performing the holes

Inter-views and the flower mind:
an exploded view of Goat Island’s films

‘The challenge is to find a way to let the film perform the holes, the gaps, and the specific absences by which it takes shape’ – Trinh T. Minh-ha

‘Treachery is beautiful if it makes us sing’ – Jean Genet

‘Is that everything? It seemed like he said quite a bit more than that’ – ‘Bob’ (Bill Murray) to a translator in Sofia Coppola’s film Lost In Translation

By way of a preface to what follows, I’d like to begin by quoting at some length from an interview by Elizabeth Dungan with the filmmaker and cultural theorist Trinh Minh-ha. Alluding to the accelerated tempo-rhythms of cinema for instant consumption, and the temporal and perceptual propositions of Zen Buddhism and its paradoxical rhythms, Trinh describes her own approach to cinema as a site for what Matthew Goulish, in another context, has called ‘slow thinking’:

In times of coercive politics and transnational terror, slowing down so as to learn to listen anew is a necessity ... The question is not so much to produce a new image as to provoke, to facilitate, and to solicit a new seeing. Science without conscience, politics without ethics, technology without poetry result in deadly short-circuits. We've had to learn this, not only through disastrous political events, but more intimately through one's own body when it is under stress - the wired-up body that takes months to wind down, to recover, or to find its own rhythm. Non-being is what we use in working with being ... when we start taking care of this utter silence, life speaks to us in a different language, one in which we catch glimpses of stillness in movement and feel movement arising in stillness. Velocity in stillness ... Speed is here not opposed to slowness, for it is in stillness that one may be said to truly find speed. And rather than merely going against speed, stillness contains speed and determines its quality. Speed at its best … is still speed. The speed of a flower mind.

(Trinh T. Minh-ha, 'Still Speed', The Digital Film Event, London & New York: Routledge, 2005, p. 13).

Inter-view

As Gilles Deleuze once pointed out in conversation with Claire Parnet, in French there are two terms for ‘interview’: entrevue and entretien. Entrevue, from the verb entrevoir - to see or encounter one another, to meet. Entretien, from the verb entretenir – to maintain, cultivate, sustain or prolong: a ‘holding together’ that nourishes (‘that’s enter-tain-ment’). Both terms contain a sense of relationality and between-ness (the mutuality and exchange of entre-/inter-), and implicate the senses: of sight (-vue/view) and touch (-tien, from the verb tenir, to hold and to see). Both terms also suggest something uncertain, partial, incompletely or fleetingly or suddenly perceived, the glimpse of a possibility to be discovered in the in-between. So the interview is posited as the possibility of a ‘third space’ of seeing, holding, and tactile feeling, both in the dynamic axis between and in a vector of futurity, a forward looking (dialogue as the possibility of fore-sight). Something happens in this dialogical spacing: the event of a felt sighting and sounding of resonances between.

Perhaps it is possible to conceive of these films as ‘inter-views’, as articulated in the terms above, with or in response to the work of Goat Island. Rather than proposing documentation of live performances, it’s important to recognize the status of the films as creative dialogues or responses - in part inspired and encouraged by the core Goat Island proposition of the ‘creative response’, a generative compositional strategy and disposition returned to repeatedly in the company’s processes of making and teaching. The films are also translations, proceeding through both loyalty (to the spirit, enquiry and affective architectures of the ‘original’ live performances) and betrayal (transformation as becoming, a ‘treachery’ that can ‘make us sing’ what Paul Celan called ‘the singable remains’ – Singbarer Rest - rather than transformation as a failure to reproduce the selfsame). For in these films fragments of performance actions, images, texts, sounds are displaced, transformed and reconfigured in new architectural assemblages within which the spectator is implicated spatially, affectively, and corporeally.

In It’s Aching Like Birds, for example, filmed in the gym building in Chicago where Goat Island used to rehearse, a complex architecture of interrelated spaces is elaborated: the penumbral basketball court, with its subaquatic tonality, and an assortment of weathered attic spaces, lockers and corridors. As spectators we are asked to navigate the relations between spaces, things, materials, feels, and our own associations and memories: of childhood, disjunctions in scale, enclosure/entrapment, falling, cars, family, landscapes, weather, Pina Bausch choreographies, loss, care, the mortality of all things and forms, and so on.

In my uncertain memories of Goat Island’s live work, including It’s An Earthquake In My Heart (2001) from which these materials are sourced and reinvented, I was always more interested in what they did rather than what they meant; or rather, perhaps, my conviction was that their meanings resided precisely in what they did. These intensely physicalised ensemble performances were characterized by a continuous shifting of modes, a dizzying density of intertexts proliferating and unraveling, and meanings skidding, fracturing, realigning and multiplying in excess. And perhaps above all for me, in this vertiginous layering and mutability, a profound sense of moments of stillness arising in movement, and velocity in slowness and suspension. The work created spaces for thought in all of its rhythms; and attention itself became a material to work and at play in these performances.

A further paradox: in Goat Island’s work concept and form generated spaces of affect, sensed intensities that remained mysterious, un-settled, vibrant in the domain of intuition. They offered an exposure that was also a veiling, enabling not ‘readings’ (the drive to decipher, to decode the legible), but a listening to resonant alterity in the image and in representation’s seams, and an attention to multiplicity and an openness to the passage of elsew/here and other/wise. In my memories, within the pieces themselves the precise location and formation of sharp-edged clarities, flarings into visibility, intervals, blurs, holes, absences, entrance and exit points, slide on unstable ground; but rhythms – and the hum of relations of speed and stillness - linger effortlessly, helping to focus, disperse and prolong precisely accented networks of relationships.

*****

Inter-rupt

When Lucy Cash first sent me these films on DVD, she wrote a note on the back of a postcard of Cornelia Parker’s Cold Dark Matter: an exploded view (1991). While watching the films, I kept returning in my mind to this image and my embodied experience of that work in the Tate Gallery, London. Here was a garden shed and its contents blown up for Parker by the British Army, its fragments then collected and reassembled as a proliferative mobile, atomized and suspended. In this way matter is anatomized in terms of its processes of flux and transformation. Material becomes molecular, dynamic, nomadising, its ‘fall-out’ moving imperceptibly and incessantly in a relational field. There were ghost architectures, disappearances, emergences. Inertia was released, fixity animated and refashioned as multiplicity, in process, caught in a liminal meanwhile of both flying and falling. The big bang. Still speed.

*****

Inter-act

In Daynightly They re-school you The Bears Polka – the title itself a montaging of fragments from a Celan poem - the two unedited camera shots place us im/possibly in the wall between two discreet and connected interiors, a classroom and a hallway with a descending staircase in the background. Invited to ‘hold together’ these two antipodal spaces, we are the very locus of montage and passage: an affective, embodied conduit, a connective tissue seeing and feeling between. As an installed work, the film concretised this spatial dynamic, with the two screens placed on either side of the spectators; here, with the DVD on my laptop, my eyes flit between congruent spaces on the screen in a micro-dance of separation and reparation.

