In his seminal essay ‘The Social Construction of Freaks’ Robert Bogdan asserts that ‘Presentations are artifacts of changing social institutions, organizations, formations, and worldviews. To understand the presentation, to become dislodged from their hold on our reality, we have to trace their origin and understand their place in the world as it is presently constructed.’Footnote 1 I begin this essay with Bogdan because he speaks of understanding the collective imaginary by tracing the ways societies construct the representation of difference. The study of theatrical discourses furthers this perspective as we focus on the transmission of a message primarily embodied in the actor in relation to a spectator. In other words, theatre is a space where bodies are reinscribed with cultural, social and political discourses pertinent to a historical time and the social experiences of the audience/recipient. Therefore it is a privileged space for the observation of the social construction of difference. Such is the semiotic principle of stage work which makes us read the bodies exhibited upon it and assign them meaning. The stage puts a body on display, and in doing so it becomes a space that allows for the re-creation of a representational system, a space for the discursive construction of the body or the body's adjustment to logos. Given society's historical and cultural variations, the perception of the body onstage is always circumscribed in a particular mode of thinking established by a spectator's individual sociocultural and historic context. Therefore what happens when a body onstage does not conform to the notions of normalcy established by mainstream or hegemonic consciousness? How do bodies onstage become a repository for social and cultural insecurities and anxieties? That which is deemed to be ‘normative’ by dominant thought becomes the criterion by which society will define what is morally right and wrong. That which violates the norm will be relegated to the margins of difference. The act of confronting figures of difference throws central concepts of identity into crisis, as this encounter forces one to construct narrative strategies to make sense of the unfamiliar. My interest in this essay is to focus on how theatre allows us to excavate the meanings of embodied differences and explore how the body has been understood over time. To do so, I will focus on Teatro de Ciertos Habitantes's play El Gallo (2009), an ‘opera for actors’ which invites us to consider the anxieties that fuel the act of exposing one's body onstage, as fears over our own perceived differences prevent us from feeling ‘normal’ in a society that constantly judges us as we recognize the discriminatory power of social normativity.Footnote 2
The Mexican theatre company Teatro de Ciertos Habitantes was formed in 1997 under the artistic direction of Claudio Valdés Kuri and successfully continues to produce plays in the present, making it one of Mexico's longest-running artistic companies.Footnote 3 The company includes members from Japan, Guadalupe, Iran and Mexico, where they are based. Their reputation has allowed them to thrive in international theatrical circuits and become an obligatory reference for any critic of Latin American contemporary theatre. Ciertos Habitantes, performance scholar Katherine Zien writes, is a company that attempts ‘to forge that which might be called a “global aesthetic,” which joins avant-garde universalist-interculturalism to contemporary neoliberal cosmopolitan multiculturalism’.Footnote 4 The international nature of the cast puts on display the globalized nature of contemporary culture and the complexities of any attempt to define a clear national identity. They are a company who create their own material through collaboration with artists from many disciplines and through a long experimental process. El Gallo, one of their most successful stagings, mixes opera, comedy and surrealist situations to expose the anxieties that fuel creation, from the audition process of five actors to the climactic concert at the end of the performance. Even though the play premiered in 2009, it continues to be part of the company repertory and has proven to be one of their most successful and longest-running performances as it has toured throughout the world. The long laboratory processes (almost a year) that led the company to the performance of El Gallo sought to identify new theatrical expressions by means of a long process of improvisation and vocal experimentation led by director Valdés Kuri and British composer Paul Barker. The proceedings are entirely sung – in an invented language akin to gibberish – to a series of tunes ranging from Gershwin to Middle Eastern folk songs, played by a live eight-piece orchestra with a conductor.Footnote 5 These are actors playing actors, and from the first act the audience plays witness to a rehearsal process beset with wrestling matches, bared insecurities and, eventually, exposed bodies. Viewers then experience the ‘premiere’ of the completed performance. El Gallo wittily conveys the obstacles and fears that descend on any production, and the sense of triumph over these that continues to draw people back to the theatre. The play was originally staged at the Centro Cultural del Bosque (Mexico City), which, as the name denotes, is a public artistic space designed for the creation and promotion of arts and culture. The audience constituted a mostly middle-class, educated combination of university students and older professionals. The company are known for their theatrical experimentation, and their audiences expect to find innovative presentations. So, the frame for audience reception is characterized by liberal individuals who would recognize an inherent critique towards the state of social and political discourse in Mexico.
