Wooster Baroque

Branislav Jakovljevic
TDR: The Drama Review, Volume 54, Number 3, Fall 2010 (T 207), pp. 87-122 (Article)
Published by The MIT Press

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Wooster Baroque

Branislav Jakovljevic
Introduction
Urb... The death of theatre, which in the West has been lamented at least since Aristotle, does not come with the passing of great tragic poets, or with religious persecution, or with the advent of new technologies. It comes with the death of death. Or, more precisely, with the death of the dead; that is to say, with the evacuation of the material presence of death from our everyday experience. Theatre not only dies for wont of a living, working, paying audience, but also because it is deprived of the population of the dead, of corpses imperceptibly decomposing under the audiences feet while the spectacle unfolds in front of their eyes. Such is the stunning proposition that Jean Genet makes in his text That Strange Word... The strange word he points to is urbanism. It is strange, he claims, because it simultaneously refers to the city, urbs, and to those guardians of the First City who bore the name of Urban. It is urbanists, not religious leaders, who can bring about the extinction of theatre or restore it to its full glory. They can do that, Genet proposes, by placing theatres in close proximity to cemeteries or, at the very least, to crematoria. Theatre needs actual corpses placed before it,
TDR: The Drama Review 54:3 (T207) Fall 2010. 2010 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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not the discursive traces of the dead. It needs its spectators to thread their way through graves after witnessing performance. And not through a few remaining steles of a dead cemetery but through a live one, [...] a cemetery where graves would continue to be dug and the dead buried, [...] a Crematorium where corpses are cooked day and night (Genet 2003:108). In short, Genet asks for a theatre in which the gravity of each gesture and of each word is impregnated by the stench of rotting or burning flesh. The only time I witnessed a performance that came close to Genets gory ideal was on Saturday, 22 September 2001 at the Performing Garage in downtown New York. A few days after the events of 9/11, the Wooster Group presented their work in progress To You, the Birdie! (Phdre) based on Paul Schmidts translation of Racines Phdre. That evening, company director Elizabeth LeCompte stepped in front of the audience, thanked us for coming, and announced that we were about to see a performance of Route 1 & 9. She quickly corrected herself. This lapse could be explained by trivial similarities between the two productions, such as the spatial arrangement of Route 1 & 9 and To You, the Birdie! in both the audience was positioned across the length of the Performing Garage. Or purely formal ones: whereas Route 1 & 9 marked the beginning of the Wooster Groups extensive use of video technology, To You, the Birdie! was the first production in which they experimented with digital images on plasma screens. This purely formal similarity points to another, more profound continuity in the work of the Wooster Group: while in Route 1 & 9 they used blackface in a provocative and controversial way, in To You, the Birdie! the flat television screen becomes a mask of sorts, a digital blackface. However, the actuality of the Performing Garages surroundings was imposing itself onto this performance more than its own past ever could. Just a couple of days earlier, the part of the city where we now sat and watched this work in progress was still out of bounds for the public. Less then a mile from the site of the World Trade Center, the streets of lower SoHo were still covered with a film of fine white ash. The air smelled of burning fuel and plastic, in which many claimed to detect the odor of scorched or as Genet would have it, cooked human flesh. The only moment of profound and immediate resonance between the incomplete theatre piece and the fractured world in which it was placed so directly and so improbably was the moment when Theseus, played by Willem Dafoe, was seen onstage, lying down on a stretcher made of bright orange fabric, identical to the ones that crews of paramedics were hopelessly carrying around the smoldering ruins, still looking for bodies that were not completely pulverized. Over the following eight years, the Wooster Group mounted four new productions (including To You, the Birdie! which was on that night presented incomplete, without the ending) and revived two (Brace Up! in 2003, originally produced in 1991, and House/Lights in 2005, first staged in 1999). Out of the four new productions, three were based on 17th-century texts: To You, the Birdie! (2002) was, as I already mentioned, based on Jean Racines Phdre; Hamlet (2007), based on Shakespeares play; and finally La Didone (2009), which used the opera by Venetian composer Francesco Cavalli and librettist Gian Francesco Brusenello. The only new work that departs from this systematic revisiting of 17th-century European theatre is Poor Theater (2004),

Figure 1. (previous page) Wess (Scott Shepherd) reaches for the meteor rejecter, while La Didone (Hai-Ting Chinn) sleeps clutching her plush toy. La Didone, St. Anns Warehouse, Brooklyn, 2009. (Photo Paula Court) Branislav Jakovljevic is Assistant Professor in the Department of Drama at Stanford University. He specializes in modernist theatre and the avantgarde, and in his current research he focuses on the relation of the event to performance. His articles have been published in the United States (TDR, PAJ, Theater, Art Journal) and abroad (Serbia, Croatia, Spain, England, Sweden, Poland). His book Daniil Kharms: Writing and the Event (2009) was published by Northwestern University Press. He is the recipient of ATHEs Award for Outstanding Essay for 2008/09 for his article From Mastermind to Body Artist: Political Performances of Slobodan Miloevi, published in TDR.

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which was based on the film recording of Jerzy Grotowskis production of Akropolis and documentary video footage of William Forsythes dance theatre. The Wooster Group began its work in theatre with a trilogy: Three Places in Rhode Island is a trilogy plus an epilogue Sakonnet Point (1975), Rumstick Road (1977), Nayatt School (1978), followed by the epilogue Point Judith (1979). A similar pattern is recognizable in its second trilogy, The Road to Immortality: Route 1 & 9 (1981), L.S.D. (...Just the High Points...) (1984), and Frank Dells The Temptation of St. Anthony (1987), followed by North Atlantic (1984/1999), which was originally a part of L.S.D. And now, a baroque trilogy stretches over the troubled first decade of the new millennium. The Wooster Groups choice to stage Phdre, Hamlet, and La Didone is surprising if we remember how distant their theatrical practice has always been not only from baroque theatre, but from the baroque style in general. With their clear contours, straight lines, right angles, and exposed corners, Jim Clayburghs skeletal stage constructions stand in stark contrast to the baroque penchant for curved lines, soft shapes, concealed borders, and general rejection of line in favor of mass, and of symmetry in favor of irregularity. In his summation of the stylistic traits of the baroque, Heinrich Wlflin asserts that the baroque wants to carry us away with the force of impact, immediate and overwhelming. It gives us not a generally enhanced vitality, but excitement, ecstasy, intoxication. [...] It does not convey a state of present happiness, but a feeling of anticipation, of something yet to come, of dissatisfaction and restlessness rather than fulfillment ([1888] 1964:38). In all of this, the Performance Groups environmental theatre of the late 1960s is much closer to baroque. This, of course, is the group from which the founding members of the Wooster Group emerged, and from which they distanced themselves not only through the spatial organization of their productions, but even more through an acting style characterized by restraint, a certain coldness, and the ambiguity of acting and not-acting.1 In his Task and Vision: Willem Dafoe in LSD, Philip Auslander correctly asserted that this treading of the borderline between matrixed and non-matrixed performing led to the diminishing of characterization in the Wooster Groups stage practice, or, as he called it, characterization degree zero (1997:41). Paradoxically, precisely at this point the similarities with the baroque begin to emerge. On closer inspection, it becomes clear that the baroque-like use of space2 in environmental theatre originates from its exploration of the three-dimensionality of the body, its depth and volume, which coincides with a certain psychological depth.3 That brings to mind the distinction that French critic Guy Scarpetta makes between romanticism and baroque: whereas the former privileges interior life, expressive authenticity, and psychology, the latter affirms exteriority or surface, artifice, and strategy (1988:23). Consequently, whereas modernism is marked by the romantic tendency to defy illusion, baroque uses illusion to assail illusion, thus bringing the whole opposition of reality vs. illusion to paroxysm (26). This baroque play with surfaces is clearly identifiable in all aspects of the Wooster Groups performance, from acting, to stage design, to their use of video and digital technologies.4 This, in turn, points to the expansion of the visual field that marked both the baroque and high modernism: whereas the former was

1. In his landmark essay On Acting and Not-Acting, Michael Kirby, a theatre historian, theorist, and an actor who occasionally collaborated with the Wooster Group, discusses acting from the point of view of form and quantity rather than style and quality (see Kirby 1987). 2. Robert S. Huddleston writes that the space of baroque art is projective: the image in the painting recedes towards the vanishing point and at the same time plunges outward to invade the space of the beholder and thus establish a single coextensive space (2001:1415). 3. For more on body and space, see Richard Schechners Environmental Theater ([1973] 1994: esp. 139). 4. Scarpetta: A 17th century theoretician such as Baltasar Gracin finalized that rhetoric of the truth of appearance and contemplated its impact on the world of representation in which he was immersed [...] Television is still awaiting its Baltasar Gracin (1988:26). LeCompte: If I had been born ten years later, I would definitively be in television (in Kramer 2007:54). Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. Wooster Baroque 89

transformed by the invention of new (or the dissemination of relatively old) optical apparatuses such as the microscope, telescope, camera obscura, and lanterna magica, the latter was shaped by new visual technologies, from photography and film to video and digital imagery. In fact, it is hardly surprising that recent history is marked by repeated waves of interest in the baroque: from the turn of the 20th century, in works such as Heinrich Wlflins Renaissance and Baroque ([1888] 1964) and Walter Benjamins The Origin of German Tragic Drama ([1928] 1998); to the neo-baroque in literary studies of the late 1960s and early 1970s that coincided with the discovery of the postmodern condition (see, for example, the work of Severo Sarduy [1975], Guy Scarpetta [1988], and especially, Jos Antonio Maravalls Culture of the Baroque [(1975) 1986]); to the resurgent interest of social critics and philosophers in the baroque (the most influential among them being Gilles Deleuze, and Guy Debord, who had a pronounced interest in the politics of the baroque) and, finally, to the latest wave of neo-baroque, prompted by the revolution in digital technology (Mario Perniolas Enigmas: The Egyptian Moment in Society and Art [1990], Angela Ndalianiss Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment [2004], and Timothy Murrays Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds [2008]).5 The Wooster Group historically coincided with the two most recent waves of neo-baroque (postmodernism, the digital age) with which it shares affinities that go beyond mere visual style. I am not claiming that with the staging of the three 17th-century dramatic works the Wooster Group entered something like a baroque phase, but that these productions retroactively highlight the baroque aspects of their aesthetics, which were always there, latent and unrecognized. The obscurity of signs in the Wooster Groups work from private references, to distorted dialogue, to video monitors turned away from the audience is reminiscent of the baroque idea of the aesthetic pleasure gained from experiencing complexity in the work of art. Furthermore, a certain baroque sensibility emerges even from the titles of many of the Wooster Groups performances. Hamlet and La Didone, staged after more than 30 years of the groups uninterrupted existence, are its first productions with the simple titles taken directly from their literary sources. Titles such as Route 1 & 9, Brace Up! and To You, the Birdie! are enigmas: they conceal more than they reveal about the performances they herald. These titles are phrases that not only announce, but order, confuse, and challenge: in other words, perform. Without much exaggeration, we can say that many of the Wooster Groups performances begin with their titles. This linguistic performance approaches the baroque ideal most effectively in L.S.D. (...Just the High Points...). What is so profoundly baroque about this title is not only its obscurity and ambivalence of meanings, but more than anything else the double ellipse that precedes and follows the parenthetical phrase. Severo Sarduy, Cuban expatriate novelist and theorist of Latin American neo-baroque literature, recognizes in the ellipse the episteme of the baroque.6 For him, the ellipse stands for decentralization and irregularity, as well as for the Gallilean idea of the cosmic orbit. Furthermore, the ellipse easily slips from cosmology and geometry to literature. In the baroque ellipse, writes Sarduy, there are two centers: the suppressed term and the suppressing term. In an ellipse, there is always a term which is hidden, censured; and one which blossoms from the textural surface to serve as a cachette or a mask for the other (1972:42). In many of the Wooster Groups performances it is easy to recognize this double center: Thornton Wilders Our Town and Pigmeat Markham LP records in Route 1 & 9, or Gertrude Steins Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights and Josephs Mawras film Olgas House of Shame in House/Lights, or Cavallis opera La Didone and Mario Bavas sci-fi flick Planet of the Vampires in La Didone. This bicentrality easily turns into polycentrality, not only of sources, but also of
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5. For a useful list of recent theoretical texts on the baroque and neo-baroque, see Murray (2008:263, n.29). 6. Here, he essentially develops Wlflins thesis about the baroque preference for oval over circular, and oblong over square shapes ([1888] 1964:63).

