Steve Mentz

The genius started with Virgilia. Virgilia!

She was lounging onstage before the start, as we all tried to figure out how it would work. The stage at the BAM opera house was deep, wide, and busy, full of modular furniture, couches, tables, and at least a dozen large TV monitors. The audience started out seated, looking up at a huge screen above the stage with a gnomic Dylan phrase on it. We also watched a digital crawl that provided translations from the Dutch and other useful facts — 297 minutes to the death of Cleopatra! — for anyone who could see it. Later, when we (the audience) took the stage we stood or sat or craned our necks looking at the action, or taking a break to order at the bars backstage right or left. I asked for a rum and tonic while Coriolanus was dismembered 20 feet away. The stage also contained make up tables for the actors on one side, and public email/twitter terminals on the other side. It got crowded, as the night wore on.

Virgilia started it, before I knew who she was. She sat on the couch as the play opened, staring up at the imposing face of Volumnia, praising her warlike son on the big screen. All the war scenes in Corioles were compressed into strobe lighting, so the first time we see the hero upon his return from the battlefield, he’s caught between mother and wife. His words give priority to his mighty mother over the wife he calls “my gracious silence,” but this performance punctuates Virgilia’s tears with lingering kisses. The deep physical pull between the lonely dragon and the upstaged wife — Virgilia cannot control her husband the way his mother can — activates the agon between sex and politics that finally explodes, almost five hours later, with Cleopatra. During the show I thought these two parts were played by the same actor, but now that I check the cast list, Janni Goslinga played Virgilia and Chris Nietvelt played Cleopatra. The two performances shared an explosive mix of eros and warplay that sits near the heart of director Ivo van Hove’s vision of politics.

Van Hove’s notes call the political vision of his production of these three Roman Tragedies “action in public,” and here the decision to open the stage to the audience — not really a new innovation, as the Village Voice notes — represents not just avant-garde dramatic play but an experiment in seeing what “free action” can mean in practice. Van Hove claims that Shakespeare “shows that politics is made by people.” His set designer and long-time collaborator Jan Versweyveld writes that the set for these plays “transforms the theater into a political conference.” Their show immersed all of  us in political news, with the the digital crawl quoting headlines from Gaza and tweets from the  audience, while a few of the on-stage monitors projected images of 21c century heroes during the show: Barack Obama during Coriolanus’s encounter with the people, Michael Phelps’s 200m freestyle triumph during the ascent of Julius Caesar, and John Edwards (!) when Antony heads back to Rome to marry his rival’s sister.

One of the best tweets on the #romantragedies thread, to which we were all encouraged to post tweets and pictures during the performance, noted, accurately, that the best part of van Hove’s high-concept theatrical flourishes was how well each one embodied the deeper metaphors of the plays. I read that sometime during the production and thought — exactly. That’s how the show worked  I’ll try to explain a few of these moments.

Coriolanus’s melt-down press conference, in which he denounces the manipulative Tribunes in front of a TV audience, was a study in anger. “You speak as a punitive god,” protest the Tribunes, at which the general rages further. His denunciation of the corrupt “two-party system” drew applause from the high-minded Brooklyn crowd, but I kept recalling the opening kiss his mother had prevented him from enjoying with his wife after the battle at Corioles. The military hero raged against all distraction, against anything that moved away from his solitary warrior self — but on this stage there was no single center, only competing forces, mothers, wives, children, Tribunes and Senators and even the talking head of Barack Obama backstage. Plus lots of extras, including me.

The political world eats up this kind of solitude — this is what I take to be the meaning of the implied connection between Coriolanus and Obama, though our President seems to have managed the dissolution of his solitude better than the Roman general. Aufidius, who appeared twice on stage being interviewed by a Roman TV station, the second time when his armies were outside the gates of the city, was impassive and implacable, biding his time before consuming his ally-enemy at last. In a play about political failure and consumption, Virgilia’s almost-silent stage-plea for a more feeling world cannot stand before her mother in law’s dictum: “Anger’s my meat. I sup upon myself.”

