Invitus Invitam Programme Note

SOMETHING OUT OF NOTHING
KIM BRANDSTRUP

In the preface to his play Bérénice from 1670 Jean Racine writes that the challenge to the author ‘consists in making something out of nothing’. He is referring to the fact that his entire five-act play is based on a single line from Suetonius’ history of the Roman Emperors: ‘Titus, reginam Berenicen… demisit invitus invitam.’ It means ‘Titus sent Queen Berenice away against his will, against her will’.

The short and matter-of-fact detachment of the writing – as in so many mythological accounts, fairytales and even the Bible – recounts the most devastating of events with a disconcerting aloofness. This can seem disturbing to a contemporary audience used to impassioned motives and psychological causality in their storytelling. In these lean narratives only the action counts: what they did, what happened – no explanations, no justifications, and no excuses – never why it happened. Where and what are logged, but reasons and causes are absent. It is left for each subsequent generation to interpret, invent, and re-create what might have caused the events.

In dance the action is meticulous, mapped and planned. The Where, the When and the What is crystallized, but the Why is not. It is left for us, the audience, to guess at, decipher, interpret, create; it is left for us to fill in the gaps. But maybe it is exactly what is not said that yields the most pleasure: that is the creative trigger not only for Racine but also for us, the audience. In his version Racine fills these gaps in an attempt to answer the questions those six words seem to beg.

Why did Titus send Berenice away? Why did he do so against his will – and against hers? It is these demands for explanation that seems to trigger Racine’s imagination and produce a whole play from six words.

In Racine’s version, Titus is forced by the senate to give up his mistress Berenice when he is crowned emperor. The play charts the agony of the two coming to terms with this separation. Titus and Bernice meet three times. The first time Titus is incapable of facing his decision and unable to tell her – she senses something is coming, but not the magnitude of it. When they meet for the second time, in Act IV, she now knows but is in denial, and he is devastated by the pain caused. In Act V they meet for the last time, and with mutual sadness they part.

Invitus Invitam takes as its impetus these three meetings and Suetonius’ six words..