Theater of Ancestral Mediation

Abstract

Miracson Saint-Val's work begins with personal experience, with corporeal practice, with the lwas—the spirits of Vodou—with which he wishes to experiment. But he also needs to find the right text. According to this Haitian director, Chemin de fer, the text by the Congolese writer Julien Mabiala Bissila, lends itself perfectly to the lines of enquiry that underlie his creative imagination, namely, a language based on the body, on Black bodies caught up in war. Chemin de fer, let us be clear for the sake of truth and memory, is about the Congolese Civil War, a war that has its roots in colonialism, a war smelling of oil, where ethnic conflict is instrumentalized in the neo-colonial competition for raw materials (Yengo 2006). In fact, the starting point of Mabiala Bissila's text is “a series of bombardments on the city of Brazzaville [. . .] where bodies are found in the corridors of shattered hospitals” (Francophonies en Limousin 2015). Nevertheless, Saint-Val, a Haitian director and actor, could not help but see in it, in a broader sense, a vast war, of longer standing, the war that the whole architecture of capitalism is waging against Black bodies. Thus, the artistic gesture he made at the Festival Quatre Chemins in Port-au-Prince in 2017 had something of the nature of a palimpsest. Chemin de fer is the Congo, of course, but it is also Haiti.By breaths, by images, without any notion of chronology, Bissila's text, oriented toward the “narrative” of the war, seems to lend itself to palimpsest. Saint-Val performs more than half of the text, but in a way that is far removed from the “narrative” style; instead, he concentrates on the framework he has created, the style of performance on which he wishes to work, that is, a kind of performance that actualizes the body, a multivocal body inhabited by the turmoil of oppression, and by the dead (Figure 1).From the director's point of view, the text can obviously be seen as raw material that can be shaped and stretched. Before approaching Bissila's story in its entirety, there is first a vision, a language of the body that the director wants to work on. He must take the time to blend the author's work with his own research perspectives. The staging will rewrite the text and, as with the author, this rewriting implies a series of questions: How do you tell the story of chaos, war, dictatorship, failed hopes and all the traumas of history that remain unspoken? How do you keep the body in a state of awareness, and alive?In the light of this research, can we perhaps speak of a dramaturgy of war (David Lescot 2001) that confronts the physical, psychic, and social traumas of the citizens of countries that have suffered disasters brought on by a colonial history? For as well as provoking or fueling wars in the physical sense of the term, the mission of capitalism in Africa and its diasporas is also to kill the soul as it exploits the body and reduces it to the bare minimum of life. This is what the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe has called “necropolitics” (2002), where one sees what might be called an amplified war, which lays siege to the body(ies). We may therefore see the theater we are dealing with here as a “theater of the state of war” in the dual sense of war as armed conflict and war as social dislocation, where the ontological struggle is actualized in the theatrical form itself.The question of form, narration, voice, and above all the question of characterization emerge from this. In short, is the restitution of a certain historical reality compatible with the individuation of character that constitutes the a priori of Western theater, even if the so-called “post-dramatic” phenomenon challenges this requirement? In fact, war sometimes destabilizes the very idea of the individual. While we may doubt the idea of the human being as an “individual” according to the principles proposed by Western epistemology, no one can doubt that living constantly with death, with the physical annihilation of bodies, in a civil war such as the one in the Congo, can dissolve the feeling of an impervious individuality, of a reflective and hermetic consciousness. The dramaturgy of subject-to-subject interaction is poorly equipped to give an account of such warfare. The idea (or illusion) of the individual is undermined when that individual feels fragmented and dispersed, when the voices of the dead and their cries still resonate within him or her, when the global alienation of society produces a blurred phenomenology of time and space. Moreover, the wars provoked by colonialism, which continues to exert its influence on social and political life in Africa (the civil war in Congo-Brazzaville is a clear example), are unique in that they are outside the framework of justice, where there is no apology, reparation, or commemoration. The gaping hole that these wars constitute is never filled by the ritual of the law. No ceremony is offered