James Oscar: RADIANCE ACROSS THE STREAM OF LIFE: A Review of Tauberbach by Les Ballets C de La B at theatre festival Festival Transmériques 29, 30, 31, May, June 1 2015
James Oscar
GLIMPSES OF RADIANCE ACROSS THE STREAM OF LIFE: A Review of Tauberbach by Les Ballets C de La B at theatre festival Festival Transmériques 29, 30, 31, May, June 1 2015
“This here is a deposit of remains…On every sepulcher is a piece of the world’s history…”
Libretto to Ballet C de la B’s Tauberbach
“We were on a remote beach and we saw that guy in the sea, bobbing around with a pelican.At first I thought he was rescuing the pelican, that it had broken its wing. Then it became clear that he was trying to drown it. And then he came onto the beach and as he walked along the shore you could see that he was swinging the pelican around by its neck. The way that the pelican was looping he was obviously wringing its neck..He glared at us as if to say: You shouldn’t be watching this…”
Peter Doig (Interview with Chris Ofili, Bomb Magazine)
“past moments old dreams back again or fresh like those that pass or things things always and memories I say them as I hear them murmur them in the mud…in me that were without when the panting stops scraps of an ancient voice in me not mine”
Samuel Beckett, How It Is
Ballet C de la B’s Tauberbach is a triumphant display of the human spirit. As a critic, you never think you will use such a phrase but somewhere along the last few minutes of Ballet C de la B’s Tauberbach, already fully imbibed in the dazzling stagecraft, sheer radiance, and complete world Alain Patel created; somewhere after C de la B performed one of the most incredible dance sequences I have ever seen, done in a live extended slow motion sequence fashion, and then slowly sitting on the ground to then hum a hushed song requiem. It is then that these actual words came into my mind, after all we had seen in this total world of the “garbage dump” set on this stage: “a triumphant display of the human spirit”.
Each and every audience member felt it and if there is any kind of reality to the idea of a global consciousness http://noosphere.princeton.edu, we felt it at that very moment - as brooding, giddy, and as unequivocal community of lovers (audience).
Alain Patel’s creation imbibed, dazzled, and presented a total-world. One might think to this idea of presenting a total world as in the work of the Brazilian author Clarice Lispector’s Stream of Life or of course in dadas like Joyce’s Finnegan Wake. The audience’s standing ovation was a polite 6 to 7 minutes (long enough), with three returns by the dancers and one could feel again that each and every audience member wanted to just continue clapping until we could somehow fall into and out of the world of Tauberbach again, again, and again. The force and sheer radiance (I realize I will use this word several times in this review) of Ballet C de la B’s Tauberbach cannot be underestimated. This is of course easy when you properly and successfully, as Ballet C de la B have surely done, present a total-world to an audience.
There is no other way to describe this magnanimous, lush, beautiful, radiant, breathtaking masterpiece of theatre. Ballet C de la B’s Tauberbach effortlessly holds its own amongst theatre immortality like Robert Wilson’s Deafman Glance or any of the works of the already immortal inhabitants of the Théatre de la Ville de Paris, Sankai Juku. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sankai_Juku
The play is based around the real life schizophrenic and ebullient Estamira Gomes de Sousa, who “by choice” led an at times merry band of outcasts living the precarious life in a Rio De Janeiro garbage dump. http://www.cultureunplugged.com/documentary/watch-online/play/9415/Estamira
Ballet C de la B’s Tauberbach’s shimmering opening scene was one of a world of abundance, not just a garbage dump as it officially might actually be. Abundance of life, living, exchange, survival, and relationship with the abundance of disregarded objects of a garbage heap. The protagonist (the “Estamira” of this play) that Elsie de Brauw plays stands up (like the quasi leader& reminiscent at times of a harmless version of Fagin from Oliver Twist) above the ramblings and ramblings of thousands of abandoned shimmering clothes of a garbage dump. One might think to the strange world of Leon Carax’s “homeless” in Les Amants de Pont Neuf or the secret community living in a warehouse in Carax’s Pola X - but amplified to the thousandth level. One might think to total environments like those of Sam Beckett that might never be far from this one of Alain Patel’ Tauberbach.
And, in terms of this idea of seeing a notion of abundance versus simply seeing this staged world as merely a dump filled with garbage, one might think to the multitudinous proliferation/ beauty of the Infinity Rooms of the 1970s artist, Yayoi Kusama. The very young Korean artist Hyon Gyon’s work (recently shown at Volta NY Art Show) also speaks to this idea of “patchwork that ultimately can evoke a kind of radiance”- the composite picture of a field of detritus as living.