In A Last, A Quartet, four screens juxtapose different rhythms and temporalities, as well as diverse modes of performing and spectating. We are invited to navigate routes and connectivities between two interior spaces - the main hall at Pulaski Park in Chicago and a corridor along its outer edge – and two areas of woodland. Minute shifts in filtered light and sound in the fixed exterior shots offer attenuated, contemplative rhythms of change, punctuated by the passage of a chestnut horse led by someone on foot, then an anomalous trotting grey, saddled but lacking a rider. The radical alterity – energetically, rhythmically, ontologically - of the untimely event/advent of an animal. In the main hall, two fencers practice a small desultory duel with swords and helmets, before the camera pans left to focus on the members of the company performing the precisely detailed and modulated choreographies of the ‘dome dance’ from The Lastmaker. The revolve of the camera ultimately describes a circular trajectory paralleling the interior of a dome, a shadow architecture informing the choreography. Meanwhile, in the corridor shot, a range of materials from The Lastmaker are refashioned and montaged into an intricately layered choreography of fragments disposed along a linear axis of passage.

As performance, these materials occur in multiple modes: functional tasks (carrying, moving objects), rehearsed or internalized markings of a performance deferred or to come (a restrained version of Mark Jeffery’s hybrid of St Francis and Larry Grayson; Matthew Goulish’s timed song), detailed choreographies (including that of the hand-held camera in its movements to and fro, and its longing return to the space of light-breeze-flowers-outside through the corridor’s window: this choreography reflects the sense of an embodied consciousness and kinaesthetic intelligence behind the mechanical eye of the lens), a stand-in (the small girl), and various modes of something akin to acting (including Karen Christopher’s uncanny channeling of Lenny Bruce’s last performance, Matthew’s heightened and interrupted recital of a section of Robert Creeley’s poem ‘Bresson’s Movies’), and so on.

The dispersed, relational architecture of the film constructs an assemblage of rhythms and angles of incidence within which there can be no singular, privileged position or mode of viewing. Its cubist, multi-perspectival form and layered temporalities undo the apparent fixity of film, and the protean micro-shifts of the ‘live’ unfold into proliferative differences in the loop of a formally doubled repetition. In addition, circularity and linearity are set in frictional counterpoint in the spaces, the set up and trajectories of individual cameras (two outside shut-off in a fixed position, one rotating in an interrupted 360 degree pan, one moving freely although constrained within a narrow linear architecture), and the use of multiples of single unedited 16mm shots. Linear progression pulses, decays into aleatory forks and curves, and unfolds into becomings through repetition. Singularity becomes multiplicity. The predicament of watchers here gives us agency, and makes of us performers. And throughout the film we encounter, glimpse, sense, remember, overlook, forget in an open field of multiple entrances and exits – a flow meeting other flows in an immersive assemblage of intensities for the activation of memory, intuition, the ‘in-sight’ of connectivity and possibility. To borrow a phrase from Deleuze in The Logic of Sense (1990) in which he endeavours to define ethics, the invitation or challenge is above all ‘not to be unworthy of what happens to us’.

When the red curtains are fully closed – formal bracketings at the beginning, middle and end of A Last, A Quartet – and we are confronted with this cultural sign of ending (the final curtain) and anticipation (the show to come), at moments it’s impossible to tell which side of the curtain we are on. Are we waiting to go on, or to watch what will be revealed? We wait in stillness in the landscape of the inter-, the trans-, the passage, our thoughts traveling at the speed(s) of a flower mind. Meanwhile the sun sinks ever lower behind the trees, and the white dog watches: ‘Keep on walking, keep on walking. To be new in ending is not the only thing to do. White dog, tell me, where is the door?’

Essay published in the catalogue/ booklet accompanying the release of Goat Island: A Last A Quartet, a DVD of four Goat Island films by Lucy Cash; launched at PSi, Utrecht, May 2011. Photo © John W Sisson Jr / Goat Island, 2009

an encounter is perhaps

a meeting with d.b. indos, zagreb

‘The only aim of writing is life, through the combinations which it draws’ (Gilles Deleuze)

‘Every word was once an animal’ (Ralph Waldo Emerson, via Ben Marcus)
_________________________________________

JUST A QUICK
From: David Williams
Sent: Tuesday, April 27 2004
To: Ivana Ivkovic, Una Bauer
Subject: group dynamics, zagreb

Hello Ivana and Una,
I hope all’s well. Just a quick request in relation to my participation in the Zagreb symposium: would it be possible to have some maps of the city please? Also I will be trying to intersect Ric’s workshop walks with animal trajectories: could you let me know if there is a zoo in Zagreb? Is there a natural history museum?
I would like to try to meet someone who has an animal (domestic or not): could be a pet, or could be a horse, pig, chickens, other farm animals – or even something more ‘exotic’ (like a tropical bird). Anyone who interacts with animals. Do you know anyone? Or do you know someone who might know someone? Any email or other contact details would be VERY helpful. Ideally I could get in contact with them before I come to Zagreb, and try to talk with them as the starting point of a possible network of people-and-animals.
Look forward to meeting you both.
With best wishes, David

***

From: Ivana Ivkovic
Sent: Tuesday, April 27, 2004
To: David Williams
Subject: Re: group dynamics, zagreb

Dear David,
We can have a good map of Zagreb waiting for you when you arrive, or would you need it in advance? There is a very good map in pdf with close up possibility here. The ZOO is where it is written Maksimir (large green area in the north-east of the city). The natural history museum is very small, but in the city centre.
I think Una has a cat :-) but I just heard of a friend of a friend who own some snakes yesterday. I am sure we can arrange something. I will ask around.
See you in Zagreb soon, Ivana Ivkovic
________________________________________

I WANTED A FORM

‘I wanted a form as obsolete yet necessary as the weather […] Who is to circumscribe the geography in which thinking may take place?’ (Robertson 2002: 21, 25).

My recent research has drawn on elements of contemporary philosophy and cultural theory in an attempt to explore the mutable parameters of performance, or its heart. It has proposed performative mappings of certain unpredictable, energetic events ‘in proximity of performance’, to borrow Matthew Goulish’s phrase: the shifting point of contact in contact improvisation; fire energetics and their implications for writing about the active vanishings of performance; place as contested and heterotopic; skywritings, a proliferative critical historiography of ways in which skies have been conceived, contested, and practised in contemporary art and socio-politics, and their implications for a performance epistemology; and in particular alterity as productive event in human/animal interactions. In these texts, I have endeavoured to explore more performative modes of writing critical histories. So, for example, I have attempted to write about what resists historiographic inscription - the qualitative, the fugitive, the unpredictable, the overlooked – and in this way minimally ‘to redirect the geometry of attention’, to borrow a phrase from Joan Retallack. Such redirection goes hand in hand with a conviction that one can never recuperate a disappeared world, one can simply try to write (into) a new one, try to find a form for what Paul Celan called the Singbarer Rest ('the singable remains'). The act of writing therefore seeks to ‘do’ or perform something of the moment(um) or affect of movement in absent bodies, or at least to rehearse aspects of the ambiguities, pluralities, displacements and ephemeralities of live performance through the conjunction of diverse modes of writing and voices, intertextual citation, linguistic slippage and fray, a poetics of repetition and accumulation, the tropes of the fragment and the list, and so on. I conceive of this writing as a material discursive practice, in which the page is a public space for enactments or instanciations of critical performance, rather than a matter of formal (or modish) ‘style’, or writing to be consigned to the ‘merely’ creative; to quote Retallack once again, ‘a space to be playful in a purposeful way’.

