Maternal Ruptures/Raptures: Leakages of the Real

Julia Kristeva describes the hallucinatory state between the real and the symbolic as rapture: “The rapture of the hallucination originates in the absence of boundaries between pleasure and reality, between truth and falsehood” (Kristeva, in Oliver 2002: 207). The real can only be accessed through this hallucinatory rapture: Floating in isolation, this vision of an unnamed real rejects all nomination and any possible narrative. Instead it remains enigmatic, setting the field of speech ablaze only to reduce it to cold ashes, fixing in this way a hallucinatory and untouchable jouissance. (Kristeva 1986: 227) The symbolic order of language is described by Kristeva as ‘cold ashes’, a mere residue of the flames of the real. The real according to Kristeva remains untouchable, a notion similar to Lacan’s “encounter with the real”, which is always “a missed encounter” (Lacan 2004 [1977]: 55). The 2,000 word provocation proposed for Performance Research will argue that the maternal in performance has the capacity to set representation ablaze, to rupture the symbolic and to infuse performance with the rapturous sparks of the real. The provocation will utilise Zoo Indigo’s PaR performances Under the Covers (2009), which presents the performers’ babies via live video link, and Blueprint (2012), featuring the performers’ real-life mothers on SKYPE video call, as case studies to argue that the non-performance of motherhood can enable the emergence of the real in theatre. Kristeva depicts motherhood as the maternal time, “the slow, difficult and delightful apprenticeship in attentiveness, gentleness, forgetting oneself” (Kristeva 1981: 31). Lisa Baraitser describes these interruptions as “breaches, tears or puncturings to the mother’s durational experiences bringing her back “again and again” into the realm of the immediate, the present, the here-and-now of the child or infant’s demand” (Baraitser 2009: 110). This immediacy responding to the corporeal urges of the child render the maternal encounter real. This provocation aims to argue that the maternal encounter in Zoo Indigo’s performances causes a transcendence towards the real, with reference to psychoanalysis, specifically the writings by Julia Kristeva and Lisa Baraitser. Kristeva notes: “Milk and tears […] are the metaphors of nonspeech, of a ‘semiotics’ that linguistic communication does not account for” (Kristeva, in Oliver 2002: 322). The release of breast milk is beyond the symbolic order, it transports us to Kristeva’s semiotic, the non-symbolic, the real. The provocation will analyse the leakage of breast milk in Under the Covers, when performers experienced the let-down reflex and release of milk when seeing their babies on screen, and the leakage of tears in Blueprint, in the moments when mothers and daughters returned to a maternal encounter beyond the symbolic. The provocation will argue that real mother-child relationships in performance remain unperformed and beyond representation, and that the maternal fluids of blood, milk and tears erupting in Zoo Indigo’s work cause a momentary leakage of the real into the symbolic framework of theatre

No Woman’s Land - Walking as a Dramaturgical Device in Performance of Maternal Migration

The practice research project No Woman’s Land NWL (2015-2017) explored the historical performance walk as a methodology to develop a dramaturgy of migration in reference to kinesthetic empathy. The project explored whether the re-tracing of the 220-mile walk undertaken by Rippel’s grandmother Lucia in 1945 from Brzeźnica Poland to Pulspforde, Germany could produce a change of the performer’s body through an “authentic” physical experience, marked by exhaustion and the somatic memory of endurance. The project explored a dramaturgy of migration, the maternal body and authenticity in performance through the inclusion of real (hi)stories and the embodied experience of a migratory walk. In Zoo Indigo’s performative response to the walk, No Woman’s Land (NWL 2016), the duo re-engaged with the experienced endurance. Throughout the piece the performers (and sometimes audience members), walked on treadmills through digital projections of past and present landscapes. This article discusses the performance walk as a methodology towards a dramaturgy of migration, enabling an authentic representation of the migrant mother through the staging of the exhausted female body, the interweaving of documentary footage, and the real act of walking

Loss and Being Lost: Performing Precarity through Multi-lingual Text, Song and Music in Zoo Indigo's 'Don't Leave Me This Way'

open access articleThis article examines the function of music and multilingualism in Zoo Indigo’s Don’t Leave Me This Way. Through an engagement with live music, song and multilingual spoken text, an “affective potential of tonality” (Fischer-Lichte 120) is explored to express themes of precarity. The use of multilingualism functions “to upset the position of dominant language” (Byczynski 33), further highlighting a cultural precarity in a Brexit-ridden Britain. Drawing upon Butler’s constructivist view of performativity, the authors reflect on a narrative of loss and being lost communicated and understood through a dramaturgical framework of multilingualism, mother tongues, live music, pre-recorded sounds and song

Loss and Being Lost: Performing Precarity through Multilingual Text, Song and Music in Zoo Indigo’s Don’t Leave Me This Way

This article examines the function of music and multilingualism in Zoo Indigo’s Don’t Leave Me This Way. Through an engagement with live music, song and multilingual spoken text, an “affective potential of tonality” (Fischer-Lichte 120) is explored to express themes of precarity. The use of multilingualism functions “to upset the position of dominant language” (Byczynski 33), further highlighting a cultural precarity in a Brexit-ridden Britain. Drawing upon Butler’s constructivist view of performativity, the authors reflect on a narrative of loss and being lost communicated and understood through a dramaturgical framework of multilingualism, mother tongues, live music, pre-recorded sounds and song

Don't Leave Me This Way (Performance Lecture)

