Afterall Journal Inhuman Polyphony in the Theatre of Ma...

http://www.afterall.org/journal/issue.36/inhuman-polyphony-i...

Summer 2014

Inhuman Polyphony in the Theatre of

Madness
Peter Pl Pelbart

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< ... histoire(s) du prsent ... > (< ... histor(ies) of the present ... >), ...
20072011..., documentation of an experience with Alejandra Riera and the Ueinzz
Theatre Company, video still
We are the Ueinzz Theatre Company, established in So Paulo, Brazil eighteen years ago.
Lunatics, therapists, performers, maids, philosophers, normopaths... Once on stage, no one
can tell the difference. Its a sort of Ship of Fools, adrift inside and outside the artistic
circuit. We rehearse every week, we have produced five plays, we have given over three
hundred performances, we travel through- out Brazil, and also abroad, and this is part of our
magnificent repertoire. But this concreteness does not guarantee anything. Sometimes we
spend months in the stagnation of insipid weekly rehearsals. Sometimes we ask ourselves if we
have actually ever performed, or will go back to performing. Some actors disappear,
sponsorships dwindle, scripts are forgotten and the very company itself seems like some
intangible virtuality. And then,all of a sudden, a date for a performance appears, some theatre
becomes available,a patron or sponsor shows up, and there is just the glimpse of a season,
with an invitation to perform in the Cariri or in Finland. The costume designer spruces up the
dusty rags, actors who disappeared months ago reappear, sometimes even running away from
internment... But even when it all happens, it is on that fine line that separates building from
collapsing. We move alongside Maurice Blanchots acute intuition that the basis of a work is
unworking (dsoeuvrement).1 And we follow Michel Foucaults hypothesis that with the
historical decline of the aura of madness and its subsequent transformation into a mental
illness, madness reappears as unreason2 that is, as the absence of work; an absolute rupture
of the work. I would place our trajectory on that moving limit between madness and
unreason,like a steep experiment over the abyss, where chance, ruination and passivity speak:
the outside.
Lets begin with an example. We are preparing to perform Daedalus' on 20 March 2000 at a
major Brazilian theatre festival. The cast is about to go on stage. The actors are getting ready
to utter, in Greek, the combative clash that begins the piece. I wait, tense; in my head I run
over the words we are supposed to shout at each other in menacing tones. Scanning the
audience, I notice that our narrator is standing a few metres away from the microphone. He
appears to be disoriented. I go up to him, and he tells me that hehas lost his script. I slip my
hand into his trouser pocket, where I find the complete bundle of papers. He stares at the
papers, which I hold up to his face. He seems not to recognise them. He puts on his glasses
only to take them off, and murmurs that this time he will not take part in the play that this
is the night of his death. We exchange a few words, and a few minutes later I am relieved to
see him back at the microphone. But his voice, normally tremulous and stirring, is now slurred
and washed out.In the middle of a scene in which he plays Charon, he suddenly walks right
across the stage and heads for the theatre exit. I find him sitting in the street, deathly still,
murmuring the demand for an ambulance his time has come. I kneel down beside him and
he tells me, Im going to the swamp. The situation lightens up after that. We negotiate: he will
accept a cheeseburger from McDonalds instead of the ambulance. I hear the final applause

