be a mountain

‘To sit, to listen, to be, to observe, to breathe, to think, to remember – the most urgent choreography’ (Lepecki 1996: 107).

‘Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will sense them. The least we can do is try to be there’ (Dillard 1998: 10).

***

Deep space

For two years in the mid-1980s I lived on a mountain in Australia, some miles to the west of the national capital Canberra. My rented home on the mountain – Mount Stromlo - was one of a number of 1950s single-storey wooden houses in a small community attached to a major observatory. A little further around the mountain towered half a dozen huge, brooding, domed telescopes. My neighbours were astronomers, astrophysicists, PhD researchers, computer engineers; they usually worked at night, and I rarely saw them out and about during the days. This was a place of deep looking of a specific kind. Initially established as a solar observatory, research at that time was focused primarily on galactic astronomy, notably supernovas and the rate of change of cosmic expansion, as well as the monitoring of space weather. To walk at night amongst the structures housing the reflector telescopes was an uncanny experience. These silent monolithic sentinels would suddenly crank and whir into life without warning, their slowly revolving aluminium domes winking in the moonlight as they opened to the infinite pearl-strewn intricacies of the night sky. Once I lay on the ground beside them, looking upwards, trying to imagine something of what they were seeing.

Awakening: ‘the 10,000 beings’

‘Don’t be a mountaineer, be a mountain’ (Snyder 1999: 20).

Lucy Cash and Simone Kenyon’s short film How the earth must see itself (a thirling) offers a distilled, poetic mapping of an area of mountain terrain – Glen Feshie on the western side of the Cairngorms in Scotland – through embodied engagement with and perceptions of its particular material attributes and energies. The film concerns itself with modalities of seeing, sensing and knowing, ecologies of place making, an explicitly gendered economy of respectful attention and exchange (in sharp contrast to the ‘heroic’ assaults, conquests or catastrophes of so many mountaineering narratives), and a resonant wonder that both recognizes the provisionality of its understandings and affirms the abundant complexity of a wilderness environment which exceeds the cognitive reach of the self. In image and sound, it proposes to displace any singular perspective in favour of a more modest, contemplative, ecological immersion in the protean dynamics of present process.

The film draws on and refashions material developed for a series of live performances directed by Kenyon with a group of women collaborators, their work inspired by Nan Shepherd’s astonishing book The Living Mountain, originally written during the second World War and first published in 1977.  Shepherd’s book might be read as a kind of modernist mystic’s love song to a place she knew intimately, and the amplified sensory attention and devotion of her enquiry are in many ways tonally and thematically reminiscent of Annie Dillard’s exquisite writings about Tinker Creek in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Both women elaborate a grace-ful pedagogy of seeing and sensing. And while Shepherd’s Presbyterian materialism perhaps offers a particularly Scottish counterpoint to Dillard’s ecstatic questioning pantheism, both seek a profound interpenetration of body, consciousness and place – they are thirled (1) - that undoes the self and sets it in motion, casting it into an unfinishable, contoured endeavour to understand an abundant, auratic here-and-now that will never fully give away its abiding mysteries.

In his perceptive introduction to a recent edition of Shepherd’s slim volume, Robert Macfarlane characterizes her writing in terms of ‘a compressive intensity, a generic disobedience, a flaring prose-poetry and an obsession (ocular, oracular) with the eyeball’ (Shepherd 2011: xiii). Consciously or otherwise, Cash and Kenyon appear to have conceived and moulded their film at least in part in the light of these qualities, and they condense fragments of Shepherd’s acutely pensive text to accompany and guide us in voice-over through the film. Spoken by the Scottish performer Shirley Henderson, these voicings are marked with a distinct gender, accent, timbre, and a flinty, weathered grain (in Barthes’s sense, grain as the body in the voice) that reminded me of Linda Manz in Terence Malick’s Days of Heaven (I can think of no higher compliment). Like Manz’s, Henderson’s voice is indeterminate in terms of age and historical time, as if archetypal – a benign revenant version of the pre-Christian Cailleach of the highlands, perhaps. And what she says come to us in a dream-like close-up, at times whispered, little more than shaped breath, like thoughts on the threshold of consciousness and at the cusp of articulation. Hers is the voice of an old soul, like Shepherd’s: faraway and so close.

The film as a whole seems to be discreetly rounded with sleep, framed by the very first voice-over words we hear in terms of the fresh perceptions activated when one emerges from a night spent on the mountain. From its opening blurred pan across the dormant body-like folds of the Cairngorms, set against a misty skyline, one might perhaps conceive of the film itself as a soft, porous ‘awakening’ into an attuned, uninsulated receptivity in an immersive, quasi-animist present. ‘Noone knows the mountain completely who has not slept on it. As one slips over into sleep, the mind grows limpid. The body melts. Perception alone remains. One neither thinks nor desires nor remembers. There is nothing between me and the earth and sky’. And the mountain itself seems to stir into flickering life – a sprig of heather dancing softly in the breeze, a scurrying beetle, the astonishing feel-stretch of a caterpillar exploring a budding twig, the play of light on a spider’s web. The film’s closing fade-to-black, set alongside the sounds of a women’s choir and bird song, returns us to the darkness of (a different) sleep.

On first ‘awakening’, we are drawn into proliferative life and movement in image and sound, registers of the teeming material world often referred to in Buddhist literature as ‘the 10,000 beings’. We slip (at first I wrote the verb ‘plunge’, but that’s much too sudden a trajectory for this study in slow perception) (2) – we slip gently into a world of dynamic complexity, delicacy, precarity, resilience and interconnectedness, and over time we come to sense a tacit invitation to ‘think like a mountain’, to borrow Aldo Leopold’s celebrated phrase. For the film perceives and maps this mountain massif as an intricate ecosystem, a biodiverse web of agencies, interrelations and interdependencies between earth, rock, flora, fauna, water, weather, sky, all of them intertwined and in process.

As the film unfolds, our orientation through seeing and listening pulses between crystalline resolution and out-of-focus, proximity and distance, extreme close-up and wider context. The camera knowingly makes of our vision a modality that is imperfect and provisional, its rhythms contrapuntal and discontinuous, its points of view shifting. At moments the materiality of the 16 mm film and the camera’s mediation of seeing interrupt the ‘natural’ quality of these images, declaring their contingent madeness. A range of evanescent visual textures and effects, both deliberate choices and chance mechanical accidents happily embraced, briefly undo the integrity and singularity of the filmed image, destabilising the authority of the camera’s claim to truth, its ‘mastering’ of reality. These include frame slippage – the split-frame judder that registers those spaces between frames that are usually invisible to the viewer – the flaring micro-tempests of light leak, over-exposure and solarisation, shifting unstable focus and the sense at times of a softer peripheral vision, and the foggy blur of halation around certain objects, like breath on a mirror. Although superficially reminiscent of the work of certain other contemporary filmmakers in terms of their heightened engagement with film’s textural materiality (for example, Ben Rivers, Guy Maddin or Mark Jenkin), in Cash’s work, in addition to her activation of duration itself as material – an analogue to the deep time of the topography of this place - the very act of seeing is foregrounded as mercurial, unpredictable and dynamic, entailing an active process of negotiation of the partial and the compromised. In this way, the film enacts a kind of formal equivalence to Nan Shepherd’s own nuanced phenomenological insights in The Living Mountain as to the unsteady provisionality of vision, its morphing multiplicity and its inevitable implicating - literally, ‘en-folding’ - of other senses in embodied processes of experiencing and (always partial) meaning making. In particular, hearing and touch.

Never silent, the film’s complex sound track invites a kind of somatic ‘deep listening’, to use Pauline Oliveros’s term. It layers Henderson’s voice over a montage of bird sounds (corvids, a cuckoo, a skylark), the chattering flow of a small stream, footfalls in heather, a tiny crunching like infinite insect legs scurrying across pine needle debris, the soft thwoosh of bodies falling, and the continuous movement of wind and air, which at times suggests the tidal susurration of a distant spectral sea. In addition, a choir of women sings Hannah Tuulikki’s meditative vocal score, its compositional arc rising gradually towards collective celebratory flight towards the film’s ending. Combining sonic materials that are both spatially close-up and further afield, this heterogeneous sonic environment elaborates a detailed topography of holistic entanglement in a textured braiding of elements, sensations, creatures and perspectives. ‘For the mountain is one and indivisible … all are aspects of one entity: the living mountain’ ...

