The Butcher, the first project in my ‘WAR project’ series, explored how war becomes inscribed in memory, the body and the psyche in three different characters: a French butcher, a German butcher and an American woman. The two butchers, both soldiers in World War I, are unable to keep traumatic memories of their wartime experience from bursting into and blurring their narratives and their lives. As soldiers, they had cut lines in the earth: linear trenches, living graves. For the soldiers, the enemy was always ‘the pig’.  As butchers, they divide animals‘ bodies into useful and un-useful parts projecting their fractured psyches onto them.

The joke in The Butcher is that the drama about borders and the drawing of borders takes place on the drawing of a pig— it is a butcher’s diagram. The names of the different cuts of pork battle with one another, and as the butcher draws this diagram, he is also describing the tragic, violent moments of battle during WWI thereby re-enacting the conflict.

The second joke in The Butcher is that with this overlaying of cultures on the same drawing of a pig (the ground, and a territorial map of Europe), a chaos arises… a kind of Babel. We can no longer return to the time/ condition when we didn’t practice this belief in boundaries and borders … especially territorial ones.

It is my belief that in war, the impulse—the animal/bestial impulse—to survive is co-opted by those in command as a weapon. This impulse is directed at the enemy and becomes murderous. Soldiers kill, momentarily forgetting that they have power to navigate their own survival instead of being in the service of the abstract and disembodied entity of the nation, a religion or an ethnicity.

We draw, cut, and engrave borders. We also draw borders in our own bodies and the bodies of others, This act of drawing borders has become tragically synonymous with being human. It is something very abstract but it was for an abstraction and an idea that World War I, and also afterwards, World War II were fought, and it is still the case today.

Written and performed by Cecile Rossant / directed by Daniela Marcozzi.
Performed in German, French and English.