Les machines désirantes au contraire ne
cessent de se détraquer en marchant, ne marchent que détraquées.
(Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, L'anti-Œdipe)
"Dancing on Ashes (Amsterdam)" and "Dancing on Ashes (Fascinus)" operate
as a diptych within the series of the six Dancing
on Ashes performances proposed in Stuttgart and Berlin between December
2009 and June 2011 (each performance is connected with all the other performances),
and they contribute to a narrative and conceptual whole in conjunction with many
other works using different media – videos, posters, installations, websites, a
novel –, all gathered in the transmedia project Angel Meat).
Both
performances started from a duchampian meditation
on art and desire from the perspective of fetishism. They depict female
characters facing objectified desire and the objects of desire – sometimes
themselves – brought to the extreme, until they’ve become vital and
metaphysical issues for the protagonists. These characters are not embodied on
stage by actors and the depicted situations are not performed, but told through
a sequenced narrative text projected in the performance space. The performances
are based on two forms of historical modern ritualized erotic entertainment:
cabaret and rock concert, highly stylized and reduced to their most immediate and
sensitive expression. This rooting into entertainment collides with the contemplative
narrative device – that is actually the active medium of this series of
performances, proposing an investigation of the cathartic experience of
collective reading, questioning stage performance as much as literature in its extended
field.
Dancing on Ashes (Amsterdam) is actually a
performance-installation in which there are no live performers at all, but
music machines (self-playing piano and guitar, sampler...) generating a random
and hypnotic music, the projected text and the video of an Amsterdam-style
erotic stand-up comedy number (performed by Ines Birkhan). The text tells the
story of Yu, a young dancer who, after learning that she enters the terminal phase
of a neurodegenerative disease, decides to live as intensely as possible before
her forthcoming death. Having spent her childhood in the Red Light District of Amsterdam in a relative indifference toward
the local sex industry, she starts a quest of self-dispossession by abandoning
herself to the endless fascination offered by sex shops and sex shows1,
and eventually discovers the Dancing on
Ashes cabaret – the core of the fictional universe of Angel Meat.
Dancing on Ashes (Fascinus) is a in situ performance conceived for the glass room of WKV in Stuttgart, taking mainly the form
of a rock concert played behind a glass wall on which the text is projected. It
tells the ambiguous encounter between two of the main characters of Angel Meat: Skullface, a Berlin jeweller
with a complex background revealed by a morbid facial tattoo, and Alicja, a
collector and manipulative erotomaniac with twisted designs. The band assembled
for the occasion (with the special participation of drummer Marco Barotti)
plays a noisy, violent and de-constructed jazz-rock. The music being stifled by
the glass wall, it was possible to conciliate the contemplation needed to dive
into reading and the vibrant and cathartic energy specific to amplified live
music2.
The stories of Dancing on Ashes (Amsterdam) and Dancing on Ashes (Fascinus) take place
in a world dominated by fetishism. A society that requires an absolute
credulity and the constant acceptance of a fictional interface to keep
functioning. Every day, television, advertising, news, politics and religions
ask us to believe in a myriad of fictions, often improbable, if not
contradictory. Human desires always have been perverted and reattached on
artificial objects – it is a constant of human societies, if not a prerequisite
–, but our techno-scientist society systemized the process with technological and
intellectual logistics beyond anything that has ever existed. Art and eroticism
are probably the only areas in which fetishism is assumed, claimed, cogitated
and therefore can be mastered and applied to the benefit of humanity. Only there,
the latent conflict between man and man-made productions can recede, the threats
exerted on man by anything meant to increase his own power are subjugated by
surrendering joy.
These
performances fed without doubt on Georges Bataille’s notion of Eroticism, but more than half a century
after it had been a central issue of the surrealist intellectual and artistic vortex,
the relation of our society to sexuality has profoundly changed3.
