{"id":469,"date":"2021-12-10T21:17:04","date_gmt":"2021-12-10T21:17:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/?p=469"},"modified":"2023-03-15T11:13:04","modified_gmt":"2023-03-15T11:13:04","slug":"the-hearing-body-in-robert-wilsons-and-mikhail-baryshnikovs-letter-to-a-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/the-hearing-body-in-robert-wilsons-and-mikhail-baryshnikovs-letter-to-a-man\/","title":{"rendered":"The Hearing Body in Robert Wilson\u2019s and Mikhail Baryshnikov\u2019s Letter to a Man<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Sylvia Solakidi<\/strong>*<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

for <\/em>\u039b<\/em><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Abstract<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

In 2015 Robert Wilson presented Letter to a Man<\/font>, a solo for Mikhail Baryshnikov, based on the diaries that Vaslav Nijinsky wrote when he was descending into schizophrenia. A soundscape composed of recorded phrases repeated by the voices of Wilson, Lucinda Childs and Baryshnikov stages the auditory hallucinations of schizophrenia. Baryshnikov\u2019s body moves in response to voices that are chasing each other by repeating motives of reflective meanings turned into sound, in a way reminiscent of a fugue. The relationship between the body and the world from the point of view of auditory stimuli and movement is explored by this essay-fugue of performance philosophy through the concept of the hearing body that the writer elaborates based on Baryshnikov\u2019s performance and her experience in the audience. Wilson\u2019s soundscape and the ontology of phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty\u2014his notions of coherent deformation and simultaneity, in particular\u2014chase each other like voices in a fugue and demonstrate a continuum between body and world that brings to the foreground the difficulties in the interaction and the play of both pre-reflective and reflective powers of the body.

Keywords<\/strong>: Letter to a Man<\/font>, Robert Wilson, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ontology, coherent deformation, simultaneity, fugue<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou are not God, you are Nijinsky,\u201d says a male voice.
A man in tails, hears the voice, moves his eyes and his body towards its source.
\u201cYou are not Christ, you are Nijinsky,\u201d says a female voice.
The man moves his eyes and his body again; where does this voice come from?
\u201cYou are not Christ, you are Nijinsky,\u201d says a male voice and repeats it in Russian.
The man is puzzled as he hears his own voice in two languages. Where should he move to, since the source of the voice should be himself?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What Is It?<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

It is Mikhail Baryshnikov on the stage of Espace Pierre Cardin, in Paris, in January 2017, performing the solo theatrical piece Letter to a Man<\/em>, directed by theatre and visual artist Robert Wilson; I am in the audience. The work premiered in Spoleto on July 8, 2015, and it is based on the published diaries of the legendary Russian ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky. Letter to a Man<\/em> is the title of an unsent letter that Nijinsky wrote to Serge Diaghilev, the director of Ballets Russes, when their relationship deteriorated (Nijinsky and Acocella vii). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to Baryshnikov, there is \u201cno choreography\u201d in this piece, \u201conly voices and movement\u201d (\u201cMikhail Baryshnikov Letter to a Man<\/em>\u201d 00:07:38). Baryshnikov perceives a world of sounds and reacts through movement. Auditory stimuli and his sense of hearing motivate him to explore the world, to ask \u201cwhat is it?\u201d \u201cThe reason I work as an artist is to ask questions, to ask what is it?\u201d states Wilson in a performative lecture that he has been giving since the late 1970s. He does not know the answer and sets out to explore the question through his works, such as Letter to a Man<\/em>. Baryshnikov does not know the answer either, and he sets out to explore the question through movement; movement is the way he makes sense of the world of sounds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I name this experience the hearing body<\/em>, I ask \u201cwhat is it?\u201d in this essay, and I set out to explore the dynamics of the relationship between body and world from the point of view of auditory stimuli and movement. View is not incompatible with sound. The world makes itself available to Baryshnikov primarily, but not exclusively, through sounds. I, the spectator, hear these sounds and watch Baryshnikov\u2019s movement, which is his response and his contribution to the world that he perceives. And, like him, I make sense from the point of view of sound, without forgetting that I am an intersensorial body in an intersensorial world. As Tim Ingold suggests, it is more fruitful \u201cto explore the common ground\u201d between senses rather than abandoning the one for the other (287). Rather than approaching hearing as a privileged way of perceiving the world, I explore the potential offered by the perspective of hearing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I choose the hearing body<\/em> here, instead of the listening body, in order not to restrict the exploration into attentive hearing but open it up to the perception of sounds. I choose a present participle instead of a subordinate clause (\u201ca body that hears\u201d) to explore hearing as an act related to movement rather than a passive reception of the world; as a process rather than an outcome. And as the present participle \u201cis relative to the time given in the larger construction\u201d (Huddleston and Pullum 80), the act of hearing is a process in all tenses. This essay elaborates on the<\/em> hearing body<\/em> as a concept in order to explore the way it acts, its agency; namely, the way it makes sense and, as I will demonstrate, modifies the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What Is It?<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

The world of Letter to a Man<\/em> is a soundscape consisting of the recorded voices of Wilson, of dancer and choreographer Lucinda Childs and of Baryshnikov, who recites in English and Russian. The phrase that one voice speaks is repeated by another voice, and then another. Repetition and variation obscure the meaning of phrases, as if the full stop at the end gradually turned into a question mark, and the voice that followed rushed to give an answer by speaking the phrase differently. Voices chase each other in a question-answer game of repetitions, in a way that reminds me of a fugue, a composition of polyphonic music. Fugue is based on imitation as the first voice presents a motif called subject<\/em>, which is subsequently reprised differently by the other voices in the form of an answer<\/em>. Fuga<\/em> means flight; voices flee as they are chased by other voices, their coming together is constantly being postponed and, unlike harmonical compositions, there is no hierarchy among them (Kennan 202\u201306).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Baryshnikov hears this fugue of the world, his hearing body<\/em> moves towards the voices and away from them, he chases them and is chased by them. His movement becomes another voice in the fugue of the world; he does not only hear the fugue, but he also participates in it. Sound is a wave and triggers hearing by making anatomic elements of the ear move. Sound, though, is not perceived only by the ear. \u201cThe whole body or organism raises a taut sculpture or statue of skin, vibrating to the voluminous sound\u201d as if \u201ccovered head to toes with a tympanum,\u201d like the membrane of the ear with the same name, as Michel Serres claims (141). Sound crashes like a wave against the shore of the hearing body<\/em> that reacts to this movement with its own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The reason why I watch\/hear a fugue is that Baryshnikov\u2019s hearing body<\/em> makes sense of the voices by organizing them through movement. He can only sing an answer<\/em> with his movement if he perceives what voices do with each other as a subject-answer<\/em> interaction and if he takes up this structure in order to respond through his own answer<\/em> to what he perceives as a voice\u2019s subject<\/em>. Without his answer<\/em>, the world would have seemed\/sounded meaningless; voices would not have chased each other but crashed against each other and the soundscape would have been nothing more than noise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The world of sounds does not depend on the hearing body<\/em> but on the process of hearing, which involves perception and response, modifies this world by organizing it into motifs that demand an answer; in the non-hierarchical world of a fugue, the voice that moves is as important as the voices that sound. As Salom\u00e9 Voegelin claims, sonic sensibility demonstrates that the world \u201cis not a pre-formed container but is built continually as the fleeting timespace of [one\u2019s] present listening\u201d (3). Movement makes sound meaningful; this is the agency of the hearing body<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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