It is difficult to write about Dark Mofo. There is so much that happens - the all-consuming surfeit of experience is quite difficult to process, and it is the strength of the programming that means that each event seems inextricably linked to all of the others. There is enough to say about each thing to do an individual write-up for every event. But that makes it incredibly difficult to convey the 'event-ness' of the whole thing, and the experience of interlinking affect that runs through the entire festival. It is an extraordinary experience, rare and risky and precious, and it inspires and challenges me in equal measure, like no other arts event I go to. The programming at Dark Mofo is programming that happens nowhere else in Australia. The experience is utterly unique.
This year, however, I feel there is one event within the festival that deserves some more critical attention, partly because the discourse surrounding it has been so dire. That event is (no surprises here) Hermann Nitsch's extremely controversial 150.Action, a three-hour distillation of his days-long actionnen performances. When this was announced in the programming, there was absolute uproar. When tickets were released and allocated, they then had to be cancelled because so many people were planning to disrupt the performance. Tickets were re-allocated on the sly (I had to email and ask for one especially), the date and time of the event were changed on the website to throw people off the scent, and patrons with reallocated tickets weren't even really told if they would be seeing the performance or merely a live-stream of it. Aside from the fact that outrage created the best free publicity Dark Mofo could have asked for, it also lead to an incredible spread of misinformation about the work, Nitsch, and the festival more generally. In the days following the performance, critical responses have either been "that's disgusting and not art" or "it was amazing and you wouldn't understand". I by chance ran into some people a day later who had either been at the performance and participated in it, and we all found it cathartic to talk to one another about it without having to explain or justify it. We all had felt the need, in the hours following the performance, to be alone and process it. A few of us had written manically, trying to get our thoughts and sensations in order. I myself have spent a lot of time trying to explain the performance to those who didn't see it, and have realised just how potent the spread of misinformation is. No, a cow was not killed live. Yes, Nitsch was there, but he wasn't butchering animals with sadistic glee. No, it wasn't disgusting. Yes, it was hard work and incredibly confronting. Yes, I absolutely would see it again.
I believe this work warrants critical attention. I believe the discourse surrounding it (both positive and negative) has not in any way done it justice. This work went beyond its content and found its most perplexing and rewarding complexities in its experience. I felt privileged to be there, and in the 48 hours since I have seen it, it has not left my mind.
So what was it? 150.Action sits somewhere between a performance and a ritual. A cast of about 25 complete ritualistic actions over the course of 3 hours, building in intensity. The whole thing is accompanied by music - organs and brass in this case - and presided over by the elderly and rather corpulent Hermann Nitsch, who sits at the head of the performance space conducting the proceedings like God himself. These ritualistic actions take their inspiration from the imagery of religious sacrifice and ritual over the course of human history. Naked and blindfolded performers, on stretchers or crucifixes, have blood, milk, and water poured over them by the rest of the white-clad cast, and are paraded around the enormous performance space in what can only be described as a modern iteration of a medieval mystery play. About half-way through the performance, the enormous butchered carcass of a bull from a local abattoir is wheeled in and hung up on a structure in the middle of the performance space. In addition to the pouring actions that occur throughout the entire performance, the bull carcass is cut open and offal is pulled out and put back in. The structure, complete with hanging bull and naked, bloodied performers, is at intervals picked up and carried by the entire cast around the performance space. At the very end of the performance, the carcass is taken down, covered in other foodstuffs, and then becomes the site for an orgiastic scrum where the performers dive into it and throw it at each other. The orchestral score is loud, and constant, and undulates in intensity in accordance with the intensity of the performance.
Explaining the performance like this, however, gives no indication of the actual experience of being there. In fact, I felt that the event-ness of the whole thing meant that it was not so much about content as context. What does it mean to be present at something like this? Lining up to get into the space and walking past a fairly subdued group of protesters at the gate, milling around for an hour or so in a large space before being told that we would be 'transported' to the performance space (it was only a short walk - again trying to throw any disrupters off the scent), cramming around a performance space in an enormous industrial shed, looking over the shoulders of others, craning and peering to see Nitsch, or the bloody fish on a white-tablecloth clad table, or the performers undressing and blindfolding themselves in a very visible 'backstage' area, observing David Walsh, the eccentric founder of MONA, standing in front of me. Existing in this space for 3 hours, moving around and standing on tiptoes and trying frantically to see where the next body would come from, was an act of durational stamina for the audience members. You began to feel the physical limits of your own body, as you watched a performance that so explicitly dealt with the boundaries of the flesh. Given that there was a great deal of movement around the enormous space, as an audience member I was constantly on guard - when would I next have to scramble out of the way as a blood-soaked naked body was paraded right next to me? Usually in a theatre, seated in a numbered place that has been assigned to you, the audience member has some sort of impenetrable sanctity of space within which to gather your thoughts. Not so here. The audience was never static, and so there was never time to stop and reflect and make sense of what was happening. The experience was constant. There was also a kind of absurdity to the whole thing from the start. Walking past the protesters and waiting to move into the performance space, eyeing off the other patrons who were also crazy enough to go to the enormous effort to come to something like this, observing the police and paramedics who had been unwittingly roped into working this event, watching people in the performance space climbing on chairs or onto ledges on the wall to get a better look - I found the experience of watching others watching the proceedings almost as fascinating as the performance itself. There was a bit of a malfunction with the enormous carcass, where it couldn't be properly attached to the structure and the cast took some time to adjust everything. When they finally got it up, everyone applauded. At one point, a maintenance guy with a mop came up to me to mop up a rivulet of shining blood that had run off the performance space and into the audience, causing a potential safety hazard. I laughed out loud.