Look out

‘I knew when I had looked for a long time, that I had hardly begun to see’ (Shepherd 2011: xix).

The mountain observatory that was my home in Australia all those years ago was a designated place of looking in other ways too. At weekends during the summer months, I worked a 6-hour solitary shift as a fire ‘watcher’, spending a sustained chunk of daylight hours at the top of a tall circular metal lookout platform on one side of the mountain. In this windowless space high above the pine canopy there was a tall chair, a curved bench table, a logbook, binoculars to scan the surrounding ranges and valleys for any trace of smoke, a phone and a 2-way radio to file hourly reports to a central fire office in the city. I remember maps, a radio for weather reports, and a printout detailing different kinds of smoke plumes and how to read their specific colours in terms of the combustible materials involved. At the top and bottom edges of the framed panoramic field of vision were compass points etched into a metal strip, a version of the old 32-point wind rose. The direction of any smoke seen in the distance could be gauged relatively accurately by suspending a line vertically through the field of vision and aligning the plume with the compass coordinates above and below. A number of such readings from partner lookout points in the area, with intersecting fields of vision, would enable the central office to triangulate and fix the whereabouts of the fire. The semiotics and mapping of smoke.

My rhythm was to scan steadily and formally, backwards and forwards across the 180 degrees of visible landscape to be surveyed, then step away from the binoculars to rest my eyes in a softer drifting mode of looking, an undirected hazy pan of reverie or a jump-zoom in on something much closer at hand. A tuning in and out. Whenever I was distracted from the methodical, meditative engagement with what lay in the scalloped distance, it was triggered by registering change of some kind, something ‘fleet and fleeting’ as Annie Dillard might say: the interruption-event of a boisterous flock of white cockatoos, a loping wallaby or kangaroo foraging in the undergrowth at the base of trees nearby, an unfamiliar insect or spider alongside me in the lookout space, a caterpillar edging forward hesitantly with invisible information, a shift in the cloud cover, the breeze, temperature or light on my face.

One Saturday afternoon, I fell asleep up there, I’m not sure for how long. Looking out just folded slowly and softly into a looking in. When I woke up with a start, flushed with self-consciousness as if someone or something might have seen me sleeping, above all I was anxious as to what I might have missed; I immediately looked up and out. And I saw that it was almost dusk, and that there were no visible smoke plumes, and that everything had been transformed utterly and remade while I wasn’t even looking. And I saw ‘in a blue haze all the world poured flat and pale between the mountains’ (Dillard 1974: 41) …

***

Almost twenty years later in January 2003, long after I had left Mount Stromlo, in the height of a summer drought a devastating firestorm consumed the mountain utterly, sweeping through the pine forests on its flanks and destroying five of the telescopes, their aluminium domes, mirrors and lenses literally melted away, along with years of research data. The fire also razed to the ground many of the research buildings and houses, including my former home, and the lookout tower. The residents were given 20 minutes warning for their evacuation. Only one telescope survived the inferno.

Seeing touching

‘I walk out; I see something, some event that would otherwise have been utterly missed and lost; or something sees me, some enormous power brushes me with its clean wing, and I resound like a beaten bell’ (Dillard 1998: 14).

Like Shepherd’s book, Cash and Kenyon’s film activates a perceptual and conceptual terrain that sits astride a number of apparent binaries: looking/seeing, proximity/distance, small/large, subject/object, human/non-human, material/immaterial, speed/slowness, deep time/the present moment, knowing/mystery, sleeping/waking, living/dying. In both book and film each of these is unstable, in flux, the axis of a potential becoming. Each term is implicated in the other. To this list must be added the core pairing of seeing/touching, a conventional Western clefting that is actively frayed and then repurposed in this film. The women performers – quietly receptive explorers of and somatic witnesses to the mountain - embody the vibrant connective tissue in the space between these two kinds of perception.

As a range of writers, philosophers and phenomenologists have suggested over the past half-century or so – Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emanuel Levinas, Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, Elizabeth Grosz and others – touch, the first sense to develop in the human foetus, involves a corporeal doing that exposes the sensitivity, porosity and vulnerability of the self to the world. As act and metaphor, touch represents the impingement of the world as a whole upon subjectivity; and touching locates oneself in proximity with the givens of the world, rather than in opposition to them. At the threshold of inside and outside, touch as encounter and interface with the more-than-oneself, the event of another. Touch as a modality of difference.

As the film unfolds we see one, then three, then five women on the mountain: Jo Hellier, Claricia Parinussa, Caroline Reagh, Keren Smail and Petra Söör. Their clothes - hand-knitted jumpers, leather belts, trousers, an elegant contemporary version of what women hikers would have worn half a century ago – reflect the textures, shapes and colour spectrum of their surroundings. They appear to belong in the mountain. They practice movements and states of being-in-place that are akin to what are known as ‘The Four Dignities’ in Chinese literature, fundamental modes of being mindful and present (‘at home’) in one’s body: Standing, Lying, Sitting, Walking. First we see one of the women standing immobile, dwarfed by a tree, contemplating its soaring presence, before softly placing her hand on its trunk and stepping ‘into’ it. Then the women as a group, walking slowly and silently through the heather. We see their eyes seeing, their bodies sensing, feeling the air on their skin and through their hair. At one point they lie folded in the heather, their arched woolen backs like scattered boulders that slowly stir into movement. A hand dips into running water, lingering with its energy and temperature, drinking them in. Another hand, then bare feet, carefully explore the qualities and architecture of thick spongey moss. The pleasure of tender exchange in the rust-coloured moss’s give and return, the responsive dance of toucher touched in the flesh of the world. Subsequently the women perform a simple collective choreographic cycle of organic emergence and return, appearance and disappearance: individually rising from the heather, standing, swaying in the breeze, gradually provoking imbalance by bending backwards and inverting their perception of the world - ‘unmaking’ the habitual - before finally letting go and falling back softly to earth. At times the camera adopts the fallers’ point of view, tracking the backward slide of their visual field across the sky.

Ultimately perhaps the film invites us to see a range of tactile encounters in proximity, with a view to the experience of the film itself offering the viewer an engagement with a haptic space rather than a singularly optical one. No opposition is established between these different kinds of sensing; instead the film encourages us to recognize the possibility that the eyes can see - and the ears hear - in a tactile fashion, apprehending and lightly brushing the epidermis of the world. If we are to find a trajectory ‘into’ any environment through open embodied contact, it seems to suggest, our journey will necessarily entail something of that pulsing world entering and taking (a) place within our own internal topography. For the edges of our bodies are membranes for two-way traffic …

So let us take time, make space.

Dissolve the mind, walk out of the body.

Allow what’s out there to in-here.

That’s the invitation, the most urgent choreography.

‘Lick a finger; feel the now’ (Dillard 1998: 99) …

***

Footnotes

1. Online Scottish dictionaries offer an uncertain etymology for the term ‘thirl’, with possible links to the words ‘through’, throw’, ‘thirl’ (a hole, aperture, nostril), ‘hurl’, ‘thrill’ and ‘thrall’. Formally, as a noun or verb ‘thirl’ suggests the creation of an interconnecting hole or passage way, a perforation that enables an intersection and interpenetration between spaces; the sensations and symptoms of intense emotion, physical stimulation or piercing cold (trembling, tingling, throbbing, vibrating, a literal and figurative ‘thrilling’); and a binding connection to a particular place (see DSL). The glossary appended to Shepherd’s book simply contains the following short entry: ‘Thirled, bound, tied’ (Shepherd 2011: 114).

2.  René Daumal: ‘There is nothing quite like the mountains for teaching slowness and calmness’ (Daumal 2010: 19).

References

Dictionary of the Scots Language (DSL). ‘Thirl’, entry in the online ‘Scottish National Dictionary (1700-)’, https://www.dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/thirl_v1_n1

Daumal, René (2010. Mount Analogue, New York: The Overlook Press

Dillard, Annie (1998). Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, New York: Harper Perennial 

Lepecki, André (1996). ‘Embracing the stain: notes on the time of dance’, Performance Research 1:1 (‘The Temper of the Times’), Spring, 103-7

Shepherd, Nan (2011). The Living Mountain, Edinburgh: Canongate Books

Snyder, Gary (1999). The Gary Snyder Reader, Washington DC: Counterpoint

Photo at the top: Stuart Lindenmayer - Mount Stromlo, burnt out observatory at night, 31 August 2017 (remains of one of the original telescopes, which now exists alongside new observatory facilities). Wikimedia Creative Commons license

This essay was originally written as a response to a film by Lucy Cash. Entitled ‘'The most urgent choreography’: reflections on seeing and sensing in How the earth must see itself (a thirling)', it was commissioned by Lucy Cash in 2019

---

liars and thieves (FE365)

Years ago, someone once sent me a rather poor photocopy of a photo of my friend Claire Marshall - in Hidden J, I think, it was a show I never actually saw. In the photo, she’s wearing a black dress and a cardboard sign tied with string around her neck, with the word LIAR written in big capital letters. Claire looks vulnerable and isolated adorned by this material textual object, 'othered' as if the sign has been coercively imposed. In some photos of her in this show, a slightly blurred Richard Lowdon is lurking in the background, his eyes directed towards Claire’s back, and his presence seems to confirm this coercion. 

