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.