From the inchoate rage of Coriolanus the production moved seamlessly — no set change between the death of Coriolanus and start of Julius Caesar  — to the high-stakes competition of Brutus, Cassius, and Caesar. Playing Cassius as a woman and then later playing Octavius Caesar as a woman in the final play suggested the slow integration of the Roman political world, from the violent masculine prehistory of Coriolanus’s Republic to the quasi-matriarchal empire of Octavius that follows the death of Cleopatra. The middle play, Julius Caesar, highlighted its female characters with a great stage coup, in which the tete-a-tete scenes of Caesar and Calpurnia and Brutus and Portia were played simultaneously across each other, such that each actor appeared to be answering both conversations at once. Calpurnia, played by Janni Goslinga, the actor whose Virgilia had failed to re-claim Coriolanus in the first play, was no more successful here in keeping her husband from being killed, but she and Portia provided a powerful template against which the Roman super-heroes measured themselves.

But the show-stopper in the middle play, perhaps predictably, was Mark Antony’s funeral oration. After a measured, polished, really quite beautiful speech by Roeland Fernhout’s Brutus — I was sitting about 5 feet behind him at center stage — Hans Kesting’s Antony swaggered to the podium, looked at the audience (I watched via video feed, since I was behind him), picked up his notes, and threw them away. Then he slouched around to the front of the podium, fell down, and sat still for almost two minutes.

We stared in near-silence at his stricken face, and I was thinking about media resources. In most plays, watching from seats, you can’t see close facial expressions unless you’re in the front row. But the video screens enabled this production to use the emotional resources of the close up as well as the shared emotional power that only crowded theaters can produce. Antony drew us to him by sitting exhausted and quiet, so that when he took up the microphone — “Friends, Romans…” (the words were in Dutch, of course, which meant I mostly couldn’t understand them, though a few old Germanic roots carried through) — we were all with him. And then he did with rage what Coriolanus hadn’t been able to do: he brought all of us all along with him.

I don’t think my description can do justice to the rippling force and mania of the speech: Antony ran through the theater screaming his lines (in Dutch), he carried the body of Caesar back on stage, he marked up a photo of the corpse with a red sharpie (which almost hit me when he discarded it behind him), he spat and dripped and cried. He waved around the paper with Caesar’s will.  And we were all with him — because we were on stage, most of us, we were the plebeians. We were the ones who wanted the honorable Brutus to pay, the ones who, deep in our stomachs, felt that being reasonable makes a poor politics.

A six-hour production needs multiple high-lights, and Antony’s funeral oration wasn’t the only one. I’ll hit two from Antony and Cleopatra: the night before the battle of Actium, and the death of Enobarbus.

Before the battle, on Cleopatra’s birth-day, she and Antony perform “one other gaudy night” (3.13) as an elaborate kiss-and-dance that fulfills the erotic promise that Virgilia had offered some 270 minutes before with her husband Coriolanus. The “soldier’s kiss” and the reunion of the lovers — Antony has spent a fair amount of the play thus far making and breaking a political marriage with Octavia, Caesar’s sister — gestured toward a theatrics of personal connection, one that didn’t care much about world-shaping battles just a few hours away. As we looked at their happy faces explaining to a furious Enobarbus that they would fight by sea, not by land, no matter what “absolute soldiership” Antony had on land, it didn’t matter that they were throwing away the world. The soundtrack was lovely late Dylan: “It’s not dark yet, but it’s, gettin’ there…”

Even better, perhaps, was Enobarbus himself, played by Bart Siegers, who’d also been the inexorable Aufidius. Having betrayed Antony, returned to Caesar, and then had his treasure sent after him by his former master, Enobarbus runs mad. He also ran through the theater out onto Lafayette Ave. around 11:15 pm, howling and writhing his Dutch rage at the taxis and bike messengers. Again, it was both a great theatrical coup and a brilliant reading of the dramatic metaphor: the great Roman soldier, who knew to leave Antony because he knew Antony had ceased to be an effective leader, has found back in the Roman camp that the world of emotions and passion, of bodies and feelings, that he loved in Egypt has gone. So he ends up lying on cold pavement, with cars and pedestrians ignoring his madness, walking by him. So fares the feeling man in the cold Roman world. You taxis, you cyclists, you worse than senseless things!

