Tanzquartier Wien

You immediately feel transported to the “Wuthering Heights” of English writer Emily Brontë when Mark Tompkins, sitting at a square table, appoints himself a weathermaker. He moves his hands and, in an instant, a snowstorm sweeps across the white table’s surface and you can hear the window shutters rattle, just like in Brontë’s novel. When a cold front catches up with a warm front and mixes with it, meteorologists call this an occlusion. But Tompkins has seated himself under the table in the blink of an eye. 1 table and 6 chairs make for a cave without an exit. The chairs had been standing in the auditorium only a second ago. But: Tompkins isn’t chained at the legs and neck like the cave dwellers in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave; and a chair is a movable object.

“Mother’s high heels inflict wounds on the flesh”, is a quote from STAYIN ALIVE. It appears that the conglomerate of autobiographical and fictional material means that Mark Tompkins acts as his own narrator. He considers memories of his youth as “emotional blackmail”. This is in contrast to Hans Blumenberg, who postulates that “memory comes like help from above, to save from a nothingness which nobody can pull themselves back out of, and to return the self to itself”. (Cave Exits)

“Because his memory is a clothesline”, Beckett wrote about Proust. Similarly, Tompkins feels his way through the mementos scattered on the floor, “the images of his dirty laundry from the past are liberated and unfailingly compliant servants of his recollection needs”. (Samuel Beckett, Proust) And so a blow-up sex doll is covered by a shimmering green dress which Mark Tompkins will soon put on, just like the tiger-striped high heels. Next to these items lie a wig of long red hair, red ankle boots, a red, heart-shaped tin box, knives, forks, spoons, a hairbrush, cuddly toys and so on, all amid and along a labyrinthine formation of belt barriers. My son, who was sitting next to me during the performance, declared the objects, arranged as if for a still life, to be “very special love stories”. “My English is terrible”, Jean-Louis Badet, the “painter” of this still life, confessed at the beginning of the performance. “Painter-arranger” would be a more accurate term, actually, because he has arranged the scattered objects in the stage set like Samuel van Hoogstraten. I had the opportunity to spend over an hour on my own with the stage set before the performance and was reminded of van Hoogstraten’s trompe-l’oeil still life[1] from 1664.

Placed on a silver tray on the floor are – no, not Jochanaan’s head, and Mark Tompkins isn’t Salome either – a plastic bottle (blue, white screw cap) of Solán de Cabras[2], a hair tonic of the Seborin[3] brand (plastic bottle, brown, ribbed), a Bekra Mineral[4] shoe deodoriser (aerosol can, blue), a tub (red) of Brylcreem Original[5] (content: 250 ml). “These are not original props; they are rehearsal props”, Frans Poelstra, the director of the piece, said when he found me kneeling with pad and pencil in front of the tray after the performance. Come to think of it: Poelstra had a mother as well, in whose stockings, dress, shoes and feather boa he likes to dress up from time to time. The song he sings when he’s doing so – not tonight – I cannot recall. Tompkins’ mother’s supposedly favourite song, on the other hand, stuck in my head long after he had disappeared through the belt-barrier labyrinth, the tiger-striped faux fur jacket elegantly draped over his shoulder. “I am what I am” still sounds in my ear. “And what I am needs no excuses.” In my mind’s eye I see Mark Tompkins ascending iron steps to board the next plane while I go back to my mother’s house in my thoughts. She sprightly moves the iron, the broom, the vacuum cleaner, the tea towels, the blankets, the cooking spoon, herself and who knows what else through the rooms, glides through and over dust, fat, crumples, rubbish, dirt and icy raindrops as if on Teflon soles. No, she doesn’t! “All that is left is the motionless body / spread across the bed […] / Nothing matters anymore”, Mila Haugová writes in the “Slow Archeress” collection of poems, and ends the poem with a quote from Hölderlin: “But people cannot believe that someone they love is dead.”

My mum isn’t dead yet but, even so, I’m not feeling too good myself either.

“It takes children a long time to understand that they have a body.” (Michel Foucault, “The Heterotopias. The Utopian Body”) It took Mark Tompkins many years before he knew that he had his mother’s body. And this is only the beginning. Because, as I mentioned earlier, STAYIN ALIVE is a Sneak Preview with rehearsal props.

“The Greek word for the body is used by Homer exclusively to refer to corpses”, Michel Foucault adds. And this marks the end of the torrent of references generated by STAYIN ALIVE. “I felt left alone at the end. Still, it was beautiful”, my son Paul remarked after the performance. The extensive eye contact with the artist made him nervous. But that’s his problem.

Julia Deutschbauer born in Klagenfurt in 1961, is a visual and poster artist, performer, film-maker and author living in Vienna and Berlin. He has been operating the Bibliothek ungelesener Bücher (Library of Unread Books) since 1997.

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[1] upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/

commons/6/69/Tromp-l’oeil_Still-Life_1664_Hoogstraeten.jpg

[2] The water that flows from a single spring, Solan de Cabras, is more than water.

[3] Fast, effective and simple – SEBORIN: fighting dandruff and hair loss for over 70 years.

[4] Say “goodbye” to odorous shoes with the mineral shoe deodoriser by BEKRA!

[5] High shine, light hold. BRYLCREEM shone on the heads of British pilots in the 1940s