Psychic Bloodspurts
By Joseph Cermatori
Je suis sang
By Jan Fabre
Kasser Theater
Montclair State University
(closed)
Before The Poetics, the word "katharsis"
existed primarily as a medical term used to describe the processes
by which bodies rid themselves of waste matter: defecation, urination,
vomiting. The link to ancient Greek tragedy is hardly far-fetched,
however, since these processes would have played an important
role in the bacchanalian revels of the Great Dionysia festival,
which frequently involved excesses of feasting and intoxication.
Orgy, too, was a fundamental component of these festivals, and
perhaps ejaculation could also be considered a cathartic event.
The point is, before katharsis came to mean a mysterious
psycho-emotional release of pity and terror in the theater, it
had a more basic definition--the physical body actively discharging
its contents: the engorged feaster shitting, the drunken celebrant
vomiting or draining his bladder, the orgiast climaxing. Finally,
participants would have experienced a kind of vicarious catharsis
in the act of seeing the tragos's throat slashed and
its blood spilled outside its body. These were ecstatic rites;
that is, the experience of ekstasis--literally, to stand
outside, the feeling of transcending one's bodily limits, of the
self outside the body--was central. For the Greeks before The
Poetics, the phenomenon of catharsis was experienced as a
corpo-reality.
Jan Fabre knows all this intuitively. Over
the past twenty-five years, the work of this Flemish artist, in
theater and visual art, has been preoccupied with the body's physical
limits and its ecstatic potential for transgressing them. Some
of his early excursions into the visual arts famously used his
own blood for paint--a gesture that recalls Hermann Nitsch's bloody
Splatter Paintings, for which the paint is drained from
the corpses of animals that have been ritualistically slaughtered
in elaborate actions, or Marc Quinn's sculpture of his own head,
Self, which was made from more than a gallon of his congealed
blood. Other bodily fluids have received special attention as
well in Fabre's work. For instance, his Histoire des larmes
(Avignon Festival, 2005) focuses on the subject of tears and weeping.
Another recent project, Quando L'Uomo principale è un donna
(Paris, 2004; recently performed at Montclair State University)--a
choreographic hymn to Bacchus and to the mutability of sex--featured
a nude female dancer who rubbed olive oil and olives all over
herself before donning a crown of laurels, inserting the oily
olives into her vagina, pushing them out again, dropping them
into a martini, and then downing it, olives and all.
Similar concerns are apparent in Je
suis sang, a "medieval fairy tale" that Fabre and his company
Troubleyn created for the 2001 Avignon Festival. The piece was
revived at Avignon in 2003 and again in 2005 when Fabre acted
as Avignon's guest artistic director. In January 2007, it appeared
as part of MSU's Peak Performances series. The fluid at the heart
of this piece, as the title suggests, is blood. In it, Fabre meditates
on the psychic, physiological, and sociopolitical possibilities
of catharsis while eschewing the traditional Aristotelian ideology
of catharsis. Je suis sang, like much of Fabre's work,
surpasses the tragic altogether: according to Patrice Pavis (in
a piece on the 2005 Avignon Festival), its proper label is "calamity,"
tragedy in which Aristotelian catharsis is impossible, tragedy
fit for a contemporary world blighted by diseases without cure,
climate change beyond repair, conceptions of history bereft of
any logical utopian endpoint, modern crusades without end, and
international and sociopolitical collapse beyond all hope. What
might have been tragic is now as irresolvable and absurd as history.
Fabre rejects not only Aristotelian catharsis
in Je suis sang but also the familiar dramaturgical principles
derived from Greek tragedy that have dominated western theater
since the Renaissance. Instead, this piece takes its formal cues
from the medieval period (a recurrent motif in Fabre's work, seen
in Histoire des larmes, Tannhäuser [Brussels, 2004] and
elsewhere). He has said that his work is greatly influenced by
the Flemish painters of the middle ages, and the Bakhtinian and
infernal landscapes of Bosch are an unmistakable influence here.
Likewise, a great debt is owed to the iconographic and episodic
dramaturgy of station drama. Fabre thus recognizes a Flemish dramatic
heritage that extends as far back as the anonymous author of Elkerlijc,
or Everyman.
Je suis sang started out as a
poem inspired by the Cour d'Honneur of Avignon's Palais des Papes--where
it would ultimately premiere--and by the butchery of the medieval
Catholic Church. This poem forms the central textual element of
the piece. An English translation--the show is performed in French,
though Fabre and his company are from Dutch-speaking Antwerp--is
projected onto the blank upstage wall of MSU's Alexander Kasser
Theater. (The immense stone backdrop of the Cour d'Honneur, alas,
was absent from the performance in Montclair: in the Avignon productions
its fortress-like, Gothic majesty formed a crucial visual and
thematic element.) The first words, which don't appear until several
minutes into the action, become an unsparing refrain for the rest
of the evening: "It is 2007 after Jesus Christ. And we are still
living in the Middle Ages." For Fabre, the middle ages are synonymous
with an addiction to blood, and throughout the performance, his
text will insinuate and reinsinuate how this addiction remains
with us to this day.
The text, however, is in constant competition
with the visual spectacle, the importance of which cannot be understated.