Yet the nomination LIAR remains ambiguous, and any stable reading skids and unravels. Claire seems to be located as A liar, if not THE singular liar. At the same time the word and her gaze also point outwards to any readers of the sign, and the term can attach itself to anyone who witnesses, perhaps to be freely accepted and shared in complicity: aren’t we all liars anyway? Or it can be received as accusation. Who? Me? Oh…

The photograph came to me at a time when I lived in Australia, and petty criminals were being publicly shamed in some states there. A boy who had been caught shoplifting in a glossy new mall in Canberra was punished in the children’s court by being obliged to stand every Saturday outside the ‘scene-of-the-crime’ in the shopping centre wearing a T-shirt with the word THIEF printed on it. Within days of his sentencing, this civic stigmatisation had been co-opted and dispersed as thousands of identical T-shirts were printed, distributed and worn around the shopping malls of Canberra.

Whenever I’ve seen this image of Claire, and it has often been reproduced since then, I have wanted to undo her isolation, and have tried to imagine (it’s not so hard) a proliferation of liars on street corners and in courts of law, in shopping centres and front gardens, in railway stations and pubs and theatres and universities and online. A community of liars, with no clear way of ever knowing if any of us were telling the truth.

Photo: Hugo Glendinning

shared enquiry

When I first arrived at UWA in Perth in 1989, at the same time as being rather overwhelmed by the beauty of its situation and that astonishing Moreton Bay fig tree, I was immediately struck by the university’s outstanding resources in terms of spaces for making theatre: the Octagon, the Dolphin, the New Fortune, as well as a small studio space. To my mind, these were world-class resources, far more ‘professional’ and plural in their possibilities than anything I had seen in England. During my six years at UWA, I was able to work with students in each of these spaces, and a wide range of contexts further afield for site-based workshop projects: the tree-lined open-air cinema behind the studio, the river front at the eastern edge of the campus, the quarries in the hills at Boya, even the sand dunes of Lancelin. 

In addition, I was struck by how adventurous and generative the theatre culture was on campus. Experimentation was thoughtful, conceptually informed, and often bold. My colleagues – notably Bill Dunstone, and David George at Murdoch – were intellectually gifted and challenging, inviting and provoking new thoughts, perceptions and questions in me as well as their students: about dramaturgy, historiography, representation, and performance as an epistemology. In very different ways, these two taught me a great deal about thinking into and through performance.

In particular I was massively buoyed and challenged by the students involved in productions, drawn from different courses at UWA as well as from Murdoch University as part of a joint programme. I was fortunate to work with people studying history, architecture, law and art as well as theatre and English. 15 years after leaving UWA, without nostalgia I can now see that they were amongst the best students I have ever had: inquisitive, intellectually and creatively energized, industrious, open and very brave. At the time I thought of many of them as smart, imaginative, driven, eccentric and often very funny people with whom to really chase something. 

At its best, for me, teaching has always felt like shared enquiry, a developmental arc for all concerned, rather than the giving over of knowledge by a supposed ‘expert’. Like theatre making, it is rooted in an everyday politics and ethics of relationality and exchange. This was certainly the case with such people as Barry Laing, Felicity Bott, Ahmad Abas, Janet Lee, Imbi Neeme, Andrea McVeigh, Chris Kohn, Ben Laden, Leon Ewing, Paul Tassone, Robert Hannah, Jodie Wise, Bronwyn Turnbull and others. They were unquestionably talented people, and since that time many of them have become established practitioners in their own right, in theatre and elsewhere.

In truth, I had little idea how to make theatre when I arrived in Perth, or at least the kind of theatre that I dreamt of but didn’t often encounter. I came brimming with enthusiasms for some work I had seen, sometimes live but more often on grainy videos passed on to me like samizdat, barely legible copies of copies. I knew I was interested in devised work rather than dramatic literature per se, and I suspected that performance rather than theatre was really where the ideas caught fire. I had a taste for the hybrid and the physically rooted, image-based events hovering somewhere between theatre and dance that I rather pretentiously conceived of in terms of a ‘critical surrealism’. Above all, I wanted something to happen. 

In my late 20s, I had a head full of Pina Bausch, Laurie Anderson, Peter Brook, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Hélène Cixous. I loved new dance, bands and live music more than theatre, which so often felt tired, its languages worn and predictable. I loved new fiction writing, and the presence of people like Gail Jones within the department excited me; I used to attend Gail’s lectures whenever possible, and she taught me a great deal too, about an attention to language and the writerly agencies of the reader. 

The Festival of Perth, at that time run by David Blenkinsop and Henry Boston, further fueled my enthusiasms, in particular through its outstanding dance and new performance programme. It provided me, and my young collaborators, with an ongoing education – through the work of, for example, Josef Nadj, Maguy Marin, Alain Platel’s Les Ballets C de la B, and the early pieces of Chrissie Parrott, as well as productions by internationally established companies like the brilliant Rustavelli from Georgia and dynamic young physical theatre practitioners like Theatre de Complicite. 

My core collaborator throughout this period was Barry Laing. When I first met him at UWA, he was a ferociously bright undergraduate student of history and theatre, and already an unusually compelling and gifted performer. From the outset I was impressed and provoked by his intellectual intensity, his genuine desire to make work, and his remarkable focus and presence as a physically engaged performer. As collaborators we were immediately attuned and generative; it seems we gave each other substantial courage, license, energy and ideas. Now a theatre maker and teacher in tertiary contexts in Melbourne, Barry remains one of my closest and most respected friends to this day.

Another core ally in the making of all of the student productions at UWA was Anne Hearder. On first acquaintance a somewhat daunting figure with her omnipresent and impossibly stacked-up ashtray smouldering to one side, and her (to me) slightly ‘old school disciplinarian’ protocols, Anne became a close friend and a profoundly trusted collaborator. She taught the students, and me, an enormous amount about managing projects, resourcefulness, communication, the pragmatics of stagecraft and the importance of networks of support. Although much of the performance work was distant in form from her own familiar territories, she was unhesitating and big-hearted in her support, and uncompromising in her commitment to seeing things through to the point at which they were the best they could possibly be. I loved and respected her for that; she was utterly invaluable.

With these students, these resources, the stimulus in term of models of contemporary practice, the food for thought provided by colleagues, and the indomitable Anne Hearder, UWA looked like an ideal context in which to really take the plunge and explore some hunches, some emerging ‘whiffs of worlds’, the beginnings of something. I wasn’t sure precisely what, but all sorts of things certainly felt possible.

Over the next few years, and with the encouragement of a most supportive head of department Bob White, then Gareth Griffiths, alongside many small projects generated within the curriculum I directed a small number of Theatre Studies public productions: a version of Caryl Churchill and David Lan’s A Mouthful of Birds (1989, The Octagon, and at the York Theatre Festival); a condensed, runaway-train version of Macbeth (Macbeth: a modern ecstasy, 1990, The Dolphin); a devised show drawing on texts by Deborah Levy, William Burroughs and Joe Chaikin, an attempt to make a spell to cheat death - a close friend in Perth had just died from cancer at the age of 32 (Thunder Perfect Mind, The Dolphin, 1992); and Still-life, a dance-theatre piece based on texts by Rimbaud, Seneca and Caryl Churchill (The Dolphin, 1994). 

I am proud of this work, it did its job – and the ambition and commitment of the students were consistently inspiring. Also, as part of the 1994 Festival of Perth, I directed a devised adaptation of Deborah Levy’s novel Beautiful Mutants in the New Fortune. It is worth noting that a number of former UWA and Murdoch students took core roles as performers and co-devisers (Felicity Bott, Andrea McVeigh and Barry Laing, who was also co-adapter and co-director), as well as scenographer (the sculptor Ricardo Peach) and sound and lighting designers (Andrew Beck and Margaret Burton respectively).

