Performance Review by David Matthews
“Dying : Young”
‘Tumor Foderato d’Infanzia’ (‘Tumor’s Pall of Infancy’)
at the
Teatro Garibaldi, Palermo – 1st/2nd July 2006
Pt. 1 – Kantor and Cusumano
Pt. II – Tumor Foderato d’Infanzia
David Matthews
With Andrea Cusumano, Alexa Reid and Roberto Sanchez-Camus
Pt. I – Kantor and Cusumano
This first section of the review takes the form of a profile of Andrea Cusumano, director of Tumor Foderato d’Infanzia; his working methods in general and in regard to this piece specifically. It is the result of an email conversation with DM, and through interviews with Alexa Reid and Roberto Sanchez-Camus, collaborators on the performances in Palermo.
Art and Kantor
Like Kantor, an artist who worked in several different media throughout his career, Cusumano aims for a form of total art in his theatrical work; a point where the borders between disciplines begin to fade, and their individual qualities combine, becoming more than the sum of their parts. He would most likely reject definition as a ‘director’, ‘painter’, ‘sculptor’ or any combination of terms as forcefully as he sought to break down the barriers between performer and designer roles in his collaborators.
Cusumano’s introduction to Kantor came in the aftermath of an exhibition in New York in 1997. A critic who had reviewed the Dead Class years before in the New York Times noted a similarity of aesthetic between the two artists’ work, although Cusumano had not encountered Kantor before; and recommended that he visit the Polish director’s work. His exhibition had included a representation of a Sicilian puppet theatre, where the audience comprised a class of blind children on swings. This would not be the last point of almost eerie confluence in their respective works; years later Cusumano visited the room where Kantor had died, to find, hanging on the window, a little Sicilian puppet.
Although the influence of Kantor may have been present before, Tumor Foderato d’Infanzia was Cusumano’s most explicitly Kantor-inspired work to date. Having extensively studied the director, he was successful in persuading Mira Rychlicka to return to the stage after a long absence and to revisit the character of Tumor, whom she had first played for Kantor over twenty years before. The relationship which Cusumano built with her, through the research and rehearsal for the piece, brought him closer to Kantor than any book or document he had examined previously.
Unfaithful Texts
An early decision made by Cusumano in his approach toward Kantor and the Dead Class was to adhere to his precursor’s methodology, but to be unfaithful to his texts. The original Dead Class was a composite text, primarily based on ‘Brain Cancer’ but also referencing Ferdydurke and Schulz; and the text for Tumor Foderato d’Infanzia would also be born of similarly mixed and uncertain parentage. Text as a dramaturgical element in ‘Tumor Foderato…’ was low on the list of priorities, and where it was encountered, the employment was anarchic and playful. For the most part, Mira Rychlicka was the sole speaker, communications between the cast of schoolchildren and artists being non-verbal. The text that emerged through the encouragement and editing of Cusumano was a tapestry of half-remembered fragments from the Dead Class, an un-sacred fugue of European languages; and performed as the mental disintegration of a polyglot mind, a cathartic babbling and an outpouring of argot. When I quizzed Cusumano on his decision to work outside of his languages, in this case beginning with Rychlicka’s native Polish, he assured me that in this form of theatre, the words are led by the actions, and as such the communication almost precedes the incidence of language. In addition, switching between languages has always afforded him further insight when formulating ideas. By increasing the abundance and complexity of languages channelled through Tumor, an attempt was made to move beyond linguistic communication; as if to build taller fences and stronger walls around the language-prison could transform the gaoled into the gaoler. Texts in performance, for Cusumano, are fonts of inspiration and finally containers of meaning; but malleable, ever-changing and a means-to-an-end rather than a constant crystallized code.
His painter’s eye was much in evidence in the performances of Tumor Foderato d’Infanzia, in the approach to the construction of stage pictures and in the emphasis placed on the visual aspects of the piece. By his own admission, this was a predominantly visual and performance-led piece. His first act when envisaging ‘Tumor…’ was to sketch and to contemplate objects, to approach theatre the way a painter approaches images, and to allow text and character to emerge later in the process.
… and Tumor
Despite the presence of Rychlicka, functioning as a link to Kantor and a living archive in effect, the Tumor who appeared on stage at the Garibaldi was a changed personage from the Tumor of fifteen years ago. Cusumano’s Tumor was a solo in effect, a monologue whose interaction with other characters, when it came, only served to highlight his solitude. Where the Tumor created by Kantor had been a coherent and psychologically defined character sphere, Cusumano aimed for a more metaphorical approach to the character, finding him to be his own self-defining and self-perpetuating world.
Tumor, a supporting character in the Dead Class, was given his first spotlight since ‘Brain Cancer’. Cusumano chose to focus his new play on this character exclusively, although other figures from Kantor’s oeuvre made flitting cameos. In addition, he found the character to be indivisible from the personality of Mira Rychlicka, and the major challenge to be re-discovering Tumor in her mind and body. In order to do this they built a candid working relationship, fostering the trust necessary for Rychlicka to re-engage with a character buried decades before. This process of exhuming Tumor was a gradual one, and came towards the end of the main dramaturgical process (was indeed still in evidence as late as the press night); as Rychlicka’s approach to character is emotive and empathetic, rather than coldly intellectual. Cusumano carefully constructed a reality for the character-world of Tumor to inhabit; first the set, then the dramaturgy, finally the act.
