City Garage Presents

by Ginka Steinwachs

Translated by Sue-Ellen Case, Jamie Owen Daniel, Katrin Sieg

September 25 – November 22, 1998

Directed by Frederique Michel

Production Design by Charles A. Duncombe, Jr.

Vanessa Hopkins George Sand, the 19th Century (female) Fox

Ruth Crossley Storyteller, Marie Dorvol (her lover), An Assesor Pig

Joel Drazner Flaubert Casimir Boron Dudevont

Paradorn Thiel A Monstrous Waitei; A Tailor; Maurice (her son), The Third Ass

Valerie Ramirez A Lady of Society, Solonge (her doughier), An Assesor Pig

Jeff Decker A Statue, Honore de Balzac, A Toilor,; Maitre de Bourges

John Burton A Statue, A Crocodile, Eugene Duc de Grondlieu, A Monstrous Waiter, Second Ass

Doria Valen Sixt,e Comte de Chatelet; A Monstrous Waiter, A Monkey

Bo Roberts Lizst, Conductor of the Locomotive; The Supreme Ass

Hope Easton Cellist, A lady of Society A Monkey

Set and Lighting Design Charles A. Duncombe, Jr.

Assistant Director Jennifer Dion

Lighting and Sound Operator Jesse Levy
Costumes Erin Vincent
Slide Photography Carlos Alvarado
Research Richard Grove

Ginka Steinwachs represents the post-modern German woman playwright. Her playful attitude toward cultural composition, down to the root forms of the language itself, permeates her text. Impossible to translate literally, her words are playful pun composites of etymological and social allusions which detonate rather than resonate their structures of vocabulary and grammar. The lre)creation of words is so central to Steinwachs’s project that she is in the process of completing her own dictionary. Steinwachs also likes to play with her own name:

she refers to herself as 0.8., which suggests George Sand and Gertrude Stein; Steinwachs itself means "grown from Stein."

Born in 1942, Steinwachs studied theology, philosophy, and comparative literature in Munich, Berlin, and Paris; then structuralism and poststructuralism with Roland Borthes at the École Normale, where she earned her doctorate in 1 971. Steinwachs taught in the university but currently lives solely from her writing and her work as a performance artist. Her performances are well known in the underground circuits in Berlin and Hamburg.

One can feel how such performance work permeates Steinwachs’s texts in the free play of images and the open sense of action. Also an excellent violinist Steinwachs’s sense of sound is central to her puns and allusions, rhythm and resonances. In her theoretical writings on dramaturgy, she calls her theater the "theater of the Palate"–the theater as oral institution in contrast to moral institution (a reference to Schiller’s work on "The Stage as a Moral Institution"). Steinwachs performs this dramaturgical notion with a large pair of leather lips, to which she gestures with her hands in white gloves. The performance incorporates the text as text incorporates the body.

The sensual, material sense of language is the base of Steinwachs’s word play, as expressed in her "palatheatre":

Steinwachs has published plays, poetry, theory, and prose. Seven of her radio plays have also been produced. George Sand was produced in 1988. George Sand has been published as a single text, and an anthology of her plays is forthcoming. A new anthology of feminist postmodern criticism, entitled Ein Mund von Welt: TEXT/S/ORTEN (A Mouth of World: Text/sGenres/Sites) is dedicated to her work.

George Sand is a massive, book-length text. In working with Steinwachs, we decided to cut some of the scenes in order to make the length more manageable for production. Also, Steinwachs decided that, for the English translation, she would completely rework the "Homolulu" scene with me, in order to find references in the United States that would make the scene work the way she felt it should for the reader or the audience. Since Steinwachs revels in nonsense words, some of the choices in English were made simply according to the "feel" of cultural usage and sound. Her steep ascensions to high art, avant-garde techniques, and philosophical references–all cut short by deep dives into the ridiculous, or sometimes the simply silly–provide a fragmentary and unusual grammatical structure. Jamie Owen Daniel, Katrin Sieg, and I worked with Steinwachs to find the American equivalent of her text rather than a translation.

