Quite a performance, and being a cat
PT.23 was, as they say in English, “quite a performance”. Do you know the phrase? Don’t think that it’s just another way of saying: great show! It’s not a comment on how good something is, but on how complicated and effortful it’s been to put together. It’s not about artistic quality, but production difficulty. For example, after some event you might say: Oof! That was quite a performance. I need a holiday!
© Inês Sambas
I write this because before talking about the art and artists at PT.23, I wanted to give credit to its producers, because honestly, the platform was quite a performance. Imagine organising it: 18 artists, 60 international and 20 national guests, 8 venues (one in Lisbon, the rest in Montemor-o-Novo), all including transport, accommodation and meals. All of us arriving with our own baggage – physical, cultural, professional, financial and personal. To use another English expression: it must have been like herding cats.
I remember one moment in particular: a heavy rainstorm caused a specially built cover across the eating area to collapse, and suddenly the producers had to take down the whole structure, rebuild it, arrange for all of us to get food in another place and provide transport to keep the whole programme on schedule. Which they did. And all we cats felt was little more than a glitch.
Doubtless other behind-the-scenes dramas happened without my even noticing. So thanks, producers, for the work you do, its success so often measured by our not noticing it so that we can give our attention, instead, to the performances.
The theatre and its double-take
At the beginning of BAqUE, Gaya de Medeiros shuffles along the floor, naked, prone, and talking into a microphone about how she should start the very performance that she is, in fact, starting. Furthermore, the question she asks is: what “starts” when somebody appears before us – is it a body, or an appearance or a person or a persona that comes first? And so we can’t help but ask ourselves: what starts when de Medeiros starts this performance, is it a body or an appearance or a person or a persona, and whose persona is that? Basically: everything is a double-take.
In Info Maniac, André e. Teodósio is an actor who explains the historical and etymological origins of the very idea of an actor, with reference to flute-playing. (He also plays the flute.) As the performance unfolds, he seems to take on the role of someone who channels multiple roles, often simultaneously – as if different presences (past, present, real, imaginary) were flitting through his words, gestures, limbs and the scenic elements that surround him. He also continuously comments on what is happening, splitting his persona between performer and director. Honestly, I don’t think there was a moment in this show that wasn’t a double-take.
I’m Still Excited! tells the story of a dysfunctional relationship between a writer-director, played by Mário Coelho, who is in fact the writer-director of this piece, and his girlfriend, played by Rita Rocha Silva, who is not and never was Mário’s girlfriend. Mário and Rita (the fictional ones) are putting together a script about their ex-boyfriend-girlfriend relationship, and have some almighty arguments about it – all of course scripted by Mário (the real one) and mediated by real Mário and real Rita’s director-actor relationship. Fictional Mário and Rita are also auditioning for two further actors to come and interpret the scripted roles of Mário and Rita. These turn up turn up half way through in the form of Pedro Baptista, who plays “Mário”, and Anabela Ribeiro, who plays “Rita”. So I’m thinking… what do you call a double-take, doubled, then multiplied by two, twice? You need a maths degree to answer that one.
These are three of the most salient examples a device that appeared, even if sometimes in passing, in many of the shows at PT.23: pointing to the illusory nature of performance through the act of performing those illusions. It makes our minds ping-pong with ambivalence, incapable even of choosing between the two escape routes from this conundrum: to see all performance as real life, or to see real life as all performance.
Cutting edge
While some shows wilfully play on theatre’s life/illusion ambivalence, others take a more direct line: this shit is real.
As if erasing the line between the world and the theatre, How to Kill Naked Women began with the performers – seven women, cis and trans – wandering through our dining area, in various states of undress and exposure. A colleague of mine commented on someone’s eyes, and thus it was that I first learned that eyeball tattooing is a Thing.
The performance continued with the incision (can I say infliction?) of a tattoo into the already highly tattooed body of Xana Novais (director of this show), while a real-time camera showed the blood seeping and sopping in giant close-ups. Novais sat with her genitals openly exposed, upping my anxiety to another level. Watching intermittently through my fingers, like a scaredy-cat at a horror film, I focused mostly on her serene smile – which was no consolation whatsoever. The rest of the show included a bed of nails, suspension by skin hooks, filmed scenes of sutures and surgery, wax dripping, skin clamping, and much brutal intimacy of sharp metal with soft flesh (it’s not by chance that Novais has performed with Florentina Holzinger). I felt like a worm squirming on a hook. Is that where they wanted me?
Other shows at PT.23 also had this sense of staging painful realities, and the realities of pain. Keyla Brasil poured hot wax over her naked body in Meu Profano Corpo Santo; in Sapo, André de Campos rhythmically stabbed a dagger into a table through the gaps of his own outspread fingers (à la Marina Abramović), the physical risk heart-tighteningly palpable. Still, compared with the How to Kill Naked Women these were softcore.
Softcore, hardcore… such words inevitably invoke the idea of pornography (here, “the pornography of pain”, to borrow a phrase from dance critic Arlene Croce), with all its tangled discourses of power, pleasure, exploitation, spectatorship, profit, choice, consent and obscenity. Let me just stick with the last one: etymologically, the word obscene means what should remain off-stage, out of public view. It is can be referred to, but not shown. What this includes of course changes, and has changed, according to time, place, culture and person; and it is always contested.
Did I find How to Kill Naked Women obscene? Not in any moral sense, but I confess I would rather not have seen it. The only way I could stay with it was to desensitise myself, whether by averting my eyes or hardening my heart. With its blood and blades, How to Kill Naked Women was certainly cutting-edge, but was it cutting-edge artistically? I was looking away too often to answer.
See also Lucy Weir (2020), The Gendered Spectacle of Suffering
Manifesting
In performance, the body becomes meaningful in a whole host of ways: in style, in costume, in composition, in action, in gesture, in look. Everything about it is coded and communicational. Yet there is always something else too, where the body is not so much communicating as manifesting. We sense a life force, the persistent physical presence of another living being. After all, life and existence underlie all meaning and metaphor. I also like the sense of protest contained in the word manifesting – as if the body were protesting its cultural burden and insisting simply: I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.
In theatre, as in life, we often take this elemental presence for granted so that we can read and respond to bodily communications. But it seems to me that dance, more than other genres, connects to and sometimes emphasises the presence of this life force. At PT.23, this sense of manifesting was most, er, manifest in Marco da Silva Ferreira’s Carcass. Behind its composite styles (encompasing voguing, folkdance and much more), its repetitive fragments of action and composition, we felt a life force insisting on its own presence, a palpable energy that was made manifest before it was made meaningful.
Did I sense this energy elsewhere? Yes, sometimes, in the full-bodied persistence of the women in Piny’s .G RITO, and in the club-dance section of André de Campos’s Sapo. In all these came the feeling not only of persistence, but of resistance – resistance to being read, named, signified, and explained away.
