square white world

ever wondered what the professionals use?

and do us a favour, when they ask you,

“where did you get the good oil on Crime Oil?”

tell them,

“the real oil on Crime Oil is only available here, at Square White World.”

lubricating the criminal element since 1999

The next days followed quickly and without major variation, except they got shorter. Tolerances to this phase of the treatment apparently decreased over time, our days ending earlier and earlier.

By three o’clock on the fourth day immobile figures on mats outnumbered those who were moving. There were squeaks and rattles and the trolleys departed.

The woman in white stopped a tall male dancer on his way out. He came back minutes later with a ladder and removed the clock. The woman in white no longer wanted us to measure the effects of the treatment by the clock.

After that first time I did not wake again in the night. But I had the impression of ghostly old people padding around me, the volunteers.

Your arms began to remember late at night and your legs and buttocks. And you might have fallen into a deep black well to start with but before morning you became restless, rolling from one side to the other.

Waking reality infected what dreams there were until you awoke at last exhausted and afraid.

On the fifth morning, or it might have been the sixth, the heat lamps came on and as usual the room went from a warm red to a brilliant white and the dancers hurried through collecting our blankets and mopping up whatever had spilled or seeped from our sleeping bodies. As usual they brought out bowls of thin sweet porridgey stuff and put them on the side tables.

There were the normal sounds of yawning and different ones like whimpers and small cries as we made our way to breakfast. But today only one trolley squeaked and rumbled into the hall.

The woman in white parked it up beside the odd piece of apparatus, which had become familiar enough to have almost disappeared.

Four nurses stood beside the apparatus. The woman in white consulted some papers and the nurses whispered amongst themselves.

The dancers variously mopped, wiped, shook out mats and repositioned them.

Breakfast took two or three mouthfuls and you felt sick. It tasted like condensed milk reinforced with baby’s formula.

By the time we’d finished everything was in order.
The half full bowls went into big plastic tubs and were whisked away. Our dancers guided us to our mats at a pre-arranged signal.

The dancers left us sitting or lying on our mats and joined the nurses around the giant egg-cup.

The woman in white seemed to be questioning them.

There were nods and some shaking of heads. Then the mood of the dancers rapidly lifted and became light as if they were relieved, as if the woman in white was pleased with their progress. There was even a bit of laughter and some gentle applause.

One of the dancers took a little bow. Her or his group, sometimes it was impossible to tell, comprised two of the smallest girls.

The dancers came away from the meeting with smiles. The one with the little girls went so far as to give them both a quick hug.

Karim smiled at our group. He patted me on the back.

It was impossible not to feel happy for them even if you didn’t know why.

Karim guided us through our movements.

You felt that the normal resistances of bones and muscles had gone. You saw into the small of your back, while your legs changed places with your arms and your neck stretched around. And even your skull seemed to be able to change its shape. And for all that you didn’t want to look too closely or consider how you looked from the outside.

If you did for an instant step out of yourself, it was sickening to see. It was like watching a snake swallow an egg.

Your limbs slithered over each other. You were jointless. You were all fibre, a single sinew.

The movement was continuous, until at some point you passed out again.

Waking, you would resume the exercises.

I’d gone for a few seconds into blackness. I came back out of it to the sound of clapping.

The hardest things were now things like sitting up, getting upright.

You could say I rested on my elbows, but equally my cheek rested on my knees. I tried to see what was going on.

Karim and other dancers were clapping. Most of the middle school were like I was.

A few attempted weakly, limply to join in with the applause. They slowly brought their arms together, like flippers.

One of the small girls had been lifted to shoulder height by the dancers. She wore a slack grin and was being paraded around the hall.

After a circuit, she was carried to the front, to the woman in white and the egg-cup.

They sat her in the egg-cup. She rested limp as a squid on the blue gel pads, which held her arms and legs and supported her buttocks and neck and followed the curve of her spine.