My approach throughout this period was insistently collaborative and much more intuitive than intellectual at its genesis; thought emerged from doing as a mode and site of enquiry, rather than theatre making being a vehicle for staging pre-existent thought, for illustrating a ‘thesis’. We used whatever strategies and materials seemed to contain the possibility of momentum in any particular context: improvisation triggered by a text or an image, a lot of reverse engineering from things that were ‘a bit like’ what we were after, music as compositional structure to re-fashion and unfold in space, a lot of hovering around rhythms that ‘did’ things, fumblings with dramaturgy as an affective as well as intellectual weave. We worked obsessively, often out of our depths and off our maps. We got lost and sometimes found things. 

In retrospect and at the time, it was seriously good fun, richly informative (about working with other people, about art and the resonant shapes it might take), and intellectually, imaginatively and creatively demanding; what more could one ask of art making in an educational context? I am grateful for having had the opportunity to collaborate with such remarkable people in such a context. It changed everything for me, and these experiences continue to inform the performance making and teaching in which I’m involved today in England and Europe. 

This essay - memories of what feels like a previous life - and extensive photographic documentation were commissioned for the UWA Centenary Theatre Collection (a new permanent collection of over 500 print and graphic items), Perth, Western Australia. The essay reflects on my own theatre practice in Western Australia, 1989-1995. Curated by Bill Dunstone, Wendy Dundas and Collin O’Brien, the Collection will be launched on 15 March 2013. The entire archive is to be digitized and made available online by UWA Special Collections. The essay is dedicated to the memory of Anne Hearder. 

Photographs (from the top): Still Life; Thunder Perfect Mind; Macbeth, a modern ecstasy; Beautiful Mutants; A Mouthful of Birds. 

shuttle 2: look again

A long day of meetings during which, at times, inevitably my attention drifted. Exhaustion rather than boredom took me elsew/here, into the refuge of daydream. At one point, desert memories unfolded in the overcast Surrey afternoon - rather different 'meetings' - in particular, during one hot afternoon in February 1985, driving yee-haa on an ochre dirt road north of Coober Pedy on the way towards Alice Springs, kicking up billowing clouds of dust. Then a blow-out, skid, judder to a halt, engine cut, sudden silence: the second puncture of the journey, no more spare tires. Oh shit. Within half an hour or so, P hitches a ride with a passing truck; R and I sit in the car on the side of the track with all of the doors open, seats angled back, shades not quite up to the glare off the bonnet. It is unbelievably hot and still. Not even a fly.

After a while, off to one side we watch a willy willy move langorously across the desert scrub, then wind its way towards us: a dust devil tilting and flexing like a tree in light wind, a spindly beige Giacometti figure leaning slowly one way and then the other. It is beautiful, and oddly funny; and we are hypnotised by it, transfixed - not even moving when it becomes apparent that it is heading straight at us. I am struck by the fact that this particulate whirlpool is revolving anti-clockwise. With a sudden roar and sand-blast sting, it passes right through the centre of the car, in through one door, out the other - right through us - whip-snap-ripping clothing and plastic bags and a hissing newspaper and a map and my hat, which fly up and out in a vortex of grit and dust like a great co(s)mic spin dryer before being deposited with apparent care over bushes and sand and road in a wide arc of perfectly spaced debris. The dust settles. Without a word we sit in the car covered in a fine layer of crystalline red, astonished, watching this tiny tornado wander off and finally, mysteriously, dematerialise.

In the rear view mirror, way in the distance, I see the rippled dust cloud of an approaching vehicle. We get out to watch its approach, shaking the sand out of our shorts and hair. Then more wide-eyed astonishment as a startling electric pink Holden ute flares into view: a grinning aboriginal driver with his foot flat down on the accelerator, two boys with him on the front seat, a group of women and kids standing on the flatbed, riding it like pony trick riders or surfers. We wave excitedly. They slow for a moment as they pass us, shouting, waving, laughing fit to bust a gut. Clearly we are the funniest thing they've seen for quite a while. Then they too disappear in a fleeting conjuror's fog, like a glorious rose space ship trailing clouds of glory, and the air is full of dancing ochre ...

Later I remember that there are also dust devils on Mars ...
_______________________  

The following text is taken from a longer polemical piece on place, originally written in Australia and published in 1998. Although many things have moved on significantly in the intervening years in Australia, the song hovers and lingers still. In what follows, I take ‘Australia’ (like ‘America’ or ‘Europe’) to be both a geophysical site and a set of ideas or constitutive myths jostling for position. 

'The more our desert, the more we must rage: which rage is love' (James Hillman)

In traditional Aboriginal cultures in Australia, in which identities are inseparably imbricated in places, one’s ‘country’ constitutes a series of texts, mappae mundi of lore/law. Creation myths, sacred teachings, cultural histories and geographies are inscribed on the ‘maternal’ body of the land itself. Physiographic features record the exploits of totemic ancestors, which may be read, like Braille, and re-animated in the present. ‘Here and there they discarded pieces of their body – organs, limbs, hair, lice, skin, nails and teeth which metamorphose into physical features of the landscape’ (Mundine 1996: 46): rock formations, trees, river courses, waterholes, and so on. 

In Pierre Nora’s formulation, such interconnected features comprise ‘milieux de mémoire, real environments of memory’, rather than ‘lieux de mémoire’, isolated monuments (Nora 1989: 7). For journeys through these places, with the narrative song cycles that articulate their numinosity for the initiated, constitute performative re-makings, re-earthings, re-memberings of originary happenings here now, fusing place, body and spirit at the intersection of secular and sacred time. To walk the story is to revisit and rehearse corporeally the itineraries of a tradition that maps the complex interrelatedness of cultural spaces and identities, pasts and possible futures. To walk the story is to privilege the route, to inhabit the space between here and there, between dwelling and travelling, and to respect its ‘logic of intensities’: an ‘eco-logic’, the evolutive process of which ‘seeks to grasp existence in the very act of its constitution; it is a process of “setting into being”’ (Guattari 1989: 136). To walk the story is to attend to landscape as inscape, and to take (a) place in the world.

In an essay entitled ‘Teatrum nondum cognitorum’ (‘Theatre of the not yet known’) about the limits of cartography as representation, Paul Foss proposes a psychogeography of Australia in terms of its early explorers’ and colonisers’ dis-placed relationships to their spatial environments, and the subsequent cultural impact of their narratives on modern Australians (Foss 1981). Foss describes a constructed ‘antipodal space’ – the other hemisphere, the place of the other – as being historically defined in terms of void, lack, or absence: a non-place, a tabula rasa on which to project anxieties and fantasies. From the moment of so-called discovery, European explorers chose to perceive this ‘Great Southern Land’ as a place of no visible contents, no inhabitants, no water, no inland seas, no songbirds: a stretch of nothing, a scorched and smouldering vacuum, a place of disappearance, a vanishing-point. Terra nullius, they called it, ascribing its features with names that memorialize their own sense of being ‘out of place’: Mount Misery, Cape Catastrophe, Lake Disappointment and Useless Loop.

In such a limbo, there could be ‘nothing out there’. Ideal for castaways – or for penal colonies to rid the so-called civilized world of its ‘waste’. Imperial history taught Australians to view their island as a ‘waste-land’, an excess of space, way beyond the comprehension and possessive hunger of the representatives of an expanding empire. You can’t possess it, went the story, but it may just possess and consume you – like so many of its early explorers, who entered this lacuna in the assumed order of Harmonious Creation and ‘died of landscape’ (Stow 1969).

Contemporary Australia is an island continent – a term which in itself, of course, infers both isolation and size – within which urban places still cling to the coastal strips: ‘to the outer rim as if ready to depart’ (Ireland 1980: 310). For Australia is built around an interior that, through European lenses, remains unplaceable (atopian), unknowable, terrifying, to be kept outside: the ‘out-back’, the ‘dead centre’. Culturally, it seems, many Australians feel obliged to look ‘out’ rather than ‘in’, thereby privileging insularity to the detriment of interiority and futurity. As novelist David Ireland wrote in A Woman of the Future: ‘Australia sits … on the comfortable coast of life, where its settled nature is steeped in the past. The future is the greatest problem. The future is at the centre of Australia’s problems’ (Ireland 1980: 187).

