What a relief to see players having such genuine and infectious pleasure in thinking out loud. With vibrant energy, theater collective Maatschappij Discordia throws up quotes, facts and anecdotes, not to show off, not out of striving, but from an eagerness to get a better handle on things, to sharpen the mind. Who likes a polished one well-made play shouldn’t be at Discordia – these creators tread into the territory of the messy, the unfinished. Their performances are deliberately designed as rehearsals. Thinking is not finished, such a form means, and it should not be suggested that a conclusion has been reached. The hall lights remain on; an invitation to think along.
Since 2011, Annette Kouwenhoven and Miranda Prein (this year supplemented by Zephyr Brüggen) have been making the series Weiblicher Akt: a recurring investigation into an author or character (the past editions focused on Elfriede Jelinek, Susan Sontag and Sigmund Freud), from a female perspective. The group has now reached number thirteen and this time the subject is a bit more abstract: the other. How do you relate to a story that takes place outside your own frame of reference?
“It seems that you can tell a story better as a bag,” Kouwenhoven mutters. She paces across the playing floor with brisk steps, as if standing still would also halt her flow of thoughts. The assumption is that a different, new story also requires a different, new narrative form. “Not like crazy.” The others barely listen.
Played underhand
“A bag. Basket,” she continues. “With berries in it, and you show them.” (No answer.) “All berries are worth the same.” It is with these kinds of underhand lyrics that the group approaches tough theories. Precisely language that begs for a drum roll is a bit frayed, such as Sartre’s text read under his breath from a telephone screen, about his meaning with the phrase ‘hell, that is the others’, from House Clos.
There is a delicate scene in which Prein explains that she was different from her parents. “Because they saw me for who I was,” she explains. “They themselves had never been seen that way.” Kouwenhoven: “Love, actually.” Written here it tends towards kitsch, but during the performance the text comes through, in all its simplicity.
To what extent is the other knowable, is the philosophical note that this Act wants to crack, and what role can stories play in learning to see what is different. The actors tackle the theme with material from many different domains. Biology for example: there seems to be a small amount of foreign DNA in every body cell. (“So the other person is literally inside us!”) And technology: how well does AI (also another person) understand us? For example, what happens if you let ChatGPT write a stage scene based on the work of philosopher Emmanuel Levinas? (We are shown the answer: a theoretical three-way conversation, with alienatingly sentimental stage directions.)
Question after question is tested in a light-hearted tone. If three people experience the same event, are they three different stories? Is a story a mirror showing something you already knew or a ‘blurred window’ between you and something you didn’t know yet? How does exclusion work – doesn’t it already go wrong with a word like ‘you’? What does that man think and feel who in that TV interview pointed out the arrival of new Dutch people as the cause of the inner emptiness he himself experiences? (“I don’t want a man like that in the performance.”) Does the sting perhaps lie in our habit of organizing reality into contradictions? A bag full of berries.
This Weiblicher Akt contains many thoughts that remain stuck until after the performance. One of them: the pursuit of seeing the other as he or she really is – and not as an abstraction, or a mirror image, or otherwise as a derivative of the self – would that be the definition of love?