From the original flyer of Five Sisters:

“Are they four, five sisters? or more? The five sisters themselves may not know for sure, and they’re too busy with the problems of modern life and its pleasures to worry much about it. But, Sunday afternoon four of them, at least, are reunited in the house where they all grew up to talk over family, emotional, professional matters and to relax.

The five sisters ‘parents both passed away several years ago and Maria, now, lives by herself in the old house in Tustin, California. Yvonne, a painter, has her studio a few miles away by the ocean; Rachel just moved to Escondido to be closer to her favorite doctor,-; Eileen, is a successful attorney in Sacramento and Dolly, a busy executive, is a resident of Los Angeles.

Light in Southern California is fundamental and is one of the essential elements contributing to the originality of this part of the country. Light is stimulus, and its many variations in intensity and color affect directly the characters in «Five Sisters». Having an exciting, relaxing or perturbing influence different lights provoke different reactions, emotions, different moods.”

For my contribution to conduct a case-study research for Performance in Residence, I will be focusing on Guy de Cointet’s play Five Sisters. The research on de Cointet’sFive Sisters is aimed at finding ways of presenting the play in a contemporary way. Where earlier posthumous stagings of de Cointet’s performances were aimed at ‘reconstructing’ or ‘remaking’, my investigation now addresses questions around the idea of ‘making Five Sisters anew’.

I will be researching the use of lights and colours instead of objects, or what may be called the ‘dematerialisation of theatre’ in the work of Guy de Cointet. I will examine new ways to stage the play and I will ask the original actresses about their memories and look for documents, especially about sound and music. Questions of space and light will be very important, alongside the rhythm. I will need to go through Cointet’s diaries and archives and look for material such as videotape and photographs from the time. There is the question of the type of actors, because it will be played with a new team, and we will also work with a director. In my analysis of Guy de Cointet’s work, this play is a new step, as the relation to the objects changed in this piece and moved towards dance and mime, indicating the direction in which Cointet wanted to go at the end of his life.

Five Sisters is a play Guy de Cointet started to develop in the seventies and was first staged in 1982. It is a play performed by four actresses and its duration is approximately 50 minutes. It was the last performance played during Guy de Cointet’s lifetime, and was first performed in 1982 in Los Angeles at the Barnsdall Park Theater. Later performances took place at the Strub Theater, Loyola Marymount University, L.A (1982); The Temporary Contemporary, Museum of Contemporary Art, L.A. (1985) (posthumous tribute), and Café Man Ray, L.A (1985) (posthumous tribute). For Five Sisters, Guy de Cointet collaborated with the sculptor Eric Orr who created the lighting and part of the sound, and the musician Joseph Hammer.

Five Sisters is arguably de Cointet’s most resolved and mature play. A sharp description of the play, and its relation to earlier pieces, is given by Connie Butler in a 2007 issue of Artforum: “In his earlier dramas – Ethiopia, 1976, Iglu, 1977, and the incantory Espahor ledet ko uluner ! – the audience was transported through a narrative of dramatically inflected clichés, non sequiturs, and pulp-fiction fragments. Brightly colored props, oversize geometric forms implying various domestic fragments and resembling a Constructivist reading room, were manipulated by elaborately clothed women (and they were almost always women) performing a kind of hyperfemme drag concocted from the daytime soaps and the self-conscious voyeurism of Warhol’s screen tests. Five Sisters is a collage of clichéd exclamations about beauty, self-help, and all manner of feigned emotions. Cosmetic surgeons, exotic locales, and New Age tinctures are discussed and punctuate the simple stage directions. The final cadence of the play is a comment on the art world, which returns us to some kind of known reality but renders it as transparent and ridiculous as the facial moisturizer that has been discussed at length in the scene before: “Why are my paintings so disturbing to me, and to Rachel, to Maria, to Dolly? My dealer seems to like them. He says they’re neat and pretty. Maybe he should take a second look at them.”“

After Guy de Cointet made the play De toutes les Couleurs (Paris, 1982), which is the culmination of the use of books and objects as props in his oeuvre, he wanted to explore new effects. He was interested in the Light and Space movement and worked with his friends Larry Bell and Eric Orr. In Five Sisters, it is the lights that create the emotions in the actresses, rather than the objects. Within the scope of Guy de Cointet’s oeuvre, the play is a new step, as the relation to the objects has changed and it moves towards dance and mime, and indicates the direction in which Guy de Cointet wanted to go at the end of his life.

Five Sisters is a key moment of the evolution of Guy de Cointet towards the Light and Space movement, that he discovered through his friends and colleagues Larry Bell and Eric Orr, and also his travels in the vast landscapes of New Mexico and Tijuana. As Larry Bell moved part of his workshop and life to Taos, New Mexico, Guy de Cointet also spent some weeks there. Again, as he did when Larry Bell moved from New York to Los Angeles in 1966, and de Cointet drove his car and decided to stay, it was an important moment in Larry’s life. His wife, Janet, was pregnant and had to stay in bed, and de Cointet took care of her during this difficult period when Larry had to travel for work. The long way from LA to Taos, a 16 hours drive, that Larry still does twice a month, is a magnificent way to comprehend and feel the immensity of the west, the ‘wild west’ that any migrant coming to America, is looking for. It is the red rocks that Guy de Cointet used in his plays like Ethiopia or Tell Me, from the stories of Indians and cowboys. Guy de Cointet had made several trips in the desert in the ’70s, and with Jeffrey Perkins, artist and film maker now based in New York, he went to see the holy dances in the caves, as Aby Warburg did several years before. On this occasion, he met John Ford!

So, for Guy de Cointet, the new field opened by the theories and experiments on perception, colors and light, were directions that he wanted to explore since the early ‘70s. Larry Bell’s collaborations with Eric Orr were a good stimulus for his creativity. The importance of phenomenology and new theories about light and transmission of affect through the channel of video was a relevant debate.

Among de Cointet’s plays, Five Sisters represents the summum of affects theories filtred by the tools of TV, soap operas or commercials that Guy de Cointet discovered in American culture since he arrived in 1965. We can say that this play represents a junction between the ‘60s and ‘70s and what was going to happen in the ‘80s: the development of video. Since Guy de Cointet’s notes about color and light in the mid ‘70s, this project takes roots in the strong idea of color and light theories, from Goethe but even before, in the Middle Age’s theories linked to the church’s enlightenment.

Five Sisters are a mix of The three Sisters by Tsjechov and Charlie’s Angels coming back from a psy show!

Its rhythm, puns, exaggerated manners, makes it the more campy of Guy de Cointet’s plays. It is one of the most funny pieces that is still very contemporary, and at the same time gives many clues about the ‘70s context of performance in LA.

Marie de Brugerolle, September 2010