This Week's This: Gary Brackett, writings

A chapter closing on Centro Living Europa?

2005-08-16T03:57:00.000-07:00

Note: this is a letter, published in various local and regional newspapers, about The Living Theatre’s Italian home and our life and work there, and the problems we encountered.

Rocchetta Ligure, Italy

An open letter to the residents of Rocchetta Ligure, citizens of Italy, my New York friends and my mother (2004):

It is often said that small towns suffer from a certain type of provincialism. But as a famous theatre director once said: generalisations are never true, they are too simple. I do agree but perhaps small towns can be a microcosm of a larger city, of a country, of the world.

So it is that I try to reflect on the last five years of the Centro Living Europa and our experience in Rocchetta Ligure in Val Borbera (Provincia di Alessandria), Italy. A story that is not yet over, whose end is still being written. We, The Living Theatre have been asked, rather told, that we will have to leave our beautiful residence here, that this "experiment' that we have been living these last 5 years must come to an end, sometime next spring.

The experiment: a world famous avant-garde theatre company; a diverse group of artists, pacifists, anarchists, single women and men, married couples and couples unmarried, hippies, gays, vegetarians, old people, young people, blacks, Italians, Germans, Americans and 'outsiders" are suddenly transplanted to the hills of Piemonte (northwestern Italy), to a small village town of a hundred persons. A town we would come to know for its own unity and divisions, its friendliness and coldness, its tolerances and intolerances, its human successes and failures, basically all that humanity can offer in its beauty and human shortcomings. In this experiment two different and unfamiliar worlds collide. Thus began a long process of strangers getting to know each other. We made some friends very easily and quickly. Some of us were reserved and shy, some making contacts easily, some less easily. And the same for the villagers; for me it was OK and "normal” that some people have yet to approach us and vice versa.

Perhaps it was easier on our part to “see” and comprehend the “others” of the village. I think it was more difficult for the villagers to understand us. My own mother thinks that as an artist I live on permanent vacation! We do not have regular 9 to 5, Monday to Friday hours; we do not live quite like other people. The mysterious and difficult process of art creation is perhaps a vague and cloudy process to the average 'non-artist'. It is this we have been trying also to shed light on; this has been the experiment.

Paradise Now

Some of us work late into the small hours of the night; some of us don't show themselves outside of the house for days; others like myself come and go like a travelling salesman; strange friends in strange dress, piercings or tattoos come and go. For sure the people of the village felt somehow invaded, and perhaps they were not exactly consulted on the decision that we were to be inserted into their lives. Even in a small town the workings of the modern state can seem distant and less than participatory.

Antigone

Shortly after our arrival we immediately began work on a new play on the experience of the local population of Rocchetta during WW II and the partisan resistance to fascism, the nazi occupation of the village and a famous battle against the Germans. Little did I understand that this was such a sensitive issue. History is often recorded through the lenses of the storyteller and just as families were often divided in those war years between difficult choices of survival, we see today varying interpretations of what happened to Italy during that violent and turbulent period. For us as pacifist and political artists it was a challenge to frame an armed struggle as pacifists; how could we interpret those events? Would I have picked up a gun and killed, if only to defend myself? So it was that we gathered material from the living sources we found at hand, for example a partisan commander, turned historian of that epoch, G.B. Lazagna. So we created the play, Resistenza, presented and refined it here in Rocchetta with open invitations to rehearsals to the villagers, and then we took it all over the world; to the outlying province, beyond into Italy, further afield to Germany itself, to Lebanon even, and then to New York. We were so proud to take the name of Rocchetta Ligure and its story to the world. Our home here and the contributions and generosity of the town made that possible.

(photos above and below: Judith Malina and Julian Beck)

But to give a fuller picture of the nature of the complexity of this story: in the local tobacco and sundry store you can buy calendars with a photo of Mussolini displayed each month. What might the consumers of those calendars think about our partisan play? Who are they who still love Mussolini? (This is no judgement on the vendors of the calendar; they just perhaps sell what sells).

Anyway life continued here in Rocchetta. Many of us were coming and going between New York, Berlin, Rome, (what a contrast of environments!) only returning for projects; other 'full-timers' staying, whose only residence was here in the village. Those like me who made their permanent home here had new challenges; trying to stay busy as artists; finding work as artists with little or no resources; feeling somehow guilty living in such a large and wonderful house with high expenses. (It is a large palazzo from the 1600’s. We live on the top two floors.) The problem of utilities surfaced here as the building is not adept for the cold months of winter and soon we were being confronted by the worries of the mayor's office over the heating bills even though the Provincial government was paying the bill.

Here were the beginnings of the future conflict we would have with the Comune. In the strange and often incomprehensible relation of the state bureaucracy in Italy; in the power struggle of partisan politics (the left versus right kind); in the struggle of control of resources between national, regional, provincial and local levels of government, we suddenly found ourselves in the unfortunate position of being a football in the power games of finance between the interested parties. At present this conflict has gone to court and provided the Comune the first “reason" for wanting us to vacate our home. (Last year we were issued various eviction orders.)

It is warranted to give some idea of our life and work in these years for I think it is not clear to many just how much has been possible for us to accomplish by the simple fact that we had a base of operations. In addition to creating the partisan resistance play, we created a street theatre version Resist Now for the crazy and intense days of G8 in Genova where we carried forth with some 30 artists and activists the message of non-violent resistance. We rehearsed and toured other plays from our repertory: Not In My Name (against the death penalty), Capital Changes, Mysteries and Smaller pieces, and recently, a new work has premiered, Enigmas, created here this last summer. It should be noted that all of these plays were done with little or virtually no financial support. Moneys came only from the actual performances of the shows. We were always rehearsing without regular salaries.

Genoa, Resist Now

Workshops are also a major part of our work. In these last five years we have met, studied and worked with literally thousands of students in some 30 workshops here at Centro Living, in the Provincia, greater Italy, Portugal, Greece, New York and Lebanon. We have also worked in the middle school every year here in Rocchetta creating with the students 'avant-garde' plays which they performed for the village. (Not always well received!) Outside the Living, yet always under its umbrella, our artists have continued to work and create, often making use of Centro Living for rehearsals and workshops. Several original productions, historic Living Theatre plays, and some 20 other workshops have been the fruit of this work. Fausto Cerboni of the Living has launched an annual festival of art, performance, cultural and organic food events at nearby Roccaforte. His "Campo Carlo" (named after G.B. Lazagna) is sure to be a permanent fixture of the Val Borbera cultural environment. We also initiated a clean up of the river campaign 'in our own backyard'. And just recently a documentary "Resist, To be with the Living" on the last ten years of our work, produced and directed by former Living actor Dirk Szuszies, has been playing in major film festivals the world over, winning first place at Viareggio, Italy. It is Rocchetta Ligure and Centro Living that provide the idyllic backdrop for our work and travels across Europe, the Mid-east and New York.

Lebanon, rehersal

Now we have to ask ourselves: does all of this end here with a forced eviction? Certainly the Living will continue, it always does. As I write, work goes on in New York on a new building which will house the new Living Theatre. Yet for the ten core members of the European branch of the Living who make their home here, for our supporters, fans and colleagues, for our new friends in Rocchetta and the Provincia, the closing of Centro Living Europa will be a great loss. The Living has always found fertile ground and support in Italy, yet there seems to be much secret and behind door manoeuvring which could be interpreted as lack of respect for us as artists and a certain presumptuousness of policy decisions on the part of elected officials.

We have not been immune to mistakes; at times tempers have been lost under the stress of the confusion and subtle, or less than subtle, tactics of those who control our fate. Even amongst our friends, for example the 'people of the water', the local populist environmentalists, we found ourselves stuck in the middle between giving support and a voice where support was due and the difficulty of maintaining a comfortable relationship with the Provincia who happens to make it possible for us to be here. (Anarchists supported by the state; we have our contradictions!) And we were rightly accused of censoring.

Spectators, Khiam Prison, Lebanon

Khiam Prison, A Day in the Life

We do not know what will happen in the Spring when the law says we must vacate our home when our contract expires. We have some support here in Rocchetta; there seems equally to be a fair amount of indifference to our presence here. Members of the ruling Giunta (ruling committee) have expressed in no uncompromising words that "we do not want you here anymore!", taking it upon themselves to speak for all community members. It seems to have gone beyond an economic problem (if indeed there ever was one: the Provincia has continued to guarantee payment for any and all of our expenses.) It now seems to be an issue of ideology, of our "comportamento"(behaviour) (as was expressed recently in private); of tolerance and intolerance; of affinity of feeling. The most frustrating part of this is the difficulty of our understanding what is really behind our eviction and how can we stop something that seems to have been already decided. Neither the Provincia of Alessandria, the Comune of Rocchetta nor the citizens of Rocchetta and us, The Living seem to be able to bring into the open the process of decision making. Our time is running out.

The Herzbollah committee checks out the show

Postscript: we lost the battle and maybe the war as well. A new Giunta was elected and began re-negotiating with us: “starting over from the beginning as friends”. After much waiting, talking, promise making, the emptying out of our beautiful home proceeded and it seems we are out of Rocchetta Ligure. Culture in Italy has paid a heavy price from the political agenda of Berlusconi and his right-wing (and fascist rooted) government. Without financing the comune of Roccheta (rightly so ) sees no reasons for us to live there, much less work there even in an intermittent basis as had been proposed. The Campo Carlo festival proceeded at a new location (Cantalupo) but they also lost financing this year and had a much reduced program.Here in Italy there is little work for Anarchist experiment theatre yet we continue her the best we can.

I woke up early today (journal entry)

2005-07-28T15:19:00.000-07:00

My heart chakra mandala

Rocchetta Ligure, Italy

Poster "Resistenza"

I woke up early today with the horses, and sun just coming up over the hills. Sometimes it can be terribly beautiful here. Today there is a great light and no wind, which has been blowing constantly these last days. I have been cleaning up my room- “spring cleaning”. I have occupied another room- Fausto’s ex- and made it a temporary office. I have papers, and pieces of paper, pictures, folders, posters, thousand of things I have accumulated these last- what, 10 years?- of work here in Italy. All of this was making my room impossible to breath in, so now it seems to be even more like a hotel, although there are still those paintings (unfinished) on the walls. Like this I thought to be organized to move out of here quickly: where to take all of my things though is a big question.

From "The Handless Maiden"

I had a “big” dream this night where there was also a protagonist, a co-star. It seems we were in New York, doing some performance, for women it seems. Afterwards she was leaving me on her grand, black bicycle built for two, plus a child’s seat! Naturally I wanted to go home with her- it was six in the morning- but alas I was left to wander strange neighborhoods of New York- New York as I have never seen it: clean with large parks coming to the cliffs of a great river (the Hudson). I imagined the Indians there and how we had destroyed the views, “tied it down” with walls and fences. It seems I was just walking to be walking- “walking the earth”- as Samuel Jackson says in “Pulp Fiction”. Eventually I was having breakfast with a typical Hollywood actor with his wig. Suddenly he was putting in his false teeth at the table. We discovered we were in the same (“entertainment”) business, and I woke up clear, so lucid and wide awake.

So this was my “mortality dream”; so many familiar themes.

The Body Pile, "Mysteres and Smaller Pieces"

I can’t seem to do anything these days. I clean and organize like some servant and watch too much T.V. The house is more beautiful than ever, and it all leaves me sad this morning. The light, the birds, the greenery, the silence and stillness of Rocchetta, of the house, the horses so regular in their breakfasting. Some thoughts come to me automatically and again I am crying, not knowing for what or for whom…and it is only 7.00 a.m.

"Police Theatre"

I suppose that is the “nut” of this entry, of this dream-

that something is missing.

And like this I was watching this show on the Spartan Wars, on Ghengis Khan (the great Mongol warrior) and the Chinese Great wall, and all the wars, all the centuries of men killing men, of plundering and destruction, of rape, of male loneliness. What else but that could explain this one great law of “mankind”: creation and total destruction. So many ingenious and cruel and tyrannical methods of pain, such evolution of cruelty- but no evolution of loving.

“The terrible has already happened”.

And we can’t, us men, get any closer to the essential problem and we create a world where our women suffer untold sadness and loneliness as well, except they, even in their despair, remain connected to something we men can never touch. But their love binds us (legare), entraps us, and sons go of to war to sever, to break, the ties. But we only find greater isolation, greater loneliness, especially the torturers (who have also taught well their women to enjoy doing it), and our hearts cry out- but only silence reigns…….
If it only were enough to admit: I am lonely. And Love is killing me.
So how to stop a love that kills?

Self-portrait

Living Theatre and G8 Genova (Genoa)

2005-07-19T03:00:00.000-07:00

note: these are two essays presented during the days of the G8 meeting in Genoa 2001. For a beautiful video, Genova Citta' Aperta, presenting myself and others with varying points of view, click: Real Player; Media Player.

Hard Lessons from Genoa and a proposal for the Tute Bianche (written after Genoa)

There was a telling scene Friday, July 20 (The Day of Action) in Piazza Dante, Genoa along side the Red Zone (a barricaded safe-zone for the G8 summit). This particular piazza, as a designated "non-violent" theme piazza, nonetheless was witness to water cannons and tear gas in use against the pacifist protesters. Protest actions here varied from the more creative artistic singing, music and balloon launching to the less-pacifistic actions of banging on the steel barrier, throwing of water bottles and shouting of epithets at the police. At a certain moment organisers, sensing that things were getting too tense felt it was the right moment to present The Living Theatre's show Resist Now. Sure enough as the show started all eyes and ears were focused on the performance circle and there was an intense, profoundly attentive silence. The contrast from the immediately proceeding noise, confusion and the potential for violence was portentously dramatic, for the demonstrators and perhaps police as well. (From around the city there were reports of street scuffles, burning trash bins, and police offensives).

Unfortunately a lapse in organisation interrupted this change of atmosphere as a group of marching old style communists, the SWP, suddenly arrived on the scene, slogans chanting, banging and screaming after which a general climate of hatred and abuse toward the police ensued. (The Living's show continued unimpeded, yet the complete focus and fullness of the potentiality of a new mental and physical state that only theatre can give was compromised.) Thus, where the Living's show may have opened up new forms of participation and communication among the demonstrators (and possibly police), what resulted instead, as in many other piazzas in Genova that day, was an attack by the forces of order with tear gas, water cannon, and often clubs. Later we were to learn of the now-famous street battles, blood, and death which once again, and still continues to monopolise all discussion of the anti-globalization movement, that is, the theme of violence, be it state organised, or of the self-styled guerrilla tactics of the hit-and-run (the so called Black Block), or of "defensive" actions of the Tute Bianche.

