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PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 27.3 (2005) 131-139



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La Belle Indifference


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Julie Taymor's Die Zauberflöte: Puppet theatre stage on the opera stage. Photo: Courtesy Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York.
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Accidental Nostalgia, an Operetta on the Pros and Cons of Amnesia, written and performed by Cynthia Hopkins, accompanied by the band Gloria Deluxe. Under the Radar Festival at St. Ann's Warehouse, January 5–23, 2005.

What is so fascinating about hysteria? Since its peak in the late-nineteenth century, and through the twentieth-century development of psychoanalysis, it has paradoxically represented the core of notions of subjectivity. New "dynamic psychiatry" saw in the hysteric secrets to explain the double nature of the "universal" human mind and experience, ironically reimagining the masculine universal through the female hysteric. Alongside Charcot's Tuesday morning-performing hysterics at Salpêtrière, a lineage of writers, from Ibsen to André Breton to Tennessee Williams, respectively, saw the hysteric's dilemma as key to the modern drama and idealized her as the quintessentially creative creature, one who allegedly performed for her own pleasure.

Throughout the past century, hysteria has remained an undercurrent in theatre and the cultural imaginary. Emerging from the hysterical characters and emotional content of modern drama and shifting into the externalized formal stagings in the past 30 years of New York's downtown scene, it has informed the style of performance, as in The Wooster Group's stagings of a form of hystericized behavior. It has proved especially prominent in Richard Foreman's Ontological-Hysteric Theatre, where many of his earliest productions featured the female hysterical subject as a traveler in a world of blurry definition. Developing from these traditions, Cynthia Hopkins's Accidental Nostalgia draws on the history, both medical and theatrical, of hysteria. Over a two-year period of development that began in 2002 at Dixon Place, Hopkins has created a collage of identities to reimagine the interplay of notions of the amnesic and hysteric in the space of the theatre.

Opening the piece, as the neurologist Cameron Seymour, Hopkins proposes to lecture the audience on the historical understanding of psychogenic (or hysterical) amnesia in order to reframe our usual understanding of it. But as the [End Page 132] singer and accordionist of her own songs she reenacts memories that may or may not belong to her as author (both Hopkins and Seymour) or as character (Seymour). By juxtaposing these two ways of intertwined remembering—explication and immersion—Hopkins attempts a neo-Brechtian turn which gets to the very question of subject formation/development. What she frames didactically in her lecture outlining the contours of amnesia and memory for her audience, she counteracts by performing bitterly nostalgic lyrics in fourteen blues- and country-inspired songs. This music inexorably pulls the intellectualized Seymour into narratives of suffering and emotionality that she cannot resist, memory both overwhelmed by and overwhelming the amnesiac truths of nostalgia. It is this intertwining of modes of remembering that reverses the hierarchy, rather than the lecture alone. The nature of memory dictates that amnesia may be kinder, in fact, than memory. This reversal in turn forces a theatrical questioning of the very premise of theatre: what is so good about reenactment? Does returning to the place of injury merely prolong injury? Hopkins theatricalizes Pierre Nora's lieux de mémoires, proposing alongside them éspaces d'amnésies—the places of memory juxtaposed to spaces of forgetfulness.

The intertwining coalesces in her references to the Renaissance memory theatre; in fact, her stage physically recalls a memory theatre of the three sections that make up Seymour's/Hopkins's "self": a lectern downstage, a screen upstage center that projects us into other spaces, the downstage presence of technicians and their Macs recalling both the theatrical apparatus itself and notions of mechanic memory, and finally stage left, Hopkins's "real life" band, Gloria Deluxe. Each section, though always visible, proposes a box to be opened uniquely by her representation...

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