DVT Divergence Vocal Theater

(from March 2011)

She is Wild. She is cunning, her name: “Klytemestra (‘famous cunning’)” (Komar 28). She is volatile. She is fierce. She takes a toll on my body and my voice. I am unaccustomed to using my speaking voice in performance and the stamina required of a non-singing actor is challenging. Every bit of my vocal technique is put to test to embody her. I’m used to extensive periods of singing but not of speaking. I speak for about fifteen minutes, total, in the play, and I’m onstage for an hour and a half: pacing, focused, pensive, waiting, lurking, baiting, praying, pleading, ravenous, daring, possessing, vengeful, joyous, healing, cathartic. I open deeply into the earth and my breath connects me to every moment, to every step, to every movement. Under each word my breath rises, swells, releases and reconnects to the ritual of focus, of theater.

Klytemnestra the Woman is desperate, plotting, steeped in pain. She is fodder for the peoples’ gossip and as disbelieved as the seeress, Kassandra. She also knows she must preserve her position of power, but power hungry is a simplistic and disparaging brand upon Klytemnestra. Her choices are few. Abducted by Agamemnon from her former husband and her homeland, she is used by him to secure a larger geographic region of power for the family of Atreus. If a man no longer controls the house, what will become of her? Her position of power is her self-preservation.

Klytemnestra the Dark Goddess is Gaia, Chaos, Supreme Female Justice. I refuse Klytemnestra the victim. I refuse Klytemnestra the whore. I refuse Klytemnestra the weak, grieved mother. I refuse any dualistic treatment of her. I embrace and aspire to embody her as Mother Right, Klytemnestra Supreme Justice. She stands against the polis, against the emerging male ordered, linear, dualistic state, against the forming patriarchy that will define our culture (for women and men) for thousands of years after her time. “Klytemnestra represents the feminist cause par excellence. Her story is really the story of the struggle of the female, blood right against the founding of male, rational law and the establishment of patriarchy” (Komar 26). If Klytemnestra refuses roles thrust upon her, then she (Everywoman) emerges whole, “spacious, singing flesh, on which is grafted no one knows which I, more or less human, but alive because of transformation” (Cixous 18). There is enormous freedom in metamorphosis so complete that a return to the previous form is impossible, nothing is left of the former incarnation:

She is.
Cixcousian Being who stands not in reaction to---
not as a secondary part of---
not as the Other Half of---
She is Non-Dualistic --- herself alone, essence of wholeness:

She possesses the inherent potential of subversive expressivity in body, voice and word, and thus the power to entirely restructure the male paradigm of society. “To life she refuses nothing. Her language does not contain, it carries; it does not hold back, it makes possible” (Cixous 18). Komar asserts that Klytemnestra’s use of words is a subversive act. Her labyrinthine speech and insistence on the use of her language in her own way are “dangerous to a society that must depend on successful exchanges of women and words” (34). In my libretto for Klytemnestra, I highlight the “Tapestry Scene”, a central moment in the play, when upon Agamemnon’s return from war, Klytemnestra brings out the sacred tapestries of the house. Through her influence and a shaming of Agamemnon’s own weaknesses, she goads him into walking into the house on the laid tapestries, a sacrilege that entraps her “little silver fish” (Harvey 59). I imagine Klytemnestra as a master weaver herself (Arachne comes to mind, of course), and she and her women are the artisans of the prized tapestries. In the warp and weft of the cloths is buried an incantation of what she must do, and with his steps onto the fabric, Agamemnon knows the tapestries ensnare him:

I weave into the sting and pulse of Night
At my loom
Strand to strand, ties and knots, lash and strap, warp and weft, dyes and breaths
Patterns, figures revealed
Open!
My oracle: the distaff yielding to its sister axis spinning
What once was perfect, still, placid, pure
I make balanced complete essential primitive whole:
Mine
Myself the design: in each thread, twist and braid
Every fiber river soaked, blood inspired: washed in the surge the waning moon draws from me, a supplication collected
in tender swells along my thighs
How flawless and bare I am, wrapped in my creation
And my love? He will softly step upon these: my finest silks, a flood over our threshold.
He returns
I await (from my libretto for Klytemnestra)

Weaving Aria Rehearsal Video. Rehearsal. April 3, 2011. (if the video plays upside-down, please try a different internet browser!) Divergence Vocal Theater. Misha Penton, artistic director, soprano, writer of sung words. John Harvey, writer of spoken words. Dominick DiOrio, composer. Meg Brooker, dancer. Miranda Herbert, actor. Kyle Evans, piano. Meredith Harris, viola.

In an early theatrical decision, I decided Klytemnestra’s acts did not grant her catharsis, that she remained trapped in a loop of grief, in the weave of her tapestry pattern. Now, however, through the rehearsal process, I do see catharsis. As an actor, I experience it. Through avenging the murder of her daughter, Iphigenia, symbol of innocence and intuition, Klytemnestra avenges the betrayal and destruction of her own innocence at the hands of the patriarchy. The murder of Agamemnon then becomes a rejection of Order and an embrace of Chaos. She is released from the limitation of societal acceptance of power-over.

Have I accomplished a rewriting of the myth? Is that even possible? In my companion opera project, in the long tradition of re-imagining this character, I take a hideous, bloody tale, and give the woman, Klytemnestra, a soaring authentic voice. A voice released, irrepressible, whole. I return to Kristin Linklater and “Vox Eroticus” and the embodied voice liberated, “...the instrument that guides us to the larger Self that lurks inside us, yearning to break free from the shackles of conformity...”. After several rehearsals for the opera, spending hours in the studio with collaborators, I feel we have created a deeply psychological world in stylized movement, dance, and sound. It is a multifaceted non-linear narrative, and the work reveals a depth of character, emotion and complexity - a glimpse of Klytemnestra as woman and archetype.

None of these insights have alleviated the feeling that Klytemnestra and “classic” characters like her may forever be haunted by the male construct from whence they came. Can these women be reinvented? Is a reclamation possible? I don’t know. Is abandonment of these stories created by, and so enmeshed in an oppressive patriarchy, perhaps the better artistic statement?

Misha Penton, March 2011

Aeschylus. Agamemnon. Trans. John Harvey. 2010. Excerpt. PDF. 

Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of Medusa”. Trans. Keith and Paula Cohen. Pétroleuse Press, 1975. PDF.

Komar, Kathleen L.. Reclaiming Klytemnestra: revenge or reconciliation. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Excerpt. PDF.

Linklater, Kristin. "Vox Eroticus". Kristin Linklater. Freeing Voice. Originally published in American Theatre Magazine. Apr. 2003. Web. 30 Mar. 2011. PDF.