Conversation

Igor, Tomas and Virginie

FRKS - A conversation with Igor Cardellini, Tomas Gonzalez and Virginie Jemmely

Virginie Jemmely: Attending the rehearsals, I was struck by the references we share, which thinks of identity as a notion of the multiple, as an assemblage, a patchwork of influences just like Marry Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), or the multitude in Donna Haraway's Staying with the Trouble (2016). How do you explore this idea of multiple identity in FRKS?

Tomas Gonzalez: It's true that the writings you mention, in particular Donna Haraway and her notion of the holobiont, particularly inspired us. Also the way Jack Halberstam uses Frankenstein's monster and the seams of his body to question his uniqueness and the way society produces its own everything.

VJ: Different fragments which, interwoven, finally form a unity?

Igor Cardellini: Absolutely. Donna Haraway insists that we are made up of a whole range of different beings, and that we are not one and the same individual. In the play, we materialize this first by dissociating the voice over from what's happening on stage. This voice cannot be associated with any of the silhouettes. They go through transitory states, are composite beings, and their costumes, for example, seem to assign them to one identity and then another. Some of these costumes blur the boundary between the object and the living, between the inanimate and the animate. Dissociation underpins the structure of the performance. In other words, there's this disembodied voice that shares a little of its intimate life, and which is associated with strong physical images.

VJ: Sometimes these interweavings are harmonious, and other times there's a squeak, creating friction.

TG: The aim of this montage is to juxtapose these two dimensions rather than to create an illustrative relationship between them. Similarly, the disembodied narrative voice creates confusion about the narrator's identity.

VJ: A fluid disorder.

TG: Yes, there's no fixed essence, but a moving space that summons up a kind of agglomeration of signs.

VJ: It reminds me of fashion, where you work with a moodboard, fed by references that are sometimes very disparate. In the collection - where they form a whole - you can feel their intertwining, but also, sometimes, a struggle, which is what interests me.

Element scénographique FRKS, © Pauls Rietums

IC: We also work with a moodboard, or rather a tool between the moodboard and the storyboard. It's very useful because we work with people who handle different media. It helps us communicate, because theater and performance is always very much a collective process. It creates sort of blocks per scene, with heterogeneous elements: bits of story we've written, sketches, visual references . . . It allows us to think about the drama and visualize what's going to happen on stage.

VJ: And what happens on stage is the staging of a monstrosity that I see in a form of duality. I'm reminded of the designer Sonia Rykiel, where she says you have to accept the recto-verso, give life to images that fight, and leave the disturbance, the sense of the senseless, and even the counter-sense.

TG: In the writing, it's something we do by proposing story fragments assembled like a cubist collage rather than a completely linear narrative. It resonates with the idea of monstrosity. Things that shouldn't normally come together, or don't fit together, do.

VJ: Is this playfulness reflected in the costumes?

IC: Yes, by fragmenting the ensembles, for example by assigning the top of a certain outfit to performer X, and then the bottom to Y. It creates the illusion of impossible body postures.

VJ: You sometimes quote Paul B. Preciado and Jack Halberstam, where the monster, or body-in-transition, allows us to destabilize norms, blur gender and redefine the boundaries of the human.

TG: One of the points of entry at the origin of the project lies in the need to reclaim monstrosity, to turn pathologization or stigmatization on its head, to change its very meaning.

VJ: A way to twist archetypes?

IC: In a way, since we're reappropriating and hijacking the form of the freak show, a historically violent format because it reduced people to an anomaly, exploited them and assigned them to the margins. We work on processes of identity blurring, as in the last scene where we evoke multi-headed monsters and create an illusion in order to shape impossible bodies.

VJ: An identity that is constructed in acts, in the camp for Susan Sontag or through stylized acts for Judith Butler?

IC: The theater stage is a powerful playground for making visible and showing the socially constructed, performative dimension of identities. When you're queer – a stigmatized identity –, you experience almost daily micro-coming-outs that reduce you to that identity. This positionality leads you to perceive norms acutely, and to see how arbitrary, violent and essentializing they are. Whereas when you're straight, because you fit the norm, you can walk around in public hand in hand with the person you're in a relationship with without even having to think about it.

VJ: Which brings Butler to the parody of identity that would prevent the dominant culture from invoking naturalized or essential identities. What use of parody do you make in FKRS?

TG: We have quite a few tools that are sort of variations on the role that parody could play: exaggeration, irony and absurdity. They all function as ways of producing this de-essentialization.

VJ: As does your aesthetic of horror, a camp exaggeration as a leverage to subvert dominant codes?

IC: In the play, we borrow certain devices from horror: strangeness, distortion of the body, appearance, disappearance, silences and their sonic aspects. Horror and sound also play an important role in the piece as a whole.

“The theater stage is a powerful playground for making visible and showing the socially constructed, performative dimension of identities.”

VJ: To guide exaggeration and excessiveness?

TG: There's a revelation of deception through exaggeration of the sounds attached to horror, yes, but it can also come through completely different means.

VJ: Kitsch?

TG: One of the things we're working on, for example, in sound, and which is pretty kitsch, is the mickeymousing or underscoring process, that is to say, this way, in horror films sometimes, or in cartoons of underlining the action, the moments of tension, “Ta Na Na Na Na Na Na huuuuh!” It makes us laugh a lot.

VJ: Yes, in this quest for influences that flirt with bad taste.

IC: It made us conjure up images from horror films. Like that shower of blood at the beginning of Blade (1998), or in Carrie (1976), when she's covered in blood. References that inspired us.

Costume FRKS, © Chaïm Vischel

VJ: In my work, I often think of the process that links creator and creation. Like a duel, sometimes in the shade, sometimes in the sun, where one makes the other disappear. In order to give birth, there is a transmission of flesh and soul from one creature to another, where the first dissolves in order to give body to the second. In one of her books, Rykiel says she feels stripped, dispossessed. She says to her creations: “You've stolen me, I'm nothing, you're everything, you wear what I've made with your arms, your breasts, your legs . . .” In FRKS, you are both the creator of the monster and the monster itself.

TG: Yes, clearly, I think it's one of our first projects that's so intimate, where we put ourselves on stage in that way. In other words, we're these freaks. And I think that, even if it's very literal, it was also a need for positioning.

VJ: Yes, in line with this questioning of what makes us visible or, on the contrary, invisible.

IC: Exactly. As with the clothing, we work on this dimension with the scenography, a 16 x 12-meter silk fabric that changes state as the show progresses, sometimes making the performers visible, sometimes concealing them. How do you approach this aspect in your work? Does the garment reveal or mask? I think you're talking about costume as talisman. Can you tell us a little more about that?

VJ: Yes, where I see clothing as borrowing codes that suggest a type of context, identity, personality. Taking hold of it in this idea of self-performance would be a way of integrating its transformative power.

TG: Yes, it's fascinating. In a similar way, our interest in urban planning and architecture in our site-specific performances or scenography in theaters follows this desire to situate power in what surrounds us. Through narrative or installation devices, we always seek to reveal an emancipatory potential.