The evolving trajectory of this work reflects a gradual displacement from the relatively ‘solid ground’ of theatre studies and theatre history towards more fluid and tentative articulations of the shifting ‘lie of the land’ in an expanded field of contemporary performance and its intersections with philosophy. This trajectory marks an unravelling of conviction as to theatre as the singular site of concern, and at the same time a growing fascination with present process, conditions, practices, perceptions ‘in the middle’, and ways of thinking through performance as interactive and ephemeral event. Perhaps these materials also suggest a certain scepticism about particular claims to knowledge and its ‘finishability’, and, to borrow Jean-François Lyotard’s terms, a desire to become a ‘philosopher’ rather than an ‘expert’ (Lyotard 1984: xxv), to know how not to know with interrogative momentum, to travel between different modes of knowing (and not-knowing) in a relational field.

‘Ordinary human beings do not like mystery since you cannot put a bridle on it, and therefore, in general they exclude it, they repress it, they eliminate it – and it’s settled. But if on the contrary one remains open and susceptible to all the phenomena of overflowing, beginning with natural phenomena, one discovers the immense landscape of the trans-, of the passage. Which does not mean that everything will be adrift, our thinking, our choices, etc. But it means that the factor of instability, the factor of uncertainty, or what Derrida calls the undecidable, is indissociable from human life. This ought to oblige us to have an attitude that is at once rigorous and tolerant and doubly so on each side: all the more rigorous than open, all the more demanding since it must lead to openness, leave passage: all the more mobile and rapid as the ground will always give way, always. A thought which leads to what is the element of writing: the necessity of only being the citizen of an extremely inappropriable unmasterable country or ground’ (Hélène Cixous in Cixous & Calle-Gruber 1997: 51-2).

When I was invited to participate in the Group Dynamics symposium in Zagreb in May 2004, feeling somewhat lost, my initial questions related to orientation and connectivity, and to a desire to try to register traces of the unmapped and the ephemeral: animal encounters and trajectories, secret places, small acts of kindness, dreams of else/w/here and other/wise. In what ways might one ‘collaborate’ in a city never visited before, a city where one doesn’t know anyone, in a language one doesn’t speak? What kinds of meetings are possible? Given how easy it would be to get lost, what might one find? I knew I wanted to remain connected to the symposium and at the same time fall out of it into this unfamiliar city. I knew I wanted to allow the occasion for the unforeseen by giving over some degree of agency in the city, through encounters with others (a provisional micro-version of ‘group dynamics’) and through a process of drift. A ‘purposeful drifting’ that requires patience, an attentiveness to detail, to multiplicities and connectivities. ‘The multiple must be made’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1987: 6). Knowingly not knowing what it is ‘about’ at the outset, what is being looked for, just staying close to whatever rule/game/attempt structures are in operation, or whatever ‘desire paths’ open up, and attending to figures and trajectories and repetitions and alliances as they occur, listening actively, letting them take shape in a relational space. Tracking something emergent, trying to go for the ride, knowing it will always be a few necks ahead of the rider. These shapes and patterns may be fictional (‘made things’), but the ways in which we represent them can have a variety of functions: aesthetic, critical, ethical, affective, epistemological, historiographic. And as Tim Etchells writes in Certain Fragments, it’s not always a matter of ‘describing a situation so much as placing the reader in one’ (Etchells 1999: 23).

'What the map cuts up, the story cuts across’, wrote de Certeau (1984: 129). Location and identity are produced as much through narration as through what already exists; they are more to do with doing than knowing. Perhaps this was an opportunity to rehearse and play-fully refashion some fragments of those heterogeneous personal mappings that we are continuously making up and over, and out of which we constitute our-‘selves’. So, a kind of fluid performative ‘auto-topography’ that could create provisional senses of self and of space and place (rather than the ‘self’ or the ‘world’ occurring preformed, as if they were pre-existent entities rubbing up against each other). Space, time, self as ‘a multiple foldable diversity’ (Michel Serres), a field of flows and intensities: spacing, timing, selfing. Here a dynamically spatialised (and fictionalised) self-in-process can perhaps fray just a little the dualist territorial imaginaries of inside and outside, of self-identity in opposition to alterity. So, a philosophy and practice of passage, rather than of ground or territory. If the continuity of identity is secured through movement and the capacity to change, rather than the ability to cling to what is already established, then my interest here was to explore simple strategies for loosening the grip of the logics of mastery and opening towards an engagement with the transitional passages, networks and inter-subjective flows of an ‘animal geography’.

Certain core questions recur throughout this work: How might one interact with another whose difference is recognised as an active event, rather than a failure of plenitude? What are the productive qualities of alterity? In what ways might one work (in) an existential in-between and perceive other-wise? How, in Jean-Luc Nancy’s terms, might one ‘think on the limit’ (Nancy 1997:70) and ex-pose oneself to the event/advent of meaning? In other words, if the ‘animal’ comprises a constitutive outside of the ‘human’, (how) can this limit-horizon be experienced as ‘not that at which something stops but [...] that from which something begins its presencing’ (Heidegger 1971:154)?
_________________________________________

INTERRUPTION 1

‘There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are the things we don’t know we don’t know’ (Zizek 2004: 9).

I’m quoting the words of that rather slippery philosopher/cartographer of modes of knowing, former US Secretary of State for Defence Donald Rumsfeld. As Slavoj Zizek points out in his book Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, Rumsfeld forgot to add a crucial fourth term – the ‘unknown knowns’, the things we do not know that we know – in other words, very precisely the unconscious, the ‘knowledge which does not know itself’ – ‘the disavowed beliefs and suppositions we are not even aware of adhering to ourselves’ (ibid: 10). These can’t be controlled, because we’re unaware of their very existence. Perhaps attentive immersion in certain activities – talking, writing, playing, drifting, dreaming, the event of encountering an-other – can generate frictions and short-circuits to unsettle or jolt them, allow us to glimpse their contours out of our peripheral vision. Perhaps one can learn how not to know what one is doing and still keep on doing it, knowing that the unconscious will always make a fool of the expert. The ground will always give way.
________________________________________

I JUST REMEMBERED

From: Una Bauer
Sent: Tuesday, April 27, 2004
To: David Williams
Subject: Re: group dynamics, zagreb

Dear David,
Hi again, I just remembered something that was sort of, right in front of my nose. There is this wonderful artist Damir Bartol Indos working and living in Zagreb, and he has a dog, and is, in general, very much interested in animal behaviour (doing his new piece of wolfs/dogs). He would be a great person to talk to – I already called him to tell him you might be contacting him … I realised most people I know are into cats, but domestic cats that don’t leave their houses, I don’t know if that’s a problem. JT is a friend of mine who has 2 cats … and then there is also a good friend MS, who is also very much into cats – just talked to her – she would also like to be part of what you are doing
Is that ok for the beginning?
Best, Una
p.s. by the way, I live very close to the zoo … if not in one.

