About Exorcism of the Father

The approach

 

The moment I entered that room where "Moi, Eugénie Grandet" was displayed, I discovered myself in an artistic world that was not only personal but also hermetic: one after another, 16 or 17 pieces of small embroideries that Louise Bourgeois created as part of her last exhibition in life. Embroideries made from scraps of pieces from her childhood that she had kept throughout her life. A work tied to her emancipatory struggle as a woman within her own family.

 

As I viewed each piece, I was fascinated by their language, by the creative process I saw behind them. I read some of her poems (also displayed), and notes about her history with the character from that lesser-known Balzac novel, Eugénie Grandet, and how she related it to her fear of having her creativity castrated by her own father. And I thought of my Butoh and my father.

 

Each image possessed a poetic abstraction that demanded something from the viewer, while at the same time being so common and basic, so connected to the older woman, the mother, the unmarried aunt, the grandmother, her personal history, the past, the small and simple object. Each image was a family story in which each viewer had to make their own effort to find it. While I watched that series of embroidered pieces, I was weaving my dance, immersed in my own story with my castrating father. I am not a woman, I do not claim to appropriate the needs of a gender, I simply identified with the personal story, with the means, with the intrinsic strength of the artistic medium chosen by Bourgeois. I was already dancing and I couldn’t stop that story.

 

The creation process

 

The process has been long and deep; I made the entire work mine, the reasons for its creation. Every day, at 10 in the morning, Bourgeois would begin to work on what she herself called "a daily exorcism." Every day at 10 in the morning, I began to work on my own exorcism and started to weave my own images, with the scraps of my memory. I also interpreted the lines embroidered by Bourgeois; of course, I turned them into movements of my body, but it was those lines that emerged from my inner memory that guided the creation of my dance. I am the girl Bourgeois and the boy Gustavo, I am the artist Bourgeois and the artist Gustavo; a "Nous, Eugénie Grandet" was created.

 

"Exorcism of My Father" is an extended embroidery. First I found the music by Sarah Sarhandi that brought my research to new deepness and sweet sensibility. Then, once the images had become my dance, and the story had turned into the embroideries of my own exorcism, I invited Belle Shafir to continue embroidering with me. Belle is a multimedia artist who works with unconventional materials, and it only took me one visit to her studio to discover an affinity with her work that she creates with an emotional impulsiveness that comes from internal pain and memory. A woman like Bourgeois, a visual artist like Bourgeois, also a Butoh practitioner, she understands the work firsthand and is passionate about it. I told her I wanted her to help me to include visual art into the dance piece, and she agreed not only to include it but to create with her horse’s hair objects a new body on stage. I am part (or that is my pretense) of her unsettling organic sculpture.

 

Belle herself comments about it: "Exorcism of my Father draws its inspiration from the deep, emotional connections depicted in the work of Louise Bourgeois. I’m very connected with the exploration of father-daughter and father-son relationships, as well as the deliberate choice of materials, for our project.”

 

We are utilizing horsehair, forming the foundation of our own artistic endeavor. Bourgeois' ability to transform personal experiences into universally comprehensible artworks serves us as a guide for our effort to explore and communicate intimate and often painful family dynamics through creative means.

 

Finally, the piece unfolds in the style that Butoh dance proposes: a 50-minute improvisation based on a complete structure, using reference points that outline the story within the dancer and create a sense of unity in the minds of the audience. Sensations, intuition, blurred images, surprising movements, bites of feelings, a short climax.

 

The Show

 

In the background, we see a curtain made from horsehair, its texture both captivating and unsettling. On the stage, there is a mattress, a bed, made of the same material—horsehair. The visual artist works with great concentration on her piece.

 

0 - The Sculptor: Creation of the Body on Stage. The Waking Up to Dance.

 

1 - Introduction: 10AM. Entry into the Artist's Daily Workspace. 

 

2 - Trance and Invocation: Walking Among Tombs of the Ancestors. Invocation of the Father.

  

3 - The Infant: Vulnerability of the Child’s Body and the Father’s Eyes Over Everything.

 

4 - The Dreaming of the Adolescent: Discovery of Art and Sexuality. Dreaming of a Personal Revolution.

 

5 - The Artist Liberates Himself: Sexuality and Creativity. Freedom is Possible.

 

6 - The Body as Monster: The Father’s Murder. 

 

7 - Solitude and Growth: The Tree of Life. The Smile of the Triumphant Old Woman.

 

The piece ends as it began—centered on the body, which has transformed through every phase of life: from the sculptor’s hands, through childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, to the final act of liberation. The exorcism of the father is complete, and what remains is a body that has learned to embrace its own strength, its capacity for creation, and its resilience against the ghosts of the past. Tomorrow she/he will need to do the same.