- text by Bojana Kunst
- Published in Maska, vol. XIX, no. 7-8, 2004.
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I. "I’m more a narcissist than a theatre maker" (1)
The last performance Maria Dolores of the belgian director Wayn Traub begins with a short overture. Wearing a grey suit, Wayn Traub puts a curtain in front of the stage, lifts his right arm into the light and, accompanied by loud music, performs a sort of “opening dance”, gesticulating wildly and casting glances at the audience. His dance is meticulous yet manneristic, his looks into the audience both mysterious and revealing. The result is an introductory gesture, which, with its uncapturable atmosphere, comes across as a mixture of mysterious distance and exaggerated pathos, the banal and the sacral, illusion and an attempt of its disclosure. The introductory gesture does not hide the tendency that this is a real authentic action, a sort of introductory ritual which opens the door into the event that follows. Nevertheless, every truth of this opening is inevitably shifted, and revealed only as a pathetic surplus; it hides precisely in those most manneristic moments which we can not really believe. Hence a special atmosphere of the overture, which leaves us between reality and fiction, belief and doubt, and places us on the elusive border at the very beginning; the tendency towards the truth indeed flashes through, but only through the most banal of its disguises.
This introductory gesture is not only on the very special way opening the curtain of the Maria Dolores performance but it is also helping us to enter into the work of this belgian artist, director, visual artist and movie director. “I have always regarded theatre as a personal ritual, as an opportunity for private cleansing and purification, as a confrontation with my own inner demons and the fact that there is death, as an attempt to shake off the past in the hope of being able to consistently work on a new life in which symbolic death – as a ritual – plays an important role.” (2) Seven years ago (at age 24), the Belgian director Wayn Traub literally initiated himself into art, chose another name, wrote The Manifesto of the Animal Theatre and started a series of theatrical researches, which he himself defines as a sequence of very special personal rituals, which are both about personal purification / transformation and the exploration of the theatrical forms. His decision for art was deeply connected with his personal decision for a new life; as he says, “you have to take the consequences of that choice”. (3) The name Wayn Traub was “a priest choice” with which he could start a new life, one committed to truth, honesty and a way out of lie. This new life is directly connected with theatre - in Traub’s view, the only place of truth and ritual. Wayn Traub sees his approach to theatre exclusively as a personal ritual, a way of personal purification and mission: “I'm more a narcissist than a theatre maker”. (4)
Wayn Traub gets his new name from the surname of his mother, Wayntraub, which is not entirely accidental: his mother suffered from schizophrenia and constantly lived in obsessive constructions and lies. Her illness was a consequence of childhood abuse; she was sexually abused by her father, whom Traub later discovered in France under the name Sender, one of the most famous French confectioners. By taking on a new name, Wayn Traub begins with continuous performing of personal rituals, intended for personal purification and commitment to truth. All grand and mystic stories that interest him (death, weakness, sacrifice, Catholicism, mysticism, love, hate), have to do with his personal metamorphosis, which can best be realized in theatre: His performance works, theatrical actions, installations and films, are thus an interesting combination of self-purification, constant self-performing and, at the same time, meticulous conceptual researches of ways of performing. Till his last performance Maria Dolores, for which Traub says that, in it, he realized his theatrical style named opera cinema, these actions served the exploration and quest of ways and styles for this personal theatrical ritual and contemporary catholic messianism, through which his real, authentic self is to be revealed.
