Peter Shaffer - Equus: seks s konjima (+Kenneth Pinyan)

Jedan od najradikalnijih suvremenih dramskih tekstova, Equus Petera Shaffera, tematizira tabuiziranu životinjsko-ljudsku ljubav. Shaffera je nadahnuo događaj iz 1973. godine kada je 17-godišnjak u napadu strasti oslijepio svojih šest konja. Ova psihijatrijsko-kriminalistička melodrama govori o psihijatru koji pokušava razumjeti mladića koji je religiozno-seksualno fasciniran konjima. To je naravno i drama o tome kako su suvremeni materijalizam i lagodnost uništili našu sposobnost obožavanja, strastvenog života i, konačno, osnovnog doživljavanja boli.
Postoji i filmska verzija iz 1977., u režiji Sidneya Lumeta, s Richardom Burtonom. (Reputacija teksta donekle je narušena otkad su postavljene kazališne verzija u kojima nastupaju onaj klinac koji glumi Harryja Pottera i, ajme meni, Alec Baldwin.

Dramu možete čitati na Google Books.
Bonus 1: dokumentarac o Kennethu Pinyanu, koji se seksao s konjima.
Bonus 2: tri sublimna posta Lucasa de Lime o umjetnosti i animalnosti/bestijalnosti.

 

Equus is a play by Peter Shaffer written in 1973, telling the story of a psychiatrist who attempts to treat a young man who has a pathological religious/sexual fascination with horses.[1]
Shaffer was inspired to write Equus when he heard of a crime involving a 17-year-old who blinded six horses in a small town near London.[2] He set out to construct a fictional account of what might have caused the incident, without knowing any of the details of the crime. The play's action is something of a detective story, involving the attempts of the child psychiatrist, Dr. Martin Dysart, to understand the cause of the boy's actions while wrestling with his own sense of purpose.[3]
However, numerous other issues inform the narrative. Most important are religious and ritual sacrifice themes, and the manner in which character Alan Strang constructs a personal theology involving the horses and the supreme godhead, "Equus". Alan sees the horses as representative of God and confuses his adoration of his "God" with sexual attraction. Also important is Shaffer's examination of the conflict between personal values and satisfaction and societal mores, expectations and institutions. In reference to the play's classical structure, themes and characterization, Shaffer has discussed the conflict between Apollonian and Dionysian values and systems in human life.

Original productions

The play was originally staged at the Royal National Theatre at the Old Vic in London in 1973. It was directed by John Dexter and starred Alec McCowen as psychiatrist Martin Dysart and Peter Firth as Alan Strang, the young patient. In 1976 it transferred to the Albery Theatre with Colin Blakely playing Dysart. It was also presented on Broadway at the Plymouth Theatre with Anthony Hopkins and Peter Firth.
Later on, Tom Hulce played the role of Alan Strang, and Anthony Perkins replaced Hopkins as Martin Dysart. Perkins was briefly replaced by Richard Burton for the star's return to Broadway for a limited run. Perkins resumed the part when Burton's run ended. Other actors to play Dysart in the Broadway production were Leonard Nimoy and McCowen.
The play received a Tony Award for Best Play in 1975 and for John Dexter's direction. Firth was nominated for Best Actor but lost the award to John Kani and Winston Ntshona for the double bill of Sizwe Banzi is Dead and The Island.
Equus was acclaimed not only for its dramatic craftmanship and the performances by the stars, but also for its brilliantly original staging. The horses were portrayed by actors in brown track suits, wearing a wire abstraction of a horse's head. The entire cast, including the actors playing the horses, remained seated on stage for the play's duration, watching the action along with the audience. Part of the audience was seated on the stage as well, in bleachers that looked out into the auditorium, creating the effect that the spectators surrounded the action. The play also offers a startling visual when the actors playing Alan and Jill get completely naked in the attempted seduction scene.

Film adaptation

Shaffer adapted the play for a 1977 film starring Richard Burton, Peter Firth, Eileen Atkins, Colin Blakely as Frank Strang, Joan Plowright, and Jenny Agutter, directed by Sidney Lumet. The film was heavily criticized by animal rights activists and by Shaffer himself, because of Lumet's bloody, realistic presentation of the abuse of the horses (although most of the horses were in fact puppets).[

