DORA DOLOROSA - THE WEEPING WOMAN: Dora Maar ______

"All his portraits of me are lies. They're Picassos - Not one is Dora Maar" - Dora Maar

" the Muses are women… Women's spirit is profoundly sunk in nature, and it is through her that man will sound the depths of silence and of the fecund night" - Simone de Beauvoir

A monologue set in a café in Paris, late 1940s and forever after

SET and PROPS small round café table, two chairs, one coffee cup and saucer, silver sugar bowl with cubes of sugar, milk jug, linen napkin, small plate, sharp knife, water glass and a bottle of Evian Water, and an orange, a blood orange.

CHARACTERS :

THE WEEPING WOMAN - Dora Marr - herself

Others actors in the historical drama - mentioned but do not appear

The Lazy Woman - Fernande Olivier - the spoon

The Dying Woman - Marcelle Humbert /Eve - napkin

The Sitting Woman - Olga Koklova- sugar bowl

The Sleeping woman - Marie Therese Walter - small plate

The Laughing Woman - Francoise Gilot - (the absent other coffee cup/saucer)

The Pottery Woman - Jaqueline Roque - milk jug

The Painter - Picasso

The poet - Paul Eluard / The poet's wife - Nusch Eluard

The Photographer - Man Ray

The Director- Jean Renoir

The Actor - Jean Louis Barrault

The Patron- Gertrude Stein

The Doctor/ Psychoanalyst - Jacques Lacan

The General - Franco

The Dictator - Hitler

The Big Painting - Guernica

COSTUME

DORA MAAR WEARS A FORTIES FULL SKIRTED BLACK DRESS AND BOLERO DECORATED WITH RED ROSES AND BRAIDED IN BLACK AND WHITE, A GORGEOUS QUIRKY RED FELT HAT, BLACK HIGH ANKLE STRAP SHOES WITH PEEP TOES, GREEN GLOVES EMBOIDERED WITH RED ROSES. SHE HAS LONG DARK HAIR DRESSED SPANISH STYLE, RED LIPSTICK AND LONG MANICURED RED NAILS

DORA ENTERS (POSSIBLY BY BICYCLE!) SITS AT THE TABLE FACING THE STREET AND THE AUDIENCE AND SLOWLY TAKES OFF HER GLOVES AND WITH THE WRONG END OF THE ORDINARY KNIFE DOES THE GAME WITH HER OUTSTRETCHED LEFT HAND AT FIRST SLOWLY GRADUALLY GETTING FASTER AND FASTER UNTIL SHE HITS HER FINGERS BUT THERE IS NO BLOOD BECAUSE SHE IS USING THE HANDLE OF THE KNIFE.

Stage Set for tragedy

No blood - see just a game! Then it was for real, or was it? A story was made of it and told by The Painter who kept the memory. It was the gloves he wanted - pour un souvenir - with the blood stains intact, impressed on them - he wanted to keep the gloves, not the hands, not the woman or the tears she would weep later on.

The tears were his - not an invention, rather a loan that became an acquisition. They came from her eyes and they were cried for him, for herself, for the state of the world then. He utilized and appropriated them, made her pain his signature, created and recreated in paint. So here I am, or rather here she is- The Weeping Woman, as the Painter saw me. A motif, an exemplar, an obsession. La Femme qui pleure- La Dame Aux Larmes!

The Weeping Woman - with dead child, with handkerchief, with hands like scissors, in striped bodice with handkerchief and mantilla, biting handkerchief while wiping tears, with eyes like boats, with cup and saucer eyes, saucers spilling tears, with eyes like fish, with eyes like drains pouring tears, with eyes doubly shrouded, veiled by her handkerchief, with eyes on stalks and looping knotted tears, with tears like swinging pendulums, with handkerchief twisted like a snail, with eyes lit up like beacons to lead ships to founder on rocky shores on dark nights. Crying a river of tears- in purple, in green, in orange, in red, in black. Picture the weeping woman, the imploring woman, who wrings her hands and cries, the Painter did; over and over again.

SHE CUTS THE ORANGE IN HALF, CUTS OFF A SECTION AND EATS IT

Was I was ripe for distortion? For fragmenting for chopping up into pieces? - So easily pulled apart and reconfigured - crying out for it, you might say- now. Not then. I was not some somnambulant teenager - a sleepwalker waiting to be animated by him -Not like the one before me, The Sleeping Woman. I was myself, all of a piece when I met him and I met him.