to the victims, no ritual of appeasement or restitution, so the dead cannot rest, nor can the living cease to live in and with the past. The dramaturgy of war and the question of character should thus be seen through the prism of race and the experiences (loss of bearings, ontological alienation) that they imply.In Chemin de fer, the body is at stake in the conflict, the “thickness” that inhabits the text, to use Sylvie Chalaye's expression (2018). Presiding over a fragmentary and nonrational writing style, with its scattered tableaux, mini-fables, and narratives of fragmented events, this body often gives voice to the absurd. However, it is far from suggesting the intrinsic “absurdity” of the so-called “human condition,” as the “Theater of the Absurd” would have it, at least in the famous definition proposed by Martin Esslin in 1961 (Allen-Paisant 2019). On the contrary, it reveals the sources of an absurd “condition” from a historical point of view. For Caribbean and Black African theaters have always emphasized that human alienation is the product of a history of Western humanism, of a Western paradigm of the human founded on rapacious capitalism and its technologies of exploitation. As Sylvia Wynter has often noted, the tragic struggle of the African diaspora is above all a struggle around the category of the Human (Wynter 2018). It does not lie in “metaphysical anguish,” but in the possibility, indeed the compulsion, to repair the body and restore its relationship to reality. This impulse mobilizes a conception of the human anchored in the traditional cosmogonies of Black Africa and its diasporas. Thus, in Afro-diasporic dramaturgies, it is often a question of the quest for a different paradigm of the human, where the body expresses a totality, an inescapable path toward reality, the power of rhythm, which is a vital foundation. With this in mind, it is therefore not surprising to note the presence in this theater of a tension between a brutalized, traumatized, even massacred body on the one hand, and on the other, a body that is an indomitable and irrepressible vibration.It should be noted that the title of the play, Chemin de fer, refers to a whole historical story. The railway—the flagship symbol of colonial ambition in Africa—is a gravitational field of violence, punctuating the narrative arc of the European presence, from colonization to civil war. This is also the history evoked in Bissila's play: the history of a war against Black bodies.To work from Vodou is to focus on the body. Vodou represents an age-old attempt to recover a shattered humanity. This is why Bissila's text was so amenable to a stage language rooted in Vodou. In Saint-Val, the multiple personifications in Chemin de fer are akin to the rite of possession in Vodou, where the incarnated spirits correspond to pieces of a story that “allows a person, despite the loss and the holes [of memory, that is], to relive a part of themselves that has disappeared” (Saint-Val 2017). The socially shared knowledge of the drama of the lwas, the power of this drama in producing restorative circles of care as well as new energies for living—this knowledge shared and transmitted via the body—forms part of what Diana Taylor calls “the repertoire,” an embodied “nonarchival system of transfer” that “transmits memories, makes political claims, and manifests a group's sense of identity” (2003, xvii). In a society in which the capacity and need to know and live beyond formal written knowledge, texts, documents, and institutions are a matter of life and death, the existence of the “repertoire”—in this case the repertoire of the Vodou gathering, of the trance, of the drama of the gods, as we see here in this performance—becomes critical as a way of living, knowing, and acting. To riff off Taylor, it is because Vodou does transmit this repertoire that those who are not literate in the Western, formal sense can also claim social memory and a sense of power existing beyond Western normalized and racialized configurations.In his multiform, multivocal production, Saint-Val (Figure 2) succeeds in creating a common energy with the spectator, in which the latter, even if he or she does not know the specific history of the civil war in Congo, may share a vibration, a way of making theater. There are pieces of text that the actor will assign to Ogou, the lwa who presides over the war. He will ensure that the physical and rhythmic observations he has of Ogou are woven into the “fable” of the Congolese war. This also means updating the text of Chemin de fer in an innovative way for a Haitian audience. As with Ogou and the Vodou lwas, Saint-Val wants to offer a corporeal experience, a theater in which the “I” is fractured and diffracted.At the beginning of the piece, we are confronted with a character whose name we will never discover. He is standing on one of the most famous roads in the country (Congo- Brazzaville): the road to Centenary Bridge. We are told this by the actor