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Issue 9. Performance

De Roovers and their Metamorphosen or the limits of epic theatre

Author: Klaas Tindemans
Published: October 2004

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

 

"Echo is a nymph who can only repeat someone else's words"

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.


Quintilianus, the famous teacher of rhetoric, had serious objections against Ovid's poetry. He suggested that he should have committed himself to drama instead of a kind of epic poetry in which he glorified his own talents before anything else. But Ovid's tragedies have been lost, so we cannot judge for ourselves. Anyway, Ovid had the highest esteem for Virgil. His Aeneis was in his time considered as the summit of epic poetry and consequently as the shining example for every poet who ventured upon this genre. But the Metamorphoses, although being an epic in verse as well, didn't answer in any respect the norms as put by Virgil. Ovid's stories were not enacted in a clear-cut heroic era as it was described into detail by Virgil, Ovid scatters around anachronism, he mixes up Hellenistic, classical-Greek, Roman and fairy-like elements. Virgil clearly means to tell an ideologically inspired message - the historical vocation of the Romans, after the fall of Troy - whereas Ovid avoids any political unequivocalness. From book XII on, Ovid tells the story of the Trojan War, and he continues, after Aeneas' flight, almost without being noticed, with the official and 'sacred' history of Rome. But he takes his time to show how the Trojan queen Hecuba weeps for her children and to tell in detail about the strange phenomena happening during the voyage overseas. Ovid escapes the supposed linearity of his narration, by describing Aeneas and his successors as interesting but normal human beings, without the historical ambition to found a Roman empire. Even if the Metamorphoses are not ideologically neutral - a storyline from the creation until Caesar can hardly be - the narration itself appears to deal with something else, the phenomenon of metamorphosis in the first place. For Ovid metamorphoses are some kind of snapshots of existence, intensified experiences which try to catch the essence of its subjects. Metamorphoses are images of this existence - Ovid uses, contrary to other mythological literature the term of imago, a technical word artists use - and these images are correct as representations, but they mainly show a serious loss. Sometimes a metamorphosis is so arbitrary - e.g. the conclusion of the cruel episode about Tereus the rapist: all protagonists transform into birds - that you can hardly speak about some essence preserved. Most of the time human beings, when transformed into animals or lifeless objects, loose their speech: they cannot go on telling stories, or it would be in the perverse way of Echo - by repeating someone else's words. Language and speech mark the fundamental difference between, on the one hand, humans and gods - this difference is for Ovid not that important - and, on the other hand, animals, plants and lifeless objects. Some commentators draw from Ovid's fascination for metamorphosis as such the conclusion that he has written an epic about art itself. Medusa - or her head - is a 'petrifier' and by this an artist and the sculptor Pygmalion obtains a central place in the narration. To say more, the narrator, by all kind of rhetorical tricks in the transitions from one story to another, is extremely present, he can manipulate to his heart's content. In the context of the antique battle on poetry - Plato forbade art, precisely because the representation of an idea would harm the truth of that idea, even destroy it - Ovid adopted a radical position against Plato: precisely the presence of the senses in the (aesthetic) experience creates order in the chaos, metamorphoses point to the essence of things, of observations, of experiences. Ovid uses surprisingly often the form of the ekphrasis, the ancient genre of the description of a work of art: as if every metamorphosis was a work of art. Put differently, the metamorphosis catches the moment in which the experience/observation and the aesthetic intervention meet each other. The spectator/reader is allowed to understand the way the so-called essence is represented. It seems one big exercise in distantiation. In the story of the weaving contest between Minerva and Arachne, this theme is explicitly present, in the description of the action and its consequences, in the ekphrasis of the weaves made by the goddess and her challenger. But this accent on the revelation of 'aesthetic truth' doesn't necessarily mean that Ovid, in spite of reputed vanity, considers art and the artist as the ultimate 'signifiers'. It can also mean that the narrator and his witnesses, inside or outside the story, simply establish the fact that the loss, after metamorphosis, is forever. A painful observation which no ideology or aesthetics are able to challenge.

 

4.


