International Association of Libraries and Museums of the Performing Arts

Société Internationale des Bibliothèques et des Musées des Arts du Spectacle

From Theatre to Post Theatre from "Interpreting" to "Changing the World"

Tomek Kitlinski (Université de Paris Vll)

Documentation des Arts du Spectacle dans une Société en Mutation / Documentation of Performing Arts in a Changing Society

Société Internationale des Bibliothèques et des Musées des Arts du Spectacle / International Association of Libraries and Museums of the Performing Arts
19ème Congrès International, Lisbonne 7-11 septembre 1991 / 19th International Congress, Lisbon 7-11 September 1992
Ed.: José Carlos Alvarez. Lisboa : 1994, p. 35-36

The Post Teatro of José-Angel comes at the end of the "post"-epochs. After postcommnunism, postmodern on MTV, postpunk, when Nihil novi has been (over)disseminated as déjà. What can still frustrate our expectation horizon as das Neue... And he does anarchize the established notions, these of theatre - the most socialized (conventionalized) practice. Theatrical concretizations fail; there is no performance, actors, gestures, audience. They all, decomposed, are metamorphosed into graphism, which does not signal any return of drama. Far from it, the word here is silence. This is a (non)theatre of the non-dit of pictography, evidently postpostpictography. The pictogram, even without the double prefix, plays and plagiarizes; José- Angel's pictogram (to repeat Federman's repetition) pla(y)giarizes. What are José-Angel's "plays" if not parasites on the bodies of the classics? Built in a minimal (shall I say minimalist) space, they are unspeakable unauditory obje
cts which minimalize the strata of theatrical artefacts and maximalize subversivity. A limitation to one medium is conducive to the striptease of theatre devices.
In extremis the Post-Theatre
is a black page; incompatible with Malevich's "icon" that dismantles only one sign system. On a different occasion (Phaedra), the eschewal of the "main text" and the foregrounding of stage directions leads ad absurdum of taking literally, or rather visually, the "psychology" of Berenice's chair. In another Phaedra, chromatic this time, the Word is crossed out by a diabolic pencil and a trident. The perverse is dangerous. JoséAngel taboos booklets; his is then Lese(Buch-)drama, an impossible innovation after Gertrude Stein, Duchamp, Kantor, Beuys, Kiefer... A drama of the cosmos, a drama in the Book is nothing but the Romantic tragedy. Revolutionary visionary theatre rather than in the theatre took place on the street or on microscopic paper. Romanticism is not an accidental reference here; the most powerful (after the Reformation) upheaval of Order, including the aesthetic Rules. And wasn't Romantic art "fiction" and "theory" in one, brought back by Der
rida and Tel Quel The artistic=political praxis mixes the sexual with the (a)theological, at least since the Song of Songs. The Post-Teatro thematizes the struggle for (erotic) power in Honor Deflowered. The pages of the book carry personajes, escenografia, objetos and sequenciograma, all drawn in a Your First Book fashion. While caricaturing totalitarianisms, José-Angel does not spare the closed system of theatrical writing. He disturbs not only the traditional, but also the recent construct of théâtralité; he opposes taking theatre for literature, but also for the arts of spectacle. Post-Theatre annexes the borderlands of "critical" and "creative" writing, as well as visual and performance arts. Just as Post Teatro negates the text, it remains an intertext: "Proust is what comes to me, not what I summon up; not an 'authority', simply a circular memory.
Which is what the inter-text is: the impossibility of living outside the infinite text - whether this text be Proust or the daily newspaper or the television screen: the book creates the meaning, the meanig creates life". So far Barthes. In a more Kristevan polysense, Post-Teatro "absorbs and transforms" a variety (in all its polysemy!) of signifying processes. It is carnivalesque! As ever, behind a "farewell to meat", there is the tragic. Postpostmodernism brings suffering back. Suffering, troubled speech and mysticism to anarchize them, but on the verge of anti-semanticity. Like my non performance, co-authored with Malgorzata A. Staniewska, The Black Post Novel Maybe, (un)speaks the impotence of writing (a Gothic Novel) hic et nunc: Eastern Europe in the postpost, José-Angel codes and immediately decodes his/our untenable time and space.
The Post-Teatro is aleatory. In a collection of nine "plays" of Joseph-Angel (Le mot de la fin et huit autres piéces de théâtre), "on dit" "on dit","replique à quelqu'un", "quelqu'un donne la réplique a quelqu'un", "quelqu'un" "quelqu'un", "quelqu" "quelqu", only to finish on a blank page of the "théâtre en blanc". The decadent author parallells in his solipsisms the "metaphysical cabaret" of Witkiewicz (and his play(y)giarism) or the aphasic "landscape plays" of Gertrude Stein (whereas for her deformations of the (edle) Stoffe der Literatur compare Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights).
Who is José-Angel: a "scientist" or an "artist"?

Both; university, as performed by Joseph Beuys in his shamanist actions or Hélene Cixous in her poetic seminars, can be rebellious, not only in 1968. On the cover of Theological Erotica (o sexo y rezo de la Espana puritana y puritana), there is a warning of the author: "Cualquier lector que abra este libro puede encontrar imágenes o palabras que pueden ofender su sensibilidad".
The Post-Theatre offers an aftercontemporany mock heroic.
José-Angel knows no sanctities; even our amorous demi-gods lose their epic quality: the Marquis de Sade and Don Juan are but paper clips with fig leaves. They are homosexual; writers and psychoanalysts have long known about it, but theatre is never open. David Schapiro: "the most exacting theatre of the last two decades may be seen in the lyrics of John Cage, just as Gertrude Stein's dilapidated lyric plays entrance us more than a whole host of more obvious performers and performances". Post theatrical avant la lettre, Stein destabilizes identity and language, plays with History, "If Ulysses S. Grant had been a religious leader who was to become a saint, what would he have done. If the Wright brothers had been artists, that is painters, what would they have done. If Henry James had been a general, what would he have had to do. If General Washington had been a writer, that is a novelist, what would he do".
On too many occasions, I witnessed (and participated) in transmitting political messages by Polish "alternative" theatre.
Politics, however, was limited to fighting communism; it was the seemingly more "form-oriented" artists who broke political= sexual=aesthetic taboos. "Now, as art becomes less art, it takes on philosophy's early role as critique of life" (Allan Kaprow). But only on condition that it disrupts the very foundations of communication and representation. That is why the Post-Teatro is counter art. José-Angel's laughter destroys fossilized theatre; at the same time, he jeopardizes every harmonious economy of a world interpreting. Moving into postpostmodernism with his (anti)tragedy, he UNRESTS, "vuestro desobediente servidor".

19th Congress

URL: http://www.sibmas.org/congresses/sibmas92/lisb08.htm