The tragic subject is a sad clown in a dancer’s body.
The tragic subject is Judith killing Holofernes.
The tragic subject is the dancing woman in the Tarantino movie.
The tragic subject is two bodies stuck in a space made of draped velvet curtains.
The tragic subject is nobody.
Or everybody in the space between the black velvet curtains.
The tragic subject is me until I decide to exit the space, and leave the tragic subject behind.
In Louis Schou-Hansen’s first solo show Tragedy, which opened on the 11. October 2024 at Podium Oslo, two tragic subjects inhabit a space made of heavy black curtains. A scenographic installation of draped velvet textiles covering the whole exhibition space developed by Schou-Hansen and Karoline Bakken Lund forms the environment of a durational performance in which the performers Thjerza Balaj and Elise Nohr Nystad embody a choreography of movement patterns, coded gestures, and fake tears. While the title might evoke the expectation of a traditional theatre setting, the choreographer and dancer explicitly conceived Tragedy as an exhibition, which puts rigid divisions between exhibition and play, and between artworks and performing bodies, into question. Understanding the durational performance of both dancers as embodied sculptures who deconstruct the linear temporal order of an enacted narration prompts me to consider the objectification of performing bodies alongside an animated understanding of the sculptural practice.
Entering the L-shaped exhibition space I quickly understand that this deconstruction of a classical tragedy affects my role as a viewer as well. I get swallowed by a dark void lit solely by a cold neon light installed in the ceiling. The scenography appears as a melange of a fetish club, an early modern theatre, or an uncanny David Lynchean nightmare scenario. Unsure about which space is the stage and which is reserved for the audience, I place myself amongst other visitors along the curtains that cover the surrounding walls. As my gaze glides down the draped velvet and rests at meticulously arranged sculptural folds, I wonder if the claustrophobic feeling emerging inside me is conditioned by the functionlessness of the curtains. What do they cover if there’s nothing to reveal?
Instead of promising a scenery for a traditional theatre play behind the curtain, these textiles enclose me and render me as part of the scenario. While a standard modern theatre set up would allow the comfort of taking a predetermined spectator’s role in the dark, with a curtain revealing the gaze through the fourth wall, the installation of Tragedy neither offers a fourth wall nor an anonymous audience space. Everyone who enters the space becomes part of the scene. Because in a space where everything is stage, everyone becomes a potentially tragic subject.
fig. 1
A temporary stage emerges wherever the two woebegone characters claim space for their tragedy and wherever the audience grants them one. Adjusting my seating position constantly to make space for the performers or to get a better view of the next sequence, I am persistently aware of my own body’s place in the room and of the limitation intrinsic to individual perception of never grasping everything at once. Observing the crowd moving out of the way whenever a new scene arises, seems to indicate a common relief in falling back into a distinction between audience and performer, holding on to the comfort of the passive consumption of a tragedy the nature of which no one is fully aware.
While both characters' outfits, featuring jeans and tank top, tshirt and sports pants appear casually contemporary, the ruffs around their necks and smeared eye make-up evoke sad 19th century clowns who have crept into the performers’ bodies. As if a clown would enact a performer. As if a stage character would perform a social character, not the other way around. Who are these tragic subjects in this space? Who performs whom and where does one draw the line between the performing and the non-performing body, between reality and fiction – if there were ever any in the first place?
“Having recently woken up to the shitshow awareness of their bodies being entirely fictional, Characters 1 and 2 find themselves in a complex state of (sort of) mourning the death of their identities,” reads Tragedy’s exhibition text, and this evokes the question of if the characters’ waking up might just be another choreographic trick leading into another performative loop of fictionalization. What is this identity that they’re mourning? What is identity if not fiction?
My experience of the show seems to become a quest for the character of these tragic subjects and the origin of their suffering. What I learn about them emerges through witnessing repetitions of embodied references, in which the two nameless figures appear to be stuck in between the velvet folds.
The tragic subject knows no outside.
The tragic subject has no past.
The tragic subject exists because I watch them.
