Solon (c. 638 – c. 558 BCE) the lawmaker made public lamentation a punishable offense, with two exceptions: funeral dirges and tragedy. In The 21st Century Fox Den we will create narrative spaces and transform them through lamentation into dialogues, spatial set-ups, and performances.
The 21st Century Fox Den investigates the possibilities of collective retrospection through improvisation-based story design, with focus on the form of public lamentation that came into being in the course of the Neolithic revolution, from funeral dirges and lamentations in attic tragedy to the hysterical passage à l’acte, strikes, and other forms of public lamentation in current time. The performative investigations in narrative space in planned works such as “Disrupting the Dinner Table,” “Union des républiques socialistes animales (URSA),” “Fail to Wail_Foxy News,” and “The Singer of Tales,” focus on the relationship between actor and object, and feature coincidental, accidental and unexpected connections. I intend to experiment with aleatoric processes, which will make it possible to revisit and speculate history, and to absorb the tradition of remembrance art into story design. Implicit memory may be retrieved and activated by mode of knowing in and through the body. By contesting the division between the realm of knowledge and the realm of speculation, I attempt to formalize the coincidental and emphasize the conscious process of oral composition that is behind works of collective bodily recollections. This manner of object-making consequently provides case studies to examine, analyze, and review function and process of oral data recording and deleting as means of exerting power. It may also demonstrate ways of production of knowledge through physical interaction between the subject and the environment.
The 21st Century Fox Den is a theater invention that in principle follows Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed, Christoph Schlingensief’s “Chance 2000” and other works, and the Situationistic Communication Guerilla. I aim to develop a method to deconstruct social relations as theater that can consequently be altered by theatrical means: staging, casting, set design, acting etc. As research, it will be conducted through the study of emotion and affect [Sara Ahmed, Eve Kosofsky-Sedgwick], and through research on oral composition [Albert B Lord, Milman Parry, John Miles Foley]. Semiospherical concepts [Yuri Lotman, Kurt Lewin, Bruno Latour], like affect theory-oriented concepts, relate in principle on subject-object relations. Gaston Bachelard, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Henri Leroi-Gourhan, Henri Lefebvre, Pierre Bourdieu and research around spatial semantics also apply, since I am interested in the literal notion of space and territory: cave and nomadic, settlement and agriculture, cyberspace and the physical body.
Given that the primary tools of patriarchal power, in particular law and money, are based on written language, overwriting writing through oral composition is an attempt to protest in and through the concept of bodily knowledge. Thus instead of writing, I will experiment with the body as recorder, and copy machine to preserve knowledge. Body knowledge can be generated reliably only as a collective undertaking. Therefore, I will explore and expand methods of creating and executing story-based remembrance and immersive place-making; collaboration techniques with actors, players, and audience members in immersive storytelling; and theatrical expertise in interactive game design.
The doctrine of positive thinking is one of the dominant narratives of consumer capitalism. Instead of calling out systemic exploitation, racism, sexism and so forth, it blames individuals themselves for lacking personal and corporal happiness. I contend that the obligation to be happy is the contemporary manifestation of the ancient ban of lamentation. Public lamentation has been undertaken through all history: labor movements, revolutions, and property crimes question current property rights; and the discourse around hysteria, eating disorders, LGBTQIA activism question the concept of family. Thus reinstating and developing forms of lamentation may disavow invisible ideologies of consumer capitalism.
Intervention One
Disrupting the Dinner Table is a theatrical set-up around the dinner table as the centerpiece of a house. The house is the main manifestation of a sedentary culture, like Simone de Beauvoir describes it: “The ideal of happiness has always taken material form in the house … Within its walls the family is established as a discrete cell or a unit group and maintains its identity as generations come and go; the past, preserved in the form of furniture and ancestral portraits, gives promise of a secure future”.[2] At the dinner family and marriage is executed, the father presides and rules – ‘for as long as you sleep under my roof’, where the mother /woman of the house serves, and where eating, the most existential human activity, is conducted. The table is what we could call a kinship object, which gives form to the family as a social gathering, as the tangible thing over which the family gathers.[3] The dinner table is a rich narrative topoi from which we take the following: the TV show Dallas, (theatrical remakes/alterations of Miss Ellie calling to sit down and have dinner), Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party, and Yuri Lotman’s insight into the domestic arrangements of the Russian aristocracy, as described in his book High Society Dinners. There are obviously endless references in regard to the dinner table, and in the course of deepening my research other references may also apply. Disruptions will vary and derive from banned lamentations around the topical space: table manners, eating disorders, food allergies, not getting enough, who cooks, who serves, as well as forms of union and forms of strike may prove to be yielding. Participants of the dinner may be performers, improv players, and audience members. Also field trips to family homes in different cultures and their dinner routines may serve as a starting for a performative investigation that disrupts the dinner table and looks at the consequences of that disruption.
