Churchill's Cloud 9 - the conclusions of Act 1 & Act 2

Both acts of Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine attempts to conclude a chain of events. In Act 1, Joshua raises a gun to Clives head, unseen by him and everyone else except for Edward who "puts his ands over his ears". In Act 2, the actress playing Betty in Act 1 returns to "embrace" the current Betty. In responding a narrowing cone of tension in both acts, a conclusion is only satisfied when it is violent: In Act 1, violence threatens to subvert the pre-existing structures of social and gender hierarchies by the implied murder of Clive. In Act 2, we are presented with a different form of violence: Betty's embrace of her 'former' self disrupts the linear integrity of the Act 2 and the play itself by forcing two different times to coexist, indeed, to "embrace". Even though Clive re-emerges near the end of Act 2, his role is detached from the events of present time; he appears as if he was a memory, or an afterthought of Betty's made manifest.

Although both acts appear to 'conclude' by violent means, one may suggest that both Acts resist a 'closure' of its narrative, in other words, both Acts resist and end via satisfactory resolutions. In Act 1, Joshua's act of implied violence (implied because the actual shooting is never actualized onstage) defies a satisfactory resolution of the narrative's conflict. Clive's murder would rob the audience of satisfaction derived from witnessing how Clive's new knowledge of Harry's sexuality 'plays out' after the heightened theatricality of the marriage. Too many loose ends between characters would be left unaddressed: Harry and Edward, Clive-Saunders, Betty-Ellen, Joshua-Harry and Betty-Harry. Rather, Joshua operates as the intrusive 'Other' on two levels: firstly the literal level as a Black manservant, and secondly as a Formalistic level as the wedge in the door that prevents the confrontation and resolution of all previous conflicts and secrets. In Act 2, the Betty-Betty embrace offers no solution when approached from a realistic viewpoint. The very fact that Act 2 Betty can only find satisfactory solace in her 'previous' self (from Act 1) suggests the failure of the Present in offering solutions for its characters. Alternatively, we may also read that the present 'Real' is insufficient satisfy Betty's incompleteness, and the play has to rely on an act based in the 'Imaginary' (or the impossible Absurd) in order to conclude. Hence, it resists closure by virtue of Act 2 Betty's inability to achieve resolution with her-self autonomously, where her Act 1 self intervenes as the intrusive Other.

Godot, again...

The world which Samuel Beckett paints in Waiting for Godot is ultimately one that is bereft of meaning, a condition pointing at the absurd existence of man in an environment he fails to understand or control. This ‘emptying’ of truth, purpose and meaning is echoed tirelessly through various intermediate worlds which coexist within the structure of Godot, namely the physical landscape, the ‘world-outside’ and the implied otherworldly paradise apparently achievable through Godot himself.

The most immediate world of the play, the physical world, is arrestingly desolate. Beckett describes its setup simply: “A country road. A tree. Evening.” Four principle characters occupy the sparse physical space of Godot, drawing attention to a fourth (and perhaps more important) part of the physical landscape: the real and present void onstage. Rather than the elements of the stage filling the void, the void fills the stage as a physical element itself. Metaphorically, Beckett’s void displaces (or outplays) the material usefulness of the existing onstage elements, as it continually threatens to consume the very existence of its human occupants as well. In a heated exchange, Gogo exclaims: “There’s no lack of void.” The physical world of Godot (the interplay between onstage elements and the void) therefore appears to mirror the ‘inner conditions’ of its characters who struggle to assert their existences lest they become consumed by meaninglessness. The length of “country road” chosen by Beckett to represent an ‘event’ likewise metaphorises the ‘wait’ that Didi and Gogo undertake: an aimless pursuit without knowledge of its own head or tail, without conception of arrival. What is clear to Didi and Gogo is the nature of the arrival (the arrival of Godot himself), but what is unclear, or remains un-confronted by their dialogue is how Godot is to save them. At the end of the play, Vladimir contemplates the options available to him:

Vladimir: We’ll hang ourselves to-morrow. (Pause.) Unless Godot comes.
Estragon: And if he comes?
Vladimir: We’ll be saved.

And their conversation regarding Godot immediately ends, with Gogo suggesting that they should leave. The lack of meaning and function in the physical world is further augmented by material insufficiency: firstly, the lack-of material to accomplish meaningful activity and, secondly, the insufficiency of the onstage elements to fulfil meaningful activity. The tree embodies such a state of insufficiency in Godot, proving itself to be useless as leverage for hanging (the tramps fret that it may “break”) as well as an object to hide behind. Frustrated, Didi declares: “Decidedly, this tree will not have been the slightest use to us.” Also, when Didi and Gogo decide to attempt a hanging, they realise that they lacked a “bit of rope” with which to do so. The material insufficiency of Gogo’s belt is also highlighted; the cord which is tested for strength “breaks” when the tramps tug at it.

The external world, or the ‘world-outside’ the immediate physical landscape occupied by the tramps is hinted at frequently. Didi speaks enthusiastically of his time in “the Macon County” and reminisces about standing “hand-in-hand” atop “the Eiffel Tower … in those days”. Pozzo’s journey to the fair suggests a going-to and coming-from, and Gogo makes reference to “a ditch” which he spent the night. There is further evidence that points to the possibility of people living “outside” the world which Didi and Gogo occupy. Didi refers to the existence of Gogo’s nightly assailants (“they”), while the appearance of the boy-messenger as a mediator between the tramps and Godot indicates the possibility of a realm beyond the tramps’ immediate reach. Despite the strong assertions of an existence of a ‘world outside’, Beckett gives us indications that the ‘world outside’ is just as ephemeral as a world constructed by the characters themselves. Gogo rebuts Didi’s musings of the “Macon County”, blurting:

Estragon: No I was never in the Macon county! I’ve puked my puke of a life away here, I tell you! Here! In the Crackon county!

However, even Gogo’s revelation is thrown into suspicion; a while later, he contemplates what he had said, admitting that the Macon County incident could “have been possible”, although he “didn’t notice anything”. Statements about the world outside are made, contradicted and restated again, throwing the very possibility of the ‘world outside’ into suspicion as well. The ‘world outside’, as it seems, could very well have been imagined as Godot’s elusive world. After all, is memory not an active form of imagination engineered in the present? Didi contemplates the indeterminate nature of his own memory:

Vladimir: Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? To-morrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of to-day? […] But in all that, what truth will there be?

Beckett’s external world presents itself as the antithesis of the present physical world which the tramps occupy. The juxtaposition sets up the possibility of meaning and value ‘outside’ the immediate physical world, but the tramp’s state of meaninglessness extends beyond their premises and implicates the external world as well:

Vladimir: We’ve nothing more to do here.
Estragon: Nor anywhere else.

Arguably, the world of Godot himself is not a world, but a symbolic representation of salvation or paradise. Godot’s presence is never experienced by the tramps. Gogo admits that they “hardly know him”, and that he “wouldn’t even know him if I [Estragon] saw him”. The possibility of Godot as a physical presence is represented by the boy who acts as his messenger, turning up only to deliver news of Godot’s postponed arrival: “Mr Godot told me to tell you he won’t come this evening but surely to-morrow.” In Act 2, the boy’s (or his double’s) return once again reveals Godot’s deferred arrival. However, Didi and Gogo are insistent on their purpose, which is to “wait for Godot” and be “saved”. To this extent, the world of Godot represents a paradise which Didi and Gogo hope to be brought into, in order to relieve their existential crisis. However, the very meaninglessness of their act of awaiting Godot’s arrival is intensified by the faint possibility that Godot may never arrive. Godot’s non-arrival (and the deferment of his paradise) may precisely be the nature of Godot. Furthermore, the ‘godlike’ status of Godot is potentially dashed by Didi’s interrogation of the boy:

Vladimir: What does he do, Mr. Godot? (Silence.) Did you hear me?
Boy: Yes Sir.
Vladimir: Well?
Boy: He does nothing, Sir.

In this instant, Godot mirrors the condition of the tramps; the world of Godot’s imagined paradise is held up like a reflection of the tramps’ conditions, throwing into subversion the very worth of Didi and Gogo’s high hopes in waiting for his arrival. At this precise moment, Godot and the tramps transcend beyond mere reflection of each other, they collapse into each other and are one and the same. Godot is very much a figment of the tramps’ imagination, spurred on by physical traces of his existence (Didi’s knowledge and the presence of the boy) rather than a concrete being. Godot as a symbolic unit also represents the hopes and dreams of the tramps, and is built as a world antithetical to the one in which they exist in, an imaginary world in which the tramps are able to invest their hopes of being “saved” in.

“Salvation” indeed is the word on the tips of Didi’s tongue when he makes biblical reference to the crucifixion, a subliminal yearning for deliverance that underlies the conditions of the tramps. Caught in a world without solid meaning and where memory betrays (exasperated, Gogo admits he fails to understand why he cannot remember: “I don’t know why I don’t know!”), Didi and Gogo adapt to their conditions by distracting themselves from their condition, engaging themselves in routines, games and other amusements in order to create meaning for themselves. Faced with the desperate prospect where there is “nothing to be done”, Didi and Gogo fill their endless wait with patter and play. Eager to “pass time”, Gogo prompts Didi to “abuse each other”, culminating in Didi’s suggestion to “make up”. At other times, the tramps lapse into a verbal improvisation about a theme. Estragon improvises upon the tramp’s established routine of phrases when they encounter Lucky:

Estragon: It’s the rope.
Vladimir: It’s the rubbing.
Estragon: It’s inevitable.
Vladimir: It’s the knot.
Estragon: It’s the chaffing.

The tramps also engage in occasional poetic cycles based on loose threads of thought. Sometimes, the cycle breaks away into a mild competition, as a more aggressive form of play:

Vladimir: They make noise like wings.
Estragon: Like leaves.
Vladimir: Like sand.
Estragon: Like leaves.

This continual game of affirmation, reaffirmation, stating, restating and contradiction forms the backbone to their language games, a device to fill the “void”. More importantly, the language games provide the tramps with a routine that is mutually familiar, a point of return, familiarity and certainty, juxtaposed against the uncertainty of their existence, and Godot’s arrival. Didi’s frequent use of the phrase “nothing to be done” indicates more than what it literally means. For Didi, the phrase is reproducible, and therefore acts as a device of security which he can reproduce and recognise immediately. It is as if Didi capitalises upon the meaningfulness of the phrase in context of its recurring pattern in order to replace the lack of meaning which he experiences. Similarly, the use of the phrase “Let’s go” affirms the bond between the tramps: both recognise the “meaning” of the phrase (in the way that it relates to their waiting for Godot) and both use it regularly as if they were executing a secret handshake. Physical routines are also employed; the tramps combine discovery (of found objects) with improvisation, adding new elements to their play-performance. Discovering Lucky’s hat left behind, the tramps fall into a routine of hat-removal and hat-wearing that evolved from Didi trying on the hat. All this business of play and routines constitute a performance which Didi and Gogo actively engage in to amuse themselves. More importantly, performance constructs a platform in which the tramps, as ‘characters’ in a show, are able ‘believe’ in the part they are playing, and hence create meaning for themselves.

