Apparatus, Attention, and the Body: The Theatre Machines of Boris Charmatz

Figure 1.

From left: Myriam Lebreton, Nuno Bizarro (image), and Benoît Lachambre in Boris Charmatz's héâtre-élévision, 2002. This image, shown on the TV screen above the spectator's head, plays with the construction of space by means of linear perspective. (Photo by Stéphanie Jayet)

The Loneliness of a Spectator

The cellar is a dark and lonely place. On my own I sit on a simple, spartan bench and wait. The old building of the German Library in Frankfurt, Germany, has been deserted since 1997, when the books migrated to the library's new building up the road, leaving behind only their spectral presence. Their absence resonates in the building, which now feels uncannily empty and crowded at the same time. The minutes drag on until an assistant appears from the netherworld to guide me down a flight of stairs into a silent room with a sofa where I am asked to deposit my coat and bags. The door closes behind me. For some time I hover in this in-between space to prepare myself for what is to come. I try to shed some of my impressions of the outside world: the noise of the city, my own thoughts, and the thoughts of others that engulfed me once I entered the main door. It would not be the last door. After a while, the assistant asks if I am ready and leads me to the inner sanctum. I step forward. The door clicks closed behind me. I turn around and find that I am alone again.

I had seen the same piece before: héâtre-élévision by the French choreographer Boris Charmatz had been shown in 2002 during the Festival d'automne in Paris. A year prior to my Frankfurt experience, my very first journey into the underworld of cultural institutions took place at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, France. In the huge entrance hall the hustle and bustle of people buying tickets and rushing off to see the various exhibitions lay behind me. A female attendant ushered me through a recess of doors into the bowels of the museum where I crossed the threshold into the liminal space of the performance installation. Inside, my role as a spectator—including the way a spectator is supposed to behave and to feel—became unclear. Although going to see a performance is generally a social event, once inside the auditorium everybody is confined to his or her seat and left alone in the dark. In retrospect, my journey up to this point seemed to be some kind of purgatorial ritual, severing any social bonds I might have and highlighting instead the isolation of the spectator. It seemed similar to that which actors or performers undergo, a passage through actual and mental doors until the persona or role he or she is to play can be assumed.

In Frankfurt, memories of my earlier episode in Paris come back to me. They filter my current experience, turning it into its own spectral double. Although I had come to the library as an audience member, I am treated like a performer. It soon becomes clear that I am both: the only spectator and the only performer in the room. The instructions I am given by the assistant include the command to step onto the piano bench and climb onto the big black box that dominates the middle of the room. The shape of the black box that is to become my theatre appears close to that of an actual grand piano. I stretch out on my back, lying on a piece of black dance floor, "like a patient etherized upon a table," as T.S. Eliot's poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" describes. My head rests on a cushion. I stare up into midair at a television set suspended from the ceiling, its screen invitingly—or is it menacingly—inclined toward me. At the same time I feel powerless lying on my back. My body is open to forces from above...