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The Iconicity of Absence: Dario Fo and the Radical InvisibleAuthor(s): J. L. WingSource: Theatre Journal , Vol. 45, No. 3 (Oct., 1993), pp. 303-315Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

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The Iconicity of Absence: Dario Fo and the Radical Invisible

JL Wing

In demonstration of the mysterious power of absence as a staging technique, Italian playwright/performer Dario Fo recounts an intriguing tale of a performance at a mental institution for "untreatable cases" in Turn, Italy.' Fo was in the midst of a skit involving

an archangel and a drunk, in which he, himself, played both characters, a task which compelled him continuously to speak to the empty spot where he had just "placed" his antagonist. At one point, as he was impersonating the drunk who was trying to get a word in edgewise, a patient began berating the (absent) archangel for stifling the drunk's story, screaming," Let him talk, you bastard Otherwise I'll come up there and give you a kick in the halo " Somewhat astonished at this response from a spectator he was told hadn't spoken in years, Fo told a group of acting students, "The amazing thing was that she was raging at the character whom I had sketched out in the air; she was pointing at the spot where I had left him." Later other inmates who had been tied to their beds expressed a desire to get up on stage and speak out against oppressive conditions in the hospital. This astonishing response raises ques- tions not only about the nature of "insanity," but also about an art form based fundamentally on presence. How did Fo shape his staging so that absence signified profoundly, so much so that, in this case at least, it induced the mute and powerless to speak? And what are the theoretical implications of this iconic nothingness?

If theatre is an iconically dense representational medium, as many theorists indicate, interpretation of that iconicity has become increasingly open to debate. As a signifier, the icon is a tease: there is simply too much there. Since, as Keir Elam tells us, "the governing principle in iconic signs is similitude,"2 our tendency as spectators is to naturalize the icon -to assume that it means what it is. This essentialist temptation is especially apparent when considering the phenomenon of the actor. In a valuable

JL Wing is Assistant Professor of Performing Arts and English at Colby College where she teaches twentieth-century drama, theatre history, and directing. Her articles have appeared in Modern Drama and a collection of essays entitled, The Semiotic Bridge. She is currently working on a full-length study of staged silences.

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education conference in New York City in August, 1989.

1 Dario Fo, The Tricks of the Trade, trans. Joe Farrell (London: Methuen, 1991), 131. 2 Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London: Methuen, 1980), 21.

Theatre Journal 45 (1993) 303-315 c 1993 by The Johns Hopkins University Press



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discussion of the slippery relation between the icon and its referent in various theatrical genres, for example, Marvin Carlson contends that "the one element which almost invariable involves iconic identity -is the actor, a human being who represents

a human being."3 Having made this assertion, Carlson hastens to cite the exception of puppetry, much as Elam, wrestling with the same problem ten years earlier, came up with immediate contradictions involving Elizabethan boy actors and Greeks play- ing gods.4

The troubling link between iconicity as "the visual component of meaning"5 and the physical presence of the actor has proved to be an especially rich source of analysis for feminist theorists, who problematize the social and psychological constructions of the subject in relation to the female body displayed on the stage (or screen).6 As Laura Mulvey pointed out in her influential essay on film theory in 1975, visibility and pleasure are inextricably linked in the Western configuration of the unconscious.7

Whether considered from a Freudian or Lacanian perspective, this link is devastating to the female subject, so much so that Mulvey proposes deleting pleasure from the representational configuration altogether.

It is said that analysing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this essay. The satisfaction and reinforcement of the ego that represent the high point of film history hitherto must be attacked; not in favor of a reconstructed new pleasure, which cannot exist in the abstract, or of intellectualized unpleasure, but to make way for a total negation of the ease and plenitude of the narrative fiction film.8

Since the pleasure/vision collusion derives from psychological theories which are fundamentally ideological in nature, as Kaja Silverman demonstrates (because they are configured within a culture which already valorizes the male), the most promising approach for a feminist critique of theatrical representation would seem to involve a radical deconstruction of its ideological apparatus. But is this possible without condemning us all to what Mulvey calls "intellectual unpleasure"?

Such a deconstruction is, of course, precisely the project to which Bertolt Brecht addressed himself, when he proposed foregrounding the mechanics of theatrical production in order to break with what he called "culinary theatre," which he equated to an illusionistic meal, easily digested and forgotten. According to Brecht, holistic representation of character or narrative is objectively, realistically misguided:

The continuity of ego is a myth. A man is an atom that perpetually breaks up and forms anew. The bourgeois theatre's performance always aim at smoothing over contradictions.