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coming from inside the theatre, and the public starts to exit through the small door that leads
onto the street, where we are. What they see as they exit is Hades (my character), kneeling at
the feet of the living-dead Charon.
And we gain their respect, because, for them, this intimate scene of collapse is part of the
performance. We perform ona razors edge, and it is on a razors edge that we live. Working,
unworking, absence of work.
What is at stake in the para-theatrical or performative device of the Ueinzz is the singular,
unreasonable subjectivity of the actors, who are or have been psychiatric patients, and nothing
else. That is, whatis being staged or acted out are mannersof perceiving, feeling, dressing,
positioning oneself, speaking, asking questions, offering or removing oneself from thegaze of
the other as well as from others enjoyment. It is a way of representing without representing,
associating whilst disassociating, of being on stage and feeling at home at the same time:
crossing the stage in the middle of the performance, bag in hand, because your part has now
cometo an end; conversing with your prompter and thus revealing his presence, before
turning into a toad... Then grunting and croaking, or, like Franz Kafkas nomads in The Great
Wall of China (1917), speaking like magpies, or just saying Ueinzz...
Some in the audience are under the impression that they themselves are the living-dead and
that real life is on the other side of the stage. In fact, in a context marked by the control of life,
modes of resistance to the exercise of biopower,3 to use Foucaults term, proliferate in the
most unusual ways. One of them consists in putting life literally on stage not bare, brutal
life, which, as Giorgio Agamben argues, is reduced by biopower to the state of survival, but life
in the state of variation: minor modes of living that inhabit our major modes, and which, on
stage or off, gain dramatic or performative visibility, even when one is on the edge of death or
collapse.4 Even if within restricted parameters, here is a device for an experiment, though
hesitant and inconclusive, in changing power over life into power of life.
Indeed, it could be argued that, if today capital and governmentality enter life on a scale never
seen before, sapping its creative strength, the opposite is also true: life itself hits back, revived.
And if the ways of seeing, feeling, thinking, perceiving, dwelling and dressing become an
objectof capital investment and molecular monitoring, they also become a sourceof value that
can, by themselves, become vectors for self-valorisation or even deviation. In the case of
madness, this happens in de-subjectivation, which undoes familiar, professional, social,
national and religious identities, thus blurring borders and dismantling limits.
On the other, it experiments with singular, plural, collective and inhuman ways of
subjectivation. As we know from Foucault, madness was expelled from the social collective,
locked away and silenced in the seventeenth century. With the adventof psychiatric medicine,
it became mental illness in the nineteenth century, and consequently the object of moral, then
psychological and finally medical treatment. And yet a schizoid flow has never ceased to cut
through the limits that scientific rationality ascribes to it a flow that runs through the entire
social body, schizophrenising the surroundings and disseminating itself through the most
varied domains, even through collective, political and poetic practices, as Gilles Deleuze and
Flix Guattari showed.
It would be therefore appropriate to insert the experience of the Ueinzz into the fluctuating
lineage that goes from the history of madness to the schizoid flow, and which spreads into the
realm of the performing arts. This is how it was intuited, since the very beginning of the
company, by Renato Cohen, a well-known theorist and proponent of performance art in
Brazil, who co-directed the Ueinzzs first three plays:
The actors of the company have arare ally on their side, who destroys representation in its
most artificial sense: time. The time of the uncommon actor is mediated by all his
dialogues;it is traversed by subtexts which become the actual text itself. In dialogues,the
reply does not come immediately, nor is it rational; rather, it goes through other mental
circuits. There is a delay,a scenic slowing down, that puts the whole audience in production.
This is not the fictional time of representation, but the time of the actor or performer,the time
of entering and exiting ones character, thus allowing other dimensions of ones acting to be
seen. Cohen concludes that as one breaks away from representation, a space opens up for the
unpredictable,and therefore for the living, since life is synonymous with the unpredictable and
with risk,5 inadvertently approaching Foucaults definition of life as an error, as something
that is errant.6 The performance then becomes a ritual, Cohen argues, where everyone
witnesses the impossible going on, the curved bodies dancing, the inaudible voices that gain
amplified strength thanks to the electronics installed for the performance.7 The microphones
are visible, since the sound that remains in the subconscious is the sound of the media the
sound of television, of radio, of electronic music, of the computer.8 Others, even without a
microphone, do not impose their voices and are barely even heard, whether because they do
not possess the vocal technique or because they have difficulties in speaking or problems with

