Theatre and the Threshold of Death

Abstract

On the eve of a global pandemic, a theatre professor becomes immersed in the lives of five artist-mystics, each of whom is a “first” in her field: Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), the first known musical composer, Eleanora Duse (1858-1924), the first modern actor in the Western world, Simone Weil (1909-1943), philosopher, activist and mystic, who Albert Camus called “the only great spirit of our time,” Marina Abramovic (b. 1946), “the grandmother of performance art,” and Hilma af Klint (1862-1944), the first known (and belatedly acknowledged) abstract painter. Each time Gough crosses a threshold into their world she is compelled to attend courses, seminars, and workshops that are simultaneously about dying and about healing. What does it mean to follow artists to practices where being in a healing relationship to other bodies is a fundamental requirement? Turning to the performance theories she has taught for twenty years, she begins to chart her experience through the dramaturgy of the first medieval mystery play – a play with hidden, mystical significance that begins with a visit to a tomb to discover a missing body who is alive in another way. Imagining these five mystics as a hierophantic faculty in a mystery school, Gough creates a series of lectures that move in that liminal space between skepticism and knowledge to ask questions about subjectivity, personhood, and the necessity of staying in relationship with the unknown world. Like the serial method in art practice, Gough’s lecture series make a persuasive argument for relational thinking, and the urgency of keeping open the questions that implore us to stay in a fully embodied relationship with our collective present-tense.