night flying

Night Flying: a performance conceived, devised and performed by Jane Mason and David Williams. Dramaturgical support from Luke Pell, Paul Carter and Wendy Hubbard. Lighting design: Mark Parry

Residencies at The Point, Eastleigh; Pavilion Dance, Bournemouth; Mark Bruce Company, Frome; Dance4, Nottingham; The Phoenix, Exeter; Exeter University

Premiere at Exeter Phoenix, then Bristol Old Vic, and Siobhan Davies Studios, London (as part of the ‘Open Choreography Performance’ programme 2019). Further touring in spring 2020 (Plymouth, Cornwall, London) - details to follow

For a review of Night Flying in Bristol, by Ian Abbott, see here

Photographs in tour pack (above) by Benjamin J Borley, Aaron Davies, Tessa France. Post-performance photograph below by David Williams

the little by little suddenly

'One thousand needles: imagine threading them with a straight thread’ (Yoko Ono 1970: unpaginated)

‘Perception over time equals thought’ (Bill Viola 1995: 150)

'Slowness is a formidable power: it has the passion of immobility with which it will, some day, fuse' (Edmond Jabes 1972: 55-6).

As Anthony Hoete has suggested in his introduction to Roam: Reader on the Aesthetics of Mobility: ‘Mobility, in the contemporary context, is a complex concept, ideologically elusive, difficult to pin down. Mobility is a transitory, transformational state, reconfigurable and self-refreshing, time after time. Mobility is an ‘event-space’, a sequence of appointments and rendezvous. Mobility is multi-dimensional […] polymorphous […] multi-scalar […] multi-linear. Whilst comprised of journeys from A to B, these lines constitute networks: from C to DE via KLM. As such mobility’s multi-dimensionality suggests a matrix, or an array of co-ordinates’ (Hoete 2002: 11-12).

Yet, paradoxically, in practice mobility has also come to infer immobility. We are increasingly obliged to ‘kill time’ suspended in the meanwhile non-places of waiting within the multi-dimensional matrix, crawling along or going nowhere in traffic jams and queues and railway stations and airports, inert in front of computer terminals as the server fails to serve our desires. In our haste to speed up our trajectories through the world we are obliged to slow down, and in this tension for many there is a loss of patience and a kind of impossible suffering. ‘Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared?’ (Kundera 1996: 4).

Some art processes and practices school us in slowness, and the qualities of attention that allow what is happening to happen and to take (a) place; they teach us about festina lente – making haste slowly. As Buddhist philosophers have recognised, there is an epistemology of and in slowness, and its propositions are informative and provocative for artists: ‘A rediscovery of the now, relocation in the here; return to the primacy of experience, of the event; rediscovery that facts are relations, that all knowledge exists on the threshold and in the interaction between subject and object (which are themselves only hypostatisations); a rediscovery of ambiguity, of contradiction, of difference; a reassertion that things – and people – are what they do’ (George 1999: 34).

In a 10-day conversation with a small group of dance writers and makers on the shore of Lake Como at Bellaggio in Italy in the summer of 2002, a conversation in which I was delighted to participate, American choreographer Susan Rethorst articulated her sense of choreography as a long, curious wandering: ‘Choreography engages what might be called a more sober passion. It lies in small cumulative moments and decisions, glimpses and glimmers that add slowly through the dailiness, that sneak into a whole consuming reality, a parallel to the rest of one’s life’. André Lepecki, one of those centrally involved in this drifting exchange, had written earlier about ‘the time of dance’: ‘to sit, to listen, to be, to observe, to breathe, to think, to remember – the most urgent choreography’ (Lepecki 1996: 107). Now we talk about the time of conversation, and its dance. The luxury of time, of taking time to make time - of slow wandering and drift and waste and interruption and change of direction and silence and connective emergence and the small ‘violence’ of dislocation - of a slowing down into the complexity and detail of what is happening ‘in the middle’.

I think of the generative deceleration described by Matthew Goulish: ‘Most of us live in fear of slowing down our thinking, because of the possibility that if we succeed we might find that in fact nothing is happening. I guarantee this is not the case. Something is always happening. In fact, some things happen which one can only perceive with slow thinking’ (Goulish 2000: 82).

I think of Bachelard’s suggestion that one of his aims is ‘to school us in slowness’ (Bachelard 1988: vii). I think of Deleuze’s challenge to ‘think other durations’ through memory, art, philosophy, to ‘think the time of becoming’ as intensive rather than extensive, of time as the force of movement whereby movement transforms time by producing new becomings. Movement, he suggests, does not move a body from one point to another (translation), but rather in each aggregation/moment of movement bodies transform and become (vibration/variation/ multiplicity): ‘Movement always relates to a change, migration to a seasonal variation. And this is equally true of bodies: the fall of a body presupposes another one which attracts it, and expresses a change in the whole which governs them both. If we think of pure atoms, their movements which testify to a reciprocal action of all the parts of the substance, necessarily express modifications, disturbances, changes of energy in the whole … beyond translation is vibration, radiation’ (Deleuze 1986: 8-9).

I think of Paul Auster, blocked as a writer, falling out of the momentum of New York into the attenuated rhythms and discontinuous intensities and flows of a dance studio, and the moving stillness of a choreography taking shape: ‘In the beginning I wanted to speak of arms and legs, of jumping up and down, of bodies tumbling and spinning, of enormous journeys through space, of cities, of deserts, of mountain ranges stretching farther than the eye can see. Little by little, however, as these words began to impose themselves on me, the things I wanted to do seemed finally to be of no importance. Reluctantly, I abandoned all my witty stories, all my adventures of far-away places, and began, slowly and painfully, to empty my mind. Now emptiness is all that remains: a space, no matter how small, in which whatever is happening can be allowed to happen’ (Auster 1998: 86).

I think of Bill Viola’s explorations of the intervals below the threshold of perception in works where, as Walter Benjamin wrote of slow-motion: ‘the camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses’ (Benjamin 1968: 236).

I think of the French paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin illuminated by his encounters with Mongol communities and with the burnt stones of the Inner Mongolian desert in the early 1920s. Years later he wrote: ‘Throughout my whole life, during every minute of it, the world has been gradually lighting up and blazing before my eyes until it has come to surround me, entirely lit up from within’ (quoted in Dillard 1999: 13). I think of deep ecologist Arne Naess’s invitation to ‘think like a mountain’, and of Wallace Heim’s notion of ‘slow activism’ (Heim 2003). I think of Marina Abramowic’s statement that she is ‘more and more interested in less and less’.

I think of Andrey Tarkovsky, Clarice Lispector, Edmond Jabès, Bela Tarr, Terrence Malick, WG Sebald, James Turrell, Ann Hamilton, Tacita Dean, David Nash, John Cage, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Jem Finer. The slow ones.

The texts and images that follow comprise 24 fragments related to conceptions, perceptions and practices of slowness, where each ‘fragment’ should be understood in Maurice Blanchot’s terms as ‘the patience of pure impatience, the little by little suddenly‘ (Blanchot 1995: 34). Or as a single frame within an imaginary film strip of one second: 24 frames per second. The explosion of an instant. A slo-mo rehearsal of a lightning strike, moving at the speed of memory.

[* Please note that for this online version, I have removed one of the frames and its accompanying text, in memory of Lyall Watson who died a few weeks ago in June 2008. A prolific writer and a rather eccentric adventurer, he was the author of a book that was important to me, Heaven's Breath: A Natural History of the Wind (1984). In the missing section, please think of a wind you know and its particular qualities; let it blow].

Above all, in dialogue with Hannah Chiswell’s 24 fragments in the original artist's book, these texts and images stage something of a slow and ongoing conversation between two friends, about snow and rocks and sky and lightning and memory and flying and falling and birds. The unfolding loop of cogitation between two attenuated and intensive seconds, a dynamic relational meanwhile between an inhalation and exhalation.
_________________________________________


1. ‘There was this, and then this, and then this: nothing … one could truly lean on’ (Chantal Akerman on her film Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), quoted in Margulies 1996: 149).


