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Mixing it
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Some accidents, asides and episodes on the way towards the hermaphroditic in performance
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hermaphroditic: adj. uniting the characters of both sexes: combining opposite qualities.
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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.
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-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).
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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.
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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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