D. Needcompany’s Dionysian Excess: A Case of Unclipped Wings
2. Reception of Needcompany’s King Lear
Lauwers expands upon this aspect of supertitling by distinguishing between spoken word and written text, or what he refers to as word as image. In an exchange with Rundle about the “material approach to language in Lear,”304 Lauwers says:
When Lear says ‘kill,’ and then you read the word kill on the LED screen, they are totally different phenomena. The word kill suddenly becomes an image. In Belgium, we performed the play in Dutch, but we also put the Dutch translation on the LED screen, so you achieve that double effect. I couldn’t do this in the States because it was too difficult for us to learn the play in English.305
While there is a doubling at play between the dialogue and supertitles in the American production, it is different from the one in the Dutch production. So is its effect.
Linguistic differences aside, both versions of NKL show how miscommunication calls attention to language in different ways – as spoken word to be heard, textual word to be read, or an image to be seen. Lauwers plays off the relationship among words, acts, and images as a series of confluences, collisions, and conflicts to explore how language eludes or exceeds us. He investigates how language falls short of capturing excessive experience, even when language itself becomes profuse. If one follows Lauwers’s sense of language as image, one can interpret the text of supertitles as the representation – the sign – of the excess that we cannot fully capture or comprehend.
constantly pushed to the limits…language somehow becomes ‘disbanded.’”306 The excess of sounds from various sources makes it difficult to distinguish them from one another and to comprehend the aural and visual information conveyed via the supertitles simultaneously. Jans expands upon this point:
Language has always been a problematic means of communication in Lauwers’
plays. Bound up with power and desire, language is both a deficiency and an excess. The plays abound in people speaking in several languages at once, in translations from one language to another, and in actors who are constantly interrupting one another, often with shouts. Language seems always to be running up against its own limits.307
We may interpret the excessiveness of NKL in several ways, two of which are particularly relevant to its reception as a controversial work that is difficult to
comprehend. On the one hand, the excessiveness of NKL may be viewed as Dionysian without the balance of its Apollinian counterpart. On the other hand, it may be viewed as a work of genius without taste. The similarity of the Nietzschean and Kantian readings has already been discussed in the first part of this chapter. Under each interpretation, I argue that a large portion of the audience was silenced by the work and did not try to work through its responses in community with others, but instead left the production before it was over. I will detail each in turn and then discuss the relation between Lauwers’s resistance to limitation or restriction and the reception of NKL.
The Nietzschean interpretation of NKL as excessive Dionysianism is bolstered by the lack of Apollinian order, decorum, restraint, or lucidity.308 In the previous section, I
306Stalpaert, p. 123. In this excerpt, Stalpaert quotes an article by Erwin Jans. “Restless Search in the Interspaces: Observation in the Work of Jan Lauwers.” Carnet: Performing Arts in the Netherlands and Flanders. 14 (June 1997): p. 2.
307Erwin Jans. “A Broken Community: On Needcompany.” In No Beauty for Me There Where Human Life Is Rare: On Jan Lauwers’ Work With Needcompany. Trans. Gregory Ball. Ghent, Belgium:
Academia Press and International Theatre & Film Books, 2007.
308Nietzsche, §1, §2, §9.
focused on problems in understanding based upon the saturation of supertitles. The chaos of Act V manifests excess through disorder and unruliness. This in turn affects
communication and comprehension both onstage and off. Stalpaert recalls the scene in this way:
In Act V the storm scene and the final section coalesce into a chaotic, hallucinatory assault on the spectator’s senses. There is no doubt about the
condensation or saturation of signs here […] The auditory component bursts at the seams. The actors who have no lines to speak wage war; they blow the sound of gun shots into the microphone, shriek chilling cries expressive of the fear of death, and produce an amalgam of sounds that pierce the audience to the marrow. The actors who are speaking their lines do not use a microphone. They try to raise their voices over the hail of auditory bullets, over the chaos and sensory violence.
They reel off their lines fast and in a flurry, as if driven on by the saturated stage.
In the end even the supertitling goes into overdrive. The spectator’s experience is one of disorientation. The solid narrative ground slips away from beneath our feet.
We no longer know what to think or in what direction our thoughts should go.309 With so much to look at, it is difficult for the audience to select a focal point among the multiple centers vying for their attention.310 In addition to overloading the spectator’s senses, the chaotic and hallucinatory scene impedes thought. This situation parallels the Dionysian cultic ritual in which comprehensibility falls by the wayside and the spectator must give in to the experience without being able to gain any distance from it.311
Apollinian reason and order seem to be completely absent from the production at this point. This strains the spectator’s ability to comprehend the work – a point that is corroborated by numerous negative and dismissive reviews.312
309Stalpaert, p. 122-123.
310Rundle, p. 65.
311This is indicated by Nietzsche’s description of the Dionysian as ecstatic, intoxicated, and trying to throw down barriers and “impudent conventions.” See §1.
312I want to pause here to note that some critical articles were more favorable towards the production.