Now the important issues of the anti-G8, of debt relief, environment, global capitalisation, 3rd World development, etc. have all but faded amongst the hype, distortions and exaggerations of the (left or right, politically) media; amongst official statements, inquiries and government investigations, and of the sadness, anger and feelings of righting wrongs among the protesters and some individual police persons.

What is clear is that the anti-global movement has thus far tried to capitalise on pre-planned organised events by the concerned powerful organisations. It is like a private exclusive party being crashed by "undesirables". After Seattle these party organisers wanted no repeat of those events thus the arsenal, talent, and expertise of the ruling 8 was (and will be) made available to combat any attempt toward disruption. Thus prepared, in Genoa for example, defensive strategies of red zoning, manipulation and broken deals, mis-information and withholding of information, all the possible means of making protest ineffective were utilised. And as we saw in Genoa (and as we say in American football) the best defence is a good offence. So it was that the forces of order were often first to attack protesters- quicker to the punch, as in the break-up of the 200,000-strong march. The fact that the police used excessive force, as at the Diaz School, is a logical extension and punitive reaction of what police do best. Especially if certain elements of the protesters were able to cause destruction to property and remain violently defiant and disorderly.

Given the general climate of hatred and disrespect toward the police from a large part (the majority?) of the protesters, together with the loss of complete order and obedience, the more sadistic traits of the individual police were brought out.

We believe once an environment of street battles began, all protesters were seen by the police as one, thus making it difficult or strategically unnecessary to separate Black Block from Grey anarchists to Tute Bianche (who were not in their usual white) to pacifists. And when both sides of the opposing camps utilise masks, helmets, shields, and defensive padding- creating a sense of general anonymity- the dehumanising and depersonalising behaviour of all players is even more easily understood.

So given the situation of a government which at all costs sees the necessity of neutralising disorder and has at disposal a large force of police trained and obedient and prepared for battle, we turn to the strategy of the Genoa Social Forum (GSF) as representative of the largest block of demonstrators, and of the Tute Bianche, who could be described as the avant-guard of the activist youth movement. There are of course other just as important players such as the pacifist Lilliput, the more militant COBAS, and a very large contingent of communists. (See below.) Indeed it seems the GSF made every attempt to present a unified group of protest, thus perhaps producing a rather militant tone, strategy and tactic that would appeal to more militant elements of the movement. In this manner of presenting a strong force and to encompass diverse groups to oppose the G8, the strategy of various theme-piazzas to accommodate the diverse levels of militancy was realised. This made it all the easier for the police to identify, separate, and neutralise the more violent groups on the Day of Action. This strategy was repeated at the large march the next day as the police easily separated the diverse tendencies among the demonstrators.

The Tute Bianche, as well as GSF and others outside of this block intended its proposals to attack the red zone, that is to exercise its right to an open city. In a previous letter we spelled out the likely problems and limitations of this tactic and other more strongly worded goals of disrupting the G8 summit. It must be said that it seems much of the 90% of the peaceful organisations turned a blind eye even to the openly violent - so called Black Block - contingent who had openly expressed their tactics. Was it not to be expected that other dark forces of police provocateurs, fascists, hooligans, and others marginalized by society might take the opportunity to express their rage and discontent towards society? As far as the Tute Bianche their decision not to identify themselves by their white "uniform" was disappointing. We must say their discourse on "defensive protection" is unclear, even vague and not in the true spirit of non-violent resistance, and their use of helmets, shields, covered faces, tear gas masks, rolling barricades -a uniform as it were that mirrors that of the police/soldier - seems to be an expectation of (and invitation to?) violence, and this visual aspect was taken in turn as a style of more violent elements of protesters - all of this minimalized the effectiveness of the Tute Bianche. (See below for some other suggestions and strategies we hope the Tute Bianche will consider).

To sum up: a partially unified protest presence (as far as the question of violence and non-violence); a strategy to divide the varying groups into separate playing fields; the known presence of pro violent so called "anarchists"; an expressed strategy to enter the red zone on the part of some players; a large contingent of "red" communists and others who are not completely pacifists, who may in their philosophy even support violent insurrection to seize power; the known possibility of hooligans, nihilists, and other known gratuitous violence makers - this said, together with an equally militant leader and government with a well-prepared police force, I think it is to the GSF's credit and to the larger part of peace loving demonstrators, that injuries and deaths were not more prevalent. Even though the anti-global movement already agrees on most issues, it seems to be that the salient question concerning the strategy we choose is how to neutralise violence in our movement, and which playing fields, what arena of action, we choose.

It is beyond the scope of these words to develop and strategies for the anti-global movement, yet perhaps we can allude to some tendencies and basic ideas that may serve it. The need for some unifying force to cross all religious, political, tactical, philosophical, and demographic lines is in order. And this principle can only be the commitment to non-violent resistance.
In the heat and passion of that last Sunday in Genoa of the G8 summit, after the facts of the brutal police raid on the Diaz School were apparent, among even the most outspoken young pacifists there was a justified cry of anger and appeal for retaliatory action. What action? To understand what type of action, indeed to realise the principle of non-violence, we must see, for example, the infallibility of this idea: to confront hate (violence) with hate (violence) can only bring forth more hate (violence). Of course we must and do condemn the brutal and excessive actions of police. We can even hate and be enraged about those actions. But to find the solution to violent actions by condemning and hating the individual policeman is not the solution. You cannot help by hating. As Ghandi said, "It is not non-violence if we love merely those that love us. It is non-violence only when we love those that hate us."

Who are we to judge another human being if we cannot know all the million and myriad causes that bring forth the individual course of the destiny of one person who for himself must decide for example, to be a policemen? If the measure of a person's life were judged by the degree of service to humanity, then to serve those who we are against, whose actions we oppose with our innermost being, should be our first order. Thus, hate can play no part in that service.

We believe that there is no problem in the world that cannot be resolved through active non-violent resistance. From Palestine, to Africa, to the environment, to third world development. Simply stated, it is the "soul-force" (satyagraha) of all individuals past and present that has created the world in which we live today. Not the force of money and banking, of war and power, of exploitation and violence - but rather it is the simple pacifist co-operation and imagination that is inherent in our species that builds the hospitals and homes, develops medicine, manages the technology, creates new methods of organising and surviving. As a worker may and can unto death (the ultimate sacrifice) refuse to obey, to work, until demands are met, so it is that a people or minority resolutely prepared to suffer the consequences of non-compliance can bring to a standstill any government, police or economy, however powerful it might be (because of our indomitable power as producers and consumers to refuse and resist). Yet the moment violence is met with violence, all solidarity with peace-loving supporters (for example the citizens of Genoa) is compromised, and the possibility of winning the hearts of our opponents (enemies?) is lost.

To bring the argument closer to home, if in Genoa there had been a truly united force of satyagraha activists prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice as pacifists - if tens of thousands of artists, nurses, workers, poets, activists, mothers, etc. had created a peace zone of respect, love, and non-violence between any potentially violent forces - if this intention had been made known to the government, the police, the demonstrators, and the media, then history may have taken a more positive direction.
In the same spirit we challenge the Tute Bianche to shelve their bandannas, shields, helmets, and protection, to become a true truth force of non-violent resistance - to go between both sides of any confrontation on behalf of both warring parties; to put their own defenceless bodies at stake in the defence of peace; and to drop feelings of hate and revenge towards the police. Like this, a movement of young people could be inspired, and the intensity and commitment that we saw in the Genoa street fighters could be channelled and transformed into a force that, using the imagination could create new forms of protest. (This could be a model of a new activism - instead of governments spending billions of dollars for bombs, soldiers, tanks, etc. in regional conflicts, a better alternative would be that peace activists organise and go to these trouble spots to teach, heal, perform, talk, to share.)

For the anti-globalization movement and the GSF we must for ourselves determine our playing field- to not wait for another summit meeting where we can be at risk of another siege situation. To seize the initiative, to organise our own global summits, to develop our own forms and tactics, to make clear that we are seeking any and all alternatives to violence, to make it simply obvious that violence will play no role in our events. Even perhaps in a year's time to reconvene in Genova on the 20th of July for a summit of peace and remembrance of the first victim of the people of Seattle - to underscore the wish that he be the last sacrifice to violence, but perhaps not the last sacrifice for peace. The path to a more just and egalitarian world cannot be created with the separations that an "us and them" paradigm creates. The question is do we want to create enemies in our inevitable confrontations with our opponents, or, do we want, with peaceful ways and the imagination, to win the hearts and minds of the masses - from which the forces of order recruit their soldiers. One road eventually leads to civil war, the other, to new possibilities.

_________________________________________

There is not just one choice.

(written just before G8)

“Only an alternative that is more effective than violence can achieve what the revolution is really about”. Julian Beck

What is the force behind this alternative?
From Seattle to Prague to Gothenburg the issue of violence has often, if not completely, over-shadowed all discourse of the merits of the anti-globalization movement. From out of the street battles, in this age of sound-bytes and images, protesters seemingly play into the hands of broadcasters, editors and officials who easily grab and divert the public from the important issues.And in Genoa much public debate seems to be already focused, and almost exclusively, on the imminent confrontation of the diverse groups of antagonists.

Thus the most important question for the anti-globalization movement is how best to enter into the streets of Genova and not risk again losing its voice among the clouds of tear gas, water cannon and as in Gothenburg, blood and even possibly deaths. What tactics, therefore, can best serve the protesters? What can best address the urgency and sincerity of the many rightly outraged youth and others wishing to express their human imperative to protest?
The Genova Social Forum, the Tutte Bianche and others have openly declared a strategy of entering the Red Zone. Many voices also call for the outright disruption and shutting down of the G8 summit. Yet, no matter how much emphasis on non-violence is voiced, given the volatile nature of the situation - the division into two large camps of protesters, many of whom are convinced of the necessity of stronger, violent action and the forces of order of the police, soldiers and the government of Berlusconi - taken together it seems inevitably simple that the movement will be marred by violence.

Thus is begged the question: what strategy can guarantee only peaceful protest and best push forward the desires, ideas, and dreams of the movement? How can we avoid the violence?

The only solution comes from a voice from the past in the frail body and often-lone presence of Gandhi. As he often proposed, if we look into the psychology, desires, and fears of our opponents (not “enemies”- he always tried to maintain a reciprocal respect in his struggles) we may discover an effective strategy.
Starting with Berlusconi who could be said to represent the G8, who most likely believe sincerely that they are following the right path, it seems he at all costs (greatest fear) must insure that the G8 summit goes forward and that his government maintain (his) order.

Of the police, soldiers, and forces of order above all they desire to follow orders (that is their job), not show fear or disobedience to their fellow workers/comrades, nor to the protesters, and perhaps only secondarily, we believe that they would prefer not to fight or enter into a violent confrontation - unless provoked.

On the other side of the Red Zone from the militant pro-violence activists to the pacifists, our fear is to be marginalized; to not have the right to express our outrage to a system that is causing untold suffering and destruction; and also the fear of remaining passive and ineffective.If this is a fair evaluation of the players and the situation, then to assuage all fears and realise the desires of all the participants, the logical solution is thus to avoid violence at all costs. It seems the Genoa Social Forum, the Tutte Bianche and others need a more powerful and effective strategy than entering the Red Zone, and also they (we) need to diffuse the violent tendencies of the protesters in general; and perhaps as unimaginable as it may seem, even to place ourselves between the front line of the police and the violence that may initiate from within our movement. Again, what force could lend itself to this strategy?

Behind the philosophy of Gandhi’s non-violence and non co-operation is the principle of self-sacrifice. Because we here in the West (the First World) are the beneficiaries of the “G8 system”- we use cell phones, computers, petroleum, etc. We are the rich even if we choose voluntary poverty; we share and use the resources and products which have been created at the expense of the Third World - the most effective tool we therefore have at our disposal is our power to withdraw our participation. Again Gandhi: “...a body not receiving the food it needs dies....the moment we cease to support the Government (Capitalism) it dies a natural death”. So for example, if here in the West on a mass level it was decided to each day from seven to ten in the evening to not use electricity, gas, cars, television, phones, to not shop or buy or consume, the shock waves from such an incredible scenario from Madison Avenue to Wall Street to Palestine would shake the system and voices would be heard! If we were to make that sacrifice...

To return to Genova, in this same spirit of personal sacrifice and non co-operation there emerges an effective strategy:

1. To form a Peace Zone: a 24-hour a day sit-in that forms along the line of the Red Zone; a buffer between the potentially violent forces.

2. Those among the participants of the sit-in are invited to enter into a three-day fast; to sacrifice our own nourishment and enter another “mental zone” of resistance, reflection and meditation on the violence in us, in others and of the system. What better way to highlight and show solidarity in this emergency of food distribution in which every 3.25 seconds someone in the world dies from hunger?

3. A University of the Street: at the Red Line Zone and in the parks, streets, and plazas to begin dialogues and teach-ins; to use the best the movement has to offer - poetry, music, ideas, dance, theatre, etc. to engage both ourselves, the public, the forces of order, and the media in a festive atmosphere of an exchange of ideas. (Much like this is already planned!)

This is a plan that can work. Of course if we were to be forbidden or physically hindered from this 3-point plan, to be joyfully and peacefully arrested and imprisoned would make more of an impact than any street battle could ever offer. Our central message must be that the anti-globalization movement has imagination and that non-violent resistance is a powerful (Love) force capable of inspiring the public and give them hope and confidence that change can happen peacefully. The other alternative of violence, conflict and confrontation with the forces of order cannot demonstrate this. We must ask ourselves which sound-bytes and what media images would best serve the people, the movement and us.

See: The Peace and Environment Resource Centre http://perc.ca/

Split! The "Schizophrenic" Experience (letter)

2005-07-18T08:48:00.000-07:00

SPLIT!

Debora told me this story of a friend of hers in Pisa. I had been talking about The Politics of Experience by R.D. Laing, which among many themes talks about the “schizophrenic” experience. Laing was a friend of The Living Theatre: around the time of Paradise Now some of his text and ideas influenced the company. ("If I could turn you on, if I could drive you out of your wretched mind, if I could tell you, I would let you know!", and "I’m going to flip out everyday to blow your mind!") Suddenly she remembered her friend, who, already a little “crazy” and a professor loved and amusingly befriended by many students, started on what Laing would call his “inner voyage”. Basically what psychology might call a psychotic episode. In Debora’s words he was on his Saint Francisco trip. Already immersed as it were in a certain religious framework, he thus framed his experience in the language of radical mystical revolutionary and confrontational politic.

