Thinking of Five Sisters

Prologue
In the empty auditorium of Frascati WG, on the second row, on a chair a bit to the right of the middle, I am sitting as a sole spectator – at least for now. I’ve been asked to write about tonight’s performance, a ‘remake’ of Guy de Cointet’s play Five Sisters. The past week I’ve learned he was a French artist who resided in LA in the 1970s, whose works range from texts, to graphic design, to sculptural work and to performance. A woman shouts from the technician’s booth “WHAT’S GOING ON?!” There seems to be some confusion regarding who is a ‘VIP’ tonight and thus allowed to get in early and sit on the first two rows. A Broadway classic plays in the background “… Good authors too, who once knew better words, now only use four letter words, writing prose, anything goes…” (1). I wonder whether I have ever been this very important before. As the other spectators come in, and against my plan not to be influenced by too much information beforehand, I read a little in the programme I have found on my chair: “On Friday 28 and Saturday 29 October 2011 at 20:30 hrs, If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution is restaging the play Five…” I stop. My eyes go back to “restaging”. Re-staging. Is that even a proper word? I wonder whether I have seen stagings or restagings of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Does one stage or restage the Swan Lake? And isn’t staging in some way already a restaging, since the question of theatre is in a way one of repeating the moment that has and will fade away night after night… Thoughts for later. Quickly, before the auditorium lights dim, I sketch the scenography on the backside of the program: white floor, white wall, two door openings; behind the right one some red light, behind the left some blue; also, the front of the wall is not lit equally. The doors close. The performance is about to start. Two women in black clothes carry a bench to the middle of the stage, right between the two door openings. They leave the stage, the Broadway song fades, a square spotlight lights the bench, an actress in a white evening gown enters.

Soap Opera
Maria cries because she’s hurting from the sun. Dolly works too much. Yvonne is a painter. And Rachel, who is involved with many doctors, changes her wardrobe for every decision, emotion or situation. The sisters are together on a Sunday afternoon in their parental home in sunny California. They discuss life, work, vacations, their relationships. They seem obsessed with beauty – using phrases such as “I feel proud of my hair these days” – or rather they seem obsessed with health, since, as Maria explains, “these days, real health, not just freedom from illness, is in fashion.” With their conversations the sisters create an image of a world in which lustrous hair, balanced minerals, ‘mental healing’ and ‘health doctors’’ are the answer to any given problem. However, appearances are deceptive: each sister still struggles with her own personal drama. Drama being the keyword here, for the absurd dialogues and situations, the seemingly flat characters and just the right amount of overacting give the feeling of watching a soap opera. Add to that the perfect looking women, their designer clothes and overly elegant gestures and the minimal setting that could easily serve as the entrance hall to any timelessly modern California villa, and the image is complete. Sometimes it even results in a kind of farce with mistaken identities and sisters not able to find each other, all presented like in a slapstick – with one sister entering the stage while the other just left through the other door, and vice versa.

However, the actresses are so devoted to this acting, not ever falling out of character or making an explicit wink to the audience, that I find it hard to tell whether_Five Sisters_ is persiflage or serious, mockery or warning – or neither. With their dramatic mimicry and grand gestures the actresses certainly tap into all kinds of clichés, striking a classic elegant pose with every statement they make, as if being photographed for a lifestyle magazine after every other sentence. Somehow these classic poses seem a bit out-dated to me. Again, I start wondering about the performance being a restaging. Could it be that this style of acting derives from the original? I search for clues of scripted, choreographed movements in the original script. There aren’t any. Then again, for a restaging of a classical ballet one often cannot rely on thoroughly scripted movements, one learns the dance from a ‘repetitor’, a coach – someone who danced the dance before (2). I think I am on to something now. In a way Five Sisters seems more like choreography than ‘theatre’, regardless, or in spite of, the scripted play; a performance rather structured by movement than by a plot. And in the rehearsal process they may even have worked with a repetitor: Jane Zingale, one of the originalactresses, is mentioned as the director of this restaging. Yet in all publicity only one ‘true’ author of tonight’s performance is mentioned: Guy de Cointet. It reminds me of the hierarchical relation of repetitor and choreographer. I ask myself: ‘Did I just watch ballet?’ And, going back to where this chain of thoughts started: ‘Is this how women in LA in the beginning of the ’80s acted?’ Maybe, if tonight’s movements are not ‘literal’ restagings of the originals, the ‘outdated’ feel stems from the genre that they were inspired by. Soap opera seems to have had its prime in the last decades of the previous century, where nowadays it has to share its popularity with, if it has not lost it to, reality tv. Which brings a woman to mind who could have been the sixth sister: Paris Hilton. What poses would she have shown us?

