Becoming-Norén
In this photograph, I am together with Torkild Jemterud at the festival “Enda mer Jemterud i Monitor plis!” We are sitting on the newly built stage at Alcatraz, in Dalsland, Sweden. Torkild is turning 50. He has invited hundreds of friends and acquaintances from Norway and Dalsland to celebrate his birthday. During the festival, he broadcasts radio together with a highly qualified panel of debaters and experts who are to discuss and debate a series of philosophical subjects. I have been given the honour of opening the entire festival. He has asked me to be, once again, Lars Norén.
Me as Norén with a shaved head; his hairstyle, or rather his hair loss, as a mask. Every time Norén enters my body I have to undergo the same transformation. It is the exterior that gives birth to the interior, the exterior gives impulses to movement, to the voice and to what it is possible to think. But it goes deeper than that. The experience is that it gives an invitation to something, and what is it, something that can take its place. In this case, the situation is a festival, and that differs from how I have worked with Lars Norén in other contexts. The first time I gave a body to Norén, I invited the audience to a performance. Now it is my good friend Torkild Jemterud who has asked me to become Norén and to open the festival by having a conversation with him. I can feel the difference. It is more difficult to be equally ruthless in this context; I feel that I carry a responsibility towards the context. At the same time, I believe that Norén would have insisted on pursuing his project without adapting himself to the context.
I know that he once taught at an upper-secondary school in Stockholm. It was my father’s cousin who invited him to come there; she worked there as a teacher. The school was Södra Latin, an upper-secondary school with an arts orientation. Afterwards, she commented that it had been a disappointment. She had hoped that Norén would teach her pupils how to write drama, but instead he came there to suck material out of the pupils. He was only interested in taking something from them.
If you have an idea that something is supposed to be produced, that the encounter is supposed to be useful, then Norén in such a situation appears selfish; as a cynical and exploitative artist. But if you believe in art and in the importance of insisting on artistic projects in all situations in life, then you can also perceive his attitude as important and principled.
When I have to defend Norén, as a mask, I am confronted with this problem. When Torkild turns 50 and asks me to come to his festival, which he has organised to bring together people he loves, different bands he appreciates, and because he wants something from that situation, I have to trust that he wants what he has asked for. But I am not immune to my own social sensitivity, and I have to discipline myself in order to remain loyal to Lars Norén as a mask and to refrain from producing. Norén descends into me and exploits Torkild without the slightest regard for the context. His friends — will they be disappointed?
There is much talk of morality in our times, and those who work in the performing arts climb over one another to mark themselves out as ethical. Perhaps that erodes something in our project? Norén confronts me with questions like these. When you think that theatre should do some good, it ceases to surprise us; it loses its vitality.
Now I have lent my body to Lars Norén on several occasions. Every time, it comes at a cost. Sometimes when I am sitting in front of someone who is obviously suffering, perhaps a friend, and still have to draw their trauma out of them, so as not to betray my mask, I encounter myself as a person, the one who is not Norén, sitting inside my head behind the mask, watching what Lars is doing, hearing his voice and his words and thinking, No… but the questions come anyway.
A feeling of unease, Torkild told me afterwards, which never quite tipped over into becoming too much. I don’t know whether that is what it means to steward Norén’s mask; I cannot determine that.
Many people think of a mask as an object, but mask must be understood as the being that is produced through an embodiment. If you have a physical mask that you place in front of your face, then the mask is the sum of that object, your body and someone’s gaze upon you; someone who is outside. The encounter invites a being to descend.
Norén’s mask is a leather jacket, a thin merino-wool jumper, black jeans, black shoes. He was thinner-haired on the crown of his head than at the sides. He had certain tensions in his upper lip, certain gestures, certain ways of holding his fingers. He sat in a particular way. When these components become organic with my body and marry with the gaze upon me, Norén can descend. That is the being of the mask.
So perhaps mask should be understood as becoming-mask. Becoming as an attitude, becoming as a method, becoming as the only way of being. I have another powerful experience of becoming that I draw from my Kung Fu training. By descending into movements and mental attitudes, I can enter into a becoming of the animals that underpin my Kung Fu system. I do not become them, but I enter into their becoming.
Gilles Deleuze speaks about becoming-woman, becoming-animal, becoming-writer. For him, writing says nothing about the writer. Writing is a becoming that makes possible a movement onwards, a looking forwards, never a looking backwards. Writing is a becoming-writer. One does not become the mask, then, but perhaps the mask should be understood as an invitation to becoming-mask — and I suppose the subject is a becoming-subject?
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