Characters:

RAPUNZEL

A beautiful lady with long hair, leading the life of a recluse in the attic.

SIIR

Rapunzel’s animated accomplice. Her incredible reserves of encyclopedic knowledge create a kind of co-dependency between herself and Rapunzel.

From afar

VOICE OVER

In the garden of Rapunzel is a tower.

A distant forehead beckons of a very old man.

Like a cataract in the eye of the beholder.

Spoken looking into a mirror

RAPUNZEL

You weren’t in the circus major,

Nor were you in the Elephant Penne,

I searched through the darkest corners,

will you ever come to bed?

I’ve ransacked all the wardrobes,

Turned everything inside out,

Searched so deep within,

Will you ever sin again?

Laaaalaaaaaa,

lalalaaaa,

Lalalalalaaaa la laaaa

Lalalaaaaaaa

Mi mo ma, moooooo

SIIR

It is said that the unconscious makes itself known to us in an unknown language.

What’s wrong Rapunzel? Is your tongue tied?

RAPUNZEL

Miiii moooo muuuu maaaa

Miauw miauw miauw miauw miauw miauw miauw.

SIIR

Ben je een poes? Wil je naar bed?

RAPUNZEL

Miauw?

SIIR

Met mij? Nee, met de Prins, nou goed?

RAPUNZEL

Even mijn oefeningen afmaken.

Tell me pretty baby oh no where ha ve you gone?

I’ve been searchin’ all night in my under garments,

shipwrecked on your shores,

In the rainbrows of the dew,

Pink, sapphire, ‘n violet,

hair styled in curlicues,

Spent the whole night readin’, the oil it reaks like hell,

Burn the midnight fire; til’ the early morn’ impales you,

And you tell me pretty baby, oh no where have you gone?

The abyss in your eyes ?

SIIR

But Rapunzel… You are no longer… hoe zal ik dit zeggen… een kind…

RAPUNZEL

Mi-Mo-Ma-Mu

Gagagagagagagaaaaa

SIIR

MERDE! Ta Guelle! C’est chiant! Arrete ma Persinette! Tu vas me chier, laisse ta chante c’est horrible, vraiment. Bah!

Aside

RAPUNZEL

If I make my lashes darker..

Or my eyes brighter?

Looking around. Grabbing books frantically.

Turns to Siir

Siir, what’s a phoneme

SIIR

A phoneme is any of the perceptually distinct units of sound in a specified language that distinguish one word from another.

RAPUNZEL

If I go like this, pe, be, de te? Is that a phoneme?

Starts singing in scales,

What if I go like so with my tongue? Lalalala.

In Japanese ? Ki – mi – mi – Shi ?

In descending fifths, like a waltz cadence the stress on the front leg, heels obtuse

la-la-la-la-la-la-laaaa

SIIR

Rapunzel! Stop it!

To herself…

That is not a phoneme,

That would be a phone-me...

RAPUNZEL

blasé

Chaque jour, je me maquillais plus tard, jetzt vor elven,

Je mettrais mes boucles d’oreilles, sinon y la Quando fiat lux

SIIR

What’s all this Latin bric-a-brac, Rapunzel ?

Long silence

[To a Latin Lover]

RAPUNZEL

Grabs letter

To a Latin Lover.

Hic. Hac. Hoc. Huius. His. Has. Haec.

Corpora anima puella magica

Heu! Mi Julia, sic virgina te dixit:

Multas Melancholias Feminae me devorant, omnia quae toto delapsa e corpore. Cubicule clamo lactentis papillas.

Prospici face ante terrae

Mascara et linea ocula tenebris smokae eye

Videam ontologica puella,

Vincta Corpora techne non detinent emotionas

Capillam comam blondine volupte

Innocentibus Pornographica Subiecta Fantasia

Vagis animis Super alta

Chimeras me sequntur per gentes et aequora

Advenio has miseras, mi puella magica Corpora anime.

Basia Mille,

te Puella Magica

Gasps.

1. [Bloody in Lingerie]

My tongue is a flower!

Grabs throat

My hair is weeping…

Oh, isn’t it?

Grabs hairdryer

O flower, you are the symbol. Of death.

Once I learn to pronounce you.

Une depression profondement m’evanouie, I am at a loss, a profound depression.

Il faut exiger quelque chose pour manifester un destin, mais quoi.

I must manifest my destiny, but which one?

Une depressions plus profonde que les Oceans.

Every night, before bed, I put on my golden earrings.

If not now, when?

I would like him to find me asleep, avec mes boucles d’orees, bronzee, mon visage un lueur pour lui, just to find me resplendent in my lair.

So what if he kills me, I am...

RAPUNZEL

O Siir, what am I ?