Revivals

Equus was presented in Baltimore, in 1979 by the Lovegrove Alley Theatre. The production starred a pre-Broadway Charles S. Dutton in the role of Dysart. Director Brad Mays did double-duty in the role of Alan Strang. A young actress named Lauren Raher played Jill Mason, and her real-life mother Rhona Raher portrayed Dora, Alan's mother.[4][5][6]
The Hangar Theatre in Ithaca, New York staged Equus in July-August 1992, with Lea Vernon, wife of Harold Gould, as Hester Saloman.
I 2000, a Spanish language version was staged on Mexico, with Mauricio Ochmann playing Strang. [7]
Massachusetts' Berkshire Theatre Festival revived Equus in the Summer of 2005, staged by Scott Schwartz, with Victor Slezak as Dysart and Randy Harrison as Strang. Roberta Maxwell, who originated the role of Jill in the original 1970s Broadway production, played Hester Saloman in this revival.
George Takei played Dysart in a 2006 revival, featuring an Asian Pacific cast, done at East West Players in Los Angeles, California. His Star Trek co-star, Leonard Nimoy, had played Dysart late in the play's 1970s Broadway run.
Equus was revived in 2007 in the West End by producers David Pugh and Dafydd Rogers, starring Richard Griffiths and Daniel Radcliffe in the leading roles. The production was directed by Thea Sharrock, and opened in February 2007 at the Gielgud Theatre. The production attracted a lot of press attention, as both Radcliffe and Griffiths appear in the Harry Potter film franchise (as Harry Potter and Vernon Dursley respectively). In particular the casting of seventeen year-old Radcliffe caused some controversy, since the role of Alan Strang required him to appear naked on stage.[8] This was despite the fact that many other young actors over the years had performed the play naked. Radcliffe insisted that the nude scene was not "gratuitous" and that he should portray the character and the scene as called for by the script. Peter Firth gave more than 1,000 performances as Alan Strang; however, Radcliffe has stated in interviews that he chose not to watch the 1977 film, as he did not want to be influenced by Firth's interpretation of the character.
The 2007 London revival has since been transferred to Broadway, at the Broadhurst Theatre, running through 8 February 2009. Radcliffe and Griffiths reprised their roles, and Thea Sharrock returned as director. Radcliffe eventually received a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actor in a Play.
In 2008 the production toured the UK with Simon Callow as Dysart and Alfie Owen-Allen as Strang.
In March 2010 "Equus" was performed at New Theatre in Coral Gables, Florida, featuring James Samuel Randolph as Martin Dysart and David Hemphill as Alan Strang; directed by Ricky J. Martinez, Set Design by Nicole Quintana, Costume Design by K. Blair Brown, Sound Design by Osvaldo Quintana, Light Design by Jesus Casimiro, and Stage Managed by Dana Hesch.
March 24-27th 2010 "Equus" was performed with the King's Theatrical Society at the University of King's College, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada; featuring George Ciobanu as Martin Dysart, and Jackson Byrne as Alan Strang; directed by Brendan Sangster, produced by Sarah Kester. This production won the "Best Play" King's Zine Award in March 2010.
In June 2010, "Equus" is being performed at Guild Hall in East Hampton, NY featuring Alec Baldwin as Martin Dysart and Sam Underwood as Alan Strang.
In June 2010, "Equus" was performed at the Downtown Arts Center in Lexington, Kentucky.
In July 2010, "Equus" is being performed at OnStage in Greenbelt 1, Makati City, Philippines and is presented by Repertory Philippines featuring Miguel Faustmann as Dr. Dysart, and Marco Mañalac as Alan Strang with Red Concepcion as understudy. Veteran stage actor Audie Gemora directed the play and has since received rave reviews all over.[9][10] Media, Broadway and West End veterans and critics like Lea Salonga of Miss Saigon fame, has generally applauded the outstanding portrayal[11] of Marco Mañalac as Alan Strang.
June 26 through September 5, 2010, Chicago's Redtwist Theatre presented a critically acclaimed production of the play, with Brian Parry as Dysart, and Andrew Jessop as Alan. Directed by Michael Colucci, it was the second time the company had presented the piece, the first being in their 2006-07 season.
Also in October 2010, a production of "Equus" is being performed at Sydney, Australia's New Theatre. The production is directed by Helen Tonkin with original music scored by Brendan Maclean and Rhys D. Webb.
During November and early December 2010, "Equus" was performed at California State University - Fullerton.  - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equus_(play)

 

Confessionalism and Horse Fucking in the Necropastoral of Louise Glück, “Equus,” and Enumclaw, Washington

by Lucas de Lima 

  

For my third annual post on art and the animal, I’m going to explore the moist, shadowy field where two taboos collide.  Bestiality (actual and representational) and Confessionalism (poetic, Catholic, psychiatric, juridical) have been on my mind lately.

My thinking begins with Louise Glück’s “Horse,” a poem that briefly riffs on the trope of young women’s attraction to horses:

What does the horse give you
That I cannot give you?