In directing her back toward Tumor, Cusumano insisted on action over thought. Attempts to psychoanalyse the character, to talk him back into being, would probably have been futile; and would not have fitted in with the methodology of experiment and deed which Cusumano favours. The constant relationship between objects and characters (the interactions with the young students in particular) served to re-define Tumor.
Cusumano was most conscious of the ‘triple identity’ of Tumor/Actress/Rychlicka and the task of carefully re-focusing the lenses between these roles until the performance was shown in clear relief. For him, the task of remembering was an active one, less a ‘work of finding memories… not looking for the past but working in the present ‘hic et nunc’ and by doing this finding your past again. By encouraging Rychlicka to re-make as much as remember Tumor, Cusumano ensured that his was a work of original creative forces, rather than a Kantor homage or museum piece.
Methodology
Andrea Cusumano employed a variety of Sicily and UK based emerging artists to realise his vision for ‘Tumor Foderato…’ fostering an atmosphere of creative collaboration and collective ownership. Operating without designated roles, and under his direction, these artists assisted in the design and construction of the set from his preparatory drawings, and ultimately performed in it alongside Rychlicka. This holistic approach employing non-professional performers engendered a strong ensemble aesthetic. As with Kantor, Cusumano favoured the use of ‘ordinary people’ for his actor/designers and placed much emphasis on the importance of these roles being combined in the individual.
His background in the visual arts also gave rise to the often very beautiful ‘paintings on stage’; moments of startling visual interaction between performers and set which functioned almost as silent choruses in the transitions between scenes. As mentioned earlier, the origination of ‘Tumor Foderato…’ followed the pattern of space – object – person – story. Experimental methods such as this which effectively reverses the way in which most theatre is commonly made, remain experimental due to the risk, and the need for a high degree of trust between performers and directors where there is no safety net of story to fall back upon. Where the risk pays off, as it did in ‘Tumor Foderato d’Infanzia’, is where the collective has kept its nerve and allowed creativity to flow, to endure the lean times when the gears refuse to mesh and overall to trust in the emergence of the work.
Characters, in addition to Tumor, were developed through the found objects which composed the set and properties. Cusumano rejected any Stanislavskian internalisation of character, preferring to allow the characters the time and space to come to inhabit their surroundings. The notion of developing character in this way is entirely consistent with his thoughts on space and story; a character developed in isolation and transported to the Garibaldi would be recognisable for the artificial graft that it was, whereas characters developed in situ would in some sense belong to the space, be of the space, in fact. Repertory actors will often use an article of costume or a prop as a means of approaching a character. It would be too simplistic to associate this technique with Cusumano’s methodology, but the example does serve to highlight the special insights that may be gained from assuming a character from without rather than assembling it from within. The introspective, analytical approach of high naturalism would be incompatible with the action-driven, sensory playfulness of Cusumano’s method. In place of any construct of character, naturalness was to be desired in the journey toward name and narrative; not striving to become it but to react instinctively towards it. As elsewhere, the emphasis was on action over enquiry.
Setting designated time in the space, but not defining how this time be used, allowed the designers/performers the freedom to innovate and create at will. Collaborators reported that rehearsal and creation would break out sporadically and spontaneously as the mood, and the objects, took them. This clearly would have contributed to the fostering of a group dynamic and allowed the designer/performers to find their own rhythm within the creative process. Indeed Kantor prized intensity and Cusumano with his insistence that the designer/performers immerse themselves in the imaginative world they were creating was adopting a method that had been shown to yield astonishing results. The rehearsals were made a safe space for improvisation with objects and characters, with experiment actively encouraged, rather than a talk/think approach.
Pt. II – ‘Tumor Foderato d’Infanzia’
The following narrative is a review of the final rehearsals and performances of ‘Tumor Foderato d’Infanzia’, which took place in early July 2006.
Place and Space
Concealed by an iron shuttered concrete façade, dust-caked from occasional drifting breezes at the height of a hot summer, the ruins of the Teatro Garibaldi played host to the re-emergence of a Kantor character and actor not seen on stage for fifteen years. Buried in a back street of Palermo, the theatre was inconspicuous from the narrow road and often confused for the larger and better maintained Garibaldi on the other side of the city; the triggering of whose alarm by thieves frequently brought the Carabinieri to the old Teatro, where to be explained that there was nothing to steal. A place often mistaken, often missed; an appropriate place, then, for an excavation of memory, a re-assembling of pictures, and in the shell of the theatre imperceptibly acted upon by the attrition of the turning seasons – a bittersweet reckoning with approaching death.
The Teatro Garibaldi had been the plaything of the General’s wife; her portrait adorned the centre point of the proscenium, flanked on either side by the dates and names of European cites as they fell to her husband’s armies. These adornments were now flaked and discoloured but still quite the best preserved part of the theatre, which had been emptied of its furniture and chattels over the years, subsequently burned in the streets as part of an ancient Palermo tradition associated with St Joseph’s day. Having served as a boxing hall, a cabaret, a porn cinema and finally a refuse tip, the theatre was taken on by Matteo Bavera and Director Carlo Cecchi, whose success in the first few years prompted an invitation to join the Union des Teatre de l’Europe network; the Teatro Garibaldi remains an important member.