Inasmuch as Didi and Gogo construct meaning through their mutual performances, the tramps actively deny the possibility of their meaningless existence, indeed skirting the very discussion of it. A glaring example that demonstrates that very hostility can be seen through their violent rejection of Lucky’s “think” speech. Lucky’s “think” speech threatens to disrupt the orderly world of words, language patterns and meaningful games of the tramps by introducing self-ambiguity and obscurity; Offended by Lucky’s subject matter built upon man’s meaningless suffering, Didi and Gogo “protest violently” and “throw themselves on Lucky” in order to silence him. Likewise, Didi refuses to hear of Gogo’s dreams (“Don’t tell me!”), as if Gogo’s dreams spring from the same absurd source as Lucky’s monologue, threatening to throw his thoughts into disarray.

For the tramps, meaning is not sufficient to support their existence. Didi constantly seeks affirmation of his own existence through memory. In Act 2, Didi unsuccessfully tries to revive Gogo’s memory of the events that had happened the day before (“do you not remember? […] Is it possible you’ve forgotten already?””). At other times, Didi’s faculties of memory betray him: “…can’t think of the name of the man, at a place called … (snaps his fingers) can’t think of the name of the place”. Through this, however, Didi can be seen as attempting to restore a sense of time to his world, which then makes progress visible to him. Didi takes no time in pointing out that “things have changed … since yesterday”, and he draws attention to the leaves that have sprouted on the tree. Perhaps by tracing the progress of the hours, Godot’s arrival becomes all the more imminent.

The most important coping mechanism the tramps use is their very faith in the coming of Godot, regardless of his arrival. Their faith resembles a religious faith in a being that will grant them “salvation” from their suffering, and also gives them an event to look forward to:

Estragon: He should be here.
Vladimir: He didn’t say for sure he’d come.
Estragon: And if he doesn’t come?
Vladimir: We’ll come back to-morrow.

Didi talks of their act of “coming back” like one of self-sacrifice, an act that will buy them pity or favour, which will spur Godot to come. Their faith therefore is one that is based on human action and the rightful rewarding of their actions. Faith in Godot’s arrival also provides meaning for Didi and Gogo in the sense that they are involved in something greater than themselves, something which they are unable to control but nonetheless express their nobility and selflessness by keeping their “appointments”. The extent which their faith becomes so necessary to their survival in Beckett’s world is displayed when the figure of Godot is transformed from saviour to oppressor. Near the end of Act 2, Didi acknowledges the imprisonment to their faith when he admits that Godot will “punish” them if they abandoned their wait. Waiting for Godot is more than a motley task for the tramps. Rather, it is the means to their survival and the ultimate distraction which they occupy themselves with in order to avoid their existential crisis.

Beckett presents us with no answers. Clearly, the tramps recognise the futility of their situation and therefore have no choice but to continue living and believing. Rather, Beckett challenges the audience head-on with his version of the human condition, framing fundamental existentialistic difficulties that would not be discussed in normal life. His version is not necessarily pessimistic; by exposing the groundless beliefs and distractions that man employs to create meaning in life, one is encouraged to appreciate the beauty and importance of these beliefs. Also, what Beckett displays is but a condition, not a claim to truth in any way. Underwritten in that condition is the mystery of life itself, the source that drives man to question, to ponder and to create meaning for himself, as well as to create plays that prod other men to question, think and wonder.

Bach's Allemande, Gould & Turek

Both Glen Gould and Turek employ bold strategies in their respective performances of Bach’s Allemande, Partita No. 4 in D. However, while Gould opts for a stricter rendition of the Allemande with a precise and clear touch, Turek seems to enjoy exploring the romance in Bach’s complex harmonies.

In Turek’s interpretation, hints of rubato are used generously, as one might add for flavour. What results is an implied romanticism of the work without blurring too much of Bach’s rhythmic and harmonic structure. Through this, Turek achieves refreshing melodic clarity in the right hand textures, which tends to dwarf the left-handed motions until he encounters denser harmonic shifts. Turek’s interpretation reads like a delicate conversation between its composite parts, each edging each other on toward new harmonic material which is then further explored between them. Although melodic clarity may come as a welcome renewal from austere Baroque purists, Turek’s rendition of Bach as melodic interlocution seems to usurp Bach’s harmonic material in favour of the textural elements rather than its harmonic complexities. Bach’s harmonies tend to follow Turek’s lyrical tendencies like a shadow, stealing behind. Bach’s harmonies require no further cluttering, rather, when approached plainly without excessive emotional gesture, tends to ‘speak’ for itself. Turek’s individual indulgence in musical excesses could have been superfluous in place of Bach’s harmonies. However, in this recording, Turek chooses to repeat the first section of the Allemande, thereby offering a second chance for the listener to sift through the work. Though amiable, Turek’s chosen repeats do little to salvage remaining harmonic interest. Rather, the repeat tends to reiterate the exhaustion of harmony over favour of melodic intention, and it feels more like a tiresome formal repetition rather than the visitation of an old friend. Also, the piece tends to feel slightly sloppy when tinkered out on a distinctly warm piano tone, as if the flow of the piece were less exact, but rough geometries seen through frosted glass.

Gould, on the other hand, opts for the bright, less mellow timbre, a pianoforte tone less removed from that of the harpsichord. Unlike Turek, Gould opts for a rhythmically solid hankering-out of the piece, each line approached with definition and distinction. Gould’s interpretation of the first section sounds slightly declarative, but it lays the necessary groundwork for harmonies that inextricably ‘announce themselves’ rather than creep into existence. For Gould, Bach’s harmonies are swept to the fore (at least for the first section), and what results sounds like block chords stretched over multiple measures. Melodic interplay that accounts for Turek’s interpretive ambiguity plays no part in Gould’s strict performance, the work stands out boldly as a single unit that shifts and morphs, edged on by Bach’s tonal ripples. There is a regal sense of importance that Gould manages to impart to each phrase that counters Turek’s somewhat aloof approach, and it pays off handsomely: rhythmic nuances present in Bach’s subtle sixteenth-note triplets and mordents sparkle amidst a rich tonal exodus. Bach’s implied harmonies that teeter on two notes appear stark in space rather than bare, and are given room to breathe while retaining the stain of their former tonal origins. Gould’s second section, however, liberally uses staccato in order to highlight textural differences between sections, as well as to mark the rise in tension. Rather than smudging pre-existent harmonic intentions, the staccato tends to augment areas of heightened harmonic frivolity, although some may find it draws too much attention to what should be already apparent. Nonetheless, Gould’s balanced approach would find itself in the good books of most listeners who prefer music-on-a-diet, whilst even dessert-seekers might find Turek’s delivery slightly overdone for their liking.

faculty dance concert, fall 2006

As early as 1922, Oskar Schlemmer employed strategies which were to define the possibilities of “modern” dance under the umbrella of the Bauhaus. His conception of human “presence” on stage was not to be “a portrayal of individual expression” manifested by pathos, but rather the manifestation of “formal stage elements” such as “space, form, colour, light, and materials. ” The sidestepping of the human dancer suggests an invocation of its performance elements which become constitutive of the dance itself. In other words, the Modern dancer, in Schlemmer-speak, is the total composition of its theatrical elements, rather than the human provocateur.

Such was the case, exemplified by Jody Sperling in La Nuit, involving the manipulation of successive layers of long, flowing garments. Sperling’s continual working of the costume became a motif central to the performance; the perpetual flux of the cloth’s hem-line moving rapidly in space recalls Laban’s theoretical disposition for movement as “a continuous flow within space itself … [and space as] the concealed basic feature of movement ”. The fluctuations of the line in space became the focus of the dance, along with the space it ‘carves out’ or draws the eye to. Each successive layer of cloth that Sperling sheds creates a physical threshold; her awakening sexuality is dramatically unveiled by the physical shedding of her premature inhibitions, a lengthy black drape that shrouds the motion of her limbs. The line is never lost through her metamorphoses: instead, the relationship between line and space is utilised to reveal new levels of freedom.

Sperling’s ‘chrysalis’ phase draws out and defines space at an elemental level: her broad, low strokes of black material sweeps out and explores the void of black around her as if it were once a component of the void it emanated from. The substance of her youth which at once imprisons, becomes the element of her sexuality (transforming into a magnificent cape that augments the splendour of her dress), and the motion of the line arcs out a larger field of space through fluid, breath-like motions. In a twist of narrative, Sperling’s final shedding returns the space to the element of the human, but one that is bereft of movement, hinting at the catastrophic transformative power of society and popular culture. Her semi-nakedness becomes a new map of space in the form of static contour, as if space itself has been collapsed into an object of desire, erasing the possibilities of free uninhibited movement characteristic of her earlier explorations.
In contrast, Kim Root’s Players expands the playing field of movement and space through the identification of 2 independent but coexistent spaces: the stage space occupied by the dancers and virtual space, occupied by the image of a pianist projected onto a mound of cloth suspended from the ceiling. Players takes its reference point from the Western Silent film tradition; the projected video of the pianist is occasionally interrupted with slides of text. As a performance unit, Players aligns itself to Schlemmer’s aesthetics of the total theatrical experience, the sum of its theatrical parts: even emblematic costumes are thrown into this confusing postmodernist pantomime. Dancers resemble vaudeville characters, and movements are stylised to capture the polar extremities between hero/villain, oppressor/oppressed and innocent/guilty, as well as to call into question the nature of their boundaries. During the pas de deux between the ‘hero’ and the ‘villian’, each character melts into the other: the villain sometimes adopts the posture of the hero, and the hero melts into the role of the oppressor. At times, both characters fully mimic each other’s rhythmic gestures, neither following nor leading until they have become inseparable elements of a total unit. These shifting boundaries are re-emphasized by the same dancers re-entering theatrical space in different costumes: the “performer” is blatantly identified by the audience; the performance is merely an ‘enactment’ of one’s roles.