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techniques, effects, and meanings. It extends beyond the single works and establishes series and groups of performances that David Savran early on characterized as trilogies (1986). The performances based on the baroque drama constitute such a clearly distinguishable group. The third trilogy. What does it bring to an end? To work in three-step structure means to progress from one point to another, from Sakonnet Point to Point Judith to three times three points in L.S.D. (...Just the High Points...). The Wooster Group trilogies are not the traditional dramatic sequences of three works established to accommodate narratives that exceed a single drama. They are closer to the visual form of a triptych, where the most significant feature is not the ordering of a sequence, but grouping as such. The purpose of a triptych is not to make room for an image larger than any of its three constitutive panels, but to bring together three relatively independent compositions. This form calls attention not only to the pictures, but also to the gaps between them. It allows whatever is behind or around the images to enter the visual field, thus disrupting their purely mimetic function. Or as Deleuze observed, the relationship between the separated parts of a triptych is neither narrative nor logical: it does not imply a progression, and it does not tell a story (Deleuze [1981] 2003:58). This prohibition of narrativity results, as we are going to see, in a circular organization in the triptych, rather than a linear one (60). Further, the triptych also questions the flatness and openness of the paintings format by allowing the hinged image to fold like a window. This polycentricism is very much present in the Wooster Groups trilogies. Writing about The Rhode Island Trilogy, the Wooster Groups first, Savran asserts that in it, the notion of memory has been expanded from an individual to the group, and from the recollection of the narrative to the reflection of the process of devising the performance itself: The chain of cause and effect is doubly disrupted (Which produced which?) and the artifact further entwined with its interpretation (1986:71). If The Rhode Island Trilogy addresses issues of memory and subjecthood in relation to the production of an artwork, then in the second trilogy, argues Savran, the Wooster Group interrogates the notion of the political, and more specifically, the end of revolutionary politics. He makes a persuasive claim that, in the arch from Route 1 & 9, to L.S.D. and Frank Dells Temptation of St. Anthony, they move from politics of open confrontation, to contextualization of utopian politics, to its seeming disappearance: In the course of the three pieces, action is gradually recast as contemplation, demonstration as discussion, and the combative as the solipsistic (Savran 1991:52). If that is the case, how are we to understand the third baroque trilogy, or rather, triptych? Does it follow the trajectory of the second trilogy, thus leading to the further withdrawal into solipsism, this time disguised as theatrical past? Or is it rather chronicling the accelerated fragmentation and displacement of the political? Is it trying to give some kind of coherence to the dispersed and fractured sense of history? Or does it rather attempt to rearticulate the self, thus gesturing back to the first trilogy? One way of approaching these questions is by looking at the order of the Wooster Groups productions. In this performative triptych, chronology is transposed into space, and each production constitutes a panel rather than an installment or a sequel. It started with Racines Phdre (sinister panel), the canonical text of European dramatic literature that is fairly unknown to general American audiences, and continued with Shakespeares Hamlet (central panel), the text from the same period that is most familiar to an average English-speaking theatergoer. As if trying to seal the point of the baroque, the triptych concluded with La Didone (dexter panel), a relatively obscure baroque opera. Musicologist and opera historian Philippe-Joseph Salazar sees in the 17th-century opera a new art form that strives to represent the unity of the perfect state (monarchy), mastered nature (Cartesianism), and aesthetic unity (1980:14). What makes some of the European baroque alien to American audiences is the cultural difference between this art of monarchic anti-reformation and a culture founded on the ideas of Puritanism and an opposition to monarchy. With their triptych, the Wooster Group seems to suggest that things have changed, and that in the first decade of the 21st century American democracy is finally catching

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Figure 2. Badminton court, from The Phoenix Book of Badminton by Fred Brundle and Eddy Choong. (Phoenix Sports Books, 1956) up with the ideal of the baroque state. After all, the Wooster Groups baroque triptych coincides with the two terms in office of George W. Bush, that president-son, the conservative head of the state, who did not shy away from legislating scientific research from an ideological standpoint.7

Sinister Panel
The Anals of Performance In Racines tragedy, we find Phaedra8 and her teenage stepson Hippolytus alone in the castle of Troezen, while her husband Theseus, the king of Athens, is away on an expedition in Epirus. The rumor of Theseuss death is followed by reports of a struggle for succession that takes place in Athens. Having as geographical references the foreign and dangerous Epirus, Athens as the magnetic center of power, and Crete as the place of Phaedras past, Troezen comes across as a space between these clearly defined loci. As Anne Ubersfeld observes in her excellent spatial reading of Racines tragedy, the most privileged topographical references in Phdre are shores and coasts or strands (1981:203). Like her sister Ariadne, Phaedra is left to die under the scorching sun on the rocky seashore. Somber shores, dreaded shores, writes Ubersfeld: The poetic discourse associates these with Troezen of the dangerous shores. Troezen is an infernal threshold, a gateway to evil and death, a crossroads where all the ways leading from Epirus to Attica, from Crete to the Land of the Dead, meet and cross each other (203). The coastline is one of Racines privileged dramatic spaces: Iphignie takes place in a military camp, close to the shore and the anchored ships; likewise, the space of Andromache is adjacent to the harbor with ships ready to sail out. In Racinian tragedy, the dramatic space is often but an interval between the open sea and the foreboding city walls. Can the dramatic space spell out in more unambiguous terms its terrible message to the

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7. Salazar argues that baroque opera represented the epitome of the principle of the monarchic unity of state and nature (1980:14). In this regard, we need only think of President George W. Bushs positions on stem cell research. 8. I am adopting Paul Schmidts spelling of the characters names: Phaedra, Enone, etc. In references to Racines tragedy, I will resort to the French version, Phdre.

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Figure 3. Final set drawing for To You, The Birdie! (Phdre). Set Design: Jim Findlay. Technical Drawing: Bozkurt Karasu. ( The Wooster Group) tragic protagonist? You have no ground to rest your foot upon, it whispers: Everything conspires against you. You are besieged, caught with your back against the wall, rising water already licking your toes. There is no way out: you cannot undo what you have done. You have no other option but to turn toward the sea, to entrust yourself to the calm waters surface. Elizabeth LeCompte and the stage designer Jim Findlay evoke this frontal focus of Racines theatre by transposing Troezen onto a badminton court. Whereas Phdre was originally performed in the Htel de Burgogne, which was, like many other theatre houses in Paris, a converted tennis court, in the Wooster Groups rendering it is placed in a gym dominated by a court for a similar racket game.9 What carries over from badminton court to the scenography of To You, the Birdie! are not just the dimensions of the playing field, or its elements, such as the net, but the perfect symmetry of the space. The court is placed on a slightly elevated platform that has a set of steps on each side. On the rear edge of the platform, there is a pair of handrails similar to those used in swimming pools and a pair of benches behind them. At center court, in place of the posts that hold the net, there are two metal poles with flat plasma television screens mounted on them. The flat screens can move up and down, like tiny glass curtains (indeed, in a visual pun, at the intermission the image of a theatre curtain appeared on the screen). Directly behind the front television, there is a large glass panel (similar to the one used in Brace Up!) mirrored by the second panel at the rear of the platform. The symmetrical stage space in To You, the Birdie! is not without depth. However, the strict symmetry of the stage, the series of frames positioned along its central axis, and the flat television screens significantly reduce the impression of the stages physical depth. As the performance advances, it becomes obvious that depth and flatness are not spatial properties that are generally applicable to all characters and all situations. This discrimination of space comes

9. While tennis dates back to the Renaissance and is, for instance, mentioned in Shakespeares Henry V, badminton is considerably more recent. Various kinds of games similar to badminton were practiced for centuries in Europe and Asia, but historians of this sport agree that its modern version was devised at the Duke of Beauforts Badminton Hall, Gloucherterhire, in 1870. The rules of the game were codified by the early 20th century (see Brundle and Choong 1956; and Davis 1987).

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across most clearly through the strategy of associating each character with a certain section of the stage. Whereas Hippolytus and his tutor Theramenes play badminton on the central badminton court, the exchanges between Phaedra and her nurse Enone are confined to the narrow area in front of and around the glass screen. Even when she steps on the court, Phaedra often walks sideways, in a crab-like fashion. Finally, the iconic image of Phaedra in this production is the one in which she stands at the proscenium, her head and shoulders concealed behind the flat television set that shows her face pressed against the glass. Within a context of the history of screen media in theatre, this pressing against the glass can be seen as an extreme departure from the appropriations of the electronic and film image in the experimental arts of the 1960s and 1970s. In a departure from early video artists, the Wooster Group expands the role of video in the creation of performance. Figure 4. Phaedra pressed against the glass. To You, The Birdie! (Phdre). (From Starting from Route 1 & 9, left): Frances McDormand, Kate Valk, Ari Fliakos. The Performing Garage, New they have used video as a York, 2001. (Photo Paula Court) source material, as an aid in rehearsals, and as a prompt in performance. For them, video is no longer just an addition of a new medium to performance, but one of its integral elements. LeCompte accurately describes this structural use of video by asserting that in their work on Route 1 & 9, the Wooster Group used video as the music (in Savran 1986:37). This expansion of the use of video in performance increases the fragmentation of perception. Now, it is no longer the image that is fragmented into live and mediated components, but the space itself, and with it, the performance.
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Together with fragmentation, video impacts performance through its capability of direct feed. As evidenced in Roberts Blossoms experiments with his theatre company Filmstage in the mid 1960s,10 film projections in avantgarde theatre were usually used as a background for

10. See the special issue of TDR on Film and Theatre (1966: esp. 4961).

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live performance, while video radically reversed this relation between the performer and the recorded image. When used in performance, a film projection of sufficient magnitude does its usual feat of creating a unified space of illusion. The screen and anything that might be placed in front of it, including live performers, is awash in the light from the projector. Conversely, video introduces fragmentation into the field of representation.11 As Kathy ODell asserts in relation to the works of Vito Acconci and Dan Graham from the early 1970s, the interpolation of video into performance creates a split in experience that disallows the audience a sense of direct identification with the performer (1990:138). As the artist William Anastasi demonstrated in one of the earliest video installations, Free Will (1968), live feed not only shows videos capability for instant mediatization and tautological repetition of an image, but also calls attention to the flattening of the physical space. His installation consisted of a monitor placed in a corner of a gallery that showed the image of the same corner captured by the video camera. Chrissie Iles points out that this simple setup also allows the monitors physical shape to be experienced, as the viewer moves away from the frontal image of the corner and perceives the monitors threedimensional mass (2001:57). The same effect is produced in the Wooster Groups synchronization of video images and live performance. At one point in L.S.D., an actors hand is concealed behind a television monitor, which shows the same hand holding a gun. The television monitor that at the same time conceals and shows the hand that holds the gun retains its three-dimensionality. It is a solid object, a box that sits on the table next to the live performers. If television is distinguished from film projection by, in the words of Jacques Rancire, the effective performance of the set, then plasma television is distinguished from its more cumbersome predecessor by its distinct performance (2007:6). Here, the image-generator is a flat screen that does not need a support on which to stand, or the rails on which to glide, as in Brace Up! In other words, as an object, the video monitor loses its sculptural properties and becomes more like a two-dimensional painting: it can be easily hung, suspended in space, lifted or lowered, and moved. In theatrical terms, it ceases being a prop and becomes a coulisse. If from Route 1 & 9 to House/Lights the Wooster Group used video structurally, in To You, the Birdie! they started using it theatrically. Here, for the first time, the video monitor is not tucked into a corner, or perched on a table, or hung above the performing area, but placed squarely center stage. The flattening of the monitor, made possible by plasma screen technology, allows LeCompte to place the video image in front of the performer and, in a completely new way, to synchronize live performance, direct video feed, and prerecorded footage. Already in the opening scene, we find Hippolytus and Theramene, played by Ari Fliakos and Scott Shepherd, seated on the bench after a game of badminton. The plasma screen positioned in front of their lower bodies shows a supposedly live feed of what it conceals and leaves their busts open to direct view. As they exchange Racines verses, they perform a series of mundane gestures, touching their knees and rearranging the towels that cover their genitalia. Then, the video footage becomes jerky. The images jump, slow down and accelerate, suggesting that what we see on the screen is not live video feed but a prerecorded tape. This and other instances illustrate what I mean by the theatrical use of video in To You, the Birdie!: its full integration in the theatrical game of revealing and concealing. Like theatre itself, here video introduces ambiguity into the field of vision. We can no longer trust what we see. What distinguishes this uncertainty from theatre proper is that in its nature it is not only optical but, more importantly, temporal. Roland Barthes suggests that stage productions of Phdre are threatened by the paradox that stems from the status of language in Racinian tragedy. On the one hand, language
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11. There are many examples of projection of film images on smaller surfaces, which results in fragmentation. In Xtravaganza (2000), The Builders Association staged a very simple and effective trick: a performer places in front of him a piece of cloth roughly at the level of his hips, and then an image of moving legs is projected onto it. This, of course, produces the effect of fragmentation and not of unification.

