Body as Space in Shifting (T)eras: Exploring Cassandra as Heterotopia, Universality and Power Reclaim
We propose a performance-lecture concerning the figure of Cassandra to explore body, vocal and linguistic aspects in combination to the concepts of non-credibility, alienation, oblivion, victimization and power at shifting eras. We engage with the Athenian state of classical times as an equivalent of a “perfect” Nordic state to justify a paradox: As a condemned figure, Cassandra, a Troyan princess punished by god Apollo with the gift of prediction in conjunction to non-credibility, through Aeschylus poetic treatment, becomes believed in a ‘heterotopia’ of alien language and place, a fact that nevertheless does not prevent her death.
Here, we implement Cassandra to investigate three main issues:
1. Credibility and the concept of ‘Fate’ in Heterotopias. We engage with the narrative of superiority and alterity within ‘Nordic concept’ combinatorically to ancient Athens, to highlight gaps between believing, understanding, and actioning in a contemporary landscape which regenerates fate, as versions of (non)action.
2. We conceive ‘body as heterotopia’: an ‘illusionary’ space of multiple times, geographies, selves, voices and analyze Cassandra’s case as a body/voice constellation of geographical-temporal-ontological contradictions which, through expression, create an ecumenical transcendental unification. We connect her fatal antinomies to a shift from matriarchy to patriarchy era, discerning at her a female embodied synopsis and catastrophic peak of changes. For us, Cassandra functions as a symbol of distances’ abolishment on levels of: Self, communication, presence in life, death and ‘speech’. Starting from migrant body/voice entity as ‘heterotopia’, Cassandra expands beyond time ‘I ‘or ‘other’ and geographical borders, through ecstatic situations as well as through pre-linguistic phenomena and mimetic vocal characteristics (Adorno).
3. Connecting this end of era to quarantine shifting times and its imprints on body, we engage with three pseudo- etymological origins of the term T-“error”: Er-otas (έρωτας/love) T-eras (τέρας/monster) and Terra (earth and homeland). We consider these words as archetypes of attraction/multiply revealed communication (erotas), of belonging (terra) as well as of unexplored depths of human nature with metamorphotic potentiality (teras) alluding also to temporal aspects as (T)-era. We investigate these pseudo-etymologies as inhabitants of the physical body, through which history, civilization and art have been mobilized, often as ‘T-error’.
Adopting Demetrio Stratos’ imperative for reconstruction of the body/voice as a means of investigating inherent heterogeneity alongside with the precious presence of the uniquity of voice, as a metaphor of self uniquity and life, as r-evolution (Terzopoulos), we constitute a vocal performance that practically supports the lecture. We choose Cassandra’s pre- death monologue in Aeschylus’ tragedy Agamemnon following two main textual elements: a) The body/voice-atavistic/cultural relations in the written ancient phonemes. b) The linking threads between diverse situations such as fear, divination, lamentation, curse and nostalgia. Projecting Agamben’s approach of “Volkloser Raum” (land without people) to body in quarantine situation as an increasingly dehumanized space, we compare Cassandra’s multi-coloured expressivity and ecumenical range to an emerging body-state of liquidity distance and oblivion, seeing her as a signal of expansive threat that asks for belief and as a reminder of ‘embodied hope’.
Katerina Maniou Performer, Athens, Greece
A Migrant Mermaid (Re-)Turning Astray:
Attempts at Still Water Divination
“So I shall die” - said the little mermaid, “and as the foam of the sea I shall be driven about never again to hear the music of the waves, or to see the pretty flowers nor the red sun. Is there anything I can do to win an immortal soul?”
~ Hans Christian Andersen, The Little Mermaid
What kind of mermaid is she?
Broken/lost & bent by longing
Scales acid-brittled Fertilized seaweed stuck in her fins
This performance builds on my dance practice by a marshland in Copenhagen. In addition, I draw on my research on racialization, differentiated whiteness, Danish exceptionalism and shifting migrant positions, as well as my work on affective methodologies, which integrates autoethnography, memory work and embodied engagements with non-human nature.
As the COVID19 lockdown begun in March 2020, I took up dancing on a wooden platform on Utterslev mose, a marshland close to where I live in Copenhagen. I danced almost every morning. I observed the light grow brighter, birds building nests, arriving and leaving, the seasons and the vegetation change.
I got to know the marshland as a polluted, fragile infrastructure out of balance, embedded in ongoing violent histories. Dancing, I reached out to rusting bikes stuck in the poisonous sludge at the bottom of the bog. I observed joggers circulating around the bog as the lockdown extended, on paths laid out as part of the Danish welfare state projects to activate unemployed people in the 1930ies. I read about thousands of fish dying by asphyxiation in the 1980ies.
The brokenness and ongoing violent histories of the marshlands (re-)directed my gaze at my own strayness as an Eastern European migrant in Denmark. The stillness of the water resonated with the very literal inability to “go back home” under the lockdown. It also prompted (re-)turns to my childhood summer spent by Riga gulf in (post-)Soviet Latvia.
As a child
I believed in black amber
The black lumps turned out to be oil waste
The online performance will build on my poem “Migrant mermaid”, visual and audio elements from Utterslev marshland, as well as voices inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale The Little Mermaid.
Linda Lapina Roskilde University, Denmark
~ Hans Christian Andersen, The Little Mermaid
What kind of mermaid is she?
Broken/lost & bent by longing
Scales acid-brittled Fertilized seaweed stuck in her fins
This performance builds on my dance practice by a marshland in Copenhagen. In addition, I draw on my research on racialization, differentiated whiteness, Danish exceptionalism and shifting migrant positions, as well as my work on affective methodologies, which integrates autoethnography, memory work and embodied engagements with non-human nature.
As the COVID19 lockdown begun in March 2020, I took up dancing on a wooden platform on Utterslev mose, a marshland close to where I live in Copenhagen. I danced almost every morning. I observed the light grow brighter, birds building nests, arriving and leaving, the seasons and the vegetation change.
I got to know the marshland as a polluted, fragile infrastructure out of balance, embedded in ongoing violent histories. Dancing, I reached out to rusting bikes stuck in the poisonous sludge at the bottom of the bog. I observed joggers circulating around the bog as the lockdown extended, on paths laid out as part of the Danish welfare state projects to activate unemployed people in the 1930ies. I read about thousands of fish dying by asphyxiation in the 1980ies.
The brokenness and ongoing violent histories of the marshlands (re-)directed my gaze at my own strayness as an Eastern European migrant in Denmark. The stillness of the water resonated with the very literal inability to “go back home” under the lockdown. It also prompted (re-)turns to my childhood summer spent by Riga gulf in (post-)Soviet Latvia.
As a child
I believed in black amber
The black lumps turned out to be oil waste
The online performance will build on my poem “Migrant mermaid”, visual and audio elements from Utterslev marshland, as well as voices inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale The Little Mermaid.
Linda Lapina Roskilde University, Denmark