His unique performing of personal rituals soon brought him the reputation of obsessed mythomaniac and mysterious manipulator, and as is usual in such cases, surrounded him by even more mythomanic rumours. At the opening of the Museum of Contemporary Art Gent - SMAK, Traub put up an exhibition entitled SMAK Campaign, where, every single day for a period of nine months, 25 people wore a ‘Wayn Traub coat of arms’ and demanded a place in the museum. At the Time festival in Gent (2000), he created a theatre performance Wayn Storm, in which a soldier Wayn Traub tries to assemble an army of the most beautiful women to help him get to power and prestige. The performance series Les Mises - En - Traubs, made for the Victoria (2000-2001), has one of the most interesting themes; each of the performances uniquely deals with the exploration of theatrical forms and elements (opera, tragedy, relation between music and word, etc.), with Wayn Traub performing himself in a special way in each of them. However, he does not do so by setting a bodily or physical border, which is typical of some other contemporary performance artworks and body art (Ron Athey, Franko B, Orlan, Kirra O'Reilly); in fact, his border where ‘the truth of the self’ flashes through, is predominantly mental and perceptive. In Mise - En - Traub I, he invites upon the stage the people that he has disappointed in his life (two former girlfriends and four former friends), and asks them to speak the worst they think or know about him. He fasts over a period two weeks, so that he does not have the energy for any kind of answers on stage, with his guests seated at a richly laden table behind his back. In Mise – En - Traub IV he worked with 13 amateurs older than 60 years from Chalon sur Saone (France), who were supposed to die all the time on the stage in all possible ways. There was also an actress Maria Lecomte who was playing the holy virgin and waked them all in a kind of miracle resurrection. In his action Mise - En – Traub VI he made a movie about Sender (his grandfather, a convicted paedophile in his young days and later an eminent confectioner), which was shown at the exposition in Vooruit during one month. In Mise – En – Traub VII, he announces that he is going to play Russian roulette on stage, but later decides not to, also because, as he says, his action would come across as spectacle, with the audience forgetting his real motives. He explains the reasons for his decision to the audience, candidly speaking to them about details from his life. In 2002, he begins to work on a new series, Wayn Wash; the result is the performance Maria-Dolores (2002), with which, as he says, he developed his style and found the animal form of theatre from his manifesto.
Most of these works were performed once or with few reprises; they are surrounded by an air of mystery and inaccurate information. Traub says that this is why a certain mystification of his work came about, but the reasons actually go much deeper and can help us reflect on how we refer to the status of truth, originality, ritual and similar contaminated notions in theatre (which have long gone through the contemporary deconstruction machine and became completely modified). The mystification takes place because Traub’s work is very complex and always wrapped into a double disguise. On the one hand, it is a believing into ritual, mission, truth, and deeply intertwined with unique mystical Catholicism. On the other hand, it develops highly contemporary and complex ways (strategies) of performing. It is this connection of personal ritual, blasphemy, personal metamorphosis, mysticism and theatrical form, through which truth should be revealed: “On stage, I can show who I really am”. (5) By means of the forms which are the most marked with the ‘corruption of representation’ (Derrida), the most intimate truth can paradoxically be revealed.
Dealing with Traub’s statements, his belief on theatre as a messianic place, his obsession with truth and honesty as intertwined with Catholic moralism, the constant narcissistic display of himself, and sometimes nearly blasphemous performing, we can not get rid of a basic uneasiness. Who is Wayn Traub, who invents himself in order for his truth to be revealed? How should we talk about his self-performing, which, with its messianism, constantly tries to make us believe, but in order for us to be able to believe, actually uses the most corruptive of forms? How can we believe into this personal ritual at all if the truth always reveals itself as metamorphosis, thereby using all important theatrical disguises? Let us take Mise - En - Traub VII, where he decides not to play Russian roulette and instead speaks about himself candidly on stage. Where is the truth: in the decision and interruption of our expectations about the performance or in the “honest” address on stage, which is always already marked with the corruption of presence? Where can this truth be located, when the most direct of actions transform it into a spectacle?