I set out to meet him. I created a performance of myself that I knew would enthrall him. He did not discover me - I put myself in his path - on a collision course - he could not overlook, not notice, not get around me - he would have to meet me and take me on. I was there for the taking yes, but I put myself there.

I knew all about him. I had watched him with the Photographer. I had watched him present himself to have his photograph made. He focused those dark coal eyes and stared down the Photographer who focused his lens on him. Then, I photographed him. I was the behind the camera with my eyes trained on him, so that the light kissed him before my lips had. I was an emulsion ready to receive the image. The Painter begged my photograph from the Photographer, even gave him a painting in exchange for me. I kept the photographs I took of him. Developing them in the dark, in my heart.

SHE MOMENTARILY ALMOST ABSENT- MINDEDLY RESUMES THE GAME

It’s a game of love and death, a game of chance and a game of skill - don't let the left hand know what the right hand is doing. The knife moves with one hand, this hand, the other stays still, does not flinch, awaits the blow that is coming towards it. Do I watch the still hand or focus on the moving hand? Part of me is the target, the rest of me holds the weapon, drives the knife, harder and harder, faster and faster.

Was this The Meeting? True, the Poet introduced us, but not here, at this café. Around the corner, at a film screening - a press preview, the Painter was a friend of the Director, I had taken the photographs on set. The Poet was a mutual friend of all of us. His wife was my best friend. The Painter extended his hand - enchante mademoiselle, he said and lowered those eyes and went to kiss my hand, which I withdrew. I replied - Me plasir, Soy de Argentin a- he was taken aback to, to hear Spanish- Buenas tardes maestro - I grew up in Buenos Aires and I already knew a lot, about him and Spain. I was no ingénue.

That was an encounter. The true meeting, was when he opened the door to me at his studio - I had found it for him- it used to belong to the Actor - I had photographed his company in rehearsal and I knew it was vacant. The Painter needed a bigger studio. I was at the door wearing a red scarf, he presented himself as a Greek god and I fell - for it. Sphink to his Minotaur. He liked to say he only painted women he had slept with. He made an exception for The Patron, but she was an exceptional woman herself! The Sitting Woman wanted to recognize her face and wear a mantilla. As if there was a choice we were all L'Espagnole!

The Sleeping Woman wasn't interested in painting and said they never looked like her; and weeping or not, they didn't look like me but I didn't care, they were always the Painter's, and for him the likeness was psychological, not physical, not spiritual.

A model sits, stands or lies - either way, holds the pose while the artist cuts, slices, paints, sculpts, depresses the button, releases the trigger. Whatever the means employed the result is the same - she is the target. Caught, held, in that moment, immortalized. Ensnared in what was seen by the artist. Seated in a chair contained by the arms, in a cage.

The knife thrower aims the knife. If she's lucky he misses her and takes aim and throws again- she is blindfolded and must not move. She must have such faith, such trust that he will miss her every time. Behind her blindfold are her eyes, always hidden like her fear.

What colour are my eyes? You never really know the true colour of your own eyes. I have, apparently - bright eyes and an attentive gaze, blue green eyes, pale eyes so fixed it sometimes disquiets, eyes glimmering like jewels, streaks of blue sky cross my black eyes, bronze green eyes, monkey's eyes and a mouth like a torn flower. For The Painter they were always dark and full of tears. I was always weeping, he said, women are suffering machines.

He was always drawing, doodling, scribbling on tablecloths, menus, magazines, newspapers; drawing faces and burning eyes in them with his cigarette. I took out my knife and cut them out and rolled them up and put them in my bag to keep. I kept everything he touched, pebbles and shells he found and carved with his knife and gave to me as offerings. Mementos to shore up my future. All in my hands - keepsakes for safe keeping.

Take my hands Let Jealousy Dangle its proud claws And absence ready its needles

One day the woman leaves, moves on - if she is lucky. The first one, the Lazy Woman was not, but being lazy she did not mind. The next one, the Dying Woman was even unluckier, she died. Then there was the dancer who sat still, The Sitting Woman who stopped dancing but refused to leave, but was left nonetheless. Ditto the Sleeping Woman, she woke up, but could not move. I was lucky regardless, I moved away. I was never his Mistress; he was just my Master.

