commedia
I pulled my old college theater textbooks down from the shelf above the windows lining the small spare room that was tucked into the corner of the house. I was looking for answers. Answers I didn’t know how to find anywhere else. Answers to questions I hadn’t yet asked. Just answers.
I brushed a thin layer of dust off of each book and placed them into a black wire basket, the contents of which were holding me together - boxes of tarot cards; books about magic; Gender Fail’s Against The Death Wish, in a death-obsessed world by Be Oakley; and a pastel, watercolor painting pasted on a greeting card I picked up downtown that happened to look like my dog, Benson. With the cicadas humming, the birds chirping, and the sun falling into a puddle of neon hues, I brought the basket into the backyard with Benson, sat down under my favorite tree, and started reading.
I was mainly looking for information on masks. I knew I had studied physical masks in college. I knew that masks have many histories - transculturally, globally - through both the History of Theater and Physical Theater courses I took at George Washington University.
Over a decade later, I found myself pouring over Japanese Theater: Shamanistic Ritual to Contemporary Pluralism, learning again about nō, kyōgen, gigaku, and bugaku masks, and popping around Lecoq’s discussions of neutral, expressive, and commedia dell’arte masks in Le Corps Poétique: Teaching Creative Theater.
Commedia dell’arte is said to be the art of being human - but I think it is the art of being governed. If everyone is dying for everything - is that not necropolitics?
and my own studies of masking in relation to neurodivergent masking and camouflage
Rooting into respiration renders structures sustained by necropower nonfunctional, decomposing conditions of possibility for necropolitical play.