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Figure 5. Frontal view of the stage in To You, the Birdie! (Phdre). (From left): Scott Shepherd, Koosil-ja, Fiona Leaning, Ari Fliakos. St. Anns Warehouse, Brooklyn, 2002. (Photo Mary Gearhart) is bound up with temporality the tragic act is tragic precisely because it is spoken, and as such, irreversible: surrendered to the logos, time cannot be reversed, its creation is definitive, writes Barthes ([1960] 1992:120). On the other hand, he claims that on the French stage, Racinian delivery, that bastard result of the double tyranny of clarity of detail and musicality of ensemble, drowns and obscures the tragic time that is at the very heart of Racines drama (142). Interestingly, even though they worked with an English translation in which the rhythm and melody of Racines alexandrines is inevitably lost, the Wooster Groups initial approach to Phdre was through language and sound. In the radio play based on Paul Schmidts Phaedra, Kate Valk, who directed it together with Lance Stan, used precisely the property of sound recording to reverse or fast forward the flow of language and thus disturb its rhythm.12 Apart from firmly situating Phaedra within contemporary audio media, another technical solution that figures prominently in Valks radio production is the distortion of actors voices that ranges from Theseuss screams to the persistent doubling of Phaedras voice. Phaedras every utterance is accompanied by whispers and echoes of her own speech. She seems to drown in her own voice, or rather, in her voicings. Unable to coincide with her own speech, Phaedra turns into a swarm of voices. They echo one another, rush ahead, lag behind, or spin off into the vast silence of the radio dramas aural space. The swarm disperses only at the point of Phaedras angry realization of Hippolytuss love for Aricia. Her scream rises above the whispering echoes, only to drown in them again.

Branislav Jakovljevic

12. For a brief account of the Wooster Groups work on Schmidts Phaedra, see Andrew Quicks The Wooster Group Work Book (2007:262). Clay Hapaz, the Wooster Groups archivist, made it possible for me to hear the radio play that was originally broadcast in 2000 on BBC Radio 3, and to access archival material.

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This doubling and multiplication followed Phaedra from radio to stage. In her interview with Andrew Quick, LeCompte explained that the splitting of the character of Phaedra between Scott Shepherd, who spoke her lines, and Kate Valk, who performed the movements, enabled her to accomplish a greater physical precision onstage (Quick 2007:263). Sheppards mediation of Phaedras voice leads to multiple onstage mediations accomplished through audio and video technology. It is precisely through this multiplication that the Wooster Group approaches the specific visuality of Racines theatre that Jean Starobinski recognized as a materialization and absolutization of the gaze (1962:75, 78).13 More recently, following on Starobinskis ideas, Timothy Murray contemplated the possibility of a certain tele-visuality of Racinian theatre, suggesting that the mechanistic legacies of cinema inscribed in the proper name, Ra-cine have the unique ability to reveal in Racines texts a vision and morality imprinted on something of an electrified screen that positions subjectivity in the virtual zone of traumatic fantasy (1998:14). To You, the Birdie! not only answers Murrays question about the televisuality of Racine, but also pushes the provocation further. On the level of effects, the plasma screen makes possible a certain (Ra)cinefication of the theatrical stage. LeCompte employs screens in order to create close-ups, reflections, and even transformations of the live image. However, she does not stop at that. The screens introduce into performance a temporal order that is completely alien to it. Most obviously, this diversification of temporalities is achieved through changes of the video images speed. In scenes based on the synchronization of live performance and video image, this slowing down or speeding up opens up or rather exposes the present. What we witness on the screen are not only images of objects and bodies, but also images of time. The synchronization of live performance and video is not only a synchronization of images, but also of their movement, that is to say, their tempo. Their de-synchronization transforms the present into an unforeseen: simply, there is no way of knowing if actions taking place behind the screen correspond to the images that appear on screen. The gap yawns between the two-dimensional image and the three-dimensional body, and that rupture sucks the future into the present moment. Of course, the video image does not have the magic property to alter the flow of time. What it can do, however, is engage the spectators faculty of anticipation. Through the symmetry of the stage space and the clear distinction between the forestage, the central area, and the backstage, To You, the Birdie! promotes a specific idea of synchronization in which the spatial distribution of performance elements is replaced by their layering. The flat screen is in front of the body, behind which is the glass partition, then the badminton court, and behind that another television screen, and then another glass partition.14 As I perceive the images on- and offscreen, I simultaneously attempt to establish connections between the different layers of images. This spatial structure extends into time, so my impatient imagination rushes away from the images that are already onscreen in order to grasp those that have not yet arrived. The gap between the screen and the body can be seen as the spatialization of temporal intervals that make possible the structuring of events. As George Kubler wrote memorably, if somewhat laconically: Actuality is when the lighthouse is dark between the flashes: it is the instant between the tics of the watch: it is a void interval slipping forever though time: the rupture between past and future: the gap at the poles of the revolving magnetic field, infinitesimally small

13. Starobinskis expos on visuality in Racine came almost simultaneously with Barthess condemnation of the traditional emphasis on musicality in onstage recitations of Racines tragedies: Barthess Sur Racine was published in 1960 and Starobinskis Loeil vivant in 1962. 14. This layered spatial structure echoes the basic technological structure of plasma television. Instead of the cathode tube, this technology is based on the layering of plates of glass that hold electrodes and cells filled with molecules of xenon and neon gas, hence plasma in the colloquial description of this new television technology.

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but ultimately real. It is the interchronic pause when nothing is happening. It is the void between events. (1962:17) Similar voids open up between different temporalities that are at work in the Wooster Group productions: the fictional time of the performance, the duration experienced by the audience, the measured time of rhythmical movement, the delayed time of recorded video footage, the simultaneous time of the live video feed, the accelerated time of the sports game... There is no smooth passage between any of these temporalities. They require leaps in which the present asserts itself. Gilles Deleuze refers to this manifestation of the present as an interval, as a variable present and a sort of differential of movement ([1983] 1986:37, 44). It is not accidental that Starobinski locates theatricality in Racines tragedies precisely in a similar interval between speech and gaze. He suggests that in Racine, the word is the mediator between the suffering of the first gaze and the silence of the last one, while the melodic modulations of the Racinian chant are outlined against the background of these intervals (1962:77).15 However small, the gap between the body and the image appears insurmountable. In order to traverse this distance the Wooster Group employs a uniquely baroque device of emotional highs and lows and of the suppression and violent discharges of sexual energies. Center-court, in between the transparent panels, two young bare-chested men spank the birdie. Their vigorous gestures are accompanied by the comments of an invisible referee coming from the speakers, together with the loud sound of shattering glass whenever one of them misses the missile, also known as a shuttlecock. The prop from the plays title consists of a base and a tail. These two basic structural elements are of disproportionate weight. Early in badmintons history, at the turn of the 20th century, the base was made of cork, into which were inserted 14 to 16 feathers from the wing of a goose. Hence the birdie.16 Upon launching, in the first half of its journey it is driven by the force from the slam of the racket upon its heavy base. Then, halfway through its path, the initial momentum weakens and the birdie comes under command of the force of gravity. It turns in midair and starts going down. No matter how hard it is hit, the birdie slows down as it goes up and then accelerates again as it falls down. This suspension between heights and lows, between inertia and the force of gravity, epitomizes the spatial orientation of To You, the Birdie! In this production there are numerous examples of the tension between lightness and heaviness, flight and fall, sky and earth: the video monitor in the front is lowered to the ground, showing a pair of dressy shoes, and the video monitor in the back, featuring the blue sky and feathery clouds, is positioned high above the stage. As Kate Valks Phaedra pants heavily, she blows her dark veil up in the air, and at the same time she is prevented from falling down by a cane-like aluminum support with a seat instead of a handle.17 Theseuss heaviness stands in contrast to the slim and pale body of Willem Dafoe. Even the cover of the CD Love Songs: Songs from The Wooster Groups To You, the Birdie! (Phdre)18 is marked by this opposition between sky and earth, head and butt, high and low, elevation and plummeting. The opening number on the CD is entitled I Hate My Life. It is, basically, Racines text in Paul Schmidts translation set to a rolling techno rhythm. As a chorus of faint female voices

15. Les modulations du chant racinien se dessinent sur ches chappes. 16. One of Alfred Jarrys siloquies is dedicated to the shuttlecock. He writes: The shuttlecock is a bird, noteworthy for the white, sometimes striated feathers of its truncate-conic tail. It is a living example of a curious form of transformism, the animal having adapted itself to the contrivances originally designated to capture it, and these devices having likewise adapted themselves to the animal (2001:252). 17. The panting and veil blowing were used in the work-in-progress version, but not in the performances that I saw during the regular run of the show. 18. Interestingly, this compilation of songs is the only commercially available piece of documentation of this production.

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chants rhythmically I want to die! I hate my life..., Kate Valk cries and whispers: I had my mother sickness, I had Venus like a virus in my blood (Schmidt 1998:10). If in Racines tragedy Phaedras black desire is leading her into her own demise, in the Wooster Groups staging it is taking her to the enema chair. And yet, this scatological episode comes across as all but farcical. It takes place in the second act, as the speculations about dynastic succession and Phaedras passion for Hippolytus simultaneously reach their peak. LeCompte eliminates the farcical undertones that scatology usually takes in theatre by casting it into striking stage images. The scenes of the court intrigues concerning the vacated throne of Theseus and Phaedras advance on Hippolytus take place in quick succession, both staged in Figure 6. Love Songs. CD cover art. Design by Caspar Stracke. carefully arranged tableaux. First, on the extreme stage right, we find Phaedra dressing ( The Wooster Group) up, assisted by her two attendants, the whole image framed by the two transparent screens. As they discuss the pool of candidates for the throne, Hippolytus is emerging from the swimming pool indicated by the sound of water lazily splashing against marble. In an almost imperceptible shift, Scott Shepherd, standing behind the platform, reads both Phaedras and Hippolytuss lines, thus allowing them to fully turn their attention to their gestures. Then, the whole tableau moves laterally across the stage until Phaedra reaches the enema chair positioned on the steps on the left edge of the platform. The transparent screen in front of the platform is promptly moved to the extreme stage left in order to frame the single instant of passion between Phaedra and Hippolytus. Perched on the chair, she grabs his bare buttocks as the two attendants insert the tubes into her and pump the liquid. Phaedras screams Give me your sword, Hippolytuss protestations (My god, my God, what are you saying? / This is shameful), rhythmic music, and even an Un, deux, trois build up towards the queens climactic discharge. Then she steps aside, weak on her legs, oblivious of the yellow tube that protrudes from under her long silk dress and drags behind her as she advances center stage.19 Unable to stand, she walks with the metal staff, and when she stops she uses it as a support for her bottom. Then she slowly revolves on this one-legged throne. Far from being an instance of random scatological humor, the Wooster Groups introduction of the enema into Racines elevated tragedy is both justified by the text and historically accurate. Lucien Goldmann points out that the stage directions are very rare and always highly significant in Racine significant in the sense that they signalize the dramatic status of the character

19. The enema tube takes the prominent place in the image on the cover art of the Wooster Groups CD. Interestingly, the Wooster Groups To You, the Birdie! was just one of three artistic works presented in New York City in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 that prominently featured bodily cleansing. The other two are Wim Delvoyes installation Cloaca, presented from 25 January to 28 April 2002 at the New Museum for Contemporary Art in SoHo obviously planned well before the events of September 2001, the installation is a room sized machine that simulates the process of digestion and, the much more commented on performance of Marina Abramovi, The House with the Ocean View, presented from 15 November to 26 November 2002 at Sean Kelly Gallery in Chelsea. Taken together, these three works come close to outlining the full range of the possible meanings of catharsis in art.

