Body in Ruin

Abstract

New York-based Uruguayan performer and choreographer luciana achugar’s visual for OTRO TEATRO is a photograph--a decimated theater in a beautifully dismal state of disrepair. The phrase repeated throughout the performance at New York Live Arts in the fall of 2014--“un dia voy hacer otra distinsta” (one day there will be a different one). Hanging from pipes and banging on the bare enclosing walls like an Epicurean pleasure taken to the atomist Lucretian extremes of indestructible destruction, clusters collide and substances push past the limits of use to the meta-constituents to animate something else. Post-performance, dancer Ralph Lemon verbally riffs on achugar’s practice of “doing pleasure” and wonders out loud about what might be beyond the obvious coupling of pleasure and destruction. This provocation engages Jane Bennett’s work to argue that this performance as a whole is a reminder that there does not need to be a use value for a performance. It can do something more than imagine or represent an imaginary, but actually enact (a score of) the impossible, what, one thought, could only be imagined. In fact, achugar’s own desire to counter consumption clearly points to the performance space itself as a substantive body-in-ruin anticipating a different kind of non-binary arousal and consumption. The concept of a body-in-ruin points to another “performance” by Jairo Cuesta (working with James Slowiak) during Jerzy Grotowski’s last summer at the University of California, Irvine in the dry chaparral hills.