The shifting nature of a “centre” of performance further augments a sense of spatial disorientation, mimicking the destruction of constructed character-dependent boundaries. Holistically, the performance can be seen as a postmodern unit dealing with plural space: the virtual (but equally valid) realm of the pianist versus the visceral space of (live) performers. Building upon the given notion that “any arbitrary point in space can become a centre ”, either regions in the performance has equal claim as a performative “centre”. Is the focus of the piece the underlying mechanism (pianist) that supports the performance, or is it the “played out” action? The Players further aggrandizes this relationship by reversing the roles of the traditional silent film. Whereas the pianist was originally the “live” element of the performance and the projected image the focus of the performance, the pianist becomes the object of the film, whilst the “live performance” takes on an implied secondary role to the projection. Through this messy web of reversals, it is ultimately the audience that shapes the overall arc of movement, vacillating between the simultaneous motion of the pianist, text, and live performers. Much like scanning a work of art, the audience’s eyes are drawn to multiple focus points that mark out the form of the painting, as Kaprow identifies:

“[S]low march of … [the viewer’s] eyes and body before the canvas. The accent is really on our sensations. ”

As movement creates space, the eye-line movement of the audience also carves out and manipulates the performative experience of the Players, pointing to the possible (co)-existence of multiple aesthetic centres individually identified by the viewer. However, the existence of “centres” within the dance suggests an implicit sense of stability, or equilibrium in contrast with its surroundings. It is this very sense of dynamic equilibrium (a process of reaching-towards) that Patricia Beaman and Seth Williams’ Cuddle evokes. Framed within a style depicting 17th Century Victorian drawing room episodes, Cuddle explores the dynamics between male and female, as they continually work towards establishing a centre of equilibrium. The equilibristic centre, however, is in a state of perpetual transience, a “never ending change of connecting and loosening ” amidst stillness and movement: “labile states of equilibrium ”, as it were. The performers form sculptures in space defined by the artistry of balance. Using each other as centres of gravity, Beaman balances atop the Williams’ flat back before breaking a sense of equilibristic ‘arrival’ and moving towards the next position. Symmetry between Beaman and Williams is clearly depicted as another form of equilibrium; both performers ‘mirror’ each others’ actions along imagined planes of symmetry creating a tension between their opposing forces, attempting to create “temporary, relative peace” between the male/female figures.

Urip Sri Maeny’s Gambyong, on the other hand, relocates the centre of gravity within the performer itself. Maintaining an austere centre, Maeny’s peripheral motions do little to alter the stability of the dancers’ core. Maeny’s strict control of inner-space likewise affects the focus of outward space: outward space points inward to the dancer’s centre of stability, suggesting a “homunculus-like” proportion in relation to the surrounding space. In other words, Maeny’s structural centre operates to “[structure] space in time ”, re-proportioning the outward space in relation to her inward space (proportion) as a measure. Maeny’s body-space architecture shifts periodically according to her positions onstage, but the overall complex remains constant, locked in a firm state of equilibrium that Cuddle occasionally hints at.

Futurism e-visited

If Art should only progress towards its own end, then perhaps the manifestoes of Futurism taken to its extremes may offer an answer in addressing the theatre of the Post-human. In fact, the possibility of a post-human theatre centred on technology is not a new one, according to the Futurists. With their manifestoes celebrating the progressive extinction of the “actor”, Enrico Prampolini stresses that the loss is not one of “theatrical action” or theatricality, but of pre-existing structures involving actors and characters:

“In the total realizable epoch of Futurism, we shall see [that] the luminous dynamic architectures of the stage … will inevitably arouse new sensations and emotional values in the spectator. [… These] authentic actor-gasses of an unknown theatre will have to replace living actors.” (My emphasis)

Fundamental to the manifestoes of Futurism involves what Dixon calls “the centrality of the machine” in defining the position of the human (as opposed to nonhuman histrionic entities) in Art. Marinetti himself identifies this pervading symbolism as the necessary “feeling of the domination of the machine” in Futurist theatre, the acknowledgement that man’s social position in the hierarchy of order must be reassessed in light of his use, dependence and likeness to machines and technologies. This reassessment, as Ivo Pannaggi and Vinici Paladini rightfully points out in the Manifesto of Futurist Mechanical Art (1922) not only redefines man’s social order, but unearths a deeper existential possibility:

“Today it is the MACHINE which distinguishes our epoch … We feel mechanically and we feel made out of steel; we too are machines. […] This is the new necessity and basis of the new aesthetic.”

In addition to the ‘replaceable actor’, Futurism also identifies the ‘machine’ in the self, an actualisation of the audience as a large mechanistic receptor. To this end, the progress theatre towards a post-human aesthetic would probably fulfil the ultimate Futurist fantasy that underlies this technological anxiety: that the post-human theatre would ultimately be one composed of machines for machines, that the performer-spectator cycle would be one that is closed. In other words, the system would resemble the aesthetic of reader-response theory, applied to an unopened book.

While the “death of the spectator” or his mechanical replacement may not seem imminent anytime soon, the traditional roles of the spectator as a theatrical non-participant (in terms of governing the form of performance) have been thrown into subversion through the blurring of performer-spectator boundaries. Prampolini’s answer to Futurism’s attempt to invoke an aesthetic of interconnectivity within their pieces involves active audience involvement in the theatre making process in hope that “the audience will perhaps become the actor as well ”. Likewise, Marinetti’s The Variety Theatre Manifesto (1913) outlines the possibility “in seeking the audience’s collaboration … communicating with the actors .” Marinetti makes it explicit that what is required is not audience participation, but audience collaboration, a process that acknowledges the role of the audience as equals to the performers in the process of Futurist theatre, even though they may not be completely aware of the direct consequences of their involvement.

As such, the focus of Futuristic theatre centres about the mechanisation of itself, the performance. By assembling performers and audience members into equal cogs that drive theatre, the entire work itself takes on a mechanical life-form of its own, unique to its time, space and participants. In order drive this condition of play-participation, Annenkov proposes that traditional roles within the internal social structure of theatre have to be abandoned . In addition to directors conducting technology rather than human beings, Dixon also points out that actors have secured very different roles in theatre:

“These performers were also historically significant as early examples of Live Art since they rejected ‘fourth wall’ conventions and involved non-narrative and often task-based actions by performers being ‘themselves’ rather than representing characters.”

Actors become mere facilitators, helpers that guide participants in turning the Futurist theatrical cog the same way in order to fulfil a meta-mechanistic end. It is here that Kozintsov’s exultation “forget the emotions and celebrate the machine ” rings familiar, bearing the consequences of a celebration of “mechanized movement”, whether it is incited by riotous spectator-involved shouting or performers invoking the aesthetic of the well-oiled machine. In a participatory scenario, the raison de theatre is expressed as the joyous realisation of the machine in theatre, a celebration in the creation of meta-automations driven by the accumulative efforts of lesser automations.

Although the futurists’ ultimate theatrical ideal seems to lead away from a human-centric episteme, Giovanni Lista claims that their innovative theatrical approach is one that seeks to understand the shifting geography of humanity in face of technology. Lista identifies the Futurists’ agenda as primarily an “anthropological project: a new vision of man faced with the world of machines, speed and technology”. Futurist theatre that appears to efface the human stain (perhaps in search of precise mechanistic perfection), in actuality attempts to locate the human stain by its very absence in performance, an inquiry into where man ‘fits in’. By attempting to locate the implied human stain, Futurism also portends to “bring art closer to life” by faithfully representing the man-machine symbiosis “attuned with … [a] vital, sensorial experience”. In other words, the Futurists work less in comprehending the urban dynamics of the Modern human condition than in exploring how this new dynamic opens up the possibilities for invoking Prampolini’s “new sensations and emotional values”.

Through the use of stylistic elements that mimic the dynamics of technology, the Futurists craft a way of seeing, as viewed through “the mechanical eye”. However, the machine-centric point of view does not necessarily displace a human-centric one; it merely reveals the finitude of the human-centric meta-narrative in relation to time and space. Dixon describes how a new mechanical view of the world is able to expand the limits of imagination and provide new paradigms of observation “beyond normal human capabilities”, spawning a “digital transformation” that is “all ‘in there’”. Although the cult of the machine may be celebrated in its application to Futurist art, what is really celebrated is the hand behind the button, an exultation of human achievement and innovation that springs from a certain disbelief in the rapid progress of technology. It is precisely this “progress” that fuels the Futuristic fascination, “a philosophy of becoming” as Lista explains, that contains the violent possibility of chaos, or the “violent psychosis of speed ” as Kroker puts it.

In a time and age beyond what the Futurists would have ever imagined, the cult of technology has been replaced with a technological indifference. The ubiquity of IT and the PC has literally revolutionised the possibilities of theatrical platforms, or “interfaces”. Nearly every middle-class American citizen owns a portable stage that fits in a small backpack; globalisation has further flattened out perceptions of space-time. As anxieties over the mechanical reproduction of art were assuaged, so were the high Futurist hopes in the cult of the machine slowly stifled. Technology has not forgotten the hand that rocks the cradle; rather, the technological cradle has become more accessible and more integrated. The “revolutionary world view / future shock” as posited by techno-enthusiasts and writers such as Huxley culminated in no more than a silent ushering-in of an era. It is perhaps the reason why Futurism is rediscovered as means to recover that lost-excitement and belief in technology and a mechanistic world-view. Futurism now offers a way of imagining how we once were without the looming presence of our present technologies, as much as we once imagined the possibilities of the future, and perhaps to reassess the dynamics of an important symbiosis, a technological revolution that happened in our sleep.

The World of Godot

Little is mentioned about the world of Didi and Gogo in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Beckett keeps his material world explicitly minimal; any clues at all as to the ecology of space are described as such: “A country road. A tree. Evening.” The world in which Didi and Gogo occupy is sparse, and the spatial realm of the play goes no further beyond the threshold of the country road of which they fill. However, the void of Beckett’s seemingly desolate landscape is substantiated by the world in which the four characters in Godot speak of, indicating the possibility of a ‘world outside’ their own. Didi speaks enthusiastically of his existence in “The Macon County” and reminisces about thronging atop “the Eiffel Tower … in those days”. Pozzo encounters Didi and Gogo on his way to the “fair”, suggesting a going-to and coming-from, and even Gogo makes reference to “a ditch” in which he spent the night.

The ultimate totemic indication of ‘the world outside’ manifests itself in the elusive figure Godot. A physical encounter with Godot is never made: his presence is imposed upon Didi and Gogo through a messenger (“a boy”) that arbiters between his world and their world. The very premise of which “Waiting for Godot” assumes suggests the possibility of salvation which Didi faithfully reminds Gogo of, himself exclaiming “We’re saved!” when he mistakes the coming of Pozzo and Lucky for Godot’s arrival. Through this, there are three distinct worlds that occupy the realm of Godot: The Physical World of the characters and the visible landscape, the ‘World Outside’ which is indicated (the fair, Paris, Macon County, Pyrenees) through speech references, and finally, the Imagined World of Godot, a world that is continually being delayed by virtue of Godot’s non-arrival.