Because our society, (also friends, family, lovers) have a hard time understanding and appreciating the intensity of this type of shamatic experience- we don’t want to here about it- we don’t know how to deal with it; the pain, the ecstasy; the tragedy; the confrontation with our own hypocrisies, falsities and limitations; the crisis; the work involved- because there just is no place to send our inner pioneers and explorers, this poor man was taken by the police to the madhouse. His mother had taken him to a certain church to be “exorcised” by a priest, who obviously couldn’t deal with him either. He then “disappeared”.

For weeks, if not months, no one could find out what was happening to him. (Even prisoners have more rights than our modern psychiatric inmates!) When finally he emerged, reappeared, he was a transformed person: no longer himself (his self was under their control); clearly under anti-psychotic medication and their all too obvious side effects (among which include obesity, tremors, lethargy, impossibility of sexual arousal, passivity). Needless to say his friends could hardly recognise him; he could hardly recognise himself and had little memory of what had happened.

This is an all too frequent occurrence in modern life. One in a hundred people suffer from “schizophrenia” and if we think modern medicine has advanced much beyond the days of frontal lobotomies, electric shock, straight jackets, isolation rooms, restraints, I challenge you all to try and visit an acute psychiatric unit. (I worked on one for three years….) This story and these issues go to the core of the social, political and spiritual crisis of modern life. Laing proposes that these persons serve the greater human social/existential/political fabric. They are pressure valves that release certain intense and necessary dynamics, like a thunderstorm releases atmospheric tension.

I have proposed to some of you before an exploration of Laing’s work. Hearing this story has given me a certain idea about a way to work. Perhaps it is “beyond our scope” at this time but what I might propose would be a type of spiritual rescue mission and the use of theatre as the means of creating, first, a type of safe house for this particular young man (no easy task to say the least) where he could escape from his tormentors (psychiatrists, priests, family and police).

Then working with him and using the Laing work as a type of manual and guide we could at one and the same time do some real extra-human (Living Theatre) work in reaching out to help someone; and also in a sense tell his, and our, human story. I imagine also a certain video documentary could be part of this project. His reintegration with his self and our world; his return to a voyage interrupted; our relation with him and our poetic/political/theatrical expression of all of this would make up the material of this play.

Obviously there are many serious and heavy considerations to consider here, some even legal risks perhaps, as well as the intensity and profound nature of the work. One could even ask the ethical question if we would not in some way be exploiting his story, his suffering, for our own ends. One might ask also would it not be more appropriate this type of work in a safer place, with “professionals”. It’s just that these places do not really exist and most professionals are already convinced that these types of experiences of the “mad” are illnesses and fail to consider the larger political and spiritual questions.

We do not know even if this young man would be interested in this type of “experiment”. I see it in a way as a rescue from certain cults, however. You don’t ask the cult victim if he wants to “escape”. And in this case the “victim” has all of “modern” medicine, the state, the voices of his family, the pharmaceutical industry and other forces telling him he is “better” now and that he was only “sick”.

I encourage you all to do a little research yourselves. I have the Laing (out of print for 40 years in Italy!), in Italian and English; and all one need do is to do a search on the Internet on schizophrenia and you can quickly see how there are two opposing camps: one, the medical and pharmaceutical industrial complex; and the other, former “patients” and rights advocates of “liberated” persons. We should also indeed search for some authoritative and experienced collaborators to help us out.
Also, even without the participation of this particular young man, we could certainly create a show on this subject from the wealth of material available; and/or invite others with similar experiences.

Any feedback or comments?

P.S. I proposed “Split” as a working title. In English it implies: divide or divided; to go away; fractured; schizo; to separate; to break open forcebly….in any, or all, spiritual or political senses.

see also: http://www.antipsychiatry.org/

Giovanna la Mariposita (a play)

2005-07-18T06:54:00.000-07:00

GIOVANNA, La Mariposita
A Modern Woman

Notes on Giovanna: where we want to go.

If we want a theatre of poetry, direct and immediate as music, then every moment in the course of the play must be full of a certain poetry of the “real”: of awareness of time, of spatial relations, contrasts, enigmas, questions, problems, dilemmas, gasps of the flights of imagination; a suspense created from the tension between actresses; between actress and spectator (witness); between the actress alone and herself, her breath, body and intensity of concentration; a virtual crisis of the “now”.
We want to build a play as sculpture, cutting away the superfluous to realize the essential drama: from the first “beat” we want to sense the historical Giovanna and her Amazonian presence: her embodiment, body present.
We will not retell the historical drama, but she will be there among us, reclaimed.
How? A commitment to the fleeting, ellusive, ungraspable moment- the smallest, most intense piece of “moment: the oppressed body/soul of woman, yet at the same time expressing, instantaneously, her liberation from the shackles of history. Presence of the actress as a challenge: Artaud, victim signaling through the flames and holy priestess. Again, Artaud: every breath must be made present, awareness of how each breath moves her body, her thoughts, her intentions; and the breath directing the choreography of action and feeling. Each breath is a signpost, a step on the spiraling journey of a testimony of struggle and dis-covery.

Will there be a “story”, a “fiction”, and a “drama”? Yes, but as a puzzle of perception and illusion, of confusion of reality from prison to madhouse, all imagined by a “crazy” woman who believes her experience is being consumed as products of a futurist economy of experience. “Schizophrenics” we have encountered often described this feeling that their thoughts are being recorded, stolen. But this future is becoming more actual with advancing technology in virtual reality and sensory implants into the brain and body; with “nano” machines that will work on a cellular level adjusting, controlling hormones, temperature; regulating body functions and consciousness.

But there must be something more “real” than the “fiction” -a hyper-reality, heightened and realized in the assembly of perceptions: the politic of gender class (the first division) and its actual presence in the assembly; text and images of the violence inherent in the colonization of the body of woman; the “feelings”, thoughts and perceptions of a public and actresses confronting ideas, time and bodies, their own bodies becoming the measure of their experience. It may move toward a certain psychological “encounter” group where is confronted “the fundamental antagonism and the fundamental attraction between me and you”: male to female, female to female; we will confront the experience of time and the moving, serpentine flow of moments; we will confront our desires, our unsatisfied desires, (the residual taste of paradise, for example), or more simply our desires, needs and wants as consumers, (the ties to a culture that cultivates death). We want a laboratory of experience, thought, perception and feeling. A laboratory as in science but also using art, poetry, movement, music, space: total theatre; sacred theatre.

There is another aspect to explore: madness and language; on behavior, poetry and the realm of the political as exemplified by Valerie Solanas and her SCUM Manifesto. She was called “mad” (crazy and sick) but she was also pushing the limits of language and performance, as in the surrealist movement, yet extending poetry into actual life: the political poetic action. Valerie Solanas in 1968 shot Andy Warhol. In her radical feminist anger she acted: acted as in theatre -act as in action. To be “mad” is not only to be angry -but in language implies sickness: woman who are mad are locked in madhouses or prison, depending on how or of what they are accused, (ex. battered wife syndrome).

The Giovanna we see could be considered autistic: “Schizo”, living in another reality outside the confines of a shared language and perception of time. She is the Buddha meditating in the world -non stop- and if we find her in situations from being raped, exploited, arrested or as a heroine on the barricade of a women’s revolution, she always remains untouched; unseen in a way, unknowable because she exists in a “moment” beyond the reach of language and words like past, present and future. Again, her special type of “presentness” challenges all of our assumptions of gender, desire, need and of being. Another way of explaining: how can a contemporary man not see a women’s body as an object? Somehow Giovanna upsets this- she makes something else happen- she infuriates the other in a way that forces the man to begin to see his own process of being, of man-ness, of one who has grown and benefited in patriarchal culture: benefited and suffered, as in his loneliness.

Giovanna takes her forty days and forty nights out from under the tree, out of the desert, and is among us, mirroring ourselves, but not the fictions we create in our mirrors at home, of our created histories, defects, vanities- all we hide or that is hidden- no, her mirroring strips away, removes the veil to reveal our falseness and ego needs and also permits us to discover (dis-cover) our divineness and evilness, our tragedy and hope; our sadness and joy; our death passing before our mirrored eyes and life struggling against that death. She brings a certain terror of honesty and sincerity. She is awful: we become full of awe.

How do we do this? How can the actress “play” this awfulness? We experiment with language, text, storytelling, testimonies and staging, and the meeting between actress and spectator/participant. Maybe it starts as “theory”, as theatre: the making visible; even as fictional event. But then maybe the “double” happens: it becomes a little real.

Anti-prologo
(In the first text this was origianlly scene 6. In the latest staging the actors appeared in their “cells” with very slow and minimalist movements.)

From slavery to heroine: the Butterfly
(alternative staging)
Series of dance-like of actions, tableaus and images, with Giovanna as victim yet “Brechtian” in her delivery: “alienation” effects, like interruptions, silences, text on placards, alternating rhythms with tableau and other “tricks and jokes” to maintain suspense. Also, dream sequences that seem to involve prominent contemporary figures.
Men dominating leading to gestures of refusal and resistance and finally activism of the heroine, example: protesters standing their ground, hands raised, palms whitened as in streets of Genova; or Beijing before the Tienamen Square massacre.

Voice:
Violence against women permeates every society.
Around the world, at least one in every three women has been beaten, coerced into sex, or abused in some other way - most often by someone she knows, including by her husband or another male family member; one woman in four has been abused during pregnancy. More women and girls die each day because of various forms of gender-based discrimination than as a result of any other type of human rights abuse.

Giovanna:
Her future is not under construction. It is already there, susceptible to entry.

Voice:
At least 60 million girls who would otherwise be expected to be alive are "missing" from various populations, killed by their own families deliberately or through neglect, because of their gender (for example, gender selective abortions).

Giovanna:
It means your life and death are set in place, just waiting for you to keep the appointments.

Voice:
"Honor" killings are on the rise worldwide. Throughout the world, perhaps as many as 5,000 women and girls a year are murdered by members of their own families, many of them for the "dishonor" of having been raped, often as not by a member of their own extended family -a stabbing, stoning, strangulation or live burning takes place every two hours.

Giovanna:
Don’t touch it. I’ll clean it up later.

Voice:
1 in every 4 women will be the victim of rape or attempted rape in her lifetime.
Every 2 minutes a woman is raped somewhere in the United States.
Official reports in the US say a woman is battered every 15 seconds and 700,000 are raped each year.

Giovanna:
It is the thing you know nothing about.

Voice:
Throughout history, women and girls have been routinely assaulted and raped as a weapon of war. Recently, "ethnic cleansing" and changing patterns of conflict that target civilians have made women and children even more vulnerable. Rape, forced pregnancy and sexual torture are now classified as war crimes and crimes against humanity.
At least 20,000 women were raped during the conflict in the former Yugoslavia in 1992 alone.

Giovanna:
Nothing seemed unusual to her, or startling, or stirring, measured against the fact and the terribly disturbing sound of matter, the blur, whatever it was -the breathless shock of her being here.

Voice:
An estimated 4 million women and girls are bought and sold worldwide, either into marriage, prostitution or slavery. Many are lured into the hands of traffickers by promises of jobs. They are bartered at prices that vary depending on their age, beauty and virginity. Trafficking of women brings criminal syndicates worldwide billions of dollars -an amount rivaling their incomes from drugs and guns. Two million girls between ages 5 and 15 are introduced into the commercial sex market each year.
1.2 million children are involved in child prostitution.

Giovanna:
This was who she was, outside the easy sway of either/or.

Voice:
Approximately 500,000 women are annually trafficked into Western Europe.
The traffickers typically use children, who are trafficked with their mothers, for blackmail purposes. In Europe, the behavior of police towards victims of trafficking has led to reluctance on the part of the women to come forward. Police have also been discovered to collaborate with the traffickers.

Giovanna:
How much myth do we build into our experience of time?

Voice:
There are 25,000 foreign prostitutes in Italy.
More than 8,000 Albanian girls are prostituted in Italy, and more than 30% of them are under 18 years. The main reason for this trafficking is the economic inequality between richer countries and the poverty in Albania. These women are held in conditions that are equivalent to slavery. They are forced to endure sexual encounters with countless "customers" everyday. They have no power to negotiate the terms of these encounters and may suffer serious beatings if they refuse.

Giovanna:
Don’t touch it. I’ll clean it up ……later.

Voice:
An estimated 130 million women have undergone female genital mutilation; another 2 million are at risk each year. Female genital mutilation means partial or total removal of the external female genitalia or other genital injury. The practice is intended to limit pleasure in sex; is intensely painful, anesthesia is usually not used; and it can cause infections, sterility or death.

Giovanna:
Something is happening. It has happened. It will happen. It will happen. This is believed.

Voice:
What part of your body do you love? Everyone should love what they see when they look in the mirror. Yet, advertisers, Hollywood and the fashion, cosmetics and diet industries work very hard to make us believe that no parts of our bodies are acceptable. Print ads and commercials reduce us to body parts - lips, legs, and breasts -airbrushed and touched up to meet impossible standards.

Giovanna:
There is a story, a flow of consciousness and possibility. The future comes into being.

Voice:
For decades, Hollywood and the fashion industry promoted the diet pill, turning it into a multibillion-dollar business. The new millennium tells women and teenage girls that face lifts and breast implants are good for self-esteem. Is it any wonder that more than 80% of fourth grade girls have been on some form of fad diet and by the eighth grade most of these girls will be using tobacco as a diet aid?

Giovanna:
But not for her.

Voice:
One of the most common advertisement themes in developed countries is that smoking is both a passport to and a symbol of the independence and success of the modern woman.
The tobacco industry has developed potent lures for adolescent girls. The industry uses women's magazines to sell cigarettes with ads linking smoking to fashion, beauty, and slimness.
In 1999, Philip Morris launched a new $40 million campaign targeting women, particularly adolescent girls, minorities and women with the slogan "Find Your Voice." The underlying message of this campaign has been that smoking is related to women's freedom, emancipation and empowerment.
Every year around 1,825,000 women, 5000 every day, one every 17 seconds, die from tobacco related illness.
Cigarette brand clothing and other giveaway accessories have been used to promote cigarette products to women and girls.

Giovanna:
She hasn’t learned the language.

