Monster Maketh Man
The premier of FRANK by Cherish Menzo opened not even 150 metres away from a BIPoC community organised vigil commemorating the life of Lorenz A. shot from behind by police in Oldenburg, Germany, days before. As someone working at the intersection of art and social justice, I couldn’t even have staged the significance of that proximity in itself, let alone emphasise how urgent artistic expressions like this are. FRANK is a commentary on – but also a means to even fathom processing – the violence happening to Black bodies on a global scale. This timely and painfully relevant performance wasn’t any harder to comprehend than what was taking place just outside of the comfort of the MuseumsQuartier.
In primary school I got into trouble because a young white girl complained that I pulled a face that scared her. It was true, I did pull a face. I had noticed that she would often stop and stare at me in the playground – and well, we were kids and I chose to respond in this way to her invasion of my space. But the accusations of her being scared of me went so far that the headmistress of my school called in my mother – a single parent who definitely had better, more urgent uses of her already limited time – to explain how frightening this was for the girl and how I should stop immediately or I would face punishment or suspension. Neither leaving the school nor being expelled were viable options being in a low-income household, so it was clear I had to stop treating the girl as my peer, as my equal who also had a part to play in this “spiel” and instead see her as a victim of what was widely accepted as my “scariness”. So it was a fear of hers that haunted me for years after.
I was reminded of that incident for the first time in a very long time whilst watching FRANK. The performers’ grimaces, like the one I had made, if deemed “horrific” have undergone a different kind of distortion by a certain kind of monster. These are expressions of pain, anguish, being taunted and terrorised, hounded, surveilled, hurt, harmed. I made a note on my phone quickly as my partner and I left the show, which had circled around in my head the whole time: “The horror is not us, it is happening to us. The horror isn’t in the monster, it’s in the maker”.
It is no coincidence that centuries later people still confuse the monster, who quite fittingly remains unnamed in Mary Shelley’s novel, with (Victor) Frankenstein, the scientist and creator of the creature. Monstrosities are constantly carried out against Black bodies – and let’s be clear: disproportionately more against dark, disabled, queer, trans Black bodies – as a result of this same root: the arrogance and ignorance of white supremacy. Our Black lives are too often taken up into the hands of those who determine at will whether we are subhuman or superhuman and both of those perspectives can have fatal consequences. This is violence disguised and therefore justified as fear.
FRANK plays with temporality to emphasise this. We get moments of slow motion, of silence, of still in between upbeat, joyful, vibrant ones to fathom, if we can, the constant glitches and breakdowns in an already broken system. The rupture of Black life is so quick and violent we are left spinning, suspended, in shock. The whole stage is set up like an operation table exposed to onlooking patients through transparent hospital bed curtains in Frankenstein’s surgery theatre. The plastic, the white floors, the uniform of nurses – or are they undertakers? – bury their own, then form the dismembered and re-membered unit of patch-ons. The displaced and haphazard movements of the performers in this formation is stunning and a reminder of how Black people are seen as a homogenous, dispensable, replaceable, divided and conquered whole, awkwardly pieced together through the lens of racialisation, a gaze they never asked for.
As a British Jamaican, the a cappella, slowed down rendition of Sister Nancy’s groundbreaking BAM BAM felt eerily familiar, yet different: like it would fit better as a graveside song. Sound communicated the horrors we were witnessing, maybe more insidiously than what we saw. The shuffles of the feet of that death march in repeat around the stage were nestled in between throngs of bass which made the walls speak back. And the play spoke. The words on screen in English, French and finally patois/pidgin were one last attempt to speak the unspeakable: they even killed a “pikin”, a child. This is for Lorenz A. and all the Black bodies suffering under various forms of genocide and psychological monstrosities carried out against us, but falsely name us monster.
Tonica Hunter (they/she) is a curator, lecturer and DJ originally from London and based in Vienna since 2014. Their work intersects curation (music, performance, discourse, visual media) and teaching with a special focus on art and applied social justice. Tonica Hunter’s work spans institutions and organisations such as the University of Music and Performing Arts (MDW), University of Applied Art Vienna (Angewandte), Ars Electronica, Wellenklænge, Wiener Festwochen, Österreichisches Museum für Schwarze Unterhaltung und Black Music and more. tonicahunter.com