Intervention Two
Union des républiques socialistes animales (URSA) This intervention intends to tap into the non-anthropocentric narrative attributes of cave art and centers around animals and patriarchy. We design narrative spaces around 4 animal narratives that may serve to investigate the possible end patriarchy: the bear, the dog, the horse, and the goat. Theatre, so far contains is tied to the human perspective, actors “imitates men in action” (mimesis prakseos, aristotle), new theatre may put humans in perspective instead. Just like world views shifted from geocentric to heliocentric, we would suggest a non-centric playroom, a theatrical space, that does not claim to represent the world it its entirety but much rather as being just another information cluster in the infinite. The stage then creates awareness of flux and elusiveness of ground – of sedentary values. It questions history, time, space, and hierarchy. Hence, the narrative space, its objects, and players in this invention will be drawn from reality-based as well as fictionalized animals as follows:
In Orwell’s Animal Farm, an old boar summons the animals on a farm together and teaches the animals a revolutionary song called Beast of England. In URSA the Latin word for bear resonates and acknowledges the primacy of the she-bear. The oldest discovered statue, fashioned some fifteen to twenty thousand years ago, is of a bear. From antiquity to the Middle Ages, the bear’s centrality in cults and mythologies left traces in European languages, literatures, and legends from the Slavic East to Celtic Britain.[4] In pre-neolithic time, the now extinct cave bear not only was the most powerful animal but also the most present in the proximity of the cave paintings. Bear bones are the dominant finding in cave excavations. Headless bear sculptures have been found in large numbers in and around the caves, suggesting a popular bear cult. Headless – as some scholars suggest- because the sculpture itself just served as a base for a bear rug – including its original head, producing in this way the illusion of full size live bear during the ceremony. Bear cults have a prominent presence in ancient mythology, most often related to a she-bear, to female/lesbian sexuality, and the power and magic of chthonic goddesses. The visual correspondence between the rather round, dark, and fury appearance of the bear and the female mature genital seems obvious. The mythology around Artemis, and the cult celebrated at the Artemis temples may serve as exemplary evidence. The early Church was threatened by pagan legends of the bear’s power, among them a widespread belief that bears were sexually attracted to women and would violate them, producing half-bear, half-human beings. Eventually the demonic bears became entertainers in the marketplace, trained to perform humiliating tricks or muzzled and devoured by packs of dogs for the amusement of (hu) mans, while the lion was crowned as the symbol of nobility – and as I may add: masculinity. In this invention we’d like to reinstate the she-bear, suspend the lion, and replace representations of lions in their capacity of patriarchal power by bears – in workshops, in story improvisations and other forms –like book corrections; new editions may be created, stories altered.
What are the parallels between the domestication of wolves – turning them into dogs– and the ‘domestication’ of women other than time? The dog, man’s best friend, a rich source of reference and social research, is the only animal that owes its existence to its submission to humans and by doing so, it changed its identity, name, nature, and race – from wolf to dog. The she-dog, the bitch, the son-of-a bitch – since became prominent and vibrant female-related pejoratives, while the wolf serves as a colloquial term for a womanizer. Considering the representation of ancient goddesses and mythological women as powerful, awe-inspiring, and in times cruel – they were just like wolves. The nature of those fears might be detected in what has been identified as justification myths. These myths typically feature a fearsome, cruel and vindictive earth goddess who murders her children (or abandons children, then raised by wolves) and in the end is killed or banished by her heroic son. Mythology conjures a frightening picture of the feminine, suggesting that the collective neurosis of men is the fear of the feminine. Anthropological research on ancient bones also suggests that in pre-neolithic times, female bodies were not smaller than male bodies, and the current gap between the body height of men and women may be the result of patriarchal breeding. Men prefer smaller women, tall women were lesser selected for reproduction. Hence, is it possible that not only the wolf transformed into a new species, but women also? Were women, before patriarchy turned them into bitches, actually a different species? And consequently, why have some wolves traded their freedom for dependency –maybe security– while others didn’t? Also, current efforts to resettle wolves in Europe, and the conflicts deriving from those efforts, can they be interpreted as an indication for taking-back patriarchy?
