Opening: Gaze Shapes the Space from the Void

Darkness. Music: OMD, “Of All the Things We’ve Made.” Two piercing points of light (disembodied gaze) slowly search the void, find a form. No eyes, no body, pure linearity of the gaze, caresses the form, shapes a feminine body from the void. Gentle caress of the gaze grows violent, forces her body into its trap, finds other forms, shapes other bodies, implicates them. Mirrors. Feminine bodies set the trap, step in, all trapped together. Gaze reflected back unto its origin in the shape of a pubic delta, shapes his body in the relation. The delta expands, creates the space. The machine is set. It begins.

"Winter Kills" Sketch: Bandage / Bondage Duet

Darkness. Silence. Breath. Lights. Two bodies in a crumpled heap. Rising slowly together, propping each other up. Movement in stillness like ice crystals crawl across panes of glass. Neither utters a sound. Music: Yaz, “Winter Kills.” He takes her hand, examines her wrist, kisses it tenderly, removes a roll of gauze from his pocket. He wraps her arm with the bandage as she struggles. He tenderly takes her other wrist and bandages her arms together. She can’t move, slumps. In silence, he moves to leave. She holds out her bandaged arms. He embraces her and they crumple once again. Breath. Silence. Darkness.

The Bachelor Machine is a Machine for Seeing

Many iterations of the bachelor machine concept privilege its relation to the function of vision, desire, and the voyeuristic gaze. This is particularly evident in the play with mirrors, glass, lenses, and peepholes in the Quay Brothers' short films mentioned in the previous blog, but it is also prevalent in Kafka's penal machine (in which a pane of glass enables large crowds of onlookers to watch the inscription as it takes place on the flesh of the condemned), Duchamp's "Large Glass" (which attempts to schematize the multi-dimensionality of desire on a two-dimensional surface pressed between two panes of glass), and Jarry's Supermale (where the entire orgy sequence takes place in a gallery filled with portraits and windows). It is thus crucial that this performance somehow address this connection. Consider the following etymology of the English word "theater" from the Oxford English dictionary:

"ad. (directly, or through OF.) L. theatrum, a. Gr. [. . .] a place for viewing, esp. a theatre, f. [. . . to behold (cf. [. . .] sight, view, [. . .] a spectator)."*

A theater is, first and foremost, a place for viewing. For the Romans, the coliseums and amphitheaters were places for members of the audience to be seen by others. The same is arguably true of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European theater as well. A large part of this performance will attempt to reconceive the space of the theater as a machine for viewing, a machine in which the audience's gaze is just as scrutinized as that of the actors. Here are a few possible ideas that in combination will activate this machine for seeing:

1) An obscuring panel and a revealing panel similar to those used in Diller and Scofidio's "Delay in Glass." This would highlight the importance of reflection and the indirect gaze.
2) Hand-held mirrors for the audience with some parts of the action staged behind them. This would individualize the obscuring/revealing panes mentioned above and situate the audience between them.
3) Alley seating, which would allow the audience to see other members of the audience seeing the action as it takes place between (and/or behind/before) them.
4) Use of sunglasses equipped with laser pointers or tiny flashlights by the actors. This simultaneously hides the source of the gaze (the eye) and reveals the object of the gaze.
5) Scrims could be dropped and lit to reveal and partially obscure events that take place behind them. With alley seating and a careful play of movement on both sides of the scrims, this could potentially highlight the differences in perspective embodied by position in the theatrical space.
6) Placeent of body length mirrors in the performance space and a play of reflected light between them.

I have to experiment with these options a bit to find the right combination for the space and for the piece, but this is a good starting point for reflecting, so to speak.


*[. . .] indicates Greek letters which would not translate to this text field. See OED for Greek spellings.

Lures, Limits, Desire, and Agency

Last night I had an informal brainstorming session with the actors. In my estimation, it was quite a success. We viewed two short stop-motion puppet animation films by the Quay Brothers: "This Unnameable Little Broom (Epic of Gilgamesh)" and "Street of Crocodiles." Both films are deliberate and sustained representations of the bachelor machine concept. By far, the latter of these provoked the most discussion. I include a copy of this short film here--in two parts because presumably it is too large to post in its entirety on Youtube. The picture and sound quality are somewhat poor and the color in particular seems to have lost its richness in the transfer, but close enough:

Part 1:



Part 2:



I asked the actors to think about what common motifs they saw in both short films and how these related to the research I asked them to do. Though it necessarily does some violence to the rich discussion that ensued, for the sake of simplicity I think the conversation can be summarized in three main points: 1) the relation of desire as one of lure and limit, 2) problems of agency and control, and 3) voyeurism and the gaze. I will reserve a more sustained engagement with the third for a separate entry, since it elicits larger questions about set design and how I plan to cast the audience in the production, both of which should be examined in much more detail. For the others, however, I will offer my all-too-brief summations of the discussion.

