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HALLUCINATIONS ON THE "SHAMANISTIC IMPROVISED
PRESENCE" BY KEITH HENNESSY
By Peter Stamer
"What's a shaman? – It's a medicine man of the
Indians. He gets into, uhm, PEYOTE trance, and it gets deeper and
deeper, and then he has a VISION, and the whole tribe is HEALED. All
cultures have a version of it, Greeks have THEATRE and Gods. Indians say the first
shaman invented sex, they call it the one which makes you crazy." (Jim Morrison
in the feature "The Doors", directed by Oliver Stone)
PEYOTE
There is a sign next to the studio entrance: "After
finishing rehearsal, please switch off the coffee machine." A remnant of the
studio's use as rehearsal space for Burgtheater actors, for pretending bodies.
Ones that have to be doped with caffeine to be able to maintain the
concentration needed for acting. Acting: to play as if a body would be
different. Coffeed bodies, resurrecting from the coffin of their being by
make-believe. Dancers don't use anything but water, pure, plain water to
moisten their tissue. They use their bodies to get it on, get high
head-over-heels. When coming into the studio, they would lie on the floor,
genuine, true 100% cotton around their waists, sweat-sucking cotton in all
colours, stretching their ligaments like untearable fabric. Which sign told
them to improvise their projected shamanic presence like THAT? Does one need
smooth, well-moistened ligaments to obtain presence?
Practising the body propels it with endorphines,
stimulating well-being, happy stretching. Body-produced drugs outperform peyote, this is what happy shiny faces on the floor seem to say which would
have to throw up rainbows if they had taken mescalinesque pieces of a certain
Indian cactus. A psychotropic impact leading to a shamanistic alleluia. The
name "shaman" is not Indian, it's said to be Siberian and denotes magicians who
have the capacity to transform energy, enabling them to look into the invisible
world. Into the animated world of spirits, not Disneyland. Into presence, not
representation. Artists have always wished for an energetic seventh sense that
makes them lucid, makes them see what is not visible for the others. That's why
they are called visionary artists. Jim Morrison, yes, Antonin Artaud, of
course, and the greatest of them all, Joseph Beuys, the greatest artist-shaman
ever. Meeting a coyote, its anima (soul) in their ground-breaking performance
"I like America and America likes me". Beuys is said not to have seen a single
grain of American soil. On his arrival at the airport, Beuys had himself
completely wrapped in felt, blind-folded, blind-felted, the heavy fabric solely
being taken off for the week-long performance. He shared America with the
untameable, uncalculable, speechless coyote only, cherishing the same presence
with the virile animal, jointly enjoying space, voicelessness, animality.
Dancing with the prairie's Steppenwolf, a wanderer
through worlds, Beuys paid a mourning tribute to America's native Indians that
have been deceived, abused, killed, extinguished by their conquerors. Blind
transgressions from one country into the other, from one state to the other.
Every trans-action, trance-action has to cross a state line, a borderline that
delimits at least two worlds, borders of continents, countries, but also of visibilities.
Yet the logic of borders is a tricky one. To which of the realms does the
borderline itself belong? To neither, one would say, since it has to separate
two territories. Alas, that's impossible, it has to belong to one at least,
since it couldn't be crossed from one side. And since a border can be crossed
from both sides, so it belongs to both. That's futile, the other would say,
since then how can it divide one from the other, exclude the one from the
other? The answer is a paradox: a border separates what it unites, and unites
what it separates.
VISION
This is why shamanic experience has border visions,
visions on the border, in the twilight zone of both reality and dream.
Half-closed eyes that shouldn't disconnect with what is going on around, observing
though but not participating in the everydaily. Connecting and separating the
body with the realms, the other bodies, the whereabouts around it. This is why
the participants are asked to close their eyes, for the sense of vision has to
fade into the afterglow of the objects' shadows on the retina until they vanish
completely. In their place, the eye sees flaws on the lens, sees thin veins of
its blood circulation system that nourishes the apparatus, sees itself seeing.
The gaze is internalized, watching through the
border of a closed eyelid that at first twilights objects having become a
negative imprint, then the eye makes them disappear, yet their presence is
around, but invisible. The eyelid unites by separating states of vision and
de-vision. Opening it again, the eye's gaze gets in touch with the other,
acknowledging the other's presence. The gaze gets in touch, touches the other.
Everything with a glimpse of the eyelid, twenty times in a minute, a billion
times in a lifetime. The outcome of all that, of acknowledging the invisible
presence of the other in myself, of my self-otherness, what comes out of these
eyes are – tears. Tears of the overwhelming. The eye has become a magic finger
with the tip of which one body softly touches the other.
HEALING
Where theory's eyes observe without a touching
gaze, they are blind. A theory of shamanism is impossible, for theory would
imply separating object from observation, creating an anatomical theatre where
the body becomes a corpse of dead knowledge. Instead, the dead are healers. A
tribe in Burkina Faso believes that a human being, even though one can feel
lonely, is never alone, since its ancestors' spirits are always present. The
dead are healers, whereas the head is a dealer of false sensations, using information
about the world instead of having the world informing oneself. The world is
full of me: "I inhale and exhale planets." (BK)
The whole world dances through the lungs every two
seconds. Full of worlds, lack of words: a dumb body lies on the floor, no
stretching needed, eyes closed, system deactivated. The body yet feels the eyes
of two others touching it, then twenty fingertips, then two hands, then the
weight of two whole witnessing bodies is treating the corpse under them,
turning, tortoising, torticolliding, distorting it as if they were trying to
reanimate it. To bring life back to the lifeless bones by squeezing breath into
it. When coming back on two feet, sensing luscious ligaments, tempting tissue,
joyful joints, the corpse has healed the world.
THEATRE
The shaman's trip strips attention bare from its
striving for difference to become pure awareness of the end in the end. To make
death possible, yet not in the sense of putting an end to existence, but to
overcome it. The end of it is not meta-physics, but corporeality: "Shamanism,
in a general usage, refers to the ritual/spiritual practices of working with
unseen forces, of energy, of transforming space and time, of shifting meaning
and perspective. Performance often engages the same intentions," says Keith
Hennessy on the ImPulsTanz website, since performance aims for the production
of corporeal presence. Coyote-Peyote. To the contrary, the presence of theatre
most often engages the presence of the past, or in Augustinus' terms – memory.
Memory lends but a hand to representation that sees (again) what the eye, the I
already knows.
Theatre, a scopophilic dispositive, focusses on
eyesight in order to present again, and again, and again, to re-present what
has already been translated into signs. Signs are products of the past,
trans-lating a sensation into what history has taught, already knows. Signs
save humanity from being forgotten. What the singular body doesn't remember
shall be restored by theatre that safeguards the humans from extinction. This
is why theatre is conservative, since it conserves history by (re-)presenting
the past, translating it into presence. But the shaman-performer is not a
translator, rather s/he provides conditions to empty objects, processes,
language, thoughts from being a sign for something else. To perform the
"presence of presence", both in the audience's and the players' bodies. To
perform what Augustinus, the oldest shaman ever, names: contemplation.
(August 20, 2008)
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