Voice:
The fashion industry, another subtle and lucrative example of the colonization of the female body, throughout the world exploits women workers by labeling these jobs as "women's jobs" and then assigning them lower wages because women perform them. In other words, women are paid less, not for the type of work they do, but because they are women. These usually young women work in dangerous conditions for extremely low wages to produce goods for the First World while governments and businesses alike violate their human rights. Increasingly, the cheapest labor is child labor.
These young women work six or seven days a week, ten to fifteen hours a day, but don't make enough to afford decent meals; many are malnourished.

Giovanna:
There has to be an imaginary point, a nonplace where language intersects with our perceptions of time and space, and she is a stranger at this crossing, without words or bearings.

Voice:
Today, more women than ever are seeking psychiatric help and being hospitalized. Therapists are the soft police of the dominant culture. When women allege sexual harassment or sex discrimination they have sometimes been ordered into therapy and diagnosed as crazy. In psychiatric hospitals the use of massive drug dosages, shock therapy and /or insulin coma therapy is a matter of routine, and often before patients are psychiatrically “interviewed.”

Giovanna:
Time unfolds into the seams of being. It passes through you, making and shaping.

Voice:
Psychotherapists traditionally ignore the objective facts of female oppression. How common is therapist-patient sexual exploitation? Studies show that approximately 15% of professionals admitted to sexual involvement with a client. However, some researchers believe that the actual incidence may be higher.

The situation changes to empowerment.
Ritual of “madness”.

Giovanna:
Perhaps the angry and weeping women in mental asylums are Amazons returned to earth these many centuries later, each conducting a private and half-remembered search for her Motherland -a search we call madness. Or perhaps they are failed Goddess-Mothers, Demeters eternally and miserably unable to find their daughters or their powers.

Chorus:
Here I sit -mad as the hatter -with nothing to do but to either become madder and madder or else recover enough of my sanity to be allowed to go back to the life that drove me mad.

Giovanna:
But not if you are her.

Prologue: ecstasy

There are various moveable platforms in the space.
Giovanna is found at center immobile yet very present. She embodies the re-appropriated historical Giovanna. The public is sorted and divided, encircled with song and a dance: male/female: the “other”, the first division: gender.
The voices weave in and out as do the actions, each becoming for a moment Giovanna. Dance of ecstasy.

Title: (projected, spoken or on cards)
Womans House of detention. 4.30a.m.

Giovanna:
Being here has come to me. I am with the moment, I will leave the moment. Chair, table, wall, hall, all for the moment, in the moment. It has come to me. Here and near. From the moment I am gone, am left, am leaving. I will leave the moment from the moment.

Chorus: (from Sarah Kane)
i came to you hoping to be healed,
You are my doctor,my saviour,my omnipotent judge,my priest,
my god,the surgeon of my soul.
And i am your proselyte to sanity.
to achieve goals and ambitions
to overcome obstacles and attain a high standard
to increase self-regard by the successful exercise of talent
to overcome opposition
to have control and influence over others
to defend myself
to defend my psychological space
to vindicate the ego
to receive attention
to be seen and heard
to excite,amaze,fascinate,shock,intrigue,amuse,entertain
or entice others
to be free from social restrictions
to resist coercion and constriction
to be independant and act according to desire
to defy convention
to avoid pain
to avoid shame
to obliterate past humiliation by resumed action
to maintain self-respect
to repress fear
to overcome weakness
to belong
to be accepted
to draw close and enjoyably reciprocate with another
to converse in a friendly manner,to tell stories,exchange
sentiments,ideas,secrets
to communicate,to converse
to laugh and make jokes
to win affection of desired Other
to adhere and remain loyal to Other
to enjoy sensuous experiences with cathected Other
to feed,help,protect,comfort,console,support,nurse or
heal
to be fed,helped,protected,comforted,consoled,supported,nursed or
healed
to form mutually enjoyable,enduring,cooperating and
reciprocating relationship with Other, with an equal
to be forgiven
to be loved
to be free.

Voice:
I didn’t know what to call this. Call it singing. She kept it going a while, ongoing, oncoming, and it was a song, it was a chant.

Giovanna:
Coming and going I am leaving. I will go and come. Leaving has come to me. We all, shall all, will all be left. Because I am here and where. And I will go or not or never. And I have seen what I will see. If I am where I will be. Because nothing comes between me.

Diverse voices:
I was laughing but she was not. It came out of her nonstop and it wasn’t schizophrenic speech or the whoop of rippling bodies shocked by God. I watched her.

It was pure chant, transparent, or was she saying something to me? I felt an elation that made it hard to listen carefully. Was she telling me what it is like to be her, to live in her body and mind?

I tried to hear this but could not. The words ran on, sinuous and empty, and I wanted her to laugh with me, to follow me outside of myself. This is the point, yes, this is the stir of true amazement.

And some terror at the edge, or fear of believing, some displacement of self, but this is the point, this is the wedge of ecstasy, the old deep meaning of the word, your eyes rolling upward in your skull.

Scene ends as the next scene is prepared.

Chorus singing:
Woman explodes in front of woman
I stand alone
Grasping my heart ecstasy soars
Advancing toward absolute rapture
I am untouched
but have cosmic perception.
Surging in my blood
tremendous visions forge my soul
I am as I am
I explode before you

II.
Prison and the market
Platforms are spaced: one central and two left and right. Some players remain amongst public. All are dressed as “inmates”.
Dialogue on market value of electro-magnetic experience.
Subject(s) are presented: hooked up to the machines. Wires connect two characters to a body: “input and output”. There are guards. There is heard a continuous litany of stock prices which seem to correspond to the movements of the triad of bodies. There is a crescendo of activity and tension. The guards become concerned. The heartbeat, breath and bodily tension of Giovanna set and respond to the increasing velocity and dynamic of the scene.
From the two sides of the public (chorus) are heard voices about Giovanna.

Chorus of numbers (from global stock markets) and chanting:
o dedi
o dada orzoura
o dou zoura
a dada skizi
o kaya
o kaya pontoura
o ponoura
a pena
poni
ge re ghi
regheghi
geghena
e reghena
a gegha
riri (from A. Artaud)

Title:
Human experinece: goods for sell.

Input:
The transition to the experience economy is complete. Lifetime value is our new operative term. The migration of human commerce and social life to the realm of cyberspace has opened new markets never before imaginable.

Output:
History suggests that each age appeals to its most impressive technology as a metaphor for the cosmos, or even for God. Science must provide a mechanism for the universe to come into being.

Voice:
There’s a code in the simplest conversation that tells the speakers what’s going on outside the bare acoustics.

Input:
The ability to control and sell thoughts is the ultimate expression of commercial prowess. No longer anchored in geography the regime of property gives way to the total colonization of experience.

Output:
I do not feel like an alien in this universe. The only incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.

Giovanna:
This tongue between four gums,
this meat between two knees,
this piece of hole
for madmen.

Voice:
This code was missing with her when she talked.

Title:
Will Givanna conceede the rights to her image?

Input:
Every spare moment of our time is being filled with some form of commercial connection. Every institution and human being is being courted and connected to some form of commodified service or relationship. Community is now a product we can purchase rather than something we create for ourselves.

Output:
We have cracked part of the cosmic code. We are able to grasp nature’s secrets. We- animated stardust carry the spark of rationality that provides the keys to the universe.

Voice:
There was a missing beat.

Input:
No place, no soil, no distance, no country, no city; the real is hidden in the reduction of images on the screen. No borders or horizon or time binds the new terminal world citizen. There is nothing more to buy, no things to acquire: the desire for pleasure and play will be satisfied by our post-modern artists expropriating the world’s cultural resources, the new props and stages, for enacting paid-for cultural experience.

Output:
The mystery of the deep enigma is linked to our awareness of our self-awareness: we are meant to be here! The experience of unity through the labyrinthine castle of science opens directly onto the Absolute.

Voice:
It was hard to find a common tempo.

Title:
Giovanna's mental activity is downloading

Input:
The shopping mall is being wired directly into your synapses! The biotechnological transplant revolution promises live cellular instantaneous transmission inside the body of our consumers. It is the death of geography!

Output:
God is subtle but not malicious. It is conceivable that evidence of divine creative activity in nature is apparent and that it has something in common with our own individual minds.

Giovanna:
And if you don't get the image
-and that's what I hear you saying
in a circle,
that you don't get the image
which is at the bottom
of my cunt hole,-
it's because you don't know the bottom,
not of things,
but of my cunt,
mine.

Voice:
All there were unadjusted words.

Input:
You have already arrived without the need of stamping your departure ticket! There is no more “here or there” and everything is now. The day has come when the day is no more!

Output:
Science asks: Can something exist that in principle cannot be observed? By analogy, with a leap of faith I conclude there exists other minds other than my own though I can only interact with your body.

Voice:
You’d lose touch with her, lose interest sometimes, couldn’t locate rhythmic intervals or time cues or even the mutters and hums, the audible pauses that pace a remark.

Input:
Economy has been transformed into one great cyber-theatre of myth, fantasy and illusion. The world is a human construct: TV is the world.

Output:
Man has two eyes: one only sees what moves in fleeting time. The other what is eternal and divine. Is not beauty the guide for truth? Did God have any other choice in creating the world as it is?

Voice:
She didn’t register facial responses to things said.

Input:
We live in the screen, all our machines are screens, and we are screens! The interactivity of men is the interactivity of screens.

Output:
Is it inevitable that biological organisms that have emerged from the cosmic order should reflect that order in their cognitive capabilities? The existence of conscious organisms is a fundamental feature of the universe.

Giovanna:
Nothing resembles love so much as the appeal of certain dream landscapes, the encirclement of certain hills by a clay-like material whose forms seem moulded onto our thoughts. When I am trying to discover myself, my thoughts seek one another in the regions of new space. I am up in the moon, dreaming, while others sit at home. I partake in planetary gravitation within the fissures of my mind.

Voice:
It threw you off. No grades of emphasis here and flatness there.

Input:
The Sky is no longer the limit! The screen superimposes the new Horizon. Life itself is the new commodity. We are the consumers of our own lives. Emotional response is guaranteed, or your money back!

Output:
Do ideas have a type of independent existence, so that they are discovered from time to time by a receptive mind? Or is inspiration a consequence of normal reasoning which takes place hidden in the subconscious, with the result being delivered to the conscious only when complete?

Voice:
You began to understand that all her talking had no time sense.

Title:
Download complete.

Input:
We now can proudly report an average of 3500 advertising messages a day per person and you can create a new different self at every connection! Are you connected?

Output:
If so, how did this ability of the normalcy of reasoning evolve? What biological advantages can such things as mathematical and artistic inspiration confer on humans?

Giovanna:
I feel a longing not to be, never to have fallen into this sink of imbecilities, abdications, renunciations, and obtuse contacts. The light of this wandering invalid who, from time to time comes to exhibit her shadow she herself spat on long ago, this hobbling, limping self, this virtual, impossible light which none the less finds itself in real life.

Voice:
And that all references at the unspoken level, the things a man speaking Dutch might share with a man speaking Chinese- all this was missing.

Input:
So take your pleasure freely. Play with us: we have need of new exotic experiences for our hungry consumers. And leave the marketing to us.
Voices of chorus, moving from audience toward Giovanna:
She seemed barely there, (four) feet away.

She didn’t know how to measure herself to what we call the Now.

What is it anyway? It’s possible there’s no such thing for those who do not take it as a matter of faith.

Maybe it is a physicist we need to talk to, someone who might tell us what the parameters are.

I hate that word. I use it but don’t know what it means and use it anyway.

Giovanna:
More than half the human race has never made a phone call.
(Market in decline)

Input and output (excitedly):
More than half the human race has never made a phone call.(Market goes up)

III.
Dialogue of inmates: in prison you know who is who

Actions of intimacy. World as prison; freedom in prison. Theatre as refuge from prison world. Scene: raised platform at center. Prisoners at center, “inside”. Voices from “outside”. Actions of rigidity contrasting with nurturing: body searches, making-up, birthdays, solitary confinement, adding some color to uniforms…
From “outside” are complimentary actions, example: a mother searching with a photo of a “missing”.

Title:
Do you have nostagia for a strong experience? In prison you know who is who.

Voice:
The cemetery. Everyday I pass it on the way to the prison. In the streets the blood is just flowing. It can’t be that you girls don’t see blood! I see it all the time.

Voice:
When we were prisoners, we were prisoners. In spite of everything we had a freedom that people outside didn’t have. We had people in whom we could confide. In prison you know who is who. But the people in the street didn’t have that. Nobody knew who was who.

Voice:
I tried to explain what it means to go directly from an extermination camp to the street, it’s as though all of a sudden they open a window to show you all the horror of the universe and then all of a sudden they shut it, and well, with that image in your head, go on back and live.

Voice:
When I flew out of the country after being exiled sometimes I would get the exact same symptoms as when I was inside. It was like being in jail when I was free and free when I was in jail. I would go to bed and be unable to sleep with the window beside me that looked out onto the street. I heard every car that stopped, every door that opened, and I never went anywhere.

Voice:
All the time I had permanent images of the prison, no? I looked at the clock at the hour of roll call -I had almost a biological clock. Every minute had another dimension -I was on prison time. I lived the rhythm of the prison. You think you know what Time is? Well, I tell you, ‘till your waiting for the next bell for a glimpse of the sun, ‘till your counting days even though you got no set sentence, ’till you under the light waiting for the next shock or slap, or listening to the steps of another man coming down the corridor wondering if it’ll be my turn or my girl friend’s….

Voice:
Before I felt myself to be a real somebody, high up on the ladder, a real man-like position: I had a deep problem with lack of respect for other people of different ideas. I was so political- a real dope I was…But inside prison all of a sudden you would see cases and you would see some woman who would be knitting all day long and she would tell you the truth of the situation and you would say “How in the world? What party does she belong to?” And she wasn’t in any party, and the lady knitted, the lady sang, the lady cooked empanadas, and that lady made flowers grow inside your head!

Voice:
I remember the first birthday we celebrated, with the cake we used to make out of bread. ” No, look, not me I don’t think I could eat that”. “Ah but listen that’s because you just arrived but you don’t know how you are going to want to eat this”. We didn’t always make them…birthdays, Christmas….
I made one for my mother when I got out -not even I could eat it!
Meeting with individuals of public: searching, encounters and questions.

The platforms separate and there is presented a long corridor; Giovanna, central alone, and others in solitary confinement but among the public in which they have created that space. Giovanna singing as the others sense her.
Scene action: torture as "writing" on body.

Title:
Torture is practiced systematically and regularly in over 60 counties worldwide.