Like most opera houses, the Garibaldi boasted two walls of small private boxes, abutting the stage, each no more than three metres square. Whatever seating had filled the auditorium was replaced by a raked scaffold supporting rough and mismatching planks which were the accommodation for audiences of several hundred. Many of the boxes displayed the evidence of their battering by the elements and the years. Layers of paint and even frayed lining paper clung to the stone in places. The front-pieces of the boxes, once presumably constructed from timber and velvet had long since burned or been looted, which gave the theatre the box-crate appearance of a half-built edifice, rather than the half-destroyed one it actually was. Sunlight entered through the gaps between the new cantilevered roof which straddled the snaggle-toothed remains of the old one; a smart and spartan bonnet perched on top of an ancient, decrepit head. Beyond the recent additions in the entrance hall there were no doors, backstage being cloaked with hanging fabric. Never more so than in the minutes before the performances did the theatre take on the charged potential of an old temple dressed for a new ritual.
Cusumano has commented on his preference for spaces with a story to tell, although his work should not be defined as site-specific. The space is a further source of inspiration, but a highly codified and narrative-loaded space like the Garibaldi brings its own set of challenges as regards a domineering influence on the work. The transportability of work is an important part of Cusumano’s methodology, as evidenced by the germination of ‘Tumor…’ in the Cricoteca at Krakow earlier in the year. For this reason it was important that the Garibaldi influence the work but not imprison it.
A family of stray cats, ubiquitous to the market places of the old city, swarmed in the garden of the theatre, occasionally loping across the seating rig to a high vantage point, there to sleep in the shade, eager both to examine the unusual proceedings and concede no territory to the interlopers. The garden was where much of the building was done: the burning and staining of drapes, the construction of the womb-chair, repairs to the assorted found objects bastardized into Heath-Robinson-esque assemblies, half statue and half machine.
Stage pictures
Mira Rychlicka, assuming the role of Tumor after a long hiatus, was supported by a cast from Palermo and invited guests from Central Saint Martins College London; who had led the building of props and set assembled from found objects in the Kantor tradition, although ‘props and set’ is perhaps to dismiss these creations too lightly for in many instances these hybrids were performer-marionettes in their own right. Thus whilst Rychlicka’s solo expertise was at the heart of the performance, the visual spectacle of the found-and-made creations made for startling stage pictures under Andrea Cusumano’s direction.
The group of schoolchildren encountered by Tumor were frequently involved in the embodiment of these pictures. On leaving the relative realism of their schoolroom, they were next to be seen on a raised area of stage-rear, low lit in green shadows, yoked at their necks with a tangle of rope and dragged in the wake of a powerful man-bird, the character of Jakob we would encounter later. His wings were fashioned from timber and rough cloth, the trailing fronds communicating with his tattered clothes, straggling beard and the bonds restraining the children. With slow beating of wings, he dragged them inexorably across the stage.
Soon to follow in their wake was Tumor, who happening across a series of puppets scattered on the stage, tugging on ropes, brought them to stand at attention. Tumor delighted in the raising of these corpses and gossiped to them animatedly, until the puppets took on a life of their own and quite without his assistance began to spring up from the ground. Behind his back they appeared, latex, wood and sacking arms waving clumsily, until finally the largest and most intimidating of their number rose to confront Tumor face-to-face, whose courage failing, scampered from the stage. With his terrified exit the students slowly reappeared and stood behind their corresponding puppets, gently manipulating arms and heads; so life was seen to stir ghosts as the children communed with their ancestors in the Dead Class and rehearsed the corpses they would become.
If the fore-stage, then, at floor level was the place of life and speech, the raised rear-stage was a dreamlike necropolis, where the ghosts of memory silently intertwined. Physically and metaphorically it was the more distant, the more unknowable: a buried part of the unconscious where men wore wings and the dead rose up from their graves. Where better to be closer to death than in the husk of the Teatro Garibaldi, in a town where blood ran in the streets at the height of the mafia killings in 1990, where the bodies of the ancient dead stand sentinel in the subterranean Capuchin catacombs; in a country suffocated by the blood-guilt and death-lust of High Catholicism? Here one was an invader in death, a grave-robber hemmed in by the blackness of the void, oppressed by an imaginative world, a city and a country that found its repose in abnegations of existence. Tumor’s memories were the eye of a death-storm whose winds guttered the candles of Palermo’s days and gave fresh smart to the grief of her centuries.
Mira Rychlicka – Remembering Tumor
Where had Tumor been for fifteen years and what had he been doing? Returned to the school room, he continued a jabbering monologue, trying to make sense of the trick that was seeming played, the mystery of his own existence unravelling.
Into a hall of receding mirrors he plunged, for here was Tumor, the prototype from ‘The Dead Class, itself a meditation on memory and remembering, compelled to remember again who and how he was; and here was Rychlicka exhuming from her memories a character from decades previously, his idiosyncrasies and reminiscences, and somewhere among all of these interlocking and overlapping spheres, the ghost of Kantor, observing and remembering in the performance of his protégé. Here too was Cusumano mediating and guiding, himself on stage in the guise of a sinister janitor given to moments of mournful drifting song. Somehow in the corpse, the memories of a life remain, as surely as the meals are preserved in the bones. For a brief hour, new blood ran through the corpse of ‘The Dead Class’ and it spoke, memories incohesive and evocative, passionate, protean and wild came tumbling out. Such was the huge responsibility placed on the shoulders of Rychlicka, to channel the ghosts of the play as she had known it, to revere the memories and to lend them body again; and what a risk she took with her own recollections, what bravery to herself tread closer to the paths of the dead and to speak with them again across the years. The greater risk than returning to the stage after so long an absence, to risk failure again after so long, was to open the mind and the memory to parts of itself that must remain closed to the living, to draw nearer to the dead, and in doing so to come back changed, perhaps harmed by the journey; to have known again absence and grief, the dying of lost years, and the cold blast of the desert that lies between the last breath and the portal to purgatory.
