Press File - Kunstenfestivaldesarts

Mysticism, life-art and another voice
Endless Medication is a story about women in a patriarchal society, told and performed by two
young women in tune with their madness, two actors seeking a language and a truth of their
own.
In this production Marijs Boulogne and Manah Depauw head off in search of their own voice: a
different way of speaking, an angle of artistic effect that goes beyond the eternal debate
between the ‘female genre’ and ‘femininity’. They craft an artistic form suited to allowing this
suddenly emerging other voice to be heard. A female voice, frequently stifled, an excessive
voice. It’s about re-enhancing the status of its specificity and past history. Its artistic echo
perhaps? Completely breaking away from the dominant norms. A female art repudiating logic
and all the dogma that is advocated on ’so-called’ reality. A voice developed from intellectual
and intuitive research, evaluating what is “real and true” according to personal experience, a
voice inspired by the chaotic perception of reality, by not knowing.
For Endless Medication, Marijs and Manah have investigated other manifestations of these
voices. They have looked into the mysticism and corporeal ecstasy of the Beguines of the
Middle Ages and the contemporary practice of female ‘performance art’. Each in their own way,
these two manifestations come from attempts to express the unspeakable, to explore and
provoke it in order to place the body in an extreme physical situation. “Life-art” or ‘performance’
tries to incorporate the unspeakable, chaos and reality in an ultimate confrontation between the
idea and the body, non-movement.
Medieval corporeal mysticism seeks to attain what is ultimately unspeakable – God as
absolutely nothing – by self-denial through mortification and asceticism. Denial and mortification
are based on a dynamic combining the fantasy of innocence with the temptation of supreme
harmony. Accompanied by acts of penitence, it is staged in a fantastical way, undertaken to
intercept emotions barely conscious of guilt, uneasiness and indecisiveness.
The story of Endless Medication is inspired by the life of one of these great mystics, Saint Rosa
of Lima (1586-1617). Plagued by a painful illness, this nun suddenly became lost in recurrent
ecstatic visions. Impervious to the extreme pain, she lived as a penitent, praying and fasting in a
cell in the middle of the family garden, continually insulted by all around her.
With Saint Rosa in mind, Marijs and Manah began writing and improvising and the
story of Rosa was born, first as a performance artist then as a fakir. Given a Belgian
tinge, this story is stained by Catholicism, troubled by erotic infantile-abominable
fantasies and perturbed by tunes from a melancholic accordion.
Endless Medication
With the atmosphere of a small old variety hall, Endless Medication tells the story of Rosa, a
strange girl with a ‘fantasy of innocence’. No-one, not her mother or grandmother, has ever
seen Rosa cry. From childhood Rosa develops strange occupations: she makes crowns of
flowers in which she plaits a ribbon of iron with small nails that cut into her. Rosa wants to
become a fakir. She picks horrible plastic flowers in cemeteries; at the supermarket she covers
herself in washing powder then jumps in the canal; she knits insect blankets and tries to go to
sleep under them.
One day she receives a visit from God. He tells her she can come to heaven, but not before
she’s given birth to the new messiah who is growing in her large intestine. As a child of God
can’t be born in shit, she has to stop eating and can only breathe air using a machine specially
sent to her by God.
Every day Rosa inhales the air she’s allowed and to start with everything goes well. But hunger
starts to gnaw away at her and she feels she will die if the new Jesus remains in her stomach.
She begs God to help her, but he doesn’t hear her. Rosa decides to dislodge the child by giving
birth prematurely. Of course things go wrong and Rosa has to call the doctor who tries to
convince her that God doesn’t exist and that life is ugly. After visiting the doctor, God speaks to
her again, annoyed because she has failed.
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