2. ‘There is a secret link between slowness and remembering, between quickness and forgetting. Think of something utterly commonplace – a man walking down the street. Suddenly, he wishes to remember something, but his memory fails him. At this moment he automatically slows his paces. Conversely, someone trying to forget a terrible experience he has just had will unconsciously quicken his pace, as though wanting to escape from what is still all too close to him in time. In existential mathematics this experience can be expressed in the form of two elementary equations: the degree of slowness exists in direct proportion to the intensity of remembering; the degree of quickness exists in direct proportion to the intensity of forgetting’ (Kundera 1996: 34-5)

3. On a bright spring morning in April 2003, British performers Gregg Whelan and Gary Winters, collectively Lone Twin, conducted an exercise on the beach at Scarborough in Yorkshire, with a dozen or so participants. The proposition was simple: count the number of steps from the Victorian Spa to the beach’s edge, then over a period of 30 minutes walk towards the sea using the same number of steps; at the water’s edge make an action imagined en route, then turn and retrace one’s journey back to the beginning of the beach, again reiterating the same number of steps over a 30 minute period. A simple meditative slowing down and immersion in present process, drawing attention to time’s passing, in counterpoint with the rhythms of beach-side traffic, dog walkers, ball games, donkey rides, a group of girls cart-wheeling dizzily, swaying metal detectors, the crash of the waves, the drift of the clouds. During the group’s attenuated return from the sea, two uniformed policemen moved swiftly towards the lead walker - coincidentally the editor of this volume - and confronted him nose to nose, blocking his passage. They had received a number of phone calls reporting ‘suspicious behaviour’, a group of people moving imperceptibly slowly across the beach. What were they doing? Was it a protest of some sort? In this way a slow private action in public, its internal dynamics, meanings and functions resistant to a normalising survey from the outside, constituted a threatening anomaly to the civic everyday. The most everyday of actions - standing, walking, thinking, at times apparently immobile and doing nothing at all – had produced an unreadable and dissident friction in the complex layered polyrhythms of the seaside. Perhaps unwittingly, they had provoked a small collision of practices of mobility and conceptions of ‘acceptable’ speeds.

4. ‘I like the feeling of the texture of cocoons. A cocoon produces numerous threads. The threads come out so fast that my body is often left behind. At such times my body is empty. I wonder where my stomach and other organs have gone. But the threads that go out may be my organs, or they may go out through all my pores. They spread out into space, no one can stop them. All that’s left of me is contours. In the meantime, my body remains in the cocoon and is suffocated. People often say that I’m not moving or that I look like an idiot. Is it because I move too fast?’ (Butoh performer Akedno Ashikawa in Moore 1991)

5. 400 polished stainless steel poles, each of them with a diameter of 2 inches and solid stainless steel tips, arrayed in a parallel rectangular grid 5,280 feet by 3,300 feet, or 1 mile by 1 kilometre. Each pole 220 feet apart. Each mile-long row containing 25 poles, each kilometre-long row containing 16. A walk of about 2 hours to cover the perimeter of the grid. A field of potentiality in waiting for the untimely, sudden, sublime event of lightning. The conditions for lightning and its ‘doing of the did’.

Completed in West Central New Mexico in 1977, Walter de Maria’s The Lightning Field was one of the iconic works of land art. It was intended for the work to be viewed alone ‘over at least a 24-hour period’ (de Maria 1980: 529). Using aerial and land surveys to determine the precise elevation of the terrain, in order for the plane of the poles’ tips to ‘evenly support an imaginary sheet of glass’ (ibid), the work took 5 months to install. Only about 60 days a year fell within the season of primary lightning activity during the summer months. It was possible to observe a number of distinct thunderstorms simultaneously from The Lightning Field. With occasional light snow in winter, and the anomalous optical phenomenon of the vast majority of the poles becoming almost invisible when the sun was high in the sky, light was deemed to be ‘as important as lightning’ (ibid: 530). On rare occasions, a powerful electrical current in the air generated the glow known as ‘St Elmo’s Fire’ which was emitted from the tips of the poles. The conjunction of art and nature, engineering and unpredictability, a tiny number of witnesses and a vast landscape/skyscape, the slowest of events and those moving at the speed of light.

6. During the 1990s, the Russian performance artist Oleg Kulik made a series of related performances collectively entitled Zoophrenia, in which he pursued the game of playing dog in a purposeful way, mimicking a certain kind of canine behaviour to excess. Becoming-dog was a strategy to ‘renounce his identity as a reflective being in order to become a being with reflexes (a dog)’ (Kulik in Watkins & Kermode 2001: 76). At other times, he also ‘became’ a bull, an ape and a bird, but the dog tracked him like a shadow. In 1998, Kulik made a performance called White Man, Black Dog. In complete darkness in a Ljubljana gallery space, a naked Kulik tried to interact and establish an intimate exchange with a real black dog. Intermittent camera flashes produced by two photographers documenting the encounter supposedly burnt ephemeral images into the short-term retinal memories of spectators. For Kulik, such an encounter and its fugitive visual traces constituted ‘the only true, “absolutely real” art’ (Kulik 2003: 23).

7. ‘Oui … Oui … Oui … Oui … Oui … Oui … Oui … Oui …’ (Aurore Clément, on the telephone in the final shot of Chantal Akerman’s film Toute une nuit (‘All Night Long’), 1982, quoted in Margulies 1996: 173).

8. She moves. Her attention adjusts and focuses as she sniffs around a quality of stillness in the action, a quality of action in the stillness, her nostrils flared for the event of it. Slowly slowly. Stalking while never letting on, while always letting on, that stalking’s afoot. Something lives here, and moves here. Something warm. Something animal. Its presence resonates and is carried on the wind in this windless space. Its reverberation comes to her as smell. Just a whiff, the merest hint of a lair, of a pelt, of a world in a surreptitious moment of synaesthesia. Coloursoundsongsmell. Something there. The need for moist attention. The need for a wet nose. Follow your nose. Slowly slowly track it, but but let it be, let it take a place in the open. Patience, go quickly go slowly, stay close to it but not too close: she must move away if she gets too close. How to be near and far? Come and go, just as it comes and goes on the wind in this windy place. The role of the eyes in sniffing it out, the role of the ears. Body all eye-ear-nose. She follows her nose, it takes her closer, closer, then no too close and she can’t smell a thing and she smells too many things, the smell blurs and its shape fades and she moves away again and begins to drift again. Circling. Circling. As if now were here, and she were all alone. S l o w i n g d o w n t o n o w h e r e s h e Breathe. Ready. Again. And. No not now, be slower. Move away again and wait, lie in wait, be still in wait. Wait. Weight. Wet. She remembers an Inuit word she read and wrote down and learnt for the rightness of its rhythm, the shape of its sound in space and the time of its gesture - an onomatopoeic map: QUINUITUQ, the deep patience of waiting for long periods while prepared for a sudden event. QUINUI - like a polar bear waiting for a seal at a hole in the ice. A chameleon invisibly perched on a branch attentive to the flashing insect wings around it. A tick on a blade of grass ready for the passage of fur. Or a photographer standing in a storm at night, camera in hand, waiting for the lightning strike. Then TUQ - a flaring into appearance. An active vanishing that burns itself into the retina for a moment, then gradually dissolves.

9. ‘There are about two hundred shots in Mirror, very few when a film of that length usually has about five hundred; the small number is due to their length. Although the assembly of the shots is responsible for the structure of a film, it does not, as is generally assumed, create its rhythm. The distinctive time running through the shots makes the rhythm of the picture; and rhythm is determined not by the length of the edited pieces, but by the pressure of the time that runs through them. Editing cannot determine rhythm … indeed, time courses through the picture despite editing rather than because of it. The course of time, recorded in the frame, is what the director has to catch in the pieces laid out on the editing table.

Time, imprinted in the frame, dictates the particular editing principle; and the pieces that ‘won’t edit’ – that can’t be properly joined – are those which record a radically different kind of time. One cannot, for instance, put actual time together with conceptual time, any more than one can join water pipes of different diameter. The consistency of the time that runs through the shot, its intensity or ‘sloppiness’, could be called time-pressure; then editing can be seen as the assembly of the pieces on the basis of the time-pressure within them’ (Tarkovsky 1986: 117).

