ρόδον αμάραντον

KCL 7 June 2014 byzantine hymn rehearsed reading and recital 6-8 pm

the umbilical rope scene: my idea for physicalizing a struggling Dikē interior and exterior

during the process of devising for the Oresteia i came up with the rope idea, my inspiration extrapolated from the original imagery associated with the scale of lady Justice but interpreted and extended as an inner/psychic and outer/societal struggle; my idea was instantly adopted giving rise to one of the most powerful scenes of the entire trilogy by everyone's admission (and i had not even finished my MA physical theatre back then, hardly what one would call an 'experienced actress'...) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJHuRGk4wxw- photo credit: Yannis Katsaris

performing a terminally-ill mother based on the singer songwriter's autobiography

olfactory

 ε ξ α ί φ ν η ς

through a dream darkly- from Langley Street to Cannes

this film is within the mono no aware strorytelling ethos by a Chinese director (49 were shortlisted to audition for four roles last week, I will be playing the wife) it examines the interrelationships of inner outer and cinematic realities exploring physical and emotional space and conversing with an old chinese film (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VN_iu_1kVjA)- shooting in London June 2014 
showing in Cannes film festival 11-22 May 2016
http://sub.festival-cannes.fr/SfcCatalogue/MovieDetail/0dc8d438-f0c4-4d8e-ba34-adb32f3debe2

Nekyia; the dead can be just as alive in this seductive indeterminate 'music'

One may start providing an explanation by thinking that it’s “the closeness of the living organism” (Grotowski Poor Theatre, 41) established by a spatial-cum-emotional closeness whereby the audience is not a mere spectator but a witness. This closeness may best be defined as sacrificial presence not only because it involves this witnessing but also because it seeks our complicity in this act of collective imagining into which it engulfs us; the actors’ bodies are sacrificed, i.e. accept to be used as vehicles in these Nekyia journeys to the shadowy worlds of otherness. Even though as seen, the feelings of dislocation and dépaysment are spatialized, through an alchemy of the fantastical interfusing with the real, the visible with the invisible, the solid with the fluid and the void, we come to transcend these ruptures and to re-member and re-cognize ourselves in a eutopia, i.e. ‘a good place’ of imaginary plenitude. Through the musique concrète of Complicite’s metamorphoses of bodies and objects and through the shadow states between the body, the word and its deferred meaning, what takes place traces in our both un-/subconscious with a sort of electroencephalographic poignancy. One can see the affinities with Shakespeare’s verbal metaphor theatre except that verbal in this theatre is vitally replaced by the nakedly somatic/kinetic: the body as a locus of uninsulated remembrance. “To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself”writes John Berger, a nakedness in which we re-member and re-cognize ourselves, a mnemonic of our mortality, fragility, desire and death, the intimacy of our common fate.

Metaphor and indeed ambiguity can be argued to be instrumental in producing this intimate connectedness. As Ted Cohen suggests: “The maker and the appreciator of a metaphor are drawn closer to one another” (8). “It’s like “a secret password [...] the pleasure of this intimacy consists in the invitation to the audience to share a world of spirit and feeling that one enters only by first sharing […]To unite the body of the actor and the soul of the audience in the act of discovery” (qtd. in States 114-115) is the mission of this intimate theatre whose sensitivities connect us back to the rituals in Ancient Athens in the earliest forms of theatre. 

This concept of intimacy based on a poetics of indeterminacy can be further illuminated by Bataille’s theory of “good duality” (qtd. in Stoekl 268). In Complicite's case this ‘good duality’ is the poetic quality of the embodied language as a principal story-telling tool on the one hand and its indeterminacy on the other hand, the paradoxical dialectic of dazzling obscurity and penumbral illumination. Tanizaki’s aesthetic advocates such a world of good duality of seeing without seeing, of presence within absence, “[...]to be there/non-there, and thereby produce a sort of flickering.” (Baudrillard Seduction, 85) It is, following Kristeva a world that resists naming, i.e. an abject world: “The abject, not yet the object, is anterior to the distinction between the subject and the object in normative language.” (317) 