Despite the strong assertions of an existence of a ‘world outside’, Beckett gives us indications that the ‘world outside’ is just as ephemeral as a world constructed by the characters themselves. Gogo rebuts Didi’s musings of the “Macon County”, blurting:

Estragon: No I was never in the Macon county! I’ve puked my puke of a life away here, I tell you! Here! In the Crackon county!

However, even Gogo’s revelation is thrown into suspicion; a while later, he contemplates what he had said, admitting that the Macon County incident could “have been possible”, although he “didn’t notice anything”. Statements about the world outside are made, contradicted and restated again, throwing the very possibility of the ‘world outside’ into suspicion as well. The ‘world outside’, as it seems, could very well have been imagined as Godot’s elusive world. After all, is memory not an active form of imagination engineered in the present? Didi contemplates the indeterminate nature of his own memory:

Vladimir: Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? To-morrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of to-day? […] But in all that, what truth will there be?

Because of the indeterminacy of the ‘world outside’, Didi, Gogo and even Pozzo and Lucky seem to be tied to the physical world which they occupy, a physical world which opens up the opportunity for discourse and inter-personal relationships, no matter how fleeting they may be. Furthermore, their need for salvation as imagined through the world of Godot becomes cyclical. For Didi and Gogo to be “saved” from the drudgery of the immediate world they occupy requires the intervention of Godot. However it is the very act of waiting for Godot that paradoxically ties them to their surroundings, to their immediate world. As James L. Calderwood sees Pozzo and Lucky’s journeying an end in itself, waiting for salvation likewise becomes a form of salvation for Didi and Gogo.

Ultimately, the immediate World which Didi and Gogo occupies is one that is devoid of meaning, and hence waiting for Godot itself becomes a meaningful activity: one to pass the time with and an imagined possibility that locates their existence through time. Throughout the play, there is a continual interplay between the “reality” of Didi and Gogo’s meaningless existence and their persistence in fending it off. For Didi and Gogo, their continual engagement in what Richard Gilman calls “the obligation to be two, a pair, a social unit outside society ” allows both of them to track their existence through time. Especially for Didi, he capitalizes on this ‘enforced’ relationship as proof of his existence and persistence through time. Gogo becomes a witness to reiterate Didi’s existentialistic anxieties, an affirmation to the passing of time, and therefore his persistence through change and continuity. In the opening scene of Act 2, Didi shares his memory the previous day, in hope of an assurance:

Vladimir: The tree, look at the tree
Estragon looks at the tree.
Estragon: Was it not there yesterday?
Vladimir: Yes of course it was there. Do you not remember? We nearly hanged ourselves from it. But you wouldn’t. Do you not remember?
Estragon: You dreamt it.
Vladimir: Is it possible you’ve forgotten already?
Estragon: That’s the way I am. Either I forget immediately or I never forget.

Gogo’s tease to Didi that he had “dreamt it” is no light joke; for Didi, proof of his existence must be assured by Gogo, since the dream-reality boundary has been blurred to the extent that he can no longer recognise waking from dreaming. His coping mechanism is one that the tramps exercise as a social unit in order to skirt the unbearable realities of their situation: ignorance. Whenever Gogo awakes from his sleep and finds the unbearable urge to reveal his dreams, Didi’s response is virtually consistent: “Don’t tell me!” as if the very utterance of the dream will put him in a state of mental disarray over a conundrum he cannot bear to contemplate. His reasons are articulated:

Estragon: (gestures towards the universe). This one enough for you? (Silence.) It’s not nice of you, Didi. Who am I to tell my private nightmares to if I can’t tell them to you?
Vladimir: Let them remain private. You know I can’t bear that.

Didi looks for proof, not ambiguity. To Didi, dreams are the very stuff of Freudian free-associations and the slippage of meaning, a means to a world that exists beyond their own, so terrifying because of its inconceivability and therefore its antithetical nature to his search for certainty and truth. Jeffery Nealon picks up on this thread, and interprets the tramps’ anxiety as one that is defined by the realm of the postmodern outside the neat Structuralist word patterns they devise, Modernist values which they are so paranoid to sustain.

Nealon quotes Lyotard in describing the “social bond” that Didi and Gogo are tied to in the context of a “question, […] itself a language game … [that immediately] positions the person who asks, as well as the addressee and the referent asked about it ”. The social bond sustains either tramp, as well as opens up the possibilities for discourse in order to fill the void of waiting, echoing Derrida’s assertion that there is “nothing outside text”. Text is everything meaningful, and therefore text must sustain, even if it is no more than word games and linguistic routines. To this effect, Didi realises he cannot exist long in the void as an independent member of his social pact with Gogo. Discourse (text) fills the silence between them that threatens to eliminate their meaningful existence. When Gogo is rudely awakened from his sleep, Didi admits: “I felt lonely. ” In their social bond, Didi seems the more gratuitous of the two: “Get up till I embrace you”. In the same way it takes two hands to indulge in a clapping routine, Didi acknowledges his attachment to Gogo in order to give them the “impression that … [they] exist. ”

Gogo, contrary to Didi, does not look to markers in time in order to track his existence; his sense of time has withered into a fluid continuum of ambiguity and might-haves. Gogo creates a idea of “self”, of which he exerts upon their social order so as to maintain a kernel of “self” in which he can believe in and act upon. One of the ways by which Gogo constructs self is through the insistence upon taste and preference, refusing to eat the turnips that Didi has to offer in place of carrots, his favoured choice of the two. By establishing individual taste, Gogo is able to exercise choice, and it is through the illusion of choice that Gogo is able to maintain a façade of self-sovereignty and free will.

Amusement through language games, routines and play are the order of the days for Didi and Gogo, mechanisms that makes their act of waiting more bearable from day to day, as well as confers an illusion of control which either tramp can exercise. After all, the slate of their activities is wiped clean each time they transpose to a different routine, a different “diversion” that will keep them occupied. There is no seriousness in their world of play; one moment Didi’s anger at Gogo is outplayed by the comical ridiculousness of hanging and erections. Another moment they are both hurling abuses at each other for sake of amusement. Because there is no fathomable seriousness (all is a performance of sorts), the ‘control’ of meaning they derive from these games are empty in themselves. Didi’s opening lines sum up the worth of their actions: “Nothing to be done.”

Richard Gilman quotes Ionesco’s “I do not teach, I am a witness,” in terms of Beckett’s portrayal of the world of Godot . For Gilman, Beckett’s imagined world “works tirelessly against … that desire for explicit meaning”, drawing a distinction between theatre with a “pedagogic function” and “one with an aesthetic one.” For Gilman, these ends are the ends imposed by the desires of audiences in the tradition of literature and art to be able to explain itself and offer consumable meaning. Beckett neither endorses nor condemns any of the strategies employed by Didi, Gogo, Lucky or Pozzo in order to exist in his world. Beckett presents us with an angle at which to view the human condition in all it’s possibly bleakness, laying bare the illusions employed by man in search for meaning and truth. In many ways, it is like a mirror held up to the audience, but one that is presented as “a Tragicomedy”. Beckett seems to point to the notion that however tragic or bleak a worldview we may be incarcerated in, humour unlocks the chains that we are subjected to, however briefly. It compels us to laugh not only at the absurdity of Didi, Gogo, Pozzo and Lucky, but also at the absurdity of our world and the ways by which we create meaning, truth and existence.

The play ends implying continuity, the guaranteed progression of Didi and Gogo through time, as will the audience. Didi says “Let’s go”, but Beckett indicates “They do not move”. They cannot move, their duty is to persist through time and space with Godot as much as an accidental distraction as their little games and routines. Likewise, there is nowhere for the audience to go except back to their own lives of routines, illusions and imagined truths. The country road in the theatre extends out and into the ‘real’ world of the spectator, such that he or she emerges into what Zizek coined “The Desert of the Real” . That truth is the dirt and rocks beneath one’s feet, and that much alone is assured. However, perhaps Beckett also indicates that it is the only way we know how to cope with our absurd conditions in life, and that beneath the tragedy of our seemingly pathetic existence, there is the possibility of humour, laughter and comedy that is equally as absurd.

Good faith, good hope?

For Calderwood, the existence of a second act appears to accomplish more than a reiteration of a situation whereby "nothing happens, twice." Lucky and Pozzo's reappearance in ACT 2 violently demolishes the fort of hope and the possibility of destination which ACT 1 builds upon. For Calderwood, waiting simultaneously inscibes within itself a sense of erasure, whereby "[it] implies the absence of the waited-for, [which] is in itself mysteriously absent." Likewise, the condition that surrounds Lucky and Pozzo is one of transition, of travelling. Calderwood plays between the physical and temporal realms of waiting: Didi and Gogo occupy the temporal realm of "wait", whereas "wait" employs physical measurements with regards to Lucky and Pozzo's travelling. Both acts are interrelated; they imply a destination, be it Godot for Didi and Gogo or the fair for Lucky and Pozzo. While ACT 1 builds up around the notion of a forseeable 'destination', Lucky and Pozzo's reappearance in ACT 2 dashes all hope of 'reaching' that postulated destination. Calderwood explains that Lucky/Pozzo's reprise gives new shape to their original condition of travel. Within ACT 1, Pozzo derives his purpose from the pillars of assurance of departure and arrival; "Inbetweenness doesn't register with him." Pozzo's jouney of the 'inbetweenness' is therefore one that is devoid of meaning, a phase of transcience that does not afflict the outcome of his destination. In this sense, travel takes the form of the waiting-of a destination. However, Calderwood reads ACT 2 as an affirmation that that destination is never reached. In fact, Calderwood suggests that Pozzo's journey is that of a "return journey" of failure, and travel-in-itself becomes his purpose. With the loss of the pillars of departure and destination comes the loss of function of travel as an "instrumental" activity, one which expedites a destination. Therefore, Lucky and Pozzo's 'return' mirrors Didi and Gogo's positions in the play, at once declaring a death to destination, as well as a death to the faintest possibility of Godot's arrival. As with Lucky and Pozzo, "going or staying, there's no escape from the human plight." Both groups have identified a position of stasis in ACT 2, a condition that condemns Godot's continued deferrence, destroying the last thread of hope in breaking out of the cyclic absurdity of existence that even Lucky and Pozzo fail to do.

