The Thunder Inside

In the center of the stage stands a golden wooden chair with a golden dildo attached to it, the scene illuminated by soft light. Two black spheres hang from the ceiling at the back, and between them, a crescent moon-shaped screen. Angélica Liddell and Atra Bilis Teatro's Esta Breve Tragedia de la Carne[ This Brief Tragedy of the Flesh] begins with a sudden sensorial attack on the audience: the sound of very loud heavy metal music combined with strobe lighting. Equally sudden is the silence that follows, as a monk wearing a white robe and a red cloth mask walks slowly carrying a bow to shoot three arrows up towards the heavens. A microphone attached to the arrows amplifies the sound of the shooting in the first of a continuous series of mesmerizing scenes of visual poetry and sublime noise that take the spectators through a cathartic ritual of emotion.

Despite her four premieres in Avignon, her regular presence on the main European stages, and her twenty-five-year-long career, this is only Angélica Liddell's second visit to the U.S. In 2011, Seattle's On the Boards programmed her solo performance Te haré invencible con mi derrota[ I Will Make You Invincible with My Defeat], a homage to renowned cellist Jacqueline du Pré. Notably, Esta Breve Tragediais also a personal tribute to a female hero, Emily Dickinson. Liddell is not only the director and founder of her company Atra Bilis [Black Bile] with her life-long collaborator Sindo Puche, but she is also a unique performer and a gifted playwright, and often works on both set and costume design, as was the case in Esta Breve Tragedia. In 2017, Liddell was named knight of the Order of Arts and Letters of France. In 2013, she received the Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale for "her theatre of resistance."

Emily Dickinson is not mentioned explicitly in the show. Liddell aims to reveal her in disappearance by way of mystery. She nearly renounces all text in Esta Breve

Tragedia, translating Dickinson's cryptic words into a visual universe addressing the affective body. Although the poet is absent, the title comes from her poem "Of all the Souls that stand create" ["When that which is and that which was / Apart, intrinsic, stand, / And this brief tragedy of flesh / Is shifted like a sand"] and the last sentence is also hers: "My business is circumference." Dickinson's motifs—bees, circumferences, nature and transcendence—are intertwined with Liddell's obsessions with beauty, death, and the loss of youth.

Liddell makes her first appearance wearing a dress. She takes it off slowly and places it caringly on the back of a chair. She then pulls her nightgown up until it only covers her breasts, her genitals fully visible. Bach's cantata Herz und Mund und Tat und Lebensounds as she gradually squats over the chair introducing the golden dildo into her vagina as she faces the audience. Her expression is not of pleasure or pain, but rather of a transcendent sadness. She stares at us as she spits blood (a rite of passage of sorts), the brutality of the image heightened by the contrasting celestial music in a non-erotic self-penetration. For Liddell, a self-declared "beauty terrorist," beauty is an almost unbearable and intimate torture.

An incessant collection of arresting images shape Esta Breve Tragedia, a visual poem evocative of a mythic nineteenth-century North America. Four beekeepers with Down Syndrome bring a white coffin to the stage (is it Dickinson's?) and pound rhythmically upon it. Two actors missing limbs and a third with both arms covered in gold appear dressed in long black skirts, puritan hats, and veiled faces. They all move slowly and carefully, adding a rhythmic element to the powerful visuality of their presence. Two identical women in long red dresses (twins Sarah and Paola Cabello Schoenmakers) dance, drawing...