Inhuman Inhuman Polyphony in the Theatre of MadnessPolyphony in the Theatre of Madness

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Inhuman Polyphony in the Theatre ofMadness

Peter Pl Pelbart

We are the Ueinzz Theatre Company, established in So Paulo, Brazil eighteen years ago.

Lunatics, therapists, performers, maids, philosophers, normopaths... Once on stage, no one

can tell the difference. Its a sort of Ship of Fools, adrift inside and outside the artistic

circuit. We rehearse every week, we have produced five plays, we have given over three

hundred performances, we travel throughout Brazil, and also abroad, and this is part of our

magnificent repertoire. But this concreteness does not guarantee anything. Sometimes we

spend months in the stagnation of insipid weekly rehearsals. Sometimes we ask ourselves if we

have actually ever performed, or will go back to performing. Some actors disappear,

sponsorships dwindle, scripts are forgotten and the very company itself seems like some

intangible virtuality. And then,all of a sudden, a date for a performance appears, some theatre

becomes available,a patron or sponsor shows up, and there is just the glimpse of a season,

with an invitation to perform in the Cariri or in Finland. The costume designer spruces up the

dusty rags, actors who disappeared months ago reappear, sometimes even running away from

internment... But even when it all happens, it is on that fine line that separates building from

collapsing. We move alongside Maurice Blanchots acute intuition that the basis of a work is

unworking (dsoeuvrement).1And we follow Michel Foucaults hypothesis that with the

historical decline of the aura of madness and its subsequent transformation into a mental

illness, madness reappears as unreason2 that is, as the absence of work; an absolute rupture

of the work. I would place our trajectory on that moving limit between madness and

unreason,like a steep experiment over the abyss, where chance, ruination and passivity speak:

the outside.

Lets begin with an example. We are preparing to perform Daedalus' on 20 March 2000 at a

major Brazilian theatre festival. The cast is about to go on stage. The actors are getting ready

to utter, in Greek, the combative clash that begins the piece. I wait, tense; in my head I run

over the words we are supposed to shout at each other in menacing tones. Scanning the

audience, I notice that our narrator is standing a few metres away from the microphone. He

appears to be disoriented. I go up to him, and he tells me that hehas lost his script. I slip my

hand into his trouser pocket, where I find the complete bundle of papers. He stares at the

papers, which I hold up to his face. He seems not to recognise them. He puts on his glasses

only to take them off, and murmurs that this time he will not take part in the play that this

is the night of his death. We exchange a few words, and a few minutes later I am relieved to

see him back at the microphone. But his voice, normally tremulous and stirring, is now slurred

and washed out.In the middle of a scene in which he plays Charon, he suddenly walks right

across the stage and heads for the theatre exit. I find him sitting in the street, deathly still,

murmuring the demand for an ambulance his time has come. I kneel down beside him and

he tells me, Im going to the swamp. The situation lightens up after that. We negotiate: he will

accept a cheeseburger from McDonalds instead of the ambulance. I hear the final applause

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< ... histoire(s) du prsent ... > (< ... histor(ies) of the present ... >), ...

20072011..., documentation of an experience with Alejandra Riera and the Ueinzz

Theatre Company, video still

Summer 2014

Afterall Journal Inhuman Polyphony in the Theatre of Ma... http://www.afterall.org/journal/issue.36/inhuman-polyphony-i...

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coming from inside the theatre, and the public starts to exit through the small door that leads

onto the street, where we are. What they see as they exit is Hades (my character), kneeling at

the feet of the l iving-dead Charon.

And we gain their respect, because, for them, this intimate scene of collapse is part of the

performance. We perform ona razors edge, and it is on a razors edge that we live. Working,

unworking, absence of work.

What is at stake in the para-theatrical or performative device of the Ueinzz is the singular,

unreasonable subjectivity of the actors, who are or have been psychiatric patients, and nothing

else. That is, whatis being staged or acted out are mannersof perceiving, feeling, dressing,

positioning oneself, speaking, asking questions, offering or removing oneself from thegaze of

the other as well as from others enjoyment. It is a way of representing without representing,

associating whilst disassociating, of being on stage and feeling at home at the same time:

crossing the stage in the middle of the performance, bag in hand, because your part has now

cometo an end; conversing with your prompter and thus revealing his presence, before

turning into a toad... Then grunting and croaking, or, like Franz Kafkas nomads in The Great

Wall of China (1917), speaking like magpies, or just saying Ueinzz...

