By Eduardo Carli de Moraes for A Casa de Vidro
From Den Haag, Nederlands, January 13th 2024
The intersections of Art and the Anthropocene are increasingly populated [1]. More and more creative people are daring to inhabit these places where artistic expression and scientific endeavour come together, intermingle and generate hybrids. We are seeing an upsurge in the emergence of new artforms that deal with our current planetary predicament, the so-called Anthropocene, an epoch defined by Rosi Braidotti as the “convergence of the Fourth Industrial Revolution with the man-instigated Sixth Mass Extinction” (read more on Harvard University) [2].
Lindertje Mans’ The Gaia Hypothesis is one excellent especimen for our appreciation. This article aims to put it under critical scrutinity in conditions that deserve underlining: I’ve seen it staged in <Den Haag (The Hague), Nederlands, in January 13th 2024, at Het National Theathe>, and decided I should write about it as soon as possible, which means the next day. I felt I had to rush with the scribblings you are currently reading in order to be able to capture in writing some of sensorial aspects of the aesthetic experiences before they faded into oblivion.
In simpler terms, I’m writing this still under the influence of a very recent contact with this impressive artwork, and didn’t give it enough time to grow on me. I didn’t let it settle down and dive into my inner oceans, into the sub and un conscioness. Hopefully, the process of writing this text will allow this afterlife of the play – its resonance in the subjective realm – to be an acelerated process and to generate a stream of consciousness that readers might embark on.
This has been aptly called a “one-woman electro-opera” (Volkskrant) [3] – initially I felt the term opera was a missnaming, for the obvious reason that various voices are required for a musical piece to be called operistic, polyphony being of its essence, but then I realized that The Gaia Hypothesis carries within itself this multiplicity of voices, even tough interpreted by one artist – it’s an electrified synthpop cyber-opera which gives voice to fishes and cells, to spacecrafts and dyonisian dancers, to the seas and skies, all within the confines of a theater.
The producers describe it thus: the play is about “life, death, fish, stars, Elon Musk, loneliness and connection. The Gaia Hypothesis is a guided meditation, a theatrical fashion fantasu, a philosophical experiment and a deeply personal essay all at once” [4]. The performance by Lindertje Mans is quite astonishing: as actress, singer and dancer she exudes exuberance, self-confidence and ability to travel from delicacy to savagery. She truly does conduce us into meditation, guiding our imagination while she embodies a sequence of metamorphosis.
She commands us – “close your eyes and imagine…” – to be witnesses to a 37-year-old woman while she changes into a fish of the deep sea, then to a russian space shuttle headed to the moon, then to a human femalee reproductive cell, to finally leads us to a frenzied dionysian dance in the face of death. She changes her “mesmerizing costumes” in plain sight of the audience, with no recourse to backstage dressing-rooms.
The main creative process at play here is of course the impersonation of the non-human – a figure of speech known as prosopopeia. She uses verbal language – in this case, the english idiom – to try to speak for those who don’t speak any human language. It’s a procedure that could be summed up in this formula: if a fish could speak, what would it say? In the preceding formula, you can exchange fish for other entities of the immense non-human realm. The fish of the deep seas adresses itself to the audience in a first person account – and this will re-occur in the next characters, the Luna space shuttle, the human cell, and the witchy dancer that is about to die tonight.
I love the delicacy through which the artist evokes grains of dust or biofosforescent fish, makin’ they appear on our imagination even tough they’re invisible on stage. The Gaia Hypothesis is deeply evocative and, if you abandon yourself to it and play along with what Lindertje is proposing, you can truly take off from the theather seat and embark on quite a cosmic trip. This is perhaps the greatest virtue of the play: a woman, with the movements of her body confined to a rectangle of a few meters, is able to take us on a cosmic journey: we dive into the depths of the ocean floor, and we rise to the topmost layers of the sky, and we venture inwards as a miniaturized tripper into a human belly, and we do it all without moving our butts from our seats.
The Gaia Hypotheses hints at the future of theather – no longer a medium for chamber pieces, set in confined spaces, like it’s often the case in Ibsen, Strindberg or Williams. It’s theather that can evoke the cosmos inside a room, that can take us trippin’ to the extremes of the Earth, and beyond our planet to outer space. I also admire how embodied this play is – metamorphosis, after all, one of its main themes, is always a bodily change, a material transfomation. This is theather rooted in biology and with deep philosophical remarks.]
Lindertje Mans was bright and brilliant in her performance of these embodied transmutations – and many moments of humour also emerge, especially when she becomes the Luna space shuttle and starts to enumerate all the trash that’s been orbiting both the Moon and the Earth – including two fighting billionaries (probably Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, trying to exchange punchs and kicks in each other despite the lack of common earthly gravity).