3Marvin Carlson, Theatre Semiotics: Signs of Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 76. 4 Elam, Semiotics, 23. Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University

Press, 1984), 45. 6 For extremely useful overviews of the theoretical implications of female subjectivity in theatrical

performance, see: Sue-Ellen Case, Feminism and Theatre (New York: Methuen, 1988); Jill Dolan, The Feminist Spectator as Critic (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988); and Gale Austin, Feminist Theories for Dramatic Criticism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990).

7 Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Screen 16 (Autumn 1975): 6-18. Reprinted in Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. Patricia Erens (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 28-40.

8 Ibid., 30.



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THE ICONICITY OF ABSENCE / 305

S . . Conditions are reported as if they could not be otherwise. ... If there is any development it is always steady, never by jerks. . . . None of this is like reality, so a realistic theatre must give it up.9

Brecht's solution to bourgeois realism--what might be called his "atomic theory" of representation - features a radical perceptual realignment, which, through various "distancing" techniques, co-opts the spectator as collaborator, rather than passive witness to the performance event. In Walter Benjamin's terms, the spectator in Brecht's configuration in fact co-produces the event, a concept which has ethical implications:

An author who teaches nothing, teaches no one. What matters, therefore, is the exemplary character of production, which is first able to induce other producers to produce, and second to put an improved apparatus at their disposal. And this apparatus is better the more consumers it is able to turn into producers--that is readers or spectators into

collaborators. We already possess such an example. .... It is Brecht's epic theatre.10 According to Roland Barthes, this process implies a disruption of the standard

semiotic equation, in which the signifier flows inexorably toward the signified on an ideologically closed circuit:

Consciousness of the unconsciousness, consciousness that the audience should have of

the unconsciousness which prevails on stage: this is the theatre of Brecht. ... The function of the system here is not to hand on a positive message (it is not a theatre of signifieds), but to make it understood that the world is an object that must be deciphered (it is a theatre of signifiers).11

The perceptual "gap" which results from Brecht's denaturalized signification strategy has been appropriated by both film and theatre scholars recently in order to conceptualize an alternative to the ideological entanglements of subjectivity and the gaze. For example, Elin Diamond has shown how the Brechtian "alienation" strategy can be applied to a feminist theatre critique:

Verfremdungseffekt . . . challenges the mimetic property of acting that semioticians call iconicity, the fact that the performer's body conventionally resembles the object (or character) to which it refers . .. by alienating (not simply rejecting) iconicity, by foregrounding the expectation of resemblance, the ideology of gender is exposed and thrown back to the spectator.'2

In a series of incisive articles, Diamond has applied her observations to show how Caryl Churchill's theatre, in particular, uses a Brechtian approach to challenge ideological presumptions, especially those involving gender construction. Among other considerations, Diamond analyzes how Churchill's dramaturgy makes visible what is normally invisible (showing us Val's perceptions as a Ghost in Fen, for example)

9 Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, trans. John Willet (New York Hill & Wang, 1964), 15, 277. 1' Walter Benjamin, "The Author as Producer," in Art After Modernism, ed. Brian Wallis (Boston:

Godine, 1984), 306. "11Roland Barthes, "The Tasks of a Brechtian Criticism," trans. Peter W. Mathers, New Theatre

Quarterly 9 (Spring, 1979): 30. 12 Elin Diamond, "Brechtian Theory/Feminist Theory: Toward a Gestic Feminist Criticism," The

Drama Review 32 (Spring 1988): 84.



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as a means of rupturing a perceptual complacency which equates icon with identity.13 In this paper, I want to consider how Dario Fo uses the Brechtian formulation to do just the opposite - to make the normally visible invisible - in pursuit of a similar goal:

to force the spectator into an active and critical collaboration with the representational process in order to challenge "the ideological nature of the seeable."14

Fo's manipulation of absence is most apparent in the one-actor skits he regularly performs under the aegis of Mistero Buffo (the title refers to the medieval mystery plays which are his source material).15 For Fo, the crucial common factor of all these skits is their historical lineage in the medieval craft of the wandering players, or guillari, which he attempts to reconstruct in his performances. This reconstruction centers initially not on visual gaps but on historical gaps in surviving texts, which Fo claims have been sentimentalized and mystified for centuries by academics who were complicitous with power structures which squelched dissent. To recover the

original vitality and intent of the medieval pieces, it is necessary to reconstitute the performative elements that linger between the words, the gestural traces that func- tioned as, "the determining part of the representation, precisely to get across to the public those allusions which it was too dangerous to write down in full."'6 Fo contends that to take everything literally is to misrepresent it:

The text belongs to a precise social class, the one which controls the power. Opposed to it there is another theatric lexicon composed of text, pause rhythm; a lexicon in which many times the word is dependent on a situation.""