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Branislav Jakovljevic

Figure 7. Tragic enema. To You, the Birdie! (Phdre). (From left): Frances McDormand, Koosil-ja, Kate Valk. St. Anns Warehouse, Brooklyn, 2002. (Photo Mary Gearhart)

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(1972:91). Phaedra swoons traditionally, fainting has been seen as one of the major symptoms of furor uterinus and is unable to stand and walk hysteric women were believed to suffer from swollen feet, and were thus often portrayed in a seated position. Both symptoms clearly reveal her physical and psychic condition. Physicians of the 17th century, such as Jean Libault, wrote confidently that the womb makes curious and so to speak petulant movements in the womans body. These movements are various [...] ascending, descending, convulsive, vagrant, prolapsed. The womb rises to the liver, spleen, diaphragm, stomach, breast, heart, lung, gullet, and head (in Dixon 1995:53). The inner wanderings of the uterus and the passions it ignites on its itinerary are all manifested on the exterior of the hysterics body. The taming of the maternal animal called for a number of procedures. Diet, bloodletting, and cooling were some of the commonly prescribed treatments. Odors were used for uterine repulsion and attraction: women were asked to inhale fetid smells that were believed to repel the wayward uterus from their heads, while pleasant odors were applied to their genitalia in order to lure it to its proper place. Rose water was injected into vaginas using clysters, and the same instrument was used for enemas, which were believed to be the best relief for the perturbed intestines of baroque patients. More generally, during the 17th and 18th centuries, the enema was viewed as a preferred cure for a number of diseases that afflicted both men and women, most notably hysteria and melancholia (Racines text contains ample evidence that Phaedra is afflicted with the former, and Hippolytus with the latter). In medical histories, the 17th century is referred to as a century of clysters. Some of the more extreme uses of this device can be traced to church and court, those pillars of the baroque society: the former used syringes filled with holy water in order to perform intrauterine baptisms, and when it comes to the latter, the court of Louis XIV was awash in lavement (washing), as the anal enema was euphemistically referred to: the king himself sometimes underwent as many as four treatments per day (Dixon 1993:28). This craze for the enema came from the conception of human internal organs as analogous to a complex plumbing system.20 The analogy moved beyond medicine, and this anal fixation of the baroque was often ridiculed in theatre: the syringe was one of the props frequently featured in commedia dellarte, and Molire used it to such a great effect that the physician Reinier de Graaf referred to it as Molires instrument.21 Scatology is not foreign to the Wooster Group, either. In Route 1 & 9 they took over Pigmeat Merkhams routine in which a character soils his pants after he mistakenly ingests a great quantity of castor oil. However, in To You, the Birdie! they place scatology in a radically different context. It is one of the rare instances in which it is not employed for the production of comic effects, and, to my knowledge, the only one in which an enema occurs in a tragedy. And once transferred into the world of tragedy, this induced evacuation begins its entanglement with the notion of catharsis. Starting with Aristotles definition of tragedy as the representation of an action that provokes pity and fear, and in doing so brings about a purgation (katharsis) of these emotions, catharsis has been considered one of defining elements of tragic theatre. The Aristotelian concept of catharsis does not owe its peculiarity only to the strange mixing of pathology and literature, medicine and mimesis, but to the curious circle between discursivity and non-discursivity that it establishes. The cathartic body is the body that escapes the dictate of the mind. It is a body that has no referent and no law other than itself. It is out of control. Yet, this unregulated and indescribable body is induced into its trancelike state by the discourse itself, a certain kind of discourse that came to be called tragedy. This distance between the body and the discourse resembles the gap between the body and the image. The baroque uses analogy in order to narrow this interval as much as possible while preserving the separation

20. Laurinda Dixon writes that baroque medicine saw the human body as a vastly complicated hydraulic complex, with the abdominal region acting as an intricate sewer system. Every bodily function was understood in mechanical terms, and blockage of the uterine vessels or the hypochondries was treated much in the same way as a clog in the plumbing system (1993:33). 21. See de Graaf s 17th-century booklet Linstrument de Molire: traduction du traite De clysteribus ([1668] 1878).

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of the two sides. Analogy uses both juxtaposition and comparison. In mathematics, it designates proportion and relationality: a is to b as c is to d (or, in the notation of formal logic: a:b::c:d ). This figure makes possible setting up proportional relations between any pair of chosen things in the universe.22 These relations often defy logic and grammar. Deleuze sees in them the analogical language that consists of expressive movements, paralinguistic signs, breaths and screams, a nondiscursive language comparable to Artauds theatre ([1981] 2003:93). If in To You, the Birdie! video images are positioned as analogous to the spatial images of performance, then the anal operation of the enema is an attempt at a violent passage from one side of the analogy to another. The two sides, however, remain distinct. Phaedras ceaseless agitations translate into bodily convulsions similar to violent evacuations of her bowels. However, her enema doesnt resemble catharsis, but literalizes it.23 LeCompte does not take this literalization lightly. She pushes it as far as it will go: in the work-in-progress version of To You, the Birdie!, after the completion of the enema procedure, Phaedras attendants remove from beneath her medical chair a yellow plastic receptacle stamped with a sign indicating hazardous materials. Even though this Figure 8. Silent confidante. Hamlet. Dominique Bousquet and over-the-top effect was removed from the Bill Raymond. The Public Theater, New York, 2007. (Photo final version of the piece, the association of Paula Court) the enema with death remained and was even amplified. In the closing moments of the production, Phaedras nurse Enone commits suicide on the enema chair. This time, it is positioned on the opposite side of the stage from where Phaedra undertook her treatment; and this time, Enone does it herself, without help of the attendants, and without ceremony. There is noise, and a hurried Un, deux, trois, but no buildup and no climactic release. Enones body slumps in the chair, as if her death is but an enema gone wrong.

22. Foucault asserts that analogy is one of the main figures of the baroque epistemology. According to baroque analogy, the human face is to its body what the face of heaven is to the ether, the swelling belly is to the body what gathering clouds are to the sky, and the tempest is to nature what the explosion of the bladder is to the swollen body; mans baser parts are comparable to the fouler parts of the world, and the damned souls [...] are like the excrement of the Universe (Foucault [1966] 1994:22). Branislav Jakovljevic 23. The principle of literalization is also at work in Racines views of catharsis. Paul R. Sellin argues that French neoclassical dramatic theories, specifically those of Racine and Boileau, followed Dutch 17th-century literary critic Daniel Heinius, whose considerations of catharsis ultimately became subordinate to the single principle of moving the proper tragic passions (Sellin 1973:211). Emotions, like nutrients, have to be in constant motion. Just like stationary food in the body, stationary emotions have a corrosive and toxic effect: constipation can be emotional, not only physical.

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1st Intermezzo
Confidence and Silence Judged by the standards of French neoclassical tragedy, Phaedras nurse as written by Racine is an unusually complex character. Barthes described the confidant as a functional figure of neoclassical tragedy, the one whose insignificance authorizes his ubiquity ([1960] 1992:53). There is an army of confidant-like characters in the theatre of this period. They appear under the guise of nurses, servants, friends, teachers, advisors. In general, these peripheral personages are silent and devoted followers of the tragic hero, mere materializations of the imperative of verisimilitude that bans soliloquy from the French baroque stage. Giving the tragic heroes an opportunity to hear the echo of their own deliberations, they appear, writes Barthes, as a voice of reason, but an utterly stupid reason (54). Far from being a simple sounding board for the heroine entangled in the throes of her tragic fate, Enone, in her own stupid way, takes an active part in the intrigues surrounding Phaedra. In orchestrating the story about Hippolytuss rape of his stepmother, she does much more than facilitate Phaedras words. She dictates her actions, which, in the highly charged world of neoclassical tragedy, makes her the perpetrator. Played by the film actress Frances McDormand, who joined the Wooster Group only for that one project,24 Enone is an involved and highly mobile character who scales the wings in order to better mold and manipulate the action that is taking place center stage. In short, she approaches the figure of the court intriguer, whose cold calculations, writes Benjamin, demonstrate an anthropological, even a psychological knowledge that fascinated baroque audiences ([1928] 1998:95). Alongside the confidant, the court schemer, or the intrigant, lurks in the wings of the baroque drama.25 In effect, the traditional figure of the confidant is featured neither in Racines Phdre nor in Shakespeares Hamlet. In her informative study on the evolution of the confidant from a dramaturgical device to a full-blooded dramatic character, Valrie Worth-Stylianou demonstrates that, following the opinions of Labbe dAubignac, Corneille made the confidants in his tragedies increasingly silent (1999:29, 31). Before they reappear radically transformed in the late tragedies of Racine, confidants, especially female confidentes and suivantes, become voiceless. It is precisely this kind of nurse that LeCompte adds to her Hamlet. Whereas in To You, the Birdie! she used Paul Schmidts translation of Racine as the primary textual source, in Hamlet LeCompte renounced the text altogether and worked from the film recording of the 1964 Broadway production of Hamlet, directed by John Gielgud and with Richard Burton in the title role. When it comes to casting and general miseen-scne, the Wooster Groups performance stays fairly close to the version filmed at the LuntFontane Theatre, with one significant exception: LeCompte adds to the cast a silent character, the nurse, who hovers in the corners of the stage like a footnote pointing back to To You, the Birdie! Dressed in black and with the white cap on her head, every now and then she would emerge from the wings to silently cross the stage, move a piece of furniture, or hand someone a prop. The only female member of the cast other than Kate Valk, most of the time she stood silently in a corner and observed the action onstage. In what seemed to be more or less regular intervals, she pushed across the stage a contraption that resembled a walker. If To You, the Birdie! was imbued with the atmosphere of a health club (badminton, pool), the presence of the nurse and the walker added to Hamlet a hospital feel. She seemed to linger not only at the edges of the physical stage, but at the borders of the performance itself. In contrast to the rest of the cast, who had speaking roles, her acting was entirely task driven. More often than not, these tasks had no purpose, which, together with her white costume, set her apart from stagehands, who

Wooster Baroque

24. She rejoined the Wooster Group in the spring of 2010 for the remounting of North Atlantic. 25. In fact, that is where one of the most archetypal intrigants of Shakespearean tragedy finds his end. Benjamin writes that Polonius, regardless of his official position in Claudiuss court, still carries a deep mark of the old model of demonic fool, which distinguishes him from a conventional confidant ([1928] 1998:127).

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were clad in black from head to toe, resembling Bunraku puppeteers. And unlike the sound and video technicians, she was always prominently present onstage. Silent and noiseless,26 she was never directly addressed by other actors, yet she always remained within earshot. In a way, she constituted the pure excess in relation to performance, its silent partner. The confidant is the one who does not speak, but is spoken to. Everyone confides in her, and in return she gives them confidence. She listens and she watches. She is the repository of language and of images. This owner of language, this auditor, is herself mute, without speech. Nonetheless, this character with no dramatic function or technical purpose is in the cast list; her role was played by Dominique Bousquet. But what is more surprising is that it is the nurse, not Hamlet or any other major character, who appears on the cover of the Wooster Groups Hamlet program. We can see the upper part of her face, the cap, forehead, and eyes, while the lower part is doubly concealed; first by the surgical mask, and then by a stack of Hamlet books, VHS tapes, and DVDs. The Playbill cover was designed by the contemporary American artist Richard Prince, and it is from his imagery that LeCompte adopted the nurse character. Prince is perhaps best known for his appropriation, that is, photographing the photographs published in printed media. Apart from cowboys, cartoons, and girlfriends, prominent among his appropriated subjects are medical nurses, which he copies from the covers of medical pulp novels and turns into large format paintings of nurses as sinister hospital bandits, terrifying in their proximity to blood, bodily processes, and death (Spector 2007:52). Repeating Princes own procedure, LeCompte appropriates his nurse. She is still close to blood and death, but is no longer menacing. What remains of Richard Princes nurse in the story of the Danish prince is her muteness. She is the rest of The rest is silence (Shakespeare 1997:1755). She is at the center of the work, and at the same time outside of it: an instance of innocence in the midst of tragedy.

