Commentary on Rachel Rosenthal\'s Pangaean Dreams

Commentary on Rachel Rosenthal's Pangaean Dreams, by Una Chaudhuri

Thirty-five years after she started her first theatre company, Instant Theatre, Rachel Rosenthal's epic Pangaean Dreams still embodies her belief that the truth of performance springs from its being rooted in presence. Commissioned by, and presented at, the Los Angeles Performance Festival in 1990, the work speaks directly from that "instant" in Rosenthal's life, a moment in which her extraordinary gifts as a performer were under attack by the merciless processes of aging and ailing. As she has done in all her many performance pieces over the years, she mapped the drama of her changing self onto the world around her, while at the same time opening herself up to the very real ways in which what she was experiencing personally was the product not only of specific physical developments but also of large cultural and ideological systems. In this case those systems include the extractive industrial-technological modes of production that have changed vast swaths of the planet beyond recognition.

Given her striking appearance—shaven head, pierced eyebrow, bejeweled hands, dancer's movements—Rosenthal's entrances are always striking, but none is as arresting, nor as powerfully signifying, as this one. Propelling her wheelchair forward, she takes the stage with a ferocity that belies her opening lament. Describing the serial physical insults sustained by her aging body, she quickly settles on the powerful metaphor that will shape this piece (and has been a fundamental trope of her performance work): the body as earth, the planet as living organism. The breaking down of her body has put her in mind of the originary tectonic breakup that gave birth to the continents we know. Resolving to follow the trail of this analogy as far as it will go, she takes on a persona that has served her well in the past: that of the shaman, the spiritual traveler who journeys into the chthonic spirit world and returns with vital and sustaining secret knowledge. This shaman lets us accompany her as she descends into the depths of the earth, endures a terrifying waning of everything familiar, and ends with her feet firmly planted on the ancient mother continent, Pangaea, which will spawn – "but not for a long, long, time"—our multiply, chronically, divided world.

Rosenthal's counter-intuitive but scientifically factual recognition that "Earth moves" (the piece begins with a quote from Alfred Wegener, who was to the discovery of "continental drift" what Galileo had been to heliocentrism) returns her to her body and its limits, specifically the pain that keeps her from dancing and cavorting like Earth. Traveling again, this time into the labyrinthine self, she confronts the monster living in its depths: pain, a separate and independent entity, who knows more about her than she does herself. In dialogue with this Autonomous Being, Rosenthal confronts her ambivalence towards her femininity, her reluctance to be a mother, her physical self-loathing. The dialogue is excruciating, enacting and revealing the etymological linkage of agony with agon—the contest, debate, conflict—that has been at the heart of drama since Aeschylus.

The supercontinent that birthed our world, and the internal monsters that cripple our spiritual lives: locating herself between these two truths, Rosenthal starts digging up—literally digging up—buried parts of herself, doing so on behalf of all of us, her spectators as well as her conspecifics.

Long before the facts of global warming had reached the levels of cultural awareness they occupy today, long before scientists proposed this geological era be called the "Anthropocene Age" in recognition of the staggering effects that the activities and behavior of one species—ours—on the geophysical conditions of the planet, Rosenthal was making art about the ecological emergency that our species has brought upon itself and on countless others. Pangaean Dreams makes Rosenthal a progenitor of what is now just being formulated as "Anthropocenic art." From the start of her career she has intuited the potential for live performance not only to discuss environmental concerns but rather to be ecological. The expressive and sensory powers of the artist's body are always, in Rosenthal's work, explicitly tuned to ecological frequencies, to the co-lives of humans with animals, plants, minerals, climates, lands, seas, caverns, tectonic plates.

The ecological paradigm she favors—Gaia, the living earth—no longer has much scientific standing, but it remains an extremely powerful metaphor for ecoperformance, enabling a "strategic anthropomorphism" that imaginatively ascribes agency to the non-human world: an essential first step away from the instrumentalized view of nature as "dead matter" that has underwritten the past century of disastrous ecological exploitation. In this and other works, Rosenthal rages against that latter view and the atrocities it has perpetrated on the world. Her fury, however, is balanced by her adoration of the earth and her faith in its ultimate power and wisdom. The dialectic of outrage and conviction is powerfully performative, opening up a space of knowing and feeling differently about our being as a species among others, as inhabitants of a more-than-human world. This is the notional space she describes at the end of the piece, when she claims that a "Pangaea of the mind" is coming into being today, as we humans become take on board the idea (a fundamentally anthropocenic one) that every hurt on [Earth's] body will reverberate on our own nervous system, our diplomatic system, our economic system, our communication system because we share her nervous system, her respiration, her metabolism, her digestive tract."


Bibliography

Jeanie Forte (1985) "Rachel Rosenthal: Feminism and performance art." Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory

Rachel Rosenthal (2001). Rachel's Brain and Other Storms. Edited and with Commentaries by Una Chaudhuri. Continuum.

Rachel Rosenthal (2005). Rachel Rosenthal (Art+Performance). Edited by Moira Roth. PAJ Publications.

Eleanor Hartney (2014), "Art for the Anthropocene Era." Art in America. February 2014. http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/magazine/art-for-the-anthropocene-era/

Carrie Rohman, "Effacing the Human: Rachel Rosenthal, Rats and Shared Creative Agency." Performing Animality: Animals in Performance Practices. Ed. Lourdes Orozco and Jennifer Parker-Starbuck. New York: Palgrave/Macmillan. Forthcoming 2014.





2/4/14 7:25 PM