Hroses, An Affront to Reason: When a text loses the performance.

Photo Barb Gray

Nick Di Gaetano and Katie Smith

Studio A at Arts Court is an open and flexible space that allows for multiple relationships between performers and an audience. In this production, the audience surrounds the acting space, which occupies a large area in the middle of the room. A tarpaulin painted a dry sandy colour is spread out on the floor and at one end of the space we are greeted by a large, solid form with four strong appendages, a back and a head shaped object. One or two people can sit comfortably on its back. It is not supposed to imitate a horse , obviously, but it does suggests a horse-like form,  that is lifted up at various moments of the performance, and set down  on different spots of the acting space.

The performance begins when Katie Swift (Lily), tells us she has had her head cut off and she tries then to define the idea of decapitation. Then there is a brief discussion about the notion of “hrose”…pronounced “horse” but the word, as we are told is totally arbitrary and not related to any fixed system of language that we know.   I wondered exactly how much of a linguistic background the writer had.  Mainly however, Lily is in a space above ground that has been destroyed. Is this the aftermath of a terrible war? Perhaps. It could be the remains of the earth after many years of slow disintegration of the human race and the rise of technology. The rise of Terminator and the era of the great machine?  In any case there she is alone, on this sometimes desolate  space.

First thing, we must note the title. It warns us that we are not in the representation of a linear world. There is no temporal chronology. “Reason” is being questioned, even insulted (in a manner of speaking).  The first element that defines this performance event is not time, it’s  language! And immediately we hear that her system of references to the world are no longer ours. What is decapitation? What is that “hrose” before her..The young girl, dressed in tattered jeans and dirty shirt, seeks definitions, seeks to understand her situation  because she is dying. She mentions the state of ruins around her, she mentions that the ground has opened up  and a man has appeared. The “hrose” is there but she also tells us about that man who appeared and is somehow related to her personal history.Which returns in a  series of trembling flashbacks.

From a theatrical perspective, this young person played by Katie Swift  addresses us directly. Therefore she is consciously performing a monologue and acting as a speaking voice in some artificially constructed space which is the theatre. Thus, there is no attempt to create an  illusion of reality.  This is not the fourth wall space. She is in her own very personal and artificially constructed world that belongs specifically to the theatre (Artaud speaks of such a concept)  and although she speaks directly to us, she makes no attempt to help us understand who she is or what has happened or how we are to understand her world.

At that point my own imagination took over and started to fill in the blanks and the first inkling of a light that came to mind  was  René Girard, the cultural anthropologist  ( La Violence et le Sacré ) who had an important impact on the way we understand certain relations in the word. A death is possibly the sign of a birth of a new world order. All great  cosmogonies, were initiated by a ritual sacrifice of an individual that set off a new system of beliefs, a new way of seeing the world. And so, here we are….

Lily has had her head cut off and the new order unfolds in front of (her) us.  Her recollections or narrative if you will, start to clarify things as a male form, appears in the acting space.   He is also in tattered clothes but he has emerged from the underground and we can  thus  understand that there are two levels of existence in this world in ruins that have established some form of collaboration. Those who live thanks to agriculture or mechanical production, or who spend time refining sugar in huge refineries on the  surface . Then, there are  those who mine  the sugar from the depths of the underground.  And, in this space where the two realities meet, the horse plays a significant symbolic role as to how they will negotiate their relationship, and share that space.

In this new order, we have almost no references on which to anchor our imagination but Jill Connell wants us to try.  I would not call  this performance a   poetic  experience because poetry always has an  emotional or lyrical side to it, since it uses  language to  create images, or combinations of  sounds and rhythms (pleasant or otherwise) , or grating sounds and new rhythms. Yet, there was no  research on the form of language in this text.It speaks about language but does not do anything with it.   This is not poetry.  It is a description of a state of being that seems unrecognizable and that lacks points of reference. It slides by and nothing remains…perhaps an alternative world that we have to think about…

There are elements that suggest  great passion.  The  man wants her to come into the underground but she wants to stay on the surface. There is the presence of a 300 year old grandmother who dominates her life. There is a sense that linear  time has lost its function as the lights flash, a noise in the background growls and suddenly, the pair is projected into another time frame  but the conversation continues without any interruption. The new order is unstable but still an enormous continuum that has radically  transformed human relationships, human communication, notions of time, and much more. The world is populated by moths that die and are reborn and even become a threat, a reference to the famous butterfly effect of chaos theory.  Parallel universes, alternative worlds  that play out against each other.
I found myself thinking of John Mighton’s play Possible Worlds but of course  Mighton’s play takes into account the  dramaturgy, the fact that the conditions of performance constitute the essence of what the play is all about , but this does not seem to concern Jill Connell.    Hroses does not give us the impression that the author is very focussed on dramaturgy although she certainly appears to be interested in Chaos theory, but as an idea, not as a dramaturgical strategy.  She is focussed  on theories of life, on mathematical equations , on notions of  time and the future of the world but she has not given much thought about the way to express these  ideas through a theatrical form.  As a result, this  one hour and ten minutes was very tedious.

The  “performance” was directed by Emily Pearlman and I could see that there were attempts to go beyond the words and elicit some spatial interaction that would give this event some life beyond the page.

There is a confrontation, there is suggestion of passion because they raise their voices. There are what appear to be heated exchanges but they are directorial choices, nothing that is the result of any human motivation . There is even an expression of desire but it remains extremely intellectualized . There are red lights, and the flashing spots on the ceiling that at times give us the impression we are perhaps in a mine, and mention is made of the air ducts .  It is true that human interaction has radically changed within  this ruined world but I needed more elements to understand why it should interest me as a performance! 

I found that certain moments of interaction between the man and the woman held my attention, but the vision of this new order of life did not captivate me at all. Perhaps we are expected to read the text before seeing the performance but if it is theatre, this should not be necessary because the text should normally be  clarified by the performance due to the  work of an insightful director with bodies and voices in space. (with all my apologies to Peter Brook who would have been horrified by this wordy event !)

Hroses:  An Affront to Reason was just the opposite. It was not an “affront to reason”, it was , on the contrary,  too preoccupied with ideas, even though it pretended to reject a rational vision of the world. There is an uncomfortable confusion here between the content and the form, that was made even worse by the fact that the performance text never materialized.This could  be a more recent version of  post-dramatic theatre because  even though there is a text,  it is not a dramatic text. so I wonder where Jill Connell goes  from here? 

In any case, Hroses, An Affront to Reason was a dilemma, to say the least.

It continues until March 16  at  the Ottawa Dance Directive, Studio A at Arts Court:

It plays at  8pm and 2pm on Weekends.

By Jill Connell

Directed by Emily Pearlman.

A coproduction of Evolution Theatre and Mi Casa Theatre.