Stylistically, Exquisite Pain none- theless departs from previous performances of the group, as the show is not characterised by spectacular imagery, simultaneous action, direct audience addresses and involvement, an unusual treatment of the theatre space or the like, but reduces theatre to an absolute minimum.
A female and a male performer alternately read out Calle's stories and those of the other contributors. They do so in minimalist sceriery, consisting only of a blue neon writing "exquisite pain," two tables with chairs and two l monitors behind them, which display the images that accompany the stories.
Whereas the Raumkunst of Calle's exhibition allows busy spectators to transform the visual experience into mere information cf. Lehmann, Postdrama- tisches Theater , the aspect of Zeitkunst in the theatrical performance forces audiences to listen carefully to each story. Audiences have to witness the full circle of Calle's talking cure - rather than being able to pick up only the thrilling or entertaining details from the tablets in the installation, they have to experience the length and slow development of each narration.
This increases the awareness for both the 'sheer repeti- tion' envisioned by Calle and the slight differences between the stories, which are gradually transformed from a mimetic plot to a diegetic 's tory.
Accordingly, White's portrayal of the reception of the audience in the, theatre resembles a job description of a psychoanalyst: : As an audience member you become involved and strangely complicit in the woman's storyte lling. Again and again you run thro ugh the script from the last version in your head, comparin g it to th e words you are hearin g spoken, lookin g for the detail that wi ll make sense of her unhappiness and how it came about.
On the other hand, the utmost concentration on the spoken word and the incessant repeti-. These reactions indicate how ambivalent the theatrical device of repeti- tion is. While it initially raises the audience's awareness and concentra- tion and can have a comic effect, it can also, when continued, become an act of challenge or even aggression towards the audience.
By denying entertainment through the stimuli of variety, diversion and change, re- petitions on stage require an effort from audiences and make them aware of the slow passing of time; they effect, as Hans-Thies Lehmann puts it, "a crystallization of time" Postdramatic Theatre This concerns, for exam- ple, the relationship of Calle's stories and those of others. The auditory, subsequent reception of the stories in real time reinforce the contrast between Calle's obsessive love story and the often more drastic other stories, especially since the performers listen to each other and in a few moments comment non-verbally on each other's stories: Every gaze and every guarded smile indicate how their stories affect each other or fail to do so.
Thus, the performance re-creates the alleged origin of the installa- tion Calle talking to others in a more experiential manner than the tablets in the exhibition; it does so, however, in a rather unemotional and detached manner. A second example regards the issues of authenticity and fictionality of Calle's allegedly biographical art. When the actress reading Calle's texts at one point reading the entry 28 days after the break-up turns to the monitor behind her and looks at the photo of the red telephone, one wonders whether she has become aware of the artistic potential of her suffering or whether she is checking on the performance of suffering that she is reproducing for artistic means.
This doubt of reliability, 9 Karen Jiirs-Munby's translation offers a shortened version of Lehmann's Post- dramatisches Theater.
My argument draws on the following observations of the German original: "Abgewiesen wird in der aggressiven Repetition das Bediirfnis nach oberfliichlicher Unterhaltung durch passiven Konsum von Reizen. Bei der Repetition findet [ It also affects the perception of the other stories : Looking at the photographs again, audiences are forced to contemplate the accompanyin g images that are shown on monitors for a longer time than they probably would do when walking through the installation and hearing the stories, the signifi- cance of the motifs only gradually becomes clear.
For example, the story after Calle's fifteenth entry relates the death of a grandfather, accompa- nied by an image of two screws, one with a broken head. T awards the end of the story, the narrator informs us that the heads of the screws that closed the coffin had to be broken off "so that no one could ever open it again. A quick, decisive act. Like saying: I accept. Worse than the last look" In the meantime, one searches for the connection of word and image and wonders whether the image authenticates the story as body of evidence or whether it is the other way around, as the narra- tor, or possibly even Calle herself, may have invented a story to accom- pany the photograph.
After having seen the performance, we do not know Calle any better. Neither has the company included text passages that would explain, justify, or ridicule Calle's behaviour and thus create a round character, nor does the acting fill the gaps or soothe the contradictions of Calle's persona as emerging from the installation..
