Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative - ISSN 1780-678X |
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Issue 9. Performance |
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De Roovers and their Metamorphosen or the limits of epic theatre |
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Author: Klaas Tindemans Abstract (E): This essay comments, from an insider's point of view, the theatre production Metamorphosen by the Antwerp based group De Roovers. This production, based upon Ovid's epic of the same name, tries to find a way of telling ancient mythological 'fairytailes' in a contemporary context. Through a radical adaptation of Ovid's text and by making strict visual and auditive choices - simple slides, simple music by Bach - this Metamorphosen invents a new theatrical speechmode. Abstract (F): Rédigé par quelqu'un qui a accompagné le processus de création de la pièce, cet essai propose un commentaire de la pièce" Metamorphosen" du groupe anversois De Roovers. Cette production qui s'est basée sur l'épopée d'Ovide du même nom, s'efforce de mettre en place une nouvelle façon de raconter les contes mythologiques pour un public contemporain. Tant par son adaptation radicale du texte d'Ovide que par les choix visuels et sonores très stricts qui sont les siens (usage de transparents, la musique sobre de Bach), cette pièce invente un nouveau mode discursif théâtral. keywords: Ovid, Metamorphoses, theatre, De Roovers, narration |
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In October 2002 Metamorphosen, a theatre production by De Roovers, a theatre company from Antwerp, knew its premiere. Actor Benjamin Verdonck adapted some stories from this unusual epic written by Ovid en he turned it, together with actors Sara De Bosschere en Luc Nuyens, designer Bert Vermeulen and the present writer as dramaturge, into a narration which was both physical and visual. The present text is by no means a reconstruction of the production process, nor an attempt to fit this quest for a theatrical narration into an adequate theoretical framework. Rather, I would like to describe some observations and intellectual experiences which took place before, during and after the working process and which caused the seeming naivety with regard to Ovid's material to be embedded in an almost evident way into a broader, more complex context. A context that takes into account both the problematic history of a work of literature - as the origin of a genre on its own - and the death of theatrical narration as it is both announced and postponed over and over again. A context in which authors such as Christoph Ransmayr and Franz Kafka appear, but also painters such as Rubens, Titian and Velazquez. The fragmentary character of the present essay shows, albeit quite superficially, the chaos caused and the order forced by any assimilation/adaptation of the Metamorphoses.
1.
The bookshop in the small Romanian town only has a few English language books, scientific publications. One of them is written by the director of the historical and archaeological museum of Konstanta, the present name of the Dacian and Roman town Tomis, the harbor at the coast of the Black Sea where Ovid is said to have spent his last days in exile. The book is called Ovid in exile and the back flap sketches the common romantic image of a cast off poet who writes his last great work, the Tristia, on this sad spot at the Black Sea shore. The statue of Ovid, erected in the 19 th century, decorates the plaza in front of the museum in Konstanta. The city cannot afford to open the discussion about the exile. Many questions are raised about the historical fact of his exile in Tomis itself, since this vanishing trick of the poet of the Metamorphoses fits perfectly well into Ovid's typical 'mythomania'. In Die letzte Welt, Christoph Ransmayr's novel, the narrator - a young student of rhetorics who escaped history - only finds some shreds of paper hanging from the bushes on the hills. He also meets some characters in Tomis who are suspiciously close to their namesakes in the Metamorphoses. The poet has disappeared, maybe he was never there. I like to believe the story about Ovid inventing and staging his own exile. It wouldn't be surprising after deconstructing, in his Metamorphoses, traditional mythology and confronting the political authority with a kind of post-modern irony. Of course, these narrative strategies were absent in the city of Rome of the first emperors, but after 20 centuries his attitude towards a ruling mythological and political discourse sounds remarkably 'contemporary'. That is the reason why I prefer to cherish Ransmayr's imagery - Battus petrified, Actaeon painted on a mobile cinema - than to read a book of a doubtlessly intelligent Romanian who - I am fantasizing - sees in Ovid the precursor of Laszlo Tökes, the minister who started the revolution against Ceaucescu. A Romanian who, as the director of a 'national' museum, shows a seamless continuity between Decebalus, the Dacian king and challenger of emperor Trajanus, and the heroes of the revolution, December 1989. I prefer a voice that goes lost in the rocks. Cotta, the narrator in Die letzte Welt, has said that Echo, the nymph, has taken refuge there.
2.
