The tempo is marked by the rhythm of exits and entrances of the performers, indicated by the handwritten notes of the artist in the typewritten script that is distributed in the theatre, giving the appearance that this element had been added at the last moment. There are no extended periods of silence to be filled as material for the work of the actor. And if they are present, they are organised with an invisible rigour typical for the musical genre. Pythagoras is mentioned in the text and undoubtedly the action is entrusted to relations of unity organized in the mise-en-scène by rhythmic means. The domain of the not known that the theatrical tempo usually opens as a potential horizon facing the bare presence of the body and the actor is not contemplated. The performance, even if situated on a theatrical stage, is explicitly not at home in the theatre. By means of the rhythm, the presence of the actor is also abstracted to become one of the elements of the representation. The performers do not construct an interior depth in the characters, but delineate a precise energy of presence, and what we observe in their interaction is an economy of energies translated immediately by the temporal-spatial axis in the order of the surface.

This relationality is not only structural in the construction of the stage image, it is also and above all a principle used in the construction of the text. The dramatic text is treated as a collage of sources which are non-homogenous, yet essentially contain recurring themes. The circle closes ever tighter to coincide then with a prototype of the feminine. An aestheticised and aestheticising model, reproduced, made familiar and never filled. The libido mobilises explicitly the symbolic-imaginative level of the real. The manipulation of irrational currents. The fear of ageing. The same fear of death. The narcoticised relationship with the cure. The doctor. The male is present in the figure of the doctor. (The theme of incurability appears in the text. One could think tangentially about the presumed illness of Guy de Cointet. This in its turn would require a separate analysis). What is obvious is that the feminine abandons the connotation of gender, and is transformed into a quality dominated by the representational strategies of advertising that comes to be documented with precision in the text. All this can be viewed as a feminist critique, which ramifies out to cross different planes. Perhaps the most obvious is how the insinuation of that model has devastating consequences in contact with life. There is something sterile in the solitude that the scene emanates, a feminine incapable of giving birth. This has a precise consequence for the perception of the performance itself, which is an act of creation. What in some way emerges is a zone in which elements belonging to the initial critical matrix of the material penetrate the present, and make meanings converge and their shifting with regard to the present, in which the oeuvre or rather the restaging is appropriated to disorient the limits of the language itself; not to delineate, but to liberate the plane of experience, reproposing a shifting of the possibility of demarcating the feminine, in one of its most elusive aspects, least able to be captured in discourse. In reality we are witnessing a performance, that is the document of a performance which took place in 1982, and this complicates things considerably.

We are facing a document: the document of a performance. What I am witnessing is not a performance, but a performance-document which delivers me the document asperformance. The relation is transformed from antithetic relation to potential relation. 
This effects a particular relation between proximity and distance. Proximity derives from allowance, because of the fact that something is made available by the gaze. To allow is an instantaneous relaxing of something that has been in tension for a long time. Allowance as permission. My looking becomes receiving and releasing, and comes to light with naturalness. Proximity brings with itself a distance, something explicitly will remain perpetually unreachable. Allowance will not ever be complete with regard to the promised ontology of the event, to the realisation of a condition. Someone is trying, not to give life to a character, but to deliver to me a work of art that by its nature is irreproducible. Someone is engaged with the risk of the impossibility of synthesis, to asymmetry and the antithetic and conflictual nature between the current and the posthumous. A work on the stage which does not fill the void it opens, but mobilises it in a critical reading, in the classic sense of the term, as a possibility of rethinking the margin of an idea or a practice. Here the current operation of the possibility of a feminist oriented critique is rendered fully autonomous with regard to the contents of the text.

To frequent an atmosphere of limits (theatre, performance, visual art) can mobilise critical practice as a radical rethinking hic et nunc, which resists the stabilization of a vocabulary and the institution of any form of objectification. This makes of the performance simply a quality open to becoming other. Its ethics lie in its opening towards an otherness (for example the fact that I at this moment am dedicating myself to writing about a phenomenon that would not be analysable, if it were not a something other than itself). This otherness is a connection not between two terms (an event and its reproduction and so on), but between subjects dedicated to creating. Therefore the feminism of the restaging can be read as an alternative to the feminism proposed by the original text, as two different modalities to practice criticism. The original play proposes to us a critique in so far as it denounces, which however is impregnated with subtle elements, in which an affective dimension is present. The operation of reproposing the document as performance acts under a different proposition, which isolates the affective element and returns it to life as a potential condition. The exhausted image of the woman becomes the inexhaustible potential of the female condition. The staged work coincides with the work of the performance itself, which detaches the relational dynamic with regard to the original and acts as something that is permitted to me. This reproduces a plane of emotionality. The stage is constantly inundated by emotionality. And my allowing myself to watch is an allowing myself to feel. The relation between me and me becomes the beginning of a relation between me and the other. Looking coincides with the possibility of liberating feeling and in this subtle thread hangs the success of the performance and its radically new critical proposal.

This text in this sense can be read only as a continuity of the opening towards this otherness, letting the encounter multiply joy (a key concept of the ethics of Spinoza). What it initiates is uncertain, even if I diligently try to gather thoughts, in the lens of the ethics of witness. The writing becomes the trace of a pleasure of allowing myself to be in this moment, as a modest revolution of mine with regard to the order of the discourse, which despite myself I cannot not stabilize.

Snejanka Mihaylova
Snejanka Mihaylova is a philosopher and artist currently in residence at the Jan van Eyck Academie. Her work is situated between performing arts and theoretical thinking.