Sasuke’s self-immolation becomes this ultimate of metaphors for such an abject world embracing subtlety, ambiguity and obscurity. Shunkin being a hybrid text par excellence is a circular non-goal driven perverse convoluted ‘narrative’ written as a book within a book, as an amalgam of pseudo-documentary fragments. Despite being written partly “as an exercise in historical nostalgia” (McBurney Essays, 84), its source is Thomas Hardy’s short story entitled “Barbara of the house of Grebe”, also evoking a sadomasochistic relationship in a vanished historical era. However in Tanizaki’s version there is no guilt associated with ‘kinkiness’; in this strange folk tale all is distanced by a series of interlocking voices: no dialogue nor full stops are used; there is a repetitive rhythm within which this perverse relationship is “examined and excavated” (ibid. 86), unfolding in a highly poetic atmosphere. Tanizaki’s aesthetics of unveiling of the hidden depths out of the well of literature is also McBurney’s post-structural theatre-cum-archaeology perception: 

  I think of my father. He was an archaeologist who always discovered the new by 

digging vertically down into the earth. If you come back to something you have done before, if you repeat the same gesture again, the body is reminded of all that was not there in the first place. It is not just that you get better at it through repetition, rather that through the act of repeating you dig down into the material and find the new under your hand where you did not know it, rather than consciously reaching for something. Auerbach has been painting the same people for thirty years. (Essays, 63) 

This rather Feldenkraisean metaphor is also deployed by McBurney when talking about Mnemonic’s revival in his Essays: “The journey of staying with the same piece of theatre is not horizontal but vertical. The repeated action of working and playing acts like a towel that uncovers a hidden structure under the earth. It is an action that deepens and develops.” (52) In Shunkin the same actions of leading, washing, dressing, cleaning, obeying, ordering are repeated - “and then, when the worst can happen, just as the pot only becomes beautiful when it has a crack in it, is the real beauty and intensity of this relationship revealed.” (63) Shunkin’s repeated gestures of thrashing her stick relentlessly as countless men roll under it serve to emphasize her cruel mechanical relationship with her lover. So too the student’s bow to the teacher is embodied by three pairs of actors as if fractured. Yet this repetitiveness which also serves to embody the passing of time and the presence of the past in the present becomes nurturing as Sasuke’s students lovingly care for him in his old age just as he cared for Shunkin. There is no clear singular narrative line, only different accounts of events such as Shunkin’s disfigurement: “there is perhaps nothing even to ‘understand’, there is only something to be felt. [...] the moment of their coming together in their blindness is extraordinary” (88), it is more than a beautiful moment, it is sublime. 

Following Kant (1790) beauty relates to the form of the object whereas the sublime is formless and boundless (§ 23). Thomas Weiskel re-examined Kant’s aesthetics from a semiotics and psychoanalytic perspective arguing that Kant’s ‘mathematical’ sublime could be viewed as the presence of an excess of signifiers, i.e. an infinity potentially fusing all oppositions while the ‘dynamic’ sublime relates to an excess of signifieds, meaning being always overdetermined. According to Lyotard replacing the beautiful with the sublime points to an aporia in human reason revealing the multiplicity and instability of the postmodern world. 

This post-modern aporia is embedded in Tanizaki’s story staged in Japanese by McBurney. In the English translation the sentence conveying Sasuke’s self-blinding has been broken down into short phrases as if to clarify; and yet in the original it’s the longest sentence in the whole text, as McBurney’s cast pointed out to him. Clearly Tanizaki was generating obscurity: “to evoke the sense of impending blindness he expressed the tortoise and gathering darkness in the very fabric of the words themselves” (Essays 88). It is in that very moment of Sasuke’s self-blinding that Shunkin requites his love for the first time. It is just a seductive flicker of a unique moment. Our tragic predicament lies in that we feel more than we understand: “one passes from the known to the unknown that defies analysis of the unseizable interiority of man” (Brook 34). Even in the immensity of pain, McBurney is showing us that humans are capable of beauty, remembering the famous saying by Lautréamont about the beauty found in the fortuitous meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a surgical table. 