On the page George Sand is unique in its composition. Perhaps only the later plays of Heiner Müller make a similar use of the written play text. Whole capitalized passages interspersed with regular print and capitalized fragments create the sense of a text set apart, underscored in some way–what Müller in his work, has described as the final remains of the chorus. Capitalization creates the sense of voice speaking through, above, or under the text, as the chorus once interpreted, responded to, or contextualized the dramatic dialogue. The reader is prompted to ask what encourages this voice: history, as it moves, or the politico-aesthetic drift of the discourse? The capitalization prints out a sense of the emphatic–the resistance the figure of George Sand sets in motion.

Steinwachs’ dialogue is a composite of poetry, prose, essayistic fragments, loose thoughts, historical details, rhetorical tropes, polemical assertions, and sometimes even a fragment of traditional dialogue between characters. Her scenic descriptions defy production. They are not calculated to set the stage but, rathe~ to work on the level of metaphor and image, requiring that the production team interpret, fantasize, and co-create an environment suitable for such philosophical ruminations, feminist dares, sexual transgressions, flights of fancy, promiscuous characterizations of canonical authors, gender jokes, and banal expressions of the heart.

George Sand does not present the character on whom its title is based but becomes, as a whole text, an icon configured as George Sand. Within the German feminist context, she marks an early hero of the social movement. A colossus of bigender, bisexual practice, she stands–as in G(E)ORGE VON FONTAINEBLEAU– astride the chasmic binary of dominant practice, one foot on each side. George is the woman who must earn her keep in cultural production, laboring, unlike the patriarchal, class-privileged dandies in the elegant men’s salon; yet not laboring like Flaubert, the engineer of the puffing loco-motive of mimesis. In this play, art as imitation is abandoned early on, as the drunken artist staggers unevenly up the stairs to illuminate the frozen statues in his atelier.

Primarily, George writes; she is the woman who writes. She writes while historical and political forces twitter in the trees, looking for bread crumbs along the Rue de Revolution. She is written by Steinwachs, as her lesbian desire blooms in a hothouse, metonymically proliferating along wet, slipping wordplays of seduction, while the

CONCEITED LADIES OF GOOD SOCIETY fan themselves. The writing does what it can do as it moves through narrative assignments showing off and rebelling, resisting the tradition of dramatic movement. After the hothouse of word-wachs, the super-8 zoom-in transmogrifies this synthesis of the social into the lyrical kernel of lesbian feminist activism: The quadrille of waiters from the Anita Bryant chapter of the Moral Majority rush in to provide aid, while George and Marie, moving through the moon phase of subject/object exchange (that is, into the utopia of intersubjectivity) pass over into EMPHATIC FLIGHT. Retaining the context of social, political, and historical forces, Steinwachs flips the narrative into the high gear of l‘ecriture feminine to take off into a flight from the dominant–emphatically exiting. Steinwachs does not stop this George Sand icon here, however, but proceeds on into the far-flung net of the legal system, on the one hand, and the French Revolution, on the other.

Steinwachs’s synthetic achievement here is stunning. In an imaginative, playful, yet political textual practice, she has brought together psychoanalytic structures of desire and discourse contradicted by, but still overcoming, dominant repressive practices; historically specific class and gender politics at work in a womans creative imagination; and the portrait of a woman caught in the contradictions of cultural production. On the formal level, Steinwachs employs a theatrical use of film technique, which also becomes a structure of meaning; late twentieth-century forms of performance, in which the performance itself may run along with the text but is not mimetically bound to it; and a semiotic approach to characterization. Sand is a sign in signifying matrices: her own imaginary one, her position in the dominant one, and Steinwachs’s own. Sand is not a "self in the old sense of the word, nor even a stable referent. Sand, like sand, runs through the fissures of text and performance, is fleetingly perceived in the net of the structures of meaning, and escapes in emphatic flight, only to run out into the channels of the law. She is the poor woman and the rich woman–a woman oppressed by society and liberated by revolution. Sand, the dynamic sign, is signified by her movement and her resistance at once. Steinwachs’s text is a wordmap of textual/sexual/political experience.