10. Of all of the artist-walkers who spring to mind - Hamish Fulton, Marina & Ulay, Lone Twin, Wrights & Sites, Janet Cardiff, Tim Brennan, Iain Sinclair, Bruce Chatwin, and so on – Richard Long seems to me one of the slowest and most patient, one of the clearest about his choices. Long repeatedly uses walking structures as generative ‘games’ in the production of photographs and texts in which words assume a sculptural quality, as well as ‘non-site’ works for gallery spaces. His walks are playful in a purposeful way, and it’s invariably hard to separate the idea for a walk, the walk itself, and the trace of walk. The walks are conceived by Long as ‘sculpture’, taking sculpture way beyond the usual definition of the generation of objects. Instead, he proposes to make experiential events and impermanent relational connections with and in places. In his registering of their traces lies an implicit set of propositions about reality, nature, our place(s) in the world: a kind of ethics of lightness, movement, process, change, relationality in complexity. We only ever witness traces of the space-time aggregate of the absent/invisible event. The sculptural work itself rarely involves violent interventions; the work is always on a human scale, often discreet, ephemeral, small restrained displacements more often than not employing the elementary and archetypal formal configurations of lines (motion) and circles (stopping points) and their variants (spiral, cross, arc, zig-zag, ellipsis).

In an interview in 1990, Long reflected on the complex relations between duration and ephemerality in his work, a slow dance of endless repetition with difference, of unfolding multiplicity within identity: ‘I suppose my work runs the whole gamut from being completely invisible and disappearing in seconds, like a water drawing, to a permanent work in a museum that could last forever. The planet is full of unbelievably permanent things, like rock strata and tides, and yet full of impermanence like butterflies or the seaweed on the beach, which is in a new pattern every day for thousands of years. I would like to think my work reflects that beautiful complexity and reality’ (Long 1991: 104).

One of Richard Long’s most remarkable walking works is Crossing Stones (1987), in which he carried a single pebble from a beach on the East coast of England, near Aldeburgh in Suffolk, all the way across Britain to Aberystwyth in West Wales, covering more than 300 miles in 10 days. On the beach in Aberystwyth, he deposited the Suffolk stone, exchanged it for another, and then carried this second stone back another 300 miles to deposit it on the same beach in Suffolk. This act of displacement is both heroic and Sisyphean in its epic absurdity. A return journey on foot lasting 20 days, covering more than 600 miles, in order to exchange two pebbles (why those two?), and all that survives is one text work, a brief score-like description of the structure of the event as a whole. The symmetrical transplant effects a re-assimilation by two pebbles on a new beach in a fresh alliance with other pebbles, all of them moving incessantly with tides and weather: so nothing moves, everything stays the same, but everything has changed. (The layerings of time: the moment of choice of a pebble, the rhythms of foot steps, the moment of placement, the rhythms of the sea, the glacial speed of change in stone: slowness is always relative). The pebbles remain remote from each other in their new locations, as far apart as ever, but a new connective relation or tissue is established between the individual stones, the beaches, the coastlines, the edges of Britain. Each of them has crossed to a situation that is the same and quite different. The space between them is blooded and activated by Long’s long walk, a passage which has all but disappeared in its embodied complexity, Nothing is mentioned of the journey to and fro beyond the fact that it took place; three weeks collapse into a few words, and Long’s experiences en route are excised completely in this most radical act of editing and distilling to a pure economy of exchange. It is the experiences of the pebbles, it seems, that are to be privileged.

11. ‘There are, on a few Shinto shrines, some sacred curiosities. Stones that have fallen from the sky. Nobody makes much fuss about them. They are simply there for people to take pleasure in, and as objects deserving of the respect accorded to everything that shares the spirit of divinity. The traditional explanation for their existence is very simple and matter-of-fact. “There is a hole in the sky”, say the priests, “and sometimes things just fall through it”’ (Watson 1984: 319).

12. In the opening sequence of Le Jet de Sang (‘The Spurt of Blood’), a short play written by Antonin Artaud, a pair of young lovers express ardent passion for each other in a (parodic? nostalgic?) exchange that culminates in the young man declaring: ‘We are intense. Ah. What a well-made world’. Artaud then provides a genuinely startling stage direction: precise, hallucinatory, dissociated, anti-romantic, surreal, apocalyptic. It appears there is indeed a hole in the sky, and fragments of well-made civilisations and anatomies fall through it as the lovers’ intensive coup de foudre gives way to cosmic dismemberment: 'Silence: noise like a huge wheel spinning, blowing out wind. A hurricane comes between them. At that moment, two stars collide, and a succession of limbs of flesh fall. Then feet, hands, scalps, masks, colonnades, porticoes, temples and alembics, falling slower and slower as if through space, then three scorpions one of the other and finally a frog, and a scarab which lands with heart-breaking, nauseating slowness’ (Artaud 1968: 63).

Although one might readily associate an Artaudian ‘theatre of cruelty’ with frenzied speed and ecstasy, it is my impression that in his writings Artaud rehearsed a particular ontology of slowness. He returned repeatedly to his sense of time and integrated, ‘orderly’ spaces (e.g. that of the human body) being out of joint, and articulated the pervasive dis-ease he experienced as ‘that abnormal facility that has entered into human relations which does not allow our thoughts the time to take root’ (Artaud 1988: 162).

13. On a footpath, in large letters traced with a finger in the fresh snow, someone’s written a message to the sky: MORE SNOW PLEASE. The gift of snow. Its aura.


14. ‘Relation of walking and thinking, the movement of the body setting thought in motion. Rimbaud composed many of his poems while walking. So does Edmond Jabès. Walking the space of a line, a phrase. As if finding it. A grammar of motion … Edmond Jabès walks. Hands crossed in back. Slowly … In the dining room, Edmond opens a drawer full of pebbles he has collected on beaches. In Brittany, In Italy. “Look at this, wouldn’t you say, a face? And this one here, magnificent”. Almost all his pebbles have markings one could see as a face. “Just look; it’s Verlaine”. Once he has said this I cannot see anything but Verlaine in the veins of the stone. But I think more of how it is sand and stone that hold his attention rather than the sea. Bits of desert … After Edmond’s death, Marcel gives us a most precious gift. Two out of a group of five white pebbles that Edmond has collected for him. These do not suggest faces. They are pure white. They are, strangely, almost perfect cubes. They sit on top of one another’ (Waldrop 2002: 15, 30, 32-3)

15. ‘In 1981, I made a videotape in Japan, Hatsu Yume ('First Dream'), in which there is one sequence where a fixed camera views a rock on a mountainside over a long period of time. When it comes on the screen, the images are moving 20 times normal speed, and gradually, in a series of stages, it slows down to real-time, and eventually to extreme slow-motion. People usually describe that scene by saying, “ … the part where the people are all slowed down while moving round the rock”. What I looked at in that scene is the rock, not so much the people. I thought it would be interesting to show a rock in slow motion. All that is really happening is that the rock’s time, its rate of change, exceeds the sampling rate (the recording time of the video), whereas the people are within that range. So the rock just sits there, high speed, slow speed … it doesn’t matter. I think about time in that way. There are windows or wavelengths of perception. They are simultaneous and interwoven at any one moment, but we are tuned only to a certain frequency range. This is directly related to scale changes in space or sound, proportion in architecture and music. A fly lives for a week or two, and a rock exists for thousands or millions of years’ (Bill Viola 1995: 151).

16. In the late 1960s, in a proposal for a new work called Island of Broken Glass, a work that might be thought of nowadays in terms of a ‘deep ecology’, American land artist Robert Smithson suggested that a small island in Vancouver harbour (Miami Islet) should be covered with broken glass. Eventually, through the forces of nature over a long period of time, the glass would break down into ever smaller pieces until its final return to sand. Smithson’s proposal was vehemently opposed by ecologists, and the work was never realised. Elsewhere Smithson wrote: ‘In the museum one can find deposits of rust labelled "Philosophy", and in glass cases unknown lumps of something labelled "Aesthetics"' (Smithson in Holt 1979: 79).

Meanwhile about thirty years after its disappearance Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) has re-emerged into astonishing visibility (for the time being) from beneath the surface of the Great Salk Late in Utah; the rocks are now caked in sparkling salt crystals in the pink waters of the lake.

17. Imagine it. A wheat field, two blocks from the twin towers of the World Trade Centre and Wall Street in New York City, opposite the Statue of Liberty. First, the clearing of rocks and trash on a disused block of land, then a fresh covering with truckloads of landfill, before the spring planting of seed in 285 hand-dug furrows blanketed with an inch of top-soil. The establishment of an irrigation system, clearing, maintenance, weeding and spraying. Four months of careful tending, from brown to green to amber, then the final harvesting in August: almost 1,000 pounds of wheat. Finally, the return of the land to the rhythms and economies of intensive urban development, and the construction of a new luxury complex.