I watch you when you are alone,
When you ride into the field behind the dairy,
Your hands buried in the mare’s
Dark mane.
Then I know what lies behind your silence:
Scorn, hatred of me, of marriage. Still,
You want me to touch you; you cry out
As brides cry, but when I look at you I see
There are no children in your body.
Then what is there?
Nothing, I think. Only haste
To die before I die.
In a dream, I watched you ride the horse
Over the dry fields and then
Dismount: you two walked together;
In the dark, you had no shadows.
But I felt them coming toward me
Since at night they go anywhere,
They are their own masters.
Look at me. You think I don’t understand?
What is the animal
If not passage out of this life?

By ending with a tidy epiphany, “Horse” seems to restrain itself like any quietist or confessionalist poem.  Contrary to the aims of a proper avant-garde, the poem forces closure and self-enlightenment; its ending only thinly disguises a confession framed as universal truth.  In the speaker’s rhetorical questions, the animal as Death and only Death (‘passage out of this life’) reads more like an assertion than a suggestion, a light beaming down from the poet godhead above us.

But what, in this flickering, depressed poem, does it mean to pass out of this life?

What is the ‘Nothing’ in the deathly bodies inscribed?

What is “Horse” if not a trot through the Necropastoral, where the unthinkable lurks in and leaks from every threshold?

Where everything, even and especially that nonreproductive ‘Nothing’ and ‘haste to die,’ becomes a threshold?

If Gluck responds austerely to the ego-centered trivialisms of Confessionalism, Peter Schaffer’s play “Equus” amplifies the confessional injunctions of religion, law, and psychoanalysis beyond their aims.  The play centers on the horse worship of Alan Strang, a troubled teenager whose theological desires make him a hard nut to crack even on the analyst’s couch.

We learn in the beginning of the play (or movie, now streaming on Netflix!) that Alan has violently blinded horses in the stable where he works.  Because no one can figure out why, it becomes the job of his analyst to suss out the truth, if not produce it.  As Foucault pointed out, ”Western man has become a confessing animal.”  Institutions like science/medicine and law have thus adopted the confessional from the religious sphere as a way to enforce authority.  This is especially the case with deviant sexuality, which is just as much regulated as it is incited by the powers that be:

“At issue is not a movement bent on pushing rude sex back into some obscure and inaccessible region, but on the contrary, a process that spreads it over the suface of things and bodies, arouses it, draws it out and bids it to speak, implants it in reality and enjoins it to tell the truth: an entire glittering sexual array…”

The threat of Alan Strang, in this sense, is that he restores Confessionalism to sublime heights, where the spread of eros takes on inhuman dimensions.  As the play illustrates his confessions, it follows the horse where Gluck’s poem fades out:  Alan rejects heterosexual fucking and replaces a portrait of Christ on his bedroom wall with one of the horse-god he calls Equus.  The teeanger submits to a worship that is a kind of death, a murder of the secular individualism to which most confessionalists cling.  As Mark Doty states in a conversation about Lowell, “There is a huge difference between the search for insight and the desire to be forgiven.”  While Doty sides with the psychoanalytic pursuit of insight, “Equus” half-heartedly entertains a Freudian explanation for Alan’s deviancy.  His ritual and sacrifice, rather than his relationship with Mom or Dad or any woman or man, become the scene and not the root of a gorgeous, impenetrable spectacle at the very limit of our understanding.  A limit where what is said must remain unfathomable, eluding all rationale in its aberrant grandeur.

Alan’s is a mutant confessionalism.  Catharsis heals him while also transforming his analyst, who confesses to wanting to be like Alan, or worse, becoming the horse he mounts on erotic midnight rides:

I keep thinking about the horse! Not the boy: the horse, and what it may be trying to do. I keep seeing that huge head kissing him with its chained mouth. Nudging through the metal some desire absolutely irrelevant to filling its belly or propagating its own kind. What desire could that he? . . . You see, I’m wearing that horse’s head myself. That’s the feeling. All reined up in old language and old assumptions, straining to jump clean-hoofed on to a whole new track of being I only suspect is there.