Fo's insistence on the "theatric lexicon" links up handily with the argument against "privileging the text," flourishing for some time now among Italian semioticians, such as Marco de Marinis and Franco Ruffini who both insist on the importance of evaluating the entire theatrical process rather than focusing on either a text or a definitive production."1 De Marinis's objection to the idea that a virtual performance is somehow already prefigured within each dramatic text--a necessary condition for the reduction of theatre to a set of codifiable sign systems which can then be defin- itively analyzed- parallels Fo's notion that the key to a performance lies in the absence between the words. If absence is the uncodifiable, creative core of the performance,

13 Elin Diamond, "(In)Visible Bodies in Churchill's Theatre," Theatre Journal 40 (May 1988): 188- 204. See also the following articles by Elin Diamond: "Closing No Gaps: Aphra Behn, Caryl Churchill, and Empire," in Phyllis R. Randall, ed. Caryl Churchill: A Casebook (New York: Garland, 1988), 161- 74; "Refusing the Romanticism of Identity: Narrative Interventions in Churchill, Benmussa, Duras," Theatre Journal 37 (Oct. 1985): 273-86; and "Mimesis, Mimicry, and the 'True-Real,' " Modern Drama 32 (March 1989): 58-72.

14 Diamond, "(In)Visible Bodies," 191. 5 Dario Fo, Mistero Buffo (Veron: Bertoni, 1974). The title translates as Comic Mystery, and refers

to a type of travesty of medieval mystery plays. Fo explains the term in his introduction to this edition: "Mystery was the word already in use in the first and second century after Jesus Christ to designate a spectacle, a sacred representation . . . thus Mystery means, 'sacred representation,' Mistero Buffo means, 'grotesque spectacle.' " My translation.

16 Dario Fo, "Lettura della Disputatio mensium de Bonvesin da la Riva," Quaderni di Teatro 3 (1979): 75,

17 Luigi Ballerini and Giuseppe Russo, "Dario Fo Explains," The Drama Review 22 (1978): 43. 18 See Marco de Marinis, Semiotica del Teatro (Milan: Bompiani, 1982) and Franco Ruffini, "Semiotica

del Teatro: recognizione degli stude," Biblioteca Teatrale 9 (1974): 34-81.



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then its very unpredictability is potentially threatening to a structure (academic or political) that thrives on codes.

However, Fo's appropriation of absence transcends an opposition to text alone. In the process of attempting to recover the original gestural satire latent in the medieval pieces, to reconstruct absence, he has uncovered a representational strategy which, like Brecht's, fundamentally destabilizes the semiotic foundation of illusionistic representation. Ironically, given Fo's forthright Marxist epistemology, the primary source for his gestural reconstruction is the rich iconography of religious paintings of the period. Fo claims that many of these paintings, which he likens to medieval cartoon strips,19 represent a synchronomous and multi-faceted narrative, embodying what Fo sees as an optimum epic style which transcends the merely linguistic. "When (medieval) painters tell a story they are outside language," Fo suggests. "They don't show the perspective of only one person. They show diverse points of view . .. the

same scene from behind, from the front, from a distance."20 Obviously this simultaneous, multiple perspective has ideological implications for

theatrical representation. On the one hand, the sense of multiplicity, of cacophony, of popular culture represented by a performer in the public marketplace recalls Bakhtin's theory of the carnivalesque; both Fo and Bakhtin identify an anarchical exuberance in the type of public performance which "precisely because of its unofficial existence was marked by an exceptional radicalism, freedom and ruthlessness."21 This theatrical exuberance is anything but benign; indeed, according to Bakhtin, it poses an explicit threat to any power structure which depends on its representation as "eternal, immovable, and absolute."22

For Fo, however, the practical challenge which presents itself is precisely one of performance: how does one reconstruct this rich iconography, this popular, pluralistic perspective? A tempting solution would be to attempt a kind of literal mimesis, to reconstitute the original image, using one actor per figure. In the case of the Mistero Buffo sketches, however, Fo came to the conclusion that the pieces were clearly intended to be performed by one actor alone. According to Fo:

The giullari almost always worked on their own; we can see this from the fact that, in the text, things that happen tend to be indicated by the actor splitting himself between (the) parts, and by allusion, so that the full comic and poetic weight of the piece is heightened by the free play of (the spectator's) imagination.23

The requisite representational strategy, then, would need to insure that the spectator's imagination is engaged in maximum movement, in order to create the nec- essarily simultaneous and multiple iconicity. This prescription calls for a kind of "motion picture," and indeed Fo deliberately incorporates cinematic techniques into his performance. A closer look at a few of the Buffo pieces will serve to illustrate Fo's approach.

'9 Fo, Tricks, 58. 20 Ron Jenkins, "Clowns, Politics and Miracles: The Epic Satire of Dario Fo," American Theatre 3

(1986): 15. 21 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 71. 22Ibid., 83. 23 Dario Fo, Mistero Buffo, trans. Ed Emery, ed. Stuart Hood (London: Methuen, 1988), 37.



