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ANAMNESIS OF ART: VOICE / MEMORY / IDENTITY
True inheritance of a tradition is an attempt to transport through time the
questions of a Master rather than his answers. Asking a question of someone
who is absent makes it necessary for me to transgress into the territory of my
own experience and doubt.
ON THE THEATER OF EMBODIMENT
I believe that the stiff, lax, lying, or hanging body of an actor is an exception¬
ally pointless way of representing death on stage. The superficial curiosity of
death and the ease with which it can be presented in drama (which always
remains a theater project, a text, recorded in language) prove how superficial
the contemporary culture of representation is. Treatises on death in torrents
of words and treatises of empty forms in living bodies, move us away from the
key experience/inexperience of death.
Of most importance for the theater, however, remains the question of “abol¬
ishing” death, which borders on misunderstanding and ridicule. This is the
question of embodying something that is absent. I try to name the basic limita¬
tion of the theater and its language to realize (like a craftsman) the qualities
and limits of the material I work with. The limitations of language are present
in every art, but this is particularly painful in the theater — in the territory
of “living art,” to invoke Appia — as it makes us realize we cannot express the
whole, the totality of our life when we are alive. And here, realizing that we
have come close to a rather trivial truth, we can only smile.
Can zar, the column of sound, take on itself some of the theater’s wrestling
with the imperfection of representation and shift its power toward embodi¬
ment? For a moment? Also, toward the embodiment of my own death, of our
death? Or perhaps we are left with nothing else but the bitter gift of represen¬
tation/embodiment of dying, not death?
I grapple with the belief that Theater is a death mask (my own, ours) that I
put on while I am still alive in front of those gathered around the performance.
And I hear my death mask, I still hear it breathing. This performance is my
death mask and the death mask of all my friends. This performance is my death
mask and the death mask of all those present, put on while we are still alive. We
demand these missions for theater as the art of embodiment; a theater that isa
death mask put on by those still alive; realized through sound, and especially
through song, as our focus is on that which flows from the body, that which is
part of the body like the heart or eye; that which is both immanent and trans¬
cendent in relation to my body; that which is at once instrumental and is the
medium of being in a body. Song is the most likely path to fulfil this mission.
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