Drawing Parallels between Unparalleled Positions
Katie Mitchell’s production of De Meiden attempted to draw parallels where I believe it is problematic to draw them. I knew of Mitchell’s controversial works and researched the original text by Jean Genet. I noted an important detail of the historical performance text: Jean Genet wrote the servants as black. Katie Mitchell made the women white migrant workers to make De Meiden temporally relevant, but I question why they were Polish, besides her production conditions (Knowles 19) of being located in Denmark with white actors, when the script originated from societally engrained racism and slavery. Wilderson III’s “’Raw Life’ and the Ruse of Empathy” combined with Mitchell’s mise en scene drew me to parallels between racial and class oppression in the building of civil and capital relations (Wilderson186). Mitchell emphasized the entanglement of migrant worker abuse to the success of capitalist Western Society with her exorbitant set and Chanelle-wearing “Madame” abusing Polish migrant workers.
Wilderson concludes that empathy is a “mode of production that secures civic relations” (186), and that “anti-Blackness is a generative mechanism of this mode of production” (186). He develops an argument that we cannot subject Black people to empathy because our use of them as objects is engrained in our society’s structure and white comfort, (196), but he is clear that this is exclusively applicable to Black people (185), thus relevant in Genet’s original text. I wonder if Mitchell made the characters white to increase empathy, but this seems to be too surface level. I speculate as to whether Mitchell’s rendition was convincing to a French audience as indicative that working migrant women are similarly a generative mechanism of production for securing capital as Black people are in securing civic relations (Wilderson 186). For me, as a Canadian hipster, I believe it is more nuanced than that equation. Though perhaps in a European condition of reception (Knowles 19) society has grasped the issue of racism, so she believes she can substitute race for class issues. Indeed, migrant workers are necessary and engrained in our capitalist way of living, and Mitchell emphasizes their capitalist benefit with Madame’s lavish lifestyle, construed by the set and costume design. As Claire and Solange spiral into self-containment with their abuse of each other, they are indicating their own abuse’s necessity to the society they are a part of, and its inherent entanglement.
Despite the parallel one can draw between Black people and migrant workers’ oppression being intrinsic to our society’s function, I think Mitchell’s argument fails in this lens because “social death” (Wilerson 185) applies only to Black people, who are continuously abused historically, and thus cannot be equated to white, Polish migrant workers, despite their function in our current mode of society.
Works Cited
“Interview with Katie Mitchell.” Festival D’Avignon: De Meiden, 16 Juillet. Program.
Knowles, Richard Paul. “Introduction.” Reading the Material Theatre. Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp.1-7.
Wilderson III, Frank B. “’Raw Life’ and the Ruse of Empathy.” Performance, Politics, and Activism, edited by Peter Lichtenfels and John Rouse, Houndmills, 2013, pp. 181-206.
