Acting Ethically? Subjectivity and the Actress in Geddy Aniksdal's No Doctor for the Dead

Abstract

This article analyses the performance work of Geddy Aniksdal, a longstanding member of the Grenland Friteater in Porsgrunn, Norway. The thrust of the argument is concerned with the conceptual limitations of the unified subject of both (liberal) humanist discourses and the de-centred subjectivities of postmodern thinking and the article demonstrates the possibilities for reading Aniksdal's embodied practice in terms of how it might offer a ‘beyond’ to those limitations. The genealogies of Aniksdal's theatre practice are considered in terms of how a combination of years of rigorous body-voice practice and a commitment to the work of the Magdalena Project might be seen to result in her unique performance style. The argument is aided by application of Julia Kristeva's writings on abjection and utilizes these in close analysis of sections of Aniksdal's performance in No Doctor for the Dead. Spliced together from the poetry and prose of Norwegian poet, novelist, scholar and professor of rhetorics, the late Georg Johannesen, the performance text itself grapples poetically with questions of identity in a post-World War Two context. The ethical implications of Aniksdal's practice are explored through consideration of her bodily and vocal engagement with Johannesen's words.

Notes

Geddy Aniksdal, ‘My Language’, Ignite 6 (2003), special issue on Magdalena Australia. Text-only copy supplied by the writer.

No Doctor for the Dead is an accompanied (piano/vocal) solo performance, created and performed by Geddy Aniksdal of Grenland Friteater, Porsgrunn, Norway. It has played at several international performance festivals since 2004. Grenland Friteater have been developing work for twenty-five years and are the producers of the Porsgrunn International Theatre Festival (PIT) which has been running annually in June for the last ten years.

Grenland Friteater, No Doctor for the Dead, performance script in theatre programme (Stockholm: Cappelen, 2004), p. 4.

Her attempts to speak Danish-Norwegian like the other actors in the company were complimented by audience members, who mistook her for a foreigner, noting that ‘the Polish actress is managing to speak Norwegian quite well’. Personal interview at Aniksdal's home in Porsgrunn, 14 June 2005.

Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. by G. Bennington and B. Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984).

Christopher Butler, Postmodernism (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 50.

Grenland Friteater, No Doctor for the Dead, p. 4.

We might recall here Elin Diamond's work on the Brechtian not/but in ‘Brechtian Theory/Feminist Theory: Toward a Gestic Feminist Criticism’, The Drama Review 32.1 (Spring 1988), 82–94 (pp. 85–86).

Elizabeth Grosz, Sexual Subversions (St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1989), p. xvii. Grosz is writing in the context of French feminisms.

The performance text is spliced together by Aniksdal from the poetry (and some prose) of the late Norwegian poet, novelist, scholar and professor of rhetorics, Georg Johannesen (1931–2005), with whom she and Grenland Friteater had a strong and artistically reciprocal relationship. Johannesen was a World War 2 child, and his writings are marked by, and in some instances explicitly grapple with, the loss of the post-Enlightenment and post-industrial narratives of progression of which Lyotard writes. The words of the performance themselves are from Johannesen, but the cutting up, selection, ordering, and a large part of the translation into English are Aniksdal's.

Noelle McAfee, Julia Kristeva (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 46.

The company was established in 1976, by a group of young people who were drawn together by a desire to resist the established, commoditized, mainstream arts practices in Norway. They thought of themselves as different, as did many of the other alternative theatre companies in the European and Scandinavian countries of the 1970s and 1980s, and as a group very much fell under the blanket term ‘third theatre’ coined by Eugenio Barba at this time.

Jane Gallop, quoted in Jen Harvie, ‘Being Her: Presence, Absence and Performance in the Art of Janet Cardiff and Tracey Emin’, in Auto/biography and Identity: Women, Theatre and Performance, ed. by Maggie B. Gale and Viv Gardner (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 194–216 (p. 196).

Laboratory Theatre, The Constant Prince, dir. Jerzy Grotowski, 1965.

David Bradby and David Williams, Director's Theatre (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1988), p. 129.

Personal interview, Gamale Posten, Porsgrunn, 12 June 2005.

Bradby and Williams, Director's Theatre, p. 129.

The Grotowski Sourcebook, ed. by Richard Schechner and Lisa Wolford (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 31.

Eugenio Barba and Nicola Savarese, The Secret Art of the Performer (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 74.

Ingmar Lemhagen, ‘The Art of Living, the Art of Dying’, trans. by Petra Mo, Ootal 5 (Stockholm: April 2001), pp. 70–72 (p. 70). Ootal is a bi-lingual Swedish/English journal.

Ibid., p. 71.

Ibid., p. 71.

Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. by Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), translator's introduction, p. 1.

Ibid., p. 22.

See Elizabeth Grosz, Jaques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 31–49.

McAfee, Julia Kristeva, pp. 46–47.

Grenland Friteater, No Doctor for the Dead, p. 4.

McAfee, Julia Kristeva, p. 47.

Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. by Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 4.

Dan Rebellato's work on universalism and ethics indirectly was helpful to my thinking here. See ‘Playwriting and Globalisation: Towards a Site-Unspecific Theatre’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 16.1 (February 2006), 97–113.

Grenland Friteater, No Doctor for the Dead, p. 6.

Ibid., p. 8.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid, p. 10.

Ibid.

Ibid., p. 12.

Personal interview, Aniksdal's home in Porsgrunn, 14 June 2005.

Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. by Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 192.

Kristeva, quoted in Kelly Oliver, Reading Kristeva: Unravelling the Double-bind (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993), pp. 181–89 (p. 184).

Ibid., p. 185.

Baz Kershaw, ‘Performance Studies and Po-Chang's Ox: Steps to a Paradoxology of Performance’, New Theatre Quarterly, 22.1 (February 2006), 30–53.

Acknowledgements: From Grenland Friteater, I would like to thank Geddy Aniksdal for her generosity in allowing me to document her performance and for giving up her time to be interviewed; Tor Arne Ursin, Anette Röde and Grethe Knudsen for their time in helping to contextualize the work of Grenland Friteater and the training influences of the company. Thanks to the University of Winchester for funding for my research trip to Norway. Further thanks to Elaine Aston, Gerry Harris, and the Women's Writing for Performance project, based at Lancaster University, for their open workshops which first introduced me to Aniksdal's work (through the ‘Performing Words’ workshop run by Aniksdal and Gilly Adams), and to Sue-Ellen Case (and other generous delegates) for helpfully critical comments on part of an earlier version of this paper delivered at the project symposium at Lancaster University in April 2006. Final thanks to Baz Kershaw and Graham Ley for their editorial help and patience.