These authors could be interpreted as a cult audience for whom complete comprehensibility is not the leading value. Chaos and mystery are more tolerable for such individuals if the work is sufficiently thought provoking or intriguing. Naturally, this is a smaller group who finds something compelling about the production and seeks to understand it together with others. So, in spite of the anti-communicative aspects
Lauwers seems to deliberately push comprehensibility to its limits in NKL. While he surely seeks an audience, Lauwers seems uninterested in its size. He certainly does not want a large audience if it means he must restrict his vision.313 This leads to the Kantian interpretation of him as a genius who refuses the restrictions of taste or convention. While Lauwers may be attempting to “set the rule to art” through his boundary pushing, without taste to temper his productions, the ideas will not be comprehensible to audience members.314 The lack of restrictions does not lead to
increasingly interesting and innovative contributions to art and culture, but to stresses on comprehensibility. As Kant frames the point, genius needs taste to make its ideas universal, lasting, and fit for an ever-advancing culture.315 Instead, because NKL is an unrestricted and unbalanced production, it falls outside of culture. This point also relates back to the Nietzschean notion of culture overlooking the incomprehensible. In this case, Lauwers’ resistance to restriction pushes the spectator out of the theater through
aggressive disregard for her reception.
Some might interpret the layers of obfuscation in NKL as a willful rejection of the audience; the complexity and obscurity could be viewed as an attempt to block
understanding of the work in a deliberate fashion. Rozett expresses a version of this scornful interpretation at the end of her review of the production: “A two-and-a-half hour King Lear with no intermission and long, silent interludes can test the endurance of even BAM’s sophisticated ‘New Wave Series’ audience members, many of whom left before the play ended […] Lauwers’ ‘performance work’ fails to make a coherent statement
of such productions, cults can form around works of art that do not have a wide appeal – or that do not seem to invite community building at all. I will expand upon this issue in greater detail in Chapter Four.
313 Rundle, p. 71 and Vanfleteren, p. 354.
314 Kant, §46-§50.
315Kant, §50.
about the text it appropriates.”316 Rozett somewhat snarkily suggests that if sophisticated New York audiences don’t understand the production and walk out midway through it, then the production is “incoherent” or nonsensical. She concludes that the evidence that the work does not “work,” is the audience’s reaction to it. Put differently, Rozett takes the New York audience to be the arbiters of normative taste.
Lauwers is more interested, however, in reexamining and subverting conventions than in obeying them. As such, we might say he is trying to set the new rule to art, as would a Kantian genius. In this case, Lauwers’s work is not tempered by taste; its wings are not clipped. He refuses restrictions that would make the production more accessible to and comprehensible by the audience. One explanation for this resistance to convention and restriction is his investment in the preservation of artistic freedom. He is wary about regulations or restrictions that stem from cultural or conventional sources, especially if they are connected to governmental purse strings.317
I wanted to preserve my freedom. I thought funding was a trap. By the time I received my first government support I had already been working in theater for eight years. And then I received funding, but not a lot […] I’m proud that I used that system, but what I’m most proud of after twenty-five years of being an artist is that I haven’t been recuperated into the mainstream. They didn’t get me. I’m still on the fringe. Yes, I play at the fantastic Harvey Theater at BAM, and I play at the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris, but I’m not an official star director. Normally, at forty-five, you do big operatic productions […] But I still have a very small company and we’re still doing our own thing. I want to keep my own freedom. I never want to become a businessman.318
Not only does Lauwers view his fringe status as a badge of honor, but also as a guarantor of his freedom as an artist. In Lauwers’s mind, as long as he remains an outsider, he will
316Rozett, p. 23.
317See Clement Greenberg’s “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” for an in depth analysis of the relationship of the avant-garde to culture and commerce.
318Rundle, p. 71, emphasis in original.
not be compelled to conform to the tastes of culture or government.319 Therefore, he will be able to produce art as he conceives of it and in his own way, unconventional though it may be. As Lauwers puts it, “Art is not a form of leisure activity but a form of freedom […] Freedom is a notion that inspires us with increasing fear. And that should not be the case.”320 Lauwers refuses restrictions that would compromise his vision of a production in order to preserve his freedom as an artist.
The lack of conformity to accepted rules of taste is especially important in deciphering the reception of NKL. Most audience members didn’t fully articulate what bothered them about the production, namely, its excessiveness, its indulgence, and its lack of taste. To return to Weber’s formulation, audience members ought to abandon all hope for theatrical conventions at this production. Audience expectations were thwarted by the excessiveness of NKL.321 So, while taste isn’t actively restricting Lauwers’s works by clipping their wings, his expression in NKL is equally as limited because it is equally incomprehensible within culture. While works of unrestrained genius are free, they are not, strictly speaking, free to be part of culture. A lack of wing clipping serves as its own form of restriction.
319In the introduction to No Beauty for Me There Where Human Life is Rare, the editors refer to Jan Lauwers as the “pre-eminent outsider.” See p. 25.
320Jan Lauwers, September 2002 Needcompany Newsletter. Katrien Vuylsteke Vanfleteren quotes this in her article “Art is Always Politics,” p. 354.
321Stalpaert, p. 123.
III.
The Avant-Garde as Moderate Wing Clipping:
Bürger and Duchamp