Loosely based on the real life of Estamira Gomes de Sousa (1), a schizophrenic garbage heap dweller in Rio de Janeiro, we are introduced to the charismatic (and never actually tough enough to be a tyrant) leader of this world of abundance (of garbage and abandoned clothes) played by Elsie De Brauw. As the director of Ballet C de la B Alain Patel has said, “Rather than adopting a documentary approach recreating the life of Estamira, I wanted to use her character as a means of talking about us, the actress, and the dancers onstage. “ From her opening word, s De Brauw brought a particular kind of gravitas into the play, somewhat in the tradition of actresses like Beckett’s Billie Whitelaw, Alice Krige, or Argentina’s Maria Onetto (Lucrecia Martel’s “The Headless Woman”).
The “Estamira” of Ballet C de la B’s Tauberbach appears on stage standing above all the heaps of garbage (clothes). She is queen of this realm, but ultimately, whom or what she is talking to is to be more part of a free floating air we are meant to undertstand as the play unravels. As was said of the real Estamira who was a kind of quasi leader of a real garbage dump in Rio De Janeiro, the real Estamira alternated “between extreme lucidity, prophecy, and schizophrenia”. And thus, the “Estamira” of Tauberbach could be seen to be speaking to a “place” somewhere between us - the audience, the “voices” tormenting her, and seemingly speaking in a voice of dissent against the very (capitalist or other) godhead that has damned these citizens to the life of garbage dump.
The garbage heap dwellers of Ballet C de la B’s Tauberbach live and play around her. They are oblivious to all that she is saying, and as we soon see - don’t give a damn. Ultimately she does occupy a kind of matriarchal position in the garbage dump, but never really with any full fledged of hubris. She could be said to be representative of the body, in whose womb, the garbage dwellers live. Her body and mind become part of their house and their house become part of her body and mind. She and the dwellers must all find a way to live together in this “total-world” despite the extreme “freedom”, yet harsh conditions of this ante environment.
The first words come out of this “Estamira” of Ballet C de la B’s Tauberbach and we see she is not “simply” a “schizophrenic”, but rather as Patel explains:
“The most difficult thing was finding a verbal language that was not a discourse on body language, that did not try to explain. We had to establish another connection between words and dance, and we found an initial entry when we had the idea of using Elsie’s words as slow motion voice over, as though a god or her own conscience were speaking to her. “ (Her own voice feeds back as recorded, contentious, cryptic, and poetic feedback.
So here we see Ballet C de la B’s manner of speaking, as they have consistently done from their beginnings; speaking from the margin, shining a “spotlight on the excluded, using physical handicaps and mental illness to express the body incarnations of feelings and anxieties that are far too vast for words like fear, suffering, and compassion”.
Tauberbach, as it title clearly says “first and foremost” finds it inspiration in Arthur Zmijewski’s recording of deaf people singing Bach and then marrying this kind of “off kilter” ( “I know having asked deaf actors to sing, that the deaf have an ambiguous rapport with music, as people have a strong negative reaction to the sound of their speaking and singing voices”Alain Patel) with the world of the Brazilian schizophrenic garbage heap dweller Estamira Gomes de Sousa. So Ballet C de la B’s Patel sought to find the evident common ground between all these socially invisible realms - all trying to have voice in what is often represented as a voiceless world.
Elsie de Brauw’s character, as the real Estamira might be for the garbage dump - her character operates as the voice of the other dwellers. They are thought to be “stuck” in their deafness but ultimately are not at all . As the curtain and dust/ steam smoke rises in the play’s oepning, the play’s “Estamira” and the playback looped voice which sounds like a hubristic staccato control module say, “Did you hear that”, “Are you listening”, “Stay in control”. “Estamira” will continue this battle with herself to speak her thoughts, and live as a woman lost between her own sometimes muddled world and the community she can never really represent. Ultimately beyond all her attempts (they are always full of inertia, tragic comedy and atrophy) to rule over the nest of the garbage dump, she says,
“Some people cannot stand it here. Can’t get used to it. It’s toxic. I’m fine. I like it here!”
Yes ultimately wrapping oneself in this particular (garbage dump) world, ensconcing oneself in it, no matter the terror and the frightfulness of the ride. But the terror is never really quite there, as the dwellers learn to make do and learn to ignore the mother hen (Estamira). But then in this stream of life, as in all streams, there is a horizon, and in that - all that comes before, during, and after it. And as in our world, we see that there are glimpses of radiance across the stream of life, but that yes, there is also the terror.
