Theatre's differential with the everyday is a distortion that
emerges from the relative speeds of mixing of the hermaphroditic body
and the normalized body.
The hermaphroditic shift
All performances invoke and exploit this differential. In this
way, the performer stands in for the audience by leaping into the void
on their behalf. S/he mixes him/her-selves up faster than the
everyday-participants, who tend to normalize their own genderizations
and sexualities in order to get on with that everyday. They store up
the potential energy of their bodies' continuous and irresolvable
mixings, precisely to discharge it during specialized,
out-of-the-everyday events, such as theatre.
The performer, mixing relatively faster, goes ahead more easily,
accelerated by the energy, the dare of the audience. At his/her greater
distance from home, the attraction of the everyday is relatively weaker:
they project out into the void of potential, yet unrealized bodies and
sexes. Here theatre most expresses its difference from the everyday: in
accelerating the rate of disorganization of those stabilized genders or
sexualities. The hermaphrodite-performer';s mixed bodies pour through
performance; and micropolitically, genitals and subjects disintegrate,
become anonymous and mobile, the (impossible) hermaphrodite tangible, fleetingly visible.
Refusing critique, it is a non-critique, which sets paradoxical 'views'
in motion, refusing theory its stabilization, its fixing of pragmatics.
It easily seduces all into its vortex, its dance, its transitoriness, its transitiveness,
by harnessing the force, riding the breaking crest of the sexual fold,
male-female, to which we are all embodied by Nature and inscribed
through Lacan's toilet doors by Culture. At the same time, it most
expresses its contiguity with the everyday, by harnessing that energy
invested by its audiences in their genderizations, and then at the end,
sending these disorganized part-objects back into that everyday, to
re-organize.
but having been perturbed, never quite in the same way as before
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