The convoluted impenetrable circularity of this tale is also reflected in Japanese music where variations of the same line are played again and again. It is non-goal/non-resolution driven, a non-teleological music concerned “with the physicality of sound in the present moment” (Bell 12), within which timbral variation is extremely important. As seen Shunkin’s portrait emerged piecemeal by fragmentary accounts of multiple narrators doubting on the veracity of the chronicle. Complicite’s staging of Shunkin played with two different genres, Tanizaki’s short-novel but also his essay on Japanese aesthetics. As established there is a seductive ambivalence in both, a post-modern dys-appearance of a fixed identity, a delicious sense of playing with any notion of a single truth/tale, what Baudrillard (1990) calls “a seduction, that is a duel and agonistic relation” (105, italics in the original). Seduction demolishes the truth-based discourses of the Western logos, the polarities of subject-object. As Schaeffer observes: “Through this game play Seduction thwarts all systems of power and meaning.” (qtd. in Banes 184) In doing so it empowers us inviting our agency in the meaning-making process and our complicity into this gaming which affords us a connectedness. 

In both discussed case-studies, what acts catalytically in this playing seductive process is eros, the desire to reach out, to inhabit desperately the world of a loved other. Al in mourning his dead wife longs desperately to inhabit her fascination for Mathematics, even though she is lost to him forever; and Sasuke blinds himself as a proof of his ultimate love even though he too outlives Shunkin. There is a heartfelt libidinal tempo, more frenzied and whimsical in A Disappearing Number, more stylized and stiller in Shunkin, yet wonderfully embodied in both. “Until the dehumanization of society by capitalism, all the living awaited the experience of the dead. [...] living and dead were inter-dependent.” writes Berger. In Complicite’s poetics the dead are the other; they are at the same time infinitely separated yet not eliminated and strongly desired. Desire, following Levinas, is an excessive relation, an ontology founded in the subject-Other: “a metaphysics of infinite separation ... opening and freedom.” (Emmanuel Levinas ‘Difficile Liberté’, ctd. by Derrida 91). Desire is a non-authoritative amoral yet ethical mode of relating repressed by the social institutions, problematising the power structures and the modalities of received truth.

This metaphysics of desire as infinite separation yet inter-dependence seems to be at the heart of McBurney’s ‘heroes’ who live in literal or metaphorical exile, have no permanent home and resolve their dilemmas not within received social ethics but instinctively and instinctually. Their flaming desire produces this Nekyia; the dead can be just as alive in this seductive world. Seducing in Greek is ψυχαγωγεῖν, ‘to be a conductor of the dead’ (Liddell and Scott lexicon) ‘to conjure up the dead’. Barker writes: “We need to see self as a potential ground for renewal and not as something stale and socially made” (qtd. in Lamb 2005)– and in his own practice he also loves addressing the audience directly assuming a conspiratorial relationship with it. At the heart of this poetics is the body as locus of a self which is perceived as an otherness par excellence, a fluid, open, mobile, ever changing self not readily identifiable within fixed historical antecedents; rather the allusive activity of words and images is of more validity in this poetic experiential theatre. 

McBurney’s dramaturgical stage-designing, the very plasticity of his iconography, his dreamscapes, the poetic liberties he takes, create an instantaneous alchemical marvel through multiple indeterminate pathways. Complicite’s alchemy takes bodies, objects, words and connects them to each other and to us, not just syntactically but as a presence under the poet-director’s gaze: “In philosophic alchemy, there exists the idea of the Soror Mystica who works with the alchemist while he mixes his substances in his retorts.” Complicite’s penumbral indeterminancy and transformational embodied poetics may be seen as this mystical sister. Its space is transitional and playful just as in modern analytic encounters where meaning and connection are both created and discovered. “Analysts, following Chodorow, talk about the music of the unconscious, of listening to the music and not the words” (487). Quoting Christian Wolff, a composer and performer of his own indeterminate music, she writes: “Wolff inadvertently conveys exactly the risky and rewarding activity of being an analyst, as we like musicians listen and respond to the patterned sounds that we can never fully hear nor fully understand.” (ibid.) Complicite’s body, object, word, image patterned aggregations invite our listening and fully responsive agencies in the meaning- and connection-making process. Its poetics distrusts the linearity of time and space, refusing to become entrapped by any attachment to the linear perspective, always creating a consoling living, moving, painterly theatre, a “passing of secrets” (McBurney xii) in embodied necromancies where the dead remain interdependent with the living, a cosmos of a nostalgic yearning for connections through infinite ruptures and separations. (In Complicite’s most recent show The Master and Margarita, such liminality is in evidence at the end of the show where the two lovers are placed eternally in a shadowy world neither the paradise nor hell.) This is reminiscent of the Bataillean (qtd. in Holland 208) transgression of an oblique movement towards the abject, beyond the tyranny of subject-object bifurcation:

