MICHEL GIROUD

ETANT DONNÉS

OR THE RETURN

OF FURY

A NON-SUBJECTIVE THEATRE, with no interiority, a stage, scenes, obscene (s)cenes of merging, whirling opposite forces, a panic theatre of the god Pan, of the total god, a theatre of irruption (and of pure rut), of the splendour of violence, (and of the blunt rape of locked-up consciences), a theatre, THE THEATRE OF FURIOSA AND WILD LAUGHTER.

A stage without actors, with only Acting Ones, of no school, of no style, of no place, of the vacuum and elsewhere. A very ancient and very remate theatre, black forces AND white forces up to the explosion, an old theatre regained, shaken, shattered by two brothers as in the mythical time of the Great Greece, that of Ephesus and Dionysus, that of the Taurus-god and the god Ouroboros, that of the theatre of elements, that of the elementary theatre of cosmic forces, such an old theatre nurtured on India and its gods including the horns and gongs of Tibet, such an old theatre reawakened by two brothers, with no antecedents and with no descendants.
ETANT DONNÉS cannot acquire a following here, in the mawkish typically-narrow-minded-French Social Democrat mediocrat tepidness, breaking ersatz items at once, condemning to the immediate wakening of untimely irruption. They have reached this degree of incandescence and furiously hilarious ingenuousness through a series of coincidences from Morocco, the Alps around Grenoble and the hispanic Murcia, already, almost Andalusian, Arab-Andalusian, mystical and libertine, through heterodox crossings with meetings taking place between St. John of the Cross, the Marquis de Sade, Fourier, St. Theresa of Avila, Gaudi and Bunuel, Dali and Lorca, Jajouka and Gwana songs and dances, Gysin's devouring desert and Augièras' quest, Daumal's and Gilbert-Lecomte's Grand Jeu, Gurdjieff and Sufism, the gongs of Asia, alpine cosmic energies.
One day, they captured the blinding release of light (illumination, revelation, return to everything) , they were shattered by some seismic tremor of the exhilarated outer mind ; at any rate, since that dar, they have been pursuing a highly strange, exube rant, burlesque and ontological "holy war", which, with no consideration of any kind, breaks and annihilates precaution, reference, diplomacy, compromise and fake dialogue of all sorts, along the un-way-marked footpath in the burning and freezing, lightning and obscure high mountains, analogous demons, werewolve of the Oisans and vecors.

ETANTS DONNES produce volcanic signs, shivers and furies in a draught-proof, imprisoned, concrete-screeded, deaf, blind, dumb, fearful world, hunched up, bunched up in its dingy inner shell (the warm and mouldy all-too-French carpet slipper of good living and good taste.
Like Sade and a few disreputable amigos, they are "very nasty", horrible rippers of ideas and idols (ideologies). They smash the honest, nauseating, infernal family home, the pedagogy of slaves. They offer stupor and the orgy of outbust. All cult and cultural vanities are dislocated.
They give danger, risk, sublime pornography.
They provide empty fullness, illuminated with ardour. Panic spinning tops, erotic torches, they burn protection barriers and set shelters ablaze, they sound the tocsin and reawaken the passions for THE ABSOLUTE, in a squatting world, cultivating its greedy landlordly owners' droppings, obsessed with keeping an eye on their artistic and banking craps, in a constipated, puffed up, scaredy-smutry-spittly-world.
ETANT DONNÉS, in their fury's splendour, ring the bronze bell like Léon Bloy and Jarry, Rimbaud and Lautréamont, Artaud and Daumal, Ossang and Magma, irreductible. Through unpredictable tremors a few maniacs spring up from chance and circumstances, the aspired-inspired, whom nothing could gag, shoot up like Saint Paul Roux, like Chazal, like Altagor, like biblical figures, prophets, hilarious vociferators, incantators from Asia or Africa, with their pagan syncretic masks, followers of cosmos.
They could just as well have appeared right in the centre of Mexico, in India, in Africa, in Australia, in Central Asia, in Tibet, in Brazil in a Macumba rite, in the Carribean, in Haiti in some voodoo trance. In their borne places there is exorcist shiver, extatic mumbling around, glossolaliac and eruptive screaming about by the Pentecotists, illuminated by the cosmic divine sweating savour, illuminated from being shot through by the illumination of being there, blowing, yelling, roaring with the absurd laughter at living that dense intensity, in a world of the buried, closed up, gagged, bruised, forsaken, frozen stiff, harassed.
ETANT DONNÉS restores action to its axis, its aXion, its instant powers of illuminating incarnation, increasing sensual delight, sensitivity, and density, to dare at last dance the dense dance blinded by the splendour of fusion, sparkling with the unbounded instant of the unheard-of.

Michel Giroud, Alpina,january 3°,2001
with the aXion radio-activa of the Weorwolf, El Coyote & Co.