Adjustments were made. The tap-wheels turned.

Her legs met her chest. Her arms crossed in front of her. And her neck bent forward. It was taken further forward.

Then they seemed to compress her body.

As if they’d suddenly thrown a lever sucking all the air out of the egg-cup, there was a strange sort of hiccup from the girl.

Her body was vacuum-packed, yet still suspended on the pads.

The woman in white removed several syringes from their packets.

She took samples from all over the compressed form, sliding one under the thin skin of her scalp.

The small girl blinked. She didn’t, she couldn’t struggle.

Seeing all eyes in the hall on her, the woman in white gave a small bow. It was an acknowledgment of their accomplishment as much, now that we had all seen what we were working towards, as a sign to resume our work.

It would be disingenuous of me to say that the problem, Is theatre an artform? is being presented without prejudice. I’ve already made up my mind.

Now where should I look for support? and how prove it? Perhaps it’s better to ask: Is theatre not an artform?

- Robert David MacDonald (left), Philip Prowse (centre), Giles Havergal (right), directors of the Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre, in a painting by Adrian Wiszneiwski, 1995

“A bunch of poofs strutting around in tights pretending their kings and queens,” is Robert David MacDonald’s summation of the view of a contemporary audience. Is this all that’s going on on stage to lead us to consider theatre not an artform? a camp theatricality? which, according to the logic of camp as the ‘the lie that tells the truth,’ swings both ways: to cheap and tawdry imitation and to expensive and shameless self-display?

Where I’m heading is this: both ‘ways’ deal with representation, a certain ‘distinct obscure’ relation of theatre to representation, and do so before they deal with concepts of incarnate or embodied or performance practice. It is a matter of priority, then, for me, if I want to show theatre to be an artform, or to argue the point, to see how theatre holds up against the charge made in Gilles Deleuze and repeated in others’ texts about Deleuze of theatre being the art of representation par excellence.’

- Dorothea Olkowski

Representation is - and this is reinforced by Dorothea Olkowski’s aptly titled Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation - the gatekeeper to theatre’s entry to the privileged group, art forms. Why Deleuze? Because, as his philosophy shows, the field of a concept’s contestation is often where that concept appears with the greatest clarity.

My argument in practice starts here: the concept of representation is most hotly, painfully, riskily contested on stage. Theatre engages this concept in a more problematic sense than other artforms (in fact, par excellence). And this is the reason for theatre’s relegation to non-artform status. Its status is rendered ambiguous by its relation to representation.

- Anthony Burgess in a photograph by Liana Burgess, taken in New York, 1972

A clear example of the preceding lies in the fate of the erstwhile ‘colonial’ stagecraft employed in New Zealand theatres. We had the British Rep. schtick down. A period of experimentation with other models marks the 70s and 80s as getting over colonial practice, developing postcolonial strategies. Today we might be said to have adopted a new abstract position, neocolonial. The metanarrative of representation remains, on at least one axis ‘colonialism,’ a barrier to what happens in these ersatz contexts being ‘art’ or, I would argue, ‘theatre.’ (And theatre is in this case like Anthony Burgess’s hand with which he composed music and not like the typewriter with which he wrote books: it has a direct line to the heart; this makes it highly, archly representative.)

Deleuze interests me as providing a strong conceptual framework - and, to be honest, a fluid one - for a valorisation of art as uniquely able to give access to what is: the famous virtual ontology or transcendental empiricism. And, therefore, because of the signally important place of art in his philosophy, and because he wrote little about theatre, the challenge is to bring his thought into theatre, to contest his concepts in theatre, and, thereby, to contest the concepts of theatre.

Deleuze called his two books dealing with cinema works of philosophy. In a similar way, I’m proposing a philosophy of theatre that is also a theatre of philosophy. In fact, to follow a Deleuzian logic, one cannot but be the other.