Reflecting on her land art sculpture-event Wheatfield (1982) afterwards, activist-artist Agnes Denes suggested: ‘It represented food, energy, commerce, world trade, economics. It referred to mismanagement and world hunger. It was an intrusion into the Citadel, a confrontation of High Civilisation. Then again, it was also Shangri-la, a small paradise, one’s childhood, a hot summer afternoon in the country, peace, forgotten values, simple pleasures’ (Denes 1982: 544).

A wheat field in lower Manhattan. Imagine it.

18. On a February morning of both sun and snow, walking through the fields on the banks of the River Dart at Dartington in Devon, I come across an oak tree that has fallen during a winter storm. Uprooted, its massive trunk shattered, the tree’s canopy lies over the pathway made by dog-walkers and joggers: an impassable obstruction, an interruption in the rhythms of walking and running. It is as if it has dropped out of the sky, like the timber house in Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho. I am struck by the juxtaposition of a long, slow period of vertical growth and the sudden moment of falling to the horizontal:

‘There is a moment when the newborn first lets out a cry into the dry air, when the pressure of light first falls on the virgin surface of the new retina and is registered by some pattern of nerve impulses not yet fully “understood” … There is a moment, only truly known in anticipation before it happens, when the eyes close for the last time and the brain shuts down its circuits forever (the end of time)’ (Viola 1995: 142).

In the weeks since the oak’s collapse, a new ‘desire path’ has been worn into the grass around it, a perfect semi-circle tracing the outline of the canopy and connecting the path at either side. The old path, now enveloped by the dead branches, remains bare. From the perspective of the buzzard floating far above my head, one might see a large brown D inscribed into the grassy surface of the field by gravitied footfalls over time.

19. [...]

20. First, a score: Yoko Ono’s TAPE PIECE III/Snow Piece (1963): ‘Take a tape of the sound of the snow falling. This should be done in the evening. Do not listen to the tape. Cut it and use it as strings to tie gifts with. Make a gift wrapper, if you wish, using the same process with a phonosheet’ (Ono 1970: unpaginated).

Then a slow and illuminating close reading of a slow and illuminating work. In his remarkable study of sound in 20th century avant-garde art work, Noise Water Meat (1999), Douglas Kahn begins by describing the paradoxical acoustical effects of snow falling: ‘It is a sound of blanketing bereft of warmth, a massive field of intense activity that is oddly quiet, and because the accumulation of snow acts to absorb sounds and the minute crystalline structure of snow breaks up sound waves at their own scale, it becomes progressively quieter as the snow mutes itself. [...] The irony of snow falling is that it produces the conditions for listening closely but then absorbs the sounds that might be heard’ (Kahn 1999: 238-9).

Kahn then turns his attention to Ono’s poetical disposition towards technology, and its embracing of multiple inaudibilities. For the score involves: ‘much more than trying to listen, even though Ono has employed and displayed the technology of listening. She has actually employed a technology one imagines and a technology one ignores. Assume for a moment an impossible transparency of audiophonic technology [...] A tape recording is made of falling snow using such technology and then ignored. Ono’s score instructs the recordist not to listen to it because it is the best way to ensure its accuracy’ (ibid: 239).

Finally Kahn highlights the ethical overlay in Ono’s score between environmental and social relations, the tacit acknowledgement of multiple silences (and silencings) and the emotional warmth in the economy of the gift: ‘A refusal to listen complements both the silence of the imagined sound of snow falling and the silences involved in the very act of gift giving. Whatever else can be said about gift giving, something is always left unsaid. Although speech may revolve around the act, the delicacy of the gesture, especially in Ono’s score, acts to absorb the sound waves of speech. When the audiotape is used as ribbon, the environment of snow falling lies covertly inscribed along the length of the tape in patterns resembling the loops of a bow’ (ibid: 239-40).

21. Las Ramblas: a bustling, tree-lined boulevard bisecting the old city of Barcelona. Lorca once described it as ‘the only street in the world which I wish would never end’. Its name derives from an Arabic word (ramla) for torrents or rapids, for at one time it was a seasonal watercourse, the route of run-off from hills to the sea. The memory of water.

Today Las Ramblas runs from Plaça de Catalunya in the north to Plaça Portal de la Pau in the south, with its harbourside monument to Christopher Columbus. Caked white with birdshit, with a hefty stone map in one hand by his side, Columbus points confidently out to sea, but in the direction of North Africa rather than the New World. This way, folks, must be.

How to remake a river? Or more modestly, for I’m uneasy with Columbus’s unshakeable conviction as model, how to make a small action whose ephemeral traces might reconnect this place briefly and playfully with its naming, and with its past role in the micro-circuits and flows of the hydrological cycle? How to re-member a river? I discussed this with Gregg and Gary. Many triggers for me in what they do, and they have moist imaginations. We chatted in a cafe, quiet little rants and what ifs and didyaknows about weather systems, bodies, maps, becoming-river, Snowflake the albino gorilla. Then Gary said what about ice.

In the end we slid a block of ice from the CCCB, past the Plaça dels Angels and along the Carrer Bonsuccés to Las Ramblas. We placed it on its side on the paving stones in the middle of Rambla Canaletes, near an old iron fountain, then wrung the melted ice from our gloves to start the flow. People watching, talking in the sun. The water of memory (David Williams in Whelan & Winters 2001: unpaginated).

22. After hearing La Monte Young talk at the Barbican in December 1998, Jem Finer, the creator and composer of Longplayer, a 1,000-year-long musical score for looped Tibetan bell-chants spiralling ‘like planets around the sun’ (Finer in van Noord 2000: 3), wrote in his journal: ‘I was interested by his talking about the evening’s performance as part of an ongoing, ever-lasting performance. The time that had elapsed since the last one merely being a pause in the music’ (ibid: 29).

23. Speed of the sound of loneliness is the title of a John Prine song sung by Nanci Griffin, a title borrowed by Richard Long for a walking work he made on Dartmoor in the winter of 1998. Walking continuously from dawn to dusk, Long circled Crow Tor at a distance representing the Earth’s orbit around the Sun; the rock acted as still point or fulcrum in a circuit of 7 miles walked 3 1/2 times, at a speed Long estimated to be at 2.8 miles an hour. Long’s published score of the event goes on to record other speeds occurring simultaneously in a sliding scale of space-times around Crow Tor - an overlay of differential speeds and relational connections moving out from the rock to the galaxy in this simple meditative staging of the vertiginous dynamics of our tiny corner of the universe (Long 2002: 149):

THE ROTATION SPEED OF THE EARTH IN ENGLAND 700 MILES AN HOUR

THE ROTATION SPEED OF THE EARTH IN ITS ORBIT AROUND THE SUN 70,000 MILES AN HOUR

THE SPEED OF OUR MOTION AROUND THE GALAXY 500,000 MILES AN HOUR

24. A man in a snail suit stands waiting at a zebra crossing. Spiral shell on his back, comedy feelers protruding from his forehead. A car slows to let him cross. He acknowledges the driver politely, then lies on his belly and slides imperceptibly slowly across the tarmac, inch by inch. Music: Bakerman, by the band Laid Back. "Bakerman is baking bread. Bakerman … is baking bread. The night train is coming, got to keep on runnin’ …" (from Dom Joly’s Trigger Happy TV).


