Extractivism and Art
Has The Muse Had Enough, Yet?
by Francesco Chiaro
Extractivism is a spacious concept. It contains, amongst other and new frontiers, the excavation of mineral resources, the exploitation of labour, the accumulation of data and the appropriation of cultures, all in the name of concentration and profit. It should come as no surprise, then, that in the current neoliberal world-making project, anything can be plundered for value – bodies included. As the discourse driven forward by intersectional feminist theorists over the last decades has been slowly seeping through the thick skin of a still classist, patriarchal and normative Western society, the number of artistic performances (critical of the current status quo) that reaches the general public has been increasing relentlessly, revealing an interest in those margins that for so long did not have access to the limelight. But is raising awareness and centring marginalised identities enough, or is this just another wave that some artists and performers are riding until exhaustion?
By analysing three recent performances that were played in different European countries over the last months, we wish to pose a series of questions that may or may not open up new vistas of critique and resistance to what seems to be a normative and extractive trend in contemporary performing arts.
Lectura Fácil (Easy Reading) by Alberto San Juan
[from November 18, 2022 to January 8, 2023, Teatro Valle Inclán, Madrid, Spain]
Lectura Fácil (Easy Reading) by Alberto San Juan
Cristina Morales’ novel Easy Reading talks about extraordinary women capable of defining themselves in spite of all attempts of domination, normalisation and oppression made by an allegedly progressive society, about marginalised women capable of loving, desiring and enjoying life despite their diagnosed disabilities and about revolutionary women who refuse to see their complexities reduced to a simpler, harmless and more controllable existence. Alberto San Juan’s theatrical adaptation of the novel, however, does not.
As the audience pours in the Teatro Valle-Inclán on a cold and festive January evening, the dull grey of towering cement walls and the worn-out red of a fire-exit door silently but eloquently await them on the stage – a well-fitting and versatile scenography by Beatriz San Juan for the two-hour-long journey to come into the institutional and bureaucratic hell of marginalised people. Freely based on Cristina Morales’ 2018 award-winning novel Easy Reading, the namesake play by actor, director and playwright Alberto San Juan (also founding member of the Teatro del Barrio cooperative in Madrid) is the theatrical adaptation of a piece of literature facing with a radicality of form, ideas and language of rare strength and efficacy the pressing questions posed by bodies, sex, politics and disability in today’s society.
In the words of the Madrilenian director, «Easy Reading is a comedy about four girls who share a flat. A story about four non-normal people, that is, who have great difficulties in adapting to the rules. Four people marked by different diagnoses of disability associated with mental disorders: Nati, Patri, Ángeles and Marga. A judge opens a process to decide if Marga’s forced sterilisation should be carried out. Marga escapes and illegally occupies an abandoned house. The police start looking for her». Starring an extremely talented cast of performers with and without disabilities, San Juan’s adaptation and directorial choices jar with Morales’ novel right from the get-go, turning the Granadan writer’s «battlefield against the white and monogamous heteropatriarchy, the institutional and capitalist rhetoric and the activism that wears the guise of “the alternative” to underpin the status quo» into a stereotypical, laughable matter.
As a matter of fact, and as it happened with the previous attempt at adapting Morales’ work for a different medium (this time by TV-show director Anna R. Costa, who created Fácil for Spanish channel Movistar+ and who was later heavily criticised by the writer for being incapable of confronting politically radical characters, so much so that the show was renamed Nazi by Morales herself), the fierce attack carried out by the author on the conditions of domination that non-normalised bodies have to endure on a daily basis gets watered down yet again in San Juan’s version for the stage, where a conformist shadow looms large. Indeed, and regardless of the most evident differences between the novel and the script (i.e., moving the action [and the critique] from highly contradictory, allegedly politically-correct and leftist Ada Colau’s Barcelona, where the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages was born in response to the forced evictions triggered by 2008 financial crisis, to conservative and right-wing Madrid), what makes Easy Reading a harmless, defused bomb is the director’s patronisation of those same bodies he wishes to set free.