In our initial discussion over at Massey’s Albany campus, Dr. Paul said something like: I don’t see how, if you are writing the texts, you are going to find anything you haven’t already put there. My part-answer was along the lines of a radical differentiation between the arts of writing and of rehearsing. On reflection, this is hardly satisfying. Rehearsing is an entirely different creative process to writing (or reading, for that matter, pace, Rolande Barthes).

- W.H. Auden

I would rather say that the revolution is in the realism and align myself with Auden. Not quite any text will do but if the assumption is that theatre is first an artform where it is last or least representation, then there are any number of historically recognised dramatic texts which will do. It comes down to what we are looking for: not for what is absent but for what is non-representational in the text and dramatic practice, what is not actualised but virtually creative on/of the text or practice.

- Gilles Deleuze with Felix Guattari

We ask the preeminent question of Deleuze and Guattari: How does it work? How does Hamlet work? How do we make a Hamlet machine, Herr Müller? The text has its way of working, its ‘logic of sense,’ its ideal ‘realism,’ and it is different from theatre’s; it differs from the same question we would ask in rehearsal: How does this scene work? with this actor? this style? this aesthetic? (and so on, along the lines of representational logic).

To grab a bit of Barthes, borrowed for the same reasons by Olkowski, the punctum is a non-representational and non-matricial property of the photograph. The studium, knowledge of what makes the photo, knowledge of context and content, is quite a different thing. And between studia, as it were, between the studia of rehearsal and dramaturgy, a great and productive gap opens, a crack-process, generating differences: neither a text nor the interpretation of a text (how it works) is equal to its realisation in rehearsal or performance (how it works); they will always work differently and, if they do work, continue to generate differences.

There is nothing revolutionary about the idea that every revolution in the arts is brought about by a new realism. (Auden was a great exponent of Bergsonism, like Deleuze; some say to the former’s detriment.) In practice, the texts have to work at their own level. I’m sure you’ll recognise this as nothing new either. The level, or milieu, we exploit, to give us a plane of consistency, in rehearsal, is quite different. That there is this difference to start with points to the possibility of theatre as art.

What is a theatre of philosophy?

- Étant donnés, Marcel Duchamp

Well, it’s a unique selling point!

And now tell me it’s anti-platonic!

- Étant donnés, Marcel Duchamp

It is.

Residual would be the word I was looking for in the previous post, in which Duchamp’s infra-mince is again at work…

…or David Byrne’s sound that never leaves a theatre…

- knee play 1, drawing by Robert Wilson

…from the knee plays…

- for the CIVIL warS, Robert Wilson, the international artistic event of the 1984 LA Olympics… from which (and from whom) the Olympic Arts Committee withdrew support

What happens when the characters from this play drop the words that up to this point they’ve been speaking, when they forget the expressions and gestures they’ve been rehearsing, and leave the play behind altogether, to walk, like children in an enchanted wood, through the story of Semele, picking their own lines as they go?[Semele]

This project explores the rift between the play, organised for its characters, and the poetic text, an arrangement of words. It asks, once the two supporting structures have been removed, what is left?

It finds, in places, a vestigial tracery of cracks, like a pattern in iron sand; in other places, a chasm opens, deep as a mountain-range is high, but again with its own delicacy and natural harmony. The poem and play have been pressed together. The project runs into the sometimes infinitesimal, sometimes gaping, difference between them, following the movement and process of differences, looking for a life outside the self-organising principles of the play or poem.

What I have not mentioned is story or drama, in the hope that these things will live inside the structures which eventuate and inhabit them with a sense found rather than forced. For structures that are at once a leaf skeleton and the instantaneous brush-stroke of a master calligrapher preparation is what is most important.