Instead, almost with the detachment of a newsreader, the actress pre- sents the stories without creating a psychological character. Both thematically and stylistically, the performance is preoc- cupied with discerning an essence, with laying bare a core, to the point of abstraction. Accordingly, Tim Etchells describes Exquisite Pain as a methodical scrutiny, as the distillation of a "mathematical and psycho- logical essence" "A Note on Exquisite Pain" 1. The installation's self-reflexive mode of narration discussed above, : which increasingly acknowledges the significance of storytelling and l narrative cliches for the trauma's occurrence and its cure, is accompa- nied on stage by moments of theatrical self-awareness.
Through these metatheatrical comments, the performance reflects on its potential for a progressing action with almost melodramatic moments of emotional climax and, at the same time, on its refusal to stage such conventions. Thus, Calle begins to imagine her night in the hotel room as a highly emotional "scene:" "88 days ago, the man I love left me. The scene was played out on January 25, " Eight days later, she transforms her experience into a combination of an author's note to a play and a I brief review, which comments on the lack of dramatic quality: 12 For an analysis of plot-driven, psychologically realist plays dealin g with iss ues i of traumatisation, see my reflections on 'Trauma Drama' in Wald and Time: January 25, , at two in the morning.
Place: room of the Imperial Hotel in New Delhi. Action: break-up over the phone. Distinguishing mark: the hero's infected finger. Title of the work: The Felon. The rule of the three unities was observed, but the lines were poor, the ending borched and the plot banal.
It starts indoors and ends out- doors. In between, the man has methodically packed everything that belongs to him, [. But the scenario doesn't pan out as desired. This time, there's no audience. These instances seem to comment on the challenges inherent in a theatre which abandons progressive action as well as psychologically realistic characterisation and acting.
When the final story describes how the "dramatic intensity slowly wanes, replaced by fatigue and a stiff back" and has its narrator "wonder when it will end" , the perform- ance ironically comments on its hardly bearable pattern of repetition and lack of action.
Through its adaptation of Calle's installation, Forced Entertainment thus offers a new, reduced version of its non-standard theatre. Etchells sees this minimalist staging as a form of faithful- ness to the original: [W]e now felt compelled, for the first time, to 'do' a text.
And it was clear too that most of what we would need to 'do' would consist of exercising restraint. There is something so perfect about the declension of the Exquisite Pain text that our strongest desire was, and remains, to let it be there as simply as possible; unfolding, taking both its time and its toll in what may be the least theatrical but most effective way we can muster.
Given this regard for the 'perfect' original text, even at the cost of theat- rical vitality, Exquisite Pain, notwithstanding its post-dramatic quality, shares a concern of script-based theatre in its most conservative form.
It might be this unusual amalgamation of unconventional and traditional qualities that has resulted in the ambivalent reviews of Exquisite Pain, ranging from Lyn Gardner's immense praise for this "heaven-sent" pro- duction in The Guardian "It is so pure there is something quite mag- nificent and quite unendurable about it" to Dorothea Marcus's much less enthusiastic review in the taz, who did not see more than a tiring reading in the show.
Once again, Calle deals with the experience of being abandoned. Rather than working through the experience of split- ting up via e-mail by repeating the story herself, this time Calle offers the raw material of her pain to others. She has invited more than one hundred women, among them artists and celebrities such as Jeanne Moreau, Laurie Anderson and Leslie Feist, but also experts such as a UN official in charge of women's rights, a fortune-teller and a psycho- analyst to read and analyse the e-mail.
This project, which once again connects repetition and difference, unstory and storytelling, the private and the public, will possibly offer new inspiration for Forced Entertain- 13"Auf der Bi.
Or maybe it will attract other performance groups or playwrights to explore alternative form s of adapting visual art - thus, staging con- ceptual art may gradually become a more diversified and a less unusual strategy of contemporary theatre.
Works Cited Bois, Yve-Alain. Sophie Calle and Christine Mace!. Munich: Prestel, Calle, Sophie. Exquisite Pain. London: Thames and Hudson, Caruth, Cathy. Cathy Caruth. Chadwick, Whitney. Etchells, Tim. Certain Fragments. Contemporary Performance and Forced Entertain- ment.
