Hunger Artist

Yesterday I saw at the Connelly Theater the amazing performance of actor and puppeteer Jonathan Levin in an adaptation inspired by Franz Kafka's novel A Hunger Artist, dealing with the relationship of a strange kind of artist with the audience (1)

It's a long time that I was not so deeply impressed by the understanding of a great and enigmatic text, an essay in interpretation of an author whose oeuvre has become canonical. We will never end leafing through the secular Bible he left us with (French translation of Oeuvres Complètes, in Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, on bible paper).
Last time must go back to the staging of Bruno Shulz Republic of Dreams by Double Edge Theater, a few years ago at La Mama. No, last time goes back to the Yiddish translation by Shane Baker of Waiting Godot, that made the text of Beckett sound as written in and for this language. And the impressing performance of Rafael Goldwaser playing Lucky in a scene where I though he was going to expire his last breath in front of our eyes - as a Lecoq actor is trained to perish. The loneliness as human condition has never been so poignant. With the absurdity of auto-imposed ordeals and the obscure expectation of a manumission of mysterious nature, the Hunger Artist brought reminiscences of Beckett.

I couldn't help also remembering another Levin, Hanokh Levin, whose Sufferings of Job I saw in the Théâtre de l'Odéon in a staging by Laurent Brethome that made me doubt that I could stay until the end of the play as I am oversensitive and have a very colored imagination.

My imagination was also transported in the anachronistic and unknowable by Kafka future history of the destruction of the Jews, namely the fate of his three sisters Gabriele (“Ellie”) (1889-1944), Valerie (“Valli”) (1892- 1943) and Ottilie (“Ottila”) 1892 – 1943. The last documentation for Valli's presence was Lodzer ghetto in Poland in 1942, from where she must have been deported.

And I had to check that, but something about the three "butchers" that visit the Hunger Artist curiosity was bothering me ... Actually Kafka's father, Hermann Kafka (1852–1931), was the fourth child of Jakob Kafka, a shokhet or ritual slaughterer in Osek, a Czech village with a large Jewish population located near Strakonice in southern Bohemia. Starving, slaughtering, eating meat but not without the proper rituals by which you recognize as life is sacred. Who is more qualified than a butcher (a fortiori three butchers) to check if a hunger artist starves himself in a kosher way? What does this bloody branch of Franz Kafka's genealogical tree tells us about the material and spiritual condition of an artist?

Was starving here a spiritual exercise comparable to the fast familiar to almost all religions, was it a metaphor of auto-destruction in the midst of the illness that was devastating Kafka's body and life? A rebellion against the physical cage of the stupid and unsafe body in which Kafka never inhabited comfortably and with which he never made peace? A criticism of the feigned interest of humans for each other? The ultimate escapist story? Figures of ermitic seclusion, anchorites, ascetics, populate Oriental and Ancient world up to the British Middle Age. They also permeate in modern Yiddish literature as we can read in Der Nister's story "Der nozir un dos tsigele", (1922, "The Hermit and The Kid Goat"). This characters re-enter Judaism by the channel of Hassidism, as they surface in modernity through various heresies.

One of the most original contribution of Jonathan Levin, writer Josh Luxenberg and director Joshua William Gelb to the approach of Kafka's riddle, in the tradition of puppetry theatre, consists in the use of scale, in the images as well as with the sounds. Beginning with the minuscule that hardly stands out from the distance when you seat in the depth of the small theatre {"can you see the hat on the lady's head?"} to the projection of the gigantic feline of the Marry-go-round turning frantically on a back screen in the tumult of the funfair - a miniature toy on the turntable of an old record player. The play makes us feel as isolated, cut away, and as close as to cosmic dust as our dreams of perfection may seem vain and meaningless. Very delicate manipulations of objects, the de-multiplication of the poetical body and characters through the dusty wardrobes, teatro povero, physical theatre of Jerzy Grotowski, all these hours of slow motion exercises of Lecoq : "Tout bouge" (3).

Everything moves in the Danse macabre (did I hear notes of Camille Saint-Saëns piece while Jonathan Levin was moving out of his cage with large dancing steps?). As it moves in the dark when the artist undergoes its lightning transformations. The dust - for the one who are sensitive to its displacements - speaks of this unrest. Yes, "Dust" could be an alternative name for our dreams and ambition. Not to speak about how this macabre tale considers progress.

(1) The story "Ein Hungerkünstler" ("A Hunger Artist"), published in the periodical Die neue Rundschau in 1924, describes a victimized protagonist who experiences a decline in the appreciation of his strange craft of starving himself for extended periods. Kafka's last story, "Josefine, die Sängerin oder Das Volk der Mäuse" ("Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk"), also deals with the relationship between an artist and his audience.
(2) http://lementeurvolontaire.com/…/06/Job-Dossier-artistique.…https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9mRQrFBvlk
(3) Tout bouge.
Tout évolue, progresse.
Tout se ricochette et se réverbère.
D’un point à un autre, pas de ligne droite.
D’un port à un port, un voyage.
Tout bouge, moi aussi!
Le bonheur et le malheur, mais le heurt aussi.
Un point indécis, flou, confus, se dessine,
Point de convergences,
Tentation d’un point fixe,
Dans un calme de toutes les passions.
Point d’appui et point d’arrivée,
Dans ce qui n’a ni commencement ni fin.
Le nommer,
Le rendre vivant,
Lui donner l’autorité
Pour mieux comprendre ce qui bouge,
Pour mieux comprendre le Mouvement
Jacques Lecoq 1999