In the previous post, in Rodolphe Rapetti’s description, the little girl in the photograph on the harmonium has become a “living doll,” “lifeless,” with “vacant eyes;” the picture of her actual body “disembodies eroticism.” (He does not, however, pass over the opportunity to make a sexual joke of “pull[ing] all the stops” to produce the “perverse fascination” of the “mechanical performance” she promises.) Whereas the work of the Nabis and Jarry with marionettes and, by inference, Symbolism itself “conjure[s] up a dramaturgy in which an author’s inventiveness [can] forgo flesh-and-blood actors.” The puppets offer an embodiment for Symbolism’s theatre of concepts, the flesh and blood of actors forgone, that is by contrast alive, vital, full, and erotic. [Symbolism, pp. 73-74 & 83]

Pierre Louÿs’s little girl is posed. She’s sat on an organ; her legs are spread; her head is tilted. She is first a passive recipient of the photographer’s instruction and might easily have been replaced with an anatomically correct doll but for the affect of vitality the photographer perhaps wished to extract from her living body. The question is: Is that affect all the more striking for being pressed, posed, forced out and subsisting in the image as a furtive pulse or point? Or is it the knowledge we have, the presumption we make, that the girl was alive at the time the photo was taken?

These two possibilities correspond to Rolande Barthes’s concepts of the punctum and studium. In Camera Lucida, Barthes asks a similar question of a photograph. He asks it because the photograph has an immediate affect on him and he wants to discover whether that affect is somehow localisable on the surface in the photograph or is in him, on the surface, in the beholder’s eye. Contrary to expectation, he finds something, some little thing, in the photo, which does not belong to the body of knowledge, social, historic, etc. he brings to the photo. He invents the terms punctum to cover this small thing and studium for what the viewer brings to the photo, which, presumably, includes the part of the viewer’s knowledge that resonates along with the punctum.

An additional question may now be asked: Do puppets have a punctum? Rapetti quotes Heinrich von Kleist, who said that the line of movement, or arabesque, of the marionette was “nothing less than the path of the dancer’s soul.” [Symbolism, p. 83] Does puppetry distill a human aspect, an affect, and literally re-present it? And, then, the obvious further question: Or is it the actor or dancer, the living person, who steals from the puppet or doll its soul?

These questions revolve round the problem of representation encountered earlier in posts here with regard to Dorothea Olkowski’s The Ruin of Representation. Olkowski pursues her line of inquiry in The Universal to ask of the punctum and that in the viewer’s studium with which it resonates whether there is an ontological basis for this resonance, this passing of energy, this vibration in the sensibility. She asks, therefore, about a relational process of differentiation and differenciation.

Symbolism raised the disembodied and embodied spectre of animation at the end of the 19th century, the problem of the uncanny, of unholy possession and of transported and ambulatory souls. Spiritualism testifies to the perverse fascination of science with that furtive substance animating puppets, dolls and people in their affects and the immaterial in its effects. It was called electricity or magnetism, in combination, electromagnetism, as if the divine breath were experienced by mortal man and woman in a thunderbolt.

- publicity photo of Nikola Tesla

- Semele perishes at the sight of Zeus

Coming soon: rigid or yielding? How do you like your puppet? Anatomically correct or plushie?

A playwright writes texts intended for performance. A director rehearses and, with the help of a company, interprets these texts for the stage. An audience attends performances. A philosopher creates concepts. Theatre possesses a philosophy: it raises the problem of the ideal theatre, the fact that none is, but that theatre signifies this ideal, and creates works under its sign. Already there are traces here of Gilles Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism.

What I propose is a research project in and doctoral thesis on theatre. Research includes starting a small theatre group called T-Cell, for which I will write texts. (I am preferring ‘texts’ over ’scripts,’ because of the idea that play scripts are in a sense pre- or pro-scriptive; although the pharmacological sense of ‘prescription’ might happily be retained, considering the group’s name and its ‘clinical’ undertaking.) These texts will function as pretexts and subtexts, to measurable degrees. That is, they will be written so that they can be rehearsed and interpreted by the group and performed for an audience. The experiment is to produce work for the stage, and for an audience, which explores and exploits the milieu of theatre through its concepts. Deleuze will guide the research, in the writing of the texts and in the practice of the group, and provide coordinates to the different but connected theatre of philosophy so that I may arrive at proposing a philosophy of theatre.

