So Tonyanna gets it. She always gets it. You can see it in these frames, she’s not performing silence, she’s weaponizing it. That’s the difference between theater kids playing dress-up and someone who understands that Ivona’s muteness is an act of violence against everyone who needs her to participate in their charade. She’s making them see themselves, and they hate her for it, and she knows they hate her, and she’s not going to give them the relief of breaking.
And here’s the thing about shooting this in the Performance Art Institute, that whole setup is its own Gombrowicz play. You’re documenting experimental theater in a warehouse with walls that are literally scheduled for demolition by tectonic activity. That concrete in the background, all that gorgeous deterioration, those cracks running through like the whole structural integrity is a polite fiction we’re all agreeing to ignore, that’s not backdrop, that’s a collaborator. That’s San Francisco saying “yeah, this is all temporary, the ground is gonna move, and everything you’re building is built on borrowed time.”
So you’ve got Tonyanna embodying this character who’s the human earthquake at the royal court, and you’re shooting her against walls that are waiting for the actual earthquake. The theater itself is as doomed as the social order in the play. And everybody knows it. And everybody’s still doing the work. That’s not irony, that’s the only honest way to make art. In the ruins, before they’re officially ruins, while we’re all pretending the floor isn’t going to liquefy.
The beauty isn’t despite the decay. The beauty IS the decay. The fact that we’re here at all.
They were suddenly united, not like a man and a woman, but in another way, in a common offering to an unknown Moloch, incapable of possessing each other, only capable of offering themselves—and the sexual contract between them grew blurred, giving way to another contract, something undoubtedly more cruel but more beautiful. All that lasted only a few seconds. Nothing happened, either; all four of us just stood there.
Witold Gombrowicz Pornografia
