through drugs or a spiritual journey (2014: 30). The latter frequently involved exoticized exploration of different branches of Eastern philosophical thinking: [F]ew people had researched Eastern mysticism in any great depth. One exception was Amanda Fielding,5 who had traveled widely in the Middle East and studied comparative religion and classical Arabic. . . . She was one among a small group of informed people who believed in trepanation, a great talking point in the late sixties. . . . [M]any found the arguments convincing, but few had the courage to try. (Drower 2014: 31)

That sense of Feilding’s courageous conviction is enhanced by Mellen’s depiction in Bore Hole, of how, when making his second attempt at selftrepanation, Amanda agreed to help me. I cannot praise her too highly for her courage and coolness in an emergency. I can certainly say that no one else would have done it. . . . However, Amanda is someone apart from the rest and she agreed to help without hesitation.

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Performing Arousal Once again I took a trip before going to work and once again things didn’t go as planned. Amanda was rotating the trepan, pressing with all her might on the point on the top of my head as I knelt. (2015 [1970]: 92)

Regarded by Mellen as “my guru of the Unconscious” (2015 [1970]: 96), Feilding’s directive power and leadership clearly inspired the trepanation scene in countercultural poet, activist, performer, and playwright Heathcote Williams’s 1970 play AC/DC (1973). An old Etonian schoolfriend, Williams published Mellen’s interview with Bart Huges in the winter 1966/7 edition of the literary journal The Transatlantic Review, for which Williams was an associate editor. AC/DC’s character Sadie displays a scroll created by Huges that rationalizes trepanation and then determinedly bores with a drill into Perowne’s head, which Williams likens to “fucking Perowne in the head with her astral dildo” (cited in Wardle 1973: xi). Slinger similarly guides proceedings in An Exorcism. Whitehead describes its pictorial representations of his relationship with Slinger as “totally us. Totally autobiographical.” Yet, he eventually realized that he “was intruding” because, in countercultural parlance, “it was her trip” (2016b). Slinger’s trip inside the self reflects Feilding’s assertion that “I very early on became my own laboratory” (I Am My Own Laboratory 2018). Highlighting the benefits of self as a testing site, Slinger explains that she used her own body as a model in these and many other images because “there’s a different kind of energy loop . . . feedback loop” when being both artist and canvas, enabling rigorous reflexive self-investigation (2017). It points to a self-sufficiency echoed by Slinger’s image, “Self Contained.” In the background, a penis penetrates a vulva, while in the foreground, a bear-headed pregnant Slinger with a penis (presumably Whitehead’s) claims access to both genitals and the capacity for self-fertilization. Feilding’s self-penetration with a phallic dentist’s drill mirrors such self-containment. Yet, just as the foreboding darkness in “Self Contained” suggests a critique of complete self-sufficiency, Slinger and Feilding’s processes didn’t absent the lover-collaborator. Whitehead shot a number of the base photographs collaged by Slinger for An Exorcism, and Mellen filmed Feilding’s autosculpture, helped create the musical score for the film, assisted Feilding in displaying the images in her exhibition, and acted as her election agent when she ran for parliament. However, Slinger explains that Whitehead “took the pictures of me, with my direction” (cited in Phillips 2012), and Feilding clearly remains the conductor of all of the different elements in TNH. Mellen demonstrates how Feilding brought the same methodical precision of her processes of sculpting to her own act of auto-sculpture and its documentation:

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Amanda is a very thorough person. . . . She had seen the hash I made of my early attempts and she was determined not to make the same mistakes. She . . . wanted to do it herself so that she would be in complete control throughout. Gradually over six months she prepared herself. When the day came she . . . laid out all the instruments on a table covered with a white sheet. She wore a simple long white dress with a bathcap plastered down over her hair to prevent any getting in the wound and infecting it, and she set up the camera for me to film the proceedings. (2015 [1970]: 103)

Whitehead and Mellen function as supportive laboratory assistants for these women’s self-sufficient artistic and ecstatic journeys into the self. The points of confluence that resonate between Slinger and Feilding allow the spectator to further drill down into these journeys. One of the few scenes in An Exorcism to display impassioned desire between Slinger and Fraey, rather than betrayal, shows a double image of the couple standing in a naked embrace under the scrutiny of a large blue eye. Its title is a quotation about lesbian love from Djuna Barnes’s celebrated queer novel, Nightwood (2014 [1936]: 151): “on her mouth you kiss your own.” The doubling and focus on the eye/I positions the other as another self. This blurred relation between self and other is recalled by Slinger’s narrative of how, when hearing on the art scene about Feilding’s bold act (without knowing that Whitehead and Feilding had supposedly once been lovers), she “had a pain in [her] head for days, thinking about it. But it was part of her journey” (cited in Bernstein 1971: 48). Slinger pays tribute to that journey in one of her Headbox sculptures entitled Trepanation—Homage to Amanda Feilding (1971/2). Echoing Feilding’s positioning of her self-trepanation as autosculpture, Slinger’s Headboxes work with a mold of her own head. With this particular sculpture, a plain mold of her head is trepanned by a drill that bores through the top of the box and into the representational skull within. Two lines of bloody paint drip down her forehead. A large mold of a brain sits in front of the head, and a shadowy outline of Slinger’s face is traced onto the Perspex box front with a circled cross indicating the place that the drill should penetrate. Williams describes AC/DC’s trepanation scene as “an obvious metaphor for direct brain to brain contact” (cited in Wardle 1973: xi). Similarly, Slinger’s representational act of accepting the drill in the Headbox evokes an empathetic opening up to Feilding and the process that she has followed, as well as a drilling down into Slinger’s self for understanding. The box intertwines Slinger’s and Feilding’s personal and artistic journeys.

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Spectator as Collaborator Drawing on Merleau-Ponty to unpack the sensoriality of the American underground’s art practices, Osterweil presents the spectator as an “embodied participant in a corporeal mise-en-scène that encompasses not only the activities documented by the camera, but the ‘chiasmic intertwinings’ of the bodies around and behind it” (2014: 12). Such embodied spectatorship can be traced through visceral reactions of excitement and repulsion provoked by TNH. One reviewer of the Suydam’s screening of Heartbeat in the Brain records how “[m]inutes flitted by like hours as [Feilding] lost pints of very Technicolor blood. Behind me, there were sounds as of ripe plumbs thudding on turf as the audience thinned out” (Haden-Guest 1978: 13). It foreshadows responses to Orlan’s later plastic surgery operation performances, which ironically replicated elements from famous paintings of idealized women (The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan, 1990–3). TNH’s 1978 screening of Heartbeat in the Brain at the Suydam and immersive exhibition of three layers of large graphic stills covering P.S. 1’s gallery walls anticipate Orlan’s embrace of the bloody medical spectacle and her emphasis on the body’s capacity to be perpetually reconfigured. Carey Lovelace describes how, during the live satellite transmission of Orlan’s Operation Number Seven, “the gallery empties of a third of its audience” while “the surgeon is sawing away, methodically scraping out flesh from below the hairline” (1995: 13). A recurring fascinated disbelief in Feilding’s daring actions, as situated completely beyond the bounds of social normativity, can be viewed in writings on Feilding from across the last fifty years. It surpasses responses to Orlan and the acts of perceived self-violence in Abramović’s oeuvre. Indeed, Abramović’s celebrated, risk-based, solo performance, Rhythm series (1973– 4), which tested her “personal limits” by exploring loss and management of control (Richards 2010: 90–2), has been increasingly integrated into and rationalized as part of a now canonical history of body art, where Feilding’s work is barely considered. Yet, this pertinent comparison with Abramović’s practice also reveals further dynamics of embodied participation in the corporeal mise-enscène of TNH. Conceptualized through comparative Eastern philosophies, Abramović highlights the “energy exchange” with the spectator that should result from endurance-based performances, “induc[ing] conditions that deliberately alter customary ways of perceiving the world” (Richards 2010: 81). For both Feilding and Abramović the energy exchange with a collaborator also facilitates the self to negotiate those conditions. Feilding points out how making the film “helped to detach [herself] from the natural

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reluctance [she] felt to be subject to such a happening” and aided immersion in the embodied action (A Hole in the Head 1998). Both Mellen, behind the camera, and the spectators that she anticipated experiencing the film became her enabling collaborators. Just as in her 1981 Documentary Study: The Head of the Medusa, Orlan recorded viewers’ responses to the performance installation displaying her menstruating vulva with painted pubic hair, Feilding analyzed her exhibition as “both the stage and stimulus for the ‘play’ of other people’s reactions” (1978). Hence, TNH enabled the continuation of Feilding’s arousing journey of research and discovery and maintained her position behind, as well as under, the microscope.

“Dynamic Progressive Eroticism” Slinger maintains her own exciting process of examination and questioning, in collaboration with the viewer, throughout An Exorcism. Photographed in Lord Lilford’s derelict Northamptonshire stately home, the house is positioned as a seat of disintegrating patriarchal power and as representative of Slinger’s psyche and body (Penny Slinger 2017). The viewer follows Slinger testing out and exploding gendered roles and behaviors within this disintegrating seat, as she interrogates: “what’s mine? What’s the projections of my partner? What’s the projections of society? How can I unravel all of this?” (Slinger 2017). In location and through its use of a playful British humor and irony, An Exorcism offers a peculiarly British take on the “radical narcissism” that Amelia Jones famously argued was utilized by contemporaneous body artists, like Hannah Wilke and Carolee Schneemann, in their nude self-portraits. Slinger “flamboyantly objectifies the (her) body but also simultaneously performs her body/self as subject” (Jones 1998: 17). Indeed, Slinger labors “not to have one’s sexuality objectified, but to subjectify it, and to reclaim it as subject” (Slinger 2017). Thus, in “Petals Blush,” we witness Slinger’s masturbatory bliss as she strokes her vulva, and vibrant yonic roses cascade across the floor, creating a burst of light and color that pushes back the shadows of the room. She joyously constructs what art critic Peter Fuller described as a “dynamic, progressive eroticism” (1971), reminiscent of Schneemann’s sensorial film Fuses (1964–7). Fuses displays the artist having sex with her lover, composer Jim Tenney. As Osterweil beautifully evokes, Schneemann immerses the viewer in “an experience of sensory abandonment,” as “painted, collaged, scratched, dyed, baked, stamped, and dipped in acid, the skin of the celluloid bristles and bursts with the affective contagion of desire” (2014: 157). This rich representation of Schneemann’s

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Figure 3.1  Old Fashioned, 1969–77. Copyright Penny Slinger. All Rights Reserved, DACS/ Artimage 2021. Photo: Penny Slinger and Peter Whitehead.

desire is enabled by the generous “lyric, energetic partnering” with Tenney (Schneemann 2003 [1977]: 26).  Similarly, and recalling Feilding’s guidance of Mellen’s actions, Slinger directs a submissively, and sometimes sacrificially, denuded Whitehead through a number of psychodramatic scenes, provoking Whitehead’s intellectual and embodied understanding of the problems of the objectifying gaze. Reflecting my earlier emphasis on Whitehead facilitating Slinger’s self-directed journey and Tenney’s generous investment in Schneemann’s vision, Whitehead explains: “I am not an exhibitionist. I wouldn’t have done it for anyone other than Penny” (2016b). And yet, Slinger’s direction also playfully facilitates both herself and Whitehead to creatively and sexually investigate their shared attraction to bisexual exploration and performance of multiple gender and sexual roles (Whitehead cited in Paul 1995; Slinger cited in Oakes 1974: 95). In “Old fashioned,” a grinning Slinger adopts uber femme, stylish, full BDSM gear, and Whitehead coolly appears as a makeup-garnished nude pinup with a fur stole coyly covering his genitals (see Fig. 3.1). The “redemptive humour” (Slinger 2016) of these images is undercut elsewhere by Slinger’s investigation of the mutual oppressiveness of gendered power dynamics, laying emotional responses and desires far more painfully bare than in Schneemann’s Fuses. However, we journey through this

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oppression to “Emergence.” Developing on a visual trope seen throughout An Exorcism of the house door as a vaginal entrance, in this later scene, Slinger serenely emerges through that door, as if giving birth to herself in an act of creative self-origination. A tiny, nude Whitehead is enwombed in her belly— his projections and perceptions finally contained by her own. Arousal and desire are exchanged for a momentary fulfillment.

Ecosexual Intertwinings The trailblazing ecosexual pursuit of loving interdependence between genders, sexualities, species, and environments evident in Slinger’s later work, such as the Mountain Ecstasy collages (1976–8), is innovatively initiated in An Exorcism. Exploring this innovation alongside the equally striking ecosexual concerns of Heartbeat in the Brain reveals further intersections between Feilding, Slinger, and Whitehead’s practices but also intensifies the transgressive resistance of Feilding and Slinger’s actions. In Fool that I am . . ., Whitehead described viewing images of Feilding’s sculptures in 1963/4 of “erotic figures of birds that are birds and yet aren’t birds . . . fragments of birds struggling to unite into a whole bird . . . half of a bird copulating with its ‘other’” (2014: 242). These depictions could be attributed to Whitehead’s fantasized memories of the period and his pursuit of birds of prey alongside and in connection with his female muse (Whitehead 1997). Whitehead introduced Slinger to the process of keeping falcons when they lived together, and he eventually became a professional falconer for the Saudi Arabian royal family. Strong blurred points of confluence with Whitehead are suggested by Feilding’s relationship with Birdie and by Slinger’s perception of the line of influence from Max Ernst’s surrealist bird and human ravishments in his collage novel Une Semaine de Bonté (1934) to An Exorcism. These clearly evoke shades of Feilding’s erotic coupling bird sculptures recalled by Whitehead. Yet, contrasting the phallocentric seduction and control suggested by Whitehead’s alignment of women with birds, Slinger demonstrates the damaging consequences of a relationship with any species rooted in manipulation and nonconsensual domination. In “Arena Union,” transgressive interspecies couplings and hybridizations are presented within a Bosch-like “Garden of Earthly Delights.” Fish, fowl, human, and nonhuman animal mingling occurs in a violent collision of body parts, pointing to a frightening collapse of boundaries through cruel behaviors. It foreshadows the questions fueling Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth M. Stephens’s ecosexual performance art: “How can humans join together with nonhumans to create

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mutually sustainable relationships and communities that flourish in the face of extinction?” (2012: 64). Heartbeat in the Brain’s representation of Feilding’s egalitarian “passionate relationship” with Birdie does, however, appear mutually sustainable (Feilding cited in Perry 1998: 116). It also anticipates Schneemann’s erotic exchange of deep kisses with her cat in the two series of photographic reliefs, Infinity Kisses I & II (1981–7 and 1990–8). Feilding explains that Birdie “was the emblem of the expanded consciousness and of the Holy Ghost. He was like being a part of the cosmic orgasm. And so, I wanted to make a film that flew on the wings of Birdie” (cited in Perry 1998: 116). Slinger’s sensual depiction of herself in An Exorcism as a bird-woman hybrid, with feathers painted onto her face or donning an owl mask as Athena, goddess of wisdom, similarly symbolizes heightened powers of perception and an ability to cross borders of reality. Focusing on Birdie’s role in Heartbeat in the Brain provides a surprising further reorientation away from the spectacle of blood toward desire, love, and an ecosexual, interrelated world. It significantly develops upon Huges’s argument that, within a trepanned society, “the increase in common sense will result in an increase in cooperation” (1995 [1966/7]: 102). Feilding and Slinger’s deliberate editing of such complex cross-species couplings into the reflexive frame of representation presents feminist collages that reconfigure those areas of confluence with Whitehead absolutely on their own terms.

Conclusion: Between Self-sufficiency and Connectedness This chapter has walked its own tightrope between unpicking acts and images of gendered self-sufficiency and self-determination, as well as chiasmatic intertwining and loving artistic collaborative processes helmed by women. In doing so, the chapter has repositioned the power balance in Feilding and Slinger’s relationship with Whitehead and also Mellen and has demonstrated that all of these women’s self-sufficient and collaborative modes of creation were underpinned by fearless experimentation. It has examined how that experimentation led to innovative acts and representations of embodied, gendered, sexual, and specied transgression, including an act of body modification that drilled down to the heart of countercultural discourses regarding spiritual self-discovery. It has, thus, served to join the voices of individuals—like the Exploding Galaxy’s Jill Drower—who have worked to challenge the male-centric focus of British

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countercultural histories. Moreover, dissecting these women’s innovative acts has contributed to the reconsideration of Slinger and Feilding’s practice, including repositioning TNH and its surrounding processes primarily as art and recognizing their significant contribution to feminist performance art history. This chapter has highlighted that arousal motivated all of these transgressive acts and images, which stemmed from desire either for another or for modes of psychological, sexual, visceral, intellectual, artistic, and spiritual penetration and revelation. Tracing all of this through this chapter provides another opportunity for those arousing images, and the loving and labored interactions between and within self and other, to proliferate.

Notes 1 I am very grateful to Ramsay Burt, Steve Chibnall, and, particularly, the editors, for their insightful comments on drafts of this work. 2 See Feilding’s (2017, https​:/​/be​​ckley​​found​​ation​​.org/​​amand​​a​-fe​i​​lding​/) and Slinger’s (2014, https://pennyslinger​.com​/recent​-press/) richly populated websites for further details. 3 Materials have been drawn from archival boxes PW/PE/0002-0003f and PW/F/0030. 4 As their letters reveal, Mellen was in conversation with Whitehead during 1967 about the possibility of Whitehead publishing Bore Hole. 5 This is a common misspelling of Feilding’s name.

References A Hole in the Head (1998), [Film] Dir. E. Kabillio, USA: Spectacle Films. Barnes, D. (2014 [1936]), Nightwood, London: Faber and Faber Limited. Bernstein, M. (1971), “Penny Dreadfuls,” The Observer, May: 48–9. Blackwood, C. (1983), “Hole in the Head,” The Observer, July. Cartwright, R. (2019), “A Psychedelic Journey into OCD,” The Face, April 17. Available online: https​:/​/th​​eface​​.com/​​life/​​knock​​ing​-o​​n​-the​​-door​​s​-of​-​​perce​​ ption​(accessed April 24, 2019). Chakelian, A. (2019), “A Trip with the Acid Countess: Amanda Feilding and the Medical Case for Drugs Reform,” New Statesman, February 27. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.new​​state​​sman.​​com​/p​​oliti​​cs​/he​​alth/​​2019/​​02​/tr​​ip​-ac​​id​-co​​ untes​​s​-ama​​nda​-f​​eildi​​ng​-an​​d​-m​ed​​ical-​​case-​​drugs​​-refo​​rm (accessed March 1, 2019).

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Clarke, A. (2019), “‘Am I Providing a Good Show for You?’: Female Performance, Labor and Collaborative Agency in Niki de Saint Phalle and Peter Whitehead’s Daddy (1973),” Feminist Media Histories, 5(2): 148–80. Drower, J. (2014), 99 Balls Pond Road: The Story of the Exploding Galaxy, London: Scrudge Books. Feilding, A. (1978), [Exhibition] “Artist’s Statement,” in Trepanation for the National Health: Special Project Exhibition at P.S.1., New York, October 1 to November 15. Available online: http:​/​/gal​​lery.​​98bow​​ery​.c​​om​/20​​19​/tr​​epana​​ tion-​​for​-t​​he​-na​​tiona​​l​-h​ea​​lth​-1​​978​-c​​opy/ (accessed July 30, 2020). Feilding, A. (1995 [1993]), “Interview by Tim Cridland,” in S. Swezey (ed.), Amok Journal: Sensurround Edition: A Compendium of Psycho-Physiological Investigations, pp. 120–9, Los Angeles: Amok Books. Feilding, A. (2017), “About the Founder & Director,” Beckley Foundation. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.bec​​kleyf​​ounda​​tion.​​org​/a​​manda​​-fei​l​​ding/​. Fuller, P. (1971), “Commentary,” Penny Slinger: Archival Press, May 24. Available online: https​:/​/pe​​nnysl​​inger​​.com/​​wp​-co​​ntent​​/uplo​​ads​/2​​014​/0​​6​/04_​​detai​​l​_2​ _P​​eter-​​Full​e​​r​_Com​​menta​​ry​.jp​g (accessed September 1, 2016). Haden-Guest, A. (1978), “Girl Needs Hole in the Head,” New York Magazine, November: 13. Harding, J. M. (2012), Cutting Performances: Collage Events, Feminist Artists, and the American Avant-Garde, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Huges, B. (1995 [1966/7]), “Questioned by Joe Mellen,” in S. Swezey (ed.), Amok Journal: Sensurround Edition: A Compendium of Psycho-Physiological Investigations, pp. 95–104, Los Angeles: Amok Books. I Am My Own Laboratory (2018), [Film] Dir. O. Hockenhull, Canada: a bric-abrac what- not whimsical notion & metaphoric certainty production. Jones, A. (1998), Body Art/ Performing the Subject, reprint edition, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lemke-Santangelo, G. (2009), Daughters of Aquarius: Women of the Sixties Counterculture, Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Lovelace, C. (1995), “Orlan: Offensive Acts,” Performing Arts Journal, 17(1): 13–25. Mellen, J. (2015 [1970]), Bore Hole, London: Strange Attractor Press. Oakes, P. (1974), “The Further Shores of Love,” Cosmopolitan, March: 92–5. Osterweil, A. (2014), Flesh Cinema, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Paul, R. F. (1995), “The Inadvertent Agent: A Conversation with Peter Lorrimer Whitehead,” Mondo, 2000: 18. Penny Slinger: Out of the Shadows (2017), [Film] Dir. R. Kovitch, UK: AntiWorlds. Perry, S. (1998), “A Hole in the Head,” Spin, May (14)5: 114–18, Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive. Phillips, S. (2012), “Penelope Slinger’s Best Photograph: Lilford Hall Montage: Interview,” The Guardian, September 12. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​ guard​​ian​.c​​om​/ar​​tandd​​esign​​/2012​​/sep/​​12​/pe​​nelop​​e​-sli​​nger​-​​best-​​photo​​graph​ (accessed September 1, 2016).

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Richards, M. (2010), Marina Abramović, Abingdon: Routledge. Schneemann, C. (2003 [1977]), “Interview with Kate Haug,” in C. Schneemann, Imaging Her Erotics, pp. 21–44, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Schneider, R. (1997), The Explicit Body in Performance, Abingdon: Routledge. Slinger, P. (1977), An Exorcism, London: Empty-Eye by Villiers Publications Ltd. Slinger, P. (2014), “Press,” Penny Slinger. Available online: https://pennyslinger​ .com​/recent​-press/. Slinger, P. (2016), Unpublished interview with author, October 14. Slinger P. (2017), Unpublished interview with author, January 6. Speed, B. (2016), “Tripping with Amanda Feilding,” New Statesman, July: 15–21. Stephens, E. and A. Sprinkle (2012), “On Becoming Appalachian Moonshine,” Performance Research, 17(4): 61–6. Stief, A. (2016), “Penny Slinger: Exorcism Exercises,” in G. Schor (ed.), Feminist Avant-Garde: Art of the 1970s, pp. 330–2, Munich and New York: Prestel. Turner, C. (2007/8), “Like a Hole in the Head,” Cabinet Magazine, 28: 64–8. Available online: http:​/​/cab​​inetm​​agazi​​ne​.or​​g​/iss​​ues​/2​​8​/​tur​​ner​.p​​hp (accessed September 2, 2017). Wardle, I. (1973), “Introduction: An Interview with Heathcote Williams,” in H. Williams, AC/DC & The Lost Stigmatic, pp. vii–xii, New York: The Viking Press. Whitehead, P. (1967), “February,” Diary, the Peter Whitehead Archive, De Montfort University. Whitehead, P. (1997), “The Falconer: Three Lives of Peter Whitehead,” interviewed by G. Evans and B. Slater for Entropy, 1(1): 10–22. Whitehead, P. (2014), Fool That I am . . .: A Trilogy, Book Two, A Dream of the Final Flight, Kettering: Nohzone Archive Publishing. Whitehead, P. (2016a), Unpublished interview conducted by A. Clarke, May 4. Whitehead, P. (2016b), Unpublished interview conducted by A. Clarke, August 18. Williams, H. (1973), “AC/DC,” in H. Williams, AC/DC & The Lost Stigmatic, pp. 1–133, New York: The Viking Press. Zarrilli, P. (2013), “Psychophysical Training and the Formation of an Ensemble,” in J. Britton (ed.), Encountering Ensemble, pp. 369–80, London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama.

4

Getting Lippy with the Patriarchy Contemporary Women Artists’ “Lip Art” Lara Cox

This chapter studies the ways in which women’s lips are used in installation art and painting as a tool of both erotic possibility and women’s empowerment. Women’s lips have often been understood as a stand-in for women’s sex. Feminism, art history, advertising, psychoanalysis, and neuropsychology are just some of the arenas that have dealt with the topic of women’s lips as an eroticized body part. Yet, this chapter takes up the notion of “lip art” by women artists that have harnessed the erotic dimensions of women’s lips to challenge sexism and serve women’s empowerment. I establish crossovers between performance art and fine art by considering women’s lips in terms of the actions that they connote even when seemingly immobilized on the artist’s canvas. All of the examples considered here are linked to the notion of bodily action central to performance art, evoking theatre, song, and ceremonial sounds. The examples considered here allow women to perform their identity away from notions of objectification or reduction—to perform their liberation. Though inexhaustive, the examples have been chosen to demonstrate a common feminist goal in the use of women’s lips across diverse artistic media and a range of geographical contexts. The chapter starts with an analysis of Polish Agnieszka Polska’s digital installation, “I Am the Mouth,” which reinjects feminist meaning into an image from Irish playwright Samuel Beckett’s Not I to denounce the sexual exploitation of Eastern European women in the internet age, extending a pattern of Polish feminist lip art from earlier generations into the contemporary, postcommunist context. I move on to examine Franco-Algerian artist Zineb Sedira’s video “A Scream for Liberation,” which was inspired by the confrontational aesthetics of the British Black Arts movement in which the artist has worked since the start of her career. Sedira disrupts the objectifications of Arab women by contesting the codes of nineteenth-century Orientalist artists and contemporary French denial of racial and ethnic difference in an eponymous, contestatory

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“scream.” The chapter closes by turning to the paintings of US artist Ellen Gallagher: Oh! Susanna and Watery Ecstatic. These paintings recast racist and male-dominated songs on the canvas via the artist’s depiction of African American women’s lips. The point of departure for this chapter is that women’s lips have been figured as an object of male sexual desire—of what film critic Laura Mulvey called the “male gaze”—in Western society (2009). As important to feminist performance art as it has been to the fine arts, the notion of the male gaze hinged on the idea that the (male) cinema spectator asserted his dominance by reducing “fragmented by close-ups” of the Hollywood actress onscreen to an object of his sexual desire (Mulvey 2009: 23). Close-ups on women’s lips, usually parted, are a favored tool of the cosmetics industry to stir the implication of “some kind of sexual pleasure to the consumer . . . which in turn may encourage purchase” (Ringrow 2016: 67). Women’s lips connote sex and sex sells. There needn’t be any “congruence” between the product being sold and the lips on display; Dolce & Gabbana and Moët & Chandon use the full-lipped Scarlett Johansson to advertise not lipstick but perfume and champagne (Ringrow 2016: 67). A Freudian reading would suggest that women’s lips are also a stand-in for the vagina. So inured are we to reading women’s sex—as in their genitalia—in lips that Nicolas Dupuis-Roy and Frédéric Gosselin (2015), psychologists at the University of Montreal, have demonstrated that we are more able to recognize women by their lips than men. It seems evident that women’s lips possess an erotic power that has been used in the service of their objectification. However, this statement can be picked apart in two senses. Erotic power does not automatically entail women’s lack of agency, and not all women’s lips have been reduced equally to the status of an erotic locus. Mulvey’s model followed the codes of Hollywood narrative cinema in which fragmented close-ups of the star’s facial features are nonetheless related back to a shot of her face in its entirety (often in soft focus). This is a pattern also favored by the aforementioned cosmetics industry focusing on Johansson’s full-faced beauty. Yet, the examples in this chapter consider more extreme forms of fragmentation—lips in the artwork that follows float free of other facial features. The theory of the male gaze does not, moreover, take into account voice, which empowers women to articulate their condition or express their suffering even when their lips arouse viewers. The degree to which women’s lips have been eroticized varies enormously according to race and ethnicity, something that this chapter examines by drawing on postcolonial theory and its “[s]iblin[g] of [s]ubalternity,” postcommunist thought (Ștefănescu 2012). I also draw on feminism at the intersection of race and gender, conceptualized by Kimberlé Crenshaw.

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In the Western world, the “whiter” the woman is, the more her lips are sexualized. Accordingly, as shall be covered in this chapter, Polska (in postcommunist Poland) and Sedira (in French and British contexts) have chosen to reappropriate a priori eroticization of white women’s— or, following Orientalist art history, whitened women’s—lips for their empowerment. Meanwhile, Ellen Gallagher, as we shall see, has made arousal a strategy that combats the historical desexualization of African American women’s lips.

Redefining Beckett: Agnieszka Polska’s “I Am the Mouth” Visitors to the “Suspended Animation” exhibit, held in the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC, between February 10, 2016, and March 26, 2017, were greeted with a giant pair of talking lips and a woman’s slow, meditative voice. “Suspended Animation” sought, as curator Gianni Jetzer (2016) stated, to explore visitors’ relationships as “carnal bodies” to digitized identities. The exhibit’s first room—darkened, narrow, and located in the Hirshhorn’s basement galleries—emphasized the improbably large dimensions of these lips, cast adrift of any human referent by virtue of the mouth’s lack of teeth. Polish artist Agnieszka Polska’s “I Am the Mouth” undeniably plays with an aesthetics of sexual allure.1 The mouth is full-lipped, pink, pretty, part computer-generated (the upper lip lacking texture and relief), and part marked by realistic human contours (the lower lip). The voice, too, arouses. Raspy and breathless, the voice of a Polish lilt (Polska’s own) marks the presence of the artist and performs the avatar’s identity as that of an Eastern European woman. National origins seem something that the artist wants viewers to note, since her pseudonym “Polska” is the Polish word for Poland. The installation conjures up what Karina Beecher calls “the sexual marketing” of Eastern European women in the age of internet pornography. Developing from the “Natasha trade” involving the physical trafficking of Eastern European prostitutes to Western nations, the online marketization of “Eastern European women and their bodies . . . as sexual commodities for profitable gain” in the twenty-first century has enabled former communist states to “‘catch up’ with the West,” as Beecher posits (2010: 8). Economically, the Eastern European online sex trade has provided more jobs; it has also allowed the former communist states to shed Soviet-era sexual repression by adhering to a Western model, however misguided that may be, of sexual freedom (Beecher 2010: 8).

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Polska’s installation states, in a breathy whisper, that she has “a mouth full of substance from the sea,” connoting the so-called money shot in pornography. She thus conjures up the hundreds of millions of pornographic and sex trade websites that Beecher’s research exposes through search terms such as “Sexy Russians” (2010: 53). Polska does not shy away from sexually enticing the viewer with such connotations in her piece. In developing the installation, the artist acknowledged her interest in “Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response” (ASMR), investigated by psychologists, musicians, and art historians in the current age (Jetzer 2016). ASMR plays on sounds and other stimuli that trigger arousal-like tingles and frissons in viewers. Polska’s research into ASMR seemed to work on visitors to the Hirshhorn. As one commentator on the digital magazine website ArtSlant quipped, the installation could seduce and “enrapture” viewers even if it read out US tax codes (Vidrine 2016). The installation may encourage sexual excitement in viewers, but it also denounces the representations of Eastern European women in the internet age as sexist and harmful. The voice of “I Am the Mouth” speaks her mind about the little agency she is given: “I possess no inner features that would qualify me for my role” (Polska 2014). The lips lament that biblical stereotypes of women’s “guilt” explain her “captivity.” She also expresses to viewers her feelings of being stifled: “I can hardly breathe” (Polska 2014). In the caption accompanying “I Am the Mouth,” Polska attributes inspiration for her installation to the short play Not I by Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, published in 1972. This reference implies a crossover between the aforementioned marketization of Eastern European women on the internet and postcolonial domination. As Jennifer Jeffers argues, Beckett’s Not I interlinks gender, empire, and trauma as the play’s main character— “Mouth”—represents one of the “old crones” (the playwright’s own words) that Beckett grew up with in the Dublin suburb of Foxrock (2009). Mouth in Not I conveys, in this sense, women’s sense of deracination and loss of identity after the British withdrawal from rural Irish areas following the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922 (Jeffers 2009: 138). The displacement and suffering of imperial withdrawal are conveyed in Not I by the lone woman who rambles on in a tortured manner at a startling speed, telling of her unhappy life after being abandoned by her parents and violated. The postcolonial reading of Beckett’s play is also stressed by the presence of the character of Auditor, who, clad in a North African djellabah, stands alongside Mouth and shrugs helplessly at her expressions of suffering. Not I was a dedication to postcolonial Ireland, reminding spectators that white women were also the victims of the British Empire. Polska’s heavily accented installation “I Am the Mouth” also suggests a form of postcolonial

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domination of white women but in the digital age and from the Eastern European point of view. In Postcommunism/Postcolonialism: Siblings of Subalternity, Bogdan Ștefănescu (2012: 41) identifies a common thread of “cultures recovering from traumas inflected by imperial oppressors” in postcolonial and postcommunist contexts. In Beckett’s Not I, this trauma is caused by the British empire; in Polska’s installation, the oppressor is more nebulous, since the sexual marketization of Eastern European women in the internet age is, as we have seen, a result of the collapse of Soviet imperialism and the exploitation of the women of former communist countries by the “liberated West” (Beecher 2010: 8). Indeed, a number of scholars have pointed to the Western exoticization of Eastern European women, such as Melania Trump, in ways that recall imperial thinking on racial otherness (Wiedlack 2018). Beckett scholar Ann Wilson was highly critical of the sexual elements of Not I, the play that inspired Polska’s “I Am the Mouth.” She argued that the reception had underestimated the pornographic elements of Not I since the “lips and tongue [are] moving rapidly, generating so much saliva that it sprays from Mouth and clings to her lower lip” (1990: 191). However, the postcommunist context of Polska’s “I Am the Mouth” arguably makes the installation’s eroticism less problematic. The Soviet Union repressed women’s sexuality; socialist realism in Soviet art favored representations of sexless, traditional peasants and “Mother Russia[s]” (Simpson 1998). During the same decade as Beckett’s Not I (1972), Polish performance artist Ewa Partum protested the Soviet desexualization of women’s bodies by staging “conceptual poetry” in the nude. She left her lipstick marks on canvas as an erotic index. Yet, the spectral trace of makeup was not the artist’s actual, bare body. This allowed Partum to avoid objectification by the camera lens. Before this, Polish Surrealist Alina Szapocznikow (1926–72) infused functional objects of the home such as desk lamps and ashtrays with sculpted effigies of women’s lips. This unlikely mix brought a certain humor to Szapocznikow’s works. The objects of the home that she chose to sexualize were both a reference to and reconfiguration of the domestic labor expected of women. Both Partum and Szapocznikow performed women’s erotic power in defiance of Soviet codes. The playfulness connoted by traces of the naked body in lipstick imprints (Partum) and the humor of disembodiment, as well as improbable relocation of women’s lips in domestic objects (Szapocznikow), also pointed to a way of looking at these works not based on male sexual desire. Polska replicates this playfulness of earlier communist-era lip art in “I Am the Mouth.” Unlike Beckett’s Not I, the lips of “I Am the Mouth” play on hyperbole: the installation makes pouty formations with the lips that are so emphatic as to be not only sexual but also humorous. Its raspy voice, drawing

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on the aforementioned ASMR technologies of arousal, is so exaggeratedly pornographic that it gives viewers the opportunity to hear the mouth’s selfdeclared “captivity”; the mouth’s aesthetic perfection is so clearly the fruit of digital manipulation that it enables viewers to see the crude sexualization of Eastern European women at work in this oeuvre.

Zineb Sedira: Mouthing Postcolonial Protest Unlike the mellow and raspy voice of Polska’s “I Am the Mouth,” Zineb Sedira’s “A Scream for Liberation” performs women’s empowerment through an uncomfortably piercing, eponymous scream. Created during the artist’s time at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design (1992–5), the video depicts a woman’s mouth as she expresses various modulations of a “youyou” sound. This is made by women (both Jewish and Muslim) from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and parts of the Middle East. The piece, developed in the context of the British Black Arts Movement (BAM), thus connotes a transborder postcolonial diaspora. Sedira was born to Algerian parents in 1963 and was raised in the Parisian suburb of Gennevilliers, but she came to the UK in the 1980s and has been living and making art there ever since. If “A Scream for Liberation” was created in Britain in 1995, it is because this exploration of past colonial damages was possible, thanks to BAM, which Sedira acknowledges explicitly as an influence. The visuals of the piece are clearly sexual. While the five-minute video is in one fixed shot, the technique of montage fragments the mouth into two to three images at any one time. Slow motion emphasizes the movements of the tongue and saliva in the mouth’s corners. Privileging a vision of the tongue, which makes gestures akin to licking in producing the “lalala” sound in particular, and a lubricated mouth, the visuals of “A Scream” suggest eroticism. The sexualized mouth repeats, with a difference, the codes of nineteenthcentury Orientalist painting. Artists depicting life in the French colonies (such as Jean-Léon Gérôme and Eugène Delacroix) played with a dichotomy of veiling and unveiling as part of the French colonial project to unveil Muslim women in the name of “civilizing” the Orient. Women’s mouths were cast either as a muzzled continuity of an excessively veiled body (for instance, Gérôme’s Harem Women Feeding Pigeons in a Courtyard) or as a synecdoche of denuded body, stripped bare and degraded in sexual submission to Arab men. Gérôme’s The Slave Market (c. 1866) and Delacroix’s The Death of Sardanapalus (1827) figure the female mouth as gaping and beholden to Arab men seeking to violate them. The paintings sought to entice the Western

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viewer with suggestions of these women’s sexual availability; The Slave Market, for instance, depicts the eponymous figure’s mouth as stuffed with the phallic finger of one of her oppressors. It also insinuated Arab men’s “backwardness” to justify French presence in the colonies. As Meyda Yeğenoğlu argues in Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism, Orientalist artists’ exposure of women’s bodies in sexual submission meant that they became “recodified, redefined, and reformulated according to new Western codes” (1998: 116). Indeed, Orientalist artists overwhelmingly depicted the Arab woman’s body, when stripped bare, as coextensive with the European one, with milky white skin resembling the female nudes of Europe. The overt sexuality of the foaming, licking mouth in “A Scream for Liberation” apes the Western sexualization of Arab women. Indeed, light brown skin surrounding the mouth and perfectly white teeth would even suggest the video’s conformity to the whitened beauty standards of Orientalist art. However, the mouth of “A Scream for Liberation” is no passive receptacle for male desire as in Orientalist art history. Unlike The Slave Market, where the Arab woman’s mouth is made the helpless orifice stuffed with her male capturer’s fingers, Sedira’s video sees a mouth actively “scream[ing] for liberation,” to recall the title. The loud sounds, ranging from a high-pitched “yiyi” to a lower “youyou” and “lalala,” produce auricular discomfort in the Western spectator who cannot collapse these unrecognizable sounds into Western codes. This nourishes what Sedira has described as an “oblique gaze” in the viewer, produced “when something assumed to be coherent and predictable is disrupted by experiences of anxiety and uncertainty” (1999: 215). If the piece stirs up Orientalist eroticism, the voice makes this eroticism confrontational. This illustrates the strategy of unapologetic reappropriation of a racist visual field at the heart of the British BAM created by secondgeneration immigrants, or in the movement’s “second moment,” as described by Stuart Hall, BAM’s main academic commentator (2006: 17). Disabused of the optimism of the first “Windrush” generation of the Commonwealth diaspora that came to the UK in the 1950s and 1960s in search of economic opportunity, this second generation reacted with anger against British racism defined by a rising and virulent National Front in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as institutional racism in the 1990s, which was exemplified by Scotland Yard’s inaction following the racially motivated murder of Black teenager Stephen Lawrence in 1993. Second-generation BAM artists also displayed a defiant sense of race positivity as the idea that “Black is beautiful” was imported from the Post Civil Rights era of the United States. For instance, British-born Joy Gregory’s Autoportrait series (1990) captured the beauty of Black skin in a series of close-up portraits of the back of the artist’s own neck, chin,

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mouth, and face, all the while confronting the viewer’s racist gaze in a look that was direct and unsmiling. Displaying the mouth as sexual, active, and confrontational in its high-pitched cries, “A Scream for Liberation” echoes the “Black is beautiful” sentiment of BAM’s women in particular. Exhibited permanently in the Pompidou Centre as part of the “New Media” collections since 2002, “A Scream for Liberation” has been “returned” to Sedira’s country of birth, where the piece unsettles a national narrative of universalism. Conceptions of French identity have absented the idea of difference from discussion since the time of the French Revolution and Henri Grégoire’s report of 1794, aiming to anéantir (annihilate) patois diversity. The state recognizes the “Frenchness” of its citizens at the expense of race, ethnicity, and other differences, which has had the effect of denying racist and ethnic oppression. The country’s national statistics office, INSEE, is forbidden from including “race” and “ethnicity” in its surveys and censors. “A Scream for Liberation,” placed in the context of a gallery named after a president of the French state (Georges Pompidou), disturbs the national narrative of sameness. Viewers are confronted with a presentation of the artist who is of nationalité française (French nationality), yet whose work confronts them with the “youyou” cries of African and Middle Eastern territories. Indeed, the caption accompanying the piece emphasizes the particularities of non-Western women’s protest; Priscilla Marques describes the “youyou” as “a symbol of the words of the Oriental [sic] woman, her way of expressing herself, shedding linguistic and social codes of submission” (2014). This non-Western feminist reading of the piece is to be welcomed in France, where, in a repetition of colonialists’ forced unveiling of Muslim women, the government sought to cast Arab immigrant women as in need of direction from the white-dominated state to achieve emancipation with a 2004 law forbidding headscarves in public schools.

Ellen Gallagher: From Impossibility to Erotic Re-imaginings of African American Women If Polska and Sedira frame women’s lips in terms of erotic possibility, the work of Ellen Gallagher (born in 1965) reminds viewers that lips belonging to African American women have, since the time of the blackface performance tradition in the nineteenth century, been configured historically as an erotic impossibility. Gallagher, who is of biracial ethnicity, with a mother of Irish descent and a father of Cape Verdean heritage, first satirizes blackface. Yet, in her later work, she goes further by making Black buccal beauty an

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aesthetic and conceptual possibility. This shift from the mockery of white standards to self-determined conceptualizations of Black women’s beauty shall be examined in two pieces from Gallagher’s early and middle career: Oh! Susanna (1993) and Watery Ecstatic (2007). Building on the proliferation of mouths in her earlier work, All the King’s Men (1992), Gallagher’s breakthrough piece Oh! Susanna displays a series of floating, oblong-shaped lips painted in dark and light browns, each filled with a white strip to signal teeth.2 Two white circles filled with smaller black points sit atop each “mouth” as eyes; together, the eyes and the mouths imply the corporeal distortions of the nineteenth-century performance tradition of American blackface. During Reconstruction (1865–77), white performers, such as William H. West, would paint their faces black, making their lips unaesthetically thick via the application of white or red paint that well exceeded the performer’s actual lip line. While it was both men and women of African American descent who were subject to the grotesque rendering of their lips in blackface, the song “Oh! Susanna” (1848), from which Gallagher’s piece derives its name, seems to make specific reference to the putative grotesqueness of African American women’s mouths. It is dedicated to a hapless Black woman, the eponymous Susanna. Often performed as part of the blackface repertoire by white women, Oh! Susanna mocked and ridiculed Black women. In the lyrics, the heroine runs down a hill in search of her repulsed lover who finds all manner of excuses to evade her. Her mouth is stuffed inelegantly with the African American staple, buckwheat cake. Gallagher’s piece Oh! Susanna reperforms the song in a way that highlights African American women’s perceived lack of erotic power in American history. The shapeless, thick lips in their crudeness and proliferation in Gallagher’s piece highlight historical stereotyping of African American women’s mouths in blackface performance and song. “Oh! Susanna” implies not only song but also the act of writing. This is owing to Gallagher’s choice of light brown penmanship paper as canvas. In the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries, the lines of this paper helped schoolchildren and scribers to practice their handwriting (Thornton 1996: 66). The blackface lips of Gallagher’s Oh! Susanna find themselves neatly encased by the gridded lines, positioning the proliferation of lips as a handwritten narrative. Floating blonde-haired, white female heads dominate this narrative, as they are interspersed throughout the piece and occupy double the space of the blackface features. These white heads have preternaturally long tongues which stick out and almost touch some of the blackface “eyes,” suggesting an intimate interconnection between blackface bodily stereotypes and white women. This may be a reference to the many women of the nineteenth century who sang so-called coon songs (e.g., May

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Irwin, Sophie Tucker, Marie Dressler, Nora Bayes) such as “Oh! Susanna” (Ammen 2016: 18). The penmanship paper of Gallagher’s piece enacts a shift from the ephemerality of the live voice in song to the permanence of the written page, hinting that popular blackface oral traditions entered the white-dominated written narratives of the history books. The piece establishes a contrast between dominant white female narratorsingers and the African American Susanna, who is reduced to the stereotype of crudely shaped lips and eyes. Yet, as Heather Hanna argues, Gallagher mobilized penmanship paper as an influence from American minimalism (prominent in the 1960s and early 1970s) in a number of her works as “an extremely symbolic paper for revision/s” (2015: 173). A revisionist gesture is established in Gallagher’s painting by the invisible spaces that it invites viewers to interrogate. Periodically, the Black women’s lips disappear into the lines of the paper instead of being encased by them. The lips also appear sometimes as a faded trace, superposed by clearer mouths. The lines of the penmanship paper also perform disappearance, becoming dotted and curved. In the bottom half of the painting, the lines vanish altogether, giving way to the eyes and lips. As legal scholar and critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw describes, Black women’s stories are often “relegat[ed] .  .  . to a location that resists telling” (1989: 1242), because they are subject to a double form of oppression in US society: racism and sexism. Gallagher’s Oh! Susanna invites the viewer to contemplate the “location that resists telling” (Crenshaw 1989: 1242), because it dwells on what is hidden, faded, and disappears into the lines of the penmanship paper, encouraging viewers to interrogate what lies beyond the stereotypes that are visually evident. This gesture was a powerful one in the context of the American beauty and film industries of the 1990s, when Gallagher created the piece. In an article published four years after Oh! Susanna in African American lifestyle magazine Ebony, entitled “Lips Are In!,” it is noted that Hollywood depicted the full lips of white film stars such as Kim Basinger and Julia Roberts as sexually appealing, but that it continued to invisibilize Black women for the very same attributes (“Lips Are In!” 1997: 170). Gallagher’s Oh! Susanna, while pointing viewers to invisible spaces beyond the racist and sexist gaze, nonetheless holds back on a clear positive representation of Black women’s lips as both erotic and empowered. Erotic empowerment, however, becomes a possibility in Gallagher’s 2007 painting, which is part of the artist’s Watery Ecstatic series.3 The work shows eight Black women’s heads topped with white, Medusa-like tendrils that fade into a white paper backdrop. Gallagher was inspired by the project of Detroit-based electro musician duo “Drexciya,” who imagined a Black-Atlantis otherworld

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of the Middle Passage (the journey taking slaves to America between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries). Building on a tradition of Afrofuturism, seen prominently in 1970s funk music like Sun Ra’s Space Is the Place (1974) and science fiction literature (the work of Octavia Butler, for instance), Drexciya imagined the pregnant African American slave women thrown overboard during the Middle Passage as being the mothers of an aquatic race of men adapted to underwater life. There, this new race was no longer the victim of degradation and racism. According to Suzanna Chan, the male duo Drexciya (James Stinson and Gerald Donald) cast Black women as self-sacrificing savior mothers. Their music thus fell back on gendered clichés at the heart of the male-dominated racial liberation movement in the United States (Chan 2017: 248). However, Gallagher’s Watery Ecstatic painting from 2007 distances itself from these clichés. The eight heads all bear recognizable faces, while variegated shades of brown, pink, black, and white convey depth, nuance of skin tone, and un-stereotyped complexity. The two figures that flank the left and right side of the paper, in particular, have full Black lips that are inflected with a lighter hue. This implies that the lips are glistening and wetted. In short, they are aroused and arousing to the viewer. They are also empowered in their eroticism. Both of these figures have their lips turned slightly upward in a smirk that takes control of the viewer’s gaze. If Watery Ecstatic figures the erotic charge of Black women’s lips as within the frame of representation and knowability, it does not forget the history of white supremacy. Hanna, who concentrates on the role of another body part—hair—in women’s art, states that Gallagher’s Watery Ecstatic “hint[s] at pathetic stories . . . lost long ago in bottomless seas” (2015: 189). Indeed, the “seas” in Watery Ecstatic occupy the majority of the piece, and they are figured in multilayered white paper which connotes the weighty dimensions of white domination. The futural imaginings figured in the luscious-lipped Black heads are inscribed at the bottom of the work almost as an afterthought. Indeed, the mouths of the eight women are not all attributed to the same level of erotic power. As the viewer works their way inward to the center of the heads, they discover mouths that are of a homogenous hue. These lack the glistening, erotic qualities of the mouths that flank the piece to the left and right, and, in their literal lack of nuance, they venture into the terrain of shapeless buccal oblongs of Gallagher’s earlier Oh! Susanna. What may be witnessed, in other words, is a juxtaposition of erotic possibility and stereotyped thick-set lips in Watery Ecstatic. This indexes the possibilities and frustrations of the social movement that, since the “Black is Beautiful” cultural movement of the 1960s and 1970s, has focused on the natural and historically denied beauty of African American women.

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Gallagher’s creations Oh! Susanna and Watery Ecstatic historically sandwich the aforementioned article from the popular African American lifestyle magazine Ebony entitled “Lips Are In!” As a result of the beauty industry promoting Afrocentric beauty, the fullness of Black women’s lips, as the article celebrated, was finally being embraced as a “beautiful and Black symbol in the White beauty world” by 1997 (“Lips Are In!” 1997: 172). Yet, as mentioned previously, the article also points out the continued subordination of Black women to white women, with Julia Roberts’s and Kim Basinger’s thick and full lips being privileged over an African American counterpart. The modulations between erotic nuance and hue-less stereotyping in the lips of Watery Ecstatic echo the frustration and excitement felt by Black women invited to embrace the fullness of their lips recounted by the Ebony article. The work, thus viewed, is a cautiously optimistic look forward while refusing an amnesiac denial of the tragedies surrounding African American women in the United States, from being thrown overboard after violation by slave masters during the Middle Passage to post-abolition blackface and beyond.

Conclusion This chapter has focused on the work of three women artists who contest the received idea that women’s lips are simply an object to be devoured by the gaze of male sexual desire. In Polska’s installation, “I Am the Mouth,” the voice playfully repeats contemporary sexualizations of Eastern European women in the age of internet, while, in the content of what the mouth says, she attempts to break free from her “captivity.” In Sedira’s video, “A Scream for Liberation,” the woman’s “youyous” express her ethnic particularity in postcolonial Britain and France in a way that is unrecognizable for the Western gaze and is thus irreducible to Orientalist codes of desire. In Gallagher’s paintings Oh! Susanna and Watery Ecstatic, an opposite strategy of conceiving Black women’s beauty as a recognizable possibility in racist and sexist America is figured in the artist’s representations of women’s lips. There is a well-known idiom in the English language that encapsulates historical dismissals of lips as vehicles for change: to pay “lip service” to something. The idiom seemingly pits actions and deeds—valuable things— against what emerge from the lips: words, voice, and sound. Yet, as this chapter has shown, it is precisely how lips connote action—how they perform and reperform theatre (Polska), sound (Sedira), and song (Gallagher)—that

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may empower women. If women’s lips are a locus of arousal, they may also be, in short, rousing.

Notes 1 The installation is in the permanent collections of the Galerie Zak in Berlin. A copy of the video is currently available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/ w​​atch?​​v​=fRO​​ZwQa3​​xZ​I​&t​​=136s​. 2 The work is on display in the permanent collections of the Gagosian Gallery, New York. An image of this work is available online: http:​/​/www​​.mult​​imedi​​ alab.​​be​/do​​c​/ima​​ges​/i​​ndex.​​php​?a​​lbum=​​abstr​​actio​​n​&ima​​ge​=El​​len​_G​​allag​​ her__​​_Oh​%2​​1​_S​us​​anna_​​_1993​​_1306​​9​.jpg​. 3 The work is on display in the permanent collections of the Gagosian Gallery, New York. An image of this work is available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.art​​slant​​ .com/​​globa​​l​/wor​​ks​/sh​​ow​/77​​8134?​​​tab​=A​​RTWOR​​K.

References Ammen, S. (2016), May Irwin: Singing, Shouting, and the Shadow of Minstrelsy, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Beecher, K. (2010), “The Sexual Marketing of Eastern European Women through Internet Pornography,” M.A. diss., DePaul University. Chan, S. (2017), “‘Alive . . . again.’ Unmoored in the Aquafuture of Ellen Gallagher’s Watery Ecstatic,” Women’s Studies Quarterly, 45(1–2): 246–63. Crenshaw, K. (1989), “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review, 43(6): 1241–99. Dupuis-Roy, N. and F. Gosselin (2015), “Man or Woman? Look at the Lips,” University of Montreal. Available online: https​:/​/no​​uvell​​es​.um​​ontre​​al​.ca​​/arti​​ cle​/2​​015​/0​​6​/15/​​man​-o​​r​-wom​​an​​-lo​​ok​-at​​-the-​​lips/​ (accessed June 15, 2020). Hall, S. (2006), “Black Diaspora Artists in Britain: Three ‘Moments’ in Post-War History,” History Workshop Journal, 61: 1–24. Hanna, H. (2015), Women Framing Hair: Serial Strategies in Contemporary Art, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Jeffers, J. (2009), Beckett’s Masculinity, New York: Palgrave. Jetzer, G. (2016), “Friday Gallery Talk: Gianni Jetzer on Suspended Animation,” Hirshhorn Museum, March 18. Available online: https​:/​/hi​​rshho​​rn​.si​​.edu/​​ explo​​re​/gt​​f​-sus​​pende​​d​​_ani​​matio​​n/ (accessed June 15, 2020). “Lips are In!” (1997), Ebony, November: 168–74. Marques, P. (2014), “Zineb Sedira,” in Collections New Media, Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou.

