Ten Theses to Subvert a Work (A Manifesto)

Bizarre anatomy: the mute face of Novarina, the polyphonic voices of Whitehead, the electronic borborygmi of Migone, the resonant backbeat of Konzelmann, the cosmic hands of Sussman, the cruel eye of Paré, the esoteric brain of Weiss. Who's there? A monster of sorts. A wireless marionette, an actor without body, a voice without origin, a body without organs. Not phantasms, but frozen mutations of language, following Novarina's injunction: "articulatory cruelty, linguistic carnage." Liberate language, fracture speech, worsen the word through logological proliferation, through onomastic frenzy. Transform theatre: from trompe l'oeil to trompe l'oreille.

1. Multiply origins. The author is not dead, but increasingly decentered.
2. Neutralize techniques. The form of thought is a function of the effects of technology, such that the contemporary baroque proffers an electronic deus ex machina. We must dissect fetishes, not repress them; encourage parasites, not suppress them; stage gods, not worship them.
3. Accept interferences. The very presence of the puppeteer creates the marionette. The form of the marionette deforms the puppeteer. Given this intimate relationship, the director is a parasite, though a productive one.
4. Confuse genres. The Gesamtkunstwerk is dead, synaesthesia is the norm. Consequently, the senses are dehierarchized and the arts hybridized, such that each art form implicitly contains all other art forms. Establish a logic of separation and degeneration in order to corrupt genres.
5. Valorize polyphonies. To the labyrinth of the text, add the imperfections, pathologies, and wounds of the voice.
6. Exacerbate paradoxes. Do not repress the ontological aporias of theatre—between text and word, word and gesture, gesture and dramaturgy, dramaturgy and staging, staging and decor, decor and text—but push them to the limit. Such is a "theatre of cruelty."
7. Excavate voids. Investigate the hollow spaces of the text, the gaps between the lines, the silences between the words. Seek not exquisite corpses but disquieting cuts.
8. Condense givens. Not the infinite text, but the definitive reduction. The condensation of text into monologue, body into voice. The quest for textual, theatrical, and sonic miniatures produces monsters, those avatars of the plasticity of the imagination and the catastrophies of the flesh, signs that aesthetics exists without any regulatory a priori whatsoever.
9. Love mannerisms. All vision, all listening, has its idiosyncrasies. Such is the origin of style, which must proliferate.
10. Dissociate significations. Avoid communication, shatter narration, celebrate solecism. Seek an impossible private language to assure an improbable universal expression.

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This manifesto is based on Allen S. Weiss's "Dix thèses pour détourner une oeuvre," which was commissioned by Alternatives théâtrales No. 72 (2002) on the occasion of the French production of Théâtre des Oreilles (Theatre of the Ears), a play for electronic marionette and recorded voice. The US production was sponsored by the California Institute of the Arts and the Cotsen Center for Puppetry and the Arts. The production team included: Valère Novarina (text); Allen S. Weiss (conception, translation, and adaptation); Zaven Paré and Allen S. Weiss (direction); Gregory Whitehead (sound montage and voices); Christof Migone and Scott Konzelmann (additional sound); Zaven Paré (décor and electronic marionette); Mark Sussman (puppetry); Jon Gottlieb (French sound design); Léopold von Verschuer (French voices); and Mark Sussman (French lighting design). To listen to a selection from the production, please visit http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/tj/v058/sound/58.3weiss01.mp3.