Gabriella Giannachi & Nick Kaye
Staging the Post‑Avant‑Garde
Italian
Experimental Performance after
1970
PETER LANG |
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Masque Based
in a former granary re-named Ramo Rosso (‘Red Branch’) in Bertinoro, Emilia‑Romagna,
Masque’s work has addressed contemporary themes of the body and technology
through a theatre in which, Gatelli proposes, ‘everything usually starts
with space [...] spaces which are inserted in other spaces’ (Gatelli in
Chinzari, 1998). From their early work, such as Prigione
detto Atlante (Prison Known as Atlantis, 1991), which makes implicit
reference to Michelangelo’s Il Prigione ‑ Atlante (The Prisoner‑Atlantis,
1530‑6), Masque’s performances have articulated interactions
between the actor and the ‘closed structures’ (Gatelli in Chinzari, 1998)
in which they perform. In this context, Masque’s theatrical compositions
‘avoid narrative consequentiality’ (Bazzocchi, 2000), drawing directly
on formal and chance‑based modes of composition from the visual
arts (Bazzocchi, 2000). In 1994, Coefficiente
di fragilità (Coefficient of Fragility), described as a cyber‑fairy
tale (Audino, 1995), foregrounded this link between Masque’s ‘post‑industrial’
themes and imagery and their work’s close link to visual art and installation.
Inspired by Duchamp’s The Bride
Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even or The
Large Glass (1923),
in which Duchamp parodied industrial technology's rationalism through
complex and paradoxical representations of useless machines, Coefficiente di fragilità also drew on Octavio Paz's critical exploration
of Duchamp's work, Marcel Duchamp,
appearance stripped bare (Paz, 1990).
Through a large‑scale reconstruction, incorporating live performers,
of The Large Glass and a simulation
of Duchamp's last work, Étants donnés:
1 ° La Chute D'eau 2° La Gaz Déclairage (Given: 1. The Waterfall 2. The
Illuminating Gas,1946‑66), Coefficiente di fragilità defined
a labyrinthine structure enclosing both spectators and performers. In
this context, Masque's performance offered a theatrical articulation of
Maurice Blanchot's notion of `the fortuitous encounter', and so the proposition,
Bazzocchi suggests, `of instantaneous intuition' (Bazzocchi, 2000). Significantly,
Blanchot's concept of the `fortuitous encounter' is reflected in Duchamp's
work, and especially in his selection of `Ready‑mades': banal, everyday
objects, signed and dated by Duchamp to be exhibited in a gallery context.
At the root of this selection, Duchamp later recalled, was a moment of
encounter, determined, like the object itself, arbitrarily. Thus, in Duchamp's
working notes to The Large Glass,
published as The Green Box (1934),
he proposed to create a Ready‑made by |
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planning for a moment to come (on such a day, such a date, such a moment), `to inscribe a ready‑made'. The ready‑made can then be looked for (with all kinds of delays). The important thing is just this matter of timing. This snapshot effect, like a speech delivered on no matter what occasion but at such and such an hour. It is a kind of rendezvous. (Duchamp in Sanouillet and Peterson, 1975: 32, original emphasis) | ||
It
is an encounter echoed, too, for Bazzocchi, in a meeting with The Large Glass. Divided into two parts, Bazzocchi proposes that Duchamp
uses this division to suggest `two mirrors positioned one on top of the
other' noting that `Duchamp speaks of the effect that the glass has to reflect
another image' (Bazzocchi, 2000). After The
Large Glass, then, Masque's own `fortuitious encounter' comes to embrace
not only the `Ready‑made', reflected in Masque's appropriation of
Duchamp's works, but also this mirroring effect. |
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Masque,
Coefficiente di fragilità ( Coefficient of Fragility, 1994)
(photo: Masque). |
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In
entering Coefficiente di fragilità, then, ‘the spectator is continuously
moved’ (Audino, 1995) through a ‘a ten-metre long tunnel […] a naturalist
environment’ evoking the walls of an old hotel (Bazzocchi, 2000). Here,
in response to Duchamp's ‘concept of unveiling and anamorphosis' (Bazzocchi,
2000), Masque confront the spectator, in their journey, with a series of
distorted images or abnormal transformations on the themes of ‘identity’