Ovid's Metamorphosen form an atypical history of the creation. The beginning leans very strongly on the Theogony of the Greek poet Hesiod (8 th century B.C.) but the narration quickly goes off the rails. The first book looks like a systematic exposition, perhaps somewhat embellished, about the genesis of the gods and the world, but the epic transforms quickly into a catalogue of metamorphoses, by gods and men. The great changes are barely justified or explained by the narrator - most of the time Ovid itself, but sometimes he lends the word to the singer Orpheus, or another hero - which makes that any idea of a divine justification or explanation quickly disappears. The cosmos is not a place where people are rewarded for their efforts, based upon some kind of equity, or where they are justly punished for there misdemeanors. Gods and men change their figure for the simple reason that, apparently, metamorphosis is the arbitrary principle which rules the cosmos. Without any theological or metaphysical foundation, without the possibility to qualify these changes as improvements or deteriorations. Love and hate - often the occasion for a metamorphosis - are a-moral, maybe victims of desire's constraints. Benjamin Verdonck made, for this production of De Roovers - a radical adaptation of Ovid's Metamorphoses.
Polyphemus' complaint
Together with his colleagues, he chose the stories, adjusted the narrative lines, and wrote in a language which made, just as Ovid did, unexpected poetical associations, images that reinforced the impression of chaos and undermined any logical cosmology, as was the case in the complaint of the one-eyed Polyphemus: "Where are / you / who runs away from me / you / you are more cruel than the beetle / who through the hole from which he was born / crawls back in again / and eats and eats and eats / until she is eaten up / his mother". The sad and violent giant appeared in this narration after the history of the creation: an actor has written some sentences on his arm and reads them aloud. The cosmos is ill, nature turns against itself. The lovers upon which Polyphemus looks down with jealousy transform into blood and water. Any suggestion that this objective cruelty could have good reasons is avoided in this scene. So Benjamin Verdonck and De Roovers create the same problem as Ovid did, already in his second book, by telling the story of the terrible death by accident of Phaeton, the son of the sun god. The world just happens to be created and the worst has already happened, so it seems. How can you continue telling stories after this? That is the challenge of the narrator: to create a world, to destroy a world, to create a world again with the debris. A cyclical movement, which is taken over in the theatrical form, by reciting a list of metamorphoses - each told in one phrase - or by repeating the same piece of music - from das Wohltemperierte Klavier of J.S. Bach - in very different versions. In his time Ovid reached out for a gigantic trick, since he wanted to avoid fatalism as the final effect of his narration. In his final books, he told the hallowed history of the Roman Empire: the deification of Julius Caesar as the symbol of eternal order. In itself this poetical-political gesture was completely incredible, but it got its signification from the irony of the preceding stories - being the ultimate irony itself. But how to solve this problem today, on stage? Put differently: how do you signify, as a narrator, to what you could call, paraphrasing Heiner Müller, both a 'starving shore' and a 'landscape with Argonauts'? Without sinking down into gratuitous nihilism.
3.
4.
The one-eyed Polyphemus - the actor simply covers one eye with his hand - is raging and reasonless from disappointed love. He punishes the girl by crushing her and her lover with a rock and changing them into a well. He screams out his complaint, the girl describes how she and her love are dissolved into water. She looks for comfort with the third player. Then follows the story of Actaeon the hunter who, punished for watching the goddess Diana bathing, is transformed into a deer and torn to pieces by his own pack of hounds: a lived-through narration, during which the other players, terrified, watch the slaughter and the dying of Actaeon's voice in bark and ruckle. The whimsicality of the gods is present in the three stories that follow. Jupiter abducts Europa by transforming himself into a bull, nicely dressed: now he can enjoy her body. Jupiter and Juno are quarrelling about the superiority of man or woman. Teiresias - once a woman - should pass final judgement, but his conclusion - man is superior - angers Juno. She makes him blind and Jupiter consoles him with the gift of prophecy. The player wanders over the stage, blindfolded. Even more painful is the outrageous revenge on the city of Aegina, on which Juno unleashes pestilence: the descriptions of the putrefaction of all living creatures, the empoisoning of all liquids, it contrasts sharply and emotionally with the petite actress who moves elegantly through a landscape of grey and blue plastic, under which the other players are hiding, waiting to escape this miserable story. The tension between identification and narration is continuously clear in these 'Olympic' stories, the players continuously remind the audience that they are just rendering a known tradition: "Jupiter / so they say / has / so they say / dressed up his head / …" and "Juno / so they say / has / so they say / not been joking with it / ...". "And then there is Atalanta": after the horror, the romance.
