Leslie Damasceno

History in the sense in which Benjamin speaks of the
double exposure of dialectical images through which the significant past comes
back to us and flashes up at a moment of extreme danger, needs to be
recognized.  This recognition is
the precondition for theatre. 

Johannes Birringer in Theatre, Theory, Postmodernism

 This economic and political conditioning has led us to philosophical weakness and impotence
that engenders sterility when conscious and hysteria when unconscious.  It is for this reason that the hunger of Latin America is not simply an alarming symptom: it is the essence of our
society.

Glauber Rocha, "An Esthetic of
Hunger" (l965)[i]

 

CENA NOVE: UM
TELEFONEMA

--Alô, é daí?

--Não, não é
daí, Escócia.  É daqui, Brasil.

Denise Stoklos, Denise Stoklos in Mary
Stuart[ii]

 

 

I Denise
Stoklos proclaims herself, unabashedly, an optimist, a full-out utopian, in
print and on the stage.  Speaking
as the director of her solo piece, 500 Years: A Fax from Denise Stoklos to
Christopher Columbus (l992), she ends her comments on the play's production
by declaring:  "I opted for
the joy of insisting on the realization (estabelecimento)
of happiness.  I opted for the
ecstasy of optimism, in which I believed, and believe. (52)"[iii]   In Des-Medéia (l994), a
piece that uses the myth of Medea as a metaphor for the Brazilian soul, the
chorus, as Denise interprets it, ends its prefatory speech by calling on Medea
to "dis-medeafy" herself, to transform the myth, to remedy it (remendéia, a play on the word Medea), to
take the reins of the sun-chariot in a flight glorified by the "effusive
victory of love."  The chorus
signifies a communal utopian process: 
"Even if this is called utopia, that for us,  souls in the daily process of  desmedification on route to an eternity
of love, for us utopia in truth rhymes well with transformation now, already
and every day” (1995b, 9).

Stoklos's plays are textually punctuated and
structured by such declarations, though the tone and sense of them vary: they
may be didactic, effusive and even sentimental, or battle cries of resistance,
defiance and transformation.  They
are often comic, hilarious, even hysterical in tone.  What all these declarations have in common is an insistence
on utopia as a transformative process motivated by a visceral (and collective)
need for communication, community, and love.  In one sense, the shape and geography of Stoklos's utopia is
affirmed by histrionic negation: it is a global "non-place" in which
the historical atrocities and social injustices that she textually eviscerates
in her plays could be cleansed from the collective body. 

But she is also a realist.  A call for utopia is a reading of
history, and her performances are interrogations of historical reality, past
and present, global and local.[iv]   Her point of departure: Irati,
the small interior town in the state of Paraná in which she was raised.  "Irati," an Indian word that
she breaks down into Portuguese syllables--"ir - a - ti / to go to
you."   Local, personal
reference expands, encompasses global history, and is always referential to
home, despite the fact that many of her performances have minimal verbal
references to Brazil.

Brazil - world.  Not a contradiction, but historical and geographical
coordinates, a tension she explores as a citizen of the world, aiming for a
transcultural communication in her work. 
Although Stoklos's gesturality is rooted in Brazilian corporeal expression,
her plays are eminently international in conception and exhibit an
international gesturality that allows her to shift languages with ease, playing
linguistic inflections off of one another, and counterposing verbal commentary
with nonverbal punctuation.

 
 Stoklos has defined her performance work
as 'essential theatre,' as "that which has the minimum possible of
gestures, movements, words, wardrobe, scenery and accessories and effects.  And which contains the maximum power of
drama in itself" (192b,5)[v].  Indeed, her theatre presents a kind of
"barroque minimalism" that, in its patterns of gestural containment
and expansion, serves to synthesize and critique  contradictions of applying parameters of "First
World" late capitalism to transmit what she calls the "Brazilian
tragedy" (5).  She elaborates
on this tragedy, linking Brazil's plight to emblems of international
disaster:  "The daily
Cambodias at the Brazilian hospitals. 
Chernobyls running from the slums, in the trains of the Central Station.
Heroism leaving sword and cloak, and jumping to the headlines........."
(12).

Stoklos describes her theatrical task in this
light, declaring: "I want to retake the tie, the knot, the manufacturing
of my Brazilianism out from within the ragged fabric of the first world, so
repressed, so disastrously depressive, dead before the atomic bomb."  (l0).  In this way, she strives to  present corporeal expression that communicates her joy for
optimism even within  dramatic
situations that she sees as clearly dystopian--past, present or pending social
catastrophes.  Situations defined
by those First World paramenters she considers "repressive, depressive,
dead."  Despite these
proclamations, the reportoire of her essential theatre reveals an optimistic
humanism that is international in conception.  Indeed, many of her plays were first developed within the
nuturing space of New York's La Mama Theatre.

As an actor, Stoklos juggles realism with transformative optimism
through corporeal expression, an option for the utopian "gestus"
which she feels is the base of an actor's credibility, generator and key to
theatrical communication.  As she
comments: "To believe in the actor as the source of theatricality in
itself is the Utopian force, the humanism, the existentialism the semiology of
drama" (8)  Performing
historical specificity and theatricalizing utopian ideals--an ambitious goal
for theatrical communication.  How
does she go about this?  She sets
up shifting coordinates of history/utopia by plugging into and playing against
hysteria.  Individual and
collective hysteria.    Stoklos has
a paradoxical performance style by which she constructs an "as if"
space of utopia on stage precisely by historicizing the hysterical subject.

