Cephalonegativity: On the Theater of Decapitation

by Mike Corrao, Evan Isoline

"Fully exploiting the Gogolesque conceit of a cephalophore whose body and head go their own separate ways, Cephalonegativity reads like Beckett’s Play (with M reprised as an even more slippery version of himself) or Not I as if performed by the secret society of Acéphale. Archaic turns of phrase and elision combine with post-cinematic headlessness to produce a stage play that plays with stages and stages play, a lesescenario from the velveteen tongue of an heretical zealot, its phrases as if slurped up off an abattoir floor, or off the rotted walls of a theatre-cum-poisoned-amniotic-sac where the performers have all become kuroko. Read out loud, at speed, in honour of its progenitors, the words turn into “chunks of hot pomegranate meat” in your mouth-turned-anus, with your gills agape, your mutinous soma exsanguinated, levitating above you, your head on fire singing like litel clergeon from the catacombs."
—​Gary J. Shipley, author of 30 Fake Beheadings

"In pursuing a theatrical treatment of the Self's head and body and self-selves, through a Bataillean notion of headlessness, through typographical humor and rupture, through a Dada-esque document of volatile mirror-pages and chorus, Cephalonegativity makes of itself a gaping gesture: a neck-stub that is a mouth that is singing out and commenting on the ritual of being present. The reader dials in via "a rotary anus" and watches a body hanging as a tail in its coprolalic spooky plastic underwater gloom psychedelia cum outer space inside of a mouth cum cult orgy. "DO/ YOU SEE THE END OF TIME? THE APPROACHING/ WALL? WHEN THE THEATRICAL BECOMES THE/ APOCALYPTIC? ENACTING A DISTORTED REALI-/ TY AS THIN LAYERS OVER THIS ONE?" This text is a porous fabric through which we might perform the wound of the stage as we watch it rot."
—​Olivia Cronk, author of Womonster

126 pages, Paperback

Published September 7, 2021

About the author

Mike Corrao is the author of numerous works including Gut Text (11:11 Press), Rituals Performed in the Absence of Ganymede (11:11 Press), Desert Tiles (Equus Press), and Smut-Maker (Inside the Castle). His work often explores the haptic, architectural, and organismal qualities of the text-object.

Reviews

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Better than Hamlet.

I would like to see this proliferate to be performed not only at the Globe Theatre but also as elementary school productions.

The film would star Kenneth Branagh.