***

From: kugla
Sent: Friday, April 30, 2004
To: David Williams
Subject: RE: re. visit to Zagreb

dear david
must be tuesday or friday, we shall use school bus. i have phone from laguna, i am every day in contact with una. my phone-mobile is …
see you, dbi
_______________________________________

AN ENCOUNTER IS PERHAPS: INDOS

‘An encounter is perhaps the same thing as becoming […] an effect, a zigzag, something which passes or happens between two […] intermezzi, as sources of creation’ (Deleuze & Parnet 1987: 6, 28)

It’s just before dawn on a Friday morning in early May, and I take a tram across Zagreb to a meeting with Croatian performance maker Damir Bartol Indos. People heading to or from work, the murmur of the city waking up, and my head still thick with sleep. The tram takes me east along Ilica through the city centre at Trg bana Jelacica, with its towering equestrian statue and its flapping explosions of pigeons, and out past the twin temples of specular mythologising and aestheticising - the zoo and the glass folly of the Dynamo Zagreb stadium, home of the Bad Blue Boys - towards the terminal point of tram line 12. All I know is that I have to look out for ‘a big man with a small dog: you can’t miss him’. In the preceding days, whenever I’ve mentioned to local people that I will meet Indos, who has a reputation as a performance maker in Croatia, some reactions suggest that he is perceived as something of an anomaly, someone on the ‘wilder’ edges of the contemporary Croatian performance scene; almost all reactions convey a sense of respect and a certain wariness, as if I don’t really look as though I know what I’m getting myself into (and I don’t). He is to be taken seriously, it’s clear. As I wipe the sleep from my eyes, and try to unfold into the day, it feels a little like a test of my resolve, this request to meet so early and so far away. And it feels like a falling off the map.

As the tram trundles along, I look in my notebook at some preparatory fragments I’ve listed about wolves, two of which now stand out: an old Italian good luck saying, In bocca al lupo! (Into the jaws of the wolf!); and the fact that Dante placed those who had committed the ‘sins of the wolf’ in the eighth circle of hell in his Inferno - seducers, sorcerers, hypocrites, thieves – I wonder what version of ‘wolf’ is being constituted there ... And I look at an image of the Earth sent to me by my friend Sue, taken from the Challenger space shuttle shortly before it broke up on re-entry in the skies over Texas: at the cusp of night and day ('between dog and wolf', as is said in French), a beginning and an end, constellations of lights in West Africa and central Europe, Greenland and Iceland adrift like clouds in the dawn sky …

When the tram eventually comes to a stop around 5.30, I see big man and little dog on the other side of the road, and wave, delighted they are there. We shake hands, and Indos introduces me to Indi, the former street dog named after Indiana Jones. The bond between Indos and Indi is self-evident, and the dog creates an instant connectivity for us two men. Both interested in philosophy, performance, animals; both born in the same year, thousands of miles apart in opposite hemispheres. I am suddenly fully awake and we head off through the cold morning air.

As the sun comes up, we walk the dog in the grounds of a local school for more than an hour. Round and round a paving circle, through the grass, past the graffiti on the playground walls: a swastika and a scrawled ‘fuck off’ in amongst the indecipherable tags. Man and dog as machinic assemblage, ‘the shift of a centre of gravity along an abstract line’. As we walk, Indos tells me about Indi’s earlier life as a stray, about the forthcoming performance of Man-Wolf (now less than a week from its opening) and past projects with his company DB Indos: House of Extreme Music Theatre (HEMT), about his interest in animals, the friend of a friend who lives in Zagreb with two wolves, his horror at the condition in which some animals are kept at the zoo, the story of him cycling past Franjo Tudman’s unfinished folly of a football stadium shouting ‘You are fucking crazy!’... At one point, he stops and says, ‘I will talk for two hours about me: and then you will talk about you’ … Later I tell him a little about Donna Haraway’s Companion Species Manifesto (which I have brought with me to Zagreb), about Deleuze (he’s heard of him, but not read anything), in particular the notion of becoming-animal and his critique of Freud’s ‘Wolfman’, as well as my interest in the animal discourses of performance, criminality and social conflict ... And I tell him about Antoine Yates who lived with a fully-grown 350 kg tiger in his Harlem apartment until he was badly bitten while trying to protect a stray cat he’d adopted – he pulled the tiger’s tail when it attacked the smaller cat, and it turned on him and sank its teeth into his thigh (or did I tell that to someone else in Zagreb? I was brim full of animal stories in Zagreb, a whole mob inside me, in pursuit of what?) …

The stuttering meander of our conversation is continually (and pleasantly) interrupted by Indi and his encounters with other dogs and their owners: always a formal and polite introduction by Indos of the ‘English man with an interest in dogs’, and then easy exchange around the dogs as they play. Lola, recovering from sickness and foolishly friendly; Koya, who has had gastritis and colitis, with her young maths teacher owner on a bike. Indi is delighted at every meeting. When no other dogs are in sight, Indos pretends he can see someone coming and calls out other dog names to Indi; the dog stops still, ears cocked, and scans the park for the newcomer, then realises it’s a game, and bounds off again. ‘And if I see a dog running, it is just as much the run that is dogging’ (Bataille) … Then we drop Indi home, Indos organises breakfast for his parents and daughter, before we join her on the school bus that will take us across town to the Waldorf/Steiner School near Novi Zagreb. Every day for the past seven years Indos has worked as a volunteer warden accompanying his daughter and other kids on their way to and from school; he makes this journey twice a day, and everyone knows him. He says this is ‘soul-work’. At the school, there are ducks in a pen, and a rabbit struggling in the arms of a young girl. I ask if I can take a photograph, and girl and rabbit are momentarily still. Bobo, a teacher at the school, talks me through the year 4 introduction to animals through looking at morphological variations; he shows me exquisite pastel drawings of a human, an octopus, a mouse, an eagle. Through illustrations of the relations between form and function, the Steiner pedagogy invites a recognition of both connection and difference. Meanwhile, Indos is collecting bottles of what he calls ‘apple acid’ for his personal use: home-made cider or juice …

He has bought sandwiches and some water, and, skirting a dead dog in the middle of our path, we eat our breakfast as we walk towards a vast rubbish tip a mile or so from the school, the site of Zagreb’s detritus since the Second World War. Indos calls it ‘the mountain’: an apocalyptic place, as if something terrible has happened’, he says. The repressed and abandoned of the city, its waste trundling out here in incessant convoys of trucks. A chaotic archive of the broken, the unwanted, the redundant, the forgotten: a monumental collection of fragments, shards of memory, the residual traces of the city’s discarded pasts. A fleet of earth movers scurry across the slopes of this wasteland, burying the most decayed material beneath a thin layer of soil. Layered temporalities and rhythms: the trucks, countless seagulls wheeling overhead, some huge pigs feeding on the flank of the hill, the invisible and attenuated processes of decay. ‘They plant grass, trees: in winter it is perfect for snowboarding’, Indos says with a wry smile, then: ‘It makes something conflicted inside me’. Bird song and gull cries as the trucks rumble. He tells me about methane build-ups within this mass of refuse, how some years ago a huge explosion scattered rubbish far and wide across the Southern suburbs of the city. We talk about the toxic stench that drifts across his daughter’s school and on to the concrete blocks of Novi Zagreb; about the leaching of toxins from the tip into the market gardens at its edges and into the River Sava. Then he tells me of his desire to make a performance here, and points to a spot high on a crest. I imagine him dancing like Tatsumi Hijikata, almost naked in a sea of trash, peering through his glasses at the birds and the other mountains on the horizon behind the city.