Briefly, it
works this way.  Stoklos plays up the
notion that theatre is a utopian act of 
communication. [vi]   From the moment of her stage entrance, she directly
engages her audience, usually by some vaudevillian stage business perhaps
reminiscent of Jimmy Durante or Graucho Marx for North American viewers. [vii]   She then begins to present us with a series of
characters and situations.  They
may be historical (such as Thoreau), collective and anonymous (the crowd that watches
Mary Stuart's execution), or Denise presenting Denise as Denise
watches/reflects and acts on the situation she has created on stage.  Whatever the role she assumes, she
always makes the fact of her relationship with her audience visible.  She makes it clear to us that she is
"trying on" characters much in the manner that she dons and doffs
hats (a characteristic gesture). 
In effect, she is performing mini-rehearsals for utopia in her
convocations toward social transformation, and the interweaving of these
mini-rehearsals  constitute what
would be plot and message in her plays.

Textually, that is, read or seen with emphasis
on textual significance, her plays can suggest a nostalgic, if comical,
yearning of the solitary performer for community.  Stoklos’s vocal dexterity is characterized by the machine
gun rapidity with which she spatters utopian statements and lists of historical
facts, spouts sound-biting political observations, intercutting humorous
confessional tidbits, quotes from historical and literary dissidents, performs
histrionic inversions of philosophical polemics, and entertains us with
hilarious readings from seemingly incongruous texts.  Indeed, if emphasis is put on text, the reader/spectator can
become voyeuristic testimony to a performer on the verge of hysterical
paralysis.

No doubt about it, her verbal utterances, in
themselves, are often "over the top," a prime example being her call
for utopian transformation: "Even if this is called utopia, that for
us,  souls in the daily process of  desmedification on route to an eternity
of love, for us utopia in truth rhymes well with transformation now, already
and every day."  However,
Denise Stoklos's controlled virtuosity as a performer wrestling with hyperbolic
text is indisputable, and much of the originality and impact of her performance
technique comes precisely from her tight control and manipulation of the
hysteric edge. 

Stoklos plays the fringes of hysteria as a mode
of empowering theatrical communication as she skates the surface of hysterical
behaviour, "acting out" what we commonly think of as the symptoms of
hysteria.  However, the disjuncture
between language and gestus that
characterizes her performance style is powerfully disciplined, a theatrical
tension used to polivalent advantage. 
She can be hysterically funny.   She also cautions us about the real and potential
hysteria of a world, and individuals, driven mad by repression, oppression,
alienation and hunger.  In this
sense, her performances are cautionary tales in which her vocal and gestural
skirmishes with hysteria are grounded by historical reference.

This historical grounding, in turn, serves to
invest her utopian invocations with authority, and juggling the hysterical with
the historical has paradoxical effects. It allows her audience distance from
the shrill, improbable and even absurd nature of some of her utopian
enunciations. This distancing also allows us an emotional space, a will to
believe.  In this respect, it is
important to see Stoklos's work in a context of continuity, or contiguity, with
the Brazilian political theatre of the '60s and '70s, a movement whose various
theatrical forms of social critique was brutally truncated by the military
dictatorship.[viii]

Thus, for those of us of her generation or
older, she reclaims a space of hope and invites us to  share dreams of transformation that we might have cast
away.  For younger audiences, she
instills a sense of possibilities, making the political available as language,
and as a way of feeling for a younger generation that grew up in a political
culture that did its best to stifle or distort historical memory.  Stoklos has a tremendous following
among post-dictatorship Brazilian youth, and these younger viewers are
distinctly aware that she is addressing them directly.  That, in a way, she is reclaiming
history for them.

As a friend of mine commented upon leaving the
theatre after seeing Des-Medéia in Rio in l996--a performance in which
Stoklos unconditionally condemned Fernando Henrique Cardoso's neoliberal
policies as a dressed up version of the same old capitulations to economic
dependency: "I dunno... Hilarious....but.., I'm sort of uncomfortable with
the hysteria of a revolution that never took place."  Then she reflected: "But she's
putting Brazilian history on stage, telling things that the younger audience
hasn't seen and doesn't know.  And
they're listening."

 

II. 
My main intention in this article regarding hysteria is to show how
Stoklos manipulates it in the name of historicity.  Historicity, as I use it here, is not primarily a question
of historical fact or event, but rather the larger process of perception,
interpretation and representation of historical movement and moment.  Historicity also implies a sense of
locale, the place from where we seek identity and how we seek it.  In theatre, it implies the task of
finding the image(s) that impact on the histrionic sensibility of the
spectator, thus tapping into a sense of connectedness with events represented
on stage.

Stoklos's
performative dialogue with hysteria goes much beyond the illustrative, the
symptomatic.  Her mode of performing
divided subjectivit(ies) and the complexity she achieves by playing language
off against, or with, gesturality are suggestive of psychoanalytic
understandings of hysteria, while they also challenge such readings.  In other word, she performs, or
stages, hysteria in a nuanced way in which "acting out" is part of a
structural strategy.  It is the
performative structural analogy to hysteria, I will argue, that gives the most
density to her performance in terms of her play with the hysterical.[ix]  The brief points I wish to make about
the structure of hysteria follow Slavoj Zizek's understanding of hysteria,
particularly as he tries to puzzle out the relationship between hysteria and
history. [x]

The
first thing to note is, that for Zizek, following Lacan, hysteria is
constitutive of being-of-language, the marker ("leftover") of
diferential between imaginary and symbolic identifications. As a simple
statement, this points to "contradiction as an integral condition of every
identity" (1989, 6).  This has
to do with point of view in conjunction with place (locale and power) of
enunciation.  Taking this from the
position of the subject and the other, imaginary identification starts from
what we would like to be, "identification with the image in which we
appear likeable to ourselves" (106). 
Symbolic identification is "from the very place from where  we are being observed, from
where  we look at ourselves so
that we appear to ourselves likeable, worthy of love." 

