(The following is an excerpt from an interview for Le Monde, translated from the French by Anna Karina; please note all the excellent word play is entirely lost…)
I: (continued from an earlier segment, also lost) I don’t know off hand what an arab strap would cost in euros…
C: Good, those things scare me, to be honest.
I: But I do understand there is some talk about the illicit things you’ve been doing during the rehearsals for ‘Monsters of the Sea…’
C: Yes, good, I’m glad to hear there are some rumors flying around. But again, to be honest, there’s not very much to say about what we’re doing, really, in that regard. No one is getting possessed, and all the kinds of sex contraptions we wanted for this show turned out to be too expensive. Instead, we’ve just been working on the show, and sometimes we sit around and talk about porn afterwards. Sometimes we go out for tacos.
I: Lovely. And I’m assuming that ‘tacos’ is a euphemism for…?
C: Nothing, really, except for the idea of the taco itself, as an ideal, there really isn’t anything metaphorical or metonymic going on. But there are several of us who are very particular about tacos. We know our way around these things.
I: So there hasn’t been any deviant acts, no drug use, or no experiments in altered states of consciousness?
C: Altered states, sure, of course, but those other things, I don’t think so, unless they happen on the breaks, but I can’t keep track of everybody.
I: What kinds of altered states?
C: Well. There are lots of things that can constitute an altered state. I mean, if you slow your breathing down, you know, as an exercise in concentration, there’s some kind of trance going on. And we have been doing yoga before we begin on most nights, in the same way that Grotowski used it as a form of subtle and useful trance for performance. Early on, I tried some basic exercises in inner journeying, the way that a lot of the new age shamans play with these things, and some of the performers were very excited by it, but there were some who felt it was very intrusive…and personally, I find that kind of work to be a bit easy and essentialist, and ultimately not very useful, so I switched to other kinds of techniques. Leading them through inner spaces to find aspects of the self, dead selves, or selves not yet born, and we were working to bring those selves back to life. Treating your Other–really more in the Jodorowsky sense than in anything more formally psychoanalytic–as if it were a corpse, grieving for that body, and then resurrecting it to have it as a spirit familiar.
I: That still sounds a little new agey to me…
C: I suppose, sure, but it’s not easy to avoid it, and in these circumstances, really impossible to avoid. The performers seem to be very comfortable in that space, I mean, Jodorowsky speaks to actors, you know? And this is an experiment in finding vocabularies for work that we do together further down the road, on the next project.
I: There’s always something else on the horizon, isn’t there?
C: I guess so, yes.
I: Perhaps it’s just a sardine can. (And she laughs, and laughs, but he doesn’t get it, so she transitions to something else…)
(There is some incomprehensible singing and laughing for a few minutes…)
I: That’s an incredible story, and really, I think could be the heart of the breakthrough you’re onto right here, but I don’t think the recorder caught it, can you repeat the last part?
C: No.
I: All right, then, I’m wondering if there was anything mysterious going on during any of these rehearsals?
C: For the most part, nothing of an occult nature, if that’s what you’re asking.
I: That is what I’m asking.
C: For the most part, no.
I: But there was something…?
C: All right. There was one evening. About three weeks ago. Before the actors got to my house, I was preparing scripts in my room, when I heard this very odd sentence, one I couldn’t make out, but it was definitely a male voice, and it was laughing, but almost menacing, angry. I decided to put it out of my mind. And we started working. When we were about to do some simple yoga exercises, after which we would be playing with metronome beats and try to find our way into an altered state, as you call it, everything stopped when we all heard a horrible sound from downstairs, from the same place where I’d heard the voice before. It sounded like someone dragging a chest covered with chains across the floor. I ran downstairs, looked all over the house, and looked outside, but there was nothing, nothing at all.
I: That sounds like you were raising ghosts.
C: I don’t know. And truly, for the purposes of this research, it really doesn’t matter. I’m not chasing after ghosts, not in any supernatural sense, although I am chasing some metaphorical ghosts, and they might even turn out to be the same ghosts, but the metaphorical ones are more useful.
I: Why?
C: Because those represent psychological mechanisms, which can be repeated, and can also be used in the spaces of performance. I mean, real poltergeists, or whatever they might be, if they are real, and I think they are, but so what? they are also unpredictable, and unreliable, and not interesting to me for this. Not yet. I mean, we’re not performing seances in my home. Not yet. But either way, this idea of ghosts is very useful in terms of looking at the desire of the performer, that desire to see something unusual, that desire to enter into another realm, and that to me is valuable. So I was very pleased that we were all hearing things.