Ballet C de la B perfectly balance the sense of showing this harrowing world with the pure pleasures of what certainly comes across in Tauberbach, as the reality of life as infinite theatre. Of course, the real life Estamira’s life was real and not mere theatre. She certainly led a harrowing life, having arrived in the world of the Rio De Janeiro garbage dump via first, according to one report, a normal life but then through hoops of spousal abuse and then being raped several times. As Ballet C de la B’s director Alain Platel said, “there are still places in the world where life is difficult for various reasons….we met artists who want to build a future under nearly impossible circumstances (in their travels meeting global artists in the most poor parts of the world) …Seeing and hearing people who remain creative and maintain a certain joie de vivre, even under very difficult conditions, was inspiring and stimulating. They reminded me of how privileged we are in the West. I needed them in order to continue to question how we see others, to question our view of the world. “
So yes of course what Ballet C de la B presents in Tauberbach is not just that (Other) world but moreover a world very familiar to us, ripe with all the vicissitudes of (velocity)…. What is present is the sense of looking at a “state of emergency” (Walter Benjamin) no matter the place and the tragic comedy that that entails.
Of course, the Tauberbach, of the title being that very dissonance one might imagine in hearing the deaf singing to Bach, works as an appropriate accompaniment to the asymmetry between “Estamira’s Beckettian rants - “Hellish!”, “I like it here”, “I’m going to prepare a fantastic spaghetti”, “Go to hell go fuck yourself” (2), “I know everybody here. Everyone nows me”, “I will not change”.
“A woman who with her words, tries to put a certain order on chaos while surrounded by creatures inviting her to be more physical, more sensitive, more sensual. The immersion of the actress in the intuitive world of the dancers came about through lengthy improvisations.” (Alain Patel)
So yes here beyond her world is the overwhelming presence of her fellow garbage heap dwellers/ the dancers of Ballet C de la B. The accomplished nature of each and every dancer, and how Alain Platel has been able to key into how “to use” each dancer to create a complete sense of a community of dancers is remarkable. For instance, a dancer like Romeu Runa whose sleek “forms” (he has many) (at times looking like a satyr or the god Pan) consistently move between the highest of ballet art, with flashes of Nijinsky, Nosferatu, and a characterization which at one point could have been a more elegant version of the animated character Road Runner, moving in stealth swathes across the stage. In this sense (of the literal morphological movements and lines he was making), Runa might be our contemporary Nijinsky; his role was equally enmeshed in his community of fellow dancers, but then also rooted in a kind of individuation which each dancer was allowed to go through during the course of the performance.
One can also think to the mind blowing solo that Ross McCormack did. This solo got a spontaneous giddy uncontrolled clapping during the show. Lisi Estaras who seemed to always be, at once behind and in front of her fellow dancers, like a light yet brooding and “perfectly lit shadow”. There was Berangere Bodin’s Godaresque sense of rebellion and Elie Tass’ subtle movements that open the play, that very importantly brings us into the complex world of the garbage heap dwellers.
With the music of Bach and more and more Bach, we slip into a this world (of the garbage heap dwellers) and like Elsie De Brauw’s “Estamira”, rebel leader of the garbage dump, we “….slip into a preconscious world, words gradually lose their power and unification of body and mind takes place” (Alain Platel).
Radiant beauty, a protean monster, grand displayer of the human condition (in such harsh conditions of living in the garbage dump) consistently testing the nexus between our animality and the human, and like an illustrious flower bed which continues to at once grow and recede, grow and recede, Tauberbach has already made theatre history!
(1) The documentary about her is called, Estamira - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0427221/
(2) It should be remembered that there is this other voice she is talking to which within the mind of schizophrenia might be oneself or another version of oneself.
James Oscar studied closely under the Martiniquan poet Edouard Glissant. He has published as a poet Perch at Black Night, Pegasus Press 2009, Notes for the White Arboreal, 5X8 Press 2014, and in fiction The Horns of Moses, Magenta Press 2014 recently performed and presented at NY’s Museum of Modern Art PS1 in October 2014. His forthcoming books are Anna Erostrata Magenta Press 2015, Infinite Essay Magenta Press 2015, and a collaboration with the Polish feminist performance artist Jana Astanov - Save the Arctic Magenta Press 2015. His work surrounds new curatorial praxis, poetics, anthropology, and issues of “post” nation. He is a news reporter at CKUT Radio focussing on issues of immigration, diversity, dance, and theatre.
jamesoscarjr@gmail.com
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