1) Lures and Limits: the Relation of Desire

The bachelor machine functions as an amplification of desire that ultimately refuses satisfaction. Some very intense moments of personal sharing emerged more-or-less organically among the actors. I was encouraged to see that this concept has relevance to their own lives, as it does to mine. I will not enumerate their related personal experiences or my own here, but I will say that all of us shared a similar understanding of desire. Despite minor differences among us, we all seemed to agree that desire functions as a lure that ultimately brings the subject to the threshold of a certain limit and refutes attempts to trangress that limit. This has various manifestations: the etiquette of communication in the early stages of an amorous relationship, the place of morality, ethics, and love in relation to sexual drive, the contradictory forces at play in the performance and construction of gender, etc.

2) Agency and Control in the Bachelor Machine

There's a certain theological impulse in most of us to understand who is the primary causal agent of desire. Who built the bachelor machine? Do we build it and rebuild it constantly? Are we ourselves parts of it? Might one be a bachelor machine in oneself? Or does it take at least two to make a bachelor machine? To what extent do individual actions shape the processes of the bachelor machine? To what extent, conversely, does the bachelor machine structure human agency? Is the bachelor machine social or individual? All questions left more or less unanswered, most likely because they are unanswerable unless one has achieved that impossible Archimedian point outside the structure and function of desire.

Brainstorming Session Invitation to Actors

I have asked my actors to contribute ideas for the script which I am in the process of writing, because the highly conceptual nature of this piece masks a deeply personal and extremely traumatic experience which played a major role in its original inception. In order to defeat the tendency to reproduce some myth of the tortured artist who creates from the darkest recesses of his or her own psyche (which I find to be a fundamentally flawed model of artistic production for reasons which I will not enumerate here) in the process, I have opted to invite the actors to contribute their ideas as raw material from which to work. I think this collaborative approach will produce a more compelling script and performance. Also, it will better ensure the actors' investment in the project. Below are the contents of two electronic messages that I sent to them--cut and pasted together--inviting them to a brainstorming session. I include them here because they reconfigure some of my earlier ideas about the performance and include web links to sites I have been using as "secondary sources." Notes from the meeting will be posted as well after it has taken place. Here is the invitation:


The meeting will be rather informal. Just want to throw around a few ideas and get to know one another. I want you all to be as involved in shaping this as possible, so I welcome your contributions. My source texts on this are Marcel Duchamp's artwork "Large Glass" and his papers for the project entitled "The Green Box," Alfred Jarry's novel _The Supermale_, Diller and Scofidio's "Delay in Glass" (a performance based on Duchamp's artwork), and Michel Carrouges' essay "The Bachelor Machines." I have also been thinking of using synthpop group OMD's "Of All the Things We've Made" from the album Dazzle Ships as a musical theme for the piece. Please look into these source texts as much as possible in advance of our meeting. You certainly don't have to read them all, but try to familiarize yourselves with their themes and basic ideas.

You might also google the terms "bachelor machine" and "narcissism" and see what comes up. For the latter, keep in mind the Narcissus myth from which the psychological condition takes its name--this brings into focus the first part of the title of this piece. Basically, I want to bring this unresolved concept of the bachelor machine from the first half of the twentieth century to bear on contemporary problems of the construction and performance of masculine sexuality in our culture. What I have in mind here is the post-feminist idea that liberation for women means treating men as pleasure machines. We see this best expressed in television shows like Sex and the City wherein men are understood as productive and useful for at least one of the female protagonists only insofar as they can supply two things: shoes and orgasms. Here and elsewhere, men are constructed as machines that supply pleasure in the form of sexual gratification and material goods. I also want to tackle the problem from the opposite angle as well: men who understand themselves as sex machines (we might recall James Brown's song of the same name here) and providers of material satisfaction. Basically, I am interested in the way that technology mediates human sexuality.

Just to get you started, here are a few things I've found.

A jpeg of Duchamp's "Large Glass":

http://www.beatmuseum.org/duchamp/images/bride.jpg

Some context for/an interpretation of the "Large Glass":

http://www.dada-companion.com/duchamp/largeglass.php

A publisher's blurb for Jarry's Supermale:

http://www.citylights.com/book/?GCOI=87286100735880

Photo documentation of the performance of Diller and Scofidio's "Delay in Glass" (login with your UMN ID, click on entry 2, "Delay in Glass"):

http://www.jstor.org.floyd.lib.umn.edu/action/doBasicSearch?Query=delay+in+glass+diller+scofidio&gw=jtx&prq=delay+in+glass&Search=Search&hp=25&wc=on

Download a copy of OMD's "Of All the Things We've Made" from iTunes. It may be listed under artist Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark. Or, buy a copy of the album. It's a good one: challenging, largely panned by critics and shunned by audiences in its day, quite conceptual and cerebral for OMD, steeped in Cold War paranoia, and has been referred to by critics upon its recent reissue as the OMD equivalent of Radiohead's Kid A.