The theatricalization of the Mexican nation
My particular interest in this piece is that it shows the aesthetics of a process of creation, in this case within the context of Mexican reality at a time of great violence and chaos. The play does not refer specifically to Mexican politics, but one cannot ignore the reality that surrounds the creation of this piece. At a time of political upheaval, of a pronounced class divide, of uncontrolled violence and the constant indifference of the government, El Gallo allows me to consider the inflexibility of a national consciousness that, with the passage of time, becomes more dogmatic. The play came to life in the few years before the magnificent celebrations of the Centennial of the Mexican Revolution and the Bicentennial of Independence, two festivities that exhibited a national identity inapplicable to all. It is necessary to confront notions of difference in a society that is grounded on a deep social and racial divide. As the Mexican sociologist Roger Bartra reminds us, ‘In plurality is the raison d'être of identity since culture can only be defined in its difference with itself. For this reason, we cannot recognize cultural identities without, at the same time, invoking the figure of the Other. The I does not exist without the Other.’Footnote 6 Notions of otherness can have varied connotations, and often (and dangerously) these acquire negative tones. Yet, without this ‘Other’ Mexico, our national culture would not exist, it would be extinguished: ‘without the Frenchified, Americanized technocrats, agnostics, socialists, positivists, Protestants, idolatrous Indians, communists, Freemasons, malinchistas, Jews, squatters, and many other minority groups, we simply could not even discuss Mexican identity’.Footnote 7 In a society that is composed through the marginalization of difference, a piece such as El Gallo, which presents us with the difficulties of such, cannot escape a political reading, and that is precisely my interest in this play.
My interpretation argues that in this performance the theatre itself works as an allegory of social order that depends on a series of metaphors in which the actor represents the everyday citizen, who is exposed with all their internal neuroses that accompany their anxiety around identity and belonging. In the play, the actors must face a series of tests that will prove their ability to perform in the correct way for the piece that they are expected to sing. The actors onstage are exhibited and pushed to the maximum limits of their vocal, physical and emotional possibilities. They face their limitations, fears and hopes (their own and those of others) as they explore concepts that are central to expected identity and help the audience realize that these are not timeless, but uneven, compromised and contested categories of exclusion. With this struggle, the actor becomes a perfect metaphor for the citizen as a social actor. To be the ideal citizen, one must perform certain duties, and the actors onstage remind us of the nature of theatre as it connects with our own engagement with the world as well as the theatrical nature of social and political traditions and rites. As citizens, we live in fear of an instrumental logic of making mistakes and we work under a fiction of authenticity. We do not accept that it is alright to be different and we do not recognize our privilege to reject those rules that determine normalcy. In the terms of Michel Foucault, we internalize the social norm.Footnote 8 Considering the state of things in present-day Mexico, an allegorical construction of the citizen and the individual is necessary to consider a stunned social order that marginalizes difference and imposes upon the national consciousness an ungraspable ideal citizen (heroic, white, upper-class). In the play, these issues can be considered through three primary matrices: first, the audition process of the actors onstage, and the insecurities that follow the rehearsal process as they face the fear of not belonging or not being accepted by the group, their incapacity to satisfy the demands of the director, and their insecurities over their differences; second, the alienation of these characters as they realize their own inability to fit in, which pushes them to find refuge in a fantasy world where they can voice their anxieties and deal with them in the open; finally, we must consider the efforts that are made to form a community onstage regardless of differences, a very problematic notion that deals with issues of plurality while facing the stereotypical identity of a national consciousness. Overall, these three aspects of the play allow me to think about the gaze of the other upon their difference and how political discourses are instituted in the spaces that are generated between the institutional gaze and the gaze of the other.
