shuttle 21: (in place of an) ending

'It's interesting to think of the great blaze of heaven that we winnow down to animal shapes and kitchen tools' (Don DeLillo, Underworld, London: Picador, 1998, 82) 
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Jean Baudrillard: - 'I went in search of astral America, not social and cultural America, but the America of the empty, absolute freedom of the freeways, not the deep America of mores and mentalities, but the America of desert speed, of motels and mineral surfaces. I looked for it in the speed of the screenplay, in the indifferent reflex of television, in the film of days and nights projected across an empty space, in the marvellously affectless succession of signs, images, faces, and ritual acts on the road; looked for what was nearest to the nuclear and enucleated universe, a universe which is virtually our own ...

I sought the finished form of the future catastrophe of the social in geology, in that upturning of depth that can be seen in the straited spaces, the reliefs of salt and stone, the canyons where the fossil river flows down, the immemorial abyss of slowness that shows itself in erosion and geology. I even looked for it in the verticality of the great cities ...

Here in the transversality of the desert and the irony of geology, the transpolitical finds its generic, mental space. The inhumanity of our ulterior, asocial, superficial world immediately finds its aesthetic form here, its ecstatic form. For the desert is simply that: an ecstatic critique of culture, an ecstatic form of disappearance.

The grandeur of the deserts derives from their being, in their aridity, the negative of the earth's surface and of our civilised humours.  They are places where humours and fluids become rarefied, where the air is so pure that the influence of the stars descends direct from the constellations. And, with the extermination of the desert Indians, an even earlier stage than that of anthropology became visible: a mineralogy, a geology, a sidereality, an inhuman facticity, an aridity that drives out the artificial scruples of culture, a silence that exists nowhere else.

The silence of the desert is a visual thing, too. A product of the gaze that stares out and finds nothing to reflect it. There can be no silence up in the mountains, since their very contours roar. And for there to be silence, time itself has to attain a sort of horizontality; there has to be no echo of time in the future, but simply a sliding of geological strata one upon the other giving out nothing more than a fossil murmur.

Desert: luminous, fossilised network of an inhuman intelligence, of a radical indifference - the indifference not merely of the sky, but of the geological undulations, where the metaphysical passions of space and time alone crystallise. Here the terms of desire are turned upside down each day, and night annihilates them. But wait for the dawn to rise, with the awakening of the fossil sounds, the animal silence ...

The form that dominates the American West, and doubtless all of American culture, is a seismic form: a fractal, interstitial culture, born of a rift with the Old World, a tactile, fragile, mobile, superficial culture - you have to follow its own rules to grasp how it works: seismic shifting, soft technologies.

The only question in this journey is: how far can we go in the extermination of meaning, how far can we go in the non-referential desert form without cracking up and, of course, still keep alive the esoteric charm of disappearance? A theoretical question here materialised in the objective conditions of a journey which is no longer a journey and therefore carries with it a fundamental rule: aim for the point of no return. This is the key. And the crucial moment is that brutal instant which reveals that the journey has no end, that there is no longer any reason for it to come to an end.

Beyond a certain point, it is movement itself that changes. Movement which moves through space of its own volition changes into an absorption by space itself - end of resistance, end of the scene of the journey as such (exactly as the jet engine is no longer an energy of space-penetration, but propels itself by creating a vacuum in front of it that sucks it forward, instead of supporting itself, as in the traditional model, upon the air's resistance). In this way, the centrifugal, eccentric point is reached where the movement produces the vacuum that sucks you in.

This moment of vertigo is also the moment of potential collapse. Not so much from the tiredness generated by the distance and the heat, as from the ireversible advance into the desert of time'.

Extract from Jean Baudrillard, America, London: Verso, 1988, 5-6, 11
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Hello Mick, and Beth,

I'm ending with Baudrillard, not because I necessarily agree with everything he proposes, but because his rhetorical postcards from the road remain provocative for me in terms of driving, the cinematic, the seismic drama of geology, time, 'silence'.

In assembling these virtual fragments over the past three weeks, a kind of ad hoc - and unfinishable - reading companion for your journey, I have often tried to imagine where you are. And I realise I've entirely elided my own embodied movements during that time, a shuttle rhythm of to-ing and fro-ing between work in London and England's (much milder, greener) 'Southwest'.

I have passed Stonehenge six times in different light, and on each occasion have hollered greetings to the pigs on the other side of the road. I've been dazzled by a billowing field of scarlet poppies in bloom. I've watched tiny swallows being fed by their hyperactive parents in their mud-spit nest above a doorway, and cried quietly during episodes of 24 Hours in A&E. And, in the gaps, I've been transfixed by events in Egypt, as well as by the river, the swifts, the bees, the clouds and the sky.

