On men and objects : staging the divided subjectivity of displacement in zero degrees

Abstract

In contemporary theatre, objects often appear in the functions of subjects, both in the performances based on realist aesthetics and in more stylized or abstract works, in which subjects and objects are used interchangeably. Despite their inanimate nature, on stage objects can acquire an action force (VELTRUSKÝ 1990:88). They can be manipulated by live performers or perceived by the audience as acting on their own, i.e. exhibiting the will for action. The most noticeable example of this phenomenon is théâtre d’objects, which emerged in the 1980s. It employs animation of everyday objects to construct “material images of humans, animals, or spirits that are created, displayed, or manipulated in narrative or dramatic performance” (PROSCHAN 1983: 4). This view of the theatrical animation of an object links its on-stage work to puppetry, in which the agency of the inanimate matter is put forward, examined, and defended. Material performance, Dassia Posner argues, is “performance that assumes that inanimate matter contains agency not simply to mimic or mirror, but also to shape and create” (POSNER 2015: 5). What interests me here is the scale of subject (actor)/object (puppet) interdependency, which is mobilized on stage not in the forms of a traditional puppet theatre or even théâtre d’objects, but in the hybrid stylistics of tanztheater (dance theatre). The 2005 dance-duet zero degrees created and performed by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, a Moroccan-Flemish choreographer, and Akram Khan, a Bangladeshi born UK dancer, is one such example. Using the language of contemporary dance, storytelling, dramatic narration and the two life-size dummies in the functions of objects and subjects of action, zero degrees demonstrates how a theatre object can acquire agency on stage. Zero degrees, I argue, challenges a traditional view of dance as presence of “authentic human bod[ies]” (WAGNER 2006: 126). Using dancers’ bodies and dummies (the replicas of the performers’ bodies) interchangeably, when dummies (the objects) turn into dancers (the subjects), zero degrees presents a special case of theatrical intermediality. When the dummies join the [ Theatralia 22 / 2019 / 2, Supplementum (109—121) ] https://doi.org/10.5817/TY2019-S-9