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Fo claims that "The Resurrection of Lazarus," was a piece de resistance among medieval giullari, requiring an astounding virtuosity, in which one actor would represent some fifteen different characters in succession. "The principle theme of the

piece," according to Fo, is "a satirization of everything that passes for the moment of mystery:

The satire is aimed at the miracle mongers, the magicians, the conjurer's art of the miraculous, which is an underlying feature of many religions, including Catholicism ... here though, the story of the miracle is told from the standpoint of the people. The scene is set as though it were about to be performed by a great conjurer, a great magician, somebody who is able to do extraordinary and vastly entertaining things.24

Clearly the "vastly entertaining conjurer" in question is analogous to Fo, himself, and indeed Fo's strategy depends on a kind of theatrical sleight of hand which needs to be "set up" as meticulously as a magic trick. To emphasize the deliberate derivation

from religious icons, and to entice audience collaboration in a "pictorial" reconstruction, Fo always precedes the Mystery sketches with slides.25 In the case of "Lazarus," he often shows one of his own drawings, which he claims to have copied from the original sketches for a fresco in a Pisa cemetery. Fo's drawing represents part of a crowd scene, which features one of the figures picking the pocket of another. Al- though this particular action clearly serves Fo's intention of irreverent demystification, his general configuration of the "Lazarus" is remarkably similar to many versions extant throughout southern Europe and the Near East. According to Emerson Swift, in The Roman Sources of Christian Art, the resurrection of Lazarus is one of the most frequently painted scenes in medieval Christian iconography,26 many versions of

which feature the multiple perspective of a crowd of people. The action is invariably more or less centripetally focused-that is, the figures are grouped in semi-circular arrangements around a central axis, that of the "miracle." But perhaps more significant than the striking similarities between all these scenes and Fo's enactment of them, is Fo's one glaring omission: although the paintings invariably feature the figures of Jesus and Lazarus as protagonists of the figural narrative, Fo notably does not embody either of these characters; rather, he quite deliberately chooses to restrict his impersonation to the crowd witnessing the event: Jesus and Lazarus may be at the center of the iconic text, the visual narration, but in Fo's demystified version, they are significantly demoted to mere projected absences.

Fo "positions" the fifteen odd characters he chooses to indicate in a semi-circular configuration around an invisible gravesite which he "places" center front. He effects these characters with a kind of staccato, strobe-light effect, introducing them through a precise, swift gestural technique he calls the invito, a kind of shorthand acting notation:

[the invito is a] synthesis created by the shortening of the rhythm of images. For the audience, therefore, the transition whereby the character comes onto the stage does not exist; it has been cut out, shortened out ... [in this way] the description [of the character

24Ibid., 64. 25 My description of the staging of the "Lazarus" and "Pope Boniface VIII" pieces is based on my

observations of Fo's performance of the skits at the Yale drama school in April, 1984. 26 Emerson Swift, The Roman Sources of Christian Art (Westwood, Conn: Greenwood, 1951), 55.



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is] made by the movement of the actor's body even before he [says] the words describing what [is] happening.27

By using this invito technique, Fo manages to engage spectatorial collaboration in the creation of a three-dimensional, virtually cinematic "crowd scene" perspective. The mood of the piece, decidedly more carnevalesque than sublime, reflects Fo's contention that the skit is a "satire of everything that contributes the mystical experience"28 A gatekeeper haggles with the crowd over attendance fees, hawkers sell chairs and refreshments ("Getcha redhots Hot n'delicious Bring you right back from the dead "), latecomers fight with earlybirds for the best seats and old codgers gossip about Jesus's family ("they don't let him go out alone, because he's a little crazy"). When Lazarus's corpse is finally uncovered, reeking and crawling with worms, one entrepreneur takes advantage of the spirited debate over whether Jesus can pull the miracle off by calling for bets. The sketch peaks at the moment of the

resurrection, with shouts of celebration, interspersed with the cries of the woman who discovers that her purse has been snatched in the commotion: the final words, ringing out in a kind of staccato opposition are: "Bravo ... Ladro (thief) ... Bravo

... Ladro... Bravo... Ladro "29

In Fo's incredibly complex configuration, then, the very core of the piece, the miracle, is represented by absence-absent protagonists (Jesus and Lazarus), wit- nessed by a crowd of spectators, which at any given moment exists almost entirely in the imagination of the theatrical spectator, who is thus mirrored, but in a manner which would seem to have escaped at least some of the ideological constraints of a literal mimesis. Meanwhile, the miracle itself, which could be said to represent a

liberation from death (significantly linking ancient fertility rituals to the Christian ritual to the theatrical ritual) is undercut by the theft; and it is precisely this subversion of the miraculous by the profane which serves as the basis for Fo's own dialogic theatricality. Whether Fo's strategy is ultimately constraining or liberating is a question which is often lost in the dazzling virtuosity of Fo's performance, as he both evokes and exorcises the crowd of characters with such speed and precision that the mind of the spectator is set on a collision course within itself to reconstruct a known event from proffered puzzle pieces that are contradictory, irreverent and finally profanely seductive. French critic Bernard Dort describes the process of piecing together Fo's Lazarus as an adventure in semantics:

