TREATISE OF PLAYING DEATH
The mimicry and the crypsis, adoption of colors and geometries from the environment, are properties of the animal world developed to escape predators. Another one, in the same context of survival, is the ‘apparent death’, that is, the simulation of death. In the presence of the predator, the individual adopts an immobile, cadaverous, inert state, minimizing any indicative of life, reducing breathing to a minimum, and sometimes even emitting intense smells that evoke those of decomposing flesh. Mimesis is thus, sensorially complete. Playing dead does not seem easy; we must convince predators, a priori and with few tools, of the futility of a potential attack. Is this mimetic act an example of sublime performance, of impeccable affective control, of interpretative method on the part of the prey? Clearly yes. As an act of ethological theatricality, we could speak then of ‘artistics’ of playing death. Could it be aesthetically pleasing to adopt a mood of immense passivity and abandon oneself physically, emotionally and metabolically, allowing gravity to tighten the body against the ground? There are good actors of death? And bad ones? If so, the bad ones die devoured during failing performances.
Let us now to explore such pretending act in our species. We ask the models to play dead before a photographer, in different environments that also allow a good dose of crypsis. We thus generate an acting treatise of human ‘apparent death’, where different styles and ways of understanding fainting are reflected in an aesthetic way, and most likely with different degrees of credibility. Which of the models is the most convincing, who is the winner, in the eyes of the spectator, who now occupies, involuntarily, the place of the predator? Who defies the challenge with more plausibility? Perhaps without an immediate threat (at least apparent), playing dead can be simple, playful and rewarding. And even, why not, liberating. But you have to be careful; executing this exercise too often, like a game, could lead to a perverse and recurrent chronification of this state, and turn us into vocational undead. It would be then necessary to look for a name for this new disease, and also, of course, a vaccine or a cure, or even, most anguishing, to develop a political interpretation.