I could go on about this show, talking about the brilliant bits of humor, as when Mark Antony almost forgets his new wife’s name, or the backstage hi-jinx, as when Octavia spilled a beer at the bar between scenes. But the full force of the production seems to me best captured by that image of Enobarbus on Lafayette Ave, crying out his pain to the uninterpreting streets. A brilliant metaphor for politics at an impasse.

If and when Toneelgroep does Shakespeare’s Histories, 8 plays in 12+ hours, I’m buying a ticket to Amsterdam.

“Shakespeare thought in pictures,” reports Mike Witmore in his oracular voice, and a swirling array of books, photographs, and objects that have grown out of that perception are now overflowomg the Folger gallery. I made a quick trip to DC last Monday for the opening of the show he’s co-curated with Rosamond Purcell, “Very Like a Whale.” Now I’m speculating about whether I can get back there before the show closes in early Jan 2013.

I knew what to expect because I taught an undergraduate class last spring using their collaborative book of photographs and Shakespearean snippets, Landscapes of the Passing Strange. The magic, as Rosamond explained to the audience in the Folger theater, is in the bottles. Her large framed photographs, which were on display throughout the hall, were all taken of the reflections of ordinary objects in these old mercury-lined glass bottles, which were originally used to store light-sensitive dyes. The results dance right up to and past the line between representation and abstraction: they are photographs, which is to say real visible things, but also changed, sometimes beyond recognition.

The book contains just the images and fragments from Shakespeare  but the show adds objects from assorted collections and from the Folger Library. Highlights include a case entitled “All the Whale’s a Stage,” which gets its title from an image of a man playing bagpipes on top of a massive cetacean body, a burned page of The Tempest from one of the Folger’s many Shakespeare Folios, an automaton (!), and many other things.

“Wood from Shakespeare’s house in the Caliban case,” claimed Rosamond during the curators’ talk. “From the property behind the house,” clarified Mike. Which led to a wonderful exchange in which Rosamond admitted her own identification with the poetic monster who finds scamels in the rocks, and suggested that Mike be cast as Prospero. 

After discovering the book at MLA back in Jan 2010, I built an undergrad Shakespeare course around these strange images during the fall of 2011, including setting up an exhibition of photographs at St. John’s and having Mike and Rosamond come for a memorable visit in October. The charge of these images is the strange push they give to your imagination as you look at them, the mobile and unexpected ways they ask us to reconsider Shakespeare’s language and the imaginative art of seeing. As I said when reflecting on the visit to Queens last year around this time, it’s good to share strange things.

That sense of radical play dominates the larger exhibition at the Folger right now. It’s a hard show to take in, especially on opening night when the hall is full of people to catch up with, meet, and congratulate. But when I stood there making academic small talk and looking at the automaton, or peering into the gorgeous array of books on objects in the “Wind” case,” I considered the larger project of putting such strangeness inside an academic institution. I remember my students being at first amazed, then a bit bewildered by the photographs in Passing Strange. But when we lingered in front of an image — I remember a great liquid desert portrait paired with lines from Antony & Cleopatra, which I did not see at the Folger Monday — things would swim into the imagination. The gambit is that such strangeness speaks to the same part of the mind that’s moved by Shakespeare, and it certainly works for me.

You could make a case that the Folger exhibition hall is overfull right now, with photographs and objects spilling out of every window-nook. But if you have all this wonderful stuff, why not give us excess of it, and more besides, and something else we’re not expecting?

If you can’t get to DC during the rest of the fall, here’s the mobile tour of the show. But you really should get there if you can.

 

 

A few weeks ago I noted that Bob Dylan just released a soundtrack for my work in progress on shipwreck. Now that I’ve been through the album a half-dozen times, plus had a look at the lyrics for the long title track about the Titanic, I think my joke was pretty right on. I’m sure I’m not the only academic of a certain age for whom Dylan’s been providing an intellectual soundtrack for some decades, but it’s quite amazing to find that razor mind directed at my current obsession.

I’m tempted now to hijack the song “Tempest” for my shipwreck project, and maybe weave it into an eco-presentation for GWMEMSI this coming spring.  Who knew that shipwreck ecologies was a waltz?

So: a few preliminary notes on the song, and incidentally on Shakespeare too.