This interplay of identifications determines
how we integrate ourselves, or are interpellated, into our social roles.   However even in ordinary social
interactions, Zizek identifies a gap between how we are seen and how we might
wish to be seen, a gap that could be expressed as an even comical second-guessing
that the subject has for the object of desire.  For example, a lover tries to figure out what the loved one really
wants from her/him in order to fulfill this demand.  The lover tries to discover what the loved one
"lacks" in order to fulfill this lack, to be essential to the
other.  But this is the 'catch-22'
of desire, the attempt to decifer the desire of the other, which is
consitutionally inaccessible—a gap of language and being that constitutes what
we might call 'normal' hysteria.[xi]

So what is hysteria in its non-'normal', or
exaggerated, pathological form then? 
This goes back to the location and problem of the gaze in the gap that exists between imaginary and symbolic
identification.  According to
Zizek, from what point of view do we appear likeable to ourselves is not a
simple operation for the hysteric. 
As he comments: 
"[i]maginary identification is always identification on behalf of a certain gaze in the Other,"
identifying this 'certain' gaze is
crucial: : "Which gaze is considered when the subject
identifies himself with a certain image? This gap between the way I see myself
and the point from which I am being observed to appear likeable to myself is
crucial for grasping hysteria [...]" (106).

Stoklos
“plays with” such ideas as “normal hysteria” and the concept of hysteria as
structured by a repeated failure of interpellation,  strategizing the nature and shape of the gap, and
positioning the ‘gaze’ to suit her theatrical purposes.  First of all, she exaggerates
linguistic hysteria in conjunction with corporeal expression.  But how does her display of vocal
hysterical symptoms--stuttering, variation and repetition, growling--work to
her performative advantage beyond spoofing the fundamental hysteria, or normal
contradictions, of the speaking subject?   As intermediary to the stories she relates to her
audience she constantly and rapidly shifts from the position of a neutral
(putatively non-hysterical) narrator, that is from the position of a "normal"
person commenting extraordinary events, to a position of wonderment (or horror)
at the self she is presenting to her public.  

This posture shifting
also allows Stoklos to pose her own self as subject-interlocutor to the
problems she is theatrically investigates..  This duality permits her, in turn, to act as referent to the
event, where Stoklos/the performer can playfully and ironically point to
herself as a kind of "Everywoman" spectator:  that particular individual who wiggles
her toes, repeating "O, meu Deus" ("Oh, my God") as she
bears witness to the spectacle of history.[xii]   In effect, the structure of
Stoklos's performance is a reformulation of the structure of hysteria by
replacing history by History.  One
of the precepts of theories on hysteria is that the hysteric feels her/himself
to have no history, or at least no integrated personal history that can be a
basis for dealing with the demands made on her/him.  This feeling of lack of history is what prompts the
hysteric's question--"Why am I what you're telling me that I
am?"  In Stoklos's work this
question becomes historically contextualized as the performer continually
reinserts herself into the crossed identifications of the historical dilemmas
she presents.

As Stoklos intensifies these divided selves of
the performer, she heightens the specular sense of hysteria in a way that links
personal (subjective) hysteria, or its potential, to the element of hysteria
intrinsic to performance.  The
process of the making-visible-of-self, the specular sine qua non  of
performance, in itself indicates a basic dynamic of hysterical structure
following Zizek:  the play between
the gaze and the gap that resists interpellation, even as the performer works
to seduce the public.  Stoklos is
hilarious in her spoofs of compulsive acting out, and in her performed and
commented upon humiliations and fears precisely because she, as performer,
knows how to locate their source, although it's part of her performance to just
as often pretend otherwise. 

 A scene from
the prologue that presents the two queens will illustrate what I mean by how
she plays with the hysterical.  It
is played out as the performer oscillates between manifesting the temperaments
of the two queens and then, as performer, comments on the performance of this
oscillation.  Almost at the
beginning of a text that consists almost exclusively of stage directions to the
actress, Stoklos directs that Elizabeth should be described as a strong
personality "with a vocation for leadership and politics and an explosive
temperament" (8).

Stoklos directs that "the words are
sometimes whispered, sometimes stuttered, shouted and even simply and
colloquially articulated." 
She proceeds to mark the disjuncture between body and language:
"There are moments in which the posture of the body don't seem to
correspond to what is trying to get expressed."  This is when the performer intervenes to try to bodily rectify the expressive situation, but
gives in to the feigned impossibility of representation.  As always in her stage directions,
Stoklos is explicit in her kinetic descriptions: 

The actress then stops talking, trying to correct
her occupation of space: she goes from one corner of the stage to the other,
trying on different positions, she stands up erect, aligning her ankle bones in
exact parallel, but cedes to the impossibility of finding a corporeal position
that completely satisfies the search for expressive exactitude: she brusquely
lets her spinal column collapse, and, in a curved position, takes the text up
again.  But there's no way to
rectify the expressive dilemma--the text is now declaimed with the vertebrae
trying to resist, one by one, with force, but still ceding, as gravity pulls it
[the body and text] towards the ground" (8-9). 

 

From this
jerking position, the performer observes the alternations of Elizabeth's
temperament and when she (the performer) demonstrates Elizabeth's constant
anger ("ira"), Stoklos
directs the performer to "hold on to the scream that is contained in the
vowel ‘I’ (‘iiiiira’), elongating it
and transforming the vowel into the very expression of flagrant
anger."  The performer is then
directed, by the text, to reestablish complicity with her public. She is to
redeem her (the performer's) "interpretative excess," which she
confesses is a "truly hysterical gestural and vocal exaggeration of lived
anger," by confiding that the lack of control is really the queen's, not
hers (the performer's).

This technique of performative oscillation, a
constant in Stoklos's performance, is essential to setting up the game of
staging potency/impotency in a way that situates her as citizen and performer.
It also signals a conundrum of impossible interpellation translates on
Stoklos's stage as a replay of (or play with)  a historical power imbalance, where the disenfranchised
subject tries to uncover the lack of the Other in order to please it, while at
the same time attempts an impossible imitation of the 'big Other."   In other words, it's impossible for Brazil to be the
United States and mostly ridiculous to try to imitate the First World in the
terms that the First World performs its own identity.   As Stoklos succinctly puts it, “We have to do
something better in this web of a universe, because the ‘First World’ is
rotten, fallen, there’s nothing left there” (Stoklos, 2000).

