Review On fringe and subversion

For those who weren’t lucky enough to go to any of those grand August festivals and were stuck in Amsterdam like myself, September was all about Fringe this and Fringe that. We will go with “Fringe that”, i.e. the Free Fringe festival (1-11 September, various venues). On its fifth year, FF’s mission is to embrace and promote diversity, creativity and artistic freedom. “To be a beacon in the darkness of corporate mediocrity” as its organisers put it.

With a plethora of visual art, music, theatre, screenings, performances, comedy, games and animation, the FF had something for everyone – everyone, that is, who’s fed up with perfection, consumption and blink and is up for more DIY, having a go and having fun. For everyone who wants to be less of a spectator in this society of spectacle. For the FF is not only about the events, creative, critical, subversive, political and noisy – a potent cacophony, if you like, amidst the apathy that surrounds us and that reflects dominant ideologies at best or reproduces them, at worse. FF is also about the venues, their social outlook and the risks that they take to break the isolation and curtail the social antagonism that has come to dominate our lives.

Black Circus (3 September, Nieuwland) can be described as an anarcho-queer cabaret. A hairy Melvis and a Lucienne Boyer coughing to death; a Master of Ceremony and a heartbroken wild child with a dildo and a baby with a dildo in hand; a carnivalesque evocation of emancipation involving a horse harness and strange creatures running loose; and news of a faraway land where an aspiring young general had the brilliant idea of giving people carefully measured “choices” that would never amount to anything of substance but still keep everyone complacent and self-absorbed in debates that largely remain besides the point. Some would call that “democracy” but we can have that discussion another time.

For now, let us talk about capitalism and the normalisation and regulation of bodies and desires. Discussing the politics of the performative, Judith Butler asks: who speaks when convention speaks? (Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, 1997:25) For you see, our bodies are at the core of the political order.

So, if I do “whatever I like” and “express myself” it should be fine, yes? Well, not quite. Doing that is great, but doing only just that is not enough. There isn’t some pure “I” that we somehow misplaced but can effortlessly recover or some unconditioned “personal choice” that we can evoke out of thin air. True, there is a lot to recover and create a new. But it is also important to understand that we live a heavily regulated life and realise ourselves in a highly classed and antagonistic society.

Black Circus shows us the transgressive potential of the carnivalesque to defy and subvert the order of power. Queer resists normativity and at least since Foucault’s History of Sexuality (1976), we should all know that sexuality is a social construct, historically formulated. “Dressing up” thus is not an act of concealment but becomes a means to uncover real social conflict. A parody that exposes and ridicules social norms, but that also critically reminds us how our bodies are regulated, classified and normalised along axes of difference (gender, class, race, ethnicity, religion) but also capitalised on, branded and sold back to us.

This critique is not done from some “safe” external position but from within the same hierarchies of power that one seeks to challenge – a power that is inscribed on our bodies: the productive, complacent and consuming body. Capitalism needs not only to reproduce goods, you see, but also people.

An act or a moment of liberation has a creative as much as it has a destructive power. It is a violent act of shattering the old and of giving way to the new: a new way of being, acting and realising interpersonal relations. To put it differently, “freedom” and “expression” means taking risks. It means getting outside our skin, normalised body and censored voice, and exceeding the comfort zone of conventions and social norms. It means pushing the limits and confronting the “other” as much as we need to confront our own selves – that personal policeman we all have roaming free in the inside of our heads scrutinising and evaluating everything we do.

Some might find what Black Circus does “threatening”. But what exactly is being threatened? The safety of the spectator who only wants to consume and go home? The categories and norms that one unproblematically adopts and reproduces, or some sense of a “self” trying to fit in and “proper behaviour”? If so, we should feel threatened. And then go and do something positive about it.

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