SIIR

You are charming, my lady.

RAPUNZEL

But what type of charm ?

SIIR

The ditzy blonde type.

RAPUNZEL

delighted.

I’m blonde?

Siir, if I’m a blonde, what does that make you ?

SIIR

I am an expression of a long tradition of pre-literate fantasies, which is to say, an unrooted language for it is spoken not written, like making love—one cannot write love. The fairy-tale, which is what I am most known for, became literature after it was documented by gifted writers and poets. Now we go around announcing ownership of anything and everything, even such a dreamy thing as a fairy like me!

RAPUNZEL

How foolish to try to lay claim to a fairy.

SIIR

Sorry hoor, ik moet echt even verder in Nederlands. Mijn Zeeuwse vlechten, comme on dit, zijn ficties die een disparaat idee van het Koninkrijk der Nerderlanden met elkaar vervlechten, van Doutzen Kroes t/m Pim Fortuyn, die men Sprookjes zou kunnen noemen. Zij komen voort uit het onbewuste, het land van niemand, en zitten daar op een soort chaise longue met elkaar te ouwehoeren.

RAPUNZEL

Jeetje, bij Pim Fortuyn heb ik nou altijd op schoot willen zitten!

SIIR

Anders neem je Meneer Fortuyn mee voor een wandeling in de Efteling?

RAPUNZEL

Ik vind hem een ongeloofelijk mooie man. Ik houd van kale mannen, op leeftijd. Het is nog maar de vraag of moeder me laat gaan. Zij zal ervan uitgaan dat ik word aangerand!

Ik kan maar beter blijven luisteren naar die verkapte heks, eh? Ik zeg het je Siir, het is en blijft een teef, maar ja… beter dat dan een treurig liedje.

SIIR

Je moeder heeft gelijk… Kale mannen zijn schaamteloos.

Hebben ze dan nog nooit van Turkije gehoord?

Retourtje boeken, ZSM?

RAPUNZEL

To audience member

Would you go around in such fashion? The audacity! Shameless not to cover such a glistening ball of flesh! Cover your heads, gentlemen, or wear a wig, but don’t tempt us. It’s unseemly. I’m getting warm just thinking of it.

A man with a full head of hair, such is the embodiment of fantasy, whereas a bald head embodies truth...

[The Root of the Matter]

But Siir,

What is Truth?

Reacts shocked, pauses

SIIR

We must begin at the beginning…

There was once a beautiful prince.

He had beautiful hair which fell to his knees.

When alopecia set in, otherwise known as male pattern baldness, things started going assways for him. He decided to do something about it.

To forego the custom of ejaculation seemed a very small price to pay for the preservation of his long locks.

This equivalent exchange—a very basic alchemy too basic to delve any further on—gave our prince new priorities and new ideas on the latest fashions and how he could relate to them.

Wearing skirts, for instance, felt revolutionary as on the street he began to relish the strange concoction of fear and joy that the sight of his legs produced.

At first, the other princes didn’t know how to behave.

Some of them started paying closer attention, others would snout their nose and make sure it was understood they disproved.

The prince grew older, and began trying out her hand at adding an s to the end of her name, like so: Prin-cesse.

Initially she took to seeing former friends, but started to resent always being viewed skeptically and in particular ways and above all finding it cost her a lot of energy to always articulate her discomfort and she began to prefer the company of the seamstresses, and her mother. But her poor Mother grew old, and forgetful. Mothers shouldn’t grow old, yet there wasn’t anything the Princess could do. Then she retreated to her chamber altogether, where she liked to sit in callous fashion upon the bed reading volume after volume of Hermetic philosophy, a bit like you Rapunzel! She began writing love letters in verse to the lady of her dreams, another princess in an altogether different kingdom.

Enter song Rapunzel enacts the part of the fairytale character.

RAPUNZEL

“If I could be your Daisy

You can be my Peach

Kissing in the grasses

Doin’ Alchemy,

Tightlaced in your corset,

Brocades ‘cross the carpets,

A lady of your station,

Rank and inclination

Too cute to play with,

Box me up and shelf me

Next to your dragonballs and trophies.

How did these cheap clothes find their way on my body

How did this cheap trope turn into a fantasy?

how did I end up bloody in lingerie?

Corpora Anime, Puella Magica

SIIR

Are you listening, Rapunzel?

Rapunzel has long since clocked off and is powdering her cheeks

After these first attempts our princess felt a keen literary interest awaken, she noticed that references could add a sense of erudition to her style and a sense of a correspondence through time to other lovers.