By implementing a series of textbook tricks of the trade (rousing background music, stage-centre motivational monologues and applause-jerking pauses), San Juan expands on the personal struggles of three secondary characters, bringing to the scene a greater number of marginalised bodies that -intentionally or not and judging by the gloating reaction of the audience- seem to portray as superhuman not only the accomplishments of said fictional characters, but also those of the actual performers on stage (wild goes the crowd when a person with walking impairment raises from her wheelchair), thus seemingly implying that both the characters and the professionals lack or have very limited skills, talents or unusual gifts to begin with (how sneaky the soft bigotry of low expectations is!).
Moreover, by sacrificing most of the dissident and thorny political reflections of the novel due to alleged concision needs (which still allowed for the introduction of the aforementioned three monologues that were not present in the original version) and by favouring those parts of the text that could be more easily digested by a “liberal” audience, San Juan delivers a highly problematic and condescending piece of theatre that pre-emptively filters out all moral conflicts, neutralising de facto the subversive reach of Morales’ work and offering a facilitated, assisted reading of a multi-layered and complex slice of contemporariness (little or no gravitas is given, for example, to the fact that the whole play actually revolves around an attempt to forcibly sterilise the already heavily medicated, oppressed and depressed Marga, a matter that quickly takes a back seat in the comic version of the Madrilenian playwright).
In this directorial context, then, it is no coincidence that every single “feat” of the performers with disabilities is followed by a self-satisfied uproar of the spectators who, at the same time, hold their breath in uncomfortable dismay (and perhaps repugnance?) whenever sex and sexual pleasure are used as emancipatory tools by the very same “incapable” bodies. Indeed, by ridding of its visceral, pugnacious and feminist approach the joyous and politicised celebration of the liberating carnal pleasures that Morales so exquisitely describes and carefully contextualises in her novel between stigmatised people, San Juan’s “transgressive” intercourses (and his “disobedience” in general) seem to strengthen -rather than demolish it- the bourgeois understanding of inclusion currently in force, that which entails two sets of people, an inside and an outside, a normality and a subnormality – an “us” and a “them”.
It is this containment, this prescriptivism, this effort to limit every dissonant discourse to the same, standardised and neutralising idea of alterity that makes of Easy Reading an extractive and normative piece of theatre in which the subject (the non-normative body) is excavated (centred on a stage), polished so as to fit the spatial and social limits within which anyone should contain his/her reach (normalised) and thus plundered of meaning (deprived of its existential value in order to produce an economic one). And still, should we, as a society, be grateful for San Juan’s inclusion of these marginalised bodies in the mainstream thought -after all, “there is no such thing as bad publicity”-, or should we demand for awareness to be raised in a non-predatory way?
Corpo Clandestino (Clandestine Body) by Victor Hugo Pontes
[Thursday 16 and Friday 17 February 2023, Culturgest, Lisbon, Portugal]
Corpo Clandestino (Clandestine Body) by Victor Hugo Pontes
Ph. by Estelle Valente
Albeit different in theme and form, the next performance also uses normativity as the pivot around which the margins are represented, “mining the exotic” in a rather blatant way, thus depriving its “raw materials” of their own voice so as to deliver an eighty-minute-long artistic solipsism in which strong and “able” bodies lift, carry, throw and jump over smaller, shorter and less “capable” ones in a choreography of aggressivity, manhandling and submission that deprive singularities of any sense of sovereignty over their own corporeity and, ultimately, their own identity. Indeed, beautiful aesthetics and telluric soundscapes are not enough to save Victor Hugo Pontes’ latest creation from the dangers of vacuity: Corpo Clandestino, an allegedly norm-shattering performance for seven marginalised bodies grossly misses the mark, consolidating rather than weakening the normative status quo.
Darkness. Curtains. An empty floor sprawled against a vertical, mournful veil and, on top of it, a honeycombed mirror hanging crookedly from the ceiling – reflections segmented by its geometrical mercilessness. An eerie, hushed atmosphere ricochets between a vaporous yet dense materiality made of flesh, fabric and exposed limbs that slowly expand to the sound of nothing. The visual inputs are manifold, but let’s start with the body, for so much is won and lost and lost and lost there.
