On Theatrical Spatiality in “Drama mexicano” by Yvonne Venegas at Lateral

The blacks in Yvonne Venegas’s photographs possess a fullness similar to the darkness we see when we close our eyes, or to the moment when the lights dim just before a play begins. Both require that interval before we enter the terrain of the dreamlike or the fictional; both are distinct states of reverie. The exhibition Drama mexicano is presented at Lateral, only a few steps from FOCO Lab. Entering a space devoted to exhibiting photographic practices produces singular experiences like that darkness made of ink, inviting us to lose ourselves in the loving—or funereal—stillness of the photograph, as Roland Barthes once described it.

The exhibition is an exploration of theater, an art form marked by a sense of time as dislocated as that of a plague. Venegas begins the text accompanying the show by quoting Antonin Artaud, a fervent figure not only in the history of theater but also in understanding modernity as a technical assault on the senses. She specifically invokes the essay “The Theater and the Plague,” filled with grandiose images of the diseased body in relation to the actor’s body as a receptor of delirious and contagious forces. Yet when looking at the photographs, a different mystery emerges around theatrical spaces: what do these containers of sweat and fiction reveal?

In the essay “Production and Metaphysics,” I find the keys to speaking about the kind of theater that unfolds in Venegas’s practice: “I say that the stage is a concrete physical place which asks to be filled, and to be given its own concrete language to speak. I saw that this concrete language, intended for the senses and independent of speech, has first to satisfy the senses, that there is a poetry of the senses as there is a poetry of language, and that this concrete physical language to which I refer is truly theatrical only to the degree that the thoughts it expresses are beyond the reach of the spoken word.” Later, Artaud states that an idea of theater subordinated to written language is a theater of grammarians, anti-poets, and positivists.

Venegas undertakes a study of the poetry she finds inherent to the spaces where staging takes place. Through the exhibition’s arrangement, we observe a dialectic unfolding among surfaces, walls, and half-open doors. Mysticism appears in the mirrors, silent witnesses to the labors of bodies. The scratched floor at Casa del Teatro expresses a language of routes and glides—marks that trace the area where the actor’s physical and spiritual work occurs. The wooden stage floor becomes a ritual zone where thought circulates differently, where muscles and bones are warmed up. And who could deny the theater found within the folds of a heavy velvet curtain, or in the fur of a black puppy sleeping backstage?

Staging also occurs in faces, which continue to constitute a kind of absolute state of emotion. Are the actresses themselves spatialities where individuality dissolves into multiplicity and language into intensity? The gestures that appear in Paula, Lucía, and Mariana seem to be captured at the precise moment when feeling takes form—on the lips, in the position of intertwined hands, in half-open eyes. Paco appears accompanied by his shadow, that expressionist silhouette, looking directly into the lens of the one who looks back at him. Finally, one photograph is placed before the seats of La Teatrería; Diana’s gaze closes the exhibition. A gaze filled with complicity, in that state of grace that is the fixed close-up, silent and without language. In Drama mexicano, staging emerges through all kinds of spells and gatherings.

— Mariel Vela

Translated into English by Luis Sokol

References:

“Production and Metaphysics,” in The Theater and Its Double by Antonin Artaud (1938). Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography by Roland Barthes (1980).