It’s funny and bittersweet, adressing ecological devastation and the matter of garbage in such a way as to underline that the Anthropocene is also an epoch were human filth fills up not only spaceship Earth, with plastic waste becoming the Seventh Continent, but also our trash is now on orbit. It reminded of ironies conveyed by Father John Misty‘s brilliant song (“there’s no place for human existence like right here / on this bright blue marble orbited by trash / Man, there’s no beating that”). [5]
When the Lunar shuttle writes a letter to “James Lovelock” (“Dear James…”), irony takes over, and also sci-fi imagination: an artifact of human techno-science, a creation of the homo sapiens species, adresses itself to the scientist most renowed for the Gaia theory (whatever happened to Lynn Margulis, by the way, the co-author of the theory, un-mentioned during the play?).
It’s a very promising method of human creativity in the Anthropocene: the new phase of prosopopeia, which encompasses also the realm of cyborgs, robots, machines. Of course it has precedents: the androids in Blade Runner or HAL in 2001: Space Odyssey where also experiments in machinic post-human prosopopeia. The Gaia Hypothesis explores daringly this field.
We could say, with Adriana Cavarero, that entities that have phoné – they can emmit sounds – but are devoid of logos – they can’t articulate speech with words and phrases – are the ones that proposopeia envisages [6]. When a human artist creates through prosopopeia, he is pretending that an entity that in reality has only phoné is endowed with human lógos. The scenario now gets further complicated with the emergence of computers that can write, speak, “think”, learn. Besides the human organic logos, we have now a man-made or man-derived machinic logos which is also being the source of human creative endeavours of cyber-prosopopeia.
The music in The Gaia Hypothesis is fueled by synth-pop, and sounds good enough, with several lyrical gems (it will be soon be available to hear on Spotify – when it does, the link will be available here). Soundtrack for The Gaia Hypothesis is a collaboration between Lindertje Mans and composer Roald van Oosten (Instagram – YouTube). With 2 albums released – 2016’s Oh Dark Hundred and 2017’s A Stir In The Air, Roald van Oosten’s abilities as singer-songwriter is noteworthy and deserves some attentive listening.
The main problem with the music lies in the comparison with similar but way-better-musically endeavours – especially Björk‘s Biophilia and Grimes‘ Miss Anthropocene. I don’t mean to be demeaning, because I’ve truly enjoyed the music here, but the task of the cultural critic is not the one of being confined in praise – we have to be the courage to be disliked while trying to communicate the work’s defaults.
For future projects, I would recommend the artists to consider learning more lessons with the truly masterful, wonderfully sang, played and filmed Biophilia by Björk, which has a vast array of timbres and instruments. I can’t help buth think that The Gaia Hypothesis could benefit from a live band and perhaps from choral voices. I also think further dialogue with the aesthetic practices of wild wild Grimes could further enrich the musical pallette.
As for further constructive critique, I must say that the imaginary planet Daisy World didn’t go down well on my digestive system, my psyche’s stomach is having trouble with it. I couldn’t feel it was neither a good start for the play, nor that it makes a very good point, besides being literally so black and white. The video for it is also kitschy and may seem a little bit silly – it doesn’t lived up to The Gaia Hypothesis as a whole, it doesn’t do it justice. I’ll say more: if I hadn’t seen the play, and was trying to decide if it was worthwhile to spend dozens of euros and confront below zero temperatures to go watch it, and if I’ve been exposed only to the following video, I’d probably not even bothered to go to the theather at all.
The Daisy World phantasy portrays a cycle or a dialetical relation between white daisies and dark daisies, it’s true, but here there are no greys – worse, the whole colourfulness of biodioversity gets nullified. It’s simplistic, dualistic, unworthy of the complexities of Lovelock’s and Margulis’ theory. Also, daisies in this parable don’t relate with anything but the Sun, which is preposterous: the soil is occluded, as well as relationships with insects (such as bees) or other animals (cows or humans). It’s an imaginary world that seems devoid of ecosystems. Where are the fungi, the worms in the soil, other fauna and flora, in this imaginary world? Sorry, put it’s too poor also seen through the perspective of ecology as science.
Some may object to me – “what the hell, man! this is art, phantasy, imagination! it’s allowed to be a bit un-scientific, a bit schematic! look at the beautiful gestures! look at how it instigates the imagination to think about climate change and its relation to plants and oxygenation!”.