who is about to play the character. This man is “often here [. . .] whether sitting or standing” (Bissila 2015, 91). We are told that “at that time,” in other words, before the war, he was a doctor. However, we also learn from the prologue that he is “a man of the theater.” This designation immediately introduces us to an important theme of this work: the making of theater as a survival instinct, a surpassing of reality. However, this is a theatricality that is not confined to theaters—one of the things emphasized by this Haitian production. Rather, it inhabits everyday life and occupies the most unexpected places. It is worth noting that this 2017 show was performed in a local bar, a fact we return to later.The relationship between theatricality and possession (Fouché 2008) is emphasized in the staging. The speaker in the prologue is waiting for a bus. He is “surprised” by the presence of “this man” next to him. Is this man the speaker himself? Is it him in another time? The man is “so calm” compared to the speaker of the prologue. “Then his voice [. . .] his voice without preamble, his voice engages in an interminable speech [. . .] In the night just his breathing, his breath” (Bissila 2015, 91). Thus, this speaker is a kind of presenter, an intermediary between the different tableaux and the audience, an outside eye on the action, but one who also takes on all the voices of the action, as if to underline the double state that is characteristic of both the actor and the Vodou initiate. This double state can also be a coping mechanism—the text implies this—for those who are subjected to daily and trivialized violence.1The doubling of character, already in evidence in Frankétienne's “spiral” theater, chips away at the dense solidity of the “subject,” making the being an empty “I,” open to the presence of the other. This has already been shown in Frankétienne's Bobomasouri, where the splintering of character (are Zikap, Gongon, and Tilami not, in fact, all the same character?) corresponds to the fragmentation of the “self,” the aim of which is to maintain the imaginary and the mythic, which are an indispensable support in the war of time that is the life of the Haitian masses.The actor's voice is very important. Vocal changes signal the advent of a new “mounting,” a word that in Haitian Vodou means “possession by a lwa.” The breath is a sign of the power of the god, of the lwa, of his vocal prowess, which ushers another world and other presences into the theatrical space, to the point where the distinction between acting and performance blurs (Figure 3).When the voice of the madman (i.e., the man of the theater) bursts in “without preamble,” we hear wild, guttural screams, accompanied by leaps, bounds, and beatings of the chest and thighs, in the manner of a captured animal. The man grunts, like a beast. It is as if he has lost the ability to speak. In a voice as guttural as his roars, he proclaims: I come from where death is on the groundI come from where death is the work of the undergroundI am from where the sky goes wild and vomits delayWe run, we fall and go under,Under the noise of firecrackersFor a penny's worth of trouble, your life falls apart under the rubbleYou ask yourself the questionWhy are you becoming a shadow? (Bissila 2015, 92)The voice is deep, angry. This is Ogou speaking, in a fit of belligerent fury. The voice fades away, along with the gestures of the “caged beast.” while another voice rises slowly. This one is calm and composed at first. This voice recounts an event that its “character” has experienced. It is a voice that places itself within the event, hence the use of the present tense once the context is established by the past tense: It all started with a Boom! Then the void.The hole.I am lying down.I am bleeding but I don't know it yet. I hear voices but I don't know whose. I am not in pain. Not really! I can't move.I want to smile but my mouthI see myself standing up straight!Walking,Coming to life. (Bissila 2015, 92)We understand that we are in the presence of the doctor, the “other man” from the prologue. In a hospital casualty department, in the aftermath of a bombing, the doctor is treating the injured: “A room with grey walls. It's ringing! You see? / The phones vibrate in a trance. / Dring, dring! Dring! / The lines are all busy, it's ringing, it's bleeding, it's bleeding. / The phones are bleeding, ringing” (Bissila 2015, 92). The French here accumulates sibilants (“saignent, sonnent, saturées”), which serve to reproduce the vertigo of the moment, an emotional overload of sensations; the phones of the emergency services ringing incessantly, the sight of blood spilling everywhere. Moreover, the obsessive nature of this memory is translated into bodily frenzy by the actor, who is sent into a trance. The gap between speech and memory is canceled.Writing in “breaths,” in swirls, a sort of unarticulated utterance, as opposed to the reasoned arrangement of speech, is an expression of a