At each moment a double (or triple or quadruple) play of meaning is invested in an image or emotion. ... By his gestures which remain unfinished--as though suspended between the past and the present-and his words which recall the gestures but which never completely resolve them .... ,Fo addresses nothing but the imagination of the spectator: he literally puts the spectator into movement. He obliges him to adapt himself ceaselessly, to multiply his points of view and perspectives. He forces him into debate.30

27 Dario Fo and Franca Rame, Theatre Workshops at Riverside Studios, London (London: Red Notes, 1983), 19.

28 Tony Mitchell, "Dario Fo's 'Mistero Buffo': Popular Theatre, the Giullare, and the Grotesque," Theatre Quarterly 36 (1979): 12.

29 Fo, Buffo (1974): 100-110. Translations are mine, unless otherwise noted. 3o Bernard Dort, "Dario Fo: Un Acteur Epique," Travail Theatral 15 (1974): 116. My translation.



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Fo's dynamic montage is a result of a confluence of carefully constructed framing strategies which are largely borrowed from film techniques, although Fo claims a theatrical lineage for them:

... long before the invention of cinema with all its up-to-date equipment every actor worth his salt managed to compel every spectator with any sensitivity or culture to employ the identical camera, the identical fields and counter-fields of vision, identical universal

focus, identical wide-angle lens .... 31

"Compel" would seem to be the operative word here, and indeed Fo's appropriation of filming strategy leads to an interesting dilemma: if, as Laura Mulvey tells us, "cinematic codes create a gaze, a world, and an object, thereby producing an illusion cut to the measure of desire,"32 then does Fo's utilization of cinematic techniques render him complicitous in the illusion/desire entanglement? Certainly he controls the site of the gaze, but what does it mean when the object "to-be-looked-at," the theatrical icon, is absence, nothingness? To what extent is the manner in which he compels focus fundamentally different from that of the filmic "eye"? It is certainly the case that Fo's intervention in the interpretation of his mise-en-scene, although intensively manipulative, is nevertheless absolutely dependent on an on-going co- conspiracy with the audience which is absent in the cinematic relationship.

Orchestration of the spectatorial "lens" to which Fo refers requires an acting technique which could be described in semiotic terms as somewhat more indexical than iconic.33 That is to say that within this configuration, it is the actor's job not to create character or essence, but rather to set up an interpretive code and to act as the mediator of that code for the audience.34 Again, Fo shapes this role of mediator in cinematic terms, exercising a canny adaptation of the link between ideology and perception

[which] arises from a particular psychological attitude which on different occasions compels the spectators, almost as though they were using a series of lenses, to frame the images produced by the actors in different ways. The decisive factor is the way the audience is persuaded by the actor to focus on one detail of the action or on the totality of the action, by the use of the lenses unknowingly stored in the individual brain.35

This notion of an individual perceptual "lens" links up with De Lauretis's contention that perception is relative to context, a context that must be destabilized in order to break ideology's stranglehold on iconicity;36 and it is precisely context, or conceptual

31 Fo, Tricks, 13 32 Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure," 11. 33 Elam, Semiotics, 26. Elam identifies the indexical function as a "pointing to." His observation

that "there are instances where what predominates on stage is a 'pointing to' rather than an imagistic mode of signifying" would seem to apply directly to Fo's technique in the Buffo skits.

34 For a comprehensive discussion on the problems of a fixed "typology of signs" in relation to performance analysis, see Patrice Pavis, Languages of the Stage: Essays in the Semiology of Theatre (New York: PAJ, 1982): 14-21.

3 Fo, Tricks, 44. 36 For example, in discussing Eco's critique of iconic signs, De Lauretis explains: "There is no such

thing as an iconic sign; there are only visual texts, whose pertinent units are established, if at all, by the context. ... The key concepts here are context, pertinence, and purposefulness (of the codes)." De Lauretis, Alice, 47.



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framing, which is the key to Fo's theatrical technique. Fo ensures the perceptual collaboration of his working-class audience by employing a traditional actor's trick he calls the intervento to insinuate himself as the crucial intermediary between his-

torical oppression and theatrical liberation. In order to establish this intermediary function, Fo uses the context of medieval fables featuring a giullare who is "born without a soul," and can therefore speak out against oppression by refusing to "give into the blackmail of a good conscience."37 Fo's analogy features himself as the giullare while the medieval peasant for whom the giullare speaks is clearly Fo's own working- class audience. Within this equation, Fo then manipulates the intervento, or disruptive commentary, as a kind of ideological tracking device, to foreground the trans-historical parallels.

