Wo Man “Man” and “woman” are only signifiers

In 2020, on the Bulgarian contemporary dance scene appeared “Wo Man”, a contemporary art performance from author and choreographer Marion Darova. She and the actress Martina Apostolova collaborated for this performance. The play is inspired by Judith Butler’s theory of gender and is an attempt to explore the concepts of “man” and “woman” and the related social roles that are attributed to each subject according to its biological sex. Darova’s idea is to question the stability of these signifiers through the work, to shake them, to loosen the connection between the signifier and the speaking being, to provoke questions.

“Wo Man” is a two-part show. The first is a short film. Various images and words are projected on the screen, through which the choreographer treats the topics of body, desire, roles, gender, and identity.

During an interview, Darova said, “Body and gender are discursive, not constant, because we express and repeat them constantly through our public acts and thus create an illusion of our identity.” This statement refers to the role of the discourse (language) in the identifications of the subject.

The second part is a live performance, which is composed of repetitive movements of the two bodies in space. The performers are together, in absolute synchrony, repeating the same combination of elements all the time, moving from one side of the stage to the other, from one corner to another in a circular motion – a meditation that aims at meaninglessness. In the interview, about this part of the show, Darova says that the live performance “does not deal with anything”, but is “an attempt to shake off thinking and thought [in Bulgarian “мисъл“].” Trying to shake off the meaning (in Bulgarian: “смисъл“).

By relating the film to the realm of the imaginary and the symbolic, and the live performance to the realm of the meaningless real, “Wo Man” approaches an aspect of psychoanalytic work, namely, changing the status of the signifier for the subject.

“All of Lacan’s teaching deals with the question of sexual difference in speaking beings, and it does so not on the basis of nature but on that of language and the subject. This radical change in point of view differentiates the phallus from the penis and, therefore, the signifier from the organ, and culminates in Seminar XX, Encore. Moving from the subject to the speaking body, the difference ceases to be organized by the binary order and gives way to a non-binary opposition between the All, including all the speaking beings of whatever gender, and the not-all, which precisely no longer allows the binary difference to hold together.” , writes Marie-Helene Brousse in her text “The black hole of sexual difference”.

In the Seminar XX , Encore, Lacan says: “What, in effect, constitutes the foundation of life, is that everything that is involved in the relationships of men and women, what is called the collectivity, does not work. It doesn’t work, and everyone talks about it, and a large part of our activity is spent saying it. Nevertheless, there is nothing serious except what is organised in a different way as discourse. Up to and including the fact that precisely this relationship, this sexual relationship in so far as it does not work, is going to all the same, thanks to a certain number of conventions, of prohibitions, of inhibitions, of all sorts of things that are the effect of language, which are only to be taken from this material and from this register. Arid which reduce very precisely the something that all of a sudden makes us come back as we should to the field of discourse. There is not the slightest pre-discursive reality, for the good reason that what constitutes a collectivity and what I called in evoking just now men, women and children, means very exactly nothing as pre-discursive reality. Men, women and children are only signifiers.”

For her performance “Wo Man”, Marion Darova won the ICARUS National Award for 2021, in the category “Contemporary Dance and Performance”.

*Image: Original Poster of the performance by Stephanie Raycheva

[1] Brousse, M.-H. (2019) “The Black Hole of Sexual Difference”, The Lacanian Review Online. https://www.thelacanianreviews.com/whats-up-in-the-wap/

[2] Lacan, J, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XX, Edited by J.-A., Miller. Trans. B. Fink. New York, Norton & Company, 2007.

[3] An Interview with Marion Darova for Marginalia, 17.05.2021, available here: https://www.marginalia.bg/tag/3796-1153/