The aesthetics of gaping

Much has been written on the “imperial gaze” (to paraphrase Marie Louise Pratt’s title Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation of 1992, a critique of imperialist hegemonic seeing and writing about “Others”) of European societies encountering and subduing as well as subverting other cultures, imposing the colonialists’ views on the whole world. Included in this condemnation are notions of the imperialistic cultures’ indulgence to project their fantasies (of the “savage”, the “natural”, the “cannibal”, the “uncivilized”, etc.) onto the reality of others, blinding them to the truth of that reality or the indigenous views of the world. This imperial gaze also incorporates the concept of the marvelous, including that of the uncanny and the occluded (either in terms of a lurking horror or the paradisical state of origin or the wisdom of the ages/sages/of the East etc.). However, taking theatre and performance as a means to inscribe and inculcate an audience with a certain viewpoint and by perceiving the audience as a passive recipient, the instructive or pedagogical aim and result of performing otherness may become a tool for understanding: by having the audience marvel at the unknown and thus satisfying the audience’s desire for new and spectacular experiences, forms of exoticizing the other or the self may have positive effects.

I have chosen the metaphor of gaping, as it indicates a close reference to perception and recognition through the image of jaw-dropping wonder. It also captures the experience of something unheard of, unseen, or unexpected–indeed miraculous. This unmediated attitude of amazement and astonishment, of leaving behind one’s habitus of thinking and feeling, may at first overwhelm me, but I will soon be able to control and compare it to familiar things. An audience might react tearfully to a sentimental melodrama, which in my opinion serves as a good indicator for the potential of a transformative attitude: the person who empathizes with a beggar’s or a cripple’s fate in a performance might recall this experience during their next encounter with the thus afflicted (neurological research would bear out this reflex of an emotive memory inscription from the performative to the social action domain). The question relevant to the performance under discussion remains: does it have to be an expert, a real beggar or cripple, to move us thus?

To continue this trajectory of the emotive future reflex and transformative power of amazement: a now famous case has been reported and much discussed in relation to the Christian theology of body organs effecting emotional stances. Greenblatt in his Marvelous Possessions (1991, with this old-fashioned spelling intended) refers to the Huguenot travel writer de Lery, who in the late 16th century observed the possession rituals of South American Tupi groups. He reported that at first he was annoyed by the ungodly wailing noises of women during certain rituals. However, he found himself taken aback and enthused over their fantastic dances and singing, ultimately hailing rather than demonizing these practices. He also described how he was carried away emotionally (echoing the writings of Michel Leiris about women’s possession in the zar-cult of Ethiopia where he felt a much stronger impulse to have intercourse with the possessed–blatantly ugly old women–rather than to write about them). Greenblatt relates de Lery’s diary entries to the notions of amazement that church fathers such as Albertus Magnus already read as a movement of the blood capillaries leading to the heart. Thus, the feeling of amazement became (in the form of miracles) a tool for leading believers to practice the “right” way.

My point here is that even the much maligned spectacularization along the lines of exoticizing or orientalizing performance practices (an anonymous voice labeled all such endeavours of the collective theatre directorship “poornography”, meaning to make the poor parts of the spectacle, to heap injury upon injustice, as it were; see Qantara website) may not just cement old prejudices or lead to the satisfaction of desires born from our own imagination of otherness, such as of the savage, the native, the oriental, the woman, etc. Of course we are always on the look-out for new sensations–sensory and spectacular–if the super-ego does not intervene in the form of the admonition: „but as intellectual, you better not have such thoughts, emotions, or desires“. Yet, all such censoriousness obeys the laws of the taboo, which exists only to be broken, as Freud and Bataille have shown us.