Atlanta
The female player gives her pants to the male player. Atalanta is not allowed to marry ("that is the way it is"), unless the suitor beats her in a running contest. But she is the fastest woman on earth and she pushes the unhappy loser in the deepest abyss. Until she falls in love with a challenger. During the race a plum tree grows from his back and she has to pick up the plums as they fall. In Ovid's original, Venus drops her golden apples, so Atalanta has to bend down and looses speed. The young man wins the race, the male and the female player run on the spot, as in a slow-motion picture. In the mean time, the third player carefully puts three pink scarves, nicely coiled up, on the front stage. Then the male player takes off the pants he received from her, and the blue and grey plastic is now entirely folded open. In the background a player starts to tell the story of the warlord Tereus, who obtains as his bride the daughter of the king, a reward for his military assistance. But being married she longs for her sister in the distant homeland. Tereus falls in love with the sister he has promised to bring to his wife, and he rapes her, he locks her up, cuts out her tongue when she protests. Until the brute's wife discovers the crimes, liberates her sister and considers revenge: she kills Tereus' son, her own child, prepares him in the kitchen and dishes him up for her husband - after the meal he discovers the cruelest truth. They all transform into birds. During this long, scary narration, the players have come very close to each other, sometimes they identify with a character in the story - an innocent gaze from an unhappy child, a hard-bitten jerk around the mouth of a revengeful woman. Then silence falls, someone starts a motor and the grey plastic fills with air: a life-size elephant, touching the walls and the roof of the scene. The players correct the position of the great bulk, which takes surprisingly realistic shapes. Then someone stops the motor, the elephant slowly sinks through his legs, the players whisper one more story. Ceyx and Alcyone are inseparable, but he has to travel overseas. Alcyone knows he won't come back, she swallows her grief, until the day Ceyx' body is washed ashore. For the last time she feels his forms and together they transform into halcyons, flying away together. The players take the pink scarves - from the story of Atalanta - and cloak them. They remain silent, everything is said for the moment. In contrast with this naked narration, reinforced from time to time with simple theatrical images - an antler made from a stick and some gloves, a crinkly hat, a half-naked player imitating a hermaphrodite - there are some visual and auditive certainties. Certainties, since they return continuously in their formality: the fragments from Bach's das Wohltemperierte Klavier, and a long series of slides, pictures of discreet human interventions (a small pole, a barn, a plantation of pine-trees) in a wooded environment. Images and sounds you don't decode immediately, since they don't ask to be decoded.
5.
Kafka does not tell anything about the transformation itself, but only about the inexorable consequences. Beschreibung eines Kampfes tells about the 'proteic' experience: the narrator himself changes constantly, since he does not find his way in Prague anymore, since he cannot give form to his desires anymore. Die Verwandlung is a totally difference experience. Gregor Samsa, as a beetle, tries to tell, very much in detail, what continues to happen in the room, in the house, in the world. But Samsa himself never changes, he has got his definitive form - just like Ovid's Actaeon who, once he is transformed into a deer, isn't able to do anything but peep to the barking dogs. As Ovid did, Kafka constantly treats the loss of voice, or the loss of a 'natural' ground of speech: when the ape, in Bericht für eine Akademie, speaks about his 'human' conscience and his 'human' communication, the junction with his 'animal-like' nature is broken. There is no such thing as nature anymore, there are only narrations based upon fragments from a memory, as a dream starts from dayrests left in the brain. Christoph Ransmayr wrote with Die letzte Welt the Ovid-novel of our time, and he could make you conclude the 'metamorphosizing' is the ultimate aesthetic tool. The young Cotta looks at all these strange creatures wandering through Tomis. He has to conclude that (Ovidius) Naso, the poet, has dared a defective and misunderstood attempt to fix all their fortunes/transformations in some futile scraps of poetry. In Die letzte Welt, the narrators fall apart: the movie-owner Cyparis has to fly town, the autistic Battus petrifies after collecting too many images and impressions, the wonderful, epic fabric is rotting in Arachne's backroom and Echo's voice is baffled after Cotta's sexual assault. The narrators are hushed, and Cotta concludes that their liberty to deal with poetic forms at will and to change people into stones - and vice versa - has become meaningless. Kafka describes the potency to tell one's story in perfect detail. However, neither in the case of Samsa the beetle who addresses a shocked reader, nor in the case of the ape addressing an academic audience, this effort has any feasible result. Just like Ovid's Pygmalion who can't escape being petrified, just like his lover he sculpted himself. The verge of narratibility, which is what Kafka and Ransmayr are talking about, without the physical optimism Canetti entertains in spite of everything.