References
Artaud, Antonin (1968). Collected Works, Volume 1 (trans. Victor Corti), London: Calder & Boyars
Artaud, Antonin (1988). ‘Manifesto for a theatre that failed’, in Susan Sontag (ed.), Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings, Berkeley: University of California Press
Auster, Paul (1998). ‘White Spaces’, Selected Poems, London: Faber & Faber
Bachelard, Gaston (1988). Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement (trans. E.R. Farrell), Dallas: Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture
Benjamin, Walter (1968). ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ [1936], in Illuminations (trans Harry Zorn), New York: Schocken Books
Blanchot, Maurice (1995). The Writing of the Disaster (trans. Ann Smock), Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press
Calvino, Italo (1993). ‘Quickness’, in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, New York: Vintage Books, 31-54
Carruthers, Mary (1990). The Book of Memory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Deleuze, Gilles (1986)). Cinema I: The Movement-Image (trans. H. Tomlinson & B. Habberjam), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
de Maria, Walter (1980). ‘The Lightning Field’, in Kristine Stiles & Peter Selz (eds) (1996), Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings, Berkeley: University of California Press, 527-30
Denes, Agnes (1982) ‘Wheatfield: A Confrontation’, in Kristine Stiles & Peter Selz (eds) (1996), Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings, Berkeley: University of California Press, 543-5
Dillard, Annie (1999). For the Time Being, New York: Vintage Books
George, David (1999). Buddhism as/in Performance, New Delhi: DK Printworld
Goulish, Matthew (2000). 39 Microlectures in Proximity of Performance, London & New York: Routledge
Heim, Wallace (2003). ‘Slow activism: homelands, love and the lightbulb’, in Bronislaw Szerszynski, Wallace Heim & Claire Waterton (eds), Nature Performed: Environment, Culture and Performance, Oxford: Blackwell, 183-202
Hoete, Anthony (ed.) (2002). Roam: Reader on the Aesthetics of Mobility, London: Black Dog Publishing
Holt, Nancy (ed.) (1979). The Writings of Robert Smithson, New York: New York University Press
Jabes, Edmond (1972). The Book of Questions, vol. 1 (trans. Rosmarie Waldrop), Hanover NH: University Press of New England
Kahn, Douglas (1999). Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts, Cambridge Mass.: The MIT Press
Kulik, Oleg (2003). ‘Armadillo for your show’, in Adrian Heathfield (ed.), Live Culture, London: Tate Modern / Live Art Development Agency, 20-3
Kundera, Milan (1996). Slowness (trans. Linda Asher), London: Faber & Faber
Lepecki, André (1996). ‘Embracing the stain: notes on the time of dance’, Performance Research 1:1 (‘The Temper of the Times’), Spring, 103-7
Long, Richard (1991). Walking in Circles, London: Thames & Hudson
Long, Richard (2002). Walking the Line, London: Thames & Hudson
Margulies, Ivone (1996). Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday, Durham & London: Duke University Press
Massumi, Brian (ed.) (2002). ‘Introduction: Like a Thought’, in A Shock to Thought: Expression after Deleuze and Guattari, London & New York: Routledge, xiii-xxxix
Moore, Richard (dir.) (1991). Butoh: Piercing the Mask (film)
Ono, Yoko (1970). Grapefruit, New York: Simon & Schuster
Tarkovsky, Andrey (1986). Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema (trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair), Austin: University of Texas Press
van Noord, Gerrie (ed.) (2000). Jem Finer: Longplayer, London: Artangel
Viola, Bill (1995). Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House: Writings 1973-1994, London: Thames & Hudson / Anthony d’Offay Gallery
Waldrop, Rosmarie (2002). Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabès, Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press
Watkins, Jonathan and Kermode, Deborah (eds) (2001). Oleg Kulik: Art Animal, Birmingham: Ikon Gallery
Watson, Lyall (1984). Heaven’s Breath: A Natural History of the Wind, London: Hodder & Stoughton
Whelan, Gregg & Winters, Gary (2001). Of pigs and lovers: a lone twin research companion, in Live Art Magazine no. 34, March-May


(‘The little by little suddenly’, in Ian Abbot (ed.), Slow, Devon: Elusive Camel Books, 2007. Limited edition artist’s book. Contributors include Matthew Goulish, Kirsten Lavers, Kevin Mount, Cupola Bobber. This version - with one frame 'missing', no. 19 - is reproduced here in memory of Lyall Watson, who died in late June 2008).

sight fall - the time of light

'Falling into the World: Gravitational Space'
An interview with Paul Virilio, by Laurence Louppe and Daniel Dobbels

Translated by David Williams 

'After the nuclear disintegration of the space of matter, we have finally arrived at the territory of the time of light' (Paul Virilio)
__________________________________________

Laurence Louppe: In the course of your pedagogic activities, Paul Virilio, you have become interested in dance notation. This fact, in conjunction with the importance of your work, prompted us to enquire about your perspective on a field that is still rather misunderstood.

Paul Virilio: I became interested in choreographic notation as a teacher of architecture. I had a Moroccan student who was working on this subject, she was doing a diploma on dance and space; and for my own part I was interested in a measure of space in architecture that would no longer simply provide facade sections, which comprise a wholly abstracted vision. Space is movement, that's the quality of a volume, so it's very difficult to notate. When I became interested in choreographic notation, I was wondering, for example, whether there might not be a way of qualifying space through Labanotation that would help develop architectural drawings and sections; as they stand, they're utterly primitive as measures of a space since they provide no measure of time. Whereas in dance, where notions of time and space are interconnected, there's a relativity which translates that reality effectively.

In architecture, people were only producing geography; and I thought it was time that the urban or architectural geography represented by the survey plans of a community, or by the floor plans of a house, should be further developed with a choreography: in other words, a measure of the quality of volume. Here Labanotation would function in ways other than as the body's preparation for a movement practice.

LL: What you're saying is at the heart of our own preoccupations. I would like to add in this context that Laban saw the body as a sort of score, essentially arranged by what he calls 'effort', in other words the displacement of weight. But this displacement of weight organises an interior cartography, and at the same time a geography in which the relationship between space and time already comprises an architectural space. When he talks of 'effort shaping', he means constructing space with one's weight, with the displacement of one's weight; it's a geography too.

PV: When I say 'only geography', I'm not denying its importance. I mean that it must be taken further through a measure of movement, and not only a measure of surfaces. In architecture, surfaces are measured, but volume isn't apprehended at all; now it seemed to me that in addition to the measure of surfaces, there was a measure of time through movement, for which Labanotation could be useful. I wasn't suggesting that it had to be adopted literally, but that it could inspire architects to qualify the space of movement, for example when going from one level to another. When architects draw up plans, they're interested in these things, but they're only able to measure surfaces for the lack of any tools to qualify volume.

LL: What you're saying is very important; but in actual fact this idea of apprehending objects, not so much in terms of quantitative measures, but in terms of qualitative criteria, is something very new.

PV: Yes, absolutely. And as far as architecture's concerned, it's still not resolved at all. I'll give another example. Earlier on you talked of interior mappings; and in fact I get my students to work on mental imagery. For about ten years I have conducted exercises where I get them to draw mentally and then graphically. In this way I try to synchronise the mental vision of plan, space and the graphic or geo-graphic representation, as we've evoked it. At present this research in architecture is not yet finished, but it's continuing in the same direction. Something else that also interested me a great deal at the time was what was called 'musicography': in other words, research undertaken by musicians into new notational forms, not simply the solfeggio. This too offered us an example. How could architecture interpret and make use of. such techniques so as to further develop its traditional practice of space?

Daniel Dobbels: What seems important to me is this definition of displacement through weight that you indicate by the word 'qualify'. The impression today being that this primordial sensation of weight is compromised, altered, imperiled.

PV: That's what's at the root of the word 'glory'. Glory means a weight, not something that's brilliant, shiny. When one thinks of 'glory', one thinks of stars, of things that shine; it's not that at all; it's weight, density.

DD: At the same time, when one 'qualifies' space-time and movement through the displacement of weight, one must immediately think of the imponderable, as a corollary. It seems to me that in Laurence's work on choreographic notation, one of the recurrent obsessions that conspired in the invention of notation related to the fact of never seeing this imponderable aspect inscribed anywhere.

PV: I would like to deal with this question in another way. I have been working on a text, which will be published shortly in Chimères, on the notion of falling. I don't think that one can perceive the world without falling into the world. This is not a metaphor. Human vision is dependent upon weight, in other words upon the fact that one either falls or one doesn't. Horizontal displacement, walking, is a way of falling from one foot to the other; similarly, the perspectival vision that we have of the horizon is connected to the fact that we are falling into the horizon. Let me explain. The Renaissance perspective of real space is already conditioned by weight, by gravity. The notion of up and down doesn't exist, no more for the living body than for the visual cortex independently of weight; so there is a fall at the origin of the perception of the world, and I would suggest this connects back to Genesis; when the eyes of Adam and Eve open, they discover their nakedness, which signifies that they fall into the real.

But I think this symbolic vision is also a practical vision. I think that any relation to the real is one of falling therefore one of weight. I am sufficiently interested in this perspective to bring gravity to bear in perception. Why? Because what interests me is speed, and because I don't believe in the purely geometric perspective of the Renaissance, with those lines that converge at infinite, the vanishing point; I find it primitive, it doesn't correspond to reality at all. I don't think the visual cone has any reality independently of the weighted body that's at the origin of this vision of the world. Hence my interest in 'vision machines', technologies of perception which eschew weight; they escape gravity since their perception is automatised, it occurs through the recognition of forms stemming from a computer being connected up to a camera.

