The Garden of Earthly Delights by Martha Clarke

First produced: 1984, at St. Clement’s Church, New York City

Type of plot: Surrealist

Time of work: The age of biblical creation and the fifteenth century

Locale: Hieronymus Bosch landscape from his triptych, The Garden of Delights (c. 1500)

Principal Characters:

• Adam, and
• Eve,
• The Serpent,
• Angels,
• Demons, and
• Coarse Peasants, all portrayed by an ensemble of seven dancer/actors and three musicians

The Play

The Garden of Earthly Delights is a series of pictorial vignettes performed without text or scenery. There are four distinct sections, dramatizing in turn Eden, the Garden of Earthly Delights, the Seven Deadly Sins, and Hell.

Part 1 begins when a smoky mist fills the blackened stage to the low sound of whistling wind. A trumpet blares as blue light illuminates a thicket of leafless tree branches held overhead by a man who trudges slowly to center stage. Six figures enter from the darkness of stage left, walking on their hands and feet, looking like animals cautiously exploring a new world. One falls over and instantly becomes the prey of the others, who pounce on it and devour it. The first musical motif begins on cello and recorder as light spreads across the stage to reveal the figures of Adam and Eve, dressed in skin-colored body suits and standing side-by-side.

The two begin a gentle, fluid movement sequence to the sweet melody of the cello. Eve gradually moves away from Adam, signifying her emergence from his rib. The two move gracefully to the floor as two merry angels piping on penny whistles fly in above them. Adam strokes Eve’s hair and then tenderly pulls her from the floor by it. Their brief moment of innocent wonder ends as they are met by the serpent, who pulls an apple from between her thighs, symbolizing the end of innocence in the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve fold over into the animal shapes of the earlier creatures, and like them exit slowly on all fours, heads bent. The tree-man stalks off, accompanied by stringed instruments playing a dirge.

The second section of the piece is set in the Garden of Earthly Delights. A musical change signals this transition; a more percussive score begins with a knocking sound on the side of a drum underscoring a flute. The musicians enter the empty stage in small groups with the dancers. From stage left, the cellist enters, accompanied by a crawling woman. When he stops upstage left, she stretches out at his feet. From upstage center another dancer enters with a man playing a lyre. She then nestles against him downstage, holding the lyre while he plucks the strings. A trio enters from stage right, led by the flute player. Two women walk closely behind him, holding the instrument as he plays, at right center. The musicians finish this soothing song, then move to the edges of the stage. One woman exits, while the three who remain begin a movement sequence which begins on the floor and eventually carries them offstage.

A collage of vivid images ensues. The low, eerie sounds of a tuba accompany the entrance of a grotesque beast. Three men roll toward center stage; a woman balances on each one with a staff for support. One man becomes a boat; the woman on his back calmly guides her stick-oar through unseen water. The other two men swim away. The remaining women kneel and wave their sticks across the floor as if conjuring. The music grows more animated. A woman in a chiffon robe flies above the heads of five figures, who have replaced the kneeling women. They watch her before dividing into a trio and duet, beginning a movement sequence characterized by contact and acrobatics. The two conjurers reenter, swinging switches like long whips. The sound of the whips and the staccato plucking of violin strings become strident. Two more women join in, with tree branches held overhead. A man enters wearing bells and using a tree limb for a guide stick. Another man enters carrying a mask on the end of a long branch.

The lights fade, leaving only the musicians in a dull, blue-gray light. The music is severe and threatening; the cello and the chimes and the slow, steady beating of the bass drum grow louder. Four figures are seen in the spill light adding layers of clothing over their body suits. Bright light illuminates seven men and women dressed in medieval peasant costumes. The third section of the piece is a broad pantomime of the Seven Deadly Sins. The accompanying music is light and awkward, like carnival music. The events that follow happen in close succession, some overlapping. A man holding a burlap sack walks to center stage and dumps potatoes onto the floor. A second adds to this pile, then puts the bucket on his head. The sound of snoring emanates from the bucket. A woman in a wimple lifts her hem and potatoes drop onto the floor. A man urinates into a bucket. A man sits in the pile of potatoes and stuffs them in his mouth as fast as he can; the others gather to watch him.

Three women sit on the floor. The two on the right and left appear to be involved in an argument, while the one in the middle watches them. They strangle her. A man drags her to the side and sexually abuses her body, then the others roll her offstage. All join hands and begin a slow circle dance accompanied by a repeated musical phrase from the cello. Four crawl off, leaving one man and one woman alone onstage. A drum beats, and a pool of light focuses on the potatoes. The woman kneels in the light and begins to gather them around her. The man stands to the side as the lights grow dimmer. The drumbeat is replaced by the rhythm of a man’s ax striking a tree. The lights go out. In very low light a woman seems to be flying above the lights, holding her head. Blue light comes up on a man holding tree branches. The flying woman suddenly begins spinning downward over the potatoes. She is finally dropped to the ground, then hung upside down. The stage goes black.

In the darkness, soft piano music can be heard. As the lights come up, a woman hanging from the catwalk plunges down, then dangles. A high, piercing whistle screams over the piano, announcing the transition into Hell. As in the painting, musical instruments are transformed into instruments of torture, and musicians dominate this section. One man rolls another under a bass drum, beating it as he eventually crushes him beneath the drum. Meanwhile two figures fly and tumble through space; another floats down to meet them as they all begin turning backward somersaults in the air. Below, two men fight, one playing a violin and using the bow like a stick, pushing it into the other’s mouth. Two women use drumsticks to beat on the men on whose backs they slowly ride across the stage. A large set of chimes is rolled onstage by three men who seem to be trying to kill one another. These three finally drop exhausted to the floor. A xylophonist’s head is pounded into his keyboard. An explosion of sirens, whistles, and drums produces a dissonant cacophony, which combines with the steady beating of a man’s head between a bass drum and a cymbal throughout.