Tragically, it’s not the fictional teenager of “Equus” whose bestiality literalized Gluck’s mention of fatal passage, but an existing person.  In 2005 Kenneth Pinyan, a member of a zoophilic community in Enumclaw, Washington died from a perforated colon after being fucked by a stallion.  According to reports, Pinyan refused to seek medical attention because of the unusual nature of his internal injury.  In light of sexual norms, needless to say, he could not confess to his own penetration by an animal.  And yet the truth, once bled out of him, spread.  Pinyan’s alternative to confession was a hastened death whose obscenity was promptly declared and codified (the state of Washington had no anti-beastiality laws prior to the case).  He was declared dead upon arrival at the ER, where a friend from the same zoophilic community anonymously left him.
For me, Pinyan’s silence resonates as the ultimate threshold in this equine entanglement of art and bodies.  No longer a self-determined human subject, I am annihilated through my affinity with him, turned into a masterless shadow his body nevertheless casts.  Just as Alan elicits from his analyst a monstrous sympathy, Pinyan’s death commands my own inhuman confession–words with the force if not the content of his secret, a visionary, epiphanic, necessarily destructive Nothing I couldn’t name if I tried.

Art is of the Animal: Grosz, Wojnarowicz, Cixous

by Lucas de Lima 

The past few posts remind me of Elizabeth Grosz’s Chaos, Territory, Art. Consider this quote in which she explains Deleuze and Guattari:
“Art is not the activation of the perceptions and sensations of the lived body [my emphasis]—the merging and undecidability of subject and object, seer and seen in a common flesh [...] but about transforming the lived body into an unlivable power, an unleashed force that transforms the body along with the world.”
Reading this, I turn to David Wojnarowicz’s art of unlivable power, a power that the image intensifies and effects even more than it represents:

the beautiful falling buffalo.
For Grosz, “[a]rt is of the animal. It comes, not from reason, recognition, intelligence, not from a uniquely human sensibility, or from any of man’s higher accomplishments, but from something excessive, unpredictable, lowly.”
Could I, while beholding Wojnarowicz’s oeuvre, say that one possible origin of art is AIDS? A disease whose origin itself is the animal?
If I can, will that help me locate my body—despite/because of its porosity—in the way that Hélène Cixous, bleeding into feralness, struggles with in the Book of Promethea:
“We never die enough, we keep on getting sick from these inflammations of the soul; Promethea, especially, breaks her body and comes all apart, because the wildness of her soul is even more energetic than the wildness of mine; and she throws herself against her own walls, with enough violence to break bones. She has already cracked a vertebra…”
Pressed into the book with a red horse on its cover, Cixous finds it difficult to trace bodily history:
“how can I make my arrow not completely free of the past so that it keeps a trace of my desire, of its provenance? The only thing that comes mind is to carve a little motto on its shaft like: ‘I come from a woman.’”
*
Although I come from a woman, too, those are not the words for me right now. They’re not as pointed as my arrow. To restore the past in my body, I think I would carve something that is not true but is, words I experience as sensation:
“I come from a homosexual animal.”


Art is of the Animal: Tori Amos & the Breastfeeding Piglet

by Lucas de Lima 

If To Bring You My Love was the album that overwhelmed and saturated PJ Harvey by turning the musician into a dramatic vessel for art, it was Boys for Pele that took Tori Amos’ mediumicity to new lows and heights beyond theatricality. Staged in the Gothic south, the album’s artwork unravels its own staginess.  While one photograph depicts Amos in a rocking chair with a gun in her lap, dead cocks at her side, and snakes slithering on a deck, in the enclosed booklet Amos accidentally suckles a piglet as per an interview:
“Um, that day, the little critter was 4 days old. And he was with me for hours. And was scared, and hungry, and just kind of fell right in on there.”
In the same interview Amos jokes about “nurturing the non-kosher” and explains the photo as a reclamation of shame.  In another interview, she recalls a childhood memory of her father covering her eyes before another woman’s exposed breastfeeding.  If it’s clear that the photo thus responds to the ways in which women’s bodies are estranged and debased, the piglet attached to Amos’ breast exceeds identity as an interpretive frame.  Identity, I think, is just what the photo ends up evacuating (along with any possibility of a mask).  As a disorientation of the “Madonna and Child,” the image achieves its sacred glow precisely through profanation.  In the piglet figured as Jesus, we see an improperly Christian separation of life–an unthinkable and unnamable cross-species encounter that awes us because of the nonhuman infant it exalts.
While elevating the piglet religiously, however, the photo reduces and confuses the porcine and human at the level of flesh.  This posthumanism, as it were, lies in the sudden conviviality of bodies opening up to each other:  Amos herself sings in the album’s “Blood Roses,” “Sometimes you’re nothing but meat.”  Sometimes, in other words, art emerges as the accidental scene of authenticity–of an act that spills through its subjects, spills subjects into each other, spills over the art-frame.  The authentic act thus erupts as a matter of bodily matter, or unrestrained and unpredictable touch, taste, milk, blood, flow:  a totally undifferentiating sensation.

 



Zoo, dokumentarac o Kennethu Pinyanu, koji je umro zbog posljedica seksa s konjem: