Collapsible Poetics Theater: Considerations on Body, Language and Labor (review)

“Start acting like you have an innovative product. Okay. Is anybody coming? No. Put on a happy-pappy face. Got it. Is anybody coming? I see somebody. ... Say something. What? HELP. Okay. What’s happening now? They’re talking to me about an innovative product.”

Collapsible Poetics Theater (2008) skirts the traditional boundaries of poetry and theater by focusing on body and language in a social context dominated by consumer culture and capitalism. Rodrigo Toscano’s latest work focuses on language’s effect on the social body, demonstrating how linguistic structures can be used to control the organization of bodies of people in society, as well as the arrangement of individual bodies in space. In the excerpt above taken from the radio poetics play, “Eco-strato-static,” one of the three disembodied voices receives instructions on how to turn his/her body and voice into a vehicle for product placement (contorting his/her expression into a “happy-pappy face” and eventually humiliated into screaming for help to get someone’s attention), only to find that the only “body” who approaches is also participating in the mindless game of selling “innovations.” Thus, Toscano ironizes the situation of global capitalism in which we are made to feel bombarded by choices while the reality of labor conditions is otherwise.

Toscano has described Poetics Theater as “a demonstration of language in its social-body making and undoing capacities” (blog: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2010/04/what-is-poets-theater/). His work is deeply committed to instigating change by showing how dominant modalities of thought are the result of linguistic constructions and how these modes can be unraveled by their inherent contradictions. In “Truax Inimical,” a transmodern masque for four voices, the players pose questions and respond: “How does a baby become a corpse? / By too much autonomy (‘don’t tread on me’) / By not enough autonomy (volonté general)” (21). Capitalism demands everyone to be both individualistic and yet compliant to the resultant consumerism, which is based on marketing strategies that look to homogenize desire.

The dislocation of linguistic structures also occurs at more formal levels in CPT making the tempo and musicality of the pieces resemble the looping of electronic music and highlight the dislocated tasks of bodies. Units of speech are dispersed into multiple voicing; linguistic subordination is at times rejected for paratactical organization, or connections are blurred through the use of attenuated hypotaxis. Discourse at times becomes staggered, mechanistic, dislocated and interspersed: “And if you’re / You learn to / Hell bent to / Act on your / Bust out / Own wits” (17). In “Truax Inimical” one of the players states, “At the edge of the Empire is a synthetic voice that sounds like a recorded loop with emotional highlighting tweaked in later” (6). The intertextual reference appears to be the repetition of “Scrolling / Pointing / Clicking / Selecting” throughout the text: faced with the market of monocultures, entities participate in mindless activities, such as web browsing, “like a rat pushing a buzzer for a pellet” as Cathy Park Hong puts it.

The activity of bodies in the “contact zone” (Toscano prefers to avoid the term “stage”) is both carefully choreographed and susceptible to slippage (sometimes, intentional “mess-ups”). The text is complete with diagrams which indicate the activity of the “entities” who act as “sieves” for the poetic text: “I’m a sap for anything that’s been, a sieve for anyone, for anything” (110), says one of the players in “Spine”, a body movement poem. Many of the activities performed by bodies make us question the purposefulness of labor; in the same body movement poem, players take turns holding up a beam which burns their hands, without seeming to know why.

Despite the heterogeneous registers of language throughout the work, there is a constant contagion of consumerism and capitalistic discourse which signals a concern for labor conditions, a deep-seated necessity in Toscano’s life work as a social activist and seen in his current work for the Labor Institute...