Actions Do The Talking As Audience Asked To Leave

In the cramped entrance to the performance space where experimental theatre director Hillar Liitoja is mounting his current show, there is a sign: “Don’t talk to Hillar unless he talks to you. Don’t ask him any questions.” Before the show can begin, the stage manager goes around with a cup and silently indicates to anyone chewing gum to spit it out. As the show reaches its close, he approaches audience members one by one and firmly points them in the direction of the door. Apparently, in the eyes of Liitoja and his DNA theatre company, an audience can be a real pest.

The artistic attitude is an unattractive one, but it can produce some interesting results. Liitoja, whose previous works include a cycle inspired by the poems of Ezra Pound and an all-day Hamlet, turns here to Antonin Artaud, the French surrealist whose theatre of cruelty sought to break down the conventional barriers between stage and life. Punning on Artaud’s collection of essays entitled The Theatre and Its Double, Liitoja calls this show Artaud and his Doubles: Prelude – Can’t. (Subsequent parts will also be staged, starting in the fall.)

This prelude contains no text, just movement and sound. In a bare and barely renovated space in the garment district, a cast of 10 actors and dancers walk, pace, run and gesture. Sometimes their movements are abstract: arms swing, a hand is pointed to the head. Sometimes they are specific: A man spoons grain into a jar; a woman hurls books against a wall. The women often expose their chests if not their entire bodies; the men wear skirts or dresses. In a hugely detailed panorama of choreographed movements, they become increasingly loud and frantic until, after 90 minutes, the audience is asked to leave.

To the impatient observer, the abstract accumulation of movement and gesture may look random and meaningless, but it is not. At its most engaging, it has the visual imagery and physical power of good contemporary dance; at its least, it washes over you the way classical music washes over the tone deaf. The point, however, is merely the frenetic activity that is wholly engrossing to the performer, but inscrutable to the watcher. It never communicates emotion or idea; it is not about anything other than its experiment.

If that experiment asks questions about the nature of the relationship between performer and audience, it doesn’t ask them with much urgency, let alone offer any persuasive replies. For the barrier between stage and life to really break down, audiences would have to take as aggressive an attitude as Liitoja does: refuse to remain silent, refuse to spit out gum, refuse to leave. Since DNA discourages its audience, its experiment looks self-indulgent.

Kate Taylor

Globe and Mail, June 7, 1996

Audience Booted Out As Artaud Play Rages On

There’s a notice in the doorway of the Wellington Space, where Hillar Liitoja’s latest creation is exploring avant-garde ideas floated by notorious theatrical rebel Antonin Artaud.

It reads: “People with heart problems or epilepsy may find the performance stressful. If you choose to enter, be prepared to leave at any time.”

Perhaps the warning notice for Artaud and his Doubles: Prelude – Can’t should be amended to say: “People who watch this performance may well develop heart problems, epilepsy or possibly a multitude of other disorders.”

People should also be prepared for an unusual move by DNA’s Liitoja after 80 or so minutes of ritual.

I don’t as a rule reveal endings, but when the audience is evicted from the premises, doors slammed and bolts shot home to prevent it returning while the “play” rages on, it seems worth a mention.

The 10-member ensemble might have danced all night for all we know, ordered not to stop until Part 2 of this two-years-in-the-making project – Stupeydoop – arrives in the fall.

What’s happening here? If you know of Artaud, you’ll recall he was in the vanguard of the French revolt against theatrical tradition after World War I that led to such labels as cubism, constructivism, dada and surrealism – ideas that would break the hold of realism and develop new forms.

The troubled Artaud, forever battling drugs, booze, head pains and emotional instability, felt Western theatre was devoted to a narrow range of human experience. What mattered to him was the unconscious, where things that lead to hatred and conflict lurk. He maintained that theatre could provide a cathartic release from horror.

His mystical, visionary approach – adopted notably by Genet and Arrabal and successfully by Weiss (Marat/Sade) – operates on the senses in what later was called a “theatre of cruelty” that forced an audience to confront itself.

All this is real meat for Liitoja, who takes up Artaud’s preference for unconventional performance spaces, loud music that’s moving or dissonant and intermittent lighting and then jettisons language entirely in favour of symbolic gesture, movement, sound and rhythm.

Perhaps his meat is infected with mad cow disease.

In one memorable sentence, Artaud declared that theatre “has been created to drain abcesses collectively.”

You may well feel drained after the audience is “downsized” and you’ve experienced ear-splitting religious Bach and Bulgarian non-melodies, plus whirling dervish activity on the floor around a table, in the audience’s face and in corners of the rectangular room.

Anyway, my brain hurts.

You realize early that this is not your average linear plot – the space lit by nine candles and a lampstand, dresses on hangers, odd objects scattered around and Tracy Wright arriving while balancing an egg in her left eye-socket.

The other nine barefoot performers include supple dancers Aviva Chernick and Jacqueline Casey, ballerina Angela Philip and the striking figures of Clinton Walker and Mark Lonergan.

They do a lot of things the immediate meaning of which is likely to be elusive, though they’re obviously in the business of creating mood.

A substance is spooned into a jug, a cloth unravelled, a crystal ball and telescope peered into, a finger dipped into wine.

Limbs thrash the air, gestures are quick, artists sprint in circles, tiptoe. They stare. Breasts are beaten and bared, spoons clashed, a bowl stirred, books tossed – and was that someone frying and egg over there?

This blooming, buzzing confusion represents something, the over-all sense that a state of serenity is collapsing into anxiety, violence and terror with foot-tapping, cries, moans, hisses, distorted Bach and loud recorded bangs on the soundtrack.

Yet the presentation mostly fails to connect, its challenge to theatrical boundaries leaving just a vague and unspecific aura that never crystalizes into something unforgettable.

This busy artistic no-man’s-land might suggest you’re in an asylum or monastery, at the Inquisition, possibly visiting a ballet training school – in any case, in a place where you relate to the hallucinations of painters Dali, Munch, Picasso and Bosch.

Drama critics could be considered fantasists who persist in getting themselves trapped in someone else’s fantasy.

At least Liitoja sets you free.

Geoff Chapman

The Toronto Star, June 1, 1996

Liitoja Way Cruel

Experiencing Hillar Liitoja’s homage/deconstruction of theatre force Antonin Artaud is like being set down in the lunatic asylum of Charenton, à la Peter Weiss’ Marat/Sade.

As 10 performers whirl, dig, clap and swoop around the Wellington Space, the audience is under increasingly violent and decreasingly rational visual and aural assault, the latter largely from a deafeningly loud degenerating recording of a Bach chorale.

Perhaps Liitoja is trying to give viewers a sense of Artaud’s own madhouse incarceration, or to explore the artist’s difficulty in preaching his concepts or to let us know firsthand what theatre of cruelty is about. Or all three.

But control is the final issue here, and it’s all in Liitoja’s possession. We may descend into a horrific vision of hell but are spared its final moments by the dictatorial hand of the creator.

The artistic concern seems to be to alienate rather than to involve. If that’s Artaudian, it’s also theatrically close to being flayed. I can do without the experience.

Jon Kaplan

Now Magazine, June 6-12, 1996