Stage plays generally operate through narrative and dialogue to engage and please their audience; but there is also a kind of theatrical work that is more abstruse, more abstract, more a sustained thought than a story. First produced at the Venice Biennale in , and restaged in the s after Fabre decided that younger performers needed to be educated about the importance of his work, it treats body, sound and image as more theatrically important than text; there is a published script, but it is more like choreographic notation than something you can actually read and envisage in the theater of your own mind.
The cast strips off in the course of the show, and some of them also get dressed again. She lies down on his knees. As for the spanking, his explanatory notes specify,. You may be able to see a video of the Avignon performance here , and there are some short extracts from a different performance here. And that means historians of such events or of particular aspects of them, such as spanking can find themselves at the mercy of incomplete documentation, imprecise language and ambiguous imagery.
The theme is the process of imitation and meme creation by which people unthinkingly try to improve themselves and their relative standing in the world. Brunette Iva and blonde Rose aim to to encourage the audience to rethink their own propensity to imitative behavior by enacting some humorous examples.
Not quite gratuitously, you may be interested to see them in another of their shows, Strip Naked, Talk Naked :. Both propose to attract that attention by taking off their trousers. This duly happens a little farther on. ROSE: I would shake my ass to make people like what we do. Both those two threats, or promises, are fulfilled and it may help to know that Iva carries around a large floppy tigerskin for part of the show , but we only have direct photographic representation of one of them:.
Look carefully here and you can see the after-effects:. If we want certainty without the undeniable evidence of a full video recording, then we need a conjunction of word and picture, each serving to eliminate the potential ambiguity or imprecision of the other. And for that, we turn to the French avant garde artist Jean-Jacques Lebel born The show included representations of various forms of sexual behavior or free expression , from onstage masturbation to a woman urinating out of a window.