De Roovers tell, after their introductory account of the creation, eight stories from the Metamorphoses. In his adaptation Benjamin Verdonck forges a language which is close to him as a writer, an idiom he also uses in other dramatic texts he wrote: simple, slightly dialectical, deeply enjoying the sound of words. In the stories themselves he stays close to the core of Ovid's anecdote, unless a deviation opens more theatrical possibilities. Anyway, to retell something that is already retold (after an 'original' myth) is a difficult enterprise, and my account risks to water down this theatrical representation even more. But as one element in my subjective reconstruction, it might have sense.

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.

 

Atalanta

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.


Ovid's work marks the beginning of a literary approach of mythology instead of a religious one.. This is the transition from Arbeit des Mythosto Arbeit am Mythos, as Hans Blumenberg puts it. Myth hasn't the purpose anymore to conjure the cruelty of reality, the metamorphoses don't have a theological, metaphysical or moralizing meaning anymore. They don't explain reality, they play a game with reality, a game of meanings of 'animated' nature as these are fixed by myth. Augustine, the father of the church, reacted sharply against literary metamorphoses, because he feared that the ultimate metamorphosis legitimizing Christianity - God becomes human and the son of man ascends to heaven - would loose strength. The mystery of the Eucharist cannot afford to be blurred by the idea that everything can be 'animated', even a (literally) petrified human being or, even worse, a stone transforming into a human. However, literary metamorphosis is so different from religious transubstantiations, since it is not embedded in a shared practice, in Christian liturgy or in the mysteries of Dionysus, Isis and the others. They begin to live a life that goes beyond ritual. So Ovid confronts the story of the metamorphosis of the Bacchae - their psychic transformation, from enthusiast women into manic, bloody murderesses - with the whimsicality of Juno, who transforms them after Orpheus' death into trees: the religious meaning is perverted, as in Euripides' tragedy. The character of the seagod Proteus is typical for the modern, literary mythography. He can transform at will, he escapes any fixed form - until he must comply with brutal power. However, Ovid also shows him as an expert in metamorphosis, when he tells Peleus how he can master the seagoddess Thetis, who is equally adept in transformation. The power of Proteus has become the power of the narrator, who changes the characters at will, as a usurer with the subtle differences between reality and imagination. The same idea is developed by Elias Canetti, in his chapter on transformation ('Verwandlung') in Masse und Macht.Canetti, as a self-declared anthropologist, is not ready to rationalize completely the real experiences of metamorphosis, such as a sweeping aesthetic shock. Something very special happens at such a moment, even in the physical sense. Masse und Macht dwells on the frontier between science and literature, in the same was as Ovid combined encyclopedia (mythography) and imagination. Ovid and Canetti put a definitive end to the fears of Plato (and Augustine) that secular imagination, stimulated by the poetic potencies of the artist, would affect our love of truth or our sense of mystery. Canetti, calling the poet the 'metamorphosis' keeper' still adds an essential thought: the possibility to make metamorphosis, as a poetic means, literarily tangible, challenges the rational, self-assured - and in more than one sense also self-destroying - overactivity of Modern society. The ruthless power of poetical metamorphosis is, in the last century, most strongly expressed by Franz Kafka. In his short fragment Prometheus, he precisely formulates how myth - stripped from all explicative clarity - has arrived in a dead-end street. After some futile attempts to tell something about Prometheus' fate, he concludes: "Myth tries to explain the unexplainable. Since it is born from a ground of truth, it has to finish again in the unexplainable."

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.