Miller's tragic hero & Godot

Miller's tragic hero is defined through his persistence in an environment that threatens to displace his rightful position in the world. Miller explicitly clarifies that this 'rightful position' with reference to the tragic hero is, in actuality, his own "image" or idea of his place in the world. While Willy Loman's insists upon believing and actively 'performing' his idea of himself despite the worldly truth of his circumstances, Beckett's Didi and Gogo 'perform' to sustain a variety of roles in order to accomplish the same end. Both worlds of characters seek to create personal (or inter-personal) meaning that overcomes the 'tragic' of their conditions, however illusory they may seem if taken from an external vantage-point. In that sense, Miller's concept of "dignity" becomes a personal victory that is guaged by one's belief (or fidelity) in his "performance" of his "role", a victory of insistence upon "self" in "environment". Willy Loman's dignity is earned through his adamant belief in his rightful role, as well as his right to personal dignity which should (and therefore will) be attained. In contrast, Didi and Gogo remain fidel to their "performative" functions. Personal dignity (or personal ideas of self) are strengthened through a paradox of role-play. Didi and Gogo's routine mocking Pozzo and Lucky is one that is borne out of good humour, but also of self-aware mockery. Mockery because it defines a position of the absurd (of which Lucky and Pozzo embrace) which they are unable to accept, and self-aware because it is this act of rebellion that reciprocally defines who they are. Didi and Gogo's tragedy lies not in an absence of self-awareness. On the contrary, it could be seen that it is their inability to express or to deal with their self-awareness in any logically reasonable language. Self-awareness is a threshold which they have come to pass, and having breached that stage of meaning, their conundrum is one that asks: "where do we go from here?" and "what meaning is there beyond the search for self-awareness?" This confoundement becomes a recurrent theme of the play, from Lucky's "think" tirade to Pozzo's blind laments. However, Beckett's protagonists nonetheless preserve dignity by a conscious deferrment of their condition much in the way Willy Loman refuses to acknowledge his. Their insistence upon the salvation and Godot reflects a condition that does not necessarily signify hope, but a necessary illusion that allows them to survive the absurdity of life and its increasing meaninglessness, much in the way games, humour and performance serve their purposes.

The salesman's ultimate pitch

Though there are many interpretations on how Willy "selling himself" works as an active metaphor for the play on "Death of a Salesman", arguably the tragedy lies in the heart of the individual Willy attempts to sell himself to. Through the play, Willy seeks assurance from the individuals he reckons to embody success: Uncle Ben, Dave Singleman and Charley. However, his attempts to sell himself to convince them is in faith of convincing himself of his rightful status and place in the world, his world. In essence, the tragedy is that Willy tries to sell himself to himself. As Miller argues, Willy's continual assertion of his actions are employed to verify the genuinity of himself. Willy questions Ben whether he has been teaching his sons the right lessons, and consecutively draws strength from Ben's reassurances. However, Willy's image of himself begins to deteriorate as his earlier certainties are met with furthering uncertainties: his posited promotion never takes place, Biff fails to live up to his imagined standards, etc. His greatest challenge of a sales pitch turns eventually turns towards himself as he begins to question his failures, yet in that act of denial, refuses to accept his condition and finds desperate gestures and means to convince himself that success is lurking around the corner. Towards the end of the play after Biff and Willy's heightened confrontation (and partial reconciliation), Willy completely ignores his earlier statements of Biff's ineptitudes and Biff's vocal revelations about his limited self, blurts "that boy is going to be magnificent!", resonating with echoes of "I was right!" when Willy confides in Ben about his parental insecurities. Willy spirals into ridiculous obsession with his beliefs, belief that he is making the right decisions, belief that his actions will be carried forward by Biff, belief that by one act of sacrifice, he can put all his hopes and dreams into motion. His final sale pitch to himself is therefore not a sale in itself, but a barter. A life in exchange for the riches of eternal hope in the "dark jungle" where delusions and denial are irrelevant concepts.

Text meets Texture Halfway

From the dynamic series of monologues that open Hell Meets Henry Halfway, Maya, played by the vivacious Sarah Stanford closes her opening banter with a statement that seals the fate of an otherwise explosive piece of theatre. Wedged in a claustrophobic train carriage, she lashes through a verbal tirade of her own decaying sexuality that culminates in an exhausted throwaway: “Stupid words.”

As Maya hints, words are both the sustenance and downfall of performance: when are words enough for the audience to marry text and character in the same plane, and when does it fail? Hell Meets Henry Halfway is ambitiously wordy, and as both Quinn Bauriedel (playing Maya’s tennis coach, Walchak) and Stanford admit, it is the first time Pig Iron Theatre Company has embarked on such a text-heavy production. Pig Iron Theatre Company has otherwise been known as proponents of rapturous physical theatre. Most of its members hail from Ecole Internationale de Theatre Jacques Lecoq, an institution after Jacques Lecoq famed for his research into mime, clowning and “neutral mask” technique. Strong physical characterisation is expected from a troupe of such repute (Bauriedel was an immediate student of Lecoq), and the company did not disappoint, delivering with self-assured aplomb. Characters were crafted with definite eclecticism, as well as the occasional defects. Dr. Petar Hincz (played by Michael Crane), for example, sported a wasted ankle whilst James Sugg triumphed as the mentally challenged Ballboy, Jon.

Hell Meets Henry can be reinterpreted as an experiment onstage as much as it is offstage. Within the confines of the rehearsal room, Hell Meets Henry represents the company’s attempt to find a new theatrical language through first-time collaboration with writer Adriano Shaplin of The Riot Group. The conversation between physical and textual eloped to an onstage experiment that questions the sufficiency (or insufficiency) of communication, framed through loose associations with Witold Gombrowicz’s 1939 novel, Posessed. The production races through the absurd, revolving about opportunistic secretary Henry (Dito van Reigersberg) in service to Prince (Mary McCool). Henry struggles with his mundane attendance of the Prince in secret hope he will bequeath his castle to him when he passes. Meanwhile, Henry’s denial about his failing marriage to Maya is further exacerbated when she becomes more engaged in Walchak, her tennis coach, than she is with his illusions. The castle’s latest guest, the dubious Dr. Hincz sides with the Prince and threatens to undo his ambitions.

Hell Meets Henry stumbles through the messy substance of words and communication. The theme of miscommunication and the slippery nature of understanding are tirelessly reiterated. Maya rails in exasperation that her body, represented as a textual instrument, has become “a difficult curriculum, […] illegible”. Her boredom is reflected as a double disappointment with her courtiers. Firstly, they are unable to ‘read’ her, and secondly, they fail to charm her with a language she desires and seeks. She admits:

“Lazy, lazy boys with poor vocabularies and poor judgement. … [H]alf-wit amateurs. Illiterate, lop-sided mouth-breathing teenagers. […] Nobody wants to be excellent anymore. Nobody tries hard enough to please me.”

In Maya, misunderstanding arises from a failure from the interpretation of text; her text extends beyond the sexual and into the psychological. However, none is able to grasp or speak her language. She seeks a new method of communication that entails a new form of abstraction. Walchak similarly shares her boredom of corporeal language, decrying the “same predictable, boring […] set of bullshit desires and petty opinions […] invented by retards who live in shit.” Walchak refers to explicit linguistic-mnemonic theory that seems a strangely ‘out-of-character’ experience, drawing attention to “opinions strung together by selective memory” and “chicken-scratch alphabets of unreason”. Both characters seem to slander at the insufficiency of classical linguistic modes of communication, providing a common space for both characters to invent their own narratives with respect to each other.

Likewise, Dr. Hincz contemplates the unstable marriage of belief and truth, himself embodying the dichotomy of science and its fickle truth. While he grants that “Nobody understands” his work, he warns Henry not to “collapse under the strain of scepticism” because “Mystery only learns to knock louder at the gates of a closed mind”. However, Hincz’s statement only serves to throw the apparent transparency of belief into further crisis: how fully are we allowed to believe what we see (or hear)? Hincz’s supposed embodiment of the scientific pillar of truth is further subverted when he misuses the word “avuncular” as an ill-meaning condition. When Henry replies that “Avuncular means ‘friendly’”, Hincz smugly assures: “That is not the way it sounds Mr. Kholavitsy, is it?” Arguably, Hincz offers one form of liberation from the semiotic crisis whereby the signifier is locked up by the signified. What a word means can be bypassed if text is returned to its basic pre-Structuralist elements. However, is it enough to save the characters in the play?

In the case of Maya and Walchak, however, it apparently fails, because both characters consistently try to read and out-read each other’s languages. Because meaning plays such a central role to the core of their competition, neither character can escape the escalating absurdity of which they are bound to. Maya and Walchak’s competition is crystallised in the physical realm through the premise of a tennis match, a competition that is founded upon their common boredoms. Their competition is also fuelled by the ability to make the other ‘feel’ or to disable (de-familiarise) the reality of the other that he or she gives in. Most disturbing is the way the bodies (or physical representations) of the characters try to ‘catch-up’ with the fast-emptying meanings of their discourse. In one of the most intense scenes of the play, Maya and Walchak hurl insults at each other within the confines of a wardrobe as they proceed to taunt each other into the act of sexual intercourse. Here, physical action betrays verbal intention: it appears that the textual context which gave rise to intercourse suddenly became discontinuous with the act altogether. However, the very nature of their competition depends on this ridiculous escalation of the absurd: losing means breaking out of the textual gridlock and acknowledging the physical, of which neither would concede to.

Contrastingly, monologues in Hell Meets Henry serve a different function, a permissible debilitation of meaning. Both Maya and Walchak’s opening monologues become increasingly abstract as they banter on, until they breach a certain threshold whereby word and noise nearly become indistinguishable, text is illegible and indecipherable. Words betray character, and words establish themselves as a source of their own, separable from the mouths of origin: “Everyone talks and talks and talks, spitting words from dry lips…” Perhaps at these thresholds where meaning is insufficient to support text and text is insufficient as a tool of expression, text undergoes a certain artistic objectification, to be viewed, tasted and examined as a work of art rather than a tool of communication. Fascinated by the incomplete structures of the castle, Hincz remarks to Henry:

“As you know, the men who built these dwellings frequently did so in an effort to satisfy artistic rather than architectural ambitions.”

In this, the play examines its own constructed nature, its comprising of text and meaning. In remembering its own functions as a means of theatrical performance, it treads the fine lines between what theatrical text means as a mean in itself versus text as an artistic end. It is where the seams of its own fiction reveal itself, and where the characters are helpless against it.

Plagued by a crisis in signification, Maya and Walchak propel themselves further into a free-play of actions and meaning, each of them daring the other to break the spell of the game that will bring the other back to reality. In a wrenching sequence, both Maya and Walchak engage in a series of verbal contradictions (the state of derision which has affected their discourse) that leads to Walchak tearing apart a tree squirrel. In that crisis, the Lacanian Symbolic (represented by the discourse of killing) collapses into the Real (the act of killing), driving both characters back into reality. Suddenly, the semiotic crisis is resolved, but with devastating circumstances that neither can bring themselves to acknowledge. Competition turns to blame in a heated exchange that picks up on the widening textual-physical divide:

Walchak: Why ask me then? Why ask for that? You’re sick.
Maya: YOU KILLED IT!
Walchak: YOU THOUGHT IT! I never would have thought it.
Maya: You MADE me think it. It’s what YOU would DO.
Walchak: YOU DON’T DESERVE TO LIVE. YOU DON’T DESERVE IT.
Maya: Who are you to judge?
Walchak: Nobody.
Maya: Nobody.