and ‘otherness’, to which this work is dedicated. On the walls of the installation,
bodies and colours are projected and continuously changed; a map, like an
encephalogram, is reproduced on monitors in response to sensors applied
to the actors' voices. At moments the spectators hear the words of a bride
telling them in the manner of a peep show about her lovers and her virginity
(Audino, 1995). Here, at a crossing point, the spectator meets an actor,
as `walking forward the spectator sees a female body lit by stroboscopic
lights' (Audino, 1995). Subsequently, the spectator retreats, walking backwards
along the path they came, but, in doing so, `the spectator finds themselves
in front of the projected image of themselves in the act of moving forward'
(Bazzocchi, 2000). Here, where the spectator sees `their own face filmed
by a hidden camera and projected over the back wall' (Audino, 1995) so they
encounter themselves. `The idea
of the work', Bazzocchi notes, was `to isolate the spectator in their vision': |
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[t]his is connected to the
fortuitous encounter, the necessity of letting the spectator meet with another
figure with whom they could have a very rapid knowledge [... ] we wanted
the spectator to be always alone, but also always with others, to be surprised
to be with themselves. (Bazzocchi,
2000) |
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After Duchamp, Paolo Ruffini
suggests in his review of the performance, the spectator, at this moment,
`becomes an involuntary voyeur' assisting the `Ready‑made' (Ruffini,
1995). In this `encounter' with their own image, in which they see themselves
as the fortuitous object of their attention, and
so as other, Ruffini suggests
that in `the stroke of an action', the spectator `transforms the gesture
devoid of sense, the everyday object, into a work of art' (Ruffini, 1995). Masque's concern with identity is strongly reflected
in their subsequent work, where it has frequently been transposed towards
relationships between the body and technology. Nur Mut: la passeggiata dello schizo (Nur Mut: The Walk of The Schizo,1996)
is an homage to Deleuze and Guattari, with particular reference to Anti‑Oedipus (Deleuze and Guattari,
1984). |
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Masque,
Nur Mut (Nur Mut 1997) (photo: Masque).. |
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Recalling
Duchamp again, but also Jean Tinguely's mechanized sculptures, Nur
Mut evoked scenes of the contamination of the physical by the
machine as the performers' bodies are integrated with mechanisms built
with found objects, including mechanical skeletons, dolls, hairdressers'
utensils, chairs, tubes, and surgical instruments. As the performance
progressed, deformed dolls were offered to the audience as a performer's
voice states: `I am my father, I am my mother, I am my son, I am also
myself' (Masque, 1999a). Describing their `confrontation' with Deleuze
and Guattari's work, Gatelli suggests that this integration reflects a
latent `cybernetic' state, emphasizing that `the only way in which we
could give back to the hero, a schizophrenic character, the place of origin
was to build around him a grinding machine system to highlight his interior
drama' (Gatelli in Chiara, 1999). Eva futura (Future Eva, 1999)
extended the company's address to exchanges between the body and machine
through concepts of simulation (Masque, 1999a). Drawing on work by the
early twentieth‑century writer Auguste Villiers de 1'Isle‑Adam,
Eva futura is performed within a selfcontained
architectonic structure representing a laboratory, in which four subjects
are hypnotized. Repeating a number of exercises, including levitation,
catalepsy, automatic rotatory movements, inhibition of voluntary movement,
analgesia, bleeding and conditioning (Masque, 1999a), the piece emphasizes
an equivalence and exchange between organism and machine, as if `life'
is implied in the actor's performative exchange. At the centre of the
structure, Masque set a piano playing on its own. Stressing in the video
documentation of the performance that `simulation is not a lie; it's the
creation of a new reality' (Masque, 1999b), Bazzocchi reads the machine
itself as a new kind of organism, noting that `we see the piano for the
keys and we forget that inside there is a body that has its own life'
(Bazzocchi, 2000). |
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