Chasing Enrique

It's been some time since the last entry. I've been busy with Heuldro Haf, the Rites of Passage training and chasing Enrique Vargas around Barcelona...to no avail. Enrique Vargas is the pioneer of Sensory Labyrinth Theatre and he invited me to come to Barcelona to work with him. What to do when you are funded to study with someone who doesn't seem to want to communicate or be studied? Some kind of response from Enrique would be useful. But phone calls, emails even a letter hand delivered to the Teatro De Los Sentidos headquarters (nobody home by the way) have had no reply.

I though last night while lying awake thinking about this that maybe I offended him in some way when I met him in Copenhagen last August...where he invited me to come and visit. In his Sensory Labyrinth Theatre production which I had just gone through, about Hans Christian Andersen, there was an instillation where a beautiful young girl in a white room who, on a lovely white table cloth, carefully cut fresh fruit put them into a small bowl and pored chocolate over them. She then invited you to come under the table with her, the overhanging tablecloth making an intimate little space. Sitting there knee to knee, she takes a spoon of the delicious looking dessert she just made in front of you and eats it herself. The next spoon she scoops she brings sensually to your mouth and quickly whips it away and gulps it herself. Great! I wanted to play! So with the next spoon I grabbed her arm and went for it. She put up a ferocious fight, using her head to bash mine out of the way and swallow the content of the spoon. She then forcefully ejected me from the space.

Did I overstep the mark? Did she go to her director afterwards and have me banned from further contact with his theatre? Performers in the Labyrinth are not working with normal, civilized human beings. They are working with an audience for whom the reality of civil society has been suspended. In that liminal space if you provoke infantile or even animal instincts you can expect not to get a polite applause and a ‘measured’ response. Of course, part of the psyche in a normal healthy person will retain the knowledge that this is theatre…it’s the social contract that permits these things to happen to them and gives a confidence of certain safety…perhaps a bit like S & M (though I wouldn’t know). But the other parts, the id, the unconscious urges, the universal archetypes that frame our deepest patterns of behaviour and repression…the dark labyrinth is their playground.