Don’t Leave Me This Way Decentralization and Multilingualism in Dramaturgies of Migration The practice research project Don’t Leave Me This Way (2021) is a contemporary performance odyssey as Zoo Indigo theatre company search for their European identity from the shores of a Brexit-ridden Britain. In a series of trips across Europe the performers left their homes to retrace their cultural heritage in Ireland, Germany and Hungary, singing songs, learning folk dances, and drinking local beverages. The journey culminated in a politically charged multilingual performance, merging English with German and Hungarian language. The performers present personal anecdotes on migration, and dances and songs from their countries of origin to reclaim their heritage, while competing in a series of citizenship catwalks. The focus of the project was to critically explore the performativity of nationhood and the loss of cultural identity, and to investigate the role of music, movement and the mother tounge in the forming of cultural identity. The performance draws upon Judith Butler’s constructivist view of performativity, which ‘is thus not a singular “act”, for it is always a reiteration of a norm or set of norms, and to the extent that it requires an act-like status in the present, it conceals or dissimulates the conventions of which it is a repetition’ (Butler 1993: 12). Thus, nationality is an “act” practiced through cultural repetition and rituals. The use of multilingualism furthermore functions to de-decentre and “to upset the position of dominant language” (Byczynski 2000: 33), further highlighting a cultural precarity in a Brexit-ridden Britain. Don’t Leave Me This Way explores somatic practices and multilingualism, to destabilise and decentre language as a dominant tool of expression in performance. This approach contributes towards the democratisation of knowledge as it aims to destabilise English as the dominant language of performance and academic discourse. Zoo Indigo aim to explore methods to discuss the practice research in a similarly multilingual, non-verbal and participatory approach in the performance conversation at IFTR. The aim is to create a non-hierarchical articulation of research, where knowledge is in flux between participants, to create a de-centred and non-hierarchical “rhizomatic learning”, informed by the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who define the rhizome as an ‘acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system without a general and without an organizing memory or central automaton, defined solely by a circulation of states’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 21). The performance conversation will explore the possibilities of rhizomatic, somatic and democratic practice research exchanges in academia, to develop a ‘hopeful practice of laboratory exploration’ (Heron and Johnson 2017: 282)

Virtual Infants in Zoo Indigo’s Under the Covers This is Now, This is Live…

The article This is Live this is now (2011), contextualises the performance Under the Covers (2009) by Zoo Indigo. The journal article is written by Ildiko Rippel on behalf of Zoo Indigo theatre company (Rosie Garton and Ildiko Rippel) and it is published in the online Body, Space and Technology Journal

Performance and Real Relationships: Family, Intimacy and Domesticity in Contemporary European Theatre

This study extends existing debates of theatre and the real and presents the first systematic exploration of the theory, history and practice of the ‘non-performer’ in contemporary theatre, particularly exploring what might be considered a niche field of non-performer family members in performance. During the Covid-19 pandemic online performances increased out of necessity, and theatre makers progressively created work with family members in their own homes. Performing with real people is a notable phenomenon of late 20th and early 21st century theatre, and the lockdown years saw a rise of familial performance. In this book, Ildikó Rippel investigates the phenomenon of performing with real family members co-opted into contemporary practice. Dissecting the dramaturgies in familial performances, the book applies a feminist perspective to investigate the sense of intimacy and authenticity that emanates from performing with family. The first section of the book discusses philosophical perspectives such as the Lacanian concept of the real and theories on metamodernism, foregrounding ideas of authenticity, to offer a central critical framework and a springboard for the investigations to follow. The book then focuses on the discussion of case studies, analysing familial theatre with parents, children and lovers. The chapters on case studies continue to apply the theoretical framework presented in the introduction chapter, with a focus on the affect on audiences. The chapters are intersected with interviews with theatre practitioners, offering an in-depth investigation of devising methodologies of family theatre, exploring the bodily experience of the artists. The book finally focuses on the emergence of familial performances on social media during the Covid-19 pandemic, and analyses examples of theatre practitioners performing with family members online. Ildikó situates her own practice alongside the performance examples, discussing Zoo Indigo theatre company’s projects with the performers’ children, mothers and lovers. This book explores the authenticity effect caused by performing with real family members and concludes that the presentations of such familial micro-narratives are ultimately universally relevant and instrumental in feminist theatre practices. The monograph distinctly offers a two-fold lens for the analysis of family theatre: the introspective bodily experiences of the practitioners interviewed, and the objective discussion of affect on the audience and spectatorship and the real

WILDING- the body at risk in militant feminist revolt (performance lecture)

“Rights of assembly struck me as different from rights of association or rights of free expression. They fundamentally involve the body in a collective, embodied set of acts.” (Butler 2015). The Performance as Research project Wilding is concerned with the precarious female body as a site of protest in feminist revolt, precarity describing the “conditions that threaten life in ways that appear to be outside of one’s control” (Butler 2009: i). Wilding is a collaboration with non-binary, queer performance maker Emma Bourke, a descendant of the militant suffragette Emily Wilding Davison, who died at the Epsom Derby in 1913 after running onto the race track in an attempt to pin a suffragettes’ flag to the King’s horse. Wilding uses a Performance as Research methodology to challenge myths surrounding femininity and precarity, and explores the meaning of feminism to non-binary people today. The project is furthermore invested in the female body risk during radical feminist revolt, and the relation of protest to queerness, “if the term is taken in its most theoretical sense to mean the bending and modification of normative structures of power and sociality” (Glazier 2015). The Wilding performance lecture merges archival footage of the Epsom Derby with autobiographical confession, and is accompanied by a soundscore of protest recordings merged with feminist Euro-Punk. Wilding explores the embodiment of protest in performance, is a response to and a protest against the UK’s policing bill, and explores the performers’ personal, political and phenomenological experiences of their protest bodies