True to Fabre's roots in painting, sketches, and the plastic arts,
this is a theater of images, albeit corporeal ones. When the audience
enters the auditorium, the event is already underway. Set against
the blackness of the upstage wall--which is empty and waiting
to be written upon--and amid a diffuse grey light, the action
takes place on a stage devoid of any set except for a number of
metallic tables, which wait in the exposed wings. Actors who look
like medieval smiths in chain-mail smocks work on and around them,
scrubbing at them with brushes, creating ambient noise. A chubby,
sweaty man, cherubic yet somehow sinister, with hair in platinum
ringlets, wearing only a red thong, dances suggestively around
the stage and puffs on a cigar whose smoke clouds the air and
assaults our nostrils. (Quando L'Uomo principale è un donna
has a similar opening, with a soloist lighting a cigarette.)
A woman in a long black gown (played by
Fabre's frequent collaborator Els Deceukelier) stalks about the
periphery of the stage carrying a book on her head and gazing
into the audience. A bearded knight in armor and black briefs
waits upstage center. A chorus of knights, also in armor and briefs,
marches out and performs a choreographed martial routine. Two
magisterial figures--one male and one female, both wearing long
green gowns and tin funnels on their heads, and both looking like
oversized chess pieces--enter from left and right to oversee the
onstage pageant. Neatly sewn into their gowns are short daggers.
As the dance concludes, the bearded knight steps out from among
them to begin a battle sequence with an invisible foe. Meanwhile,
the chess figures--the piece's récitants, it turns out--don
green medical smocks and latex gloves, as if preparing to perform
an autopsy before an audience of medical students. We have entered
the theatrum corpi.
The
Knight continues to battle his unseen enemy in what might be a
chivalric swordsmanship competition. (Games based on violence
recur several times throughout the piece in the form of knife
juggling, wrestling, and bull fighting, bringing to mind our civilization's
venerable history of bloodsports, which also includes gladiatorial
competition, bearbaiting, and so forth.) As the battle continues,
the Knight begins to fall repeatedly and with mounting violence.
At the climax, a jet of blood sprays from his mouth.
What transpires over the next ninety minutes
amounts to a continual psychic bloodspurt, an Artaudian deluge
of images, ideas, and sensory attacks, arranged in a theatrical
form that resembles the interweaving structures of medieval polyphony.
Before our eyes and ears: a woman clad only in white panties sings
"Son of a Preacher-Man" (in Quando L'Uomo . . . it's
"Volare" that we hear); screeching heavy metal music blares from
a rock band that includes several electric guitars and an amplified
tuba; brides in wedding dresses bleed from their crotches while
a chorus of men emasculate one another, the castrations represented
by bloody socks over their penises; women pantomime using blood
as rouge and lipstick; actors form human cadavres exquis;
acts of bloodsucking (from women's nipples and other body parts)
and bloodletting transpire, as does Chinese medicinal fire cupping
(to stimulate the circulation, for sexual pleasure, or both?);
actors adopt the sadomasochistic iconography of Saint Sebastian
while the spoken poem muses on the lifegiving (i.e. eucharistic
and vampiristic) qualities of drinking blood; mimed tortures and
mutilations take place that bring to mind not only the Inquisition
but also Titus Andronicus and the Holocaust. In short,
Je suis sang is pure carnival, and fittingly so, since
the performance strives to bid farewell to the flesh, to let blood
transgress the bounds of the body and flow freely, transcendentally,
in absolute catharsis.
Fabre represents this transcendence near
the end of the piece, in a moment when the two récitants
rhythmically incant a litany of more then thirty self-inflicted
incisions. This is not a reference to neurotic self-injurious
behavior; the poetic cuts are obviously meant to be mortal wounds:
slashes to the throat, to the arms and legs, to the genitalia.
With
each cut, they describe the opening of a different major vein
or artery, and the woman in black chants the blood vessels' scientific
Latin names in antiphonal response. As vein after vein is verbally
opened, driving home images of blood gushing forth in floods,
the poetic rhythm grows hypnotic, sublime, and strangely hopeful.
The only way to escape the absurd, never-ending calamity of existence,
it seems, is to transform the landscape of the body into a gushing
flood. "In life, two things are certain, and they may actually
be the same," the chorus bellows at us, in English, "we shall
die, and we shall exceed limits."
Je suis sang culminates the only
way a post-cathartic tragedy can--in pure apocalypse and Dionysian
bedlam. The stage is transformed into something like a live version
of Bosch's Hell: amid screaming, goldfish swallowing,
and the deafening wail of electric guitars and explosive tuba
belches, ensemble members don enormous ears (rabbit ears? jackass
ears?) and torture blindfolded brides demonically. White powder--the
dust of civilization?--flies everywhere. The chorus strips nude
and douses itself in Chianti. The satyr-like cherub appears naked,
tarred and feathered. In short, the spectacle confronts its audience
with a vision of complete dystopia, Wagnerian in its overwhelming
totality. The tables are lined up across the stage and tilted
on their sides to form a tall, monolithic wall, not unlike those
of the Cour d'Honneur. The chaos falls silent. Blood oozes out
from behind the wall of tables, finally released and uninhibited,
in a profusion that is every bit as sacred, as spontaneous, and
as disturbing as the stigmata.
This is one of only two moments in the
entire performance when we see liquid blood onstage; the blood
that comes from the Knight's mouth near the beginning is the other.
In both cases, we assume that what we see is mere stage blood,
and that there is never a moment of actual bloodshed. It is interesting,
given Fabre's obsession with the existential realness of the human
body onstage, that he opts for this relative dryness. Perhaps
his greatest accomplishment with Je suis sang is a kind
of reassociation of sensibility: he needs only to invoke the idea
of blood through his hallucinatory poetics and theatrics, and
the sheer thought of it is enough to awaken the experience of
its actual physical presence within us.
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