Amid the usual character-salad the song presents, from “Leo” (we know who that is!) to Wellington to Jim Dandy to the gamblers “Calvin, Blake, and Wilson” (also theologian, poet, and soon to-be US President when the great ship went down?), the key figure in the song is “the watchman.” He’s the one who appears four time as semi-chorus and structures the long narrative ramble. None of the other figures gets a return visit, except Leo by which point “he’d lost his mind already / Whatever mind he had.”

Each watchman verse starts the same way, “The watchman, he lay dreaming…”, which of course sends us Shakespeareans right to Prospero in Act 4. When this eyes-closed figure “dreamed the Titanic was sinking,” in the other repeated line, 3rd in the 4-line stanza, he sounds like a magus who’s lost his art. Familiar? I thought so.

The movement across the four watchman stanzas takes us from “ballroom dancers” and a vision of “the underworld” (stanza 6) to the watchman’s and ship’s bodies tilted together “at 45 degrees” (stanza 16) to recognizing that “the damage had been done” coupled with a futile desire at this point “to tell someone” (stanza 37) to, in the concluding stanza, a vision of loss and possibility:

The watchman he lay dreaming

Of all the things that can be

He dreamed the Titanic was sinking

Into the deep blue sea.

The watchman traces the disaster from distant knowledge to bodily experience, epic possibility to unanswered need. He watches, but he can’t tell.

Why a watchman? In historical metaphor he’s the one who missed seeing the iceberg, but in Shakespearean terms, or maybe I should say in my terms, it’s a demotion of Prospero from all-controlling magus to passive dreamer. In Dylan’s world, shipwreck must be all and only divine —

There is no understanding / Of the judgement of God’s hand

The wizard makes another brief appearance  in stanza 32 — “In the long and dreadful hours / The wizard’s curse played on” — which phrase has a darkly playful taste of a bad theater or performance review. But I’m struck by how much the song writes Prospero out. A song without a hero. (Which, come to think of it, is what Thomas Hardy does with the Titanic also.)

The eco-point, perhaps, might be about how the direct encounter between human bodies and the ocean generates a powerful intellectual craving for distance, perspective, a story that explains the cause of the disaster. Tell me the cause, Muse! We, like the people Dylan sings about “at the landing,” retreat from the disaster and “try to understand.” But the wetness of the encounter — the brute physicality of shipwreck — won’t let us. “There is no understanding,” which is to say, in my terms, no final dryness. This song, this disaster, the oceanic history that stories like the Titanic open up, won’t let the living reach a stable rest. Or, to put it another way, the only stability in shipwreck is on the sea-floor.

Our revels are now ended, but at sea there are no easy roundings.

Dylan must have been reading my mind or my blog, b/c his characters provide a who’s-who of my shipwreck project. Another character, Davey the brothel-keeper, sees the shipwreck as a historical hinge, “the changing of his world.” The bishop accuses the heavens, just like Anthony Thacher and Parson Avery in 1635. The “many, many others” see what I see in stories of shipwreck —

The ship was going under

The universe had opened wide…

Good music for thinking.

What happens when you rip open a supposedly “open system”?  That’s the question  I find myself asking in the aftermath of BABEL, my head spinning & imagination charged. Hard to think of an academic event that contains and produces so much joy (pun intended). I’m more and more interested in performance and pleasure as essential academic virtues, which means that clearly I was in the right place.

I arrived mid-day Thursday & caught the first set of panels before that night’s plenary and reception. Started off with “Getting Medieval,” a round-table that featured the journalist and role-playing fantasy game participant Ethan Gilsdorf, author of Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks, who wanted to know if we’d see the Hobbit trailor. Not yet — it only came out the day before. His insider enthusiasm was an odd fit among the professors, since his love and commitment overshadowed the fairly thin critique of industry or modernity he finds in the worlds Tolkien wrought. Thinking back on that first panel, Gilsdorf, with his almost-wizardly name, might unfairly be cast as an Uninterpretive Dragon at the gates of an imagined caricature anti-BABEL, a monster of sloppy affection and enthusiasm unattached to academic habits of analysis, pressure, or rhetorical gloss. The point, as I understand it, is to let ourselves play inside and across our academic fields and enjoy that playing — but also to find or create meanings in play itself.