And to have in one’s defence only the actor’s tools of detachment and make-believe. Her absence from the stage had not seemed to dim Rychlicka’s powers. Her characterisation was in constant flux, as if Tumor were testing at the walls of prison, finding gaps in the mortar and loose bars. During rehearsals she moderated the performance to the mood, her own and that of the cast and the theatre, occasionally experimenting with bits of stage-business which largely disappeared as the performance nights drew closer. A routine with a skull suspended from twine, (did she recognise the face?), had been prominent in the arc of her performance but dwindled and diminished as opening night approached, until finally it became an organic progression of thoughts, a seemingly unrehearsed system of gestures cogent with Tumor’s investigations. The ability to reduce in a part, to make smaller and entrust to the audience the duty of ascribing meaning, is a sure sign of great confidence in an actor and a role inhabited rather than assumed.
In this fashion, Rychlicka’s performance became less kinetic as the energy increased, as she put further emphasis on thought and on silence. The hectic physicality of the restless Tumor was still present, but did not rely on actorly mannerisms, any hiding behind the short-hand characterisation of the repertory actor. In the final performances she radiated energy that was never permitted escape; a communion with the crowd in the live context, but having seen several of the rehearsals it became obvious how this energy had been built from within, and not borrowed from adrenalin and an expectant audience on the night. Her energy was of the sort that one senses rather than feels, had the focused potential of electrical charge as opposed to the messy outpouring of fire. Her achievement was made all the more remarkable in that Tumor does not interact in any meaningful way with any of the other characters, there could be no re-acting, no reliance on the other to carry the energy and to make the scene. Tumor, and Rychlicka, had to function in a vacuum, the living among the dead, which made the task more than merely the tuning up of a great actor for a difficult part; but became harbingers of the struggle to come, which all individuals must face alone, in the hour of their own death.
Kantor(‘s) Happening(s)
The climax of the show arrived with Tumor’s dream sequence. Having fallen asleep amidst the children whilst watching a film, he was manoeuvred in his school desk to centre stage; from where his sleeping memories would swirl around him. The boxes that made up the side walls of the theatre were suddenly alive with activity, the found objects that had before been ornaments in these spaces now manipulated by performers who had seemingly emerged from the flaking plaster.
The dream sequence began at a low intensity; people rose from beds, removed sheets and set to work at library desks. Before long, however, the sound effects became a crunching discordant melee of distorted screams and falling bombs; the gantries were washed in red light. A be-goggled man, drawn into a competition of wills over a library book was distracted by a pretty adolescent girl playing tennis and played out a creepy flirtation at an upstairs room. Another man, lame and walking with crutches had his wounds dressed by a catatonic nurse. Two young men drunkenly exchanged blows underneath a bare light-bulb. The dream sequence was book-ended by Jakob, firstly creeping in to examine and stroke the hair of the sleeping Tumor, before beginning the destruction of his imaginative world; later to emerge as a slave master, with his familiar network of nooses, leading the children out of the auditorium and away, to what?
The dream sequence employed the frenzied anarchy of the ‘happening’, a continuing point of reference for Kantor, but there was also narrative at work. Where the activities of the characters seemed a series of randomised non-sequiturs, it was in their interactions that personas and stories began to emerge. For the most part they were figures from Tumor’s past: Pataculo, whose mischief making he had earlier identified now appeared to pace the stage and periodically collapse to the floor. Jakob, who had haunted stage-rear earlier in the play, was now an active participant in the story. Played at a rising intensity, with performers contributing to the nightmarish soundscape by hammering on doors and furniture, the dream sequence rapidly transformed into a bad-trip replete with the threat and helplessness of a contretemps with sensory overload. And, at the height of the maelstrom, it broke, and the tide washed back. The soundscape moderated to a harmony of wakefulness, the deformed and demented characters shrank back into their boxes and Tumor stirred from sleep.
The dream sequence allowed new insight into Tumor, before appearing as a slightly doddery buffoon, always talking to himself, always at the mercy of the world around him. But in his dreams, there was caustic violence and frenzied lust, the mad abandon of younger years and fantasies waiting to be played out. If Tumor’s body was failing him, if his own death was indeed approaching, then his diminishment was a physical one only, for the old man was as alive in his unconscious mind as he had ever been. Indeed he had grown stronger with experience, with the huge archive of memories wherein the desks had now been overturned and the papers cast to the winds. Here were memories competing for position, regardless of chronology or relevance. Out burst, in sleep, a dream-horde of all the words and images and people of a life, a discourse expressed and burned-out in a heart-beat. All themselves, and all Tumor too, the full measure of the man, hurtled onto the minds eye in the space of five minutes.
And yet, here was death, the explosion of memories no less than the final disintegration of Tumor’s corporeal mind, the unravelling of his psyche and the loosing of a lifetime. It is often said that the life ‘flashes before the eyes’ in the moments prior to death, that the release of enzymes into the blood as the cortex falters makes the experience of death a benevolent one. In the dream sequence we were party to Tumor’s partial death, to the beginning of his march toward the hereafter, his next long journey to emerge far away, or maybe here again, twenty, or fifty or a hundred years later; but beyond the realms of his mortality, where only his soul is permitted to tread. In rising from the desk, having removed her make-up and costume, Rychlicka allowed Tumor, kindly and with care, to die a little more. And so the ending was bittersweet, for a theatrical treat, an important part of stage-history was over, but so also was Tumor, almost, and his next performance when it comes, may be to an audience of eternity, his next encore in the afterlife.
