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On the Transgression of the Process in "The Shame-man meets the Mexican't and la hija apócrita de Frida Cola and Freddy Kruger inBrazil"
Andréa Maciel Garcia
One of the most interesting and richest debates took place on the last night of the Hemispheric Institute and UFMG's Fifth Encuentro of Performance and Politics in Belo Horizonte. It was a powerful debate concerning political, aesthetic, and methodological issues, as well as a conversation based on a collective experience which involved its participants on different levels. In this article, I will discuss the trangressiveness of the creative process through a performatic happening's standpoint, as well as introduce a discussion on several effects of the piece's execution.
My focus is on the performance/installation "The Shame-man meets the Mexican't and la hija apócrita de Frida Cola and Freddy Krueger in Brazil", developed by Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Violeta Luna, and James Luna, and presented at the Francisco Nunes Theatre of Belo Horizonte on March 17. The objective of the piece was to build a performatic happening of risk in which the solo performances of Guillermo Gómez-Peña, James Luna and Violeta Luna would also complement their workshop Performance, Pedagogy and Communitarian Building, held two days before the performance.
The idea of the presentation was to somewhat follow the same process used in the workshop: to liberate the subjective flux of subconscious images affecting the participants and spectators at the moment of the performance; and to play with this liberation in the open space of the production in order to cause shock, flux, connections and desirable synergies. Throughout the presentation, as well as in the workshop, the body was the vehicle of the image, which in Gómez-Peña’s work gains a visceral role based on the strength of its representations and oppositions.
Various shrines were constructed on the theatre's stage, adorned with a juxtaposition of radical symbols. The chairs in the audience remained empty in semi-darkness, giving the impression of a ghost theater. At one end of the stage, a small Indian woman lay naked on a gynecological table as her body was being transfigured and crossed by images of decomposition, cultural violation, and transsexuality, which, in the end, literally transformed her into a travesty. Therefore, the featured image of the naked woman and those elements invoked a vigorbeyond the act per se.
Occupying the same space as these shrines with their sharp and shocking images, a bar served performers and the audience. These two groups literally collidedon the same stage throughout the performance, and the performers acted as guides for the public to an unconscious release through their incorporation or exclusion of elements and spaces, such as microphone stands, microphones, and amplifiers.
 The experience or happening or event generated a variety of impressions, oppositions, and controversies. These included questions of institutional protocol, of security measures (regarding the risk of the presence of a bar, and of the number of people smoking like chimneys within a theatre), political questions concerning the excess of sexual and violent images and the emphasis on the female body, as well as problems related to the reality of alcoholism among American Indians, which is responsible for the devastation of many Native American communities.
The discussion after our performance was especially interesting, for it included people who had performed, conducted, or participated as active or passive members of the public. During our discussion, everyone spoke about his or her real place throughout this experience, which allowed us to voice our ideas as protagonists based on a concrete point of reference.
The shared experience of active participation among those present at the discussion allowed for an extremely vigorous dynamic, one which opened space for reflections on central concepts in the context of political, postmodern performance. These included the treatment of the image and the conflicts generated between binary poles, such as context vs. presentation, result vs. process, conservation vs. consumption, and finally, transgression vs. methodological process.
I will digress here, focusing on a particular aspect of the transgressive act vs. the creative process, to then add my own personal reflection to the rich fabric of questioning caused by the event. I will speak from my place as a participant in both the workshop and the performance, a position which at first made me grateful, provoked, moved, and bothered, but not necessarily in that order.
Guillermo and Violeta's pedagogical approach was precise and careful, resembling the one used in oriental practices. They carried the creative process from exercises in sensory expansion focused on breathing and movement that flowed from movements of shamanic approach—like intrinsic clockwise and counterclockwise circles (frequently utilized in Umbanda and Candomblé temples)—to dynamics imbued with psycho-artistic elements, always explained in words that were well chosen and well applied.
Thus, the workshop stimulated the subjective potential of the performers, and this stimulation encountered fluid channels for its evasion. Images made an impact and heightened multiple senses that were liberated through our active and receptive bodies. An extremely political principle was exercised through the dynamics of allowed liberties. How far will I allow another person to express her ideas through my body? Or how far will I allow myself to truly act my own ideas on my own body as the property of my individual and collective issues? Questions like these are important parts of a solid flux of the liberation of images from the reality of contemporary politics. There were no guidelines for the conceptualization of these images and their origins, other than their legitimacy from their cathartic liberation.
 From this perspective, the process of becoming part of these imaginary representations was more important than their possible meanings. In becoming part of these happenings, we were invited to transgress, to go against, to infringe on our known patterns in other to reach out for other patterns. In other words, the transgressive movement was implied in the process, rather than at its ends. This approach, besides stating the performative character of the process, values the process to the detriment of the product, and is in tune with a dynamics of mediating between the individual and the world in which the body and action carry out essential roles.
Returning to specific questions of the process in focus, it is interesting to observe the dialogue between the acts of limitation and transgression. The establishment of clear marks of fruition was extremely necessary for the creative and collective liberation which enhanced the dynamics of these unconscious images.
In this sense, it is possible to state that the concept of transgression, as I understand it, is associated with the relationship of surrealistic thought and contemporary art, in which the idea of the destruction of conventional signifiers and the creation of new signifiers and counter-signifiers follows the dynamics of the juxtaposition of radical images impelled by an opposition to the established vehicles.
I consider this opposition essential to the creative act: it is neither transgression without limit, nor limitation without the possibility of infraction. We must know very well how things function if we wish to transform them.
 This political act—inherent to performative behavior—was made somewhat fragile through the transposition of the workshop's process to the presentation of the performance piece in the theatre, as the limits of this specific alteration were very unclear.
In conducting the process of development in the performance/installation, the following points of reference were established: the state of play and improvisation which separates itself from the normal state of listening, i.e., the dynamics of stimulus and response; the distribution of roles with defined objectives; the spatial nature that primarily served to delimit the shrines as the protagonists of the space and the other performers as supporting characters; and finally, the interactive relationship with the public, which was meant to follow the same premise as the cathartic liberation of the workshop.
Then we had a movement built in opposition to a specific reality: the passive state of the theatre audience. We therefore ran the risk of being driven out (in the transgressive aspect) and utilizing references that narrowed our creative flow (limits). However, at the moment of action, one of the primary references was surprisingly broken for reasons inherent to the chaos of performance. The shrines were centered themselves, and did not establish a game with the other performers; therefore, the objectives of the supporting roles remained partly undefined. These fading limits provoked a decrease of intensity of the creative action, weakened its relation to its opposition. Bit by bit, the performers discovered other connections which refocused the action in its intended direction: the public.
My goal here is not to criticize or qualify this incredible performance, but to examine the processual element so evident in its dynamic and execution instead. And, based on this examination, I wish to propose questions for future reflections of our creative work.
For the involvement of the public in the performance, it was necessary to arrange a collection of demarcated limits since they strengthened an opposing action that generated movement. The moments that they were broken, the action went through a temporary weakening. But if our guiding concept was the inexistence of any delimitation—if the limit was the nonexistence of limits—would the element of risk still be present ?
This leads us to propose other questions. Is risk really inherent to the existence of points of control? Is the definition of references a fundamental fact in the creative process of performance?
If the answers to these questions are affirmative, perhaps we must intensify our vigilance in the definition of the delimiting marks of our processes, so that they might acquire new transformative potential.
Andréa Maciel Garcia is a professor of acting at the Univercidade and is currently working on her master's degree at UNI-RIO in the fields of Performance and Anthropology.
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