Paul Valéry considered dance as the perfect metamorphosis, since in the dance the most physical concreteness transforms into the most radical abstraction: "When one only has the means of the head to talk about the wonders of the legs, one has to rely on a little philosophy." So Valéry reflects upon the truth of movement-as-a-metaphor, and he concludes: "I never see a contradiction - I cannot see one - between intelligence and sensibility, between a thinking conscience and direct circumstances." This 'idealism' about the meaningful relation between physical and material signs, in their visual and auditive simplicity, and the stratification of an 'efficient' theatricality, this naïve effort has been taken up by De Roovers in their Metamorphosen. You put a bucket on your head, you sit on hands and feet and you are both a fawning dog and a sexually available nymph: these are the mechanisms. During the performance, the players are looking for a plurality of meanings - meanings which escape intentions, meanings that surprise the players themselves, even after twenty performances. They cross the narration with simple images: the little dog, or the pink scarves that represent (rolled up and lying on the floor) ripe fruit or (around one's neck) the halcyons, the boy hiding his sex to look like a girl, the not yet blown up elephant which shows in its grayness a pestilent landscape. These are superficial metaphors, which do not create on their own this plurality of meanings, on the contrary. They only obtain this plus-value, they only relate to the narration, if other structures become apparent. This happens with strictly defined means: one fragment of music (from Bach's das Wohltemperierte Klavier, as said) in four different executions, from orthodoxically authentic to shamelessly romantic, and a long, almost repetitive series of slides, which register very subtly human interventions in nature. Both the musical fragments and the series of slides separate/interrupt the stories as some kind of refrain. The music does this more striclty, since it accompanies an action: two players, who bring in the elephant, unwrap it, unfold it and finally blow it up - the surprise effect of the production. Moreover, the catalogue the actress cites, is in fact less a meaningful text, rather than a formal mark and, at the same time, a contextualization of the singular stories we hear: a smooth vaccine against anecdotism. No matter how arbitrary meaning is obtained, the moments when image or sound - sometimes you hear dogs barking, far away - breaks up the narration, determine the 'narratibility', the narrative potential, of these Metamorphosen. The spectator is confronted with a systematic iterability of signs - and, as Derrida said, the dissemination of meaning which accompanies this event - of a life cycle included in the phenomenon of metamorphosis. The actress starts the performance with her naked reading of mythical metamorphoses, she picks up the litany after Polyphemus' complaint and she reads the list for the last time before the stories about Jupiter's (mis)behavior. After that, no catalogues anymore, the mechanism is made clear, the concrete fortunes are automatically connotated with iterability: we do not learn lessons from good luck or bad luck, that could be the moralist's conclusion. During the last lists, a new form has been introduced, the series of slides. You see a forest of young pine trees, and it becomes slowly clear how rectilinearly man has planted them. During the reading of the last list, the slides zoom in on a small wooden pole with a hole in it, a hole 'metamorphosing' from a neutral object into a kind of lens which sharply focuses on the landscape. In between, right after the Polyphemus' story - the girl telling her own death, the transformations of her lover and herself into a well of water - another new formal system has been introduced: the play with the plastic of the inflatable elephant, always accompanied with the Bach-variations. The fuga from das Wohltemperierte Klavier is repeated four times: once on a harpsichord, once on a pianoforte, and twice on a piano - more and less 'romantic'. After Polyphemus and the dead lovers, the actors roll a big blue sack with the elephant skin on stage, they jump on it, fall under it, and in this tumult one of them starts telling the story of Actaeon: the first interlude. Right after the blinding of Teiresias by Juno a series of slides is shown with a large tree, wearing a strange plate, until it becomes clear that this is a metal plate which once was a signpost but now has become unreadable, overgrown by moss. Jupiter consoles Teiresias with the gift of prophecy, the narration stops for a moment and the two players take the grey plastic out of the blue sack. One of them hides within the sack, the second hides under the plastic itself: second intermezzo. In between, the actress started the story about the pestilence, about the terrible wrath of Juno, and the players leave their hiding place very slowly and very cautiously. The third intermezzo takes place after this horrible story: a player unfolds the plastic - still no spectator has any idea of what this grey thing could represent - and the girl slowly gets out of her pants, while the boy draws on these pants very carefully. The slides show a construction in the woods, some wooden planks with a lot of outgrown grass in front of it, inaccessible and without any function.

 

actors in the woods

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

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.


Sometimes, the grown interest in Ovid's Metamorphoses, in the 16 th and 17 th centuries, is explained theologically. In contrast with the strong, monotheistic doctrines - both the (Calvinist) reformation and the contrareformation after the Council of Trent - a desire for some kind of paganism emerged, a desire for a religiosity fascinated by transgression, by forms of existence that transcend the boundaries between men, animals and gods. One could qualify the phenomenon of metamorphosis as the ultimate transgression. However, the way painters have dealt with Ovid's material is difficult to reduce to this idea. The notable thing in a painting such as Pieter Bruegel the Elder's Landscape with the fall of Icarus (created around 1560) is precisely the fact that the anecdote of Icarus' pride disappears in the margins of the painting.