Some in the audience are under the impression that they themselves are the living-dead and

that real life is on the other side of the stage. In fact, in a context marked by the control of life,

modes of resistance to the exercise of biopower,3to use Foucaults term, proliferate in the

most unusual ways. One of them consists in putting lifeliterally on stage not bare, brutal

life, which, as Giorgio Agamben argues, is reduced by biopower to the state of survival, but life

in the state of variation: minor modes of living that inhabit our major modes, and which, onstage or off, gain dramatic or performative visibility, even when one is on the edge of death or

collapse.4Even if within restricted parameters, here is a device for an experiment, though

hesitant and inconclusive, in changingpower over lifeintopower of life.

Indeed, it could be argued that, if today capital and governmentalityenter life on a scale never

seen before, sapping its creative strength, the opposite is also true: life itself hits back, revived.

And if the ways of seeing, feeling, thinking, perceiving, dwelling and dressing become an

objectof capital investment and molecular monitoring, they also become a sourceof value that

can, by themselves, become vectors for self-valorisation or even deviation. In the case of

madness, this happens in de-subjectivation, which undoes familiar, professional, social,

national and religious identities, thus blurring borders and dismantling limits.

On the other, it experiments with singular, plural, collective and inhuman ways of

subjectivation. As we know from Foucault, madness was expelled from the social collective,

locked away and silenced in the seventeenth century. With the adventof psychiatric medicine,it became mental illness in the nineteenth century, and consequently the object of moral, then

psychological and finally medical treatment. And yet a schizoid flow has never ceased to cut

through the limits that scientific rationality ascribes to it a flow that runs through the entire

social body, schizophrenising the surroundings and disseminating itself through the most

varied domains, even through collective, political and poetic practices, as Gilles Deleuze and

Flix Guattari showed.

It would be therefore appropriate to insert the experience of the Ueinzz into the fluctuating

lineage that goes from the history of madness to the schizoid flow, and which spreads into the

realm of the performing arts. This is how it was intuited, since the very beginning of the

company, by Renato Cohen, a well-known theorist and proponent of performance art in

Brazil, who co-directed the Ueinzzs first three plays:

The actors of the company have arare ally on their side, who destroys representation in its

most artificial sense: time. The time of the uncommon actor is mediated by all hisdialogues;it is traversed by subtexts which become the actual text itself. In dialogues,the

reply does not come immediately, nor is it rational; rather, it goes through other mental

circuits. There is a delay,a scenic slowing down, that puts the whole audience in production.

This is not the fictional time of representation, but the time of the actor or performer,the time

of entering and exiting ones character, thus allowing other dimensions of ones acting to be

seen. Cohen concludes that as one breaks away from representation, a space opens up for the

unpredictable,and therefore for the living, since life is synonymous with the unpredictable and

with risk,5inadvertently approaching Foucaults definition of life as an error, as something

that is errant.6The performance then becomes a ritual, Cohen argues, where everyone

witnesses the impossible going on, the curved bodies dancing, the inaudible voices that gain

amplified strength thanks to the electronics installed for the performance.7The microphones

are visible, since the sound that remains in the subconscious is the sound of the media the

sound of television, of radio, of electronic music, of the computer.8Others, even without a

microphone, do not impose their voices and are barely even heard, whether because they do

not possess the vocal technique or because they have difficulties in speaking or problems with


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diction. Speech loses a little of its weight with all the different elements that make up the

scene, thus giving space for other speeches (corporal, for example),9in a disjunction between

bodies without voices and voices without a body.10

Politics of Perception

The course of the Ueinzz has also been inflected by an experience outside ofthe field of theatre,

which in a certainway puts it in suspension: a collaboration with Alejandra Riera, who doesnt

present herself under any defined category, be that of artist, f ilm-maker or writer.Born in

