Chicana Ways - Aletta

AnyBody's Concerns 6(2003)
desensitizing her body and thus putting a magical ban on them
(Prammer 138).8 At the same time, her concept is an openly
didactic one, which closely follows the feminist axiom of the
personal being the political: she attempts to change people's
consciousness by staging typically gender-marked experiences
of pain, which hurt her viewers more than herself (Zell 164).
18 In comparison to Export's feminist work and political
attitude, Hermann Nitsch's aesthetic programme, which he
conceives of as a theatre of abreaction (Vergine 177) and
enacts in his Theatre of Orgies and Mysteries, appears to be a
decidedly masculine one. Nitsch's performances do not involve
real pain but use (animal) blood and (mostly male) human
participants/models or slaughtered animals in order to evoke
pain in faked rituals of sacrifice and festivity, which mingle
associations of violence and desire (he refers to crucifixion,
the holy communion, ritual regicide, the blinding of Oedipus
and the killing of totemistic animals in his performances -
Schneede 138). A theatrical framework serves him to stage what
he considers to be an integral but - in modern times -
suppressed element of cosmic reality and human nature:
aggression and destruction. "Ich sehe Zerstörung auch als
Folge von Lebensüberschwang, von zu viel Kraft, von
ungebändigter Kraft" (Hermann Nitsch cited in Zell 40).
Nitsch's Dionysian and implicitly masculine concept of
performance art is based on an idealized, ecstatic
aggressiveness considered to be an outlet for naturally built-
up feelings which are norm-breaking and norm-reaffirming at
http://www.genderforum.uni-koeln.de/anybody/gutenberg.html (18 van 60)31-3-2005 18:21:57