bodily consciousness, of a restless body straining to transcend oral reality. The process of identification is more than a sign of traumatic oppression, although it certainly is that too; it is also a way to create another space, a space where the dead are present and can make their voices heard. There is pain, mourning, trauma, but also, by the same token, the dynamism of life: the body refusing to be crushed; struggling to come back to life. The body is thus an instrument of creation. It is the body that animates the void. It is on the body that the authorial gesture rests, in order to make the imagined body act on the body that exists in the concrete world. This is not to cancel the latter; this is not a process of ir-realization, but its aim is to bring about the union of the two bodies, to allow the body of the dead person to exist in its own right. At the same time, the body of the present world (the body of war) is opened up to the spirits of the earth.All the phantasmagorical images of violence—the shellfire, the sounds of the city, the dead sprawled on the tracks, and so on—and all the other traumas—“Amputation, impotence, confusion, hallucination”—are presented as images in the maze-like hospital by a series of voices embodied by the actor: “a man caught in the labyrinths of chaos” (Francophonies en Limousin). This seemingly bare arrangement (a single actor playing a large number of characters and a multitude of scenarios on stage) nevertheless offers the potential for a vibrant performance. For the various incarnations, from storyteller to doctor, from doctor to madman, from madman to worker, from worker to train driver, and so on, the screams, the groans, the contortions, the leaps and acrobatics, the convulsions of the body and the trance, all lead to a sense of the excess of reality (Figure 4).The actor's body thus gives rise to multiple sets of imagery. In the grip of possession, the body becomes plural, multivocal, collective. The stripped-down language of “poor theater” and of “the empty space” thus becomes, paradoxically, the language of expansion, of a multisignificant space, as the body evolving in that space becomes a generator of signs. Thus, from an austere scenography, the theater generates multiple exploding and clashing images; the theater of the bare, undecorated space becomes a rich theater of the vibrant body.Through glossolalia, cries, and the bubbling over of language, Bissila seeks something other than the exhibition of speech. Rather, the approach is to allow many voices to bear witness, in turn allowing the actor's body to become the focus of different presences, to make possible a sensory immediacy, a confrontation with the spectator who thus operates at an irreducibly somatic level. This spectator is no longer the simple witness of the construction of a narrative, if by “narrative” we mean the sequential representation of events. He or she is led to understand that the actor is inhabited by other presences, that these presences demand to be heard and that duties are performed for them. In other words, the narrative gives way to the voice, which is embodied, incarnated in a literal sense, and in the perspective of this embodiment, the link between voice and body is emphasized as it has rarely been.In other words, possession is a way of experiencing the relationship between the “transcended” or “imaginary body” (Dantò, Fréda, Féray, Ogou, among others) and the “physical body” of the fixed space, all the more so since, for the actor, the possession by the spirit is undetermined. Mastering one's acting requires training, because the actor only knows “more or less how it will happen” (Saint-Val); he does not simply act “being possessed.”In his theatrical gesture, Saint-Val refers to Louis Price-Mars and his notion of “ethnodrama,” a term he formulated in the 1970s to describe collective experiences in Vodou. Ethnodrama, according to Price-Mars, is the “dramatic religion” constituted by Vodou, more specifically, “the intervention [. . .] of the gods in the form of a moment of possession” (1982, 29). For Price-Mars, Vodou is fundamentally theatrical. This idea is pursued in particular by Franck Fouché in his book Vodou et théâtre (1976/2008). Ethnodrama would thus be a system of signs where possession, “composed of a range of distinct gestures” (Price-Mars 1982, 34), is the signifier, and where the spirit, the god, is the signified. As for the moment of possession, it is defined as “a conditioned psychological state, a metamorphosis, or a normal psychological state that reproduces the face and gestures of the gods in the manner of a theatrical performance” (Price-March 1982, 33). Cultures that feature ritual possession thus use “the whole body, in an extraordinary way, as an instrument of language, possession as a symbol of the divine, dance as a means of communication” (Price-Mars 1982, 37).Saint-Val's production thus constitutes a fully formal approach, based on the principles of