Voice (there are "silent" screams):
The most terrible moment, when I felt truly jailed, was when I shared solitary with the Mariposita. We didn’t know if she was a politico or una com_n. We never did find out. In the hole I couldn’t even see her, but there was this presence, this intense caring, like a….communion. It was religious I tell you. And that little butterfly, so fragile so…feminine, so silent: she survived, she survived the worst blows any of those men could give her. Strange, from this darkest imaginable situation came the most intense beautiful moments. It….-she, saved me.

Giovanna, singing:
This is the whitest Christmas coming
The whitest Christmas I have ever know
This will make you remember the nights of snow of home
I am recalling the whiteness of the emptiness
And of this hope that is white as well
And I am making the effort to fill with color
so the whiteness once again means
purity and not absence
in the heat of the sun to feel warmth
and close to your company
in the deep green freedom of sown fields
in your children and in those who are yet to come
and even though it may be necessary to wait
for another white Christmas,
or for the one that will have the color of our lost friends
it will be the fullest
the one that will solace so many years of pain
because we will have made that Christmas
out of life’s color.

Diverse voices:
It begins to gather you into it and you realize that there are people being tortured halfway around the world, who speak another language, and you have conversations with them more or less uncontrollably until you become aware you are doing it and then you stop, seeing whatever is in front of you at the time, like…..
One night not being able to sleep, listening to the raspy nasal intake and finding myself moved in an unusual way. Like a woman anonymous to herself in sleep she was no more unknowable than anyone else.

Look. The shrouded body feebly beating. This is what you feel, looking at the hushed and vulnerable body, almost anyone’s, and you lie next to her after making love and breathe the heat of her merciless dreams and wonder who she is, tenderly pondering the truth you’ll never know, because this is the secret that sleep protects in its neural depths, in its stages, layers and folds. What did it mean, the first time a thinking creature looked deeply into another’s eyes? Did it take a hundred thousand years before this happened or was it the first thing they did, transcendingly, the thing that made them higher, made them modern, the gaze that demonstrates we are lonely in our souls?

IV.
Prison theatre: myth of Demeter

The first rape.
Mothers and daughters.
The “inmates” present a “naÔve” representation of the myth.
What is the goal of this scene?
To use myth as a way to understand “contemporary female psychology”.

Storyline:
She had no protective surface….she was alone and unable to improvise, make herself up. She was scared. How simple and true. She was here in the howl of the world. This was the howling face, the stark, the not-as-if of things. (Persephone?)

I.
“In the beginning”: Demeter and four daughters. (Paradise)
First menstruation. (biology)
Abduction and rape. (incest)
Rage and tears.
Return home, isolation; and fate of sisters.

II.
Repression of the story.
Evil step-mothers.
Wandering stepmothers.
Princes and white knights.

III.
Where we are today.

Title:
The actors show the prisoners showing the myth of Demeter and Persephone

Title:
Who who be our godeses amd heroines?

Chorus:

Now we are ready
To put to rest and make this test
Of how woman has become woman
From times long long past
Let’s gaze toward this contrast
Of a biology of being oh how we are seeing
This psychology however transmitted
How we’ve been fitted to see ourselves
Perhaps it’s in these tells that…….

(ritornello)
Goddesses never die
Where are their daughters?
Where is our magic?
Disguised idle persecuted?
Altars and temples abandoned yet calling in dreams
Mother where are you?

Title:
In what language will they be interpreted?

In the fields of lore sat Persephone
Gathering poppies for the first mother Demeter
Such a perfect love you could never berate her.
Language music laughter and more these gifts she
And her sisters created for she so fated
Goddess delegated to life and grains
Her energy forever flowing and renewing for…….

Title:

How can the creative impulse help woman- we who have forgotten our myths and rituals?

(ritornello)
Goddesses never die….

On this day special, first menstrual blood appearing
Celebrating such loveliness joy not amiss
But is arrived a strange smell (from hell) in the air
From down under he’s not very fair
A brother father husband to be, Pluto
Splitting and tearing with such pain
Carried away Oh cursed day
Persephone is saying……

Title:
How can we use the divinity that resides in the female body?

(ritornello)
Goddesses never die….

Minus one sister that daughter can’t forget her
Demeter rages and ages before our eyes
Mourning the fate of divine maidens’ cries
Leaving their homes the phallus is piercing
Yet she summons darkness all enveloping and fearsome
‘Till returned in love’s reunion to their wheel of sacrifice
Turning ever alone these two forever together turning
Forever female but…….

Title:
When will stop the stupid lies between mothers and daughters?

(ritornello)
Goddesses never die….

No celebrations of daughters and mothers
It is fierce prophets and brothers
Who have risen now
As a wretched wanderer Demeter turns away
Making pay Cinderella for her dreams
It only seems a white prince could save
Or a spell called love to cast us out
Still forgetting that …….

Title:
How will we celebrate that day?

(ritornello)
Goddesses never die….

And so where are we now
Among those traits assigned to our fates
What values place you high
As man or woman do you decide
Where your seat in society resides
For sure in his world much of our blood flows
Is it possible to be simply a woman who knows…….

Title:
How will women learn to go beyond an incestuous and procreative model?

(ritornello)
Goddesses never die….

So the raw nerve of the world howling cruelly
Alone and separate we
how simple and true
Sisters mothers and lovers women we are
Could be created sacred and new
A fearless bond, loving and prideful
Between Demeter and you
It must be construed because……

Title:
How can we crate a climate that will further women as dispensors of knowledge?

Goddesses never die
Where are their daughters?
Where is our magic?
Disguised idle persecuted?
Altars and temples abandoned yet calling in dreams
Mother where are you?

Notes (from Women and Madness, Phyllis Chesler):

Women were probably the first group of human beings to be enslaved.
The fierce bond of love, continuity and pride between Demeter and her daughter Persephone does not exist in catholic mythology or (contemporary) culture.
Female children are literally starved for matrimony: not for marriage, but for physical nurturance and a legacy of power and humanity from their mothers. Within modern society women’s dependent” and” incestuous” personality stems from not being experienced as “divine” by the mother and father.
Female children turn to their fathers for physical affection, nurturance, or pleasurable emotional intensity - experienced as “sexual” by adult male -if she is innocent, helpless, youthful and monogamous (and only if she idolizes him).
Daughters don’t turn to mothers for “sexual” initiation - they turn away.
Any society with sex-role stereotypes implies an often crippling harshness between adults and children of the same sex.
While most women do not commit incest with their biological fathers, patriarchal marriage, prostitution, and mass “romantic” love are psychologically predicated on a sexual union between daughter and father figures.
Contemporary women are “free” slaves: they choose their servitude for “love”. Women are trained to get “carried away” emotionally to the degree in which they cannot think at all. Persephone was carried away from her mother to the underworld, like women today carry themselves down the aisle of matrimony to the same underworld.
Giovanna D’Arc serves as a source of male renewal, through her military victories and persecution. Although doomed she is physically and spiritually bold, a leader of men. She is not raped and does not become a mother: she embodies the avoidance of both Demeter-Mother fate and Persephone-Daughter fate, stepping outside the realm of patriarchal culture. For this she is killed.
The inevitable sacrifice of self that biology demands of women in most cultures is at the heart of the Demeter myth. Persephone is condemned to a universally female fate, like her mother, nurturing and producing (crops, mothers and daughters: the nature cycle of birth and renewal) to sustain mankind.
Modern Persephone still has no place to go but marriage and motherhood: her mother has not taught her to be a warrior -to take difficult roads to unknown and unique destinations.
Unlike men, women are categorically denied the experience of culturally supremacy, humanity, and renewal based on their sexual identity.
All women who bear children are committing, literally and symbolically, a blood sacrifice for the perpetuation of the species.
“Madness” of women is essentially an intense experience of female biological, sexual, and cultural castration, and a doomed search for potency, often treated in turn as another form of self-sacrifice.
Modern Persephone is no longer graceful, no longer divine, no longer saved by her mother. Demeter exists no more - and certainly not for a daughter. Persephone has become Cinderella, struck dumbly domestic by a Demeter turned stepmother, both self-hating and mutually mistrusting. (Step)mothers do not prepare their daughters for pilgrimages, conquests, or reflection and have given them instead brooms and romantic or escapist illusions.
Mothers initiate daughters into the sacred sisterhood of discontent not only in order that daughters survive; Mothers are lonely and need nurturance- something they did not receive from their own mothers or husbands, something like Demeter, they may hope to receive from daughters.
Thus, “rebellious” daughters are treated harshly by their mothers as the deserting lovers and companions they are meant to be.
Why didn’t our mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers tell us what battle it was we lost, or never fought, so that we would understand how total was our defeat, and that religion and madness and frigidity were how we mourned it?
Why were our mothers so silent about rape and incest and prostitution and their own lack of pleasure? Why, when they had so many words, did they not name our heroines for us, tell us about feminists and suffragettes and Amazons and great-mothers?
V.
First intervention of public

Mothers and daughters: performers searching and (maybe) finding their ”mothers” and “daughters”. Testimonies, questions, surveys.
Titolo:
Si presume che 130 milioni di donne abbiano subito la mutilazione degli organi
genitali, e oltre 2 milioni sono a rischio ogni anno.

Intermission
The public is invited to participate in the second half of the play. A rehearsal is organized.

VII.
SCUM Manifesto: The return of Valerie Solanas

Recruitment and poetic/political action: the SCUM cadre is formed.
Note on staging and text: “cut-ups” and collage as surrealist form; language as weapon. “Rough" (popular) theatre and various Brechtian techniques: fun, loud, joking, exaggerated style, placards and banners.
Action: recruitment and formation of SCUM cells.

Valerie (played by "Giovanna" in a black wig), improvises with public and at times utilizes prepared “speeches” in verse:

Title:
Scene: the return of Valerie Solanas.

Valerie:
What a bore and how boring are these men-
We need them? Awful beings incomplete.
Thrill-seeking women that’s what turns me on!
An animal? Not even that man!
He’s just a machine, a walking dildo,
Obsessed with fucking -fear creates that sham!

Title:
Valerie Solanas: author of SCUM. She shot Andy Warhol.

Voice:
The male is completely egocentric, trapped inside himself, incapable of empathizing or identifying with others, or with love, friendship, affection or tenderness.

Valerie:
To fill his abyss of sad loneliness-
Envy, jealousy, insecurity,
he will screw a woman he despises.
Fucking babies and corpses that’s his lot,
and convincing us mommy-ness and sex,
Weakness and vanity is all we got!

Voice:
There is no reason why a society consisting of rational beings capable of empathizing with each other, complete and having no natural reason to compete, should have a government, laws or leaders: all created by men to keep women down.

Valerie:
In reality he’s pussy envy.
He really, sorely wants to be like us.
Independence, courage, vitality-
Strength, intensity, these are surely ours
So to prove he’s a big, big man
He creates war among the super-powers!

Voice:
There is no human reason for money or for anyone to work more than two or three hours a week at the most. All non-creative jobs (practically all jobs now being done) could have been automated long ago, and in a moneyless society everyone can have as much of the best of everything that she wants. But there are non-human, male reasons for wanting to maintain the money system.

Valerie:
Unable to get right with his woman,
by money, his idol money he’s ruled.
Power, control, dreams and goals of success,
master over all and everything live-
Love is scorched by him who can’t give or take,
ever excited by his nine to five.

Voice:
No genuine social revolution can be accomplished by the male, as the male on top wants the status quo, and all the male on the bottom wants is to be the male on top. The male “rebel” is a farce; this is the male’s ‘society’, made by him to satisfy his needs: He’s never satisfied because he’s incapable of being satisfied. Ultimately what the male “rebel” is rebelling against is being male. The male changes only when forced to do so by technology, when he has no choice, when ‘society’ reaches the stage where he must change or die. We’re at that stage now.

Title:
Valerie Solanas is considered "crazy" and "criminal" because she simply called things as she saw them: the existence of mysogyny and the asexuality of partiarchal society.

Valerie:
Thinking himself a Somebody but not,
Seeing not the magic world that she is,
Her eyes a mirror turns and hides his fear.
This man a castle for himself apart,
Separates woman from woman so far-
If her madness should spark, he warns: don’t start!

Voice:
Just as humans have a prior right to existence over dogs by virtue of being more highly evolved and having a superior consciousness, so women have a prior right to existence over men. The elimination of any male is, therefore, a righteous and good act, an act highly beneficial to women as well as an act of mercy.

Valerie:
So if you haven’t understood by now,
If you want a change: We all withdrawal!
This man’s world without us women won’t go-
Begging for mercy -let’s do without
These useless, lower than apes, sickly men.
Solidarity starts here: we’ve got clout!

Most women are not dimly aware of where they are at in relation to men. The conflict, therefore, is not between females and males but between SCUM -dominant, secure, self-confident, nasty, violent, selfish, independent, proud, thrill-seeking, free-wheeling, arrogant females, who consider themselves fit to run the universe, who have free-wheeled to the limits of ‘society’ and are ready to wheel on to something far beyond what it has to offer -and nice passive, accepting, ‘cultivated’, polite, dignified, subdued, dependent, scared, mindless, insecure, approval-seeking Daddy’s girls who are too cowardly to face up to the hideous reality of what a man is, what Daddy is.

But SCUM is too impatient for the de-brainwashing of millions of assholes .Why should the swinging females continue to plod dismally along with the dull male ones? Why should the independent be confined to the sewer along with the dependent who need Daddy to cling to?
A small handful of SCUM can take over the country within a year by systematically fucking up the system, selectively destroying property, and MURDER!
Here's what we're doing women:

Diverse voices:

SCUM, we are members of the unwork force, the fuck-up force; we take jobs of various kinds of unwork.

SCUM salesgirls we do not charge for merchandise;

SCUM telephone operators we do not charge for calls;

SCUM office and factory workers, we fuck up our work, and secretly destroy equipment.

SCUM we unwork at a job until fired, and then get a new job to unwork at.

SCUM, we forcibly relieve bus drivers, cab drivers and subway token sellers of their jobs and run buses and cabs and dispense free tokens to the public.

SCUM, we forcibly relieve employees of radio and TV and are taking over the airwaves of the radio and TV networks.

SCUM, we are couple-busting -barging into mixed, male-female couples, wherever they are, and bust them up.

SCUM, we will keep on destroying, looting, fucking-up and killing until the money system no longer exists, then instituting complete automation, all governments will cease to exist.

Title:
Her behavior was "sick" because it represented the attempt of a socially impotent class of persons to unify body and feeling.