Buenos Aires and living mostlyin Paris, she documents through texts and images how to deal

with others and with the stories that come through us.11Riera came to So Paulo in 2005;

shortly after her arrival, she approached the Ueinzz group to work together on a componentof

her projectEnqute sur le/notre dehors(Enquiry on the/our outside, 2007 ongoing), an

ongoing research that seeksto activate a devicefor very precise,though open, enquiry. This

segment ofthe collaboration took place over a period of ten days and consisted of a daily

outing to a place in the city suggested by theactors of the Ueinzz, where the group would

approach someone of their choice a pedestrian, street vendor, student, police officer,

homeless person and fire at them any questions that came to mind. Since the interviewees

didnt know the interviewers but sometimes perceiveda certain strangeness everything

could easily go wrong, without anyone managing to detect the reason for the derailing. Places

started skidding and the personal, professional or institutional masksthat everyone dearly

holds onto fellto the ground, allowing a glimpse of the unusual dimensions of the disturbing

normality that surrounds us every day. The encounters were recorded on video, albeit not in

a conventional interview format: often the camera doesnt focus on the person speaking, thus

creating a hiatus between what we see and what we hear, which questions once again the

anchoring point of discourse and sets the automatism of comprehension in suspension.

Let us take one minuscule example. We are talking to a peanut seller in front of the Legislative

Assembly in So Paulo. One of our actors asks him what the magic of that place is. The street

vendor does not understand, and asks if the interviewer wants to know how much he earns.

No,I wanted to know what is your happiness here? I dont understand, answers the peanut

seller. The actor, a little agitated by his interlocutors deafness, asks him point blank: No, I

want to know what is your desire, what is the meaning of your life? Then everything stops;

there is a silence and we see the man sinking into a dimension that is totally other. He replies,

quietly,with a certain difficulty: Suffering...This is the basis without a basis of the entire

conversation, the disaster already occurring, the exhaustion that cannot be spoken of; it is the

bitter isolation of a man cornered in front of a monumental building that represents an

unshakeable but nonetheless empty power; it appears only by means of a sudden interruption,

triggered by a sort of vital irritation.An interruption provoked by the one who is supposed tobe drowned in his own abyss the crazy actor. Here everything shifts, and the spectator

suddenly wonders who is truly alive the interviewer or the interviewee and if that

question still has any meaning, since what emerges from this unusual dialogue is nothing but

a whole context of misery. What causes an eruption is the psychosocial instability upon which

everything else rests. In making the situation schizophrenic, in the way that Deleuze and

Guattari use the term, there is the momentary impression that everything may become

derailed: functions, places, obeisance, discourses, representations. Everything may fall,

including the device itself. Even if we meet what was there from the start grievance,

resignation, impotence we witness disconnections that make so-called normality flee, along

with its linked automatic reactions; and also the evocation of other possible bonds with the

world. As Riera states in the text that opens the film-document, thisis not social reporting, nor

a survey with humanist ends, but the recording of an experiment. It has no make-up, no

claims to denounce a situation and no inclination towards aesthetics.

In the end, we do not really have a proper documentary, or a film, but an unusual object, a

trace of an event, which may itself trigger other events, as was the case when some fragments

were shown in La Borde, a psychiatric clinic in the centre of France, where Guattari once lived

and worked. Its a late Friday afternoon in the autumn of 2008, and patients and psychiatrists

are waiting for the Brazilian film in the enormous central hall of this decaying castle, but

there will be no film, documentary or theatrical piece. Absence of work. How to explain this

without disappointing expectations? After the weekly meeting ends, the hundred people

seated in the auditorium turn towards the screen already stretched. Alejandra Riera thanks

those present and straightaway points out that she does not intend to show a film. She

explains that this is only an experiment, that it is very difficult to talk about... Instead of giving

a talk on the project, on her intentions and her logic,as one would expect, she confesses that

she has experienced great difficulty working recently... that in the end she could not manage it

any more... to work, or to build...


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Imagine the effect of this talk on people who had abandoned the circuit of work, projects

and results long ago. She then adds that lately all she can manage is to take things apart, such

as the computer she used to work with, and from her handbag she takes two plastic bags

containing fragments of a disassembled keyboard, one filled with alphabet keys, the other with

the functions (delete, ctrl, alt, etc.), to be circulated amongst those present. The spectacular

expectation of a film gives way to an extraordinary complicity with an artist who does not call

herself an artist, who confesses that she is not able to workand shows the remains of her

computer instead of the work; pieces that havebeen dismantled, evoking a project whose

impossibility

is immediately made known, leaving only the impasse, the fiasco, the paralysis, the exhaustion

that is commonto us all, whether we are lunatics or philosophers, artists or psychiatrists...