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diction. Speech loses a little of its weight with all the different elements that make up the
scene, thus giving space for other speeches (corporal, for example),9 in a disjunction between
bodies without voices and voices without a body.10
Politics of Perception
The course of the Ueinzz has also been inflected by an experience outside ofthe field of theatre,
which in a certainway puts it in suspension: a collaboration with Alejandra Riera, who doesnt
present herself under any defined category, be that of artist, film-maker or writer.Born in
Buenos Aires and living mostlyin Paris, she documents through texts and images how to deal
with others and with the stories that come through us.11 Riera came to So Paulo in 2005;
shortly after her arrival, she approached the Ueinzz group to work together on a componentof
her project Enqute sur le/notre dehors (Enquiry on the/our outside, 2007 ongoing), an
ongoing research that seeksto activate a device for very precise,though open, enquiry. This
segment ofthe collaboration took place over a period of ten days and consisted of a daily
outing to a place in the city suggested by theactors of the Ueinzz, where the group would
approach someone of their choice a pedestrian, street vendor, student, police officer,
homeless person and fire at them any questions that came to mind. Since the interviewees
didnt know the interviewers but sometimes perceiveda certain strangeness everything
could easily go wrong, without anyone managing to detect the reason for the derailing. Places
started skidding and the personal, professional or institutional masksthat everyone dearly
holds onto fellto the ground, allowing a glimpse of the unusual dimensions of the disturbing
normality that surrounds us every day. The encounters were recorded on video, albeit not in
a conventional interview format: often the camera doesnt focus on the person speaking, thus
creating a hiatus between what we see and what we hear, which questions once again the
anchoring point of discourse and sets the automatism of comprehension in suspension.
Let us take one minuscule example. We are talking to a peanut seller in front of the Legislative
Assembly in So Paulo. One of our actors asks him what the magic of that place is. The street
vendor does not understand, and asks if the interviewer wants to know how much he earns.
No,I wanted to know what is your happiness here? I dont understand, answers the peanut
seller. The actor, a little agitated by his interlocutors deafness, asks him point blank: No, I
want to know what is your desire, what is the meaning of your life? Then everything stops;
there is a silence and we see the man sinking into a dimension that is totally other. He replies,
quietly,with a certain difficulty: Suffering...This is the basis without a basis of the entire
conversation, the disaster already occurring, the exhaustion that cannot be spoken of; it is the
bitter isolation of a man cornered in front of a monumental building that represents an
unshakeable but nonetheless empty power; it appears only by means of a sudden interruption,
triggered by a sort of vital irritation.An interruption provoked by the one who is supposed to
be drowned in his own abyss the crazy actor. Here everything shifts, and the spectator
suddenly wonders who is truly alive the interviewer or the interviewee and if that
question still has any meaning, since what emerges from this unusual dialogue is nothing but
a whole context of misery. What causes an eruption is the psychosocial instability upon which
everything else rests. In making the situation schizophrenic, in the way that Deleuze and
Guattari use the term, there is the momentary impression that everything may become
derailed: functions, places, obeisance, discourses, representations. Everything may fall,
including the device itself. Even if we meet what was there from the start grievance,
resignation, impotence we witness disconnections that make so-called normality flee, along
with its linked automatic reactions; and also the evocation of other possible bonds with the
world. As Riera states in the text that opens the film-document, thisis not social reporting, nor
a survey with humanist ends, but the recording of an experiment. It has no make-up, no
claims to denounce a situation and no inclination towards aesthetics.
In the end, we do not really have a proper documentary, or a film, but an unusual object, a
trace of an event, which may itself trigger other events, as was the case when some fragments
were shown in La Borde, a psychiatric clinic in the centre of France, where Guattari once lived
and worked. Its a late Friday afternoon in the autumn of 2008, and patients and psychiatrists
are waiting for the Brazilian film in the enormous central hall of this decaying castle, but
there will be no film, documentary or theatrical piece. Absence of work. How to explain this
without disappointing expectations? After the weekly meeting ends, the hundred people
seated in the auditorium turn towards the screen already stretched. Alejandra Riera thanks
those present and straightaway points out that she does not intend to show a film. She
explains that this is only an experiment, that it is very difficult to talk about... Instead of giving
a talk on the project, on her intentions and her logic,as one would expect, she confesses that
she has experienced great difficulty working recently... that in the end she could not manage it
any more... to work, or to build...