But it’s  not  fair to pick on non-academics for not playing like academics, all the more so since the breadth of participants is one of BABEL’s real strengths.  Gilsdorf also showed an interesting slide of a map he drew in the early 1980s as part of a D&D game, which he started to read as a coded representation of his earlier self. I wanted more of that — maybe b/c I too sketched such maps in those years.

A strong “Going Postal” panel about networks, anonymity, the death of a thousand cuts, Derrida, and Milton — alas no Crying of Lot 49, my favorite work on postal systems — brought us to the first set of plenaries, with talks by earth scientist Lindy Eakins-Tanton from the Carnegie Institute in DC and Jeffrey Cohen of GUW. Lindy opening with a dazzling drawing  out of geologic time, the 4.568 billions of years since the earth formed. Using this video she provided a time line for the age of the earth, which she then broke down into the scales of human lifetimes, then larger, larger again, and eventually all the way up to the full frame. Catastrophic events — Lindy works on the Permian Extinction, possibly caused by a massive meteor strike in Siberia over 250 million years ago — interrupt our lives, but viewed toward the geologic scale they assume regular patterns, even aesthetic forms. Seeing the structure of our lives as “between catastrophes” challenges our imaginations — this is the way earth science is like poetry — to at least provisionally span multiple time scales, human and nonhuman, realms of stone and flesh. Exhilarating stuff.

(When I think of the age of the earth I’m usually with Joseph Conrad —

If you would know the age of the earth, look upon the sea in a storm.

but I like this method too.)

Jeffrey Cohen began with flesh, some Polynesian, naked, and painted by Gaugin, and also his own historical body, which, he tells us, used to sit in front of this great paintingat the Musuem of Fine Arts when he was a graduate student & contemplate big questions. His typically elegant talk traced the human stories activated by stone, including a geologically young rock that he brought back from Iceland, got the audience to pass from hand to hand, and then, after explaining each of our hands had undergone a physical exchange with that rock, leaving real traces on itshard surface, he presented the hand-out to Eileen as a keepsake. The first, but not the only bit of emotional stagecraft of the weekend.

Jeffrey concluded with a rhetorical flourish that highlighted BABEL itself as living community and mobile “now” in a world that is “not for us” but which we inhabit nonetheless, and then he and Lindy sat down for a fascinating exchange that was a model for how conversations between humanists and scientists can really happen. Hard questions were asked — “What are the big questions of your research?”, asked Lindy to an uncharacteristically & only momentarily silent Jeffrey, and “What is the role of beauty in science?” passed the other direction. I was vastly impressed by the willingness to engage that was on display; Lindy’s courage to brave the pre-modernists in their den made my own occasional forays into historical, maritime, or Chaucerian circles seem timid. Jeffrey’s curiosity  helped the discussion become a real exchange, in which things appeared that no one expected.

These plenaries activated for me what was the central unspoken backbone of the conference, which is to trust the intellectual and human encounter, the moments that different things come together, to reveal things you didn’t know  before. It wasn’t just the factual information in the two talks, much of which I knew or had heard in a not-very exact sort of way, but the bringing together of voices & disciplines, human beings and planetary and subatomic time scales.

The next morning was about Intellectual Crimes, a panel I put together about the ways in which we never own our ideas, even when we use them as professional currency. I talking about stealing from old sailors and colleagues with the help of a stray bit of marlin twine, Craig Dionne laid out the fine art of punking with the precision of an old hand at cony-catching games, Sharon O’Dair put envy and ressentiment on the table as the seldom-spoken masks of class in the academy, and Adam Zucker told a wonderfully multifacted narrative of a fateful footnote and the relationship between mentor and graduate student. We were all, in different ways, thinking about how to bypass excessive claims about originality and ownership, and to re-imagine vexed relationships through which knowledge and professional status circulate. No reform plans were articulated, but it was nice to pull back the veil a little.