DM
D.Matthews@rhul.ac.uk
‘Tumor Foderato d’Infanzia’ (‘Tumor’s Pall of Infancy’)
at the
Teatro Garibaldi, Palermo – 1st/2nd July 2006
Pt. 1 – Kantor and Cusumano
Pt. II – Tumor Foderato d’Infanzia
David Matthews
With Andrea Cusumano, Alexa Reid and Roberto Sanchez-Camus
Pt. I – Kantor and Cusumano
This first section of the review takes the form of a profile of Andrea Cusumano, director of Tumor Foderato d’Infanzia; his working methods in general and in regard to this piece specifically. It is the result of an email conversation with DM, and through interviews with Alexa Reid and Roberto Sanchez-Camus, collaborators on the performances in Palermo.
Art and Kantor
Like Kantor, an artist who worked in several different media throughout his career, Cusumano aims for a form of total art in his theatrical work; a point where the borders between disciplines begin to fade, and their individual qualities combine, becoming more than the sum of their parts. He would most likely reject definition as a ‘director’, ‘painter’, ‘sculptor’ or any combination of terms as forcefully as he sought to break down the barriers between performer and designer roles in his collaborators.
Cusumano’s introduction to Kantor came in the aftermath of an exhibition in New York in 1997. A critic who had reviewed the Dead Class years before in the New York Times noted a similarity of aesthetic between the two artists’ work, although Cusumano had not encountered Kantor before; and recommended that he visit the Polish director’s work. His exhibition had included a representation of a Sicilian puppet theatre, where the audience comprised a class of blind children on swings. This would not be the last point of almost eerie confluence in their respective works; years later Cusumano visited the room where Kantor had died, to find, hanging on the window, a little Sicilian puppet.
Although the influence of Kantor may have been present before, Tumor Foderato d’Infanzia was Cusumano’s most explicitly Kantor-inspired work to date. Having extensively studied the director, he was successful in persuading Mira Rychlicka to return to the stage after a long absence and to revisit the character of Tumor, whom she had first played for Kantor over twenty years before. The relationship which Cusumano built with her, through the research and rehearsal for the piece, brought him closer to Kantor than any book or document he had examined previously.
Unfaithful Texts
An early decision made by Cusumano in his approach toward Kantor and the Dead Class was to adhere to his precursor’s methodology, but to be unfaithful to his texts. The original Dead Class was a composite text, primarily based on ‘Brain Cancer’ but also referencing Ferdydurke and Schulz; and the text for Tumor Foderato d’Infanzia would also be born of similarly mixed and uncertain parentage. Text as a dramaturgical element in ‘Tumor Foderato…’ was low on the list of priorities, and where it was encountered, the employment was anarchic and playful. For the most part, Mira Rychlicka was the sole speaker, communications between the cast of schoolchildren and artists being non-verbal. The text that emerged through the encouragement and editing of Cusumano was a tapestry of half-remembered fragments from the Dead Class, an un-sacred fugue of European languages; and performed as the mental disintegration of a polyglot mind, a cathartic babbling and an outpouring of argot. When I quizzed Cusumano on his decision to work outside of his languages, in this case beginning with Rychlicka’s native Polish, he assured me that in this form of theatre, the words are led by the actions, and as such the communication almost precedes the incidence of language. In addition, switching between languages has always afforded him further insight when formulating ideas. By increasing the abundance and complexity of languages channelled through Tumor, an attempt was made to move beyond linguistic communication; as if to build taller fences and stronger walls around the language-prison could transform the gaoled into the gaoler. Texts in performance, for Cusumano, are fonts of inspiration and finally containers of meaning; but malleable, ever-changing and a means-to-an-end rather than a constant crystallized code.
His painter’s eye was much in evidence in the performances of Tumor Foderato d’Infanzia, in the approach to the construction of stage pictures and in the emphasis placed on the visual aspects of the piece. By his own admission, this was a predominantly visual and performance-led piece. His first act when envisaging ‘Tumor…’ was to sketch and to contemplate objects, to approach theatre the way a painter approaches images, and to allow text and character to emerge later in the process.
… and Tumor
Despite the presence of Rychlicka, functioning as a link to Kantor and a living archive in effect, the Tumor who appeared on stage at the Garibaldi was a changed personage from the Tumor of fifteen years ago. Cusumano’s Tumor was a solo in effect, a monologue whose interaction with other characters, when it came, only served to highlight his solitude. Where the Tumor created by Kantor had been a coherent and psychologically defined character sphere, Cusumano aimed for a more metaphorical approach to the character, finding him to be his own self-defining and self-perpetuating world.
Tumor, a supporting character in the Dead Class, was given his first spotlight since ‘Brain Cancer’. Cusumano chose to focus his new play on this character exclusively, although other figures from Kantor’s oeuvre made flitting cameos. In addition, he found the character to be indivisible from the personality of Mira Rychlicka, and the major challenge to be re-discovering Tumor in her mind and body. In order to do this they built a candid working relationship, fostering the trust necessary for Rychlicka to re-engage with a character buried decades before. This process of exhuming Tumor was a gradual one, and came towards the end of the main dramaturgical process (was indeed still in evidence as late as the press night); as Rychlicka’s approach to character is emotive and empathetic, rather than coldly intellectual. Cusumano carefully constructed a reality for the character-world of Tumor to inhabit; first the set, then the dramaturgy, finally the act.
In directing her back toward Tumor, Cusumano insisted on action over thought. Attempts to psychoanalyse the character, to talk him back into being, would probably have been futile; and would not have fitted in with the methodology of experiment and deed which Cusumano favours. The constant relationship between objects and characters (the interactions with the young students in particular) served to re-define Tumor.