II. Maria-Dolores: only when we are performed, we can be put into a relation
Traub’s last performance Maria-Dolores (2002) with which he found his theatrical style and named it opera cinema, is excelently dealing with this questions. Maria-Dolores is a complex combination of the a classic medieval miracle play, which takes place on stage, and a film (projected upon the canvas hung in the middle of the stage and surrounded by an aura made of shining lights on a wire). On stage, we follow the dialogue between a young girl Maria, who claims to have been visited by the Holy Virgin, and an old sickly nun named Dolores. The film is actually a montage of film shots by Geert (played by Wayn Traub, who gives the role his previous name, Geert); he openly and secretly films Maria and Dolly (which is the movie name for Dolores). In all Geert’s shots, both Maria and Dolly always put up an act, and pretend that they are something different than they are. The relationship between the two of them is often unclear; many times, we do not even know whether we are dealing with one or two persons. Through the entire film, musicians appear as a kind of musical red thread between the compositions of the shots of the two women and those of a cartoon; we find out later that the cartoon is being synchronized by Dolly, and ironically depicts the fertilization of the Virgin Mary. In addition, the film features a TV show called Camping Libris, where the French poet Jean Benoit Ugeux (played by himself) is interviewed about his book Maria-Dolores, and about poetic aspects of a triangle between two women and a man. The key dramaturgical, symbolic and also ritual element which connects all these parallel realities, is that of the metamorphosis of birth and death. When Maria is highly pregnant and Dolly’s health suddenly deteriorates, they both find themselves in hospital. Maria gives birth to a girl, but dies at birth. The girl’s name is Dolly, and it turns out that the man behind the camera, Geert, is actually Dolly’s father and Maria’s lover. The shots turn out to be a combination of various shots of the last period of life of the mother Maria and her daughter Dolly, who lived and died in similar ways 20 years apart. In the miracle play on stage, a parallel story about birth and death takes place, symbolically corresponding to the metamorphosis of birth and death on stage. A young girl dies pregnant; in the event of her death, however, a miracle occurs – an old sickly nun Dolores gets well. In the end, Maria reveals herself as the newly born Dolores; singing the song Ave Maria, she slowly comes to the foreground of the stage. At the same time, we can see a man (Wayn Traub) appearing at the back of the stage and standing under the canvas. Traub casts another short glance at the audience, similar to the one at the beginning of the performance, while accompanied by the final text which goes approximately like this: l'homme monte sur la scene, leve son bras, le rideau tombe et puis la piece est finie.
It is very difficult to catch the complex and dramaturgically very densed structure with the description. The performance is namely consisting of numerous parallel stories, levels, elements, and the intertwining of roles, music, film shots, theatrical and film action, and various levels of performing. The performance (lucidly made in the manner of medieval miracle play, with filigree-like meticulousness of the rhetoric and movement repertoire, and with costumes and symbols of the late Flemish Middle Ages), intertwines with the film on the canvas. The action continuously moves from the film to the stage and vice versa. This intertwinement is of complex nature; in the accompanying material to the performance, Wayn Traub says that the performance consists of ‘four important realities: the reality of the stage play, music, film and poetry.’ (6) Such realities do not form a relation of a key that could give us an answer to the question 'what is reasonable to believe'; we can say that none of the realities is in hierarchical relation to another, nothing is commented, simulated, imitated, counterpoised as an explanation, distance, ironic comment, metaphor. Individual realities are not fractured in their course or questioned; quite the contrary, they are performed in filigree-like and utopian fashion till the very end (e.g. the medieval miracle play on stage or the TV interview). Moreover, all the realities are disclosed as a way of performing (film, show, story, poetry), each of them having its own course and bound to its own illusion. We can thus not say that they refer to each other in the post-modernist deconstruction manner, which is supposed to give us insight into the problematic character of representation. The form through which the realities are performed is namely of great importance and almost archaeologically carried out in all of its important details; of equal importance as the form, however, is the illusion; we can say that this representation is corruptive as it can possibly be. The performance thus moves and flirts both with pretending and with unique utopian essentialism. It never offers us a direct key to differentiate between authenticity and pretending, between truth and lie, between the authentic and the fictitious, although the acts that guide the action and also unite it into a single, nearly mystical, symbolic (and the most authentic) parallel: that of birth and death.
This kind of elusive structure reminds of the Baroque understanding of the world as an endless intrigue where nothing is certain and everything is just an endless play of life and death. More even, connections between things and events are not understood as those of cause and effect; these two notions never explain each other, although they are incessantly connected. The connection with the Baroque is not coincidental, as it is precisely Baroque sensibility that is most frequently considered as parallel to the contemporary sensibility of endless and multiplied connections and to the changed contemporary status of reality and truth. Baroque analogy works in the same way, turning the medieval relation of similarity upside down. In the Middle Ages, things are related due to markers of similarity, which, within the order of these markers, connects things with one another. In Baroque - a wild time of omnipresent openness, as it is defined by Deleuze and can in many ways be connected with the contemporary understanding of reality – the analogy complicates this relation of similarity to a great extent. (7) Things are indeed in relation due to their similarity, but this similarity is mainly the way something is performed when placed into a relation: every similarity is thus already a chimera of similarity. Baroque similarity thus does not have a calming effect: it incessantly multiplies the gaze of the spectator, and confuses it by constantly leading it into the field in-between. The relation of similarity can be understood as the layering of metamorphoses and pretence: the metamorphosis takes place always when a person or a thing is placed into a relation. (8) What matters if we want to get to know the world, is thus primarily the way in which we break through the intrigue of structure, woven by the pretence of all things in the world; this structure, of course, is deeply theatrical. Precisely because everything pretends, it is also interrelated and connected; only in this way, we can reveal what something is.