In
the remainder of this article, I wish to show, in a more diagetic manner, how
she uses the hysterical to propose a perspective of hope toward historical
change in two very different performance pieces:  Denise Stoklos in Mary Stuart (l987) and  500 Years: A Fax from Denise Stoklos
to Christopher Columbus (l992).

II. Mary Stuart (l987) is an astonishing tour de force, a play of compact
imagery.  Playing both Mary Stuart
and her cousin Elizabeth, Stoklos manages to weave metaphors of power and
feminism, propitiously linked at strategic moments to authoritarianism in
Brazil.  A consummate mime,
gestural abstraction is exquisitely referential to Brazilian linguistic and
gestural codes but in no way limited by these references.

Theatrical space is minimalist, with only one
wooden chair as prop.  In one
sense, this chair represents a specified historical moment and locale,
signifying both the distance and contiguity of the Elizabethan court and Mary
in the Tower.  But it is also the
communal space from which Stoklos constructs her major personages and marks
their respective isolations.  Mary
and Elizabeth engage in a power struggle for that chair.  When Stoklos invokes the presence of
the crowd assembled for Mary Stuart's execution, the chair signifies the common
ground of public spectacle.  It is
also the site from which Denise, engaged but anxious spectator, puts it all
together.

Stoklos strides into the stage space in tights
and a tunic, encircles the stage twice, all the while looking directly at the
audience.  In the long prologue,
Stoklos compresses an abbreviated narration of Mary Stuart's story and
presentation of characters (Elizabeth and Mary) into an intentionally verbally
and corporeally disjointed discussion of both the necessity and enormity (read
impossibility) of actually staging such a history.  The "play" (or second scene) starts with Mary in
prison, an enclosure traced out as Stoklos anxiously explores its parameters in
conventional enough pantomimic language. 
However, locales shift with a flick of a finger (a raised digit that
signals Elizabeth's authority), or a smoothed "bustle" that signifies
her court.  At times Stoklos plays
against herself, as the body language 
of one queen is responded to by the words of the other.   Temporal/cultural  allusion is expanded, as references to
modern technology foreground the struggle between the women.  For instance, Mary telephones Elizabeth
from her cell (an anachronism), complaining about the conditions of her
imprisonment, and pleading with Elizabeth to answer her letters. (It is
historical fact that Mary wrote Elizabeth numerous such letters, and Stoklos
actually quotes from them.)

The drama/comedy is not restricted to the
women’s struggle.  Stoklos also
portrays the Elizabethan cultural body and suggests the excitement of an
Elizabethan crowd stuffing sausages into their mouths in hungry anticipation of
Mary’s execution; the toes of one of Stoklos's feet chase each other up and
down the calf of her other leg in a display of fervent excitement.  Mary’s execution is signified by the
final spot that falls on Stoklos, now thoroughly Mary Queen of Scots.  It's as if an immobile Stoklos, without
bodily inflection, lends her corporeal space for a solitary Mary to register
her death.  And yet, the frozen
wide-eyed expression of her face, lips forming a large red square framing teeth
set tightly on edge confronts the audience with a polivent mask that suggests,
at the same time and without movement, terror, amazement, paralysis,
fascination and questioning.  It's
a facial ambiguity that provokes a moment of historical freeze-framing (Mary's
terror, the crowd's fascination) while suggesting continuity and historical
analogy (Stoklos's/the mask's unspoken questions regarding the present stare
out at us--how do we respond?).  
This is the penultimate scene of the play.  Although Stoklos stages a kind of epilogue in which the
performer loosens the noose from around her neck, declaring herself free, I
believe that the penultimate image of Mary's execution provides the more
powerful final imagistic impact on the audience.

Throughout the play,  historical time is telescoped as references to Elizabethan
history bring up mention of contemporary figures such as Mandela, Meinhoff, and
Vladmir Herzog.[xiii]  Her bodily contortions add image and
shape to verbal reference.  As we
see in this interview statement, she expands, and then conflates, her concept
of historicity, --its sense and feeling--in Mary
Stuart.  Speaking of the tragic
aspect of the play, she affirms:

 

[Mary Stuart] is
a tragedy about power between two women in an extremely important moment in
history  [...]  It's about the potentiality of Mary
Stuart's power, disabled [condenada]
by her sentimentalism and passion, confronted by a Queen Elizabeth [who is]
objective, and has tremendous physical strength.  [Mere] potentiality of power is always destructive.  It's a metaphor for the Latin American
situation: our future, part free, part imprisioned by political motives.  We are violated, fecundated by the
First World, seduced....  
(Stoklos 1991) [xiv]

Now, these
metaphorical oppositions that present a feminized Latin America have long been
a central convention of Latin American theatre and literature.  And, especially since the surge of
feminist literary and cultural criticism of the '80s, the problematization of
such feminized imagery--whether it has served to portray exploitation,
violation or glorification of nationhood--has become a critical source for the
reexamination of Latin American political and cultural history.[xv] 

  Stoklos's brief metaphorical interpretation of
a feminized Latin America, as quoted above, is made more complex by two points
integral to my interpretation of how her performance plays with the
structuration of hysteria:  a) the
fact that she has chosen to perform, as metaphor, a tragedy in which both
protagonist and antagonist are women; and b) her ambiguous statement that
"the [mere]potentiality of power is always destructive. [...]"

In conjunction with these points, I will argue
that if we think of hysteria as structured by the repeated failure to
interpolate identification, then Stoklos's performance in Mary Stuart plays with the failure of interpellation in three
interconnected, but often seemingly contradictory, ways that are performed in
almost constant tension throughout the play: she degenderizes but sexualizes
the notion of hysteria; she ontologizes hysteria by inflating the specular
sense of it; and, ultimately, she historicizes hysteria, pointedly locating the
subject in history with a perspective toward agency.