Suddenly, it becomes very quiet. A stiff-limbed man with his head thrown back plunks out a simple melody on a toy piano. The other men and women plod noisily off like animals, leaving the cellist alone onstage. The cellist recapitulates the sweet melody from Eden. A young woman crawls to his side and tries to distort the music, pulling the cellist’s arm, tugging at the bow, and plucking the strings. They struggle over the bow until she pulls it from his grasp. She lies seductively before him on the floor. He lifts the cello and impales her on its spike. Then he calmly continues to play, plucking out the rest of the melody. She writhes quietly beneath him, and he pulls the cello spike out. Meanwhile, a wan man on tree stump stilts limps into a white light to survey the desolation. It is nearly dark onstage. A flute plays softly in the final moments of light. In the approaching darkness, a woman’s lifeless body spins in space.

Dramatic Devices

The Garden of Earthly Delights is distinguished from much contemporary performance art by the dominance of the expressive use of the human body, replacing all spoken text. Clarke’s approach to developing material and directing the action is primarily choreographic. The images of Bosch’s paintings are brought to life by the performer’s bodies, transmuted into human and animal characters. Clarke is able to evoke a range of beautiful and horrible images by her use of movement motifs which are initially suggested in the paintings and subsequently expanded to extend the ideas of the painting in time and space. The characters are choreographed in the air as well as on the ground, making the entire theater an animated canvas.

The most striking mechanical device used throughout the piece is the flight of actors and musicians, accomplished by means of harnesses and wires. Angels float and soar above the stage and damned souls hurdle toward Hell or hang lifelessly in darkness. The careful blending of dance and aerial movement, mime, acrobatics, music, and lighting effects with a minimum of props exhausts the formal possibilities of expression without surrendering to the demands of specific textual themes.

In the Seven Deadly Sins section, Gluttony, Anger, Envy, Lust, Pride, Sloth, and Covetousness are personified by a band of medieval peasants in a quick series of cartoonlike scenes. These scenes are the most humorous in the piece, but in an unquestionably cruel way. While the peasants’ actions are broadly drawn and sometimes clownish, the implications of their coarse behavior are frightening.

By employing actors who constantly transform from one role to another, good to evil, male to female to natural object or animal, Clarke suggests that the range of actions and feeling suggested by the piece are somehow abiding elements within all human beings.

Critical Context

Martha Clarke’s use of the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch has been anticipated in various ways in the work of a number of modern artists; she shares, for example, the grotesque physical quality that distinguishes the Rabelaisian pantomimes of Jacques le Coq. The Garden of Earthly Delights is most distinctly similar to the works of Michel de Ghelderode, a twentieth century Flemish playwright who frequently reworked painted images and specialized in the use of a grotesque landscape he called Brueghelland. In plays such as Le Massacre des innocents (pb. 1929; the slaughter of the innocents), Ghelderode dramatized Brueghel’s historical translation of biblical events to the Low Country, duplicating their detailed violence in the context of his Pauline conviction that sin deforms the body. These sacred events, simultaneously being revived by surrealist painters such as Salvador Dalí and Yves Tanguy, were treated by Ghelderode in a meditative but intense symbolist style, not formally complex but self-consciously spiritual. Clarke’s theatrical work is clearly a new step in this ongoing reception of the religious imagination in pre-Renaissance northern Europe.

The theatrical genre closest to Clarke’s work is the theater of images, a genre which includes the contemporary work of directors Robert Wilson, Peter Brook, Ping Chong, and Meredith Monk. These artists synthesize music, text, gesture, and visual environment to achieve richly textured and thematically complex works of performance art. Clarke’s work is distinguished by her detailed articulation of the human body to communicate actions and emotional states, and her collaborative approach to each project. Her work has also been compared to that of the contemporary German artist Pina Bausch, who similarly transforms movement, music, and setting into the choreographed interplay of images and ideas that characterize her work with Tanztheater.

The Garden of Earthly Delights, the first of Clarke’s large performance artworks, shows the choreographic influence of her seven years as a performer with the Pilobolus Dance Theater. With Pilobolus, Clarke practiced organizing movement material into a dramatic logic in such dances as Monkshood’s Farewell (pr. 1974) and Untitled (pr. 1975). The acrobatic and distorted use of the human body, a Pilobolus trademark, is employed in The Garden of Earthly Delights more than in any of Clarke’s later works; the director thinks of it as a last salute to Pilobolus. Subsequent Clarke pieces such as Vienna: Lusthaus (pr. 1986) and The Hunger Artist (pr. 1987) similarly combine dance, gesture, music, and design elements but add spoken text. Later, in Miracolo d’Amore (pr. 1988), song is added to the blend, bringing her work close to opera.

Sources for Further Study

Clarke, Martha. “Images from the Id.” Interview by Arthur Barton. American Theater 5 (June, 1988): 10-17, 55-57.

Clarke, Martha. Interview by Elizabeth Kendall and Don Daniels. Ballet Review 12 (Winter, 1985): 15-25.

Copeland, Roger. “Master of the Body.” American Theater 5 (June, 1988): 14-15.

Gussow, Mel. “Clarke Work.” New York Times Magazine, January 18, 1987, pp. 30-34.

Sadler, Geoff. “Martha Clarke.” In Contemporary Dramatists. 6th ed. Detroit: St. James, 1999.

Smith, Amanda. “Inside the Fellini-esque World of Martha Clarke.” Dance Magazine 60 (April, 1986): 70-74.

Zimmer, Elizabeth. Review of The Garden of Earthly Delights. Dance Magazine 58 (September, 1984): 85-88.