As we walk towards the concrete housing projects of Novi Zagreb en route to Indos’s studio, we pause to watch a chicken and a cat sharing a piece of bread on the street. The gulls circle overhead ‘like shoals of fish, like water’, says Indos: a multiplicity and a singularity, a molecular aggregate. Then, with a laugh: ‘That is group dynamics – many in one! That’s the real symposium, up there!’ The conference of the birds. ____________________________________

From: Una Bauer
Sent: Thursday, April 29, 2004
To: David Williams
Subject: a poodle

Here is another guy who wants to talk to you: Adam S – a musician, he has a poodle
Best, Una
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INTERRUPTION 2

‘A flight of screaming birds, a school of herring tearing through the water like a silken sheet, a cloud of chirping crickets, a booming whirlwind of mosquitos … crowds, packs, hordes on the move, and filling with their clamor, space; Leibniz called them aggregates, these objects, sets […] Sea, forest, rumor, noise, society, life, works and days, all common multiples; we can hardly say they are objects, yet require a new way of thinking. I’m trying to think the multiple as such, to let it waft along without arresting it through unity, to let it go, as it is, at its own pace. A thousand slack algae at the bottom of the sea’ (Serres 1995: 2, 6).
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From: Una Bauer
Sent: Friday, April 30, 2004
To: David Williams
Subject: animal thing again

David,
What do you think about a child taking part in your animal thing? I thought of M’s daughter who is 8 or so, and she has a turtle? I haven’t asked M about it, but perhaps …
Una
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DO YOU KNOW WHICH

Do you know which animal you are in the process of becoming and in particular what is becoming in you […] a whole mob inside you in pursuit of what … ? (Deleuze & Parnet 1987: 76).

It’s not long after 9.00 a.m., and we walk along a muddy path towards Indos’s studio, at the back of a semi-derelict club once trashed by skinheads, Indos tells me, for showing communist films. ‘Skinheads are not political enough, they wear costumes not uniforms’. This leads him into a discussion of Gandhi’s philosophy of ahimsa, and of the paradoxes of non-violent protest: ‘perfect for the police or the army, but maybe one must fight with skinheads’. When we walk around the side of the club towards the work space, Indos forewarns me: ‘no toilet, no heating’. At Indos’s invitation, I relieve myself in the waste ground at the back as he opens up and prepares; I smoke a cigarette, write some notes. And some mental connection is tentatively made between Indos, this context on the margins and Brian Massumi’s resistant ‘strategies for becoming’: 1. Stop the world (becoming begins with an inhibition); 2. Cherish derelict spaces (holes in habit, cracks in the existing order); 3. Study camouflage (seeming to be ‘what you are’ in order to ‘pass on the inside’); 4. Sidle and straddle (when in doubt, sidestep, remain marginal: move sideways through the cracks towards ‘the place of invention’, the dynamic in-between of transformational encounter); 5. Come out (‘what one comes out of is identity’) … (Massumi 1992: 103-6).

Inside, a tiny semi-industrial space, perhaps a garage originally. It’s a minefield to negotiate a route across the playing area towards some simple raked seating, only 3 or 4 rows. It looks like the wreckage of some Constructivist scenography; the space is covered with wooden industrial palettes, dozens of car tyres scattered randomly or in piles, loose bits of timber and small tree branches, scraps of paper, two ancient reel-to-reel tape machines and speaker system. Indos fumbles with his glasses, puts them on in order to tinker around and then cue the sound for the rehearsal of Man-Wolf. He hands me a package of photocopied materials, which will be distributed to spectators in this ‘anti-symposium’, as Indos describes it with a smile. The bundle of papers includes a contextualising programme note in Croatian and English, listing performers, textual and audio sources, and offering a rather elliptical account of the event-to-come: ‘Performers establish their otherness using tools, shaping beauty, establish their otherness from their animal Ur-forms using psychoanalysis, transcend to a state in which they pose questions, arrive to conclusions about the uniqueness of various forms of existing and perishing’. As well as trade journal descriptions of wooden palettes and torches (both of which are to be used in the ‘lecture/demonstration’ performance, the programme note informs us, ‘in order to build a stage object: wolf territory’), here are also: cartographic representations of ‘howling sites’ (the estimated range of audibility of individual wolf cries in a territory in Minnesota); an analytical zoological text entitled ‘Use of faeces for scent marking in Iberian wolves (Canis lupus)’ – Indos pronounces faeces ‘fakes’, and completely confuses me for a moment; materials about social order, expression and communication in wolf packs, including texts with line drawings about wolves’ facial expressions (‘high ranking’, ‘anxiety’, threat’, ‘suspicion’), about wolves’ tails as indicators of mood and status, about the presentation-withdrawal of the ‘anal parts’, and a very graphic text called ‘AND FAMILY LIFE’ describing vulpine coitus, tying and ejaculation. Finally, there is an extract from Freud’s case study of the ‘Wolfman’ (‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis’, 1918), including the Wolfman’s well-known dream.

Before I have really had any time to read this material, Indos begins to set the scene as if this were a performance for an audience of one, then proceeds to talk and run through it on his own. He runs it in sequence, demonstrating certain episodes with his own actions and those of the other (absent) performers, at times enacted in a walk-through shorthand, with fill descriptions as he locates with a gesture where specific events will take place, at times performed at a massively heightened level of intensity and energy. The shift between these modes is often almost instantaneous, the jar of sudden gear-shift quite bewildering; Indos has that disarming capacity to transform himself utterly in a split second from quiet practical description to embodied actions and vocalisations of a blowtorch intensity, a white-hot flaring into appearance, a teetering dance of borderline possession; it’s like flicking a switch between Brechtian guide and Artaudian martyr signalling through the flames. A long circling clenched dance with a song that gradually evolves into wolf-like howls. A rolling contorted action on top of a circle of wood balanced precariously on an uneven pile of tyres: ‘the surface is alive’, he remarks. A sequence in ‘what we call English gibberish’ – a hilarious nonsense parody of a chewing-gum American draaaawl. These actions interspersed with taped sound of a wolf keening, a layered wolf chorale, a crackly recording of Yvette Gilbert singing in French about a woman walking along the street followed by the dogs she attracts, extracts from an audio-lecture by wolf zoologist Fred Harrington describing his encounters with timber wolves, a variety of bird song samples and a frog …

As the sounds play, Indos is entranced, attentive, his gaze fixed into the distance. I feel at ease with the tape material somehow, and almost drop off for a moment; Indos doesn’t notice. But as my head snaps up again, I find myself once more astonished at this 47-year-old man-child-performer-philosopher-giant- old-soul playing and mapping and writhing and howling and singing in a deserted workshop, the door wide open framing a patch of early morning waste ground. I have never witnessed anything quite like this in my life. As an event, it unseats me, this something-taking-place, this someone-going-through-something. A haecceity, inseparable from an hour, a season, an atmosphere, an air, a life ... This is a landscape of the trans-, of passage. Like fire, Indos is a ‘shaking up of myriads’ (Serres 1995: 103). At the end, we sit in unembarrassed silence for a few minutes, drops of sweat falling from Indos’s nose, then he jumps up to pack things away, locks up, and once more we walk, this time at high speed, towards the city. I laugh as he pulls out one final sandwich, wrapped in foil and a paper serviette with a cartoon fluffy sheep on it: ‘the most better sandwich last!’ We pass a man training an alsatian on the grass between streaming lines of traffic, a flower memorial on the verge where some accident has occurred, and it begins to rain softly …
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INTERRUPTION 3

'The animal might interrupt writing, as if demanding something of us, but writing can’t catch the animal, though it tries. You’d think a quotation might pin it down. A quotation, after all, like an animal, is a literalism. And like an animal, according to Benjamin, quotation is a mode of interruption. ‘To quote a text involves an interruption of its context’. The writing that allows itself to be interrupted by the animal is the writing that understands the complications of context, offering itself as fractured, scattered, corrupt, misdirected, multiple, elsewhere, other. The writing that would pay respect to the animal acknowledges the animal, gives place to the animal. Except even these are metaphors, and the animal is too literal to give itself up like that. That is its dignity, ‘to be shaped, sir, like itself, and it is as broad as it hath breadth: it is just so high as it is, and moves with its own organs: it lives by that which nourisheth it, and the elements once out of it, it transmigrates’ [Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale]. Which is to say, the animal is like nothing on earth. Writing, it appears, can barely cope. Even if the animal can be trained it cannot be scripted’ (Kear and Kelleher 200: 88).