The freak difference
I choose to use the term ‘freak’ to talk about the marginal other because it allows me to discuss difference as a body that transcends the boundaries of the norm as constructed and prescribed by the discourses of power in terms that vary from the visually different, to the unpredictable and unstable, to the anomalous. I am interested in the figure of the freak from a historical perspective, not only in terms of a visual otherness but also as a political issue upon which the anxieties of a society are projected. This terminology of freakery – understood in its physical and moral dimensions as the monstrous, the grotesque, the deformed, the disabled, the disproportionate, the socially deviant and/or morally excluded – will give a more profound meaning to the behaviours and actions of the actors onstage, who become freaks, as they are made aware of the instability and unpredictability of their perceived identities. The freak onstage symbolizes the recognition of the different body as a political issue, a social construction, an individual difference and a category of inquiry. It examines reconceptions of the body as a tool for dissidence and considers how the body can be transformed and mutated to reflect deeper social and political acts of resistance. The freak acquires greater significance in a globalized community that defines the ‘normal’ person as useful and docile, while the ‘abnormal’ person demonstrates an inability to conform mentally, physically or emotionally and thus is implicitly disqualified from citizenship. Additionally, I choose to read the characters in this play as freaks and not as simple stand-ins for categories such as ‘the disabled’ or ‘the other’, because their differences exist in a sphere ruled by public exhibition, performance and consumer culture. Their enfreakment may be physical at times (of course, as a theatrical representation) and at other times behavioural or moral, but either way the characters in these performances embody a pathology of difference that keeps them on the margins of the social order.
The characters go through a series of rehearsal processes that clearly establish their incapacities to fit into the expected mould required for the final performance, as established by Viptim, the composer and director of the fictional piece. These ‘abnormalities’ on their part push them to retreat into fantasies where they are able to defy conventions by exploring notions of violence, gender roles, race and class. Yet they remain marginal figures as they deal with their own fears of maintaining an identity imposed upon them by a social order. As socially deviant and excluded figures, the characters onstage fit Bogdan's definition of freakery: ‘freak is a frame of mind, a set of practices, a way of thinking about and presenting people. It is the enactment of a tradition, the performance of stylized presentation.’Footnote 9 Thus the freak is a social role dependent on a particular context and historical circumstance, making this figure a necessary category of inquiry. In the case of El Gallo, what is most provocative is that the freakish quality of the characters onstage is realized through their gestures, costume (or lack of costume), non-verbal language and staging. They embody the essential qualities of freakness as their actions demonstrate a discrepancy between the unstable categories of deviance and normalcy. In other words, their staged presence disrupts the construction of the ‘normal’ citizen, a category that becomes unstable due to their own perceived inability to fit into a standard social perception of normalcy.
Singing and dancing our oppression
‘Freaks’, those whose bodies elude classical or ‘normal’ visions of bodies (e.g. white European, middle-class, ‘healthy’ and so on), have long been cast as spectacles that have entered the cultural field of vision as somatic evidence of hegemonic ideas about race, class, sex and health. At the same time, as Rachel Adams reminds us, ‘freakishness is a historically variable quality, derived less from particular physical attributes than the spectacle of the extraordinary body swathed in theatrical props, promoted by advertising and performative fanfare’.Footnote 10 The actions of the characters in El Gallo make freaks out of them as the play exposes the anxieties that plague their attempts at establishing their own identities. It conveys the obstacles and fears that descend upon those who are exposed, or onstage, which becomes a metaphor for life. The action is set in any rehearsal room, in this case a black box theatre. Viptim, the director and composer, has written a piece for six soloists and a string orchestra, which will debut in just two weeks. He has called together five singers to perform his work. The story begins on the day of the audition.
Viptim will be, throughout the play, a source of oppression, as he demands perfection from his singers. Nevertheless, he himself is plagued by the same insecurities that torment the five actors. After all, it is his piece that they will all perform. Carrying out his demands, the actors go through a process of enfreakment as their actions become a sign of their own disoriented identities.Footnote 11 They will turn on each other as they attempt to escape exclusion and, even worse, any chastising by the director. This process will reveal their individual differences, as their own sociocultural insecurities are brought to the forefront of their identity.
The first step in this process of enfreakment is to confront the audience with the unfamiliar; to this end, the entire play is developed in a made-up language that no one can understand. The actors, then, communicate with the audience through sounds and body language. As composer Paul Barker (personal interview) explains,
Only in the most superficial way, such as through syllabic repetition, does the text of El Gallo structurally represent a language. The choice of syllables was never random; rather, the sounds are chosen as appropriate to the vocal and dramatic objectives, as well as the character's narrative: collaboration with the singers often led to a series of sounds which they had perhaps subconsciously chosen, which I adopted. The sounds were then both created and assembled.