Only once the link between art and audience is short-circuited, once the audiences

expectations from that presentation of images are undone, andthe central protagonist is

de-individualised, only then can something else occur:an event as the effect of a

suspension.Then even a projection of fragments can take place, or a controversial

discussion,at times accusatory or visceral, thatdrags on into the night, into the twilightof theauditorium, which no one has taken the trouble to light up; it all ends with the hilarious

question from a patient: Do you all have a project? As if reconnecting to Rieras initial speech

about her difficultyin working, in constructing a project, in doing work, the question evokes

Blanchots intuition on the common ground existing between art and unworking, as well as

Foucaults idea about the relationship between madness and the rupture of work.12Perhaps

this is where we can find a performative exhaustion of the project or work, so that inaudible

voices and improbable events can emerge.

Its true that the video fragment depicting a street prophet evoked an irate explosion from one

of the residents at La Borde when it was projected there. Why are you showing us this, what

right do you have to intensify the mystical deliriumof a paranoid person on the street? This is

not a film, its a provocation, an insult! An immediate and comprehensible reaction, and one

that a more sane public wouldnt perhaps have dared to express when confronted with such a

harsh, beautiful and unbearable scene. Indeed, there is pain everywhere, and the film doesnt

seek to explore it exotically, but neither does it aim to cover it up. The film is about not

ignoring the insanity on the streets, or the loose word that rarely finds a place to land. The

actors gave themselves the liberty to grab fragments of what courses fluidly around them,

what one cant perceive, or stand to see,or is prevented from noticing but which nonetheless

makes noise. Its about a buzzing that hums far below many peoples affective threshold, given

the sensory and media shield that cushions the harshness and the friction of life. In the filmed

fragments projected at La Borde one does indeed recognise types, somewhat like caricatures,

but over the course of the event they end up being divested of their characteristic traits in a

process of corrosion. Such is the case in Kafkas 1919 letter to his father, according to Deleuze

and Guattaris reading: in the unsent missive, the figure of the father is inflated to such a point

that he ends up exploding and leaving something else to be seen,a whole other molecular

movement underneath that was previously hidden.13Likewise, in the enquiry, the recognisable

identity of the interviewee or the interviewer crumbles throughout the conversation.

(Dis)occupation

In 2009, the collective occupation of one floor of the cultural centre Sesc Paulista,in So

Lieu(x)dtudes (Place(s)ofstudies), 2009, documentation of an experience with Alejandra

Riera and the Ueinzz Theatre Company, video stills


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Paulo, intensified this coexistence between interruption and event, introspection and the

outside, opacity and the endeavour to make visible. Over a period of twelve days, the group

performedFinnegans Ueinzz, a play inspired by James JoycesFinnegans Wake(1939), which

was accompanied by contributions from guest speakers and film screenings.14

During this period, Riera proposeda lieu(x)dtudes(place(s)ofstudies), whereby actors,

security guards and cleaners were invited to participate in situations of collective reflection,

with the hope that each one would leave aside hisor her place of origin and question the

competencies, places of enunciation and instruments of perception available in order to be

heard and seen. A dismantled computer on a table, the body without organs of technology, asurgery in which one reinvents the body, inspired by Antonin Artaud, an anagram by Maya

Deren drawn on the floor... In this context, Godardian scenes were staged, such as actors or

cleaners reading dense theoretical papers while moving around machinesof perception and

recording, thereby upsetting the division between those who speak and those who work, those

who represent and those who are represented, those who go crazy and those who theorise

about the unconscious.