Virgyl: can you hear me? ... Alice, you're breaking up ... Alice ... 

(Dim solitary shafts of light isolate each one ...) (A Disappearing Number 216) 

 “It is only if I remain attached to the order of things that the separation is real” (Bataille Acccursed Share I, 192) Within this constant and poignant breaking of the spatiotemporal order lie the deep-structures of Complicite’s generative grammar of infinite connectedness. “In the processes of individuation worked out in the Jungian laboratory between the patient and the analyst, the same fusion takes place. It is a forbidden love which can only be fulfilled outside of matrimony. While it is true that this love does not exclude physical love, the physical becomes transformed into ritual.” (Satinover ibid.)

“Our job is seeing the world through Simon’s eyes - ... a terrifying and unique perspective on the world.”, says video designer Finn Ross. McBurney, a sacred maniac, is like an ever impatient Orpheus who in a moment of utterly imprudent fascination and exceeding all godly advice enables us to experience the purest form of desire through his dark morbidly erotic gaze. By looking back and losing Eurydice, Orpheus also lost himself; but in losing himself, in this very act of ruining and obliterating himself, he can only create the space for the song to begin again. By going back to the shadowy depths of the dead and the living Complicite reveals these seductive paths where every crossing is loved as if it frees us to enter again and again an inner homeland long lost and finally recovered.

L'Amour et la Mort n'est qu'une mesme chose. I bet the Master could never pun in French!

yūgen 'flower moments' or brain in the belly: “theatre is alive, a river static but constantly changing”

Objects and tropes: ambiguity and metaphor

Love and memory are also at the centre of Shunkin, the story of a domineering, blind player of an evocative stringed instrument, the shamisen, and Sasuke, her submissive servant lover, who blinds himself in an ultimate act of love. Bodies and objects recur as loci not only of memory but also of its shadowy ambiguity celebrated and eulogized as part of Complicite’s poetics. Minimally staged, Shunkin is inspired by the work of one of the most important Japanese writers of the twentieth century, Jun'ichiro Tanizaki. It is a tale of devotion, passion and power, where beauty is cruel and love literally blinding. Using puppetry modeled on traditional Japanese bunraku puppets the story is dramatized non-naturalistically, based on Tanizaki’s novella A Portrait of Sunkin. Complicite’s adapted piece also draws significantly on Tanizaki’s celebrated essay In praise of shadows, written concurrently in 1933, in which he discusses the traditional Japanese appreciation for darkness and ambiguity juxtaposed to the Western aesthetic that privileges ‘Apollonian’ values of clarity. 

Complicite follows Tanizaki by turning off the Western electric lights in this show to create a dreamland permeated and haunted by the hidden depths of yūgen or shadowy darkness. There is a wonderful simplicity and stillness, a playfulness with light and shadow at the heart of which are not just the Japanese performers’ visceral bodies but also the objects employed metonymically, metaphorically and ambiguously with a fluid ever-changing meaning; flapping papers turn into soaring larks, the space-delineating poles convert to waving branches, and Honjoh Hidetaro's shamisen music even evokes the horrific act of Suzuke’s self-blinding. As Williams points out:

McBurney’s dramaturgies of emergence and dissolution allow highly focused ‘image-worlds’ to appear from the deployments, interactions and transpositions of bodies and objects [...] with the economy of a haiku ... [T]he laws of Newtonian physics seem […] to be momentarily suspended as [...] displacement, connectivity and the fluidity of memory and identity have become recurrent themes in McBurney’s work. (Fifty Key Theatre Directors, 250-1)