The audience must rely primarily on the body language and bodily reactions of the actors to gain a sense of understanding in the piece. This necessity also forces the characters to be constantly observed and examined by the viewing audience, as the focus is on a body that does not behave in the expected ways of theatrical communication (dialogue, monologue and so on), and thus emerges as different. Zien explains the confusion that the audience experiences with this metatheatrical event:
A confusion that intensifies as the singers shift between vocal and corporeal registers, imbricating attempts at song with chanting, whistles, gurgles, grunts, weeping, and hysterical screams. Their sonic barrage extends to bodily percussion – slapping, snapping, clapping, and stomping. In the absence of intelligible language, El gallo enacts a cacophony in which ‘failed’ and successful notes mingle promiscuously.Footnote 12
Furthermore, their bodies are different in the sense that all their eccentricities and insecurities are at the forefront of the act of communicating with each other and with the audience, meaning that those fears that are usually reserved for the privacy of our thoughts are here exposed as we become privy to their fantasies about exclusion and marginality. This is especially apparent in the racially different characters of Jogbos (an Afro-Caribbean woman), Shaktas (Middle Eastern) and Shaktom (of Asian origin).Footnote 13 All three of these characters face the added weight of transgressing the rigid social categories of race as it becomes apparent that notions of ethnicity are part of an inextricable yet particular exclusionary system legitimated by misconceptions about bodily variation, what Rosemary Garland-Thomson has brilliantly expressed as the realization that ‘what we assume to be a freak of nature was instead a freak of culture’.Footnote 14 In the case of Jogbos, her first attempt to audition is with the piece ‘Mon coeur s'ouvre à ta voix’ by Saint-Saëns, which she sings out of tune. Yet she tries to perform a second time with ‘Summertime’, Gershwin's famous aria from Porgy and Bess, which is also considered evocative in the way it mixes elements of jazz and the song styles of African Americans in the south-east United States from the early twentieth century. One must wonder whether the character's attempt to perform a piece of music associated with black culture (even though the character is by no means African American) also implies an effort to fit into her ‘assigned space’ as a black woman. Is she performing what is expected of her racial self? In doing so, Jogbos embodies a racial identity that excludes her from the highbrow world of ‘classical music’ and instead follows a logic of visual corporeal difference that consequently allows her to use specific musical forms.
Shaktas and Shaktom face a deeper crisis of identity as their bodies also transgress racial ideals and carry excess markers. For Shaktas, his raspy voice is unsuitable for what is asked of him in the performance; he does not fit into the vocal constrains of male opera singers, and this makes him question his validity in a fit of rage. Nevertheless, he beautifully performs the intonations of his ancestors as he eventually seeks refuge in folkloric Middle Eastern sounds. For all three characters, a narrative of estrangement dominates the racialized body. This leads us to question the ways in which immigrant bodies are incorporated into normative standards of citizenry, which are themselves constructed categories of normalcy. Let us not forget that, in the imaginary of the North American freakshow, the figure of the wild man was the most common, a person of colour whose act dramatized the racist equation of dark skin with savage exoticism. In the play, these three characters, then, carry the excess pressure of racial markers within the already racialized Mexican context of identity.Footnote 15 The characters are moved to find ways in which to deal with these. Viptim even vocalizes with Shaktas, with the intention of taking away his breathy voice. Unable to do so, and out of his mind, he takes Shaktas to extreme vocal zones, to the point of passing out and provoking a state of extreme tension that affects all the characters (Fig. 1). Shaktom endures a crisis that leads her to desperate attempts to find a centre of identity. Shaktas's extreme conditioning triggers in Shaktom an unexpected revelation in her unconscious. Shaktom lives an internal struggle against the familiar conditions that, unconsciously, crush her. She takes a mop and performs a tragic song in which she deals with gender expectations that crush her. She leans on the mop, unable