Underskog

Galleri Maria Veie proudly presents Animal Magnetism 3 Friday February 4th and Saturday 5th

I.
Henriette Pedersen is an interdisciplinary artist with a background from choreography and time-based art, and to define her trilogy it was necessary to come up with a new term. Theatre critics might call it a performance when it is presented on stage with the audience safely seated in the dark, but what happens when the work of a choreographer enters the gallery space? Is it contemporary art or ballet? From my perspective, as an iconologist, Animal Magnetism 3 is not a performance, but an interformance.

Pedersen chooses dancers that are splendid instruments of expression and movement. The dancers’ extreme strength and independent artistic qualities make it possible for them to interact in a condition beyond control – responding to the state of the audience. Hysteria is not just a diagnosis; it may also be expressions of our suppressed feelings.

Pedersen works site specific, using three dimensional space, flood lights, and organisms as materials. She is not performing herself, but implementing her artistic ideas through living materials like dancers and opera singers. The dancer Kristine Karåla Øren is crucial for Pedersen’s work, but this time she is not wrestling with another female, but in a hysterical spiral with the Swedish opera singer, Fredrik Strid. In addition, Pedersen is cooperating with Tilo Hahn. Hahn works with electronical controlled light as the two others work with their voice. Animal Magnetism 3 is thereby a highly interfering work being created as a response to the specific space, the audience and the moment itself. It consists of sound and movement as the dancer and the tenor use their voice and their ‘historically effected consciousness’ (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein) as described by Hans-Georg Gadamer in Truth and Method (1960). As a scholar finds the ways that a text’s history articulates with their own background, they use their experience in creation.

II.
The trilogy “Animal Magnetism” by Henriette Pedersen is a tribute to all hysterics throughout human history. The first written sources describing hysteria are on papyrus from 1900 B.C. The syndrome is strongly tied to the female sex, therefore the name “hysteria,” Greek for uterus. Few are aware that many men are also affected, but can hysteria ever be masculine?

In our theatrical age it is natural to make a theme of a syndrome characterised by simulation and acting. The symptoms of hysteria have changed with time, but have always had similarities with the era’s “popular” diseases. The syndrome continuously adopts new expressions, but also changes name according to the sex practicing it.

Hysteria reached epidemic proportions and occupied many doctors during the upheaval around the turn of the last century. Since this golden age of hysteria, 1870-1910, the symptoms have changed from demonstrative to more introverted. The behaviour commonly called “hysterical” today, resembles the syndrome as it was expressed 100 years ago. Animal Magnetism III deals with the demonstration of the male hysteria from its golden age until today.

Mesmerized
During the first decade of the 20th century there was a public interest for so-called “animal magnetism.” According to the German researcher Franz Anton Mesmer, there is a magnetic fluid in all living creatures. Using magnets and the laying-on of hands, Mesmer restored the balance in, amongst others, hysterics, from which comes the English “mesmerized.”

Both hypnosis and hysteria were objects of investigation during the golden age at Salpêtrière hospital in Paris. The influential neurologist Jean Martin Charcot chategorized, almost choreographed hysteria’s symptoms and attacks in aesthetic illustrations. Charcot broke with Antiquity’s gynaecological and the Middle Age’s demonological explanations of hysteria. He described the syndrome as neurological. Amongst Charcot’s patients were many men, something his followers wrote out of medical history. Hysteria continued therefore to be “the quintessential female malady” right up to our time.

Globus hystericus
At Salpêtrière Charcot staged hysterias great fits by releasing well chosen hysterical patients on the public every Thursday. In the auditorium many men were inspired, amongst others August Strindberg and Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson. Amongst those who would later take over the research were Freud and Gilles de la Tourette. They did not consider it suitable to call affected men hysterical, and instead proposed “Melancholy” and “Hypochondria” as diagnoses. And then the 1st World War broke out and Shell Shock was introduced.

Hysterical men had, according to Charcot, much the same symptoms as women, but fewer and shorter fits. They were especially prone to “Globus Hystericus,” a large lump located in the throat, which paralysed the vocal chords and gave the patient the sensation of being choked. (Other masculine stigmata are listed). 150 years after Charcot, Henriette Pedersen tests his research findings alongside her performers. Pedersen’s “star hysteric,” Kristine Karåla Øren, has also tried Charcot’s four-phase hysteria on her own body, particularly the perfect fit as it was staged in Animal Magnetism I.

Smokescreen
During the Victorian age it was considered distinguished to be hysterical: “The English Malady” conferred status. Without hysterical tendencies, one wasn’t worthy to be a member of the upper class. Amongst Freud’s patients and male research objects we find the extremely wealthy, Russian Wolfman. Freud understood hysteria to be a disease of the mind and his development of psychiatry was anchored in the syndrome. Freud’s favourite syndrome, Don Giovanni, presents one of the most hysterical male characters in the history of scenic arts. His hysteria in characterized by projecting ones feelings onto others. Such a smokescreen creates great confusion and frustration in the male hysterics surroundings.

Both Charcot and Freud, but also the psychoanalyst Juliet Mitchell, believe that trauma is a condition for hysteria. Mitchell asserts that sibling jealousy predisposes for the syndrome, since hysterics seek out the physical condition if symbiosis with the mother. The sufferer “regresses” to the time before a sibling replaced him. But for anyone who isn’t an infant, it is intolerable to be both body and feelings. The hysteric reacts by adopting any behaviour or symptom that allows him to “be someone.” The adopted identity causes re-traumatisation. In this way, the hysteric is imprisoned in a hysterical spiral, “only body, nobody, somebody & back.”

Hysterical spiral
In Animal Magnetism III dancer Kristine Karåla Øren finds herself in a hysterical spiral with tenor Fredrik Strid. They inhabit a foggy no-mans land, probably in the inter-war period. Maybe they are siblings, or soldiers? This time Pedersen’s star hysteric has adopted the male hysteria, not least literally in the form of a military green suit. Does she then become hysteria’s great defender, as Charcot was at Salpêtrière? Is Mr Stride a hospitalized hysteric? Which one has infected the other? Under Øren’s suit jacket the syndrome’s feminine history hides as a low cut and see-through “body” from Animal Magnetism II.” Can hysteria ever be masculine?

Through 5000 years hysterics have simulated other diseases. All who act out hysteria are not just colluders to spreading the syndrome; they also choose hysteria’s expression! When Pedersen’s series Animal Magnetism makes hysteria a theme, we have no idea what we’ll receive, but there’s no doubt that we will receive. Get well soon!

TEXT
I. Maria Veie Sandvik
II. Sidsel Pape