 

Landscape with the fall of Icarus

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

Tintoretto - Minerva and Arachne


From the other side, Titian is clearly inspired by Ovid's episodes which show a harsh eroticism, such as the meeting of Diana and Actaeon or the abduction of Europa. He paints pictures that balance on the dangerous frontier between physical violence and seduction: Titian's compositions and his use of colors do not clarify this distinction, on the contrary.

 

Rubens Tereus

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.

 

Las Hilanderas

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

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.


In Der Messingkauf - dialogues about the art of acting -Bertolt Brecht asks 'the actress' to play a male person. 'The philosopher', another character, concludes from these exercises that, when females play males, their behavior cannot simply be look at as 'generally human', but that the typical 'male' comes out. In other words, the woman adds to the man what she thinks is typically male. The actress herself gives an even more beautiful example: children play adults selling an elephant. They manage to clarify this way, more convincing than in any other attempt, the laws of market economy, precisely since the presence of children is so 'unimaginable' in this context. Brecht considers it as essential that the theatre shows that the world is changeable, that we can 'imagine' - represent for ourselves, propose to ourselves and others, … - the idea that a narration takes a turn different from what bourgeois worldview is ready to accept. The dialectic relationships between the particular - man, wife, child - and the general - male, female and childlike - actors are experimenting with, and these are all exercises to translate this flexibility scenically and physically. Just as Valéry, quoted above, refuses to make a choice between intelligence and sensibility, Brecht creates exercises, both in acting and in thinking, in which intellectual processes and physical (sensible) attitudes confront each other in a way that results in a synthesis but not in a reconciliation. The 'conflict matter' that is left behind is essential in Brecht's vision of theatricality, since these moments when the changeability of man and society seems to attain its limits, these moments are most precious and meaningful.

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.


Literature

 

The (Dutch) text of Metamorphosen, by Benjamin VERDONCK, has been published in the Flemish theatre review "Etcetera" (22/89, December 2003)

OVID, Metamorphoses I & II (with a translation by Frank Justus Miller), London/Cambridge, Mass., 1984 (Loeb Classical Library)

HESIOD, The Homeric hymns and Homerica (with a translation by H.G. Evelyn-White), London/Cambridge, Mass.,1982 (Loeb Classical Library)

QUINTILIAN, The Orator's Education I-V (with a translation by Donald A. Russell), London/Cambridge, Mass.,

VIRGIL, Eclogues. Georgics. Aeneid (1-6) & Aeneid. Appendix Vergiliana (with a translation by G.P. Goold), London/Cambridge, Mass.

Leonard BARKAN, The Gods Made Flesh. Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism, Yale,  1990

Hans BLUMENBERG, Arbeit am Mythos, Frankfurt am Main, 1979

Bertolt BRECHT, "Der Messingkauf" in Gesammelte Werke 16. Schriften zum Theater 2, Frankfurt am Main, 1967

Elias CANETTI, Mass e und Macht , Düsseldorf, 1960

Piet MEEUSE, De jacht op Proteus, Amsterdam, 1992

Friedmann HARZER, Erzählte Verwandlung. Eine Poetik epischer Metamorphosen (Ovid-Kafka-Ransmayr), Tübingen, 2000

Franz KAFKA, Sämtliche Erzählungen, Frankfurt am Main, 1970

AdrianRADULESCU, Ovid in Exile (translated by Laura Treptow), Iasi/Portland, Ore., 2002
Christoph RANSMAYR, Die letzte Welt, Nördlingen, 1989

Joseph B. SOLODOW, The World of Ovid's Metamorphoses, Chapel Hill (North Carolina), 1988

Paul VALÉRY, "Philosophie de la danse" in Œuvres I, Paris, 1960 (La Pléiade)

 
 
 

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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