Wooster Baroque

Wooster Baroque Branislav Jakovljevic Introduction Urb... The death of theatre, which in the West has been lamented at least since Aristotle, does not come with the passing of great tragic poets, or with religious persecution, or with the advent of new technologies. It comes with the death of death. Or, more precisely, with the death of the dead; that is to say, with the evacuation of the material presence of death from our every- day experience. Theatre not only dies for wont of a living, working, paying audience, but also because it is deprived of the population of the dead, of corpses imperceptibly decomposing under the audience’s feet while the spectacle unfolds in front of their eyes. Such is the stunning proposition that Jean Genet makes in his text “That Strange Word...” The strange word he points to is “urbanism.” It is strange, he claims, because it simultaneously refers to the city, urbs, and to those guardians of the First City who bore the name of Urban. It is urbanists, not religious leaders, who can bring about the extinction of theatre or restore it to its full glory. They can do that, Genet proposes, by placing theatres in close proximity to cemeteries or, at the very least, to crematoria. Theatre needs actual corpses placed before it, TDR: The Drama Review 54:3 (T207) Fall 2010. ©2010 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 87 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00006 by guest on 26 September 2021 not the discursive traces of the dead. It needs its spectators to thread their way through graves after witnessing performance. And not through a few remaining steles of a “dead cemetery” but through a “live one, [...] a cemetery where graves would continue to be dug and the dead buried, [...] a Crematorium where corpses are cooked day and night” (Genet 2003:108). In short, Genet asks for a theatre in which the gravity of each gesture and of each word is impreg- nated by the stench of rotting or burning flesh. The only time I witnessed a performance that came close to Genet’s gory ideal was on Saturday, 22 September 2001 at the Performing Garage in downtown New York. A few days after the events of 9/11, the Wooster Group presented their work in progress To You, the Birdie! (Phèdre) based on Paul Schmidt’s translation of Racine’s Phèdre. That evening, company director Elizabeth LeCompte stepped in front of the audience, thanked us for coming, and announced that we were about to see a performance of Route 1 & 9. She quickly corrected herself. This lapse could be explained by trivial similarities between the two productions, such as the spatial arrangement of Route 1 & 9 and To You, the Birdie! — in both the audience was positioned across the length of the Performing Garage. Or purely formal ones: whereas Route 1 & 9 marked the beginning of the Wooster Group’s extensive use of video technology, To You, the Birdie! was the first production in which they experimented with digital images on plasma screens. This purely formal similarity points to another, more profound continuity in the work of the Wooster Group: while in Route 1 & 9 they used blackface in a provocative and controversial way, in To You, the Birdie! the flat television screen becomes a mask of sorts, a digital blackface. However, the actuality of the Performing Garage’s surroundings was imposing itself onto this performance more than its own past ever could. Just a couple of days earlier, the part of the city where we now sat and watched this work in progress was still out of bounds for the public. Less then a mile from the site of the World Trade Center, the streets of lower SoHo were still covered with a film of fine white ash. The air smelled of burning fuel and plastic, in which many claimed to detect the odor of scorched — or as Genet would have it, “cooked” — human flesh. The only moment of profound and immediate resonance between the incomplete theatre piece and the fractured world in which it was placed so directly and so improbably was the moment when Theseus, played by Willem Dafoe, was seen onstage, lying down on a stretcher made of bright orange fabric, identical to the ones that crews of paramedics were hopelessly carrying around the smoldering ruins, still looking for bodies that were not completely pulverized. Over the following eight years, the Wooster Group mounted four new productions (includ- ing To You, the Birdie! which was on that night presented incomplete, without the ending) and revived two (Brace Up! in 2003, originally produced in 1991, and House/Lights in 2005, first staged in 1999). Out of the four new productions, three were based on 17th-century texts: To You, the Birdie! (2002) was, as I already mentioned, based on Jean Racine’s Phèdre; Hamlet (2007), based on Shakespeare’s play; and finally La Didone (2009), which used the opera by Venetian composer