FLOODESIGN

3. Cruelty A world is being defined here that observes a legible logic and rationale for its unfolding. There are continuities on every level. What is the mise that this world materializes? There are a series of tableaus and ritual formations, both satisfying and anxiety-provoking in their unrelenting contingency. There are bodies that suggest pain, violence, deformity and the socially marginal: performers with missing limbs and genetic disorders; a face masked as John Merrick, of the drama "The Elephant Man"; Liddell's body, bloodied and spread-eagled. Amid the brutality there is also gentleness and grace: careful ministrations of bodies, tender words of address. If we witness something cruel or discomfiting, does our aversion relieve us of our complicity? 4. Symbols The work is densely referential in its citation of film and literature, theatrical archetypes and ceremonial songs and formations. As citations accumulate, this symbolic system — made visual, through images and text, and aural, through speech and song — becomes its own frame of reference: musical passages echo one another; paths are retraced; a glass case arrives, leaves and arrives again. So the alternations between representation (performance) and ritual (manifestation) move us continually across both registers, and we move in and out of our suspension. Symbols produce pleasure in both their operation and their recognition as such: the pleasure in noticing a rhyme in a poem or a pattern in the natural world. 5. Risk It's thrilling to be shown something that induces fear. The performers subject themselves to physical threats and exposure, and our acts of witness enable empathy, but also contagion. The danger that's approximated is still proximate; it's still close enough. 6. Interiority A collectivity or a collection has a quality that feels singular, like the inside of one person's experience. In the different forms that boundedness takes over the course of this work, we are reminded of edges, completion, containers and containment, but also leakage, seepage, deformations and death. We understand what is kept on the outside and what is kept on the inside; even what is inside holds further interiorities, because interiority is an infinite regress. One wall comes down, and another is intact just behind it. Certain modesties are abandoned; others remain in place. When peace arrives and we're returned to safety, the truce we're offered feels like an uneasy armistice. We move forward with heightened senses. www.peakperfs.org 61 "The theater will never find itself again — i.e., constitute a means of true illusion — except by furnishing the spectator with the truthful precipitates of dreams, in which his taste for crime, his erotic obsessions, his savagery, his chimeras, his utopian sense of life and matter, even his cannibalism, pour out, on a level not counterfeit and illusory, but interior." —ARTAUD, A. "THE THEATRE AND ITS DOUBLE" "I propose symbols — almost in a medieval sense — that give meaning to the inexpressible. That's what worries me: the inexpressible. I consider my works to be long journeys to unexplored lands, where each stop gives sense to the one previous. That is to say, the scenes only make sense in their development, sometimes only at the conclusion of the work. My pieces are organisms flooded with blood vessels that feed the unconscious. The most important thing is to build these connections, or to establish very solid codes to elaborate an enigma. Not to solve it, but to ask it. But what gives coherence is, finally, the aesthetic structure." —LIDDELL, A., "POETRY THAT SMASHES OUR COMFORT. ANGÉLICA LIDDELL'S 'DEAD DOG AT DRY CLEANERS: THE STRONG'" Ange´lica Liddell in "Esta Breve Tragedia de la Carne." Photo: Isabelle Meister

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