Feminism against feminism

The next week the next issue of the magazine " Theater." dedicated to feminist discourse on the modern stage. Colta.ru publishes the column of the editor -in -chief preferred by him.

At that moment, when the magazine’s issue was already on a layout, I looked in Amsterdam at the Holland Festival “Alla Book” - a new opus of one of the icons of theatrical feminism of Angeliki Liddell. If this did not happen, my introductory word would probably be somewhat different. But now it will have to start with the description of the “scarlet letter”, because the icon of feminism made, in fact, an anti -feminist play. Suddenly she went against the progressive trend, being its embodiment and even its quintessence.

Liddell is a star of European festivals, but in our area it is not very famous. How to describe in a nutshell her theatrical style ... Imagine that in the visual environment of performances, Romeo Kastelmovich suddenly placed Marina Abramovich with her most violent performance, and you will understand something about Liddell's performances. The stage surrounding at once is minimalist and extremely saturated with meanings and symbols. Misanists are sometimes built as if craftsmen of the Cvatrocento era worked on them. (By the way, like Castelpelli, the director of the “scarlet letter” is the owner of the “lion” of the Venetian Biennale - not “golden”, but “silver”.)

Liddell herself writes the texts of her performances, she directs them herself and invariably soloes them in them. At the same time, it is inspired by the most unexpected things - from Emily Dikinson's poems to newspaper reports about murders on the Norwegian Island of Dethy. In this case, the source of her inspiration is Opus Magnum Nathaniel Gorotorna “Scarlet letter”. Having drunk a sip from the literary source, life-giving moisture, the iron lady of the Spanish scene, as usual, is embarking on a journey far from the source. The plot of the novel (the main character Esther in the absence of her husband conceived a child from a local priest) is only guessed in the play, but the topic is enriched with unexpected overtones.

Gornov was a native of Salem, the very one in which at the end of the 17th century the process over the “Salem Witches” passed, and his book describes the Puritan life and morals in detail. In a sense, this novel written in the middle of the 19th century can be considered a harbinger of feminism. In the love triangle of the “scarlet letter”, men are tormented by numerous complexes and in the end die morally broken, but the heroine subjected to social ostracism does not lose its presence and defends her right to build life without looking at respectable norms. But Liddell paradoxically addresses the novel not in order to once again prove the woman’s right to independence (it has been proved by her and so long ago), but in order to crouch the puritanism of the 17th century with the current new ethics. At first, gradually, and in the final monologue from a pure heart in simple words, Liddell questions all the principles of this ethics, which regulates the life of a person, cleaner than the Puritan rules.

Liddell herself limit. Esther in her performance resembles a witch, or a night gathering for Walpurga, or just returned from her. A dozen naked and well -built men leads a variety of round dance around her overlord, and the lord turns up, rampers, lusts, plays with each nudist corps de ballet into whimsical sexual games, and in the finale sticks chrysanthemum bouquets into the male ass. What is our life? Game! Sadomasochist game, Liddell clarifies. It is not without reason that the heroine’s dominance is now and then replaced in the “scarlet letter” by the moment of her delightful humiliation and subordination to the masculine beginning.

The liddell’s incident clearly proves: the main confrontation is now unfolding between the right (conservatives) and left (progressors), but inside the most progressive trend.

Man is a slave to his flesh. But alien flesh too. You cannot tame nature. And is it necessary? If you completely emasculate, will there be something human in a person? Is it not right to give him at least partly the right to passion, which does not know the boundaries of “personal space”, the right to love, in which there is almost no equality, finally, a holy and integral right to sin? After all, it was with the fall that the story of a person began: in the first minutes of the play, a naked man and a woman come out onto the stage and unequivocally froze from the tree of the tree of good and evil, sticking out in the middle of the scene of the tree.

The crimson tones staining the play Liddell send us at once and to the scarlet letter A (the first letter in the word “adultery”), which was branded the fallen Esther, and to the velvet decoration of ancient theaters. In his frantic impulse, Liddell destroys at once and all theatrical conventions of the classic, wrapped in velvet of culture, and all the covenants of the New Age. It seems to be shown the language of the fierce guardians of the new ethics: without hesitation, it objectifies women in general and itself in particular, suddenly gives out all the cliches of eijism, sexism and luxurism, or mocking them, or agreeing with them. "Ah, how beautiful young virgins are and how terrible aging bitch are!" - In this way, approximately the spirit.