to stand any longer. Another character, Thiktum, shares in her painful fantasy, as he is also victim of strict gender codes, as we will later examine. Yet he does not join her as support, but still as her competition. Her anger leads to a fierce duel sung in high notes between herself and Thiktum, with him the winner (Fig. 2). Defeated, she challenges the others, refusing to accept her imposed condition as woman and as racialized body. Eventually, she sheds her clothes in an aggressive attempt to shed her constricting identity. But, unable to find a centre, she is ‘crowned’ with a makeshift veil and left in despair. Both Shaktas and Shaktom are trying to find a centre through their assumed identity (Middle Eastern, Asian), but this becomes impossible, as their identity is more complex than the expected codes legitimized by racial categories. The character conflict in all three of them stems from the fact that identity has been located in one's exterior image, which causes a conflict when the exhibited body challenges the common and accepted idea of normalcy: ‘Social upheavals such as immigration, emancipation, and feminism – along with discriminatory responses such as nativism, segregation, and eugenics – depended upon the logic of visual corporeal differences for their coherence and enactment. Consequently, the way the body looked and functioned became one's primary social resource.’Footnote 16 These characters are freaks because they cannot fit into the normative and uniform body of the ideal citizen, and so they are socially constructed as marginal, as a freak. Both Shaptes and Shaktas attempt to find an emotional connection in their racial roots (Shaktas sings in solitude, intoning musical ranges from the Middle East, while Shaktom seeks comfort in movements based on meditation practices). Yet these are unfamiliar codes even to them, as they exist in the interstices of these racial categories.
All singers onstage suffering their own particular exhaustions. Photograph by Lorena Alcaráz Minor.
Thiktum (Edwin Calderón) and Shaktom (Irene Akiko Iida) duel with high notes. Photograph by José Jorge Carreón.
Producing a neurotic citizen
The neurosis brought forth by the awareness of an inability to fit into the category of ‘normalcy’ is primarily presented through the character of Shaptes. In the notes to the performance (access granted by the director), she is the only character assigned a Latin American identity (‘soprano de origen latino’, while Thiktum is described as having ‘indefinido origen’, or an undefined origin).Footnote 17 Shaptes is the character most affected by the certainty of being categorized as ‘abnormal’. From the audition process her fear prevents her from interpreting a coherent rendition of her aria. She is constantly unable to hit the proper note and is in a permanent state of terror produced by Viptim, whom she cannot please. The pressure she feels in her inability to perform properly renders her a freak in her own eyes (as well as in ours). An embellished narrative of otherness is imposed and accepted upon her own body as she is deemed abnormal by the standards of ‘correct behaviour’ expected of her character. She understand herself as freak as she is read and composed by a discourse of power embodied in the character of the tyrannical director Viptim. Her internalization of her own freakishness is part of the social neurosis that affects her as she comes to terms with an inability to be accepted. As the characters in the group carry on with the rehearsal, Shaptes constantly tries, unsuccessfully, to sing her lines. Eventually her inner self emits shouts of desperation that the others cannot hear, but which the audience observes (Fig. 3). Her frustration expressed in a scream is a signal of a desperate bid for recognition. Her suffering is the acknowledgement that she is constantly being judged. All the characters attempt to fit into the expected mould of their identities, but they are also aware that they are being judged by their differences. When they sing in harmonies, Shaptes is keenly aware of her inability to harmonize with the others, of her inability to fit within an expected category. Yet her scream becomes a complaint of great significance. As Emily Russell clarifies, ‘complaints of individual exclusion are themselves an act of citizenship, in that they make a claim upon the State for civil rights’.Footnote 18 This becomes a moment of narrative collision that emerges as the excluded subject (in this case Shaptes) exposes the contradictions and gaps upon which citizenship and acceptance are founded.
Shaptes's ‘inner’ scream of desperation (Itzia Zerón). Photograph by Eniac Martinez.