Cusumano was most conscious of the ‘triple identity’ of Tumor/Actress/Rychlicka and the task of carefully re-focusing the lenses between these roles until the performance was shown in clear relief. For him, the task of remembering was an active one, less a ‘work of finding memories… not looking for the past but working in the present ‘hic et nunc’ and by doing this finding your past again. By encouraging Rychlicka to re-make as much as remember Tumor, Cusumano ensured that his was a work of original creative forces, rather than a Kantor homage or museum piece.
Methodology
Andrea Cusumano employed a variety of Sicily and UK based emerging artists to realise his vision for ‘Tumor Foderato…’ fostering an atmosphere of creative collaboration and collective ownership. Operating without designated roles, and under his direction, these artists assisted in the design and construction of the set from his preparatory drawings, and ultimately performed in it alongside Rychlicka. This holistic approach employing non-professional performers engendered a strong ensemble aesthetic. As with Kantor, Cusumano favoured the use of ‘ordinary people’ for his actor/designers and placed much emphasis on the importance of these roles being combined in the individual.
His background in the visual arts also gave rise to the often very beautiful ‘paintings on stage’; moments of startling visual interaction between performers and set which functioned almost as silent choruses in the transitions between scenes. As mentioned earlier, the origination of ‘Tumor Foderato…’ followed the pattern of space – object – person – story. Experimental methods such as this which effectively reverses the way in which most theatre is commonly made, remain experimental due to the risk, and the need for a high degree of trust between performers and directors where there is no safety net of story to fall back upon. Where the risk pays off, as it did in ‘Tumor Foderato d’Infanzia’, is where the collective has kept its nerve and allowed creativity to flow, to endure the lean times when the gears refuse to mesh and overall to trust in the emergence of the work.
Characters, in addition to Tumor, were developed through the found objects which composed the set and properties. Cusumano rejected any Stanislavskian internalisation of character, preferring to allow the characters the time and space to come to inhabit their surroundings. The notion of developing character in this way is entirely consistent with his thoughts on space and story; a character developed in isolation and transported to the Garibaldi would be recognisable for the artificial graft that it was, whereas characters developed in situ would in some sense belong to the space, be of the space, in fact. Repertory actors will often use an article of costume or a prop as a means of approaching a character. It would be too simplistic to associate this technique with Cusumano’s methodology, but the example does serve to highlight the special insights that may be gained from assuming a character from without rather than assembling it from within. The introspective, analytical approach of high naturalism would be incompatible with the action-driven, sensory playfulness of Cusumano’s method. In place of any construct of character, naturalness was to be desired in the journey toward name and narrative; not striving to become it but to react instinctively towards it. As elsewhere, the emphasis was on action over enquiry.
Setting designated time in the space, but not defining how this time be used, allowed the designers/performers the freedom to innovate and create at will. Collaborators reported that rehearsal and creation would break out sporadically and spontaneously as the mood, and the objects, took them. This clearly would have contributed to the fostering of a group dynamic and allowed the designer/performers to find their own rhythm within the creative process. Indeed Kantor prized intensity and Cusumano with his insistence that the designer/performers immerse themselves in the imaginative world they were creating was adopting a method that had been shown to yield astonishing results. The rehearsals were made a safe space for improvisation with objects and characters, with experiment actively encouraged, rather than a talk/think approach.
Pt. II – ‘Tumor Foderato d’Infanzia’
The following narrative is a review of the final rehearsals and performances of ‘Tumor Foderato d’Infanzia’, which took place in early July 2006.
Place and Space
Concealed by an iron shuttered concrete façade, dust-caked from occasional drifting breezes at the height of a hot summer, the ruins of the Teatro Garibaldi played host to the re-emergence of a Kantor character and actor not seen on stage for fifteen years. Buried in a back street of Palermo, the theatre was inconspicuous from the narrow road and often confused for the larger and better maintained Garibaldi on the other side of the city; the triggering of whose alarm by thieves frequently brought the Carabinieri to the old Teatro, where to be explained that there was nothing to steal. A place often mistaken, often missed; an appropriate place, then, for an excavation of memory, a re-assembling of pictures, and in the shell of the theatre imperceptibly acted upon by the attrition of the turning seasons – a bittersweet reckoning with approaching death.
The Teatro Garibaldi had been the plaything of the General’s wife; her portrait adorned the centre point of the proscenium, flanked on either side by the dates and names of European cites as they fell to her husband’s armies. These adornments were now flaked and discoloured but still quite the best preserved part of the theatre, which had been emptied of its furniture and chattels over the years, subsequently burned in the streets as part of an ancient Palermo tradition associated with St Joseph’s day. Having served as a boxing hall, a cabaret, a porn cinema and finally a refuse tip, the theatre was taken on by Matteo Bavera and Director Carlo Cecchi, whose success in the first few years prompted an invitation to join the Union des Teatre de l’Europe network; the Teatro Garibaldi remains an important member.
Like most opera houses, the Garibaldi boasted two walls of small private boxes, abutting the stage, each no more than three metres square. Whatever seating had filled the auditorium was replaced by a raked scaffold supporting rough and mismatching planks which were the accommodation for audiences of several hundred. Many of the boxes displayed the evidence of their battering by the elements and the years. Layers of paint and even frayed lining paper clung to the stone in places. The front-pieces of the boxes, once presumably constructed from timber and velvet had long since burned or been looted, which gave the theatre the box-crate appearance of a half-built edifice, rather than the half-destroyed one it actually was. Sunlight entered through the gaps between the new cantilevered roof which straddled the snaggle-toothed remains of the old one; a smart and spartan bonnet perched on top of an ancient, decrepit head. Beyond the recent additions in the entrance hall there were no doors, backstage being cloaked with hanging fabric. Never more so than in the minutes before the performances did the theatre take on the charged potential of an old temple dressed for a new ritual.