The horse is a gender-shared animal-topoi. It is one of most represented animals in cave paintings, and a symbol of freedom, power and means of individual transportation for men. The cowboy and his horse, the king on his steed, (not on the mule), the fascination of the beautiful und fastest horses is proven all through recorded history (today in parts replaced by cars). For women on the other hand, the most striking and idiosyncratic relationship with horses happens typically in early adolescence. The girl’s room is covered with horse posters, and horseback riding is a known obsession that girls often enjoy – especially in their early phase of coming to sexual maturity, most often in regard to ride the stallion. Barbie owns horses and riding outfits etc … The question here aims to explore how a narrative around horses may serve as a consolidating story, recurring to a shared desire for freedom, and in regard to the function of horses in nomadic cultures – to a shared desired to break out of the sedentary impertinences.
The word tragedy comes from tragos and oide, which means literally “he-goat” and “song”. The origin of tragedy remains a subject of debate. Some scholars suggest that the word refers to a goat having been sacrificed before the theatrical performance, others suspect a goat was given as an award for the best performance afterwards, yet others connect the origins of tragedy with Dionysus, the satyr-like transgressive God and his ritual symbol, a goat’s penis. These explanations are not mutually exclusive. Considering the presence of pity and awe (Greek: eleos and phobos) as formative elements of tragedy, it seems surmisable to connect tragedy with the whining of slaughtered animals, and through the element of pity, the trauma of the shepherd slaughtering the wailing creature. He silenced the lambs. Living a semi-nomadic lifestyle cattle breeding was their main source of income. The shepherd became integral topoi in patriarchal culture. The Hebrew deity YHWA derives from Amen-Ra, the Egyptian God of the herds.[5] Therefore, it is no accident that shepherds were present at Jesus’s birth – less as a reference to the underclass in early Christendom, but rather as the implicit founders of religion. The Lord is my shepherd. The myth of the shepherd appears over and over again in patriarchal iconography, including the cowboy as an anarchic adversary of the cattle baron (representing the archetypal patriarch in the Western film genre), that is modern tragedy.
Intervention Three
Fail to Wail_ Foxy News In this invention the speech act is the ban of the ban, a form of forced lamentation. Since knowledge isn’t absolute but relative to the subject (re) producing it, claiming knowledge may be worthwhile. A theory or thesis’ validity is generally based on its capacity to make correct predicaments about the future. The process must be documented thoroughly so that other scientists may repeat the experiment precisely. Only by getting the same positive results is the theory testing considered valid. It requires repeatable results. This theatrical staging will feature women that have failed to wail where they should have wailed – because they were afraid, silenced, cowards, ambitious, ignorant and so forth. The invention is a faked documentary of sorts – a publication, a conference or social media news release that claims the resurfacing, the discovery, or the (belated) release of a female lamentation /wailing – in regard to a patriarchal assault that had remained unreported.
[2] Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, Vintage, ([1949] 1997), 467.
[3] Sarah Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, (Duke University Press, 2006) 81.
[4] Michel Pastoureau, The Bear: History of a Fallen King, (Belknap Press, 2011).
[5] In the fifth year of his reign, around 1340 BC, Egyptian king Amenhotep IV took decisive steps to establish Amen-Ra or Aten as the exclusive, monotheistic god of Egypt: he disbanded the priesthoods of all the other gods, and diverted the income from these other cults. Yet the Egyptian people did not follow the new system and after a short time the old polytheistic system was re-established. One minority, however, named the Hebrews, kept the monotheistic system. After a failed rebellion 55 years later, they fled Egypt and settled 40 years later in Judaea. The former Egyptian god of the herds (sun and fertility) Amen-Ra –now spelled in Hebrew YHWA became the god of their new mosaic religion. In a similar way, Freud argues that Moses had been an Atenist priest forced to leave Egypt with his followers after Akhenaten’s death.
Sylke Rene Meyer