The violent reassertion of the “real event”, however, is short-lived. The inexpressible void left by Walchak’s heartless killing is similarly shared by Maya, both characters are implicated in the scheme of competition such that it would not have mattered who committed the actual killing. Perhaps word takes on a vivid life of its own, forcing characters to become prisoners of their own thoughts. The cruelty of text as an incarcerating device echoes of Jacques Derrida’s own assertions that there is “nothing outside text”. In this system of textual provocation, both Maya and Walchak are powerless to the whims of their texts. However, it is their attempts to reconcile “event” and “text” that leads them almost inevitably towards their own fate fore-crafted by their own texts. In the end, their competition drives them to accept ridiculous ends, each dragging their bodies impaled along a javelin closer together to stop living. Here there is a desperate reversal along the narrative of the absurd. No longer able to transform the event with text, both try to label the event (death) as it occurs, finding fetishism in a new and even more absurd form of competition:

Walchak: Stop breathing.
Maya: Stop moving.
Walchak: Stop trying.
Maya: Stop talking.
(They collapse. Blackout)

Neither can bring themselves to acknowledge death impending, so they fend it off through mock instructions, in hopeful delight that text will produce their desired outcome of the other. For once in the play, communication and interpretation are reconciled, but are reconciled with one catch: the death of text.

Kaprow's "Impurity": a theoretical stain?

Invoking the works of Modernists Mondrain, Stout, Pollock and Newman, Kaprow attempts to classify Modernist agendas through the lens of purity/impurity. As Kaprow reasons, the functional language of Modern art is vast; the purity/impurity binary should suffice to sustain “an adequate critical language” (27), or so he proposes. The fundamental problem of the purity/impurity dichotomy, as Kaprow himself admits, is one that is semantic. Firstly, the purity/impurity complex is one that is not dichotomous. Rather, their relationship is one that is intertwined and inter-informed:

“The two ideas involve one another, one takes its meaning from the implicit denial of the other, and neither can exist in fact without invoking the shades of its opponent.” (28)

Kaprow draws reference to an advent of interest in Eastern philosophy, and it is easy to see how Han dynastic conceptions of yin-yang polar opposites consume and support each other the way the impure/pure paradox is developed. In this essential conceptual paradox, it therefore follows that neither purity nor impurity are pure idea-manifestations of themselves. The proposed “pure” in Modernist art must therefore always be interpreted against the background (or the present-void-of) its binary opposite (and vice versa).

Secondly, the pure/impure complex is one that is epistemological, and therefore almost nearly relativistic. Kaprow’s lengthy discussion of the attributes of the pure and impure is worryingly sensuous, and therefore individual. His allegories of “pure” to related concepts such as “uncontaminated … unweakened … formal … chastity … cleanliness … [etc.]” (28) suggest a very personal episteme of the pure/impure binary; flimsy structures that recall instable concepts of “beauty” and “romanticism”. It is the assumption of the latter that is perhaps most dangerously condemning, and it continues throughout his essay unchecked. Ultimately what surfaces is a very personal reading of a set of works artfully placed together by virtue of the author’s choice in order to enlighten the reader with his set of discoveries through careful rhetoric.

Kaprow attempts to reinforce his assertions through careful selections from an expansive canon of Modernist Art, both “Classical” (if I may permit myself to use the term), and works produced nearer to the time of the article’s print. It seems that Kaprow invites us to use our intuitive devices to fathom works of arts, and apparently come to the same distant conclusions of an eloquent erudite. In the case of Barnett Newman, Kaprow cuts through the thick of Barnett’s critics, persuading us to view his works with “reasoning [that] is more intuitive…” (40) rather than “historical and analytic”. Two further problems arise from that proposition with regard to Newman.
Firstly, Kaprow’s reading of Newman’s Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1950-51) indicates a sense of presentational unity through its alignment to the impure/pure paradox, comprised of “unequal but equivalent forces.” (43) However, the viewer, devoid of the pure/impure paradigm, might just as easily bypass Kaprow’s esoteric interpretation of equivalent artistic tensions. In fact, Kaprow’s own elucidation of the nature of Newman’s work incorporates several interpretive swerve points that deflect from numerous possible interpretive paths a viewer might chose to take. Here Kaprow also makes an assumption regarding the status of his imagined viewer, imagining him as one that is steeped in the traditions of art in order to appreciate the pure/impure complex. Furthermore, one may also propose that Kaprow’s own exposition about the interconnectivity of binary opposites collapses in his own argument at this point, since there is a secondary-order binary opposite: that of the [pure/impure] binary versus the [other established forms of critical reasoning]. Each informs the other, and hence Kaprow’s own evaluations cannot be attained by the lay-spectator without having grasped one polar end of the secondary binary.

This, in turn, points to a second problem: the implicit (hidden) necessity for precisely the “historic and analytic” paradigms of which Kaprow suggests sidestepping. The “historic” and the “intuitive”, therefore, inflect off each other in a process which Kaprow tries to hint at, but fails to acknowledge fully. In outlining the very process of “seeing art”, Kaprow describes the necessary:

“[S]low march of … [the viewer’s] eyes and body before the canvas. The accent is really on our sensations.” (43)

However, the real accent is on the act of our senses encountering Newman’s work. In actuality, Kaprow’s observations are primarily phenomenological in nature without him fully acknowledging it. His insights into ways of looking at a work of art is largely centred about how the limited faculties of human subjects try to accommodate the alien phenomenon of “art” that is present before them, and how their other faculties (memory, knowledge, experience…etc) serve to inform, inflect or manipulate that conjugative experience. The “meaning of the work” (43) of which Kaprow speaks of, is therefore dependent entirely upon the condition of reception.

Once the condition of phenomenology is made central, we can therefore speak of the Modern in Art as an invitation to new ways of “seeing”. Inevitably, one work of art will relate to the next; one’s subconscious faculties search for meaning through repetition, memory, mimesis et al. To Kaprow, simply glancing is not enough to absorb a work. The aesthetic experience involves contemplation that navigates between the pure/impure fissures. In observing “everything that is not immobilized” (31) in Piet Mondrain’s Composition 2 (1922), the fissure yields a “tabula rasa” and an aesthetic experience that serves to further alienate the “pure” through the “impurity” of the viewer (i.e. his limited faculties). In Myron S. Stout’s Untitled (No. 3) (1956), the immediacy of his shapes widen Mondrain’s art-pure, viewer-impure divide. In Jackson Pollock’s compositions, pure/impure rhythms are sustained through visual unity and a sensation of controlled equilibrium between explosive and implosive forces. In Barnett Newman’s Vir Heroicus Sublimis, purity and impurity play off each other to create a homogenous composition.

As a primer, the pure/impure binary system can do no further than highlight material elements in a work. On a phenomenological level, however, it is up to the viewer to construct the levels of meaning on which he is willing to operate and view the art. Without rigorously acknowledging this basic paradox, Kaprow opens himself up to an eternal free-play of interpretation, and his developed insights reveal themselves to be no more than inspired discourse based on cataleptic sensations.

Duchamp, Danto: the object in art

The use of terms to describe Art appears challenged. For one, Danto himself refutes “postmodernism” as a descriptive label, offering the term “post-historical” to describe the aesthetics of Contemporary art after Modernism. His reasons are equally confounding:

“[P]erhaps “postmodernism” was too strong a term, to closely identified with a certain sector of contemporary art.”

Here, we uncover two differing crisis at hand that have been misinterpreted as one. Firstly, we have the crisis of temporality: the crisis that styles or intentional categories of art outlive their labels. For example, “Modern” art has ceased to denote a state of art produced “now”. Secondly, this gives rise to a crisis of semiotics, or the crisis of the functions of the signifier and the signified. The functions of “Modernism” as a label had outlived its original temporal function, and, as Danto reveals, developed to embody “a stylistic meaning and a temporal meaning”.

Such was the crisis similar in the Contemporary in art, a description of an artistic consciousness that transcends “what is happening now”, to a term that “has come to mean an art produced within a certain structure of production”. The Contemporary in art, according to Danto, no longer identifies with modern art created by contemporaries today. Rather, is a state or condition that reflects “a period of information disorder” and of “perfect aesthetic entropy” that eloped from the binds of Modernism. “Contemporary” has come to signify the liberating paroxysmal in Art after Modernism, a “post” situation that has come to signify a lack of artistic unity, a release from its own existential crisis. Likewise, this release has affected the traditional role of the Object of Art as an actual ‘real’ material construct, drawing attention to the conceptual role of the Object rather than the Object-in-itself in a prepared artistic encounter.

In this light, Dadaist Marcel Duchamp’s controversial “Readymades” (works of art derived from al-ready pre-manufactured commodities) places the very idea of the “object of art” in jeopardy. Two of his famous works Fountain and Bicycle Wheel present the viewer with commonplace objects that occupy a space set-aside for artistic display. Fountain presents the viewer with a porcelain urinal, a vulgar gesture made at preexistent notions of artistic beauty signed off by the Duchamp under a pseudonym “R. Mutt”. Bicycle Wheel consists simply of a bicycle fork inverted and screwed upside down onto a white stool. Duchamp seems to slander at preconceived notions of aesthetic objects, perhaps hinting at the evanescent quality and constructed-ness of beauty and aesthetics itself. Interestingly so, Duchamp denies creating Bicycle Wheel with a categorical sense of the Readymade as a stylistic gesture. He acknowledges:

“The Bicycle Wheel is my first Readymade, so much so that at first it wasn’t even called a Readymade. It still had little to do with the idea of the Readymade.”

Duchamp’s own artistic process reveals a central concept of the Contemporary in art and the aesthetic experience: that which Danto points at a “turn from sense experience to thought […] to philosophy”. There is a clear separation between the creation of Art and the contemplation of Art, a separation that both legitimizes all Contemporary art and leaves the experience of Art wholly upon the shoulders of the viewer.

As with Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box, Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain is thoroughly indistinguishable from the common urinal, save the artist’s signature. Even so, the gesture of signing that functions to legitimize art and attribute it to a sense of an artistic authorial stamp of approval (a renaissance concept) is sabotaged. “R. Mutt” is but a fictional persona, created to lead the spectator to retrace the act of creation to a bogus source of origin, a source that is of and imagined by the viewer himself. In a certain way, Duchamp “disowns” his work, perhaps even inviting the viewer to take artistic ownership over the commodity. Encounter leads to an establishment for contemplation and discourse. Danto thus describes the functions of the Contemporary artist:

“[Contemporary Art] had delivered itself of a burden it could now hand over to the philosophers to carry. And … [contemporary artists] were free to make art in whatever way they wished, for any purposes at all.”