6.
The Actors in the Woods
The boy and the girl tell together the touching story of Atalanta's love, clasped between two terrifying stories: we had the pestilence and now follows the story of Tereus the rapist and the murder of his son. A long story, once more interrupted by images of the same wooden construction, now with close details. The gaze enters the shack, it becomes dark and - just at the moment that the actor tells about the rape - gets a lurid meaning: it is the only time one sees a direct relationship, almost an illustration of the word with an image. Anyway, there are no more images anymore and the music returns only once, after the Tereus' episode. Then a player turns on the motor, the plastic is blown up and Bach is repeated until the elephant is standing up, helped on his feet by the actors. When, during the last story (Ceyx and Alcyone) the elephant slowly collapses, there is no image anymore, nor any extra sound.
Actress Sara De Bosschere between the dying legs of an inflatable elephant
The relationships between two-dimensional images (the slides projected against the white backcloth), the repetitive variations of Bach (music) and Ovid (the catalogue), the actions with the grey plastic, and the narration, these relationships are both synchronic and diachronic. Narration and action are diachronic process: against the plurality of the narrations (the metamorphoses according to author Benjamin Verdonck), stands the purposiveness of the action (two people unfolding, step-by-step, and blowing up a plastic animal). The result of this predominant action confuses, since the elephant is a bit too exotic and doesn't fit enough into the stories as such, but the narration concludes, in spite of all prior cruelty, with a simple, almost sentimental note - Ceyx and Alcyone flying away as halcyons, their love is tangible. There are moments of synchronicity: against the complete arbitrariness in the way the gods, first of all Jupiter, deal with the world and its people, stands the sense of order with which people construct objects in the so-called virginal forest - until nature overgrows them. This is also a narrative form, but an atmosphere that could be too noncommittal or too self-evident - Jupiter's frivolity - is undermined, since the poetry of the images completely lacks this frivolity. However, it is not certain that you can observe and qualify these confrontations between systems and processes of signification as the contrast between 'intelligence' and 'sensibility' the way Valéry has put it. The monumentality of the blown up elephant makes all the other theatrical means look so miserable, that only a sad romance - 'a little philosophy' - can provide put things in perspective.
7.
Breughel - Landscape with the fall of Icarus
The attention is focused on the farmer with his plow, on the shepherd and his herd, on the harbor and the ships - on the economy, in fact. The real transformations are taking place in the society and a mythical hero such as Icarus has become marginal. Perhaps Bruegel is not representative for the genre, but around the same time, Tintoretto places Minerva and Arachne in front of each other on the loom which, by means of the perspective used, almost pushes aside the human figures: the semi-industrial tool also dominates the 'Olympic' conflict.
Tintoretto - Minerva and Arachne
Rubens - Tereus
Some hundred years later, during the Baroque, the theme of the rapist/seducer remains present, as for instance in Rubens' imagination about the horror of Tereus: the betrayed and raped women offer Tereus the head of his son - the whole painting radiates rage, through the eyes of the characters. But the most special painting which resulted from the Baroque fascination for the Metamorphoses, is Las Hilanderas - 'the spinners' - by Velazquez.
Velazquez - Las Hilanderas
It was long time considered as a genre painting - about the craft of spinning and weaving - and not as an allegory of Ovid. The theme is an episode in the Minerva-cycle from the Metamorphoses, in which the goddess of belligerence and wisdom wants to make clear who the master is. Arachne had challenged Minerva for a weaving contest. Arachne weaves large tapestries on which she parodies the gods, Minerva defends the arbitrariness of the gods. She punishes Arachne's provocations by transforming her into a spider, doomed to weave her whole life. The construction of Velazquez' painting is at least as complex as his more famous Las Meninas, this distorted portrait of Spain's little princesses. But Las Hilanderas treats likewise the subject of the position of the artist in front of his subject: how do you, as an artist or as a spectator, look at the aesthetic metamorphosis, which takes place in the creation of an image? This question also interested Ovid himself, since he uses consequently the word imago when he is talking about images, more specifically the representations of the drunkenness with power of the gods. The Latin term imago is a technical term for a painted of sculpted representation. Ovid uses in his story of Arachne the genre of the ekphrasis - i.e. the rhetorical description of a work of art - and Velazquez does in fact exactly the same. His foreground, with the two rivals at their spinning wheel, is relatively dark, almost all luminosity comes from a background where two things are visible: a tapestry based upon Titian's Abduction of Europa and a tableau vivant, which shows, among other things, the armed Minerva damning Arachne.