Over the last 50 years or so, this central ‘void’ has been increasingly colonised – by British nuclear test sites, American tracking installations, multinational mining concerns, vast properties – then abandoned to create new wastelands, toxic no-go zones like Maralinga or Wittenoom. Meanwhile the notion of an empty centre of deserts, desertion and desolation stubbornly persists, despite the fact that this is only a simulacrum of the void, a construction. Of course countless peoples, cultures, creatures, places do exist there; it is not empty at all. 

‘The very habit and faculty that makes apprehensible to us what is known and expected dulls our sensitivity to other forms, even with the most obvious. We must rub our eyes and look again, clear our minds of what we are looking for to see what is there’ (Malouf 1994: 130).

If they remain largely ‘unseen’, as do Aboriginal peoples and their claims to the places and lives stolen from them for so many on the ‘comfortable coast of life’, perhaps this lack of recognition stems from more than blinkered or flawed perception. It relates to a refusal to look in, or behind, to the enduring shadows. To listen to the ‘empty space’ at the heart, and to apprehend it as a dynamic place for re-reading and re-writing histories and geographies: a theatre of the not yet known, where everything is (to be) decided. 

References 

Foss, Paul (1981). ‘Teatrum nondum cognitorum’, The Foreign Bodies Papers, Sydney: Local Consumption Papers, Sydney University

Guattari, Félix (1989). ‘The Three Ecologies’, trans. Chris Turner, New Formations 8 (Summer)

Hillman, James (1989). A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman (ed. Thomas Moore), London: Routledge

Ireland, David (1980). A Woman of the Future, Harmondsworth: Penguin

Malouf, David (1994). Remembering Babylon, London: Vintage

Mundine, Djon (1996). ‘Without land we are nothing. Without land we are a lost people …’, in V. Somerset (ed.), Spirit + Place: Art in Australia 1861-1996, Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art

Nora, Pierre (1989). ‘Between memory and history: les lieux de mémoire’, Representations 26

Stow, Randolph (1969). ‘The singing bones’, in A Counterfeit Silence, Sydney: Angus & Robertson 
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Originally publication: David Williams, ‘Frontwords’, Performance Research 3:2, Summer 1998 (‘On Place’), v-viii

For Arizona storm chaser Mike Olbinski's extraordinary timelapse images of the Phoenix Haboob of 5 July 2011, see here. For other timelapse sequences of dust storms, supercells etc., see Mike's website here.

welcome to dreamland

I will not help you with this. You have to ‘deal’. Which means cope with un-meaning. Or with the possibility of un-meaning. Or cope with me not coping. Or with me not meaning. The trembling of this moment … (Tim Etchells)

About three years ago I was asked to give a presentation at a gathering in Lancaster to mark the 20th anniversary of Forced Entertainment: what follows is an edited version of it. In many ways, it was a bit of a surprise to find myself there in Lancaster. A pleasurable one, yes, I was chuffed to be there, but a surprise nonetheless. I don’t regard myself as any kind of ‘expert’ in this context (or any others for that matter). For over half of Forced Entertainment’s more than 20-year existence, I wasn’t even living in Europe, I was on the other side of the world in Australia. I only came back to work in England at the end of the 1990s. So for a 13 or 14 year period, I had no direct contact with these people and this growing body of work. Whatever impressions I formed were the fruit of (at the very least) second hand information and experiences - and the same can be said of a small number of other influential presences shadowing my psyche; they are part of my memory and of how I constitute myself, they hover around the edges of the stories my cortex hums to me about who and where I am, I recognise them but I couldn’t claim to ‘know’ them.

In the case of Forced Entertainment, in Australia I saw the odd grainy copy of a copy of an often quite baffling video, decayed flickering traces drifting ever further from the ‘events’ they purported to register, the cassettes exchanging hands like a rather dodgey samizdat from another world. I also came across the odd text by Tim Etchells: sharply perceptive and interrogative, challenging, dissident, very funny and a bit arsey in ways that reminded me of something of what I missed of England, and of what was absent from so much of the performance I was able to see. In addition I heard the odd story from my old friend Claire Marshall, who is a long-term member of FE; we met sometimes when I came back to England for work or family reasons. She once sent me a video of Marina & Lee, and I showed it to the programmers at the Perth Festival of the Arts, who were quite evidently bemused and thought I was having a bit of a laugh.

And then a lot of word-of-mouth: that generative connective tissue that thrives on the unstable blur between memory, desire, fiction, and all sorts of assumptions and projections about what-it-is-one-would-like. In the early 1990s, for example, Phil a friend from Perth in Western Australia traveled to England, and somehow found his way to Sheffield to see Forced Entertainment’s retrospective trilogy Welcome to Dreamland: (Let the Water Run its Course) to the Sea that Made the Promise, 200% and Bloody Thirsty, and Some Confusions in the Law about Love). On his return, it was clear that something had happened to Phil. And that something was still happening for Phil. He burst into my house wild-eyed and waving a programme from the performances, ranting about angels and skeletons and wigs and dead people and the interruptions and not-knowing-whatthehell-was-going-on and the shouting and the weeping and the overload and the mess and the aching aching beauty of it all…. In the end he just flopped into a chair, took a deep breath and with a quiet melancholic seriousness said: ‘Jeeeez Dave mate, you’d have fuckin loved it!’

Somehow these mediated fragments made rather a lot of sense to me in Australia, with its lopsided grins and its displacements and its savage histories and its collective amnesias and its surreal wildlife in-the-everyday and its cultural frictions and its combative politics and its freak weather systems and its apocalyptic fires and its national ‘Sorry Day’ and its skywriters marking the vast indifference of the scriptable blue with ephemeral words like ‘GREED’ and ‘YES’ and ‘WE’, yes the blue of the sea and the blue of the sky, and now not even the sky but the memory of sky, and the blue of the earth in your lungs. I was living in a city where there were shops with names like ‘Bloody Cheap Strides’, and graffiti like ‘Chica! Estas fuerte!’, and ‘More than repair, everything is in need of mercy’. I had visited places with names like ‘Burnt Shirt’, ‘Catastrophe’, ‘Infinity’, ‘Useless Loop’ and ‘Paradise’. And I was fascinated by all those failed Australian explorers, setting off into the vast interior of this island continent in search of their projected desires (in particular imaginary inland seas), losing their way, and ‘dying of landscape’: they are part of the constitutive mythology of Australia. And then all those 19th century convict escapees from Sydney, heading west through the Blue Mountains towards the Red Centre, a line of flight to freedom, or so they thought: it was said that China lay on the other side of these mountains …

Then in early 1999, shortly after arriving back in England, at a time of major transitional uncertainty in my life personally, professionally and culturally - around that time I first read Tim’s book Certain Fragments, started to see some of the Forced Entertaiment shows, started to meet and talk around these events, then took part in a couple of workshops, and got to know a little bit more of these people and their work. And that’s pretty much it.

So my contact with Forced Entertainment over these 20 years has been sketchy, inconsistent, fragmented, at a distance, far more imagined than actual, but no less formative or real to me for all that. It feels as though I’ve been in some long-distance conversation with them across time and space for quite a while. And certain aspects of what they may have done and do indeed seem to do have marked my thinking, writing, teaching, making, playing, and dreaming in fundamental ways. It feels as though their fingerprints are all over my imagination - which is a slightly scarey thought: you don’t really where those digits have been, do you? … And so, as a stand-in for an absent ‘expert’, all I can hope to do is continue that conversation, and rehearse some sense of how these fingerprints have changed my perspectives – how they’ve shifted the angles and shapes of my perception, attention and energies to some degree: try to describe some of the patterns they form for me, how they feel, what they do, what they ask, what they enable. Not all of my stories will be true, but perhaps some of them will be good. A good story and a true story are not at all the same thing. And that suits my purposes here just fine ...
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An enquiry into the word 'we' (1)

Imagine. A naked man in a monkey mask, with white feather angel wings on his back, is squatting up a tree. A woman stands below, trying to persuade him to come down.