First of all, choosing as analogy to the
historical present a moment in which the major players are women already
suggests a reading of history that seeks to be a counter patriarchal reading of
historical process.  But even
though Stoklos makes the point of staging "a tragedy about power between
two women in an extremely important moment in history," Mary Stuart still might suggest the
stereotypical binomial equation: 
powerless but passionate (feminine) Mary (Latin America) remains
imprisoned (if not murdered) by oppressive rational (masculine) Elizabeth.  How does Stoklos problematize that
possible equation?   In part
because, as performed by Stoklos, Mary is condemned by her sentimentalism and
passion not because these characteristics signify a conflict of identity in
gender and/or sexual terms, but primarily because they coincide with historical
fact.  Elizabeth's claim to Henry's
crown was stronger, and she remained unswerving in her determination to
maintain her advantage.  Mary's
potential claim was doomed because, among other things, her heart lead her to
chose alliances that proved disastrous.              
But more importantly, the
skewering of categories of hysteria is accomplished by acknowledging a third
major player, the performer (as played by Stoklos), who hystericizes both
queens at advantageous moments, while historicizing the hysterical subject (the
performer).  In a sense, this
performer works the gap that Zizek comments, as she simultaneously resists
interpellation while at the same time demands recognition. As performer-clown, this intermediary figure continually recasts
the problem of potentiality, a problem which is intricately bound with the
structure of hysteria and spectacle.

  The
power struggle between the two queens as mediated by a performer who
intermittently professes her own lack of power to interpret such a struggle
both recalls, and displaces, psychoanalytic notions that the conflict between
masculine and feminine identification is the constitutive conflict of hysteria
and that hysterical physical symptoms are conversions of psychic conflict.  But, who wins identification with the
father-as-power (Henry) is not the point of Stoklos's Mary Stuart.[xvi]  In fact, Henry's absence/presence is
mostly ignored in the performance, which in itself helps to disqualify the
patriarchal as the focus of identification.  Symbolic
identification is not unidirectional, rather it is represented as a shifting
triangulated movement among the major players (Mary, Elizabeth,
Stoklos-performer).   In this
triangulated movement, the tragic spiral of potentiality is constantly recast
as shifting positionalities that finally converge in an intentionally
de-gendered ambiguity that restores agency--at least on stage and in a manner
that implies extension beyond the footlights.  

There is a gender
ambivalence in Stoklos's performance that points to an intriguingly
conceptualized play between the psychoanalytic and the historical in what seems
to be Stoklos's intention of recasting hysteria in terms of history in Mary Stuart.  In a more vertical reading of power struggles, it's possible
to see Stoklos's performative hysteria in lines with Cixous's and Clément's
argument  of the "hysteric as
a threshold figure for women's liberation and as a form of resistance to patriarchy."[xvii]  However, in a certain sense and in all
of her pieces, Stoklos performs androgyny (an ambiguity that, in turn, hints at
hysterical possibilities).[xviii]  She often plays off gender stereotypes
and talks about sex, but when hysteria is performed as an engendered, embodied
battle between the masculine and the feminine, it is because she--in character
or as performer--wants to manifest as split-self in order to comment on that
split.

In brief, it seems that Stoklos wishes to keep the
vitality of sexuality alive in performance without reproducing gender
distinctions. This movement between gender and sex (or sensuality) relates to
historical analogy in Mary Stuart, as
the performer oscillates between manifesting the temperaments of the two queens
and then, as performer, comments on the performance of this oscillation.  Near the beginning of the play where
Stoklos directs that Elizabeth should be described as a strong personality
"with a vocation for leadership and politics and an explosive
temperament" (8), the performer then matter-of-factly comments on
Elizabeth's sexual voracity and disdain for her suitors before she segues into
a description/embodiment of Mary's charms.  She makes crude sexual remarks about what Mary's suitors
really want from her. But she immediately excuses this lapse from historical
narrative rectitude by explaining that this urge to bestializing silliness,
("avacalhação"), "comes from the depths of her Brazilian soul, a
national desire to make fun of or mock ("esculhambar") everything
(16).

Here, the technique of
performative oscillation sets up the game of staging potency/impotency in a
sexualized, but gender-minimized manner. 
What does this have to do with the power play between Brazil and the First
World, (remembering Stoklos's intention "to retake the tie, the knot, the
manufacturing of my Brazilianism out from within the ragged fabric of the first
world")?  Or, how  does Stoklos "sexualize"
history to restore the possibility of potency?  Although Stoklos mentions that Elizabeth is also, at times,
tender in her affections, her sexuality is mainly characterized as raw
power.  This is suggestive of the
rigidity of power (oppression and repression) of empires before they crash.  On the other hand, Mary's sexuality is
cast in terms of the flexibility of sensuality.  One of Stoklos's
frequent messages is that sexual sensuality will eventually prove to be more
powerful than a raw display of power. 
That, in terms of emotional expressivity collectively galvanized,  Brazil's/Latin America's ability to
express unrepressed sensuality has a lot to teach in showing the way to a
global community constructed on love and communication, rather than on
hierarchical repression.  But, then
again, Stoklos characteristically carnivalizes such proclamations even as she
declares them, claiming irony--in its capacity to see oneself in a situation
and make fun of self and situation--as a complementary national trait and
strength.  This is a thematic
contrast that we see, in one way or another, in all of Stoklos's plays.

This
is obviously a problematic characterization that certainly adds to the hysteric
even as it plays with it.  However,
I think that the precarious performative tension between the sexualized
subject/object and historical agency works because Stoklos, as performer,
displaces the locus of hysteria from the gendered to the ontological in a way
that counter-balances what, as briefly described above, might seem an over
highlighted sexuality.  Paradoxically,
this is done by inflating the specular sense of hysteria in a way that performs
a very comic exaggeration of the Lacanian notion of the fundamental hysteria of
the speaking subject.  