I completed my MA thesis, entitled “Nihilism, Cosmetics and Audacity: Dandyism and Dorian Gray,” in 1992 and, having done the theory, wanted to put it to work, into a theatre practice. In actuality, the relationship turned out to be asymmetrical: the practice literally swallowed up the theory. My plan, now, is to generate theory from the practice directly, towards writing a doctoral thesis, which will test and record the findings of the research I’ve sketched as well as opening up the conceptual field: the working method may be summarised, after Deleuze, as both critical and clinical.

The concept I want to begin with is: theatre as art. Following Deleuze’s lead, the problem can be stated: Is theatre an artform? Is that the Idea? Or is there just something wrong with the company it keeps? The myths of its foundation place it one step up from the brothel and one step down from the rites of religion. The crack between the flesh and spirit runs right through theatre and may account for its extraordinary fertility as a metaphor, theological, psychoanalytical, philosophical, political, martial, passional.

The problem with theatre being an artform is that where it is invoked as metaphor it acts, in Slavoj Zizek’s phrase, as a ‘negative disavowal’ of representation. A judgement that, without the double negative’s suspended sentence, is confirmed by theatre being condemned as “representation par excellence.” Theatre’s status as an artform is settled: in a virtual ontology, art generates what representation kills. So the initial concept of theatre as art leads immediately to two more problems.

The problem, firstly, of representation arises particularly with regard to Deleuze’s philosophical treatment of theatre. Although a collection of essays about him might bear the title Gilles Deleuze and the Theatre of Philosophy, his writing on theatre amounts to a single extended piece, called Un manifeste de moins. Add to that the stringent requirements that Deleuze makes of art - “there are many who write but very few writers” -, its signally important position within his philosophy, and we ought to ask whether it is possible to read Deleuze in the theatre at all.

The second problem, or concept, here has to do with ‘embodied practice.’ In order to meet Deleuze’s critical criteria, and if it is indeed possible to read him in the theatre, what then is a Deleuzian theatre? So far, we can at least project that it will be non-representational. I would suggest further that it will involve the Bergsonian concept of duration and would refer to Dorothea Olkowski’s feminist reading of Deleuze and, since he wrote extensively on theatre, Roland Barthes.

T-Cell will set out to inquire into what non-representation on stage, before an audience, might be. The thesis I am proposing will set out to inquire what it might mean, or, in other words, how it works. What this summary proposal misses is company: the group collaboration, the community of the theatre, the society of the audience.

Even to the height of mighty Olympus (or Όλυμπος), reports of the exceptional beauty of the child had reached. The king of all the gods, who has his throne upon that mountain, Zeus (or Ζεύς), heard them. He watched and waited.The child’s mother, Harmonia (or Αρμονία), was born of the unlikely union between love and war, Aphrodite (or Ἀφροδίτη) and Ares (or Ἄρης), making her uncles, on her mother’s side, fear and panic, Deimos (or Δεῖμος) and Phobos ( or Φόβος). Her father, the hero Cadmus (or Κάδμος), was founder of the city of Thebes; he’d brought his immortal bride, Harmonia, to the city, where she’d given him three daughters, Ino, Agave, Autonoë, and a son, Polydoros, before the fourth daughter, whom it pleased Zeus to look on from afar, who was called Semele (or Σεμέλη).

The child flourished in the well-appointed city of Thebes, a city happy to have as wise and just a sovereign as Semele’s father, Cadmus. Her mother bestowed on her an harmonious disposition, to add to the almost-divine radiance of her limbs and features, a beauty of mind or soul, and balance in all her inward and outward attributes and virtues. So she grew to womanhood; for an immortal eye, this happened in an instant.

