Performing Viral Resistance

Abstract

In ‘Performing Viral Resistance’, Anthony Kubiak explores the cultural and historical intersections between theatre, mask and contagion. Tracing both the shifting perceptions of how mask is received within both theatre and pandemic, and placing these perceptions alongside our adversarial relationship with viral contagion, we begin to understand, he suggests, the deep and deeply contested interrelationships between theatre, dis-ease and performance.

In a footnoted mirror-text, Kubiak also traces the life-cycle of Physarum polycephalum, the common, and unfortunately named, slime-mold. This strange and still mysterious life-form demonstrates a remarkable and distributed form of intelligence that suggest possible strategies in resisting, or perhaps capitulation to, the forces of environmental stress and emergent fascism through an evolutionary performance of individual self-abnegation and sacrifice.

Notes

1 I am using ‘mask’ to designate the object itself, and ‘masque’ to designate masked performance, or mask as it functions within performance. There is necessarily overlap between these usages—at times mask is its own performance, at times performance itself operates as mask or masque. The sometimes ambiguous switching between terms suggests, in part, the destabilizing impact of the mask itself. Relegating this comment to a note is a kind of written masking, concealing the difference where it may not be seen.

These mask/masque torsions are also reflected in the terms theatre and performance. I have long argued against the truism that theatre is somehow a subset of a larger phenomenon called ‘performance’, an argument coming out of Schechner, as I recall. I see performance, including performance art and body-art, as a subset of theatre. In my own work theatre defines that set of practices that, when realized, brings self-reflexive awareness to acts of performance that may or may not bring self-aware consciousness to the playing space. One can be unaware of one’s actions as performance. One cannot be unaware—except for fleeting moments—that one is engaged in theatre. Theatre, then, suggests a broader umbrella defined by the acuity of that conscious moment. Mask/performance, and theatre/masque reflect a similar argument. I prefer to leave it to the reader to work through to their own conclusions.

2 The Therapeutae were itinerant healers in the first century CE. The Latin term is derived from Philo’s Greek Therapeutai (Θϵραπϵυταί), and denotes ‘one who is attendant to the gods’, that is, a healing conduit who treats dis-ease in both a spiritual and more strictly medical sense (New World Encyclopedia 2020). The word Therapeutae is also cognate with the Sanskrit ‘Theravadan’, an early Buddhist tradition originating in India, where Buddhism had been established some 500 years earlier. The Theravadan monks and nuns were sent by Ashoka singly and in groups along the tentacular Silk Road to spread the teachings and healings of the early Buddhist traditions. The Therapeutae were the link among various healing traditions; Ayurvedic Buddhists, the Greek followers of Asklepios some two hundred years later and Jewish charismatic healers like Jesus were linked by the single belief that dis-ease caused illness, and that it was necessary to re-establish ease or balance as its remedy, and that spiritual healing was fundamental to all types of sickness, soul torment and madness. The philosopher Philo describes that historical moment in some detail (Fordham University 2021).

3 In terms of the healing qualities of mask and masquing that resonates through these performances, we should note that mask was also called persona, which literally means ‘hearing through’. The term is borrowed from Latin, but derived from the Ancient Greek πρόσωπον (prósōpon, face or appearances). In the Ancient Greek and Roman theatre, then, the mask was not simply an amplification of the face and appearances but of voice and sound as well. It might very well be that mask was intended to transmit sight and song to those in the Asklepieion as well as to the back rows of the theatre.

4 See Pleading in the Blood: The art and performances of Ron Athey (Johnson 2013) to engage with the ‘blood readings’ of Athey and Franko B respectively, and how the work of each was received at the time.

5 The main actors in the following notes, Physarum polycephalum—the ‘slime mould’, as they are rather disparagingly named—belongs to an obscure sixth kingdom of life, the Mycetozoa, a microbial form that branched off from the evolutionary tree before animals split from plants and fungi. Its name means ‘many headed’. P. polycephalum is a golden-brown creature of constantly changing boundaries, an ancient, strangely intelligent organism with no brain or nervous system, enveloping prey in its flows until some stressor—hunger, thirst, diminishing habitat, parasitic invasion, climate distress—drives them to release their Strange Attractor, a chemical distress call (Alim et al. 2017).

6 When the stress alarm is sounded, the solitary single-cell creatures organize themselves into a cooperative community, an acellular plasmodium. Previously invisible, they coalesce into visibility as they meet and transform from a multiplicity into a single organism, dissolving boundaries, cell walls and individual identities in order to form a single fruit designed to disseminate their genetic information. And there are costs in doing so: some of the creatures must sacrifice themselves to become a portion of the fruiting stalk that now rises slowly above the viscous body in order to hold aloft the fruit that will burst and spread cellular spores to new, more habitable locales.

7 In their movements as a single person (in the animist sense) P. polycephalum form/s spatial memories. They can navigate mazes modelled on the Tokyo transit system intelligently and efficiently (Sheldrake 2020: 15). They learn and teach others of its species, moving seemingly chaotically, changing directions, pulsating, moving as a Body-without-Organs, shapeless, permeating/being permeated, all in response to distress signals in its environment.

8 They move through space during crises, organizing, confronting and eluding danger, finding shared sustenance among themselves. They follow the flows and current, the spoors and pathways, in order to disseminate their information. And while some may sacrifice themselves in order to broadcast their core messages of life into the future, they do so in the course of preserving their community at all costs. These creatures, these persons, are primordial. They endure.