Jamie Lyons

Strauss’s Daphne directed and designed by Romeo Castellucci 

Castellucci knows what you know but pretend to forget… that pastoral is a lie… always was. Those sunlit meadows and nymphs dancing? Bullshit. The world’s a wasteland and nature’s not your mother, she’s indifferent, she’s cold, she’ll bury you under six feet of snow and not think twice about it. So he takes Strauss’ Daphne, this 1938 opera dripping with late-Romantic longing, and strips it down to bone. No green anywhere. Just snow. Perpetual, pitiless snow falling on that Berlin stage like the universe giving up.

And you sit there in the Staatsoper watching this and something breaks open in your chest because Boecker’s Daphne isn’t some pastoral fantasy, she’s us, alienated, desperate, trying to find something pure in a world that’s fundamentally polluted by human want, human need, human fucking touch. She’s singing her luminous soprano lines and she’s already a ghost, already transforming into something non-human because humanity is the disease, right? That’s what Romeo Castellucci’s saying with that giant projection of Eliot‘s Waste Land title page, that modernist desolation bleeding into ancient myth.

Because the Greeks knew it too. Daphne runs from Apollo not because she’s coy, not because she’s playing virgin games, but because she sees what he represents, desire as consumption, love as annihilation. And when she becomes the laurel tree in Castellucci’s vision, it’s not romantic transformation, it’s escape, it’s the only way out. Guggeis lets that final metamorphosis stretch out, the orchestra doing all the work while the visual becomes pure abstraction, pure withdrawal from the human project.

Pape and Černoch can sing the hell out of their roles, and they do, but they’re irrelevant the moment Daphne chooses extinction over connection. That’s the radical move here. Romeo Castellucci’s not interested in redemption or reconciliation. He’s showing you what it looks like when someone would rather become mineral, vegetable, anything than remain human in a world this broken. The snow keeps falling. The stage stays empty. And somehow Strauss’ sublime late-Romantic orchestration sounds more desperately beautiful for it.

Antonin Artaud gets out of Rodez, nine years of psychiatric lockup, electroshock frying his brain, and the first thing he does is get near a microphone. Thévenin sets him up with this radio program, Club d’Essai, and Artaud records Les Malades et les médecins. The whole thing’s a middle finger to the doctors: You want to know about sickness? The patients know. We’ve been down there. We’ve seen what you fuckers won’t look at, the hideous beauty you’re too chickenshit to acknowledge.

Listen to this recording. His voice sounds like gravel scraped across concrete, words forced through a mouth that electroshock had basically destroyed. He’s hammering out syllables, whistling them through broken teeth. And he hates it. He thinks his rhythm’s off, so he immediately does another one, Aliénation et magie noire, about waking up from electroshock, that absolute terror of not knowing who you are anymore. In this one, he just goes for the throat: French psychiatry is sexual butchery. They’re putting people into insulin comas, shock comas, artificial deaths, and robbing them. Death is black magic, Artaud says, and these doctors are practicing it.

But he’s still not satisfied. His voice on tape isn’t the voice in his head. So he disappears from radio for a year.

Then La Voix des Poétes (The voice of the poets) calls. Do whatever you want, they tell him. Two weeks later, two weeks, and the guy’s dying of anal cancer, he’s written Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu. He’s rehearsed his collaborators once. That’s it. They record the pieces between November 22nd and 29th, 1947. Then on January 16, 1948, Antonin Artaud and Roger Blin (the guy who directed the first productions of Beckett’s Waiting For Godot, Endgame, and Happy Days) record the bruitage, the screams, the glossolalia, the percussion, the primal noise underneath language.

What you get is this cacophony of rhythm and chaos and laughter, sound trying to become physical image, fracturing space, marking both presence and absence simultaneously. It’s Artaud’s last stand against language itself: interrogating it, dissecting it, smashing it to pieces, trying to forge from the wreckage something that actually expresses what a human body is.

This time, finally, Antonin Artaud says yes. This is it. This transmission hits the nervous system directly.

A good art exhibition is a lesson in seeing to those who need or want one, and a session of visual pleasure and excitement to those who don’t need anything — I mean the rich in spirit. Grunts, sighs, shouts, laughter, and imprecations ought to be heard in a museum room. Precisely the place where these are usually suppressed. So, some of the values of pictures may be suppressed too, or plain lost, in formal exhibition.

I’d like to address the eyes of those who know how to take their values straight through and beyond the inhibitions accompanying public decorum. I suggest that true religious feeling is sometimes to be had even at church, and perhaps art can be seen and felt on a museum wall; with luck.

Those of us who are living by our eyes — painters, designers, photographers, girl watchers — are both amused and appalled by the following half-truth: “what we see, we are.” And by its corollary: our collective work is, in part, shameless, joyous, autobiography-cum-confession wrapped in the embarrassment of the unspeakable. For those who can read the language, that is. And we never know just who is in the audience. When the seeing-eye man does turn up to survey our work, and does perceive our metaphors, we are just caught in the act that’s all. Should we apologize?”

Walker Evans – Boston Sunday Globe, August, 1st, 1971, p. A-61.

Walker Evans gets it exactly fucking right. Every time I walk into some pristine white cube with its hushed reverence and security guards treating me like I’m a potential vandal, I want to scream, not at the art, but at the entire apparatus designed to domesticate my response to it.

My mother ran an antique print gallery in San Francisco that actually understood this. She let people react, encouraged it, demanded it, even. Laughter echoed off those walls. She held court there, spinning story after story about these long-dead artists, the provenance of each piece, the historical moments and cultural currents that birthed what hung before a visitor. And there was always music, because silence, she understood, isn’t reverence. It’s death twice over. That space proved Evans’ point daily: art doesn’t need protecting from human response. It needs it. Craves it. Dies without it, and these artists were already dead. The least she could do was let their work breathe.

Because here’s the thing: Evans understood what I’m still desperately trying to articulate in my journal and my late-night editing sessions, that the work is a confession whether I admit it or not. Every photograph, every constructed space, every durational performance is me saying “this is what I saw when no one was looking, this is what moved through me, this is the shape of my hunger.” And the museum, that glorious mausoleum, wants to file it under “contemporary practices” and stick a wall text next to it explaining what I allegedly meant.

The “rich in spirit” Evans mentions? Those are the ones who get it without the PhD, who grunt and sigh because the image or the theatrical gesture hit them in the solar plexus before their critical faculties could erect the usual barricades. Meanwhile, I’m standing there with my theoretical frameworks and my Sontag and my Artaud, convinced I need all this intellectual scaffolding to justify what is essentially an act of exposure.

And that vulnerability, fuck, that’s the unbearable part. I’ve spent years in archives (LINES and Mabou Mines) and rehearsal spaces, constructing these elaborate structures of meaning, when really I’m just desperate to be seen. Truly seen. Not what I’ve constructed, or arranged or currated.  But me.  By someone who reads the language, who catches me mid-confession and doesn’t look away.
Should I apologize? Fuck no. The apology is already baked into the work, in every desperate frame, every constructed sightline, every moment I arrange for an audience I simultaneously court and fear. The museum wants decorum; I’m offering my guts on a wall. The only question is whether anyone’s brave enough to look.