When she was ready enough, Zeus one night alighted on the flat roof of the palace. He swung himself down into her bedchamber, silencing the young woman’s nurse, Beroe, who still slept in her room, with a whiff of sevoflurane, a drug the god had stolen from his wife, Hera; since Hera kept a veritable pharmacy of ethers and barbiturates, haloalkanes and opioids.

From the awesome majesty of his divine body, Zeus changed to mortal form, wherein he was yet a paragon of physical strength and male beauty. Approaching her bed and for the first time within arm’s reach of Semele, Zeus comprehended the distance by which her pulchritude outstripped her years and knew that it was this gift of the gods, even as an infant swaddled in the lap of her nurse, Beroe, had drawn his attention to her.

But Semele was born mortal and for her Zeus had prepared and brought with him a draft made from pieces of the heart of Zagreus, his son, whom he had off his daughter, Persephone, when he went to her and lay with her in the shape of a serpent. His son’s heart had been all that was left to Zeus after the Titans, acting on the orders of his wife, Hera, found Zagreus in the care of the dancing Curetes (or Κορύβαντες) and pulled him to bits and devoured him, half raw, half cooked.

Zeus had had a son to rule Olympus after him, had lost him to Hera’s jealousy, and had contrived a plan to bring him back. He would feed Semele the pieces of the heart, which, when incorporated into her body, although she was human and would be a mortal mother, would mingle with Zeus’s seed when he impregnated her, to give forth a god. Semele, the ruler of all the gods thus reasoned, would bear him his son, named Zagreus, anew.

Semele woke up to utter darkness and felt not seeing the presence of the god in her room, before she heard him. Artemis (or Ἄρτεμις), the eternal virgin, another of Zeus’s daughters, over whom he had exercised his influence, had in turn used hers, so that she need not bear witness to her father sleeping with the mortal, Semele, to steal the moon’s light away, while she hunted in other quarters.

Zeus then spoke to Semele and she immediately knew him, for his voice was deep and rolled like thunder, pressing her down onto the bed, making her whole body quake. He told her to drink the draft and standing beside her bed even brought it to her lips and held her shoulders so that the warmth of the heart of Zagreus going down her throat into her belly was nothing compared to that passing through his arm and from the nearness of his chest to her: she felt his breath on her face and smelt in it the charge in the air that precedes a summer storm.

Semele emptied the cup down to the final drop without a thought as to what it might have been, too distracted was she, excited by the bedside manner of the king of all the gods. But as soon as she was finished, Zeus lay down with her on the bed and saying not one word further, he had intercourse with her.

The next morning, Semele was ashamed: even if it was a god, even if it was that god, how could she prove it? and, what had she done? She prevailed on her nurse, Beroe, who had awoken none the wiser, to burn her sheets and to destroy any evidence she might find of a man having been there.

In this way, neither her father, Cadmus, nor mother, Harmonia, found out a thing. The very absence of the moon, on that occasion and on all subsequent visits by the god, they rationalised away and thought no more of than it were a season of cloudy nights and stormy presages, which never seemed to amount to the promised thunderstorm and did not achieve that relief, which is availed when the weather finally breaks.

For Semele, also, the nightly visits brought no relief: through the days she couldn’t wait for her lover’s touch and by night all she yearned for besides his touch was the light to see him by, to look into his eyes, and the sound of his voice, because he never again spoke to her as he did the first time, asking her to drink the heart-seeds of his son.

Semele gradually lost confidence that the god loved her, because he gave her none that he did; and without his reassurance, she began to suppose that he might, in fact, despise her: to all her requests to look on him, to hear him speak a single word, whether of love or despite, he remained dumb. He made love to her silently and, as she had from the first taken care that their love-making stayed secret, secretly.