Corpo Clandestino, Portuguese choreographer, stage and artistic director Victor Hugo Pontes’ latest creation, incorporates seven of them – seven performers clad in pastel-coloured, burqa-like garments that dance while coated in the mist of fashionable homologation. Their different heights, sizes and see-through revelations, however, state the play’s grammar right from the get-go: clandestine will be a synonym for “non-normative”, here. Indeed, as the bodies of Ana Afonso, Andreia, Gaya, Joãozinho, Mafalda, Paula and Valter fluctuate like threads of smoke unspooling from a stranger’s lips, tiny details of divergent physiognomies begin expanding, eventually engulfing the whole scene.
On paper, the performance is «an exercise in dislocation and reconfiguration: the stage becomes a setting for what usually has no place on a stage; attention is readjusted; body parts are fitted together like puzzle pieces. Given the spotlight, non-normative bodies present the viewer with a corps de ballet that shuns ideals or classical standards. They are a sole body made of seven unique pieces». In the reality of Lisbon’s Culturgest, however, things are less clear and much more problematic.
By making a centrepiece out of dwarfism, obesity, transsexuality and disability, Pontes enacts an iconography of tameness in which the image – the form – is paramount and the message – the content – is naught. As a matter of fact, the choreographer seems to focus all of his energies on a series of rather conformist aesthetic devices (nudity, cross-dressing, grotesqueness) that are as eye-catching as innocuous, setting aside any dramaturgical tension and intention within and around the movement itself in the name of an onanistic spectacularisation of the body.
In her 2003 essay “Queering the Crip or Cripping the Queer?”, scholar Carrie Sandahl writes that the verb “to crip” means to probe «mainstream representation or practices to reveal able-bodied assumptions and exclusionary effects». In other words, to crip is to refigure something, breaking down any exclusionary barriers, and in so doing, to articulate disabled pride. In Corpo Clandestino, nothing gets cripped: the exclusionary barriers are embedded in the physical score and in those rare moments of non-dependency in which a “non-normative” body stops being used by someone else (someone “more able”) and is given free agency on itself, the movements it is allowed to experiment with are limited to a very dogmatic set of standard, classical exercises of control.
Paradoxically –and in spite of the artistic director’s wish to rethink «the normativity of bodies in force until the 21st Century, proposing a path of communicability and sharing, an alternative to reductionist, standardised and useless perspectives»–, the choreographic codes inscribed in the performers’ bodies could not be more normative: impairment is not treated as a generative, artistic force in and of itself, but as a condition existing only in relation to another condition, thus reinstating and reproducing those very same power structures that the play allegedly wanted to subvert.
Here, too, then, alterity is shined a light upon only to be better stripped of its most precious parts – the ones that can be put on display, that can be sold – for the voyeuristic pleasure of “normal” people and for the artistic profit of others, recalling to mind a colonist past that may not have been dealt with by Western societies just yet.
Seek Bromance by Samira Elagoz with Cade Moga
[Thursday 22 and Friday 23 February 2023, Teatro do Bairro Alto (Cinema São Jorge), Lisbon, Portugal]
Seek Bromance by Samira Elagoz with Cade Moga
Ph. by Samira Elagoz
The last performance we will mention in this article is also the most interesting one as far as extraction from and exploitation of bodies are concerned. Indeed, given its apparently collaborative nature, Samira Elagoz and Cade Moga’s Seek Bromance brings to the fore all of the problematics which appear within hierarchical artist-muse relationships, underlining the highly complex entanglement we have with each other and helping us pose a decisive question, exquisitely put by anthropologist and poet Maria Beatriz Oliveira Pinheiro de Abreu Afonso in her dissertation “A Antropologia e o Invisível - A descolonização do pensamento antropológico através da poesia” (Anthropology and the Invisible - Decolonising the Anthropological Thought Through Poetry): «how do we inhabit otherness without invading it, without occupying it?».
Winner of the Silver Lion at Venice Biennale 2022, Seek Bromance is a «romance situated at the end of the world between two trans-masculines, a saga almost four hours long developed in collaboration with Cade Moga» that started taking shape back in 2019, right at the beginning of the pandemic. Armed with «a car, some cash and a supply of testosterone», Elagoz and Moga embark on a three-month immersion into each other’s transitions, filming, documenting and exposing the tentacular dynamics of the historical attitudes known as masculinity and femininity via desert-clad performances, spontaneous discussions and scripted confessions.