As already seen in A Disappearing Number, mutation, deconstruction, migration, dislocation embodied by actors and objects, as well as a heterogeneity of forms, sources, materials and the privileging of an image as composite, often facilitated by technology, are constants in the Complicite tout bouge poetics. ‘Everything moves’ was the title of Lecoq’s lecture-demonstration performed internationally from the late 1960s, and it is of course the Heraklitean tenet par excellence! There is an astonishing limpidity in McBurney’s use of objects, not the clarity of the ratio or intelligence, or what the French call ‘la belle clarté’, but rather a kind of shadowy transparency following which behind a given element something else can be seen. McBurney writes of The Street of Crocodiles that: “if you had opened the door of the rehearsal room when we first began you might have thought you were in a prop maker’s workshop, a second-hand clothes store, or even a hallucinatory jam session, with the participants playing desks instead of drums and dancing with coats instead of partners.” (www.complicite.org.uk) In his post-show talk after the Shunkin performance, he admitted, with a nod to Heraclitus: “theatre is alive, a river static but constantly changing”. (My transcripts of his talk, 11/11/2010, Barbican) It is as though things move in order to remain the same, in self-similar, fractal ways: a movement of immobility, just like the Japanese tea ceremony which “has drifted and changed constantly as well as remaining the same.” (McBurney Essays, 61) Given that, what then is the function of the objects in this production? 

In her article in the Shunkin programme, Eleanor Margolies remarks: “Complicite has spent 25 years exploring the long street of theatrical animation, on which puppets are just one stopping point.” Margolies states that improvising with objects reveals two impulses: (i) evocation of the meaning of objects by past generations; and (ii) their liberation from everyday use, reinvesting them with new meaning(s). In Shunkin Margolies talks of a tripartite production in terms of animation: the bunraku doll with just a head and hands and all other body parts within a long kimono used to dramatize the girlhood of Shunkin, subsequently replaced by a female actor wearing a white mask puppeteered by two actors, one of whom evolves into Shunkin herself. This puppet to puppet-actor to actor sequence, writes Margolies (7), is reminiscent of the governor’s son in The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1997) who starts life as a baby-sized cloth doll then changes into a puppet; what seems to be the same puppet is carried on stage then puppeteered to reveal an actor child. In their evolving modalities of representation, these transformations themselves reference natural processes such as a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis or magic tricks such as producing a dove (animate life) from a hat (inanimate/lifeless object). 

There are moments of pure poetry in this show, as when Shunkin (still a puppet) and Sasuke first have sex, when she gives birth to their first child, and when Sasuke blinds himself, all on a dimly-lit stage, where a shaded ambiguity mesmerizes the collective act of imagining and rediscovering a shadowy world into which we are invited. In this world some associative correspondences with the Artaudian theatre of cruelty or Schechner’s rasaesthetics can be traced – to which I shall return later on - reenforcing this embodied poetics of ambiguity and indeterminacy.

One of the show’s most unbearably painful but beautiful scenes is the self-immolation of Sasuke, Sunkin’s servile music student and secret lover. Shunkin is herself blinded since her youth; the original text alludes to her blinding as a possible act of cruelty. When, on top of that, one of her adversaries disfigures her face with scalding water, to preserve the image of her former beauty forever in his mind, Sasuke at once blinds himself by thrusting a needle into his eyes. This horrific act staged with a shaded lighting is reminiscent of the aesthetics of sumie paintings. These are typically monochrome in design, being composed of tonal variations of a single color, namely, black India ink. According to Odin (1980), this monochrome blackness confers upon the painting the pervasive aesthetic quality of shadowy darkness. Just like a sumie painting, the self-immolation scene is extremely stylized with three planes of depth: a clear foreground with the two lovers, a mid-ground where we hear the samisen music, and a distant background that fades into the mystery and obscurity of the pictorial space. As McBurney stated in his post-show talk, lighting in this production is another character of the story. As Odin suggests, the pervasive aesthetic quality of shadowy darkness in a sumie picture suggests the Buddhist unobstructed interfusion of solid with void. (79-80)