Foucault often referred to infamous men and their insignificant, inglorious lives; men who by

a game of chance were illuminated for a brief moment in the floodlights of power with which

they came face to face, and whose words then appeared to have been traversed by an

unexpected intensity. Perhaps we no longer encounter those resplendent, although inessential

poem-lives, particles endowed with an energy all the greater for their being small and difficult

to discern.15Diluted between the multiple mechanisms of anonymous power, their words no

longer enjoy that theatrical resplendence and fleeting vibration that Foucault savoured in the

archives it is banality that takes centre stage. But from within, signs of singularity appear to

confirm the desire for something else. As Deleuze used to say (even before the term

biopolitical' was coined), we are all in search of vitality.16Singular, collective, anonymous,

plural, suspensive, intensive, unworking life each time reinvented, between exhaustion and

a fleeting vision.

Footnotes

See Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation(1969, trans. Susan Hanson),

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. !

1.

See Michel Foucault,Madness and Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of

Reason(1965, trans. Richard Howard), London: Routledge, 1992; and M. Foucault,

Madness, the Absence of Work (1964, trans. Peter Stastny and Deniz S!engel), in Critical

Enquiry, vol.21, no.2, Winter 1995, pp.29098. !

2.

See M. Foucault, Right of Death and Power over Life, The History of Sexuality, Vol.1:Introduction(1976, trans. Robert Hurley), New York: Vintage Books, 1990, pp.13361. !

3.

See Giorgio Agamben,Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life(1995, trans. Daniel

Heller-Roazen), Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. !

4.

Renato Cohen,Performance Como Linguagem, So Paulo: Perspectiva, 2002, p.58.

Translationthe author's. My reading of Cohens work is deeply inspired by the writings of

Ana Goldenstein Carvalhaes, an actor in the company who studied the Ueinzzs process in

light of Cohens perspective. See A. Goldenstein Carvalhaes,Persona Performtica:

Alteridade e Experincia na obra de Renato Cohen(So Paulo: Perspectiva, 2012). !

5.

See M. Foucault, Introduction, in Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the

Pathological(1966, trans. Carolyn R. Fawcett and Robert S. Cohen), New York: Zone

Books, 1989, pp.725.R. Cohen, press release for the play Gotham SP, performed in 2001

at Teatro Oficina, So Paulo. !

6.

R. Cohen, press release for the play Gotham SP, performed in 2001 at Teatro Oficina, SoPaulo. !

7.

Ibid.!8.

See A. Goldenstein Carvalhaes,Persona Performtica, op. cit.!9.

Flora Sussekind, A Imaginao Monolgica,Revista USP, July 1992; quoted in R.

Cohen,Work in Progress na Cena Contempornea, So Paulo: Perspectiva, 1998. !

10.

Alejandra Riera,Maquetas-sin-cualidad (en la fecha del 19 de diciembre de 2004):

fragmentos: un problema no resuelto, , vistas parciales, un trabajo inacabado:

produccin autnoma(trans. Carlos Manzano), Barcelona: Fundaci Antoni Tpies, 2005.

Translation the authors. !

11.

See M. Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, op. cit.; and M. Foucault,Madness and

Civilisation, op. cit.!

12.

[Kafka] deterritorialise[s] Oedipus in this world instead of reterritorialising himself on

Oedipus and in the family. Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari,Kafka: Toward a Minor

Literature(1975, trans. Dana Polan), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986,

13.


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p.10. See also Franz Kafka,Letter to His Father(1919, trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne

Wilkins), New York: Schocken Books, 1976.!

Guests included the psychiatrist Jean Oury, philosopher David Lapoujade, sociologist and

critic Laymert Garcia dos Santos, author and critic Celso Favaretto and psychoanalyst and

cinematographer Miriam Chnaiderman. Several films were projected, including interviews

with Guattari, Francesc Tosquelles and a short film of a dance by Min Tanaka, filmed by

Franois Pain. !

14.

M. Foucault, Lives of Infamous Men (1977),Power: Essential Works of Foucault,

19541984(ed. James D. Faubion, trans. R. Hurley et al.), New York: New Press, 2000,p.161. !

15.

G. Deleuze, On Nietzsche and the Image of Thought (1968),Desert Island and Other

Texts: 195374(ed. D. Lapoujade, trans. Michael Taormina), Los Angeles and Cambridge,

MA: Semiotext(e) and the MIT Press, 2004. !

16.

A different version of this essay was presented at the seminar Histor(ies) of the Present,

co-organised by UNIA arteypensamiento and Afterall at UNIA, Seville on 29 October 2013.

!

17.


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