Baroque analogy, which ‘arranges’ connections in the Baroque curiosity museum, can indirectly remind us of several topical characteristics of our contemporarity – which is also marked by wild openness, and realized though the intertwining of various parallel realities. It was Umberto Eco in the mid-eighties that first recognized Baroque analogy as parallel to the post-modern view upon reality, more precisely, to the transgression between various media, to the layering of truths one on the other. In his opinion, the post-modern world is close to the endless Baroque hermeneutical symbioses, the layering and exaggerating of information, and the intertwining of parallel metamorphoses; this endless transgression determines the contemporary conception of the world in many aspects. (9) Nevertheless, Eco forgets about an important feature of Baroque analogy, which has a much deeper meaning than that of the openness of perceptive chaos; he forgets about this chimera of similarity, where a special ontology of the world and its truth is revealed. Despite the incessant layering chimeras, Baroque analogy is in fact fundamentally bound to truth. It is not only about the recognition of parallels between Baroque doubt about reality and the contemporary post-modernist layering of endless connections - for the realization that today, everything (like in the Baroque period) is but a palimpsest accumulation of things in an all-embracing simulated spectacle. Something else is also taking place today that brings us back to this Baroque chimera of similarity, and which can be analysed also on the example of contemporary artistic works which intervene into the status of truth. It is precisely this chimera of similarity (which equals this contemporary fact that everything can only be placed into a relation as performed) that determines the contemporary understanding of truth and untruth, authenticity and forgery, truth and lie. When we talk about Baroque analogy and place it into a relation with contemporarity, we open a problem that is deeply present in the Baroque: also in Baroque, a different ontology is disclosed, a different approach to recognition and truth.
Frequently, another parallel with Baroque analogy is established, which we can also directly connect with the theatrical style of Maria-Dolores. Many times, we chance upon opinions that contemporary media realities, or the intermediality of our contemporary experience of the world, are close to Baroque analogy or the Baroque understanding of the world of endless connections. (10) It is not only about a superficial associative connection between the compiling information, the multilayered and dispersed character of contemporary realities and the openness of the Baroque world, but about a certain similar sensibility regarding the status of reality and truth. Truth indeed revives transformation, but at the same time, strikes back with its most contaminated qualities. It is along these lines that we can capture a certain specificity of Traub’s theatrical style, which, at first glance, could be described as intermedial, but we have to pay attention to what intermediality actually brings to the theatrical medium and how it intervenes into the very cognitive structure of theatrical event. Traub does not say in vain that, in his performance, all realities are equal, with each of them participating in the metamorphosis of truth. The different realities in the performance are actually the different media. They refer to each other only as chimeras of similarity (film, TV show, miracle play, music), yet in a way in which - precisely through interrelatedness and the constant multiplying of connections - the status of truth is revealed. These kinds of realities directly make use of the mediality of theatre as a media form par excellence, and thus directly open a different cognitive structure which produces different imaginations of the in-between. (11) Quite a few of these procedures of the in-between, which, in Lehmann’s opinion, are essential to the understanding of intermediality (heterogeneity, metamorphosis, a taste of uncertainty, the extreme and the paradoxical, simultaneity, parallel identities), can be found in Traub’s performance. (12) What shifts such intermediality from the perceptive field into the field of truth and reality, and confronts us with some ontological questions, is precisely the way in which, despite the layering, intertwining, heterogeneity and constant transgression, the performance moves in the strict core of truth. In short – it constantly agrees with its most contaminated background. To put it differently: if Lehmann says that intermediality rejects “consistency and organic totalization”, it is excatly this procedure of organic totalization which is at work in Traub's performance, and is of the same importance as the dispersing and the metamorphosis. This is also why the notion of Baroque analogy is again being topicalized in connection with the reflection on contemporary intermediality, with new ways of performing and conception of reality: these new ways of connection do not only reveal different cognitive models; the ontology of being and things is shifted and re-interpreted. With its way of connection, Baroque analogy does not only give rise to perceptive chaos, new cognitive structures (which prepare and underlie cognitive structures of the early modern world), but is also the way of ontological connection between things of this world: the Baroque way of understanding the truth of things, being, the self. Here, truth is never tautological (since everything is pretending, everything is just a pretence), but is nevertheless performed in the way of pretence. Thus, its potentiality is revealed: it is the most original in its most mannerist excess, in its most theatrical surplus. Truth becomes an essential part of every pretence, every disguise that is put on. In Maria-Dolores, intermediality thus directly leads to a certain understanding of contemporary performing, which deeply intervenes with our ontological understanding of being, identity, the self. Pretence becomes the main face of our most inherent truth; only when we are performed, we can be put into a relation in a certain way.