Valerie:
The sick, irrational men, those who attempt to defend themselves against their disgustingness, when they see SCUM barreling down on them, will cling to Big Mama with her Big Bouncy Boobies, but Boobies won't protect against SCUM; Big Mama will be clinging to Big Daddy, who will be in a corner shitting in his pants. Men who are rational, however, won't kick or raise a fuss, but will sit back, relax, enjoy the show and ride the waves to their demise!
By the end of the scene the space is divided into two warring camps with the participation of the spectators who take on various roles like violent revolutionaries, “Black Block”, police, etc.

VIII.
At the barricade.

Violent revolution breaks out in the “theatre”. Public as two battling sides.
Giovanna and women neutralize (Shanti Sena) the forces of order and the violent revolutionaries with their “organless” naked bodies. At the height of the crisis Giovanna intervenes.

Giovanna (addressing the violent revolutionaries):
Whenever we can seize upon a form, however imperfect it may be, hold it fast, lest we lose the entire thought. I am beneath myself, I know it, it makes me suffer, but I accept the fact in the fear of not dying entirely.
Sisters! Look at me and see reflected in this silver mirror that I am the rigid hate of this tired old world. But I know you see also this hate dissolving away, and something new, tender and delicate calling. Answer that call. Can’t you hear it calling?

(Addressing the forces of order)
The human face
is an empty power, a
field of death ...
... after countless thousands of years
that the human face has spoken
and breathed
one still has the impression
that it hasn't even begun to
say what it is and what it knows.

A prayer (Addressing all)
All who live are in despair. And that is sickness unto death. It is that a man refuses to be what he is. And women, we women should be open to ecstasy or divine illumination.
I am certain that there are human qualities still to be discovered: to live in an inspired condition, to know truth, to be free, to love one another, to consummate experience, to abide with death in clarity of consciousness. Good and Evil are real. The inspired condition is therefore no visionary matter. It is not reserved for gods, kings, poets, priests, shrines, but belongs to us all and to all existence.

(Awakening and revealing herself)
Nobody can show what they really are without a sense of exposure and shame.

IX.
Madhouse and prison

All Giovanna’s delusions?
The scene is staged as in scene II.

Returns chorus of numbers and chanting:
menendi anenbi
embenda
tarch inemptle
o marchti rombi
tarch paiolt
a tinemptle
orch pendui
o patendi
a merchit
orch torrpch
ta urchpt orchpt
ta tro taurch
campli
ko ti aunch
a ti aunch
aungbli (from A. Artaud)

Title:
Where are we: madhouse or prison or research laboratory?

Input:
Maybe this woman is defenseless against the truth of the world.

Output:
What truth?

Voice:
Time is supposed to pass.

Input:
But maybe she is living in another state.

Output:
It is a kind of time that is simply and overwhelmingly there, laid out, unoccuring, and she lacks the ability to reconceive this condition.

Voice:
What ability?

Input:
There is nothing she can do to imagine time existing in reassuring sequence, passing, flowing, happening-the world happens; we feel it- with names and dates and distinctions.

Output:
Her future is unnamed. It is simultaneous, somehow, with the present. Neither happens before or after the other and they are equally accessible, perhaps, if only in her mind.

Voice:
She was staring at me. Seemed to but probably wasn’t. I didn’t think her eye was able to search out and shape things. Not like normal anyway. The eye is supposed to shape and process and paint. It tells us a story we want to believe.

A dialogue: premonition of the fate of Giovanna.

Giovanna:
Then when it comes to me.

Voice:
What?

Giovanna:
A thing of the most. Days, yes, years.

Voice:
Do you know what that means? A day? A year? Or did you hear me use those words?

Voice:

Say some words.

Giovanna:
Say some words.

Giovanna:
In when it comes.

Voice:
In when it comes. What?

Giovanna:
Leave into leaving.

Voice:
Who is leaving?

Giovanna:
This is when you, yes, you said.

Voice:
What did I say?

Giovanna (in another voice):
Don’t touch it… I’ll clean it up….later.

Silence. The actress sings a lullaby trying to involve her. Giovanna makes the effort, touching and hopeless.

Giovanna:
The word for moonlight is….moonlight.

Chorus together:
The word for moonlight is….moonlight.

X.
Public Intervention 2

Dialogue; the “mirroring” with public on “schizo-marketing” and resistance: Desire and “what is missing”.
Are you willing? Are you a Queen/King (sacred)? Or, Giovanna identifies the King.

Note:
The frenzy of Modern capitalism as it utilizes always evolving technologies, producing increasingly more rapid cycles of desire/lack (identifying/consumption), will continue to create new forms of consumption and payed-for experience while perpetuating at the same time: hierarchical structures of patriarchal authority; cultural and ecological exploitation and destruction; the continued atomization and indoctrination of false needs; the ever shrinking arena of the autonomy of ideas; and the increasing impossibility of real and actual human contact. (All the diversity of world experience is soaked up like a sponge and squeezed out like dishwater and subsequently marketed.)
Thus to disturb, break and eliminate the desire/lack cycle becomes the focal point of an activist resistance to the growing infringement on the commercialization of human experience.
Tactic of resistance: defusing the urge to buy and replacing of the commodification of human experience with a profound and active search for alternative modes of being, and of realizing and actualizing communities. “Imagination as the survival kit…” (Julian Beck). We start with the here and now -time -and explore another type of desire and awareness where there is no “lack”, but the encounter and dis-covering of beings.
Action: “Exquisite corpse”.

Theme: “What is required of all liberation movements: the force of the unconscious itself, the investment by desire of the social field, the disinvestment of repressive structures”.
Improvisation in sound, movement and automatic poetry. Other themes: desire and "hunger" and social change

Title:

Imagine that a wizard looks you furiously in the eyes and asks: what is your one true desire?

Voices (pieces of text also given to audience for use in creating actions):

But it can’t be true that she drifts from one reality to another, independent of the logic of time.

This is not possible. You are made out of time. This is the force that tells you who you are.

Close your eyes and feel it. It is time that defines your existence.

Time is the only narrative that matters. It stretches events and makes it possible for us to suffer and come out of it and see death happen and come out of it.

But not for her.

She is in another structure, another culture, where time is something like itself, sheer and bare, empty of shelter.

What is the moment? What does this mean to you? Show me the moment. Are you hungry?

Can you stay in the moment with your hunger?

What if you were to catch desire by the tail?

Maybe there are times when we slide into another reality but can’t remember it, can’t concede the truth of it because this would be too devastating to absorb.

XI.
Super heroine: the great refusal.

Anti-consumer, beyond desire /lack.
Action: the women get together. Form: a “happening”.
Parateatro:: how women communicate

Title:
News Flash: The Mariposita steals the hearts of millions of adolescent girls.

Giovanna (on a video screen):
The New Woman possesses even greater, more direct feelings. She stands alone grasping her heart. And from the surge welling up in her blood, she is in an absolutely impulsive state. Now she is not an IMAGE ANYMORE! -she is actually woman. Completely entangled in the Cosmos, but with cosmic perceptions. Not counterfeit thoughts, but her emotions alone lead her and guide her. Only then can she advance and approach absolute Rapture, where the tremendous ecstasies soar from her soul. Yet these New Women are in no way crazy or foolish. Their thought-processes work according to a different nature. They are untouched. They live not in circles nor through echoes. They experience directly. Woman explodes in front of Woman.

Title :
What must belong to all requirements of liberation: the force of the unconscious itself, the investment by desire in the social field and the disinvestment of repressive structures.
If we women are to ever pull ourselves out of the morass of self-pity, self-destruction, and impotence which has been our legacy for so long as we can remember, while it is important for us to be compassionate and understanding of each other’s failures and weaknesses, perhaps it is even more important that we be supportive of each other’s achievements and successes and strengths.

Giovanna:
Be!……don’t consume. Stop the treadmill of desiring machines. Bodies without organs!

Chorus singing:
Woman explodes in front of woman
I stand alone
Grasping my heart ecstasy soars
Advancing toward absolute rapture
I am untouched
but have cosmic perception.
Surging in my blood
tremendous visions forge my soul
I am as I am
I explode before you!

Title:
Breaking News: Erika and Omar confess to the killing that shocked a nation. She said she wanted to be famous as the Mariposita.

Giovanna is arrested.

(note: Erika and Omar are two infamous teen-agers in Italy. They conspired to kill Erika's mother, and brother, later confessing.)

XII.
Betrayal

Title:
An infernal machine is assembled. Or, daughters kill your mothers: homage to Erika and Omar. No more sacrifices.

Voices:
Death Penalty for Erika!

Judge:
The defendant is accused of having instigated the deaths of the mothers of numerous teens. How do you plead to the charge?

Giovanna:
We are all perverts!

Judge:
Is there evidence to be presented?

Defense:
The accused is simply a poet of the surrealist school. Yes she is an artist of the anarcho-liberatarian feminist school and she did have an active role in the rebellion but she has already paid her debt to society.
Let's anticipate the arguement of the prosecution: every technology has its disasters. Nuclear has Chernobyl; Oil is suffocating the planet; and everyday on our roads the automobile destroys the lives of hundreds, if not thousands! And now the prosecution wants to pretend that Giovanna La Mariposta is responsible for the harms of audio-visual technoloy, a technology that has devastated the lives of our youth, like the lives of the poor and defenseles Erika and Omar!

Prosecutor:
There is a frenetic need of consumers to continuously recreate themselves to respond to the always newly created desires. Every desire is a new potential self, a potential sell. This state is the postmodern consciousness and I submit that it was the irresponsibility of this artist that led to the death of this innocent mother.

Giovanna:
What a rest to speak of bicycles and horns. Unfortunately it is not of them I have to speak, but of her who brought me into the world, through the hole in her arse if my memory is correct.

Defense:
Erika is a girl extremely malleable. She has a false sense of life, she is detached from an essential sense of self and lives detached from the real world.

Prosecutor:
Capitalism, in its most recent development in technology and hyper-consumerism must create a continual cycle of new desires for products and experience and transactions. Artists serving mammon!

Giovanna:
We have not finished chanting the litany of ignorances of the unconscious; it knows nothing of castration or Oedipus, just as it knows nothing of parents, gods, the law, lack. The child is a metaphysical being and parents have nothing to do with it. We are not castrated, so you get fucked!

Defense:
Cries when she shouldn't cry. Laughs when she shouldn't laugh. She is outside of every sense of normalcy.

Prosecutor:
The fragmentation of the conception of self corresponds to a multiplicity of incoherent and disconnected relationships, exactly the techniques employed by these artists. These relationships pull us in myriad directions, inviting us to play such a variety of roles that the very concept of an authentic self recedes from view.

Giovanna:
From a certain point of view it would be better if nothing worked, if nothing functioned. Never being born, escaping the wheel of continual birth and rebirth, no mouth to suck with, no anus to shit through.

Defense:
Erika lives in what experts call diffusion of identity, she is dispersed in various worlds, each different from the other, and none of them real.

Prosecutor:
The images that flash across the retina of the viewer of MTV are isolated, disconnected, discontinuous material which fail to link up into a coherent sequence. This schizophrenic culture fails to accede fully into the realm of speech and language. Such a culture is rootless, separated from history, and outside of human time.

Giovanna:
You are who you pretend to be. I love everything that flows, even the menstrual flow that carries away the seed unfecund.
Under the skin the body is an over-heated factory,
And outside,
The invalid shines,
Glows, from every bursting pore.

Defense:
Hers is a Borderline personality, dissociative, immersed in psychosis.

Voices:
Death Penalty for Erika. Burn that witch and Omar along with her!!

Judge:
Order, order in the court!
Why did we ever think there was something psychotic about her except in the sense that people who threaten our assumptions are always believed to be mad? Please continue prosecutor.

Prosecutor (in love with her):
Please, Giovanna. You are my star…..witness. Did you incite?

Giovanna:
I am my daughter, my father, my mother, and myself.
And I won’t say I anymore, it’s just too damn stupid. Every time I hear it, I’ll use the third person instead, if I happen to remember to. If it amuses them.

Defense:
Objection!

Judge:
The code of delirium proves to have an extraordinary fluidity. There is a code available that does not coincide with the social code, or coincides with it only in order to parody it. Giovanna, did you love your mother?

Giovanna:
I remember at the age of six, just as I was eating a chocolate bar -that a certain woman known as my mother gave me -I asked myself what it meant to exist, to be alive, what it meant to be conscious of one’s breathing, and I remembered that I wanted to inhale myself in order to prove that I was alive and to see if I liked being alive, and if so why.
I got no
Papamummy.

Judge:
There are unfortunately victims in this inexorable march of capital . Parents need to help their children by closely monitoring their choices of purchases. We find you guilty as charged. Sentence hearing will be scheduled for tomorrow. You may address the court if you like.

Giovanna:
Churches, armies, states - which of all those dogs want to die?I am God I was not God I am clown of God; I am Apis. I am an Egyptian. I am a Red Indian; I am Negro; I am a Chinaman. I am a Japanese. I am a foreigner, I am a stranger. I am a sea bird. I am a land bird. I am the tree of Tolstoy. I am the roots of Tolstoy…I am husband and wife in one. I love my wife. I love my husband.

XIII.
Sacrifice

Death of Giovanna Burning at the stake: Brechtian theatre, the actress “shows” the death of Giovanna.
Action. Giovanna has a candle; slowly other candles appear around her.

A song:
Why shouldn’t the death of a person you love bring you into lurid ruin? You don’t know how to love the ones you love until they disappear abruptly.

Giovanna: (from "The Rainbow" by D.H. Lawrence.)
And she was sick with nausea so deep that she perished as she sat. And then, in the blowing clouds, she saw band of faint iridescence coloring in faint color a portion of the hill. And forgetting, startled, she looked for the hovering color and saw a rainbow forming itself. In one place it gleamed fiercely, and, her heart anguished with hope, she sought the shadow of the iris where the bow should be. Steadily the color gathered, mysteriously, from no where, it took presence upon itself, there was a faint, vast rainbow. The arc bended and strengthened itself till it arched indomitable, making great architecture of light and color and the space of heaven, its pedestals luminous in the corruption of new houses on the low hills, its arch the top of the heavens.
And the rainbow stood on the earth. She knew that the sordid people who crept hard-scaled and separate on the face of the world's corruption were living still, that the rainbow was arched in their blood and would quiver to life in their spirit, that they would cast off their horny covering of disintegration, to a new growth, rising to the light and wind and the clean rain of heaven. She saw in the rainbow the earth’s new architecture, the old, brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitting to the overarching heaven.