***

With special thanks to Una Bauer, Ivana Ivkovic, Ric Allsopp, Alan Read, Adrian Heathfield, and in particular Indos for his great generosity: In bocca al lupo!


References
Allsopp, Ric (1999). ‘Performance Writing’, Performing Arts Journal no. 61, 21:1, January, 76-9
Bataille, Georges (ed.) (1995). Encyclopaedia Acephalica: Critical Dictionary, and Related Texts, trans. Iain White, London: Atlas Press
Butler, Judith (1993). Bodies that Matter, London: Routledge
Certeau, Michel de (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall, Berkeley: University of California Press
Cixous, Hélène in Cixous & Calle-Gruber, Mireille (1997). Rootprints: Memory and Life- Writing, trans. Eric Prenowitz, London: Routledge
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix (1987). A Thousand Plateaux: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
Deleuze, Gilles and Parnet, Claire (1987). Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson & Barbara Habberjam, London: Athlone Press
Etchells, Tim. Certain Fragments: Contemporary Performance and Forced Entertainment, London: Routledge
Haraway, Donna (2003). The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness, Chicago, Ill.: Prickly Paradigm Press
Heidegger, Martin (1971). Poetry, Language, Thought, New York: Harper and Row
Kear, Adrian and Kelleher, Joe (2000). ‘The Wolf-Man’, Performance Research 5:2 (‘On Animals’), Summer, 82-91
Lyotard, Jean-François (1984). The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoffrey Bennington & Brian Massumi, Manchester: Manchester University Press
Lyotard, Jean-François (1991). The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington & Rachel Bowlby, Cambridge: Polity Press
Massumi, Brian (1992). A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press
Nancy, Jean-Luc (1997). The Gravity of Thought, New Jersey: Humanities Press
Pollock, Della (1998). ‘Performing writing’, in Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane (eds), The Ends of Performance, New York: New York University Press, 73-103
Robertson, Lisa (2002). ‘How Pastoral: A Manifesto’, in Mark Wallace & Steven Marks (eds), Telling it Slant: Avant-Garde Poetics of the 1990s, Tuscaloosa, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 21-6
Serres, Michel (1995). Genesis, trans. Geneviève James & James Nielson, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press
Schmidt, Natalie Crohn (1990). ‘Theorizing about performance: why now?’, New Theatre Quarterly 7:23, 231-4
Sinclair, Iain (1997). Lights out for the Territory, London: Granta Books
Zizek, Slavoj (2004). Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, London & New York: Verso
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Originally published as 'An encounter is perhaps: a meeting with DB Indos, Zagreb 2004' in Frakcija (Croatia), no. 36, October 2005, pp. 18-35. Text published in English & Croatian - © David Williams/Frakcija

anima(l) mundi: bartabas

With the arrival of Bartabas to perform The Centaur and the Animal at Sadler's Wells this week, in collaboration with the Butoh practitioner Ko Murobushi and four horses, I'm pasting below some extracts from an article I wrote over 10 years ago. An account of some of the exquisite encounter-events Bartabas staged with horses in the work of his Paris-based company Théâtre Zingaro, and in particular in his training.
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‘The construction of the human is a differential operation that produces the more and the less “human”, the inhuman, the humanly unthinkable. These excluded sites come to bound the “human” as its constitutive outside, and to haunt those boundaries as the persistent possibility of their disruption and rearticulation’ (Butler 1993: 8).

In this account of aspects of the equestrian performances of Théâtre Zingaro, my primary concerns are with the nature of animal ‘performance’ and the possibility of an inter-species inter-subjectivity. Bartabas’s encounters with horse-performers seem to actualise certain core elements of the philosophical discourses of contemporary theorists of alterity and ethics. They rehearse, in the fire of the moment each time a-new a-gain, a constellation of questions relating to identity and difference, seeming and doing, being and the infinite works-in-progress that becomings make of identities. How might one interact with another whose difference is recognised as an active event, rather than a failure of plenitude? What are the productive qualities of alterity? In what ways might one work (in) an existential in-between and perceive other-wise? How, in Jean-Luc Nancy’s terms, might one ‘think on the limit’ (Nancy 1997:70) and ex-pose oneself to the event/advent of meaning? In other words, if the ‘animal’ comprises a constitutive outside of the ‘human’, (how) can this limit-horizon be experienced as ‘not that at which something stops but [...] that from which something begins its presencing’ (Heidegger 1971:154)?

[...]

HORSE SENSE

‘[Man] was bound to fear the eye of the animal as the carrier of a view of himself over which he had no control’ (Berger 1984:99. Italics in original)

Animals - ‘trapped in a place of endless misrecognition’, like all of patriarchal humanism’s others - have often been defined in terms of lack: of reason, memory, imagination, free will, conscience, language, and so on. Early Christian philosophers, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hegel and others constructed hierarchies of the senses, categorised according to degrees of ‘humanity’ and ‘animality’. They tell us nothing about the particularities and differences of animal senses and perception; they homogenise ‘animals’, and privilege human vision and its connections with the cogito (eye/I) above all else. Horses, for example, are often homogenised as a species, despite the enormous diversity of forms and types of equus caballus, and the very particular qualities of individual horses; and, like ballet dancers, their bodies are often defined in relation to an abstract ideal (‘conformation’). Furthermore, the mapping of an animal’s body, the naming of many of its constituent parts, tends to be effected through an anthropomorphic lens. For example, the ‘points’ of a horse include forelock, jowls, throat, shoulders, breast, elbows, forearms, knees, heels, belly. The Empire of the Selfsame.

But what can a horse’s body do? Let’s take two examples.

Firstly, horses are often homogenised as a species, despite the enormous array of forms and types of equus caballus, and the particular qualities of individual horses; and, like ballet dancers, their bodies are often defined in relation to an abstract ideal (‘conformation’). The Akhal-Teke, a golden-sheened desert horse from Turkmenistan highly prized by desert nomads, is all ‘wrong’ in terms of this ideal; in addition to its notorious disdain for humans, its back is too long, its hind legs marred by sickle hocks and lacking the ‘second thigh’ so valued by Western riders, its chest too narrow, its rib cage too shallow, its withers too high, its head held impossibly high ‘above the bit’, i.e. above the level of the rider’s hands, and therefore ‘uncontrollable’. In (classical Western) theory, an Akhal-Teke should be unrideable. Yet as a long-distance endurance horse, its resilience remains unparallelled. In 1935, in a journey lasting 84 days Akhal-Tekes were ridden from Ashkhabad to Moscow, a distance of over 4,000 kms., almost 1,000 of which was over desert; they covered 400 kms. through the arid Karakoum in just three days. The Olympic gold medal winner for dressage in Rome in 1960, a stallion called Absent, was an Akhal-Teke. At present, there are Akhal-Teke performers in Bartabas’s ‘equestrian operas’ with Théâtre Zingaro (see below).

