if . . .

No words can prepare one for the event. I sit in the Broadway Theater in Saskatoon and Tanya Tagaq gently guides us into her performance by inviting us into an improvisation. She motions to and introduces Jean Martin and Jesse Zubot as long time fellow collaborators about to dialog together.  Days afterward, I struggle to articulate the experience ... not to name and grasp but to activate and research ... Retribution.  Somehow bracketed by the ever present notions of truth and reconciliation I experienced Retribution as a way of "schizo-analysis" - a pragmatic, disciplined, playful, experimental and collective process. Tagaq sources her ancestral throat-singing to follow an extreme vocal imaginative analysis induced by the colonial capitalist neurosis systems that pillage ourselves and the earth. Her deeply rooted presence enforces her acts of incarnated cultural reality of Cambridge Bay in the northern Canadian territory of Nunavut, as a way of maintaining nor...

"In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari advocate one of the more radical models of the improvising self by deconstructing the "restrictive codes of Oedipus" and the tyrannical suppositions of psychoanalysis in general. In their place, they substitute "schizoanalysis," a method which shifts its attention from the neurotic--"the one on whom the Oedipal imprints take" (xxi)--to the psychotic, the one who is "incapable of being oedipalized": "It might be said that the schizophrenic passes from one code to the other, that he deliberately scrambles all the codes, by quickly shifting from one to the other..." (15). The work of the Open Theatre on transformations and of Grotowski with the holy actor have many parallels with Deleuze and Guattari's mythopoetic schizophrenic, not the least of which are the goals of penetration and fluidity." ( Improvising Character: Jazz, the Actor, and Protocols of Improvisation by Marshall Soules)