London: Routledge, Contextualising Pack Franzen, Jutta. Frankfurt a. Freud, Sigmund, and Josef Breuer. In col- laboration with Marie Bonaparte. Studies on Hysteria. Lon- don: Hogarth Press, Gardner, Lyn. The Guardian 3 Nov. Gratton, Johnnie.
Gill Rye and Michael Worton. Manchester: Manchester UP, Heath field, Adrian. A Conversation with Tim. Judith Helmer and Florian Malzacher. Berlin: Alexander, Heinrich, Barbara. Exhibition Catalogue. Kassel: Museum Fridericianum, Laplanche, Jean, and J. The photograph of a banal jar of cream suddenly appears cold and cynical. The juxtaposition of photograph and text unearths an unbearable dimension of fiction in the project, which was of course always already present, for instance in the reconstruction of the hotel room.
If the idea of showing and looking at the pain of others entailed certain difficulties, the notion of illustrating and staging pain is one step further. The jar of cream is the ultimate limit of the autobiographical pact underlying the project and reveals how Douleur exquise differs from Calle's other autofictional projects.
Because of the emotional charge of its subject, the autobiographical character of the project turns out to be a necessary presupposition as well as a guarantee for the authenticity of the suffering. Retroactively, the project slides into autofiction and the alternation of I-narrators turns out to have been very deliberately set up from the beginning. The first pain experience that is opposed to Calle's a young women suddenly left by an older man almost perfectly mirrors her experience, only the red telephone is replaced by a white wash basin Calle, And is the red telephone - a popular icon of calamity in the Cold War period - not almost too good to be true?
Princenthal: 2 The effect is further reinforced by intertextual allusions, for instance to the wedding dress mentioned by Calle to emphasize the extraordinary significance of the love affair that came to such a traumatic end during her first night with M.
The blatant Oedipal connotations obviously fit in with the Freudian streak of the therapeutic process of Douleur exquise but combined with the previous stagings, the ironical subversion of the subject threatens to tip the confession over the edge of melodrama or slapstick. In another interview, Calle confirms that she did not merely illustrate the narratives but that she also "edited them, producing narratives that are consistent in tone, and, she admits, are as much hers as her subjects" Princenthal: 3n1.
This notion of staging is taken one step further in Forced Entertainment 's adaptation of Douleur exquise for the theatre. Paradoxically, a number of relatively small alterations to Calle's text result in rather different effect. The doubled staging of the theatre performance paradoxically ends up emphasizing the authenticity of the project, in spite of its fictional and postdramatic aspects. The first structural intervention to the text is the cutting of the first two parts of the project, in order to concentrate on the experiences of pain.
The photograph of the red telephone is printed on the flyer handed out at the beginning of the show, in a short prologue the prehistory of the trip to Japan and Calle's method are explained by the actors, Cathy Nader and Robin Arthur. Subsequently, they take turns in reading Calle's story Nader and the anonymous narratives Arthur from a tousled manuscript.
In Nader's lively performance of Calle's versions of the facts, the attention gradually shifts to the act of narrating itself. The theatrical context highlights the use of ironical and self-reflexive terms such as "staging", "setting" and "story" and reinforces the distance between the actress and the role she is reading from the page.
In the narratives read by Arthur, the irony is occasionally accentuated, invoking laughter from the audience which was mostly very quiet on the two occasions that I saw the play. According to the programme, the show is "intimate and simple" but the detached character of the performance makes for a paradoxical viewing experience.
The simple reading of the narratives hampers identification and catharsis. Rather than suffering with the characters on the stage as the Greek origins of the word 'sympathy', 'sum-pathein', designate , what seems to be at stake here is an appropriation of the pain of others, which somehow feels like transgression.
The experience of voyeurism is acute. Moreover, after a while as the performance is quite long and repetitive a sense of boredom sets in. And yet, the emotional effect of the stories all but disappears. The strange cocktail of collective malaise within this theatrical context, the realization of distance and detachment, combined with the emotional core of the narratives and the slow repetition, gradually reintroduce the affect. There is something so perfect about the declenching of the Exquisite Pain text that our strongest desire was, and remains, to let it be there as simply as possible; unfolding, taking both its time and its toll in what may be the least theatrical but the most effective way we can muster.