An example of this "metatheatrical" manipulation38 occurs in "La Nascita del Villano" ("The Birth of the Peasant"),39 a text which Fo incorporates virtually intact from a

piece done by the giullare, Matazone da Caligano, in the sixteenth century. It features the "miraculous" birth of a peasant from a donkey's fart, followed by the appearance of an angel who stipulates a "dress code" for the peasant, requiring a garment with a convenient slit so he can relieve him without losing time from his work:

As soon as he's born, in the buff Give him an old piece of cloth To bag him up with a few stitches And make him a good pair of britches Pants with a slit-no zipping So he doesn't waste any time pissing.40

At this point in the presentation, Fo abandons the character of the angel and addresses the audience directly: "You know, this guy seems to have a lot in common with the bosses today "41 After telling about a factory in Verona, where the man- agement declared 11:25 a.m. to be the only time for a bathroom break and where the workers when on strike, according to Fo, "[t]o be allowed to pee when they felt the urge,"42 Fo leads the audience back to a historical perspective by proceeding to impersonate both the landlord and the angel. When the landlord justifies his ex- ploitation by telling the peasant that this is his fate on earth but his immortal soul will transcend terrestial suffering, the angel unwittingly subverts the religious blackmail by blurting out, "How can this stupid serf have a soul when he was blown out

by a donkey's fart?"43 What the authoritative angel sees as a critical absence, however, Fo identifies as

a source of power, forging a bond between the peasant and the giullare as blood brothers inn a material struggle; for the immortal soul that they both lack is really nothing more than a kind of spiritual blackmail used to ensure passive behavior on

37 Erminia Artese, Dario Fo Parla di Dario Fo (Cosenza: Lerici, 1977), 140. My translation. 38 Marina Cappa and Roberto Nepoti, Dario Fo (Rome: Gremese, 1982), 80. 39 Fo, Buffo (1974), 89-99. 40 Fo, Buffo (1974). All quotations "The Birth of the Peasant," are from this edition and are my

translations.

41 Fo, Buffo (1974), 92. 42 Ibid. 43 99.



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the parts of those who "buy into it." But even more important to the dialectical process than the declarative climax is a catalytic intervento, through which Fo has deftly compelled a perceptual link between the medieval peasant and the contem-

porary factory worker, a configuration which, as one critic notes, is differentiated from a fundamentally static vision ("Plus ca change .. .") by the "continuous mobility of the text" which sets itself up as constant interruption, opposition and debate.44 The complexity of this representational structure undergoes individual permutations in each of Fo's Mistero Buffo skits.

In Le nozze di Cana ("The Wedding at Cana"),45 for example, the skit which somehow impelled the mute to speak at the Turin mental hospital, Fo creates a direct dialectical opposition between two ideological "matrices," in this case representing divergent interpretations of a biblical story. As in all the medieval pieces, the underlying theme here is the overturning of officially sanctioned, "authorized" versions

of gospel stories and church history, to be replaced with a populist notion of religious tradition in which the character Jesus is seen as a working-class hero, described by one observer as "a human, exploited peasant Christ who refutes the injustices of the hypocritical religion of the rich."46 Again Fo constricts interpretation by constructing a didactic framework for the piece, insuring a perceptual link between Christ and fertility rituals by showing a slide of a sacre rappresentazione,47 depicting a Palm Sunday procession, in which Dionysus, Bacchus and Christ all take part. Using the Brechtian device of eliminating the suspense by telling the fable before enacting it, Fo then explains the significance of the earlier deities to his proposed skit:

Jesus Christ became Bacchus [who] at a certain point is seen standing on a table, shouting to all the celebrants, "Drink, gentlemen, be merry." Be happy, that's what counts: don't wait for paradise hereafter, paradise is here on earth. [This is] exactly the opposite of the doctrine they teach you from childhood on, when they explain that one must endure, that we are in a vale of tears ... not everyone can be rich, there are those who do well and those who do poorly, but everyone will be compensated when we are in heaven

.. . be calm, be good, and don't rock the boat ... Now instead this Jesus Christ of thegiullarta says, "Rock the boat and be happy "48

In this irreverent configuration, then, Fo represents Christ not only as "just another god," but as an ill-behaved one at that, a rabble rouser, the veritable life of comedy's requisite party. As in the other giullaresque sketches, however, the Christ of "The Wedding at Cana" is not directly impersonated by Fo, but is rather a projected absence, an invisible referent of the two oppositional characters alternately "placed" onstage by Fo. Using a technique which Fo calls, sdoppiamento, or splitting, Fo sets up a dramatic confrontation between two unlikely antagonists: the first is the archangel, who speaks in the polished Venetian dialect of an aristocrat and affects, as Fo says, "pretty gestures;" he is, of course the alazon, or pretender, in the archetypal con-