So it's true that there's a reinvention of the body's weight, but in my opinion it could go much further philosophically speaking; what's still missing between subject and object is the trajectory. We must reinvent and retrieve meaning for the nature of the trajectory - I say this in a very concrete way; nowadays I talk of the trajective and of trajectivity, in the same way one talks of object, objective, objectivity. The existence and nature of the trajectory has to be reinvented. And it can be if we give gravity back its force, its power to emit and express reality. We are creatures of gravity. When we say we're terrestrial beings, this means that we are creatures of the earth's gravity - not of the moon's gravity, or of any other planet's.

LL: What you're saying is particularly disconcerting, because a system such as that of Feuillet, as far back as 1700, bases the essence of dance on the 1055 of support. What creates the transaction of the danced movement is the exchange between the supporting leg and the free leg, and it's the way in which the supporting leg loses its balance that is notated. So it's the quality of the loss of support on which the dance is based. And when Laban discovered this, he was astonished, because there was already, as far back as the 17th century (and it's not surprising that this was the Baroque period), an idea of the gravitational.

PV: Today what interests me, and this picks up on what you've just said, is what in parachuting is called the 'sight-fall'. A sight-fall is a free fall without recourse to an altimeter. I'm also studying those people that throw themselves into the void with elastic attached to their feet [bungy jumping], because it seems to me that this contains a shift to the very limit of falling, which reveals in an essential and very pure way the elements we have just been discussing. A sight-fall is when someone throws themselves into the void relying only on their weight to evaluate their vision of the moment when the parachute should be opened - and their weight in this context is absolute, since they're free falling. Usually parachutists use an altimeter for this purpose, and they open it up at the last moment. But the sight-faller (which is a beautiful term in its own right) attempts to base the decision to open the parachute on the perception they have of the ground, and this perception wholly results from their body weight. If they make a mistake, and the parachute opens too late, obviously they kill themselves.

DD: How is this moment of evaluation inscribed?

PV: I can't go into much detail because I'm still working on the subject. But I am interested in the number of people involved in falling sports: bungy jumpers, or cloud surfers who throw themselves into the void with a board on their feet so as to glide on the wind relative to their fall, or sight-fallers. All reflect the attraction of falling, which seems to be another way of explaining the allure of drugs today - except this is a drug of weight, it's 'gravitational' rather than chemical; it's a question of attaining and exploring one's limits exclusively through one's weight, rather than through the ingestion of substances of varying degrees of danger.

LL: One must also attain vertigo ...

DD: In situations of extreme vertigo one clings on to something; what's the ultimate point at which one still clings on to life?

PV: If one's perspective is connected to one's weight, there's a moment at which one can fully experiment with it; and that's the sight-fall, because there the measure of one's weight in free fall brings the rational person to the moment of decision. So the vision they have is directly connected to their perspective, since it's related both to what's fleeting, in flight (remember that vertigo is an effect of the fleeting), and at the same time to one's weight, which provides an absolute perspective. A sight-faller's perspective is the only true perspective. We must really try to analyse in a very fine way what occurs at that moment. Furthermore, as you well understand, it's a phenomenon of speed, a dromoscopic phenomenon; this vision is really very pure, it doesn't involve any mode of conveyance with its own trans formative, mutative effects.

When you're in a train or in a car, rather than a true perspective, what one sees is bluff - deformations related to the motor and the vehicle's position in relation to the ground. In sight-falling, the vehicle is the body in free fall; it's the trajective which reveals the objective.

DD: Is this trajectory rectilinear, or rather, is there still the possibility of effecting a sort of clinamen, of opening an angle of inclination and producing a deviation?

PV: No, there's no change. When you listen to sight-fallers you realise that there are states of perception which change on one hand with the speed of acceleration of the fall, and on the other with the modification of the relation to the ground. So something very complex occurs at the level of stages gone through before the parachute comes in; and they say this quite explicitly, one's vision is modified several times until the moment at which it stops changing, because one's afraid of going too far and that the ground's too close. So the free fall manifestly contains radically different sequences. At the beginning, it's clear that the ground doesn't seem to be coming towards one, one gets the impression of being in a kind of nirvana, although admittedly this is at about a thousand metres up; subsequently the ground does look as though it's coming up - in other words, one inverts; and finally in the third stage, the ground seems to open up. There would be still further stages after this, but they are beyond human possibility given the risk of crashing into the ground.

DD: What would be the status of language in this experience? One often associates the cadaverous state inertia, death - with the fact that the body no longer has signifiers; in this context is the signifier suspended, as if it's in parentheses, or, on the contrary, does it fall with the body? One gets the impression that when one falls, one makes language fall too.

PV: There's a very misunderstood word, and that's vertigo, which you mentioned just now. In some ways, quite apart from chemical vertigo, in other words something stemming from bad digestion or similar phenomena, vertigo without chemical effect is something wholly unknown; I would even suggest that the word 'vertigo' is a carry-all concealing what vertigo is. I would suggest that it will not be possible to discuss vertigo until the existence and nature of the trajectory has been rehabilitated. In a certain way, 'vertigo' is what serves to conceal trajectivity. I talk of the trajectivity of someone walking or of someone falling. What interests me behind this idea that any vision of the world is a fall, a literal fall that entails weight, is that we have a perception of the world because we are falling into the world.

A friend of mine, who was going to have his liver removed before a transplant, was saying to me: 'It's extraordinary, now my liver's sick it weighs; it's no longer a liver, it's a dead weight'. As if something was falling inside him; it's not only the body that falls into the world when it's living, but when the life of an organ starts to fade it falls into the body like a dead weight, as if an interior weight inside the body doubled up the exterior weight of the body in the world. To my mind, corporeity-as-fall is a wholly interesting element of the materialism of corporeity. And one is reminded of religious and mystical thought in a non-metaphorical way: falling into the body, falling into matter - these aren't metaphors, they're concrete.

DD: In the word that you use, trajectif ('trajective'), I'm hearing trajet-dit (' the said trajectory'); as if something in the trajectory is 'said' at the very moment the fall occurs. Is consciousness of this 'saying', particular to the trajectory, embodied at such moments? Is the signification of the gesture 'spoken, in such a way that it suspends other forms of speed, other forms of reduction, other forms for the advent of dead weight? Finally, don't you think that all these systems of notation, as well as the actual practice of choreography, seem to be haunted by an obsession: to suspend time, in such a way that another time can come and double the dead times?

PV: This takes us back to Husserl and the notion of a 'living present'. There is no time, no temporality for someone not living; time doesn't exist for stone, or for water. Time only exists for the human being looking at the stone, or watching the water flow. I think that the notion of a living present is very current, particularly given how much we talk today about real time, present time. The real time of technology is only real time because of the living present of the spectator, listener or actor. So dance is effectively the implementation of the dancer's living present. And this living present is an enigma. It's not the present of the past, or of the future; the living present has neither past nor future; it's in the 'quick' of life, it exists in the speed of being in the world - in the speed of falling into the world. And it is so in a total way; in other words the body of the dancer is wholly implicated, like the body of the parachutist we discussed just now.

DD: Which is not to confuse it with the ephemeral. In what you're saying, I still hear duration.

PV: Absolutely: the living present is life itself. It's not a chronological time; it's a 'chronoscopic' time - in other words, the time of presence. And I would suggest this kind of time avoids the tripartite structure of traditional time; the living present contains no before/during/after. […]

DD: There's an exhibition about J. Van Cleve on at the moment, and it contains two representations - one by him, one by Gerard David - of Adam and Eve, naked, after they've been expelled from Paradise …

PV: The nude should be reinterpreted, in terms of a fall into appearance ...

DD: What 's magnificent with Gerard David is the impression one gets that the body, in particular Adam's body, is a fall into the world; behind him is a shadow drawn on a grayish blue background, and the shadow grows increasingly slender towards the bottom. Could one fall into the world either with or without a body? This is also one of the questions of dance. Of course I fall into the world, but perhaps I don 't fall with the body I require to be able to support this relation to the living, which awaits me in some way as destiny, as the unknown, as enigma.

PV: I think that images possess a weight. I disagree very strongly with people who say that images are nothing and that the thing is all. I myself am an image with weight, and I'm nothing other than an image. Besides there are certain technologies which allow an acceleration of visualisation; in fractions of seconds, one can show a mouse in perfect condition decomposing to the point of crumbling into dust. I find that there's a truth in such documents, so that there's no difference between the living mouse and the representation of the mouse. In some ways, I'm a Berkeleyan; I find many things in Berkeley very interesting and very relativist. So for me we're images that have weight.

The decline of the image is a decline in reality. To say that "images are nothing, the thing is all" in some ways sweeps away the thing, it sweeps matter away. To my mind, the materialism-gone-astray we've inhabited for about a century, contains a 'tragedy' (back to your word again [trajectif/trajet-dit/tragédie]) of the visible. "What's visible is nothing, matter I all”: what does that mean? It means that an image only has value when one touches it; we valorise a tactile image to the detriment of a visual or auditory image. Is something more real because I have it in my hand, or because I see it? We know full well that we can't do this, all the more so given the technologies we have today for 'tele-palpation'. Therefore it's clear that the image has weight, the image is the thing.

DD: This brings us back to Léger's 'Ballet Mécanique', to that rendering of a woman who, by climbing some stairs in a way, takes weight in the image and gives the image its real weight. There's also the work of Bill Viola, which shows how a body is constantly in the process of reestablishing balances, and that in fact a body comprises
pure moving.

PV: Movement is nothing other than an imbalance fostered and entertained.

DD: Why do you want to point that out?

PV: Well, why is imbalance negative? Why does moving take precedence over imbalance? Because, I would suggest, there's an old underlying pride, in the Biblical sense of the word, that says that what drops, what falls, is not good … Well, I believe exactly the opposite. I believe that the original accident - the 'fall' - is a blessing; we exist because we inhabit an original accident; we are because we're 'sinners'. Maybe this is a poor interpretation of the Bible, or a resistance to the Scriptures; but I believe the accident to be original, at the root of humanity. I myself am accident-prone, I'm a man in the process of falling, a fall-ible man; that's my greatness. Terms like chaos, imbalance, accident are located as negative, whereas they constitute us as humans. In reality we only exist through our failures, we only exist through our falls; we only exist through the accident that our life itself is. This is true of human beings and of many other situations one could mention. And what's interesting in the idea of dance as fall is that in some ways it reintroduces humanity as accident rather than as 'glorious substance'.

DD: And this is the starting point for our inventions of the real.

PV: Yes, for our constitutions of it. Which brings us back to the philosophical adage, which is now rather forgotten: "Lightning doesn't flash if there's no eye to see it; thunder has no sound if there's no ear to hear it". This table is not solid without a hand to feel its solidness. In a certain way, therefore, the entropic principle (which we now talk about at a cosmogynic level) reintroduces the notion that as the observers of the world, human beings thereby constitute the world. And this takes us back to Berkeley. And it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with immaterialism. Unfortunately analysis of Berkeley's thinking has revolved completely around immaterialism, whereas to my mind it constitutes another kind of materialism. Perhaps today, through Einsteinian relativity, the analysis of Berkeley can be reinterpreted in another way.

LL: If in fact we constitute ourselves in falling, how does one interpret the idea of rebound, suspension, the function of holding oneself upright? In Doris Humphrey's work, for example, there were two principles in dance: fall and recovery. And she also said: "Movement is an arc of life, strung between two deaths: vertical death and horizontal death". And movement is precisely what describes the curve …

PV: It's the trajectory.

LL: Yes, but a trajectory that's not on the ground: it's in declivity.

PV: It's a parabolic trajectory.

LL: And, furthermore, one which can also cut podal supports. But how do you locate suspension, rebound? In relation to this ancient desire to fall, how can we hold ourselves up, suspend and rebound? For you, is this something negative for the existence and nature of falling?

PV: No, not at all, because a fall to the horizontal, which means one goes towards the horizon, includes a rebound. One shouldn't understand falling as being exclusively from up to down; it can also happen from down up. A jump is a fall upwards, just as taking flight is an attack in reverse. I don't think there's any centre to the fall, except for the living present of the dancer. The centre is the dancer's own body, there's no centre elsewhere, there's no ground. If one accepts that walking is a falling towards the horizon, there's no ground; the ground is relative, it doesn't exist at all any more except for someone falling from up to down.

In order to understand what sight-falling means - the fall into reality - one must try to forget traditional referents: down and up. So as to locate oneself exclusively in the particular body as centre of time, centre of the living present. And all technologies today lead us back to the human body. Tele-technologies mean that it's at the centre of the world, that the ground has less importance; hence deterritorialisation, the horizon has less importance, it's possible to see weapons over the horizon with radars … In a certain way, the last planet, the final frontier is the particular body, and the particular body is the living present. This isn't only a 'body' in the materialist sense of the word, it is the living present. Behind desocialisation, behind the return to individuality, I think that in reality there's a resurgence of the human being as centre of the world, the human being as egocentrism. The conquest of the universe, whether infinitely large or infinitely small, the conquest of space, all technological conquests lead us back to 'egocentring'. And dance is in fact one of the arts of egocentring. To avoid falling over, to turn around and find oneself confronted with an audience, an egocentring is constantly exercised, just as it is in certain sports too. And this brings us back to the sightfaller, who is a sort of planetary body: weighted-ness making them fall, like planets attracting one another mutually. The sight-faller is Newtonian.

DD: At this stage in your thinking, what would be the status of the presence of others in relation to this egocentring? Can more-than-one fall into the world together? If so, how?

PV: One does nothing else, since one is engendered, one is reproduced. The fall begins with parental reproduction, and through a reproduction of the social body. I would like to suggest that there's more than one fall. There's the fall into birth. In certain techniques of giving birth, in fact, the women allow the child to fall: it falls as it is born. Similarly, society falls on to the territorial body, it's projected by the territorial body. If one takes the three bodies - territorial body, social body, animal body – they each fall into each other. Because there's a territorial body, the species falls into the world. If this world wasn't the earth but a planet with gravity x, life would be entirely different, as would the vision of the world.

Similarly, the family makes the animal body of the new-born child fall, because the family itself is expelled from the social body; it distinguishes itself through the loving relationship and marriage, through what I call the 'peopling unit'. The peopling unit, which will produce the animal body of the new-born child, is itself expelled; hence the importance of the family, of this structure which is both outside of society and its very foundation. What a long way the notion of 'social class' is from the materialist, animal origin! The origin of society is male/female reproduction; hence the gravity of instances of in vitro reproductive 4 technologies today.

It seems clear that there are three falls. Firstly, the fall into the world of the earth [terre], of gravity; without gravity, there would be no society; the terri-torial body is fundamental, it's the first weight, the first measure. Secondly, there's the social body, in other words the species; and the species will engender a couple who will become the source of a new fall, the third fall, into birth. Therefore the movement of falling is global, gravity is everywhere; and it's not a metaphor.

DD: And we talk of ‘descendants’, ‘offspring’: that’s what this is.

PV: Absolutely.

LL: You feel this falling when you give birth.

PV: It's like the problem of my sick friend and his liver, except that the weight in giving birth is that of a living being. When one carries a child, one feels its weight, and then it's pushed out.

LL: And it'll weigh differently too.

PV: Yes.

LL: I'd like to deal with the question of the choreographic. You spoke of territoriality. Does a sign in fact have the right to mark out this falling into the territorial, as choreographic plans and notations do? To what degree is it imbricated in wider ideological mechanisms? I'm thinking in particular of Laban's relations with Hitler. Laban distributed copies of his scores all over Germany, to different dance and gymnastic groups, and about a thousand dancers gathered in the stadium in Berlin. At that moment, Laban was frightened because he saw that the sign had been reassembled instantaneously as something far beyond his own wishes; and they were all using his signs as their starting point. Ultimately he recognised that his signs reterritorialised an absolute, centralising power. I mention territory because choreographic territory isn't exclusively metaphoric, it's a real space too. So isn't the sign-itself dangerous?

PV: I think that pushing off with one's feet, when one's at the bottom of the swimming pool, is one of the elements of the rebound. And there's no rebound without a collision of bodies: the feet touching the diving board, the body rebounding, the bottom of the pool … Your reference to Laban seems to me to be an important element; I wasn't aware of his relations with Hitler.

LL: The following day, he was forced to leave Germany very quickly.

PV: It's true that Nazism has a very strong relation to the territorial; blood and earth are core elements. And it's not surprising that Laban felt so strongly, because he was touching directly upon something central to Nazism. What I mean is that there's something in the ancient, even pagan, myth of the earth-mother that continues to fascinate me: not in the sense of the ancient goddess, the alma mater, but in the sense of what we've just been discussing - in terms of the relations of falling from one body to another, from the body of the earth to the body of another, and from the body of another to the birth of the new man or new woman.

I want to say that there's a mysterious conspiracy or complicity between inert elements (matter) and animate elements; and inevitably my favourite saint is Francis of Assisi, who said that the inanimate and the animate are closely related; he talked of a 'fraternity'. If one says 'my brother the sun', it's not simply a beautiful phrase; if one says 'my sister the rain', something of this conspiratorial relatedness of animate and inanimate is articulated. And in terms of the body's gestural life, dance is another aspect of this relationship; one needs a floor to rebound, and a spectator to see the movement the dancer won't see ... So there's a mysterious complicity of animate and inanimate, which means one can no longer oppose spiritualism and materialism; one can read Berkeley again with eyes that don't blink at the 'absurdity' of his immaterialism and of his materialism - absurd because he supposedly fails to take into account the complicity of living and non-living. To my mind, dance is one of the important sites of this. Moreover it's not just chance that so many mystics use dance as prayer.

DD: This reminds me of the work of Edouard Boubat; in his photographs, one perceives a sort of 'solidarity' between the inert elements and the solitude of bodies. One of Boubat's photos is of an old woman, who really looks to be near the end of her life, resting on a bench in the Place Saint-Sulpice; and what's wonderful is that one gets the impression that the street, and the feet of the bench holding her up, are in a strange relation of solidarity with her; they share and accompany her in her solitude. That's why, when you mentioned Nazism - the blood and the earth – I think it also entailed a change of light, a shift in the register of light, such that a flood of bodies were carried off and away; this was one of the vectors of what was called total mobilisation. How can we invent systems of movement today which will enable the creation of effects of solidarity between distinct bodies and morphologies, distinct rhythms and dynamisms, without this inevitably and ultimately producing a mass effect, in the totalitarian sense of the word?

PV: That's absolutely true, but it had started with Futurism. One mustn't forget what Nazism took from Fascism and what the Fascists took from Futurism; it started with Futurism, although for them it was an attack, an assault. One finds something similar with Heidegger; an attack on the world is not a fall into the world; it involves a movement of course, it's simply that its interpretation is quite different; an attack on the world is a violence enacted in a fall. The Nazi assault contains a fall, but it is a conquering fall. Whereas the sight-faller's fall is exactly the opposite. I risk dying in order to gain the world, for the acquisition of a goal. Parachutists who throw themselves into the void want to acquire the world through their weakness; it's an anti-assault.

DD: That's always the crucial question. What is it that always makes for a possible ambivalence between the moment of either gaining the world through my weakness, through my fall, or becoming the kamikaze that's the extreme point of this? So the question, for choreography for example, is: at what point am I even half-sure that my fall is not going to be a kamikaze fall, but a fall to 'gain the world through weakness', to be on the side of weakness, as Bram van Veld said? It's a question of this difference.

PV: Once again I can't respond. This is where the freedom of human beings is to be found; in a certain way it's the enigma of the liberty of the living. Moreover there's a lot of work to be done on the notion of liberation; remember that there's a speed of liberation, that of rockets, which enables human beings to free themselves from the control of gravity. The free-falling parachutist is the opposite; they remain constrained within gravity, and indeed it's from within gravity that they acquire the world as experience of falling; in this way, they prefigure a new perspective - their fall is vertical and horizontal, it's a fall towards the horizon, and no longer a fall towards the ground. This touches on elements to which we lack answers - in other words, questions of liberty; one can choose assault, one can choose suicide, one can choose grace, but it is a choice.

DD: Is it a choice, or isn't there still in fact a completely unforeseeable or imponderable part which determines at a particular moment whether you come down on the side of falling or on the side of grace?

PV: There is death. It's clear that today's bungy jumpers possess a suicidal dimension similar to that of drug abuse; it is very dangerous. In some ways, one can throw oneself into life just as one throws oneself into death; that is one of the great differences between attack and flight. We've just seen an example of flight in Iraq [at the end of the Gulf War] - a rush towards life; we could have seen the inverse, a rush towards death. There's nothing more I can say. It's a problem of choice, and one is free to choose death.

DD: One's own death.

PV: Yes, one's own death.

DD: But what about being brought to the point of choosing the death of others?

PV: That's a completely different discussion.

DD: There's a sort of disproportion …

PV: I think that when one chooses the death of others, one has already chosen one's own. But this is an altogether different matter, we're touching on areas that I'm not willing to develop further; I'm not a moralist.

DD: Nevertheless there's a threshold at which one would like morbid or death-dealing things to be suspended. In the practice of dance and choreography, this possibility of deviating exists, amongst others …

PV: Let me give you an image: the difference between dance and combative arts. One can dance with pride and one can dance with modesty. To my mind, the greatest dancers are not proud. I have seen some great dancers - I won't name names - who were so arrogant, so proud that their work was technically perfect but emotionally dreadful. What does falling with grace mean, if not falling with modesty, dropping into the world with humility? I'm tempted to say that the great dancers I've just mentioned, those that I find so horrifying, are combatants; they have gestures and a way of revolving around themselves that resemble warriors, martial artists; they have a strength, an arrogance, a pride which makes them both perfect and dreadful. I've often felt that in dance.

DD: And yet one gets the impression that some people want to see arrogance. They see more interested in an occupation of space than in a pre-occupation with it. It seems with some choreographers that, rather than being preoccupied with fashioning a space, inhabiting it, knowing how to enter into it, observing its implicit rules, they try to appropriate it - sometimes despite themselves, because they are under great pressures.

PV: Once again there's not much I can say, except that I don't want to see that kind of dance, which has had its day. I saw too much of it in the 1950s and 60s, after the ballets of the Marquis de Cuevas, which I attended regularly; and it dated very quickly, it aged enormously; in some ways, it became a parody of dance. What interests me in contemporary dance is its invention, its innovation, the fact that it is never the same, it's always other. One learned a great deal from those dances on vertical wall surfaces [Trisha Brown], for example.

LL: With regard to the living present, how do traditional systems of representation function? Semiology assumes the absence of the living present in order for a sign to be formulated; are we dealing with something concomitant here? For example, dance notation attempts to trace out its territory, and at the same time reveals its own confusion, constituted as fall, as hollow trough within the territory. In relation to the living present, how can such a constitutive tracing be effected?

PV: It's the difference between the aesthetics of appearance and the aesthetics of disappearance. Despite its informing principles, a lot of older dance inscribed itself in the aesthetics of appearance: "did I bring it down properly?" Dance today is rediscovering the principle of fidelity to the aesthetic of disappearance; its movement shows much more effectively that the body is in flight, that it's falling. So it's reconnected with the arts of representation, like music and cinema; in other words, it's accepted the primacy of the aesthetic of disappearance over the aesthetic of appearance. Remember that in the aesthetic of appearance, what persists is matter; whereas in the aesthetic of disappearance, it is retinal - the 'persistence of vision' - or the persistence of memory, of the mental image. I saw a lot of dance in which appearance was a very important element; it sufficed to see the dancers' costumes to realise that there wasn't anything 'fleeting' there, these were things that encumbered. The aesthetic of disappearance informs and supports our own time; now the body is naked, in the sense we discussed earlier - nakedness as a fall into appearance, or rather a fall into transparence.


The French essayist, philosopher and urbanist Paul Virilio is the author of a number of books, including The Aesthetics of Disappearance, War and Cinema, Vision Machine, The Lost Dimension, Vitesse et politique, La Dromoscopie, ou la lumière de la vitesse, Open Sky, and The Virilio Reader. This interview first published in Laurence Louppe (ed.), Danses tracées: dessins et notations de choréographes, 1991.

This unpublished translation is by David Williams. Thanks to Barry L for his unwitting reminder, and for sending me a copy of a translation I had long since lost but not forgotten.

A rather different translation, by Brian Holmes, is published as 'Gravitational Space' in Laurence Louppe (ed.) (1994), Traces of Dance: drawings and notations of choreographers, Paris: Editions Dis Voir, pp. 35–59.