The Constant Journey: An Introduction and a Prefatory Note

The Constant Journey: An Introduction and a Prefatory Note MONIQUE WITTIG I: AN INTRODUCTION I All theatre works with the same themes, endlessly repeated. Sophocles rewrote Aeschylus; Shakespeare took his themes from Greek and Roman antiquity, as did Racine; Brecht, continuing this tradition, rewrote Shakespeare . Without necessarily referring to these illustrious examples. we can see the same sort of rewriting everywhere in contemporary French theatre. This way of working informs us about the imaginary and is relevant here only as justification for my venturing to recreate Quixote and Panza once again in the theatre. In this case the project requires a double justification, since the actors playing these roles are women. This is not, as some have charged, simply a matter of transposition. If the spectators of The Constant Journey are convinced when the curtain falls by these new characters Quixote and Panza, it is because they have been present scene by scene at the remaking of heroes of a new sort. Indeed" the success of this play depends on active spectators, capable of recreating a complete fable from nothing. As always, it's a fable they know by heart because each episode is faithfully repeated from Cervantes, including the scene of the puppet show, and even including Quixote'S rewriting since in the second part of Cervantes's novel Quixote knows about his own adventures and takes the place of the author. In The Constant Journey, Sande Zeig is the one who alternates with the author of the text, creating the stage field of action. The dissociation of sound from action in the play may thus be better understood as an internal necessity dictated by a series of imperatives. To begin with, new elements had to be given separately to the spectators to allow them to recreate the plot as it was unfolding: Cervantes's barber, priest, and housekeeper have been transformed into mother and aunt; instead of a niece, Quixote now has two sisters. Next, the procedure of separating sound from action as in film served not only to Modern Drama, 39 ([996) [56 Introduction to The COllstant Journey 157 reconstitute the heroes step by step, but also to unfix in the theatre gestures which have become too firmly stuck to words and words which often seem only to serve gestures. I wanted to kill two birds with one stone: to rescue the theatre, which for me is this miracle of the physical presence of actors on stage, from its subjection to the text and, simultaneously, to release Sleeping Beauty from her secular sleep and her tired presence in our dreams. It strikes me as provocative that I have chosen such typically masculine heroes to carry this out, since I am certain that at least half the public in its reading and phantasmic projections recreates itself in the role of hero just as readily as in that of heroine. That is to say, in reading, as in dreams or selfcontemplation , one imagines oneself beyond gender. If I mention Sleeping Beauty, it is because, with this single exception, all the heroines in fairy tales have active roles, as they do in Beauty and the Beast and most of the old tales from here or elsewhere. The text itself is also liberated, in the sense that it acts independently of the action. It is not diminished by this separation: the entire creation of a crowd of secondary characters who will never appear on stage depends on it; in addition , it helps us to conceive abstractly the concrete characters of Quixote and Panza. And finally, the whispering we hear contributes to the fantastic atmosphere necessary for the whole performance to come together. The project could not have existed without the preliminary work of Sande Zeig, who gave me the idea of taking off from these characters, of emphasizing body language, movement, and comic acrobatics. The visual work is all hers; note how in the stage image she combines venerable clowning techniques with routines from the Peking Opera. She was assisted in this work by John Towsen, director of the New York festival of clowns, and by Syn Guerin, who co-directed the American production of the play. I have spoken of...