There is a voice crying in the wilderness…

A discussion of Zingarina’s dance from the film Transylvania (2006) (6 different languages spoken in the film) directed by Tony Gatlif with reference to Hélène Cixous & Catherine Clément’s (1986) writings The Newly Born Woman and abreaction.

“There is a voice crying in the wilderness … the voice of a body dancing, laughing, shrieking, crying. Whose is it? It is, they say, the voice of a woman, newborn and yet archaic, a voice of milk and blood, a voice silenced but savage” – Sarah M. Gilbert (1986).

There is a scene in the film Transylvania that offers us a glimpse into a woman’s dance, Zingarina, that seems to combine a knowledge of Greek dancing (plate smashing) and Flamenco wrist rolls. Some research suggests that ancient Greeks smashed plates in an act to achieve kefi (good spirits and joy) as well as warding off evil spirits and to bring good luck in celebrations (such as weddings). A symbol of new beginnings and for the western viewer a release from female duties (the washing up). The sensuousness of Raqs Shaki, or the connection to Arab influences and imagined, is also present. Zingarina dances fear and desire, passion, remembrance and a body that transcends time and transgresses rational meanings. No good fortune comes from this dance. The plates smashed belong to the dark continent of intense sadness and the active engagement – that is foreign to us – of the body-in-action living through grief.

She is dancing her rejection, her alcohol releasing her hysteria and what looks to be an attempt to release herself from her repressive culture. Catherine Clément wrote a tale about a Tarantella, a story of women dancing in “a ferocious festival of metamorphosis… with a tragic happiness.. an interlude of orgasmic freedom” (Gilbert, 1986, pxi). Outside of the law, the familial structure and society, Zingarina’s dance becomes her shriek – not from her mouth, but from her desire to release her body from her sexual desire that has been refused and rejected by her unborn baby’s father. Gilbert (1986) writes, “The hysteric, who lives her body in the past, who transforms it into a theater for forgotten scenes, bears witness to a lost childhood that survives in suffering” (1986, pxii).

For Freud and Breuer, “at the center of this theater of catharsis” is abreaction. Clément and Cixous’ writings suggest that a silenced woman, her repression and suffering, participates in dance to take an interlude and express wild. abandon and orgasmic freedom in style of an exorcism. Abreaction “Emotional discharge through which the subject liberates himself from the affect connected to the memory of a traumatic event, thus permitting it to not become or remain pathogenic” (1986, 15-16). Zingarina’s act brings out the trauma of her loss and through her dance this appears and does not achieve resolution or catharsis. Her living and daily acts need to provide this in her final achievement of ridding the past that possesses her: the birth of her child at the end of the film. This is the cathartic moment: we might imagine the hysterics body bathed in light as catharsis and woman reborn from dancing, shrieking and through milk and blood.

Zingarina’s pain and suffering appears flamenco-like in structure. Her arms raise and she rolls her wrists. She turns on her body and looks no-one in the eyes. Her drunkenness possesses her. Her body is foreign to us: the depth of pain seems “hysterically possessed by a nameless Master” and there is no spoken language to soothe her or to spoken by her to relieve her pain (Gilbert, 1986, xii). Her dance is one of painful loss. And it reveals her childhood that survives in suffering; following other scenes of imagined meeting between herself and her past lover and the intensity we witness: she, like a very young child who brings toys to their mouth to explore their world, taste it and own it, longs to taste, hold and touch – engulf – her lover. The dancer’s body is “located in the past” and cannot at that point in time move forward, or step out of into the present beyond the emotional pull to the past. The discharage of emotions necessary for abreaction, or liberation, is still caught in life and lived passion.

The flamenco-like approach to movement sets up a sequence that reveals the archaic or primordial shaman or witch approach to the spectacle of magic and illness. The dance is a métissage, a mix and fusion of cultural influences that brings us to acknowledge Zingarina’s authentic or genuine felt experience that fuses her awareness of her body with the music to give to us her dance of pain, passion and longing to forget or release (from her dreamlike state and childlike desire to return through imagination to her past). It’s a dance that questions the western viewer’s sensibility and knowledge of dance and styles; it transgresses our ordinariness (the western viewer) to seek gratification in the music and the moment. And is also a scene filled with pathos – pity and sadness – as well as a maternal desire to give empathy, love and warmth to the outcast and destitute isolation and loneliness intensely felt through Zingarina’s dancing body.

Zingarina unzips her top to reveal her belly; her seduction is of no-one, an imagined body exists within the music. Her seduction is mythical and hysterical, it is memory and it is frightening. The strangeness or foreignness to us, the viewer, is her hysteria that has through struggle, revealed itself through her grabbing of plates and releasing her emotions at each smashing or dropping of the plates. Her past is desiring to leave her body, through the plates and release to the floor. The interlude that is the dance gives her this moment, a symbolic moment that – from the following scenes – fails. Zingarina needs time and this dance is a point of departure as well as arrival. She is, throughout the movie, often in a trance-like state that her unhappiness and torment possess as well as dispossess her from feeling in the present.
The rebellious body, the excess and the antiestablishment attitude is an adult with alcohol, a desire beyond her own culture that desires the music and touch of her lovers culture, as well as the fear that she crossed the boundaries from sanity or rational understanding into the irrational grip of out-of-control memories in emotion. This pull in the dance is also the release from her hands of the plates as well as the loss of rational awareness and inhibitions to move with the music, rhythms and voice of the singer in a small, enclosed space. A club? An underground cafe/nightclub? The place is unknown and time is not conscious. The dance appears to have transcended time and it is only until Zingarina leaves with her traveling compainion Marie that we are brought back into any awareness of time: it is night.

This language of the body reveals something akin to what Clément and Cixous describe as a cry-language; her libido is cosmic and isolated and her attempts to make a history with her past lover come only into being as pain and passion oppressed. The mythical being that dances before us, as spectacle has exposed the invisible and revealed the child struggling out of fantasy or child-like myth. This dance presents unrealisable and unrecognisable desire; it is fictitious (metissage, or fusion) and imagined as well as archaic and belongs to a time beyond my own, Clément and Cixous write “Madmen embody the impossible configurations of a return to childhood. Shamans claim to have made fictitious voyages, transitions between here and the beyond” (1986, p7). Zingarina is not speaking the language of flamenco as we know it she is speaking the tongues of may oppressed and rejected people; the many tongues of Roma people dispersed through exclusion and myth, Imaginary and their Reality (abject poverty and loss, lack of political representation and recognition that love would affirm). This dance forms part of Zingarina’s journey to move from childhood and hysteria – or the holding onto a past that can’t be touched – to motherhood and acceptance of her body, her life with her child in a land that is strange and familiar to her: Romania.

Cixous, Hélène & Clément, Catherine. (1986). The Newly Born Woman. Trans. Betsy Wing. Introduction by Sandra Gilbert. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Gatlif, Tony (director). (2006). Transylvania. Film.

©Cate Andrews, 2021.