ethnodrama. It draws on the mechanism of identity-metamorphosis peculiar to the phenomenon of possession to illustrate the specifically theatrical resources through which Vodou allows the performer to respond, through the body, to the trauma of experience, to a life that suffocates and crushes the human.Saint-Val associates another theoretical body of thought with ethnodrama—a European one—that of Grotowski (Saint-Val 2017). It is true that Grotowski's work is situated in a very different cultural context from that of the Caribbean, with its history of colonial violence, and of European attempts to eliminate the ancestral traditions of colonized peoples. However, Saint-Val's interest in Grotowski lies in the fact that he offers a methodology that can be used for the training of the actor, which is not the case with Price-Mars.Grotowski's concept of “poor theater” gives a certain robustness to Saint-Val's research and offers confirmation of what he had already discovered in ethnodrama (Saint-Val 2017). For Grotowski, the actor, like the Vodou practitioner “in the moment,” is a “sacred” man whose “body must be freed from all resistance. It must virtually cease to exist” (Grotowski 1971, 34) so that the new character can be revealed in it. This implies that the actor must perform in a trance state. Grotowski's terminology shows the essential links he conceives between the “source techniques” (including possession) and his approach to acting. It should not be forgotten that, as part of his research into the “source arts” between July 1979 and February 1980, Grotowski traveled to Haiti, where he studied Vodou practices in the Saint-Soleil community (Slowiak and Cuesta 2007, 32). The techniques of movement and voice he learned there would be important tools for his work at University of California, Irvine during his political exile in the United States, as his student James Slowiak testifies in his book (Slowiak and Cuesta 2007, 37).In the November 2017 production, the actor is placed at the center of the theatrical event as a solo element, apart from a guitarist standing at the rear of the cramped playing area, whose acoustic music accompanies the various scenes of the play. The music obviously plays a very important role: It accompanies the voice, accentuates the body's dynamism, and punctuates the “breaths” of the play. It helps the actor to experience each consciousness he wishes to evoke.The actor takes on “roles” that are not his or her own, in the terms of Western theater. He assumes all the “roles”: actor, “scenarist”, and “director,” making these categories flexible, and emphasizing the idea of the actor as the center of the theatrical event insofar as he or she is the guarantor of a sense of community.In fact, the actor's work becomes an all-encompassing whole, akin to that of an athlete and a priest. When, during our research, we were personally able to see and hear him prepare, in Yanvalou, thanks to the high ceiling and the wide doorways which offered an unobstructed view from the courtyard, we had the feeling of being present at a holy ritual, so much so that we felt embarrassed to enter the space. The preparation includes intensive work on the voice: screams, resonances drawn from different registers, sometimes low, sometimes shrill. There are jumps, leaps, and beatings on the body. A mass of energy is created around the actor. His body had to be in a state of transcendence by the time the show began.Thus he dispenses with the features of a rich, or even of a more modest, stage design, as the only objects present in the design are candles placed on a coffee table, which, once lit by the actor at the beginning of the performance, remain lit for the duration. So the work of the body in the space is simply the exploration and discovery of the infinite capacities of the body itself.2The event takes place at Yanvalou,3 in the Pacot district of Port-au-Prince, a bar with no theater set, backdrop, or props. There is no machinery, no special lighting (except that the playing area is in darkness before the performance begins). It is an ordinary, everyday place, which the performance must inhabit as such, rather than a “theater space” according to the norms of traditional Western practice. A “space,” yes, but a bar, too (Figure 5 and Figure 6).Directly in the spectator's line of vision is a load-bearing pillar—in Haiti, it is not a choice to seek out such performance spaces; the noninstitutionalized space is unavoidable by force of circumstance: No functioning theater building exists at the time of writing. The walls, too, are awkwardly positioned, separating the space where the audience gathers in a circle from another area of the bar that the actor sometimes inhabits (although he is most often among us). The actor is sometimes masked by these asymmetrical walls. But Yanvalou is also an intimate playing space, a place of assembly and also of celebration. It is a place where theater and city intermingle and that, thanks