Endgame Tania Bruguera
Known, among other things, for her performance art, Tania Bruguera is staging
Endgame, with its subte political message about the transgression of power.
A surprise awaits you when you enter the theater: A circular scaffolding shaped like a giant cylinder, whose center is covered by a large canvas. Quickly you realize that you have to mount the metal structure’s stairs and look for an opening just large enough to stick your head through. Below you can see a small round stage bathed in a halo of pale light. Like moonlight that lets you glimpse the heads of an intrigued audience and a strange, cloth-covered shape placed center stage. Tania Bruguera’s set is fascinating. When we see the young Clov appear and pull back the white sheet covering the older Hamm, we feel more as if we are watching a theater play than performance art. Yet this Cuban artist is known for her performance work. Further, the two characters have familiar names and attitudes: the young man who staggers across the stage at the sound of the slightest whistle, and the helpless old man in his wheelchair. Bruguera’s piece is based on Endgame, which Samuel Beckett originally wrote in French and then translated into his native tongue shortly after its April 1957 premiere.
THEATRICAL PARENTHESIS
This is Bruguera’s first time out as a theater director. Her choice of the text was no accident; she has reread it hundreds of times since a friend gave her a copy in 1998. When we revisit the play through her production, we immediately note the distinguishing characteristics of what is often labeled “theater of the absurd.” Clov’s opening words are revealing: “Finished, it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished.” They announce the endgame—or, more accurately, as expressed in French, the end of the game—and at the same time express doubt as to its reality, thus blocking all intrigue and progression. The game may be over, or beginning all over again indefinitely. Bruguera’s stage design emphasizes this point. The cyclical aspect of the text is mate-
rialized by the enclosed, circular stage that Hamm rolls around thanks to Hamm’s goodwill before inevitably returning to the center. The choice of the setting shuts off any sense of perspective and reinforces the feeling of an impasse that the characters ceaselessly run up against, even when Clov takes out his telescope to try and peer at the horizon. Another Beckettian trait accentuated in this production is the pairing of characters. Hamm and Clov are seen onstage, while Hamm’s parents are present only through their voices emanating from the trashcans in which they are hidden. As Bruguera explains in her production notes, she wanted to play down “the psychological influence exerted by the Father and Mother characters and instead refocus attention on the relationship of power as a social relationship rather than its personal or psychological dimension.” This crucial choice is what links her staging of this play with the rest of her art.
POWER AND DOMINATION
Her explanation indicates how we should attempt to understand this work in the context of a career marked by performance pieces with explicit political implications. She speaks of her work as “useful art,” an art that can change a given social situation. In Tatlin’s Whisper #5 in 2008, she had two moun- ted police ride through Tate Modern in London, forcing visitors to group together within authorized perimeters. The following year, Tatlin’s Whisper #6 (Habana Version) consisted of a podium installed in the middle of the Cuban capital so that anyone who wanted to could speak their minds for one minute, flanked by two imitation soldiers. In her projects in support of migrants she asked passersby to sign a petition demanding that the Pope grant Vatican citizenship to the undocumented. What these interventions have in common is a direct interrogation of the relationship between social groups and authority: faced with both the violence of domination and voluntary servitude, is it possible to transgress and challenge power? These issues are at the heart of her production of Endgame, which makes the significance of these interrogations more universal by downplaying their rootedness in a specific context. Bruguera says, “When I was given the book, I read it without stopping. Every time I spotlighted a different relationship between the characters I could see different things happen: the dialogue took place between a Black man and a white racist, between a woman who had been raped and the rapist, between two lovers… what was always the same was the way I visualized the space where all that happened.” A BLIND PANOPTICON The choice of space takes on particular importance if seen as a quasi-scientific study (the stage also recalls a lab). The heads we see from above, those of the audience and those of the two secondary characters after the trashcans are opened, converge toward a central position that Hamm makes it a point of honor to occupy exactly. Here we have a panopticon that is all the more effective in that the slot through which each spectator must stick their head makes it impossible to move their bodies and indeed makes them disappear. We also see it in the relationship between Hamm and Clov, the former controlling the latter’s every move through his questions and orders. Yet this is an almost sightless panopticon. The text emphasizes the master’s blindness, which becomes determinate: “Did you ever see my eyes?,” Hamm asks his servant. “Did you never have the curiosity, while I was sleeping, to take off my glasses and look at my eyes?” The latter says no, even while obviously fully aware of the darkness in which he finds himself. Thus the panopticon is rendered inoperable by the blindness of the man at its center. But it seems to function anyway by means of a kind of inertia that keeps the former in the comfort of domination and the other in the habit of submission. Clov has no more reason to leave than to stay, and he seems in no hurry to go off toward freedom.
A CROSSROADS
Thus we are free to explore different interpretations, and of course we can’t help but think of Bruguera’s Cuba. Imprisoned in his wheelchair, Hamm vaguely recalls Fidel Castro during his last years when he, too, appeared sitting and wearing a jogging suit. For him, the game is truly over. That is undoubtedly the message conveyed by Bruguera, who remains a politically engaged performance artist: the same game can begin again, but it’s also possible to change the rules. That’s not so absurd, after all.
Translation, L-S Torgoff