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Mulvey, L. (2009), Visual and Other Pleasures, 2nd ed., London: Palgrave Macmillan. Polska, A. (2014), I Am the Mouth [Installation], Berlin: Galerie Zak. Ringrow, H. (2016), The Language of Cosmetics Advertising, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Sedira, Z. (1999), “The Oblique Gaze: Notes of an Artist/Notes of a Spectator,” in F. Lloyd (ed.), Contemporary Arab Women’s Art: Dialogues of the Present, pp. 215–18, London: WAL. Simpson, P. (1998). “On the Margins of Discourse? Visions of New Soviet Woman in Socialist Realistic Painting 1949–50,” Art History, 21(2): 247–67. Ștefănescu, B. (2012), Postcommunism/Postcolonialism: Siblings of Subalternity, Bucharest: Editura Universităţii din Bucureşti. Thornton, T. P. (1996), Handwriting in America: A Cultural History, New Haven and London: Yale University. Vidrine, A. (2016), “Unsuspend These Animations: On Digital Bodies and Agency at the Hirshhorn,” ArtSlant, March 9. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​ w​.art​​slant​​.com/​​ny​/ar​​ticle​​s​/sho​​w​/464​​58​-un​​suspe​​nd​-th​​ese​-a​​nimat​​ions-​​on​-di​​ gital​​-bodi​​es​-an​​​d​-age​​ncy​-a​​t​-the​​-hirs​​hhorn​ (accessed June 15, 2020). Wiedlack, K. (2018), “In/visibly Different: Melania Trump and the Othering of Eastern European Women in US Culture,” Feminist Media Studies, 19(8): 1063–78. Wilson, A. (1990), “‘Her Lips Moving’: The Castrated Voice of Not I,” in L. Ben-Zvi (ed.), Women in Beckett: Performance and Critical Perspective, pp. 190–200, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Yeğenoğlu M. (1998), Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

5

Transformation and Arousal The Pleasure of Performative Indeterminacy in Persona Theatre Company’s Phaedra I— Avra Sidiropoulou

Audience and Pleasure Any encounter between performers and spectators is a fraught exchange of gazes that brings tension and pleasure to both sides. The spectator’s pleasure (less so the performer’s) and even arousal have been amply theorized by semiotic and phenomenological studies of the performative event, as well as comprehensive studies on theatre audiences and practices of spectatorship.1 Many theorists have analyzed the different forms of pleasure in the theatre, whether they are derived through our identification with a situation or a character, a sense of complicity, or pure intellectual stimulation. In its most common and perhaps narrow function, arousal is the result of a kind of voyeuristic fulfillment that may or may not be related to an overtly sexual or pornographic content. Voyeurism, the pleasure of the forbidden, is, according to Rodosthenous, “an intense curiosity which generates a compulsive desire to observe people (un)aware in natural states or performed primal acts and leads to a heightening of pleasure for the viewer” (2015: 5–6). After decades of liberated avant-garde practice, “the presence of stage nudity is a regular feature in European productions, while elsewhere it becomes a powerful directorial tool for the director/auteur to provoke, scandalize, get noticed, outrage, titillate, and excite the unsuspecting and, at times, conservative audiences by converting them to complicit voyeurs” (Rodosthenous 2015: 1). Beyond the beautiful and potent bodies, however, the vulnerable and dejected body also becomes a spectacle of sensual contemplation and fetish. A unique form of a pleasure in live performance is inextricably tied to the spectators’ crossing of mental and emotional distance: their transgressing the boundaries of the fourth wall to become a part of the action and experience the forbidden, something that is just as elusive as it is ephemeral. At the same

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time, Laurens De Vos explains that the performance may never achieve true voyeurism: In the voyeuristic act of looking the human lack is temporarily bracketed in the phantasm of the suspension of desire. The voyeur wants to blend into the scene he is watching in which he recognizes the fulfilment of his desire. Strictly speaking, therefore, the looking subject, marked by a sense of self-awareness through the scopic exchange, stops being a subject in the voyeuristic act but rather becomes the object due to a lack of selfrecognition. (De Vos 2015: 33)

Contemporary performance offers plenty of opportunity for additional spectatorial pleasure quite aside from the peep-hole pleasures of the forbidden. Maaike Bleeker considers the “intense experience referred to as ‘presence’” as a characteristic of many contemporary theatre practices and argues that “it is precisely the direct and explicit relationship with the audience that contributes to the intensity of the theatre as a ‘live’ experience, directly present and visible over there” (Bleeker 2008: 133). It needs to be stressed, however, that, contrary to the beautiful body sexually objectified and displayed for the audience’s arousal, some of the onstage bodies “do not necessarily capitalize on voyeuristic pleasures. Often, they are explicitly theatrical. They look back at the audience, showing that they know that they show. They present a challenge to the audience to make a distinction between the act of showing and what is actually there to be seen” (Bleeker 2008, 133). In Anne Ubersfeld’s emblematic essay, “The Pleasure of the Spectator,” theatrical pleasure is “the pleasure of an absence being summoned up .  .  . and it is the pleasure of contemplating a stage reality experienced as concrete activity in which the spectator takes part” (1982: 128). Ubersfeld’s observation that “pleasure finds its fulfilment as sensual pleasure at the precise moment that the ever-increasing gap between the acting-out and the fiction, between the body and the character portrayed, disappears” will be the theoretical springboard of my chapter (1982: 138). Using a practice as a research approach, I would like to document how, in the production of Phaedra I—, the digital component—which informs both structure and characterization—offers an added layer of pleasure for the audience but also for the performer, as she interacts with technology. The particular focus of this chapter will then be the special pleasure that the spectator derives from the spectacle of absences that technology repeatedly stages. If spectatorial pleasure is drawn from the mechanisms of identification and transformation, both of which are essential to the act of spectating, this pleasure gets more complex when the ruling agency of mediation also comes

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into play. With technology present, the split between authentic self and its simulacrum leaves both performer and spectator with a pleasurable aporia, a desire to bridge the gap between the two. This could be related to the duality of satisfaction versus unsatisfaction, the peculiar yet very present kind of pleasure that Ubersfeld speaks of when “something happens in theatre which satisfies the spectator while at the same time leaving him unsatisfied, something in which pleasure and dissatisfaction are conjoined” (1982: 134). The gaze (which, in Lacan’s understanding, entails “the uncanny sense that the object of our eye’s look or glance is somehow looking back at us of its own will”) in the meeting of the corporeal body and its digital counterpart extends further out to the audience (Felluga 2015: 110). The object of the spectator’s gaze is now split between what is present and what is absent, and any pleasure that ensues is the result of the spectator’s degree of success in matching the one with the other. This struggle for unity is ongoing, since “the object of desire is forever in flight; it is and it is not: it constantly repeats to the one who desires it, ‘I am and I am not what I am.’ If there is a passion proper to theatre, it resides in this uninterrupted flight” (Ubersfeld 1982: 138). This fleeting quality prevails in Phaedra I—, where the interplay between live and digital presence and absence is a constitutional element of the narrative.

Context I started writing and workshopping Phaedra I— in 2017.2 The piece, produced by Athens-based Persona Theatre Company, premiered at Tristan Bates Theatre in London in February 2019, where it played for nine sold-out shows. It was performed in English by the British-Australian actress Elena Pellone. The set, costume, and video design were by Mikaela Liakata, the lighting by Anna Sbokou, and the original music by Vanias Apergis. The production was dramaturged by Eleni Gini and Miranda Manasiadis and assistant-directed by Julia Kogou and Maria Hadjistylli. The project was realized with the kind support of the J. F. Costopoulos Foundation. Drawing from the ancient Greek myth, the play tells the story of Phaedra, the wife of the King of Athens, Theseus, and her profound existential boredom, which makes her crave a life of constant fulfillment. In keeping with Euripides’ premise,3 the action is set in motion with a spell that the goddess Aphrodite casts on Phaedra, which both liberates and traps her into seeking sensual pleasure in her stepson, Hippolytus. The audience is made witness to sequences of charged interactions between Phaedra and the chorus of Athenian women, who alternately castigate and act envious of her. Phaedra exists at the threshold of transgression, well outside the rules dictated by

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her societal role. Victim to an insatiable thirst for life, she is surrounded by the ruins of contemporary Athens, looking for release. Her confession to Theseus, when she accuses Hippolytus of having raped her, becomes a fatal step which leads up to the inexorable ending of the play. The triangle is momentarily dispelled, but Phaedra emerges stronger and even more capable of the violence and the hurt to which Aphrodite has condemned her. Composing the text as an elliptical, cubist portrayal of the mythical queen, I wished to trail Phaedra’s jarring trip through the various stations of her personal and public history. Inspired by the myth as treated by Euripides in Hippolytus (Euripides 1974) and later taken on by Seneca and Racine, my ambition was to combine poetry with raw, everyday speech and sensual imagery. Already from the early stages, I had conceived the production as a multimedia exploration of contemporary cultural assumptions relevant to representations of the self, which would interrogate the titular character’s desire to break free from what is perceived as acceptable and “proper.” Unable to find peace and longing to escape the void in a metropolis that suffocates within its ruins, Phaedra is split by her desire for motion and for love. Visualizing her memories and active reenactment of key encounters of her life, technology helped me present a sexually liberated version of a woman torn between her voluptuous nature and the condemning preconceptions of others. In her solo performance, performer Elena Pellone embodies all the characters in the play, taking on their speech, actions, and obsessions. She impersonates Aphrodite, Theseus, Hippolytus, the chorus, and the city itself, emerging as a palimpsest of selves. On stage, this choice is digitally enabled through the use of 3D mapping and the projection of videos and stills on the minimalist set and costume that house the performer’s body. The voice-overs and recorded dialogic parts substitute for the missing characters. Working closely with the set and video designer, Mikaela Liakata, in rehearsal, I became deeply aware that the visual and auditory framing could challenge and reformulate the performer’s subjectivity, as she becomes both actor and observer of her story. The use of media, therefore, intended to capture Phaedra’s fragmented identity and conflicted self, as the character oscillated between hedonistic abandon and utter dejection. The projections were also meant to interrogate stereotypes of femininity and the prejudices that the Athenian citizens carried around and “spat out” whenever Phaedra appeared. In fact, some of those images essentially reflected the chorus’s own projections about Phaedra’s “picture-perfect” life. Working on both the dramaturgy and the mise-en-scène, I inadvertently ended up using Aristotle’s model of plot structure as a way to map Phaedra’s journey of self-exploration. I found a way of documenting the title

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protagonist’s fluctuating feelings, following her path of emotional, mental, and sexual self-discovery: from infatuation to emotional high to bitter cynicism; from daydream to hyper-awareness to clarity; from arousal to climax to postcoital dysphoria and then placidity. This trail became my entryway into the character and the textual composition. Here’s how it played out.

Exposition/Inciting Incident Both script and production are interspersed with sensual imagery and overt sexual language. At the opening of the play (the scene cogently entitled “Wet Dreams”), Aphrodite engages Phaedra in a ritual of sexual initiation, which is meant to prepare her for meeting Hippolytus. The “uploading” of memories onto Phaedra’s body became a seminal metaphor in the play. The goddess imparts to Phaedra the fierce determination to live life to the fullest, casting the love spell on her. The mixture of Aphrodite’s recorded speech and Phaedra’s live but obviously abstracted presence—as she falls into the goddess’s snare fully enchanted—bolsters the conceptual framework of the play from the get-go: this is no clean version of the myth, but a bizarre, messy coexistence of fact and fiction, bringing a relatively ordinary love story to the realm of the gods. The incantations shared by Aphrodite’s recorded text and Phaedra’s live words generate a chant which is meant to follow the climactic development of the sexual act: Αphrodite   Devour me, Phaedra/Consume me/Consume him,   Phaedra/Devour me/Υour breath/ A storm/Υour   waves/A sea/Consume me, Phaedra/Consume him   /Devour me, Phaedra/Consume him

(1.2)

[. . .] Phaedra   I will/I am/I will.   I’m yours, Aphrodite, my goddess/   Don’t stop what you’re doing, it’s magic/   I’m yours, Aphrodite, my goddess.

(1.2)

Here, self-arousal and objectification go hand-in-hand: Phaedra strokes her body while echoing the refrain, “Consume me,” a constant reminder of her self-objectification, following her “consumption” by others.

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Rising Action In scene 1, “History,” the chorus (whose lines are spoken by Pellone) lays out the play’s exposition and sets the action going. Here, we receive information about the way the Athenian citizens view Phaedra: “The City desired you/Longed for your skin” (1.6). Words such as “passion” and “desire” prevail, shaping up characterization while also suggesting the chorus’s envy for the sensual queen. Phaedra experiences being looked at and perceived as a trophy wife. Such objectification becomes crucial to her dissatisfaction and thirst for more. Chorus   Beware of those passions Phaedra   That rise suddenly/   And remain unquenched Chorus   Try to quell them while they’re still young Phaedra   Before they drive you mad

(1.5)

[. . .] Chorus   I envy you/ Your story Phaedra   Your eyes seduce Chorus   Your body rewards Phaedra   Your mouth devours Chorus   I envy you/Your life and your pain and your long beautiful hair

(1.7)

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The same section is also revealing of how Phaedra uses her sexuality as a weapon. Nowhere is the auto-erotic mood more apparent than in the character’s recollection of her wedding day, into which she seems to seduce her audience. It is no accident that Phaedra’s white, oversized dress is also displayed as a wedding dress on the surface of which the protagonist’s expectations and the chorus’s conflicting emotions of envy and admiration meet and clash. Phaedra   Yes, I was dazzling   Yes, I loved my wedding dress   Yes, the endless lace/It was barely covering my body   It inhabited every thought, every gaze, every street corner, even.

(1.8)

Phaedra’s self-arousal, however, her fascination with the image she projects, is very quickly replaced by intense self-hatred: Phaedra   I fear it   I fear it   I fear this craving   I fear this sickness   I fear the way I laugh

(1.8)

Complications and Reversals In “Marital Bliss,” the subsequent, manifestly domestic scene between Phaedra and Theseus, the former shares her sentiments of boredom and disenchantment to the latter. While the couple’s discussion moves from the purely commonplace expression of a marriage crisis (“I need a new life”) to self-exploration (“I want to be surprised”) to the broader existential (“But— isn’t there more? I mean—can this be all?”), the audience’s attention is directed to a video of an elegantly positioned cluster of male and female naked bodies writhing in white sheets. In this languid depiction of erotic play, the moving images on Phaedra’s costume visualize the subtext underneath her reflections. The spectators are led into Phaedra’s mind, following her suppressed desire for freedom and her ambition to reinvent herself sensually, leaving behind

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the mask of well-preserved respectability that a queen is forced to wear at all times. While working on the piece, the team repeatedly addressed Phaedra’s perpetual need for sexual satisfaction (“Take my boredom away-consume me”), which interrupts the seemingly placid domesticity of the scene. Indeed, the ambience of postcoital languor emanates from the projection of a naked couple—a video recording of Pellone and a male actor—sitting on the bed and having a smoke with their backs to the audience. The sexual mood is also prevailing in the nightclub scene, “Rapture,” where Phaedra is first introduced to Hippolytus. The queen sits on a bar stool, digitally crossing and uncrossing her legs, while the performer continues to sit still underneath her huge costume. The projection of the bottom half of a woman’s body in a short skirt and fishnet stockings is on par with the laid-back setting and mood, while the dialogue between Phaedra and Hippolytus— all lines spoken by Pellone—is fraught with flirtatious innuendo. We follow the erotic sparks via the gossipy chorus, whose recorded voices accompany Phaedra’s reverie. Clearly, the chorus’s response to Phaedra’s interaction with Hippolytus is a commentary on the objectification and shaming of female sexuality: Chorus   Just look at her—She craves the attention/How big   Hippolytus has grown nearly a man/They say   there’s something there/C’mon, see that? She’s   really hitting on him/Look at her—the dress/Oh,   and the hair /And her long white back/Look/That   look between them/How she’s glaring at him–   Hippolytus/She is quite something, though/And   him/That look/Don’t you think he takes after his   father?/Yes, the big forehead/The heart-shaped   lips/Just like Theseus/Yes

(3.11)

Both the video designer and I wanted the projection to reinforce the ambiguity of Hippolytus’s absence-presence imagistically. The two characters, Phaedra (performing live) and Hippolytus (whose lines Pellone also speaks), flirt profusely, as is revealed in the video recording of a nameless man leaning on a woman’s dangling stiletto heels and, subsequently, in that of a male hand grabbing a woman’s glittery top, as the couple dance away. The anonymity of the image (no faces are revealed) imbues the sequence with a risky recklessness that also feels congruent to our idea that Phaedra is

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Figure 5.1 Phaedra I—. Persona Theatre Company. Text and direction by Avra Sidiropoulou. Designed by Mikaela Liakata. Performed by Elena Pellone. At Tristan Bates Theatre, London, February 2019. Photo credit: Michael Demetrius.

not specifically in love with Hippolytus but with what he represents for her: youth, challenge, risk, and freedom.  After the brief encounter between Phaedra and her stepson, where our aim was to recreate for the audience the excitement that characterizes first dates, the scene culminates in Phaedra’s song. Pellone stands up, dancing and singing in the nightclub, manifestly losing control of herself, as she plunges deeper into her arousal. The erotic imagery of the lyrics, set to Vanias Apergis’s contemporary suave score, guides the performer and the audience through the character’s emotional journey.

Transformation and Arousal Phaedra   You are to me water   I’m thirsty and I drink you   You are to me fire   I burn and I swim in you

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(3.12)

Phaedra’s growing desire for Hippolytus is also likened to a teenager’s sexual awakening. While staging the scene which comes after the one in the nightclub, “Euphoria,” we looked for images to convey the overwhelming novelty of feeling that a young girl in love for the first time experiences. In stark contrast to the dark sophisticated “adultness” of the nightclub scene, here, the visual displays rose petals falling on and around Phaedra in slow motion while she awkwardly dances alone in her bedroom with a joy that is hard to contain. If anything, her self-arousal in fantasizing about Hippolytus’s “younger bones” is full of freshness and innocence, a kind of coming of age: Phaedra   The earth’s too small for us let’s get away   The sky’s so close to us let’s reach it.   Fly me further fly me high   Fly me further and further in the sky   Spread your wings and drop your heavy bones   Crash my burdens with your younger bones

(4.14)

Climax The project’s main conceptual premise was that technology would introduce and validate the play’s missing characters, involving them in the action visually and auditorily, as if they were physically present on stage. In terms of sound, we integrated prerecorded voices for Aphrodite, the chorus of women, the mixed crowd in the nightclub, and Theseus. Each scene conveyed this narrative convention in different ways, but the audience soon began to accept and enjoy it. Only Hippolytus remains voiceless, a choice meant to underline the carnal, irrational aspect of Phaedra’s desire for him. Even more startlingly, technology bestows the absent actors a digital body and a face. In most cases, this is a fragmentary identity, torn into pieces that are scattered over Phaedra’s costume and add to the overall impressionistic effect. Once again, Hippolytus

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stands out from the rest of the characters. He is given a full body, his commanding carnality drawing attention to Phaedra’s sexual fantasies of her stepson. Significantly, in the most climactic scene of the play, “Declaration,” in which Phaedra confesses her love to him, also speaking Hippolytus’s lines, the male character is digitally personified in the video images of three different semi-naked male bodies crawling up and down Phaedra’s body. The body multiplication suggests that Phaedra is enamored not with one specific person but with the idea of falling in love and being sexually fulfilled. Not only is she not actively pursuing one single man, but she can actually be captivated by whoever alleviates her intense existential ennui: “I’m still young you know and—and—/And you are young and—and/Don’t you ever get bored? Don’t you—” (5.16). As the video projects those unnamable, faceless men, we are made witness to Phaedra’s increasing arousal. She desperately tries to grab those bodies as she verbally confesses her love: Phaedra   Do you ever need a change?/I like change/   (PAUSE)   I want you, Hippolytus. Hippolytus   —? Phaedra   This thing is growing/Gnawing at my mind Hippolytus   Can you stop? Phaedra   I want you. My heart hurts with all this longing.

(5.16)

As she approaches climaxing, she frantically clutches at the male projections, which duly escape her: Phaedra   Just this once/Can I have you just this once?/   I have thought of you day and night./How good this would be/ [. . .]

(5.17)

Transformation and Arousal Phaedra   Enjoy me—enjoy this now/And I won’t say anything else/   Not now/Not ever/Let’s just/Let’s enjoy this strangeness.

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(5.17)

Falling Action In general, we wanted the projected images to support the emotional intensity of scenes to the extent that the image takes over as a visual counterpart of the live narrative. That was also our intention in the scene “Contempt,” which follows the protagonist’s transformation from a love-torn, dejected woman (in the scene “Despair”) into someone who philosophizes on the nature of rejection and of being human and vulnerable. The video image depicts a barren, cracked piece of earth, which trembles throughout, suggestive of an earthquake. The idea was to visually create a landscape of sterility that would sharply contrast the sexualized imagery of the “Declaration” scene. Phaedra’s arousal has given way to the cynicism that comes with being turned down, and her speech—blending high poetry and confrontational direct address— nearly synchronizes with the quavering landscape. Standing still, the performer laments Hippolytus’s dismissal of her love, which she attributes to her invisibility. Having acknowledged her rejection, Phaedra proceeds with her revenge plans. In the second bedroom scene, “Betrayal,” where she is once again alone with Theseus (present as a voice-over), she coyly communicates to her husband that she has been raped by his son. The real-time narrative of the rape builds to a climax. Ironically, Phaedra is altogether aroused in the reliving of a scene that may or may not have happened, telling her husband, “The darkest one/The fairest one . . . Your son . . . He fucked me . . . He pushed and pushed and pushed and pushed/I begged him to stop . . . But he pushed and pushed and pushed” (8.24) This was the only scene of the play where no video projections were used. We felt that the starkness of the backlit, white dress was the right choice in foreshadowing the end of the tragedy.

Scene of Suffering We decided to introduce the news of Hippolytus’s violent death using the archaic convention of the messenger in a mock split-narrative account. Ιn the scene entitled “A Kind of Ending,” Phaedra, Theseus, and Hippolytus offer different

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perspectives on Hippolytus’s death. Τhis gives a sinister feel to the Hippolytus’s burial, which becomes an extended scene of suffering. An enlightened heroine, Phaedra appears to have accepted the tragedy and be ready to move on.

Resolution At the end of the play, “An Old Beginning,” as Phaedra exits the stage naked, leaving behind everything she possessed, the video is still left playing against the cadaver of her costume, which lies on the floor crumbled. The projection of a landfill of colorful debris on her discarded “dress-skin” keeps playing in slow motion until it shrinks to a snapshot of a funnel devouring every remaining bit of garbage as the play fades to dark. The symbolic significance of this extended image poses questions about Phaedra’s future. One wonders whether Phaedra is a free woman who has been liberated from the burdens of her past, ready to embark on new adventures; or whether the final visual suggests some kind of regret and a “deconstruction and reconstruction of her personal moral code/value system” (Sidiropoulou, 2019b). Although the play is open-ended, the final scene serves to convey that Phaedra eventually breaks away from whatever held her captive: societal and familial conventions, recriminations, moral values, or her emotions. The ending therefore implies a sense of personal salvation—Phaedra emerges out of the rubble cleansed, a survivor. At the same time, the rubble is more than just a statement; we are surrounded by the debris of a culture of instant and cheap gratification in which people—women and men alike—suffocate alone in their search for a modicum of meaning. As Eleonora Colli’s analysis of the play points out: Phaedra’s voice and emotions resist repression by the patriarchal apparatus, as proven by her survival at the end of Sidiropoulou’s play. Through her re-interpretation of Racine, Sidiropoulou manages to break away from the patriarchal impositions of Euripides’s and Seneca’s texts: here, Phaedra refuses to die and refuses to be silenced, despite the internalized shame of her own actions. (2019: par. 15)4

Thus, Phaedra is liberated from Aphrodite’s spell and exits naked, reclaiming her sexuality. When she leaves the stage before curtain call, the performer, just like the protagonist of the play, can finally own her body; she is able to discard the imagery that has thus far been imposed on her. Phaedra’s liminal existence as she travels from one medium to another can now find peace. In the end, the performer acknowledges, manipulates, and takes pleasure

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in all these numerous performative dichotomies, journeying through the “other body” and “other bodies.”5 According to the accounts from different spectators, the audience experienced a form of private pleasure in abandoning themselves freely to Phaedra’s radical metamorphosis. Phaedra’s final act is a coming of age—an apologetic sexual awakening—a ritual of becoming fully embodied, breaking free from the digitally imposed fragments of selfhood. From the point of view of the audience, watching the actor revel as she divests herself of whatever held her captive reinforces its complicity in Phaedra’s release. There is a sense of affirmation that the charged interaction of gazes between the auditorium and the stage—unmediated, unrepeatable, ever fluid—has indeed accelerated the course of the character, the performer, and perhaps also the audience’s inner transformation. 

Notes 1 See Bennett 1997 and Fischer-Lichte 2008. For modes of spectating in new media theatre, see Loukola 2009. 2 The text (unpublished), which was written over a period of two years, incorporated the insights of the company during the workshop phase of the project in July 2017. It was then developed and revised extensively for the premiere of the play in London. 3 At the opening of Euripides’ tragedy Hippolytus (428 BC), Aphrodite, goddess of love, in her prologue, lays out for the audience her revenge plot on the title hero for refusing to honor her. 4 Colli goes further to argue that “Phaedra’s survival in Sidiropoulou thus represents a possible change and a new future for women’s voices; one in which both the external and internal influences of the patriarchy do not stop women from retelling their stories and showcasing their hidden desires” (2019). 5 Maiju Loukola studies this process of transformation from the point of view of the spectator, explaining how “in the context of phenomenological contemplation of image, the matter of dwelling in digital image-space approaches the idea of actualization and be-coming of the ‘imaginal experience.’” She calls this perceptual operation “the be-coming of a sensuous process” (2009: 205).

References Bennett, S. (1997), A Theory of Production and Reception, London and New York: Routledge.

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Bleeker, M. (2008), Visuality in the Theatre: The Locus of Looking, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Colli, E. (2019), “Re-Appropriating Phaedra: Euripides, Seneca, and Racine in Avra Sidiropoulou’s Phaedra I—,” Didascalia: 15. Available online: https:// www​.didaskalia​.net​/issues​/15​/11/ (accessed June 22, 2020). De Vos, L. (2015), “Always Looking Back at the Voyeur: Jan Fabre’s Extreme Acts on Stage,” in G. Rodosthenous (ed.), Theatre as Voyeurism: The Pleasures of Watching, pp. 29–49, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Euripides. (1974), Three Plays, trans. P. Vellacott, London and New York: Penguin. Felluga, D. F. (2015), Critical Theory: The Key Concepts, Abington and New York: Routledge. Fischer-Lichte, E. (2008), The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics, London and New York: Routledge. Loukola, M. (2009), “Dwelling in Image-Spaces”, in A. Oddey and C. White (eds.), Modes of Spectating, pp. 197–206, Bristol and Chicago: Intellect. Rodosthenous, G, ed. (2015), Theatre as Voyeurism: The Pleasures of Watching, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Sidiropoulou, A. (2019a), Phaedra I—. Unpublished. Sidiropoulou, A. (2019b), “Greek Ancient Drama in the UK,” Greece in the UK, 15: 20–4. Ubersfeld, A. (1982), “The Pleasure of the Spectator,” trans. P. Bouillaguet and C. Jose, Modern Drama, 25(1): 127–39.

Part Two

Political Body

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6

Höch’s Weimar and Wilhelm Rundschau’s Avant-Garde Reframing J. Brandon Pelcher

Dada was, in form and content, in time and location, in seemingly every way, radically heterogeneous, and Dada’s interactions with the human body were no less complex. The works and performances, often one and the same thing, of Marcel Duchamp and others in New York Dada regularly investigated, and transgressed, the accepted boundaries of the body as a gendered and sexual being (Jones 1998). Zurich Dada, indeed Dada itself, was founded in a cabaret suffused with bodily performance and dance, regularly viewed as a balm against the depression of their exile (Damman 2016: 355). In Paris, at the tail end of the Dadaist movement, Tristan Tzara wrote his play Le Cœur à gaz (The Gas Heart), which directly, if nonsensically, addresses the bodily violence and dismemberment to which soldiers of the First World War were subjected (Garner 2007). While these and many other examples of Dadaist engagement with the human body evidence their profound heterogeneity, a unifying feature that underlies each is their political nature, that is, their use of the human body to arouse political sentiments (Adamowicz 2019; Biro 2009). For many of these works and performances, the body is not merely the raw material to be ordered by politics, but the battleground on which, and the weapon with which, politics is fought. As Richard Huelsenbeck, integral member of Zurich Dada and cofounder of Berlin Dada, exclaimed in an April 1918 manifesto, “to be a Dadaist means to allow oneself to be hurled by things” (1920a: 40).1 This is a bodily process: “The highest art will be that whose mental content represents the thousandfold problems of the day, which has manifestly allowed itself to be torn apart by the explosions of last week, and which is forever trying to gather up its limbs after the impact of yesterday” (Huelsenbeck 1920a: 36). With allusion to the bodily trauma of the war and its violent echoes in Weimar, Germany, Huelsenbeck conceives the Dadaist body as a medium of political representation—the precarity of the human body utilized in order to represent the violence of political life, a political life that had evaded proper representation as violent and had therefore remained

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hidden. This mirrors Hugo Ball’s evaluation of Zurich Dada’s masked dances, where the “horror of this time, the paralyzing background of events is made visible” (2018: 83). The subversive performance of violence exposes not only that violence but also the political and ideological structures, otherwise hidden in plain sight, that authorize it. Though Huelsenbeck’s and Ball’s comments predate the photomontages of Berlin Dada, these works uniquely inhabit this intersection of representation and the violently and traumatically political and politicized body. In the wake of Germany’s defeat in the First World War and the violently suppressed German Revolution and Spartacist Uprising, including the political assassination of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, Dadaist photomontage in Berlin regularly represented the human body as the locus of political, which is to say state sanctioned or mandated, violence and trauma (Broué 1971; Jones 2016). This was mirrored in both the violence of the cut and the grotesque bodies that would result from the subsequently montaged fragments. The first published Dadaist photomontage, John Heartfield’s Jedermann sein eigner Fussball (Everyone their own soccer ball), published on February 15, 1919, on the cover of a pamphlet by the same name, represents a proper bourgeois gentleman with besuited limbs doffing a bowler hat whose chest and abdomen has, however, been replaced by an oversized soccer ball. The eponymous Jedermann, who constitutes the photomontage, the everyman of the recently formed Weimar Republic, was to be violently kicked about by political forces beyond their control. Indeed, Jedermann shares the pamphlet’s cover with a proto-photomontage of the embodiment of those forces, the Scheidemann cabinet, who assumed power two days before the pamphlet’s publication, Weimar’s first governing cabinet.2 Similar to Jedermann, members of the Scheidemann cabinet functioned as a metonym for Dada’s deeply detested Weimar, particularly Friedrich Ebert and Gustav Noske, Weimar’s president and minister of defense. As such, Dada often turned their montage violence and trauma upon the bodies of Ebert and Noske—exposing their lungs, replacing their noses and eyes, threatening throats with razors. While Dada was no ally to the bourgeois everyman, the subversive violence and trauma of Dadaist montage are indiscriminately applied to both metonyms of Weimar—everyman as well as Ebert and Noske—those who are kicked and those who have kicked them, those at the mercy of Weimar’s politics and those who wield it while simultaneously ignoring their position in the hierarchy of politically authorized violence. This broad-brushed violence and trauma of Dadaist photomontage, the homogeneity of Dadaist photomontage’s violent and traumatic frame, however, diminishes the potency of the critical intervention that the photomontage performs. The works of one Dadaist photomonteur,

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however, concern themselves with this critical vision and the framing of violence and trauma that would best foment it. Hannah Höch, a coinventor of the Dadaist photomontage with her partner Raoul Hausmann, deployed the “traumatic shock . . . made visible in a fragmented body” in order to represent the Weimar woman, traumatized under its bourgeois patriarchy and misogyny (Doherty 1997: 84). Her larger and more complex society-spanning works, however, rarely direct the implicit violence of the montage-cut toward the bodies of Ebert, Noske, or those in positions of political power in the Weimar Republic. Höch’s framing of bodies, and therefore her montage’s critical view of bodies, reflect their various positions within the hierarchy of political violence. Rather than frame the political avatars of the new Weimar Republic with the trauma that may arouse compassion or the ironic violence that may arouse righteous glee, Höch’s works reframe and reveal the very real violence of Weimar politics and culture as its perpetrators. Höch largely foregoes a severe alteration of any specific image-fragment that may represent Weimar power, such as Ebert and Noske, in favor of its repetition within a subversive representation of its previous, traditional frame. Much of Höch’s critical intervention lies in this reframing. As Judith Butler notes, a frame’s “very reproducibility introduces a structural risk for the identity of the frame itself ” (2009: 24). Höch’s reframing takes advantage of this reproducibility in that it performs framing, but intentionally performs it poorly, a productive failure of framing that forces a reexamination of traditional framing itself, which had all too easily become the invisible status quo. Höch’s subversive performance of traditional framing, a new Dada reframing, then “exposes and thematizes the mechanism of restriction, and constitutes a disobedient act of seeing” (Butler 2009: 72.). Höch “gathers up the limbs” of bodies that had been “hurled” to and fro, not only to “represent the thousandfold problems of the day” but to reframe and re-view those who Dada had viewed as responsible for those problems (Huelsenbeck 1920a: 36). Few of Höch’s works focus on the critical potential of this disobedient vision as intently as her photomontage Dada Rundschau (Dada Review).3 A play on the German word Rundschau, most often translated as review, as in a journal or newspaper, but also more literally as a look around or panorama, the work’s title alludes simultaneously to the source of many of its montaged fragments as well as to the radical breadth of Dada’s critically variegated and panoptic vision of society. This duality is evident in the upper right corner of the work where the word Rundschau, taken from a newspaper masthead, is connected, through the word Dada, to the work’s date, 1919, via a strip of black paper, interrupted by a disembodied and bespectacled pair of eyes, “which thematically and visually summon Dadaist relativizing vision in

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all directions” (Bergius 1989: 106). If, then, Dada Rundschau functions as a Dadaist newspaper with a rebelliously panoptic vision of society, there were few better suited to its creation than Höch, who worked as a draughtswoman from 1916 to 1926 at Ullstein Verlag, the publisher of multiple illustrated newspapers and magazines including Die Dame (The Lady), Uhu, and, most importantly, Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung (Berlin Illustrated Newspaper), often abbreviated BIZ, easily the most popular news magazine in Germany, if not Europe, with a circulation nearing 2 million in 1920 (Feber 1982; Ross 2008: 144). “Höch stands out among other Berlin Dadaists as an especially avid collector of small ‘wanted’ photographs from magazines” (Bergius 2000: 91). Though Höch collected and reappropriated fragmented images from these traditional print media, her performative framing, of course, is far different than that of their origin. With an array of black and colored strips of paper that crisscross the work, Höch’s Rundschau performs the clean angles and vertical columns, as well as the properly separated hierarchy of mastheads, sections, and subsections that designate the traditional print media so poorly, and therefore productively, that the very concept of traditional framing is questioned. Not only do these strips further enhance the concept of the montage-cut, making it a visible and evident theme of the work itself, but they also complicate the ways in which such cuts become frames. Here, Höch makes the frame visible and thereby reframes it as something other than restrictive, other than a border. Rosalind Krauss suggests that in “dada montage the experience of blanks or spacing is very strong, . . . as the medium that both combines and separates them” (1997: 106). Rundschau focuses on these strips of paper almost exclusively as connective tissue, thematically integral to the work itself, occasionally overlapping and giving depth to other textual and iconic elements in the work. For example, a strip lays atop the word Nationalversammlung (National Assembly) in the upper left, or indeed, another strip travels through the opening of the second D in Dada in the middle right. In this way, the concept of the connective cut is as thematically relevant to the work as any of its representational elements. That is to say, while these strips of paper initially appear similar to the internal frames of traditional print media’s columns and order, if a particularly chaotic version, they are something wholly other. Neither an enclosure that is uniquely porous nor merely an “editorial embellishment of the image” (Butler 2009: 8), these strips of paper function as both the tissue that connects ostensibly disparate elements within the work and a thematization of the montage-cut itself. The traditional frame that is “taken for granted in one instance becomes thematized critically or even incredulously” in Höch’s hands and at the edge of her scissors (Butler 2009: 10). Höch’s strips of colored paper make visible both the frame and

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the utility of the montage-cut as a subversive tool to reconnect elements that had been traditionally framed as separate. Butler summarizes that the “critical role for visual culture during times of war” was, as Dadaists certainly agreed, “to thematize the forcible frame, . . . that restricts what is perceivable and, indeed what can be” (2009: 100). Höch simultaneously thematizes the forcible frame that separates and disobedient framework that combines. Thematically highlighted by these strips of paper, the combinatory framework of the montage-cut represented by Rundschau almost exclusively involves, which is to say excises, the very elements that constituted the illustrated print media that Rundschau reappropriates and critiques: photographic images of bodies and lines of printed text. The thematic connectivity of elements to each other, represented by the addition of tableau-spanning strips of paper, is supplemented by the subtraction of potentially dissimulating textual or photographic backgrounds, contexts, frames. For example, while the traditional print media would have likely separated Georges Clemenceau, the prime minister of France, from Freikorps snipers atop the Brandenburg Gate ready to fire on Spartacus League revolutionaries by multiple pages, columns, and sections, wholly dissociated from each other, Höch is able to place the former atop the latter’s back in the lower right of the work. This is, of course, a sly allusion to an anarchist assassin’s attempt on Clemenceau’s life (the photo is of his forced repose after the attempt) as he reclines on the back of right-wing snipers who would soon open fire on Spartacus anarchists and communists. The juxtaposition also serves to represent the cascading effect of Clemenceau’s harsh stance against Germany after the First World War on Weimar’s subsequent violent suppression of dissident thought. It is perhaps most immediately, however, a critique of the media that had kept their stories independently framed, cordoned off from each other, and that therefore refused to acknowledge their association. Excised from the photographic framing of his comfortable Paris reading room, the location of Clemenceau becomes all the more immediate and clear: on the backs of right-wing, paramilitary assassins. This excision, which is to say a reframing, removes any sentimentality toward an elder statesman recovering from an assassination attempt and instead, thanks to the association with ruthless and roving bands of right-wing mercenaries, arouses scorn. This scorn is certainly meant for Clemenceau himself, but also the media from which the fragment was taken. The fact that “the montaged fragments . . . insistently point outside the artifact to the context from which they were yanked” (McBride 2016: 18) indicates that the critical potential of Rundschau’s connective cuts, and those of other Dadaist photomontages, functions in two directions. Because Rundschau’s audience was familiar with the traditional framing and contextualization imposed by BIZ and other

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traditional media on Rundschau’s fragments, Höch’s avant-garde reframing explored complicities and causalities that had been prevented or precluded by their customary frames. The viewer of the work is then “led to interpret the interpretation that has been imposed upon [them], developing [their] analysis into a social critique of regulatory and censorious power” (Butler 2009: 72). There is perhaps nowhere in Rundschau that exemplifies this dynamic more than the two bodies at its center: Gustav Noske and Friedrich Ebert. If not of location, the two men are unquestionably Rundschau’s center of focus. Noske and, over his left shoulder, Ebert stand shirtless, hands on hips. In addition to the size of the montage fragments of their bodies, the largest in the work, and their relative bodily autonomy (i.e., they are two of three bodies represented in the work that remain as intact as their initial photographic images allow), Rundschau’s audience would have immediately known not only the men represented but the specific image from which the fragments were excised. Without question, the most well-known image in 1919 Germany, the Badebild (Resort Image) infamously ran on the front cover of the August 24 edition of BIZ, though distributed on August 21, the day of Ebert’s swearing in as president of Weimar, with the mocking caption “Ebert and Noske in the Freshness of Summer” (Albrecht 2002; Mühlhausen 1999: 310–37). This image of the vacationing Ebert and Noske standing in the Baltic Sea is cropped, reframed and refocused on the two who would come to represent Weimar Germany from a larger image that had run on the cover of the conservative Deutsche Tageszeitung (German Daily Newspaper) two weeks earlier, which, like BIZ, mocked the subjects of the image in their frontpage caption: “The Representation of the ‘New Germany.’” After the furor over the image’s publication on the cover of BIZ, and seeking to politically damage Ebert and Noske, as well as reap the rewards of the growing scandal’s publicity, Deutsche Tageszeitung published a once more reframed version of the image as a postcard insert.4 Deutsche Tageszeitung gave the cropped image of Ebert and Noske a thick white-and-black frame that extended to the edges of the postcard. Centered above and below the main image of Ebert and Noske were smaller threequarter portraits of Kaiser Wilhelm II above and Paul von Hindenburg below. In these official portraits of the final German emperor and king of Prussia, and his field commander throughout the First World War, respectively, the two wear their full military uniforms and regalia, adorned by various medals, epaulets, and ribbons. The difference in presentation between the elder statesmen of the German Empire and the representatives of the new Weimar Republic, bare-bellied and smirking, is put into harsh relief with a caption in old German script: Einst und jetzt! (Then and now!). What had

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been originally framed with a sneering invocation of “New Germany” was here performatively reframed in contrast with the “Old Germany.” While the original image had proved embarrassing to Ebert, Noske, and the Scheidemann cabinet, its reframing as something of a proto-photomontage itself was an immediate and smashing success for Deutsche Tageszeitung and an utter catastrophe for the governing coalition. Ebert’s first demand for legal action and prosecution as president of the newly formed republic was against the continued publication of the postcard and for the destruction of any extant copies. The political power of an image, and perhaps more importantly its performative frame, was quickly learned by the politicians, press, and political agitators. The press of the political right framed and reframed this image of the two representatives of Weimar, bathing in their trunks, in order to arouse and subsequently heap scorn upon them. Höch had no intention to negate that scorn, but rather to arouse new scorn, to augment it, to performatively reproduce and reframe it from the political left. As the two focal and central figures of Rundschau (Ebert’s genitals are placed at the exact center of the work), the multivalent critique created by avant-garde montage framing is most pronounced with the bodies of Ebert and Noske, here fully excised from the idyllic background of the coastal resort. Though excised from their original contexts, the images of these bodies ceaselessly refer back to the scorn aroused by the original image. Indeed, Höch alludes to this scorn, often couched in emasculation, with her only enhancement of their bodily images: a small flower that bursts from the front of each of their swimming trunks. Höch performs the postcard’s reframing again, re-reframing Ebert and Noske with the nationalist, military bravado that they were unable to duplicate, though now as new nationalist, military violence targeting their own citizens. This is perhaps most immediately visible with Ebert’s montaged feet. Beneath the Baltic in the original image, Ebert’s feet are now placed in a pair of shiny military boots and surrounded by the tagline for a popular foot powder to ward off sweat and smell: “Gegen feuchte Füße” (Against wet feet). In Höch’s avant-garde reframing, Ebert’s feet are shown as clearly meant “Für militärische Stiefel” (For military boots). The feet of Noske, now placed to the right of Ebert rather than as they were originally oriented, their relation to each other fully interchangeable, remain hidden, though now behind an amorphous cloud. Ostensibly labeled “DaDA,” the cloud also immediately implies the recent use of chlorine and mustard gas in the First World War, with the addition to the top of the cloud of a gas-mask bedecked woman, pointing forward toward the viewer. Beyond the militaristic elements adjoined directly to Ebert and Noske’s bodies, the excisions-as-frame thematized by the strips of colored paper and enacted by the excisions of other bodies and elements

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from their traditional contexts performatively frame and reframe Ebert, Noske, and the new Weimar Republic with national and military violence, re-viewed. Through the hole in the image of Ebert, between his left arm and body, as his left hand jauntily rests on his hip, dives the young swimmer and film star Annette Kellerman directly into the end of a trench periscope, a literal reframing of military perception, that runs down the lower right of the work. At the end of this periscope is not only the hand of the military man holding the periscope from the safety of a trench but also an image of a protesting group and the sniper atop the Brandenburg Gate on whom Clemenceau rests—a member of the right-wing paramilitary Freikorps group that had been deployed by Ebert and Noske in order to quell the Spartacus Uprising after the Freikorps’ arrests and executions of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht (Pelz 2018; Broué 1971). By a series of leading lines, the viewer’s gaze is drawn inexorably from Ebert to the Freikorps. That is, the excised photographic images and text function just as the connective strips of paper do. Not merely within the spatial confines of Rundschau itself, nor simply upon a matrix of spacing common to Dadaist photomontage, not only thematized by the work’s strips of colored paper nor merely in connection with whichever photographic representation that is most immediate—each and every element that constitutes the work, as well as the syntax within which those elements are placed, creates a cascading and totalizing series of interconnected internal frames, a totalizing framework. Within the spatial confines of the work itself, there is no conceptual difference between an image, a piece of text, and a frame; each functions as the others. In addition to the original contextual frames from which each fragment was excised and to which each fragment invariably continues to refer, each element within Rundschau contextually reframes and recontextualizes, creates a reevaluation and re-view of every other element within the work, connects it to previously disparate elements. The reframing, then, is so reciprocative and comprehensive that there is simultaneously no frame and nothing but frame, a non- and hyper-framework of nationalism and militarism made visible in and through that framework, the properly critical panoptic vision of Dada and its Rundschau. At its center stand Ebert and Noske, if not blissfully unaware, then blissfully unperturbed, now seen reframing and being reframed by the political violence that they perpetuated or ordered. Though there are various fragments-cum-reframings that reinforce these themes, such as General Erich Ludendorff ’s head combined with uniformed bodies or photographs of nationalist mobs holding placards proclaiming “Wir bleiben deutsch!” (We remain German!) and “Einig und deutsch!” (United and German!), one element in particular, a naval cannon at the bottom center of the work, most

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immediately demonstrates the pervasiveness of this framework hiding in plain sight (Barth 2003). Upon seeing the cannon, taken from the February 21, 1915, edition of BIZ, with the original caption “Looking into the tube of a large ship gun,” the initial viewers of Rundschau would be immediately reminded of the November 3, 1918, mutiny in Kiel, Germany. Ordered into a final and needless battle with England’s Royal Navy during armistice negotiations, German sailors mutinied, effectively ending the German Empire’s ability to continue the war. The mutiny led to a larger revolution in Kiel, which quickly spread throughout Germany, sweeping aside the monarchy and leading to the German Revolution and Spartacist Uprising—all within the span of three months (Wette 2010; Dähnhardt 1978). A representation of the radical tipping point of the mutiny, the barrel of the cannon functions as something of a portal back in time, receding away from the tumultuous first months of Weimar back to the German Empire. Indeed, this is precisely how it functions in the work. Rundschau invokes yet another disobedient act of seeing—to look literally (around) back, where one finds Höch’s “second” work on the folio verso, a highly variegated portrait of Kaiser Wilhelm II, with the title Friedensfürst (Prince of Peace) violently scrawled across the portrait and Wilhelm’s shoulders.5 The title was a common moniker for Wilhelm II following the 1915 publication of Reinhold Kirchhöfer’s political pamphlet “Wilhelm II. Als Friedensfürst der Weltpolitik” (Wilhelm the Second as Prince of Peace in World Politics). The title, of course, had become darkly tragicomical in the wake of the horrors of the First World War, the violent suppression of the German Revolutions, and the continual difficulties of the new Weimar Republic. Höch here performs the framing of Deutsche Tageszeitung’s postcard, Ebert and Noske framed by Wilhelm II, Weimar framed by Wilhelmine. The framing device of the cannon’s barrel, however, is not merely a tipping point’s portal back and forth between einst und jetzt (then and now). Rather, as with an actual cannon, the trajectory of destruction is exclusively unidirectional. Given the location of the cannon in relation to the three-quarter portrait of Wilhelm II on the backside of Rundschau, as well as the Dadaist’s often scatological criticisms of the Great War and its aftereffects,6 the barrel functions as something of a menacing, mechanical, military rectum. Here, Höch implies not only that the nationalistic and militaristic culture of Weimar Germany continues to be supported by Wilhelmine Germany, literally resting upon Wilhelm’s back, nor simply that the two epochs of German history are indeed two sides of the same coin (or tableau), but specifically that Wilhelm and the German Empire were the body politic from which Weimar was noxiously expelled. Indeed, Höch’s work reframes a citation originally meant to frame

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Ebert and Noske and the culture of Weimar Germany in toto. Beaming from a spotlight perched atop the rectal naval cannon, as something of a textual ray of light, a fragment reads “Schatzkammer des deutschen Gemütes entleert” (Treasury of the German spirit evacuated). This textual fragment originally intended, similar to the defeatism of the einst und jetzt postcard, to arouse scorn for those who had so degraded the nobility of a formerly proud empire. Höch’s use of the citation to reframe the militaristic anus of a now disgraced emperor, amidst the chaotic and violent nationalism and militarism portrayed by Rundschau, preemptively answers the Dadaist refrain: “What is German culture? (Answer: Shit!)” (Huelsenbeck 1920b: 35). The revolution, the mutiny, and all the war and violence had, in essence, achieved nothing. All that had changed was appearance, military pomp for soggy swimming trunks, “that a pseudorevolutionary belly [had] displaced an absolute head of state” (Doherty 1998: 66). Weimar was not the new republic that had risen from the ashes of the Great War. Performatively reframed to empower a new dissident perception, Weimar could be viewed for what it was, merely the evacuated excrement passed through a naval cannon anus, little more than the expulsive echo of the decayed empire that had come before. The scorn that the resort image of Ebert and Noske had aroused, whether framed by Deutsche Tageszeitung or BIZ, whether as a cover story with a scathing caption or as a postcard with a biting critique—scorn heaped upon national leaders without grandeur or grace, dignity or distinctions— is likewise performed in Höch’s Rundschau, though reframed. The einst und jetzt that had originally framed Weimar Germany as a precipitous degradation of culture from Wilhelmine Germany, and thereby highlighted a radical difference between what had been and what is now, has come to represent in Rundschau less of a differentiation between old and new than a radical continuation. Thanks to this reframing, which is to say the addition of this new frame of Kaiser Wilhelm II, himself now scornfully reframed by Höch’s harsh strokes of color and the violent scratch of the darkly ironic title Friedensfürst scrawled across his shoulders and Wir (We) across his chest, the scorn aroused for Weimar is also reframed. The anti-Wilhelmine scorn of Friedensfürst reframes the frame of the (already reframed) postcard, reproduces it with a new initial scorn which builds upon itself. Weimar’s Ebert and Noske are again framed as Wilhelm undressed, their soft fat bellies now packed into hard military boots, previously just out of sight, but grounded in militarism and nationalism all the same—einst und jetzt, both the same as it ever was and worse. The performance of framing, the reframing, allows and even forces the new perception, the re-view. Here, the critical potential of framing and reframing comes to light, metaphorically if not literally beamed from the same searchlight that

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announced the fecal evacuation of German culture. Another appeal, once again reframed, comes from a traditional newspaper during the wartime paper rationing: “Lesen und an Männer und Frauen weitergeben!” (Read and pass along to men and women!). Dada’s panoramic investigation, reframing, and re-view of society is not meant merely for them but is to be passed on. This begs the question, however, of what exactly is meant to be relayed to men and women. Is it simply this particular reading of these particular social conditions at the dawn of the Weimar Republic? Might it rather be this critically interventional mode of reading itself—a variegated and panoptic vision of society in which frames and framing are seen for the reproducible, iterable, and therefore manipulatable, social and cultural apparatuses that they are, where reframing can be a radically critical act? Indeed, as Butler argues, “This circulation brings out or, rather, is the iterable structure of the frame. As frames break from themselves in order to install themselves,” or when those frames are broken by an avant-garde photomonteur, “other possibilities of apprehension emerge” (2009: 12). That is, “a taken-for-granted reality is called into question, exposing the orchestrating designs of the authority who sought to control the frame” (Butler 2009: 12). Dadaist photomontage, and the larger societal photomontages of Höch in particular, not only prefigures but also performs this critical intervention. They were certainly not, however, the last to perform such a critical reframing. To some degree, not merely the “production of new frames” but also the critical reframing of the frame, “when a frame breaks with itself ” (Butler 2009: 12), has become a fundamental element of alternative media, from the immediate inheritors of Dadaist political aesthetics such as surrealist and constructivist works to anti-fascist montage in the 1930s and punk aesthetics in the 1980s, through to contemporary memes and darkly ironic newspapers like The Onion. In many ways, the critical reframing by Höch and Dada was indeed read and passed on—each new iteration a moment where “a politically consequential break is possible” (Butler 2009: 24).

Notes 1 Unless noted, all translations are my own. 2 Heartfield’s archives are housed at the Akademie der Künste. See https:// heartfield​.adk​.de​/node​/6805 3 The work is housed at the Berlinische Galerie. See https​:/​/sa​​mmlun​​g​-onl​​ine​.b​​ erlin​​ische​​galer​​ie​.de​​:443/​​eMP​/e​​Museu​​mPlus​​?serv​​ice​=E​​xtern​​alInt​​​erfac​​e​&obj​​ ectId​​=3069​

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4 A copy of the postcard is housed at the Deutsches Historisches Museum. See https​:/​/ww​​w​.deu​​tsche​​-digi​​tale-​​bibli​​othek​​.de​/i​​tem​/I​​TL3M7​​PCF3C​​4KGVM​​ V2​UKI​​HESPI​​B3IT5​D 5 The work is housed at the Berlinische Galerie. See https​:/​/sa​​mmlun​​g​-onl​​ine​.b​​ erlin​​ische​​galer​​ie​.de​​/eMP/​​eMuse​​umPlu​​s​?ser​​vice=​​Exter​​nalIn​​terfa​​​ce​&ob​​jectI​​d​ =162​​060 6 Tristan Tzara, a founding member of Dada in Zurich, for example, wrote: “we want we want we want to piss in diverse colors” (1975: 562f.). Perhaps more politically: “Dada remains within the framework of European weaknesses, it’s still shit, but from now on we want to shit in different colors so as to adorn the zoo of art with all the flags of all consulates” (1975: 357).

References Adamowicz, E. (2019), Dada Bodies: Between Battlefield and Fairground, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Albrecht, N. (2002), “Die Macht einer Verleumdungskampagne: Antidemokratische Agitationen der Presse und Justiz gegen die Weimarer Republik und ihren ersten Reichspräsidenten Friedrich Ebert vom ‘Badebild’ bis zum Magdeburger Prozeß,” PhD diss., Universität Bremen. Ball, H. (2018), Die Flucht aus der Zeit, Göttingen: Wallstein. Barth, B. (2003), Dolchstoßlegenden und politische Desintegration. Das Trauma der deutschen Niederlage im ersten Weltkrieg 1914–1933, Dusseldorf: Droste Verlag. Bergius, H. (1989), “‘Dada Rundschau’ - Eine Photomontage,” in E. Moortgat and C. Thater-Schulz (eds.), Hannah Höch 1889–1978: Ihr Werk, Ihr Leben, Ihre Freunde, pp. 101–6, Berlin: Argon Verlag. Bergius, H. (2000), Montage und Metamechanik: Dada Berlin - Artistik von Polaritäten, Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag. Biro, M. (2009), The Dada Cyborg: Visions of the New Human in Weimar Berlin, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Broué, P. (1971), Révolution en Allemagne: 1917–1923, Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Butler, J. (2009), Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?, London: Verso. Dähnhardt, D. (1978), Revolution in Kiel: Der Übergang vom Kaiserreich zur Weimarer Republik, Neumünster: K. Wachholz. Damman, C. (2016), “Dance, Sound, Word: ‘The Hundred Jointed Body’ in Zurich Dada,” Germanic Review, 91: 352–66. Doherty, B. (1997), “‘See: ‘We Are All Neurasthenics’!’ or, the Trauma of Dada Montage,” Critical Inquiry, 24(1): 82–132. Doherty, B. (1998), “Figures of the Pseudorevolution,” October, 84: 64–89. Feber, C. (1982), Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung: Zeitbild, Chronik, Moritat für Jedermann 1892–1945, Berlin: Ullstein.

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Garner Jr., S. B. (2007), “The Gas Heart: Disfigurement and the Dada Body,” Modern Drama, 50(4): 500–16. Huelsenbeck, R. (1920a), Dada Almanach, Berlin: Erich Reiss. Huelsenbeck, R. (1920b), En Avant Dada: Die Geschichte des Dadaismus, Hannover: Paul Steegman Verlag. Jones, A. (1998), “‘Women’ in Dada: Elsa, Rose, and Charlie,” in N. SawelsonGorse (ed.), Women in Dada: Essays on Sex, Gender, and Identity, pp. 142–72, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Jones, M. (2016), Founding Weimar: Violence and the German Revolution of 1918–1919, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kirchhöfer, R. (1915), Wilhelm II. Als Friedensfürst in der Weltpolitik, Eisleben: Verlag der Kuhut’schen Buchhandlung. Krauss, R. (1997), “Photographic Conditions of Surrealism,” in R. Krauss (ed.), Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, pp. 87–118, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. McBride, P. (2016), Chatter of the Invisible: Montage and Narrative in Weimar Germany, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Mühlhausen, W. (1999), Friedrich Ebert: Sein Leben, sein Werk, seine Zeit, Heidelberg: Kehrer. Pelz, W. (2018), A People’s History of the German Revolution, London: Pluto Press. Ross, C. (2008), Media and the Making of Modern Germany: Mass Communications, Society and Politics from the Empire to the Third Reich, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tzara, T. (1975), Oeuvres Complètes, Paris: Flammarion. Wette, W. (2010), Gustav Noske und die Revolution in Kiel 1918, Heide: Boyens Buchverlag.

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The Dissonance of Resonating Bodies and the Collisions of Reality Friction Structures of Ambiguity in Christoph Schlingensief ’s Bitte liebt Österreich Tony Perucci

In Bitte liebt Österreich—Erste europäische Koalitionswoche (Please Love Austria—First Austrian Coalition Week, 2000), the best-known work by the German theatre artist, filmmaker, and political provocateur Christoph Schlingensief, a small group of asylum seekers arrived on a bus at the main square of Vienna during the 2000 edition of the international arts festival, Wiener Festwochen. One at a time, they disembarked from the bus as a loudspeaker announced their national origin and profession. They masked their identities with ill-fitting wigs and other disguises and covered their faces with tabloid newspapers, as they were shepherded into their temporary home for the following days—an assemblage of shipping containers outfitted with video cameras, which would broadcast their daily lives through a live stream on the web in what Richard Langston describes as Schlingensief ’s “appropriation” of the format of the reality TV show Big Brother (2008: 237). Over the course of the week-long performance, spectators were invited to “vote out” the contestants on the internet, after which they would reboard the bus, allegedly to be deported. Throughout each day, Schlingensief stood atop or in front of the containers as both an emcee for an ongoing cabaret of performances and to deliver ongoing harangues about the resurgence of the farright in Austrian politics. The audience of everyday Viennese, politicians, and festivalgoers found themselves confronted with a work intended to instigate— to arouse indignation, critical self-reflection, and action. The container did so precisely by claiming the container’s status as “real”—as a structure that contained actual refugees, facing actual deportation, and as “art”—as an aesthetic frame that contained a theatrical fiction. By asserting its status in each of these two frames, Schlingensief challenged the pleasures of certitude and

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righteousness, including those which opposed the far-right, through a political aesthetics of the arousal of irritation.1 In what follows, I posit Schlingensief ’s Bitte liebt Österreich as representative of a form of political performance that I term “Reality Frictions” (Perucci 2019). In Reality Frictions, such as Bitte liebt Österreich, performances do not only occur “in the middle of reality” (Handke 1969: 307) but also challenge spectators’ understandings of the “reality” in which they are in the middle. Reality Frictions frame themselves as alternatively and irreconcilably theatrical fictions and (f)actual occurrences with real consequences for the participants. The work of framing, as well as our ability to identify the frame of an event, is essential to what sociologist Erving Goffman describes as our ability to “know what is really going on” (1974: 454). As I will explain, Goffman posits frames and framework as situational and culturally specific “schemata of interpretation” (21) through which we perceive the actions of others in everyday social interactions and cultural performances as belonging to either “real” or “fictive realms of being” (563). Reality Frictions do not merely operate within a specific and ambiguous frame; they stage their frames as part of the work. Their interruptive and frictive collision of frames arouses—in a fundamental and frustrating way—the absence of closure that Brecht promoted. For Schlingensief, Bitte liebt Österreich’s frame-sabotage contested the utopian performativity of the artistic frame, an image-logic proposed by the celebrated German filmmaker Wim Wenders. Accepting the Best Director award for Der Himmel über Berlin (Heaven over Berlin, US title: Wings of Desire, 1987) at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival, Wenders proclaimed, “We must make better images of the world in order to make the world better” (Scheer 2018: 45). Rather than constructing a frame to produce “better images,” Schlingensief viewed the shipping containers as self-sabotaging frames, which would function as “a machine that disrupts images” (2012).2 The solidity of the physical frames of the container structures worked to unsettle the spectators’ ability to conceptually frame the bodies of the asylum-performers who occupied them. The instability of the meaning of the image-bodies occupying the containers was intended to disrupt the image of Vienna as an elite cultural site untouched by the rise of the xenophobic farright. To that end, he would produce “images of Austria that damage Austria’s reputation” (cited in Forrest 2015: 82), not to reveal or unmask a hidden truth but to create images that would interrupt what the artist Adrian Piper calls the “way of averting one’s gaze”—images that would irritate by undercutting the euphemisms that enable the “emperor’s new clothes” of contemporary racist ideology (1996). Before turning to Schlingensief and his container piece, I begin by briefly framing it with a historical context of practices by theatrical and political

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actors. I trace how challenges to the solidity of the theatrical frame emerged from the belief that its stability inoculates against arousal to political action. Since becoming prevalent in American and European theatre in the 1960s, cultural critics have dismissed such practices for their sublimation of arousal in favor of detached irony. However, tracing this arc highlights the irritational force of Bitte liebt Österreich—in which Schlingensief ’s containers and his staging of “container aesthetics” perform through the ambiguity that structures the work. That is, the work’s structural ambiguity of continuous colliding of perceptual frames is produced through the containers functioning as physical structures of ambiguity (Boyle 2016).

When Frames Collide At least since the Bertolt Brecht–influenced radical theatre of the 1960s, the challenge to the theatrical frame has been central to the political-aesthetic means of arousing spectators to take action against injustice. However, for the Austrian playwright Peter Handke, attempts to produce spontaneous radical action through audience participation in theatrical works, such as the Living Theatre’s Paradise Now and the Performance Group’s Dionysus in 69, were based on what he saw as a fallacy inherited from Brecht—that “revolutionary intent” could translate into revolutionary action within the context of a theatre event (1969: 304). Written on the heels of his first major play, Publikumsbeschimpfung (Offending the Audience, 1966), and in the midst of radical left activism in West Germany, Handke’s essay “Straßentheater und Theatertheater” (“Street-Theatre and Theatre-Theatre”) derides—with a manifesto-like bravado—the “sickening untruth” (ekelhafte Unwahrheit) of political theatre’s “seriousness in play-spaces” (Ernsthaftigkeiten in Spielräumen) (1969: 305). He expresses incredulity and exasperation at neo-Brechtians’ “mendacity” (Verlogenheit) in failing to comprehend what he sees as theatre’s “fatal” power to formalize and aestheticize as a “Spielund Bedeutungsraum” (play- and meaning-space) (1969: 305). For Handke, attempts to bring “real” political struggle into the theatre through chanting on stage—for example, anti-Vietnam slogans by the Living Theatre—turn political commitment into “kitsch” and an “affectation” (Manier), leaving the very gravity of that political investment “irretrievably gambled away” (rettungslos verspielt) (1969: 305). However, for all of his bombast, Handke does not abandon theatre but contends that, while “engaged theatre” is not possible in Theatertheater, activists of Kommune were enacting Straßentheater on German streets by “‘terrorizing,’ theatricalizing and ridiculing reality [Wirklichkeit]” (1969:

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306). While Handke’s disdain evokes the spirit of German “anti-theatre” of the 1960s, it can be better understood as a political corollary of the aesthetics expressed by the speakers of Offending the Audience. In both Offending the Audience and “Street-Theatre and Theatre-Theatre” Handke plays with the multiple meanings of Spiel (play) and spielen (playing). Spiel can refer to a theatrical “play” or it can mean a game. Similarly, spielen can refer to acting (performed by actors: Schauspieler), game-playing, or pretending. Throughout Offending the Audience, the speakers’ endless disavowal of theatre returns again and again to a refusal to spielen (play) and a disavowal of the theatrical frame’s ability to render everything on the stage as an inconsequential Spiel (game). Despite the speakers’ constant assertion that they are “spielen nicht” (not playing/acting), Handke is well aware of the impossibility of evading play in a theatrical work, as he writes that “theatre formalizes every movement, every insignificant detail, every word, every silence” (1969: 305; 1966: 20). While the speakers of Offending the Audience refuse to play in a play-space, Handke insists in “Straßentheater” that the street protesters are the ones who are “playing,” not in Spielräume, but in the “middle of reality” (Wirklichkeit) (1969: 306–7).3 Counterintuitively, theatre’s play-spaces become sites for the refusal to play, while the “middle of reality” becomes the site for playing to be performed (1969: 307). Theatertheater’s political potential—as the “opening lines” for politics— exists in the irrational capacity of a Spielraum’s ambiguity and uncertainty (1969: 306). For, Theatertheater’s Spielräumen may also, in turn, produce “undiscovered inner Spielräumen” in the spectators’ consciousness—spaces for “sensitizing” (Empflindlichmachen) the audience, for “making them irritable” (Reizbarmachen) and “as a means of coming into the world” (1969: 307). In this way, the theatre would not attempt to “create an image (abbilden) of the world”; rather, the world would appear as theatre’s “afterimage” (Nachbild) (1969: 306). The irritation at the heart of theatre can thus appear as agitation through the spielen (acting) of activists until all of reality becomes a Spielraum. To Handke, such a transformation would be “lovely” (1969: 307). Amidst Handke’s call for what Walter Benjamin termed “interruptions of happenings” (1968: 150) to occur outside of theatre spaces, politically radical theatre artists came to view “happenings” as the only sufficient means for political interruption, be it through the “dramaturgy of radical activity” of US anti-Vietnam demonstrations (Baxandall 1969), the “environmental theatre” of Richard Schechner’s Performance Group, Jean-Jacques Lebel’s Parisian happenings, Situationist derives, or the Happenings of Kaprow and the Fluxus group. These aesthetics of the “interruption” of the real into the theatrical frame, and of the theatrical political interrupting of the quotidian, have long been romanticized.

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However, social critics decried such challenges to the artistic frame as both symptomatic of the dissolution and as a perpetuation of social decline. Writing in the mid-1970s, Christopher Lasch locates “experimental theatre” within an American “culture of narcissism” exemplified by the proliferation of selfhelp books, the rise of the public relations industry and the “degradation of politics into spectacle” ushered in by President John F. Kennedy’s privileging of “appearance and illusion of national greatness,” before reaching “tragicomic climax” of the Nixon administration’s “politics of spectacle” (1979: 81). Lasch sees the New Left’s embrace of a “politics of theatre” of street protest as both a “delusion” and its own “mirror-image of the politics of unreality” enacted through the Nixon administration’s “theatrical conception of politics” (78–9). While Lasch denounces the New Left for an embrace of illusion, he condemns experimental theatre for its “war against illusion” as both expression and perpetuation of indifference and ironic detachment (1979: 87). He argues that the intentional destabilization of the theatrical frame by the Performance Group’s Dionysus in 69 and the Living Theatre’s Antigone “announces the collapse of the very idea of reality, dependent at every point on the distinction between nature and artifice and illusion” (1979: 87). These tactics are symptomatic, for Lasch, of the narcissistic inability to suspend disbelief and dangerously “promote a theatrical approach to existence” (1979: 90). Lasch turns to Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life with ambivalence, enlisting Goffman in his critique of the “contemporary malaise . . . [of] self-consciousness,” where even the concept of “the performing self ” undermines a “belief in the reality of the external world” (1979: 90). With the Performance Group and Living Theatre attacking the stability of theatre, Lasch posits Goffman’s performing self as theatricalizing through an “ironic detachment that dulls paint but also cripples the will to change social conditions” (1979: 96). With a theatre of “[a]wareness commenting on awareness” and street protests that are mere spectacles of “selfdramatization,” gestures of destabilizing the theatrical frame undermine even a “belief in the reality of the external world” (1979: 96). Goffman’s more subtle Frame Analysis (1974) provides a glimpse of the political potential of Reality Frictions through the interruption, not (just) of happenings but of their own conceptual frames. Goffman describes the constant negotiation of the conceptual frames that we use to organize and thus understand “what is really going on” in any social situation (1974: 454). When a frame we have been consciously or unconsciously dependent upon is broken, the experience is not simply not understood but “finds no form and is therefore no experience” (1974: 379). This interruption of happenings at, and of, the frame produces a “‘negative experience’—negative in the sense that it takes its character from what it is not, and what it is not is an organized and organizationally affirmed response” (1974: 379). Without a frame, we

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are “thrust immediately into [a] predicament without the usual defenses” (1974: 378). It is precisely a “predicament without the usual defenses” that Brecht desired. Moreover, this is also the condition that Handke claims that Theatertheater cannot produce, since the theatrical frame and its attendant aesthetic distance constitutes one more “usual defense” against political action. The dangers of frame breaking by political theatre artists no longer arouse the hyperventilation of earlier decades. The effects of mediatized simulation and spectacle are widely seen to have dissolved the boundaries of “reality” and “artifice,” resulting in a generalized culture of suspicion that often manifests as the ironic detachment feared by Lasch, as well as the comforts of the cynicism and “savvy skepticism” (Andrejevic 2004: 212). The collapse of governance and media spectacle found its apotheosis in Donald Trump’s presidency, which did not simply make this dissolve undeniable; it made the distinguishing of these frames seem quaint, or at least exhausting and ineffective.4 Since the 1990s, the “manufacture of negative experience” has been more prevalent in the work of interdisciplinary artists and “artivists,” ushered in by the graphic design of “subvertizing” and “culture jamming,” in the performance interventions of Guillermo Gomez-Peña and Coco Fusco’s Two Undiscovered Amerindians, 0100101110101101​.o​rg’s Nikeplatz, and in the political pranks of the Yes Men and Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping. Activist and curator Nato Thompson describes the dilemma faced by such politically engaged artists as the navigation of what he terms “a spectrum of legibility,” bounded by the polarity of the pragmatic and instrumental clarity of activism, which he terms “the didactic,” and the poeticism and productive confusion of the irrational, absurd, and nonliteral open work that he terms “the ambiguous” (2015: 34). To be sure, the tendency for “political art” to be situated in the “critical purgatory” of not-quite-art and not-quite-activism is nothing new (2015: 34). However, works that overtly engage in social and political intervention, but whose meaning or intention remains willfully illegible, are particularly fraught in what Thompson describes as our “paranoid age,” which is characterized by a “complicated, anxious relationship with the question of what constitutes an image—and what its intentions might be” (2015: 46). He argues that the pervasive “atmosphere of visual suspicion” is rooted in our own awareness of our manipulation by images, where the more ambiguous the image, the more we find consolation in a “unified suspicion of truth” (2015: 46). Reality Frictions emerge from this context of a culture of suspicion in a paranoid age, where theatre and performance are no longer feared as disruptive forces, where street protests are largely ineffectual, and where the inability to distinguish the “factual” from the “fictional” is an irritation, rather than an interruption. While Reality Frictions explicitly engage with and identify as forms of political engagement, they do not fit within

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the comfortable confines of “political theatre.” Rather, theirs is a politics that irritates the “ontological queasiness” of theatre’s duality of artifice and actuality, such that what we perceive as theatrical fiction creates a friction with that which we perceive to be reality (Barish 1981: 3). The fundamental indecidability of their fictionality need not create another instance for cynicism and ironic detachment; rather, by repeatedly calling their own “reality” into question, Reality Frictions challenge resignation by implicating the spectator both in the action of producing reality and in the material social and political effects of that production. Reality Frictions do not presume a stable “real” against which a theatrical fiction might be set. These Reality Frictions are also Reality Fictions, irritating the points where what we perceive to be “reality” and “fiction” touch and rub against each other. As a means of political engagement, they both proclaim and disavow their theatrical fictionality. Schlingensief, in particular, embraced theatre’s queasy-making double failure of aesthetic autonomy and political efficacy as a productive and active force, repeatedly interrupting its status both as an aesthetically intended fiction and as real political process. This friction at what Schlingensief called the “dividing line between reality and fiction, art and life” (2012: 99) is propelled by this double-gesture of aesthetic and political interruption. The disorientation of operating at this “tipping point” creates instability for artist and spectator, creating a yearning for “clarity” amidst the “total confusion” that Schlingensief shared with his audience— who alternately worried that he alone was “in reality” that the audience did not take “seriously” and that he was the one who had failed to do so. This is the “shared ability to be irritable” that Alan Read identifies as the political potential in the social occasion of theatre and performance (2008: 12). Bitte liebt Österreich stages what Read calls performance’s “irritant gene” by featuring “the indecidability for the audience to the status of the theatre act itself ” as its unstable political engagement (2013: xii, 54–5,). To do so, Schlingensief looked specifically to theatre’s ambiguous relationship to “play” (spielen), attempting to “build a theatre that doesn’t play/pretend (vorspielen) anything,” but rather “plays politics through” (Politik durchspielen) (Schlingensief 2012: 95).

Structural Ambiguity and Resonating Bodies The one truly surrealist act possible is to shoot randomly into the crowd. If this is a form of radicalism, it has worked here in the end. You could not hear the shot, but an incredible lot of people were stumbling around and heavily wounded, screaming “Ouch!” and hollering. Christoph Schlingensief, on Bitte liebt Österreich!

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As the epigraph here makes clear, Schlingensief saw the image-disruption machine of Bitte liebt Österreich as not just an intrusion of art into the “middle of reality” but also an intrusion whose effects were part of the work itself. Throughout his work, Schlingensief utilized frame breaking and its destabilizing ambiguity as a central aesthetic for engaging with the political. Moreover, he made the arousal of audiences’ “anxious relationship” with that ambiguity the focus and center of his work. For Schlingensief, performance was an inheritance of Joseph Beuys’s “social sculpture”; thus, it was not so much a matter of conveying a political message, but one of what he called “resonating bodies” (Das Halten 2001). As frames collide, the friction and force of that vibration may spread to and through the bodies of intentional and unintentional participants in Reality Friction performances. In Bitte liebt Österreich, these “radical and disharmonious forms” of frame collision and resonating bodies stage what Diedrich Diederichsen calls Schlingensief ’s “mise en scène of dissonance” to interrupt Austria’s denial of complicity in the return of the far-right to national political power (Diederichsen 2011: 190). These practices characterized what Boris Groys has called the “aesthetics of irritation” (Langston 2017) of Schlingensief ’s films, theatre works, television shows, and public space actions from the 1980s until his death in 2010. Indeed, he was often intentionally irritating, which director Frank Castorf described as Schlingensief ’s sincere staging of himself as a “total asshole” (2011: 168). However, he constructed this aesthetic of “Totalirritation” (total irritation) not just in this performance of self but also by staging the indecidability of the theatrical fictionality of his work as such (Löhndorf 1998). Throughout his work, Schlingensief ’s practice of “kognitive Irritation” (cognitive irritation) not only rendered its condition as “actual political intervention” or “aesthetic fiction” as indecidable but also staged that indecidability as its political intervention (Koch 2014: 120). At the time, Schlingensief was best known for his trashy and controversial films that utilized B-movie aesthetics to confront Germans with the insufficiency of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the postwar ethos of coming to terms with the crimes of the Nazi era. Schlingensief had garnered critical attention for Mein Filz, mein Fett, mein Hase (My Felt, My Fat, My Rabbit), his performance at the 1997 Dokumenta, during which he was arrested for proclaiming Tötet Helmut Kohl (Kill [German chancellor] Helmut Kohl). The following year, Schlingensief launched a political campaign to compete in the 1998 German federal elections, forming the Chance 2000 political party as part of a months-long set of performances in Berlin and throughout Germany. By 2000, Schlingensief had achieved widespread notoriety as a political and artistic provocateur, becoming an artist-in-residence at Berlin’s Volksbühne theatre.

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The commission from Wiener Festwochen was his first appearance on the international artworld stage. Festival director Luc Bondy described the inclusion of Schlingensief as a protest against the Austrian government following its 1999 parliamentary election (Ausländer Raus!). Following the surprise second place showing of the anti-immigrant, far-right party FPÖ (Freiheitliche Partei Österreich [Freedom Party of Austria]), the Austrian government shocked the world by constituting a coalition government that included the Jörg Haider-led FPÖ, a party founded in the 1950s by former Nazis and Nazi-sympathizers. For the directors of Wiener Festwochen, the inclusion of the FPÖ represented a mainstreaming of resurgent Nazi ideology in Europe and a betrayal of Austrians who had been assured that the FPÖ would be excluded from a governing coalition. The formation of the coalition crossed the Rubicon by legitimizing unapologetically xenophobic and racist rhetoric, even as it was disavowed by the cultured, progressive Viennese. Even before what he advertised as his Volksverbundene Aktion (People’s Performance Action) began, Schlingensief initiated his aesthetic strategy of producing an image-disrupting machine through the friction of what Lehmann terms “concrete life-process [realer Lebensprozeß]” and “aesthetically intended fiction[äesthetisch vermeinte Fiktion]” (2016: 443). On the website portal where viewers could later watch livestreams from the containers and vote to deport the refugees, the homepage announced that this was both Schlingensief ’s work as an action artist and a “serious situation” (“Bitte liebt Österreich!” n.d.). The website makes clear that Austria is not Schlingensief ’s exclusive target, as “Austria says what the rest only think” and that “this Austria could be anywhere” (“Bitte liebt Österreich!”). As the “real refugees” disembarked their transport bus and entered the container village, Schlingensief announced the “rules of the game” of the performance—a performance that he announced was sponsored by the FPÖ—in which nightly online voting would result in the nightly deportation of those voted out. Standing atop the containers and speaking into a megaphone, Schlingensief announced that the performance was simply an expression of the political reality that Austrians had voted into being. He declared, “So now we will initiate an act that is real. I’m saying it again. This is a performance of Wiener Festwochen. This is an actor. This is the absolute truth” (Ausländer Raus!). On cue, the drapery was dropped to reveal a massive sign above the containers, bearing the Nazi slogan, “AUSLÄNDER RAUS!” (Foreigners, Out!). With that gesture, Schlingensief not only made the hidden visible but made it a spectacle. The status of the authenticity of the asylum seekers was ambiguous, not because it was unclear but because Schlingensief made emphatic pronouncements for their authenticity and the container’s artificiality.

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For Schlingensief, this serious situation was also a matter of playing— of “playing out Häder” (Ausländer Raus!). Over the ensuing weeks, the uneventful video streams were accompanied by Schlingensief ’s nonstop carnival barking, goading spectators into often quite heated confrontations about the performance. While some Viennese challenged Schlingensief with rationalizations for limiting immigrants (e.g., erroneously stating that Austria was traditionally a non-immigrant country), many of the arguments centered on whether the image Schlingensief was creating with the containers and sign represented the “real” liberal democracy that Austrian’s believed themselves to have. These spectator-participants were indignant— outraged that Schlingensief ’s broadcasting of this image made “Austria look ridiculous!” (Ausländer Raus!).

Ambiguity, Irritation, and Indecidability The ambiguity of the asylum seekers’ authenticity functioned as part of Reality Fictions’ “irritational aesthetics” by shifting the locus of arousal away from the bodies of the “real refugees” in the container (Perucci 2019). The “structural ambiguity” of the work’s frame meant that the authenticity of the performers/refugees was impossible to determine because Schlingensief continued to mark the containers as framing devices. In this way, the piece was unrelenting in its arousal of spectators’ irritation. As structures of ambiguity, spectators’ own bodies became irritated by an inability to perceptually frame the performers’ bodies as being either “real refugees” or “actors.” This mode of friction between “reality” and “theatre” operates in what Sianne Ngai calls “irritation’s location in the uneasy zone between psychic and bodily experience . . . [which] produces an oscillation of insides and outsides” (2005: 201). As such, it mobilizes what Ngai terms “ugly feelings” in service of a confrontational political aesthetic appropriate to the age of “truthiness.” Schlingensief makes this oscillation unrelenting by repeatedly signaling the ambiguous status of the work’s “reality” or “fictiveness” and by staging that ambiguity so incessantly that spectators would be constantly (and irritatingly so) confronted with the fact that they did not know what elements were aesthetically intended fictions, which were actually being undertaken “for real,” and which actions were simply part of Schlingensief ’s performance of himself as a bad-boy provocateur. Thus, Schlingensief heightens rather than attempts to resolve the challenge of ambiguous art in the paranoid times that Thompson describes. His image-machine to disrupt images stokes the paranoia that the work (or elements of it) might not be “for real” as a way to confront the xenophobic

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paranoia that enabled centrists and leftists to tolerate the euphemismshrouded racism of Austrian culture. This production of a frictive relationship between the “fake” and the “real” might be understood by means of Tom Gunning’s (2012) useful distinction of two different modes of experience of an unstable relationship with the “real”: truthiness and more (than) real. Truthiness, the 2005 Miriam-Webster “word of the year,” coined by comedian Stephen Colbert, refers to the quality of assertions whose veracity is based on the speaker’s belief, regardless of verifiable evidence, save for what is felt to be true, as Colbert puts it, “in my gut” (Colbert Report, 2005). For Gunning, the art of truthiness is the art of resemblance—that which appeals to our attraction to the familiar, affirms our preconceptions, and “reassures us that reality actually is the way we think it is” (2012: 184). Moreover, in affirming the familiar, a work’s truthiness feels “so real,” such that the performances absolve us of any need to “struggle to grasp them” (2012: 181). In contrast, the more real is an “effect” of art based on defamiliarization, a form of “intensity of experience . . . that affects us like a collision” and thus compels reexamination of the world (2012: 182–3). On the other hand, the “more real” is that which necessitates struggle—to understand that “the real is something we have to struggle for” (2012: 185). Gunning’s distinction helps to clarify the limitations of didactic practices of “political art”—that, in their reaffirmation of our progressive political agenda, we are compelled to further consider neither the artwork nor the constitution of our “reality.” And “ambiguity,” then, does not simply refer to that which has an indeterminate meaning, but rather whose very status as being “real” is itself left to be ambiguous. The “more real” is, most certainly, not a claim to political efficacy but, rather, describes the experience of struggling with the real due to the “more (than)” of the aesthetic encounter. In Bitte liebt Österreich, this condition of struggle is the central operation of the work. As a form of didactic, political art, its “statement” seems abundantly clear—it is a critique of the normalization of the far-right and its promotion of xenophobia. But, the core of the work is rooted in the fact that the object of critique here is not the far-right, but the liberal or centrist spectator, who may not disavow the fascist and racist cultural currents and political practices that have enabled the FPÖ. By announcing, “This is Austria! This is Nazi!,” Schlingensief does not perform the didactic act of disillusioning its publics but, rather, serves to confront what Kevin Young calls “the age of euphemism” (2017: 431). Moreover, part of the “more (than) real” collision is the deliberate ambiguity of the container-performers’ refugee status. We are told by Schlingensief and his related media materials that they are “real” refugees and that, if voted

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out, they “will” be deported. We don’t know whether we can believe the veracity of what Schlingensief is framing for us because the act of framing is, itself, what is being framed for us. The Dutch activist collective BAVO describes this as the “structural ambiguity” of Bitte liebt Österreich, where “situations . . . not only are not clear, but also cannot be made clear” (2007: 28, emphasis in original). By making the aesthetic frame itself the structure that is made ambiguous (rather than only what is contained therein), spectators are destabilized with the untenable situation where, as Schlingensief puts it, “No matter what they did, it would be the wrong move” (Ausländer Raus!). As curator Inke Arns and art historian Sylvia Sasse note: During the whole duration, the public and media asked the same questions again and again: are the inmates real asylum seekers, or simply actors? Is the daily deportation of two of them a fake, or is it indeed an element of European reality? Were the FPÖ banners on the containers authentic? And, a question that many enraged tourists asked themselves: is the event in the square near the opera house part of Austrian reality? Questions and irritations were so far-reaching that the city administration thought about putting up signs saying, “Attention! This is a theatre performance!” (Arns and Sasse 2006: 453)

Attempts to concretize the meaning and reality status of the container were highlighted by the group of Left “anti-fascist” activists, who stormed the container, defacing the “AUSLÄNDER RAUS!” sign and “liberating” the refugees. In Paul Poet’s documentary on the project, Schlingensief derides the activists and points out that, by shutting down the project and dismantling the Nazi slogan, the Left had actually done the far-right’s and its enablers’ work of purifying Austria’s image for them. We might say that the activists, contrary to their intentions, were doing the work of didactic-truthiness by enacting a clear message that served only to reinforce their sense of the world and their place in it. Here, Handke’s critique of self-deluding political Theatertheater finds its corollary in Straßentheater, where the activists enact a symbolic protest as if they were disrupting a governmental deportation action. The fact there are few (if any) “correct” ways to respond to the work speaks to the work’s political potential through its aesthetic gesture of staging irritating ambiguity. Amidst the collision of the frames of concrete life-process and aesthetically intended fiction, Bitte liebt Österreich sidesteps attempts to be “morally exemplary,” as Claire Bishop notes, instead mobilizing the potential “artistic representations . . . [with] a potency that can be harnessed to disruptive ends” (2012: 283). Bishop argues that this “artistic representation of detention” caused more outrage and “dissensus” than the “real deportation

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center a few miles outside Vienna” (2012: 283). And it is this “shocking fact” and “disturbing lesson,” as Bishop puts it, that Schlingensief sees as the “selfdeceiving demonstration culture” exhibited in the anti-fascist’s “liberation” of the containers’ refugees (2012: 283). These well-meaning activists, she points out, had never sought to perform a similar liberation of real deportation centers—only this artistic representation of one. Writing in 2020, Carl Hegemann, Schlingensief ’s longtime dramaturg, contends that Schlingensief ’s Aktionskunst would likely be impossible in the contemporary art environment and its moral instrumentalization of sociallyengaged art (2020: 43). He points to a recent editorial in the German art magazine Metropol, which claims that, amidst the contemporary Erregungsgesellschaft (arousal society), the politically engaged artist must take on the responsibility of clarifying the political intentions and context of its production (2020: 42). As Hegemann notes, a work such as Bitte liebt Österreich could not be thus realized because of its refusal “to explain itself, or even to reveal itself to be art” (2020: 42). The structurally ambiguous art arouses because it cannot be easily instrumentalized and thus does not provide the comfort of moral certitude. As the forces of xenophobia and demagoguery continue to spread throughout the United States and Europe, it also is met by self-righteousness from the center-right to the far left. While Bitte liebt Österreich might not be possible twenty years later, it is more necessary now than ever. It would demand those Americans who have opposed Trump to take responsibility for his rise—that we cannot simply disidentify with Trump-America—because the United States will always be the country that elected Donald Trump.

Notes 1 My description of the performance draws largely from Paul Poet’s documentary about the event: Ausländer Raus! Schlingensiefs Container (Foreigners Out! Schingensief ’s Container) (2002). The limitations of this dependency are laid out in Birgit Tautz’s “Paul Poet Transforms Christopher Schlingensief ’s Container Project: Performance into Image” (2019: 50–67). 2 Schlingensief ’s film 100 Jahre Adolf Hitler: Die letzte Stude im Führerbunker (1988) begins with a television set playing Wenders’s acceptance speech, including this specific passage. 3 Nearly twenty years later, Handke would write the screenplay for Wenders’s Himmel über Berlin referenced earlier. Translations from German are mine, aided by Erik Butler and Doreen Jakob. 4 See “The Trump Is Present” (Perucci 2017: 127–35).

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References Andrejevic, M. (2004), Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Arns, I. and S. Sasse (2006), “Subversive Affirmation: On Mimesis as a Strategy of Resistance,” in IRWIN (ed.), East Art Map: Contemporary Art and Eastern Europe, pp. 444–55, London: Afterall. Ausländer Raus! Schlingensiefs Container (Foreigners Out! Schlingensief ’s Container) (2002), [Film] Dir. P. Poet, Germany: Bonus Film. Barish, J. A. (1981), The Antitheatrical Prejudice, Berkeley: University of California Press. BAVO (2007), “Always Choose the Worst Option: Artistic Resistance and the Art of Over-identification,” in BAVO (ed.), Cultural Activism Today: The Art of Over-identification, pp. 18–39, Rotterdam: Episode Publishers. Baxandall, L. (1969), “Spectacles and Scenarios: A Dramaturgy of Radical Activity,” TDR: The Drama Review, 13(4): 52–71. Benjamin, W. (1968), “What Is Epic Theatre?” in Illuminations, trans. H. Zohn, pp. 147–54, New York: Harcourt. Bishop, C. (2012), Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, New York: Verso Books. “Bitte liebt Österreich!” (n.d.), [archived web page], Wiener Festwochen. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.sch​​linge​​nsief​​.com/​​backu​​p​/wie​​n​akti​​on/. Boyle, M. S. (2016), “Container Aesthetics: The Infrastructural Politics of Shunt’s The Boy Who Climbed Out of His Face,” Theatre Journal, 68(1): 57–77. Castorf, F. (2011), “He Asked the Question of Guilt,” in S. Gaensheimer (ed.), Christof Schlingensief: German Pavillion, 2011. 54th International Art Exhibition la Biennale di Venezia, pp. 165–8, Berlin: Sternberg Press. The Colbert Report (2005), [TV program], Comedy Central, October 17. Das Halten von Totenschälden liegt mir nicht! (2001), [Film] Dir. A. Kluge, Germany: Filmmuseum München / Goethe-Institut München. Diederichsen, D. (2011), “Combating Discursive Scarcity, Futile Intention, and the Negative Gesamtkunstwerk: Christoph Schlingensief and His Music,” in S. Gaensheimer (ed.), Christof Schlingensief: German Pavillion, 2011. 54th International Art Exhibition la Biennale di Venezia, pp. 183–90, Berlin: Sternberg Press. Forrest, T. (2015), Realism as Protest: Kluge, Schlingensief, Haneke, Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. Goffman, E. (1974), Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience, Boston: Northeastern University Press. Gunning, T. (2012), “Truthiness and the More Real: What Is the Difference?,” in E. Armstrong (ed.), More Real?: Art in the Age of Truthiness, pp. 176–85, Minneapolis: Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Handke, P. (1966), Publikumsbeschimpfung und andere Sprechstücke, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag.

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Handke, P. (1969), “Straßentheater und Theatertheater,” in Prosa Gedichte Theaterstücke Hörspiel Aufsätze, pp. 303–7, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkampf Verlag. Hegemann, C. (2020), “Ästhetische Praxis im öffentlichen Raum: Warum Christoph Schlingensiefs Aktionskunst heute wahrscheinlich keine Chance mehr hätte,” in V. Höving, K. Holweck, and T. Wortmann (eds.), Christoph Schlingensief: Resonanzen, pp. 37–44, München: edition text + kritik. Koch, L. (2014), “Christof Schlingensiefs Bilderstörungsmaschine,” Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, 44(1): 116–34. Langston, R. (2008), Visions of Violence: German Avant-Gardes After Fascism, Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Langston, R. (2017), Personal communication. Lasch, C. (1979), The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations, New York: Norton. Lehmann, H.-T. (2016), Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre, trans. E. Butler, New York: Routledge. Löhndorf, M. (1998), “Lieblingsziel Totalirritation,” Kunstforum, 142: 94–101. Ngai, S. (2005), Ugly Feelings, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Perucci, T. (2017), “The Trump Is Present,” Performance Research, 22(3): 127–35. Perucci, T. (2019), “Irritational Aesthetics: Reality Friction and Indecidable Theatre,” Theatre Journal, 70(4): 473–98. Piper, A. (1996), “Way of Averting One’s Gaze” in Out of Order, Out of Sight: Volume II: Selected Writings in Art Criticism, 1967-1992, pp. 127–48, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Read, A. (2008), Theatre, Intimacy & Engagement: The Last Human Venue, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Read, A. (2013), Theatre in the Expanded Field: Seven Approaches to Performance, London: Bloomsbury. Scheer, A. T. (2018), Christoph Schlingensief: Staging Chaos, Performing Politics and Theatrical Phantasmagoria, New York: Bloomsbury. Schlingensief, C. (2012), Ich weiß, ich war’s, Köln: Kiepenheur & Witsch. Tautz, B. (2019), “Paul Poet Transforms Christopher Schlingensief ’s Container Project: Performance into Image,” South Central Review, 36(3): 50–67. Thompson, N. (2015), Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the 21st Century, Brooklyn: Melville House. Young, K. (2017), Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Postfacts, and Fake News, Minneapolis: Graywolf Press.

8

The Sacrificed Young Woman Necropolitics and Patriarchy in Koffi Kwahulé’s Bintou Selim Rauer

A History of Sacrificed Bodies: Marronage and Exile Written in 1997, Bintou is a play by Franco-Ivorian dramatist Koffi Kwahulé. Born in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, in 1956, Kwahulé is one of the leading figures of Afro-contemporary Francophone theatre in the past twenty-five years. He, among other authors and artists including Kossi Efoui, Léonora Miano, and Bintou Dembélé, claims an “Afropean” cross-border background (Kwahulé 2014: 23–4). This identity articulates a Marronage culture rooted in the traumatic and post-traumatic memories of colonialism and slave trade history. Marronage also reflects a hybridization of the humanities, rites, and languages which proliferated in France during the postcolonial era. This period was first characterized (in the aftermath of the painful decolonization process) by the migration of workers from former French colonized countries traveling to the French metropole to reconstruct the republic after the Second World War (1939–45). These populations eventually remained in France and gave birth to the next generation of French citizens with foreign origins. However, the notion of postcolonialism does not implicate an overcoming of logics of racial discriminations and practices which were characteristic of colonialism—far from that (Lapeyronnie 2009: 21). A racialized perception of the Other, considered through their ethnicity and gender as inferior and presupposing a relation of domination (expressed by way of emotional and physical control), lies at the core of Bintou by Kwahulé. It is also an essential part of the cultural emancipation imaginary encapsulated by the Marronage ethos. What is Marronage? Memory and aesthetic imply, as the Caribbean poet and writer Édouard Glissant reminds us, a poetics of detour—a logic and aesthetics of escapism—as a way to account for specific living conditions,

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suffering, and memory related to the economy of plantation, but also as a way to transcend and sublimate the physical and psychological trauma of exile and the demotion connected to it. In order to escape this situation that implicates both relegation and ghettoization, Marronage proposes a strategy of emancipation (Glissant 1997: 68). Marronage refers to the experience of Black slaves who managed to flee the estates of “white masters,” particularly in Haiti and in the Antilles. Following their escape, these slaves found shelter at the top of hills, mountains, and forests. This theory of liberation from servitude through elevation shatters the racial and sexual codes established by the colonial power—a power structured by a sacrificial, racialized economy of death. Marronage, at the heart of Koffi Kwahulé’s theatrical poetics, expresses “a flight from the negative, subhuman realm of necessity, bondage, and unfreedom toward the sphere of positive activity and human freedom” (Roberts 2015: 15). Bintou articulates this relationship and this conflicting hybridization between a patriarchal, sub-Saharan cultural environment on one side, and a postcolonial or neocolonial French secular society on the other. This relationship renders French suburbs around large cities such as Paris, Marseille, Lyon, Strasbourg, and Toulouse as places of seclusion or urban relegation on the fringes of centers symbolizing the cultural and political authority of the state. These centers are almost impermeable to secondgeneration French populations. The French banlieue, or suburban space, that emerges in the play participates as a postcolonial, post-traumatic landscape to Bintou’s tragedy. It ascertains this situation of ghettoization that was part of the colonial administration, something Frantz Fanon places under the concept of “zone,” allowing for the control of bodies, populations, and territories (1963: 39). Bintou is a young girl, barely fourteen, who ends up abused and murdered by her own family members. Bintou’s body becomes both the symbolic figure of a Christian Eucharistic sacrifice, but also that of a ritual of excision calling on Voodoo, paganism, and beliefs in demons and dark forces, which seem to have sought refuge in her body. Through Bintou’s dramatic figure, Koffi Kwahulé presents a French teenager whose identity exists at the junction of cultures and genders. Bintou rebels against the social norms imposed upon her. She opposes the French postcolonial civil society by endorsing the role of a simultaneously revered and feared gang leader. She also contests the ancient patriarchal customs surviving in her family’s culture. Her uncle, aunt, and mother decide to coerce her into female genital mutilation or excision. To achieve this, her mother and especially her uncle, Drissa, use the pretext of a “trip to the country,” an initiative that might help to save her “corrupted soul” (Kwahulé 1997: 9). From this moment, Uncle

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Drissa appears to be a false devotee and pervert. He struggles against his incestuous impulses toward his niece, who despises him, and works at deconstructing his pathetic image of the dominant male (Kwahulé 1997: 5–7). Up until this point, Bintou’s father has been recovering from the loss of his job within the confines of his bedroom. In his absence, Bintou’s brother takes over the household, making a prisoner of his father in the aftermath of shameful social trauma. Prisoner of a social trauma, the father figure is absent throughout the play. The despotic patriarchal function which Uncle Drissa assumes materializes with the assistance of Moussoba, an old woman and exorcist. With the support of the rest of the family, Uncle Drissa and Moussoba contribute to the onstage mutilation and sacrifice of a young girl. The ritual of excision presented in this play embodies the Christian Eucharistic sacrifice, articulated here as the bloody offering of the body to the patriarch in order to cleanse the rest of the community of its sin (Chalaye 2014: 65–74). This ritual also resembles pagan sacrifice imaginary, which aims at cleansing the community by slaughtering the chosen scapegoat. This action should provide for the restoration of peace and the maintaining of a gerontocrat and patriarchal order. As the anthropologist René Girard reminds us, the scapegoat, by assuming the function of the culprit by dying “as he deserves,” accepts unconsciously or consciously to become the savior of the community. Sacrifice as a ritual mirrors the alleged sanctity of the offering (Girard 2007: 21). What is represented here through the staging of a sacrificed body—more precisely of a young woman’s body entering adolescence, a period of transformation toward adulthood—is the power of command of a thanatological authority over life itself, something encapsulated and enacted in history by colonial power. Bintou, in the casing of her objectified body, is a territory suffering a non-legitimate occupation—a political vessel to be assassinated. The settler’s theory at work in this drama, explored through the power of death, is precisely what a writer such as Koffi Kwahulé intends to display. Kwahulé addresses two issues in one single reality staged at the margins of the French society’s center: a colonial legacy that encapsulates both the occupation of the woman’s body through patriarchal logics and the occupation and exploitation of a foreign territory. These issues, which are central to Mbembe’s notion of necropolitics, are at the core of my analysis. Bintou is a powerful modern suburban tragedy relying on an antique Greek dramaturgical pattern in which the chorus, as a non-individualized group and consciousness meeting the spectators’ presence, occupies a central role from the outset of the play. In this tragedy, the chorus functions as the consciousness of the community, and it emerges as witness to the theatrical process of creating community through the act of spectatorship.

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Behind the archetypal dramatic functions enabled by each character (the chorus, mother, father, uncle, aunt, old woman, members of the gang, etc.) lingers a more pervasive and cruel social, economic, and political reality which has resulted from a long-lasting colonial, cultural, and political influence that inflicts violence and isolation upon ghettoized individuals in a given society. It is precisely this postcolonial arrangement that the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe scrutinizes in his collection of essays On the Postcolony. Mbembe discloses a society ordered by principles of fear—by a sovereignty defined by its “right to dispose” (2001: 25–35). But, to move beyond the (post)colonial paradigms and expressions of violence, what an author like Kwahulé questions is the political origins of the violence itself: the violence as a means of institutional control. Drawing on Foucault’s biopolitical reflections, which consist of defining the nature of power and its practice of “letting live and letting die” in modern Western societies, Mbembe offers an inverted interpretation of the same picture. The peculiarity of biopolitics in the racialized and neo-racial societies of the postcolonial and post-Shoah eras refers to what he designates as being necropolitics. This concept underscores the “contemporary forms of submission of life to the powers of death (politics of death) profoundly reconfiguring the relationships between resistance, sacrifice and terror” (Mbembe 2003: 39). These are the relationships of sacrifice, terror, and resistance in which the body of a young woman is engulfed and “thingified” by a patriarchal power structure (Singh 2018: 18). In this chapter, through this major work by Koffi Kwahulé, I will try to show how French colonial imaginary and patriarchal forms of society have survived in the so-called postcolonial era. Writing at the junction of various cultures (France and Ivory Coast), Kwahulé offers a critical reading of both history and present times that dialectically evolve. He not only assesses sociocultural features from the French colonial past but also highlights all forms of somatic subrogation and appropriation, which all but define patriarchal societies in Europe and sub-Saharan Africa. These two dimensions determine specific relations to bodies and territories through the racial and sexual biases marked by necropolitics—in other words, by the powers of death over life.

A Dramaturgy of Sacrifice: Figures of the Host and the Stranger In order to understand the literature of the Franco-Ivorian (or Afropean) writer, we must place it within a historical-materialist and cultural context

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which seizes on a colonial genealogy that highlights the discriminative realities of sexual, racial, and class bias present in French postcolonial society. If racial discrimination is based on physical appearance and/or skin color, sexual discrimination embraces or overlays all other categories by stigmatizing beyond the racial and class paradigms. Bintou highlights a neocolonial society in which racial, cultural, and social segregations have been cemented in a specific socioeconomic reality—that of relegated, lowwaged, and chronically unemployed individuals assigned to poverty and to a different citizenship category. More specifically, this category of citizenship ascribes—at best—to a persistent precariousness due to Bintou’s familial ethnic origins. It illustrates the relationship between patriarchy (as a social structure and as an ideology) and neocolonialism as a major force driving this drama forward. It unleashes tragic practices directly connected to patriarchy and superimposed on a neocolonial experience. Postcolonial France is a time and space that has produced and perpetuated borders and fractures resulting from a multifaceted imperialist past (Thomas 2013: 97–9). In this tragedy, we discover a household awash with a feeling of shame after Bintou’s father loses his job and, with it, the esteem of his daughter and the respect of the rest of his family. The notions of labor, social and masculine status, and identity are culturally tightly enmeshed in this family. The familial relations to the absent father figure are mostly experienced and spoken of by characters with a certain kind of distance and detachment. Bintou seems a double victim of this patriarchal order, not only by way of socioeconomic isolationism but also through the extreme violence she endures. This order expresses itself unconsciously through Bintou’s inclination to dominate and impose herself on others through violent physical and psychological actions. For instance, a young newcomer, P’tit Jean, who wishes to join the Lycaon’s gang, led by Bintou, is asked to kill a stranger— somebody randomly chosen in the street to prove P’tit Jean’s strength and virility (Kwahulé 1997: 22–5). Evidence of courage ordered by Bintou to others is nothing less than a demonstration or pledge of virility expressed by violent rites and performed by other members of the group that she reappropriates as the leader. In this sense, Bintou interiorizes and re-projects patriarchal structures of violence and command into her world. What emerges here is what Tracy McNulty describes as the duplicity of the host situation and, more specifically, her female manifestation: the “hostess” (2007: xliii). Let us begin with the term “hospitality,” which appears as a predicate to the reception of any person foreign or external to a group. Finding its origin in the Latin etymology hostis, the word introduces notions of equality or reciprocity through compensation. This notion implies a rewarding exchange between

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the home provider and the grantee, who brings back goods or valuables to incorporate into the community, even if it is for a limited period. What this term instantiates is mutual obligation. However, the word potis refers in Latin to notions of control and domination exercised within a domain, a house, or space over which the subject has power (McNulty 2007: ix). Bintou, as the master of her domain (her masculine gang), reproduces logics of power and submission—dynamics of physical and symbolic violence that are also at work in patriarchal environments such as her family. Since Bintou’s father’s symbolic disappearance, Uncle Drissa has turned into the dominant masculine figure in Bintou’s household. He is now the guarantor of male authority. As such, Uncle Drissa becomes “the host,” the one who can no longer tolerate the disorder and insults supposedly brought back home by Bintou, who appears as a challenger or an opponent to that masculine authority. Caught between an absent father, a passive mother, and an aunt subjected to her husband’s will, Bintou transforms into the center of attention—an obsession. She becomes the unifying repulsive element and scapegoat around which the decaying family can reconstitute itself through an excision that will amount to an act of exorcism ending in homicide. Bintou is a body and a spirit attempting to fuse a “sexual bi-categorization, which is an epistemological obstacle” (Dorlin 2016: 42), into one single Maroon culture and identity that emerges as a contestation of a male establishment. We are able to envisage how this patriarchal, bi-categorical thought of gender identity and sexuality reproduces another bi-categorical thought or opposition: the Schmittian paradigm of the friend and the enemy in law and political theology (Schmitt 1996: 26). This notion of the friend and the enemy determines for Schmitt that any agonistic reality will unleash an exercise of violence and punishment over a fourteen-year-old girl whose body is eventually maimed. The abuses inflicted on Bintou (considered a stranger by the host, Uncle Drissa) fulfill the symbolical function of a patriarchal reassignment of a sexual identity and domination in which the culturally constructed figures of the woman (as a body-object and body at disposal) and that of the victim (as a dead body) converge. This necropower, considered as a threatening imaginary and relation of domination foisted to others, aims at one thing: to “domesticate” the world into racial and sexual categories that pervade the unconscious. What Koffi Kwahulé’s Bintou discloses is how this subjectification of others and their bodies, considered as disposable things, is a central tenet of the colonial mode of thought, having survived and been reenacted in specific socioeconomic relations and urban spaces in the Postcolony. What we are able to find at the center of this dynamic is a male-established feminine prototype as a diminished, altered, or colonized other. The city, and more specifically the French suburbs or

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periphery, morphs here into a location that crystalizes the whole of racial and sexual prejudices, which are part of the colonial and patriarchal history and inextricably linked (Dorlin 2006: 193–275).

The Body, Necropower, and Patriarchy Scene 2 of Bintou, “Jazz,” develops into a polyphonic variation, intermingling several voices, including those of the members of the “Lycaons” gang—at the head of which sits the fourteen-year-old Bintou. The voices impel different rhythms, sounds, and narratives, establishing the genealogy of their group and the nicknames of their members, attributed by Bintou. The images and impressions that emerge from the monologues of Khelkal, Manu, and Blackout show emotional effects but also reflect a set of desire-constructions and forces of attraction that likewise rely on patriarchy (Kwahulé 1997: 15–17). Obsession, fetishization, and fascination for and of the Other are different sides of the same problematic. In the same way, fascination for Blackness can be a racist expression of thinking, and fascination for a specific determination of manhood or womanhood can be part of the same patriarchal paradigm. According to Sylvia Walby’s definition, this cultural construction reflects a system of structures and social practices in which men dominate, exploit, and oppress women (1990: 21). Through these social and cultural practices, this system allows for the development of imaginary constructions in which absolute values, codes, and aesthetics predominate and structure social and economic orders, but it also determines a particular relationship to bodies, violence, desires, and domination exercised under the aegis of a “masculinity” as a symbol of power, performance, security, and virility. In this imagined reality, the feminine Other is often objectified and fetishized— that is, dehumanized. In Bintou, Kwahulé divulges how a girl barely out of childhood, having grown up in a French suburb on the margins of a neo-racial society, has internalized a violent speech that shapes relationships to bodies, sexuality, and sociality as locations subjugated by male tenets. Bintou is not only a young woman resisting her family, denouncing her uncle’s incestuous inclinations, her aunt’s aggressiveness, her father’s shame, or her mother’s calamitous passivity, but she also exacerbates and produces in paradoxical ways the same kind of violence she challenges within her family circle. The story of a man’s assassination by Blackout (a gang member whose real name is Okoumé) is celebrated as proof of courage, virility, and strength by Bintou. The moment she throws herself at her companion’s neck after having “caressed [his] still hot 9mm” emerges as a sexual and racial trope in which the powers of death over life are crystallized in the feature of a phallic gun

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as an instrument of death (Kwahulé 1997: 16). This scene confronts us with our current neo-racial society’s necropolitical culture in which the body and killing devices become tangled, unveiling how death as a threat has become an inextricable component of power dynamics. In such a relationship, the body occupies a central position as a territory to be purified, dominated, or abolished as a material or symbolic border. In his eponymous essay, Achille Mbembe expresses how sacrifice, martyrdom, and manslaughter are essential components of a neo-racial society that continues to rely on the dialectics of the friend and the enemy, a political notion developed in modernity by former Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt (2019: 50). Necropower unveils a particular global society not freed from its imperialistic racial and sexual past and bias. As Kwahulé’s Bintou confirms, skin color, libido, power, and violence are intersected by an unconscious that has interiorized colonial, racial, and sexual imaginary productions (Fanon 1952: 134, 145). Furthermore, we can observe how a young teenager, engaged in unbridled rebellion, celebrates her ability to appropriate these same virile and feminine codes prearranged by a peculiar masculine desire and cultural dominion. These codes exalt a male imaginary exercising influence over society and determining lives and families, both inside and outside suburban areas. This haunting invisible power staged in Kwahulé’s suburban tragedy discloses a French banlieue understood as a specific neocolonial site where Bintou has grown up, and where the post-traumatic memories of the colony survive (Fanon 2002: 239). She is “this little wildflower having grown” on a border or threshold where conflictual forces and influences create a situation of entropy (Kwahulé 1997: 5). Bintou’s tragedy doesn’t only relate to that of the Eucharistic sacrifice, as referenced by Sylvie Chalaye (2018: 87–95). Her misfortune also relies on patterns, which dramaturgically respond to Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy (Coddon 1994: 71), crumbling under the forces of necropower. This instrumentalization of the powers of death over life derives from a logic of command specific to the neoliberal dominion and its theological-political discourse of moral order in postcolonial societies (Kotsko 2018: 119–20). The lack of sensitivity toward the tragic of necropower is a specificity of necropolitics; it normalizes the unbearable—the ordinariness of death and sacrifices (Mbembe 2019: 38). This logic of necropower, embraced by Bintou in a dynamic that mirrors the society she inhabits, is enlivened by the patriarchal ferocity that preceded postcolonialism and continues to survive in current postcolonial societies. Patriarchy, considered as a system of society and government determined by masculine power, implies a spiritual and physical form of colonization— of powerlessness—that is, male censorship and domination of the woman

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(Gilligan and Richards 2018: 63–4). This sexual and racial logic of authority has structured the way colonialist nations have defined their entity and identity, as Elsa Dorlin shows (2006: 148–51). It is a violence of which Bintou becomes the sacrificial victim within her family after having allowed and encouraged it outside the household as a gang leader, thus rearticulating Derrida’s dialectic of a dialoguing and proliferating interiority and exteriority (1967: 164–6). As Mbembe points out again: In this hedonist culture the father is still granted the role of first planter. Haunted as this culture is by the figure of the incestuous father who is possessed by a desire to have sex with his own virgin daughter or son, the annexing of the woman’s body to one’s own as a complement to man’s defective statue has become utterly banal. (2019: 61)

The woman’s body, and perhaps even more so, that of the young woman— of the virgin perceived as a spiritual and carnal space on which patriarchy can exert an exemplary hegemony—is considered, as shown in this play, as a border-space. This body-territory has been dramatically rendered and staged since the antiquity, as Nicole Loraux reminds us (1985: 13); it discloses a specific sexual difference exhibiting an evident praxis and definition of power. In tragedy and antique Greek imaginary, “there is for a woman no other accomplishment as to silently lead an exemplary existence, as a wife and a mother, alongside a man living his citizen’s life” (Loraux 1985: 26). Kwahulé’s Bintou exemplifies a negation of Loraux’s statement; she is a character who vehemently imposes herself on the bruised family consciences, especially that of her uncle. She endures the presence of a man (her uncle) sexually attracted to her, but, at the same time, her brave and rebellious spirit challenges and denounces the incestuous inclinations he strains to repress (Kwahulé 1997: 9–11). To him, Bintou incarnates the space of an insufferable sexual and cultural hybridity which, by asserting her freedom and autonomy, shatters a preestablished male-controlled order. Although very young, Bintou’s body appears to him as the symbol of desirable femininity, which seems undermined by her position as the leader of a young male delinquents’ gang. Here, the notion of the border develops into a symbol representing an area of Marronage production—a delta and a place of production transcending and binding both identities and genders at once. Through this creolization, Bintou’s body becomes the location and affirmation of an opposition to the morbid influence of patriarchy (Roberts 2015: 143–5). The young woman’s “Maroon” body not only refers to a new constructed identity but to a space of resistance and a getaway to necropolitics, unshackled by the historical genealogy of male authority.

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Bintou’s body is not limited to the matrix or body-object definition of femininity as prescribed by a specific patriarchal order. She embodies both a sociohistorical position and post-traumatic memory in the French postcolonial era that reflect at once the desire to emancipate oneself from the racial and sexual conception of the “zone,” as imagined by a former colonial culture, but also from an archaic male-defined society that thingifies body and gender identities. Bintou is a fourteen-year-old female who appears to the men of her family and friends as a body “too mature” (Kwahulé 1997: 28, 31). She is the one who “has so much beauty in her” and “ceased to be a child,” according to her lecherous uncle who stares at her each time she undresses in her bedroom (Kwahulé 1997: 6). Bintou’s experiences expel her from childhood into objectified adulthood. She is diminished to a thing deprived of any form of existence and self-sufficiency. She morphs into the receptacle of a male domineering consciousness irradiating its sinfulness (Kwahulé 1997: 9–10). Her body, reduced to the reality of an object, is therefore seizable and confiscable as a something that can be dehumanized, altered, modified, broken, or sacrificed. Bintou’s body-object becomes the site of forbidden desires, leading the uncle to contemplate the idea of an excision. This idea becomes the solution, the sacrificial gesture that should supposedly allow for the abolishment of Bintou’s hybridity, anchored in self-determination and power of existence. In that sense, excision, as a necropolitical action, reshapes the condition of the enslaved body in the plantation society and economy, as asserted by the American abolitionist Frederick Douglass, born into slavery in 1818 (Douglass and Blight 2014: 330). What Kwahulé shows is how necropower, as an implementation of the powers of death over life, has not only survived slave or colonial societies but also become part of a superstructurant sociocultural issue that is patriarchy: a phenomenon that still dominates societies around the globe. Physical mutilation of Bintou’s body cancels out the hybridity of her experience and imposes a singularity of identity, which is not hers. It is a criminal act that repeals or weakens Bintou’s femininity, as well as a “castrating” gesture, which is supposed to prevent her from enjoying symbolic and physical feminine power and sovereignty, something that seems to disrupt the archaic order that structures Uncle Drissa’s imaginary, and also those of his wife (Aunt Rokia), Bintou’s mother, and the often mentioned but absent father. Bintou’s omnipresent-absent father is conflated with an invisible body—a diminished patriarchal figure and order challenged by the symbolic and cultural significance of Bintou’s Maroon body. She represents a queer body which refuses heteronormative structures and displays multicultural physical and spiritual realities at the crossroads of norms and masculine references (Campbell and Farrier 2016: 8). She is a young woman

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made powerful through the expression of her adult consciousness, gravity, and internal beauty. Bintou, in a way, is dominated by the alienating desire or jealousy she arouses from men and women that are part of her entourage, be it her family or her gang mates. She possesses a charm—a charisma—which, for a patriarchally structured imaginary, is equivalent to a spell. Bintou’s magnetism seems to be an endangering and unidentifiable form of otherness. For that reason, we find in Moussoba, “the woman with the knife,” references to an excision that equates a practice of exorcism; it is a matter of fleeing the demon that inhabits Bintou’s body that generates a gender confusion (Kwahulé 1997: 31). In a sense, attempting to violate or prevent through excision the strength and identity of Bintou’s queer body, which is synonymous with vitality and power, is an attempt to resurrect the cadaverous body of patriarchy, which has been crushed by a neoliberal economic order, as the unemployment of Bintou’s father indicates in this drama. Neoliberalism is an order in postcolonial France that disposes of the body relegated to a mere object through the possibility of employment and firing; it alienates and controls the available labor force through what Karl Marx described in his Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy as the reserve army of the unemployed (2010: 212). Bintou’s transgender identity is at once the place of beauties and desires, exacerbating a specific femininity dictated by virilism (Kwahulé 1997: 9–11, 37–40). Virility reaches an “extraordinary” height for her family in her capacity as the leader of a young men’s horde, each of which is older than her and diligently submits to her. In that sense, scene 6, “Gangsta-Rap,” which takes place in a bar, conflates two tenets of the specific definitions of masculinity and femininity exacerbated and normalized by patriarchy (Kwahulé 1997: 37–41). The two male-female genders and their firm patriarchal divisions and definitions are entangled in Bintou’s body and spirit—a body that is fundamentally and above all a consciousness and independent force which is later handled and discarded as a thing—a dead body. In this scene, Bintou shows her skills as a belly dancer. She performs to “oriental music” and demands that the bar owner—a man surnamed Nenesse—introduce her: “[n]obody will miss the spectacle of a thirteen-year-old girl squirming her ass to oriental music in the cellar of a seedy bar. No one” (Kwahulé 1997: 39). This outrageous statement shows Bintou’s spectator awareness and what she perceives through the eyes of others about herself. Here resides primarily a moral assertion on account of a dominating male interpretation of otherness and womanhood, framing specific relations to gender and sexual identities, objectifying the living, as well as femininity by way of antagonism between bodies in a state of arousal and broken bodies. As a teenager, Bintou stands at the crossroads of ages

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and genders. Caught between adolescence and adulthood, her Maroon body crystallizes different ages and gender definitions, a phenomenon that defies and celebrates the dying, surviving, or decaying body of patriarchy after colonization. Her “oriental music” and belly-dancing body encourage the exotic and perverse depersonification of a racialized “thirteen-year-old girl squirming her ass” (Kwahulé 1997: 39). She is a “girl” who thinks, judges, and behaves like an adult—a very young Afro-descendant woman born and raised in France—to whom an unequivocal, non-dialectical, non-mixed culture, body, and space should be imposed by way of a neocolonial and sexist unconscious rearticulating the dead time and segregated space of the colonial society. Bintou’s excision, practiced in the form of sacrifice, takes place in metropolitan France, where she appears to be caught between two objectifying poles. On the one side, the Lycaon boys celebrate and fantasize about her charisma and sensuality in mysterious ways; on the other, her family attempts to overpower her strength and femininity as irreconcilable and immoral. Bintou is inevitably reduced to an inexistent body-reality that becomes a space of projection of desires and symbols for both sides. Moussoba, the lady with a knife—the “soul healer” and priestess who is appointed to lead the excision-sacrifice ritual—recalls: “Bintou’s body is a place of uncertainty and ambiguity” (Kwahulé 1997: 33–4). She must be assigned a physical and spiritual space of reclusion that disempowers Marronage and again assigns a zone, which is the physical and spiritual place of control of the colonial society (Fanon 1963: 37–41). Bintou’s excised body equates to an identity purged of its transgender productivity and multiculturalism. After the excision-sacrifice is accomplished, leaving on stage nothing but a corpse, her very soul seems to find a way out to the audience that resides on the other side of a border. The trembling soft voice of a dying young girl rises in the theatre hall and gives a sheer expression of disembodiment and transfiguration (Chalaye 2018: 90). Nevertheless, this transfiguration, which implies a transformation through the destruction of the body, instead seems to intensify Bintou’s essence (Kwahulé 1997: 45–6). On stage, her lifeless bloody corpse is a testimony to an unspeakable aspect of brutality culturally developed and celebrated by some patriarchal groups. This voice, which seems to resonate from the grave, is a dramatic scansion that reconnects with the musical variation of a dramatic corpus, entangling poetry and musicality, proper to the antique Greek tragedy (Curtis 2003: 295–307). As if detaching from her incarnation on stage, Bintou seems to leave her body, which, in turn, becomes a symbol of condemnation or an evil spell that will remain in the memories of her executioners. They are now forced to bury their child in their own house. With this crime, Bintou’s family residence turns into what Katherine McKitterick

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describes as a demonic ground: a sanctuary marked by racial and sexual hate and violence forced upon Black women in history (2010: XVIII–XIX). With Bintou, Kwahulé’s writing and dramaturgical construction disclose “[m]onotonous chants, syncopated, broken by prohibitions, set free by the entire thrust of bodies, [producing] their language from one end of this world to the other” (Glissant 1997: 73). As the play reflects a symbolic, historical, and psychic reality, it is therefore not surprising that the desire to “normalize” or “correct” Bintou’s soul goes through a “depropriation” of the young woman’s body, which is the site of her personality as much as her property (Benslama 1995: 40–1). By imposing rape, any form of violence, or excision, the victim finds herself expropriated from herself through the orders, incantations, purifying speeches, and practices of the uncle, the aunt, and the “lady with a knife.” Bintou surfaces here as a sacrificed foreigner accused of both trespassing and incarnating a border—the border as a location unifying various identities of a girl’s emancipatory postcolonial trans-culture. By dispossessing Bintou of her own body, Uncle Drissa reaffirms, with the disappearance of Bintou’s father isolated in his room, that he is “the lord,” the master, and the possessor of the family house and of any living body under his roof. He reifies practices proper to the colonial society and its so-called sovereignty or right to dispose (Mbembe 2001: 25). Uncle Drissa can only claim to be “master of himself ” by asserting his possession of other objects or bodies (McNulty 2007: XXIX).

References Benslama, F. (1995), “Dépropriation,” Lignes, 24(1): 34–61. Campbell, A. and S. Farrier (2016), Queer Dramaturgies: International Perspectives on Where Performance Leads Queer, London: Palgrave MacMillan. Chalaye, S. (2014), “Sacrifice et eucharistie dans le théâtre de Koffi Kwahulé,” in K. Gyssels and C. Stevens (eds.), Le sacrifice dans les littératures francophones, pp. 65–74. Vol 1 of Francopolyphonies, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi B.V. Chalaye, S. (2018), Corps marron: Les poétiques de marronnage des dramaturgies afro-contemporaines, Paris: Passage(s). Coddon, K. S. (1994), “‘For Show or Useless Property’: Necrophilia and the Revenger’s Tragedy,” ELH, 61(1): 71–88. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.jst​​or​ .or​​g​/sta​​ble​/2​​87343​​2​?seq​​=1​#me​​tadat​​a​_in​f​​o​_tab​​_cont​​ents (accessed July 14, 2020). Curtis, F. J. (2003), “The Language of Musical Technique in Greek Epic Diction,” Gaia: revue interdisciplinaire sur la Grèce Archaïque, 7(1): 295–307.

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Derrida, J. (1967), L’écriture et la difference, Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Dorlin, E. (2006), La Matrice de la race, Paris: La Découverte. Dorlin, E. (2016), Sexe, genre et sexualités, Paris: PUF. Douglass, F. and D. W. Blight (2014), My Bondage and My Freedom, New Haven: Yale University Press. Fanon, F. (1952), Peau noire, masques blancs, Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Fanon, F. (1963), The Wretched of the Earth, trans. C. Farrington, New York: Grove Press. Fanon, F. (2002), Les damnés de la terre, Paris: La Découverte. Gilligan, C. and D. A. J. Richards (2018), Darkness Now Visible: Patriarchy’s Resurgence and Feminist Resistance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Girard, R. (2007), De la violence à la divinité, Paris: Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle. Glissant, E. (1997), Poetics of Relation, trans. B. Wing, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Kotsko, A. (2018), Neoliberal Demons: On the Political Theology of the Late Capital, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Kwahulé, K. (1997), Bintou, Morlanwelz: Lansman. Kwahulé, K. (2014), “Afro-Européen,” Africultures, 99–100: 23–4. Lapeyronnie, D. (2009), “Primitive Rebellion in the French Banlieues: On the Fall 2005 Riots,” in C. Tshimanga, D. Gondola, and P. J. Bloom (eds.), Frenchness and the African Diaspora: Identity and Uprising in Contemporary France, pp. 21–46, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Loraux, N. (1985), Façons tragiques de tuer une femme, Paris: Hachette. Marx, K. (2010), “Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy,” in J. Cohen, M. Cornforth, and M. Dobb (eds.), Karl Marx Collected Works: Marx & Engels, 28: 162–256, e-book edition, London: Lawrence & Wishart. Mbembe, A. (2001), On the Postcolony, Los Angeles: University of California Press. Mbembe, A. (2003), “Necropolitics,” Public Culture, 15(1): 11–40. Mbembe, A. (2019), Necropolitics, trans. S. Corcoran, Durham: Duke University Press. McKittrick, K. (2010), Demonic Ground: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. McNulty, T. (2007), The Hostess: Hospitality, Femininity, and the Expropriation of Identity, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Roberts, N. (2015), Freedom as Marronage, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schmitt, C. (1996), The Concept of the Political, trans. G. Schwab, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Singh, J. (2018), Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements, Durham: Duke University Press. Thomas, D. (2013), Africa and France: Postcolonial Cultures, Migration, and Racism, e-book edition, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Walby, S. (1990), Theorizing Patriarchy, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

9

Pussy Riot’s Radical Acts Transgressive Bodies in Performance and the Ghosting of the Russian Avant-Garde Julia Listengarten

On July 15, 2018, four members of the Pussy Riot feminist collective dressed as Russian police burst onto the field of Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium, interrupting the second half of the World Cup soccer championship match between Croatia and France. This guerrilla action, described in the news as “the World Cup final pitch invasion” (Stow and Hyatt 2018), was staged in front of Russian and foreign dignitaries and befuddled millions who watched the game on televisions and other digital devices across the world. Like its earlier street provocations, the group staged the “invasion” to direct media attention to Russian political repression and disrupt the government’s methodically constructed narrative of Russia as “hospitable” and “openminded.” Two Pussy Riot performers who participated in the invasion served a fifteen-day jail sentence for disrupting an international sports event. Since its early site-specific performances, in front of the Kremlin, on the roofs of trolleys and jails, on scaffolding in subway stations, and at Moscow’s central cathedral, Pussy Riot has evolved into a transnational collective whose live and mediated performances transcend the group’s immediate social context and cultural specificity. Drawing on Rebecca Schneider’s concept of the “explicit body,” which she employed to address the ways in which feminist body performance subverts, disrupts, and transgresses cultural and social norms of what is deemed appropriate (1997), this chapter explores the transgressive quality of Pussy Riot’s site-specific and mediated performances, traces the group’s indebtedness to the Russian avant-garde (particularly a short-lived Soviet artistic collective known as the Oberiu),1 and discusses how its performances address precarity “as a condition that speaks to practices of marginalization and invisibility” (Fragkou 2019: 4). In her rejection of the postmodernist claim that “all transgression is defunct,” Schneider contemplates how “the explicit body in much feminist

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work interrogates socio-political understandings of the ‘appropriate’ and/ or the appropriately transgressive” (1997: 3) and champions the rights of contemporary feminist performers to continue “the avant-garde tradition of transgressive shock” (1997: 4). As Pussy Riot operates within the strict system of political and cultural control of post-Soviet Russia, the group has adopted the Foucauldian “play of limits and transgression” (Foucault 1977: 34) to remap the borders of appropriate (or “appropriately transgressive”) public performance and its engagement with the audience. Having embraced transgression as an underlying method of artistic expression, the collective performs gendered and racialized bodies to reveal the invisible and silenced, to revolt against systems of power, to upset existing frames of representation, and to arouse confusion, anger, shock, and condemnation.

Transgressive Acts: Pussy Riot’s “Explicit Bodies” in Site-Specific Performances of Protest The image of Pussy Riot—a group of “angry” masked women invading public spaces to disrupt the state’s ideology and agitate audiences—is embroiled in multiple contexts and intersects several, at times conflicting, narratives. The punk-rock ensemble came to international prominence in early 2012, when a photograph of eight performers in bright-colored balaclava masks appeared in all major media outlets; eight women, whose faces were completely covered, stood in a line in front of the Kremlin waving a flag that called for solidary, unity, and strength, and pounding the air with their fists “in rugged defiance” (Elder 2012). A Guardian article described the act as a political protest, noting that “before police carted them off, the members of Pussy Riot managed to shout their way through a minute-long punk anthem: ‘Revolt in Russia—the charisma of protest / Revolt in Russia, Putin’s got scared’” (Elder 2012). Preceding the international recognition, Pussy Riot’s first video clip, “Free the Cobblestones,” was released in November 2011 to “commemorate” the ninety-fourth anniversary of the Russian Bolshevik Revolution and featured women dressed in ugly but playful clothes, singing revolutionary lyrics in an abrasive punk style, thereby painting a grim picture of Russia, where “it smells of sweat and . . . of control” and “feminists dispatched on maternity leave” (Pussy Riot cited in Gessen 2014: 72). Feverishly dancing on the roofs of trolleys and atop towering scaffolds in a Moscow subway, ripping feather pillows in front of astonished bystanders, they expressed solidarity with the Arab Spring and urged the audience to revolt against social injustice and authoritarian

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control, to “spend a full day among strong women,” and to “turn Red Square in Tahrir” (Pussy Riot cited in Gessen 2014: 73). Through site-specific performances that became the basis for the video montage in “Free the Cobblestones,” Pussy Riot orchestrated transgressive shocks that operated viscerally and as a social commentary to disrupt the state’s authoritarian control and destabilize the society’s restrictive gender norms (Listengarten 2012 and 2016). Pussy Riot emerged in late 2011 as an offshoot of the Russian street-art group Voina (“war” in Russian) that became known in the late 2000s for staging public space interventions such as the midnight wake in a Moscow subway station to commemorate the death of Russian conceptualist poet Dmitri Prigov. A direct antecedent to Pussy Riot’s site-specific performances, Voina’s provocations were conceived as transgressive acts, in which the bodies of the performers became both material objects and sites of visceral affront and social critique. “Fuck for the Heir Puppy Bear,” Voina’s early scandalous action, culminated in sexual intercourse by the group’s naked members in front of a taxidermic bear at Moscow’s K. Timiryazev State Biological Museum. Staged the day before the 2008 election of Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, the public copulation, performed for a small, invited audience, pointed to ironic parallels between a stuffed animal and the soon-to-be-elected president (“medved” means bear in Russian) and was framed as a political action that exposed Russia’s corrupt election. Voina’s transgressive acts laid a foundation for Pussy Riot’s radical performances that rely on the explicitness of the performer’s body to challenge social and political dogmas. As Schneider reminds us, “the explicit body in representation is foremost a site of social markings, physical parts and gestural signatures of gender, race, class, age, [and] sexuality” (1997: 2). The transgressive character of Voina’s (and, later, Pussy Riot’s) provocations is rooted in the reimagining of the performer’s body as a site of confrontation that challenges social prejudice and dismantles the state’s official narrative. Remembered as one of Voina’s “most loaded and confusing” provocations (Gessen 2014: 41), “In Memory of the Decembrists” (2008) involved a staged hanging of five men: “three representing, in costume and makeup, [Central Asian] migrant laborers and two representing homosexuals (one of whom was also Jewish in real life)” (Gessen 2014: 41). Taking place in the aisles of one of Moscow’s largest supermarkets—where, as part of the provocation, the customers received “hunting licenses” that supposedly “grant[ed] them the right to shoot migrant workers” (Gessen 2014: 41)—the action confronted Russia’s widespread homophobia, racism, and anti-immigrant prejudice, implicating the supermarket’s customers in perpetuating xenophobia that often resulted in real violence on the streets.

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The act of “hanging” might have been perceived as fake, but the presence of an actual body hanging in full view of the shoppers inevitably focused the audience’s attention on the body itself as a subject of violation and transgression. Handing out hunting licenses, albeit fake, to shoot real bodies further complicated the relationship between the staged/performed and “unstaged”/real and shifted the audience’s position from curious onlookers to unsuspecting or unwilling participants in a violent act.2 These manifestations of the explicit body exposed the state’s oppressive politics and racist attitudes and paved the way for Pussy Riot’s work, in which the group used their bodies to locate their experiences in sites of oppression and precarity across race, gender, and sexual orientation. As Voina split and migrated to Europe in 2012 after the arrest and self-exile of its core members, several of its performers went on to form Pussy Riot. In a manner similar to Voina’s street actions, Pussy Riot’s provocations continued to fuse layers of meaning and systems of signification to affirm the agency of the female body and embrace the potential to subvert the state’s policing of public spaces. Pussy Riot’s transgressive character in site-specific performances was born at the intersections of female body image, punk-rock-inspired performance styles, and historically emblematic places that the group intervened in and re-signified. Through its radical acts, the iconic stature of Red Square, the Kremlin, and the Cathedral of Christ the Savior was disrupted, and the cultural symbols became sites of critical inquiry that pointed to the troubling connections between Russia’s political past and present and revealed multiple, complicated threads in cultural memory. The group’s most notorious sitespecific performance, “Punk Prayer,” took place at the altar of the newly built Cathedral of Christ the Savior. The action lasted only a few minutes, during which five masked women performed a song asking “Virgin Mary, Mother of God” to “chase Putin out” (Pussy Riot cited in Gessen 2014: 117) before police intervened. Described by the authorities as jumping aggressively, inappropriately lifting their legs, and hitting imaginary enemies with their fists, the artists were accused of devaluing church traditions through their “sexually debauched” performance. The action, decried as “vulgar,” “licentious,” and “inappropriately sexual,” was ultimately condemned as a criminal act, and the three performers were convicted of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred” (Lipman 2012). Church leaders conflated Pussy Riot’s intended political arousal with perceived erotic provocation to implicate the performers in spreading blasphemy. The politically motivated public trial, “an outrageous, astonishing, biased, exhausting, ridiculous, and at times comic spectacle” (Lipman 2012) in 2012 in Moscow, became a terrifying display of the performers’ actual and figurative unmasking; their political and politicized bodies were caged in an aquarium-like glass

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container, their unmasked faces were revealed, and their activism was shamed as transgressive and disgraced. Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina served two years in penal colonies; Yekaterina Samutsevich received a suspended sentence. After their release in December 2014, the performers immediately resumed their political activism, advocating for prison reform in Russia and around the world (Listengarten 2012 and 2016). On the one hand, Pussy Riot’s aesthetic is deeply rooted in Russian cultural and political history. On the other hand, the group’s consistent selfreferencing of Western culture, specifically the 1990s underground movement Riot Grrrl, among others, firmly places the performers in contemporary Western alternative contexts. Steeped in international punk-rock references, Pussy Riot’s musical performance style is most closely associated with thirdwave feminist bands such as Bikini Kill and Huggy Bear, yet the image of the performers in colorful ski masks evokes parallels with post-1960s feminist performance groups, especially The Guerrilla Girls, who staged art interventions while wearing gorilla masks. Schneider notes that “conflation of the ‘primitive’ mask with the masked identities of the female artists suggests a complex interrelatedness between coding of race and gender, especially vis-à-vis the politics of representation and artistic authority” (1997: 2). Like The Guerrilla Girls, Pussy Riot carefully constructs an incongruent and grotesque self-image that heightens the precarious condition of the gendered body and challenges the politics of its representation. A principal marker of Pussy Riot’s persona, the balaclava indicates a problematic relationship between invisibility and the intentional anonymity that women artists have negotiated as they struggled to position themselves in male-dominated artistic terrains. The intended awkwardness of the performers’ bodies dressed in shabby, flimsy summer clothes that exposed their bare skin even during Russia’s winter subverts the idea of female beauty in consumerist culture and confronts persistent commodification of the female body. As Pussy Riot calls attention to the vulnerabilities of the gendered body, the group also underscores the potential of feminist performance to remake gender norms. By literally and symbolically revealing the duplicity of “masking and unmasking, veiling and unveiling, modesty and uncovering” (Baer 2016: 23), Pussy Riot’s performers have conceived their explicit bodies as agents of transformation. In this creative and political impulse, the group’s site-specific performances are akin to the work of other contemporary feminist performance collectives such as SlutWalk and FEMEN that “expose the precarity of the female body, understood in a double sense as the insecure status of the female body within oppressive regimes of power but also as a site of ambivalence and potential resistance” (Baer 2016: 23). Balaclava, for Pussy Riot performers, becomes a marker of erasure and embodiment of

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gender precarity but also a signifier of the group’s collective female identity, representing rebellion against gender inequality and human rights violations. Such a reading of the balaclava’s signification is rooted in its military origin; worn for the first time by British troops during the Crimean War at the Battle of Balaclava, the balaclava became the headwear of military forces or political rebels across cultures and ideological affiliations. More recently, balaclavas became a part of the uniform worn by the Russian special police task force during Perestroika to shield the identity of officers from the Russian mafia. As Pussy Riot contemplated its own precarious position as transgressive feminist artists—always choreographing strategies to avoid police brutality or arrest—they conceived of their image in part to protect their individual identities as performers and in part to celebrate the collective power of women to effect change. Asserting their potential to become a symbol of global political activism, the performers suggested, “Anybody can be Pussy Riot, you just need to put on a mask and stage an active protest of something in your particular country, wherever that may be, that you consider unjust” (Pussy Riot cited in Kedmey 2014). Transformed into an international sign of women’s resistance, Pussy Riot’s balaclava was refashioned as a knitted pink pussyhat when millions of women wore it during protests against Donald Trump’s American presidential administration in 2017.

Holy Fools and Subversive Bodies: The Oberiu’s Influences on Pussy Riot’s Aesthetics The aesthetic and philosophy of Pussy Riot are deeply entrenched in Russian subversive culture, in which the combination of playfulness and grotesque exaggeration often resulted in political satire and mockery of oppressive powers. Close in spirit to Mikhail Bakhtin’s understanding of the medieval carnival with its irreverence and subversion of official culture (1984), Russian subversive culture embodies ambivalence about the grotesque incongruity of the human condition under oppression. Pussy Riot pointed to its fascination with the subversive quality of Russian culture, particularly with the concept of yurodstvo (holy foolishness) that had become a phenomenon in medieval lore connoting religious and political subversion and reflecting a complex mixture of foolery, insanity, mischief, and courage to speak truth to power. As Pussy Riot’s performers explained, they “search[ed] for real sincerity and simplicity [and] found these qualities in yurodstvo of punk” (Pussy Riot 2012: 92), thereby connecting different historical and cultural expressions of rebellion. Drawn to the ambivalent character of the holy fool whose

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grotesque, sometimes hideous, body often became a transgressive site, Pussy Riot infused the subversive quality of holy foolishness with punk’s deliberately offensive aesthetic, thus interweaving the indirect with the explicit, the ambivalent with the overt. As Pussy Riot combined the spirit of mischief and play with punk’s disruptive energy to embrace incongruity and arouse confusion and often outrage, its members often found themselves in direct dialogue with the Russian avant-garde, particularly the Oberiu—a Leningrad artistic association that became the last Soviet avant-garde group (1927–30) before the state imposed socialist realism in the early 1930s. Proclaiming themselves the “poets of a new world and a new art” (“The Oberiu Manifesto” in Gibian 1974: 195), Oberiu members experimented with simultaneity and collage in their written work to create an artistic reality that defied logic and challenged the boundaries between life and art. Their experimentation with “diverse textual and visual metamorphoses of characters and objects” often resulted in “a grotesque, incongruous reality filled with exaggeration, punning, clowning, maniacally speedy action, and averted as well as real cruelty” (Listengarten 2003: 59). This world not only functioned as an expression of the Oberiu artistic philosophy and metaphysics but also manifested itself as a social parody reflecting or anticipating the horrifying reality of political violence and terror under Joseph Stalin. Describing themselves as the Oberiu’s descendants, Pussy Riot members drew a compelling connection between their precarity as socially engaged performer-activists and the Oberiu’s tragic fate—most Oberiuty, including Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky, fell victim to the Great Purge. In her closing statement during the trial in which three Pussy Riot performers were convicted of hooliganism, Tolokonnikova referred to the Oberiu as a source of Pussy Riot’s artistic inspiration and spiritual endurance; she invoked the Oberiu’s “search for thought on the edge of meaning” and pointed to the group’s ability to capture the “irrationality and senselessness . . . of their era” (Pussy Riot 2012: 99), an act of extraordinary courage that cost the Soviet writers and artists their own lives. What also connects the Oberiu’s literary and artistic experimentation with Pussy Riot’s performances of protest is consistent engagement with the body—the body of a character or performer—as a powerful focus of transgression and critical investigation. Tat’iana Nikol’skaia underscores the Oberiu’s eccentric body performances as a manifestation of their creative impulse to baffle, upset, and disorient their spectators. She writes that “by their frequently preposterous outer appearance and by their absurd behaviour, [the Oberiuty] were striving not so much to shock as to perplex the public by the alogicality of what was happening, to give a twist in the public’s

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consciousness to normal causal-investigatory notions” (1991: 195). In the tradition of the Russian Futurists and Imaginists who “walked the streets in outrageous attire, their faces painted, sporting top hats, velvet jackets, earrings, and radishes or spoons in their button holes” (Goldberg 2001: 32), the Oberiuty orchestrated street provocations that were infused not only with juvenile prankishness, playfulness, and theatricality but also with selfirony, audacity, and derision of laws and expectations. Assuming the role of a “clown/jester/buffoon” (Cigale 2017: xvi), Kharms once appeared in front of a medical commission, which was to determine his fitness for military service, “wearing a tie and top hat, a large pectoral cross and carrying a cane, but with no other clothes on” (Nikol’skaia 1991: 196). He would suddenly lie facedown on the street or stroll the busy boulevards of Leningrad “in a rimless straw hat, a jacket without a shirt, military breeches and bedroom slippers, holding a butterfly net” (Nikol’skaia 1991: 196). In Kharms’s street provocations, the holy foolishness of the performer threatened the status quo, and the performer’s body became a performance object—exaggerated, distorted, fragmented, abject.3 These acts invoked the spirit of the Rabelaisian carnival, which celebrated incongruous and grotesque images of “the unfinished and open body” (Bakhtin 1984: 26) and aimed to joyfully entertain as well as destabilize the norm. Placed in the context of Russia’s rapidly changing political reality during the Stalinist period, Kharms’s eccentric performances were no longer seen as theatricalized pranks or childish manifestations of the artist’s personal anxieties and paranoia; they suddenly took a darker political turn by exposing the precariousness of the body and becoming rebellion that celebrated danger, irrationality, and individual creativity. “The grotesque of the body” that Kharms used in his street performances and more deliberately in his literary work functioned as “a form of resistance, outwardly transgressing the boundaries of the body that the discipline society tries to enforce” (Brookes 2017: 63). As the Soviet apparatus no longer permitted the public display of the grotesque and subversive body, the regime gradually made the bodies of Oberiu artists invisible. Kharms died of starvation in the psychiatric ward of a prison hospital in 1942; Vvedensky was arrested in 1941 and died of pleuritis en route from Kharkiv to Kazan, where he was being transported with other prisoners. Many others disappeared in the gulags. The focus on the precarious body as a subject of the state’s control is at the core of Kharms’s and Vvedensky’s literary explorations, which influenced several generations of Soviet dissident writers and artists and, in part, guided Pussy Riot’s commitment to exposing the systemic othering and marginalization of the nonnormative body. In his analysis of Kharms’s ministories, Alec Brookes applies the Foucauldian discourse about “enclosure,

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surveillance, and discipline” to view the body in relation to the “power, which disciplines the body’s enclosure, and resistance, which transgresses it” (2017: 57). In Elizaveta Bam (1927), Kharms’s best-known dramatic work, a false accusation of a terrible crime—a method of discipline by the oppressive state—propels the characters’ inexplicable acts of violence toward each other, during which their bodies are being disfigured, disabled, and discarded; they succumb to their injuries, disappear, expire, and then come back to life with vigor. As the characters’ identities evolve, multiply, turn puppet-like, and lose their human features, the line between victims and perpetrators dissolves, rendering the cruelty meaningless. In Kharms’s absurd, menacing world, the reality is both painful and comical, terrifying and nonsensical, and the moments of resistance, when the body responds violently or incongruously to arouse fear, incomprehension, or disbelief, are equally perturbing and morally ambiguous. The incongruous bodies in Kharms’s reality are akin to Pussy Riot’s explicit bodies that shock in public spaces and disrupt the politics of representation. In a Kharmsian fashion, Pussy Riot employs transgression to resist the “power, which disciplines the body’s enclosure” (Brookes 2017: 57), thereby challenging the state’s mechanisms of surveillance. The influence of Vvedensky’s sensibility on Pussy Riot is equally compelling. Inspired by “his principle of the bad rhyme” (Pussy Riot 2012: 99), Pussy Riot revels in the inexplicable and incomprehensible that Vvedensky embraces in his writing through the images of terror and cruelty inflicted on the psyche and body of the character. Similar to Kharms’s Elizaveta Bam, the tragi-grotesque world of Vvedensky’s Christmas at the Ivanovs’ (1938) is infused with senseless violence and farcical randomness and illogicality, but it is also permeated with sexual perversion, moral degradation, and eschatological imagery, presenting a microcosm of normalized terror in which female bodies are sexualized, fetishized, and persecuted. In a world suffused with baseness, spiritual deprivation, and morbid pleasure, bathing children and slaughtered animals occupy the same space: a one-year-old boy predicts his own death; children amuse themselves with outrageous sexual remarks; a nanny chops a girl’s head off with an ax and is sentenced to hang; and the grieving parents copulate in the room that houses their daughter’s coffin. Drawing attention to the complexity of gender representation, Vvedensky underscores, perhaps unintentionally, the visual incongruity of the sexualized female body. The mother of the slain girl Sonya “wears a feminine armor. She is a beauty. She has a large bosom” (Vvedensky 2015: 373). Sexually enticing Sonya, “a thirty-two-year-old girl” who is too old to be looked after by a nanny, playfully teases other “children”—whose age ranges from one to eighty-two—bragging about the size of her breasts and promising “to hold

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up [her] skirt and show everything to everybody” (Vvedensky 2015: 370). Her erotic remarks arouse the nanny’s outrage and instigate her murderous response. As Sonya’s “cut-off head lies on the cushion right up against her former body” (Vvedensky 2015: 373), the parents’ overwhelming grief is suddenly overcome by lust. The decapitated and putrefying corpse stimulates the father’s sexual desire as the mother “powders” and “undresses” herself, finally “giv[ing] in” (Vvedensky 2015: 400). Vvedensky emphasizes the irony of the father’s fleeting recognition of his own carnal impulse: “Having finished his business, the father cries, ‘God, our daughter has died, and we are here like beasts’” (Vvedensky 2015: 374). Arousal and corporeality converge; the female body, both living and dead, is turned into a sexual fetish, an object of erotic desire and pleasure highlighting what Schneider calls the avant-garde’s “fascination with a ‘primitive,’ sexual, and excremental body” (1997: 3). Vvendensky embodies the power of the state through the absurd and terrifying images of a psychiatric asylum, interrogation cell, and courtroom, in which the body of the nanny is subjected to surveillance, humiliation, and punishment. Reframing the Oberiu representation of subversive bodies in the contemporary context, Pussy Riot conflates the sexual with the political, centering on the female body that is both marginalized and sexualized, a subject of the state’s control and a commodity of capitalism. The ghosts of the Oberiuty continue to emerge through Pussy Riot’s work as the feminist performers “talk back to precedent terms of avant-garde art and transgression” (Schneider 1997: 3) to excavate history, to reveal previously silenced subversive voices, and to reclaim and assert the centrality of the performer’s female body in disrupting systems of power and transgressing norms.

Pussy Riot’s Global Resistance and Mediated Images of Precarious Bodies In Pussy Riot’s post-Gulag work, the focus has shifted from site-specific street actions to music videos, art installations, and occasional performances in galleries and traditional theatre venues. The collective persona of the group no longer exists; Pussy Riot has added new voices, and the group’s original members rarely collaborate with one another. Still, their individual work continues to expose social injustice and sexual violence. Through their music videos, the performers draw attention to the precarity of the marginalized body across cultural and geographic borders and gender significations. Embracing and critiquing the culture of sensationalism and commodification, they have created a series of viscerally shocking montages—mediated performances

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that embody disturbing images of political oppression and sexual violation— to arouse anger and scorn but also to express solidarity with the silenced and marginalized. In their music video that appropriates “Make America Great Again” (2016) as its title, performers dressed as Trump stormtroopers relentlessly torture the Other—immigrants, women, gays, nonconformists—invoking the visceral violence against the body embodied in the literary works of the Oberiu. The distressing images of violated bodies disrupt the viewer’s senses and arouse fear and repulsion. An ironic moment of celebration as a result of Trump’s presidential victory disintegrates into violent scenes reminiscent of the brutality of Nazi concentration camps and KGB torture chambers. The branding of the female body with burning marks such as “Outsider,” “Fat Pig,” and “Pervert” alludes to the medieval punishment in which the mark on the human body, a form of disfigurement, was symbolic of disgrace and public shaming. “Make America Great Again” is a fast-paced montage of sickening images of female disempowerment via humiliation, torture, and rape. Similar to the representation of violated and discarded bodies in the works of Kharms and Vvedensky, the female body in this video is being “marked” by the figures of authority, violated by prison guards, experimented upon by brutal medical staff, sadistically annihilated, and then gruesomely discarded in a body bag as no longer desired. This realm is indeed reminiscent of the Oberiu’s illogical and cruel world in which the female body is often rendered powerless and abject. The focus of Pussy Riot artists to reclaim authority over their own bodies through feminist transgressive body performance, however, challenges the Oberiu’s reading of the female body as subject to external manipulation and firmly positions the group in the politics of global resistance. Responding to Trump’s “grab ’em by the pussy” remark, “Straight Outta Vagina” (2016)—a music video that was released during Trump’s presidential campaign—is a celebration of female empowerment but also an ironic nod to Freudian castration anxiety induced by the sight of female genitals. In an interview with The Guardian, Tolokonnikova acknowledges the multilayered meaning of the video, saying that it “could be considered an answer to Trump. .  .  . But I believe the idea of powerful female sexuality is much bigger than any populist megalomaniac man” (cited in Frank 2016). As a chorus line of women performs a takeover of “boring patriarchy,” the video bombards the viewer with self-referential images: the colorful balaclavas that were emblematic of Pussy Riot’s previous guerrilla-style performances; a church altar that recalls the group’s performance at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior; and a commanding display of female bodies, barely clothed and intentionally lacking modesty—a reminder of Pussy Riot’s site-specific

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transgressive acts that celebrated the power of the female body to challenge patriarchy and political authority. In a compelling gesture of parody and protest, feminist performers occupy urinal stalls, mock the culture of excess by “unveiling” themselves in front of ostentatious, gold-plated mirrors, assume the masculine physique, and incite viewers to take the power back— “[to] throw a fit right now (right now); [to] put up a fist right now (right now)” (Pussy Riot cited in Frank 2016). As Pussy Riot performers develop as transnational performance activists, they blend cultural iconographies, break down geographic borders, and draw parallels between different histories of oppression. Pussy Riot’s first Englishlanguage song, “I Can’t Breathe” (2015), was produced as a tribute to Eric Garner, an unarmed Black man whom New York City police killed in 2014. The statement that accompanies the song’s video montage reads: [This work] is dedicated to Eric Garner and the words he repeated eleven times before his death. This song is for Eric and for all those from Russia to America and around the globe who suffer from state terror— killed, choked, perished because of war and state-sponsored violence of all kinds—for political prisoners and those on the streets fighting for change. We stand in solidarity. (Pussy Riot 2015)

The video’s intentionally conflicting visual and contextual signs blur the boundaries of representation of gendered and racialized bodies. When two formerly incarcerated Pussy Riot performers, whose bodies have been repeatedly assaulted by Russian police, are being buried alive, two disturbing narratives—the killing of Garner and the execution of the activists—collapse in one image of the state brutally disciplining the precarious body. The Russian police riot uniform, ironically worn by the executed performers, becomes an embodiment of state power, and its corporeality points to the incongruous fusion of visual signs of the oppressed and the oppressor— further complicating the relationship between political and politicized bodies, between individual agency and state manipulation and control. Similar to Voina’s “In Memory of the Decembrists,” in which the hanged bodies of gay men and migrant workers were displayed in one of Moscow’s central supermarkets, “I Can’t Breathe” places the bodies of the performers in relation to “others to whom [they] belong as inseparable, not separate” thus creating “affective ties” with Others (Carrillo Rowe 2005: 27) and building collective sites of resistance. In an art installation at Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center Benefit and Gala in the Hamptons, which Tolokonnikova and her partner conceived during the 2016 American presidential election, an electric chair was placed in front of Trump’s campaign slogan “Make

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America Great Again” to allude to the history of political executions and torture under brutal dictatorships. At this writing in 2020, when thousands of demonstrators across the United States and the world rallied to protest the killing of George Floyd, another unarmed Black man who died at the hands of American police, Pussy Riot’s images of the marginalized body—silenced, tortured, suffocated—communicate a deeper sense of urgency to address oppression and injustice. The “I Can’t Breathe” that protesters wore on their masks during the Covid-19 pandemic and on their shirts echoed Floyd’s last words, expressed their anger and pain, and emerged as an expression of global solidarity in the fight against oppression. Amidst the protests, Pussy Riot released “Manifesto Against Violence,” co-written and co-performed by an international collective of feminist artists from Mexico, Chile, and Russia. “We unite our forces to stop police violence. In solidarity we trust” (Pussy Riot 2020), the manifesto declares. As Pussy Riot shifted its focus from site-specific performance activism to global sites of social engagement and political arousal, its punk-rock style, characterized by intentional simplicity and disruptive energy, came to reflect a more complex music and visual vocabulary that interweaves varied cultural narratives and iconographies. The ghosts of the Russian avant-garde in Pussy Riot’s performances remind us of the perils of the past, but also call attention to the alarming parallels with the present across geographic borders. “The agents of transgressive art,” to use Schneider’s expression (1997: 4), Pussy Riot performers challenge the understanding of history as a linear and stable narrative and speak a larger discourse about the precarity of the gendered and racialized body in local and global contexts. As this chapter offers an analysis of Pussy Riot’s artistic transgressions, it shows how the group employs “feminist explicit body performance” (Schneider 1997: 3) in multiple physical, digital, and imagined spaces to disrupt gender representation and normativity in performance and unearth the absent, the ignored, and the marginalized. Drawing on the Oberiu’s reading of the precarious body and engaging with the constant interplay of “limits and transgression” (Foucault 1977: 34), Pussy Riot’s transgressive bodies reperform histories, remap geographies, and recast the female body at the center of a radical performance act.

Notes 1 In discussing Pussy Riot’s connections to the Russian avant-garde, I borrow the concept of avant-garde ghosting in contemporary performance from Rebecca Schneider’s Explicit Body in Performance (1997) and James M.

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Harding’s The Ghosts of the Avant-Garde(s): Exorcising Experimental Theater and Performance (2013). 2 A transitional work from Voina to Pussy Riot, the women-only action “Buss the Buzz” (2011) continued to turn random witnesses into unsuspecting participants in transgressive acts. The artists’ gendered bodies were rendered explicit through moments of forced intimacy, during which women performers kissed unsuspecting women police officers on their lips. 3 In addition to the connection with Pussy Riot’s site-specific provocations, Kharms’s transgressive body performances invoke a parallel with another contemporary Russian street artist, Pyotr Pavlensky, whose radical acts often involve self-mutilation as a form of political protest.

References Baer, H. (2016), “Redoing Feminism: Digital Activism, Body Politics, and Neoliberalism,” Feminist Media Studies, 16(1): 17–34. Available online: https​ :/​/do​​i​.org​​/10​.1​​080​/1​​46807​​77​.20​​​15​.10​​93070​ (accessed August 10, 2019). Bakhtin, M. (1984), Rabelais and His World, trans. H. Iswolsky, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Brookes, A. (2017), “Enclosure, Writing, and Resistance: Revisiting the Prose of Daniil Kharms,” Canadian Slavonic Papers, 59(1–2): 56–69. Available online: https​:/​/do​​i​.org​​/10​.1​​080​/0​​00850​​06​.20​​​17​.12​​94311​ (accessed May 20, 2019). Carrillo Rowe, A. (2005), “Be Longing: Toward a Feminist Politics of Relation,” NWSA Journal, 17(2): 15–46. Cigale, A. (2017), “Translator’s Preface,” in D. Kharms, Russian Absurd: Selected Writings, trans. A. Cigale, pp. xv–xxiii, Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Elder, M. (2012), “Feminist Punk Band Pussy Riot Take Revolt to the Kremlin,” Guardian, February 2. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​guard​​ian​.c​​om​/wo​​rld​ /2​​012​/f​​eb​/02​​/puss​​y​-rio​​​t​-pro​​test-​​russi​a (accessed May 15, 2020). Foucault, M. (1977), Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. D. F. Bouchard, trans. D. F. Bouchard and S. Simon, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Fragkou, M. (2019), Ecologies of Precarity in Twentieth-Frist Century Theatre: Politics, Affect, Responsibility, London: Methuen Drama. Frank, P. (2016), “Pussy Riot’s ‘Straight Outta Vagina’ Wants Trump to Remember Where He Came From,” Huffpost, October 26. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.huf​​f post​​.com/​​entry​​/puss​​y​-rio​​t​-str​​aight​​-outt​​a​-vag​​ina​_n​​_580f​​c07​ 7e​​4b085​​82f88​​c7eab​ (accessed June 8, 2020). Gessen, M. (2014), World Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot, New York: Riverhead Books.

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Gibian, G. (1974), Russia’s Lost Literature of the Absurd: A Literary Discovery; Selected Works of Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky, trans. G. Gibian, New York: Norton. Goldberg, R. (2001), Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, New York: Thames & Hudson. Harding, J. M. (2013), The Ghosts of the Avant-Garde(s): Exorcising Experimental Theater and Performance, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Kedmey, D. (2014), “Those Two Pussy Riot Women? They’re Not Actually in the Band Anymore,” Time, February 7. Available online: http:​/​/tim​​e​.com​​ /5570​​/thos​​e​-two​​-puss​​y​-rio​​t​-gir​​ls​-th​​eyre-​​not​-a​​ctual​​ly​-in​​​-the-​​band-​​anymo​​re/ (accessed June 8, 2020). Lipman, M. (2012), “The Absurd and Outrageous Trial of Pussy Riot,” New Yorker, August 7. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.new​​yorke​​r​.com​​/news​​/news​​ -desk​​/the-​​absur​​d​-and​​-outr​​ageou​​s​-tri​​​al​-of​​-puss​​y​-rio​t (accessed May 10, 2020). Listengarten, J. (2003), “Theater and Cultural Translation: Translating Politics and Performing Absurdity in Vvedensky’s Christmas at the Ivanovs,” The Theater of Translation: Translation Perspective, XII: 57–73. Listengarten, J. (2012), “Performing Punk Prayer: Pussy Riot and National Controversy,” Ecumenica, a Journal of Theatre and Performance, 5(2): 71–5. Listengarten, J. (2016), “Pussy Riot and Performance of Social Justice: Collectivity, Collaboration and Communal Bond,” in K. M. Syssoyeva and S. Proudfit (eds.), Women, Collective Creation, and Devised Performance, pp. 317–30, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Nikol’skaia, T. (1991), “The Oberiuty and the Theatricalisation of Life,” in N. Cornwell (ed.), Daniil Kharms and the Poetics of the Absurd: Essays and Materials, pp. 195–9, London: Macmillan. Pussy Riot (2012), Pussy Riot! A Punk Prayer for Freedom: Letters from Prison, Songs, Poems, and Courtroom Statements, New York: Feminist Press. Pussy Riot (2015), Pussy Riot - I Can’t Breathe. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​ .you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=dXc​​​tA2Bq​​F9A (accessed June 8, 2020). Pussy Riot (2020), “Manifesto Against Violence / Riot x Lastesis,” Medium, May 28. Available online: https​:/​/me​​dium.​​com/@​​nadya​​.tolo​​kno​/m​​anife​​sto​-a​​gains​​ t​-pol​​ice​-v​​iolen​​ce​-ri​​ot​-x-​​las​te​​sis​-4​​703d6​​a6a1b​7 (accessed June 8, 2020). Schneider, R. (1997), The Explicit Body in Performance, London and New York: Routledge. Stow, N. and E. Hyatt (2018), “Fever Pitch: Who Are Pussy Riot, were they Responsible for the World Cup 2018 Final Pitch Invasion and What were they Protesting?” The Sun, September 13. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​ sun​.c​​o​.uk/​​news/​​67853​​58​/pu​​ssy​-r​​iot​-w​​orld-​​cup​-f​​i nal-​​pitch​​-inva​​sion-​​​2018-​​ pyotr​​-verz​​ilov/​ (accessed May 12, 2020). Vvedensky, A. (2015), Christmas at the Ivanovs’, trans. J. Listengarten and K. Coonrod, in R. Knopf (ed.), Theater of the Avant-Garde, 1890–1950: A Critical Anthology, pp. 368–87, New Haven: Yale University Press.

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Body as Site for Feminist Theatrical Discourse A Pedagogic and Performative Experiment with Arousing Images by Anuradha Kapur Indu Jain

In her influential book Gender Trouble, Judith Butler writes: To make trouble was, within the reigning discourse of my childhood, something one should never do, precisely because that would get one in trouble. The rebellion and its reprimand seemed to be caught up in the same terms, a phenomenon that gave rise into my first critical insight into the subtle ruse of power: the prevailing law threatened one with trouble, even put one in trouble, all to keep one out of trouble. (1999: xxvii)

Anuradha Kapur is a feminist female director from India—one of the chief changemakers at the National School of Drama (NSD) in Delhi since the 1980s—and can truly be called a “troublemaker” in Butler’s sense of the term. For decades, Kapur has created space for gender-sensitive culture and representation in theatre. During her employment at the NSD and Ambedkar University, the patriarchal hierarchical discipline constantly restrained her creativity and threatened her with retaliation, should she defy institutional expectations. However, these spaces also provided her with possibilities for defiance and rebellion. In her essay “Antigone’s Claim,” Butler asks if Antigone can “work as a counterfigure to the trend championed by recent feminists to seek the backing and authority of the state to implement feminist policy aims” (2000: 1) and thus interrogates formational questions of the feminist movement: the nature of the individual subject; agency; and the relationship to the state, family, personal, and political. Drawing from Butler, one can see Kapur as Antigone herself, negotiating her progressive feminism and sexual politics within institutional spaces, wherein through her interventionist

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works in theatre, she manages to exercise agency within the rigid mold of institutional regulation. In this chapter, I locate Kapur as one of the key female theatre directors in India—one who accepted a permanent teaching position at the NSD in 1981 with a keen understanding of agency as something which is deeply implicated in the very relations of power it seeks to oppose. Through two of her productions as case studies, this chapter highlights how Kapur has designed her own strategies of subversion and delineates Kapur’s specific aesthetic, as well as political ideology, which enables her to create a gendersensitive theatre in India with the cynosure being the body as a site for feminist theatrical discourse. In my analysis, I focus on Kapur’s process of devising a feminist performance, her methods of rehearsing a play, and her pedagogy. To examine the idea of pedagogy and dissemination of knowledge to her students, I envision her working process as also being a training process during production—one which stems from her long-term engagement with teaching acting. In order to delve deeper into an analysis of her work, it is important to situate her within the larger context of feminist theatre work in India.

Kapur: A Self-conscious Public Intellectual in the Indian Feminist Theatre Scape In the Indian theatrical context, the postcolonial state created institutions to provide support to cultural art forms like the theatre. These institutions, including the NSD, were primarily concentrated around the capital, Delhi. This active theatrical public sphere was used to showcase the new national identity and further the vision of the benevolent state. However, starting in the late 1980s, it was the theatre created by female directors in this space which provided visibility to the feminist interventionist works of the likes of Kapur. In her own writings, Kapur has mapped how these women changed the aesthetics of performance through “innovative use of the female body on stage, new dramatic structures that stressed cooperative working processes, circular plots, non-linear narratives, undoing dialogic communication, destabilizing gender norms and upsetting gender hierarchies” (2001: 6). Kapur took over as the director of the NSD from 2007 to 2013, overhauling the admissions process and making it more egalitarian. At the admissions level, she underplayed preknowledge of the Hindi language for the performance test, allowing candidates to use the local language, as well as nonverbal theatrical expressions, and encouraging the creation of representational

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frames through bodily images. The ratio of female-to-male students during her administrative tenure increased by 25 percent, and, in her supervisory capacity, she attempted to bring in more progressive day-to-day changes, such as new reading propositions for students and the showcasing of innovative international plays. Kapur’s inclusive and synergistic methodology situates her students and collaborators as active players in the devising of the performance from the conception of the idea to the completion of the project. I see Kapur as one of the torchbearers of change within the institutional space—someone Edward Said might call a “self-conscious public intellectual” seeking to “speak truth to power” (1993). The amalgamation of her acts of dissent, protest, and feminist activism, as well as the politics of social change, gave birth to politically nuanced and gender-sensitive cultural productions and performances during the time in India.1 There was a new imperative to think critically about culture and a persistence to devise new ways of intervening in its practice. Within this context, educated, creative, intellectuals like Anuradha Kapur play a significant role in confronting the orthodoxy by raising challenging, provocative questions for the authorized powers at the center. Unfortunately, in historical mapping, there is a tendency to homogenize and ghettoize female artists (directors/playwrights/actors alike), thereby undermining their distinctive identities, individual stories, and particular approaches to the genre of theatre performance in India. Therefore, the very reconstruction and analysis of Kapur’s works is subversive of mainstream historiography. This chapter explores how Kapur brings about the displacement of text-based theatre to create a performance-based text through long improvisation processes, use of materials in performance, and excavation of history through the body in performance. In her writings about the (re)presentation of the female body in theatre, Jeanie Forte postulates: through women’s performance art, the body speaks both as a sign and as an intervention into language: and it is further possible for the female body to be used in such a way as to foreground the genderization of culture and the repressive system of representation. (1988: 227)

Kapur too foregrounds that “[f]eminist theatre in India is interested in seeking new ways of making knowledge from the view point of the body” (2019). To illustrate this argument, this chapter analyzes two of Kapur’s works: the production Dark Things (2018) with students at Ambedkar University and Nale Wali Ladki (2018) with those at the NSD. The choice of these two plays is governed by an important common denominator: both

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are student productions wherein Kapur’s feminist pedagogy plays a pivotal role in making her student actors autonomous. Dark Things is a large-scale, outdoor performance which delineates the hardships of various frontiers of work and suffering in twenty-first-century India. Through a series of riveting images, the performance paints a dark picture of the lives of refugees and migrant laborers and heightens the horrors of migration, modern forms of slavery, and exploitation of factory workers in the face of rising capitalism. By presenting scenes from the lives of manual scavengers, the performance throws light on issues, such as the way toilets in India are made as cesspits which ultimately must be manually cleaned by the migrants themselves. Kapur deftly brings sounds, objects, actors’ bodies, music, and screen projections as the materials of this performance. Dark Things materialized from an elective course taught to performance studies students at Ambedkar University and is a collaborative project by Anuradha Kapur, Deepan Sivaraman (co-directors), and Sumangala Damodaran (music). It is important to briefly explain the structure of institutional spaces where Kapur works. Ambedkar University is headed by the Delhi state government, and the state funding for theatre in India is competitive and has declined in recent years; therefore, most directors are dependent upon corporate funding, which shapes the nature, content, style, and space of their work under different kinds of pressures and political agendas. This funding dichotomy also impacts the feasible scale of performances. These challenges affect female directors more than their male counterparts, as their work is already further subjected to ideological obstacles. Kapur is deeply conscious of the prerogatives that a male actor enjoys, of the parameters which define masculinity, and of the different norms that affect the process of socialization; she understands how different genders visualize and actualize their bodies on stage and makes this a conscious part of her pedagogy. While her success in completely undoing these social relations is debatable, Kapur’s work at Ambedkar University is rooted in critical responsiveness to the country’s social and gender norms. Her exploration of these can be seen in her NSD production of Nale Wali Ladki. Nale Wali Ladki outlines the story of a mother from an economically marginalized section of society seeking help to trace her missing daughter. She is shown running to the police, administration, her local community, and the middle-class elite for help with this task. The knowledge that her daughter has been raped and her body disposed of in a drain forms the undercurrent of the narrative. The helplessness of the mother provides a scathing critique of the state machinery and class structure, which subjugates underprivileged groups including the economically disadvantaged communities and women.

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Kapur retired from the NSD in 2013 but was invited to direct this play with the final year students of the school in 2018. The students staged the play on December 3, 2018, in the Bahumukh Auditorium of the drama school. Priyanka Pathak (a student of Kapur from 2010 to 2013) was invited to collaborate on this project as an assistant director and costume designer. To Pathak, “Anuradha was much more confident to experiment and question the inherent class hierarchy with this production than when she was teaching at the NSD” (2019). As an outsider, Kapur had more freedom to use her pedagogy as a form of resistance that could generate hope and spearhead the crucial questions of agency, equal rights, and the politics of responsibility. Pathak, in discussing her own work, speaks of her personal interest in the materials of a performance. She emphasizes her focus on the minutiae when she works with the costumes, as well as the need to work in a collaborative environment and the way she was taught to actively contribute to the devising of the text and the body on stage. Each one of these characteristics was a focal point for much of Kapur’s process, wherein she created a safe environment to experiment with the body both on and off the stage, as discussed further in this chapter.

Kapur’s Nale Wali Ladki: A Dialectical Collaborative Performance In Nale Wali Ladki, Kapur first began her process by asking students how they could make their voice heard. Students were encouraged to think beyond the use of smartphones and explore an alternative way to make a political statement vis-à-vis identity, visibility, representation, and justice—in this case, a cry for help for a missing rape victim. It is from such discussions that the idea of civil disobedience through arousing images, like that of a woman writing on her naked body as a means of protest, informed the group’s collective storytelling. There was no fixed text; on the contrary, it was through the use of the actor’s body that Kapur truly defined what it means to be a feminist. Contemplating her own feminist theatre practice, Kapur wrote, “Feminist theatre practice is somewhere related to the issues of looking, experiencing, discovering, formulating different kinds of experiential aspects and to the understanding of liveness on stage. I think in its most basic, it is about visualising social experiences through the actor’s body, which normally does not get represented” (Kapur 2019). One can situate Kapur within the framework of what Carlo Ginzburg, a noted historian and proponent of microhistory, refers to as microhistorians in many of his works (Ginzburg

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1993). There is an attempt to excavate as well as liberate history through performers’ bodies. Kapur, in her classroom, aspires to create a liberatory environment, made possible by narrowing in on small units of research, such as an event, community, or an individual. By encouraging and guiding her students to celebrate their differences in a holistic manner—by focusing on the “self ” on the “body”—Kapur, as a microhistorian, opens up myriad possibilities for experimentation, raising questions, and change, by asking “large questions in small places” (Joyner 1999: 1). This also reflects in her choice of subject matter for her student productions, wherein she focuses on the life of the underprivileged in order to construct a scathing critique of existing destructive hatred and subsequently effect social change. Kapur questioned dominant habits of comprehension and bodies in performative action in various theatre exercises conducted with the actors of Nale Wali Ladki. Through a process comprised of a series of questionanswers, body movements, scene work, and class exercises, a structure of the play began to emerge. Nale Wali Ladki’s narrative and primary action circle around a Nala (drain) on stage, filled with garbage, where the body of a young girl who has been raped and murdered has probably been discarded. In creating this performance, Kapur asked her students to delve into their own individual experiences of drains, ponds, and rivers in their respective villages, towns, and cities and encouraged them to draw from the reservoir of their memories to visualize this drain—to imagine the objects they might find floating in it. Consequently, students produced an array of objects like condoms, empty chip packets, cigarette butts, chemicals, dry mango seeds, dead rats, and so on, which were thereafter used as part of the scenographic framework for the play in order to invoke an image in the mind of the spectators. Kapur therefore invited her actors to approach acting as a task, rather than drawing upon internalized psychology—her students envisaged an episode like this and created a respective context as well as an environment around it. As a result, the student portraying the mother of the dead girl who represented the plight of the marginalized and oppressed social group was shown as reaching out to the systems of power in place through improvised gestures taken from rehearsals and classroom theatre exercises. Here, Kapur employed a compelling methodology to depict the agency of women’s bodies. In the story, the desperate, angry mother with an immense emotional response about her missing child is first shown communicating verbally— that is, asking questions from people to seek help as well as get some answers. However, language fails her. The community is aware of the horrendous crime which has been committed, but the mother’s cries for help are met with complacent silence and mere whispers of sympathetic chatter. Thereafter, the mother uses written word, printing and distributing pamphlets, mounting

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a searing attack on the lack of investigation of this crime by the authorities. The frames Kapur created in the performance through gestures of a thin frail woman continuously printing and pasting written questions on the walls of institutions offered a powerful expression of protest. Kapur was able to generate true nervousness and fear as we witnessed the policemen trying to stop the woman’s endeavors. This emphasis on corporeality of the female speaking subject as a performance tool, in a language which provided greater fluidity and meaning to the narrative, allowed Kapur to explore the female body as female subject. By returning subjectivity to women—rejecting the body’s patriarchal “text” and providing multiple new “texts”—Kapur successfully attempted to deconstruct and semiotically disrupt the male order. Thus, the most powerful form of communication that the (char)actor of the mother embraced at the moment was perhaps this act of “speaking” through the female body. The body in performance created and upheld several unwritten rules and, for a female director, served as a device for creating a new historiography, one in which the feminine presence was truly emphasized. This move from spoken word to written word to body—that is, the “explicit body”—can be seen as “a means of addressing the ways such work aims to explicate bodies in social relations. That is, to expose not an originary, true, or redemptive body, but the sedimented layers of signification themselves” (Schneider 1997: 2). Kapur’s protagonist, in a nonverbal and powerful rendition of emotional duress, indeed shows her helplessness but also demonstrates defiance and protest in the face of adversity by inscribing “Where is my daughter?” and “Missing” in a literal and figurative movement on her hands, legs, and breasts as she rips the clothes one-by-one off her body, thereby giving space to what Janelle Reinelt calls as the “polyvocal” nature of the female subject (1989: 51). In the performance, it is when these pamphlets start entering public spaces, and the naked body of the woman disturbs the so-called social fabric of civility, that we see her disobedience being perceived as a threat. This movement is the unfolding and legacy of Kapur’s pedagogy on stage, wherein “the body made explicit has become the mise en scene” (Schneider 1997: 2). Later in the play, questions and taboos around a woman’s sexuality and body are highlighted by the use of material objects in relation to the dos and don’ts presented by the privileged class in the plot. The missing girl’s salwar (legging) is found on the school swing, and, instead of taking on the responsibility to investigate the matter at hand, the principal of the school chastises the mother, reminding her not to speak publicly on issues like rape and female body parts. This materiality in the performance is further developed by the scenographer of the play, Deepan Sivaraman, who designed moving platforms

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on rails to carry the police station, the printing press, and other locations in Nale Wali Ladki. The play was developed not for a proscenium but for a black box space, with the audience sitting on the two sides watching and receiving a different visual picture depending on their line of sight. The manner in which Kapur allowed her students to play with the machinery on stage also brought focus to the materiality, corporeality, and tangibility of performance—of how its labor is neither hidden nor kept behind the curtains; the “illusion” of reality is created on stage. When the play began, the audience saw two women simultaneously speaking to each other as well as to us, narrating their everyday routine as they wheeled in a model of their village and the neighboring town. The audience was witness to the actors’ physical work— to their bodies awkwardly dealing with this machinery on stage—in sharp contrast to traditional realist representations. Kapur paid specific attention to the details of the set and lighting. The miniature model of the town had a sharp blue light at one edge, as did the boxed space where the audience sat watching the performance. By intentionally replicating these spaces, Kapur made a larger argument about the silence that follows such acts of crime. The audience watching Kapur’s play thus became complicit in the post-rape inertia of the justice process. Nale Wali Ladki ends with the powerful image of the naked body, inherently questioning the subversive order through an embodied frame. This exploration of alternate performance spaces, attention to minutiae, and generation of performance material residues through the use of objects is much more explicit in Dark Things—Kapur’s second production that this chapter traces.

Dark Things: Generating Outrage through Objects in Performance Kapur’s commitment to questioning theatrical realism, as well as her desire to experiment with new approaches to directing, is truly exemplified in her production Dark Things (April 19, 2018). In this case, her collaboration with Deepan Sivaraman and Sumangala Damodaran, as well as with students at Ambedkar University, Delhi, embraced a transformative transdisciplinary perspective, disrupting disciplinary curricular borders between the fields of music, acting, mime, singing, gender studies, and more. Here, Kapur presented a far more nuanced amalgamation of collaboration, wherein technology and materiality worked to complement each other. A varied group of art practitioners, from writers to scenographers to academics to musicians, worked on this piece together, and each contributed their own

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individual materials to the collective imagination. Dark Things’s focus is on visuality and music, as well as on the practicality of its production process. Throughout the production, one witnessed laboring bodies delineating a topography of crisis, which highlighted the absent and the voiceless on stage. Deepan Sivaraman, who worked on the scenography for both Nale Wali Ladki and Dark Things, states, “I see my work as the continuation of experiments brought in by directors Anuradha Kapur and Anamika Haksar. I consider their work as the beginnings of Indian avant-garde theatre, which among other things, challenges the word-based performance culture in India—and which questions authenticity and tradition” (Punjani 2013). Dark Things was a site-specific performance based on a text for an oratorio by South African poet and academic Ari Sitas, wherein the set allowed for open-ended visual narrative. A dilapidated basketball court toward the backside of the university campus, surrounded by storerooms, classrooms, and abandoned backyard, formed the performance site. The performance raised questions about displacement, unequal treatment, and the silencing of minority voices by highlighting the precariousness of the human condition, especially in the face of brutal labor conditions and class and caste disparity in India. The audience’s first glimpse of this world was an open-air space with various levels and dimensions. The narrative unfolded through the use of images, shadows/projections on the back wall (like refugees escaping on overcrowded small boats), movement, space, and live music.2 Through the electronic information/message board, questions about human experiences of displacement, homelessness, and humiliation (such as “What kind of night is this? I saw people walking into the brightest nothing”) were visible on a loop at the back of the stage.  In the time of the Covid-19 pandemic, these images in Kapur’s Dark Things become even more poignant. The government in India imposed a blanket lockdown in March 2020, displacing millions of poor Indians and forcing them into homelessness and hunger. The pandemic exposed structural, social, and economic inequalities of the country; horrific images of swarms of migrant laborers—of tired and afflicted bodies of men young and old, as well as pregnant women, children, and disabled people walking thousands of miles on foot—were put on display by media outlets and television channels. All these images resonate with those arranged by Kapur in her production; the complacent privileged class, safely ensconced in their houses built by these laborers, watched indifferently as police subjected the poor and displaced to barbaric violence stripping them of any dignity. This feeling of being “unwanted” is not only typical to the dilemma of the refugees but also applies to citizens of the nation, like the migrant workers in India, in the face of this world pandemic.

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Figure 10.1  Dark Things. Directed by Anuradha Kapur. Photo credit: Indu Jain.

Niraja Gopal Jayal, writing on the concept of citizenship, states: “Concealed beneath the placid surface of this apparently consensual concept, lie a multitude of tensions, ambivalences, and disagreements. The tensions are frequently expressed in the form of morally loaded binaries” (2013: 3). This articulation posits that oppressed groups are often circumscribed within an ambiguous boundary of citizenship rights. On the one hand, their numbers are used by the various political parties to create and assemble votes during elections; on the other, they are barely granted even peripheral rights as citizens. Being treated with the “stranger danger” mentality (Ahmed 2000: 19), bodies are left to travel on foot long distances to their respective native villages and towns without state support, carrying the load on their shoulders. The migrant workers are treated as nonhuman resources and are commodified by the state and the capitalist regime. In line with the aforementioned argument, the evocative images in the 2018 production seemed almost prophetic as they showed the space teeming with materials like empty drum barrels, wire, bones, hangman’s rope, and a wheelbarrow carrying black balloons. From the real parking lot of the university, one could see a procession of people with luggage carrying on their shoulders their belongings, including a bicycle, bookshelf, bathtub, and paintings. This very act of walking depicted the precarity of life—of shelter—as well as that of a space called home. These notions of corporeality and tangibility of the bodies are important to Kapur’s body of work, where the students learn how to deal with objects. For example, for Dark Things,

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students were given a hangman’s rope for improvisations—a material which both leaves a physical trace and yet also arouses an image of life’s vulnerability. On a huge wall at the back, one could see the shadow of these items being carried in a magnified dimension, thereby connoting the burden of displacement and histories of brutalities. Kapur deftly played with the idea of scale in performance; these augmented bodies on screen further made the precarious bodies visible in the transient form of shadows. The image immediately brought to mind William Kentridge’s The Head & the Load,3 wherein Kentridge visually makes the challenges faced by Africans during the First World War visible through a similar shadow play of the physical and emotional load. In Kentridge’s work, as in Kapur’s, these ideas and themes of futility and labor are embodied in projections on a screen—that is, maps of the countries being colonized, with shadows of Black people carrying the loads of their masters on their heads. Kapur’s feminist scenography in Dark Things was not restricted to evocative images alone. The objects used, the words of the performers (which are sometimes discernable but more often a gibberish verbal sound), the music (Afro-Asian tonalities ranging from raga to jazz), and the movement of the bodies were also vital components of the performance canvas. Additionally, the use of a prop like a JCB, which is a big piece of equipment used for construction and demolition, further allows Kapur to talk of labor and work ethics. Marvin Carlson in The Haunted Stage remarks how “postmodernism delights in the eclectic, in unexpected and innovative juxtapositions of material, creating new relationships, effects, and tensions” (2003: 168). In a typical postmodernist fashion, Kapur deliberately juxtaposes her objects and creates a montage of materials in which the audience can immerse themselves. The mise-en-scène Kapur composes is fluid, enabling her to create a working environment which impels her actors to achieve spontaneity, further leading to an engaged experience for the audience with an acknowledgment of the labor that went into it. The key point for Kapur has always been a collaborative process and a continuity thereof. However, in terms of scenography, it is the actors melding with the objects that can bring about a collaborative vocabulary, which is not possible in the conventional processes (like the one governed by a realist portrayal). This interblend of the performing artist and the miseen-scène created the images, which were deeply dynamic and crucial to the performance in their ability to arouse a nearly visceral response from the audience. The sheer variety of materials used in this performance also questioned the traditional theatrical pedagogy, wherein a carpentry class which was part of the module might equip the students with a traditional set of canvas and wood. The music, as well as the polyphony of languages in

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the play, also worked on many levels. Dialogues and verbal communication seemed more like an afterthought, and, even if there had been no verbal enunciation, the performance would still have been equally potent. The fragmentary scenes which depicted manual scavengers taking a bath in dirty drain water, the mill call, the drudgery of the laborers, the farmers’ protest marches, and female bodies protesting brutal rapes by pulling toilet paper— on which the data of these traumatic events had been recorded—out of their vagina all look at the question of history as a collage through a visual language, rather than a linear, verbal narrative. “Theatre should be like grass and not like a pyramid” (Kapur 2019), says the director who, in her classroom and acting spaces, makes her students/ actors aware of the process of socialization vis-à-vis bodies on stage. Through various theatrical exercises, Kapur incites her students to present a montage of graphic, violent, and explicit images in their work. Aspects of corporeality and theatre economics are used together with the body on stage in representative frames. Each frame is calibrated to evoke an inquisitive response and facilitate various degrees of immersion for the spectator in both productions. It is important to underscore the deliberate and conscious modalities of the bodies; on stage as actors and in her classroom space, students’ bodies are part of an aforethought methodology brought into effective action by Kapur. A teacher-student relationship is much more complicated than the directorperformer equation. On the one hand, the feminist ideology informs Kapur’s endeavors to train and guide young minds to become thinking individuals; on the other, Kapur is constrained by regulatory mechanisms set in place by the institutions where she teaches and practices her craft. However, Kapur manages to negotiate the two through her neoteric and off-center training strategies. In class as well as rehearsal, Kapur works extensively with her students to grasp the idea of the self and explore different possibilities to perform it on stage. She makes her students comfortable with disagreements, pluralities, friendly animosities, and participatory debates, as well as the need to nourish fluidity and liminality within the rigid framework of “identity” formation. One of the key tenets in her works is that she fosters nonconformity to oppose any fixed, non-fluid, singular, and authoritative narrative. Feminist pedagogy for Kapur does not have any defined tools or prescriptive strategies. It is the coming together of her feminist values, ideology, and activism, wherein the impetus is to resist hierarchies in the teaching environment so that the students experience a transformative learning. It is the synchrony of transfer and transformation that is crucial for this female director. By teaching her students through radical body movements, new forms of blocking, scenography, lighting, and other embodied practices, Kapur has

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created her own theatrical repertoire, one which her students continue to use and transform in their works as active co-creators.

Notes 1 This repertoire included street plays, songs, posters, films, sculptures, installations, handicrafts, and paintings. 2 Renowned musicians Chandran Veyattummal from Kerala and Reza Khota from South Africa were involved in creating the musical landscape for the production. 3 The Head & the Load is a book about Africa and Africans in the First World War. It discusses all the contradictions and paradoxes of colonialism that were heated and compressed by the circumstances of the war.

References Ahmed, S. (2000), Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality, London: Routledge. Butler J. (1999), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 2nd ed., New York: Routledge. Butler, J. (2000), Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death, New York: Columbia University Press. Carlson, M. (2003), The Haunted Stage. The Theatre as Memory Machine, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Forte, J. (1988), “Women Performance Art,” Theatre Journal, 40(2): 217–35. Ginzburg, C. (1993), “Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know about It,” trans. J. Tedeschi and A. Tedeschi, Critical Inquiry, 20(1): 10–35. Jayal, N. G. (2013), Citizenship and its Discontents: An Indian History, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Joyner, C. (1999), Shared Traditions: Southern History and Folk Culture, Urbana: University of Illinois. Kapur, A. (2001), “A Wandering Word, an Unstable Subject,” Theatre India, 3: 5–12. Kapur, A. (2019), Unpublished interview with author, September 10. Punjani, D. (2013), “‘The Future of Indian Theatre Will Be Based on Our Ability to Intermingle with Other Art Disciplines’—Interview with Deepan Sivaraman, Indian Theatre Director and Scenographer,” Critical Stages, 8. Available online: http:​/​/www​​.crit​​ical-​​stage​​s​.org​​/8​/th​​e​-fut​​ure​-o​​f​-ind​​ian​-t​​heatr​​ e​-wil​​l​-be-​​based​​-on​-o​​ur​-ab​​ility​​-to​-i​​nterm​​ingle​​-with​​-othe​​r​-art​​-disc​​iplin​​es​-in​​ tervi​​ew​-wi​​th​-de​​epan-​​sivar​​aman-​​​india​​n​-the​​atre-​​direc​​tor​-a​​nd​-sc​​enogr​​apher​/ (accessed December 7, 2020).

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Reinelt, J. (1989), “Feminist Theory and the Problem of Performance,” Modern Drama, 32(1): 48–57. Said, E. (1993), The Reith Lectures: Representation of the Intellectual, [Radio] BBC4, June 23. Schneider, R. (1997), The Explicit Body in Performance, London: Routledge.

11

Both Sides, Now Between Narratives of Decline and Gestures of Care Alvin Eng Hui Lim

What does it mean to rehearse for the end-of-life? What does it mean to confront the inevitability of death through theatre? There is a growing interest among gerontologists and cultural scholars to study the “place of theatre in the lives of older people” (Bernard et al. 2015). The Performance Research (2019) issue “On Ageing (& Beyond)” demonstrates a turn toward an “age theory” and explores “creative ideas regarding ageing in the field of performing arts and at the level of discourse that considers ‘ageing’ as being performative” (Gough and Nakajima 2019: 1). Advancing “a theatre criticism informed in part by age theory,” Elinor Fuchs questions: “how is it possible that we have largely ignored the vast undeconstructed binary of youth and age?” (2014: 69). In this chapter, I consider the possibility of an age-related theatre dramaturgy in producing theatre for the aging. The increasing precarity of aging bodies, or what Gilleard and Higgs call the “corporeal consequences of living longer” (2020: 1), necessitates a rethinking of what it means to create theatre for and alongside the elderly, retelling narratives that arouse one to address inequality, insecurity, and risk in later life in terms of health, social connections, and financial security. This chapter also considers the prevalence of the peak-and-decline master narrative (Gullette 2004: 13) in an Asian or, more specifically, a multicultural Singapore context and how applied theatre and community-based theatre in Singapore negotiate with prevailing attitudes toward aging and dying. Framed in terms of labor, productivity, and employability, growing older in Singapore is a complex process of facing up to one’s decline and negotiating with the dominant narrative that, as a citizen, one is to contribute to society as labor even beyond the normative age of retirement, which in Singapore will be sixty-three years in 2022. Moreover, the aging narrative is sometimes performed in terms of success stories of Singaporeans working, even in old

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age. I recognize the importance of resisting the peak-and-decline narrative and the implicit ageism that comes with defining a peak in our age that also indicates one’s contribution to the economy. Moving away from Western plot structures, my notion of decline is not mapped “in classical plot structure— in reversals, recognition, and suffering” nor codified “in Freytag’s Pyramid” (Fuchs 2014: 72). Instead, I pursue a definition of decline narrative as one that is episodic. I describe this dramaturgy as a durational process interwoven with episodes of intervention and reflection that respond to the precarity of dying. More specifically, I am defining “decline” as a bodily process and corporeal inevitability that underpins any awareness of one’s precarity. This awareness can be formed or shaped through episodes of end-of-life—either one’s own close encounter with death or experiencing someone else’s death. When endof-life is staged through theatre, these processes are arguably highlighted as a form of rehearsal, a speculative yet poignant spectatorship of dying for some, and an act of mourning for others. The community-based project in Singapore, Both Sides, Now (BSN), provides ways to explore how narratives about corporeal decline offer the occasion to “embody [the corporeality of later life] within the social” (Higgs and Gilleard 2013: 1). Their sustained engagement with communities with a significant elderly population illustrates how participants and audiences can respond to the precarity of later life and dying and engage with—even confront—their mortality alongside others. To think of the body is to think of its “mortality, vulnerability, agency” and “its invariably public dimension” (Butler 2004: 26). The BSN project manifests this public dimension of the body—both of the performers and of the elderly participants who contributed to the curated program. I address how BSN has developed a dramaturgy of care that resonated with the communities they engaged with, drawing some of their approaches from Augusto Boal’s forum theatre (1995). Forum theatre was first introduced to Singapore in 1994 under controversial circumstances when Haresh Sharma and Alvin Tan of The Necessary Stage (TNS) were alleged by The Straits Times (a mainstream newspaper in Singapore) to have Marxist connections when they attended Theatre of the Oppressed workshops conducted by Boal in New York (Peterson 2001: 43; Tan 2013: 195). The government, “fearful that such engagement may become uncontrollable, susceptible to subversion and could be a threat to national security,” promptly imposed a de facto ban on the form (Wang et al. 2013: 89). The “ban” was eventually lifted in 2003, and Drama Box “started engaging with communities using forum theatre at various outdoor community places” (Peterson 2001: 44–50). Forum theatre has now become a mainstay in Singapore’s theatre ecosystem and has been adapted in varied ways by different groups engaging with different

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communities. BSN, helmed by several members of Drama Box, brings the public dimension of bodies to the fore when the artist-collaborators are able to assemble bodies to respond to the theme of end-of-life, affirming the relationality between artists and audience as co-participants.

Both Sides: Declining Performativity and Affirming Relationality In 2015, the Ministerial Committee on Ageing announced a SG$3 billion “Action Plan for Successful Ageing in Singapore,” which has been promoted on websites, mainstream media, and the 2016 publication of “I feel young in my Singapore! Action Plan for Successful Ageing” by the Ministry of Health.1 In the publication, the first indicator of “successful ageing” is employability, with the aim to make workplaces “ageless” and to “review or extend retirement age—some think it should be extended to 70, while others feel it should be abolished entirely” (Ministry of Health 2016: 12). Consulting over 4,000 Singaporeans before conceiving this “action plan,” the report consists of a subtle organization of bodies by other bodies—institutions and employers—along the lines of labor and healthy lifestyles. Singapore’s obsession with “successful aging” reflects a growing popularity of “a set of practices around the globe [that are] now thoughtfully critiqued (as having become an ‘obsession’ of culture) on the grounds of ageism” (Lamb, cited in Gullette 2018: 252). Gullette argues that it is the noun “aging” that needs to be unpacked and critiqued: The serious problem with the noun aging in the common culture is that it usually does not mean what “growing older” or “maturing” means. [. . .] Discourse about the aging process, even when this process is considered to be multifactorial, seems to reinforce various kinds of determinism (once hormonal, later genetic), that however historically changeable, can be summed up as decline. (Gullette 2018, 257–8)

Like Gullette, I am keen to “break the binary between positive aging and aging as decline, to show there were myriad personal narratives” (2018: 262). The practices I describe in this chapter can be understood as performing “agingas-progress” narratives, a myriad of personal stories and reflections that are “neither an ‘anti-aging’ story nor a successful-aging story” (2018: 262). By emphasizing decline as a verb, I argue that decline can mean a process of being vulnerable, which, in turn, arouses communal gestures of care and concern. These gestures can and do arise when the decline narrative comes to the fore (in the form of a theatrical performance).

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Theatre provides that occasion of experience that rehearses an ethical entanglement between people of a given community. It lengthens the duration of grief, rehearses grief, or provides an occasion to grieve. More specifically, when end-of-life issues are staged in the form of forum theatre, where audience members are invited at the end of the play to respond and suggest alternative ways to rework the scenes and actions of characters, an ethical entanglement between the performers and the audience members emerges. When BSN’s forum theatre plays end without resolution, they open up the theatrical space for conversation and even intervention. The theatre I describe in this chapter illustrates an ethical relationship contingent on the implicit sharing of precarity and decline of the other—characters are unable to communicate with their dying loved ones, and characters struggle with end-of-life decisions that they have to make on behalf of the debilitated or unconscious patient. From this theoretical perspective, I witnessed how the precarity of both the declining body and theatre as perpetually perishing activated the BSN artists, volunteers, social workers, and elderly residents of one-bedroom apartments in public housing to respond to the difficult subject of end-of-life with care. Audience members became what Augusto Boal would call “spect-actors” of BSN’s forum theatre performances. Enacted in a makeshift environment at the heart of a housing estate, revised scenes included gestures of concern and care—speech, listening, and dialogues—that articulated Butler’s affirmation of relationality as an ongoing normative dimension of our social and political lives. Where the artists cared, the participants reciprocated.

Both Sides, Now (2013–19): Arts-Based Community Project BSN began in 2013 with an interactive theatrical experience of Khoo Teck Puat Hospital in Singapore. The hospital’s main foyer was converted into a performative space; visitors encountered artworks, video installations, and performances such as a verbatim theatre piece. Through a spatial transformation, the creative team, consisting of artists and producers of ArtsWok Collaborative and Drama Box, as well as other independent artists, “wanted to create a safe space where people could reflect on their hopes and fears about living and dying, and empower them to start grappling with endof-life issues” (Both Sides, Now | 两面之间 ). Subsequent iterations of the project saw a shift “towards a community-based, arts-driven approach” where artists worked with volunteers and collaborators within a community—

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Khatib and Toa Payoh in 2014; Chong Pang and Telok Blangah from 2017 to 2019—for a longer period time (Both Sides, Now). They employed artistic approaches for engaging the community, especially the elderly, culminating in a “carnival” of performances, installations, films, and participatory arts activities for all ages. During the BSN carnival at the respective public housing estates, curious onlookers encountered a temporary stage; they would stop to watch performances and view art installations that explored end-of-life issues and questions of mortality. My focus here is on the latest edition of the project titled “Living Well, Leaving Well” (2017–19). My research methodology included interviews with the creative team, which were done on Skype and Zoom due to the Covid-19 pandemic. While the digital format is not ideal, and my preference would be to meet them in person, these interviews drew my attention to the gesture of listening. We focused on the dramaturgy of the overall project and how it has evolved since 2013. At the core of their approach is a combined effort to bring people together, create inclusive safe spaces, and communicate with empathy (ArtsWok Collaborative 2018: 12–19). The collective describes this approach as “call and response,” an invitation to have a dialogue: As such, artworks were incomplete, dialogic, participatory, and often posed as questions that invited responses. The team believed that the process needed to be non-prescriptive and non-didactic. The call with a question was not about finding a solution or communicating a message. It was an invitation to ask how much more we needed to know. (ArtsWok Collaborative 2018: 7)

The company’s approach involves creating temporary spaces in which dialogue can happen. For them, the aim is to ensure “openness and a wide range of access points for different individuals” and bring “conversations into places that people are familiar with, making the invisible visible, and the private public” (2018: 11). Other forms of artistic practices—interactive art installations and participatory artworks—also contributed to the whole programming of BSN. What intrigued me the most was the simple but profound use of round tables to encourage “Community Conversations” to happen. The round table is a common furniture setting in local households (especially among the elderly population) and a familiar sight in Singapore where people gather around for meals, weddings, and wakes. The tables were also where the team’s notion of “listening aesthetic . . . that is deeply vulnerable” came to the fore (ArtsWok Collaborative 2018: 18). At the end of each day, people could “sit around a table and have a chat with those around you on the topic of living with

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dying,” and volunteers were also in place to listen to these conversations, which provided “opportunities for participants to articulate their experience” (11). Participatory (forum theatre) performances such as Exit and Last Dance further contributed to this dialogic approach during the BSN carnival where participants “unveiled their own assumptions, clarified their responses, and . . . rehearsed their options for action” in the future (19). These conversations surrounded the subject of end-of-life choices and directed participants to Singapore’s Advance Care Planning (ACP) program for the first time. Introduced in 2011, public hospitals partnered to initiate “Living Matters,” the national ACP program in Singapore. It is also within this context and in response to this initiative that BSN artists introduced the ACP program to the elderly community through a myriad of approaches to get more people to leave advance directives about their end-of-life. The act of signing the ACP form is an example of this profound emergence of self through the acknowledgment of death and the performative actions that will happen in such an event. Conversations sparked by the forum form fostered an ethical relationship premised on the gestures of speaking—participants told stories about the passing of a loved one or how one wished to die—and listening. My interviewees shared that such conversations could sometimes be the necessary outlet for participants to verbalize their own emotional journey dealing with the passing of a loved one. For some, that traumatic experience was a recent memory. The round table setup had the effect of encouraging dialogues. Kok Heng Leun, the artistic director of Drama Box, and Tay Jia Ying, the company manager of Drama Box, spoke about their first few visits to Telok Blangah and the initial difficulty to connect with some of the residents. They hosted a “Hello Party” and invited residents to join them in an informal gathering. By the second time this gathering was hosted, residents came to help set up the space. When the team were setting up the space for the carnival, other residents passed by and asked what they were doing and even commented that “no one will participate” (Kok 2020). On the day of the event, these same people came to join them in watching the performances, took part in the conversations, or interacted with the art installations. I turn my attention to a close analysis of two forum theatre plays, Exit and Last Dance, staged as part of the BSN carnival. I approach the issue of end-oflife and bodily precarity through the perspective of relationality and decline and consider how entangled subjectivities came into play through the forum theatre approach, which involves interventions from spectators at the end of the performances. In fact, neither the bodies in decline nor the deceased (referenced in the two narratives) were ever performed in person on stage; instead, they were gestured at or spoken about in the dialogue, shifting

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the focus to what the living could do or relate to. Invited by a facilitator to prescribe points to intervene and suggest changes to the actions of characters, spectators, in some instances, could even replace the actors. Departing from forum theatre’s oppressor/oppressed binary (Boal 2005: 243–4), however, BSN adapted the form, not by insisting on any direct intervention but, rather, by using the scenes performed as a basis for spectators to comment and/or gently suggest changes to the action and emotional journey of the characters. Spectators also gave honest accounts of their own experiences and memories of their deceased loved ones, reflecting on their own emotional journey that mirrored those of the characters. This, I argue, invited an active form of listening, where action and contemplation of end-of-life were made possible through the communal sharing of space and time during the performance, as well as the intertwining of the narrative world with spectators’ personal narratives. The episodic nature of the plays and the facilitation at the end of the play that had no resolution or “peak” also ushered in a gathering of perspectives and voices, each with a different opinion on how the play would progress or be changed. The “decline” narrative—of a dying loved one or the mourning for the deceased— is no longer a cultural construct, as described by Gullette and Fuchs, but a given reality that everyone must confront or has already confronted as grief. When presented through the forum theatre approach, the “decline” narrative required a form of listening that allowed the precarity and vulnerability of the self to surface, where spectators, spect-actors, and onlookers joined together, in declination.

Exit: To Decline through Active Listening Exit (2018), written by Kok Heng Leun and directed by Rei Poh, transported audiences to a hospital ward where the interactions between characters of different ethnicities emphasized the struggles of making end-of-life choices: whether to resuscitate a patient; whether to continue with life support; and whether to conduct rites according to the deceased’s religion despite the difference in religious belief. Differing cultural attitudes toward death and dying took center stage, reproducing the cultural tensions and differences that exist in multicultural Singapore. Exit has two overlapping narratives. In the first, a 38-year-old man goes into a coma as his cancer advances, prompting his oncologist (Jaisilan Sathiasilan) to suggest surgery. The teenage son (Chng Yi Kai) opposes this as he feels that his father does not want to suffer in pain. The mother (Koh Wan Ching) believes that the surgery would give him the chance to

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fight cancer. The second story tells of an elderly woman, Ah Po (Jalyn Han), who also has cancer, but she would like to go home instead of dying in the hospital. Her daughter (Doreen Toh) refuses to accept her decision and tries to convince her to accept the cancer treatment. The characters constantly code switch. In one poignant scene, Ah Po attempts to speak Bahasa Melayu to the Malay nurse (Adib Kosnan), but she struggles to find the right words and switches back to Hokkien. The nurse has to then decipher her Hokkien as they discuss their views on dying and death rites. Ah Po also relies on the teenage boy to translate the Advanced Care Planning form and to help her to complete it in order to make her own end-of-life decisions. These performative translations on stage reflect the reality of miscommunications that happen in a stressful hospital setting. Presented in the context of end-oflife decisions and palliative care, these scenarios resonated with the audience members. They aroused the multicultural crowd into a deep reflection on the corporeal consequence of later life, where the ability to communicate one’s own end-of-life decision is diminished, even taken away. Interviews with the public revealed that the performance deeply moved them to think about their own struggles with family members, and they believed that they should make their own will or decide their end-of-life choices in advance. In a “Highlights” video uploaded to YouTube, one audience member shared that her seven siblings struggled to come to a consensus on how to tell their father about his health condition and decide whether to go ahead with the treatment or not (Both Sides, Now SG 2018). This sharing is not coincidental as it comes very close to the same experience of the son in Exit. As BSN’s longtime collaborator Adib Kosnan puts it, “a story begets stories” (2020). Exit’s applied theatre approach was instrumental to this outpouring of stories post-performance. The play’s scenarios were not about oppression; they captured a difficult ethical choice to make in the face of death. A facilitator stepped out at the end of the performance and asked the audience members: “If you can replace one character, who will you replace?” Slowly but eventually, several audience members took turns going on stage to suggest ways or offer advice to the characters, sometimes replacing the actors to present their own interventions. They acted out their own proposed actions in the hopes of making the characters come to terms with their struggles to accept the death of a loved one. Overall, some of the gestures and images they presented were attempts of reparative intervention. In one scene, the mother slaps the teenage son in a heated argument over the father’s treatment. Spectators, when invited to intervene, stepped in to reenact the scene and depicted the mother as being more patient in explaining why she wants her husband to continue treatment. Instead of an escalated moment between mother and son, both overwhelmed

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by the ethical choice that they had to make on behalf of the debilitated loved one, the intervention allowed more measured responses to emerge. Gesture begets gestures—the postshow interventions and conversations created an environment of sharing where audience members were aroused to become vulnerable to strangers and neighbors alike. This was a powerful platform for some of them to come to terms with their ongoing grief, reflect on conversations with their dying loved one, and contemplate the best way forward; for others, it was an important call to reflect on one’s own end-oflife plans. It was also a learning experience that gave some the courage to speak to their own elderly loved ones about Advanced Care Planning. After decades of language policies and emphasis on English as the lingua franca, most young Singaporeans have been disconnected from the older generation because they are unable to speak the languages of the elderly population. Onstage performance spilled to offstage conversations as young volunteers sat (or squatted) next to elderly audience members and explained the ACP form to them. The performances thus became the occasion for concern, and each intervening gesture allowed others to follow. Through active listening, these postshow conversations signaled a temporary community of spectators and actors, facilitators and volunteers. Societal and cultural barriers around talking about death were transcended when meanings of death and end-of-life were evaluated and put into words, spilling over to the round tables where minute gestures of care could emerge. These included participants exchanging narratives of their experiences, gathering the community to come together where some were previously strangers, and going through the ACP forms at the conclusion of each performance. Each gesture then constituted a form of caring for the self that simultaneously implied the concern shown by others. End-of-life issues and the body’s decline transformed from a boundary to an occasion for “forum” to address and care for our inevitable decline and the inexplicable experience of death. As studies in psychological science have shown, “reflecting on mortality makes people defensive about their worldviews and their self-esteem, and increases their commitment to close relationships” (Burke, Martens, and Faucher 2010). These studies point to the role of physiological and subjective arousal (often aversive), evoked when the inevitability of mortality is made salient, “relative to reflecting on death-unrelated topics” (Klackl and Jonas 2019). The mediating role of subjective arousal in the context of BSN forum theatre, however, is to activate and mobilize participants to respond to endof-life (as mediated through the fictional story of Exit) in their own time and space as a gesture toward care and a sharing of vulnerability, rather than a defense mechanism. Mortality, made salient by the spectators’ interventions and gestures of care for the characters, strangers, and the elderly among the

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audience members, now has a buffer in the form of a forum through which existential anxiety can be simultaneously aroused and alleviated.

Last Dance: A Sharing of Vulnerability and the Gesture of Speaking Exit richly informed the new work of Last Dance, staged for the first time in 2018. The main character/narrator (Adib Kosnan) started each performance by speaking directly to the audience members, framing the performance as the 100th day after the death of his father. Round tables surrounded the performer, and audience members were positioned around the tables, forming a theatre-in-the-round configuration. There were two characters, both Malay Muslims, and the 100th day alluded to the post-funeral tahlil, an occasion for the bereaved family members and their guests to recite prayers and supplications together on the 3rd, 7th, 40th, and 100th day after the death. After the tahlil ritual, they had a meal together, a gesture of mourning in solidarity. However, the Muslim character was dressed in a bright blue suit with a bowtie, and this ambiguated the cultural context as a result. Moreover, at a later point during the performance, audience members were encouraged by the narrator to join in a simple dance, with bubbles and ambient lighting blurring its supposed cultural context. It became a staging of mourning as well as a celebratory gesture performed by the character to make sense of his loss. In that sense, it was an attempt to encourage audience members with different religious beliefs to connect in this liminal space. Through its theatre-in-the-round staging, the actors and facilitators invited audience members to join in a dance and take center stage to tell their personal stories. During the postshow discussion, the facilitator, Kok Heng Leun, invited the audience members to speak: If you have a story of an experience or you have an idea, or you have a thought about what’s the value of death. Some of you may have thought about it. Some of you have even personally experienced dealing with end-of-life and may be even thinking of these questions already. So if anyone of you would want to come up, come over here and start. (Both Sides, Now SG 2019)

Co-created by Kok Heng Leun, Chong Gua Khee, Muhammad Muazzam Bin Amanah, and Rei Poh, Last Dance alluded to Boal’s notions of gesture and gestic extension and invited anyone who wished to extend their personal gestures of mourning, translating them into a gesture of speaking. Encountering the

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personal mourning of the host of Last Dance, an audience member could translate “the action or gesture she has seen . . . by changing her own position” and show “what results from the gesture” (Boal 2005: 136). Boal’s context is, of course, somewhat different, but it speaks of the capacity for nonactors to extend the gestures offered through the performance of actors. In Exit and Last Dance, the nonactors offered their own stories, shared their own retelling of them, or improvised and immersed themselves in newly crafted scenarios. When the narrator and the facilitator gestured to the audience members to share, one by one, they walked to the stage and began to share their stories. The solemnity of the occasion meant that audience members spoke in soft tones. Sometimes, they had philosophical discussions about what it means to die; overall, the voices and slow movement echoed Boal’s technique of asking actors to speak as quietly as possible for an improvisation exercise—a “softly softly” mode, as he calls it, where “movements must also be very slow; they must move in slow motion” (Boal 1995: 62). While the nonactors were not told to move in slow motion, the effect of placing themselves on the spot allowed them to “acquire an enhanced power of self-observation,” and they became more attentive spectators themselves. Because of this “slowness,” “each gesture appears magnified; by their secretive tone, the words reveal their true content” (Boal 1995: 63). Kok Heng Leun shared with me that the element of time was as important as the spatial dimension when encountering the adapted form of forum theatre. By temporarily inhabiting these public spaces and converting them for performance, conversations, and storytelling, an experience with BSN could alter one’s sense of time. This experience could “bend time,” as Kok explained in the interview, such that spectators became attuned to themselves and their actions (2020). They gained the agency to improvise, intervene, and tell stories, and their gestures also appeared magnified in relation to their own inner experience. Their dialogic gestures proceeded from the enigmatic encounter with death into a discursive and salient articulation that connected them with others. Last Dance adopted a dramaturgical approach that was highly effective in breaking through a wall of silence. Through a facilitation underlined by care and empathy and informed by a simulated scenario of end-of-life, BSN enabled and reified the capacity to speak and to gesticulate, arousing action before the sudden and quick threshold between life and death. By inviting spectators to participate in a gathering inspired by a Muslim ritual, Last Dance subverted the peak-and-decline narrative by reconfiguring the decline of the character’s father as the son’s procession—a durational act of mourning. Sharia (Islamic religious law) requires the body to be buried as soon as possible, and cremation is strictly forbidden. Death, however, is not

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the ending; mourning continues, rearticulated in different episodes of grief, remembrance, and reflection. The decline is thus extended beyond physical death. In Last Dance, this was framed as a communal gathering—a dance extended. While we die alone, we do not actually die alone when there is a community to support those in mourning.

Toward a Dramaturgy of End-of-Life, Now Situating grief in the broader Singapore context, aging as well as dying remains a subject that is often avoided and difficult to process. Pragmatism, embedded even in policymaking pertaining to death and burial, can take over. The New Burial Policy was introduced in 1998 to limit burials to fifteen years, citing land scarcity as its main reasoning: “Graves will be exhumed and the remains cremated or re-interred, depending on one’s religious requirements” (National Environment Agency 2020). As my grandmother’s remains will be exhumed and cremated by 2021, this chapter is also my personal reflection on the time- and space-sensitive nature of dying (in Singapore). Both Sides, Now imagines a community that affirms relationality and produces performative gestures of care, exemplary of “an ongoing normative dimension of our social and political lives, one in which we are compelled to take stock of our interdependence” (Butler 2004: 27). “By virtue of being a bodily being,” we are “already given over, beyond ourselves, implicated in lives that are not our own” (28). The comma in Both Sides, Now signifies a figurative period of pause and contemplation, allowing one to slow down and process what needs to be addressed before death. It is also a reparative space, inviting members of the community to intervene figuratively, such that they may themselves be able to make that ethical choice. BSN illustrates an application of a politics of care (for others), profoundly addressing our physical decline and end-of-life issues and enabling conversations to happen. The gestures of care and listening that I point out in this chapter are not prescriptive but a series of acts contingent on vulnerability and relationality. They manifest a shift in orientation— an ethically driven impulse to make sense of one’s own relationship with death alongside others. In that sense, this theatre arouses people to care for themselves, even as they show that they can care for others. Through these simple gestures of care and sharing, any existing peak-and-decline narrative of aging prevalent in society is replaced by a notion of decline that necessitates and triggers dialogues about one’s vulnerability and grief. Framed through BSN’s dramaturgy of care, the decline and end of the forum performances usher in a period of sharing and a buffer through which one can gain multiple salient

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points of understanding about what it means to grieve alongside others. Each time a spectator, actor, or listener performs a response to mortality, or one side of the story, one is motivated to “take stock of our interdependence” (Butler 2004: 27). In this sense, the comma also represents an interval within a lifetime of aging—a performative episode of arousal that activates a conjunction with others and their own feelings toward dying, albeit momentarily and within the safe space of the table or theatrical space. End-of-life and dying will always be a difficult subject to broach, whether in public or alone in one’s thoughts. But the acts of care performed in BSN illustrate that there is an alternative to conversing about those questions only at the last moment. Instead, the community can be implicated in a collective witnessing of decline through an episodic performance that arouses further discursive gestures in the present.

Note 1 An elaboration of what the “Action Plan” is can be found at https​:/​/ww​​w​ .moh​​.gov.​​sg​/if​​eelyo​​ungsg​​/abou​​t​/wha​​t​-is-​​the​-a​​ctio​n​​-plan​​-abou​​t. The online version of the publication is available at: https​:/​/ww​​w​.moh​​.gov.​​sg​/do​​cs​/li​​ brari​​espro​​vider​​3​/act​​ion​-p​​lan​/a​​​ction​​-plan​​.pdf.

References ArtsWok Collaborative (2018), “On Death and Dying: Vital Signs for a Healthy Civic Dialogue,” Singapore: ArtsWok Collaborative. Available online: https​:/​ /ar​​tswok​​.org/​​websi​​te​/wp​​-cont​​ent​/u​​pload​​s​/201​​9​/10/​​ArtsW​​ok​-Co​​llabo​​rativ​​e​ -Sin​​gapor​​e​-Cas​​e​-Stu​​dy​-On​​-Deat​​h​-and​​-Dyin​​g​-Vit​​al​-Si​​gns​-​F​​or​-A-​​Healt​​hy​-Ci​​ vic​-D​​ialog​​ue​.pd​f (accessed May 14, 2020). Bernard, M., M. Rickett, D. Amigoni, L. Munro, M. Murray, and J. Rezzano (2015), “Ages and Stages: The Place of Theatre in the Lives of Older People,” Ageing & Society, 35(6): 1119–45. doi: 10.1017/S0144686X14000038. Boal, A. (1995), The Rainbow of Desire: The Boal Method of Theatre and Therapy, trans. A. Jackson, Abingdon: Routledge. Boal, A. (2005), Games for Actors and Non-actors, trans. A. Jackson, London: Routledge. BOTH SIDES, NOW | 两面之间. (n.d.), “About Both Sides, Now.” Available online: http:​/​/www​​.both​​sides​​now​.s​​g​/201​​7​-201​​9​/​abo​​ut​.ht​​ml (accessed May 14, 2020). Both Sides, Now SG (2018), Highlights of Forum Theatre “EXIT” (2018). Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=MnW​​​LhzQt​​MCU (accessed May 14, 2020).

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Both Sides, Now SG (2019), Highlights of Participatory Performance “Last Dance” @ Telok Blangah (2018). Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/ w​​atch?​​v​=L5K​​​vchtp​​L_E (accessed May 14, 2020). Burke, B. L., A. Martens, and E. H. Faucher (2010), “Two Decades of Terror Management Theory: A Meta-analysis of Mortality Salience Research,” Personality and Social Psychology Review, 14(2): 155–95. doi: 10.1177/1088868309352321. Butler, J. (2004), Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, London and New York: Verso. Fuchs, E. (2014), “Estrangement: Towards an ‘age theory’ Theatre Criticism,” Performance Research, 19(3): 69–77. doi: 10.1080/13528165.2014.935177. Gilleard, C. and P. Higgs (2020), “Precarity and the Assumption of Rising Insecurity in Later Life: A Critique,” Ageing & Society, 40(9): 1849–66. doi:10.1017/S0144686X19000424. Gough, R. and N. Nakajima (2019), “On Ageing (& Beyond),” Performance Research, 24(3): 1–8. doi: 10.1080/13528165.2019.1655324. Gullette, M. M. (2004), Aged by Culture, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Gullette, M. M. (2018), “Against ‘Aging’—How to Talk about Growing Older,” Theory, Culture & Society, 35(7–8): 251–70. doi: 10.1177/0263276418811034. Higgs, P. and C. Gilleard (2013), Ageing, Corporeality and Embodiment, London: Anthem Press. Klackl, J. and E. Jonas (2019), “Effects of Mortality Salience on Physiological Arousal,” Frontiers in Psychology, 10: 1893. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01893. Kok, H. L. (2020), Skype interview with author, March 31. Kosnan, Adib (2020), Zoom interview with author, May 8. Ministry of Health (2016), “I Feel Young in My Singapore! Action Plan for Successful Ageing,” Singapore Ministry of Health. Available online: https​:/​/ ww​​w​.moh​​.gov.​​sg​/do​​cs​/li​​brari​​espro​​vider​​3​/act​​ion​-p​​lan​/a​​ction​​-plan​​.pdf?​​​sfvrs​​n​ =41f​​2e793​_0 (accessed July 14, 2020). National Environment Agency (2020), “Crypt Burial System,” Singapore National Environment Agency. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.nea​​.gov.​​sg​/ou​​r​ -ser​​vices​​/afte​​r​-dea​​th​/cr​​ypt​​-b​​urial​​-syst​​em (accessed July 14, 2020). Peterson, W. (2001), Theatre and the Politics of Culture in Contemporary Singapore, Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Tan, K. P. (2013), “Forum Theater in Singapore: Resistance, Containment, and Commodification in an Advanced Industrial Society,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, 21(1): 189–221. Wang, W.-J., P.-C. Tam, B. J. Kim, and H. L. Kok (2013), “New Imaginings and Actions of Drama Education and Applied Theatre in NIE4 in Asia,” Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 18(1): 79–93. doi: 10.1080/13569783.2012.756182.

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Part Three

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The Knee, the Elbow, the Face On Body as Abject in Vladimir Nabokov’s Visual Imagination Yana Meerzon

In her influential book Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection (1982), Julia Kristeva theorizes the abject as something dreadful, horrifying, and repulsive, but also as arousing and bewildering. Similar to Freud’s theory of sexual drives and instincts, Kristeva’s abject can be manifested as our longing for the horror and the torment of the unknown, as it is through our desire for the unfamiliar and strange that we can grasp a dismaying stillness of the abyss (Kristeva 1982: 208). Historical avant-garde—from Dada’s poetry to surrealist film and expressionistic painting—was fascinated by the promise of death within a living human body and often focused on exploring and revealing the power of the abject. The opening scene of the 1929 Un Chien Andalou (directed by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí) presents the epitome of this technique. The film begins with a close-up of a male character sharpening a razor blade at his balcony door, then moves on to the next shot of a young woman calmly staring into the camera, while a male’s hand inflicts the razor blade onto her eye. The violence of the gesture is at the core of the abject—a man’s hand forces the sharp razor onto the eye of a woman—but the abjection itself emerges within the receiving mind and body of the observer/filmgoer, who looks at the screen in horror and anticipation and who experiences repulsion, arousal, and pleasure at the same time. The work of Vladimir Nabokov, the Russian American writer in exile, this chapter argues, exemplifies this tendency as well. In his novels and plays, Nabokov depicted an exilic body as an object of the artist’s gaze and as something that can become the abject of its own life drama. Relying on the devices of literary synesthesia—a writer’s ability to evoke vivid pictures in his readers’ minds through language—Nabokov created the abject through verbal visualization. He also investigated, dramatized, and staged the longing for the abject as a paradigm of nostalgia, which Svetlana Boym theorized

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as a type of exilic amnesia and aesthetic mimicry. Based on an “uncanny repetition that entails difference and unpredictability of imagination,” the act of writing allowed Nabokov a luxury of estrangement and an imaginary return (Boym 2001: 265). Eclectic in style, Nabokov’s work, in his theatre specifically, is often dreamlike and irrational, comparable in its atmosphere and conflict to a nightmare (Frank 2012: 65). Often, his characters’ “misperception of reality is caused by automatization” of their actions and experiences (Glynn 2007: 54), whereas, on Nabokov’s stage, a living body frequently appears as a walking corpse, chained to its present by the traumatic events of the past. It is a body without a future, a figure looking beyond the realm of the living, someone who we want to “thrust aside in order to live” (Kristeva 1982: 3), but also someone whose uncanny company of the unfamiliar and of the abject we are secretly longing. Nabokov best depicted this sense of automatization, fossilization, and theatricalization of life and commented on the power of the abject in his plays Chelovek iz SSSR (The Man from the USSR, 1926) and Sobytie (The Event, 1938)1. He reminded us that there is something endlessly seductive or abject-like in the strangeness of the Other, as this strangeness can arouse our desire to cross the border between I and the Other but also prevents us to become one with this other self.

On Nabokov’s Visual Imagination: The Gift—A Case Study A multilingual aristocrat in exile (the family left Russia in 1919, then Nabokov studied in Cambridge and settled down in Berlin), Vladimir Nabokov himself resembled Walter Benjamin’s flâneur (1983), a detached observer of human nature and history. Life in-between—specifically during his early period of exile in Berlin—sharpened Nabokov’s synesthetic abilities and his preoccupation with the “automatization of perception” (Glynn 2007: 53). A true polyglot, he used literary synecdoche as visual metonymy to de-automatize his readers’ perception and to reveal on page the distortions of the world, already defamiliarized in his own consciousness. He mastered a device of word picture to emphasize his characters’ psychological traits, to describe their dwellings, and to denote “images of light and shade, actions, gestures or landscapes, but most often of scenes in which peoples are caught in a way they never have been portrayed before” (De Vries, Johnson, and Ashenden 2006: 12). Many scholars attributed this quality of Nabokov’s writing to his “theatrical imagination” (Frank 2012) and to his interests in

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cinema and fine arts, with the book Nabokov and the Art of Painting listing 150 paintings referenced in Nabokov’s works (De Vries, Johnson, and Ashenden 2006) and arguing “the exceptional importance of the pictorial to Nabokov’s poetics” (Shapiro 2009: 188). What interests me here is the working of Nabokov’s visual imagination—the forms of literary and dramatic construction he used to depict the cities and the figures of the Russian exiles as the abjected bodies of political precarity. Historical avant-garde, of which Nabokov was a true representative, was reflective of its laboratory status and of the traveler’s gaze (Sell 2010: 754). To be a foreigner (a stranger), Kristeva states, was the fetish of modernism (1991: 8). In the works of “exilic performative” (Meerzon 2012), the linguistic barrier and the foreigner’s skewed perception of the world became the sources of artistic contemplation. Many exilic writers used estrangement and magic realism as personal escapism, with fragmentation, suspension of disbelief, syncopation, distorted point of view, and grotesque as their stylistic choices. Thematically, exilic performative often mixed autobiographical narratives with surrealist imagery to depict the alienating power of voyage as separation of self from self and self from Other. Stylistically, it capitalized on objects, urban landscapes, and language to reshape exilic identity. In his own work, Nabokov often accentuated the physicality of the citylife, its thingness, and the sense of estrangement. He often employed visual metonyms, which can “structure not just our language but our thoughts, attitudes, and actions” (Lakoff and Johnson 2003: 39–40). Nabokov’s metonymies were “grounded in our experience,” the process that “involves direct physical or causal associations” (40), and they emphasized his characters’ failures. “While exploring the inner deluded worlds of his protagonists, Nabokov always assume[d] an external material universe with which these protagonists collide. One of Nabokov’s traits as a writer [was] his innate sympathy with, and his ability vividly to realize, the phenomenal world” (Glynn 2007: 58). Fragmentation and distortion became his leading devices of literary synesthesia; as a result, he frequently depicted an exilic body as a disjointed automaton, a body in decay, which invites parallels with the paintings of German Expressionists. In their distorted images and worlds, Expressionists often focused on “sociopolitical commentary”; Nabokov, however, “refused to sociopoliticize his art” (Shapiro 2009: 192). “The acutely observed conditions of Russian émigré life in Berlin and later America” were Nabokov’s “variation of a theme which also finds expression in more abstract metamorphoses, in the preoccupation with the nature of death and the otherworld as well as in Nabokov’s frequent play with illusion and disillusionment, fiction and reality,

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deception and truth” (Frank 2007: 631). Similarly, in Nabokov’s theatre, the residents of the Russian diaspora emerged as fragmented and disjointed body parts, not holistically envisioned human beings. The characters’ knees, elbows, mustaches, and pince-nez appeared to metonymically stand for their masters’ selves, distorted by their experiences of exile, revealing an exilic body as a deadening, frightful matter—an abject—which, much in line with Freudian uncanny, can simultaneously upset and arouse the onlooker. Although Glynn points at Nabokov’s distrust of Freudian teachings (2007: 60–1), using Freudian uncanny as a critical lens helps in analyzing Nabokov’s characters as their own doubles. The work of uncanny, in this case, prepares the work of the abject. This abject does not sit with a “definable object,” Kristeva explains; on the contrary, it is situated within “the twisted braid of affects and thoughts” associated with “such a name” (1982: 1). The abject also reflects the artist’s personal conditions of making and receiving a work of art. Political exile, one’s impossibility of return, can instigate sensations similar to the abject in the mind of an exilic artist, who, in the moment of encounter with the new land, might experience excitement and repulsion at the same time. These sensations can be directed at the exilic subject’s self and at others outside them. They can also be manifested in the exilic artist’s works, which, through their artistry, can contribute to our better understanding of the psychophysiology of displacement, and who can also help move an artistic quest forward. Nabokov’s 1937–8 novel Dar/The Gift, his best work about exile, as the writer attested himself (Nabokov 1963: 7–9), presents an example of constructing the abject through literary synesthesia. Russian diaspora that emerges on this novel’s pages bears resemblance to Max Beckmann’s expressionist painting Paris Society (1931), which depicts artists, intellectuals, émigrés, businessmen, and aristocrats engaged in a reckless festivity on the eve of the Third Reich. The painting reflects the distortions, uncertainties, and anxieties of Interwar Europe. It also suggests the power of the abject to evoke the burning desire for life in the viewer—something one might experience at the threshold of death—and one’s realization of the sameness and sovereignty of “I” in the sight of a cadaver (Kristeva 1982: 3–4). “The theatricality of all things; the ambiguity of the fictional reality; the deliberate glimpse through the fabric of the fictional world” are the defining characteristics of Nabokov’s novel (Nabokov, D. 1984: 3–4). Its opening scene draws Russian Berlin in colors similar to those of Beckmann. “One cloudy but luminous day, towards four in the afternoon on April the first, 192_ . . . a moving van, very long and very yellow, hitched to a tractor that was also yellow, with hypertrophied rear wheels and a shamelessly exposed anatomy, pulled up in front of Number Seven Tannenberg Street, in the west part of

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Berlin” (Nabokov 1963: 11). The sense of estrangement marks Nabokov’s word picture: On the side-walk, before the house, .  .  . stood two people .  .  . the man, arrayed in a rough greenish-brown overcoat to which the wind imparted a ripple of life, was tall, beetle-browed and old, with the grey of his whiskers turning to russet in the area of the mouth, in which he insensitively held a cold, half-defoliated cigar butt. The woman, thickset and no longer young, with bowlegs and a rather attractive pseudoChinese face, wore an astrakhan jacket. (Nabokov 1963: 11)

This opening sequence closes with a gesture of literary estrangement typical to Nabokov. “Someday, he thought, I must use such scene to start a good thick oldfashioned novel” (Nabokov 1963:11). Not only does this sentence introduce a fictional narrator, Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev—“he thought”—but it also reframes the picture that Nabokov has just drawn in the reader’s mind; it makes it distanced and painterly. Nabokov de-automatizes our perception and introduces drive for the abject as a strategy to experience his work. Here is another example of how this technique works in The Gift: in the middle of the action, the reader follows Godunov-Cherdyntsev on a tram traversing the streets of the 1920s Berlin. As the tram stops, the narrator zooms on a pair of “charming silk legs,” which promised Fyodor a romantic encounter, only to disappoint him with “the face [that] was revolting” (Nabokov 1963: 157). This image betrays our expectations and de-automatizes our perception once again; it functions as an act of rupture and forces the abject. Here, however, the abject is “not an ob-ject facing me, which I name or imagine; nor is it an ob-jest, an otherness ceaselessly fleeing in a systematic quest of desire” (Kristeva 1982: 1). Here, the abject is a state of “being opposed to I” (1); it manifests as a narcissistic crisis, which appears only as something “seeming” (14). In the following, I examine how this drive for the abject is established in Nabokov’s theatre, in which a dramatic text “provide[s] an accurate copy or translation of the objective and stable, external world,” so the writer can “favour an imaginary theatre production staged in the reader’s mind” (Frank 2012: 66).

The Man from the USSR: Drama in Five Acts Commissioned by Yuri Ofrosimov, an artistic director of the Russian emigrant theatre company Gruppa in Berlin, The Man from the USSR

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premiered on April 1, 1927. It served, according to the Russian theatre critic Boris Brodsky, as “the very first dramatic depiction of the Russian émigré community” (cited in Babikov 2008: 579). Situated in the Russian “off-stage” of 1920s Berlin, the play tells a story of a Soviet spy, Kuznetsoff, who, as the result of his frequent trips between the Russian Berlin and the communist Moscow, loses historical and personal perspective. Having admitted his curse to be a servant of many masters, Kuznetsoff must return to Moscow once again. There, he understands he will most likely be imprisoned or killed. The Russian diaspora cheered Nabokov for writing this play, because, as Brodsky suggested, Nabokov realistically depicted the conflict between two camps—the camp of his fellow immigrants and the camp of the Soviets. Nabokov, Brodsky wrote, “does not mock, does not curse, he smiles sadly” (cited in Babikov 2008: 579). In Berlin, there is “lack of will, confusion, and chatty neurasthenia with a naive belief in miracles. Over there, in the Soviet Russia, there are clenched teeth, no sentiments and clever restraint” (Brodsky cited in Babikov 2008: 579). In its visualizations or word pictures, the play is quite eclectic, and thus, in its many influences, it refers to various traditions of the European avantgarde. For example, it widely cites the work of Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, who was the founding member of the group World of Art and Nabokov’s drawing teacher. The opening stage direction describes a typical bistro à la Russe in Berlin, which evokes Dobuzhinsky’s style and suggests Nabokov’s irony: “the proprietor has evidently tempted to give the tavern a Russian atmosphere by means of blue babas and peacocks painted on the rear wall above the strip of the window, but his imagination has stopped there” (Nabokov 1984a: 35). At the same time, located in the basement, with the rectangular windows under the ceiling, the bistro allows only half-views of only the passersby’s legs: From time to time legs pass from left to right and from right to left in the strip of the window. They stand out against the yellowish background of evening with a two-dimensional clarity, as if cut out of black cardboard. If one compared the action on stage to music, these silhouettes would serve as black quavers and semiquavers. (Nabokov 1984a: 35–6)

This image suggests expressionistic overtones as it refers to the overflow of the dead matter over the living. The cut-out silhouettes appear over the stage and thus dominate the living bodies; they echo Kristeva’s views of a human corpse, an ultimate signifier and an object of death, as tightly linked to the working of the abject. The corpse “upsets even more violently the one who confronts it as fragile and fallacious chance” (Kristeva 1982: 3); “seen without

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God and outside of science, [the corpse] is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life” (4). Theatrical experiments of Italian Futurists, and specifically Tommaso Marinetti’s 1919 Feet, come to mind as other possible borrowings of Nabokov’s eclectic style. In his short scenario, Marinetti engages with the threedimensionality of the fractured body. Feet consists of seven tableaux, each featuring two or three characters engaged in a domestic conflict. The opening stage direction reads similarly to the one in Nabokov’s play: “A curtain edged in black should be raised to about the height of a man’s stomach. The public sees only legs in action. The actors must try to give the greatest expression to the attitudes and movements to their lower extremities” (Marinetti 2010: 228). Although there is no factual evidence of Nabokov being familiar with Marinetti’s experiment, their theatre works share the same drive for distortion and fragmentation; they point to theatre’s wish to experiment with the performer’s body, to turn it either into a series of fragments or a canvas, and to make it unfamiliar and uncanny. Kristeva theorizes the Freudian uncanny as a problem of foreignness and a chance to reject one’s strangeness as one’s own (1991: 191–2). Historically, Kristeva explains, a foreigner has been identified “in negative fashion” as someone who “does not belong to the group, who is not ‘one of them,’ . . . the other of the family, the clan, the tribe” (95). With the emergence of the nation-states, the foreigner has become the one “who does not have the same nationality” (96) and hence falls beyond the duties and the privileges of the nation. The fascination (positive or otherwise) we associate with foreignness, Kristeva argues, has to do with only one type of difference that marks the figure of foreigner: the difference of not belonging (96). Sarah Ahmed makes a special point of identifying “stranger-danger” as the power of embodied encounter. The color of one’s skin, body type, smell, sound, postures, and gait—all material signifiers we produce—make it impossible to cross borders between the self and the Other, the self and the foreigner (Ahmed 2000: 50–1). Nabokov, as if forewarning Ahmed’s argument, chooses to introduce Kuznetsoff, a Russian spy in Berlin, by zooming in on his legs, shoes, and trousers, and only then focusing on his face: There appears, in the strip of window, a pair of legs, which first cross from left to right, then stop, then go in the opposite direction, then stop again, then change direction again. They belong to Kuznetsoff, but are seen in silhouette form, i.e. two-dimensional and black, like black cardboard cutouts. Only their outline is reminiscent of his real legs, which [in gray pants and sturdy, tan shoes] will appear on stage

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together with their owner two or three speeches later. (Nabokov 1984a: 39)

The bistro waiter’s line—“Those legs are heading here”—is followed by this stage direction: Pushing aside the cloth, Kuznetsoff appears and pauses on the top step. He is dressed for travel: gray suit, no hat, tan raincoat draped over his arm. He is a man of an average height with an unprepossessing cleanshaven face, with narrowed myopic eyes, his hair is dark and slightly thinning at the temples, and he wears a polka-dot bow tie. At first sight it is hard to tell if he is a foreigner or a Russian. (Nabokov 1984a: 39)

This description reveals Nabokov’s deep appreciation of the realistic traditions in dramatic writing, in which the detailed account of the character’s physicality serves as insight into their psychology and as the actor’s guide for characterization. It also explains why Nabokov preferred a closet drama over a theatre performance, as any reading of this play would better convey an image of Kuznetsoff “with an unprepossessing clean-shaven face” and “narrowed myopic eyes” (Nabokov 1984a: 39). The characters take Kuznetsoff for a German, but as soon as they hear him speak, they recognize him as one of their own. The body, which promised danger a moment ago, becomes domesticated and familiarized—a trope that Nabokov likes to frequently explore.2 Kuznetsoff ’s dramatic entrance also adds to the play’s heightened theatricality. Nabokov’s characters never appear on stage as they are. For example, Marianna, a Russian-German film star, enters the stage lips and legs first. These body parts “identify her as a Russian. She walks with a loose gait” (Nabokov 1984a: 48). Later, Marianna will fall in love with Kuznetsoff because of his theatrical walk across Berlin’s busy streets: Marianna  The traffic outside is atrocious, one car on top of the other, the policeman is performing all kinds of ballet gestures. The pedestrians are waiting for him to stop the traffic, and [Kuznetsoff], cool as cucumber, goes and crosses! In a straight line. The cars honk at him, the policeman freezes in amazement in a Nizinsky pose—no reaction, he goes straight across. And yet he looks so peaceable. (Nabokov 1984a: 64)

The scene Marianna describes is based on the device of narrative estrangement. To a certain degree, it echoes Brecht’s theory of theatrical alienation. In his program article “The Street Scene. A Basic Model for an Epic Theatre,” Brecht

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also uses a traffic incident to set up his model of epic dramaturgy. Similar to Kuznetsoff ’s offstage performance, as described by Marianna, Brecht’s actor/ demonstrator makes a clear distinction between their work of representation and the site of accident. The actor/demonstrator does not want their own “feelings and opinions” and those of a “demonstrated” to be merged. Like Kuznetsoff, Brecht’s actor/demonstrator achieves theatrical estrangement by paying special attention “to his movements, executing them carefully, probably in slow motion; in this way he alienates the little subincident, emphasizes its importance, makes it worthy of notice” (Brecht 1964: 122). Likewise, Nabokov’s estrangement manifests irony, which prevents the author from falling into the trap of sentimentality. By referencing the feet of the passerby in the first act and by appealing to the off-stage traffic of Berlin in the second, Nabokov uses visual synecdoche as his major performative force. Here, “the outside reality intrudes onto the stage with increasing force, leaving ever less room for the illusions and deceptions on the inside” (Frank 2007: 652). Theatrically, the instability of the exilic mise-en-scène and its disintegration in the characters’ lives are illustrated visually, through significant changes in the décor that surrounds them: The overt theatrical setting of the first two acts corresponds with the main characters donning their masks. In both acts, the whole space of the stage is still available to act out their illusions, self-delusions and deceptions. In the third act, however, the action shifts to a bare foyer, dominated by a grey wall which takes up a quarter of the stage. (Frank 2007: 650)

This theatricalization of the exilic world and resulting increase in the appeal for the abject find a special echoing in Nabokov’s other play, The Event.

The Event—A Dramatic Comedy in Three Acts The Event premiered on March 4, 1938, in Paris at the Russian Theatre and was directed by Yuri Annenkov. The production received different responses with some of Nabokov’s critics who praised the writer for creating a powerful criticism of human nature, similar in its effects to Nikolay Gogol’s The Inspector General, in which fear drives the action forward (Babikov 2008: 585–7) and in which people turn into grotesque figures, the automata of their own follies and sins. Unlike Gogol’s masterpiece, however, The Event offers no clear resolutions. Instead of the scene of punishment or

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mute scene for which Gogol’s play is widely known, the ending of The Event produces an effect of missed opportunity. Nabokov’s characters receive no chance to properly confront the fears that rule them. This ending and the play’s structure suggest another reading of The Event along the lines of the genre monodrama, in which an exterior conflict and performance of the play correspond to an interior conflict of its character(s), and where “an interior event on stage implies its primacy over the exterior event that masks it” (Babikov, Pechenik, and Johnson 2002/3: 152). The painter Troshcheykin and his wife Lubov are in the center of The Event. They live in mourning of the untimely death of their son and in fear of their past, neither of which they properly acknowledge or address. The play begins, much like Gogol’s masterpiece, with troublesome news. Barbashin, Lubov’s former lover who once threatened Troshcheykin’s life and was found guilty, has been suddenly released from prison. His sudden pardon creates chaos and terror among the characters, who now live in anticipation of Barbashin’s revenge. The story, however, finishes anti-climactically: instead of paying the Troshcheykins a visit and finishing his dark deed, Barbashin never shows up. Nabokov leaves the Troshcheykins to face their unresolved inner conflicts and loveless marriage; he gives them no reconciliation. The act of the abjection, as it often happens in Nabokov’s work, takes place in the implied or interior performance of Troshcheykin’s mind and in the imagination of his spectators. It becomes less figurative and turns into an artistic gesture, which can be read in dialogue with Kristeva’s statement that “all literature” (and dramatic theatre too) is “a version of the apocalypse” (1982: 207). Literature emerges “no matter what its sociohistorical conditions might be, on the fragile border (borderline cases) where identities (subject/ object, etc.) do not exist or only barely so—double, fuzzy, heterogeneous, animal, metamorphosed, altered, abject” (207). For an exilic writer like Nabokov, I would argue, literature (and by extension a dramatic text) serves as an archeological site to study these fuzzy or double selves. It helps the writer reveal his characters’ inner rigidities and follies by translating them into external signifiers of their automatized behavior, that is, revealing their disjointed selves through their puppet-like bodies and mechanized behavior. Accordingly, in its implied performance style, The Event activates theatricalist poetics, which is inspired by the world of puppets and the fantastic (Posner 2016: 3). It “celebrates itself as theatre” and reflects the artist’s “subjective perspective; playful manipulations of aesthetic distance; commenting on the making of theatre as one makes it, and the celebration of individual fantasy” (6). Here, the uncanny and the abject rule. Traces of symbolist and surrealist aesthetics, as well as Nabokov’s unresolved polemics with the realism of the Moscow Art Theatre (Frank 2012: 50–66), mark this text. In the play itself,

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Revshin compares Lubov to Chekhov’s heroines and to the Italian tragic actress Eleonora Duse, whereas Antonina, Lubov’s mother, likens their life to a theatre play in which the terrifying reality turns into a farce (Nabokov 1984b: 156, 170). Most importantly, “in a self-reflective twist,” The Event, a “play about a painter[,] continuously emulates and merges with the mode of painting, exploiting the affinities in the aesthetic attributes of theatre and painting” (Frank 2012: 78). Troshcheykin’s paintings and his visual imagination reveal his inner conflict—his inability to face the death of his child and the mortality of his own being; they turn into the sites of the abject. Troshcheykin’s unfinished portrait of his dead son emanates Picasso’s Girl On The Ball, whereas his other works, including “Old lady with laces and a white fan,” widely refer to the school of the Old Dutch masters and surrealism. Analyzing Nabokov’s The Gift, Yuri Leving suggested seeking a prototype to its fictional painter Romanov in the figure of the Russian émigré artist Tchelitchew (Leving 2011: 192–205) and his painting Hide-and-Seek. Adept at surrealism, Tchelitchew used a technique of simultaneous image to depict a simultaneity of parallel realities, the mirroring effect they produce, and the doubling upshot they create. In The Event, Troshcheykin practices a similar artistic strategy. Unlike Tchelitchew, however, he does not complicate things and uses two different canvases to make his simultaneous images. Troshcheykin explains: “Unbeknownst to Baumgarten I painted two versions of him simultaneously on the sly: on one canvas as the dignified elder he wanted, and on another the way I wanted him—purple mug, bronze belly, surrounded by thunderclouds” (Nabokov 1984b: 134). Here, Nabokov reemphasizes the unresolved inner conflict Troshcheykin carries; recognizing the falseness and the duality of the subject he must present, Troshcheykin runs away from the truth. If he dares to speak the truth of the ugliness of human nature, of the uncanny juxtaposition between who we want to be and how we are seen by the others, Troshcheykin will have to acknowledge and address the same ugliness in himself, that is, to recognize his own drive for the abject. Troshcheykin’s dramatic fault is exactly that—his inability and reluctance to face his own drive for darkness. At a later point, this simultaneity of parallel realities, of which Troshcheykin is aware but not able to confront, acquires a new performative or external dimension. Describing an ideal painting he yearns to make, Troshcheykin presents himself as a “suffering subject of the abject” (Kristeva 1982: 140–1). He tells his wife: Imagine that this wall is missing, and instead there is a black abyss and what looks like an audience in a dim theatre; rows and rows of faces, sitting and watching me. And all the faces belong to people whom I know

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or once knew, and who are now watching my life. .  .  . There they sit before me, so pale and wondrous in the semidarkness. My late parents are there, and my past enemies . . . all of them. (Nabokov 1984b: 132)

These invisible spectators of Trosheykin’s mind resemble the uncanny automata of many exilic figures in Nabokov’s work; they reflect the writer’s gaze as distant, playful, and free but also mournful and melancholic. The images that Troshcheykin’s inner eye creates are frightening; the figures of his dead parents and the people from his past emerge in the style of a dancemacabre, which suggests the expressionism of Kurt Jooss’s 1932 composition The Green Table, on the one hand, and the likeness of the statutes in Alexander Pushkin’s poetry, on the other. These statues come alive in Pushkin’s work in a fantastic innuendo that carries death. Statue—“a plastic representation” of a living person—foregrounds the “material of which the statue is made,” such as the stone, the bronze, and the gold (Jakobson 1987: 321). Pushkin’s statues function as the catalysts of the story’s action and plot. Much like body parts and body images of Nabokov’s theatre, they stand in opposition to the living matter, the dead bodies calling our attention to the possibilities of life, so “the boundary between life and immobile dead matter is deliberately obliterated” (Jakobson 1987: 326). Likewise, in his attention to the promise of death that a living body carries, Nabokov presents his characters as rigid androids. He suggests that fear can lead to the ossification of one’s body, if not death, so Troshcheykin’s imaginary universe emerges on his painterly stage as pitiful and grotesque. This morbid promise that Troshcheykin’s imagination holds is further realized in the scene depicting Antonina’s fiftieth anniversary. A gathering of the Russian intellectuals calls back to Max Beckmann’s work once again. Using a meta-theatrical gesture of a play-within-the-play, Nabokov leaves Troshcheykin’s guests frozen at the back of the stage, while our attention focuses on the painter and his wife placed upstage. Emotionally withdrawn from each other, the Troshcheykins suddenly find themselves in the mise-enscéne of an unexpected intimacy, brought together by the hand and will of the playwright. While helplessly gazing into the audience—“a dark chasm full of eyes, . . . watching [them], awaiting [their] destruction”—they suddenly realize that their life has turned into a “grotesque farce” (Nabokov 1984b: 213–14). Behind them is “an old theatrical flippery” of “the frozen masks of a second-rate comedy” (214); they all are disconnected from the truth of their reality, frozen in the space/time dichotomy of a farce that brought them together. The scene ends on a high, comic note: the news about Barbashin, who purchased a gun and supposedly embarks on his path of revenge, ceases this solemn moment, and the painted backdrop rises up again. The play

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closes in the most uneventful way; despite everybody’s fears, Barbashin never shows up, and the gun never fires. Much like in the Chekhovian universe, watching or reading The Event would presuppose turning tables back to the spectators, so it would make our “attention rebound from somewhat dubious offstage matters, travel back, and focus with increased intensity on the visible microcosm of the play” and, by extension, on our own selves (Nabokov, D. 1984: 8).

Conclusion In closing a chapter on the working of the abject in Vladimir Nabokov’s dramaturgy, it is important to remember that the condition of displacement remains one of the definitive markers of his work, and, thus, it is also important to recognize the power of personal estrangement that such experience grants the artist. In Nabokov’s case, this estranged perception forced the author to remove the onlooker from the scene at which they were looking. Not only does Nabokov remove the narrator/protagonist from the action by using a third-person singular pronoun “he,” but he also undermines the responsibility of representation. By using verbal grotesque to paint his characters, Nabokov presents Russian Berlin as pitiful, and so he exhibits his own gaze, the gaze of a traveler, as somewhat detached and reserved. He also constructs the situation of reception as an encounter with the abject, which calls the receiver’s attention to the mortality of their own body. Similarly, Kristeva argues that the act of the abjection defines the genre as abject literature, which emerged in reference to the destructions of the twentieth century. This literature appeared “where apocalypse and carnival left off ” (1982: 141). To reflect the precarity of its own world, this literature built a narrative canvas which was “constantly threatened”: “for, when narrated identity is unbearable, when the boundary between subject and object is shaken, and when even the limit between inside and outside becomes uncertain, the narrative is what is challenged first” (Kristeva 1982: 141). In its appeal to the readers’ synesthetic perception and its recognition of de-automatization of consciousness as one of the traits of exilic being, Nabokov’s work not only chronicled the condition of his own displacement, but it also spoke to the artistic search of many of his contemporary artists who lived through similar conditions of existential, physical, and political dislocation. Nabokov staged the trauma of migration by bringing the materiality of human experience, the corporeality of life, and the uncanny power of the abject to the forefront of his artistic and philosophical investigation. His contribution to the development of the abject literature, with its shattered linearity, “flashes, enigmas, short

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cuts, incompletion, tangles, and cuts,” as well as “language of violence, of obscenity, or of a rhetoric that relates the text to poetry,” is absolute (Kristeva 1982: 141). This chapter is a modest attempt to study the dramatic and theatrical devices Nabokov used to speak of displacement as “a crying-out theme” of the twentieth century and of making “a boundary-subjectivity” or the abject (141).

Notes 1 “Chelovek iz SSSR was written for a small theatre troupe in Berlin which shortly before had a modest success with the production of an Ostrovskii play, while the later dramas, Sobytie and Izobretenie Val’sa, were written for the Russian Theatre in Paris which experienced a relatively stable phase of success at the end of the 1930s” (Frank 2007: 630). Act One of The Man from the USSR was originally published in the Russian newspaper Rul’ in Berlin on January 1, 1927. The Event was originally published in Russkie Zapiski, in Paris, in 1938. 2 In The Gift, when Fyodor rides a tram, he is irritated by a passenger in front of him—to Fyodor, the passenger’s back looks too German. Fyodor’s attitude changes as soon as he sees this passenger unfolding a Russian newspaper. In this moment, Fyodor recognizes in this seemingly unfriendly and even ugly figure a fellow Russian, and the assumption makes this stranger familiar.

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Frank, S. (2007), “Exile in Theatre/Theatre in Exile: Nabokov’s Early Plays, ‘Tragediia Gospodina Morna’ and ‘Chelovek iz SSSR’,” The Slavonic and East European Review, 85(4): 629–57. Frank, S. (2012), Nabokov’s Theatrical Imagination, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Glynn, M. (2007), Vladi​mir N​aboko​v: Be​rgson​ian a​nd Ru​ssian​ Form​alist​ Infl​ uence​s in His Novels, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Jakobson, R. (1987), “The Statue in Pushkin’s Poetic Mythology,” in K. Pomorska and S. Rudy (eds.), Language in Literature, pp. 318–68, London: Harvard University, Belknap Press. Kristeva, J. (1982), Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. L. Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press. Kristeva, J. (1991), Strangers to Ourselves, trans. L. Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press. Lakoff, G. and M. Johnson (2003), Metaphors We Live By, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Leving, Y. (2011), Keys to The Gift: A Guide to Vladimir Nabokov's Novel, Boston: Academic Studies Press. Marinetti, T. (2010), “Feet,” trans. V. Kirby, in M. B. Gale and J. F. Deeney (eds.), The Routledge Drama Anthology and Sourcebook: From Modernism to Contemporary Performance, pp. 228–9, London: Routledge. Meerzon, Y. (2012), Performing Exile—Performing Self: Drama, Theatre, Film, Houndmills, Basingstoke and Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Nabokov, D. (1984), “Nabokov and the Theatre,” in V. Nabokov, The Man from the USSR and Other Plays, pp. 3–23, London: Harcourt Publishers. Nabokov, V. (1963), The Gift, trans. M. Scammell, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Nabokov, V. (1984a), “The Man from the USSR,” in V. Nabokov, The Man from the USSR and Other Plays, pp. 32–122, London: Harcourt Publishers. Nabokov, V. (1984b), “The Event,” in V. Nabokov, The Man from the USSR and Other Plays, pp. 123–264, London: Harcourt Publishers. Posner, D. (2016), The Director’s Prism: E. T. A. Hoffmann and the Russian Theatrical Avant-Garde, Chicago: Northwestern University Press. Sell, M. (2010), “Resisting the Question, ‘What Is an Avant-Garde?’,” New Literary History, 41(4): 753–74. Shapiro, G. (2009), The Sublime Artist’s Studio: Nabokov and Panting, Chicago: Northwestern University Press.

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Trauma, Ethics, and the Puppet Body in Handspring Puppet Company Dawn Tracey Brandes

A man in a dark suit stands in a dim pool of light, shadows playing over his creased face as he looks out at the theatre audience. He stands behind an upholstered easy chair used in the previous scene, but in the dim light, the back of the chair becomes a podium on which the man rests his hands. He is flanked by two men who look up at him with unwavering interest and perhaps concern. A screech of microphone feedback interrupts the silence, and the voice of an unseen man asks, “Can you hear my voice clearly?” The dark-suited man’s eyes search the gloom briefly for the source of the voice, and then he gives a small but definitive nod of his head. Moments later, his testimony begins, delivered in Xhosa and translated into English by a translator on stage left. The man looks out at the audience, gesturing subtly with his hands as he tells his story. When his son did not return home one night, he made the painful trip to the local mortuary in search of his son’s body. Upon arriving at the mortuary, “[t]he smell was terrible,” he tells us through the translator, dropping his eyes and taking two deep breaths before he is able to continue. When he saw his son’s body, which he identified by a mark on his chin, he could not grasp the horror of it. “Asingomntwana wam lo,” he repeats in increasingly emotional Xhosa, while the translator dryly translates, “This is not my child.” He stares out at the audience, his frame moving up and down with quick breaths, before he lowers his head once more and the light fades (Handspring 2016). While the words in this testimony were taken verbatim from South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), the man in the dark suit is not an apartheid survivor or an actor playing one. Rather, the man is a lifelike, Bunraku-style puppet, created by Handspring Puppet Company’s Adrian Kohler and cast, alongside other puppets and human performers, in Handspring’s 1997 production Ubu and the Truth Commission. Faced with the challenge of translating real trauma to the stage, the creative team opted to use puppets to portray apartheid survivors, while live actors portrayed the comparatively buffoonish perpetrators, Ma and Pa Ubu. Much of the

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scholarship surrounding this production emphasizes the alienating, Brechtian quality of puppetry; by drawing attention to their own theatricality, scholars contend, these puppets allow for the kind of spectatorial distance that Brecht prizes in his Epic Theatre. In this chapter, I want to complicate these articulations of puppet estrangement by considering the embodied nature of the puppet’s imagined life, especially in Handspring’s work. By drawing the audience’s attention to the specificity of the individual puppet body, and by pressing them into the service of what Handspring cofounder Basil Jones calls the puppet’s “Ur-narrative” from the moment the show begins, the witness puppets invite not a Brechtian reading but a phenomenological one. In particular, I will argue that the phenomenological ethics of Emmanuel Levinas help to explain how Ubu and the Truth Commission transforms survivor testimony into a performance that at once interrupts the audience’s totalizing empathy and arouses their sense of ethical responsibility to the individuals represented.

Handspring Puppet Company: History and Context Founded in 1981 by four graduates of the Michaelis School of Fine Art, including Basil Jones and Adrian Kohler, Handspring Puppet Company has grown from its early years as a traveling children’s theatre to one of the world’s most celebrated purveyors of puppetry for adult audiences. While they produced work in South Africa throughout the 1980s, their success on the international stage coincides with their collaboration with South African visual artist and animator William Kentridge, beginning in the early 1990s. Kentridge directed a trio of Handspring collaborations that recontextualized canonical European plays in South Africa: Woyzeck on the Highveld (1993), Faustus in Africa (1995), and Ubu and the Truth Commission (1997).1 All three plays featured the distinctive aesthetics of the collaborating artists: Kentridge’s characteristic charcoal animations and Handspring’s Bunrakustyle puppets, created by Adrian Kohler. The puppets are made from wood and plaster, with unpainted wooden faces that feature unsanded chisel marks and deeply evocative expressions. They are usually manipulated by two or more puppeteers, and puppeteers are often visible to the audience. The final installment of this loose trilogy, Ubu and the Truth Commission, draws most immediately on the social and political context of South Africa when the play premiered in 1997. Written by Jane Taylor and based on Alfred Jarry’s 1896 play, Ubu Roi, Ubu and the Truth Commission reimagines the farcical, violent, grotesque antics of the murderous King Ubu in the context of South Africa’s TRC. When the play premiered, the TRC—a series of

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broadcast testimonies by the survivors and perpetrators of apartheid—was still underway. The play juxtaposed the story of apartheid perpetrator Pa Ubu, played by actor Dawid Minnaar and written in the overwrought and scatological language of Jarry’s original text, with verbatim testimonies taken from the TRC broadcasts, performed by puppets. Taylor wrote in her introduction to the printed edition of the play that “Our purpose, in this play, was to take the Ubu-character out of the burlesque context, and place him within a domain in which actions do have consequences” (Taylor 1998: iv). While the only two non-puppet characters in the production are Ma and Pa Ubu, there are animal co-conspirator puppets who assist Ubu with his crimes: a three-headed dog named Brutus with a penchant for violence and a crocodile with a handbag for a body that Pa Ubu uses to hide evidence of his misdeeds (which Ma Ubu will later find and release for her own purposes). However, the beautifully wrought witness puppets are most significant for my purposes here. Several times over the course of the production, these puppets perform verbatim testimonies from the TRC hearings. Each witness puppet is manipulated by two puppeteers, one of whom provides the voice for the puppet’s testimony, which is offered in Zulu, Xhosa, or Sotho. Both puppeteers focus their concerned, empathetic gazes on the puppet, and their visible presence creates a visual reminder of the silent “comforter” figures who accompanied survivors during TRC testimonies (Coetzee 1998: 43). The stories relayed by the puppets are harrowing, each one focusing on the torture and/or murder of a loved one. In the second testimony, for instance, an elderly woman puppet describes being given a match and told to throw it on her gasoline-soaked son. (She resists, but his captors carry out the deed anyway.) The puppets look out to the audience as they speak, gesturing subtly with their hands to emphasize certain points but remaining fixed in the same spot on the stage. During each testimony, a human performer (who has operated puppets in an earlier scene, though not in this one) translates the witness’s words into halting English from a rectangular glass booth on the other side of the stage, which elsewhere in the show will serve as a shower stall that Pa Ubu uses to wash away his crimes. The translators’ affect in these scenes matches the solemnity of the testimonies, rather than the contrasting ribald buffoonery so prominent in the Ubu scenes.2 These testimonial scenes are importantly set apart from the rest of the action, interspersed between scenes of Ubu’s growing concern that his violent actions will be discovered. Interpolating verbatim testimonies of actual traumas into the play presented enormous performative and ethical challenges, as several members of the creative team acknowledged. Representing trauma onstage always raises questions about responsibility, but as Patrick Duggan argues, the theatre may also serve as a particularly rich outlet for grappling with

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traumatic experience. Duggan writes that trauma—whether physical or psychic—always contains an element of theatricality, insofar as the traumatic events themselves are “unknowable in the instant of their occurrence; they must somehow be codified, set in relation to other events and experiences, in order that they might be confronted again so that the survivor-sufferer can begin to process them towards some level of comprehension” (Duggan 2012: 15). In other words, the rehearsal or repetition of the traumatic event is essential to the survivor-sufferer’s ability to process an event that defied comprehension in its original form, and finding words to reclaim the experience might offer the survivor-sufferer a way of “work[ing] through” the original event (Duggan and Wallis 2011: 5). As such, Duggan argues that “because of the conditions of its operation—the encounter of live bodies that gaze upon each other—the theatre might be considered an ethically dense and complex space, especially when attending to questions of representations of trauma” (Duggan 2013: 147). Duggan conceives of theatre as a space where audiences can take on the role of “ethical witnesses” in the face of traumatic recollections, based partially on the co-presence of live performer and spectator bodies. Duggan draws in part on the relationship of ethical responsibility to the Other central to Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy when describing this kind of ethical witnessing. Duggan writes that “performance made in relation to or read through Levinasian ethics encourages the spectator to take ethical responsibility for the (represented) other, rather than simply viewing the performance as a reflection or exploration of personal subjectivity” (Duggan 2013: 155). In other words, performance has the capacity to arouse a sense of ethical obligation on the part of the spectator directed toward the co-present, represented Other on stage. I will say more about Levinas’s philosophy in relation to performance later in this chapter, but, for now, I simply want to raise the crucial question that Ubu and the Truth Commission poses: Does replacing live performers with puppets either improve or complicate the ethical exhortation made possible by theatrical depictions of trauma? For director William Kentridge, the central challenge of traumatic representation was the representation itself. In his director’s note, Kentridge describes how he sees puppetry as a way to circumvent this thorny issue: What is our responsibility to the people whose stories we are using as raw fodder for the play? There seemed to be an awkwardness in getting an actor to play the witnesses—the audience being caught halfway between having to believe in the actor for the sake of the story, and also not believe in the actor for the sake of the actual witness who existed out there but was not the actor. Using a puppet made this contradiction palpable.

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There is no attempt to make the audience think that the wooden puppet or its manipulator is the actual witness. The puppet becomes a medium through which the testimony can be heard. (Taylor 1998: xi)

For Kentridge, then, the use of puppets serves to safeguard the actual witnesses whose verbatim testimony has been incorporated into the play. Rather than allowing the survivor’s words to become absorbed into the narrative of the fictionalized production, the artificiality of the puppet sets the testimony apart, both bringing the language of the survivor onto the stage and highlighting their absence from it. Basil Jones also acknowledges the sensitivity required in bringing verbatim witness testimony to the stage. He writes that there is a danger that the testimonies could “become a kind of horror pornography” if handled improperly (Taylor 1998: xvii). While he does not expand on the term, “horror pornography” suggests a work that encourages an audience’s salacious desire to voyeuristically consume the pain of others. For Jones, that desire is interrupted by the introduction of puppets as witnesses. He writes that “puppets assist in mediating this horror. They are not actors playing a role. Rather, they are wooden dolls attempting to be real people. . . . They cross the barrier of the here and now and become metaphors for humanity” (Taylor 1998: xvii). Jones’s choice of words is telling. “Horror pornography” implies a representation that evokes a visceral response in its audience by tapping into their desires. Puppets, on the other hand, resist this kind of bodily arousal: they are only “wooden dolls,” functioning as “metaphors” rather than flesh and blood human beings. In other words, like Kentridge, Jones highlights the puppet’s artificiality as a protective mechanism that shields survivor stories from an excess of audience identification. Puppetry is praised for the amount of distance it is able to create between the spectator and the narrative.3 Given Kentridge’s and Jones’s emphasis on their puppets’ capacity for creating a productive distance between the audience and the emotional charge of the story on stage, or between the narrative being relayed and the bodies that actually experienced the events, it is not surprising that scholars see the influence of Bertolt Brecht’s Epic Theatre at work in Ubu and the Truth Commission. Brecht sought to create performances that would prevent audiences from identifying too closely with the characters on stage and encourage them to think critically about the sociopolitical structures driving his characters’ lives. Brecht advocated for performance choices that would create a productive distance between spectators and the performance, such as musical numbers, title cards describing locations rather than elaborate

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sets, and an approach to acting that emphasized the separation between the actor and the character they played. His insistence that the audience’s emotional attachment to the characters on stage must be challenged in order to encourage critical thought seems to echo Jones’s reference to “horror pornography,” both in its distrust of visceral (rather than intellectual) audience reception and in its emphasis on revealing the mechanisms of the theatre in order to interrupt the audience’s desire for a more engrossing, emotional form of spectatorship. Ubu and the Truth Commission contains a healthy dose of Epic influence. Ma and Pa Ubu’s buffoonish performance styles, the projected scene headings, and interjections of songs by Ubu and his three-headed dog of war, Brutus, all owe a debt to Brecht. Even the puppets’ visible manipulators are in line with Brecht’s concern to reveal the mechanisms behind stage artifice. Many scholars have noted the Epic inheritances of Ubu and the Truth Commission. Peter Ukpokodu calls the production a “multimedia event” that “both engaged and Africanized Bertolt Brecht’s Epic Theatre and its Verfremdungseffect” (Ukpokodu 2013: 408), and Yvette Coetzee and Mathias Thaler similarly take up the language of Brechtian alienation in their analyses of the piece. And yet, while the tempering of audience desire through the distancing tactic of artificiality may avoid some pitfalls of representing trauma on stage, it is precisely the estranging quality of the production’s puppets that draws criticism. Many of the same scholars who praise the Ubu and the Truth Commission puppetry for offering a unique aesthetic approach to trauma and testimony on stage simultaneously worry about the implications of “reducing” survivors to puppets. Marlin-Curiel articulates a common criticism of this element of Ubu and the Truth Commission when she writes that “the puppets reduce victims to ‘small’ people with no agency and permanently pathetic expressions on their faces. Puppets speak to us from that ‘other-space’ of death. The indication is that victims, like puppets, are dead to us until they speak” (Marlin-Curiel 2001: 83). Likewise, Shane Graham worries that using puppets to represent witnesses “reduces the victims to interchangeable parts. If their stories are all alike, because they lack agency, then the survivors themselves appear equally devoid of substance, and any puppet can speak any victim’s faceless tale of suffering” (Graham 2003: 20). These criticisms are valid only if we take Kentridge’s and Jones’s descriptions of the puppets’ distancing qualities at face value. However, I argue that this simple equation of puppets with Brechtian estrangement overlooks aspects of puppet performance that undermine these efforts. In fact, Jones’s own writing about Handspring’s puppetry complicates this equation and offers ways of understanding the universality of puppetry that

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do not seek to overcome its embodied, physical particularities. Indeed, there are three elements of puppetry that the Brecht-inspired readings of this performance fail to consider: agency, puppet life, and embodied thought.

Agency and Imagined Puppet Life To say that puppets lack agency is not a product of the Brechtian inheritance; Brecht, after all, would never have denied the agency of his performers, so important was it to him that the theatre reminded audience of his characters’ agency, as well as their own. Rather, concern over puppet agency is rooted in a belief about puppetry in general and about the material world at large—that is, the notion that puppets are objects devoid of agency, as opposed to the human subjects that control them. Puppeteers and puppetry scholars tend to resist this simple binary, insisting alongside vital materialist and object-oriented ontology scholars that material can have an agency of its own. As Dassia Posner writes in the introduction to The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance, puppetry is best understood as “the human infusion of independent life into lifeless, but not agentless, objects in performance” (2014: 5). To suggest that puppets are “dead to us until they speak” ignores both the agency of the objects themselves and the idea that a silent puppet can still “live” on stage, as Jones and others have suggested. This idea of the puppet’s imagined life is in direct tension with a straightforward Brechtian reading of Ubu and the Truth Commission. While it is undoubtedly true that puppetry draws attention to its own objectness, it often also paradoxically demands that its audiences work to imbue that object with not only a sense of agency but an independent life of its own. Puppetry scholar Steve Tillis calls this tension between perceiving the puppet as an object and imagining it to be alive “double vision,” and he identifies it as a constant feature of all puppet theatre, though some performances may highlight the tension more directly than others. Tillis writes that double vision “creates in every audience the pleasure of a profound and illuminating paradox provoked by an ‘object’ with ‘life’” (Tillis 1992: 65). Rather than simply guiding audiences toward critical reflection, the tension between object and life, according to Tillis, results in an emotive response. Indeed, while the audience always perceives the puppet as both object and living being, it is the imagined life of the puppet that implicates the audience in its creation. In Basil Jones’s essay “Puppetry, Authorship, and the Ur-Narrative,” Jones identifies a key difference between the human actor and the puppet on stage: “the primary work of the puppet is the performance

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of life, while for the actor this fundamental battle is already won. . . . The puppet’s work, then—more fundamental than the interpretation of written text or directorial vision—is to strive towards life” (Jones 2014: 61–2). Like other puppeteers and scholars, Jones privileges the puppet’s imagined life as part of the core definition of the puppet in performance.4 A successful puppet is, as Tillis suggests, “a theatrical figure, perceived by an audience to be an object, that . . . fulfills the audience’s desire to imagine it as having life” (Tillis 1992: 65). American puppeteer Bil Baird is even more direct about the role of the audience in imbuing the puppet with imagined life when he writes, “When the puppet performs before an audience, he begins to create a kind of life. I say before an audience, because only in the imaginations of an audience does a puppet begin to exist” (Baird 1965: 15). Taken together, these scholars and artists emphasize both the centrality of the puppet’s imagined life to the very core of its performance and the audience’s role in imagining that object into living, breathing existence. Thus, while it is true that puppets inevitably draw attention to their own artifice, it is also the case that the puppet calls on its audience to actively participate in the creation of its illusion, in order for the performance to work as a piece of puppet theatre. As Jones says, the puppet’s life is provisional and precarious; without the audience’s sustained willingness to imagine the object alive, the puppet fails in its Ur-narrative. This desire is a strong one; Kentridge says that in Ubu and the Truth Commission, he noted audiences consciously avoiding looking at the visible puppeteers, training their eyes instead on the puppets. He interpreted this as a desire to believe in the life of the puppet (Coetzee 1998: 42).

Embodied Thought Finally, Brechtian alienation runs counter to the embodied nature of puppet life in Handspring’s work. Jones connects this primary performance of life to what he calls “micromovements”—that is, “apparently minor quotidian functions” that constitute “a performance of Ur-narrative: the performance of life” (Jones 2014: 63). Breathing, for instance, is a micromovement; while it does not move the plot along, a puppet that appears to breathe fulfills its primary function of appearing to be alive. These micromovements are precisely the kinds of perfunctory gestures that would likely be overlooked if the performers were actors rather than puppets, but they are essential to the puppet’s Ur-narrative. The fact that Jones highlights the movement of the puppet is not merely a technical concern. It also offers some insight into the character of the

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puppet’s life on stage. Jones writes that when we watch a puppet move on stage, “the movement is the thought. Here we are talking about an embodied form of thinking, of thinking incarnate. . . . We assert that we refuse to make a separation between mind and body; that is, the mind that thinks, and the body that moves” (Jones 2014: 66). Jones borrows the language of “embodied thinking” from phenomenology, and, while he does not cite any philosopher by name, the phrase is particularly resonant with the work of the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. For Merleau-Ponty, we err when we think of thinking, imagining, or remembering as interior processes of the mind, ultimately divorceable from the physical world of our bodies and our surroundings. Who we are—the very core of our consciousness—is always already wholly entwined with our bodies in relation to our world. Jones’s description of micromovements fits easily within the framework of MerleauPonty’s philosophy. To emphasize the body’s centrality is to acknowledge that its infinitesimal movements and ways of engaging with the world are not simply an addendum to the thoughts and feelings of the subject but the key to the very core of who and what we are. A comparison of Jones’s micromovements and Brechtian gestus may shed light on the crucial difference between a Brechtian reading of puppet movement and a phenomenological one. Gestus—a gesture made by an actor that draws attention to the social relations of characters—often serves to undermine theatrical illusion. It draws attention to itself, and, in doing so, it points to a fact about the character that lies beyond the particularities of this individual, connecting them to the larger societal structure in which they exist. As Stanton B. Garner puts it, the body of the actor in Brecht’s theatre is objectified—that is, the actor’s body points to a series of relations, dynamics, and ideas beyond itself. Garner writes that “Brechtian Verfremdung is, to a striking degree, an estrangement of the body as phenomenal site” (1994: 164). Counterintuitively, I would suggest, the opposite is happening with the witness puppets in Ubu and the Truth Commission. Although the puppet is literally an object, it is not objectified in the way that Garner describes Brecht’s actors. Rather, Handspring’s puppets spring to life, thanks to the puppeteers’ minute manipulations of the puppet’s body, prompting the audience to imagine the subjective life of the puppet. The opening image of the production is representative of this dynamic (Handspring 2016). A puppet that will later serve as one of the TRC witnesses is positioned center stage, flanked by Busi Zokufa (later Ma Ubu) on her left, operating her body and left arm, and a male puppeteer crouched on her right, operating her right arm. The puppet is cooking—dumping invisible ingredients from a real bowl into a real silver pot, stirring the concoction with a wooden spoon, and raising the spoon to her lips to blow on and then

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taste her creation. The two puppeteers rest their hands on top of the puppet hand they each operate, melding human and puppet hands together so that they can easily grasp the objects that the puppet uses. Zokufa makes the soft sounds of blowing on and tasting the soup as she moves the puppet’s head almost imperceptibly, and we in the audience are meant to imagine the puppet to be gently smacking its unmoving lips. The puppet’s glistening black eyes stare out in the direction of the audience, and it is clear that she is not looking at us but rather searching her own thoughts, pondering the readiness of her dinner. We see her decide on a way forward, reach for a box of seasoning, sprinkle some into her pot, stir, and raise the spoon once more to her lips. Just then, Pa Ubu bursts onto the scene, kicking over the puppet’s cookware and prompting the male puppeteer to sweep the puppet off the stage and Zokufa to become Ma Ubu. The silent sequence with the puppet before Pa Ubu’s entrance lasts approximately one minute and twenty seconds. I have outlined this scene at some length because it beautifully encapsulates the way the puppet’s micromovements bring it to life. All of the puppet’s gestures—stirring, tasting, raising her eyes in thought—are recognizable and quotidian. We might say that these gestures do tell us something about the social situation of the character; she is part of the domestic sphere, and her labors are immediately upended by Ubu’s unthinking destructiveness, a dynamic that will be played out with much more brutal consequences when the testimonies of apartheid violence come to light later in the show. But prior to that sociopolitical reading of the scene, the audience observes what Jones calls the Ur-narrative: the life of the puppet itself. That life is established through the most banal, specific, particular motions of this particular wooden-and-plaster body, and the audience is transfixed by and implicated in the establishment of that life from the earliest moments in the show. We are left with a series of subtle contradictions. The puppets are clearly objects, but they perform as subjects, centering their agency at the heart of their performance. Our “double vision” asks us to hold together our constant awareness of the puppet’s artificiality and our equally powerful desire to imagine it into aliveness. The puppets function as “metaphors for humanity,” but their embodied, quotidian movements (along with the specificity and detail of their design) ground their life in their individual bodies. While the Brechtian model speaks to the puppet’s estranged qualities, that model does not make room for the totality of contradictory ways these puppets make meaning on stage. In order to make room for both puppetry’s otherness and its particularity, I propose that we turn our attention to the work of philosopher Emmanuel Levinas.

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Levinasian Ethics and the Puppet Working in the same phenomenological tradition as Merleau-Ponty, Levinas is a useful figure through which to understand the role of embodiment in puppet life. Levinas’s work takes ethics as its foundational principle, and he asks: What is our ethical relationship to the Other? The answer, for Levinas, cannot be predicated on sameness or empathy, which risks the Other being absorbed into the self (prosaically, the dreaded “I know how you feel”). Rather, Levinas champions a posture of “absolute alterity”—the acknowledgment that the Other’s experience remains fundamentally unknowable to the subject (Levinas 2002: 517). Like Brecht’s theory, then, Levinas’s theory insists on a recognition of otherness or difference. However, this is where the two theories diverge. Brecht employs difference—in this case, between the performer and the character they represent—in order to evoke a critical response from the audience. The response is not aimed at the character on stage; rather, the audience is prompted to question the character’s actions in order to illuminate the broader social or political structures that shape the character’s world. On the other hand, the distance that Levinas describes— this time between self and unknowable Other—does not prompt the self to abstract from the particular Other before them. Instead, Levinas insists that an ethical encounter with the Other, whose inner life one cannot fully know, necessitates the acknowledgment of one’s fundamental responsibility for the Other. His ethics insist that an encounter with the radical alterity of the Other is not abstract or generalizable; as Michael L. Morgan writes, the encounter with the Other is “concrete and particular . . . this woman’s responsibility and this man’s suffering” (Morgan 2007: 61). That is, the face of the Other does not simply “stand in” for a more originary otherness beyond the individual nor remind the self of a generalized responsibility to all others; rather, the face-to-face encounter is a call from one particular individual to another, which the self recognizes and affirms with a feeling of utter responsibility for the Other. I want to suggest that this notion of absolute alterity offers a way to theorize the witness puppets without resorting to the language of Brechtian alienation. As Mathias Thaler writes, in the Brechtian model, the audience’s “impulsive instinct to identify with the victims is repeatedly frustrated, with the effect that critical thinking and transformative self-reflection can hopefully gain traction” (Thaler 2018: 669). In the Levinasian model, on the other hand, the effect of the estrangement is not one of critical distance or self-reflection that moves beyond and through the individual but a careful attention to the specificity of the Other’s plight, which we cannot fully

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understand, but for which we can take responsibility. Duggan describes this Levinasian spectating in live-actor theatre using the language of embodiment; he writes that a so-called Levinasian performance “ask[s] us to engage with an ethical responsibility that extends beyond our own bodies and the bodies that immediately surround us in our personal lives” (Duggan 2013: 155). By drawing the audience’s attention to the specificity of the individual puppet body and by pressing them into the service of the puppet’s “Ur-narrative” from the moment the show begins, the puppet encourages the audience’s recognition of their responsibility to the Other.

Conclusion In Ubu and the Truth Commission, we can see a case study for how puppetry might enable a theatrical engagement with trauma that neither fetishizes the survivors nor deindividuates their suffering. That is not to claim that critiques of the production’s treatment of survivors are not valid; for instance, in placing the perpetrators Ma and Pa Ubu at the center of the story, the play does spend more time articulating their lives and motivations than it does fleshing out the witness characters, who are present only for their brief testimonies and are not given lives outside of those relived moments of trauma (Graham 2003: 18). However, the tendency to associate the use of puppetry necessarily with a Brechtian estranged reception ignores the powerful emotional attachment that the audience feels toward the puppet. This attachment is not empathy, which both Brecht and Levinas reject; rather, it is a sense of responsibility for the fragile life of this unknowable, foreign, but wholly unique puppet on the stage. We do not need to know details about the puppet in order to experience this sense of responsibility, just as absolute alterity suggests that we cannot truly know the Other. In its ability to evoke both distance and responsibility, puppetry models a kind of ethical witnessing that remains active in the face of the unknown.

Notes 1 These plays were not Kentridge’s only collaborations with Handspring Puppet Company. He would go on to direct Il Ritorno d’Ulisse (1998), Zeno at 4am (2001), and Confessions of Zeno (2002). 2 Busi Zokufa, who plays Ma Ubu, acts as translator and puppeteer in some of these testimonies, providing an interesting visual link between the otherwise quite distinct worlds of the witness puppets and the Ubu plotline. For more

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insight on Ma Ubu’s potential ability to traverse the worlds of both Pa Ubu and the survivors, see Marlin-Curiel (2001: 89–92). 3 The notion of puppetry as an answer to the excesses or limitations of live actors has a long history. Heinrich von Kleist’s 1810 essay “On the Marionette Theatre” is an early and influential entry into this genre of puppetry theory, and his claim that puppets are free from the selfconsciousness of live-actor performers was taken up by modernists like Edward Gordon Craig. In his essay “The Actor and the Übermarionette,” Craig praises puppets for their “noble artificiality” (Craig 2010: 259) and contrasts them favorably with actors whose desire for applause cheapens their art form. Relatedly, Jones’s reference to “metaphors for humanity” might remind us of Alfred Jarry’s fellow symbolist playwright Maurice Maeterlinck, who wrote marionette plays to comment on the “mysteries of the human soul” and on the supernatural forces shaping human existence (Segel 1995: 50). In each case, puppets are understood to insulate the performance from the emotional unpredictability of human performers’ particularities and desires. 4 For additional work on the imagined life of the puppet, see Tillis (1992); Francis (2012); and Bell (2014).

References Baird, B. (1965), The Art of the Puppet, New York: Macmillan Press. Bell, J. (2014), “Theory and Practice,” in D. Posner, C. Orenstein, and J. Bell (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance, 13–15, New York: Routledge. Coetzee, Y. (1998), “Visibly Invisible: How Shifting the Conventions of the Traditionally Invisible Puppeteer Allows for More Dimensions in Both the Puppeteer-Puppet Relationship and the Creation of Theatrical Meaning in Ubu & the Truth Commission,” South African Theatre Journal, 12(1–2): 35–51. Craig, E. G. (2010), “The Actor and the Über-marionette,” in A. Nisbet and J. Collins (eds.), Theatre and Performance Design: A Reader in Stage Design, pp. 257–63, New York: Routledge. Duggan, P. (2012), Trauma-Tragedy: Symptoms of Contemporary Performance, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Duggan, P. (2013), “Others, Spectatorship, and the Ethics of Verbatim Performance,” New Theatre Quarterly, 29(2): 146–58. Duggan, P. and M. Wallis (2011), “Trauma and Performance: Maps, Narratives, and Folds,” Performance Research, 16(1): 4–17. Francis, P. (2012), Puppetry: A Reader in Theatre Practice, New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

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Garner, S. B. (1994), Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Graham, S. (2003), “The Truth Commission and Post-Apartheid Literature in South Africa,” Research in African Literatures, 34(1): 11–30. Handspring Puppet Company (2016), Ubu and the Truth Commission. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=lVg​​T​_x5​3​​z14​&t​​=82s (accessed August 12, 2020). Jones, B. (2014), “Puppetry, Authorship, and the Ur-Narrative,” in D. Posner, C. Orenstein, and J. Bell (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance, pp. 61–8, New York: Routledge. Levinas, E. (2002), “Ethics and the Face,” in T. Mooney and D. Moran (eds.), The Phenomenology Reader, pp. 515–28, New York: Routledge. Marlin-Curiel, S. (2001), “A Little too Close to the Truth: Anxieties of Testimony and Confession in Ubu and the Truth Commission and The Story I Am about to Tell,” African Theatre Journal, 15(1): 77–106. Morgan, M. (2007), Discovering Levinas, New York: Cambridge University Press. Posner, D. (2014), “Introduction,” in J. Bell, D. Posner, and C. Orenstein (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance, pp. 61–8, New York: Routledge. Segel, H. (1995), Pinocchio’s Progeny: Puppets, Marionettes, Automatons, and Robots in Modernist and Avant-Garde Drama, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Taylor, J. (1998), Ubu and the Truth Commission, Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press. Thaler, M. (2018), “Reconciliation through Estrangement,” The Review of Politics, 80: 649–73. Tillis, S. (1992), Toward an Aesthetics of the Puppet: Puppetry as a Theatrical Art, New York: Greenwood Press. Ukpokodu, P. (2013), “Puppets as Witnesses and Perpetrators in Ubu and the Truth Commission,” in G. Salami and M. Blackmun Visonà (eds.), A Companion to Modern African Art, pp. 408–25, West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons.

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“Upside Down” The Rough Play of Narcissister’s Avant-Porn Rebecca Clark

What happens when a doll comes to life and does a striptease? How and why would it make you feel? Meet Narcissister, a Brooklyn-based artist, photographer, and “avant-porn” burlesque performer, whose work probes the erotics of the inorganic and the arousal of abstraction. To protect her anonymity, she is never seen without a signature plastic mannequin mask covering the front, and often also the back, of her head. She has informed interviewers that she is a former Alvin Ailey dancer and the child of a Moroccan Sephardic Jewish mother and an African American father from LA (Narcissister Organ Player 2018). She was briefly a contestant on the televised talent show America’s Got Talent (AGT). In the routine called “Upside Down” that brought her to television screens across the country, Narcissister walks onto a stage that has been set with a roughly six-foot-tall dollhouse (Narcissister 2011). She is wearing her customary mask and a floorlength blue velvet hooded cape over a long red dress with full skirts. Think a color-corrected Little Red Riding Hood. As Diana Ross’s “Upside Down” plays, the burlesque begins. Dancing a slow striptease, Narcissister removes the cape and turns around to reveal another face and a blue floral print on the other side of her dress. Then she flips into a handstand, skirts now covering her head, face, and torso, to reveal, between her legs, another head with yet another plastic face. Her legs are clad with long satin gloves, like her arms. She cartwheels during the rest of the song, over and over, removing more and more clothing from her two pseudo-torsos in the process. By the end, she stands before the judges on her feet, her red satin bra-clad back facing them while she holds the microphone up to the mask on the back of her wigged head and thanks them for their applause and kind words. The AGT number was a PG-13 version of stage pieces like “The Masquerade,” which Narcissister has performed in various Brooklyn burlesque clubs, in which she ends up completely naked aside from a harness that loops around her neck and down her torso to her crotch to keep her

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other “head” in place. Other performances include a reverse striptease entitled “Every Woman,” in which she starts out entirely naked aside from wig, mask, and merkin and redresses herself with items of clothing that she removes, one by one, from various bodily orifices. Across her performances, the mask remains constant, and she often wears multiple. Even the merkin, a vagina wig, is, as Ariel Osterweis explains, “itself a kind of mask,” which “emerged as a way for prostitutes and others to mask a pubic area affected by the hairlessness of venereal disease” (2015: 102). With her ever-present impassive plastic face, whether she’s cartwheeling her way through a topsyturvy striptease or pulling objects exotic and mundane from inside her body, Narcissister seems always to be presenting herself as an uncannily animated sex doll. Dressed—and undressed—as a life-sized doll, she dares her viewers to pick a script for how to play with her. In “Upside Down,” she becomes three sorts of inanimate pleasure-giving playthings at once: the sex doll, the Barbie, and the topsy-turvy doll, embodying often painful histories of racial and sexual objectification in America and creating arousal from them. Whose arousal, though? The crux of the affective ambivalence in her work is that it emphatically insists on the seemingly contradictory self-enjoyment of the inorganic—the radical narcissism of the object—upending the dynamics of arousal we might expect from burlesque. Just as Narcissister constructs her persona from objects that seem to demand to be played with, she also plays with us, presenting herself as an object both sinewy and smooth, starkly naked and stubbornly illegible. Most importantly, she plays with herself as this object. In short, Narcissister asks us: What happens when a sex doll starts pleasuring itself? In the sections that follow, this chapter will explore the pornographic dynamics of Narcissister’s citations of dolls in her performance, and what this work by a masked, mixed-race woman can tell us about the pornographic titillation of abstraction and the self-enjoyment of the object.

Pornographic Narcissister calls her genre of performance “avant-porn.” Linda Williams, who in many ways inaugurated the “serious” academic study of pornography with her 1989 monograph Hard Core, asks in her contribution to the 2014 volume Porn Archives about the tendency of academic “porn studies” to generally eschew the more formal “pornography” in favor of the vernacular “porn”: “How have we come to designate a field of academic study by this term? Why have we lost the graph in pornography?” (2014: 36). I want to take

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seriously the graphicness of Narcissister’s pornographic performances. The provocatively disparate implications of the term “graphic” can help us clarify the particular ambivalence that Narcissister’s work elicits. “Graphic” is a term with two very different connotations. On the one hand, “graphic content” is a warning label we attach to words and images that show too much, that overshare. Here, graphic pertains to a provocative, upsetting, unsettling excess and almost invariably labels works that inadequately temper their sexual or violent content. This usage dates to the mid-nineteenth century but gained significant currency with the mass marketing and distribution of media with inflammatory content across multiple platforms after the 1960s. This graphic is gross, gooey, sticky, shocking. On the other hand, and at the far end of the spectrum, “graphic” is not about oversharing but about organizing—representing information on a coordinate plane, creating visual images of complex data, and mapping and appraising people and places from a safe distance. This sort of “graphic” is about schematic calculation, antiseptic detachment, diagrammatic abstraction, and disinterested evaluation. The graphic, seen doubly in this way, bifurcates—or goes somewhat topsyturvy—into the perplexing parallel play of the “graph-ick.” Helen Hester argues that “adult entertainment and the pornographic should not be viewed as one and the same thing” (2014: 184). She is invested in articulating “a distinction between pornography as a representational genre and pornography as a capacious cultural concept” (2014: 14). She describes the “slippage” that the term “pornographic” has undergone in recent years. Referring to increasing popular coinages such as “war porn,” “torture porn,” “grief porn,” and, even, “food porn,” Hester notes that porn has become “a kind of descriptive suffix,” abstracted from its original meaning, used to describe a panoply of texts and scenarios, “few of which actually put the sexual body front and center” (2014: 14). This expanded pornographic carries with it a distinct affect: “it is not preoccupied with eliciting a genitally sexual response but with provoking more general forms of queasy jouissance—horror, anger, sorrow, and a certain nauseated fascination” (Hester 2014: 185). What Hester terms the “queasy jouissance” of porn tells some but not all of the stories of Narcissister’s rough play. The rest of the story unfolds if we take seriously each type of doll into which Narcissister’s performances transform her body: the sex doll, the Barbie doll, and the topsy-turvy doll.

Animating the Sex Doll The sex doll is, in many ways, the pornographic object par excellence.1 Preoccupied with texture, surface, and access to otherwise guarded interiors,

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it uncannily shows how the desire to know and have a body sexually through fixation/fixity produces confusion between subject and object, person and thing, natural and artificial. In performances like “Upside Down,” Narcissister casts herself into the role of just this sort of erotic doll. The history of the sex doll is shrouded in rumor, speculation, and myth. Histories of the sex doll often take as their starting point the myth of Pygmalion, who so loved his own sculptural creation, the marble statue Galatea, that Aphrodite brought it/her to life for him to consummate his desire. Pygmalion lives on in the psychological profession via the disorder dubbed “Pygmalionism,” first discussed at length by Iwan Bloch (often dubbed the first sexologist) in 1908 and defined today as “the condition of loving a statue, image, or inanimate object; sexual attraction towards such an object. Also: love for an object of one’s own making” (“Pygmalionism, n.” 2017). In the seventeenth century, French and Spanish sailors would take crude fornicatory dolls made of cloth or leather and known as “dames de voyage” or “dama de viaje” with them on long sea voyages (Ferguson 2010: 16). The original dames de voyage only survive in stories, one of which features that champion of the disembodied mind, René Descartes. The metaphysician is reputed to have carried with him on at least one mid-seventeenth-century sea journey a lifesized metal and leather doll named “Francine,” which he referred to as his daughter (Ferguson 2010: 16). The Japanese, who encountered these sorts of dolls through frequent trading with the Dutch East India Company, called them datch waifu (Dutch wives). By 1908, Bloch refers to French sex dolls made of rubber and plastic, replete with “a ‘pneumatic tube’ filled with oil” used to imitate “the secretion of Bartholin’s glands” and lubricate the artificial female genitals (1928: 648–9). Moving from the titans of Enlightenment and colonial expansion into the twentieth century, a popular urban legend holds that Nazi Germany designed the first “modern” sex dolls during the Second World War but abandoned the project in 1942. “[Heinrich] Himmler was allegedly concerned about the debilitating effect of sexually transmitted diseases picked up by his troops from foreign prostitutes of inferior races.” His solution was to commission an army of gynoids to accompany his army of soldiers. They were to be “housed in a series of ‘disinfections-chambers’” and “reflect the Nordic/Aryan beauty ideal, with pale skin, blonde hair and blue eyes” (Ferguson 2010: 24–5). The Nazi sex doll allegedly aimed both to protect the sexual health and to train the sexual tastes of the Reich’s conquering ground troops. In the 1960s, the now-iconic inflatable sex doll first appears in the United States in mail order advertisements printed in men’s magazines. In the 1980s, a West German company won a case in the European Court of Justice to allow it to import inflatable sex dolls into Britain for the first time (Ferguson 2010: 30).

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Anthony Ferguson describes the contemporary sex doll as “woman in her most objectified form .  .  . never more than the sum of its fully functional parts. A woman rendered harmless, . . . immobile, compliant, and perhaps most importantly, silent” (2010: 5). Debates surrounding sex dolls tend to be analogous to those around the bodies and actions depicted in hard core video pornography. Are these depictions of women as sexual objects inherently violent themselves? Following Robin Bernstein’s notion of the scriptive thing, “an item of material culture that prompts meaningful bodily behaviors” (2011: 71), do they encourage their users to enact or mimic certain violent actions? Are they just good dirty fun? The sex doll focuses these myriad debates about pornography and the pornographic to more specific questions about the interplay between guts and geometry—flesh and fabrication— that are at the heart (pulsing or plasticized) of the affective ambivalence of a doubled sense of the “graphic” (graph-ick). The sex doll can be uncanny, repulsive, titillating, or hilarious. Narcissister’s performances up the ante of these dynamics, as she animates the form in all of its antiseptic sensuousness, raising larger questions about the arousal of inorganic abstraction and the self-possession (auto-Pygmalionism, even?) of objects. The sex doll seems to aim at a verisimilitude—visual, tactile, and functional—in which “the aim of the image is to displace reality” (Ferguson 2010: 5). It is a representation—or replacement—however, that is always skirting both the pitfalls of the uncanny valley and ethical censure (Mori, MacDorman, and Kageki 2012). Sex dolls depict women too well for comfort while turning a mirror back unflatteringly upon the men who consume them. “The image may be of a woman,” Steven Connor argues, “but what it unmistakably shows is male desire, objectified and made immediately recognizable and mechanically predictable” (2015: 25). There is some debate in scholarship on sex dolls, though, about whether “reality” or “verisimilitude” is really the aim of the object at all, or the only source of its titillation. In a study that focuses on the fetish of the “erotic doll” in both the context of commercial sex dolls and the work and lives of prominent twentieth-century artists including Oskar Kokoschka, Hans Bellmer, and Marcel Duchamp, Marquard Smith argues that “the erotic doll or mannequin is held up not as a site of verisimilitude and mimeticism but as a fabricated form organized or arranged, and understood to draw attention to its own distorting, fragmentary, partial and anagrammatical nature” (2014: 25). Narcissister’s signature mask, and her commitment to never being seen without it, places her in the mold of just the sort of life-sized plaything Smith theorizes: erotic because of, not in spite of, its obvious fabrication. The plastic mask promises anonymity, replicability, mass production, and interchangeability—in short, the protections and provocations of abstraction.

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In concert with her solo performances, Narcissister also launched a community project in 2013 entitled Narcissister Is You, which her website describes as: many different sisters (including male sisters) embodying the Narcissister character. Fundamental to this project is the idea that Narcissister can be anyone, she is universal, reflecting that on some level we are all one, that radical narcissism/ radical self-love can be found in our quotidian existence and that it is a concept worth cultivating. Participants are asked to document themselves and their friends wearing the Narcissister mask and doing anything that feels radically narcissistic or radically self-loving. The video installations are comprised primarily of these self-shot video clips which are edited together and set to original music by Narcissister and Earthmasters. (Narcissister, n.d.)

Narcissister’s mannequin mask is, in the words of the project, “universal.” The procedures of the project are, to borrow Smith’s term, anagrammatical. The function of the mask in the Narcissister Is You project feels like a fleshedout version of comics scholar and cartoonist Scott McCloud’s theory of the cartoon face: that the more cartoonish or abstracted a drawn face, the closer it comes to being what McCloud calls an “icon” (1994: 27), the extreme version of which is the simplest smiley face—the easier it is for readers (through an action he calls, evocatively, “masking”) to occupy the subject position of a comics character as they read or “to mask themselves in a character and safely enter a sensually stimulating world. One set of lines to see. Another set of lines to be” (1994: 43). Narcissister’s wearable, circulating mannequin mask seems to offer similar sorts of lines (guidelines, scripts, even lifelines), letting the various Narcissisters who wear it both hide and expose themselves. It revels in the vexed dynamics between flesh, face, and fabrication, particularly for bodies usually not granted a default universalism or abstraction (those not white, cis, and male)—offering no solution of or for this mixture but, rather, a medium for temporary, ecstatic suspension. Narcissister’s description of the mask and its power plays against the ways in which, in Phillip Brian Harper’s words, “abstraction itself has historically been detrimental to black people, both directly and collaterally, constituting them as a dehumanized generality thus eligible for enslavement (among other things) and underwriting an exalted generic national personhood from which they have typically been excluded” (2015: 62). The mask’s power seems to work by an alchemy of incomplete anonymizing, somewhat paradoxically providing its wearers the cover to

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uncover, access to a luxurious sort of abstraction through an emphasis on their own fleshy particularity as they engage in “radically self-loving” acts.

When Topsy Met Barbie Uri McMillan ties this “universal” mask to a particular set of material objects—the dolls that Narcissister’s “Upside Down” performance cites: “she wears her signature double-faced mask—eerily resembling a lifeless Barbie— on her head as well as over her nether regions, repeatedly contorting her body to reveal all four mask faces; in swirling petticoats, she resembles a modern-day topsy-turvy doll come to life” (McMillan 2015: 220). First appearing in 1959, Barbie was named after the daughter of its creator, Ruth Handler, but modeled off a German doll based on a comic strip prostitute named Lilli.2 In Barbara Johnson’s words, she “possessed the secrets of adult femininity seemingly without any of the awkwardness, messiness, or embarrassment experienced by her human owners. The flavor of her past as a sex toy for men doesn’t damage her appeal; on the contrary, it seems to guarantee her heterosexuality” (2008: 165). With neither nipples nor anything but smooth plastic at her crotch, Barbie is a thing of sterilized stereotyped white womanhood, ready to teach girls how to dress, accessorize, and possibly—at that sweet spot of preteen backlash—dismember her.3 The provenance of the topsy-turvy doll—a two-in-one with full skirts that hide not legs, but another torso of the opposite color, revealed only when you flip her over—is far older and harder to pin down, but most scholars agree that she/they/it was originally sewn by enslaved Black women in the antebellum south (Bernstein 2011: 20). The topsy-turvy doll predated the Topsy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but, after the success of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, it was for a time commercially produced as the Topsy-Eva doll. Many have argued that the topsy-turvy is both unsexed—no legs, much less genitals to go between them—and obscene—scripting you to peek perpetually under her skirts. The sinister, subtly sexual “cuteness” of the topsy-turvy doll is evocative of Sianne Ngai’s study of that aesthetic category, in which she points out that “cuteness is a way of sexualizing beings and simultaneously rendering them unthreatening” (2012: 72). Citing Lori Merish, Ngai notes that “if cuteness is a ‘realm of erotic regulation (the containment of child sexuality) that offers “protection” from violence and exploitation,’ it is clearly also a way of bringing that sexuality out” (Merish 1996: 189, cited in Ngai 2012: 60). According to Merish, this comic and sexualized cuteness has also been “consistently racialized” in America, and “arguably evolved in close

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association with minstrelsy” (1996: 263). Though its lack of genitalia can be read as “prudish” (Sánchez-Eppler 1993: 133), the topsy-turvy seems to beg to have its skirts lifted regardless of whether black or white torso is being displayed on top, and its very alternation of black and white—separate but mirroring—alludes to (even as it polices) “racial mixing, sex, and rape within the plantation system” (Bernstein 2011: 20). According to Ngai, cuteness is “an aestheticization of powerlessness (‘what we love because it submits to us’)” (2012: 64). The sex doll is imperfectly cute—too life-like and firm to suit that aesthetic’s squishy ideal. Yet its submissiveness and muteness arouse an analogously ambivalent affective force, one which weds the desires to dote and to destroy: “The cute object’s exaggerated passivity seems likely to excite the consumer’s sadism or desire for mastery as much as her desire to protect and cuddle” (Ngai 2012: 65). Scholars have argued that sexual violence is encoded into the topsy-turvy doll, which has been read as “enslaved women’s polyvalent representation of their experiences of sexual violation” (Bernstein 2011: 81). At the same time, it voices a sort of resistance through its very existence, which “smuggled enslaved women’s thoughts and anger into the inner sanctum of southern domesticity” (Bernstein 2011: 20).

Abstraction and Arousal Combining hard and soft, abstraction and viscerality, both in her physical materials and in her citational precursors (sex doll, Barbie, topsy-turvy), Narcissister dares her viewers to pick a script for how to play with her. Her performances seem creepy, cold, floppy, confrontational, awkward, and titillating all at once. They are also not seldom hilarious. Sex is funny, and sex dolls are particularly funny. The most graphic (or graph-ick) depictions of sex, in the dual senses of both explicit and graph-like, are also those in which bodies engaged in or contemplating sex are rendered most doll-like— their actions most mechanically scripted. These are frequently moments of often quite dark and unsettling humor. The comedy of Narcissister’s performances is that of the animated sex doll, a categorical incongruity à la Schopenhauer (1907) that also embodies Bergson’s famous definition of the comic as “something mechanical encrusted on the living” (1914: 37). Osterweis characterizes Narcissister’s surface and texture play in just this way: “By donning hard masks and inserting doll heads into various orifices, . . . Narcissister places the brittle surface of the racist kitsch object . . . onto—and into—the mutable, muscular surface of a live fleshly body”

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(2015: 109). The comedy of Narcissister’s performances is, like much comedy, shaded somewhat heavily by discomfort, with a particularly racialized valence. When Narcissister has herself talked about the mask, the crux of her (sex, Barbie, topsy-turvy) doll play, she tellingly speaks not just about anonymity but also about animation: Narcissister is nobody. It is a plastic mask that is only animated by the person who is wearing it. The mask becomes a mirror and it’s very rare for artists to make themselves a mirror. It’s so much more common that we get absorbed into them. Into their subjectivity. (Keckler 2014, emphasis added)

Racial animatedness, as theorized by Ngai, haunts the Topsy side of the TopsyEva doll that Narcissister plays (with). The figure of Topsy from Uncle Tom’s Cabin epitomizes for Ngai how “the affective ideologeme of animatedness foregrounds the degree to which emotional qualities seem especially prone to sliding into corporeal qualities where the African-American subject is concerned, reinforcing the notion of race as a truth located, quite naturally, in the always obvious, highly visible body” (2005: 95). As “the mask becomes a mirror,” Narcissister both jumpstarts and shortcircuits the usual objectifying dynamics of racial animatedness by exposing nearly all of her body while cutting off visual and, with it, affective access to her own “real” face, presenting us only with smooth flatness. “Narcissister doesn’t exist unless someone animates her. I put her on for rehearsals a few times a week. And I embody her, of course, when I perform or when someone else performs her for my work. It satisfies me that there’s not much density to her beyond this” (“A Night Out with Narcissister” 2018). She embraces while refusing to recuperate the dynamics of “thinging” the racialized body that Ngai identifies as characteristic of animatedness. Citing the examples of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s treatment of her fictional character, Uncle Tom, and William Lloyd Garrison’s preface to the 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Ngai notes that the connection between animation and affectivity is surprisingly fostered through acts resembling the practice of puppeteering, involving either the body’s ventriloquism or a physical manipulation of its parts. Yet the “thinging” of the body in order to construct it, counter-intuitively, as impassioned is deployed by both abolitionists as a strategy of shifting the status of this body from thing to human, as if the racialized, hence already objectified body’s reobjectification, in being animated, were

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paradoxically necessary to emphasize its personhood or subjectivity. (2005: 99)

Narcissister’s auto-thinging thumbs its/her nose (and other parts) at the contortions of suing for personhood through emotive excess that have historically attended the racially animated body. She’s a self-satisfied/ satisfying thing, not a sentimental object to be saved. It might just as easily be said that the plastic mask not only is animated by the person who is wearing it but, turned outward, unsentimentally animates those who are watching it—arousing feeling without ever giving her own away. Speaking, fittingly, of her character in the third person, Narcissister declares: “She can’t really be absorbed. She always has this additional surface. That’s how she keeps her power” (Keckler 2014). This insistence on surface is key to her play with the pornographic, where a lust for knowledge of interior sensations morphs into an obsession with applying various epistemological grids to more visible exteriors. Williams argues that “the principle of maximum visibility operates in the hard-core film as though [Eadweard] Muybridge’s measurement grids were still in place, trying to gauge with increasing exactitude the genital equivalent of ‘at / which point in a leap the female breast / is highest’” (1989: 49). If pornography has classically been obsessed with charting and capturing the mystery of female orgasm, Narcissister’s insistence on only showing a “face” that is a mask qua mirror stymies the satisfaction of one of the key pornographic urges. Put another way, Narcissister confronts viewers with an affective problem of dimensionality. Her porno-graph-ick performances, which would incorrectly be described as animated grotesques, transmute her various titillating openings (the grottoes of the classical grotesque) into both passageways and Wile E. Coyote-esque trompe l’oeils—2D and 3D at once, exposing tantalizingly gross interiors and bating their would-be excavators to run violently headlong smack into unrelenting surface (Goodwin 2009: 7).4

Conclusion The arousal of Narcissister’s “avant-porn” performances is strange, hilarious, even discomfiting. The discomfort and strangeness come from her citation of three sorts of pleasure-giving playthings—the sex doll, the Barbie, and the topsy-turvy doll. These dolls carry with them histories of racial and sexual objectification in America, as well as strands of submerged subversion. They script actions both tender and violent, seemingly demanding both play and punishment. Narcissister cites and situates herself as one of them in the

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fullness of their ambivalence—pulling in multiple affective directions at once, even while sutured together into one object. Her citation hinges on the omnipresent mask. Immovably affixed to the face of a mixed-race woman (or, as in the Narcissister Is You project, any number of her nonnormatively bodied proxies), the Narcissister mask holds up a mirror to, without attempting to reconcile or recuperate, the fraught intimacy of abstraction and arousal, objectification and titillation, in both Narcissister’s citational precursors and her contemporary American milieu. By becoming a dancing, cartwheeling, stripping doll, Narcissister makes her performances doubly graphic—graph-ick—stirring up a heady mix of explicitness, anonymity, animation, and abstraction. The power of her mannequin mask, that “mirror” that is yet one of many layers of un-absorbable “additional surface” that make up the Narcissister persona, is the power of abstraction. It is emphatically not really a face at all but the plastic abstraction of one. Perhaps most famously in theories of the face and its ethics, Emmanuel Levinas vests the human face with ethical transcendence, calling “the face of the other . . . the most naked part of the human body,” the part that offers “an absolute resistance to possession,” and, because of this naked power of recognition, it is also the only true target of violence (1979: 197). Donning a plastic abstraction of a face, Narcissister doubles down on and troubles the Levinasian ethics of the face. Offering us an abstracted, inorganic standardization of the notion of face in the lineage of Barbie and her ilk—all of which, as we’ve seen, are objects that are made to be possessed yet also subtly script violence—Narcissister harnesses a different sort of power. Covering her “most naked part” while letting the rest hang out, she embodies, instead, what Benjamin calls “the vital nerve” of consumer fetishism: “the sex appeal of the inorganic” (1999: 8). Returning us to theories of the sex doll whose titillation resides in its constructed and anagrammatic rather than mimetic nature, arousal in Narcissister’s work is as much about plastic as it is flesh. Yet, its resistance to possession—anyone can animate Narcissister, but no one owns her—may reside precisely in its rejection of organic recognition.5 Her work’s play with arousal, objectification, inorganicism, and abstraction always exists within the context of American structures and histories of racialization. Returning to Phillip Brian Harper’s analysis, abstraction has long entailed for Black people in America “their conceptualization in collective terms as a massified source of relatively skilled and fully expropriable labor, and in individual terms as entities more or less interchangeable with one another and fully exchangeable for other items held as property” (2015: 31). Narcissister’s invocation of the Topsy-Eva doll cites this historical baggage of abstraction, while the character’s mannequin mask qua mirror embodies

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(em-things?) Ngai’s definition of the abstract as “closely associated with the nonsensuous and unparticularized” (2015: 34). By accessorizing her particular nakedness with this piece of aestheticized, plasticized abstraction, Narcissister un-particularizes the former while sensualizing the latter, to destabilizing—and frequently arousing—effect (and affect). She becomes a special sort of pornographic object, in which the visceral and the abstract do not so much seamlessly meld as rub provocatively up against one another—and viewers are left to figure out how and what to feel for (and about) themselves. Regardless, Narcissister wants you to know the friction of this rough play is working for her. From her name to her Narcissister Is You project manifesto, this avant-porn performer is all about self-enjoyment. The crux of the affective ambivalence in her work is that it emphatically insists on the self-enjoyment of the inorganic. She is the object that arouses itself. She is the sex doll who’s learned how to masturbate.

Notes 1 For a more extended analysis of the relationship between pornography and the slapstick humor of sex dolls, through an analysis of Fran Ross’s 1974 novel Oreo, see my article “Gag Reflexes: Sex Doll Slapstick and Fran Ross’s Oreo” in Post45 (Clark 2020). 2 “Legend has it that she was initially offered for sale to gentlemen who frequented the bars and tobacco shops of Hamburg’s Reiperbahn, a notorious German red-light district. . . . While the Lilli doll was not a penetration toy, she was created as a type of pornographic caricature” (Ferguson 2010: 28). 3 For more on the fraught history of attempts to create racially diverse Barbies, see Ann Ducille’s article “Black Barbie and the Deep Play of Difference” (2003). 4 See https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=4iW​​​vedIh​​WjM (Jones 1949). 5 Many have tied Benjamin’s writing on consumer fetishism to the commodification of female bodies in hard-core porn and fashion photography alike. See, for instance, John Stratton’s The Desirable Body: Cultural Fetishism and the Erotics of Consumption (1996).

References “A Night Out with Narcissister” (2018), Interview. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​ w​.int​​ervie​​wmaga​​zine.​​com​/c​​ultur​​e​/a​-n​​ight-​​out​-w​​it​h​-n​​arcis​​siste​r (accessed October 22, 2020).

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Benjamin, W. (1999), The Arcades Project, trans. H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin, Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Bergson, H. (1914), Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. C. Brereton and F. Rothwell, New York: The MacMillan Company. Bernstein, R. (2011), Racial Innocence, New York: New York University Press. Bloch, I. (1928), The Sexual Life of Our Time in Its Relations to Modern Civilization, New York: Allied Books. Clark, R. (2020), “Gag Reflexes: Sex Doll Slapstick and Fran Ross’s Oreo,” Post45: 4. Available online: http:​/​/pos​​t45​.o​​rg​/20​​20​/01​​/gag-​​refle​​xes​-s​​ex​-do​​ll​-sl​​apsti​​ck​ -an​​d​​-fra​​n​-ros​​ss​-or​​eo/ (accessed October 22, 2020). Connor, S. (2015), “Guys and Dolls,” Women: A Cultural Review, 26(1–2): 129–42. Ducille, A. (2003), “Black Barbie and the Deep Play of Difference,” in A. Jones (ed.), The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, pp. 337–48, New York: Routledge. Ferguson, A. (2010), The Sex Doll: A History, Jefferson: McFarland & Company. Goodwin, J. (2009), Modern American Grotesque: Literature and Photography, 2nd ed., Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Harper, P. B. (2015), Abstractionist Aesthetics: Artistic Form and Social Critique in African American Culture, New York: New York University Press. Hester, H. (2014), Beyond Explicit: Pornography and the Displacement of Sex, Albany: State University of New York Press. Johnson, B. (2008), Persons and Things, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jones, C. M. (1949), “Looney Tunes (Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner): Fast and Furry-ous,” Warner Brothers. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​ /w​​atch?​​v​=4iW​​​vedIh​​WjM (accessed October 22, 2020). Keckler, J. (2014), “The Real Face of Narcissister: A Conversation with the Woman Behind the Mask,” Vice. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.vic​​e​.com​​/ en​_u​​s​/art​​icle/​​exmqj​​a​/an-​​inter​​view-​​with-​​n​arci​​ssist​​er​-40​5 (accessed October 22, 2020). Levinas, E. (1979), Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. A. Lingis, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. McCloud, S. (1994). Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, New York: Harper Perennial. McMillan, U. (2015), Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance, New York: New York University Press. Merish, L. (1996), “Cuteness and Commodity Aesthetics: Shirley Temple and Tom Thumb,” in R. Thomson (ed.), Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary, pp. 185–203, New York: New York University Press. Mori, M., K. F. MacDorman, and N. Kageki (2012), “The Uncanny Valley,” IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine, 19(2): 98–100. Narcissister. (n.d.), “Narcissister Is You,” Narcissister​.com​. Available online: http:​/​ /www​​.narc​​issis​​ter​.c​​om​/na​​rciss​​ister​​​-is​-y​​ouu/ (accessed October 22, 2020).

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Narcissister. (2011), “Upside Down,” America’s Got Talent. Available online: http://www​.narcissister​.com/#​/upside​-down/ (accessed October 22, 2020). Narcissister Organ Player. (2018), video recording, Sundance Institute, USA, directed by Narcissister. Ngai, S. (2005), Ugly Feelings, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ngai, S. (2012), Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ngai, S. (2015), “Visceral Abstractions,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 21(1): 33–63. Osterweis, A. (2015), “Public Pubic: Narcissister’s Performance of Race, Disavowal, and Aspiration,” TDR, 59(4): 101–16. “Pygmalionism, n.” (2017), OED Online, Oxford University Press. Available online: http://www​.oed​.com​/view​/Entry​/155341 (accessed October 22, 2020). Sánchez-Eppler, K. (1993), Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body, Berkeley: University of California Press. Schopenhauer, A. (1907), The World as Will and Idea, trans. R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp, New York: Routledge. Smith, M. (2014), The Erotic Doll: A Modern Fetish, New Haven: Yale University Press. Stratton, J. (1996), The Desirable Body: Cultural Fetishism and the Erotics of Consumption, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Williams, L. (1989), Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible,” Berkeley: University of California Press. Williams, L. (2014), “Pornography, Porno, Porn: Thoughts on a Weedy Field,” in T. Dean, S. Ruszczycky, and D. Squires (eds.), Porn Archives, pp. 29–43, Durham: Duke University Press.

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Queer Epistemologies in the Making of Queer Makishi Visibility, Trans-position, and Devised Performance Practice Johann Robert Wood

Performance is how I theorize my life, and theory is the way I perform it. As a closeted, queer teen of color growing up in Mississippi, I performed a certain level of heteronormative masculinity while holding the dissonance of queer arousal in my body. I remember the deep, velvety voice calling to me at recess: “Is you gay?” I slowly turned and saw three brothas approaching. They were dark and masculine—beautiful. As they walked closer, I felt a shift in my pants and a blush in my cheeks only hidden by my dark skin in the Mississippi sun. “I said, is you gay?!” That time, the tone was a bit more threatening. I prepared to retort their accusation only to have my pubescent voice crack, “I’m not gay, I’m a Christian,” as if this were a mutually exclusive fact. Somehow, I managed to get out a question before they came any closer. “Why would you ask me that?” “Because you walk like that.” “You talk funny.” “You don’t be checkin’ out girl’s butts ‘n stuff.” I ignored the first two comments and went directly to a feminist discourse: “That doesn’t seem to be very respectful of women.” I shifted my eyes between the three brothas and the ground, but they saw right through me. Laughing, they shouldered past me. I staggered at the realization that I had to “fall in line”—drop my voice a bit, relax my posture, and make a little less eye contact—if I was going to survive middle school with my newfound, queer arousal. In the theatre, however, I found a level of plasticity that allowed me to explore other ways of being and performing—other ways of knowing. Performatic1 questions that began with “What if, I were . . . such and such a character?” became questions like “What if I were . . . such and such a person?” and “What if the world were . . . such and such a place for said persons?” And so began my own queer investigation that led me to discover that I follow other artist-scholars like E. Patrick Johnson, Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, Daniel

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Alexander Jones, Della Pollock, and others who use the “interplay of memory, experience, identity, embodiment, and agency” (Smith and Watson 2002: 4) to manifest performances in everyday life and performance praxes that create new readings—a queering, if you will. This queering, or queer epistemology, serves as a critical lens for my work through a methodology that I call “transposition.” I define trans-position as the movement of a principle or quality considered from one context to another, and I apply it in practice as both a way to make the invisible visible and as a technology of embodied liberation, that is, shifting the positionality of the marginalized by translating their life experience into performances that are both critical and embodied. A dialectical tension holds theory and praxis in a cycle of inquiry that E. Patrick Johnson says becomes part of an “epistemological loop of self: a way of knowing the self as other and the self as same” (2011: 429). Johnson talks about queer epistemologies in terms of how we theorize our lives through life writing. Keeping a journal and writing poetry as a Black queer teen was, for Johnson, a “self-reflexive mirror” in which to see an image of himself that he “did not or could not see in the eyes of others” (2011: 429). Personally, I have found a similar reflection in a kind of embodied, life writing through devised performance practice that, as Della Pollock argues, “evokes worlds that are other-wise intangible, unlocatable: worlds of memory, pleasure, sensation, imagination, affect, and in-sight” (1998: 80). In my practice, I find that these worlds are intangible and unlocatable because they are hidden and subconscious; they are invisible worlds that performance makes visible. For the queer body, the invisible nature of being “in the closet” is a dissonant similarity to the invisibility that has been historically evoked by the Black body when viewed through a Fanonian “white gaze” (1952: 90). Fred Moten claims, “invisibility .  .  . has hypervisibility at its heart” (2003: 84). We understand that being seen as “other” both exaggerates and collapses the image of the Black body. The act of creating performance and the performance itself seek to (re)visibilize the inner realities of this Black queer body in “a theatre of embodied self-presentation” for both the performer and spectator (Smith and Watson 2002: 5). However, the issue that arises here is “the precariousness of empathy and the uncertain line between witness and spectator” (Hartman 1997: 4). How the white spectator sees or does not see Blackness often reflects how the spectator relates or does not relate to the humanity of the Black body. To witness the body is to see it as a multidimensional potentiality of inquiry and authority that includes its history. Lewis R. Gordon argues that invisibility creates an “epistemic closure,” which is an assumptive knowledge that “closes off efforts at further inquiry” (2015: 49). The Black body is thus “sealed in a world without reciprocity.” Returning to Hartman’s line of thought, the “precariousness”

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of the white spectator’s empathy is in proportion to its failure to witness the Black body as a complex, variant of humanity. This failure to witness thus renders the Black body as merely a grotesque spectacle with little to no difference than seeing a puppet or an animal for entertainment. The idea that seeing and performing Blackness is indeed a queer epistemology comes into clearer focus in my practice, yet I notice my body performs a mixed-ness that opens a mode of queer inquiry as well. In the discourse around race and the psychological effects of the white gaze, often there is an assumption when a Black person claims their mixedness or biracialism that they are rejecting their Blackness. Gordon argues that when people of color claim their biracialism, they seek to “transcend, if not eradicate, blackness” (2015: 26). In my work, I wrestle with mixedness, not to “transcend” or “eradicate” but to make visible a Crenshawian “intersectionality” that emphasizes the ontology of being both Black and biracial. To Black and white bodies, claiming “mixedness” is queer. The noticeable “mixed body” is often other-ized or made invisible in order to create coalition with a monolithic Blackness that often refuses the great diversity of those that consider themselves Black. In this chapter, I seek to provoke questions around intersectionality and trans-position through the autoethnographic, bricolage method that I use in devised performance practice. I will conduct a brief (de)montage that parses out a couple of moments in the development of my recent devised, solo project, Queer Makishi (Wood 2020). The first (de)montage centers the transposition of my Black-body consciousness into performance while the second emphasizes the transposition of my queer-body consciousness. I seek to demonstrate how the construction of an image can help us explicate the blurred, liminal space between theory and praxis. But first, I will establish the context out of which Queer Makishi arose while offering a glimpse into the world of the piece.

Introducing the Mask: A “Makishi” Queer-ing Queer Makishi is the queering of a Zambian festival. The term makishi comes from a Zambian kumukanda (initiation), in which young boys go out for a time to live in a bush camp learning the lessons necessary to have a productive adult life. Makishi is “a festival of dance, song and theatrical performance” that marks the return of the initiated from the wilderness. Throughout makishi performance, physical masks are worn to “represent communion with the spirit and teach important lessons about the history of the tribe” (Chingonyi 2017: ix).

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Masks are a critical part of the devised work I do and the performance training tradition of which I am a part, namely, the Jacques Lecoq School via arthaus​.berli​n. Rather than a physical mask, according to Lecoq, “masks” represent states in which the performer reaches “an essential dimension of dramatic playing, involving the whole body, and experiences an emotional and expressive intensity” that becomes a permanent reference point for the performer (2018: 54). As opposed to a psychological interpretation of a character, through this performance state, a performer can activate the spirit of the mask through improvisation. Additionally, the mask is not limited to the domain of the actor-character relationship. The performance space can also have or be a “mask”—the mise-en-scène. Also, the entirety of a piece like Queer Makishi can have (or be itself) a “mask.” Queer Makishi is not only a queering of a Zambian festival but a festival of several divergent masks that sample, (re)mix, and trouble the traditions of clowning, blackface minstrelsy, drag, camp, and absurdism. In this solo piece, I perform all the masks: Rob (the voice-over), Yo (the meditator), Queer Makishi (QM), Uncle Andy, Marie AunTEAnette, and The Baron. Through these divergent masks, Queer Makishi contemplates a polyphonic simultaneity of a transformative body at the crossroads of change and questions our relationship to queer intersectionality, trans-position, and visibility. 

Figure 15.1  Johann Robert Wood’s digital image collage from his devised short film Queer Makishi. This collage was used in the social media marketing campaign for the piece as part of Columbia College Chicago’s second annual Third Mask Festival. The image depicts three of the “divergent masks” the author performs throughout the piece: Marie AunTEAnette (Left), Queer Makishi (Center), and The Baron (Right). Photo by Johann Robert Wood.

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Queer Makishi: The Context In March 2020, I wrapped up a work-in-progress showing of Black Sun Devising Project—a collection of fragments in which my ensemble, who, like myself (Black, mixed, and queer), explored themes of power and joy beyond Black trauma. After the performance, we heard the news that Chicago was shutting down because of the Covid-19 pandemic, and a couple of my ensemble members would be leaving the city. For a few days, I mourned the loss of being in “the space” with my beautiful ensemble while also mourning the version of my project that never came into being. However, with the loss of my performance trio came the realization that my ensemble had already reflected back to me a triple-consciousness (Black-mixed-queer) that I was compelled to explore and ultimately perform in my solo, devised performance film—Queer Makishi.

Queer Makishi: The Performance Queer Makishi begins with a rainy soundscape looking out a window in Chicago. We hear Rob (the narrator) speak: “When I was a kid . . .” He shares a childhood memory of waiting at a window for someone to take him away from his “racist, back-water Mississippi” home where the color of his “skin didn’t mean so much.” The scene changes to two men asleep in bed—one white, one Black. The man of color (Yo) wakes up and puts on his glasses. We follow Yo through his more mundane morning rituals of awakening: getting out of bed, drinking water, a shower ritual, a prayer to a Yoruban water goddess, the pouring of coffee from a French press, and sitting on a yoga meditation cushion. Throughout these rituals, glitches of dis-ease flash across the screen: coffee grounds dirtying the shower ritual prayer and a white face glaring at us with critical, blue eyes. Yo drinks from his coffee mug and closes his eyes for meditation. We experience his total shift in consciousness from a mundane reality to an inner landscape that mixes dream and memory through fragmented selfportraits of his triple-consciousness. The introduction of each mask begins more isolated in their own fragmented worlds, but as the piece goes on, the boundaries between them unravel and blur. “Black Coffee,” “Brown Sugar?,” and “White Milk!” echo in our ears by an ensemble of disembodied voices as whirling figures in petticoats move, ghostlike, across the screen fading to black. We hear Jimmy Scott’s version of “Sometimes I feel like a Motherless Child” play in the background and then witness Yo’s bra-wearing alter ego (QM) drink coffee and perform a makeup ritual as a phantom silhouette of

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a woman in a petticoat moves into and out of the scene. By the end of the verse, “a long way from home,” we begin to suspect that the kid waiting at the storm glass door might have made it out of their “back-water Mississippi” home. Next, we are introduced to our wild-haired, magenta-lipstick-wearing, whiteface character, Uncle Andy. He mocks QM and us with his queer Fanonian “white gaze” and repetitive lip-smacking. This whiteface grotesquery, reminiscent of Andy Warhol, both queers and (re)mixes the nineteenth-century melodramatic, Black archetype of Uncle Tom. Continuing a theme of fluidity, we hear water pouring and a toilet flushing, as if to eliminate the persistent and voyeuristic white gaze. In the next scene, the classical music of formerly enslaved Joseph Bologne is heard as we are introduced to Marie AunTEAnette. She was the phantom in the creamcolored corset and petticoat we saw before. Complete with short brunette hair, a red clown nose, and goatee stubble, she offers us some comic relief as her breastless corset continues to slip, revealing her dark nipples. Her wide, open mouth and inviting eyes silently introduce us to the ingredients she will later use in her failed demonstration of the “perfect café,” where she will dilute the coffee until there is no coffee left, the milk overflowing onto the floor. To remind us of a racial discourse, the ingredients are introduced with visual titles: Black Coffee, Brown Sugar, White Milk. We laugh as the black coffee is too hot to hold, the brown sugar too sweet to taste only once, and the white milk too cold to embrace. She will return later to relieve us again, never letting us off the hook with her postcolonial message. Finally, we are introduced to The Baron, who will, for now, only reveal a choreography of his eyes surrounded by a crudely painted blackface. Filling the screen with his big, brown eyes and brown skin showing through the black paint, he actually seems more human. Later, he will take us on a full hero’s journey through dance, dressed in a black suit, top hat, and gloves. The balance/off-balance nature of his epic, choreographic journey is punctuated by a trumpet screaming in our ears with the gaping red lips of minstrelsy arresting our eyes. But, for now, The Baron’s movements perform in a simple juxtaposition to the disembodied narrator telling us about the time his adopted, white mother said, “I don’t see color, baby” and his little, five-yearold brain believing that his Black body was invisible. In the final scene, while QM performs variations on a movement theme, Rob offers a longer monologue recalling different childhood memories that center his mixed-race, queer identity: playground violence, clenched fist in photo shoots, and his mother rejecting him at his queer confession, “I’m gay.” This sparks the penultimate cacophony of visual montage and voices that we have heard throughout the piece until an explosion of silence returns us back

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to Yo, lying in his bed, smiling at us as if the whole performance is a ritual cycle that goes on and on in perpetuity.

Queer Makishi: The Process My creative process is nonlinear, body-centric, and laboratory-based. The work is nonlinear in that I use many voices/spirits that are speaking in my life at any given moment to engage in a creative and critical conversation. When I label and specify particular voices, I call them “points of departure.” For the embodied researcher, points of departure represent an infinite possibility of questions, be it personal, historical, or theoretical. Part of the artist’s job is to follow curiosity, wonder, and serendipity to uncover the questions hidden by the answers. A point of departure is any starting point from which a creative process can begin: a movement quality, any object or scenario, qualities in a painting, the flow of a piece of music, etc. In my work, several points of departure are being developed at any given moment in what I call études, or embodied studies. I give each étude a title, set it aside, and then work with another point of departure. At a certain moment, I begin to see associations and patterns among the fragments. I follow the strongest impulse to synthesize these fragments in order to discover some new dissonance or juxtaposition relevant to the current project. This nonlinearity often expresses itself in my work as collage or montage. Weaving together actions, materials, and/or fragments into a new synthesis, I attempt to capture the essence of the question(s) with which I am wrestling, both through the process and performance. As an artist-scholar, I center the body by remaining engaged with many critical discourses that resonate or clash in relationship to my Black queer body. The practice of embodied performance is a way of knowledge, insight, and clarity for me. I rely on a philosophy of embodiment that affirms: “the body knows.” Embodied practices center, as Della Pollock would say, “living bodies of thought” (2006: 7). My body is discourse—a way of thinking; it is a point of tension between myself and other bodies—myself and the world. Therefore, I center embodiment by trans-posing a point of departure and its questions through the body, making the invisible visible in a call and response dynamic. I transform a call (or question) into a body-answer (or response). For instance, if I am investigating a texture in a painting, I might contemplate through movement by asking, “What is the essence of that texture in and through movement? How does it feel in my body, and what does it make me want to do?” I perform this call and response with my whole body, and then I write down some action verbs that describe the trans-position.

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Improvisation is central to my process of trans-posing a point of departure through the body. I lean heavily on four principles of improvisation: the principle of Rep & Rev, accumulation, amplification, and essentialization. I use Suzan-Lori Parks’s understanding of the jazz aesthetic Rep & Rev (i.e., Repetition and Revision), which is the “literal incorporation of the past” represented in African diasporic literary and oral traditions but transposed into the context of body, movement, and performance (1995: 10). Using the principle of Rep & Rev, I take an initial movement impulse and repeat it until something else arises. This “something” is often simply a “mis-take” in the repetition, or it could be the associative impulse to add to or subtract from the initial movement. Repetition intends to remember where we came from—the original impulse, or at least something close to it. Revision intends to remember a movement impulse into a different orientation or configuration. The principle of accumulation is when one repeats a movement or gesture until the mover is satisfied enough to simply add to it until a series of movements/gestures is accumulated. This forms a movement score that the mover can improvise more freely around by changing the order to tell a different movement story and/or choose to transpose another quality or principle onto the movement score all together. Amplification and essentialization are two principles I often transpose into a movement score in order to extract more information about the poetics of the movement. Amplification seeks to expand or heighten the movement or gesture (in tempo, size, density, etc.), while essentialization seeks to strip the movement down to its most simple yet condensed expression. These principles represent a small sample of the diverse ways of improvising with qualities of movement and can become points of departure in and of themselves. Finally, I consider my process laboratory-based because “the spirit of the studio,” rather than the writing desk, is my primary field of research and creation. “Laboratory” has an etymological meaning emphasizing a regular practice (labor) that is necessary to any process of embodiment and a spiritual dimension of prayer (i.e., oratory) to creative and intellectual ancestors who guide my process. Laboratory also means that there is a deliberate oscillation between beginning with a question (experimentation) and letting that question go (exploration), trusting that the body knowledge has information the analytical mind may not be able to access. Being laboratorial in nature, my devised work follows Eugenio Barba’s Theatre Anthropology which seeks to explore “recurrent principles” like I have mentioned above that are found in performances around the world (2005: 7). Other principles include but are not limited to slow motion, opposition/push and pull, fall and recovery, accumulation, and equivalence. My use of these principles extends this tradition of historically European theatre laboratory research into a global

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performance practice by trans-posing certain Black and queer aesthetics through the body, particularly from visual art, poetry, dance, and music.

(De)montaging the Invisible: “I Don’t See Color, Baby.” Close to the beginning of creating Queer Makishi, a memory returned to me from childhood that centers how society often renders Black bodies invisible. I wrote: I’ll never forget. . . . Sitting in my momma’s lap, I looked down to her fair-skinned hands and I remember pointin’ to my little dark fist . . . and saying, “Ma, we’re different colors.” I didn’t look up at her bright blue eyes to read them, I listened. “I don’t see color, baby.” Confused, my 5-maybe6-year-old brain stuttered . . . terrified I might be invisible. (Wood 2020)

At the time of this life writing, I was conducting a particular étude on Bert Williams’s blackface performance of A Natural Born Gambler (1916). Fascinated by the humanity that Williams seems to embody in blackface through the articulation of his eyes, I was also provoked by the queering of the Black face with black makeup. In this étude, I analyzed Williams’s movements, particularly at the end of the film where he performs his famous pantomime of playing poker with himself. At first, my étude focused on a more formalistic analysis, imitating his performance beat by beat. Next, I sought to extract the essence of his facial movements. For instance, one of his gestures is a quality of collecting and melting, where he quickly gathers the muscles of one side of his face toward his eye. Then, using the principle of slow motion, he releases that tension, giving the appearance of a melting quality. I conducted a series of movement analyses like this from Williams’s poker face performance, essentialized the movements, and developed them into an eye movement score to improvise around. Later, I filmed a version of that eye movement score up close, myself in blackface, seeking to transpose something of Williams’s humanizing, blackface performance for a contemporary audience. Upon reviewing the footage, I realized I wanted a text to accompany it. As I continued to work with the score, a memory returned to me, and, intermittently, I wrote and recorded the above text as a voiceover. I experimented to see how juxtaposing these two disparate fragments (one audio, one visual) could create new or more complex meanings through montage. Sometimes, I use borrowed text or music to overlay a movement score. However, here, I use an autoethnographic practice to excavate a personal memory, and, through the montage principle of juxtaposition, I set

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the different pieces against one another to see what other meanings might arise. As I devise new work, I materialize diverse points of interest from my studies and life, and, using the principle of association, I experiment to see how these puzzle pieces fit or do not fit. I often find myself surprised at how the epistemology of not fitting, or not fitting in, reflects a dissonant, queer knowledge in and of itself. When I critically think about this moment of montage and embodiment, I recognize that Queer Makishi continues a discourse of the Black body having been made invisible through hypervisibility. Here, I consciously use the power of performance to reverse this process in two ways. Not only have I constructed a moment where voice-over externalizes a queer interiority as memory, but the wearing of blackface (re)visibilizes the Black skin I have already. The juxtaposition of the disembodied text, “I don’t see color, baby,” gives voice to a different body-time relationship, expressed through montage. I discover some insight about the subjectivity of Blackness as I engage the black-faced image that silently speaks through the literal (re)visualization of Black skin covered with the queering of black makeup. Fred Moten’s theory of antiblack racism resonates with my attempt to (re)visibilize the Black queer body in performance: The mark of invisibility is a visible, racial mark; invisibility has visibility at its heart. To be invisible is to be seen, instantly and fascinatingly recognized as the unrecognizable, as the abject, as the absence of individual self-consciousness, as a transparent vessel of meanings wholly independent of any influence of the vessel itself. (2003: 68)

In performances like Queer Makishi, the artist can (re)visibilize the queer body through what Johnson calls “the very performativity of self-portraiture” (2011: 430), which constitutes subjectivity through a moment of self- and cultural reflexivity, “a knowing made manifest by a ‘doing’” (2006: 446).

(De)montaging a Queer Memory: The “Fist” Score For a deviser like me, “doing” centers a method of building a movement score and then using improvisation to transform the score into a signification that contributes to the story or emotional arc being expressed through the larger montage. I practice the score multiple times, over a span of hours or days, applying different principles of improvisation. For me, improvisation becomes a technology of queer liberation as I seek to “accumulate” energy, through Rep & Rev, around a gestural theme until I am led or “lead the audience

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toward some single explosive moment” of associations transcending the initial score (1995: 9). An example of this score-making and trans-position occurs toward the end of Queer Makishi in “The Fist Score.” I guessed early on that the moment of highest tension between the themes of the mother and the queer son was (like in many cases) the moment of a queer confession like, “Mom, I’m gay.” In particular, I was looking for the gestural archetype from which I might build a score that would help this piece reach an appropriate emotional climax. Already, the image of the fist had surfaced in the text discussed earlier: “I always had my hands in fists. I don’t know why. I mustuve been angry or something. But I remember pointin’ to my little dark fist.” So, I decided to excavate other images from my life around this point of departure. I realized “the fist” is a strong metaphor for the anger and tension experienced in the body of a Black, biracial, queer kid adopted by a white family in the Deep South. Through a longer autoethnographic monologue, I describe my clenched fist in childhood photos and the story of a Black girl on the playground who used her fist to bash my forehead to the ground; then, ultimately, I use the fist to describe the moment of my mother’s rejection at my queer confession. I take these three fist memories from my life and begin to embody and construct them into a few essentialized, archetypal gestures. Using accumulation, I tried out each fist gesture variation until I arrived at three gestures that most evoked a feeling for me. Then, I quickly organized the three gestures into a movement score, similar to the previously mentioned eye movement score but this time with larger movement centering the physicality of my fist. The score is as follows: (1) curling of the fist by the hip with the head turning away in the same direction, (2) the fist coming down in front like a hammer while jumping, (3) the arms folded in front with the fist clinched, and (4) I returned to the opening gesture. With this movement score, I began a deeper improvisation to explore what else might come to me—what memories, associations, feelings, etc. For example, as I practiced the third fist movement with “the arms folded in front with the fist clenched,” feeling like I was posing for a bodybuilding competition, I remembered some photographs I found online of my biological father (who I have never met) posing for the magazine Muscular Development. I formed some questions about how masculinity and femininity are performed, and I improvised these qualities into the score I had constructed. This exploration helped me embody certain questions that had arisen for me, like “How do the poetics of the body and movement change if I perform these gestures with a wider stance or a narrow pivot in my hips and legs?” This question is exemplary of the embodied, improvisational dynamics and principles (particularly amplification and essentialization)

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that I often use once I have constructed a basic movement score. In this way, oscillating between embodied experimentation (i.e., with questions) and improvisational exploration with principles and qualities of movement helps me discover what might lie beneath my conscious practice through the knowledge of the Black queer body.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have sought to articulate how queer epistemologies evoke an appearing of the invisible through trans-position. As a queer epistemology, trans-positionality challenges monolithic categories like Blackness, whiteness, or even “the queer.” Trans-position emphasizes a fluidity—a constant becoming—that makes visible a dimensionality that the straight, white gaze collapses into invisibility. In my opening story, I describe the queer teen realization that I had to “fall in line” with heteronormative performance in an attempt to get those beautiful “brothas” to not collapse me or make me invisible in my queerness like we are made invisible in our shared Blackness. The queer epistemology of “falling in line” implies not only that the queer body is not “in line” with constructed heteronormativity but that there is a construction in which all bodies must be subjugated in the face of hegemonic structures of power. Yet, this particular structure of a “line” is so thin and arbitrary for any “body” to perform within that it becomes a kind of incarceration that collapses masculinity and, in its very pathological need to gain more power, becomes a toxic beast struggling to be free. As a technology of embodied liberation, I find that radical queer performances, like Queer Makishi, widen this thin, arbitrary “line” through a trans-positionality by constructing mixed, liminal spaces that are hyperblurred for the heteronormative, white gaze. I am not saying that radical queer performance seeks to accommodate this toxic masculinity or the white gaze. Rather, hyper-blurred, radical queer performance both disorients and (re)orients the toxic, masculine, white gaze by calling into question the very construction or existence of the “thin, arbitrary line.” This hyperblurred space could open the “epistemic closure” of all bodies viewed by an “other” and thus challenge our need for monolithic categories of race, gender, sexuality, ability, age, and class. Hartman says that there is an “uncertain line between witness and spectator” that accompanies “the precariousness of empathy” (1997: 4). The hyper-blur of the “uncertain line” in radical queer performance constructs a dimensionality—a wider space for further inquiry and queer knowledge. I echo a quote attributed to Black queer writer James Baldwin: “the purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been

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hidden by the answers” (cited in Bogart 2001: 82). However precarious in our empathy we may be, being uncertain, odd, or queer in our quest is also a guide to help us realize when we are on the verge of new knowledge, creation, and, hopefully, the discovery of invisible worlds made visible. As Pollock exclaims, “more power for performance,” and, at the intersection of Black and queer epistemologies, more power for its potential to propel “us forward into . . . a world full of dangerous and fantastic possibilities” (2007: 243).

Note 1 Diana Taylor proposes in Performance that we use the term “performatic” as an adjective for performance as to not confuse that which pertains to performance with the “performative” (2016).

References Barba, E. (2005), Theatre Anthropology, 2nd ed., Abingdon: Routledge. Bogart, A. (2001), A Director Prepares, London and New York: Routledge. Chingonyi, K. (2017), Kumukanda, London: Penguin Random House. Fanon, F. (1952), Black Skin, White Masks, New York: Grove Press. Gordon, L. R. (2015), What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to His Life and Thought, New York: Fordham University Press. Hartman, S. V. (1997), Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, New York: Oxford University Press. Johnson, E. P. (2006), “Black Performance Studies: Genealogies, Politics, Futures,” in D. S. Madison and J. Hamera (eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Performance Studies, pp. 446–63, Thousand Oaks: Sage. Johnson, E. P. (2011), “Queer Epistemologies: Theorizing the Self from a Writerly Place Called Home,” Biography—An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, 34(3): 429–46. Lecoq, J. (2018), The Moving Body: Teaching Creative Theatre, New York: Bloomsbury. Moten, F. (2003), In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Parks, S.-L. (1995), The America Play and Other Works, New York: Theatre Communications Group. Pollock, D. (1998), “Performing Writing,” in P. Phelan and J. Lane (eds.), The Ends of Performance, pp. 73–103, London and New York: New York University Press.

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Pollock, D. (2006), “Part I Introduction: Performance Trouble,” in D. S. Madison and J. Hamera (eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Performance Studies, pp. 1–8, Thousand Oaks: Sage. Pollock, D. (2007), “The Performative ‘I’,” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 7(3): 239–55. Smith, S. and J. Watson (2002), “Introduction,” in S. Smith and J. Watson (eds.), Interfaces: Women/Autobiography/Image/Performance, pp. 1–46, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Taylor, D. (2016), Performance, trans. A. Levine, Durham: Duke University Press. Wood, J. R. (2020), Queer Makishi: A Short Devised Film, M.F.A. Thesis, Columbia College Chicago. Available online: https​:/​/di​​gital​​commo​​ns​.co​​lum​ .e​​du​/th​​ese​s_​​edpp/​​1/.

16

Island Icarus Signaling through the Flames as Critical Performance Design Dorita Hannah

In ancient myth, Icarus desires to escape island incarceration, which leads to his flight and an eventual fall. Brought down by the scorching sun, which melts his wings constructed of wax and feathers, he perishes in the sea. This chapter introduces and discusses Island Icarus (2016–19), an iterative art project provoked by the more recent story of a young refugee “in flight” from persecution, who was also imprisoned on an island and who tragically set his body ablaze. Myth meets media in this singular act of self-immolation, which was deliberately undertaken to create an arousing image that makes visible the suffering of those rendered invisible through isolated internment. To examine such tragic acts as a designed performance is in itself incendiary but crucial when presenting a creative practice that utilizes performance design to address sanctioned cruelty of the status quo, which many are inclined to overlook.

Staging the Media(ted) Image While live performance and other creative art forms tend to frame the truth through fiction—sanctioned by a mutual agreement to suspend disbelief— the intensifying onslaught of media images makes it difficult to separate theatricality from sociopolitical reality outside the arts arena. This complexity could be understood through “performance design,” which, as an extended notion of scenography, also provides a lens for acknowledging and critiquing the inundation of events played out in a world that, as performance theorist Jon McKenzie contends, “has become a designed environment in which an array of global performances unfold” (2008: 128). Such unfolding is primarily evidenced via broadcast imagery associated with political upheaval, conflict,

Figure 16.1  Image collage: Clockwise from top left Island Icarus: Remanence exhibition (Hobart, Australia 2017) Image: Sean Coyle. Island Icarus/PhoneHome: Flickering Landscapes exhibition (Orlando, USA 2019) Image: Dorita Hannah. Island Sentinel: Intervening in the Anthropo(s)cene (Maria Island, Australia 2016) Image: Sean Coyle. Island Icarus/PhoneHome: Fragments exhibition (Prague, Czech Republic 2019) Image: Dorita Hannah. PhoneHome: Architecture & Urbanism Biennale (Valparaiso, Chile 2018) Image: Pablo Blanco. Island Icarus/PhoneHome: Fragments exhibition (Prague, Czech Republic 2019) Image: David Shearing.