The darkness, the silence and the secrecy took their toll on Semele. That she had fallen pregnant and that her efforts at secrecy could no longer claim to be rewarded, the secret being out, did not at all lessen or mitigate but rather increased the weight and strain under which the god’s love placed her. Hera, meanwhile, on high Olympus, heard and soon saw for herself, in Semele’s burgeoning belly, the extent of her husband’s betrayal.

One morning, disguised as Beroe, her nurse, Hera appeared to Semele and while the latter wept with frustration at being so used by the god, Zeus, she told her exactly what she wanted to hear. She consoled her by encouraging her indignation at her lover’s offhand treatment and persuading her she ought by rights to demand Zeus come to her, not like a thief, silently stealing in under cover of darkness, but in all the splendour and majesty with which he visited his wife.

“Ask Zeus to come to you as he comes to Hera, so you may know what pleasure it is to sleep with a god.”

To which end, Hera, as Beroe, gave Semele to know an oath even a god would not dare break, that by the river Styx (or Στυξ) Zeus should swear to grant whatever she asked of him.

The same night, rather than, as she was wont to do, asking for a light to see his eyes, a word to know his heart, Semele put aside all caution and presented her case: since Zeus had not answered her constant badgering or met any of her demands, she from henceforth promised never again to question his silence or the need for darkness, if he would, instead of granting all, fulfil but a single one of her desires.

Semele refused to let him near her till he spoke. Unwilling to force the issue with a mortal woman bearing his divine progeny, Zeus gave his assent. When they’d made love, Semele had him swear the oath by the river Styx and after he’d sworn it, she told him her one and only desire, which he was now bound to serve: that Zeus come to her in all his power and glory that she may know what pleasure it is to sleep with a god.

Regardful of the consequences, since for a god to lose his immortality is of greater consequence that for a mortal to lose her life, Zeus could not break his oath, could not resist Semele’s demand and did not prevaricate longer than the intervening day. Although he was reluctant, the following night he came to her as a god.

She lay bathed in moonlight waiting for him on her bed, until the refulgence of his awesome and immortal form cast that pale fire in the shade, and Semele felt the divine heat of Zeus, king of the gods.

The heat burnt Semele and the storm presaged in a season of cloudy nights broke with lightning and thunderbolts on her bed.

The splendour and majesty of Zeus consumed Semele and in love, by love was she immolated; and not silently, neither secretly, nor in darkness, as Semele burst out screaming and from her body came the immortal infant she’d carried for six long months.

Zeus wrested the baby from the flames, from the mother and from the thunder, and, slicing open his thigh in a long and deep wound, he placed it there, sewing the skin shut and enclosing it in this makeshift womb.

Three months later, the motherless child was born a second time; he was called Dionysus (or Διόνυσος), the twice-born, and the only god of the pantheon who, like Christ, dies.

This is not, however, the end of Semele’s story. Dionysus was given to Semele’s sister Ino and her husband, Althamus, to raise; and then, when Hera wreaked her terrible vengeance on these two foster parents as well, to the nymphs of Nysa.

Eventually, the child born by Semele and Zeus returned to Thebes; and, where “the chamber of Semele, still breathing sparks, was shaded by self-growing bunches of green leaves, which intoxicated the place with sweet odours,” Dionysus, the god, founded his rights.

As an adult, the divine Dionysus went looking for his mortal mother, Semele. He descended to Hades (or Ἅιδης) and retrieved her, and redeemed her, and himself, in the eyes of both Hera and of Zeus. Thus, in apotheosis, was Semele elevated to Olympus where she was made a goddess, Thyone; to whom Zeus addressed himself, saying,

“You have conceived a son who will make mortals forget their troubles.”

For in the mysteries of Dionysus are found the two linked and unequal intoxications, of duplicity, disguise and theatre, in which mortals, like the god himself, are born and die twice, and, of wine, in which they are said to forget, but, by this lesser truth, are led to remember a greater, which is freedom (or ελευθερία). The drunkenness of the latter leads inevitably to the former’s stage of all souls, of gods and men and fools; so mortals forgetting of their troubles may as well forget their mortality, and act out of, as much as in, character.