III. Authentic persistance in the corruption
Where should Traub's self-invention and messianism be classified then, along with his demand for theatre as the place of personal ritual, where the truth of his self can be revealed and simultaneously become the locus of his most personal purification? Is it about the mysticism of the sixties? Or does Traub, combining Catholic messianism and blasphemous pop icons, palimpsest imagery, and nearly New Age messianism, actually participate in contemporary (post-modern) conservative mysticism?
It is, of course, impossible to answer all these questions, also because they point to the fact that truth can neither be detected on stage nor be avoided. The questions sooner reveal a certain strategic shift in the conception of truth, authenticity and presence. Today, this notions show themselves to us as deeply contaminated, intertwined with ideological mechanisms, essentialist, naïve, totalising and excluding. The contamination of these notions was especially clearly revealed in post-modernist reactions to the theatrical practices of the sixties and seventies - to their utopian essentialism and belief in the originality of theatrical presence. As Philip Auslander writes, the belief that the “pure presentation of performer to audience is the best means available to the theatre to make a radical / political statement«, is nowadays replaced by the »suspicion into the theatrical presence”. (13) Instead of the belief into the transgressive and radical power of pure presence, which was supposed to be revealed in a theatrical situation and thus shatter established ways of perception by means of its 'authentic power', today, this pure presence shows itself as the most contaminated one. It is always authentic only to the extent that it forgets about its own mediations; it is already a repetition (Derrida), always already discoursively determined, and represented as an always present lack.
Traub’s work can help us think about what is happening with the contemporary conception of theatrical presence and what makes this strategic shift of truth different both from essentialist beliefs and the deconstructional revelation. The contemporary strategies in which we can find resistance to originality and authenticity of presence, do not simply mean that, today, we have made a step from authentic and original gestures to constructed and discoursive identities, that instead of the natural body, we watch the cultural one (which is paradoxically revealed precisely through its most natural excesses). The first problem is that such a view actually narrows the notion of performing arts to a great degree, and attributes them a nearly didactic deconstructional function, which is all that should be left to them in the contemporary world of spectacle. The second problem is that, in such a way, every theatrical presence is understood as an oppositional tactic: the way of its representation is supposed to reveal its most inherent corruption. The recognition that corruption can not be chased away, but that it can be revealed, is actually paradoxical: by disclosing the corruption, we actually participate in this corruption to an immense degree.
This is something that Wayn Traub (former Geert Bové), is very well aware of - the paradox that, in order for our truth to be revealed, we must first be performed. More even, the truth revealed in this case is the ambivalent truth of the one who invents himself. This is why theatre works as the most appropriate place for this pursuit, and performing as the only honesty that still remains. But now it is not about an essentialist belief into the rituality and communicativeness of theatre, but for a different perception of the way truth can be argued today, or shine through (the original Latin meaning of the word argument is the shimmer of dawn). The invention process strategically shifts the questions on the relation between the real and the fictitious, the natural and the artificial, the secular and the sacred, life and death, truth and lie. This shift is not the revealing of ‘anything goes’ but constant detection of truth through the different procedures of self-performing.