She offers him glass beads
She offers him PJ Harvey
She offers him an intimate secret
She offers him a banana
She offers him a list of other more modest trees, bushes and shrubs
She offers him a small act of kindness
She offers him a barely veiled threat
She offers him a list of things that go up and must come down
She offers him a magic trick
She offers him a hat
She offers him a home
She offers him a real good time
She offers him the vegetable of the day
She offers him words of wisdom
She offers him a single entendre
She offers him a small companion animal
She offers him the involuntary sounds of her body
She offers him an incomplete collection of back issues of Vogue
She offers him a variety of weather conditions
She offers him an obscene vetriloquism act
She offers him an impression of Bjork
She offers him a seismograph of her heart
She offers him flying lessons
She offers him descriptions of imaginary places
She offers him Pina Bausch
She offers him a crime that is bound to work
She offers him Archie Gemmill’s goal against Holland
She offers him a right old mess and a good kicking
She offers him a glimpse of the place where the nothing shows through
She offers him Edith Piaf
She offers him the big long breakfast thing
She offers him a medley of chimp calls and bird songs
She offers him her hand against the glass of a window
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Liars and thieves

Dear Claire

Someone once sent me a rather poor photocopy of a photo of you - in Hidden J, I think, it was a show I never saw. In the photo - and you’ll know the one I mean - you’re wearing a black dress and a cardboard sign tied with string around your neck, with the word LIAR written in capital letters. You look vulnerable and isolated adorned by this material textual object, 'othered' as if the sign has been coercively imposed. In some photos of you in this show, a slightly blurred Richard Lowdon is lurking in the background, his eyes directed towards your back, and his presence seems to confirm this coercion. Yet the nomination LIAR remains ambiguous, and any stable reading skids. You do seem to be located as A liar, if not THE singular liar. At the same time the word and your gaze also point outwards to any readers of the sign, and the term can attach itself to anyone who witnesses – perhaps to be freely accepted and shared in complicity: aren’t we all liars anyway? – or it can be received as accusation. Who? Me? Nah.

The photograph came to me at a time when petty criminals were being publicly shamed in some states in Australia. A boy who had been caught shoplifting in a glossy new mall in Canberra was punished in the children’s court by being obliged to stand every Saturday outside the ‘scene-of-the-crime’ in the shopping centre wearing a T-shirt with the word THIEF printed on it. Within days of his sentencing, this civic stigmatisation had been co-opted and dispersed as thousands of identical T-shirts were printed, distributed and worn around the shopping malls of Canberra.

Whenever I’ve seen this image of you, Claire, and it’s often been reproduced, I’ve wanted to undo this solitude, and have tried to imagine (it’s not so hard) a proliferation of liars on street corners and in courts of law, in shopping centres and front gardens, in railway stations and pubs and theatres and art colleges and online. A community of liars, with no way of ever knowing if any of us were telling the truth.

Love to you, D
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An enquiry into the word 'we' (2)

'”We” is a performance art. But how does one learn what to do together? How to be, once again, bodies in public, together, guardians of each other’s shame, looking the part? Where do the steps come from? […] But once we know the rules of the game, we can think about our performance, we don’t have to worry about the game. We take some things for granted so that we can take other things for something else' (Adam Phillips)
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Walkthroughs (1): rude cement fart o nite

What happens if you bring a group of people into a city they don’t know, let them loose on its streets, encourage them to fall off the map and get lost? What are the stories and lies they might tell? What might they find? What possible worlds might they imagine? What desire paths might they create? What invisible cities are interwoven with this one? What other places can migrate here? For the city is multiple, mutable, layered, and always in the process of being ‘made up’...

In April 2000, Forced Entertainment invited 13 people to participate in a workshop, led by Robin Arthur and Claire Marshall. Dancers, video makers, performance makers of different kinds, the odd teacher. Only one of them was familiar with Sheffield. Over a ten-day period, this ad hoc group was introduced to some of the recurrent propositions and strategies of Forced Entertainment’s working processes, with a view to generating a site-specific durational performance as the culmination to the workshop: Saturday Night at the Grosvenor Hotel. I was one of the 13.

We did a lot of walking in and around the city, maps in hand. We interviewed each other about what we had seen, the traces of places we carry within us, places in our memories and dreams. We described to each other the places we believed they were thinking about, and the people and objects that ghosted those places. We collected objects, textual fragments and vast quantities of photographic traces; we used them to invent stories and tell bare-faced lies.

My notebook of that time is full of odd lists: The list as conjunction without causality, elliptical cartographies and historiographies, overflowing through accumulation, always in excess, and always incomplete, partial. Too much and too little. In particular here, there are lists of fragments of gags, trigger words or punchlines - trifle deaf / wide-mouthed frog / boomerang that doesn’t come back / what’s grey and comes in pints / Al Caprawn / why couldn’t the sea urchin see 'er chin / 2 freemasons having a bath / William Hague walks into a bar / brass belly button / my girlfriend’s writing a novel in her sleep / why couldn’t the viper viper nose / Carrie was always a troubled child / Doctor Doctor I’ve got a pastie on my head. Also, street names I lifted from the maps of Sheffield: Blonk Street, Blast Lane, Blue Boy Way, Carsick View Road, Carsick Grove, Jaunty Lane, Nodder Road. And lists of mystics, criminals and dictators I thought about claiming to have encountered in the streets of the city: Gurdjieff, Krishnamurti, Pol Pot, Sri Baba, Myra Hindley, Mme Blavatsky, St John of the Cross, the Emperor Bokassa, Squeaky Frome, Reggie Kray. In the end I claimed to have met Charles Manson in a baker’s shop, and Jesus on the ring road, asking for directions to the Sheffield suburb of Paradise.

Collectively we drew maps of the city and marked on them the sites of events, memories, hallucinations, desires, possible dis-placed places: the Agamemnon Sporting Club and Drop-In Centre, the Clytemnestra Massage Parlour, the Mark E Smith Ward for the Criminally Insane, the River of Blood, Nirvana Avenue, Berchtesgarden Villas, The Odessa Steps, The Hanging Gardens, The Winter Palace, The Silk Route, Attention Deficit Disorder Drive etc.

Our base and performance space was the Grosvenor Suite, a vast tacky ballroom in the Grosvenor Hotel in the centre of Sheffield. On the wall by the entrance to this space was one of those grooved boards with white felt lettering, spelling out who’d booked the room: FORCED ENTERTAINMENT. Every day we rearranged these letters to make obscene or nonsensical anagrams – for reasons that remain murky, the only one I remember is: RUDE CEMENT FART O NITE. Every morning when we returned to the space, the letters had been put back in the right order by some invisible nocturnal hand.

We tried on a lot of old Forced Entertainment costumes, the sloughed skin of ghosts. We told jokes in many languages, until generic formats started to collapse and migrate into other jokes, producing rambling broken narratives in search of a laugh forever deferred. We shuffled objects and furniture and lights in our space until we found a configuration that contained a kind of tawdry tension.

‘Acting’s allowed as long as you can’t see it’, Rob said.

Out of the debris of material produced, we elaborated a structure for a 6-hour durational performance. A tiny stage at one end of the cavernous ballroom, all silver and blue tinsel tat and bright lights; in the middle, a huge dance floor scattered with empty chairs, its outline ringed with fairy lights; then the spectators at the other end of the space, perhaps 30 metres from the performers, in an area of chairs and long white tables, with video monitors relaying extreme full-face close-ups of events on stage.

The event looped around a recurrent 3-part structure: (1) a fractured stand-up routine at a microphone onstage, with absent punchlines, possessed ramblings, lonely visions, driftings and stumblings and failings through sorry gags that had themselves fallen off the map into a kind of disoriented yearning - appeals to be heard, to be loved, to take (a) place; (2) an interrogation/interview from a shadowy figure at a table on the dance floor about ‘the city’ - now a composite palimpsest of desire, imagination, possibility, unabashed lie and the actual here now - it’s only a short walk from Campo Street past Netto’s the supermarket to the collapsed church next to the lake with the immersed statues, only a short drive from Cafe Uno in Ecclesall Street to the crossing point in the wall and the desert beyond; and finally (3) improvised dance marathon routines in teams - like the gags, broken pleas, temporary alliances unravelling into further dispersals, mis-matchings, attenuated mechanisms for losing the way, then briefly finding it, then losing it again. Stand-up and dance marathon sections were conducted at 16 rpm, the gramophone giving us Mrs Mills on Valium. The interview was conducted in silence.