" Cappa, Fo, 81. 45 Fo, Buffo (1974), 56-72. Subsequent quotations from "The Wedding at Cana" are from this edition

and are my translations. 46 Lianfranco Binni, Dario Fo", II Castoro 123 (1977): 52. 47 "Medieval mystery play." For an excellent overview of the sacre rappresentationi, see, Cesare

Molinari, Lo Spettacolo drammatico nei momenti della sul storia dalle origini ad oggi (Milan: Mondadori, 1972), 93-108.

48 Fo, Buffo (1974), 56.



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figuration. Opposing him is a subarticulate, drunken oaf, who speaks in a coarse, peasant dialect peppered with obscenities, and who is barely able to hold himself upright due to his inebriated condition. For the archangel, authority and text are

inseparable. As the two struggle for the audience's attention, the archangel repeatedly intones the same litany, as though repetition itself increased credibility:

(To the drunkard) Be quiet I must begin because I'm the prologist. (To the audience) Good people, everything that I tell you is true, because it all comes from books and from the Gospels. What comes from them is not fantasy ... 49

The drunkard, on the other hand, appeals only to his own experience for veracity:

Me too, what I want to tell you isn't fantasy. I enjoyed a drunkenness so sweet, so beautiful, that I never want to get drunk in this world again, so I won't forget this fantastic drunkenness that is on me now 50

However "well-spoken" the angel, however, his supposedly divinely sanctioned text is no match for the corporeal subversion of the drunkard. In an apparently benign attempt to cooperate with the edicts of censorship, the drunkard, explores the pos- sibilities of non-verbal communication:

Drunkard: ... I'll think, think, think, and use my eyes . . and they'll understand. Archangel: No. D: But I don't make noise with my brain. A: You're making noiseD: I'm making noise with my brain? Dammit I must really be drunk Holy shitA: Don't breathe

D: What? I can't breathe? Not even with my nose? I'll burstA: BurstD: Ah . . . but if I burst, I'll make noise, huh?51

Here physical excess and textual purity are in direct conflict and the constant play between the presence and absence of each creates a troubling tableau indeed if Fo's configuration is in any sense "an illusion cut to the measure of desire."52 According to comic convention, however, the implications are somewhat more direct: forbidden to express himself through his own body, the drunkard proceeds to subvert the physical authority of the angel plucking his feathers, and eventually kicking him offstage. Thus far, the structure of the piece follows the pattern that Ron Jenkins has identified as "a dialectic between freedom and oppression [in which] each slapstick crescendo is orchestrated around a liberating triumph over injustice."53 Again Fo plays both parts, using the invito to defy conventional standards of iconicity: at any given moment, he is a presence addressing an absence, which he has established as a presence in the spectator's imagination. That the "absent" figure is every bit as "real" to the audience as the (temporarily) incarnated one is evidenced by Fo's experience at the mental hospital, which would certainly seem to indicate that his configuration of the absent Other is an empowering strategy for his audience. The

49Ibid., 59. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid., 61. 52 Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure," 11. 53 Ron Jenkins, "Dario Fo: The Roar of the Clown," The Drama Review, 30 (1986): 178.



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314 / JL Wing

voiceless in this case not only identified with the oppressed clown, they were actually enticed by the empty space to join in his revolutionary behavior. On this evidence alone, one might conclude that although Fo's ideological framing devices constrict

interpretation somewhat, his use of absence produces a kind of iconic underdeter- mination, which would seem to invite participation. This is true, not only in the "Cana" dialogue, but also in Fo's staging of the story of the medieval Pope, Boniface.

If the sanctimonious posture of the authoritative archangel is subverted by the finally triumphant voice of the opposing clown in "The Wedding at Cana," the representational dialectic of "Bonifacio VIII'"54 is somewhat more complex. Icono- graphically, Fo structures the piece as a processional, although it is important to keep in mind that this configuration is indeed "in mind" -the only figure actually on stage at any given time is Fo himself. Unlike the "heteroglossia"55 of "Lazarus," or the dialectical opposition of "The Wedding of Cana," "Boniface" is a true monologue-

only the protagonist of the piece, the medieval Pope of the title, has a voice. Nev- ertheless, the silent, subversive forces of a procession of choirboys in the background are no less potently evoked in the minds of the spectators than the irrepressibly voluble drunkard of Cana.

