Eonnagata's Interpellation

A few weeks ago I saw Eonnagata, a collaborative theatre piece by a trio of acclaimed artists who also serve as its sole performers. Theatrical innovator Robert Lepage, ballerina-turned-contempory-dancer Sylvie Guillem and choreographer Russell Maliphant premiered Eonnagata in London in 2009 and recently brought it to the states on a brief and limited tour. They take as their storyline the history of the Chevalier d'Eon, an 18th century french diplomat and spy who lived the first part of his life as a man and the second half as a woman. Most accurately described as dance-theatre, it blends theatre, dance, martial arts, visual spectacle, and a Kabuki technique of cross-gender performance called onnagata.

I saw the piece at UC Berkeley's Zellerbach Theatre, which was probably a few hundred short of its 2000 seat capacity, and found myself almost blissfully engaged throughout the entire performance. There was a great interpretive openness that allowed my mind to drift in and out of their visually stimulating world. The minimal text and frequently changing mis-en-scene invited me to assemble the pieces as I saw fit, which I deeply enjoy, and if I was ever lacking engagement, I had merely to turn my attention to the breathtaking grace of Sylvie Guillem, who moves like something out of a liquid dream.

The piece was certainly not flawless. The staging was frequently stuck centerstage, their reliance on expensive design elements was a little too easy, the dancers didn't handle spoken or sung language particularly well, and Lepage's limited dance abilities held the trio back.

And still I loved it. The piece called out to an audience that I don't quite believe exists yet in the United States. It interpellated us as viewers who embrace the non-linearity and characterlessness of post-dramatic performance art. It trusted that we too were interested in a world in which gender doesn't resolve itself to an entrapping binary, and where performances of self-expression are not merely in service of a constantly hardening and sedimenting individual ego. These are things that I frequently see in small fringe theatre and dance spaces in San Francisco and New York. Seeing them explored onstage in a large venue to a seemingly warm audience was exciting.

I believe we can say things in art that we don't yet have the words to say in critical and academic discourse. In Eonnagata, I felt Lepage, Guillem and Maliphant reaching towards new visions of gender and embodiment - visions that are as yet unarticulatable with language, but might be almost graspable through attending deeply to the materiality of bodies in motion onstage.

Only A God

In On the Marionette Theatre, by German Romantic author and philosopher Heinrich von Kleist, the first dancer of the Opera insists to the narrator that the grace of the marionette is superior to the grace of human beings...

"My reply was that, no matter how cleverly he might present his paradoxes, he would never make me believe a mechanical puppet can be more graceful than a living human body. He countered this by saying that, where grace is concerned, it is impossible for man to come anywhere near a puppet. Only a god can equal inanimate matter in this respect. This is the point where the two ends of the circular world meet." (Kleist, On the Marionnette Theatre)

In this video, an inanimate object (the fans) animate another inanimate object (the fabric). The result is so full of vital grace that it calls my own liveness into question. In the interaction of these two non-sentient phenomena I see and feel emotional depth, symbolic meaning, a dramatic arc, and a clear aesthetic vision. I'm not sure if this is an argument for a god-less universe or one where god-full-ness is everywhere. Perhaps that's the place "where the two ends of the circular world meet."

P.S. Everything in this post is borrowed from the brilliance of my friends: performer Grace Booth, who found the video, video artist Joe Moore, who showed it to me, and playwright Elizabeth Hersh, who connected the beauty of this dancing scarf to Herr Kleist and his automatons. And Daniel Wurtzel (not yet a friend) is the installation artist who made it in the first place.

"Directing Shadows:" Artaud's Dreams

I re-read Artaud last week. I'm always inspired by his vision for what theatre could be. Here are a few snippets, along with images of his own artwork:


"For the theatre as for culture, it remains a question of naming and directing shadows: and the theater, not confined to a fixed language and form, not only destroys false shadows but prepares the way for a new generation of shadows around which assembles the true spectacle of life." (The Theatre and its Double, p 12)






"We must believe in a sense of life renewed by the theater, a sense of life in which man fearlessly makes himself master of what does not yet exist, and brings it into being."(The Theatre and its Double, p 13)








"We can now say that all true freedom is dark, and infallibly associated with sexual freedom which is also dark, although we do not precisely know why...The theatre releases conflicts, disengages powers, liberates possibilities, and if these possibilities and these powers are dark, it is the fault not of the theater, but of life." (The Theatre and its Double, p 31)






"The true purpose of the theatre is to create Myths, to express life in its immense, universal aspect, and from that life to extract images in which we find pleasure in discovering ourselves... May it free us, in a Myth in which we have sacrificed our little human individuality...with powers rediscovered in the Past" (The Theatre and its Double, p 116)