Aware of her exposure as ‘not normal’, Shaptes eventually disposes of her clothing, and in a state of trance she crosses, like a tightrope walker, a tortuous road of light on the stage. Her fragility is fully exposed, and she finally falls to the floor. In the course of Shaptes's walk, the rest of the characters also undress. This is a crucial moment in the action, considering that, thus far, this collection of freaks has refused to band together in any way. The rehearsal sessions are characterized by jealousy and an inability to support one another. Shaptes is the most affected by this, as she is often left to cry alone in shame for her incapacities as a singer. Shaktas is the only character who forms an uneasy bond with Shaptes, as he tries to help her deal with her fears. For example, as Shaptes walks the tightrope, Shaktas follows this action by exploring, with difficulty, his feminine side in an emotional effort to feel her pain (Fig. 4). After all, gender identity is an integral part of the process of enfreakment. In the case of Shaktas, he makes an attempt at defining his own masculinity through an exercise in feminine limitations. Thiktum faces a similar negotiation with his inner self, as he is the one character who performs in different voices (tenor, countertenor and soprano). This creates a fragmented identity in the character, as he is expected to perform in the tenor register, and his ability (the excess of voices) only alienates him from fixed notions of masculinity. Eventually, as the characters retreat into their own fantasies, Thiktum explodes with emotions as he exposes his fears of his own freak identity. All the characters must expose their own freakness as they try to come to terms with the sense of unfamiliarity that plagues them all.
Shaktas (Kaveh Parmas) connects with femininity as Shaptes collapses. Photograph by Lorena Alcaráz Minor.
Their inability to connect, though, is fully explored in a scene imagined by Shaptes. Inconsolable because of her fears and exasperated by the situation, she imagines herself in a lucha libre ring: she is a técnica (good-guy) wrestler, while Jogbos and Shaktom are the rudas (bad guys).Footnote 19 Viptim is the commentator, Thiktum the referee, and Shaktas her fan. The match opens with a fierce showdown against Shaktom and her ‘surprising eastern technique’ (director notes). Jogbos immediately comes in with ‘her African fury’ (programme notes). Obviously, all characters are exploiting the exotic freak identities of their conceived selves. Shaptes can beat both Shaktom and Jogbos. Recovered, Shaktom re-enters the ring and helps Jogbos to knock out Shaptes. As the two rudas celebrate their win, something takes over Shaptes, who comes back into the ring and easily annihilates them. A winner in her imagination, Shaptes returns to the sad reality of the rehearsal. It is not surprising that wrestling becomes the character's attempt to deal with her identity crisis. For artists and intellectuals interested in lucha libre, this form appears as a metaphor for society, ‘metaphor to comprehend the depth of Mexican culture; a space to reflect on the singularities of Mexican national identity’.Footnote 20 As characters who are struggling to confirm any authenticity in their own self, much less in others, lucha libre becomes a poignant aesthetic choice for visualizing marginalization.
Can we find community in chaos?
The characters’ inability to form a community as they embody the condition of freakness refers back to the idea of inclusion as an ethical project. The notion of inclusion starts with the premise that an individual has a right to belong to society and its institutions, which therefore implies that others have obligations to ensure that this happens. Levinas has already identified the challenge that this work poses to individuals as one of responding to, and for, the other without creating further obligations in the other.Footnote 21 Yet the play reminds us of the ethical work that is required to create the conditions for inclusion, as this is guided by an underlying telos and a set of principles that, as Foucault has stated, ‘tell you in each situation, and in some way, spontaneously, how you should behave’.Footnote 22 Work of this kind, as Foucault has asserted, involves challenging the relationship between power, knowledge and social control.
Since power operates through a network of disciplinary mechanisms and technologies that regulate and normalize individuals’ conduct, these mechanisms work by establishing ‘habits’ and ‘ways of acting’ that are considered acceptable and desirable within a given social context. It is not until the characters become aware of their collective behaviours, marginal identity and fear of rejection that they are able to come together through their exposed fantasies. In a scene where they have finally disposed of their clothing and are left standing in their white underwear, after they are exhausted from living their anxieties through fantasy, Jogbos sings a slow tune that brings calm to the stage. With everyone's eagerness abandoned, they are finally able to come together and perform. The characters can find a sense of unity with themselves and each other, to take the fragments that compose them and find a sense of self. This is made even more apparent through the lights, which project a kaleidoscopic set of shapes on the ground as the characters fuse into the darkness (Fig. 5). This moment shows that what the performance ‘undresses’ onstage is the mechanisms of political normalization and the relationship that is developed between the gaze and a body that does not conform to expected norms as it is reconfigured and integrated to fit into the hegemonic discourse. While unusual bodies have been exhibited in society, partly, to reassure onlookers that they are, by contrast, normal, freak bodies have also challenged the very concept of normalcy, destabilizing its social, political and aesthetic construction. For many, freak bodies are compelling spectacles because they seem so dissonant with classical bodies, creating alternative and provocative modes of reimagining what it means to be an embodied subject. for those who feel excluded from a community, identifying with freakness can be a potent way of forging resistance against the mechanisms of inscription and subjection that impose on citizens’ bodies violent forms of normalization, invade bodies and legitimize the most violent actions in favour of productivity and economic gain.
