On Tuesday morning, Francesca Di Fazio, Minna Jeffery and Vanja Baltić shared their work and ideas on very different plays: Francesca Di Fazio discussed puppetry’s particular aptitude for embodying ecological ideas, with reference to Demeter by Agrupación Señor Serrano, Notre Vallée by Cie Arnica, and Earthbound by Marta Cuscunà , Minna Jeffery presented Kellarikerroksessa (The Basement Flats) by Finnish playwright Elvira Willman, and Vanja Baltić talked about Waiting for Godot, specifically the production Aspettando Godot directed by Theodoros Terzopoulos.
Demeter is a Greek Myth, told using Lego pieces, in which a king offends the goddess Demeter by cutting down a tree, and she punishes him with insatiable hunger. He consumes everything, and ultimately himself – an allegory for humans consuming the resources of the Earth. In Notre Vallée, based on Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, Émile Flacher uses puppetry to offer non-human viewpoints, play with scale and overthrow conventional hierarchies by, for example, presenting underground dwellings and overhead views, or putting a bird and a farmer on the same physical scale. In Earthbound, inspired by Donna Haraway’s writings, three animatronic puppet symbionts, part human, part non-human endangered species, attempt to live – to make-together.
Kellarikerroksessa (The Basement Flats), written in 1907, stages the lives of members of an impoverished lower-class neighbourhood, particularly the women. Elvira Willman disapproved of “bourgeois” plays about individual characters and argued that theatre should be about communities. Criticised by the press for being too concerned with material rather than spiritual things, Kellarikerroksessa was welcomed by workers’ associations as a form of reportage and protest against conditions of precarity and poverty.
Discussing Waiting for Godot, Vanja Baltić focussed on the character of Lucky, and described the other characters’ obsession with being seen and recognised. “Are you looking at me?” “Do you hear me?”. She referenced George Berkeley’s proposition that the universe exists only through God’s continual perception of it. If there is no witness equal to the act of witnessing, the universe cannot exist. The play is saturated with the fear of being unperceived, and therefore not being at all.
And there, in this existential anxiety, lies the (or, anyway, a) connection between these diverse plays. Existential anxiety runs through all three. Ecological anxieties are incarnated in the puppetry theatre described by Francesca Di Fazio, material and societal anxieties inhabit the stage in Kellarikerroksessa, and Waiting for Godot expresses a profound spiritual anxiety. Or, to state it differently, these plays express anxiety at different scales: on the level of the natural world, in terms of human society, and within the psyche of the individual.
And if a play about a human community rather than a main character was too outlandishly socialist a hundred years ago, little wonder that staging visions of our multi-species community is still radical today.
Picture: Guido Mencari. Earthbound https://www.martacuscuna.it/en/earthbound-en/
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