Cusumano has commented on his preference for spaces with a story to tell, although his work should not be defined as site-specific. The space is a further source of inspiration, but a highly codified and narrative-loaded space like the Garibaldi brings its own set of challenges as regards a domineering influence on the work. The transportability of work is an important part of Cusumano’s methodology, as evidenced by the germination of ‘Tumor…’ in the Cricoteca at Krakow earlier in the year. For this reason it was important that the Garibaldi influence the work but not imprison it.
A family of stray cats, ubiquitous to the market places of the old city, swarmed in the garden of the theatre, occasionally loping across the seating rig to a high vantage point, there to sleep in the shade, eager both to examine the unusual proceedings and concede no territory to the interlopers. The garden was where much of the building was done: the burning and staining of drapes, the construction of the womb-chair, repairs to the assorted found objects bastardized into Heath-Robinson-esque assemblies, half statue and half machine.
Stage pictures
Mira Rychlicka, assuming the role of Tumor after a long hiatus, was supported by a cast from Palermo and invited guests from Central Saint Martins College London; who had led the building of props and set assembled from found objects in the Kantor tradition, although ‘props and set’ is perhaps to dismiss these creations too lightly for in many instances these hybrids were performer-marionettes in their own right. Thus whilst Rychlicka’s solo expertise was at the heart of the performance, the visual spectacle of the found-and-made creations made for startling stage pictures under Andrea Cusumano’s direction.
The group of schoolchildren encountered by Tumor were frequently involved in the embodiment of these pictures. On leaving the relative realism of their schoolroom, they were next to be seen on a raised area of stage-rear, low lit in green shadows, yoked at their necks with a tangle of rope and dragged in the wake of a powerful man-bird, the character of Jakob we would encounter later. His wings were fashioned from timber and rough cloth, the trailing fronds communicating with his tattered clothes, straggling beard and the bonds restraining the children. With slow beating of wings, he dragged them inexorably across the stage.
Soon to follow in their wake was Tumor, who happening across a series of puppets scattered on the stage, tugging on ropes, brought them to stand at attention. Tumor delighted in the raising of these corpses and gossiped to them animatedly, until the puppets took on a life of their own and quite without his assistance began to spring up from the ground. Behind his back they appeared, latex, wood and sacking arms waving clumsily, until finally the largest and most intimidating of their number rose to confront Tumor face-to-face, whose courage failing, scampered from the stage. With his terrified exit the students slowly reappeared and stood behind their corresponding puppets, gently manipulating arms and heads; so life was seen to stir ghosts as the children communed with their ancestors in the Dead Class and rehearsed the corpses they would become.
If the fore-stage, then, at floor level was the place of life and speech, the raised rear-stage was a dreamlike necropolis, where the ghosts of memory silently intertwined. Physically and metaphorically it was the more distant, the more unknowable: a buried part of the unconscious where men wore wings and the dead rose up from their graves. Where better to be closer to death than in the husk of the Teatro Garibaldi, in a town where blood ran in the streets at the height of the mafia killings in 1990, where the bodies of the ancient dead stand sentinel in the subterranean Capuchin catacombs; in a country suffocated by the blood-guilt and death-lust of High Catholicism? Here one was an invader in death, a grave-robber hemmed in by the blackness of the void, oppressed by an imaginative world, a city and a country that found its repose in abnegations of existence. Tumor’s memories were the eye of a death-storm whose winds guttered the candles of Palermo’s days and gave fresh smart to the grief of her centuries.
Mira Rychlicka – Remembering Tumor
Where had Tumor been for fifteen years and what had he been doing? Returned to the school room, he continued a jabbering monologue, trying to make sense of the trick that was seeming played, the mystery of his own existence unravelling.
Into a hall of receding mirrors he plunged, for here was Tumor, the prototype from ‘The Dead Class, itself a meditation on memory and remembering, compelled to remember again who and how he was; and here was Rychlicka exhuming from her memories a character from decades previously, his idiosyncrasies and reminiscences, and somewhere among all of these interlocking and overlapping spheres, the ghost of Kantor, observing and remembering in the performance of his protégé. Here too was Cusumano mediating and guiding, himself on stage in the guise of a sinister janitor given to moments of mournful drifting song. Somehow in the corpse, the memories of a life remain, as surely as the meals are preserved in the bones. For a brief hour, new blood ran through the corpse of ‘The Dead Class’ and it spoke, memories incohesive and evocative, passionate, protean and wild came tumbling out. Such was the huge responsibility placed on the shoulders of Rychlicka, to channel the ghosts of the play as she had known it, to revere the memories and to lend them body again; and what a risk she took with her own recollections, what bravery to herself tread closer to the paths of the dead and to speak with them again across the years. The greater risk than returning to the stage after so long an absence, to risk failure again after so long, was to open the mind and the memory to parts of itself that must remain closed to the living, to draw nearer to the dead, and in doing so to come back changed, perhaps harmed by the journey; to have known again absence and grief, the dying of lost years, and the cold blast of the desert that lies between the last breath and the portal to purgatory.