Secondly, a horse’s ‘surplus of seeing’ (Bakhtin) is humanly unthinkable. Its eyes are the largest of any land mammal. Set laterally on the head, they have a field of vision of approximately 357 degrees, of which only about 60 degrees frontally are binocular. A horse holding its head level has two narrow blind spots: one directly behind its rump, one a few centimetres directly in front of its nose. In a horse’s eyes, active receptivity and blindness coexist. The placement of the eyes permits a panoramic view in the horizontal plane of vision; but with only limited accommodation in its lenses (about 1/5th the diopters of human eyes), a horse has restricted focusing ability. Its relatively fixed focal length is set at some distance, where it has a high degree of visual acuity - but without a fovea (enabling the tight, ‘grasping’ area of focus in human vision), a horse’s vision remains planar, largely undifferentiated: i.e. peripheral throughout the panoramic vista, tactile. Like many mammals, horses are dichromates; they have red-blue colour vision, analogous to colour-blindness in humans. Like many mammals, and unlike most humans, however, they have excellent night vision.

[…]

ANIMA(L) MUNDI: BARTABAS AND THÉÂTRE ZINGARO 

‘In the eyes of a horse, sometimes I have even thought I’ve seen the primitive beauty of a world before the arrival of human beings’ (Bartabas in Pascaud 1997: 34)

‘Heaven and earth are one finger: all things are one horse’ (Chuang Tzu in Breytenbach 1990: 9)

Over the past fifteen years, Thèâtre Zingaro have created six different productions: three versions of Cabaret Équestre (1984-90), Opéra Équestre (1991-3), Chimère (1994-6), and Éclipse (1997-99), as well as two feature films, Mazeppa and Chamane. A new performance, Triptyk, opens in March 2000 in Amsterdam. This body of work is characterised by an aesthetic heterogeneity and the centrality of animal-performers, particularly horses; it has its roots in new circus, street theatre, impulse-based dance forms (e.g. contact), the corrida and, above all, Spanish and Portuguese ‘high school’ dressage forms (e.g. in the teachings of rider-philosopher Nuno Oliveira). However, although company director, trainer and performer Bartabas is an écuyer of exquisite finesse, his equestrian project is minoritarian; he is a foreigner in his own tongue. Here the machinic assemblage of classical dressage ‘stutters’ (repetition) and ‘stammers’ (suspension), it frays and unravels to produce im-possible lines of flight. So, for example, Bartabas is only the second known rider this century, after James Fillis, to have realised the (‘unnatural’) reverse canter:

‘The way in which I work in dressage is very particular. I attempt to use the least possible physical force. What I do has almost nothing to do with classical dressage, which uses all sorts of aids, the hands, the legs. My approach relates to an old French training tradition which was then taken up by the Portuguese. The horse stands freely, supports himself; he is very well balanced. Physical strength has no role to play at all. Everything is based on sensation’ (Bartabas in Eyquem & Shungu 1997:39).

Each of the Zingaro productions has been conceived scenographically and musically in terms of a particular horse-/traveller-culture. The company’s stylistic trajectory has traced an itinerary from quasi-Orientalist spectacle to increasing sobriety in performances which have drawn in turn on the cultures of Mitteleuropan gypsies, Berber and Caucasian nomads, Rajasthani itinerant musicians, Korean shamanism and, most recently in Triptyk, a conjunction between the music of Stravinsky, Boulez and the Keralan martial art kalarippayyatt. Above all, Bartabas structures every show - and every day at their communal base in Aubervilliers, north-east of Paris - around the primacy of encounters with horses. As well as core performers, the horses constitute a kind of anima(l) mundi, the cornerstone of a way of life for these contemporary nomads:

‘Horses have taught me everything. It is said [originally by the French natural historian Buffon] that ‘the horse is man’s most noble conquest’, but I don’t agree at all. Man is the horse’s most noble conquest. For a horse is a mirror; it reflects back at us our mistakes and our moods. Every horse must be approached in a different way, just like people, and sometimes the encounter is completely disarming. Horses have taught me that there are no absolute rules. Nothing is ever finally acquired with them, and nothing ever happens as predicted. Working with horses means knowing how to adapt. [...] Loving horses and living with them also means being chained to them, like children. It’s not enough just to ride them, you have to look after them, care for them, stay vigilant; they didn’t choose to be there, we chose for them. Horses have also taught me that there’s a vast world between the dream one has and what one manages to do. But the greater the richness at the outset, the greater what remains at the end. At that stage, the relationship is no longer physical but psychic; one thinks of a movement and the horse does it. Sometimes the horse only traces the outline of the movement desired, and you must reward him for that, for he will have understood the work’s essence. Time spent with a horse is never time wasted; it’s fundamental, it’s the soul. One mustn’t let oneself be caught in the dissipations and dispersals that characterise our flawed lives at this century’s end. One mustn’t give in to comfort’ (Bartabas in Ciupa 1997:79).

But in what ways do (the) animals ‘perform’?

CLEVER HANS 

‘The essential concern at the heart of all our performances is the relationship between people and horses. The theatrical subject is only a pretext’ (Bartabas in Eyquem & Shungu 1997: 37).

‘The animal eye perceives and reacts to the animal image in the other’ (James Hillman in Moore 1989:68-9) 

In 1904, a retired Berlin schoolteacher called Wilhelm von Osten attracted international attention when he produced public ‘evidence’ that a stallion, Clever Hans, was able to communicate ‘verbally’ and execute relatively complex mathematical, temporal and musical calculations; it was claimed, for example, that Hans could identify coins and musical scores, and answer questions about history, politics and geography. Using a blackboard, von Osten believed he had taught the horse a simple system correlating numbers with individual letters of the alphabet. Hans would tap a number on a board with his hoof to produce letters (1 tap = a, 2 taps = b etc.), then words, sentences, ‘thoughts’; he would also nod or shake his head in response to questions. Every correct answer elicited a sugar-cube reward. The Prussian Academy of Sciences was understandably skeptical, and set up a commission to explore these claims of inter-species communication. Ultimately their research revealed that von Osten was unconsciously cueing the horse through subtle corporeal micro-tensions and releases, powerful catalytic triggers for the animal of which the human-trainer was not even aware. Hans was indeed sufficiently clever (and familiar with von Osten) to work out that if he stopped the tapping of his hoof at the point when von Osten relaxed, he would be rewarded.