Central Panel
The Rise of the Dividual Whereas in To You, the Birdie! performers interact with video images on screens placed in front of them, in Hamlet they perform in front of a large video display of the filmed 1964 Broadway production of Shakespeares play. A year before its opening at Lunt-Fontane Theatre, Richard Burton, then at the peak of his powers as an actor and a celebrity (which came largely due to his relationship with Elizabeth Taylor), approached John Gielgud and asked him to direct him in Hamlet. It turned out that for some time Gielgud had planned to stage Shakespeares tragedy in a minimal setting and with actors, who, he had hoped, would place a greater accent on acting. LeCompte used a recording of this performance as the script for her production of Hamlet.27 Here, she not only asked the cast to duplicate the gestures and behavior of actors recorded in the Lunt-Fontane Theatre, but also reproduced the overall spatial arrangement of the original production. In the Wooster Groups production, the ramp on stage left is replaced by a platform and the long upstage elevation by a large screen for video projections. Through a careful arrangement of video screens, the overall impression of the vaulted space, quite common for the proscenium stage, was recreated in the black box spaces at St. Anns Warehouse and the Public Theater. I counted no less than eight plasma screens and television monitors arranged close to the wings, above the stage, and even underneath the platform. The sheer number of screens used in this production transforms the performance into an elaborate montage of images. As the

Branislav Jakovljevic

26. The only time I saw her open her mouth onstage was during Scott Shepherds address to the audience during one of the preview performances at St. Anns Warehouse, when she approached him to whisper something into his ear, only to disappear quickly behind the scenes. 27. LeCompte: I looked at the script of Hamlet four months ago, after Id been working on it for a year and a half (in Kramer 2007:268).

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projection of the film versions of Hamlet 28 is unfolding on the big screen upstage, the live feed of the ongoing performance is running on plasma screens. The video camera captures an image, or a moment from the performance, and adds it to the scenography of that very performance. Every now and then this footage freezes unexpectedly, like an unshakeable memory of what just took place right onstage. These dregs of performance are digitally altered, and in that way detached from their point of origin, still in progress, itself irreversibly transformed. The effect is that of the live performance shedding its Figure 9. Set drawing for the Broadway production of Hamlet, own images, which then fade, crumble, and designed by Ben Edwards. From Richard L. Sternes John Gielgud decompose in order to form a set of indepen- Directs Richard Burton in Hamlet: A Journal of Rehearsals dent visual compositions. This new texture (1967). (Courtesy of Richard L. Sterne) forms the environment for the performance from which the images originally came. In comparison to To You, the Birdie! the video images in Hamlet are more diverse and less dependent on the live performances that take place onstage. In Hamlet live performance and video images work with and against each other. They are in a constant process of pasting and scrapping, composition and decomposition, making and unmaking. The stage that dark, closed room becomes a laboratory for the splicing of images and the parsing of time. The Wooster Group disturbs the narrative time of the play by creating temporal circuits that emerge from the performance only to plunge back into it. This complex circuitry is made possible by the juxtaposition of recordings and live performance. Here, the video footage is no longer used just for close-ups or slight distortions of the live performance. Now, the images on the video depart from the live performance and engage with one another. The screens exchange images in the same way that performers trade lines. The video image is no longer subjected to the simple economy of projection and reflection. Instead, it bounces around the space of the stage in the same way sounds and voices do. A visual echo of sorts. Long before the Wooster Group decided to use the recording of Richard Burton and John Gielguds Hamlet, the Broadway production was implicated, in one way or another, in a significant number of recordings. First, even though Gielgud insisted on a low-tech production, in his staging of the ghost scene he resorted to audio recording technology. He himself appeared, so to speak, in the role of the ghost by taping his voice and replaying it in live performances.29 The second recording came during the run, when the entire production was recorded and published as an audio LP record by Columbia Records.30 Then (third), in just two days, on 30 June and
28. Apart from Burton-Gileguds Hamlet, LeCompte used Kenneth Brannaghs 1996 film as well as the celebrated Soviet Hamlet directed by Grigori Kozintsev (1964). 29. Even Gielguds minimal and mediatized participation in the performance received critical attention. Susan Sontag wrote that hearing John Gielguds voice on tape, even thus Cinemarized, reminded one of how beautiful Shakespeares verse sounds when it is spoken with grace and intelligence. But then she adds that the rest of the performances gave only various degrees of pain (1966:160). Somewhere in the audience was young Elizabeth LeCompte, who some 40 years later described that night in the theatre in her characteristically understated way: I invited my mother. I wanted to go because it was Burton, and that meant that Elizabeth Taylor might be there. I loved Elizabeth Taylor she had my name and, after the play, there she was, all in pink, like Jackie Kennedy, coming out of the stage door. It made a deep impression (in Kramer 2007:54). 30. It was issued to coincide with the 400th anniversary of Shakespeares birth. Industry press reported this to have been a commercial success: the record sold for $17 a piece and had 25,000 advance orders (Leff 1981:21).

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Figure 10. Video image and live performance: Richard Burton and Scott Shepherd. Hamlet. The Public Theater, New York, 2007. (Photo Paula Court) 1 July, the theatre performance was filmed for release in movie theatres across the country. The film recording was done using Electronovision, a new technology that preceded video. It was an attempt to combine the electronic recording technology used in television with film production methods. The filming of Hamlet was done during actual performances, using seven electronic TV cameras. In a further resemblance to a TV studio, the signals from the cameras were transmitted to an electronic mixing board located underneath the stage, and from there to a modified movie camera outside the theatre. William Sargent, the owner of Electronovision, Inc., hired William Colleran, an unaccomplished television director, to handle the filming of Hamlet. He did all the mixing and editing onsite. The new filming technique did not require additional lighting, which makes this particular recording of Hamlet one of the first video recordings of a theatrical performance unaltered to fit the standards of film production. Indeed, in the advertising campaign for the film, Sargent highlighted as the main attractions the celebrity appeal of Richard Burton and the uniqueness of the live theatrical performance recorded spontaneously, in the theatre, in the presence of an (invisible) audience (Leff 1981:22). Even the commercial release of the film was conceived as an extension and dissemination of the live performance: it was released as a one time-affair, on 23 and 24 September, in 971 theatres in the United States and Canada, which had a combined seating capacity of over a million (23).31 However, the story of the Hamlet tapes then turns to a recording that, at least initially, was much less public. The fourth recording: Richard L. Sterne, then a young actor who was an understudy and also played a couple of minor roles, secretly recorded the entire process of rehearsals using a portable tape recorder concealed in his bag. These recordings were eventually approved by
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31. For an illuminating discussion of the production of Burtons Hamlet, as well as of the questions of live versus recorded in relation to recent performance studies scholarship, see W.B. Worthen, Hamlet at Ground Zero: The Wooster Group and the Archive of Performance (2008:30322).

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Gielgud and Burton, and Sterne used them in putting together the book John Gielgud Directs Richard Burton in Hamlet: A Journal of Rehearsals (1967). This record of the staging of Hamlet belongs to a minor genre of theatre books that document specific performances.32 One such book is Rosamund Gilders John Gielguds Hamlet: A Record of Performance (1937). Gilders book includes a long article by Gielgud himself, The Hamlet Tradition: Some Notes on Costume, Scenery, and Stage Business. Here, Gielgud reveals that in his own work on the role he relied heavily on Ellen Terrys memoirs for her minute description of Henry Irvings performance of Hamlet from 1874 (Gielgud 1937:29).33 This series of performances resembles a family tree in which attitudes, stage compositions, and even specific movements and gestures were handed down from one performer to another, from one performance to another. Richard Burton attached himself to this theatrical genealogy, and by doing so introduced it to a wide film audience and, eventually, to the Wooster Group. In his essay, Gielgud does not limit this transfer of performance only to personal contact, but also includes writing as a medium particularly suitable for preserving past performances. He claims that a skillfully written description of an actors performance can convey a good enough idea of her art, and then he adds: but I do not believe that any mechanical reproduction can recreate an acting performance that one has never seen (42). Gielgud wrote The Hamlet Tradition virtually at the same time as Walter Benjamin was working on his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, first published in German 1936.34 Benjamin, like Gielgud, was aware that the actors apprehension towards the new technology of reproduction of images comes, in part, from their fear of the degradation of their profession. He cites reports from the industry that reveal that the actors are instructed to act as little as possible and are used as props (2003:260). One of the most persistent features in the reports from the Wooster Groups rehearsals are LeComptes prompts to her actors to do exactly that which their predecessors in the 1930s dreaded so much: to act as little as possible and instead perform simple, task-oriented stage actions.35 The Wooster Groups Hamlet is a live reproduction of Gielguds staging of this play, which was recorded with primitive video technology. This reproduction by means of performance was made possible precisely by the Wooster Groups disavowal of the traditions of stage acting that Gielgud cherished, and by their full acceptance of precisely that kind of acting that he rejected. Over the years, the recognizable Wooster Group performance style evolved through a close engagement with the new technologies of electronic recording and reproduction of images.

32. This technique of recording live performances through detailed written descriptions was marginalized by the emergence of new technologies, such as film and video. However, there were still instances in which, long after the beginning of the widespread use of these technologies, writing seemed indispensable for the recording of live performance. For example, the Polish theatre critic Malgorzata Dzieduszycka produced a description of Grotowskis Apocalypsis cum figuris (1974). 33. Among other models and sources of inspiration that Gielgud mentions, there is another that, together with Irving, seems to have exerted an especially great influence on his own thinking about Hamlet. It is Irvings student, Ellen Terrys son and Gielguds second cousin, Edward Gordon Craig. Gielguds grandmother Kate, also an actress, was Ellen Terrys sister. 34. As Samuel Weber demonstrates in his essay The Virtuality of the Media and in his 2008 book Benjamins -abilities, Benjamins frequent use of the word formation using -barkeit (-ability, as in translatability, citability, reproducibility) is not just a question of style (2000:305). Reproducibility (and other -abilities) indicates the impartable as immediately effective qua possibility itself, and not merely [...] an anticipation of a possible realization (309), while reproduction designates a process that stems from this potentiality. Replacing a mode of becoming (reproducibility) by an actuality (reproduction) seemed a natural choice for Harry Zorn in his translation of Walter Benjamins essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, published in Illuminations (1968). 35. See, for example, Euridice Arratias Island Hopping: Rehearsing the Wooster Groups Brace Up! in TDR (1992), and the chapter on Elizabeth LeCompte in Susan Letzler Coles Directors in Rehearsal: A Hidden World (1992).