Showed in various festivals around the world, Seek Bromance goes beyond the limits of a cinematic experience also thanks to Elagoz’s presence on the stage at every screening, firmly showcasing his «farewell to his femme identity» all the while interacting sporadically with the footage (but never with the audience) as if to remind us of his presence in that quiet, dimly lit armchair stage left. And it is here, in his first interference, that the bromance begins to lean more towards the self (the director) rather than the other (the muse/guide).
As it happened with the previous two performances, here too a marginalised reality is centred and shone a light on in the name of diversity. What differentiates Seek Bromance from Easy Reading and Corpo Clandestino, however, is the fact that the person directing it is also the one being crossed by that same marginality, thus exposing not only a general issue, but a personal struggle, too. In this context, then, one would expect Elagoz’s performance to go beyond the normative and hierarchical limitations seen above by adopting a (trans)feminist point of view made of care, listening and collaborative growth. Instead, his docufiction (a form used to encapsulate facts and fiction in a blurred, cinéma-verité-like fashion) turns out to be just another exercise of absorption, consumption and extraction.
As a matter of fact, and as denounced time and again by Cade Moga themselves, their «real trans love story» is far from being either real or filled with love. Coming from a past working as a «cis femme video vixen/car show model catering to the male gaze», Cade began exploring trans-masculinity in order to deconstruct binary identities and their own “sexy latina” character, publishing, amongst other things, also a manifesto on the experience. Contacted by Elagoz months before the pandemic’s first light, Cade «signed a contract with the Finnish filmmaker, who collected footage of Cade for 3 months in a reality-TV approach», before dropping out of production without ever declaring their love for the director. Moreover, as again denounced by the Brazilian performer, they had no idea that Elagoz was considering a cinematic gender transition «until they were already inside [their] house», in a period in which Cade had just gotten surgery and was «barely hanging in there with [their] own mental health». To top it all, thus underlining even more the extractive/exploitative approach wittingly or unwittingly adopted by the director, Cade (whose absence from the stage during the screenings is justified with the “end of their bromance” and not with this asphyxiating power structure imposed by Elagoz) was denied access to a copy of the work and still insists, to this day, that the footage was collected «by methods that were coercive, illegal, and traumatic». As it happens, «Cade continues to experience violence with every non-consensual screening», all the while Elagoz gains recognition and awards for “his work”.
What we see on the silver screen, then, is the director’s unquenchable thirst for more -more pain, more struggle, more “rawness”-, but constantly filtered through his presence, his persona and his ego. A telltale example of this would be, amongst the countless ones that could be highlighted, the final goodbye between the two performers, which takes place -yet again- in a “safe environment” for Elagoz, but not for Cade. Indeed, some months after the shooting, the Brazilian performer was asked to provide an ending to the performance, thus ultimately agreeing to send a long video to him in which they express all of their thoughts and worries. And this sharing, too, gets grinded in the predatory machinery of Elagoz’s egocentric narration. For an excruciatingly painful twenty minutes or so, then, what we witness is a fake real-time conversation between the two in which the director demonstrates his total domination over the other person’s contribution by way of stopping and interrupting their monologue with a surprising degree of nonchalant, structural and childish violence that the audience can only endure with gritted teeth.
Hence, what makes Seek Bromance a highly problematic piece of art is the ruthless ahistorical and apolitical predatory attitude that the director adopted throughout its production (the few moments in which the discourse actually gets political are always sustained by Cade’s personal reflections and lucubrations, with Elagoz’s thirsty camera eyes ready to record, incorporate and suck it all in), vesting another precarious body with a whole array of projected roles (muse, guide, therapist, lover) and extracting from this imposed hierarchy another person’s creative and emotional labour in order to attain both a personal and professional profit, without much regard for the rubble created in his wake.