I: Because the collective desire is strong enough to make something happen.
C: Yes. But it gets even more interesting. After rehearsal, two of the actors were waiting for a ride from their mutual friend. This mutual friend called from his phone, inside his car, outside, because he didn’t want to come in. He told them later that while he was waiting outside, he saw a phantom walking around outside my house, and he thought he might be seeing things, but when he looked into his rear view mirror, there was a face staring back at him.
I: That’s a little creepy.
C: We’re all a little creepy, I suppose.
I: So you are chasing real ghosts.
C: No, not at all. In fact, later that night, I talked to my Kongo spirits at their altar, and told them to keep these things away. And they told me to light a candle to them from that point on, and everything would be smoother.
I: And did that work?
C: Yes.
I: I’m not sure I understand why you would send them away.
C: For the same reason you send anyone away during a rehearsal. Because we have work to do, and they’re interrupting. If these manifestations are supposed to be a part of the performance, they’ll come back, but if they’re just there to say hello, well, they said hello. That’s enough.
I: I’m still not following why you wouldn’t want these things in the room.
C: Well, they are in the room, always, of course. Everyone has ghosts, things that follow them around, and some people understand them in spiritist terms, while others might accept them as projections, but everyone has their own ghosts they carry, and I’m more interested in how performers perform with all of that, and I’m wondering how we might learn how to make those things work for us to create a space where our–spectator and performer–projections can come in and start to play with us. I guess in spiritist terms, then, I’m creating spaces where multiple projections are possible, and everyone is entitled to their own perspective on their projections. I’m not interested in manifesting one particular spirit who can talk to us, and so on and so forth, because that’s already been done. It’s religion. And this isn’t religion, although it may have some religious overtones, in the strict sense of the term, that thing that re-links. But not in the Jungian sense, where the ideal is to reach a space of collective understanding, but really and truly in the Lacanian sense, where we can see that our perceptions are constructed from a lifetime of profound misunderstandings, looking for fissures and cracks, stutters and slips, that might reveal some of our symptoms.
I: Hm, well, it sounds like a lot of work ahead.
C: Yes, fortunately.
I: And it also sounds like you have some symptoms that you’re investigating, some very personal things.
C: That’s true, but that always happens.
I: Is this different than what you’ve done before?
C: Very much so, yes, it’s much more structured. And I’m staying out of the way, to let the script, that thing that’s in the video, the words we speak, and the rituals in between these things, I’m watching to see what connections might come up. In the past, there’s been a lot of hidden attempts to confess something I needed to say, but this time, I’m not really confessing, you know, a secret love for this person, or an ongoing secret relationship with that person, but really more focused on finding out what this piece is really about.
I: And what are you finding?
C: That it is entirely personal, ultimately, but not what I expected. There are all these things going on with my father, this past month I’ve been in the hospital with him even more, there was this other surgery, which was radical, and it revealed some very sad news about his health, which is not very positive. And in this piece, there are all these metaphors for death, with Orpheus and Eurydice, a story about losing someone absolutely vital to you, someone who connects you to the world in ways that are biological, as well as spiritual and mythic. So for me, this is about that. It’s about coming to terms with that impending loss. But at the same time, what we’re making, it’s more like a love story, a story of lost love, and exploring how our perception of the Other changes when the Other has to go somewhere else. But I’m sure, in all of that, I’m wrong, that I don’t really know what it’s about, that there are these fissures and spaces in between, where the Real story lives. And I tell the performers–and myself–that this is what will be revealed when there is an audience here next week. But I also deeply suspect that this isn’t true, not at all, that we might never even know what it is that we’re doing here. But we’re all terribly driven to do it, so something very important is happening under the surface, and that thing that’s happening will only reveal itself partially, in cracks in video image, in cracks between words, like traces of a ghost who keeps on interrupting.
I: And perhaps it’s not so important what the message is, so much as it’s about the act of interrupting.
C: What?
I: The fact that there are these ghosts who are interrupting, that they feel compelled to interrupt, is more important than what they have to say.
C: Yes, because whatever they might say will be mistranslated.
(End of interview.)
No comments:
Post a Comment