Without me he would never have done that big painting - what did he really know about politics. Until he met me, he was not engage. Now, his homeland, his patria, was in flames. The headline said: "Milles bombes incendiaries lancee par les avions de Hitler et de Mussolini reduisent en cendres la ville de Guernica"

The stench of burning flesh carried over the mountains, even here we could smell it. The smoke made his mothers eyes weep, like a real Mater Dolorosa, perfect tears of glass running down her carved cheeks. He could hear the women screaming, the children crying when the bombs fell but what could he do. He was only a painter he was not a soldier. He was never a fighter. A winner, yes, a victor, but not a fighter, everything just fell into his hands, surrendered themselves. All the fights happened elsewhere. The Painter liked to watch from a safe distance behind the lines.

Without me, standing beside him watching him do The Big Painting, he would never have had the balls for it. The photographs I took allowed him to see it all, and realize what he had seen in black and white and every shade of grey between, to see the composition on such a scale. Any big paintings he did after that were not real paintings like that one was. Painting a stage cloth is not the same, you work from the original. That Big painting was the original. He would never repeat that one. I made the photographs of the Big Painting in all its stages, an animation of his method

After that, I stopped taking photographs for myself. I had done it all - fashion, erotica, portraits, documentary, art photography, Surrealist Tableau - it was enough. I had worked with the best, I had seen the best. From then on, I only photographed the Painter and his work. Nothing else. I began painting again - the roses of her fingers smell like turpentine- he said and kissed my hands my painter's hands. I had my own studio. I had been his "wicked photographer ", now I would be his "Great painter." I painted still life, the river and him. And I painted myself, as he did, as the Weeping Woman - Femme qui pleure sous une lampe, Femme qui pleure au chapeau rouge. I made one last photo montage, a shrine to the Painter's women, myself included - Femmes a leur toilette - Les Femmes Assises et Les femmes au Chapeau. I lined us all up against the wall of his studio, a collection of icons in a chapel consecrated to The Painters women- Les Demoiselles D'Artiste.

SHE SQUEEZES THE CUT ORANGE INTO THE EMPTY GLASS

He never leaves them, he simply moves onto the next one, picks them like ripe fruit. Firm young flesh for the plucking, squeezes them for the juice and chokes on the pith, can't swallow it, not interested in the pith just the sweet juice, spits out the seeds. He never lets go. They ripen and fall, fall away to dance forever in the back of his head caught behind those eyes. But he never picked me, I picked him and when he dropped me, I did not fall. I stopped and then I lived again, as myself, for myself, as before. Unregarded, sans regard, sans regret. There is no such thing as love he said, only proofs of love. What constitutes proof?

I was sterile, a barren woman, a cause to weep for some women. I could not give him more children. He taunted me about it - a real woman, a true woman gives birth, splits herself open and bleeds, submits herself to the knife. He already had two children, one by the Sitting Woman and one by the Sleeping Woman, but he wanted more - of everything. The one after me, also a painter, The Laughing Woman - twenty years younger than me, forty years younger than him, she gave him two more children and kept him for a while but then he lost interest, even in his children. Finally there was just the Pottery Woman who took it all and got fat like a jug of sour milk and called him, Monseigneur.

SHE POURS EVIAN WATER INTO THE GLASS

It's a miracle the Painter said, that we do not melt in the bathtub like a lump of sugar. Everything is a miracle. I say.

SHE DROPS A SUGAR CUBE OR TWO INTO THE GLASS, THEY DISSOLVE

I melted, I came apart, I broke down. The mirror shattered. I was in tears all the time but could not cry. I was given electro shock treatment for three weeks. The Poet found me and made the Painter take me to his doctor, the Psychoanalyst, I saw him for two years. He put me back together and gave me to God, to whom I gladly went.

After Picasso, there is only God. This is what I said when the Poet asked me to marry him. His wife, my best friend, was dead. We had all loved her, she had been my model, the Painter's and the Photographer's too. I refused him. I could have been the Poet's wife. It would have suited everybody, the Painter and his new mistress - the laughing schoolgirl, the grieving Poet; I was alone, but why would I want to marry, now? I meant it, there is only God, the true God I devoted my life to.

