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3:
A performer re-members constantly their own astonishment
at encountering this Inhuman; but, unlike the everyday person (which
includes the performer when they return home), s/he has the mystery or
quality or trick to sustain their own astonishment and seduce us to participate in it: to mix with it.
This is the secret rapture of a miracle turned communion, of a
love-making turned orgy. This miraculous event can never be properly
remembered, since it cannot find a form with which to express its
astonishment: that is, the astonishment exceeds its expressing and
excites and requires more complex modes and styles of encounter. A
miracle explained in documentable proof always re-presents as mundane,
silly, inconsequential, not unlike the practice of analysing performance
semiotically. Yet, in its very one-off nature, a miracle couples
energies and occasions and things in wildly unfamiliar ways, that
everyday techniques cannot recognize. It performs a window of
appearances in the Real, that offers a perspective so sensitive to that
Real it dazzles. To such fury, all theatre aspires.
2nd ASIDE:
2nd ASIDE: [Fra Angelico's Annunciation]
takes place as if God was face to face with God... Our physical eyes of
flesh see Mary and Gabriel, but faith contemplates, in spirit, the
apparition facing the incarnation. SERRES, Michel (1995) Angels, A
Modern Myth, trans. Francis Cowper, Paris: Flammarion, p111. The
paradigm encounter is the apparition-incarnation of Serres'
Annunciation when the Word was made Flesh, that fathomless flux of
energy in the potential between words and things: this is the most human
characteristic of the mix. That event of the monstrous made robust, the
divine made human. This annunciative face-to-face, of god and human, of
performer and person, of theatre and the everyday. In this encounter,
our perception of the materiality of the mixing precedes our concept of
the mix. The idea always chases the event; the event always flees the
idea. In theatre, like the Annunciation, the mixing is of matter and
principle, even more, the principled matter and materialized principle.
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EPISODE 2:
If theatre gathers together, transforms fleshes
into bodies, to be re-presented, written upon, gazed at, heard, then
this is essentially an activity of touching, governed by notions of
propriety, which attempt to legislate that mixing of bodies. Emerging
from flesh, the fleeting body is intensified into flesh again in order to be touched, eroticized, felt. However, the more a performer's flesh mixes, the more propriety is replaced by propinquity
- the absolute nearness of flesh and minds. This is a terrible action
of togetherness, that submits the most primordial and sublime
transformation of the Human - the word into flesh - to the most brutal
and subtle, careless and wilful interrogation: so that bodies (in terms
of moves and words, sound and visual images) are rendered down again to flesh AND rendered up for the first time to the sublime. Furthermore, this touching approaches the impossible point of propinquity, the ideal of community, without ever actually arriving, thus standing in for the togethernesses of all communities.
So, in performance, every touch is an act of manumission:

'to send from one's hand';, the Roman ceremony of
freeing a slave, the hand of God, from God to Christ to Peter to the
pope to the priest to the laity: so the bread of the last supper became
the flesh of Christ, so the communion is a ceremony of propinquity, one
flesh becoming another, transubstantiation into consanguinity. So, with
every touch, the performer draws attention to the performativity of all
touch, as s/he sends everyone present back into their everyday. And if
the limits of bodies cannot be realized, except as conceptual objects,
then all bodies are constantly in touch, touching, have the potential to
feel each other, if only our senses were attuned sufficiently
intensively, as angels in constant coitus.
The sex of
angels, an old problem…: sex, unfortunately, has a name which suggests
'section', or a cutting-off, whereas the interchanger joins together.
Dare I say it, cherubim live in a state of constant coitus, in an
angelic joy of mutual liking.
SERRES, Michel (1995) Angels, A Modern Myth, trans. Francis Cowper, Paris: Flammarion, p169.

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