simon jones: mixing it: towards the hermaphroditic in performance

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:

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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