to the arrangement of forms and objects, including protruding structures and a protruding bar counter, also forces (or encourages) an interpenetration of the spectator's space and that of the actor: One is sometimes face to face, the actor, at times, almost surrounded. We see and feel him close by, his body brushes against others, there is a fusion between him and the audience. The theater becomes a sacred rite that links the actor to the community, and vice versa, because this way of inhabiting the space, breaking the end-on dynamic, is intended to involve the community in the actor's work. At certain moments, the audience members feel like actors in the performance. They are there in the work, in the guitar music, when the actor sings, in his gestures, when he shakes hands with the audience in a Vodou ritual greeting. Noises, roars, and resonances inhabit their bodies. They are driven to react, somatically solicited, through the very floor. The actor's leaps recall the importance of the ground as a vector of energy in African cults. In short, the play appeals not only to the actor's body, but to everyone's body. We support him, we laugh with him, we join in his song: Kote'm foule pye mwen y'a rentre Lwa tèt mwen lwa fwa mwenLwa Guinée mwen, kote ou ye? (“Wherever I go, they enter me./ Lwa guide of my life, lwa of my faith,/ Lwa of my ancestors, where are you?”) (my translation)During his song, he picks up a small child from the audience. This gesture is totally unexpected; it is not something he does at each performance. But it is important to leave this room for maneuver beyond training and preparation, to leave room for surprise. The aim of the whole thing is to create community and communion, to “share a little sweat” (Saint-Val 2017).Ritual, which promotes communion and breaks down barriers, also determines the way in which the audience and the space are conceived. The dynamics of space are not thought of in terms of security or propriety, as in the West. Haitians are used to a certain lack of “security.” They have an aesthetic of the instability of space where borders, even those between “beings,” are in question. There is a slippage, an osmosis between bodies. One feels the body becoming a space that is no longer watertight or a singular subjectivity, as in the experience of a European audience, where we are individuals who attend the theater, to consume its product, the product of an industry (Adorno speaks in this sense of “the culture industry”). In Haiti, there is a different model for the audience experience. While the body might imply a border, a limit in accordance with “common sense,” this way of playing with bodies allows us to imagine different kinds of borders with each other. An implicit and fundamental question in this artistic gesture is to ask what would be left if we took away the dance, the sharing of bodily energy that the ritual offers.It is not surprising, therefore, that Chemin de fer should provide a framework for experimentation with bodily dynamism and organized ritual. The staging is above all a mechanism that allows existence to multiply, to transcend its corporeal envelope. Thus, the actor is the emergency-room doctor but also the father talking to his wife on the telephone. Because there are two realities that do not manage to merge, a split is created in the character, reflected in sudden transformations of the voice and the body: Hello tell him that daddy will be back in a few days and that . . . - It wasn't your day, it wasn't your day, yes I know, everyone says that,There's nothing I can do, sir!You're stopping the surgeons attending to other patients.We're overworked! And you're playing at Lazarus. You die, you come back to life, you die, you come back to life, then you die again, you think that's funny?You're taking the piss!It's not easy to live a good life. You might at least die a good death. Take a look around! What the fuck! (Bissila 2015, 96; italics in the text)One must, at least, know how to “die a good death” (“savoir-mourir”). It is a fantastical, fanciful idea, a dream-life, where the speaker can imagine reality differently. Removed from realism, language itself becomes absurd, in the face of an absurd reality: Should we not learn to live death? Language is used to create a diversion or shelter from a reality felt as the enemy. In other words, it is anchored in a performativity that is designed to prevent total despair. In this respect, it is evocative of the absurd in the work of the Congolese writer Sony Labou Tansi. In addition, Bissila's use of language is reminiscent of La Parenthèse de sang and other plays by Labou Tansi, as well as his novel La Vie et demie. Language thus serves to create distance. By throwing out baroque profusion, it becomes an indicator of the psyche's struggle to create a new reality, a reality that transcends the traumatic past.So here are real scenarios transformed into dream scenes. If the event is unspeakable, how can it be told? This