simon jones: mixing it: towards the hermaphroditic in performance

Mixing it


Some accidents, asides and episodes on the way towards the hermaphroditic in performance

hermaphroditic: adj. uniting the characters of both sexes: combining opposite qualities.

Do we truly need a true sex?
Foucault, Michel (1980) Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-century Hermaphrodite, trans. Richard McDougall, New York: Pantheon, p. vii.
-1:
We enter the gallery: a shrouded cube: a space within a space, a theatre within a theatre. As we approach we notice a light, like someone left it on inside a coffin. We climb the stairs.


We are in the presence of two lovers silently touching, who only have eyes for each other, who pay no heed to us although we are so close, who seem to be so self-sufficient they do not need to speak.


This is the opening of Bodies in Flight's tenth work DeliverUs, presented in autumn 1999 and revised and re-presented in summer 2000. It took for its scenario that long and languid post-coital scene from Godard's À Bout de Souffle (Breathless).
0:
The occasion of theatre has always been close to the occasion of fucking: anthropologically in the Dionysian orgy; legally in the association of actors with prostitutes; medically in the closing of theatres to prevent the spread of plague; socially as the warm-up act to a night of passion. Hence theatre's general function is to mix bodies, to miscegenate. It often runs alongside, supports, introduces, provides the milieu, the mood, the rhythm for, intensifies sex. They are twinned, themselves a kind of hermaphrodite of actual (sex) and possible (theatre), subjected to the same Foucauldian regimes, which attempt to inhibit and channel their promiscuity reproductively. This paper explores a fundamental constellating of performance and sex: in the shared character of the mixed-body hermaphrodite; and in the shared characteristic of the hermaphroditic mixing of bodies. Furthermore, it claims theatre as the sine qua non of social sites, the event to which we all repair to experience the hermaphroditic as a community, however fleetingly. Hence theatre's robust persistence amongst more novel techno-cultural industries and practices.
1st ASIDE:
1st ASIDE: Othello kisses Desdemona before he kills her. After Iago's plot has been made plain to him, he stabs himself with his own sword and goes again to kiss her, who has suddenly transformed from whore to heroine, uttering the words: To die upon a kiss This is a notorious instance of the tremendous multiplicity of theatre's impossibly mixed body: Burbage-moor, actor-character, Desdemona-boy, feminine-masculine, adolescent-mature, black-white, lover-killer, native-second nature, host-parasite, most accomplished-most ignorant, and (most significant of all to this paper) poet-malapropist, since all Elizabethans knew "to die" was slang for "to orgasm", Othello (o great tragic hero) dying on a smutty pun. And performed in the Globe, south of the river, without the City walls, beyond the aldermen's control, amongst the brothels: the newest trade of the playhouse amongst the oldest trade, performance once itinerant and parasitic upon the great nobles and their houses, now housed itself in the great Wooden "O". Capital, that heretofore had only been accumulated through land and violence, and transferred through church, family, monarch, poured into these playhouses - the most successful businesses of their day. They realized a third way for capital. through dreams, by way of desire



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