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Lieu(x)dtudes (Place(s)ofstudies), 2009, documentation of an experience with Alejandra

Riera and the Ueinzz Theatre Company, video stills
Imagine the effect of this talk on people who had abandoned the circuit of work, projects
and results long ago. She then adds that lately all she can manage is to take things apart, such
as the computer she used to work with, and from her handbag she takes two plastic bags
containing fragments of a disassembled keyboard, one filled with alphabet keys, the other with
the functions (delete, ctrl, alt, etc.), to be circulated amongst those present. The spectacular
expectation of a film gives way to an extraordinary complicity with an artist who does not call
herself an artist, who confesses that she is not able to workand shows the remains of her
computer instead of the work; pieces that havebeen dismantled, evoking a project whose
impossibility
is immediately made known, leaving only the impasse, the fiasco, the paralysis, the exhaustion
that is commonto us all, whether we are lunatics or philosophers, artists or psychiatrists...
Only once the link between art and audience is short-circuited, once the audiences
expectations from that presentation of images are undone, andthe central protagonist is
de-individualised, only then can something else occur:an event as the effect of a
suspension.Then even a projection of fragments can take place, or a controversial
discussion,at times accusatory or visceral, thatdrags on into the night, into the twilightof the
auditorium, which no one has taken the trouble to light up; it all ends with the hilarious
question from a patient: Do you all have a project? As if reconnecting to Rieras initial speech
about her difficultyin working, in constructing a project, in doing work, the question evokes
Blanchots intuition on the common ground existing between art and unworking, as well as
Foucaults idea about the relationship between madness and the rupture of work.12 Perhaps
this is where we can find a performative exhaustion of the project or work, so that inaudible
voices and improbable events can emerge.
Its true that the video fragment depicting a street prophet evoked an irate explosion from one
of the residents at La Borde when it was projected there. Why are you showing us this, what
right do you have to intensify the mystical deliriumof a paranoid person on the street? This is
not a film, its a provocation, an insult! An immediate and comprehensible reaction, and one
that a more sane public wouldnt perhaps have dared to express when confronted with such a
harsh, beautiful and unbearable scene. Indeed, there is pain everywhere, and the film doesnt
seek to explore it exotically, but neither does it aim to cover it up. The film is about not
ignoring the insanity on the streets, or the loose word that rarely finds a place to land. The
actors gave themselves the liberty to grab frag- ments of what courses fluidly around them,
what one cant perceive, or stand to see,or is prevented from noticing but which nonetheless
makes noise. Its about a buzzing that hums far below many peoples affective threshold, given
the sensory and media shield that cushions the harshness and the friction of life. In the filmed
fragments projected at La Borde one does indeed recognise types, somewhat like caricatures,
but over the course of the event they end up being divested of their characteristic traits in a
process of corrosion. Such is the case in Kafkas 1919 letter to his father, according to Deleuze
and Guattaris reading: in the unsent missive, the figure of the father is inflated to such a point
that he ends up exploding and leaving something else to be seen,a whole other molecular
movement underneath that was previously hidden.13 Likewise, in the enquiry, the recognisable
identity of the interviewee or the interviewer crumbles throughout the conversation.
(Dis)occupation
In 2009, the collective occupation of one floor of the cultural centre Sesc Paulista,in So

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Paulo, intensified this coexistence between interruption and event, introspection and the
outside, opacity and the endeavour to make visible. Over a period of twelve days, the group
performed Finnegans Ueinzz, a play inspired by James Joyces Finnegans Wake (1939), which
was accompanied by contributions from guest speakers and film screenings.14
During this period, Riera proposeda lieu(x)dtudes (place(s)ofstudies), whereby actors,
security guards and cleaners were invited to participate in situations of collective reflection,
with the hope that each one would leave aside hisor her place of origin and question the
competencies, places of enunciation and instruments of perception available in order to be
heard and seen. A dismantled computer on a table, the body without organs of technology, a
surgery in which one reinvents the body, inspired by Antonin Artaud, an anagram by Maya
Deren drawn on the floor... In this context, Godardian scenes were staged, such as actors or
cleaners reading dense theoretical papers while moving around machinesof perception and
recording, thereby upsetting the division between those who speak and those who work, those
who represent and those who are represented, those who go crazy and those who theorise
about the unconscious.
Foucault often referred to infamous men and their insignificant, inglorious lives; men who by
a game of chance were illuminated for a brief moment in the floodlights of power with which
they came face to face, and whose words then appeared to have been traversed by an
unexpected intensity. Perhaps we no longer encounter those resplendent, although inessential
poem-lives, particles endowed with an energy all the greater for their being small and difficult
to discern.15 Diluted between the multiple mechanisms of anonymous power, their words no
longer enjoy that theatrical resplendence and fleeting vibration that Foucault savoured in the
archives it is banality that takes centre stage. But from within, signs of singularity appear to
confirm the desire for something else. As Deleuze used to say (even before the term
biopolitical' was coined), we are all in search of vitality.16 Singular, collective, anonymous,
plural, suspensive, intensive, unworking life each time reinvented, between exhaustion and
a fleeting vision.