Etchells Although director Tim Etchells indeed tried to avoid the "theatrical" in the performance in order to let the experiences speak for themselves, to keep the drama "small" so to speak, the theatrical - parody, irony, detachment - pervades and perverts the text.
At the same time, the ordinary, bland setting of the play reinforces the universal aspect of suffering, which is very important for Etchells.
This universal character is retroactively confirmed by a seemingly minor alteration of Calle's text. Forced Entertainment' s play does not end with the news story of suicide and the jar of cream, but with a phrase that strongly juxtaposes the anonymous pain experiences against Calle's "accomplished" process of working through. The trauma is the impossible origin of pain, not the summit. The experience of pain not just installs a "before" and "after" with their different counts, it also sets in motion an ongoing process of fragmentation.
No matter how often the story is recounted, no matter how much a subject tries to endow the experience with sense or purpose by formulating and ordering the fragments, the trauma is a delay-action bomb that splinters the subject. The scar remains more than a memory or mark: it is a permanent weakening of the system.
The installation in Pompidou first and foremost drew attention because of its dimensions. In three very large rooms the panels of part 1 and 3 are hung closely together. In the third room, the set-up is sober and Japanese minimalist: the narratives are embroidered machine stitched on grey, silk-like fabric. As narrative time elapses and Calle's story becomes shorter and shorter the story literally exhausts itself , the black and white contrasts of fabric and letters gradually fade to a play of lighter and darker shades of grey, until background and letters finally coincide.
The design is symbolic and complex. To begin with, the fading of the colour represents to the gradual dulling of pain over time. The use of needle and thread refers to the suturing of a wound or trauma: the scar remains visible, but it takes on the colour of the skin. Princenthal points out the connotation of "fabrication": "Moreover, as in all of Calle's work, there is the nagging question of whether she is deliberately embroidering this story, or even though this seems highly unlikely making it up out of whole cloth.
Finally, the use of needle and thread can also point at the Lacanian notion of "suture", which can be connected to the principle of the project. The concept of suture indicates the problematic process of identification or suturing of a subject with the subject position in a story. This is especially clear in classic Hollywood cinema, in which three subject positions can be distinguished.
Silverman: First of all, "the speaking subject" or the protagonist of the story: in this case Sophie Calle and the I-narrators of the testimonies.
Secondly, "the subject of speech" is the one who is speaking, the subject of enunciation, in other words, the artist bringing everything together in a montage, from a particular point of view that is orchestrated. Finally, the third instance is the "spoken subject", the position of the spectator who is addressed by the narrative.
Suture- theory thus points out that the different subject positions are opposed in relations of power. What can be seen and what not is determined by ideology or by resistance against it. Hence, in the first room, tensions are created between the romantic expectations and the repeated ominous imprint of the word "douleur", between the radical alienation of the red stamp and the recognizable exotism of the travel narrative, between the anachronism of the train journey and the contemporary setting of the installation as opener for M'as-tu vue?.
In the second room the radical break or gap must be sutured by the visitor in a retroactive interpretation of what happened. In the third room the continuity of the narrative is disrupted by the alternation of the stories. The anonymous stories are embedded in the greater narrative whole of the exhibition that belatedly threatens to turn into fiction at every moment.
The layout of the text of the exhibition, finally, agains raises the question concerning the representation of the affect, namely the effect on the spectator or reader and the possibility of empathy or catharsis.
The light grey fabric cover of the book very small compared to the huge dimensions of the exhibition with a small telephone engraved in it, at first brings to mind a little telephone book or agenda. The table of contents is printed in the back in the form of a monthly calendar, with a photograph for each day reinforce this impression.
The colours of the cover grey with red golden letter and edges, inside the colors black, red and white dominate , the format and the ribbon as page marker also remind one of a pocket bible.
The symbolic layout annoys certain readers, "t his compelling content is unfortunately compromised by the book's design, which lacks finesse. The stamped pages feel clumsy and careless, where they should feel emotional sincere and the small format which should evoke intimacy and closeness , lends the work a sense of distance and inaccessibility" Gerber , whereas others experience the booklet as a comforting object. Both the book and the exhibition play on a traditional iconography of suffering, also apparent in the structure of the triptych, in which the moment of suffering is central.