‘Give yourself enough rope to hang yourself’, Rob told us.
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An interruption about knowing: Gregg's story

My friend Gregg Whelan of Lone Twin told me about going to see Pina Bausch at Sadler’s Wells a few years ago. He’d never seen a Bausch show, and he’d never been to Sadler’s Wells; in fact he confessed he’d never been to what he called ‘a proper posh theatre’. Anyway, he was having a drink in the bar beforehand, checking out the surroundings and the punters, dressed up to the nines. Suddenly his attention was caught by an unusually loud laugh, and everyone turned round … to see Simon Callow wading through the crowd in a dinner jacket, holding a glass of champagne aloft in front of him, with a rather beautiful young man following him in his wake. There’s Simon Callow, everyone said. Gregg was surprised at how round and glowing Simon was. Then everyone started to move into the auditorium, and eventually settled into their seats. Everyone was in, and there was a low and expectant hubbub. Then at the last gasp there was a mini-kerfuffle behind him and everyone turned round … and Simon Callow came in at high speed down the aisle, still carrying champagne glass, still with young man in tow, then proceeded to squeeze along a row past dozens of seated punters with a series of excuse me’s and beaming smiles and muffled laughs. It’s Simon Callow, everyone said. Then just as Simon & friend sat down bang in the middle, the lights started to fade to black. Gregg started to applaud. He thought it was brilliant. So this was the world of Pina Bausch ...
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An enquiry into the word 'we' (3)

Imagine. A naked woman in a monkey mask, with white feather angel wings on her back, is squatting up a tree. A man stands below, trying to persuade her to come down.

He offers her gleaming things from the other side
He offers her an Elvis move
He offers her a comic fruit
He offers her his inner clown, called Peanut
He offers her a pint and a takeaway
He offers her spurious origins for his scars
He offers her a peacock cry
He offers her Thom Yorke dancing
He offers her a view from space
He offers her the dream about the horse in the shopping mall
He offers her a new identity and no questions asked
He offers her a shoulder, and a neck, and some arms
He offers her a soft landing
He offers her a fish with eyes like wells
He offers to disappoint when the chips are down
He offers her a melancholy shuffle and a stifled burp
He offers her a swift rub-down with an oily rag
He offers her a ride on a pantomime horse
He offers her a variety of silences
He offers her a map of the world, scratched on the ground with his toe
He offers her an orchard and a lake and a lame excuse
He offers her a crime that is just bound to work
He offers her a volcano
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Walkthroughs (2): ‘And in that failing is your heartbeat’

In retrospect, the legacy of this workshop (and of other encounters with the company’s work) takes shape for me in five core sites that linger on in my thinking and practice:

First, something about a compositional process. It’s a topological process, where topology is (in Michel Serres’s words) a ‘science of proximities and ongoing or interrupted transformations’. Here is Serres talking about his own multi-modal journey towards an unstable ‘map’: ‘When you are working on relationships that are in process, you’re like a man who takes a plane from Toulouse to Madrid, travels by car from Geneva to Lausanne, goes on foot from Paris towards the Chevreuse valley, or from Cervina to the top of the Matterhorn (with spikes on his shoes, a rope and an ice axe), who goes by boat from Le Havre to New York, who swims from Calais to Dover, who travels by rocket towards the moon, travels by semaphore, telephone or fax, by diaries from childhood to old age, by monuments from antiquity to the present, by lightning bolts when in love. One may well ask: ‘What in the world is this man doing?’ There are dilemmas in the mode of travelling, the reasons for the trip, the point of departure and the destination, in the places through which one will pass: the speed, the means, the vehicle, the obstacles to be overcome, make that space active. And since I have used diverse methods, the coherence of my project is suspect. […] In fact, it was always a matter of establishing a relation, constructing it, fine-tuning it. And once established, thousands of relations, here, there, everywhere – after a while, when you step back and look, a picture emerges. Or at least a map. You see a general theory of relations, without any point focalising the construction or solidifying it, like a pyramid. The turbulences keep moving. The flows keep dancing’ (111-12).

In this context in Sheffield, composition involved the generation of masses of fragments (which Blanchot calls ‘the little by little suddenly’) through drifting as a means of uncovering versions of what’s there. This requires patience, an attentiveness to detail, to multiplicities and connectivities. Knowingly not knowing what it is ‘about’ at the outset. Tracking something emergent, trying to go for the ride, knowing it will always be a few necks ahead of the rider. I’m sure this must have been something like the process of WG Sebald, whose works dance around unnamed polycentric subjects that are only ever implied.

Second, something about the relations between space, place and identity. ‘What the map cuts up, the story cuts across’, wrote Michel de Certeau. Location and identity are produced as much through narration as through what already exists: more to do with doing than knowing. This kind of work provides opportunities to rehearse and play-fully refashion those heterogeneous personal mappings that we are continuously making up and over, and out of which we constitute our-‘selves’. So, a kind of fluid performative ‘auto-topography’ that creates senses of self and of space and place (rather than the ‘self’ or the ‘world’ occurring preformed, as if they were pre-existent entities rubbing up against each other). Space, time, self as ‘a multiple foldable diversity’ (Michel Serres), a field of flows and intensities: spacing, timing, selfing. Here a dynamically spatialised (and fictionalised) self-in-process perhaps frays just a little the dualist territorial imaginaries of inside and outside, of self-identity in opposition to radical alterity. A philosophy and practice of passage, rather than of ground or territory. If the continuity of identity is secured through movement and the capacity to change, rather than the ability to cling to what is already established, then this work proposed simple strategies for abandoning the logics of mastery and letting elements of outside in-here.

Third, something about politics and the political. The FE work struck me as overtly political - in the micro-politics of its collaborative processes, the complex authorship in the elaboration of its forms and languages; in its critical engagement with the task of ‘bearing witness to the dreams and failings of a culture’ (Tim’s words in Certain Fragments); in its ambiguously contestatory relations to a range of conventions and expectations in theatre; in its obsessions with the urban; in the ethical complexity of the situations it creates for its spectators and the agency it grants them as makers of meaning in the proliferative play of signification. In a notebook I once wrote, ‘Forced Entertainment are the bastard children of Brecht and a drunken panto horse. Poor old horse’.

Fourth, something about dramaturgy. In his book The Postmodern Animal, Steve Baker writes about contemporary art practices involving animals or animal representations, where ‘things appear to have gone wrong with the animal, as it were, but where it still holds together’. He discusses strategies of imitation where the disguises are tawdry, compromised, incongruous conjunctions, coming apart at the seams, active reminders of difference, and perhaps of a certain shame. With reference to Deleuze & Guattari’s word ‘rater’ (to spoil, ruin), he coins the term ‘botched taxidermy’ for such practices, giving examples under thematic headings which sound like a taxonomy of Forced Entertainment strategies: ‘Mixed materials … ‘Stuffed’ animals not as taxidermy but as toys … Other uses of ‘wrong’ materials … Hybrid forms … Messy confrontations … Taxidermic form reworked … Finally, tattiness …’. I think of Roland Barthes on the body, and how to write it: ‘Neither the skin, nor the muscles, not the bones, not the nerves, but the rest: an awkward, fibrous, shaggy, ravelled thing, a clown’s coat’.

As Baker points out, ‘botching’ (and the related term ‘bodging’) don’t necessarily always mean utter ruination or abject failure, the wrecking of something. ‘It can also mean sticking or cobbling something together in a makeshift way, an ‘ill-finished’ or clumsy or unskilful way, with no attempt at perfection but equally with no implication of the thing completely falling apart’. So it’s related to assemblage and bricolage, and the knowingly open display of ‘faulty’ technique: a creative procedure in the generation of the provisional, the informal, the recycled – instances of the inexpert that are ‘questioning entities’ (to borrow a phrase from Jacques Derrida).

Now, I’m not just referring to all those shonky animal disguises and uncertain animal/human hybrids in Forced Entertainment shows: Cathy in the dog costume in Showtime, the panto horse that gulped whisky through an eye socket and cans of lager through the join between the two halves of the costume, and danced in its own lagery piss in Pleasure, the recurrent gorilla suit with or without head, and so on. I’m also thinking of the structures and tonalities that seem to characterise so many of these shows: messing with received and overly-familiar and overlooked representational forms, displacing them, defamiliarising them, turning them inside out and on their heads, messing with their anatomies, abusing them, taking them apart, stitching them up (in both senses) and reanimating them as comic or pathetic or psychotic or narcoleptic or drunk or incompetent or conspiratorial or inventive revenants in a different context here-now. Everything staggers on the lip of falling apart, yet it somehow still holds together. It was this tension that was happening to Phil when he burst into my house years ago, and he couldn’t resolve it. It’s a core ambiguity and complexity in this work, which one might call a fucked-up-and-yetness. This ‘and-yetness’ (which is political in its invitation to possibility and connectivity) takes many forms compositionally and affectively, from the melancholic, the poignant and the corrosively comic to the most astonishing micro-events of a flaring into appearance.

