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