As in the other skits, Fo straddles theatrical "frames," functioning alternatively as the craftsman and the character. As the storyteller with a microphone, he introduces his subject by recounting historical horror tales of Boniface's repressions of both penitential religious orders and the early communards of Lombardy and Piedmont, gleefully punctuating the narration by miming Boniface's grotesque torture techniques, which included nailing dissenters by their tongues to the doors of offended

nobility. Then, in a sly shift of historical perspective, Fo assures the audience that the present Pope has nothing whatsoever in common with Boniface, after which he proceeds to tell "Pope stories" which imply just the opposite. Having thus set up a vivid and grotesque analogy between the present Pope and his medieval counterpart, Fo launches into his impersonation of Boniface, who is in the process of getting dressed for an important procession: as he is weighted down by increasingly more opulent garments, Boniface irritably interrupts his liturgical chant to berate his in- competent choirboys, finally threatening one with a tongue hanging. The dialectic in this representation involves an opposition which is set up within the figure of Boniface, himself. Fo foregrounds the Pope and then situates the choirboys behind him, so that Boniface effectively upstages himself each time he turns to admonish them, a configuration which causes him to subvert himself as the voice of authority. In addition, the opulent signs of wealth and power, progressively accumulated upon his body, cause him to be grotesquely weighted down, and finally, literally "tripped up," as one of the choirboys steps on his mantle.

This vision of an arrogant, cruel and grotesquely ornamented Pope is suddenly interrupted when Boniface sees Jesus coming up another street, leading a procession

54Fo, Buffo (1974): 110-127. Translations mine.

55 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). According to Bakhtin, heteroglossia connotes, "a multiplicity of social voices and a wide variety of their links and interrelationships" (p. 263), Bakhtin conceptualized heteroglossia as a means of indicating "the primacy of context over text (428).



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of penitents. When one of his underlings points out that it would be wise to be seen as a humble servant of Christ (in whose name, after all, he supposedly derives his own spiritual authority) Boniface throws off his jewels, smears mud on his face and

obsequiously presents himself to Jesus, who doesn't recognize him ("What do you mean, what's the Pope?") After several ludicrous attempts at self-abnegation, the Pope becomes increasingly more impatient ("Pay attention to me, you twit ") Finally he goes to far and is seen to be "flung a long way by a terrible kick in the butt."

Like the clown/drunkard of Cana, "Christ" has presumably been pushed too far. In this case, however, the only visible representation of his revenge, is enacted by the character, Boniface, on himself, as he stumbles grotesquely across the stage, consumed by humiliation and rage. In Fo's brilliant staging configuration, the power that pushes this raging alazon out - the triumphant comic empowerment - emanates from nothing other than absence, an iconicity of nothing. One could argue that Fo

has infused this nothing, this absence, with a "Christ" character, but it is clear that whatever is there, it is nowhere if not in the mind of the spectator. If it is a "signifying space," it would seem to signify a force created by the collaborative imagination of performer and audience together, a force which is seen to eject an agent of oppression. Because it is not embodied, this force evades overdetermination. If Fo's use of "icon- ized absence" is an effective strategy for "denaturaliz[ing] identity," in Kaja Silver- man's terms, "by emphasizing at every conceivable juncture its imaginary bases,"56 then it would certainly seem to be a promising scheme for breaking down an op- pressively encoded entanglement of iconicity and ideology in theatrical representation. By emphasizing the mechanics of perception, Fo has transferred the "burden of iconicity . . . from the representation to the viewer's judgement," and it would seem that he has considerably empowered the viewer's judgement in the process.57

As I have indicated throughout this essay, Fo's theatrical framing devices create a deliberate interpretative constraint, a kind of "forced perspective," which is scarcely free of ideological entanglements. Nevertheless, Fo has succeeded, at the very least, in setting up an extraordinarily dynamic theatrical dialogue. Indeed Fo has said that the purpose of his theatre is to create a debate, that he doesn't want his theatre to "rain down vertically on people's heads."58 By presenting a kind of fragmented iconicity --fragments of characters, fragments of actions and interactions - Fo has shaped a dramatic montage in which the shifting perspectives force a sense of com- munity. There is no time to identify privately with one character or point of view; the spectator is too busy in every given moment, working on the collective creation of the event, an event which is tossed back and forth through the time and space of the theatrical protoplasm like Brecht's atomic particles of humankind.

56 Kaja Silverman, "Fassbinder and Lacan: A Reconsideration of Gaze, Look and image," Camera Obscura 19 (1989): 62.

17 De Lauretis, Alice, 64. In her chapter on "Imaging," De Lauretis draws from theories of visual perception to suggest strategies for, "construct(ing) the terms of another frame of reference, another measure of desire" (68).

58 Dario Fo, "Some Aspects of Popular Theatre," trans. Tony Mitchell New Theatre Quarterly 1 (1985): 136.

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