Body is the First Word I Say, Eve BonneauToday I've watched in DVD the live performances of the first SPILL festival, 2007. The pieces all share things in common, it is interesting to see how much the history of the artform influences contemporary artists today, during the festival there was a participatory timeline of social, political and visual arts key moments in the history of the genre, of which I specially remember Antonin Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty, and feminism. And alot of the pieces delt with 'classical' issues like violence, murder, violence against women, feminism, gender bending/breaking, sexuality, physical and emotional suffering and limits, women, nudity and selfcutting. The way the show is curated gives an emphasis on the exploration of the body.
Most important for me was the perceived key difference between pieces that used technology (speakers, microphones, video), strong theatrical ilumination, make-up and costumes, relied on other elements (set, stage), and where the performer(s) performed with clear acting skills (i.e. they had a script and talked, there was a narrative, or sucessfull expression of emotions); versus extremely austere pieces. This difference affected the whole nature of the piece, with the division REAL / ARTIFICE. The more theatrical built their strength in a good drama/show, whilst the more raw and crude built their strength in the unexpected, radical, underground, perverse, edgy, absurd, ilogic and nonsensical.
I specially liked Eve Bonneau's Body is the First Word I Say, and Kira O'Reilly's Syncope. In both, a nude woman explores her body, it's movement, physicality and language, in very unconventional ways that underline the strict order of rules, practices and meanings our bodies are (usually) inscribbed in. The core of these performances was the nude female body, with barely any other elements, Bonneau used a mobile light bulb at the end of a cord, the only light source in the room, which she moved around her body. O'Reilly wore heels and used a repetitive mechanic background noise. There was no limits to their space of action, engulfing the audience into their unruled deviant behavioural realm.
The lack of stage, costume, technology and theatrical lighting brings the action ever so close to the audience, there is no distance. The rol or inscribbed location of the performer breaks out of control, this is not theatre were you sit and enjoy the show. The disembodied eye and it's objectifying gaze turned into forced witness, into a self-conscious subject that identifies with the performer.
"We abolish the stage and the auditorium and replace them by a single site, without partition or barrier of any kind, which will become the theatre of the action. A direct communication will be re-established between spectator and the spectacle, between the actor and the spectator, from the fact that the spectator, placed in the middle of the action, is engulfed and phisically affected by it."- Antonin Artaud