Jogbos (Fabrina Melon) brings calm to the chaos. Photograph by José Jorge Carreón.
The process of unity onstage is of great importance as perceived by the audience, especially as we are pushed to recognize our own readings of the action onstage. Even though each spectator has their own particular point of view by which they read the performance onstage, often these are inherently connected through shared cultural values. In this way we can talk about a general notion of the audience. As audience members we are faced with a set of unfamiliar images, from the use of language to the unstable identity of the characters. Even if we do not fully understand the action onstage, we are aware that these characters are not ‘acting normal’; therefore we do become aware of a set of categories that legitimates what constitutes normalcy. The institutionalized social process of enfreakment unites and validates the disparate perspectives positioned as viewers. And as viewers, the cultural work of exhibiting the freak is to make the physical particularity of the freak into a hyper-visible text against which the viewers’ indistinguishable body fades into a seemingly neutral, tractable and invulnerable instrument of the autonomous will, suitable to the uniform abstract citizen that democracy institutes. The notion of freakery allows us, as viewers, to consider what Elizabeth Grosz defines as ‘the ways in which the body is lived and represented, the inputs and effects of the subject's corporeality on its identity’.Footnote 23 An encounter with the unfamiliar, especially with figures that we are unable to define, allows us to contemplate the potential dissolution of our own corporeal and psychic boundaries. If identity formation, whether individual or collective, involves both the incorporation of that which defines the category of ‘normal citizen’ and the repudiation of deviant forms of behaviour, then ‘freaks remind us of the unbearable excess that has been shed to confer entry into the realm of normalcy’.Footnote 24 As audience members, we should become aware of the ways in which we define our own identity as citizens of a society. We construct our own identities through the acquisition of desired attributes and the refusal of the intolerable. And, as Rachel Adams reminds us, ‘freaks embody this cast-off refuse, reminding the viewer of the costs of normality, but also stirring doubts about whether she really belongs there’.Footnote 25 When we observe Shaptes's heartbreaking despair and fragility before her own certainty of her own embodied difference, we cannot help but identify with her freak identity as it stands as a symbol of human alienation and despair.
Conclusions
Susan Sontag, in her study on photography, maintained that the interest in what we consider to be the monstrous shows an impulse to violate human innocence, to adopt an exotic viewpoint, to look without pity at one's own society and show the horror of its deformities.Footnote 26 Roger Bartra continues in this line as he states that the representation of otherness stimulates a critical attitude in the observer, ‘since the artist invites us to understand that the apparent normality is more monstrous than we are normally prepared to admit’.Footnote 27 It is through the anomalous body that we make sense of our own reality – what is ‘normal’ human behaviour and what is not. The extraordinary body is fundamental to the narratives by which we make sense of our world and ourselves. These bodies have always been regarded as atypical, and their cultural resonance relates to their historical and intellectual moment; thus freaks are not read in the same way at all times. Yet they always confound cultural categories, and so ‘they function as magnets to which culture secures its anxieties, questions, and needs at any given moment’.Footnote 28 In the case of El Gallo, the characters’ anomalous qualities extend from the arsenal of cultural insecurities that they carry upon their bodies. They become a metaphor for the social neurosis that we collectively experience as part of a society that constantly imposes notions of normalcy upon our identity as citizens. After all, theatre is a space where we exhibit the state of our society, and so the bodies of these characters become a site of contention as we map our concerns upon them and extract cultural understandings of our state in the world. As an audience we can ‘admire’ from a safe distance, in a collective act of looking, as these bodies go through the process of enfreakment. El Gallo allows us to face a process that we fear as the characters become the citizen (the actor–citizen) who wants to fit into the norm but must constantly face a power structure that does not accept their differences (whether it be racial, gender or bodily variances, such as voice). As audience members (social actors) we watch with great ambivalence as we recognize our own fears and neuroses about our own inabilities to fit into the category of ‘normal’ citizen.
