1:14 am
Je n’aime que le mouvement
—“What are the states of your being around 1:14 in the early morning?”
—“In good states, live in God’s favour; in bad states, there are none—I am not me anymore, and you are not yourself. You and I are not one, where we walk on the edge of chaos.”
In the work and homonymous exhibition “Weightless,” a.f.art theatreFangling integrates theatre and cinema by the form of video installation for the first time in her practice. She goes beyond the linear narrative featured by either category but succeeds in establishing a fabricated experience of time and space. Employing certain body techniques as the very medium, she steps into the image of the figure, thus realising the “double vision” of acting and performance. The work does not only attend to the spatiotemporal value of the subject—the constant struggle between the actress (performer) and the character being sublimated as the regeneration of “dramaticism” and “theatricality,” but also illustrates in theory the conception of “alienation” in theatrical performance—mentioning the other meanings that “alienation” would refer to, which include “mental disorder,” the unhealthy and abnormal status, and the feeling of less integration or a high degree of “distance” and “isolation,” a condition considered as the inherent problem of modern society. The artist constructs the “semiotic self,” a concrete and unique one, through the engagement of the multiple roles of the figure, namely displacing herself with the mind and soul of the figure: Who “I” am now is telling about the “me” in the past to the “you” in the future, all of whom are myself.
4:48 am
Critical Point
—“Who is Sylvia Plath?”
—“My love, who I attempt to love.”
“Weightless” originates from Fangling’s reading upon Sylvia Plath and her literature. On the one hand, the confessional poet was born sensitive and had suffered from the clinical symptoms of comorbid with anxiety and depression since early, while stuck with the failure of marriage when leaving her own country and finally taking extreme measures to end up her own life. On the other hand, with a strong sense of her autobiography, her writing expressed herself, or to say, revealed herself in a perceptual way, and reached the audience by constructing the transference effect to share intimacy with. Correspondingly, Fangling attempts to “represent” Plath through the imitation of her style. The mere aim is to transcribe the pathological and psychological situations of Plath during her lifetime, to set up a mirrored reflection between Plath and Fangling, and to define such situations by using the term “weightless.” However, in fact, what “Weightless” truly describes is the symbiont of “Plath—Fangling.” Every single word uttered and every single move taken by Fangling belong to a concatenation of existence, the being of Plath. Meanwhile, the self of Plath serves as the unveiling object, recalling Fangling, the subject and the codependent. That is to say, the artist deliberately performs the fracture between the actress (performer) and the character, to bridge the distance between consciousness and reality. Who “Plath—Fangling” is now is telling about the past “Plath” to the future “Fangling.” Bearing such a spatiotemporal framework, the artist tries to subvert the authorship and gender identity that mires her: Is Fangling an actress (performer), an artist, or even the character herself? Does the very essence of “female,” not to mention “femininity,” remain in performance or behaviour? “Weightless” is somewhat an autobiography that signifies the being of Fangling under the guise of Plath.
6:05 am
No Content
—“Who are you again?”
—“Plath, the gone girl.”
During her long-term practice of experimental theatre and theatrical experiments, Fangling has realised that the entry point to drama and theatre is the idea of “between-the-acts” (interlude). On this occasion, she follows such a model to embody the above-mentioned spatiotemporal framework. In Between the Acts, English writer Virginia Woolf’s final novel, the annual pageant prepared by the heroine, together with the villagers, which was a celebration of history, compared itself to the outbreak of the Second World War. Resting on the few moments between the acts, the plot holes in the story-within-a-story get disappearing, which sets the contact of extremes via the overlap of onstage life and real life. Fangling also has the between-the-acts well displaced. She divides “Weightless” into five acts, Je n’aime que le mouvement, Critical Point, No Content, Wrestle, and Zero-G. Each act refers to a specific moment in a day, either before dawn or after sunrise, introducing the behavioural habits of the figure. Furthermore, she installs five screens for the loop of each video on a loop, where the disturbing moments questioning the meaning of time would reconstruct the spatial meaning of each act and ensure the instantaneity between the acts in the enclosed gallery. The audience draw their imagination during the orientation in the dark space and articulate the fragmented scenes into an improvisational theatre. Just as Woolf having the heroine say “Audiences were the devil” and “I am the slave of my audience,” Fangling assumes that the untouchable audiences are at the core of the structuring of dramatic language, because the sense of reality in theatre could be only perceived and accessed by them.
11:37 am
Wrestle
—“Tell me about the story of the tortoise and the snake?”
—“The tortoise and the snake, on the swart asphalt road, are fighting slowly under the blazing sun of the mid-day. They are wrestling in a tough way, with a special kind of strength. One would eventually win an overwhelming victory.”
So, what is the skin of the structuring of dramatic language? Say the least of it, concerning the unique system of discourse in “Weightless,” “alienation” that is applied as the performing technique, directly implicates the “alienation” (mental disorder) of Plath and the “alienation” (consumption) of Fangling. It may also involve the other early uses of the word, including “transfer of property,” “split of Gods and men,” “loss of affection” (part of the legal reasoning on which important judgments upon a pending divorce are based), etc., demonstrating the “female” or “women” being historicised. In the first act Je n’aime que le mouvement, Fangling is the phantom of an aristocratic descent who seems to have come down in the world but insists in taking dandyism and weaving it into the fabric of her daily life. Following the male pattern of discourse, she imitates Plath who was faced with a complete change when separating from Ted Hughs in 1962. However, the second act Critical Point immediately directs to the climax of Plath’s life—being gas-poisoned. Fangling sculpts her body into different positions and makes herself look out of control. Long and steadily being gazed at, at last, she empowers Plath as the signified. The third act No Content describes the competition between Fangling and the male voice of narratage, thus subverting the dominance by male authority and patriarchy. Again in the fourth act Wrestle, Fangling retraces the method of “animal modelling” in theatrical performance and entangles her body with the one of a male choreographer. She also sets a screen within the screen—a glass wall which seems to be a mirror, assuming the unfixity of gendered or sexed bodies. The fifth act Zero-G draws the picture of Fangling turning herself upside down and returning to the backstage. The stage setting rises slowly, and the screens no longer function as the very boundaries. Plath is forced into disappearance. Absent-minded, Fangling gets back to her true self.
5:09 pm
Zero-G
—“How to free the body?”
—“Tell the truth.”
Fanling extends her theatre vocabularies that pertain to the “carnivalesque”, the aesthetic genre mentioned by former Soviet literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, which triggers her encounter with Plath who was once possessed. Michel Foucault states that “In the Middle Ages and until the Renaissance, man’s dispute with madness was a dramatic debate in which he confronted the secret powers of the world… In our era, the experience of madness remains silent in the composure of a knowledge which, knowing too much about madness, forgets it.” [1] Fangling deliberately exaggerates how Plath suffered the symptoms of her disordered mental status and interprets it as a normal condition. The fading-in-and-out of “alienation” in the work is to help audiences experience the pathos of Plath through Fangling’s acting and performance. For Fangling, the role that drama or theatre plays lies in how “alienation” is being downplayed as something normal, while “weightlessness” is the true embodiment of reasoning.
Notes:
[1] Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage Books, 1988), p xii.