Stoklos
inflates, strategically exaggerates and identifies by verbal or gestural
pointing.    It’s a
deictic function that characterizes all of her work.  The deictic function of Stoklos's intentionally performed
ambiguity with identification and power 
in Mary Stuart (with whatever
or whomever has it) is to point to the historical and social
consequences of abuse of power. 
The deictic is the expressive mode that dominates in Mary Stuart:  Stoklos is constantly verbally and gesturally "pointing
at" connections between events, places and positionings.  Indeed, her historical analogy is encapsulated
in the adverbial pointing to connections in the brief telephone call Mary tries
to complete to Elizabeth that I cite as a prefatory quote to this essay :

 

--Hello, are you calling from there?

 

           
--No, not from there, Scotland. 
From here, Brazil.

As
I've commented, the slippage between who is placing the call--The operator?
Mary Stuart? Denise Stoklos?--indicates a crossed line in international
connections, in which Brazil is equated with a colonized and embattled Scotland
in an unequal struggle for power. 
It's the deictic that repositions the hysteric as a historical subject
as well.

However, there is a more precise moment of
historical analogy that Stoklos is flagging, or pointing to, in Mary Stuart.  1985 marks the moment of "official redemocratization"
in Brazil, the "New Republic": 
the official end of the dictatorship, a paradoxical return to
representative government  without
public access to the vote. 
Citizens had no direct vote, 
the president was elected by congressional vote.  In a series of short scenes toward the
end of Mary Stuart entitled "Wash your feet," Wash your
arms," "Wash your hands," Stoklos sums up her skepticism
regarding the new government's intentions to empower the Brazilian people:
"And they wash their hands in the soap of the Brazilian lack of
memory" (65).  It is clear
that Stoklos wishes to underline the precarious state of Brazil's still
potential civil autonomy.

In closing my discussion of Mary Stuart, I would like to go back to
Stoklos's ambiguous statement that "the [mere] potentiality of power is
always destructive.[...].  The
potentiality of power is always destructive, following Stoklos's metaphor,
because as long as power is stiffled in its realization, signifying an incompleted
identity, it is vulnerable to repetition of the circumstances of its own
unfulfillment.    It is
also destructive in that, as a potentiality, it leaves the subject in a
permanent state of indecision or postponed agency.   Her call to alarm in Mary Stuart, in Benjaminian terms, seeks to bring the significant
and recent past to us in a analogy that uses the many artifices of performed
hysteria to let us know that Brazil's interpellation into the global system
still remains  hanging very much in
the terms of the hysteria-impotence stasis that Glauber Rocha allegorized in
l967.

We will see hysteria performed much to the same
theatrical advantage in her l992 production 500
Years: a Fax from Denise Stoklos to Christopher Columbus.  That is, Stoklos employs the same
performative strategies to tease out and explicate the contradictions between
imaginary and symbolic identification. 
However, Fax is not posed as
historical analogy, but rather as a direct confrontation with
history-as-knowledge.  Accordingly,
the hysterical conflict she will interpret will be that between truth and
knowledge. 

 

III.  One of the common strategies of Stoklos's work is an
irreverent play with the rhetoric of public knowledge.   At some point
in all her plays Stoklos directly engages her audience in the act of reading or
recitation.  This hallmark stage
business is intended to be simultaneously serious and funny.    These public
"lectures" are different in intent and tone from her corresponding
signature device of quoting historical people, although both devices are often
used to contrapontal effect.   
Stoklos quotes from historical figures whom she respects.  She often exalts them as she quotes,
standing tall, sweeping their words out to the world, to the sky, with her
arms.   Like Thoreau and Paulo
Freire, as she portrays them in Civil
Desobedience, they are people whose visions of the future and integrity in
their presents are to be emulated.

Her "lectures," on the other hand,
are generally delivered with much vocal pyrotechnics, facial mugging and
gesticulation, to hilarious effect. 
But they are also serious: exaggeration questions the value given to
received knowledge and culture.  
If she gives an outrageously exaggerated reading from Gertrude Stein,[xix]
we howl with laughter, but we also gain a fine appreciation for her prose.  On the other side, she often deflates
official history and epistemological systems, interrupting and commenting on
her readings.   Whether she is
inflating or deflating knowledge, her histrionics raise serious questions about
the value we give to our cultures and to the truth of written histories.

These lectures are also triangulated.  The comic performer in the middle takes
on the arduous task of unpuzzling the riddle of how, and where, truth is not
knowledge, and vice-versa.  In
Lacanian theory, truth is never conflatable with knowledge because
"truth" is structured within, and perceived from, the constitutive
gap between imaginary and symbolic identification.  As such, "truth" always puts knowledge into
question.  It is a conundrum of
being-of-language.   In the
case of the hysteric, the hysteric's insistent questions amplify the
disjuncture.   As Wajeman
condenses it: "While knowledge cannot articulate the hysteric, the
hysteric ushers the articulation of knowledge."[xx]

In 500
Years: a Fax from Denise Stoklos to Christopher Columbus Stoklos works to
reorganize the categories of knowledge and truth from the personal to the
public.   The work is one long
rant about historical "truth."   
Perhaps the most discursive of Stoklos's plays in the sense that its
text is a discourse directly delivered to Columbus (and his inheritors in
exploitation), Fax gives voice to a
counter-reading of the celebration of the discovery of the Americas. Textually,
it is structured as a "lecture" in a double sense:  Stoklos plays with readings (in the
ways mentioned above), as she delivers a passionate and  aggressive polemic against
Columbus.  Textual movement is
expository: a short preface, followed by a long monologue on historical
accountability that segues into a series of declamations regarding the
citizen's (and artist's) responsibility toward reshaping deformative hate and
passivity into transformative love. 
However, this textual exposition is not a smooth one, rather one interrupted
by a series of chaotic scenes in which Stoklos pits modes of communication and
interpretation against one another. 
In other words, the themes are textually expounded, but the gesturality
is metatextual. 