XIV.
Last public intervention: The real is found here.

For what is the public really hungry?
For example, exploration of politics of gender:
Action: Everyone is bisexual: all have two sexes.
Two persons encounter, if two opposite sexes, then for example, a man presents the female living in him to the male living in a women.
Then, his male to her male,
his male to her female,
his female to her female,
and then: “Namaste!” (from Sanskrit: the divine in me salutes the divine in you.)

Chorus (each phrase is linked to an action involving spectators):

There is this fundamental attraction and fundamental antagonism between me and you.

Nobody can show what they really are without a sense of exposure and shame.

Is reality too powerful for you?

Take the risk. Believe what you see and hear.

It’s the pulse of every secret intimation you’ve ever felt around the edges of your life.

Is the thing that’s happening so far outside experience that you’re forced to make excuses for it, or give it the petty credentials of some misperception?

Are you unable to imagine such a thing even when you see it?

Voice of Giovanna:
There are two bodies in a room. This is how she feels them; in the slivered heart of the half-second it takes to edge around the doorpost, with hands that touch and rub and mouths that open slowly. His cock is rising in her slack pink fist. Their mouths are ajar for tongues, nipples, fingers, whatever projections of flesh, and for whispers of was and is, and their eyes come open into the soul of the other.

The End

Sources

"Women and Madness" by Phylis Chesler.
"The Mind of God" by Paul Davies.
"Open Sky" by Paul Virilio.
"The Age of Access" by Jeremy Rifkin.
"The Protean Self" by Robert Lifton.
"The Body Artist" by Don DeLillo.
"The Adventures of Augie March" by Saul Bellow.
"Anti-Oedipus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia" by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.
“Desdemona’s Lament” by Julie Taylor, article in TDR Winter 2001.
Text from a German expressionist manifesto.
"The Rainbow" by D.H. Lawrence.
“SCUM Manifesto” by Valerie Solanas.
Antonin Artaud, miscellaneous from the collected writings.
Sarah Kane.

Siddhartha, the River Smiles (a play)

2005-07-18T04:02:00.000-07:00

Siddhartha, the River Smiles

A free re-elaboration written by Gary Brackett

Prologue

As audience enters the players are in place, grouped together in a configuration resembling the lotus of a thousand petals. Once the audience is settled the lights fade.

Enter the Boatman with a lantern. She explores the space, moving about shining her light to revel the scene, as well as the public. She moves onto a runway that extends into the public’s space in which they are seated on two sides. She moves to her station at the far end of the runway.

Boatman:

Will not man always come upon his most wonderful discoveries when he sits alone, walks alone? On lonely ledges and to lonely hearts the answers come.

Speaking directly to audience as she begins to row:

The river looks at us with a thousand eyes- green, white, crystal, sky blue....look lovingly into the flowing water, into the transparent green, into the crystal lines of its wonderful design. Bright pearls rise from the depths, bubbles swimming on the mirror, sky blue reflected in them.

The players slowly, singing softly begin to unfurl a long cloth and moving with it toward and onto the runway.

Chorus:
(individual voices; Action: river.)

Voice:

Here at the center I see the meaning of things, all things.

All:

I am the meaning. The whole meaning.

Voice:

The four directions come together in me. I am the center.

All:

And everything flows from me, returns to me.

Voice:

I am that which they call great mystery.

All:

I am that which each one calls the undiscovered law before coming here.

Voice:

I am here and so I know.

All:

Here I know everything. Here I know myself.

Voice:

I am truth and will.

All:

And nothing sits above my will.

Voice:

I am pride and joy.

All:

And nothing sits above my joy.

Voice:

I own my life.

All:

And I shall make proper use of myself.

Voice:

I stand here in the light of my own presence.

All:

And I recognize my power.

Voice:

I am reason.

All:

And nothing sits above my choice.

Voice:

I am truth. And live in the spirit.

All:

And so I live forever.

Voice:

I am the oneness of the whole.

All:

And whatever happens, happens in me. I am river. I own the earth.

Boatman:

Nothing is mine, I know nothing, I possess nothing, I have learned nothing. How strange it is! Now, when I am no longer young, when my hair is fast growing grey, when strength begins to diminish, now I am beginning again like a child.

Chorus as River (action develops: the coming and going):

Things are going backwards.
Flowing continually backwards, singing merrily.
No shadow of the past,
nor shadow of the future.

Boatman:

The river has many voices. Has it not the voice:

Chorus:

of a king
of a warrior
of a bull
of a night bird
of a pregnant woman
a sighing man
and a thousand other voices.

Siddhartha (pulling the cloth the river suddenly disappears):

Smoke. Fulmas, fumus.

The chorus, transformed, singing softly they slowly exit:

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child....a long, long way from home.

Scene 2, by the River

Boatman:

Waken, ghost-eared child, but into darkness. Waken, phantom, O into us. Try, try, O try the way. Open the wall of light. Ghost, ghost, who is the ghost? O whispered laughter. Here, O here. The way is here. Have you forgotten? The leaf, the rock, the wall of light. Lift up the rock, the leaf, the stone, the unfound door, The River. Return, return.

Siddhartha, alone:

All of our life goes up in smoke. There is no structure, no creation in it, not even the smoky structure of our dreams. Come lower, angel; whisper in my ear. We are passing away in smoke and there is nothing today but weariness to pay for yesterday’s toil.

Chorus is transformed into individual Siddharthas. They enter, taking positions on the stage and runway.

Siddhartha (chorus, individual voices):

Naked and alone I came into exile.

In her dark womb I did not know my mother’s face.

From the prison of her flesh have I come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth.

O waste of loss, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this most weary unbright cinder, lost!

Remembering speechlessly I have sought the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven.

There sounds in my heart a solemn music. It fills the earth, the air, the universe;

It is not loud, but omnipresent, and it speaks to me of death and darkness.

And of the focal march of all who live, or had lived, converging on a plain.

The world filled with silent marching men: no word is spoken, but in the heart of each there is a common knowledge.

The word that all men know and have forgotten, the lost key opening the prison gates, the lane-end into heaven.

Boatman:

With a distorted countenance Siddhartha stares into the water. He sees his face reflected, and spits at it; So that he can fall headlong and finally go under, he bends, with closed eyes - toward death.

Sound of Om begins almost silently and then raising to a loud vibratory drone.

Boatman:

When a man needs to know something, a teacher appears.

Silence. A Siddhartha rises and tries for himself the sound: Om. Others one at a time until there is a chorus of Om.

All lay down as if to sleep.

Scene 3, a dream.... a dialogue

Boatman:

A path lies before us which we are called to follow.

The chorus awakens to the sound of the river and are immediately swept up in its current.
Moving back to the stage and behind the backdrop:

Who are we.... Where do we come from.... Where are we going?

Scene: a great divide, a crossing over to meet ones self. In silhouette.

Chorus, women:

The meaning of all things sits at the center

Chorus, men:

I desire to see view my soul,
to see myself born.
I am here in spirit and on this realm to see my soul.
I recognize certain deficiencies.
I know my soul as imperfect,
as something I choose to improve.

You choose to improve your soul
but will you recognize the meaning in your choice?

And yet ....if I go to the center
and discover the great mystery,
then nothing mysterious exists.
And if I discover that which really exists,
then I am the center and I, the reality.

Siddhartha, know your self.
Know your soul as your constant companion.
Become your soul.
In this manner and only in this manner will you improve.

I hear far voices and laughter.
My mind gathers itself out of the wreckage of little things.
A light is waking. The wind is quaking, A star, far.
The night, the light. A chant, a song,
the slow dance of little things within me.
Over us all is something.
Star, night, earth....light. O lost!....a stone...
a leaf.... a door....o ghost!

I, Siddhartha, tell you something. Try to hear:
Two or twice-two; the life-force intends a balance.
Sky and earth, male and female,
warm and cold, root -stem-leaf-berry,
south-north, east-west.
The life-force maintains a rhythm, the heartbeat rhythm.
Every song, ya he ya ya, ya he ya ya.

We shall not come again.
We shall never come back again.
But over us all, over us all is- something.
And over the day the dark.
But over the darkness- what?

Recognize the spiral path
upon which you move level to next high level,
a spiritual path upon
which you evolve toward the oneness of the whole.
You live on one earth with many, many planes,
but you encounter more spiritual infusion at each level.

The laurel, the lizard, and the stone will come no more.
The women weeping at the gate have gone
and will not come again.
O Spring, the cruellest and fairest of seasons,
will come again.
And the strange and buried men will come again,
in flower and leaf the strange
and buried men will come again,
and death and dust will never come again,
for death and dust will die.

Recognize your true parents: sun and earth.
Demand your true heritage: to inherit the whole.
But not even the extraordinary
command the sun or change the moon.
And so I ask:
what things will you command...or change?

Chorus, to public:

What things will you command...or change?

Scene 4, Samsara

Action: the snake of Samsara, with Kamala. Chorus with masks.

Boatman:

The world was catching him; pleasure, covetousness, idleness, and finally also that vice that he had always despised and scorned as most foolish- acquisitiveness.

Siddhartha:

O but I can’t go now.

Chorus:

Why not? (whispered).

Kamala:

Come up into the hills, o my love. Return!

Boatman:

Property, possessions, and riches have finally trapped him. No longer a game and a toy; they have become a chain and a burden. Siddhartha wanders along a strange and twisted path of this last and most base declivity....through the game of dice.

Siddhartha:

Because her face is so white, and her forehead so broad and high, with the black hair drawn back from it, and when she sits there on the bed she looks like a little child. I can’t go now and leave her alone.

Chorus:

She is alone and so are you.

Kamala:

O lost and by the wind grieved, ghost come back again, as first I knew you in the timeless valley, where we shall feel ourselves anew, bedded on magic in the month of June. There is a place where all the sun glistens in our hair, and from a hill we can put a finger on a star.

Boatman

He began to play dice for money and jewels with increasing fervour. In no other way could he show more clearly and mockingly his contempt for riches.....the false deity of the businessman.

Siddhartha:

And when she purses up her mouth and stares, so grave and thoughtful, she is like a little child.

Chorus:

You are alone now. You must escape, or you will die.

Kamala:

Where is the day that melted into one rich noise? Where the music of our flesh, the rhyme of teeth?

Boatman:

He loved that anxiety.....and continually sought to renew it, to increase it, to stimulate it. After every great loss he devoted himself to the procurement of new riches, went eagerly after business and pressed his debtors for payment for he wanted to play again, to show his contempt for riches again.

Siddhartha:

It is all like death: she shares herself with me, I sleep in her bed- she is the value and meaning of life. All this is over now, and each time it is like death.

Chorus:

And like a life- each time that you die, you will be born again. And you will die a hundred times before you become a man.

Kamala:

Quick are the mouths of earth, and quick the teeth that feed upon our love. We who are were made for music, will hear music no more. In our dark houses the winds are silent.

Boatman:

Siddhartha has become impatient at losses, he has lost his patience with slow-paying debtors, he is no longer kind to beggars, he no longer has the desire to give gifts and loans to the poor. Sometimes he dreams of money at night.

Siddhartha:

I can’t! I can’t! Not now- later, more slowly.

Chorus:

No. Now.

Kamala:

Ghost, ghost, come back, return not into life, but into magic, where we have never died, into the enchanted wood, where we still lie, strewn on the grass.

Boatman:

And whenever he awakes from this hateful spell, sees his face reflected in the mirror, grown older and uglier, whenever shame and nausea overtake him, he flees into passion again, to wine, and from there the urge for acquiring and hording wealth.

Siddhartha:

I am afraid. I have nowhere to go.

Chorus, having encircled Siddhartha form a cage-like structure:

You must find the place.

Kamala:

Come up into the hills, O my love return.

Boatman:

Then a dream reminds him....how closely related passion is to death. His heart is full of misery and secret fear.

The chorus takes meditation positions around Siddhartha.

Siddhartha:

I am lost.

Chorus, whispering, eyes closed:

You must hunt for yourself.

Kamala:

O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.

Boatman:

Kamala keeps a small rare songbird in a small golden cage.

Siddhartha:

I am alone. Where are you?

Chorus:

You must find me.

Kamala:

We must try to love one another.

Boatman:

He stood alone, like a shipwrecked man on the shore....in a pleasure garden. This game is called Samsara.

Siddhartha, crossing to embrace Kamala:

This terrible and beautiful sentence, the last, the final wisdom that the earth can give, remembering at the end, speaks too late, wearily.

Chorus, rising, removing their mask, speaking directly to public:

It stands there, awful and untraduced, above the dusty racket of our lives. No forgetting, no forgiving, no denying, no explaining, no hating.

Kamala:

O mortal and perishing love, born with this flesh and dying with this brain, your memory will haunt the earth forever.

Scene 5, Ritual of the River, five senses and the breath.

Action of the breath and simple movements involving the public.

Chorus:

Life turned shadow.
The living lights going ghost again.
Give life a pattern: why here?
Why there? Why now? Why then?
All that is touched, all that touches.
this allusive dance of the present.

Boatman:

Listen! The many-voiced song of the river echoes softly.
Do you hear? Listen better!
All voices are one:
the lament of those who yearn,
the laughter of the wise, the cry of the indignant
and the groan of the dying.
All interwoven, interlocked, all the voices,
all goals, all sorrows, all pleasures,
all the good and evil-
the music of the world, of life.

Chorus:

Continually flowing, flowing,
yet always here, only here.
Always the same yet every moment new.
Love this river, stay by it, learn from it.
Everywhere the same,
beginning or ending,
mountain or ocean.
No shadow of the past,
nor shadow of the future.

Boatman:

You can learn from it, but not from me.
The river has taught me to listen.
To listen with a still heart, with a waiting, open soul.
Without passion, without desire,
without judgement, without opinions.

Chorus:

Sorrowful river voice,
burning paths of desire,
Sad and yearning song,
flowing towards its goal.
No shadow of the past,
nor shadow of the future.
this allusive dance of the present.

Boatman:

Have you learned the secret?
There is no such thing as time.
I saw my life and it also is a river:
the boy, the mature man, the old man-
separated by shadows, not through reality.
Nothing was, nothing will be, everything has presence.
Is not then all sorrow in time?
All difficulties and evil, all self-torment and fear.
Come, conquer time- listen:
the song of ten- thousand voices, of all living creatures.
Do you know it?

Scene 6, Passion, a means of conversion

A series of actions and tableaux on the theme of individual in confrontation with the collective.

Boatman

Moreover, something is or seems,
That touches me with mystic gleams,
Like glimpses of forgotten dreams-
Chorus:

Siddhartha learns something new on every step of his path,
for the world is transformed and he is enthralled.
He sees the sun rise over the forest and mountains
and set over the distant palm shore.