Footnotes
1. See Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation (1969, trans. Susan Hanson),
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
2. See Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of
Reason (1965, trans. Richard Howard), London: Routledge, 1992; and M. Foucault,
Madness, the Absence of Work (1964, trans. Peter Stastny and Deniz S engel), in Critical
Enquiry, vol.21, no.2, Winter 1995, pp.29098.
3. See M. Foucault, Right of Death and Power over Life, The History of Sexuality, Vol.1:
Introduction (1976, trans. Robert Hurley), New York: Vintage Books, 1990, pp.13361.
4. See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995, trans. Daniel
Heller-Roazen), Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
5. Renato Cohen, Performance Como Linguagem, So Paulo: Perspectiva, 2002, p.58.
Translationthe author's. My reading of Cohens work is deeply inspired by the writings of
Ana Goldenstein Carvalhaes, an actor in the company who studied the Ueinzzs process in
light of Cohens perspective. See A. Goldenstein Carvalhaes, Persona Performtica:
Alteridade e Experincia na obra de Renato Cohen (So Paulo: Perspectiva, 2012).
6. See M. Foucault, Introduction, in Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the
Pathological(1966, trans. Carolyn R. Fawcett and Robert S. Cohen), New York: Zone
Books, 1989, pp.725.R. Cohen, press release for the play Gotham SP, performed in 2001
at Teatro Oficina, So Paulo.
7. R. Cohen, press release for the play Gotham SP, performed in 2001 at Teatro Oficina, So
Paulo.
8. Ibid.
9. See A. Goldenstein Carvalhaes, Persona Performtica, op. cit.
10. Flora Sussekind, A Imaginao Monolgica, Revista USP, July 1992; quoted in R.
Cohen,Work in Progress na Cena Contempornea, So Paulo: Perspectiva, 1998.
11. Alejandra Riera, Maquetas-sin-cualidad (en la fecha del 19 de diciembre de 2004):
fragmentos: un problema no resuelto, , vistas parciales, un trabajo inacabado:
produccin autnoma (trans. Carlos Manzano), Barcelona: Fundaci Antoni Tpies, 2005.
Translation the authors.
12. See M. Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, op. cit.; and M. Foucault, Madness and
Civilisation, op. cit.
13. [Kafka] deterritorialise[s] Oedipus in this world instead of reterritorialising himself on
Oedipus and in the family. Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor
Literature (1975, trans. Dana Polan), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986,

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p.10. See also Franz Kafka, Letter to His Father (1919, trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne
Wilkins), New York: Schocken Books, 1976.
14. Guests included the psychiatrist Jean Oury, philosopher David Lapoujade, sociologist and
critic Laymert Garcia dos Santos, author and critic Celso Favaretto and psychoanalyst and
cinematographer Miriam Chnaiderman. Several films were projected, including interviews
with Guattari, Francesc Tosquelles and a short film of a dance by Min Tanaka, filmed by
Franois Pain.
15. M. Foucault, Lives of Infamous Men (1977), Power: Essential Works of Foucault,
19541984 (ed. James D. Faubion, trans. R. Hurley et al.), New York: New Press, 2000,
p.161.
16. G. Deleuze, On Nietzsche and the Image of Thought (1968), Desert Island and Other
Texts: 195374 (ed. D. Lapoujade, trans. Michael Taormina), Los Angeles and Cambridge,
MA: Semiotext(e) and the MIT Press, 2004.
17. A different version of this essay was presented at the seminar Histor(ies) of the Present,
co-organised by UNIA arteypensamiento and Afterall at UNIA, Seville on 29 October 2013.

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