Titiaan - Abduction of Europa
The spinners Minerva and Arachne look in fact at themselves, at their mythically dressed counterparts. But this heroism is also downplayed by two other well-dressed ladies - one of them makes, by her gaze, a link between the workshop and the stage. This arrangement could not only signify an allegory of art - divine inspiration as contrasted with commonplace craft - but it also suggests an economical relationship: rich patrons enjoying a beauty which is, as the foreground makes clear, precisely the result of prosaic crafts: the triumph of matter over spirit. The spinner Minerva looks away from her tool, Arachne concentrates on her work. Las Hilanderas is an analysis of metamorphosis as an aesthetic phenomenon, because it shows both the process of transformation and the radiating effect of the creation. In a comparable way, these elements are present in the performance by De Roovers. The action with the elephant is a very material and objective construction - without any attempt to hide this - but at the same time, it is suggested that this gigantic transformation is the (theatrical) result of a series of narration, of the musical rhythm and of the climate called forward by images on the slides.
8.
It would be (too) easy to consider acting itself as an endless process of metamorphoses. Anyway, De Roovers have chosen deliberately, by making these Metamorphosen the way they did, not to make a (fortuitous) statement about acting/metamorphosizing. That would be too self-evident and it is finally more interesting to let this problem seep into a more naturalistic repertory, since this material is more stubborn. Nevertheless, these Metamorphosen also result, ineluctably, in Verfremdung, since the players are ostensibly looking for modes of narration which problematize identification, mostly with the victim of heroic violence. Ovid's material, still reinforced in this respect by Benjamin Verdonck's adaptation, is clearly fit to do this, since the position from which one speaks continuously changes. An exorbitant quarrel about relations between men and women (Jupiter, Juno and Teiresias) converts, not unnoticed but visually very logically, into a raw narration on pestilence, in which children seem to fantasize about the decline of everything alive. This looks like fatalism, but precisely the light tone of narration feeds the doubt about the ineluctable. The poetry at the end of this episode - "Children run / look for branches / to burn their dead / little brothers / and then / there was / nowhere / a tree anymore / for wood" - is so touching, that the action which follows immediately - actor and actress change pants - makes a naïve belief of the curing force of love seeps into one's thoughts. Just like the final story, in which Alcyone lives so intensely the death of her beloved Ceyx that they transform together into halcyons. The endless versatility actors can show has its parallels in the stories themselves. This was an example where a metamorphosis consoles, but the end can equally silence any cry for help, as it has happened with Actaeon who is destroyed for his admiration of the divine beauty of Diana. But metamorphosis, as an idea which controls our mind and our body and provides dynamism, is only partially comparable with the brechtian insistence on 'changeability'. There is no question here of historical developments, since the metamorphoses are completely arbitrary, as there is no question too of a rationality which bridges the gap between the consciences of the player and the spectator. Nevertheless, the lesson De Roovers learned from Brecht is not that noncommittal, it is more than intellectual discipline or acting technique. Since discipline and technique are well controlled by these players, consciously or unconsciously, it has become possible for them to thematize also the general doubt about the signification of all those metamorphoses. They can afford to create aleatory junctions between image and sound, speech and action. They seem to force by this Ovid's material, but finally they point to the radicality of his narration. The adaptation has sieved the radicalism and the added objects - misleading images of nature, a euphonious exercise of form with Bach, a sadly looking spectacle with an inflatable animal - heighten abstraction, reinforce both the sensibility and the sense of reflection of the spectator. You have to forgive this spectator, when he, after the performance, does not know so well how to change the world. In another passage of Der Messingkauf, Brecht lets an actor remark that you cannot play the slaughter and the sheep at the same time. The 'philosopher' says that he should be able to play the slaughter of the sheep. The player/slaughter can show how intimate or how commercial his relationship with the sheep is. These Metamorphosen go in fact one step further and the players show, in their best moments, both the slaughter and the sheep. But Ovid did the same 2000 years ago, when he made Tereus' betrayed wife kill her child - his child - and offer it to the father as his meal. Until he found an unboiled finger in his plate.
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Klaas Tindemans (°1959) is Ph.D. in law (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven), with a thesis on law and tragedy in ancient Athens. He is a Professor at the media school RITS (Erasmushogeschool Brussel), he teaches dramaturgy at the Universiteit Antwerpen and he works as a dramaturge for De Roovers, an actors' collective in Antwerp, and for BRONKS, a youth theatre in Brussels. |
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