Critical Perspective of Marie Brassard's The Invisible by Michael Thomas Taylor

Marie Brassard’s Invisible: Ghost in a Machine

Ectoplasm was a word coined shortly after the turn of the century by a French psychologist to describe the physical manifestation of spiritual energy through bodily openings. Still visible today in photographic images from this age, it is a decidedly modern substance tied to the invention of the camera and to the discovery of x-rays, which predated it by ten years. As indexes of reality, photographs had always claimed to reveal rather than merely capture or document reality. Ectoplasm was thus no invisible, paranormal spirit within the body. It was a ghost in a machine, a projection of a technological medium.

The strength of Marie Brassard’s most recent show, The Invisible, is to bring this machine on stage. Brassard appears among metallic strips and balloons reminiscent of the earliest photographic negatives; she moves and speaks with the same deliberate restraint as the theatrical contraptions surrounding her, from a smoke-machine that comes down out of the rafters to an ancient film-projector sitting on the stage. The austere aesthetics and surreal landscapes may remind you of de Chirico, but the theatre adds a third and fourth dimension of sound and duration. The slow pace stretches the audience tight; like other elements of the performance, it can feel physically disrupting. This machine is not about ratchety dualisms of mind and matter, reality and imagination. It reveals our dreams and desires, as well as our fears and our pains, to be creatures and projections of our technologies. And in Brassard’s retelling, the realm of this revelation is the realm of fiction.

Fiction appears here most immediately as JT Leroy, a recent literary hoax of an author. A ghost and causality of a literary market that trades in imagination but mercilessly punishes fraud, JT Leroy absorbed the violence that can be wielded by the consumerism controlling artistic creation today. It is thus unfortunate that Brassard’s own channeling of this androgynous character, and of the painful images of abuse and homeless prostitution that circulate through her works, falls flat. The stories that Brassard tells and the dreams she speaks are too flimsy, too predictable, too recycled to match the tension of the landscape she inhabits. The unnerving range and force of the figures from Peepshow are missing. Despite the distortions of her voice and the iterations of her character, she remains too present, too constant, too visible on stage as a performer – as the theatrical “sorceress” that others have (rightly or wrongly) seen behind her work.

Michael Thomas Taylor
Assistant Professor of German
The University of Calgary
www.michaeltaylor.de