“Theatre Allows for Escaping Westernized Unity of Humanity” – Justyna Jakubiec

Western understanding of humanity has permeated into different layers of cultural and societal considerations. The western master narrative has turned the understanding of what it means to be a human into the myth of “original unity, fullness,” stable and not subjected to changes (Haraway 2016, 8). Such a way of reasoning may result in ceasing to reconsider what being a human means, even if the times that humanity is part of are constantly changing. It may result, but does not have to: articles and books focusing on denaturalization of mostly Western reasoning methods are piling up.

However promising they might be, the aforementioned written works do not always eventuate in wide-reaching and tactile results. Nevertheless, challenging master narratives is very much worthy of consideration, also outside of the academic world. It seems that Manuela Infante, working as a theatre director, is in favor of such thinking. Her Estado Vegetal beautifully engages with the notion of working with entities that are radically different (or rather seem to be different) from humans. Although an offline viewing of the play in the year 2020 was not possible, an online version does enable the viewer to engage in it (CIM/Ae 2017).

The play can be analyzed from various points of view: one could interpret it as a work aiming to escape the master narrative by placing a human in the center. While Western thinking is somehow unconsciously accepted, Estado Vegetal appeals to notions that escape human consciousness. Such notions refer to, for example, human perception of the staging of theatre performances. The fact that lights follow actors’ dramatic movements on stage is rarely noted: but it is so thanks to human-centered thinking. When plants become the center around which the play revolves, this fact ceases to be obvious. As plants follow the light, the actress who creates many figures in Estado Vegetal, does the same. She is subjected to the working of light beams and escapes thinking that unquestionably puts humans in the center. She changes her personality by blurring the division between human and non-human: she respects, perceives, and becomes a plant herself.

Estado Vegetal can be understood as a process in the making. The given, namely the human being as a center of a theatre play, becomes unstable and fluid. What is considered as unquestionable, or as a given, ceases to be so. The Western master narrative, running on finite entities and foregrounding the human, starts to tremble. Human consciousness is appealed to in order to show how much escapes it. It is possible precisely thanks to paying attention to behaviors that are typical for some non-human entities, but which are not that obvious when applied to humans.

References

• Haraway, Donna. 2016. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In Manifestly Haraway, 5-90. University of Minnesota Press.
• CIM/Ae. 2017. “ESTADO VEGETAL de Manuela Infante.” Accessed November 17, 2020. Vimeo video, 1:21:39. https://vimeo.com/252358003.

Image credits: Jasmin Raffaele, Pixabay photograph, March 21, 2019.