Both the act of self-blinding and the specific way it is enacted by Sasuke, in my opinion, directly references Oedipus’s self-immolation – although, following the aesthetics of the Ancient Greek Tragedy, all acts of (self-)cruelty occurred offstage. In Oedipus’s case, the act of self-blinding, rather than plunging him into a world of darkness, gives him for the first time a clarity of vision regarding his identity and origins which his originally biologically perfect eyesight had denied him. Sasuke’s blindness also admits him into a world of a spiritual inner-vision into which come flooding youthful memories of the dark world of the closet where he used to practice; his perception of Shunkin is transformed by blindness into the sacred iconographic mandala-image of a Buddha enhaloed with an aura of luminous darkness. As Odin (86) observes: “The theme of Zen Buddhist sudden enlightenment and its relation to the visionary apperception of beauty as luminous darkness finally culminates in the last sentence of Tanizaki’s (1966) story”: It seems that when the priest Gazen of the Tenryu Temple heard the story of Sasuke’s self-immolation, he praised him for the Zen spirit with which he changed his whole life in an instant, turning the ugly into beautiful, and he said it was very nearly the act of a saint. (84)

This, following Odin, is reminiscent of the phenomenological profile of the organismic consciousness in the East-West syncretic, elaborated by the foremost modern Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitaro (1870-1945). Kitaro draws on the Dionysius Areopagite (qtd. in Odin 84) concept of “dazzling obscurity”, giving the self an unfathomable depth of meaning in the abyss of darkness. In contemporary Western metaphysics, this model of perceptual experience has been expressed in Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy of organism. As Whitehead suggests (1978): “Consciousness flickers; and even at its brightest, there is a small focal region of clear illumination, and a large penumbral region which tells of intense experience in dim apprehension.” (267) In Whitehead's phenomenology, the recurrent notion of a “penumbral shadow” is the key organismic metaphor for expressing the unbroken, sumie-like continuity of the perceptual field and the beauty as “intrinsic to all phenomena by virtue of their hidden depths.” (Odin 74) Far from being an act of self-imposed cruelty, Sasuke’s blinding elicits an ultimate beauty though the extreme depths of its pain and intensity of feeling of love. As Odin remarks, Tanizaki’s eulogy of shadows relates to the subconscious as formulated by depth psychologists, including not only the Jungian underworld of archetypal imagination, but also the Freudian psyche with its dark interiors of erotic and demonic fantasies. 

Sasuke’s self-blinding constitutes then what Zeami called ‘flower moments’ (76), i.e. those supreme aesthetic experiences where dualisms are not reduced or resolved but ‘suspended’ (ibid.) i.e. cancelled and prolonged simultaneously. According to performance theorist David George, Zeami was the first ‘Ambiguity Theorist’ (75): the supreme Noh being reflecting the paradox of the sun shining at midnight. George suggests that phenomenology and Quantum Theory are based on the same fundamental theatrical shadowy indeterminacy; and the performance space “is already similarly fundamentally indeterminate in being both material and imaginary, perceived but conceived; performance time is fundamentally indeterminate in being both now and past, unrepeatable but repeated.” (78) George also states that all binaries are hidden dynamic triads. Paradoxically he quotes the father of dualism Plato in corroboration: “Two things cannot be held together without a third; they must have some bond of union.” (Timaeus 31 qtd. in George 79) In performance the actor does not turn into another person but acts in-between identities, hence performing is liminal, an in-betweenness.

And Complicite’s staging of Shunkin is indeed liminal, painfully so. “When Peter Brook characterizes the psychic traces of theatrical performance as a “silhouette” that “burns” in the mind and “scorches” the memory, his language indirectly captures the searing effect of such plays on the audience, the vicarious infliction of pain, both during and after performance” (Garner 161). This original metaphor comes from Artaud, and Complicite’s poetics in Sasuke’s act contains something of this Artaudian interest in bodily affliction, and its psycho-physical repercussions within spectators. According to Garner: 

Even in its dramatized (or simulated) forms, pain violates the perceptual 

demarcations and the differential spheres of otherness essential to representation, including the audience in its discomfort through a kind of neuromimetic transferral (the impulse to close one’s eyes during simulated blindings onstage reflects not simply an aversion to the representation of pain, but also a deeper defense against its sympathetic arising in the field of one’s own body). (180-1)

