Wet dreams |Manuela Infante
When theatres and rehearsal spaces were closed, I was not able to think anymore.
I supposed it was stress, depression, shock.
That’s what they said it was. “Inability to concentrate is normal” they said.
But they were wrong, it wasn’t shock, it wasn’t stress, it wasn’t a lack of concentration. It was the lack of theatre.
Theatre is the way I think.
Not because I think by means of it,
but because the theatre thinks.
And, sometimes, I get to take part in its thinking.
***
I once had a strange dream.
It was extremely realistic.
It must have been during my early twenties.
I found myself sitting in something like a waiting room in what resembled a public office; some dull, sad place in some downtown ministry.
I was told to wait there, since I would be introduced to God.
I waited, in wonder, trying to understand the riddle given to me in so many words:
I am going to be introduced to God? What does that mean?
After an ellipsis in which time didn’t pass but was represented as passing, they came for me. I have no idea who is ‘they’. I probably didn’t even see them, but I followed.
I walked into a room. Someone drew a curtain. Maybe I did.
In front of me there was a table, on which lay, like an embalmed dead president, Susan Sontag.
Her eyes closed. Her gray hair shining like it was made of solid silver. Susan Sontag is God?
I remember being surprised not to be taken by the absurdity of it all, but rather by a feeling of serious reverence.
There was no riddle. No hidden meaning.
Susan Sontag was God. Ok.
Later, many years later, it hit me.
Against Interpretation had become my bible.
“Art is not about something; it is something.” … reads the bible.
***
I echo the bible… (Is that praying?)
The theatre is not about something; it is something.
The theatre is some-thing.
The theatre is some-thing that thinks.
The theatre is some-thing that thinks as a thing.
The theatre is a thing that thinks about some-thing.
And sometimes, it also thinks about itself.
***
It’s not us who think or dream about the world by means of the theatre.
The theatre is, rather, the world thinking about us.
It’s the world dreaming us up.
The theatre is an erotic thinker.
And its dreams of us are wet.
The theatre does not think with what it declaims.
Not at all.
That’s how it thinks the less.
That’s how it fools us.
The theatre thinks like a plant.
When it philosophises about time and space, space is what it creates as it stretches, and time is the form of its body.
The theatre thinks like a rock… Slowly. Slowly. It piles up… Stuff.
Its weight, like the weight of a stone, is nothing but accumulated time. It aggregates. It archives. Slowly forming dense compact things that can be thrown to break the windows of an anti-riot police truck.
What is erotic about breaking window shields you might ask?
Oh, everything.
The erotic thinking of the theatre, erodes.
That’s what it does.
It riots stubbornly at the borders separating ‘We’ from ‘It’, wearing them down.
And then, it calls out to those who patrol the borders, shouting: “Do you even know who you are working for?!”
The theatre also thinks like the wind, pounding persistently until it erodes even the question “Why theatre?” down to its bones. And the ‘We’ that lurks behind it is fully exposed.
“There is no ‘We’ ”, sings the wind, “So whose theatre do you mean? Which theatre? Where? When?” it buzzes.
***
I don’t make theatre because I want to figure the world out.
Much less because I want to fix it.
I don’t make theatre because I need to say something about the world.
I make theatre because I feel the desire to have the world say something about me.
Because I feel the urgency to be thought by some-thing-other.
***
Why theatre?
Well, we all know what God said:
“None of us can ever retrieve that innocence before all theory, when art knew no need to justify itself, when one did not ask of a work of art what it said, because one knew (or thought one knew) what it did. From now to the end of consciousness, we are stuck with the task of defending art.”
Why theatre?
Go ask the theatre if you like.
It will answer in play.
And in place.
I’m thankful for the conversations I have had with Maaike Bleeker on the subject of theatre as a thinking thing, and my on-going conversations with Michael Marder on plants and non-cognitive thinking.
Manuela Infante is a Chilean playwright, director and musician. she is well known for creating scenic articulations of complex theoretical issues. in her recent play ‘Vegetative state’, she probes in which ways new concepts such as plant intelligence, plant communication or a vegetative soul change human perspectives.