ART & PERFORMANCE NOTES Julie Taymor’s Die Zauberflöte: Puppet theatre stage on the opera stage. Photo: Courtesy Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj.2005.27.3.132 by guest on 29 September 2021 LA BELLE INDIFFERENCE Patricia Coleman Accidental Nostalgia, an Operetta on the Pros and Cons of Amnesia, written and performed by Cynthia Hopkins, accompanied by the band Gloria Deluxe. Under the Radar Festival at St. Ann’s Warehouse, January 5–23, 2005. hat is so fascinating about and shifting into the externalized for- hysteria? Since its peak in mal stagings in the past 30 years of New W the late-nineteenth century, York’s downtown scene, it has informed and through the twentieth-century de- the style of performance, as in The velopment of psychoanalysis, it has para- Wooster Group’s stagings of a form of doxically represented the core of no- hystericized behavior. It has proved es- tions of subjectivity. New “dynamic pecially prominent in Richard Foreman’s psychiatry” saw in the hysteric secrets to Ontological-Hysteric Theatre, where explain the double nature of the “uni- many of his earliest productions fea- versal” human mind and experience, tured the female hysterical subject as a ironically reimagining the masculine traveler in a world of blurry definition. universal through the female hysteric. Developing from these traditions, Alongside Charcot’s Tuesday morning- Cynthia Hopkins’s Accidental Nostalgia performing hysterics at Salpêtrière, a draws on the history, both medical and lineage of writers, from Ibsen to André theatrical, of hysteria. Over a two-year Breton to Tennessee Williams, respec- period of development that began in tively, saw the hysteric’s dilemma as key 2002 at Dixon Place, Hopkins has cre- to the modern drama and idealized her ated a collage of identities to reimagine as the quintessentially creative creature, the interplay of notions of the amnesic one who allegedly performed for her and hysteric in the space of the theatre. own pleasure. Opening the piece, as the neurologist Throughout the past century, hysteria Cameron Seymour, Hopkins proposes has remained an undercurrent in the- to lecture the audience on the historical atre and the cultural imaginary. Emerg- understanding of psychogenic (or hys- ing from the hysterical characters and terical) amnesia in order to reframe our emotional content of modern drama usual understanding of it. But as the 132 ᭿ PAJ 81 (2005), pp. 132–139. © 2005 Patricia Coleman Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj.2005.27.3.132 by guest on 29 September 2021 singer and accordionist of her own songs nally stage left, Hopkins’s “real life” she reenacts memories that may or may band, Gloria Deluxe. Each section, not belong to her as author (both though always visible, proposes a box to Hopkins and Seymour) or as character be opened uniquely by her representa- (Seymour). By juxtaposing these two tion of memory: the lectern, activated ways of intertwined remembering—ex- by her presence behind it, stages the plication and immersion—Hopkins at- values and limits of empirical knowl- tempts a neo-Brechtian turn which gets edge; the screen reveals the byways and to the very question of subject forma- movements that produce and transport tion/development. What she frames di- us into memory—in videos of roads, a dactically in her lecture outlining the locomotive, a house, voyeuristic pas- contours of amnesia and memory for sageways into Seymour’s body; the band her audience, she counteracts by per- both produces the music that cu(r)es forming bitterly nostalgic lyrics in four- both Seymour’s and the audience’s nos- teen blues- and country-inspired songs. talgia and is the product of her own This music inexorably pulls the intellec- musical nostalgia. tualized Seymour into narratives of suf- fering and emotionality that she cannot But the stage is a memory theatre in resist, memory both overwhelmed by another way as well: it recalls the the- and overwhelming the amnesiac truths atres from which Hopkins’s own pro- of nostalgia. It is this intertwining of duction derives. In the tradition of The modes of remembering that reverses the Wooster Group, two simultaneous per- hierarchy, rather than the lecture alone. formances that are neither behind the The nature of memory dictates that scenes nor entirely presentational con- amnesia may be kinder, in fact, than tribute to the central performance while memory. This reversal in turn forces a functioning as their own independent theatrical questioning of the very premise performances; overlapping spaces allow of theatre: what is so good about reen- both collaborations and transgressions. actment? Does returning to the place of From one end, the workshop of de- injury merely prolong injury? Hopkins