They also playfully rely on another central object of the investigations of the
early 20th century avant-gardes which are still today's art basis:
mechanical eroticism. But everything has been reversed, there is no need anymore
to use the euphemisms of the Bachelor Machine, the Chocolate Grinder or the
Carving Machine to evoke the ecstatic union of man and machine fantasized at
the dawn of modernism, and the fascinating dildo of the ancient poetess or the
faraway geisha has become the commonplace birthday gift sold at the drugstore. No
more ecstasy or panic, but new questions about how and where intimacy and art
meet – in desire.
The game of
objectified desire requires that human and in-human exchange roles again and
again until the distinction becomes irrelevant. In (Amsterdam), the self-playing instruments don’t need human musicians,
they are activated by strings and electric fans (like Roussel’s elemental music
machines), they are puppets – like the talking dildos manipulated by the
Comedian for her farcical number, but also like Yu trying to get rid of her ego
and become a mere image to escape the feeling of a stone statue growing inside
her. In (Fascinus), the musicians
wearing the cliché costumes and make-up of two-dimensional rock idols perform
behind a glass wall, like the erotic objects in a window (or the prostitutes of
Amsterdam) that Skullface exhibits in an art fare, and all the characters
display strong artificial interfaces – a facial tattoo for Skullface, heavy
jewels and stereotype behaviour for Alicja… Objects and images actually play
with the people more than the contrary, but it is not a power game, it’s a
practice of selfless indifference leading to abstraction and serenity through
sated desire.
An early
concern while elaborating these performances was to generate emotion for the
audience through clearly artificial devices – literature, music, technology –
better than with theatrical empathy. The performers have no identifiable
features but wear iconic make-up and costumes, they only address the audience
through stereotyped behaviour – either stand-up comedy or rock concert – but
they manipulate objects that have immediate emotional impact, sometimes mixed –
like arousal, embarrassment or amusement with the sex toys handled by the
Comedian, or excitement or rejection with the music (a combination of phasing
complex rhythms, atypical time signatures, distorted sounds, screams and chaotic
soundscapes, that one could describe as ‘math-noise’). But all this is supposed
to happen only in the peripheral vision or as auditory stimulation – the most direct
emotional levels of perception – because the central device is the narrative
text, that has its own powerful way of conveying emotions, not only
psycho-physiologically, but as the central cultural element of Judaeo-Christian
civilisation.
In the stories told in the two performances –
fragments of a bigger narrative but meant to stand on their own –, like in real
life, the protagonists are confronted to an endless series of objects, statues,
tools, weapons, toys, jewels, images that they can use as adjuvants in their
quest of the self. Actually, one could define human by his ability to conceive,
create and produce the in-human – and more than an ability it may well be a
necessity, as these concepts, images or objects are permanently determining
reality and interfacing with it, up to oneself and one’s fellow humans. The
object able to fulfil many levels of human needs – symbolic, phantasmic,
metaphysic, aesthetic, erotic – as described by Alicja in (Fascinus) is just a step further than the ordinary paraphernalia
of daily life, though it can easily reveal the latent animism of a materialist
civilisation. But there again, acknowledged and purposeful fetishism is
probably much less alienating than its widespread suppressed alternative.
Bertram Dhellemmes, Berlin, June 2011
1. Amsterdam is unique
in that more than any other city, it has the capacity to exhaust the scopic
drive of its visitors, both by the richness of its public art, museums,
architecture and urbanism, its music, theater and dance scene, and the
ubiquitous exhibition of the sex industry – with its windows showings either
erotic objects or prostitutes – the casual theatricality of its inhabitants and
the exposure to alternative lifestyles – all this being mirrored in its canals,
doubled and inverted. This is a great source of inspiration and constant
reflection on art, exhibition, perception and desire.
2. Some members of the audience actually danced to the music,
spontaneously and unexpectedly reaching the novel experience of dancing while
reading!
3. There is much to tell about how many
surrealist claims about unrepressed sexuality and acceptance of the 'dark side'
of the human psyche have been achieved in mainstream culture better than in
arts – with pornographic or gore movies, or different practices of psychedelic
or musical trance – but instantly trivialized without bringing the expected
liberating effect!
This text was written for the Design of the (In)-human project website proposed by Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart.