The Brooklyn Rail

Barefoot and swallowed by a long, white linen shirt with dark hair draped over her face, Patricia Hoffbauer is already dancing as an audience filters into the theater. She models the archetype of the hysteric, communicating distress through arrhythmic stomping and pained yet sensual movement. A phantom pair composed of Jacques Lacan (Keith Sabado) and Sigmund Freud (Tom Rawe) keenly observe this darling of psychoanalysis who resists their guiding of her limbs and waist.

An omniscient voice from the audience (Peggy Gould) accompanies Hoffbauer’s refractory movement upstage with a reprising monologue, rife with phrases hinting at the hysteric’s condition, like “sensorial truth,” “deep neural network hard to debug,” “American expansionism,” and “you are so mother!” Meanwhile, a minotaur wearing a black harness (Luis A. Lara Malvacías) slithers on the floor downstage. Unlike the ideal hysteric—often rendered elusive by psychoanalysts—the analysand before me clearly articulates the fragmentation experienced in a rapidly burning world.

Recently premiered among other performances engaging in political and cultural commentary during the twenty-first annual La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival, Center for Fiction: This is Not May 68. exists in the continuum of revolutionary action that defined the global anti-imperialist uprisings of 1968. Hoffbauer homes in on the labor and student movement that captured France in May 1968 and seriously disrupted the established political order. She further stitches into this absurd and introspective performance theories of pedagogy and psychoanalysis to examine the limits of intergenerational discourse and revolutionary possibility.

Center for Fiction proceeds from an actual, and peculiar, encounter that occurred in the shadow of May ’68. In the newly-turned-stage-cum-classroom before us, four inquisitive students (Fran Janal, Rachel Ha-Eun Lee, Noah Witke Mele, and Grace Yi-Li Tong, all as themselves) giggle at a projected video of a 1972 confrontation in which Lacan is interrupted by Anatole Atlas, a young Situationist who destroys Lacan’s documents during a lecture, decrying the “spectacle” managed by a generation lulling on justifications for their desolate conditions. Hoffbauer in turn interrupts the video from behind a podium, having transitioned from the hysteric into an instructor.

The audience learns in the classroom that Hoffbauer was so intrigued by Atlas that she visited him in Belgium, where he now resides in his seventies. We watch a video of them dancing in sentimental sways on a beach, Hoffbauer adorned by the same sartorial pantsuit that now contours her frame. There are compounding imitations: Hoffbauer is the instructor and divagating interrupter. The intercepting clips of Hoffbauer and Atlas prompt her and the students to sing the lines “navegar é preciso, viver não é preciso” while rowing imaginary paddles around each other. These physical gestures of relation between Hoffbauer, her students, and Atlas are persuasive. She is demonstrating a desire to remain curious about those who learn from her and from whom she learns.

Hoffbauer’s idées fixes are regularly exposed, including a satirical outburst about the demonological arguments for hysteria when she and her students grow bored of discussing white male psychoanalysts. Instead, they lean into the cultural moment and choose to consider the Kardashians, Trisha Paytas, Julia Kristeva, and Ana Mendieta. “Oh God,” she says, “please open these women’s wombs and enable them to conceive!” She slowly dances with the minotaur in the succeeding silence.

Center for Fiction benefits from its erudite and culturally relevant risibility. When Hoffbauer intervenes in a heated discussion on cultural appropriation between Tong and Witke Mele, she misgenders Witke Mele while attempting to come to her defense and her pupils isolate her. Offering a proper Gen-Z consolation to Witke Mele, Janal says of Hoffbauer, “She’s the clocky one.” The faces of Lacan and Freud are painted white to emphasize their presence as spectres, and Lacan is unsettingly suggestive: “I think we should all go back to the bedroom,” he says. Hoffbauer reminds us of theorist Slavoj Žižek’s postulate and the absurdity of believing that revolution will be convenient, declaring, “Maybe I need a revolution with a dishwasher!”

Against the backdrop of increasing anxiety around censorship in the US and elsewhere, Center for Fiction embeds humor into its premise as a shield. The cast seems to recognize that, historically, political messaging is either laughed at or censored. Whenever Witke Mele arrives at the podium to speak on behalf of students, it is taken from her. The students supplement a discussion of Patricia Gherovici’s essay “Why I Did Not Write a Book on Lacan and Tango” by mirroring an anecdote described in the text: the jeering behavior of some audience members at a 2019 conference in Paris who were upset when the prominent transgender psychoanalyst Paul B. Preciado asked if there were any other queer psychoanalysts in the auditorium. The integration of Gherovici’s story in the performance links Preciado’s treatment to the encounter between Lacan and Atlas. In both scenarios, the audience laughed to dampen the severity of critical commentary on intellectual rigidity.

The weight of abundant references anchors Center for Fiction—buoying rather than sinking the production. Vincent McCloskey, the stage manager who had been shifting a whiteboard on and off stage with cryptic revolutionary messaging like “TO FORBID IS FORBIDDEN” written on its surface, does joyful pirouettes akin to Mariinsky Ballet dancer Kimin Kim’s Le Corsaire, a spectacle that appeals to Sabado’s Lacan. The students bring a bluesy line dance to the stage, forming another quartet to perform a costumed rendition of the “Madison” dance as portrayed in director Jean-Luc Godard’s 1964 film Bande à part, emphasizing the cultural appeal of a transgressive youth. As an ode to conceptual art, the avant-garde choreographer Yvonne Rainer recites lines from Gherovici’s essay in a projected video. Center for Fiction, through these instances, prioritizes expression over theory. The performance’s engagement with historic cultural moments is Hoffbauer’s reminder to us that everything the cast wants to do and say has a predecessor. When Lacan, Freud, and Gould as Jean-Martin Charcot place Hoffbauer under hypnosis, she is possessed by the hysteric and the spirit of the exiled Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire, whose sustained curiosity and tolerance seduces her as an instructor thrilled by resistance.

Center for Fiction gives credence to a knowledge-sharing collective that can endure solidarity even in its messiest iterations. I believed the performance when Hoffbauer responded to a live interruption. In the front row, a child had a series of outbursts, dropped his clunky toy truck several times, flailed over audience members, and motioned to run on the stage.

When discussing Freire, Hoffbauer used the word “pedagogy.” The child, at a heightened pitch, responded: “Pedagogy? What’s that?”

“That’s right,” Hoffbauer said, remaining in character as the instructor. “Teach them young!”