Francesco Cavalli and librettist Gian Francesco Brusenello. The only new work that departs from this systematic revisiting of 17th-century European theatre is Poor Theater (2004), Figure 1. (previous page) Wess (Scott Shepherd) reaches for the “meteor rejecter,” while La Didone (Hai-Ting Chinn) sleeps clutching her plush toy. La Didone, St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn, 2009. (Photo © Paula Court) Branislav Jakovljevic is Assistant Professor in the Department of Drama at Stanford University. He specializes in modernist theatre and the avantgarde, and in his current research he focuses on the relation of the event to performance. His articles have been published in the United States (TDR, PAJ, Theater, Art Journal) and abroad (Serbia, Croatia, Spain, England, Sweden, Poland). His book Daniil Kharms: Writing and the Event (2009) was published by Northwestern University Press. He is the recipient of ATHE’s Award for Outstanding Essay for 2008/09 for his article “From Mastermind to Body Artist: Political Performances of Slobodan Milošević,” published in TDR. Branislav Jakovljevic 88 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00006 by guest on 26 September 2021 which was based on the film recording of Jerzy Grotowski’s production of Akropolis and docu- mentary video footage of William Forsythe’s dance theatre. The Wooster Group began its work in theatre with a trilogy: Three Places in Rhode Island is a trilogy plus an epilogue — Sakonnet Point (1975), Rumstick Road (1977), Nayatt School (1978), followed by the epilogue Point Judith (1979). A similar pattern is recognizable in its second trilogy, The Road to Immortality: Route 1 & 9 (1981), L.S.D. (...Just the High Points...) (1984), and Frank Dell’s The Temptation of St. Anthony (1987), followed by North Atlantic (1984/1999), which was originally a part of L.S.D. And now, a baroque trilogy stretches over the troubled first decade of the new millennium. The Wooster Group’s choice to stage Phèdre, Hamlet, and La Didone is surprising if we remember how distant their theatrical practice has always been not only from baroque theatre, but from the baroque style in general. With their clear contours, straight lines, right angles, and exposed corners, Jim Clayburgh’s skeletal stage constructions stand in stark contrast to the baroque penchant for curved lines, soft shapes, concealed borders, and general rejection of line in favor of mass, and of symmetry in favor of irregularity. In his summation of the stylistic traits of the baroque, Heinrich Wölflin asserts that the baroque “wants to carry us away with the force of impact, immediate and overwhelming. It gives us not a generally enhanced vitality, but excite- ment, ecstasy, intoxication. [...] It does not convey a state of present happiness, but a feeling of anticipation, of something yet to come, of dissatisfaction and restlessness rather than fulfillment” ([1888] 1964:38). In all of this, the Performance Group’s environmental theatre of the late 1960s is much closer to baroque. This, of course, is the group from which the founding members of the Wooster Group emerged, and from which they distanced themselves not only through the spatial organization of their productions, but even more through an acting style characterized by restraint, a certain coldness, and the ambiguity of acting and not-acting.1 In his “Task and Vision: Willem Dafoe in LSD,” Philip Auslander correctly asserted that this treading of the borderline between matrixed and non-matrixed performing led to the diminishing of characterization in the Wooster Group’s stage practice, or, as he called it, “characterization degree zero” (1997:41). Paradoxically, precisely at this point the similarities with the baroque begin to emerge. On closer inspection, it becomes clear that the baroque-like use of space2 in environmental theatre originates from its exploration of the three-dimensionality of the body, its depth and volume, which coincides with a certain psychological depth.3 That brings to mind the distinc- tion that French critic Guy Scarpetta makes between romanticism and baroque: whereas the former privileges interior life, expressive authenticity, and psychology, the latter affirms exteri- ority or surface, artifice, and strategy (1988:23). Consequently, whereas modernism is marked by the romantic tendency to defy illusion, baroque uses illusion to assail illusion, thus bring- ing the whole opposition of reality vs. illusion to paroxysm (26). This baroque play with surfaces is clearly identifiable in all aspects of the Wooster Group’s performance, from acting, to stage design, to their use of video and digital technologies.4 This, in turn, points to the expansion of the visual field that marked both the baroque and high modernism: whereas the former was 1.

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