Week 2 reading notes

(Was part of a group with 2 others but the email did not work)

Matthew Causey, "Tragedia Endogonidia" in Theatre and Performance in Digital Culture (Routledge, London and New York, 2008), pp167-179

• Tragedia Endogonidia (also called BR.04) – a term and play created by Romeo Castelluci, combining the notion of tragedy - associated with culture and awareness of our mortality - with the ‘endogonidial’ - that which is outside of our culture and an ongoing process (derived from microbiology, where living forms with gonads constantly reproduce).

• Romeo Castelluci addresses the issues of modern technology that is slowly embedding itself onto our human bodies to create these genetically modified forms, in a way, creating the superhuman or the perfect being. Example artists that also address this problem include Orlan and Stelarc.

• An example of this term is this surrealist minimalist play that consists of five scenes briefly illustrating a human’s life from birth to death. The space is enclosed and made with white marble lit with fluorescent lights.

• First scene – a black woman dressed in a cleaner’s uniform mops the floor quietly. Brings up connotations of the mess left behind for someone of inferior(?) status to clean up.

• Second scene – An infant crawls around the room. Also on the stage is a free-standing head and shoulders that blinks and speaks. The infant approaches this “machine”. What is interesting about this particular scene is the natural audience reaction and the lack of choreography (since the infant was very young and cried of distress in the first performance).

• Questions arise from this: if the infant is not aware of their surroundings, does the performance become void of its process as theatre? Or does the spectator’s reaction account for this?

• Third scene – a woman in a Victorian-styled dress with thinning hair holding her arm out behind with the other supporting it. The infant from the second scene appears. A projector turns on and it appears to be a loop of a bonfire. The woman points at the projector with a rod and takes steps forwards and backwards. She picks up the infant.

• Fourth scene – A man enters through the proscenium and onto the stage. However, he is dressed in a bikini and wanders about, looking confused. As he gets onto the stage, he approaches a chair that is supplied with garments. He puts these items of clothing on and slowly but not rapidly either becomes a uniformed policeman. To quote, “The movement from child-like naivete to uniformed authority, from playful clothing to spiritual garb, and ultimately to uniform of the law, communicates clearly. Upon the body we place signs of the self, God, and the law, and with each layer the subject’s life is further removed, further subject to control and party to the repression” (p172-173). The scene continues when two more uniformed men enter and begin to set up what looks like a crime scene. One of the men sits within a pool of blood and is immediately perceived as the victim. The victim becomes beaten by the other man until his face becomes swollen and bloody. He is then placed in a bag, quietly chanting Hail Mary and gasping for air. The woman from the third scene appears with a string in her mouth that is eventually pulled out revealing a bloody object. The woman from the first scene enters with a bag and reveals to the audience animal organs, laying them in front of the victim. A young boy in a top hat uses a fluorescent light to shine at the women and as such the entire scene goes into chaos.

• This scene evokes many thoughts and concepts such as the presence and absence of the sacrificial body and the close relations between violence and the Law. To quote again, “At this point in the performance, amidst the trauma, it is as if all connections of the body in pain were severed. The scene is a piling up of unprocessed traumas, and an abyss of psychic terrors is unearthed” (pg 177).

• Fifth and final scene – the old man from the beginning of the previous scene is lying on a hospital bed eating bread. Slowly, he gets under the sheets of his bed, sinking and disappearing completely. The young boy also from the previous scene appears and stands by the bed. It is a somewhat poignant and real scene, however despite the disappearance of the ‘hero’, the stage that provides the narrative still continues. The curtain eventually falls.

• Embeddedness is the next step forward from mediatised culture and performance. We are in ‘the era of spectacle’ where what we see formulates our desires to improve or build upon our notion of self. “The site of power has shifted from the exterior screens of simulation to the interior body or the material subject” (pg 179). However, Causey concludes with the belief that Embeddedness can allow manipulations for the worse threatening our mortality and our knowledge within our lives.