The set-up of the exhibition - the countdown mechanism, the lack of space between the panels, which force the visitor to cue and the large rooms - bore a faint echo of the catholic ritual of the Via Dolorosa, although the effect seems to be rendered ambivalent. Whereas the catholic, through his emotional experience of Christ's suffering, is taken into the community of Christ, which was founded by that suffering and by Christ's sacrifice in order to atone for our sins, the effect of Douleur exquise is less 'pure'.
The contrasts between banality and emotion, between authenticity and fiction, between intimacy and public render us uneasy. According to Kristeva, installations are characterized by their double focus on incarnation on the one hand and on narrativity on the other hand. This could result in a kind of communion of spectator and artwork. In this way, the installation can reconnect to a primary or religious dimension, which has, so Kristeva deplores, largely disappeared from contemporary art under the influence of commerce.
At first sight, Douleur exquise perfectly fits this picture, because of its emphasis on narrativity, the carefully constructed design and because of its doubled intent on indiduality and collectivity. Still, its effect is more complex. In its different forms, Douleur exquise demonstrates that there can no seamless identification with the suffering of others.
The act of looking, of contemplation, may bring about a state between activity and passivity in which the consciousness becomes hyperactive. In my view, this is what Princenthal suggests when she states that it is the very contradictions, gaps and breaches of confidence in Calle's project that ultimately guarantee its 'truth'.
Emotionally detached though her counting game may seem, it is fuelled, and powerfully, by its own contradictions. They begin with the irrational premise that pain can be anticipated, ordered and numbered, and expand to include all the violations of emotional logic - the psychological outrage - that make up the experience of losing love. This madness, alas, is just like life, and so heedless, that you can't help feeling it's best to get out of the way.
Princenthal: 3 The physical discomfort and the paradoxical experience of the spectator in the exhibition or in the theatre as it were offer a kind of weak echo of the confusing and conflicting experiences and memories of intense pain. But, then again, the question remains: can pain be exquisite? Calle's project continually balances on the thin line between emotion and distance, between complexity and banality, between authenticity and exploitation, that is captured in the oxymoron of the project's title, Douleur exquise.
The adjective "exquisite" entails a connotation of refinement and uncovers a masochist undertone in the project. The shame that comes with the telling of and looking at pain not only concerns the exhibitionist, exaggerating and deforming character of narration, but also the mysterious, forbidden enjoyment linked to it. The strict rules and scenario's in Calle's work Macel: 23 and the aesthetic stagings are reminiscent of Deleuze's characterization of masochism.
The exquisite enjoyment of the masochist subject consists in an ultimate form of control in its own staged loss of control because the masochist's submission takes place in a strictly defined, contractually determined context that is aesthetic, theatrical and also humorous the execution of the contract is so extreme that it ultimately undermines and ridicules itself.
The subject loses its grip and is thrown into what Lacan calls the real, the brute, unnameable experience of suffering. The staging in its different forms - in narratives, images - is first of all an imaginary attempt to regain control which entails alienation. It is the second degree of order, the aesthetic staging by Calle in the project as installation which creates a tension between affect and concept.
The painful experience is lived through, analysed, manipulated and exploited by the suffering, therapeutic and artistic subject, for and through the spectator. The view from a window.
A green Mercedes. The man tells stories from many different people; each a snapshot of sorrow, big or small, that takes its place in a growing catalogue of suffering, break-ups, humiliations, deaths, bad dentistry and love letters that never arrive. In this simple and intimate performance Forced Entertainment explore how language, memory and forgetting move to contain, preserve or erase events; how people come to terms with trauma. Exquisite Pain is about love, loss, and the stories we tell ourselves when things have gone wrong.
Temps D'images, Warsaw, Poland. Cambridge Junction, Cambridge, UK. Uppsala Stadsteater, Uppsala, Sweden. The Point, Eastleigh, UK. Teatro i, Milan, Italy. La Filature, Mulhouse, France. Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France.
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