And to have in one’s defence only the actor’s tools of detachment and make-believe. Her absence from the stage had not seemed to dim Rychlicka’s powers. Her characterisation was in constant flux, as if Tumor were testing at the walls of prison, finding gaps in the mortar and loose bars. During rehearsals she moderated the performance to the mood, her own and that of the cast and the theatre, occasionally experimenting with bits of stage-business which largely disappeared as the performance nights drew closer. A routine with a skull suspended from twine, (did she recognise the face?), had been prominent in the arc of her performance but dwindled and diminished as opening night approached, until finally it became an organic progression of thoughts, a seemingly unrehearsed system of gestures cogent with Tumor’s investigations. The ability to reduce in a part, to make smaller and entrust to the audience the duty of ascribing meaning, is a sure sign of great confidence in an actor and a role inhabited rather than assumed.
In this fashion, Rychlicka’s performance became less kinetic as the energy increased, as she put further emphasis on thought and on silence. The hectic physicality of the restless Tumor was still present, but did not rely on actorly mannerisms, any hiding behind the short-hand characterisation of the repertory actor. In the final performances she radiated energy that was never permitted escape; a communion with the crowd in the live context, but having seen several of the rehearsals it became obvious how this energy had been built from within, and not borrowed from adrenalin and an expectant audience on the night. Her energy was of the sort that one senses rather than feels, had the focused potential of electrical charge as opposed to the messy outpouring of fire. Her achievement was made all the more remarkable in that Tumor does not interact in any meaningful way with any of the other characters, there could be no re-acting, no reliance on the other to carry the energy and to make the scene. Tumor, and Rychlicka, had to function in a vacuum, the living among the dead, which made the task more than merely the tuning up of a great actor for a difficult part; but became harbingers of the struggle to come, which all individuals must face alone, in the hour of their own death.
Kantor(‘s) Happening(s)
The climax of the show arrived with Tumor’s dream sequence. Having fallen asleep amidst the children whilst watching a film, he was manoeuvred in his school desk to centre stage; from where his sleeping memories would swirl around him. The boxes that made up the side walls of the theatre were suddenly alive with activity, the found objects that had before been ornaments in these spaces now manipulated by performers who had seemingly emerged from the flaking plaster.
The dream sequence began at a low intensity; people rose from beds, removed sheets and set to work at library desks. Before long, however, the sound effects became a crunching discordant melee of distorted screams and falling bombs; the gantries were washed in red light. A be-goggled man, drawn into a competition of wills over a library book was distracted by a pretty adolescent girl playing tennis and played out a creepy flirtation at an upstairs room. Another man, lame and walking with crutches had his wounds dressed by a catatonic nurse. Two young men drunkenly exchanged blows underneath a bare light-bulb. The dream sequence was book-ended by Jakob, firstly creeping in to examine and stroke the hair of the sleeping Tumor, before beginning the destruction of his imaginative world; later to emerge as a slave master, with his familiar network of nooses, leading the children out of the auditorium and away, to what?
The dream sequence employed the frenzied anarchy of the ‘happening’, a continuing point of reference for Kantor, but there was also narrative at work. Where the activities of the characters seemed a series of randomised non-sequiturs, it was in their interactions that personas and stories began to emerge. For the most part they were figures from Tumor’s past: Pataculo, whose mischief making he had earlier identified now appeared to pace the stage and periodically collapse to the floor. Jakob, who had haunted stage-rear earlier in the play, was now an active participant in the story. Played at a rising intensity, with performers contributing to the nightmarish soundscape by hammering on doors and furniture, the dream sequence rapidly transformed into a bad-trip replete with the threat and helplessness of a contretemps with sensory overload. And, at the height of the maelstrom, it broke, and the tide washed back. The soundscape moderated to a harmony of wakefulness, the deformed and demented characters shrank back into their boxes and Tumor stirred from sleep.
The dream sequence allowed new insight into Tumor, before appearing as a slightly doddery buffoon, always talking to himself, always at the mercy of the world around him. But in his dreams, there was caustic violence and frenzied lust, the mad abandon of younger years and fantasies waiting to be played out. If Tumor’s body was failing him, if his own death was indeed approaching, then his diminishment was a physical one only, for the old man was as alive in his unconscious mind as he had ever been. Indeed he had grown stronger with experience, with the huge archive of memories wherein the desks had now been overturned and the papers cast to the winds. Here were memories competing for position, regardless of chronology or relevance. Out burst, in sleep, a dream-horde of all the words and images and people of a life, a discourse expressed and burned-out in a heart-beat. All themselves, and all Tumor too, the full measure of the man, hurtled onto the minds eye in the space of five minutes.
And yet, here was death, the explosion of memories no less than the final disintegration of Tumor’s corporeal mind, the unravelling of his psyche and the loosing of a lifetime. It is often said that the life ‘flashes before the eyes’ in the moments prior to death, that the release of enzymes into the blood as the cortex falters makes the experience of death a benevolent one. In the dream sequence we were party to Tumor’s partial death, to the beginning of his march toward the hereafter, his next long journey to emerge far away, or maybe here again, twenty, or fifty or a hundred years later; but beyond the realms of his mortality, where only his soul is permitted to tread. In rising from the desk, having removed her make-up and costume, Rychlicka allowed Tumor, kindly and with care, to die a little more. And so the ending was bittersweet, for a theatrical treat, an important part of stage-history was over, but so also was Tumor, almost, and his next performance when it comes, may be to an audience of eternity, his next encore in the afterlife.
DM
D.Matthews@rhul.ac.uk
posted by Camus Live Art at 11:09 PM
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