Objects of Contemporary Art are likewise liberated from the Artists’ hand; any object placed under the conditions of “Art” could pass off as such. The job of the Contemporary artist is therefore not to present, but to set-up the conditions for an Artistic-encounter that is central to the viewer. However, the Contemporary in Art has to tackle with yet another outstanding issue, that of aestheticism, or the “aura” of Art as postulated by Walter Benjamin. Without consistency or standards, how does one judge, criticize, evaluate or appreciate Contemporary art? How does one experience the metaphysical aesthetics central of art? Perhaps it is in the amorphous quality of the imagined (or projected) object of art which is prepared for viewing, or simply the evaluation of an art-viewer encounter. Even more possible is the conferring of the aesthetic quality by virtue of the presentation of an object of Art, such as Duchamp’s Readymades, so the work is, in essence, the event of presentation in itself. Presentational conditions ‘confer’ an artistic aura upon the object (for example, Duchamp’s urinal), opening it up to new platforms of viewing, new angles of contemplation and new ways of interpreting. Bathed in these conditions, Duchamp’s urinal ceases to be a urinal, but a point locality for discourse and interpretation, a point locality set-up for an encounter.

Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel establishes such an encounter. And whilst the artist suggests his ‘reading’ from his personal encounter with his work (making references to the cyclic movement mimicking dancing flames in a fireplace), Contemporary objects of art are open to multiple readings that are mutually exclusive to that of the artist’s. Bicycle Wheel sets out to explore different encounter-pairs: wheel/stool, presentation/interpretation, immobility/mobility and so on and so forth. However, these encounter-pairs are secondary constructs in which the viewer assembles through the fundamental art/viewer encounter.

Once the object of Art is encountered, its material set-up of the encounter loses its purpose. Like the urinal, the wheel and the stool, these materials return to the corporeal non-aesthetic realm. In the minds of the viewer, however, the material undergoes a sea-change through the encounter; the physical transcends into the sensuous into the cognitive and conceptual. Viewer becomes artist, Art becomes idea. In shaping an encounter, Duchamp inevitably surrenders all ownership of artistic aestheticism because the work does not draw towards itself, but draws towards the viewer and his past-histories. The contemporary artist constructs the parameters of the encounter, the viewer steps in to fill that void; the history of art displaces its burden of aesthetic interpretation onto the tools of the history of the viewer

Avro Part: Aliinale

Much of the simplicity immediately apparent in Arvo Pärt’s Aliinale (For Alena) sheds away at the general clutter of music the 21st century listener is already accustomed to receiving. And yet, in the construction of careful tonal parameters for the short work of 14 measures, Pärt seems to be able to unlock new platforms for communication, and even perhaps a jest at the traditions of three-part counterpoint. Moreover, Pärt seems to further assemble a dimension separate from musical time and space; somewhere at their intersections does Aliinale appear to illuminate the poetical imagined space opened by the possibilities of dialogue. This elopes even though the melodic conversation of its separate ‘narratives’ are affixed to its all-too-visceral parameters of regular note increments, tonic components and scale. The idea that thought and concept (of music) is inseparable from the discourse of itself that validates it as such can be examined through the ambiguous intentionality of its title “for Alena” (presumably an association of the composer’s) as a congregating point for discourse and the way which the musical narrative informs (or is informed) by it. Pitch and temporal space are greatly exaggerated between first and second voices, whilst the tonal centre is reiterated subliminally via an opening B sounded in the third voice: a possible ‘voice of reason’ or ‘voice of corporeality’ that sustains about two-thirds through the piece. Though the third voice eventually recedes into the tonal background as a home-key signifier, an important sonic and visual turning point occurs in the 5th beat of measure 11. The sostenuto pedal is released and the home-bound reminder disappears suddenly, leaving the nearly-contrapuntal interlude between the first two voices hanging in mid-air. The held C# - F# perfect fourth scintillates for the first time as if anew, emancipated from its previous measures of condemning harmonic inflexibility. In this moment, the dialogue transforms, their relationship evolves as if bathed under new light as both intertwining organum reach a new state of coexistent independence. Visually, Pärt sketches in a flower, perhaps a tribute to the folly of love taking flight, ascertaining the opened possibilities of new harmonies. The function of the third voice disappears totally for the remaining 4 measures of the piece, although the upper two voices continue to echo it’s presence as a ghost-fundamental, attempting to reach a closure by a progressive diminution of notes in each consecutive measure. However, the dialogue cannot seem to find closure in an absence of conditions that once sustained it. The melodic fragments seem to become simpler, nostalgic, searching for the basic elements that gave rise to its release. Arguably, the event of release reveals itself as jouissance, a bare folly of its constituting elements. In an attempt to find closure, the dominant mathematical progression trumps itself, and the upper voices increase to 3 notes in the last measure, seeking irresolution and the possibility of new unexplored dialogue as a compromise to finality.

Beauty/Beast/Binaries

It can be suggested that the structural binary of beauty/beast is best distilled in The Singing Ringing Tree, which is in itself a melting pot of various folk and fairy tales. Threads of The Winter Rose (248), The Singing Springing Lark (88) (of which the film title bears curious resemblance to) and Snow White and Rose Red (161) are found in the stories, accompanied by dramatic transfigurations of animals or beasts into perfectly charming royal suitors. Initial conflict is necessary, for in the genre of exaggerated fantasy, the ending is all the more extravagantly satisfying.

The Singing Ringing Tree is no exception, and its protagonist is immediately thrown into conflict. The Prince turns to tragic hero, and waits upon the reciprocity of the stubborn Princess as his only salvation back to a human-like form. In the film, his insistence upon laying claim to the princess is therefore easily forgiven by the pity we feel for him. Similarly in The Winter Rose and Beauty and the Beast, the deference of the Prince by his beast-like appearance is temporarily subverted by a “magical device” linked to the Prince that reveals his true inner-beauty. For The Singing Ringing Tree, that device is the tree itself, as is the Rose to The Winter Rose and Beauty and the Beast. Here, inner-beauty/outer-beauty cross pollinates: The beauty (of the Prince’s true form) is deferred within the plant, of which the female protagonist feels strongly attracted to. Hence it is not totally a symbolic reference to beautiful ladies and their affinity to beautiful apparatus, but also a hinting at the female’s intrinsic recognition of the Prince’s true inner beauty through his singular possession. In The Singing Ringing Tree, the role of the “rose” (or the tree) is used as a rhetorical double paradox, a hidden joke, since it is the ugly inward nature of the Princess that desires the plant for its magical (beauteous) properties, properties that are reflected in the prince but betrayed by his ugliness. However, the paradox is never really fully satisfied, because the tree’s magical properties are tied to the Princess’ true love for the Prince.

The beauty/beast binary also functions in the relationship between the Princess and the (transfigured) Prince, and only through the destruction of the paradox can the spell be broken. In other words, the beauty/beast paradigm has to be transcended: either outward beast overcome by inward beauty or outward beauty is overcome, revealed by inward beast. The latter is best personified by the princess who comes to recognise the true nature of inner-beauty when her inner and outer appearance are forced coexist in the same plane due to a nasty magic trick. In order for this visual or verbal play to be fully successful, the polarity of beauty/beast has to be stretched far enough to elicit an unsettling enough response in order to culminate in a satisfying closure.

In the case of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, we find ourselves one step closer to the blurring of beauty/beast boundaries, but not in the same way as The Singing Ringing Tree. Bearing closer resemblance to The Winter Rose and Beaumont’s Beauty and the Beast, Belle, the female protagonist, represents the ideal maiden, flawless and selfless to take the place of her father even in death, not unlike Grimm’s heroine in The Singing Springing Lark. However, aided by colourful cartoon theatrics and hum-along theme songs, the distance that separates notions of Beauty and Beast is diminished. Angst-ridden and thoroughly human, Disney’s careful graphics soften the harsh features of the Beast, making him a rather charming archetype of his own kind instead of a representational antithesis. The humanisation of the Beast inevitable dampens the initial shock the viewer has to endure between such incompatible extremes, thereby “romancing” the idea of diversity and the binary.

Conceptually, Beauty/Beast endures because it embraces the very kernel central to the novelty of the story. However, in contouring the film to make the Beast appeal to younger audiences (or to boost post-premiere sales of action figurines), the Beast fails to live up to its reputations. This casts a very solemn message, that from the start, Beauty and the Beast were meant to be together because they were made (or sketched) to be together. What this consequently affects is the reconciliation of the Beast with his true appearance, where inner-beauty reflects outer-beauty faithfully once more. Something of his new charm is lost in the destruction of the beast because his metamorphosis is not earned aesthetically. In fact, the child may just as well pine for the demise of the Beast in the metamorphosis of him into his human form.

Arguably, Dreamwork’s immensely popular movie Shrek threatens to offer a postmodernist reading of the classic Beauty/Beast binary, by completely doing away with it and embracing the possibilities beyond the established Fairy Tale meta-narratives previously embraced. It shamelessly flaunts its own pastiche, breaking down the page-barrier that divides separate fairy tales into a conjugate space that fills to encompass the wide-spectrum of well-known characters. Within ten minutes of a scene, recognisable characters such as the three blind mice, the three little pigs, the three bears… etc. fills the limits of the audience’s mind with their presence onscreen. Also, Shrek disables the fairy-tale-child boundary with brusque references that are cheekily adult. Phallic symbolism abounds everywhere not just as subtext but as a literal joke skirted about the corners. In one sequence, Shrek jokes that Farquhar’s ridiculously tall building was”compensating for something”. Later, excited by images of Princess Fiona, Lord Farquhar hastily checks beneath his blanket. Even well known anthems and tunes are thrown into this potpourri of a movie that seeks to deconstruct the bastions between popular culture.

The ultimate subversion of the Beauty/Beast binary occurs in a final twist involving Princess Fiona’s transfiguration, apparently into her beautiful self once again. However, upon recovering, Princess Fiona revives to discover her “beautiful self” was actually her form as an ogre. This disrupts the entire system of Beauty and its assumed conditions, whilst remaining faithful to the narrative structure of the fairy tale, one that espouses a “happy ending”. The whole “Beauty” system becomes incorporated into the structures of “Beast”, represented by Shrek and the image of the Ogre. Instead of eliminating the binary, Beauty/Beast’s incorporation into each other forms a third paradigm, one that is composed of both, yet even more satisfying that that of The Singing Ringing Tree. In the latter, the final transfiguration of the prince is anticipated, and is played right into the expectations of the viewer. In Shrek, however, anticipation is fulfilled by pulling the rug from under the viewer’s expectation. There is a reiteration of the initial shock of the Beauty/Beast combination, for now absolute beauty has been displaced by the film’s constructed notions of absolute Beast, but it immediately resolves itself because the original Beauty/Beast binary is not sustained. Rather, both characters are compatible for each other and true love transcends language games that build notions of beauty and ugliness: an ending truly satisfying for the viewer.