I would partialy agree, but my previous arguments still stand – even the realm of phantasy, especially after the groundbreaking and breathtaking works by Ursula K. Le Guin and Hayao Miyazaki, Daisy World is simply not good enough speculative fiction. It’s a mediocre start for a theather play that afterward gets better and better, diving into the deep seas and rising up to the skies, going way beyond kitschy white and black daisy-binarism.
This is, despite the flaws pointed above, an excellent piece of mindblowing theatre. It convinced me of an idea I’ve nurtured for a long time: there’s a lot of future for prosopopeia and for its fusion with cybernetics. Miayazaki, for instance, uses it profusely and with very astonishing results in his films. I’ve been nurturing the thought that the art of the Anthropocene includes prosopopeia as one of its main elements and there’s a good reason for that: we are urgently in need to go beyond the human perspective. We need artists that speak for trees, for fish, for cyborgs.
The narrow frame of humaness must be overcome. The Gaia Hypothesis has been called “a tantalizing posthumanist pop-opera, a sensual musical trip” (NRC), and this goes to the core of the matter: posthumanist art means, for me, to de-center from always-human-perspective, to reach for the overcoming of anthropocentrism. And The gaia Hypothesis does it marvelously, and it has left me with a desire to watch it again and to engage in dialogue with its creators.
Lindertje states at the Firma NES (theather group she co-founded) website, about the artwork whose direction and scenography are done by Thomas Schoots: “The Gaia Hypothesis gives me a new perspective on my place on the planet. In the seventies, the hypothesis was received with skepticism, but it has only become more urgent since then, and is now on the basis of modern climate science. Apart from that, it is a personal way for me to explore my position in this world, as a single woman in her thirties: what do I need to feel connected? Do I need to reproduce in order to feel like I am truly a part of this world, or can I make kin with other beings?” [7]
Making kin with other beings, feel as truly part of this world, these are all tasks of the utmost relevance and urgency. Donna Haraway has been writing extensively about it in very inspiring texts. It also leaves strong marks in the theoretical works by Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers, Deborah Danowski, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. This mindblowing artwork performed by Lindertje Mans comes as another proof and symptom that the anciet Greek myth of Gaia is alive and kicking.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
[1] See, for instance, Aesthetics of the Anthropocene. CPCL – The European Journal of Creative Practices in Cities and Landscapes, 2022. URL: https://cpcl.unibo.it/issue/view/1151?fbclid=IwAR1WW20W5S9dkC822Uem-EWmKTwOmF3KN1dLwccwr1_CIT4li__PwKrI62Q
[2] BRAIDOTTI, Rosi. Quoted by Charles Shafaieh, 2019. In: “We were never considered fully human, so why should we care about this crisis?” Rosi Braidotti on collective positivity in the face of human extinction. Harvard University. URL: https://www.gsd.harvard.edu/2019/03/we-were-never-considered-fully-human-so-why-should-we-care-about-this-crisis-rosi-braidotti-on-collective-positivity-in-the-face-of-human-extinction/
[3] VOLKSKRANT. URL: https://www.volkskrant.nl/cultuur-media/the-gaia-hypothesis-imponeert-bovenal-met-de-muziek-en-de-kostuums~b13dbb26
[4] FIRMAMES.NL. The Gaia Hypotheses official synopsis.
[5] FATHER JOHN MISTY. “Things It Would Have Been Helpful to Know Before the Revolution”. Track 3 of the Pure Comedy album, Sub Pop Records, 2017. Lyrics. This landmark musical journey has also generated a short film.
[6] CAVAVERO, Adriana. For More than One Voice – Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression. SUP, 2005. https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=5895.
[7] MANS, Lindertje. Quote taken from FIRMAMES.NL: https://firmames.nl/projecten/the-gaia-hypothesis/
The photographs of the play used in this post are from Joris Jan Bos.
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THE GAIA HYPOTHESIS: the cosmos fits inside a theater room in Lindertje Mans' one-woman cyber-opera produced by Firma MES. Read the article by Eduardo Carli de Moraes at A Casa de Vidro: https://t.co/kw9Ctdf3l8 – Seen at Het Nationale Theater, Deen Haag, January 12th 2024.
— A Casa de Vidro (@acasadevidro) January 14, 2024
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Scientists Debate Gaia: The Next Century | |||
Author(s): | Stephen H. Schneider, James R. Miller, Eileen Crist, Penelope J. Boston, James Lovelock, Lynn Margulis, Pedro Ruiz Torres |
Publicado em: 14/01/24
De autoria: Eduardo Carli de Moraes
A Casa de Vidro Ponto de Cultura e Centro de Mídia