Of something felt, like something here;
Of something done, I know not where;
Such as no language may declare.

At night he sees the stars in the heavens
and the sickle-shaped moon
floating like a boat in the blue.
He sees trees, stars, animals, clouds,
rainbows, rocks, weeds;

Have you not felt that your real soul
was imperceptible to your mental vision,
except in a few hallowed moments?

Flowers, brook and river,
the sparkle of dew on bushes in the morning.
All this, coloured and in a thousand different forms,
has always been here;

It is as if the opposites of the world,
whose contradictoriness and conflicts
make all our difficulties and troubles,
were melted into unity.

In previous times all this had been nothing to Siddhartha,
because reality lay on the other side of the visible.
But now his eyes linger on this side;
he sees and recognizes the visible
and he seeks his place in the world.

Refer to the spirit as something luminous
that hovers over the body
until at death when this light slowly fades.

The days and nights are short,
every hour passes quickly
like a sail on the sea, full of joy.
He sees a group of monkeys in the forest;
hears their wild eager cries.

Treat the hands as something wonderful,
the hands and also the eyes and mouth and ears.

He sees a ram follow a sheep and mate.
In a lake he sees the pike making chase in hunger;
strength and desire
reflected in the swiftly moving whirls of water
formed by the raging pursuer.

Make wonderful use of these things;
treat yourself as something sacred,
as a power for truth.

All this has always been
and he has never seen it;
he was never present.
Now he is present and belongs to it.

All symbols-
exist as wrappings which hide the truth.

Through his eyes he sees light and shadow;
through his mind he is aware of moon and stars.
Both thought and the senses are fine things,
behind both of them lay hidden the last meaning;

Until a man knows something,
he uses one word:
mystery.

It is worth while to play with both,
to listen intently to both voices.
He will gain experience himself.

The true monk takes nothing with him
but his lyre.

Scene 7, Lucky Stars; the story of Kamala

Enter a small train of men and women; they carry Kamala.

Kamala:

Why does sex exist? In the beginning we didn’t even know what it was. We were bewildered when Brahma announced that it would be our task to initiate a new mode of creation.

Chorus:

And he said something about the female body.

Kamala:

With great naturalness and gravity, we discovered- and they too, the gods, discovered- what it is we must do.
Brahma hadn’t even mentioned the pleasure. It took us by surprise.
one day we asked him:

Chorus:

What’s this pleasure for?

Voice of Brahma:

Smiling a somewhat embarrassed smile Brahma answered:
To preserve the world’s gloss. Pleasure is the Tapas of the without. It is like a cloak we must put on, otherwise it would grow dusty. If Tapas always drew us back to the formless place from whence we came, the world would wither too soon!

Kamala:

It is well your wives trouble you, that kings put their daughters in your beds, it is even well that the Apsaras, those celestial nymphs, come and make fools of us, plays those tricks....Every time we give into them, we help the world to refresh its gloss.

Kamala, singing, and a chorus of dancing women:

Into her fair grove went the fair Kamala,
At the entrance to the grove stood the fair Samana.
As he saw the lotus flower,
Deeply he bowed.
Smiling, acknowledged Kamala,
Better, thought the young Samana,
To make sacrifices to the fair Kamala
Than to offer sacrifices to the gods.

Siddhartha:

His life is coiling back into the brown murk of the past.
Siddhartha says to himself:
So I enter this town under a lucky star.

Boatman:

The grove of Kamala, the well-known courtesan.

Kamala and Siddhartha are left alone. The chorus group together in various groups with minimal actions of seduction and caresses.

Kamala:

Did you not stand outside yesterday and greet me.

Siddhartha:

Yes indeed. I saw you and greeted you.

Kamala:

But did you not have a beard and long hair and an old torn loincloth?

Siddhartha:

You have observed well. You have seen Siddhartha, the Brahmin’s son who left his home in order to become a Samana. Now I have left that path, and the first person I met was you. I have come here to tell you that you are the first women to whom Siddhartha has spoken without lowered eyes. Never again will I lower my eyes when I meet a beautiful woman.

Boatman, as the chorus is interrupted and glances suspiciously at the public and each other:

Movement of the million sensations that chance- the loss or gain of a moment, the turn of a head, the enormous and aimless impulsion of accident- has thrust into the blazing heat of him.

Chorus as before.

Kamala:

Is that all that Siddhartha has come to tell me?

Siddhartha:

I have come to tell you this and to thank you for being so beautiful. And, if it does not displease you, Kamala, I would like to ask you to be my friend and teacher for I do not know anything of the art of which you are mistress.

Kamala (laughing):

It has never been my experience that a Samana from the woods would desire to learn from me. Many young men come to me, including Brahmins’ sons, but they come to me in fine clothes, in fine shoes; there is scent in their hair and money in their purses. Do you understand?

Siddhartha:

How could I fail to understand when it comes from such a mouth? But are you not afraid of the Samana from the forest? He could force you, fair maiden, he could rob you, he could hurt you.

Kamala:

That which belongs to ourselves, can only be given if we wish, when we wish. That is how it is with Kamala and with the pleasure of love. It can never be stolen.

They kiss.

Chorus, women, as they rise, separating from the men who are left in tableau:

Woman, secure of position and pure of blood;
Woman, keeper of the morality and personification of spiritual strength.
Women, real and unpretentious and on a definite path.

The women take up Kamala and begin to move away.

Siddhartha:

Dear Kamala, where can I go in order to obtain these things: clothes, fine shoes and plenty of money?

Kamala:

My friend, many people want to know that. You must use what you have learned. A poor man cannot do otherwise.

Siddhartha:

I can think, I can wait, I can fast.

Kamala:

Nothing else?

Siddhartha:

Nothing. O yes, I can compose poetry.

Kamala, gesturing to Siddhartha to follow:

Wait- you can read and write?

Siddhartha:

Certainly. (To public) When a man needs to know something, a teacher appears.

Chorus, men:

......a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. And of all the forgotten faces.
Which of us has known his sister?
Which of us has looked into his mother’s heart?
Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?

Boatman:

These images that burn him exist without beginning or end, without the essential structure of time.

Scene 8, Father and son; top of the circle

Boatman:

The world is like the impression left by the telling of a story.
Well...we are about to arrive at the beginning of our story...uh...did I say beginning? Well.... end, beginning...all so many words, like gestures, and like words, there are only so many gestures one can make, but meanings, meanings are innumerable. So the stories are repeated, with variations, so that each time we may discover, in one slow rotation a new earth and a new sky of meanings.
Like the stories of fathers and sons: look, up ahead, turning the next bend, there is Siddartha and his son...but then maybe it’s Siddartha and his father. This is confusing! Let’s listen now. Listen to the voices of the river...

There is a sea of Siddhartha’s all standing, wearily.

Father, to the Siddharthas:

So I said to him, my heart full with anger, anxiety, fear and sorrow:
Why are you waiting?

Chorus:

I am not Happy.
Though beloved by all, there is no joy in my heart.
From the river flow dreams and restless thoughts.

Father:

Will you go on standing and waiting until it is day, noon, evening?

Chorus:

My mind is not satisfied.
My soul is not at peace.
In my heart I feel the seeds of discontent.

Father:

You will grow tired Siddhartha, You will fall asleep, you will die. Will you not give up this project?

Chorus:

I will grow tired. I will not fall asleep, I will die.

Father, touching the shoulders of a Siddhartha one at a time:

Can I prevent you from living your own life?

Chorus:

Your children are not your children.

Who will protect you from Samsara?

You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.

From sin, greed, and folly?

You may give them your love but not your thoughts.

Cannot my piety, my knowledge, my own seeking protect you?

They come through you but not from you.

If I were to die ten times for you could I change your destiny in the slightest?

Our souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you can not visit, not even in your dreams.

The chorus speaks this last line directly to the audience.

Father:

And he went into the forest and became a Samana.

The chorus exits, singing the river song.

Father:

If you find bliss there, come back and teach it to me.

Boatman:

He realized that Siddhartha could no longer remain at home- he had already left.

The father remains alone.

Father, exiting:

His soul dwells in the house of tomorrow, which I can not visit, not even in my dreams.

Scene 9, Death of Kamala

Enter a Siddhartha.
From behind the backdrop, a vision of Kamala and Siddhartha in a position of the Kama Sutra.

Voice of Kamala:

You are the best lover I ever had. Some day when I am older, I will have a child by you. And yet, my dear, you have remained a samana. You do not really love me...You love nobody. Is that not true?

Voice of Siddhartha:

Maybe. I am like you. You cannot love either, otherwise how could you practice love as an art? Perhaps people like us cannot love. Ordinary people can....that is their secret.

Siddhartha:

Vasudeva! Do you hear? The river is laughing at me.

Boatman:

You have heard it laugh, but you have not heard everything Siddhartha. Let us listen; you will hear more.

Voice of the son of Siddhartha, entering:

Bring your own trigs! I am not your servant. I know that you do not beat me; you dare not! But you continually punish me and make me feel small with your piety. You want me to be just like you, but just to spite you, I would rather become a thief and a murderer, than be like you. I hate you; you are not my father even if you have been my mother’s lover a dozen times!

He runs out.....Siddhartha in pursuit. He stops on seeing the entering chorus.

Chorus entering, lead by the Buddha. They carry on their shoulders the dying Kamala. She is wrapped in the cloth of the river.

Chorus, singing:

Om is the bow,
The arrow is the soul,
Brahman is the arrow’s goal
At which one aims unflinchingly.

They continue, sottovoce:
The boatman, comes down to speak to Siddhartha. All gather around the dying Kamala, who is placed at the station of the Boatman. Action of fire.

Boatman:

You grieve for those who should not be grieved for. The truly wise never weep for the dead or for the living.

The Buddha:

And Gotama said:
Never was there a time when I did not exist, nor you, nor these rulers of men. Nor shall all of us cease to be hereafter. Mystery surrounds the origin of beings. Mysterious too is their end. Only in the interim, between birth and death, are they manifested clearly. For the born, death is unavoidable; and for the dead, birth is sure to take place. Therefore, for the inevitable, there is no justification for you to grieve.... for Kamala.... for me.... or for Vasudeva.

The chorus begins to unfurl the cloth in which Kamala is wrapped. They return to their original positions on the river (prologue).
Music, of the river, beginning to rise as the river appears.

Boatman:

The river flows on towards its goal. Siddhartha sees the river hasten, made up of himself, his relatives and all the people he had ever seen. He sees his father, lonely, morning for his son; he sees himself, lonely, also with bonds of longing for his faraway son. All the waves and water hasten, suffering, towards goals, many goals, to the waterfall, to the sea, to the ocean and all goals are reached and each one succeeds another. But the yearning voice is altered. He hears them all, the whole, and his wound is healing. Surrendering himself to the stream, full of sympathy and compassion, he belongs to the unity of all things.

Chorus, with River action:

We are returning to the origin.
Listen attentively to the river;
To the song of a thousand voices.
Do not listen to the sorrow or to the laughter;
Do not bind your soul to one particular voice.
Every cloud, every bird, every beetle is equally divine.
Perfect at every moment, from robber, to Buddha, to Brahmin;
Hear them all, the whole, the unity.
A path lies before us which we are called to follow.
All the goals, all the yearnings, all the sorrows, all the pleasures.
The great song of a thousand voices consists of one word....

As the sound climaxes, the river suddenly disappears.
Blackout.

Epilogue

The boatman lighting her lantern begins to return upstage. She discovers the chorus in their positions at the beginning of Scene two.

Boatman:

I have waited for this hour my friends. Now it has arrived, let me go. I have been Vasudeva, the ferryman, a long time. Now it is completed. Farewell river. Farewell.

The chorus begins to move forward onto the runway, as in Scene two.
They return to their original positions, but with a new intention: contact with the public.

I will open my heart to the world
and breathe the wind of life
like the water of the river,
free in the quest of the sea.
And like the river that drags the refuge
I would like to smooth the stones of my life.
I would like to love but I can’t.
I am unable to find a sense of all this.
Also even if everyone else finds the sacred cow
I feel only a red wing that comes out from my naked body
and the light of the eye that opens the mind.
Determination shines the way of my life.
Undaunted crossings of the vast region of thoughts and mind,
these, my initial beginnings from an enchanted mountain.
I listen to the sounds of nature, I hear the birds, I feel my breath, I am at home;
Simultaneously up and down,
Everything and its contrary, slowly;
sweetly and intensely,
explodes the life that reveals a god in every slice.
I am not looking.
I want to be lost in this lake I seek
and I am certain: it’s the ocean

The chorus after executing a series of actions remain in tableaux. Slowly they become aware of the public and begin moving down to them.

Chorus, staring deeply and closely into the eyes of an audience member:

I want to be lost in this lake I seek
and I am certain: it’s the ocean.

Music fades out.
Silence.
Chorus, different voices, not altogether, to individual spectators:

What is the meaning of this; what is this all about?

Addressing the public the chorus announces the beginning of a tribunal of questions:
questions on the significance of the themes of the play for the contemporary world. Each chorus member expresses their own question.
Then the public is invited and encouraged to pose their own questions.
After some time the lights again fade and as in the opening moments of the play we see the actress who has portrayed the boatman on stage, again with her lantern, although she is no longer in costume. She is herself as in daily life.
She moves to the station of the boatman.

She speaks:

We have listened to the voice of the river; We have recalled with Siddhartha, our own lives and the way of our companions... a long or very brief time, as the case may be.
What is the meaning of this?
Seriously, or for fun, we will consult the wisdom of the East to better understand the mystery which leads our life.
The ancient Chinese book, The I Ching, or Book of Changes will propose an answer from the tossing of three coins...
No, I don’t want to play this attractive gambling...!
But though our will and blind impulse constructs this story we call Life, and gives it much flavour, nevertheless may something, or someone over us illumine our choices and direct us to a greater good.

Choosing one of the questions expressed she, or the audience member whose question she has chosen, tosses six times the coins, each time reporting the numbers.
The relevant hexagram is identified and she reads without comment the Judgement, Image, and significant Lines from the book. (Edition Richard Wilhelm).

The End

Principal sources:

Siddhartha. Herman Hesse. Transalation by Hilda Rosner
Hanto Yo. Saga of the Sioux, Ruth Beebe Hill
Look Homeward, Angel. Thomas Wolfe
Bhagavad Gita. Transalation by Swami Tapasyananda
The Prophet. Khalil Gibran
The Variety of Religious Experiences. William James
Ka. Roberto Calasso. Translation by Tim Parks