Touching tongues

“Meeting the Beast” at the St. Lawrence

By Chris Thompson

“Meeting the Beast” is at the St. Lawrence Arts and Community Center, November 29 through December 2. Call (207) 775-1248, or Susan Bickford at (207) 846-9096.

BEASTLY: an example of what you’ll find at the St. Lawrence next week.

It may be more than an interesting coincidence that we celebrate the French tongue for its unmatched capacity for two kinds of seductive speech: the amorous and the philosophical.

In one dialogue, the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze described his early career as something that for lack of better English words could be called a romantic fling with the Western philosophical pantheon. “What got me through that period,” he said, “was conceiving of the history of philosophy as a kind of ass-fuck, or, what amounts to the same thing, an immaculate conception. I imagined myself approaching an author from behind and giving him a child that would indeed be his but would nonetheless be monstrous.”

While this might strike many of us as a troubling way to picture that typically rarified activity known as philosophy, and while it might leave some philosophers feeling somewhere between seduced and debauched, it asks some important questions: Should thinking be free from seduction? What kind of thoughts could we have if we thought of thinking as an act that, like sex, blends ethics, aesthetics, and erotics? Can thinking be an unsafe activity? What is the relationship between safe thinking and thinking ourselves to be safe, both in our heads and in the world around us?

An upcoming collaboration of over a dozen performers, organized by local artist Susan Bickford, experiments with a range of artistic responses to these questions. Billed with a title that comes close to a manifesto — “Meeting the Beast: An evening of interdisciplinary performance: movement, installation, sound and video projection, in which beauty comes face to face with itself” — the project seeks to translate the idea of a dialogue with many participants into a multimedia conversation.

Any face-to-face discussion operates not just through words but also through body language, visual and olfactory cues, shifts in temperature and mood of the space and the people in it. And so “Meeting the Beast” will stage a face-to-face encounter between many participants, but also between their ways of working and responding to images, choreography, poetry, music, speech, the formidable “deep thoughts” of famous philosophers, and the amorously irreverent engagement with them.

The project began, not surprisingly, as a conversation. This past summer, having just completed her MFA degree, Bickford found herself at a party on a sultry July evening, fielding the Dustin Hoffman question: “So, Susan, now that you’ve graduated, what comes next?” Rather than let her dialogue with her well-meaning friend convince her to explore the financial possibilities of plastics, she decided to use it as an opportunity to explore the plastic possibilities of dialogue. She had been interested in orchestrating a “performance piece initiating from a text and involving a larger cast” and wanted this to be a kind of sculptural process that would “work in dialogue or collaboration with a larger group.”

Later that evening, she asked another friend, “between beers, which text was most interesting to him, in terms of dialogue. He suggested Emmanuel Levinas’s Totality and Infinity and I read it. I couldn’t help but notice some similarity in a long time favorite fairy tale of mine, Beauty and the Beast.”

And so began the conversational menage-a-trois with the philosopher and the fairy tale. In his book Totality and Infinity, first published in 1961, the Lithuanian-born French philosopher Levinas began a lifelong project that tried to establish ethics, the relationship between the self and the other, as the basis for philosophical thinking. He wrestled with the question of whether, if we are capable of really producing these things called “peace” and “justice,” they will come from the “war of all against all — or from the irreducible responsibility of the one for the other.”

Levinas chose the second approach, one that puts each of us personally responsible for all the rest of us. He argued that it is in the face-to-face encounter, faced with this other who always overflows whatever preconceived ideas we might hold about him or her, that we become directly aware of this responsibility.

The analogous lesson of Beauty and the Beast is that you can’t really love something unless you can let it go. In bringing together a range of talented artists and performers, and negotiating the demands of overlapping media and various visions of how they ought to interlace, the participants have had to work to observe this lesson. From its conception, this labor of love has been as much a process of letting go of good ideas as it has been one of sharing them.

On opening night, the piece begins with Miss Maine body builder Marcea Anna Segal hauling on a sack of potatoes, and washing and cutting them in preparation for a stew. It ends with a video projection of a young girl singing the words, half of them improvised, to “This Land is Your Land,” which she learned in elementary school in the days following September 11. The multimedia tapestry linking these two poetic fragments, ruminating on life, love, beauty, and horror in our time, is still being woven through the dialogue between its participants.

Says Bickford: “Making conversation is an art, listening, finding a thread, waiting your turn, speaking, listening again, overlapping, butting in, and sometimes screaming for attention. There is so much more, it is infinite.”

Chris Thompson can be reached at xxtopher@hotmail.com