Thyone, then, the goddess, forever presides over the freedom of Dionysus (or Eleuthyrios), over the bacchanalia and mysteries, and over the Dionysian frenzies, which ensue as the rights of her son, the god.

…

- Jupiter and Semele, by Gustave Moreau, 1894-5

The Symbolist painter, Gustave Moreau (1826-1898) wrote of his final masterpiece, Jupiter and Semele:

In the midst of colossal aerial buildings, with neither foundations nor roof-tops, covered with teeming, quivering vegetation, this sacred flora standing out against the dark blues of the starry vaults and the deserts of the sky, the God so often invoked appears in his still veiled splendour…At the foot of the throne, Death and Sorrow form the tragic basis of Human Life, and not far from them, under the aegis of the eagle of Jupiter, the great Pan, symbol of Earth, bows his sorrowful brow, mourning his slavery and exile, while at his feet is piled the sombre phalanx of the monsters of Erebus and Night..

…

Notes:

Jupiter is the romanised form of Zeus as Symbolism is a somewhat christianised paganism.

Moreau’s Jupiter and Semele has been called the nearest painting’s come to depicting orgasm, or depicting’s orgasm in painting’s come. This would then be the Symbolism I’m interested in here, as incarnate.

Recall, also, Georg Frideric Handel’s opera, Semele. He wrote it for William Congreve’s libretto (for, in fact, John Ecccles’s 1707 opera of the same name) in answer to the fashion moving away from Italian opera, wanting English. Handel’s Semele is usually considered a dramatic oratorio but, as either opera or oratorio, what distinguishes the work is the carnality of Handel’s choice of subject-matter. It is therefore properly carnal as opposed to either sacred or secular, and perhaps it is this very savouriness marking the work out as English.

Hence, then, Symbolism incarnate, carnal opera and Semele, immolated for love, by love, achieving her apotheosis in Olympus, presiding over the Eleutheria (or ελευθερία) … we’ll see how what kind of meaty, gamey constellation, or carnival, will come from these notes and ideas…

I’ve sent the following, under various guises and permutations, to: http://www.mch.govt.nz; http://www.fuel4arts.com; http://www.thebigidea.co.nz; http://www.nzlive.com.

WHO’S DOING WHAT WHEN WHERE HOW TO WHOM IN THE PERFORMING ARTS AND ARE THEY GETTING PAID FOR IT?

I’m soliciting for information, on the fly (immediate and informal) to provide a snapshot of what’s going on out in the general field of New Zealand theatre, a Snapshot Of Real Theatre On the Fly (SORT OF, the acronym). I say New Zealand but input, links, comments and suggestions from elsewhere are welcome.

Based in Auckland, I’ve recently been accepted for PACE on the pretext of a proposal to establish a small, mobile theatre group - called T-Cell - with an honed theoretical edge. Hence, I’m signed up for an UB at WINZ: you can read of my travails at http://www.squarewhiteworld.com

PACE suggested I do a bit of research in the field - through which those Pathways to Artistic & Cultural Employment, of their acronym, are said to cut.

I’m interested in your narratives as theatre people. There follow some deliberately loose questions around which I encourage you to improvise:

Who?

Where do you situate your activity in the broad field of the performing arts (or theatre practice, or simply arts practice)? (Where concretely, place, area; and notionally, interest, e.g. educational, psychodramatic, & c.)

What?

What are you doing right now?

When and where?

Are you in production, performance, touring, in house? For what period?

How often do you do what you’re doing right now?

How?

How do you operate, in terms of organisational model?

How long have you been working in this field? and how long employed?

Do you employ? How many?

To whom:

Do you have a recognisable audience? Where? Who are they?

Anything you can tell me that you consider may be of use - like are you getting paid for it and where does the money come from? - would also clearly be greatly appreciated. I look forward to your contribution.