The mid-day panel was a BABEL highlight, “Impure Collaborations”, which featured six pairs, one solo respondent, and so much energy I thought my pencil would burst into flames. To summarize in the bedlam rush that I experienced it all: two sisters talking about the famous/notorious Indian girls who’d been raised by wolves, maybe, and their own interdisciplinary practices; a staged debate between   “Eddie” and “Princess” about anthropological field work and post-colonial ethics; a husband-wife pair talking about how his work in game design and theory infiltrated hers in 14c French musical forms; a feminist re-wiring of sexual practice through overlaid reading of Nashe and Cavendish; a discussion of the “we” in collaboration by two collaborating scholars; a deeply felt evocation of dedication, love, and community by Anna Klosowska & Eileen Joy, and Michael O’Rourke’s response in monologue. Taken whole, washing over the audience, it was a show-stopper. If Gilsdorf was an uninterpreting dragon, and Eakins-Tomlon and Cohen curious interdisciplinary rovers, this panel was about self-articulation, the joy (sic) of performing in space and in public.

There are risks along with the rewards of such an approach, and Eileen’s reading of a cautionary email from a senior colleague articulated some of them. I also wondered, perhaps because one of my own hobby-horses, Thomas Nashe, received rather abrupt treatment, about the tension between intellectual force and performative display. I always want both, but academic culture thinks it only values the former, so it’s important for events like BABEL to be overt about performance and the positive values of mobility. The best bits for me, always, are places where the spark lands on just the right tinder, so that things start burning before you know it. At the risk, of course, of the whole place going all Fight at Finnsburg on us.

Next was the Ecomateralisms project  which assembled for this occasion an elemental mix of fire (Cohen + Stephanie Trigg), water (Sharon O’Dair), air (me), abyss (Karl Steel), and glacier (Lowell Duckert). I’d read everything before except Lowell’s new meditation of glacial dreaming, but it was great to hear it all together, and a pleasure to be surrounded by such great writing. We talked a bit about the elements as human-scaled, neither too small (quantum physics would be part of that night’s plenary) nor too vast (the age of the earth), which also reflected back on Lindy’s plenary. We were all working, in our different ways, on elemental intimacies, ways that nonhuman forces and objects touch & shape our minds & bodies. I do wonder, though, about the lure of time scales beyond the human, which infiltrated all or most of our talks. Makes me think that the typically human response to scales, temporal or physical, is to want at least two of them.

Jane Bennet’s plenary that night  re-purposed Paracelsus’s ideas about universal sympathy via a lively reading of Walt Whitman’s presentation of human posture. That slight tilt of the head, the incantation of “I, too –“, helped her imagine democracy also as driven by a process that moves from below consciousness into consciousness. Agency at a distance in this model seems as much poetic as alchemical, and I’m curious to see how this model develops. David Kaiser of MIT gave the paired keynote, “How the Hippies Saved Physics,” about quantum theories alternative culture from Berkeley to Big Sur. It was a wonderful, & professional presentation, though not as speculative as I really like. I did perk up when Werner Erhard turned up as quantum physics’s sugar daddy, largely b/c of the stories my in-laws love to tell about Werner coming to dinner in their house in Sausalito in the 60s  & the crazy world he brought with him. I suspect there’s a larger story of the artistic imagination’s entanglement with science that could also be spun out of Kaiser’s research.

I missed much of theBeowulf reading, alas, and I wasn’t among those who closed down the bar at 3 am, but I did make a reasonable showing for an old early modernist. If the longboats headed out for waters north of Boston, however, I’m afraid I missed them.

Sat morning morning I had to cut short my personal BABEL, with assorted soccer games calling from CT, but I did get to an intense  panel on Synaesthesia which featured not only very smart talks about multiple modes of perception but also some juicy quotations about liquidity from The Faerie Queene, than which little is more pleasing to the ear after long days and nights among medievalists. The final panel on “Parts and Wholes” featured some interested philosophical and biological puzzles, from slime molds to the biotic flora that inhabit each of our bodies.

Hard to get a single sum from that maze of ideas, performances, and engagements, and in the spirit of plurality maybe it’s best not to try. BABEL’s both a utopian vision and an intervention in the existing structure of scholarly practice, and its plurality never works alone. I like Chris Piuma’s pithy summation of one of its strands: More creation. Less critique.

I still like critique a little bit, but there’s no doubt that creation the real thing.