Which brings me, finally, to something about the 'event'. What is the nature of the event, and of ‘eventhood’? Natalie Crohn Schmidt has reflected on notions of event in the discourses of 20th century science and their further exploration in post-Cagean aesthetics: ‘In science it has come to be understood that the event is the basic unit of all things real – that energy, not matter, is the basic dictum. In the increasingly widespread perception of reality as endless process, performance, not the art object, becomes primary […] performance is an event rather than an object’. The notion of ‘event’ is much discussed in contemporary philosophy, notably in the work of Emmanuel Levinas (‘the event of alterity’), Jean-Luc Nancy (the notion of passibilité), Gilles Deleuze (the concept as event), Alain Badiou (ethics and event), and Jean-François Lyotard (the event as ‘non-mastery of self over self’). Lyotard writes of the event’s capacity to exceed and undo the cognitive reach of the self: ‘Because it is absolute, the presenting present cannot be grasped; it is not yet or no longer present. It is always too soon or too late to grasp presentation itself and present it. Such is the specific and paradoxical constitution of the event. That something happens, the occurrence, means that the mind is disappropriated. The expression ‘it happens that…’ is the formula of non-mastery of self over self. The event makes the self incapable of taking possession and control of what it is. It testifies that the self is essentially passible to a recurrent alterity’ (Lyotard, The Inhuman, 1991, 59).

In the early 1980s the performance theorist Herbert Blau asked how one might ‘effect the liberation of the performer as an actor who, laminated with appearance, struggles to appear’? (Blau 1982, 257). The struggle is all, ‘at the dubious end of ideology, at the possible end of history, when our lives are still dominated (incredibly) by the prospect of an actual disappearance. All theatre comes against the inevitability of disappearance from the struggle to appear. The only theatre worth seeing – that can be seen rather than stared through – is that which struggles to appear. The rest is all bad make-up’ (ibid, 298).

So what happens at those moments of a flaring into visibility through appearance, of an ephemeral visitation in the active vanishing of performance? like that of a ghost (une apparition) erupting through the walls of appearance to take (its) place? At the intersection of visible appearance and invisible happening, dream and event, the ‘doing’ and ‘the thing done’ (Elin Diamond), what then appears, and to whom? How might one make space for something akin to Lyotard’s theatre of energetics, in which what appears is ‘the highest intensity […] of what there is, without intention’? (‘The Tooth, the Palm’, 1997). I don’t have the answers, and ‘the turbulences keep moving, the flows keep dancing’ - but it seems Forced Entertainment (and others) return again and again to related questions: in particular, in terms of a desire to create situations in which we are encouraged to watch the people in front of us, at risk, ‘not representing something but going through something’. ‘Staying inside difficulty’. At such moments, as Tim suggests, ‘They lay their bodies on the line … and we are transformed – not audience to a spectacle, but witnesses to an event’ (Certain Fragments, 49).

The last word goes to Tim Etchells in a text called ‘We seek the unsought misfortune’ (2004), which itself forms part of Matthew Goulish’s text ‘Peculiar Detonation: The Incomplete History and Impermanent Manifesto of the Institute of Failure’:

'I am in love with you. I want you to see me. I want you to see me without filters, without frames, borders, deceits. I want us to meet in this time. In this moment to abandon expectations. Defences. Limits. To breathe. And I want you to be wary. To be aware that your gaze judges and prescribes me. And that my gaze is also judgemental. That I do not love or trust you. How could I? I do not know who you are ...
Presence. The moment. The now.
Thrown back on your own devices. I will not help you with this. You have to ‘deal’. Which means cope with un-meaning. Or with the possibility of un-meaning. Or cope with me not coping. Or with me not meaning. The trembling of this moment ...
To put it very simply: You get up here (you come up here) and you fail. And in that failing is your heartbeat, and in that failing is you connected to everything and everyone'.
______________________________________

An enquiry into the word 'we' (4): 'Good evening, Sheffield - Is there anyone there?'

Q. David, you’re on the tallest building in the city: what do you see?

A: I see a stadium with its lights on. I see a deserted soccer pitch on top of a hill. I see the disused steel works and a huge mound of tyres. I see a canal system like arteries running through the city. I see the ring road. I see a motorway bridge across a gorge. I see roof gardens. I see a block of flats in the shape of a honeycomb. I see a field of ashes. I see an eagle perched on a rock on top of the multi-storey carpark, staring. I see two men in blue boiler suits walking along the river’s edge. I see the peaks in the distance. I see the sky. I see seven hills. I see seven dwarves outside Debenham’s waiting for it to open. I see seven samurai directing traffic. I see seven seasons in one day. I see seven people dying from smoking related illnesses. I see trousers with seven creases. I see seven fingers on one hand. I see seven steps to Heaven. I see seven seas. I see seven tombstones with the word YID scrawled on them. I see myself at the age of seven.

Q. You mention Debenham’s. You’re driving past Debenham’s in a speeding car, heading for the desert. What do you see?

A. I see pedestrians scattering, it’s a pedestrian precinct. I see Isabella Rossellini coming out of the HMV shop with a DVD - looks like the first series of ‘Twin Peaks’. I see the lady of the bridge. I see a statue of an angel with one wing missing. I see a man eating a kebab. I see a black dog chasing a white plastic bag. I see the engineering works on Matilda Street. I see the scene of the crime.

Q. Do you know what’s the best place to be when the rains come?

A. On top of the tower in the old radio station, it’s a stopping point for the small fleet of craft that takes to the water as it rises. When the rains come, whole suburbs disappear; and when they recede whole communities are revealed, they return to life, churchbells ringing. Ghost cities perfectly preserved. And the desert is carpeted with flowers.

Q. Do you know the big wall? What’s on the other side?

A. I’ve only been there once, and that was a couple of weeks ago. There’s a memorial to all those people who died. It was the anniversary. Flowers, scarves, messages. I went with my spray can ... to leave some thoughts. There was no one else there apart from a woman, who said to me, ‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ … And beyond that, well, there’s “a wreck of a place. There are three gates standing ajar and a fence that broke off. It is not the wreck of anything else in particular. A place came there and crashed. After that it remained the wreck of a place. Light fell on it”.

And now I have some questions for you: - Is there anyone there who has ever been penetrated by a traffic cop? Is there anyone there who has ever defended a dog in a court of law? Is there anyone there who has ever danced with a life-sized cut-out of Adrian Heathfield? Is there anyone there who has ever tried to murder someone by sneaking up on them with two Bic lighters, then held one to each nostril and released the gas? Is there anyone there who has ever been trapped in a lift with an entire rugby league team? Is there anyone there who has ever felt love for a whippet? Is there anyone there with their own teeth? Is there anyone there who feels pain? Is there anyone there with a heart? Is there anyone there?

Is there anyone there?


References
Baker, Steve (2000). The Postmodern Animal, London: Reaktion Books
Blanchot, Maurice (1995). The Writing of the Disaster (trans. Ann Smock), Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press
Blau, Herbert (1982). Take up the Bodies: Theatre at the Vanishing Point, Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press
Etchells, Tim (1999). Certain fragments: contemporary performance and Forced Entertainment, London & New York: Routledge
Etchells, Tim (2004) ‘We seek the unsought misfortune’, in Helmer & Malzacher 2004: 264-5
Helmer, J. & Malzacher, F. (eds) (2004). Not Even a Game Anymore: The Theatre of Forced Entertainment, Berlin: Alexander Verlag
Lyotard, Jean-François (1991). The Inhuman: Reflections on Time (trans. Geoffrey Bennington & Rachel Bowlby), Cambridge: Polity Press
Lyotard, Jean François (1997). ‘The Tooth, the Palm’ [1977], in Timothy Mottram (ed.), Mimesis, Masochism, and Mime: The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary Thought, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 282-8
Serres, Michel & Latour, Bruno (1995). Conversations on Science, Culture and Time (trans. Roxanne Lapidus), Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press


Edited version of ‘Welcome to Paradise (you’d have loved it)’, opening keynote address at symposium to mark the 20th anniversary of Forced Entertainment (’We are searching for a theatre that can really talk about what it’s like to live through these times’: A Forced Entertainment Symposium’, Lancaster University, 2004. All presentations recorded & held by the National Sound Archive, London). Photograph of Claire Marshall in Hidden J © Hugo Glendinning/FE. Texts © David Williams. My thanks to Hannah for her help with this material. For Chris Kohn's RealTime review of the Lancaster symposium, see here.