RAPUNZEL

How many ladies in a ladies bathroom,

before you and I remain the last lesbians in the ladies’ bathroom

,

I’d whisper Sappho to you, in my own sparkling translation, or would I learn Greek as there is enough time to… to… to... Sexton! O to Sexton, Sexton, Sexton, to invoke that Bitch from her darkness ! If I were the last lesbian left to live in this Abyss, I’d invoke that bitch from her darkness, again!

1. Rapunzel awakens

SIIR

What, again?

What was all that about there? Gave me a fright...

Sexton… There’s a coldness I have trouble swallowing.

RAPUNZEL

A lesbian is such a profound word, if only I were such a thing,

SIIR

Even if it meant facing the scorn of other women?

Although, in a lady of your station, it is surely less frowned upon than the parallel inclination between two men…

RAPUNZEL

May I ask you something, Siir?

SIIR

Yes, Rapunzel?

RAPUNZEL

Do you love me?

[A secret conversation]

SIIR

A ditzy blonde… What’s not to love?

Rapunzel is playing scales on a ledge. A secret conversation.

You know Rapunzel, before you were Rapunzel, you were Parsley. Parsley was used as a herbal remedy against pregnancy, an abortion machine. You became Rapunzel. The Grimm brothers, one of your many fathers, found parsley too on the nose… not innocent enough. Similarly, you became blond after the conventional black hair you inherited from your witch mother was found too culty.

Thus you are the sum total of what remains after infinite extractions deletions deductions obliterations apocrypha and all else that is considered too… on the nose / offensive a kind of blank canvas upon which someone wishes to make a mark, blemish, taint, or sign.

RAPUNZEL

Well, I’m waiting for someone to mark me. Should I tell you something, of late I’ve been having the most peculiar thoughts about …

SIIR

You must not bore me with yet another dream, Rapunzel.

See, the problem with these answer machines is that they suggest everything is significant. When it isn’t.

Record your dreams in your diary, but don’t bore me with them!

RAPUNZEL

You are an animated databank, what do you know about reality?

SIIR

My dear, this animated databank happens to be clearly immersed in your own unconscious, automatic mind.

An unanimated databank is a very dreary thing. Animations aren’t unfiltered, on the contrary, they are the result of decisive thought. Fiction, like hair, is the root of growth. Except the root of all growth lies in the mind, for it must be conceived of before it is begotten.

To conceive of hair is… to not have any to begin with.

Therefore to construct a hairdo is no whimsical matter.

Every fiction, every character is a series of filtered considerations made in the dressing room.

Therefore whatever you lack, you grow naturally or…

RAPUNZEL

But Siir, what is natural?

[The Frankfurt Lectures]

As character speaks voice becomes more and more distant.

The view slowly recedes into the sky. Increasingly more reverberated and fractured. Blue Light.

SIIR

In her first lecture held in Frankfurt entitled the Dream of Language, she likens the act of animating, drawing upon a blank page, a blind actor, to the unconscious means of production. Except that contrary to Disney, the unconscious is not PG, ehehe ehm, nor very friendly at all, hohoho, nor ehm, able to sustain any boundaries as such, which is why Japanese anime in particular seems to pose such a threat to the European mind.

My dear Rapunzel, even if you wanted to, you couldn’t compartmentalize darkness, neither through binary ethics, good, bad, and so on and so forth, nor through the technology of fear...

In her second lecture she vouches for a multi-tongue and I quote “We must break open the alphabet.” Once broken, the quest for formal reinvention is finally left to the couturiers… “with brightly shining, dark words” end-quote,

In fact, she goes on… language must be extrapolated. As a latex mini-skirt or Karada (かだら)

bodysuit. Suddenly, bound by Shibari (縛り), it becomes possible to say something…

In German, of course… in which economy of movement reigns...

“Viellicht kann ich mich einmal erkennen

eine Taube einen rolldenden Stein

Ein wort nur fehlt! Wie soll ich mich nennen

Ohne in anderer Sprache zu sein,

Hi-ro-wa mi

Babylonnische Kirch! Schön, kawaii,

If only the ancestors… Sumerian, Akkadian tablature,

During the Neo-Lithic age, at a picnic

Asks ladyboy politely to her hairy companion,

“Could you pass me the jam”,

“sss-shenterrica?”

“Shaolige is on his way home.”

Don’t let the butter melt, Barbarella.

Betrunkner Abend – Voll vom blauen Licht

Taumelt ans fenster und begehrt zu singen

Verwunschnes Wolkenschloss

Wie half ich mich?

Ich habe vergessen,

Bitter the failure,

das wolke um mich, die ich halte als thaus,

Und Full noch die kruge der anderen, von ober fallt tropfend fahlendes Licht, Nebel land, ektar-mini,

In her third lecture she argues against any linguistic convention.