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Press File - Kunstenfestivaldesarts

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Mysticism, life-art and another voice<br />

Endless Medication is a story about women in a patriarchal society, told and performed by two<br />

young women in tune with their madness, two actors seeking a language and a truth of their<br />

own.<br />

In this production Marijs Boulogne and Manah Depauw head off in search of their own voice: a<br />

different way of speaking, an angle of artistic effect that goes beyond the eternal debate<br />

between the ‘female genre’ and ‘femininity’. They craft an artistic form suited to allowing this<br />

suddenly emerging other voice to be heard. A female voice, frequently stifled, an excessive<br />

voice. It’s about re-enhancing the status of its specificity and past history. Its artistic echo<br />

perhaps? Completely breaking away from the dominant norms. A female art repudiating logic<br />

and all the dogma that is advocated on ’so-called’ reality. A voice developed from intellectual<br />

and intuitive research, evaluating what is “real and true” according to personal experience, a<br />

voice inspired by the chaotic perception of reality, by not knowing.<br />

For Endless Medication, Marijs and Manah have investigated other manifestations of these<br />

voices. They have looked into the mysticism and corporeal ecstasy of the Beguines of the<br />

Middle Ages and the contemporary practice of female ‘performance art’. Each in their own way,<br />

these two manifestations come from attempts to express the unspeakable, to explore and<br />

provoke it in order to place the body in an extreme physical situation. “Life-art” or ‘performance’<br />

tries to incorporate the unspeakable, chaos and reality in an ultimate confrontation between the<br />

idea and the body, non-movement.<br />

Medieval corporeal mysticism seeks to attain what is ultimately unspeakable – God as<br />

absolutely nothing – by self-denial through mortification and asceticism. Denial and mortification<br />

are based on a dynamic combining the fantasy of innocence with the temptation of supreme<br />

harmony. Accompanied by acts of penitence, it is staged in a fantastical way, undertaken to<br />

intercept emotions barely conscious of guilt, uneasiness and indecisiveness.<br />

The story of Endless Medication is inspired by the life of one of these great mystics, Saint Rosa<br />

of Lima (1586-1617). Plagued by a painful illness, this nun suddenly became lost in recurrent<br />

ecstatic visions. Impervious to the extreme pain, she lived as a penitent, praying and fasting in a<br />

cell in the middle of the family garden, continually insulted by all around her.<br />

With Saint Rosa in mind, Marijs and Manah began writing and improvising and the<br />

story of Rosa was born, first as a performance artist then as a fakir. Given a Belgian<br />

tinge, this story is stained by Catholicism, troubled by erotic infantile-abominable<br />

fantasies and perturbed by tunes from a melancholic accordion.<br />

Endless Medication<br />

With the atmosphere of a small old variety hall, Endless Medication tells the story of Rosa, a<br />

strange girl with a ‘fantasy of innocence’. No-one, not her mother or grandmother, has ever<br />

seen Rosa cry. From childhood Rosa develops strange occupations: she makes crowns of<br />

flowers in which she plaits a ribbon of iron with small nails that cut into her. Rosa wants to<br />

become a fakir. She picks horrible plastic flowers in cemeteries; at the supermarket she covers<br />

herself in washing powder then jumps in the canal; she knits insect blankets and tries to go to<br />

sleep under them.<br />

One day she receives a visit from God. He tells her she can come to heaven, but not before<br />

she’s given birth to the new messiah who is growing in her large intestine. As a child of God<br />

can’t be born in shit, she has to stop eating and can only breathe air using a machine specially<br />

sent to her by God.<br />

Every day Rosa inhales the air she’s allowed and to start with everything goes well. But hunger<br />

starts to gnaw away at her and she feels she will die if the new Jesus remains in her stomach.<br />

She begs God to help her, but he doesn’t hear her. Rosa decides to dislodge the child by giving<br />

birth prematurely. Of course things go wrong and Rosa has to call the doctor who tries to<br />

convince her that God doesn’t exist and that life is ugly. After visiting the doctor, God speaks to<br />

her again, annoyed because she has failed.<br />

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