But the main thing that Liddell fought passionately for is the very art, to which the newly -minted radiators of ethical norms are ready to indicate the limits at any time. In his allies, Jeanne d'Arc the European scene takes Socrates (his bust lies on the stage), Michel Foucault (is referred to here), Antonen Arto (his portrait decorates the scene) and, in general, the whole culture of previous times. “Do you want to leave us Nabokov without Nabokov, Dostoevsky without Dostoevsky, Bokkaccio without Bokkaccio? She screams in the final. “Why do I need a world without Bokkaccio!” According to the political corner of the European Hall on the Scarlet Book, a nervous laugh runs every now and then.

The liddell’s incident clearly proves: the main confrontation is now unfolding between the right (conservatives) and left (progressors), but inside the most progressive trend. Conservatives can no longer offer the world nothing new, they have repeatedly that they kept repeating at the time of Gorno and even during the “Salem witches”, but an interesting confrontation has been discovered inside the left discourse: over the past decades, several basic concepts have been radically revised here - first of all, the very attitude to the human body and the problem of sexuality. Due to various circumstances, I recently had to collect materials related to the phenomenon of counterculture, and once I caught my eye with the charter of one of the hippies, based in the very beginning of the 1970s in Germany. “If someone approached someone with a sentence of sex, a member of the commune has no right to refuse him, because the idea that our bodies belong to us are bourgeois prejudice”-about this way one of its points sounded. It is amazing what fantastic evolution has since then been a progressive thought. What, I would say, is somersault. The bourgeois prejudice is now the very idea of ​​an attempt on someone's body without sanction from the owner of this body. The idea of ​​freedom and destruction of all and all boundaries entered the clinch with the idea of ​​personal security and the need to protect these boundaries. It is no coincidence that almost all the main defendants in the # metoo -scandals belong to the generation of counter -culture.

The struggle with the status of the Creator is the last impulse and the last convulsion of European egalitarism.

But Armageddon, which happened inside the progressive trend, is not limited to this. You agree with Liddell or not, it is difficult not to admit that the status of the Creator itself comes into clinch with the new ethics. Isn't that why contemporary art more and more often - almost like in the times of romanticism - puts the figure of the artist as such in the center of his artistic reflection. Only if, during the time of Hoffmann, he entered the battle, first of all, with the world of filler and routers, now he attacks immediately from two sides: his opponent turns out to be not only inert society, but also to no less “progressive forces”, casting doubt on his claim to special rights. In the tolerant world where there is no place for violence, objectivation, violation of personal boundaries and insulting anyone's feelings, an artist who claims to be freedom from any rules is a person who is obviously dubious. The once opposed the repressive world of political and social life, he himself is perceived as the bearer of this repressiveness. Not only does he dictate his will from the height of talent and authority to those who are involved in the sphere of his art field; He tries to manage emotions and, therefore, the thoughts of the recipients themselves, that is, those who perceive art. The progressive world seemed to tell the artist: you once defended your right to be above the king, above the commander or Pope, and now you yourself have turned into a monarch and the patriarch. You, my dear fighter for your privileges, are now the main stronghold of the former hierarchy. You are imagining yourself an aristocrat of the spirit, but the age of aristocrats has long passed. We will overthrow you from your throne. We equalize in rights with ordinary mortals. New ethics - it is for everyone. It is one for both the layman and for genius. I will please you at its Procrustean bed of his behavior, his declarations, and at the same time his fantasies.

In a sense, this struggle with the status of the Creator is the last impulse and the last cramp of European egalitarism.

Liddell breaks out of all scroll lodges. And from the old and from the new. The artists of any gender, she claims, does not have taxation in the form of etiquette, because the boundaries of art, unlike other boundaries, are always open: you want - you go, you want - you go out, you want - you pass by. Her egalitarianism has a lot of elitist pathos, and in its feminism there is a lot of anti -Feminist. But vice versa - its antifeminism itself becomes a pillar and assertion of feminism. The one that allows a woman to be a politician of any rank, a housewife, a vampire, a well -being, and a lord, and a slave of other people's desires. For the right of women, not to look back at any norms and the right of art to endless Liddell, apparently, is ready to fight to the end - no matter what a red letter was branded for this.

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