Wishes, to you and the shuttle crew,
 for the journeys home and to come, 
elsew/here ...

Photos: Richard Misrach, drive-in cinema, Las Vegas, 1987; (bottom) William Egglestone

Unhurried departure music: Jem Finer's Longplayer - time lapse film of a live performance at the Roundhouse, London, 12.9.2009 (1,000 minutes in 1,000 seconds). For the Longplayer website, and a live stream link to this ongoing musical composition (currently 13.5 years into its 1,000 year duration), see here

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 ...
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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.

festival

These notes form part of the tour programme for The Festival, the third part of Lone Twin Theatre's The Catastrophe Trilogy. It opened last week at the Barbican in London, and is currently on tour in England, then in Europe.
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‘Quelle catastrophe!’ Notes on the making of Lone Twin Theatre's The Festival

‘Good. There’s our catastrophe. In the bag. Once more and I’m off’ (Samuel Beckett, Catastrophe, 1982)

The task of devising is to try to locate the shapes of what it is you think you’re looking for while often being largely in the dark as to exactly what that is. At the very beginning of work on The Festival, we have only the barest of hunches as to what we are after. We know that we will continue to explore narrative forms and structures in a simple traverse staging, a presentational and relational performance space of proximity, encounter and exchange. Beyond that, we have little more than a broad sense of wanting to generate a narrative set in the present, in counterpoint to the ‘pasts’ of Alice Bell and Daniel Hit By A Train.

In addition, we want to modulate the notion of ‘catastrophe’, and explore something much smaller on the sliding scale of catastrophic possibilities. Something more everyday, domestic, familial, something more intimate than cataclysmic. Perhaps just the sense of something missing, or someone missing out on something or someone: like the quiet pulse of a ‘hungry heart’. Gregg talks of the ambiguity of ‘tragic fun’, and of ‘songs of everyday life and how the silent catastrophe of love seeps into each hour …’

On one of the very first days in the studio, as we grope our way towards a beginning, there are just four words on the flip-chart - NO DEATH. NO INSTRUMENTS – like the seeds of some new version of Yvonne Rainer’s No Manifesto. So, we will orient ourselves towards the ever more spartan and pared back in a further refinement of the company’s goal to employ minimal means to maximal effect. Gregg describes Dennis Potter’s creation of song-based conventions for ‘saying complex things in simple forms’, then wonders aloud: if Alice Bell was a ‘line drawing’ and the greater complexity of Daniel was ‘coloured in’, then what would be a third form that had the ‘elegant simplicity of the natural?’ He suggests our task will be to ‘do what’s required, don’t art it up, then get out as cleanly as possible without the performance mode getting in the way’.

*****

As we work, we dance around the rhythms of the ordinary in our stories and in our lives: the weather forecast, the café, work, the kitchen table, traveling. At the same time we return again and again to instances of the extra-ordinary in the everyday: chance encounters, surprising visitations, as unforeseeable as Miles Davis’s sudden appearance with his band on the runway of an outback mining community in Rolf de Heer’s 1991 Australian film Dingo: “Hi, my name’s Billy Cross and I’d like to play for you …”

Throughout the work of Lone Twin Theatre, there has been a shared enthusiasm for music, song and dance, without any of us necessarily being ‘expert’ in these areas, and at times we have approached devising with the buoyant, untutored energies of a newly formed band. In our work on this new performance, songs in particular start to assume particular functions in the studio and in the emerging fictional world. Songs as meeting points, games, sites of imagination, desire, small epiphanic excursions and suspensions in the ongoingness of it all (an ‘interruption of the incessant’, Maurice Blanchot). Expressions of pleasures and fragile yearnings in the face of present absences. Fleeting mechanisms for reflection and immersive celebration. As with the solace of the radio in the kitchen or the car, songs can offer dreams and time machines in the everyday. As we proceed, the micro-festival of singing provides the soundtrack to our lives.

*****

As has so often been the case in Lone Twin Theatre’s approach to devising, our frames of reference in initial discussions are rooted in music, film and contemporary fiction (rather than, say, theatre). At one point early on in this devising process, for example, we look closely at some of Alice Munro’s remarkable stories. In part as structural and textural case studies and possible triggers for our own fictions: resonant ‘shapes’ and ‘feels’. In part for their grace-ful anatomizing of everyday lives, their repressed yearnings, confusions, compromises and mysteries.