This absurdity extends to the performance itself, which I noted was distinctly lacking in performativity. The very visible backstage space, the business-like demeanour of the cast as they transport bodies around the room and pour blood onto the mouths and bodies of their fellows. The direction, given very obviously from a large white binder, of the leader of the cast, who also had a whistle which was used to signify transitions between actions, was something between stage manager and sports coach. Indeed what is most interesting about this lack of performativity to me is where it sits within the context of the rituals from which this performance comes. Crucifixion and the Eucharist are hugely significant in the work, as are Greco-Roman sacrifices. Nitsch himself speaks of the violence that is inherent in all human ritual (violence with which he became fascinated during his childhood in WWII). Given the inextricability of ritual and violence, where is the line where one becomes more or less the other? This piece constantly contests this boundary, toying with ritual and ceremony and the violence at its core, in turn tipping from one to the other. However in religious ritual, the implied or actual violence is shrouded in mystery and justified with the promise of transcendence. The violence exists to appease, or satisfy, or invoke, or pay homage to, another plane of being. What occurred to me was the fact that without this transcendental context, most rituals are essentially banal. A great strength of this work is in the banality of repetition. There are patterns of pouring and parading that are repeated with very little variation, and the audience becomes inured to both the concept of transcendence, and the shock of the real. I was reminded of Marina Abramovic's distinction between theatre and performance art, where she speaks of performance art existing in the space of the 'real' - the blood is real, the knife is real, the pain inflicted is real, and therefore theatre, with none of these things, is fake. There are a great many issues with this statement (which I will not go into here), but what is most pertinent to this performance is that without the transformative and transcendental context of performativity, the real is decidedly entrenched in the banal.
The most potent images in this work are unsurprisingly images of flesh. The anonymity of the blindfolded and naked performers who were bloodied as part of the ritual highlighted the anonymity of sacrifice within the context of ritual. It is the reduction of human to flesh. In this sense, the anonymous presence of human bodies, and the presence of that of the bull, similarly displayed and paraded, was not so much about juxtaposition as assimilation. The flesh is not sacred. The flesh is more or less the same no matter who or what it belongs to. The performance actively played with the ideas of the boundaries of the body, asking when it loses its integrity as a whole. Is it when it is cut open and turned inside out? Or is it when it is made anonymous and used not as a signifier of identity, but as an object in ritual? The boundary between the flesh in performance and the flesh of the audience was also a contested one - the orgiastic feast at climax of the performance, where the cast scrambled over one another diving into the carcass of the bull, eerily recalled the movement of the audience at the beginning of the performance, scrambling and peering over one another to get a better view. The act of pouring blood and milk and water onto (not really into) the mouths of performers was one that recalled the grotesquery of nourishment. It looked as though the surfeit of the body was overflowing out of itself, the origin of the blood and the milk insignificant. The boundaries of the body, which we like to think of as empirical and sacred, were erased with relish.
To someone who wasn't there, all of this probably sounds unbelievably disturbing. Disgusting even, perhaps profane and perverse. I am not suggesting that this performance was not confronting - it undoubtedly was. But what disturbed me most, more than the images and actions and the offal flying around the room, was my lack of a visceral reaction to it. Should this performance have bothered me? Why? The lack of performativity manifested in an air of calm detachment, and it was with a kind of coolness and detachment that I craned my head, watched, saw the blood and the milk and the flesh, moved around to get a better look. I am a vegetarian (who eats fish) and I haven't eaten red meat, or any meat at all really, for coming on 10 years. I'm not entirely sure how to justify this performance within the ontological framework of my lifestyle choices, only to say (somewhat hypocritically) that my love of performance art is more potent than my dietary requirements. I was expecting to have a highly visceral reaction, to feel sick, perhaps even to faint. I was also expecting others to do the same. Instead, about 2 hours in, I was suddenly very hungry and popped into the adjacent room to get a toasted cheese sandwich and watch a live stream of the performance, before heading back in 15 minutes later, my hunger subdued. Something that has constantly occupied my thoughts after this performance has been this lack of reaction. I'm not certain if detachment was a collective coping mechanism in response to an extremely confronting work, or if it was a result of being so immersed in the experience and the audience, or if, when it comes down to it, the fact of the performance being disturbing is all hype and spin. Perhaps, (and I am beginning to think this is the case) detachment is a sign of a delayed reaction, a coming-to-terms-with that has taken place over a couple of days and manifested in a sudden compulsion to know about Nitsch and to speak about the performance and to replay parts of it over and over in my head. This experience, and I believe that in its totality it was more of an experience than a performance, will stay with me for a long time. The morning after I went to my favourite quiet place in Hobart - on the wharf side of the Antarctic research centre, behind the polar icebreaker, and compulsively wrote in an attempt to straighten out and name the impressions and thoughts and complications in my mind. Others I spoke with over the course of the festival did the same.
I wore my red 150.Action wristband with a sense of pride after the performance, almost as a badge of honour - I saw it, I survived. I'm not sure if I can say that I 'loved' it, in the same way that I love a great deal of work that I see. What I can say is that I have been irrevocably influenced by this experience. I still can't believe it was programmed, I still can't believe I saw it. I would go back and watch it all over again. The only thing that stopped me from signing up as a participant this year was arriving in Hobart a few days after the compulsory rehearsal. If I ever get this opportunity again, I will not hesitate.