There is also an interpenetration and
compression between verbal and written text initially set up by the plays
textual framing device:  a "diário a bordo" (daily ships log)
becomes a fax sent in l992.  It is
a temporal/historical compression perhaps best exemplified by her lexical play
with "Columbus."  This
occurs in the middle of the short preface.  After rhetorically positioning  Columbus's 
discovery in the non-recorded history of the world (starting with the
"big bang" of some l5 billion years ago), the actress disdains him as
a historical dwarf, almost an accident with disastrous consequences in which
the name, Colombo (Columbus) becomes an abbreviation representative of the
"multinational gang" that has taken control of America in these last
500 years.  She spells it out:
"Co de corrupção, L de lucro, O de obsessivos, M de
manter Bo nós, bobos.  Colombo: Corrupção e Lucro Obsessivos Mantém-nos Bobos” (6).[xxi]   She then spits out that this is a
history so common and vulgar--profit above all--that she doesn't understand how
it can be spoken of for even five minutes without exacting an "urgent
clamor for revolution."  A
shout which she repeats several times before she "remembers" that in
Latin American "we are all Hamlets."  That is, eternally dispossessed inheritors, incapable of
"reordering the primitive state of law/rights."  The preface ends with the question
"Why?" repeated three times, a paroxysm of anguish and anger.[xxii]
The hysteric's question resoundingly prevails over the master's answers.[xxiii]

Briefly, I want to indicate how this rather
constant textual rhythm and metatextual contrapositioning is staged throughout
the play.  In contrast to the
sparse or scattered design of props of most of her other plays, Fax presents a unified stage design that
equates Latin America with a shipwrecked beach.  Ripped but continuous netting crosses the entire stage
diagonally.  Stage space is
littered with the flotsam of shipwreck, chests of strange design that will
later disclose evidence of 500 years of civilization/barbarism. 

Stoklos's presence has three registers that are
interspersed and played off of one another throughout Fax: shipwreck victim, performer and citizen.  She first appears, gyrating underneath
the netting, garbed as a shipwreck victim, in characteristic tights covered
with a tunic of netting:  a victim
of shipwreck caught up in the web of history, but a victim condemned to
register (her log). This is a statement of relative passivity
(observer/participant) complemented by her other two registers as creative
performer and citizen.  Creativity
and citizenship are functions and effects of responsibility.  A rhetorical apology for the chaotic
nature of her performance made at the beginning (textual chaos signifying
historical chaos) is answered by an enunciatory stance almost at the end of the
play where Stoklos conflates her artistic and ethical responsibilities:  "I wanted to make this performance
exactly this way:  reflective.  From text.  I could be doing a performance about any other thing.  But I chose to manifest myself
explicitly as a Brazilian citizen, I refused to retreat from the fierce fight
of this moment" (42-43). 

But what does this moment signify?  And why such urgency?  Obviously, it is referential to the
hoopla of the Columbus quinticentenial. 
But it is also explicitly referential to a crisis between government and
citizenship that was rocking Brazil, provoking the contextual immediacy of Fax.  In l989, after 21 years of official military dictatorship,
and after the beginning of the Nova República of l985 (captained by a President
elected by representative vote), Fernando Collor de Mello became the first
president since l961 to be elected by direct popular vote. Soon after assuming
the presidency in l990, Collor was linked to a series of outrageous scams and
economic frauds (outrageous even for our times), a scandal marked by
questionable deaths of key persons. 
As Stoklos developed and performed Fax,
her protest resonated with the multitude of public protests that inexorably led
to Collor's impeachment in December of l992.[xxiv]

Among other things, this crisis underscored
fundamental contradictions between the power of mass media and the exercise of
citizenship.  Collor was a media
candidate:  a handsome, articulate
politician, unequivocally backed by the media conglomerates.  In a tirade against media politics, and
Collor, Stoklos alternately strides and races around the edges of large circles
of light made by spots, denouncing the deformative cyclicity of the citizen's
seduction by the media and complicity with media politics.  At one point in this physical frenzy
representing the dumbing down of a regressive civilization, Stoklos begins to
reverse the process, gesturally and textually.  She has grabbed a tattered sack of manioc flour--up until
that moment just another unidentified scenic element of detritus.  Tossing flour up into the air as she
circles, she marks the stage with footprints as it floats down, imprinting a
declaration of historical reversal: 
the flour--symbol of a diet of deprivation--is, as she declares and
demonstrates, "thrown on high like confetti to celebrate a new era in
which unprocessed flour is NOT the only daily bread" (35).[xxv] 

The fierce and overt acting out  and manic reappropriation of clichés
and stereotypes that marks the play throughout is leavened by a metatextual
inquiry that extends itself to the scenery and illumination.  The particular urgency of Stoklos's
rage against the abuse of communications systems is interwoven with an
insistence on ripping truth from the written word.  At one point, she actually rips pages out of books.  As in all of her plays after Mary Stuart, books are important, but
perhaps even more so in Fax.  Books can tell the truth as well  as lie.  You have to know how, and in which position, to read them.  It's quite literally about
epistemological positioning.

In Fax,
playing the hysteric is playing out positionalities regarding knowledge and
truth.  According to Wajeman, the
hysteric's injunction--"Tell me!"--pushes the limits of knowledge,
since her demand is ambiguous: on the one hand her injunction produces some
answer (knowledge), but "on the other hand, her solicitation pushes
knowledge to its limits, demonstrating that knowledge does not coincide with
the truth that it supposedly expresses" (l5).  Inasmuch as the hysteric remains a hysteric, however, this
is a dead-end game.  The hysteric
may have the power to banalize or question knowledge, but has commandeered no
personal identity--integration of the imaginary and symbolic--from where to do
more than pose her/his history as a continual riddle.  Again, this is an exaggeration of an ontological
inaswerablitiy that has to do with acknowledgement of personal history, in
which the category of truth is ever experienced as shifting subjectivity. 