In this sense, Traub’s work can be put next to that of several other contemporary artists who deal with contemporary ways and paradoxes of performing - ways in which the truth of the self comes to be performed. A great majority of such practices come from performance art and it is not coincidental that, at least till Maria-Dolores (2002), Traub’s actions frequently take up this form of performance art: they namely realize this perceptive openness for connections, ruptures, and for performing an act which is not bound by theatrical dramaturgy. The artistic interventions of all the authors in question differ to a great extent, but are nevertheless marked by a similar sensibility in the detection of the status of truth, and in their ways of self-performing. They open the notion of authenticity by intervening through what has been additionally produced by the authentic gesture. These kinds of shifts can for example be discovered in the body art of the last ten years, especially in the way of displaying the body, which constantly offers the body as a strategic place of contemporary subjectivity. In this case, the body opens as the most authentic place (with all of its spectacular fluids and orifices), which, in its core, is also the most empty. It is constantly performed between the identity of flesh and fictional identities, and invented only as a performative surplus between the natural and the cultural. Its identity is recognized and located in performative excess, and therefore, its truth is even harder to accept. This strategy can also be found in many projects related to new technologies, especially to the internet, where it is primarily about establishing different realities and searching for their elusive authentic place. We can frequently read that, by means of contemporary technologies, identities are becoming fictitious, that they are disappearing, and that they can be entirely constructed and artificial. But this by no means signifies that the question of the authentic totally disappears; it is just that the authentic has been strategically shifted.
Traub’s way of self-performing, through which the truth of self-invention should be revealed, differs in many points from these works, nevertheless, the differences seem to generate a similar sensibility. Wayn Traub never forgets to emphasize that his identity is a result of mystic transformation, a way of personal ritual in which he can purify himself, and that, for him, theatre is the place where the truth can be revealed to us and first and foremost to himself. Not only is his every theatrical act deeply personal, but also has a certain mission: Wayn Traub wants us to believe him, but also constantly confronts the potentiality of believing himself. This kind of believing is closely connected with the Catholic understanding of believing, where truth is always connected with rituals of purification, transformation and metamorphosis: it is through these disguises that truth can shine through. Traub defines himself as a contemporary priest, whose current aim is to become John Baptist (which is also the title of the new performance that he is making in the Het Toneelhuis in Antwerpen with the premiere in September 2004), or to achieve his ideal. His mystic and Catholic transformation combined with ways of theatre performing, detects truth and ways of believing in it, and is incredibly complex: it can actually never be captured, no matter how recognizable its iconography may be. In Traub’s case, truth is not only a result of constant transformation and metamorphosis, but incessantly flirts with mystical excess and transformation of consciousness. He does not peel off his corruption in order for the core to reveal; it is this core that is revealed as corruptive: the core is always the result of the procedure. We can say that Traub incessantly insists in this inability of contemporary believing, which always returns as its most overloaded and mannerist surplus: there is always some procedure at work.
The performing of the self does not have so much to do with mystification (although it flirts with it constantly) as it does with the actual awareness of this impossible and nevertheless responsible situation into which contemporary performing places us. The problem of truth and believing, which, by Traub, is both messianically and blasphemously oriented, can be connected with what Lehmann calls ‘politics of perception’, but with a small yet essential modification. What Lehmann calls ‘politics of perception’ is opened through these incessant metamorphoses of truth; and yet, Lehmann forgets about a basic corruption that will always be at work as well: “What is the specific quality of the theatrical perception, which is foregrounded by post-dramatic theatre, while being more or less concealed by dramatic theatre? It is not only aesthetic, but the ethical implication of the spectator. In the reality of theatre itself the co-presence of actors and audience can make us aware that communication always means responsibility. The act of communication in itself, the fact that I am addressed by someone, makes me responsible even for what the other communicates to me. (...) It can realize a politics of perception.” (14) In his description of contemporary politics of perception, Lehmann actually returns to the understanding of theatre as a secularised spot of representation, a place of public address, where more transgressive (and real!) factor will be this potentiality of address rather than the way in which one is addressed. Lehmann’s definition forgets this ‘corruptive’ trait of every theatrical situation: this directness of communication (the directness of the address itself), which, paradoxically, must be performed over and over again in order for us to be able to capture or at least perceive its truth. In this sense, it is never the act of addressing that gives rise to a politics of perception, but the inherent paradox of that act (its most inherent helplessness), and this places the audience before an ethical responsibility. Ethical because this is an inevitable responsibility: I am responsible because immediately when I am addressed, it is already a forgery: but it is a forgery precisely because I’m directly adressed. The ‘evil of representation’ (Derrida) (15) , discovered by means of theatrical and dance procedures of the last twenty years, is thus not a simple transgression from ritual to procedure, from the original to repetition, from political transgression to oppositional resistance, from the natural to the artificial, from the ideology of original presence to its performativity. As every authentic gesture, every disclosure of authentic gesture will additionally produces something: everything is always revealed regressively. In order for the corruption of ceremony to be revealed, the ceremony itself must be re-established in a way.
