Consuming Regurgitophagy

REGURGITOPHAGY
Conceived, Written and Performed by Michel Melamed
Directed by Alessandra Colasanti, Marco Abujamra and Michel Melamed

By chance, twenty four hours before I saw Portuguese monologist Michel Melamed’s Regurgitophagy I sat in a nearby bookstore and reread Shirley Jackson’s hauntingly calculated story The Lottery. The 1948 short story about the an annual ritual in small town America levels a trenchant critique on the ways we all accept, allow, and perpetrate violence in our communities (it’s a wonderful and disturbing story, and if you haven’t read it you should). So it was with my mind already attuned to question of my own complacency that I sat down to view Melamed’s meditation on cultural brutality.

Regurgitophagy finds a way to complicate and make visceral the critique in Jackson’s story. At start, with the tattered clothing and stoic placidity that you might expect in guillotine scenes from the French revolution, Melamed walks out into the sparsely and simply designed stage and clamps the metal cuffs on his wrists and ankles into the interface cables hanging from the ceiling. The interface, known as ‘Pau-de-Arara,’ is set up thusly: microphones trained at the audience will transform every sound you make—laughter, cheers, sobbing and coughing—into electric shocks transmitted to Melamed’s body. As he launches into the cavalcade of streaming words that makes up the substance of Regurgitophagy, the audience sits in anxious anticipation, unsure if and how to interact with the performance.

Melamed, however, assures you that it is okay to respond. Even as his body is tautly contorted from the painful shocks, he encourages you to engage. He eggs you on. He almost seems to enjoy it. The content of Melamed’s performance—a fiercely intelligent and fast paced deluge of lyric word play performed with a mixture of wild abandon and intent focus—is frequently laugh inducing. His manic cycling through personas and subjects feels much like surfing through a litany of grotesque and perverse cable stations. Yet the pained convulsions of Melamed’s body with each vocal response might be enough to silence even the rowdiest audience if it weren’t for his absolute and direct insistence that we engage. When he is met by silence, Melamed points to a man near the front. “What’s your name,” he says. And he waits patiently until the man musters the courage to respond, delivering the shock that we all know is coming. At another point, stepping into the role of radio pundit, Melamed looks into the house, asks “Who’s there?” and then waits with the patiently honest look of a performer prompting audience interaction. When someone from our midst voices a response, I’m not sure if I should judge him for his willingness to enact this violence or respect him for being brave enough (braver than I) to give Melamed what he wants.

With as prevailing a concept as this, the show risks being overly reliant on the shocking (sorry) gimmick— Melamed uses the same machine in two other shows as well, and I’d be curious to see how well those shows play. What allows Regurgitography to broaden into a more complex cultural critique is the meaning of this somewhat cumbersome title. A program note breaks it down into its component parts: REGURGITATE-“to expel, to cast out that which in a cavity is in excess, especially in the stomach.” And PHAGY-“to eat.” Regurgitophagy is then the act of excising everything in order to decided what to re-consume. As Melamed throws out a litany of cultural touchstones, he highlights our selection of what to re-consume by allowing the decision to register physically on his body.

There are certainly moments in the performance that don’t always pack the emotional punch they might. The feverish pace of the text combined with Melamed’s thick Portuguese accent make the language sometimes feel impenetrable, ultimately diluting the visceral terror of being asked to commit this violence a muddling our ability to truly regurgitophagate. Feeling sometimes alienated from the content of Melamed’s words left me more invested in the intellectual and conceptual questions raised by the piece, than in the specific moments of highlighted consumption. But it is precisely in this task of interrogating the more easily digestible challenge to our everyday complacency that Regurgitophagy is most successful. I could write for pages on the philosophical quandaries that Melamed has me pondering—issues of martyrdom, questions of internationalism and the role of foreign cultures in both mediating and acknowledging violence, and of course the cyclical paradox of who is enacting the violence and who is having the violence enacted upon them (Melamed for the obvious reasons vs. me for being forced to commit violence). It’s a sprawling litany of cultural concerns and one that I will be sifting through for a while.

Elliot B. Quick