Ultimately, and albeit deeply different from one another, Easy Reading, Corpo Clandestino and Seek Bromance seem to suffer all from the same, trendy condition, that is, an approach to alterity that defuses and denies it, turning it into a silent fiction of each director’s own imagination so as to reflect their own thoughts and points of view on the Other -who thus becomes a mere human-shaped canvas whose knowledge and experience are more of a consumer product than a way to rethink our own normalised (and normalising) bodies- rather than letting the Other (the muse, the marginalised subject, the racialised individual, the challenged existence) speak for itself, in its own words and with its own centre as a pivot around which us, the others, would revolve.
The shows were played in various locations around Europe, as mentioned above.
the Centro Dramático Nacional presents
Easy Reading – Lectura fácil
by Alberto San Juan
(freely adapted from Cristina Morales’ novel “Easy Reading”)
direction and dramaturgy Alberto San Juan
cast Desirée Cascales Xalma, Laura Galán (replacing Carlota Gaviño in 28, 29 and 30 December and 1, 3, 4, 6, 7 and 8 January), Carlota Gaviño, Pilar Gómez, Anna Marchessi, Marcos Mayo, Pablo Sánchez and Estefanía de los Santos
Yifi voice Nacho Marraco
set design and costumes Beatriz San Juan
light design Raúl Baena
sound design Fernando Egozcue
percussions Gabriel Marijuán
video Arantxa Melero
makeup Marta Pereira
movement Elisa Keisanen, Élise Moreau and Cristina Morales (Iniciativa Sexual Femenina)
acting coaching, advice and inclusion support Kube Escudero (AMÁS escena)
assistant director Anna Serrano
assistant light design Eduardo Vizuete
assistant set design and costumes Arantxa Melero
seasonal assistant director Antonio de la Casa
scenography realisation Mambo Decorado
poster design Equipo SOPA
co-production Centro Dramático Nacional and Bitò
in collaboration with the Contemporary Art Biennial of ONCE Foundation
Nome Próprio presents
Corpo Clandestino
by Victor Hugo Pointes
artistic direction Victor Hugo Pontes
set design F. Ribeiro
music Joana Gama, Luís Fernandes
technical direction and light design Wilma Moutinho
costumes Cristina Cunha, Victor Hugo Pontes
cast Ana Afonso Lourenço, Andreia Miguel, Gaya de Medeiros, Joãozinho da
Costa, Mafalda Ferreira, Paulo Azevedo, Valter Fernandes
director assistant Ángela Diaz Quintela
sound Rafael Maia, Kiko Rurelas
artistic consultancy Madalena Alfaia
production director Joana Ventura
executive producer Mariana Lourenço
production assistant Inês Guedes Pereira
residence support CRL - Central Elétrica, O Espaço do Tempo, Rota Clandestina - Município de Setúbal, Teatro Municipal do Porto - Campo Alegre
Coprodução Nome Próprio, A Oficina - CCVF, Centro de Arte de Ovar, Rota Clandestina - Município de Setúbal, Teatro José Lúcio da Silva, Teatro Municipal do Porto, Théâtre de Liège, Theatro Circo
acknowledgements Teatro Nacional São João
Nome Próprio is supported by República Portuguesa – Ministério da Cultura / Direcção-Geral das Artes and resident in the Teatro Campo Alegre, under the programme Teatro em Campo Aberto.
Seek Bromance
by Samira Elagoz
direction and concept Samira Elagoz
in collaboration with Cade Moga
featuring Samira Elagoz and Cade Moga
film footage Samira Elagoz and Cade Moga
edited by Samia Elagoz
dramaturgy Samira Elagoz
advisors Bruno Listopad, Antonia Steffens
extra editing advice Otto Rissanen, Jessica Dunn Rovinelli, Tiana Hemlock-Yensen, Valerie Cole, Michael Scerbo, Daniel Donato
script advice Tiana Hemlock-Yensen, Richard Sand, Valerie Cole
advice during filming Jeanette Groenendaal
production SPRING Performing Arts Festival
co-production Frascati Amsterdam, Kunstenwerkplaats Pianofabriek Brussels, Black Box Teater Oslo, BIT Teatergarasjen Bergen, Finish Cultural Institute for the Benelux, Arsenic - Contemporary Performing Arts Center, Lausanne
With the support of Fonds Podiumkunsten NL, Koneen Säätiö FI, Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds NL, Ammodo NL