In Lives of Girls and Women, Munro writes: “People’s lives were dull, simple, amazing and unfathomable – deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum”. Elsewhere in an interview, Munro suggests: “The complexity of things – the things within things – just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple”.

Perhaps above all, at this early stage we are drawn to Munro’s temporal weave in some of these stories: the braiding of the time of lived experience with the unpredictable time of memory and its ‘embroideries’; the juxtaposition of the time of waiting, anticipation and imagination with the linear time of sequential events in the everyday, and the cyclical time of recurrence and return. Out of these delicate temporal architectures, Munro elaborates compassionate cartographies of processes of change.

Perhaps that’s what we’re after: a story that tracks small changes in understanding over time?

*****

In mathematics, ‘catastrophe theory’ attempts to model the dynamic systems at play when small shifts in circumstances of equilibrium provoke sudden changes in behaviour (e.g. the ‘tipping point’ in a landslide).

In classical tragedy, the ‘catastrophe’ is the final resolution or narrative unraveling that brings things to a close. Aristotle proposed a ruinous shock that would provoke terror and pity and enable the purgative effect of catharsis.

In Samuel Beckett’s short play Catastrophe, an irritable director conducts a final rehearsal of a minimalist play-within-the-play. On one level the ‘catastrophe’ here is the actor’s tiny act of defiance in the face of the authoritarian director. For at the very end of the play, when the director has left, he ruptures what has been imposed by the director (and by a mode of theatre) by looking up and out into the audience, and ‘the applause falters and dies’. He returns the audience’s gaze in what is now a space of encounter, and the audience is uncertain as to how to respond. So the ‘catastrophe’ seems to reside in part in a particular mode of theatre, in its coercive power relations and compromised economies of representation.

When Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1969, his wife Suzanne’s response after hearing the news by phone was: ‘Quelle catastrophe!’ She knew the changes this would entail for this most self-effacing and private of people; she knew that he wanted above all to be able ‘to be in his life’. I have always loved the honesty and compassion of this response to ‘success’. Reputedly, Beckett quickly dispersed the prize money amongst those of his friends most in need.

(Since their deaths in 1989, Sam and Suzanne have been buried together in the Montparnasse cemetery beneath a common gravestone that he had stipulated, with his characteristically mordant wit in the face of the inevitable catastrophe of mortality, could be ‘any colour, so long as it’s grey’).

As we proceed in rehearsals, the catastrophes in The Festival remain modest, related to small losses and a barely articulated sense of incompletion. The fiction hovers around a largely unspoken desire for ‘something more’ in a life that feels fine, but not quite ‘right’, ghosted by other imagined possibilities that seem to be somewhat compromised – and at the same time compromise one’s capacity fully to be where one is. So much is unspoken here; the dialogue often glosses over feeling, and moves on. Only occasionally do the emotions and perceptions that underlie these everyday exchanges breach the surface in small wishes and revelations. When they do emerge, they have a disarming economy and immediacy in this context, a joyous honesty that in itself may be both a micro–catastrophe and an illumination, an admission enabling integrative acceptance and change.

*****

Ultimately all three performances in this Catastrophe Trilogy present differing conceptions and experiences of catastrophe in stories of love, conflict, failure, loss and compromise. However the ‘catastrophic’ here, whether epic or intimate, social or domestic, is always contoured with hope and the possibility of change. From these invitational and open-ended structures emerge playfully minimalist pieces of music-theatre, in form and tone suggesting a kind of proto-Brecht discovered by intelligent children with their hearts a-pumping on their sleeves.

And as we come to an end of devising this final part in a cycle of performances, and the ‘things within things’ unfold endlessly, our work feels unfinishable. For other stories and new songs insistently bubble up and out, and it seems as though this disparate ‘band’ of fellow travelers and accomplices has only just begun …

Extracts from rehearsal journal during the devising of The Festival, January-February 2010
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The Catastrophe Trilogy is on tour from March to May 2010. The tour includes dates in the Barbican London (The Pit, as part of BITE), Huddersfield, Manchester, Aberystwyth, Dartington, Lancaster, Brussels (Kunsten Festival des Arts), and Utrecht (Festival ad Werf). The Festival will also be performed separately in Bath, Plymouth, Colchester, Barnsley, Bristol and Brighton.

For some reviews of The Catastrophe Trilogy, see here, here, here, and here

For further details of Lone Twin Theatre and the current tour, see the Lone Twin website here

For earlier posts on Lone Twin Theatre, see here and here