Maraña: Organismo

One Body, Several Souls

An Essay by Paulette Richards

As audiences take their seats before the performance, they marvel at the Organismo installation—a large, crocheted backdrop made up of brightly colored panels with orifices and portals covered by fringed flaps—that stretches across the stage. During the performance these openings disgorge other crocheted objects—pronged shapes that quiver in agitation, hanks of yarn coughed up like hairballs, and breasts/eyeballs that focus intently on the audience or shower down onto the stage below. The craft technique evokes awe and wonder because people are aware that it must have taken hours and hours to create. In fact, during the “Notes on Sounds and Words” panel at the Ellen Van Volkenburg Puppetry Symposium, Paula Riquelme, who created the performance scenography, said she worked on it for eight years—and it is still growing. The yarn is pliable, giving an organic sense of aliveness. It looks soft, warm, and inviting. When offered the opportunity to take photographs after the show, audience members could not restrain themselves from touching the material that touched them so deeply. Lucien of Samosata, the second century CE satirist and rhetorician, whose “Of Pantomime, Of Dancing” offered one of the first theoretical discussions of dance dramaturgy, would have judged the performance a success. In his terms, it was “a fulfilment of the oracular injunction KNOW THYSELF.” Audience members depart from it having learned “something that is to be sought after, and something that should be eschewed” ([n.d.] 1905: sec 81).

In Reading the Puppet Stage: Reflections on the Dramaturgy of Performing Objects, Claudia Orenstein defines dramaturgy as a  structure (which may or may not be “dramatic”) that takes a spectator through an emotional journey through time (2024: 35-36). While Organismo does not present a narrative, it certainly takes audiences through a lush emotional landscape. Music drives the journey. In the beginning, there is more of a soundscape than a musical track. The sounds of tropical animals suggest the scene takes place in a rainforest. Then melodic “movements” develop, punctuated by silences. Between the silences, the music builds and releases dramatic tension as it transitions through different songs or rhythmic patterns. 

Well coordinated with the movement and the music, lighting contributes equally to the emotional journey. Organismo opens with a blacklight illuminating a small area of the stage. This spotlight makes the bright colors of the woolen set glow even more vividly. Soon the light switches to red, which creates a nighttime mood, then shifts back to blacklight as the focus gradually widens. Perhaps the performance is a day in the life of the titular organismo, or it may simply be a series of vignettes. Either way, in Organismo, the whole set enacts being alive. The panels “breathe.” The “orifices” open and close. Objects, human body parts, and whole bodies are extruded from the portals or sucked back inside. 

The life of the organismo blurs the relationship between humans and the material world. The humans appear first as disembodied limbs. It is difficult to count and assign these appendages to individual human bodies since they take on the character of distinct entities. From the beginning there are sections of choreography where hands and/or feet belonging to different dancers emerge from adjacent orifices and execute synchronized movements. Though Riquelme conceived of Organismo as a circus performance, the aerialists don’t use the bars extending from the backdrop to perform tricks. Instead, the choreography presents a series of shapes. In one moment, the performers balance on their hip bones with their backs arched and their arms stretching behind them. In another, two pairs of legs thrust through adjacent orifices. Next, the dancers put their feet together in wide straddle splits to form a vertical diamond shape. Then they plié in first position with their legs turned out, arch their backs, and create two smaller diamonds side by side. The strength, flexibility, and control the dancers exhibit is masterful.

Eventually whole bodies emerge–—lean, lithe, and androgynous in close-fitting, flesh-colored shorts that leave an impression of nudity. Long yarn wigs cover the performers’ faces. Though each one has a different colored wig, their personalities are not fully distinct, and the human bodies do not vocalize. The organismo, however, has multiple voices that sing in an unintelligible language through the orifices. In one sequence, the music shifts to flute with sounds like ocean waves in the background. Then as hands and arms caress the panels of the organismo, voices murmur “Mmm” and make other moaning sounds. Since viewers can’t assign a definite gender or personality to these appendages, they could be part of the organismo or perhaps larvae that live in a parasitic relationship to it. Do the human figures serve the organismo by feeding/caressing it, or is the organismo feeding/pleasuring itself? 

Whatever the relationship between the dancers and the organismo, they succeed in pleasuring the audience. The Saturday performance I attended at the Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago was sold out. Each pause between the musical sequences brought enthusiastic applause. At the climax of the show, all five bodies were out from behind the set swinging their yarn hair wigs while the strobe lights flashed. Then the light shifted to a dark red, the music slowed, and the figures moved in slow motion before easing into a dead hang for twenty seconds. A voice whispering unintelligible syllables started during this moment of suspension. Then another voice began keening as the bodies slid back inside different holes/portals. The whole set expanded and contracted with one final breath, then blackout. The enthusiastic applause fulfilled Lucian of Samosata’s highest standards for pantomime—“every man pouring out his whole soul in admiration of the portraiture that reveals him to himself” (sec 81).

Lucian argued that dance is a fine art because it is an intellectual as well as a physical exercise (69). He applied his analysis to pantomime performances in which the principal dancer customarily acted out narratives from classical mythology accompanied by musical instruments. His comments are of interest for the dramaturgy of twenty-first century dances that incorporate performing objects because, in his time, pantomime dancers traditionally wore masks. He cites the amazement of a foreign visitor who, on learning that the five characters in the show would be animated by one performer, exclaimed “I observe that you have but one body: it had escaped me, that you possessed several souls” (66).

The Marana collective’s performance of “Organismo” speaks profoundly to the connectedness of all life, erasing distinctions between individuals, between living entities and the landscape, as well as between animate and inanimate matter, reminding audiences that while we experience this life as several souls, we are bound up in one planetary body. Thus “Organismo” enjoins us to know ourselves in relation to all that is rather than as individual monads.