Personal Structures
Though over-the-top, the style of acting is taken so seriously, that soon one forgets about its artificiality and accepts it as the way these sisters behave. In a way the poses and gestures come ‘natural’ to the sisters. Or have the gestures become them? With every pose the sisters strike it seems to get more and more unclear what came first: the thought or emotion or the gesture emphasizing it. Further along in the performance I even start questioning whether there is a connection between gesture and text at all. Is it because the gestures are performed in such a cliché manner that they have become ‘overdone’, redundant, emptied out?

With every repetition the poses seem to change more and more from overacted communicative gestures into mere abstract demonstrations. It becomes unclear what they demonstrate or represent, except that they demonstrate. The sisters’ way of moving now seems to me a continuous act of presenting themselves, showing a constant awareness of their appearance and presence, of the possibility of them being seen and being there; yet, at the same time it seems to result in a severe ‘uncertainty of being’ as well. All sisters suffer from a feeling of not being themselves, most clearly shown in the case of Dolly who repeatedly asks herself “Is it me? Am I me?” Because the connection is lost between gestures and an underlying psychology, the characters do not have a clear sense anymore of who they are, if they are. Moreover, the sisters are not recognizable as themselves to each other. As the motto on the programme cover reads: “Are they four, five sisters? Or more? The five sisters themselves may not know for sure…”

I have to think of my favourite dialogue from the play. 
«Quote»
Yvonne: Eileen! Your green outfit… Oh, I’m sorry Rachel, I believed for a second Eileen was there.
Rachel: So did I. Oh, this dress is deceiving! It is bold, linear, easy, snappy like Eileen. Yvonne, sometimes I think I am Eileen.
Yvonne: And sometimes I think white is green. Maria sometimes thinks I’m Dolly.
Rachel: What does Dolly think?
Yvonne: She thinks she’s not Dolly.
Rachel: I’d be curious to know what Eileen’s thinking…
«Unquote»

What strikes me in this fragment is its wittiness and the absurd logic, but most of all, the rhythm, the rhyme, the composition. This play is choreography. One of words, of movement, of light, of sound, of voice, of appearance, of flawless timing. Five Sistersis an abstract work of art, except maybe for the layer of fiction. A never fully succeeding fiction, that is. Five Sisters never offers full coherency, not even if you try to put the (fragmented) pieces of the puzzle together in retrospect. I’m starting to think that perhaps instead of the Aristotelean unity of time and space, de Cointet offers his characters no time and no space, or rather: a non-time and a non-space. The visit of the sisters takes place on a Sunday afternoon, but as the performance proceeds the feeling develops that this might be a certain Sunday, but might also be another, or several; for the sisters it always seems to be Sunday afternoon – hence the clock is no longer ticking and time is standing still, held up in an everlasting moment. In a similar fashion the space in which the sisters find themselves seems mainly defined by what it is not: not the kitchen, not the garden, not the ‘moodroom’, not the bedroom, not the bathroom. It seems as though they are on the border of (a) space, in a not-anymore and not-yet place.

Continuing this line of thought, it appears that this fiction cannot go completely beyond what is actually happening, as if it is continually pulled back to, remembered of and confused with what is taking place: four women staging themselves or four women being staged. In a way the women in black carrying the bench announced it already at the beginning: this is a construction waiting to happen. A Deus Ex Machina to start with. It is the only reason that we are here, that they are here, or that they can be here. Or so it seems.

Epilogue: On Restaging
Restaging is a word. And Five Sisters is in fact a restaging. It being restaged may even be placed in a ‘trend’ within performance art and contemporary dance to deal with issues of memory, history, and archiving of the performance itself – in discourse, research and artworks. It shows an interest in reconstruction and in reflecting on this process while performing it. This aim is not apparent in this restaging of _Five Sisters). Though part of the Performance in Residence programme of If I Can’t Dance, which looks at past performances that are considered important from the point of view of contemporary performance practice (3), the performance itself does not deal with the restaging nor is it explicitly placed in a context of reconstructing. As I read in the programme, this performance originates from the question of making Five Sistersanew and finding its place in a contemporary context. In that respect, it resembles the (re)staging of (canonical) plays by contemporary theatre directors. However, the Five Sisters performance is not at all presented as a director’s vision on the play, as is often the case in theatre (4). In that sense, it appears to have more in common with restaging a classical ballet. Nonetheless, the performance that I have seen may be completely different from the ‘original’ without me even suspecting it.

Aukje Verhoog
Aukje Verhoog graduated in 2011 at the MA Theatre Studies at University Utrecht. Since then, she has been working as dramaturge and producer within the field of performing arts.

1 The song is Anything Goes by Cole Porter, written for the musical Anything Goes.
2 Of course nowadays most choreographies are filmed and these film records serve as important tools in rehearsing a choreography again. 
3 www.ificantdance.org 
4 Here, I’d like to remark that this is written from the perspective of a Dutch theatre practice. For example in a French or British theatre context it is not as common for the director to step forward as the ‘author’ of a restaging of a play as in the Netherlands.