Although, at first sight, Traub’s self-performing reminds us of ritual moments in the theatre of the sixties and seventies, it essentially digresses from it as well, just like it digresses from the demand for the understanding of identity as entirely constructed, which only reveals to us in the form of palimpsest reflections of its myriad images. Traub’s self-performing is not of original and authentic nature, nor is it an endless reproduction as an answer on the always already given. In order for one to be able to be self-performed (and thus come to one’s truth), one actually has to invent oneself. Every invention, however, inevitably poses the question of truth, but on an entirely different strategic level. In this case, truth does not have the status of reality, but is a result of numerous intertwining metamorphoses: it is only through uncapturable connections that it is revealed. Every contemporary identity, every self can namely be disclosed as performed (and thus inevitably pretending, lying), as a result of numerous recombinant realities. An invention thus discloses only the procedure, the potentiality of something which could be its original core.
The question of the ways in which the contemporary status of truth can be understood, is especially topical today, when theatre has long lost the privilege of performing and thus its traditional (political) power, which had the possibility of revealing the most immanent corruption. The privilege of reality is now the domain of the media; in contemporary society, where everything is a performance, performing arts no longer have the privilege of secular place of address and their former power. What theatre does (primarily performs) is paradoxically becoming our most topical contemporary ritual - the way we understand contemporary identities, the relation to other, the locus of our being. We can indeed disclose this procedure endlessly, and show how these notions are contaminated and constructed, but nevertheless, the revelation of the procedure can not go beyond the omnipresent performing: it quickly turns into spectacle, into a new performed procedure. Precisely because every question about truth moves on this slippery border between totalizing essentialism and no less totalizing procedure, the more important it is that this question be set, and that these contaminated notions be fought with. To put it differently: the development of contemporary media and technological realities is indeed changing our conception of presence and truth, but this does not mean that these notions do not return where they are least expected. They can hit us as intolerable locality and marginality (the field where all personal and intimate experience are stored today, like death, love, suffering), as an authentic gesture of the unknown (violence, contemporary terrorism, catastrophes), as a radical experience of border (the radicalism of the other, authentic gestures). Nevertheless, we must be careful here. What hits us is what is additionally produced by every authentic gesture, and it is in this performative surplus that the truth of an authentic gesture can be sought: an authentic gesture can only be performed as being revealed regressively, there is namely no pure act.
Or to put it differently. The personal authentic which is revealed here, is always a matter of invention; no matter how personal it may be, it is always already corruptive in a way. The self becomes mythomanic as soon as it is put on display: as an uncounterfeited self, it namely reveals itself only as put on and performed. Messianically (as a true priest), Traub insists precisely on this corruption: he does not want to reveal or deconstruct it, nor simulate it or establish it anew, but actually uses it as a strategy of truth searching. We can say that his work helps reveal a unique shift, which occurs in today’s understanding of truth, in order for us (after all the essentialist disappointments and post-modern deconstructions) to be able to speak about it at all. It obsessively devotes itself to truth, but at the same time, obsessively realizes ways in which the very status of truth is captured in a basic paradox: there is no other revelation of truth but the one in the most corruptive place – theatre. Truth can thus only be shown through performance, a surplus which is produced through its revelation. But as soon as truth returns as performed, we are again confronted with its problematic and elusive locus. This is precisely why Wayn Traub incessantly combines things incompatible at first sight: theatre and truth, pretension and messianism, banality and holiness, mannerism and naivety, etc., which additionally increases his notoriety of exhibitionist mystifier and narcissist. But what he actually does is incessantly persist in a paradox; he constantly has to invent himself in order to be able to talk with utmost seriousness. It is therefore not surprising that someone who creates a radical blasphemous self-image for himself,starts the talk with the following statement: »I never mystified myself.« (16) He can be believed precisely because he so consistently insists in this corruptness of believing, in the corruption of the statement itself.