Witnessing on stage Sasuke’s extreme act, we feel the transgression of the audience-play boundary which Edward Bond has theorized under the label “aggro-effect,” setting discomfort in contrast to the privileging of rationality in Brechtian theory. (113) Aesthetically, Shunkin seems to be visibly drawing on this aggro-effect as well as on the Balinese theatre’s perception of a  performance as “An upset to the equilibrium. [...] A stab as well as a caress. A nuclear bomb that is also a haiku.” (Putu Wijaya 1997: 387 qtd. in Banes 191). Apart from being an attack on our sympathetic and neuromimetic systems, Sazuke’s act of extreme painful beauty fulfills what Cocteau has asked of a poet: “[he] must bring objects and feelings from behind their veils and their mists; he must show them suddenly, so nakedly and so swiftly that it hurts man to recognize them.” (qtd. in Cole 241). 

Just as the audience-play boundary is transgressed so too in this sensuous, experiential, fragrant staging the outside is interfused with the inside, the up with the down, the levity with the gravity in a sumie-like unbroken deep continuity; As such it reflects McBurney’s espousal of Rabelais’ pre-Cartesian centrality of the body in all its forms following which “our mystical experience begins in our bellies” (McBurney on Rabelais, 13/10/2011 at the Institut Français). It thus may fall clearly within Richard Schechner’s “brain in the belly” (qtd. in Banes 18) performance theory of rasaesthetics, from rasa meaning ‘taste’: “[it is] an aesthetic...fundamentally different from one founded on the “theatron”, the rationally ordered, analytically distanced panoptic.” (13). This is a radical departure from the Western epistemology of ‘knowing is seeing’. Following Phelan: “Aristotelian philosophy is undone by Newton [who discovered the prismatic properties of light]. Vision cannot be the guarantee of knowing once one knows that vision is never complete.” (qtd. in Welton 149) In rasic performances the emotions are expressed and feelings are experienced so as “to lead the performance to the spectators”. It is not Western narcissism nor Brechtian Verfremdumseffekt, but rather a liminal space to allow for play, improvisation, variation, self-gazing. (Schechner 24) “There is no narrational imperative insisting on development, climax, recognition, and resolution. Instead, as in kundalini sexual meditation, there is as much deferral as one can bear, a delicious delay of resolution.” (ibid.) This deferral is reflected in Shunkin in so far as: 

the narrator pieces together [her] portrait from a variety of sources that sometimes contradict each other: a formal document, some comments from a former maid, the gossip of friends and even conjectures of the narrator himself. By allowing this portrait to emerge as a series of piecemeal and uncertain fragments, Tanizaki very skillfully replicates the process by which we come to know the totality of people’s lives in the everyday world. (Dodd 11) 

Just as Sasuke’s self-romanticizing account of Shunkin’s life can’t necessarily be trusted, so the narrator throws doubt on the veracity of his chronicle, destabilizing the spectators’ value and belief systems. Both the activation of shadows in the subtlety of Complicite’s lighting in this production, and the transitional use of dolls to embody Shunkin in her early stages of life, serve to layer the production’s poetics in unique, ambivalent and multi-sensory ways. Phenomenologically this plunges us right back to the indeterminacy and primordial difference of the pre-linguistic developmental stage where infants, following Winnicott (1971), experience ‘transitional objects’ through play in a time where the ‘not-me’ is an extension of ‘me’ (xii). George points out that “humans learn from the beginning complex rules of association between different signs and even between the diverse sensory stimuli emanating from ‘one’ object: their visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory and tactile messages may be and often are quite different and even contradictory.” (82) Yet paradoxically amidst the indeterminacy of this show too, an overwhelming and enduring sense of connectedness emerges. As Gandhi says in a voice-over in A Disappearing Number: 

There is an indefinable mysterious power that pervades everything. I feel it, though I do not see it. It is this unseen power which makes itself felt, and yet defies all proof. (31)

Is there an explanation for this abiding sense of connectedness within plurality and indeterminacy?