Watching one of the characters lying breathlessly on the carpet, her head hidden behind the curtain, makes me think of the famous opera scene in David Lynch’s Mullholland Drive. The opera singer Rebecca Del Rio drops unconscious to the floor during her performance of “Llorando.” When she gets dragged behind the curtain by two men, her ghostly voice continues singing disembodied. Her fainting is juxtaposed by the continuation of her voice, where the constructed reality of her stage persona persists without her body. Her existence is produced by the illusion of the show and her audience as much as the tragic subjects exist within the curtain-covered walls of Podium's exhibition space.
fig. 2
The movement archive which both characters draw from reveals references to biblical paintings, movie scenes, pop-cultural codes, disciplined dance exercises, and repetitive sex scenes all while simultaneously including seemingly incidental gestures such as adjusting their clothes or brushing their hair out of their faces. An anachronistic collection of sociability, behavioral codes, or a miscellany of determinations are inscribed into the performing body; gestures of desire and pleasure appear to be as disciplined and dreadful as the painful ones.
The tragic subject makes phone calls that are never answered.
The tragic subject fucks and is getting fucked.
The tragic subject rests, weeps, dances, repeats.
While the performers' bodies narrate moments of seduction, desire, passion, and longing that never resolve in actual intimacy, a subplot emerges on both characters’ faces, and I wonder if these are the moments where the sad clown takes over. Expressions of despair and mourning, which at no time align with the movements seem to work against the stories being told by their bodies. With both narrations coexisting, or rather forcing against each other, this battle is sequentially overtaken by one or the other expression. As the characters merge into and out of repetitive movement sequences, their choreographies are disrupted by melodramatic collapses into fits of crying before they gather themselves to move on to the next task.
The tragic subject mourns, suffers, collapses.
The tragic subject weeps and cries but sheds no tears.
The tragic subject does not feel but perform.
The suffering and mourning displayed in the tragic subjects’ faces, the cause of which remains unknown to the audience, appear as choreographed as the narration told in their movements. Rather than offering an affective resistance to apathetic repetition, the replication of the collapse becomes a choreographed disruption.
The tragic subject wears sad clown ruffles around their necks and stockings with ties.
The tragic subject wears their emotions on their face.
Their rehearsed, contextless emotions offer a platform for our own emotional projections. Just like the tragedies of ancient Greek theatre, which offered a state of catharsis by the release of repressed emotions emerging from the audience’s unconscious, the performers’ bodies become a green screen for my own melancholia. My identification with the tragic subject mirrors an unconscious reenactment of my tragedy. The tragic subject embodies my everyday struggles, insecurities, and love dramas, and I watch them. What I see in their collapse is what I want them to feel.
The tragic subject lives my tragedy.
Other than the Greek theatre, which would offer the audience a happy ending, moral, or at least a conclusion to their narration, Schou-Hansen’s Tragedy doesn’t offer an easy way out. Instead, it draws me deeper and deeper into endless repetitions that become as much alerting as chastening. It leaves me with the uncanny feeling that those coded gestures, the being stuck in repetition, don't end upon leaving the curtain-framed space. Tragedy is sassy, funny, mean, and provocative. It’s testing one's endurance to stay with the tragic subject (that might be oneself), provoking an uncomfortable confrontation with the seductive voyeurism of suffering and this mirrors the behavioral codes, patterns, and external inscriptions all of our bodies inhabit.
fig. 3
Shortly before the day's durational performance comes to an end both tragic subjects cling onto each other as if to avert their disappearance with the lights switching off. I sit so close that I can see their chests moving with their breath. One of their hands reaches for my phone. As they did numerous times before with their phones, they pick up mine to call an unknown outside that never answers. And, yet again, the call fails. I’m out of battery. They hand it back to me with a mourning face and I think: maybe I should call my mom tomorrow.
The tragic subject calls her mom.
//
- Image credits
Cover: Thjerza Balaj and Elise Nohr Nystad in: Tragedy, Louis Schou-Hansen, Podium Oslo, 2024 © Chai Saeidi.
fig. 1: Thjerza Balaj in: Tragedy, Louis Schou-Hansen, Podium Oslo, 2024 © Chai Saeidi.
fig. 2: Thjerza Balaj and Elise Nohr Nystad in: Tragedy, Louis Schou-Hansen, Podium Oslo, 2024 © Chai Saeidi.
fig. 3: Thjerza Balaj and Elise Nohr Nystad in: Tragedy, Louis Schou-Hansen, Podium Oslo, 2024 © Chai Saeidi