Your gaze never leaves me

And your angel keeps me

The Painter said my madness had nothing to do with him. He, who had never loved anyone in his life; and who didn't know how to love. He said this. And then he said, It was all the fault of the Surrealists! How ridiculous! They were my friends. I had lost the Painter, to love or jealousy and my best friend, the Poet's wife to death. The war was over, the Dictator dead, the General victorious, the Occupation ended, the camps open. Life was normal - this was reality. If only it had been surreal, it might have been bearable. And what did The Painter have to say? "She was always mad - just look at the crazy hats she wore!"

SHE DROPS MORE SUGAR CUBES INTO THE GLASS, THEY DISSOLVE

I will always be Dora Dolorosa; before I was Adora. His Adora, Amour Dora mia, adored, adorable, and adoring. Adoree made golden by his cold touch; then it was the Sun himself that warmed me, and me his. I am Henriette Theodora Markovitch, Madame Markovitch. I shall hold history to ransom and write my own place in it. I have kept everything; every negative, every proof, every scrap of paper, every stone, every drop of blood - the provenance is unique and mine until my end. It is all there waiting…

My fate is magnificent however it seems, I used to say my fate was very harsh however it seems… but I know now my fate is magnificent…

END______(c )Suzanne Spunner, 2006

DORA DOLOROSA - THE WEEPING WOMAN : Dora Maar ______"All his portraits of me are lies. They're Picassos - Not one is Dora Maar" - Dora Maar

" the Muses are women… Women's spirit is profoundly sunk in nature, and it is through her that man will sound the depths of silence and of the fecund night" - Simone de Beauvoir a monologue set at Deux Magots, Paris in 1949 and forever after … with ELLA WATSON-RUSSELL as THE WEEPING WOMAN

Writer /producer/ designer - SUZANNE SPUNNER

Director/dramaturg - MEREDITH ROGERS

Dora Maar's hat 'Passion 1937' created by PETER JAGO milliner extraordinaire, assisted by Nick Gray and Margaret Watson

Dora Maar's gloves - provided by Angela Sheppard, dyed chrome green by Margaret Watson and embroidered with scarlet roses by Suzanne Radajan

Stylist - Hair and makeup - David Harris

Thanks also to- Theatreworks, VCA School of Drama, University of Melbourne School of Creative Arts and The Indian Bicycle Shop, St Kilda

DORA DOLOROSA was commissioned by the NGV Public Programs for PICASSO LOVE & WAR, 2006 and produced by PARADISE PRODUCTIONS ______

THE PROPOSAL to NGV

One woman show / Monolgue new original work commissioned by the NGV virtuouso performance by ELLA WATSON- RUSSELL, a talented recent graduate of the VCA Drama School

Set at a cafe table at Deux Magots in the late 1940s

"All his portraits of me are lies. They're Picassos ...not one is Dora Maar " - Dora Maar

She will wear a fabulous hat created by leading Melbourne Milliner, Peter Jago . Afterall her hats we designed by Schiaparelli and Picasso said "she was always mad, just look at the crazy hats she wore!"

She will have red painted fingernails and wear red and green gloves and there will be a knife!

After Picasso there is only God - she said and there was only God after Picasso for her.

" I shall hold history to ransom and write my own place in it. I have kept everything, every negative, every proof, every scrap of paper, every stone, every drop of blood - the provenance is unique and mine until my end. It is all there waiting..." - DORA DOLOROSA

Writer/Producer / Designer - SUZANNE SPUNNER - who created I AM ALIVE for the recent Margaret Preston retrospective, ART AND LIFE

Brief for Peter Jago ______Picasso reminisced about Dora - how the steadfastness of her gaze reflected her intelligence, and how her outre sense of fashion had inspired the surrealistic hats trimmed with fish food and sardine cans that figure in so many of his portraits of her - such a contrast he said to the tam o'shanter from Hermes that he gave her rival Marie- Therese

With her taste for startling outfits and her drastically nonconformist behaviour , she was very much seen as a Surrealist

A fondness for the modish hats of ALBOUIS and ELSA SCIARPARELLI

A highly independent, unconventional, flamboyantly dressed young woman , fully in control of herself and aware of her great talents as a Photographer

Dora dressed in snappy clothing and eye-catching hats and painted her nails different colours according to her moods - having shot a few famous fashion photographs of hats she delighted in wearing them herself - Her painting Weeping Woman in a Red Hat shows one of those famous hats