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Even the central stage prop used in Hamlet indicates that LeCompte is not interested in reviving past performances, but instead in replicating their traces on film or video. The ordinary table and chair that Gielgud used in his Broadway Hamlet are faithfully replicated in the Wooster Groups production. However, in this replication, the way in which this furniture set appears is more important than the way in which it works. As if seen by a nave eye that had never seen a table and a chair before, the two are attached together. However, this literal transferal of film images into live performance results in surprising cuts: once the chair is removed from the table, its back remains attached to it. The back, then, leaves its original context and becomes an independent stage element, valued for its visual appearance rather than for its function. The same goes for acting. On many occasions, we see actors waiting for their characters to appear on the back screen, then trying to catch their step and duplicate their movements, gestures, and bodily postures. Here, the video footage has the same status as the printed material in the opening scene of L.S.D., in which cast members simply sit at the table and read from books. Instead of disappearing, that is to say, becoming sublimated through dramatic performance, the text remains stubbornly, physically present, its pages cluttering the set (Auslander 1997:66). Similarly, the video footage of Hamlet is the text that actors read not only with their lips and occasional gesture, but with their entire bodies. In the Wooster Groups baroque triptych, video becomes a moving choreographic score that is staged, as in classical ballet, through repetition. LeCompte is not asking what is behind Gielguds stage images, but what is in them. Surprisingly, it turns out that by engaging in this simple procedure of copying a performances mere appearance, the Wooster Group reveals more, not less, about performance, recording, and the very situation of spectatorship in a culture shaped by electronic media. Benjamin warns that the theatres rash reactions to film neglect the fact that this new technology captures not only the actors performance directed at the camera, but also the environment into which both the actor and the camera are immersed. It is, he claims, the cameras ability to capture this excess in the field of vision that constitutes the testing capacity of the equipment (2003:265). The camera is not only an apparatus for recording behavior, but also an instrument for the study of gestures. The knowledge of gestures is based not only on this ability to record and repeat performances, but also on the possibility of their fragmentation; that is, on the potential to disrupt the sequence of actions, or, in other words, isolate an action from the one that preceded it and the one that follows. The equipment puts on display mans environment, including that which is imperceptible to the naked eye, at the price of its spatial and temporal distortion. Therefore, in the very process of recording, making visible and representing, the new media transform the environment in which they operate. The Wooster Groups baroque triptych shows us the behavior that has been affected and transformed by the recording equipment. And further, it demonstrates that human behavior is inseparable from the means of recording. Grainy images of electronovision lend their texture to the Wooster Groups Hamlet. This is an austere world in which everything exists within the narrow limits of a gray scale, including the actors with their black robes and pale faces. They shadow the onscreen shadows, then drop out of that game to pursue their own stage business. The onscreen score continues its mechanical run, and the actors return to it only to depart again. They fall in and out of synchrony with its motions. This exchange between screen and stage is not a one-way street. Occasionally, Scott Shepherd steps out from his role of the Danish prince to ask the video technician to fast forward or rewind the tape. The performance is temporarily suspended until its score gets to the right cue. We almost forget that it is the score that should cue the performance, and not the other way around. Slowly and almost imperceptibly, a number of leakages open up between the video recording and the live performance. Richard Burton appears on the left side of the screen and dashes towards its right side, but in the process he disintegrates, turning into a slightly disturbed gray zone of empty pixels, while onstage Shepherd continues his action. In a surprising reversal, the actor becomes the surrogate for the missing video image. But, what the onstage actors are taking from the screen are not only the movements and gestures of the actors

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that performed Hamlet in the Lunt-Fontane Theatre on 30 June and 1 July 1964, but also the movements of the equipment itself. Their actions, motivated by the narrative, are interrupted by unmotivated and alien movements of the video image. Through jerky movements half-step forward and back, hand raised and then returned the technology penetrates their actions. In this performance, human and inhuman movements merge to create a hybrid behavior halfway between organic and technological.

This impersonation of the flickering video image brings a whole new dimension to the theme of spying in Hamlet. The projection of grainy and jerky electronovision footage reminds me that I partake of the visual culture of surveillance on a daily basis; the enactment of these images onstage, however, makes me realize to what degree it partakes of me. The elaborate surveillance apparatus that has by now become an integral part of our daily lives not only perpetually produces the electronic images of my own appearance, but also dictates that very appearance: my conduct, my behavior. Lets rewind: Burton dashes across the screen; his image disperses; his movements are taken over by Shepherd. The electronic image and the live actors body are synchronized, but they never fully merge. This Hamlet is not a bourgeois individual: he is a dividual, the sort of subject produced by the control society. According to Deleuze, the control society differs from the disciplinary society in that it is no longer characterized by the duality of mass and individual, but by an internalization of that division (2002:319).36 Dividual is both mass and an individual.

Figure 11. Ghost in the machine. Hamlet. Scott Shepherd and Ari Fliakos. The Public Theater, New York, 2007. (Photo Paula Court)

Hamlet is a play about the everyday that cracks open to let in the supernatural. In modernist theatre, this form of the supernatural has been identified with the nonhuman, that is, with the technological. It is therefore not surprising that Gielgud, while opposed to mechanical reproduction, did not object to the use of audio technology to distort the voice of the ghost in the 1936 production of Hamlet, an effect that he adopted in his own staging of Hamlet on Broadway. It is precisely this single technological solution in Gielguds production that came to haunt the Wooster Groups production of Hamlet. The ghost scene, accomplished on Broadway purely through sound effects, has no action score that can be replicated onstage, and no bodies that can be copied in performance. The jerky movements of actors imitating a videotape have already invested this performance with an unprecedented amount of ghostliness. Indeed, this is one of

36. Interestingly, Deleuze originally developed his notion of the dividual not in relation to electronic surveillance technologies, but in relation to early film experimentation, particularly in the work of Sergei Eisenstein. Deleuze credits Eisenstein for inventing in his films a compact and continuous intensive series that can attain new reality which could be called Dividual, directly uniting an immense collective reflection with the particular emotions of each individual ([1983] 1986:92). Deleuzes notion of the dividual should not be confused with that of Samuel Weber, for whom the dividual emerges as a result of a theatrical fracturing of the individual: dividuals persist, divided between life and death, spectator and actor, strange and familiar (2004:42).

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the rare productions of Hamlet in which the eerie sense of the nonhuman comes from within the actors performances rather than from the overused arsenal of banal scenic effects (dimmed light, artificial thunder, stage fog). If the ghostliness in their acting comes from impersonations of the random mechanical jumps of the video image, then the ghost appears onstage as an assemblage of fragmented images. In the Wooster Groups Hamlet, the ghost scene is staged as a video collage of sorts. The hand in close-up appears on the plasma screen close to the proscenium, the head on the back screen, seemingly on top of the table. The ghosts nonexistent body is a kaleidoscopic image projected on objects and dispersed across the stage. The ghost is, at the same time, a no-body and a legion. It merges with the scene that functions as an actorless play within the play. The ghost resembles other personages from Hamlet insofar as they are both embodied human beings and entities composed of images, sounds, objects, as well as the intervals that separate these elements. As we have seen in To You, the Birdie! the temporal structure of melancholia, like that of catharsis, is punctured by gaps and ellipses. However, now the shudder of the body is replaced by the trembling of the grainy video image. These gaps are the intervals between images. The actors no longer inhabit the interval, but the other way around, the interval enters the actors to fundamentally restructure their behavior.

2nd Intermezzo
Legibility of the Event If in To You, the Birdie! the gaps between the performers bodies and the video screens are infinitesimal, then in Hamlet they extend to engulf the entire stage. In effect, the entire space of the stage turns into an interval. This gap is no longer traversed at the price of violent discharge (that is equivalent to death), but instead inhabited. It breeds dividuals. If there is a story in this baroque triptych, it is the story of passive adaptation. Lets recap: As Deleuze recognizes, an emphasis on gaps between film shots instead of on images themselves carries perceptions into things, that is, puts perception into matter, so that any point whatsoever in space itself perceives all the points on which it acts, or which act on it, however far these actions and reactions extend ([1983] 1986:81). And, importantly for this discussion, he asserts that the formation of an image defined by molecular parameters increases with video and electronic imagery (85). This molecular perception consists of the image and its perception, and has the event as its nexus. The event, at once public and private, potential and real, participates in the becoming of another event and is the subject of its own becoming (Deleuze [1988] 1993:78). Performance enters the event precisely through this baroque dynamics of folding. In an interval, the meaning does not emerge from the collision of two adjacent frames, but from the mutual perceptions of any points in space, however far they extend: according to Deleuze, the theory of the interval no longer marks a gap which is carved out, a distancing between two consecutive images but, on the contrary, a correlation of two images which are distant ([1983] 1986:82). The Wooster Groups baroque triptych is an exploration of the terrible abolition of this distance. The relation between performance and its image is no longer about succession and simultaneity, but about acceleration and deceleration, separation and splicing. If in To You, the Birdie! the physical proximity and combination of live performance and video image produced the effect of analogy (or analology), and if in Hamlet the inhabitant of the interval becomes a dividual, then La Didone could be the final chapter in this story of adaptation to the culture of electronic image.
Branislav Jakovljevic

The Wooster Groups engagement with the video image did not begin (and is not likely to end) with the baroque triptych. There is no one way in which the Wooster Group has used video, nor have they ever used it in isolation from other technologies. In Route 1 & 9, the first production in which they extensively used video, the footage from an old teaching film on Thornton Wilders Our Town was used as a framing device for their devising of the performance. They combined it with another medium: the telephone. If video footage brings into

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theatre images from the outside world, then the scene in Route 1 & 9 in which Kate Valk telephones an actual fast food joint to order a meal brings performance into the outside world without ever leaving the stage. In Hamlet, this operation of pushing performance through the technological vanishing point is recognizable in the very technique of electronovision: electronic cameras are capturing the event and channeling it down, under the stage, into the trap space, which in theatre has been traditionally associated with the inhabitants of the underworld ghosts and devils. The images emerge from that improvised TV/video studio to first reach the cinemas, then VHS and DVD players in home theatres, and finally St. Anns Warehouse on Water Street in Brooklyn, some 40 years after the original event. Any of the Wooster Groups various insertions of video and other media into their performances amounts, to some extent, to repeated attempts to leave the theatre while preserving its distinctiveness, or, in other words, to find the way to a non-environmental environmentalism. The point is not to recognize what aspects of baroque and neobaroque entered the Wooster Groups aesthetics, or in which ways they correspond to each other, but what the Wooster Group had to add to this, to use Maravalls expression, aesthetic complex. By the end of the triptych, it became clear that it was certainly not a new way of staging old texts, or even a radical transformation of the very idea of what constitutes a text in performance, but a different way in which words and actions, language and image, can be conjoined in performance. What distinguishes the Wooster Group from the recent fashion of combining digital video technology and live performance (video is ubiquitous on theatre stages today: from The Builders Associations 2005 Super Vision, to Richard Foremans 2007 Wake Up Mr. Sleepy! Your Unconscious Mind is Dead, to Robert Lepages 2009 Le Damnation de Faust at the Metropolitan Opera) is that for LeCompte and her company, video is not just a stage effect, or even a technology that is introduced to performance. Instead, recording technology is an inherent part of their performance vocabulary that goes back to the use of record players and tape recorders in the Three Places in Rhode Island plays, and of walkmans and camcorders in L.S.D. Speaking during the rehearsals of Brace Up! the Wooster Group designer Jim Clayburgh said that since Route 1 & 9, microphones and video monitors have been like performers, part of the company (in Arratia 1992:127). LeCompte started experimenting with the use of prerecorded video footage already in L.S.D., but subsequently she also started using video recordings as a stand-in for the members of the company who couldnt make the rehearsal call time. By the time she started working on Brace Up! 37 this emergency strategy developed into a full-fledged method of electronic surrogation of missing performers. More generally, in the performance vocabulary of the Wooster Group, prerecorded video footage became a mark of absence, a pure signifier that often completed and replaced its own signified. Starting with Frank Dells Temptation of St. Anthony, LeCompte was also using existing film and video footage not only as visual but also as textual material for live performance. As Susan Letzler Cole reports in her detailed account of the rehearsal process of this piece, apart from Flauberts play, LeCompte used as source materials video recordings from semi-pornographic New York cable Channel J and also Ingmar Bergmans The Magician, which actors transcribed in order to create a Bergman action script that existed alongside two other action scripts (1992:103). Finally, in Poor Theater, video completely replaces the dramatic text as the source, however distant, of live performance. Poor Theater: A Series of Simulacra (2004) is an important production that coincided with the baroque triptych, but that at the same time departs from the pattern of the 17th-century drama. It was staged immediately after To You, The Birdie! and it predated Hamlet by several years. In it, LeCompte used the film recording of Jerzy Grotowskis production of Akropolis
Wooster Baroque

37. In her performances/video installations such as Funnel (1974) and Mirage (1976), the New Yorkbased video and installation artist Joan Jonas used live video feed as an instant replication and reflection of the ongoing performance. In her experimentation with video and live performance LeCompte was following in her footsteps, which she acknowledged by casting Jonas in the role of Masha in Brace Up!