Stoklos theatrically transposes the personal to
the body politic as she literally repositions herself corporeally with history
in Fax.  As shown below, in its conflict with knowledge,
"truth" becomes History as experienced.  That is, the hysteric's riddle is still posed, but
paradoxically de-hystericized in its demand for empowerment vis-à-vis
knowledge.

Towards the
beginning of the play, Stoklos the shipwreck victim/actress/citizen opens a
chest that resembles a time capsule. 
Energetically extracting books, she gives an enraged recital of the
horrors of colonization, connecting Indian massacres to Tianamen Square,
transposing locales and epochs. 
Some of the books are official histories, which she reads against the
grain, slamming them down on the stage in disgust.  She then slides across the stage, using the books as
slippers, chanting "burn, burn, burn."  Other books, such as those written by Eduardo Galeano, are
reverentially guarded as testaments. 

Having alternated between frontal declamation
and circular movement in a fixed circle of light, Stoklos suddenly crouches
down, refusing to read further.  A
quick shift of illumination to backlighting  projects a gossamer quality to her hair and clothing that
evokes a fully formed fetus awaiting birth.  Backlighting transforms into numerous and uneven spots that
pepper the stage, Stoklos and her books—fragmentation and contiguity.

Stoklos positions history upside down (or right
side up) in a sequence in which she stretches out on her back, head to the
audience, pulls up her legs to support a large book which she opens to pictures
of the destruction of a Polish city in World War II.  As she shares this image, she chases a fly with one hand,
crushes it in the book which she slams shut, reopens the book, picks out the
fly and eats it.  This is a
gestural defiance of an old Portuguese proverb: Em boca fechada não entra mosca (No flies enter a closed
mouth).   For her it is
transformative resistance: she will keep talking, ingesting and digesting flies
(hate) until hate becomes love. 

In our final image of the play, the discursive
repetitions and histrionic ending of Fax
are both restrained and organized by the permanence of the stage set.  An appeal to cliché/counter-cliché
provides the tone for the play's ending. 
After a punctuating numerical reversal--500 represents the statistical
500 grams of meat that is consumed by the average poor Brazilian family
yearly--she bellows out the abbreviated essence of her
counter-communication/fax: "Enough! 
(LOUD MUSIC).  I said 500
times enough!" (35). 
Stoklos's counter-proposal relies, somewhat frenetically, on an
ambiguously problematized characterization of the Latin American/Brazilian soul
as passionate and musical. 
Speaking of the importance of love-making to the Latin, she proposes a
radicalization of love: 
"Then, if this is our way out, perhaps naïve, but let it be a
restored way out. Let it be radicalized as a sign, installing itself as
integral energy, indispensable and intense, this passion that we inherited from
the primitive presence of Africa in our countries, and that saves us..."
(42).  This scene climaxes with
Nina Simone singing "I loves you Porgy," thus linking the Americas
through African heritage.  This
scene culminates as Stoklos "signs" her fax with music:  Elis Regina singing Violeta Parra's
"Gracias a la vida." 
Thanking the life that brings with it the possibility of transformation,
she argues the need to speak without fear. 

  Although
she concludes her performance declaring “The doors of the theatre are open for those who want to abandon this
ship in flames” (Taylor, 12), it’s clear that she indites the historical
present as a means of enjoining those who would stay to fight for a better
future.   The pervasiveness of netting the full stage may be
metaphoric of a Latin America trapped in historical determination, and of a Brazil
seduced, shipwrecked and abandoned at the very moment of its first bid for
direct democratic process.  But
this stage design can also be read as referential to continental solidarity and
resistance precisely by its disparity from the professed minimalism of
Stoklos's "essential theatre."[xxvi] 

 

IV.     In brief summary, I would like to
retie the thread of utopia into the fabric of my arguments.  First of all, I don't think there's any
doubt that the idea of utopia, in itself, recalls hysteria inasmuch as it
(utopia) represents an unattainable state, a potential but inherently deferred
identity.  One could argue that
performing hysteria makes for problems with interpreting history. However, as
performer, I don't believe it's necessary that Stoklos actually solve the
problem of whether hysteria is psychological or historical, but that she
perform the ambiguities that she raises in such a way that the audience becomes
engaged in historical thinking. 
Stoklos's historicized hysterical subject, the performer as
intermediary, engages us with her very serious arguments.  As we laugh at the performer's
compulsive repetitive insistence on historical recognition, we also cheer her
dramatized moments of triumph.

However,
and by way of conclusion:  In the
process of writing this article, I've come to recast Stoklos's definition of
herself as an utopian optimist from a slightly different angle.  It's not that I quarrel with that
definition.  But after some
thirteen years of accompanying her work, and puzzling it out in the terms of
playing with the hysterical-historical as I've done here, I’ve come to see the
self she exhibits in performance in a somewhat different light.  To indirectly borrow a phrase of Cornel
West's, I've come to view Stoklos in performance as a "prisoner of
hope." [xxvii] 

This distinction describes the particular
tensions that Stoklos sets up.  Is
it by design that her plays scenically and thematically deal with incarceration
and liberation?[xxviii] 
 Certainly the tense
freeze-frame final images of most of her plays also remit to peril held at bay,
suspended by will and hope.  
And whether our final view of her taut immobilized body with its facial
contortions is nuanced by soft verbal appeal or countermanded by intense
proclamation, the effect is essentially the same. These endings are freeze
moments, imagistic conflations that project a utopia of immediacy in which body
and voice are intimately connected. 
It is a stage moment, a fantasy moment, a performed possibility of the
voice of a historical collective body.   An "as if" moment that asks us to join her
play for utopia.  Play, in the
double sense of her ludic rehearsal for utopia, and her bid to reclaim it.  And reclaiming utopia can be a powerful
strategy for  a prisoner of hope.

 

 

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