signer/technician/performers, Jeff Sugg theatricalizes Pierre Nora’s lieux de and James Findlay, is visible, and they mémoires, proposing alongside them are as well. Equipped with Mac Power- éspaces d’amnésies—the places of memory books and iSight cameras, they create juxtaposed to spaces of forgetfulness. the mirage-like sets that Hopkins moves through and the PowerPoint collages The intertwining coalesces in her refer- that imitate the structure of the brain. ences to the Renaissance memory the- As performers and operators, Sugg and atre; in fact, her stage physically recalls a Findlay are more than merely unmasked memory theatre of the three sections puppet masters; they have what seems that make up Seymour’s/Hopkins’s to be free movement in the interior and “self”: a lectern downstage, a screen exterior of Seymour’s brain. Their pro- upstage center that projects us into jections serve as memory aids in addi- other spaces, the downstage presence of tion to producing new remembrances; technicians and their Macs recalling they leave their workshop to dance re- both the theatrical apparatus itself and strained but sexy vaudeville-inspired notions of mechanic memory, and fi- numbers or to peek underneath Sey- COLEMAN / La Belle Indifference ᭿ 133 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj.2005.27.3.132 by guest on 29 September 2021 mour’s dress with an iSight, while prod- not; Hopkins never completely aban- ding her to disclose her remembered dons her teacherly tone. Unlike those victimization. During the song “Swarm singers Hopkins is compared to in re- of Bees” Hopkins lies on a hospital table views of the piece, “ part Lou Reed, part that Findlay manually revolves upside Patti Smith, part performance artist ” down. Onscreen, her body appears sus- (The Washington Post), and “Lotte Lenya’s pended in mid-air, as if she is perhaps kid sister shacking up in a cheap Atlanta hanging by a rope or dancing on a roof. hotel with Tom Waits” (Time Out New The moment produces dizzying intensi- York), Hopkins complicates their nos- ties through the shifting places of talgia with a narrative of self-knowledge Seymour’s inside and outside and the achieved by analysis, or at least a thor- alternating positions of Findlay and ough reading of psychoanalytic litera- Hopkins as master and victim. As ture. As Hopkins sings in “Cover Me Hopkins sings, she produces an auto- With Your Darkness”—“the best way to hypnotic trance. Her voice seems to believe you have control is to self split from her, partly a simple physical destruct.” reality as upside down the blood is rushing to her head, but also she/ Hopkins’s pursuit of self remains after Seymour sings as a victim of incest, the songs end, sought elsewhere in other recalling how she described patterns on nostalgic artifacts of the production. the wall, rather than feeling/remember- Her stories recede and fall out of her ing the physical realities. Her theatre grasp, that is, she tests their limits and seeks always to find a/the subject; it then lets go to find some other kind of strains to reproduce the hysteric as self, evocative cueing. Once the lecture has finding nothing but performances all reached the limits of “lab study,” the way down. Seymour conducts a “field study,” de- ciding and promising to track down her The switch from inside to out is made self by uncovering the memories lost possible by the remembered presence of through amnesia. She will go to her Hopkins’s own band and her perform- hometown in Carlson, Georgia, where ances of the songs. Hopkins’s songs, her memories and thus her self may such as “Swarm of Bees,” often begin as have been buried: perhaps as the result stories that she appears in control of, of the trauma of her mother’s death; or but then she trails off into a world of perhaps as the result of the sexual abuse amnesia and hysterical imaginings. It is she suffered at her father’s hands; or her own songs and singing that propels perhaps as a result of her father’s mur- her/Seymour forward to reenact with- der, suicide or disappearance. It is to out any reason. The narratives of her this imagined and remembered child- songs pull and strain against the struc- hood that she runs to find fixity, and yet tures of her dissociated person. They are paradoxically, she fleas to avoid being hysterical performances, which both map fixed; to “Sweet Pretty Lies,” the finest this disembodied memory and burst orchestration in the piece, she tears a forth from an unremembered, but not childhood diary to shreds rather than forgotten past. The songs seem about to read it; she refuses to be arrested by release something, perhaps even her self, childhood friends turned cops, choos- in the process, but they cannot, they do ing instead to break her neck.