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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 exceptionally 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 “abolishing” death, which borders on misunderstanding and ridicule. This is the question of embodying something that is absent. I try to name the basic limitation 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 embodiment? 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 representation/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 transcendent 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. * 221 +