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and documentary video footage of William Forsythes Frankfurt Ballet and of the Wooster Group itself as the text, which actors copied in order to produce a new performance piece. LeCompte claims that Poor Theater was meant to be a departure from the performance that had just finished its run: To You, the Birdie! has been such a struggle with all the different elements, bringing them together, and because finally a lot of it rested on me [...] So I thought that I wanted to simplify everything and just work with three or four actors, pull everything in, go back to the Garage (LeCompte in Savran 2005:17). In the process, as Savran aptly observed, the video became not a play text but a directing text based on Grotowskis production of Akropolis (16). However, it is not, as he suggests, Grotowskis staging that LeCompte literally rehearses, translates, and mimes, but James MacTaggarts film recording of Grotowskis staging. Here, literally is key, not rehearsing, translating, or even miming, for it is LeCompte who insists that she wanted to copy exactly Akropolis (19). As she related in another conversation about Poor Theater, this copying of a film recording of a performance consists in a taking of the form rather than a taking of behavior (Dunkelberg 2005:49). In other words, the live reproduction of a filmed performance does not involve the methods and techniques that went into the original staging, but only the close repetition of one of its versions as it was captured by the film camera. The metaphor that LeCompte used in Poor Theater for this literal taking down of a performance is the painterly technique of frottage: transferring scratches and grooves from a surface by placing a paper on it and rubbing it with a pencil. Frottage obliterates the interval between the object and the image, and at the same time transforms the entire space outside the image into an interval. Within the baroque triptych, Poor Theater holds the status of methodological statement in which such issues as repetition, image, body, movement, synchronization, variation, ephemerality, and recording receive their theoretical elaboration. The heart of this performance-essay, its thesis statement so to speak, comes in Scott Shepherd and Sheena Sees reenactment of William Forsythes video interview: FORSYTHE: The dancers are trying to remember a...a...a ballet, but theyre also offering translations. Translation literally means a cross to the other side. INTERVIEWER: To bridge. FORSYTHE: Yeah, to bridge. And...and theyre trying to bridge between the memory of what it was in space and...and what it is now in a collapsed space. So they have to now read each others bodies, and theres a series of instructions also they read from these four televisions in the corner. And...but they have to translate this into another geometry, but they have to read the other person, theyre not on their own, theyre independent in the fact that each one gives the other person information, but they all have to translate that, visibly again, into kinds of alignment. And this alignment is what I consider to be the legibility of the event.38

Dexter Panel
Wonderful Complexity With La Didone, the Wooster Group finds itself at the same time on familiar and radically new ground. Like House/Lights, which takes as its dual source a piece of high (modernist) art and a 1960s B movie, La Didone is based on the opera La Didone (1641) by Francesco Cavalli and Gian Francesco Busenello, and Terrore nello spazio (American title Planet of the Vampires), a 1965 sci-fi horror flick by the Italian director Mario Bava. While reenacting films, as we have seen, has become the Wooster Groups signature method of theatre making, they have never before ventured into opera, and in that sense for them La Didone represents a significant departure. It

Branislav Jakovljevic

38. Transcribed from the Poor Theater video, with the assistance of Scott Shepherd and Clay Hapaz.

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Figure 12. The frontal view of La Didone. On the extreme left is the band of musicians, and on the right is the technical crew. (From left): Jennifer Griesbach, Harvey Valdes, Kamala Sankaram, Scott Shepherd, Ari Fliakos, John Young, Kate Valk. RedCat, Los Angeles, 2009. (Video still The Wooster Group) worked surprisingly well, and the reasons for that go much deeper than the clever trick of pairing a baroque Italian opera and a trashy Italian movie. In the staging of the triptychs final panel, LeCompte refrains from Hamlets complexity and returns to the simplicity and symmetry of To You, the Birdie! However, this time around there is no badminton court with its central axis. Instead, the Dutch set designer Ruud van den Akker devised a series of frames with semi-transparent screens suspended above the stage that highlight the single-point perspective. Unlike in To You, the Birdie! the plasma screens are not positioned vertically, at the extreme high and extreme low of the stage, but horizontally, next to one another, waist high, dead center upstage. They underline the parallelism as the main organizing principle in staging opera and film. The stage brings together distant worlds: opera and film, myth and fantasy, deep past and remote future. These worlds never fully merge, but instead comment on each other in ways that are ironic, but also illuminating. This parallelism begins with the structural intertwining of the two narratives. The whole intrigue of Bavas sci-fi horror is based on the attempts of the space explorers to grasp the nature of the life form that takes possession of them while they sleep. When finally spotted, the alien beings quickly disappear. Captain Mark, Dr. Karan, and engineer Wess39 stare into a multihued fog that surrounds the ship, searching for the quickly disappearing globes of light: MARK: Its possible they are an alien form of life. DR. KARAN: Thats true. Their forms here could be based on a different plane of vibrations. Flesh-and-blood man cant see them, except [...] quickly, as you, Mark, did, out of the corner of your eye. WESS: And these strange sonic wails we heard could be their voices. (Bava 1965)
39. In the Wooster Group version of the film, they were played, respectively, by Ari Fliakos, Judson Williams, and Scott Shepherd. Wooster Baroque 113

In the film, the alien life form that exists at the limit of the perceptible and can be seen, as it were, only in parallax view, is accomplished through a cheap effect created by rapidly moving multicolored light bulbs in front of the camera. In La Didone, the source of the sonic wails is clearly identifiable as opera singers. Similarly, when Didone falls asleep, hugging a plush toy, the space crew and the undead aliens invade the stage, as if she conjured them in her dream. The parallelism extends from the two sources to the video screens upstage and on to the proscenium, where a band of musicians is positioned stage right and a group of technicians manning the mixing board sits stage left. Both groups are integrated into the show: the musicians accompany the onstage actions, and one of them, the accordionist and singer Kamala Sankaram, freely moves between the band of musicians and the band of actors. Whereas in Hamlet the technicians were ambiguously positioned between the stage and the audience, here they are given, to use Michael Kirbys term, a symbolized matrix: they dont act, but are part of the action (1987:5). Clad all in black with high silver boots, the technicians are attentive to the stage action and gradually are perceived as a film crew at work. They appear to be filming a troupe of actors dressed in uncomfortable space suits pretending to be on another planet. The spaceship crew can be seen as yet another version of the self-referential play with the idea of the group of actors, a motif that resurfaces in the Wooster Groups productions with great regularity. Most recently, we find it in Hamlet, which is not only a copy of Burtons Broadway production, but is in fact inserted in Burtons film the same way the Mouse trap scene is set within Hamlet: it is a play within the play, or more precisely, a show within the show. This makes the Wooster Groups cast a group of actors trying to put on Burtons Hamlet. The troupe that attempts to stage Burtons Hamlet has its direct predecessors in the Miami dance troupe from the last section of L.S.D., Donna Sierra and Del Fuegos. They resurface again a few years later in the Wooster Groups staging of Flauberts rendition of the St. Anthony story. Here, it becomes obvious that the theme of the troupe of actors adrift is inseparable from the theme of melancholy.40 The story of St. Anthony has been traditionally seen as a melancholic narrative (see Panofsky et al. 1964:302). The members of the Wooster Group closely identified Del Fuegos from the Miami episode of L.S.D. with the place in which it performs, which, according to them, emanates sadness and death. LeCompte describes Miami in the following way: Its southern, its migrs, people who have left New York and moved south...to die? Old-age homes? And the performing team is still performing. More to the point, Ron Vawter describes Miami as the elephant graveyard, at the same time infused with this Latin energy vibrant, third world, Central American, jazzy, energetic (in Savran 1986:218, 214). Ken Kobland relates the scene of dancing in the woods from The Crucible to Del Fuegos as a cheap, seedy dance troupe (214) and describes Ron Vawters Miami episode as an instance of wonderful melancholy (211). To this inventory of melancholy we can add the nostalgic mournfulness of Chekovs Three Sisters. Further, in the hands of the Wooster Group, even blackface, despite its striking historic and cultural references, is not free from the undertones of the black face and dark face of melancholia (Panofsky et al. 1964:290, 320), which is remarkably manifested in the furor melanacholicus of Emperor Jones and in Yanks longing frenzy in The Hairy Ape. Finally, at the end of the line (for now) we find Dido, the dark queen of the North African city of Carthage. In the latest permutation of the Del Fuegos theme, the space adventure enactors cluelessly wander around a cheap and improvised soundstage to stumble into one of the most prominent representations of racialized and gendered sorrow in Western theatre. Starting from Virgils Aeneid and continuing through a long list of Western literary, theatrical, and visual artworks, the character of Dido figures as the epitome of strangeness and foreignness. In La Didone, for the first time ever, the regular Wooster Group members step aside to yield the center stage to

Branislav Jakovljevic

40. For an excellent investigation of this theme in Poor Theater, see David Savrans article The Death of the Avantgarde (2005).

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guest performers; namely, to the cast of opera singers lead by Hai-Ting Chinn, who brings to Didone yet another layer of what Anne Cheng (2001) calls racialized melancholia.41 Cavalli and Busenellos Didone, the African queen, is the operatic predecessor of those alien and exotic women who, as Catherine Clment argues, opera enjoys undoing. Like Carmen, Aida, or Butterfly, Didones foreignness is not geographical and racial, but, before anything else, womanly: always, by some means or other, they cross over a rigorous, invisible line, the line that makes them unbearable; so they will have to be punished (Clment [1979] 1988:59). Dido is more dangerous and feared than a dancing gypsy or an exotic courtesan. She is the queen, the embodiment of female rule. For that she will have to be rejected and destroyed. And that is not enough: she brings the curse to her own realm, Carthage, doomed to be eradicated from the face of the earth. Dido, the punished ruler of a vanquished city, personifies loss and rejection. Cavalli and Busenellos La Didone is relatively obscure in comparison with some more prominent renditions of the same story, such as Christopher Marlowes tragedy Dido, the Queen of Carthage or Henry Purcells opera Dido and Aeneas. Unlike all other works for stage inspired by Dido, Busenello takes the story back to the fall of Troy and dedicates the entire first act of the opera to Aeneass departure from his homeland. That defers Didones first appearance to the beginning of the second act. Dramaturgically, this choice not only provides the background for the story of Dido, but also establishes a parallel between Troy and Carthage, the two cities destined for destruction. Musically, it gives an opportunity to the composer to develop lamentation as the primary mode of female expression. As Wendy Heller points out in her essay O castit bugiarda: Cavallis Didone and the Question of Chastity, like Ariadne and Medea, Didone belongs to the order of abandoned women (1998:169). This order is firmly established in the other two segments of the Wooster Groups triptych: before Didone, there were Phaedra, whom Theseus leaves behind in Troezen, and Ophelia, who is rejected by Hamlet. Didones response to Aeneass departure is closer to Ophelias grief than to Phaedras. In her final lament, Dido clutches Aeneass sword, which seems to have traveled all the way to Troy in order to pierce her heart. In the Wooster Groups staging, this is one of the rare moments of the synchronization of live performance and video footage reminiscent of To You, the Birdie!: before it reaches her, the sword that attendants hand to Didone passes behind the video screen that shows the image of that same sword. If for Phaedra the sword is an unambiguously phallic symbol, for Didone it is the harbinger of death. She moans: Am I a Queen, am I Dido? I am no longer either Dido or Queen. But an omen of despairing destiny And of torment. Vilified by my own And threatened by the dead Scorned alike by men and by shadows. I fear I have betrayed you O unhappy husband; [...] Carthage, I leave you, Sword, go with the hilt, the pommel in the earth, And at the judgment of my death. Call all the infernal shadows out of the abyss

41. In her book The Melancholy of Race, she writes: The question of racialization of Asian Americans is in some ways more apparently melancholic than that of African Americans in American history in the sense that the history of virulent racism directed against Asians and Asian Americans has been at once consistently upheld and denied. Shuttling between black and white the Scylla and Charybdis between which all American immigrants have had to pass Asian Americans occupy a truly ghostly position in the story of American racialization (2001:23; emphasis added).