Finally, a link to project blog "How to build a Bachelor Machine" (pretty bare-bones at the moment, but it should give you a basic idea of what I'm after):

http://bachelormachine.blogspot.com/

I'd like each of you to come up with one or more sketches of scenarios that might somehow evoke the above. So give this some thought and we'll brainstorm. Let me know if you have any questions. Very much looking forward to working with you all, and looking forward to seeing what you guys come up with!

Musical Theme: OMD's "Of All the Things We've Made"

The song fades in with a synth drone, which is overlayed with a repetitive, jangly, dissonant, atonal guitar riff. A metronomic drum beat enters, followed by a hauntingly beautiful electric piano line, and finally by McClusky's icy baritone that does not soar here like it will on later OMD tracks like "If You Leave," but rather blends in with the stillness of the instrumentation. As the song comes to a close, these elements all drop out quickly but one at a time, leaving only the jangled dissonance of guitar, which abruptly ends. No instrumental solos or bridges, no chord changes or crescendos, just a delicately sparing and minimalist song that is elegant, beautiful, and somehow simultaneously cold and sad. It has a sound of ending, winding down, and entropic stillness that will work well with the themes of the piece. Both the music and the lyrics go nowhere, but simply repeat with very little change. In keeping with the concept of the Bachelor Machine, the song does not come to climax. Instead, it plods on with a driving pulse until it comes to a sudden halt. Below are the lyrics:


Of All the Things We've Made

To want this.
Of everything we've made.
The times it's worked before.

Of all the things we've said.
Times that worked before today.

To want this.
Of everything we've made.
The times it's worked before.

Of all the things we've said.
It always worked before today.

Auditions and Casting

Auditioned 15-20 actors for the performance. Cast 3 women and 2 men. The audition consisted of a more-or-less informal conversation and some very basic directed improv movement and object work. No prepared monologues or sides. Directions were as follows:

1) Actor wants to convince a table (placed on one side of the room) to go to bed with him/her. (MOTIVATION)
2) Actor has a stool (placed on the opposite side of the room) to assist in the seduction of the table. (OBJECT)
3) With the above in mind, actor must move the stool next to the table. (TASK)

Needless to say, there were some very creative and memorable performances. Some rather awkward moments as well. It was a real challenge for all the actors, as I hoped it would be. I think I pulled together a pretty good group. All of them demonstrated, in various ways, that they were willing to take risks and experiment. I'm looking forward to working with all of them.

What is a Bachelor Machine?

It is an impossible perpetual motion machine, an absurd and perverse assemblage of sexuality and technology. It is that structure of desire which both sexually stimulates the body and indefinitely suspends expenditure (i.e. the moment of climax). It is the grotesquely narcissistic pursuit of a perfect masculine body, the hedonistic philosophy of pleasure purely for pleasure's sake (minus any notion of function or utility whatsoever), the deferral and defeat of any and all procreative impulse, the accelerated rhythm of pistons somehow unaffected by the physical laws of friction and entropy, outmoded technology fused to beautiful flesh, the triumph of useless-value, "that guy" at the muscle beach and the discotheque.

But most of all, the Bachelor Machine is the intersection of the performing body with the apparatus of the stage, the persistent desire of the audience for climax and closure melded to a refusal and deferral of it all.

And so, in a darkened theater, the Bachelor Machine whirs to life. We listen to its heartbeat mechanism, shifting into overdrive, becoming more than the sum of its parts, humming in resonances that recall electropop tunes--those famous songs of men who loved their synthesizers and drum machines like their women: coldly, with calculation and restraint, electric semen scintillating in the circuitry, never released, always held in absolute abeyance. Reserved.

Project Proposal for a Work in Progress

Reflections (or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bachelor Machine)

an original work written and directed by Wade Haynes

Concept:

The conceptual frame of this project draws upon two primary notions: narcissism and the “bachelor machine.” Sigmund Freud defines the first of these as “the libidinal complement to the egoism of the instinct of self-preservation.”[1] In this sense, narcissism as self-love parallels the survival instinct (the latter refers not only to the fight or flight impulse at the level of the individual organism, but also to the necessity of the sex drive for the survival of the species).