Eventually, the characters onstage are able to come together for the final concert, which includes Viptim as he joins them in the performance. Their freakery is integrated into the cohesiveness of a group dynamic that allows for the performance of Viptim's concert piece. But Shaptes retains her belief that she does not truly fit in, and so her inner freak ‘comes out’ in this final performance. This becomes an act of deviance. In the original performance of the play (Mexico City, 2009), the audience is moved to a different space, where the final performance will take place. The actors come back onstage (now an Italian proscenium stage), elegantly dressed. The concert begins and Thiktum sings the main part as the other singers respond. As their harmonious sounds are reaching their climax, Shaptes's voice breaks and lets out a horrifying crackle: the famous gallo of the title. Failure has occurred; Shaptes's fear of performing incorrectly is exhibited for all to see. The rest of the group try to conceal her error, trying to keep up with the music after being stunned for a moment. There is nothing to be done, though. They have made a spectacle of themselves and have drawn attention to their own marginal condition. The composer, Viptim, explodes in anger against Shaptes, no longer caring that they are before an audience. They are all devastated. There is a heavy silence in the theatre; awkwardness reigns, as no one knows what to do (audience included) in such a situation of deviant behaviour. The actors leave the stage, and after a heavy silence they come back and begin to timidly applaud Viptim, who has remained devastated onstage, for his work. Usually, the audience joins in the applause, creating an ovation that causes the resurgence of the composition. This is a crucial moment in the performance because the moment of ‘acting out’, of ‘making a spectacle’, is resignified in defiance of the expectations of audience and composer. As they come to terms with their inability to harmonize as expected, their acceptance becomes an act of defiance so that the gallo is no longer a mistake, but a moment of creating community between audience and actors. They make everyone accept the anomalous as normal, and as the audience claps, the composition becomes renewed, as it synthesizes all their collective desires for belonging. The freaks onstage appear as misrepresentations of the citizen, as our personal fears about normalcy allow us to make an otherwise ‘normal’ person into a freak through purposeful distortions designed to exhibit our own insecurities. In this way, as Bogdan has stated, ‘whenever we study deviance we have to look at those in charge – whether self-appointed or officially – of telling us who deviants are and what they are like’.Footnote 29
Onstage, an act of deviance becomes an act of defiance as they ‘talk back’ and force us to recognize the ideological complexities of belonging and the participation of the common citizen. The actors are finally a collective identity as Shaptas's ‘error’ becomes normalized and everyone joins in triumph, including Viptim, who now accepts his composition as a glorious act as it provides a catharsis for all (Fig. 6). The ‘happy ending’ in the play is more complex than it seems. The characters have found harmony in disharmony, as they incorporate movements that were previously presented in their fantasies. Yet the idea of a harmonious ending can be too accommodative, since societies do not function in this manner, and this is a non-existent ideal.
Viptim (Ernesto Gómez Santana) joins the singers onstage for the final performance. Photograph by Eniac Martinez.
The final tune, then, is a moment of acceptance by all (ourselves included) as we are reminded that one must problematize the categories of ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’, especially as these fixed categories are inapplicable to anyone, making us all freaks. But the harmony at the end also looks back to the political state of Mexico, where an acceptance of plurality is nothing more than a superficial dogma that does not mean more humanitarian or ethical behaviour towards otherness. The ending is almost apocalyptic with its aesthetics of harmony, as it reminds us that this is precisely what society has done with difference: integrate it to make it disappear. It seems to me that if we turn our backs on cultural and historical multiplicity and choose to look at Mexican society as a harmonious and unified collective, it makes it necessary for the freaks to break out in order to defy all the norms established by fantasies of national identity, to liberate the plurality that remains trapped under the stereotype. What continues to fascinate me about this performance is how it makes us think about the relation between our gazes and the exposed body as an attempt to construct political discourses. This is a necessary inquiry to be made if we wish to consider the disparate state of any nation.