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And you, kind blade, End my grief, Finish my torments, Send my spirit to the dark river: Wicked Aeneas, beloved light, I am dying, farewell. (Busenello 1987:19)42 Busenellos melancholic lyrics are reflected in Cavallis music. Didones entire final lament is composed as a recitative, not as an aria. The melody is prevented from lifting off by the solemnity of her words. To all accounts, Cavalli was very well aware of the different effects of recitative and aria. Salazar locates the birth of the ideology of the aria in Egisto (1643), the opera that Cavalli composed only two years after La Didone. According to Salazar, the ideology of the aria consists in shifting the center of gravity of the opera from poetry to music. As the drama becomes replaced by the new alliance of music and meaning, the text is reduced to a pure ornament. This disturbance of the balance between drama and music diminishes the expressivity of the opera and replaces it with mere pleasantness (1980:34). So, Didones recitativo lament marks not only the limit of her own existence, but also the limit of dramatic opera, soon to be swept away by opera as the site of extraordinary technological innovations that range from the complexity of instrumentation to the lavishness of the spectacle.43 In its pairing of La Didone and Bavas outdated science fiction movie, the Wooster Group exposes this double limit of death and technology. By placing La Didone next to Terrore nello spazio, LeCompte literarily sends the opera into space. However, unlike in space opera, here, there will be no endless sequels.44 La Didone, the last panel in the triptych, is the end of the line. Planet of the Vampires is the story of two spaceships, the Galliot and the Argos, which are lured by calls for help from the mysterious planet Aura.45 While landing, the crew members experience inexplicable episodes of rage that drive them to attempt to kill one another. Some of them succeed and the entire crew of the Galliot ends up being wiped out. The survivors from Argos gradually discover that the inhabitants of the enigmatic planet are vampire-like beings that parasitically invade the bodies of the dead. Placed next to Cavalli and Busenellos opera, the film points to death as the cause of Didones forsakenness, and at the same time retrospectively highlights the theme of the return of the undead as yet another prominent current in the Wooster Groups triptych. In To You, the Birdie! Theseus, who was believed to have died in Epirus, suddenly returns; that Dafoes Theseus is an animated marble monument more than a living human being is indicated by the images of his torso projected on plasma screens whenever he appears onstage. In Hamlet, the theme of the undead emerges, predictably, in the ghost scene, but then goes on to invade the entire production. Finally, in La Didone it becomes an integral part of the narrative. The undead is the lost object that returns radically and imperceptibly transformed.

42. Following the conventions of contemporary opera houses, all arias in the Wooster Groups La Didone were sung in Italian, with English translations projected on a screen above the stage. 43. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe writes in Musica Ficta that music, even more than painting or architecture in any case in a much more spectacular manner was the site of formidable technological innovations, which not only affected instrumentation but also worked toward amplification ([1991] 1994:xx). He traces this dependence of opera on technology from the baroque to Bayreuth. 44. For an overview of the subgenre, see Gary Westfahl, Space Opera (2003). Branislav Jakovljevic 45. Unlike cosmonauts from the Argos and the Galliot, I have to resist the planet Aura. Yielding to this random clue would lead back to Walter Benjamins discussion of technology. That would, in turn, take us to Samuel Weber, who, like Deleuze, engages with theoretical questions that are of central importance for this essay: from the interval (see his essay The Virtuality of the Media [2000]), to the dividual, to the image. The end product would be an essay in the form of a diptych, in which each panel would approach the same subject from a different theoretical position. I am afraid that would turn the whole attention to Weber and Deleuze and leave the Wooster Group, as it were, out of the picture.

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Whereas in Hamlet the ghost of the electronic equipment merges with the living bodies of the actors, in La Didone LeCompte scrupulously avoids this kind of interpenetration. Here, the interaction with video images is scaled down to a minimum. The two screens in the back are used mostly for the projection of footage from Planet of the Vampires. The film no longer cues the onstage action, but instead merely indicates the general ambiance of the scene. The synchronization of video and live performance clearly privileged in Hamlet and To You, the Birdie! in La Didone remains limited to a few scenes. Most often, it is used in staging, when hand gestures are blown up onscreen. Time and again, the actors hands reach into a screen in order to manipulate the spaceship gadgetry. The insistent repetition of this effect underscores the obvious pun between the digitality in electronics and in fingering. Beyond that, however, it establishes a temporal and conceptual warp in which digital technology is used to reenact a future imagined in an analog past. This impossible return to analog technology and to analogy as such marks the final point of the baroque triptych. In La Didone, this interaction of human and nonhuman aspires to a full integration. In the first two panels of the triptych, LeCompte investigates different modes of interaction and integration of live performance and video images through radical experimentation with form. This, as we have seen, has lead to a multiplication of screens and a perceptual fragmentation of bodies that reveals the complex temporality of intermedial performance. In La Didone this investigation is transposed to the level of the narrative. Here the complex synchronization of an actors body and video footage is replaced by a co-temporalization of two radically different times: the mythical past and the fantastic future. In Cavalli and Busenellos version of the story of Dido, the heroine remains suspended in a pluperfect of sorts. We left her with the point of the sword pressed against her chest. She utters the final words of her lament, the operatic I am dying, farewell, and then collapses. But a moment later, she rises again. This was not death, but a mere swoon. She survives in order to marry Iarbas, whom she had previously rejected. But this is a baroque happy ending, heavy with sadness and doom. If Virgils Aeneid tells of the journey of the hero Aeneas westward, from the devastation of Troy to the birth of Rome,46 then La Didone narrates not Didos death by suicide, but her survival in the city of Carthage, which would meet the fate of Troy. If the narration of the mythical past has as its purpose the explanation of the present state of affairs, then the narration of the future finds its purpose in reaffirming it. At least, that is most often the case with science fiction and fantasy. Frequently, science fiction narratives use the future to reduplicate the present in which the narrative is written. That, according to Boris Eizykman, creates a strange narrative loop. Whereas conventional storytelling relies on the premise of a simple narrative order in which a past story is narrated in a more recent past to an assumed reading present, science fiction invents a new temporal order in which the hypothetical narrator is telling a future narrative as if it was her own past. In that way, the reading present is addressed from a futures future (Eizykman 1985:67). This strategy, which amounts to the abolishment of linear temporality, is very well suited for the novel. It can be transposed to a certain degree to film and television, while in theatre it fails almost without exception. As many critics who have tried to explain the relative absence of sci-fi from theatre have observed, theatres materiality prevents it from accommodating the specific kind of illusion that this genre demands.47 This difficultly is structural. It

46. To the 17th-century Venetians, their republic is seen as the continuation of Romes old glory. 47. For example, in his comments on Mabou Mines production of Philip K. Dicks novel Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, Samuel R. Delany proposes that theatre is in some ways an ideal medium by which to manifest the reality of imaginary things because in it, the dead are made to walk and inanimate objects to speak. At the same time, he maintains that it is extremely difficult for the theater to manifest the unreality of real things. When an actor says I, the actor, am not here, it is not that the image belies his statement; it is simply that we know that the actor is lying (1988:14). Wooster Baroque 117

comes from the transposition of the nonlinear narrative temporality of science fiction to the linear temporality of theatre. This is, more than in any other aspect of performance, revealed in gestures. In theatre, a gesture is the index of the present. It is precisely through gesture that performance joins the flow of time. It gives reality to props, scenery, and even language, not the other way around. Because of the obvious unavailability of examples of future behaviors, in sci-fi the gesture is always borrowed from some other time and some other situation. The abyss of the unimaginable and unforeseeable future uses of the human body is routinely bridged by transplanting familiar gestures into unfamiliar situations. Thus, in sci-fi we recognize not only quotidian gestures from the present, but also codified gestures from cowboy movies, domestic dramas, or crime stories. It is the context that gives reality to these future gestures, not the other way around. In that way, sci-fi reduplicates the present and forecloses the future. It is precisely in this feature of sci-fi that Eizykman recognizes its production of homogeneity and, ultimately, its conservatism (79). However, he acknowledges the value of sci-fi precisely in those rare moments when the abolition of conventional temporal order makes it possible to imagine a radically different future that casts a critical view on the present instead of reinforcing it (81). In the case of La Didone, this kind of critique of the present comes from the superimposition of the baroque melancholic happy ending onto the futuristic parable. Planet of the Vampires offers a dystopian solution to the question, posed in Hamlet, of the ghosting of the human body by inhuman forces. The crew of the spaceship Argos finally meet an alien face to face, in a manner of speaking; they are confronting the dead body of Salas, captain of the sister ship Galliot, when he replies: SALAS: No, its not Salas, it is just his body. I inhabit the body of your late captain, and I am just one of many beings on this planet, many beings who are desperate. We have been in trouble many years now, and we are trying to survive. We arranged for several of you to kill each other, so that we can take over your bodies. You are our last chance. It is imperative for our race to continue to exist. MARK: At our expense? SALAS: If you were in our place, you would understand. On many of the planets I know you humans have fought down through the centuries. Do you really expect us to be any different? We cannot be wiped out. Well stop at nothing. We must fight, no matter how. We are a race that exists at a vibratory plane different than yours. Our limitations are entirely different... our technology...we cannot build anything, spaceships like this. We need ships to get away. Perhaps our survival is possible somewhere else. Our sun has been dying, as you can see, and that means the end of our species as well. We have been attempting to summon you here for centuries. Just as our sun has no more energy, you heard our message, we never expected you to actually respond... WESS: And I suppose you need our dead bodies? SALAS: No, they must be willing only to submit. Lose their bodies as well as lose their will. CAPTAIN MARK: We will never submit to a breed of parasites.

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Figures 1315. Argos reaches the shores of the New World. Stills from the final scene of Terrore nello spazio, the 1965 sci-fi horror flick by the Italian director Mario Bava. (Screenshot by Ljubia Mati) SALAS: Our relationship will be symbiotic. In effect, we would be one body. It would be in no sense parasitical. You got no choice. Either all of us go back together or nobody will get there. (Bava 1965) The sole survivors, Mark, Sanya, and Wess,48 nuke the ship infested with aliens/vampires and escape. The meteor rejecter, the key gadget on their ship, has been destroyed, and they cant make it back to their own planet. The plot of Planet of the Vampires is hardly original. It has been told in countless short stories, novels, and films.49 By now, this kind of plot has migrated to comic books and cartoons intended for very young audiences. Dido, clutching her plush toy, is as childish as the spaceship crew that brandishes their plastic field ray guns. After surviving the traumatic events, they acquire not wisdom, but a certain navet of a higher order. To all appearances, that is what our culture is asking us to do. In order to survive, we have to ignore pain, betrayal, death, and fear, and become used to inhumanity. As Argos glides through space, Wess discovers that both Captain Marks and Sanyas bodies have been invaded by the aliens. When Wess panics, Sanya calms him down: You must become one of us. All you have to do is want it. Just let one of us join you, it will give you this wonderful complexity (Bava 1965). The schizophrenic situation of the dividual does not end in the restoration of the individual, but in normativization and normalization of dividualism. Argos approaches a planet that seems inhabitable. It is, says Captain Mark, a young primitive world, but he is optimistic that it will be all right for them. They look through a longrange telescopic lens and see the blue planet. The continents and bodies of water merge into the image of a cityscape thickly dotted with skyscrapers. As I watch this scene on plasma televisions placed center stage at St. Anns Warehouse, I cant but wonder if Sanya is going to be another Dido, waiting for her hero at the shores of the New World, at the waterfront, not far from Water Street where we sit as we watch La Didone. The film is over, but the story continues. I have been transported outside without leaving my theatre seat. The spaceship lands, and the world gains its wonderful complexity. Everything changes and everything remains the same. Sanya/Dido sits at the harbor. She is across the river, in the familiar urban landscape. These brownish images of skyscrapers have been shot in the past and projected into the future that they came to resemble. This uncanny resemblance of future and past comes from the absence of the two buildings that towered over that landscape from a time just after the film was made until the moment the staging of the baroque triptych had begun.

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48. Played, respectively, by Ari Fliakos, Kate Valk, and Scott Shepherd. 49. Some of which, such as the 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers, were better than others.

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