DEFA's Rumpelstiltskin; co author: Jeff

It isn’t often that a literary work is afforded the opportunity to observe and review a cinematic translation of one of our most treasured styles of the medium, the Fairy Tale. Whilst the fairy tale as a specific type of short fiction has very direct characteristics which are difficult to modify to the cinematic screen, “Rumpelstiltskin” proved to be no exception. This film proved itself to be a sufferable version of one of the most beloved Grimm classics of the same name, failing mainly in its blunting of the mature, darker style of Grimm, and in its weak production value.

While most may not be familiar with the original tale of “Rumpelstiltskin”, the collective work of Jacob and Willem Grimm (better known as the Brothers Grimm) occupy a sizeable portion of the fairy tale canon; nary a child (or adult) can forget the magical whimsicality of “Little Red Riding Hood” or “Hansel and Gretel”. At the heart of any tale spun by the Brothers Grimm is usually a wry sense of sardonic humour, pomp and over-the-top exaggeration of the absurd: qualities that turn a witty eye upon the nature of man. One may well argue that the very value in the Brothers Grimm’s body of work was precisely this caustic presentation of tales that take no shame in representing the world in all its dirt. It is here where that the filmic version of “Rumpelstiltskin” decided to cut around the corners, trimming off the absurd fat that plagued the original tale with such delicious decadence. In pursuit of the presentable, the film became but a faded image of its former self: the film is safe; but much too safe for comfort. What resulted was a petty moral reminder, a knife without edge, and fable that seemed to drag its feet through the some seventy-minutes of its length, devoid of the wicked imagination it was born out of.

Without its former characteristic Grimm-bite, the production could have made amends in its faithful representation of fantasy. However, expectations fall short where production value is concerned. Grimm’s spacious Kingdom is conveniently compacted to occupy the humble dwellings of a sparsely furnished court and the castle dungeons, devoid of wealth in its cheeks. Hans’ journeys revolve around a claustrophobically small mill house, locking the panoramic angle of the camera to awkward, often disjoint positions. Scene transitions are accomplished by screening the camera lens with a translucent panel that swings annoyingly into view: it would have been better that the camera was submerged into a bowl of water. Overall, the fantastical land of an imagined Kingdom turned up flat, constructed, cold and sterile on screen. Words of black ink would have held grander facades than the film’s meagre attempts at pomp. Cinematography, as a result, is restricted to the basic elements of film-capturing. The vacillation between camera angles were ill-paced to momentum of onscreen narrative, resulting in jarring pacing irregularities that forfeited rather than salvaged any last attempts at slapstick.

Similarly, the characters crafted were lacklustre representatives of stereotypes. While the invention of Hans (the incipient use of his vantage point) and an exploration of Kunz and Marie as characters added another layer to the original tale, none of the characters were fleshed fully enough to trace a visible character-journey. Besides the Prince’s change of heart (a soporific “sea-change” heightened by his apparent onscreen indifference), all other characters adopted an incidental approach to their personalities, personalities dictated neither by motive nor by intention, but by the very audible voices of their scriptwriters.

What the film did achieve, however, was a laudable attempt to breathe life into “Rumpelstiltskin”, the tale’s most enigmatic character. While the Grimm’s tale paints him as a one-sided gnome (unpredictable nonetheless), who tears himself into two in the end, filmic “Rumpelstiltskin” carries the burden of the ‘rejected man’ from a society that fosters strong materialistic undertones. His reasons for rejecting mankind become entwined with pre-materialist notions of values, and this becomes his motivation for wanting Marie’s child: to raise him away from the materialistic derisions of the ‘real world’. Filmic “Rumpelstiltskin” was well played, and possibly saved the show from plunging into drudgery. “Rumpelstiltskin’s” final parting moments with mankind gives rise to the film’s saccharine ending, but leaves a bitter aftertaste in the mouth that longs for something with more zing in flavour.

Otherwise, filmic “Rumpelstiltskin” mostly trips on itself along the fabled journey of storytelling. Mostly lifeless, music-less and convincingly helpless, its cardboard characters and plot fail to truncate the misery of seventy-odd minutes misspent.

The Princess Paradoxes

Of the numerous tales involving female protagonists and heroines, characterised females seem to be an extension of the physiological universe they occupy, as well as objects which personify the folkloric conception of femininity and the female gender. Objects such as the spindles, thimbles, wheels and kerchiefs refer almost immediately to the types of trade Teutonic females were well accustomed to. Also, they represent the precipitation of how men (who were characterised by their heroic functions in text) viewed woman and her personal spaces. Tools, garments and objects, to an extent, are the congealment of a social structure objectified; a unifying metaphor that recurs extensively in such tales.

Tales such as The Goose Girl (89), All Fur (65) and Brier Rose (50) draw reference to such objects, objects that occupy an important role in developing central themes. In The Goose Girl, the loss of her blood-blessed handkerchief severs strong maternal ties between the princess and her mother, allowing her chambermaid to exploit her helplessness. Symbolically and literally, the handkerchief can be read as the fruition of one’s trade. Although the Queen probably did not spin the cloth herself, she inscribes her ‘craftsmanship’ upon the item by staining it with three drops of her own blood, perhaps a casual reference to the spindle-prick central to Brier Rose. Blood and toil (or national undertones of blood and war) are ‘interwoven’ in the symbol of the kerchief in order to remind the princess of her origins. Hence, perhaps the loss of the kerchief opens up the possibility of forgetting, the potential of memory loss which the chamber maid seizes opportunity to ‘erase history’ (memory) and create a fictional destiny for herself.

Similar articles are employed in All Fur, who uses the symbolism of her golden miniatures (Ring, Spinning-Wheel and Reel) to alert to the King of her veiled royalty. Here, object symbolism works on two levels, mimetic object-subject and memory-projection. All Fur hints to the King of her ‘inner-royalty’, one that is characterised by the material gold as a mimetic representation of bloodline origins and roots. Similarly, the objects carry with them a memory of her former Kingdom, at the same time reinforcing her femininity and gender. All Fur chooses to abscond her former life with the objects explicitly referred to as “three of her precious possessions”, objects that imply the female working class of her Kingdom, suggesting All Fur as a higher archetype of the gender-class structure.

Usually when mimetic representation of inwardly beauty or royalty is not enough to support the magnitude of a given metaphor, nature as a living-object is turned to. Heroines that emanate with virtue in adverse circumstances are not uncommon threads in the tales, their inwardly beauty so outwardly affecting that natural elements such as trees, plants, animals and fruit react to their goodly sources. Snow White (53) exhibits such supernatural qualities with the animal kingdom, where “wild beasts darted by her … but did not harm her.” During the process of her funeral, “[s]ome animals came also and wept for Snow White.” Two Eyes from the tale One-Eye, Two-Eyes and Three-Eyes (130) receives help from a little goat. Likewise, her fruit tree only permitted fruits to be plucked by her, whereas the “branches and fruit drew back from [her sisters] … each time they tried to grab hold of them.” Apart from nature’s ‘confrontational’ qualities, nature also doubles up as a barometer for growth. In Brier Rose (50), Rose’s maturation is signalled by the termination of her 100-year slumber; it can be read that the flowers bloomed and the thicket of Brier “opened of their own accord” in response to the Prince’s timely arrival to ‘partake’ of that maturation.

The natural world, especially the animal kingdom can sometimes blur the pre-existent relationship between heroines and their furry friends. The distinction between beauty/beast becomes blurred and the natural world becomes a haven for damsels to adopt concealment and disguise. All Fur articulates this phenomenon, where beauty consciously decides to take the form of a wretched creature in order to hide her true identity. A ‘transfiguration’ takes place, one that is akin to the larger unifying thread concerning animal brides et al. Cinderella’s (21) transfiguration echoes similar in the way that ash dehumanises her the same way All Fur’s coat animalises. Animalistic concealment is also employed in The Goose Girl at the Spring (179), the Goose Girl adopting a wearable ‘skin’ that was “ugly as sin”. Though not strictly animalistic, it could be suggested the Goose Girl fulfils her mother’s belief that she had been eaten by “wild animals”, since she is ‘consumed’ by an appearance of the wild.

For All Fur, The Goose Girl at the Spring, Maid Maleen (198), The White Bride and the Black Bride (135) and Cinderella, much conflict and interest in narrative is worked around the concealment of true identity, and the steps at which the story undertakes leading to disclosure. In The Goose Girl at the Spring, All Fur and Cinderella, true identity is deferred by means of disguise of various degrees. At the most extreme end, All Fur’s disguise revokes human appearance, and is manifested as beast. At the other end, Cinderella’s disguise is as skin deep as the ash she rubs on her face to elude her prince. However, in all accounts, disguise transforms from means to a vice. Each protagonist becomes slave to the means of disguise, and seems to be unable to shed off their false double life in front of their intended suitors. All Fur retreats routinely to her life of slavery, Goose Girl to her pastoral matters and Cinderella to her sisters.

Although one could suggest that these women willingly partake in a game of their own leisure and become intrigued (or amused) by their own acts of deception, one also could read it as an act of salvation, a self-perpetuated invitation for the male protagonist to participate and finish the narrative. For All Fur, her disguise has become such a vice of her former life that she is unable to shirk off her cloak without feeling vulnerable to her father’s advances. All Fur presents a paradox: the single object that links her to the memory of her father’s incestuous tendencies has become her only form of protection, as a child to security blanket. In order to exist independent of the coat, she needs a preceding male figure to occupy the symbolic realm of the phallic which her father once occupied. Thus, she is able to shed of the coat at times in order to communicate with the other King, but has to retreat into her other life once the ball is over. Only by an act of violent force of the other (the King seizes her arm and tears off her coat) can she reconcile both her past and present identities and accept the King as the rightful replacement of her father. Without an action perpetuated by the King, the act of revelation would be meaningless as it fails to address the former symbolic occupant (her father). Gender-bound, All Fur cannot save herself without a male protagonist to complete the act. Similarly, Goose Girl is wound up by the circumstances of her banishment that her skin serves as a shield from the world she was ousted. Only can a male occupant from that symbolic realm re-invite her into her proper place as princess. For Cinderella, the device of her undoing (the shoe) is capitalised by the prince who spreads pitch on the stairs, who then relieves her of a life of filial-bound disenchantment.