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contamination, climate change, pandemics, and the plight of those seeking refuge from these threats. Blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction, inherently “theatrical” media imagery—that is, visually orchestrated and/ or captured for dramatic impact—is deliberately composed to alarm our spectatorial hearts. Presented on and offline as officially sanctioned photographs or video footage, they are increasingly captured on mobile phones by those who utilize social media for protesting and exposing their intolerable treatment and conditions. In his 2012 lecture-performance, The Pixelated Revolution, Lebanese theatre artist Rabih Mroué focuses on this tactical use of phone footage in Syria’s revolution, asking, “How should we read these videos?” Theirs are not journalistic images. These images do not hide any ideological discourse or subliminal messages; simple images, yet strong in spite of their technical fragility. They are not amateurish, yet they do not seek to be professional, in the academic sense of the word. Their only concern is to record the event, as it is experienced in real time, in order to report to the world what they are going through over “there.” (2012: 31)

This transmission of a perilous reality was advocated by French avant-garde artist, actor, and theorist Antonin Artaud (1896–1948), whose formulation of a Theatre of Cruelty demands we contact the very core of our existence through “culture-in-action” rather than culture-as-form: when we speak the word “life,” it must be understood we are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating centre which forms never reach. And if there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames. (Artaud 1958: 13)

Artaud’s words of urgency invoke suffering via the affecting image of a tormented body “signaling through the flames.” They are indelibly linked to the silent film, La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc, where he plays a young monk who, in the final smoke-filled scene, compassionately raises a crucifix toward Joan of Arc, bearing her anguish as she begins to burn on the pyre (La Passion 1928). Considering Artaud’s clarion call for artists and audiences to vividly communicate and experience the intensity of cruel events—through performative presentation rather than mimetic representation—Island Icarus comprises a series of co-created installations provoked by a more recent act

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of immolation: that of Omid Masoumali, a 23-year-old Iranian refugee who set himself on fire in 2016 on the Pacific island of Nauru. Protesting against detention by the Australian government, this fatal act was recorded on the mobile phones of fellow detainees, posted on social media, and utilized by mainstream media. In addition to revealing intolerable circumstances to the world, such extreme tactics are a response to being silenced by distant incarceration, legislated muzzling of reportage, and a generalized indifference. The aim is to expose authorized inhumanity toward those in exile whose only crime is to seek safe haven from unbearable situations in their homelands. As an interdisciplinary artist—operating across the spatial, performing, and visual arts—many of my collaborative projects and written publications respond to such devastating events and their associated media images in which myth and theatre become entangled with politics. Focusing on the performative dimension of these actions and their intervening dramaturgies, I utilize my design practice to challenge preconceptions of how sites, bodies, and media interact in order to expose the intrinsic inhumanity of particular situations, specifically in relation to the built environment. By means of spacing—the designed spatial act and its experience in time—my collectively created performances, exhibitions, and installations establish an embodied witnessing that vacillates between affective immersion, called for by Artaud, and critical distance, espoused by German theatrical reformer Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956). Island Icarus constitutes an aesthetic re-action to Masoumali’s selfimmolation, which was confronting through an undeniable relation to the real. In its two main iterations—as site-specific installation (Island Icarus, 2017) and intermedial exhibit (Island Icarus/PhoneHome, 2017–19)—the project utilizes observers’ bodies, video, and the screen itself to enact a visceral engagement through what Artaud calls “an inspired shudder,” the reverberations of which outlive both political and aesthetic event (1976: 569). This effect is created through “empathic vision,” described by art theorist Jill Bennett as “the artist’s capacity to transform images” and “specifically, to open up a space for empathic encounter for others to inhabit” (2005: 142). It involves what documentary artist John Di Stefano defines as “an embodiment of doubling . . . through the performance of witnessing” (emphasis in original) (2008: 263). In Island Icarus, such performances also entail listening and are physically enacted by observing bodies while deliberately withholding a clear view. Triggered by Masoumali’s radical act of protest, the overall project critiques Australia’s Pacific Solution—subsequently named Operation Sovereign Borders—a governmental policy established in 2001 to deny

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sanctuary to refugees and asylum seekers attempting to arrive on its “mainland” by boat. Having undertaken perilous sea journeys (with many perishing on the way), their already precarious bodies are intercepted and transported to Kiritimati/Christmas Island, Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island, and the island Republic of Nauru, where they are indefinitely interned. Acknowledged as violating the Refugee Convention and international human rights law, these intentionally isolated detention centers—a “border externalization” further distanced through layers of security fencing, strict media bans, and silencing of personnel—have been repeatedly referred to as “concentration camps” with reports of self-harm and suicides, which are briefly recounted and soon dismissed or forgotten. Cameras secretly smuggled into the camps reveal confinement in tent clusters, adapted barracks and off-the-shelf prefabricated “containers.” The general invisibility imposed on these detainees provokes them to extreme acts that demand visibility. The following text outlines the Island Icarus installations—undertaken with various colleagues over three years—which, responding to Masoumali’s drastic action, form practice-based protests against island detention in order to unpack their relation to the tragic myth of Icarus, a confrontation with the Real and Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty.

“Moving” Images As a series of performative works, Island Icarus began with a site-specific video installation that was then adapted for the PhoneHome exhibition. Its genesis lies in two affective images generated on islands in 2016: phone footage of Masoumali’s radical protest against detention on Nauru on April 27 and videography taken nine weeks later in a performance design research workshop on Tasmania’s Maria Island in Australia.

Image #1: April 27, 2016: Republic of Nauru Positioning himself centrally in a gritty compound of demountable housing, 23-year-old Omid Masoumali confronts delegates from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) who are visiting Nauru to interview indefinitely incarcerated asylum seekers and refugees about their deteriorating mental health. Highly distressed, Masoumali has just heard that he and his wife will remain detained on the island with no release date in sight. His blue T-shirt is doused front and back in fluid, and he is said to be crying out in Farsi, “This action will prove how exhausted we are. I cannot

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take it anymore,” before setting himself on fire.1 The action and ensuing panic—echoed in blood-curdling screams and shouting—are recorded on mobile phones as people rush to extinguish the flames engulfing Masoumali’s body, which suffers extensive burns that result in his death two days later in a Brisbane hospital. As a deliberately suicidal act, his self-immolation was a performance of protest, cognizant of being witnessed and recorded. After incarceration on the island for three years, Omid, whose name means “hope,” had lost all hope.

Image #2: July 2, 2016: Tasmania, Australia In a more southern part of Oceania, the researcher participates in one of five workshop teams, engaging with the landscape through, and as, an event. Standing on the edge of Maria Island’s fossil cliffs at dawn, she is wrapped in a wind-whipped emergency blanket that allows her to stare directly through the Mylar film into the rising sun. This immersive midwinter experience is both intimate and epic with body, object, and environment rendered contiguous through dynamic interior and panoramic exterior. The synthetic “space blanket”—fused silver and gold—registers and heightens constant shifts of air and light, fluttering wildly against the researcher’s body. Transformed into a blazing gilded figure within the landscape, she faces the vertical glitter path on the Tasman Sea, connecting her eastward to Aotearoa/New Zealand—the island nation where she was born and where her grandparents came by boat early last century from Mount Lebanon. She is accompanied by four other researchers, each wrapped in foil blankets and staring into the sunrise. Spaced along the cliff edge, the “Island Sentinels” are both together and alone, sharing this improvised experience, co-created during a three-day international event, titled Intervening in the Anthropo(s)cene. These two durational images are “moving” as both action and effect, as video footage and as affective representation: the first, on the world’s smallest island nation of Nauru, is hastily captured and uploaded online; while the second, on Maria Island—off the island of Tasmania, below the island continent of Australia—is aesthetically mediated documentation of a spontaneous action. Each “image,” although singular in its aggregation, is multiple and auditory. Both inform each other in Remanence, a curated exhibition during Tasmania’s Ten Days on the Island arts festival in which artists were invited to “respond to and represent fire: its power to destroy, transform and rejuvenate” (Remanence 2017).

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Remanence: Island Icarus Dedicated to Omid Masoumali, Island Icarus is first presented as a siteresponsive installation in Domain House: a partially renovated heritage building with an interior bearing the traces of 150 years of past inhabitations. The exhibition curators wrote that the title, Remanence, “creates links to continuance and remains, but also references . . . the concept of residual magnetism and invisible forces that linger long after an initial object or event” (Remanence 2017). Fellow workshop researcher and New Zealand scenographer Sean Coyle joined me in this undertaking, which provided an opportunity for us to address Australia’s offshore detention centers through the resonance of Masoumali’s tragic self-immolation. Rather than utilizing the mobile phone footage taken by witnesses, Island Icarus draws on Sean’s videography of the landscape performance on Maria Island. The exhibit takes up three adjoining rooms forming an L-shape within the neo-Gothic landmark. Two empty spaces flank a distanced chamber with dirt floor where footage of one of the “Island Sentinels” is projected onto layers of hanging plastic skins. This tattered screen typifies makeshift privacy dividers depicted in clandestine videos recording the conditions of island detention centers, which were smuggled out for media dissemination. The entire exhibit is rendered inaccessible by layers of security fences blocking all doorways: the ones at which visitors stood and the distant doorways adjoining the chamber. Observers’ bodies are purposely restrained at the thresholds, denying access to, or a clear sighting of, the remote life-size figure, shrouded in its airborne blanket, the sound of which rages like fire from concealed speakers. Viewers are obliged to stand close to the metal grill in order to peer across the No Man’s Land of intervening rooms toward the image beyond the second grill. This spectatorial action deliberately mirrors those pervasive media images of island detainees distanced through doubled layers of metal barricades. Here, the detained outsiders, kept inside and perpetually looking out, are now the gallery insiders who can only stare inward. Our artists’ statement read: From a Tasmanian island once ringed with long-extinguished Aboriginal fires, to Australia’s “Pacific Solution” that drives Omid Masoumali and others to self-immolation, to contemporary Greece where lifejackets and mylar blankets line the shores, Icarus’ fatal flight is referenced to highlight the staggering cost that thousands of refugees continue to pay for wishing to live their lives in safety and security. (Hannah and Coyle 2017: 13)

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Mythos and materiality combine in our work referencing the Greek legend of Icarus, mentioned at the outset of this chapter, who died while attempting to escape imprisonment on the island of Crete. Outlined in Ovid’s The Fall of Icarus, this tragic tale is said to be themed on failure at the hands of hubris or high-flying ambition. Icarus forfeited his life because of an “effrontery to invade the realm of the gods” (Kilinski II 2013: 177). Punished for his desire to soar high and free, he is often represented as a flaming figure falling into the Mediterranean Sea: a body of water constantly traversed by refugees and asylum seekers “in flight” during the second decade of this century. As part of a global exodus numbering over 70 million humans, their plight is linked to that of Icarus. Karl Kilinski II therefore asks in his book, The Flight of Icarus in Western Art, “Is it only coincidence that the Latin verb volo, meaning ‘to wish,’ also means ‘to fly’?” (2002: 2). For the Remanence installation and the subsequent PhoneHome exhibition, Sean and I were interested in an historical tendency to portray Icarus in artworks and literature as a disregarded precarious body whose presence and visibility are overlooked or denied. This is particularly evident in the sixteenth-century Flemish painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (1558: originally attributed to Bruegel the Elder) in which Icarus’s drowning—indicated by pale thrashing legs in the sea within the bottomright quadrant—has no effect on the scene. This event, scarcely noticed by onlookers within the painting or viewers standing in front of the artwork, denotes a generalized indifference to the devastating effects produced by Australia’s punitive legislation meted out to those who risk the journey in search of asylum. The Maria Island video was further reworked for screening on a smartphone as Island Icarus (“You Peeled Our Skin Off ”) in PhoneHome (Valparaiso 2017), an intermedial exhibition which I conceived, co-curated, and designed with colleagues, Joanne Kinniburgh (Australia) and Shauna Janssen (Canada), for Chile’s 2017 Architecture & Urbanism Biennale on “Unpostponable Dialogues.” PhoneHome was composed of nine identical maquettes of refugee cabins on a mirror-lined niche in the gallery wall before which was placed a padded kneeler like those found in church pews. Each cabin is embedded with a smartphone streaming a looping video accompanied by sound and connected to hanging headphones. The fluctuating digital glow that emanates from the cabins’ tiny windows beckons visitors to kneel in front of these miniatures, don headphones, and view the videos, which are framed and kaleidoscopically reflected by an internal mirror box. Remounted for New Zealand’s Architecture Festival (Auckland 2018), the exhibition was further distilled into a singular cabin atop a plinth—as Island Icarus/PhoneHome—and presented in subsequent exhibitions, Shifting

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Terrain: Images of Migration and Detention (Orlando, 2019) and Fragments (Prague, 2019).

PhoneHome: Island Icarus (“You Peeled Our Skin Off ”) The title PhoneHome deliberately references the popular Hollywood movie E.T. (1982), in which the stranded extra-terrestrial who needs to “phone home” constructs a communication mechanism from electronic components found around its hosts’ house. As a stranger in a strange land, the detained alien is yearning to connect and return to a familiar realm. Almost four decades later, over 30 million people, exiled and in motion, are officially declared refugees or asylum seekers; many find themselves defined as “aliens” and confined in unhomely refugee camps and detention centers. Accommodated in emergency housing that epitomizes alienating and spatially reductive experiences—barely containers for what Giorgio Agamben calls a “barelife” (1998)—their agency is reduced alongside a withdrawal of political autonomy. In such conditions, the mobile phone becomes a tethering device for refugees, keeping them in touch with friends, family, and community across vast distances. Standing in for home, these precious portable devices are kept safe with identity documents in a watertight plastic bag. As body extensions, they provide the means for situating, orienting, documenting, representing, and resisting a life lived in exile. Although mobile phones are banned in Australia’s onshore and offshore detention centers, they continue to be smuggled inside to record and disseminate images of the surroundings and their effect on traumatized detainees. Notably, Kurdish-Iranian artist-activist Behrouz Boochani, who was confined on Manus Island for over six years, utilized contraband phones to secretly and painstakingly create both an award-winning book (2018) and documentary film (Boochani and Sarvestani 2017), which corroborated rumors and eyewitness statements denied and/or ignored by Australian authorities. Literally a home for a phone, PhoneHome’s architectural model is scaled around a standard affordable smartphone. Fabricated from white acrylic laser-cut into component parts, it miniaturizes the ubiquitous flatpack emergency cabin assembled from extruded polystyrene sandwich panels, which are cheaply produced and sited in Australia’s island detention centers as well as countless refugee camps around the globe. Arranged in precisely gridded coordinates, such rudimentary shelters equate with Elaine Scarry’s description of an architecture of “protection” as “a materialised image of decreased sentience” supported by the “supersentient” technologies of

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surveillance and control (1987: 349). Its flagrant banality and attention to the minimal requirements of accommodation cause us to wonder at such design solutions, which are incapable of protecting against the indifference of extreme weather and vermin, let alone indicate any sense of comfort, domesticity, or communality. As Shauna Janssen writes in the exhibition catalogue: The miniature refugee cabins in PhoneHome reference architecture’s capacity to reproduce a nation-state of social exclusion; provoking artistic, curatorial, architectural and urban design practices to address spatial injustice. PhoneHome is a “call” to redress the histories and contemporary continuum that the space of shipping and containerisation hold; where refugees tend to exist as mere cargo and human surplus. (2017)

The identical maquettes—reflected back-to-back and end-on-end in boundless rows—each house moving images created by selected artists, architects, designers, and correspondents whose work resonates with PhoneHome’s themes of spatial mediation, alienation, and detention.2 These discrete video works are given new meaning through the mediating elements of barred windows, internal reflections, and headphones as kneeling viewers are obliged to adjust their bodies and the focal length of their gaze. The gigantic overlooking is reciprocated when the viewer’s own eye is caught staring back, momentarily disrupting the infinitude of the projected interior world. Representations are internally multiplied and refracted as landscapes take up residence in the delimited confines of the reproducible and transitional shelter (shrunk to 100 × 100 × 200mm) in which the unhoused are rehoused but never re-homed. In PhoneHome, Island Icarus is re-presented as an intentionally enigmatic image that flickers behind the barred openings of the phone’s home through which we discern an enwrapped figure standing on the cliff edge before an oceanic horizon. This flickering of the looping image housed within the tiny cabin reflects in the eyes of spectators who see dawn light glinting off both sea and shrouded body, jump cutting as an eternally returning event. As digital image, it flickers with pixelated movement similar to mobile phone footage taken in haste and shock. It also flickers like the century-old celluloid of Dreyer’s silent movie depicting a sacrificial body on the pyre. As media arts theorist Felicity Colman writes of Artaud’s performance in Joan of Arc, “This is a virtual not an actual, physical body (although it might engage the flesh): a body of thought and feeling that lives in the flicker of light and moving images on screen and in the engaged spectator” (2014: 62).

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The turbulent sounds of wind and the moving golden shroud are augmented with audio taken from the Nauru phone footage recording the panic and terror of those witnessing Masoumali’s self-immolation, which was preceded by his repeated cries of “you peeled our skin off,” a Farsi term that verbalizes extreme mental torture. Taking on an enigmatic mythic dimension, the flapping form—as wing, flame, and skin—signifies the thrill of flight, the flare of fire, and the unbearable pain of excoriation. Its fierce crackling masks human shouts and screams carried on the wind from a Pacific island where out of sight is all too often rendered out of mind. In 2019, Island Icarus/PhoneHome was presented as a single miniature refugee cabin sitting atop a freestanding white plinth as New Zealand’s contribution to the Fragments exhibition during the Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space. An abstracted prie-dieu (prayer desk), the podium integrates an upholstered kneeler and padded rail to assist viewers in raising and lowering their bodies. Sited in the shadows of the Czech Republic’s Lapidarium, housing archaeological remains, tombs, and stone sculptures, it is towered over by sooty fragmented forms of Catholic emperors and saints, reinforcing the confessional act and literal incorporation of body as exhibit. Unlike other displays where visitors stand back to contemplate the artwork, the kneeling observer in front of the miniature cabin completes the exhibit— as spectator, auditor, and participating supplicant—enacting an intimate encounter with the miniature framing of an abstracted body in flames and the very real cries of human calamity. Viscerally engaging with spectators’ bodies, Island Icarus questions the eye’s primacy in apprehending moving images; by deliberately obstructing the view in Remanence and encouraging observers to kneel, adjust their position, and focus their gaze in PhoneHome. Rather than aestheticizing suffering, the project indicates how the victim adopts an aesthetics of suffering. Drawing links between the drastic gesture of self-immolation and Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, we can trace shifts from “presentational” protest action to media dissemination of its “representational” images and the eventual “re-presentational” form as performative exhibit. Yet, the overall project is troubled by the unrepresentable Real (with a capital “R,” defying symbolization and language), which flares briefly in the public imaginary, arresting space and time through a confrontational event of radical signaling advocated by Artaud.

Artaud, Signaling Cruelty The link between Masoumali’s act and Artaud is reinforced by theatre scholar, Grzegorz Ziółkowski, who contends that “contemporary suicide protests by

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fire” constitute A Cruel Theatre of Self-Immolations (2020). Intended to be a communicative and transformative spectacle, such “self-inflicted bodily suffering and the high likelihood of death” is motivated “by the desire to reach out to an audience, both on site and through the media” (Ziółkowski 2020: 7). Of the twelve deaths recorded in Australia’s offshore detention centers, seven were known or suspected suicides, “signaling” cruelty through the inherently cruel act of taking one’s life in protest. But Masoumali’s selfimmolation involves what Ziółkowski calls “twofold” cruelty: “It is literally cruel, merciless and ruthless on both a physical and a psychological level. Above all it is cruel to the person who performs it, but also—to a degree— to the witnesses or observers of his/her actions, who might be shocked and experience complete stupefaction” (2018: 566). Wishing to establish a more direct relationship between spectator and spectacle, Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty acknowledges and engages with the inherent brutalities of humankind, experienced at the limits. Such brutal acts are found in Australia’s island detention centers, as well as the detainees’ deliberate gestures of self-harm that reflect the sanctioned physical and mental torture they experience. Like Artaud, they aim to provoke what André Green calls “a frisson that shakes the spectator out of his passivity, out of the softening seduction that anesthetizes him by way of the pleasant, the picturesque and the decorative” (1997: 145). Although “cruelty” conjures up associations with blood, pain, and distress, Artaud was primarily concerned with its qualities of rigidity and unrelenting severity, exemplified in Australia’s resolute detention policy, which New York Times columnist Roger Cohen refers to as “Offshore Cruelty” (2016). As Artaud wrote to Jean Paulhan in 1932, “[it] signifies rigor, implacable intention and decision, irreversible and absolute determination” (1958: 101), evident qualities in Operation Sovereign Borders. However, cruelty is found in the nation’s overall indifference to the resulting human suffering, summed up by one of the country’s foremost authors, Richard Flanagan: “These things have happened because of a more general cowardice and inertia, because of conformity; because it is easier to be blind than to see, to be deaf than to hear, to say things don’t matter when they do. Whether we wish it or not, these things belong to us, are us, and we are diminished because of them” (2016). The Pacific Solution’s ultimate cruelty therefore lies in strategically disregarding detainees on far-flung islands, which leads to extreme enactments of protest in a quest to be present. Those prepared to self-mutilate engage in their own form of rigor and implacability, weaponizing their bodies as the only material they have left to protest with. Here, cruelty’s palpable materiality is found etymologically and alarmingly in cru or “raw flesh.”

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Performative Protestations of the Real In their introduction to The Aesthetics of Global Protest, the editors maintain protest is a performative enactment of democratic power (McGarry et al. 2019: 16). However, if the democratic public is sanctioned to demand recognition, embody visibility, and perform its existence through protest, what happens when “we the people,” such as those sequestered in island detention centers, are denied recognition, visibility, and a dissenting voice—when what Judith Butler refers to as “the right to appear” through “performative assembly” (2015) is withheld? In their need to be seen and heard, protesters make aesthetic choices that are “bound up with the visual framing or staging” (McGarry et al. 2019: 17). When media access is withheld, the use of phones and internet banned, and the ability to speak about conditions prohibited, detainees perform their desperation: clinging to fencing and standing on rooftops with banners bearing desperate messages; raising crossed hands above their heads for outside cameras that have managed to evade authorities; or utilizing contraband phones to document their substandard surroundings and radical acts of self-harm, such as sewing up their lips or self-immolation, which stage the cruelty inflicted on their bodies and minds. The “violence of power,” as Lefebvre pronounces, “is answered by the violence of subversion” (1991: 23). Artaud was dedicated to the precarious body as an arousing image. The very thought of a body in self-inflicted flames scorches the psyche as it demands an imagining, which, in her discussion of suicide protests, Karin Andriolo calls “the most radical form of embodied minding” (2006: 102). Imagination is taken to its limit by engaging with the body experientially and metaphorically in order to come up against the Real. The sacrificial protester becomes a site for inscribing political messages. Confronting witnesses with the possibility of intense suffering, they demand their signaling be reciprocated. We therefore return to Artaud’s role as the monk, Jean Massieu, in The Passion of Joan of Arc where the body signaling through the flames is not the victim but the witness whose physicality both anticipates and mirrors Joan’s suffering. For Gilles Deleuze, a close-up on Artaud’s face provides a powerful affection-image, transcending the setting’s place and time through “an encounter with the limit” (1986: 108). This is where the affective act— such as self-immolation—reveals the unbearable and the unknowable, identified by Slavoj Žižek as “the stain of the Real” (1992: 236), de-centering the subject from within. Žižek is referencing Lacan’s “irruption of the Real,” defined as a brutal occurrence marking “where thought becomes witness to a performance of the real” (Lacan 1990: 36). Lying outside the field of representation, this Real makes its presence known through a confronting reality we can neither gaze at nor turn away from. However,

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in Island Icarus/PhoneHome, the irruption of the Real—first intimated by the shroud’s violent crackling—is sounded out through the very real actions and reactions that took place on Nauru. Like Artaud’s infamous scream, the primal materiality of Masoumali’s immaterial cry of rage causes physical and emotional agitation.

The Inspired Shudder In “The Twice-Killed: Imagining Protest Suicide,” Andriolo insists that we “ought to pay attention to protest suicides” in order to register ourselves “as conscious participants in humanity” (2006: 109). This chapter has paid attention to the presentational act of Omid Masoumali’s protest immolation and its representation via media imagery, in order to performatively engage with the event—and, particularly, what it protested—within the re-presentational iterative artwork of Island Icarus. Through the screened audio-visual, which draws on the trauma of enforced detention, we bodily “bear witness” to what Hélène Cixous calls “[t]he enigma of human cruelty, that of others and my own” (1995: 342). Confronting the incomprehensible image involves what Richard K. Sherwin calls an “encounter with the ethical sublime. . . . We shudder and we know we must act” (2011: 80). This resonates with Artaud’s demand for an “inspired shudder” in his final essay, “To Have Done with the Judgment of God” (1947), written after his release from an asylum and at the conclusion of the Second World War. That same year—the year of his death—Artaud wrote Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society (1947), in which he identified with the Dutch artist’s paintings, seeing them, like his Theatre of Cruelty, as both violent and curative. Insisting Van Gogh’s suicide should not be trivialized by madness, Artaud saw it as a punishment wrought by society’s “collective consciousness” (1947: 486–7). Masoumali, therefore—along with others who take their lives in detention—is also suicided by society. Since Australia externalized its borders to deal with “boat-people” by sending them to distant and isolated islands, many protests have been undertaken by offshore detainees as well as onshore and international sympathizers; these protests include marches, silent vigils, performances, academic papers, journalistic reports, books, documentaries, and social media campaigns such as #LetThemStay and #BringThemHome. It has taken almost two decades for the underlying force, created from an accrual of these protests, to finally empty out the camps, although a number of refugees still remain island-bound, and Australia’s varying governments have yet to acknowledge the intense suffering they have produced.

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Jon McKenzie has proposed that “a resistant performativity cannot do without a global feeling of political love” (2008: 133). Referring to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s demand for “a more generous and more unrestrained conception of love” (2004: 351), operating beyond romantic and familial ties, McKenzie suggests being “a/part”—“feeling a part of the world and feeling apart from it at the same time” (2008: 129). This (dis)passionate approach, which requires operating somewhere between affective immersion and critical distance, is demanded by the Island Icarus installations: in the Remanence exhibit, observers have to face the divide and contend with a deliberately limited vista, which renders them outsiders to the work; while PhoneHome requires viewers to calibrate their gaze in order to observe the screened videos through an-other screening of the windows’ intervening bars. As each viewer kowtows on a kneeler to peer within and decipher the video, they appear to passersby as votaries expressing deference to the miniature home for mobile phone. Engaging bodily, the viewer is invited to critically reflect on their own complicity in democratically sanctioned cruelty, as well as the realities belonging to some of the most precarious political subjects of our time—the refugee, detainee, asylum seeker, and perceived “alien.”

Notes 1 These are the words briefly reported in April 2016 and then repeated in several newspapers as the result of a press release on October 11, 2019, regarding an inquest into Masoumali’s medical treatment. However, what was recorded on mobile phone and uploaded online (translated from Farsi by Mehrangiz Modarres Tabatabaei) speaks to the cruelty: ‫ دیگه چکارکنیم! ایا اومدین بدبختی ما رو‬، ‫خسته شدیم از اینجا! خسته شدیم بابا! پدرمونو در اوردین‬ ‫ سه سال پوست ماروکندین‬, ‫ به خدا‬, ‫ سه سال پوست ماروکندین‬٬‫ بدبختیم بابا‬٬‫ببینین ? همینه‬. We are tired of being here! We are exhausted, damn it! You gave us a hard time! What more do we have to do! Are you here to see our misery? That’s true, we are miserable! Damn it!​For three years you peeled our skin off, swear to god!​For three years you peeled our skin off!

2 Exhibited works were Nothing to Declare (Dictaphone Group: Lebanon), Island Icarus (Dorita Hannah, Sean Coyle & Chris Jackson: New Zealand/Australia), Vigil (Tracey Moffatt: Australia/USA), Ayaz’s Lament (Rescue4Children: Kurdistan/Iraq), Drone Footage of Homs (Alexander Pushin for RT: Russia), Revolting (Lindsay Seers: UK), and then the rain (David Shearing: UK), and TeaTime EUROPE (Giorgos Zamboulakis: Greece). The contributing artists and correspondents were selected by an

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international committee: Sodja Lotker (Czech Republic), Jordan Geiger (the United States), and Tony Fry (Australia).

References Agamben, G. (1998), Homo Sacer: Sovereign power and Bare Life, trans. D. Heller-Roazen, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Andriolo, K. (2006), “The Twice-Killed: Imagining Protest Suicide,” American Anthropologist, 108(1): 100–13. Artaud, A. (1958), The Theatre and Its Double, trans. M. C. Richards, New York: Grove Press. Artaud, A. (1976), “To Have Done with the Judgement of God,” in S. Sontag (ed.), Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings, pp. 553–71, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Bennett, J. (2005), Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma and Contemporary Art, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Boochani, B. (2018), No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison, trans. O. Tofighian, Sydney: Pan Macmillan Australia. Boochani, B. and A. Sarvestani (2017), Chauka, Please Tell us the Time, The Netherlands: Sarvin Productions. Butler, J. (2015), Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cixous, H. (1995), “The Place of Crime, The Place of Pardon,” in R. Drain (ed.), Twentieth-Century Theatre Reader, pp. 340–4, London and New York: Routledge. Cohen, R. (2016), “Australia’s Offshore Cruelty,” The New York Times, May 23. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.nyt​​imes.​​com​/2​​016​/0​​5​/24/​​opini​​on​/au​​stral​​ias​-o​​ ffsho​​​re​-cr​​uelty​​.html​ (accessed November 30, 2020). Colman, F. (2014), Film Theory and Philosophy: The Key Thinkers, Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Deleuze, G. (1986), Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam, London and New York: The Athlone Press. Di Stefano, J. (2008), “You are Here: Moving Image + Documentary Paradigm + Performativity,” in D. Hannah and O. Harsløf (eds.), Performance Design, pp. 253–66, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), [Film] Dir. S. Spielberg, USA: Universal Pictures. Flanagan, R. (2016), “Australia has Lost Its Way: Inaugural Boisbouvier Lecture in 2016 Melbourne Writers Festival,” The Monthly, September 1. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​month​​ly​.co​​m​.au/​​issue​​/2016​​/octo​​ber​/1​​47524​​4000/​​ richa​​rd​-fl​​anaga​​n​/doe​​​s​-wri​​ting-​​matte​​r​#mtr​ (accessed December 19, 2020). Green, A. (1997), “The Psycho-Analytic Reading of Tragedy,” in T. Murray (ed.), Mimesis, Masochism and Mime: The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary French Thought, pp. 136–62, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

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Hannah, D. and S. Coyle (2017), “Artist Statement,” Remanence, [Catalogue of an exhibition held at the University of Tasmania, 17–23 March] Glebe: University of Tasmania. Hardt, M. and A. Negri (2004), Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, New York: Penguin Books. Janssen, S. (2017), “‘Fantasy in the Hold’: Architecture, Critical Mobilities, Political Love,” in PhoneHome/Llama a Casa, [Catalogue of an exhibition held at the University of Tasmania, 26 October–10 November 2017] Hobart: University of Tasmania. Kilinski II, K. (2002), The Flight of Icarus in Western Art, New York: Edwin Mellon Press. Kilinski II, K. (2013), Greek Myth and Western Art: The Presence of the Past, New York: Cambridge University Press. La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1928), [Film] Dir. C. T. Dreyer, France: Société générale des films. Lacan, J. (1990), Television, trans. D. Hollier, R. Krauss, and A. Michelson, New York: W.W. Norton and Co. Lefebvre, H. (1991), The Production of Space, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd. McGarry, A., U. Korkut, O. Jenzen, I. Erhart, and H. Eslen-Ziya, eds. (2019), The Aesthetics of Global Protest, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press McKenzie, J. (2008), “That Global Feeling,” in D. Hannah and O. Harsløf (eds.), Performance Design, pp. 113–28, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. Mroué, R. (2012), “The Pixelated Revolution,” TDR: The Drama Review, 56(3): 18–35. Remanence: Ten Days on the Island (2017), [Exhibition] University of Tasmania, Hobart, March 17–26, 2017. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.uta​​s​.edu​​.au​/c​​reati​​ ve​-ar​​ts​-me​​dia​/e​​vents​​/art-​​hobar​​t​/201​​7​/mar​​ch​/re​​manen​​ce​​-te​​n​-day​​s​-on-​​the​-i​​ sland​(accessed December 19, 2020). Scarry, E. (1987), The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Sherwin, R. K. (2011), Visualizing Law in the Age of the Digital Baroque: Arabesques & Entanglements, London and New York: Routledge. Ziółkowski, G. (2018), Okrutny teatr samospaleń: Protesty samobójcze w ogniu i ich echa w kulturze współczesnej, Poznaniu: Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza. Ziółkowski, G. (2020), A Cruel Theatre of Self-Immolations: Contemporary Suicide Protests by Fire and Their Resonances in Culture, Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Žižek, S. (1992), “In His Bold Gaze My Ruin Is Writ Large,” in S. Žižek (ed.), Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock), pp. 210–72. London: Verso.

Contributors

Dawn Tracey Brandes teaches in the Fountain School of Performing Arts at Dalhousie University and is the executive director of the Halifax Humanities Society. Her published work can be found in  The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance, Canadian Theatre Review, and Puppetry International. Rebecca Clark is a postdoctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows and Department of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. Her research focuses on contemporary American literature, visual culture, the “graphic,” and affect theory. She has published articles on bedbugs and narrative tangents in Teju Cole’s Open City, sex dolls and slapstick comedy in Fran Ross’s Oreo, and an original comics adaptation of Thomas Hoccleve’s My Compleinte. Her current book project is titled American Graphic. Alissa Clarke is Associate Professor in Drama at De Montfort University, Leicester. Her research exploring gender, performance processes, the body, and pleasure within live and onscreen performance has been published in books and periodicals, including Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, The Drama Review, and Feminist Media Histories. She is coeditor with Julia Listengarten of the forthcoming series, Reflections on Contemporary Performance Process (Bloomsbury Methuen Drama). She cocurates De Montfort University’s Cinema and Television History Institute’s Peter Whitehead Archive. Lara Cox is an instructor of English at Cergy Paris University. She is interested in the question of visual and intellectual reappropriation between France, the United States, and Britain. She has published on the topics of Anglophone reappropriations of the Theatre of the Absurd, foreign women in the Hollywood Western, contemporary intellectual history between the United States and France, art history in cinema and new media, and reappropriation across racial lines on screen, canvas, and stage. She is the author of Afterlife of the Theatre of the Absurd: The Avant-garde, Spectatorship, and Psychoanalysis (2018).  Tim Butler Garrett is a freelance academic, editor of the British UNIMA journal Puppet Notebook, and a visiting lecturer at Wimbledon College of

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Contributors

Art. His research interests include the connections between puppets, the cinematic, and contemporary Visual Theatre; “Vienna 1900”; and the 1960s counterculture. His writing for books and journals includes chapters on the UK’s Suffragist movement, sound and vision in The Walking Dead, the Mitteleuropean sensibility of Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, and gender in the films of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Dorita Hannah is a designer and independent academic whose research— operating across the architectural, performing, culinary, and visual arts— focuses on performance space and spatial performativity. Her projects range from theatre architecture (space-in-action) to participatory events (actionin-space), addressing the dynamics, politics, and intermediality of the public realm. Hannah has published on Performance Design and Event-Space, while work from her creative is regularly selected for exhibition in  World Stage Design and the Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space. Indu Jain is Assistant Professor at Janki Devi Memorial College (Delhi University) in the Department of English. Her thesis contributed to recovering a feminist historiography in theatre and performance history in the Indian context. She is interested in exploring the lacuna in the documentation of such works and studying the embodied nature of their performance aesthetics. She has published Contemporary Indian Feminist Theatre and Pedagogy. Alvin Eng Hui Lim is a performance, religion, and theatre researcher. He is Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the National University of Singapore. He is also Deputy Director and Technology and Online Editor (Mandarin) of the Asian Shakespeare Intercultural Archive (A|S|I|A, http://a​-s​-i​-a​-web​.org/). His first monograph, titled Digital Spirits in Religion and Media: Possession and Performance (2018), studies how lived religious practices in contemporary Singapore perform in combination with digital technology. He has also published on Singapore theatre, translation, and digital archiving. Julia Listengarten is Professor of Theatre at the University of Central Florida. She has written on avant-garde and contemporary theatre, scenographic practices, and performances of national identity. Her recent books include Playwriting 2000–2009: Voices, Documents, New Interpretations  (with Rosenthal, 2018) and The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre

Contributors

253

since 1945 (with Di Benedetto, 2021). She has contributed to many theatre publications, coedited the eight-volume series Decades of Modern American Drama: 1930–2009 (2018 with Murphy), and was the editor (2013–20) of the journal Stanislavski Studies. Yana Meerzon is Professor at the Department of Theatre, University of Ottawa. She was appointed a President of Canadian Association for Theater Research in June 2020. Her research interests are theatre of exile and migration, cultural and interdisciplinary studies. She is the author of three books, with the latest volume, Performance, Subjectivity, Cosmopolitanism, published in August 2020. J. Brandon Pelcher  is a lecturer at the University of Colorado Boulder in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures. His research interests include the historical avant-garde, particularly Dadaism; media theory and cultural techniques; Marxist and post-Marxist literary theory; and material and feminist ecocritical thought. He has published on the ideology critique of Dadaist praxis and the phenomenology of forgetting. Tony Perucci is Associate Professor of Performance Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His two ongoing research projects focus on (1) the theory and practice of Mary Overlie’s Six Viewpoints approach to theatre and dance, and (2) the interplay of the “fictional” and the “actual” in politically engaged contemporary visual art and performance. He is the author of the books On the Horizontal: Mary Overlie and the Six Viewpoints (forthcoming) and Paul Robeson and the Cold War Performance Complex (2012). Selim Rauer is a teacher of continental philosophy at the Felix Faure state high school in Beauvais (France). His work examines the territorialities of foreignness, as well as traumatic and post-traumatic memories related to colonialism and the Shoah in French and Francophone literature. He has published in various literary and academic peer-reviewed journals such as Modern Drama, Research in African Literatures, and Contemporary French & Francophone Studies: Sites.  Avra Sidiropoulou is Associate Professor at the Open University of Cyprus and Artistic Director of Athens-based Persona Theatre Company. Her research interests include directing theory and practice, ethics of adaptation,

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Contributors

and contemporary theatre-making. She is the author of Directions for Directing. Theatre and Method (2018) and Authoring Performance: The Director in Contemporary Theatre (2011) and the editor of Staging 21st Century Tragedies. Avra was nominated for the League of Professional Theatre Women’s 2020 Gilder/Goigney International Award. Keri Watson is Associate Professor at the University of Central Florida in the School of Visual Arts and Design. Her research, which focuses on modern and contemporary art, has been recognized and supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, Fulbright-Terra Foundation, and the Society for the Preservation of American Modernists. Her book This Is America: (Re)viewing the Art of the United States is forthcoming. Johann Robert Wood is an artist-in-residence at the University of Vermont. He holds an MFA in European Devised Performance from Columbia College, Chicago. His creative and research interests focus on critical intersections of race and sexuality through devised performance practice and postmodern aesthetics in theatre, music, and dance.

Index abject  7, 29, 138, 141, 177–82, 186–9, 229 abstraction  7, 206–13, 216–17 aging  6, 160, 162, 171 Advance Care Planning (ACP)  165, 168 decline theory  6, 160–2, 165–6, 168, 171–2 end-of-life  160–72 mortality  161, 164, 168, 172, 187, 189 peak-and-decline narrative  160–1, 170–1 arousal  1–8, 24, 27–8, 44, 60, 63, 72, 82, 103–4, 111, 168, 172, 215–16, 220 inorganic  206–7, 210, 217 political  104, 134, 143 self-arousal  76, 78, 81 Artaud, Antonin  3, 236–7, 243–7 cruelty  8, 236, 238, 245, 247 “signaling through the flames”  236 asylum  102–3, 110–11, 113, 140, 238, 241, 247–8 audience  32–8, 108–9, 128, 153, 187–8, 192–203, 236, see also pleasure, spectatorial interaction  104, 132, 134, 156, 161–3, 167–70 Australia  235, 237–42, 245, 247 Maria Island  235, 238–41 Tasmania  235, 238–40 Austria  102–4, 109–13 Freiheitliche Partei Österreich (FPÖ)  110, 112–13 (see also Nazi) automata  7, 185, 188 Autonomy Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR)  61, 63

avant-garde  1–3, 13, 16, 31–2, 46, 72, 89, 140, 154, 236 framing  94–5 historical  177, 179 modernist  13, 17–19, 21–2, 24, (see also modernism) Russian  6, 131, 137, 143 (see also Russian culture) Beckett, Samuel  60–2 Not I  58, 61–2 Bellmer, Hans  24, 210 Berlin  14–15, 89–90, 103, 109, 178, 183–5 Russian Berlin  179–82, 189 Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung (BIZ)  92–4, 97–8 Badebild  94 blackface  65–9, 223, 225, 228–9, see also Williams, Bert Boal, Augusto  163, 170 forum theatre  161 gesture  169 body able-bodiedness  29, 36, 38 animated  15, 207, 213–15 Black body  221–2, 225, 229 disembodied  27, 34–6, 91 embodied performance  2–4, 8, 148, 152, 226 erotic  15, 19, 23–4, 36, 51, 53, 58–60, 62–9, 80, 140, 209–10 exilic  177, 179–80, 185 explicit body  3, 46, 131, 133–4, 143, 152 (see also Schneider, Rebecca) gendered  36, 42, 46, 51, 54, 89, 132, 135, 142–3 (see gender)

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nude  27, 33, 42, 46, 49, 51–3, 62–4, 78–9, 82, 84, 150–3, 206–7, 216 objectification  25, 58–9, 73, 76–9, 119, 123, 126, 200, 207, 210, 215–16 queer body  3, 29, 126–7, 221–2, 226, 229, 231 racialized  38, 117–18, 120, 128, 132, 142–3, 214 sculpture  29–30, 34–5, 41–2, 48–9, 53 subversive  90–1, 136–8, 140 transgressive  41–3, 46, 131–7, 141–3 Both Sides, Now (BSN)  6, 161–8, 170–2 community-based theatre  160– 1, 163 round table  164–5, 168–9 Brecht, Bertolt  103–4, 184–5, 193, 196–203, 237 burlesque  7, 27–8, 36–8, 194, 206–7 Butler, Judith  1–2, 91–3, 99, 146, 163, 246 Clemenceau, Georges  93, 96 colonialism  6, 63, 65, 117, 119–21, 209 neocolonialism  118, 121, 124, 128 postcolonialism  2–3, 5, 62–3, 69, 117–29, 147, 225 (see On the Postcolony) Covid-19  8, 143, 154, 164, 224 Crenshaw, Kimberlé  3, 8, 59, 67, 222, see intersectionality culture Blackness  7–8, 123, 221–2, 229, 231 Francophone  117 French  58, 63–5, 118, 120–4, 126, 209 German  23–4, 29, 89–90, 94–9, 104, 109, 184, 209, 212

Indian  147, 154 Malay Muslim  167, 169 Russian  61, 131–3, 135–6, 142, 179–88 (see also avantgarde, Russian; culture, Russian; Moscow) Singaporean  160–2, 164, 166, 168 Dada  3, 5, 89–93, 95–9, 177, see also photomontage Dada Rundschau  89–98 Jedermann sein eigner Fussball (Heartfield)  90 Dalí, Salvador  27–8, 32–8 Dream of Venus  27–8, 32–8 lobsterwomen  35–7 desire  4–7, 31, 41, 43, 51–5, 73–4, 77, 81, 123–4, 126–8, 177, 181, 196, 198–9, 209–10, 213 sexual  28, 33–6, 38, 59, 62, 69, 125, 140 (see also sexuality) Deutsche Tageszeitung  94–8 devised performance practice  4, 220–4 disability  4, 27–9, 33–6, 38 discrimination  2, 4, 42, 117, 131, 138, 140–1, 143, 149, 151, 221 ableism  31 anti-Semitism  18–19, 21 racism  31, 59, 64–5, 67–9, 103, 110, 112, 117, 121, 123, 133–4, 213, 224, 229 sexism  58, 61, 67, 69, 121, 128 (see also misogyny) doll  20, 196, 206, 216 Alma  4, 7, 14–16, 18–19, 21–2, 24 (see also Kokoschka, Oskar; Mahler, Alma) Barbie  7, 23, 207–8, 212–16 Bellmer’s  24 Bild Lilli  23, 212 erotic  209–10

Index sex  7, 23, 207–10, 213, 215–16 topsy-turvy  207–8, 212–16 Drama Box  161–3, 165 dramaturgy  7, 75, 105, 120, 160–1, 164, 171, 185, 189 Drexciya  67–8 Duggan, Patrick  194–5, 203 estrangement  178–9, 181, 184–5, 189, 193, 197, 200, 202 ethics  156, 163, 167–8, 171, 192–5, 202–3, 216, 247 eugenics  23, 28–31, 37–8 Euripides  74–5, 84–5 experimental theatre  106 Living Theatre  104, 106 Performance Group, The  104– 6, 135 Fanon, Frantz  118, 221, 225, see also white gaze Feilding, Amanda  5, 41–55 Birdie  44–5, 47, 53–4 Heartbeat in the Brain  41–2, 45, 50, 53–4 I Am My Own Laboratory  42–3, 48–9 LSD  41–2, 44, 47 Trepanation for the National Health  42–3 feminism  2, 5–6, 19, 41–3, 54–5, 58–9, 131–2, 135–6, 141–3, 146–8, 156–7, 220, see also movement Indian Feminist Theatre  147 pedagogy  147, 149–50, 152, 157 First World War  89–90, 93–5, 97, 156 Freud, Sigmund  13, 15, 20, 22–4, 32–3, 44, 59, 177, 180, 183 castration anxiety  22, 24, 28, 33–5, 38, 141 psychoanalysis  31, 33, 36, 58

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Gallagher, Ellen  5, 60, 65 “Oh! Susanna”  59, 66–9 penmanship paper  66–7 “Watery Ecstatic”  59, 66–9 Garner, Eric  142 gaze  52, 64, 67 male gaze  13, 59, 69, 72, 74, 85 white gaze  221–2, 225, 231 (see also Fanon, Frantz) gender  3–5, 13, 16, 20, 27–8, 36–8, 41, 43–4, 59, 61, 117–18, 134–6, 140, 146–9, 231, see also body, gendered identity  122, 125–8 representation  54, 139, 143 roles  20, 51–2, 68, 133 transgender  37, 127–8 Goffman, Erving  103, 106 Gogol, Nikolay  185–6 Greek mythology Adonia festival  22 Antigone  146 Aphrodite  17, 74–6, 81, 84, 209 Galatea  17–18, 23, 209 Hippolytus  74–6, 79–84 Icarus  234, 238, 240–1 Phaedra  74–85 sphinx  17, 19–20, 22 Theseus  74–5, 78–9, 81, 83 grief  35, 140, 163, 166, 168, 171 guerrilla  131, 141 Guerrilla Girls  135 Gunning, Tom  112, see also truthiness Handke, Peter  104–5, 107, 113–14 Offending the Audience  104–5 Straßentheater  104–5, 113 happening  105–6 Heng Leun, Kok  165–6, 169–70 Exit  165–70 Last Dance  165, 169–71 Höch, Hannah  91–5, 97–9 reframing  91, 93–6, 98–9

258

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installation  8, 51, 58, 60–2, 140, 142, 163–5, 211, 236–8, see also “I Am the Mouth” Island Icarus  8, 234–8, 240–4, 247–8 PhoneHome  235, 237–8, 241–4, 247–8 Remanence  235, 239–41, 244, 248 intersectionality  3, 8, 222–3, see also Kimberlé Crenshaw Black queer studies  221, 226, 229, 231 Johnson, E. Patrick  220–1 Jones, Basil  193, 196–201 Ur-narrative  193, 198–9, 201, 203 Kapur, Anuradha  6, 146–58 Ambedkar University 146, 148–9, 153 Dark Things  148–9, 153–6 Nale Wali Ladki  148–51, 153–4 National School of Drama (NSD)  146–50 Kharms, Daniil  137–9, 141, 144 Kleist, Heinrich von  16–17, 204 Klimt, Gustav  13–14, 18, 20–1 Kokoschka, Oskar  4, 7, 13–16, 18–19, 22, 24–5, 210, see also Alma doll Kristeva, Julia  7, 177–83, 186–7, 189–90 Kwahulé, Koffi  117–21, 123–8 Bintou  117–29 laboratory  48–9, 179, 226–7 Lasch, Christopher  106–7 Levinas, Emmanuel  193, 195, 201–3, 216 Mahler, Alma  14–15, 18–19, 21, see also doll, Alma mannequin  23, 33, 206, 210–11, 216

Marronage  6, 117–18, 125, 128 Masoumali, Omid  8, 237–40, 244–5, 247–8, see also Pacific Solution self-immolation  8, 234, 239–40, 244, 246 Mbembe, Achille  120, 124–5 necropolitics  117, 119–20, 124–5 On the Postcolony (see postcolonialism)  120, 122 media, see also technology digital space  3, 8, 62–3, 73–5, 79–82, 85, 143, 164, 223, 243 mediated identity  1, 4, 16, 27, 131, 140 social media  223, 236–7, 247 television  109, 114, 131, 140, 154, 206 Mellen, Joe  42–5, 47–9, 51–2, 54–5, see also trepanation Bore Hole  45, 47, 55 microhistorian  150–1 mise en scène  50, 75, 109, 152, 156, 185, 188, 223 misogyny  15, 18–19, 21, 23, 91, see also sexism montage  5, 63, 133, 140–2, 156–7, 222, 225–6, 228–9 photomontage  90–6, 99 (see also Dada) Moscow  131–4, 142, 182, 186, see also culture, Russian movement, see also feminism British Black Arts Movement  58, 63–5 expressionism  14, 18, 177, 179, 182, 188 futurism  19, 68, 138, 183 modernism  3, 13–14, 16–19, 21–5, 38, 179, 204 (see also avant-garde, modernist) postmodernism  131, 156

Index surrealism  4, 15, 23–4, 27, 32, 36, 38, 41–3, 53, 62, 99, 108, 177, 179, 186–7 movement score  227–31 Nabokov, Vladimir  7, 177–90 Event, The  178, 185–7, 189–90 exile  7, 177–80 Gift, The  178, 181, 187, 190 Man from the USSR, The  178, 181, 190 visual imagination  177–9, 187 Narcissister  7, 206–7, 209, 211, 213–17 plastic mask  210, 214–5 “Upside Down”  206–7, 209, 212 Nazi  18, 23–4, 109–10, 112–13, 124, 141, 209, see also Freiheitliche Partei Österreich Ngai, Sianne  111, 212–14, 217 New York World’s Fair  27–9, 31, 32, 36 normativity heteronormativity  5, 7, 27–8, 126, 220, 231 masculinity  5, 19, 25, 35, 121–4, 126–7, 142, 149, 220, 230–1 typical American family  28, 31 Oberiu, The  131, 136–8, 140–1, 143 Pacific Solution  237, 240, 245, see also Masoumali, Omid; refugee alienation  242–3, 248 asylum  238, 241–2, 247–8 detention  237–8, 240, 242–3, 245–7 Republic of Nauru  237–8, 244, 247 performance art Abramović, Marina  43, 50

259

countercultural art  5, 43–5, 47–8, 54 Orlan  43, 50–1 Partum, Ewa  62 Phaedra I—  5, 72–85 chorus  74–5, 77–9, 81 Pellone, Elena  74–5, 77, 79–80 pleasure  4–5, 21, 33, 42, 59, 72–4, 80, 85, 102, 139, 207, 215, 221 spectatorial  72–3, 198 (see also audience) politics  28, 35, 88–90, 95, 99, 109– 11, 119–20, 124, 134, 147, 149, 155, 193, 246, 248, see also political power communism  60, 62, 93, 182 political action  2–4, 6, 104, 107–8, 133, 150 political art  102–5, 107, 112–14 (see also pornography) political oppression  5, 90–1, 96, 131, 137, 141, 143, 180 political resistance  132, 135–6, 138, 142, 144 politics of death  120 post-communism  5, 58–60, 62 Pollock, Della  221, 226, 232 Polska, Agnieszka  5, 60–2, 65, 69 “I Am the Mouth”  58, 60–3, 69 (see also installation) pornography  61, 72, 207–8, 210, 215, 217 (see also politics, political art) avant-porn  206–7, 215, 217 horror  196–7 power  5–6, 13, 17, 22, 45, 48, 52, 54, 104, 118–20, 122–7, 132, 135–6, 139–40, 142, 146–8, 151, 170, 211, 215–16, 224, 231–2 erotic  59, 62, 66, 68 necropower  122–4, 126 patriarchy  6, 51, 58, 85, 124–8, 141–2

260 political  90–1, 94–5, 109, 246 (see politics) precarity  1–2, 5–6, 8, 13, 19–22, 25, 46, 89, 121, 131, 134–8, 140, 143, 154–6, 160–1, 163, 165–6, 179, 189, 221, 231, 246, 248 protest  2, 8, 62–3, 65, 96, 105–7, 113, 132, 136–7, 142–4, 148, 150, 152, 157, 236–9, 244–7 provocation  3, 6, 131, 133–4, 138, 144, 210, 214 punk  99, 132, 134–7, 143 puppetry  3–4, 7, 14–20, 24, 139, 186, 192–204, 222 Handspring Puppet Company  7, 192–3, 197, 199–200, 203 Kentridge, William  156, 193, 195–7, 199, 203 Kohler, Adrian  192–3 puppetesque  13–14, 16–17, 23, 25 Pushkin, Alexander  188 Pussy Riot  6, 131–44, see also Voina balaclava  132, 135–46 “Free the Cobblestones”  132–3 holy fool  136–8 “Punk Prayer”  134 Pygmalion  16–18, 23–5, 209 Pygmalionism  209–10 queer  43, 49, 220, see also body, queer body; sexuality epistemology  7, 220–2, 231–2 queering  221–3, 228–9 radical queer performance  231 Queer Makishi  7, 222–31 mask  222–4 radical alterity  202 Reality Friction  102–3, 106–9

Index refugee  102, 110–14, 149, 154, 234, 237–8, 240–4, 247–8, see also Pacific Solution Rep & Rev  227, 229 ritual  76, 85, 169–70, 224, 226 excision  93, 95, 118–19, 122, 126–9 Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von  21 sacrifice  117–20, 124, 126, 128–9 Salome  17–18, 21 scenography  151, 154, 156–7, 234, 240 Coyle, Sean  235, 240, 248 performance design  8, 234, 238, 244 Scheidemann cabinet  90, 95, see also Weimar Republic Ebert, Friedrich  90–1, 94–8 Noske, Gustav  90–1, 94–8 Schiele, Egon  14, 19 Schlingensief, Christoph  5, 102–4, 108–14 aesthetics of irritation  103–5, 107, 109, 111, 113 ambiguity  102, 104–5, 108–9, 111–13 Bitte liebt Österreich  5, 102–4, 108–10, 112–14 indecidability  108–9, 111 Schneider, Rebecca  46, 131, 133, 135, 140, 143, see also explicit body Sedira, Zineb  5, 58, 60, 63–5, 69 “A Scream for Liberation”  58, 63–5, 69 sexuality  5, 20, 24, 29, 36–7, 44, 51, 64, 78, 84, 122–3, 133, 212, 231, see also sexual desire ecosexuality  53–4 female  17, 35, 62, 79, 141, 152 fetish  2–4, 7, 13–15, 17, 22, 24, 38, 45, 72, 123, 139–40, 179, 203, 210, 216–17

Index hypersexualized  1, 4, 28–9, 34–5, 38 legs  35–6, 79, 134, 152, 181–4, 206, 230, 241 lips  5, 58–62, 65–70, 184, 200–1 queer  133, 141–2, 220, 225, 230 (see also queer) sexual awakening  1, 24, 81, 85 sexualize  1, 63–4, 69, 83, 139–40, 212 sideshow  28, 36–8 simulacrum  4, 13–15, 17–18, 20, 23–5, 74 site-specific performance  8, 131–5, 140–1, 143–4, 154 Sivaraman, Deepan  149, 152–4 Slinger, Penny  5, 41–55 An Exorcism  41, 43–6, 48–9, 51, 53–4 spiritual space  5–6, 41, 46–7, 54–5, 124–6, 128, 137, 139, 227 striptease  206–7 synesthesia  177, 179–80 Szapocznikow, Alina  62 Taylor, Jane  193–4, 196 Ubu and the Truth Commission  7, 192–3, 195–200, 203 technology  15, 23, 73–5, 81, 153, 221, 229, 231, see also media projections  6, 75, 79, 82–4, 197, 240 trans-position  220–3, 226, 230–1 trauma  3, 5, 7, 20, 35, 61–2, 89–91, 117–19, 157, 165, 178, 189–92, 194–7, 203, 224, 247 testimony  128, 192–4, 196–7 trepanation  42, 44, 47–9, see also Mellen, Joe Huges, Bart  44, 47–8, 54 Trump, Donald  107, 114, 136, 141–2

261

Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)  192–4, 200 truthiness  111–13, see also Gunning, Tom uncanny  3, 7, 13, 20, 23–4, 178, 180, 183, 186–9, 210 verisimilitude  210 Vienna  13–15, 18, 21, 23, 25, 102–3, 114 Wiener Festwochen  102, 110 violence  1, 3–5, 8, 13, 19, 24, 34, 50, 75, 89–91, 95–6, 98, 120–5, 129, 133, 137, 139–43, 154, 177, 190, 194, 201, 212–13, 216, 225, 246 police  136, 142–3 visibility  2, 147–50, 215, 220, 223, 238, 241, 246 hypervisibility  221, 229 invisibility  2, 67, 83, 131, 135, 229, 231, 238 (re)visibilize  221, 229 Voina  133–4, 142, 144, see also Pussy Riot voyeurism  1, 5, 7, 28, 36, 38, 44, 72–3, 196, 225 Vvedensky, Alexander  137–41 Weimar Republic  5, 89–91, 93–100, see also Scheidemann cabinet einst und jetzt  94, 97–8 military  94–8 Weininger, Otto  13, 18–19, 21 Whitehead, Peter  41, 43–9, 52–5 Wilhelm II, Kaiser  94, 97–8 Friedensfürst  97–8 Williams, Bert  228, see also blackface Williams, Heathcote  48–9 Xhosa  192, 194

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