Endnotes:
- Interwiev with Wayn Traub, 22nd of August, Antwerpen.
- http://www.fransbrood.com/picts/resource/MDdoseng.doc
- Ibidem.
- Ibidem.
- http://www.fransbrood.com/picts/resource/MDdoseng.doc
- Ibidem.
- Cf.Gilles Deleuze: Le Pli, Les Editions de Minuit, Paris, 1988.
- Baroque analogy is also one of the main ways in which relations between things / displayed objects were established in Baroque curiosity museums: a human skull pretends to be alive - it is placed next to a stone from nature, which pretends to have the form of a human head.
- Cf.: Umberto Eco: The Limits of Interpretation, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1995.
- Cf. Barbara Maria Stafford: Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine, MIT Press, 1991. Also: Barbara Maria Stafford: Visual Analogy, Consciousness as the Art of Connecting, MIT Press, 1991.
- Intermediality is understood in terms of Derrick de Kerckhove; in his studying of Greek theatre, he analyzes how this theatre functioned as “perfect training ground for these new perceptional standards”. Derrick de Kerckhove: The Skin of Culture, Investigating the New Electronic Reality, Somerville House Publishing, Toronto 1995. See also: Peter M. Boenisch: “coMEDIA electrONica: Performing Intermediality in Contemporary Theatre”, Theatre Research International, 2003/1.
- On the understanding of intermediality as the in-between cf. Hans-Thies Lehmann: Postdramatisches Theater, Verlag der Autoren, Frankfurt am Main 1999, p. 407.
- Philip Auslander: From Acting to Performance, Routledge, 1997, p. 62.
- Hans-Thies Lehmann: "The Political in the Post-dramatic", Maska, No. 74- 75, Vol. XVII, 2002, p. 76.
- Jacques Derrida: O gramatologiji, Analecta, Ljubljana 1998, p. 367.
- This was one of the first statements when interviewing Wayn Traub for the research, on 22th of August in Antwerpen.
Literature:
- Philip Auslander: From Acting to Performance, Routledge, 1997.
- Peter M. Boenisch: »coMEDIA electrONica: Performing Intermediality in Contemporary Theatre«, Theatre Research International, 2003/1.
- Derrick De Kerckhove: The Skin of Culture, Investigating the New Electronic Reality, Somerville House Publishing, Toronto 1995.
- Gillez Deleuze: Mille Plateaux, Capitalisme et shizophrénie, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1997.
- Gilles Deleuze: Le Pli, Les Editions de Minuit, Paris, 1988.
- Umberto Eco: The Limits of Interpretation, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1995.
- Umberto Eco: »The Return of the Middle Ages«, Travels in Hyperreality, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, San Diego, New York, London, 1983.
- Jacques Derrida: O gramatologiji, Analecta, Ljubljana 1998.
- Hans-Thies Lehmann: Postdramatisches Theater, Verlag der Autoren, Frankfurt am Main 1999, p. 407.
- Hans - Thies Lehmann: "Self-Presentation", in: TrueTruth About the Nearly Real, 4th International Summer Academy, A Reader, Ausdruck 7, A Publication of Kuenstlerhaus Mousonturm, Frankfurt/Main, 2002, 101-103.
- Hans-Thies Lehmann: "The Political in the Post-dramatic”, Maska, No. 74- 75, Vol. XVII, 2002.
- Barbara Maria Stafford: Visual Analogy, Consciousness as the Art of Connecting, MIT Press, 1991.
- Internet: http://www.fransbrood.com/picts/resource/MDdoseng.doc (Accompaing material to the performance Maria-Dolores, Manifesto of the Animal Theatre)