The second concept is derived by Michel Carrouges from a common figure he notices in the works of Marcel Duchamp, Alfred Jarry, Franz Kafka, Raymond Roussel, and others. He defines the bachelor machine as “a fantastic image that transforms love into a technique of death.”[2] The bachelor machine disrupts the “normal” order of sexuality by deflecting libidinal energies back onto the self: in this sense, bachelor machines are masturbatory mechanisms that threaten to disrupt the survival of the species. Simultaneously, the bachelor machine endlessly defers the arrival of orgasm until the moment of death: in this sense, bachelor machines are tantalizing torture devices that alternately disarm and exaggerate the fight or flight impulse by both promising and withholding pleasure.

For my work, the bachelor machine functions as an exaggerated figuration of the contradictory forces at play in the construction and performance of masculinity in Western culture. The masculine subject is as much an agent as he is subjected to these forces, but the more self-aware he becomes of his place within them and tries to utilize them to his own ends, the more instrumental he becomes in their operation.

Plot and Narrative:

The play presents a caricature of the narcissistic bachelor—a remarkable specimen of masculinity, enamored with his own appearance, grotesquely well-endowed, and absolutely insatiable in the bedroom—in a series of absurd quotidian situations, each of which gradually reveals the operations of a mysterious and invisible “bachelor machine” governing his movements and interactions. In attempt to unlock secrets of pleasure and finally achieve the orgasm that no woman can give him, this bachelor assembles a blueprint from his experiences and constructs his own bachelor machine so that he might exercise absolute control over his pleasurable pursuits. His sexual union with the machine has three results: he finally achieves climax, the machine falls in love with him, and he effectively dies by melding into its circuitry.

The play will be presented in the style and structure of a self-reflexive farce, with a plot whose action accelerates towards a climax, only to be frequently interrupted by quasi-vaudvillian interludes which designate the bachelor character’s fantastic epiphanies. These epiphanies occur at moments in the narrative when the bachelor character devises blueprints and constructs and assembles parts for his bachelor machine. The dramatic action of the plot, with its fast pace punctuated by interludes, thus perverts the operation of the invisible bachelor machine referred to in the narrative. Whereas the invisible bachelor machine indefinitely impedes the bachelor’s progress toward (the) climax, each interlude paradoxically stops the action of the play only to propel it forward, which is to say that each epiphany brings (the) climax closer to its realization. The deus ex machina prevalent in many manifestations of the farce form is thus both literalized and complicated here as the bachelor machine that the main character assembles for himself. These finer points of the play’s construction are to be rendered explicit through didactic use of a combination of projections, sight gags, and dialogue.

Overall Aesthetic:

Costumes, props, and scenery are to match the farcical tone of the play and its grotesquely exaggerated characters. Costumes are to be vibrantly colorful and reminiscent of Futurist, Dada, and Bauhaus design. They will be relatively inexpensive to produce: largely composed from cardboard coated with mylar, aluminum foil and other light, reflective materials. Hand-held props are to be exaggerated in size and shape. From the prop shop, I will need a full-size bed, a few standing mirrors, and other minimal interior furnishings and accoutrements for one side of the stage, and a minimal assemblage of props that signify an urban exterior for the other. Minimal scenery is to be cartoon-like, with dark outlines, vibrant color, and exaggerated shapes.

The duration of the performance will be somewhere between 50 and 60 minutes. It will contain simulated sex acts and violence, nudity, and strong language.

Sources and Inspiration:

The ideas embodied and enacted in this performance are largely derived from Freud’s essay on narcissism (cited above), as well as from Carrouges’ insights on the bachelor machine figure (also cited above) and from several of the latter’s source texts. Jarry’s novel The Supermale functions as the narrative backbone of the play, and supplies its climax and ending as well as a basic sketch of the main character. Ideas for action and dialogue in the interludes are lifted directly from Duchamp’s papers (collected as “The Green Box”) written during the construction of his masterwork “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even.” General inspiration for shaping the aesthetic and feel of the performance comes from a variety of other sources, including: the fiction of J.G. Ballard, William S. Burroughs, Franz Kafka, and Bruno Schulz; the plays of Heiner Müller, Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, Maurice Maeterlinck, Oskar Kokoschka, and Ernst Toller; the films of Stanley Kubrick, Kenneth Anger, David Cronenberg, the Quay Brothers, and Terry Gilliam; the dramatic theories of Antonin Artaud, Edward Gordon Craig, and Heinrich von Kleist; and the music of Kraftwerk and Gary Numan.

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[1] Freud, Sigmund. “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” General Psychological Theory. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963. 56.

[2] Carrouges, Michel. “Directions for Use,” The Bachelor Machines. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1975. 21.