Freud’s deathbed fantasies have been brought to life in a collaboration of sculpture, performance and sound, writes Brenda Atkinson
Sigmund Freud has become a much- derided father-figure in the Nineties, a paternal icon who has been killed many times over by both his sons and daughters. Post-modernism and feminism have declared the founder of psychoanalysis passe, but his writings have entered and remained in the contemporary vernacular, and we still throw his insights about, often ignorant of their prophetic source.
Whatever your affinities with psychoanalysis, there’s no denying that Freud was a brilliant, if sometimes misguided, groundbreaker who revealed the Victorian obsession with sex before Foucault was born. He brought us concepts that have been as helpful to some as they have been offensive to others. He was a fallible human being, a complex man with a coke habit and an addiction to cigars who died in London, riddled with pain, of mouth and throat cancer.
Couch Dancing, which premiered on Thursday at the Market Theatre’s Rembrandt van Rijn Galleries, is a critical and empathetic look at the dying Freud.
Conceived by artist Rodney Place, this “fictional biography of Freud” took seed six years ago, and has developed into a three-way collaboration that uses sculpture, performance and sound to imagine Freud’s own fantasies on his deathbed.
Place’s desire to put Freud himself on the couch has catalysed and been informed by the kinds of uncanny coincidences that the good doctor would have loved: the dancer Place wanted to perform in the piece at the Freud Museum in London had, he discovered, been a stripper at the All in the Family Lounge. For her 21st birthday, she had received a card from her family that had Freud’s face on the front and a picture of a stripper inside.
The 20-minute performance piece in Couch Dancing is pivotal to the show, directing the way in which Sarah Calburn’s slides and Place’s own artworks are read. Brilliantly choreographed by Robyn Orlin and performed by Nelisiwe Xaba, with music by Warrick Swinney, it imagines the masturbation fantasies of Freud the psychoanalyst, art historian and would-be anthropologist, whose own relationship to Africa is the stuff of an analyst’s dreams.
Place’s unusual positioning of one of the 20th century’s most controversial figures attempts, as he explains it, to explore how you imagine someone while masturbating.
“Freud liked the slippage and the junction between imagination and reality,” says Place, “but he also failed to address the imagination that you make when you need it.
“There are so many clichs about Freud – he’s about dreams, he hates women, he was obsessed with sex. I believe he was a seer, with a compulsion to turn seeing into conclusions. I want to imagine him at a point where he can’t do that.”
Through its multi-media form, Couch Dancing also engages indirectly with pornography and fetishism, and directly with the point at which theory and art-making come undone.
“People distrust art,” says Place, “including Freud. They want to know what the idea is before they will engage with it.”
Place believes that the show won’t say much to viewers who don’t know Freud, but I believe that the power of this work will lie for viewers in its refusal to reach resolution, in its emphasis on art as a set on which performances are played out.
Much as Freud did, its components flirt in and out of Africa, snake around history and the politics of sexuality, deconstruct Freud the icon with vicious tenderness and a biting sense of humour.
Couch Dancing is on at the Rembrandt van Rijn Galleries in Johannesburg until August 22