Since that time, Clever Hans has been returned to repeatedly by animal behaviourists, psychologists and others as both cautionary tale and proof of the restricted parameters of animal ideation, and of the deep-seated projections and assimilationist tendencies of an anthropomorphism that yearns, like Dr Doolittle, to ‘speak with the animals’. The so-called ‘Clever Hans phenomenon’, they suggest, underlines the fact that an animal’s actions are little more than imprinted behavioural patternings (e.g. causal reward-based exchanges) or genetically hard-wired manifestations of instinctive response patterns (e.g. dominance/ submission, flight/fight). But isn’t the give-and-take of any dyad, human and/or animal, marked to some degree by aspects of this phenomenon? And, to borrow the title of a Peggy Lee song, is that all there is? For Clever Hans also signals the humanly unthinkable sensitivity of animal perceptions in terms of an ability to apprehend the micro-details of expression, mood, shifts in skeleto-muscular tension, thermal skin patterning, olfaction, and so on. Oskar Pfungst, a scientist who published his study of Hans in 1907, concluded that the horse, when compared with his critics, was in reality a ‘superior observer’ (Hediger 1981:15). It seems an animal’s ‘dumbness’ is really the measure of our ‘deafness’.

Similarly, Bartabas contends that:‘A horse’s perception of the real is so much finer than our’s. If intelligence is sensitivity to what is around us, then horses are far more subtle than us. The more one knows, the less one feels’ (Bartabas in Pascaud 1997).

For Bartabas, human-horse interactions represent the possibility of a conjunction of two very different ontologies and epistemologies - one sensory-motor-perceptual, the other intellectual - and, in riding, the temporary creation of a third composite assemblage much greater than the sum of its parts: equestrianism as a becoming-centaur for both rider and horse (2):

‘A horse perceives us on an internal level, that’s his great strength. All the more so if you work with him every day. He feels your internal energy. Your moods, your joys, your troubles, he senses them all. Since a horse is a kind of mirror, he doesn’t miss a thing, and that’s why he won’t ever forgive you. Errors are almost always the rider’s fault. [...] The work with horses, as with other artists in the company, is always directed at a heightening and focusing of sensitivity. How to sublimate the beauty of a horse’s gesture, how to create conditions which will allow such actions to be produced with a certain warmth which is both emotionally rich and gentle, how to develop this affective aspect within the relationship between a human being and a horse. [...] In Europe there’s a common tendency to seek reassurance by thinking of animals as humans. To my mind, animals in general, and horses in particular, have a highly developed instinctive perception - contrary to humans, who possess another kind of intelligence (which sometimes creates problems for them): reflexive awareness of life, death, time, which can be channeled into art, etc. It seems in the interest of both humans and horses to find ways to come together; what happens if you conjoin a horse’s instinctive modes of perception and a human’s intellectual reflection? The basis of all of my work is in trying to get closer to their perceptions of the world; and this is at the centre of my whole way of life. What counts is what lies behind the intention of a gesture, what informs it. Any gesture only has value if it touches on grace’ (Bartabas in Corre 1997:14).

LOUSY ACTORS: ‘THE THING WHICH IS NOT’

‘Yahoo as I am, it is well known through all Houyhnyhnmland, that by the instructions and example of my illustrious master, I was able [...] to remove that infernal habit of lying, shuffling, deceiving, and equivocating, so deeply rooted in the very souls of all my species: especially the Europeans’ (Swift [1726] 1985:40]

Ethologists have written extensively about animal display, their so-called displacement/redirected activities and ritualized behaviours, in terms of performance. But what kind of performance? In a paper presented at a conference on the Clever Hans phenomenon in 1981, Paul Bouissac considered circus animal acts in terms of constructed and partial overlappings of different socio-biological and semiotic frames - those of trainer, audience, and animal:

‘On the one hand the trainers interact with their charges on the basis of their socio-biological competence, on the other they frame these interactions in particular situations relevant to the system of social interactions shared by the public for which they perform. Therefore all animal acts are the combination of a biologically patterned behavioural sequence and a constructed social situation’ (Bouissac 1981:19).

For example, the bear who performs the ‘kiss of death’ on the mouth of his female trainer simply pursues and consumes bait (a carrot discreetly concealed in the trainer’s mouth); spectators, however, see only the ‘kiss’ as part of a micro-narrative relating to, say, sexual power and an infantilised bestiality. In this way the trainer, ‘a professional deceiver’ (ibid:21) aware of both perspectives, manipulates hard-wired or imprinted animal responses by recontextualising them to provide spectators with what they desire: charged narrative imagery and the illusion of an erasure of socio-biological ‘otherness’, i.e. the illusion that the animal recognises and shares the world of the social situation in which he is placed, a world he is able to inhabit with ‘pleasure’.

Bouissac concludes his causally behaviourist, zoosemiotic account of these constructed illusions of inter-species communication by suggesting that a circus animal can only be said to ‘perform’ in a very limited way:

‘[it] negotiates social situations by relying on the repertory of ritualized behaviour that characterizes its species. [...] The trainer can elicit at will some segments of behaviour and frame them in a situation of his/her choice, but the animal’s behaviour is never performed out of its own socio-biological context’ (ibid: 24).

In other words, animals cannot knowingly enact the fictions of make-believe. Like Swift’s equine Houyhnyhnms, they are unable to say ‘the thing which was not (for they have no word in their language to express lying or falsehood)’ (Swift [1726] 1985:281).

Performance theorist Richard Schechner reaffirms this perspective when he suggests that, because most ritualized animal behaviour is genetically determined, animals lack one of the defining qualities of theatre:

‘[A] great difference between human and non-human performers is the ability of humans to lie and pretend [...] Although a few species specialize in “deceit”, most animal performances are automatically released, fixed, and stereotyped. There is no irony, no pliable back-and-forth play between the role and the performer, no trilogical interaction linking performer to performer to spectator’ (Schechner 1988:225,248).

In a more comic, anecdotal vein, Laurie Anderson has articulated a similar perception:

‘We built a big platform in my loft to do the “angry dogs” film I needed for a song I was writing [...] Captain Hagerty, their trainer, promised: “They’re vicious! Really vicious!” But he could only get them into attack mode for a few seconds at a time before they began to smile those happy dog smiles they’ve all got. That’s what I love about dogs: they’re such lousy actors’ (Anderson 1994:73).

However, if one shifts the models of performance and the nature of its interactions, it may be possible to conceive of an animal’s ‘lack’ or ‘inability’ in rather more affirmative terms. In the mid 1960s, Grotowski had characterised his ideal of an actor’s psycho-physical organicity in animal terms. He described a cat’s ability to think with its body, short-circuiting the gap between internal impulse and external action; being is already doing. Bartabas’s training and aspects of the Théâtre Zingaro performances seem to me to inhabit the space of an unpredictable play between task or work-game, horse-performer and human-performer, where ‘performer’ is conceived in the terms of Grotowski’s later research as:

‘an organism-channel through which the energies circulate, the energies transform, the subtle is touched [...] Everything is in lightness, in evidence. With Performer, performing can become near process’ (Grotowski 1990:375-6).

The very ‘lousiness’ of animal ‘actors’, in terms of their inability to sustain fictive bodies and effect a consciously ironic meta-braiding of a not-self with a not-not-self, makes for a particular quality of attention, conductivity and present-ness in the face-to-face encounter. While there are sequences in Théâtre Zingaro performances which reflect Bouissac’s model of overlapping socio-biological frames constructing anthropomorphic images and narratives for spectators’ pleasure, the model is reductive. It occludes another economy based on the circuits and intensities of an unpredictable energetics, and a poetics of lightness. Furthermore, it ignores the ways in which the human is dis-placed by the call of the animal outside and required to respond by ex-posing something of the ‘animal’ within. When one watches Bartabas interact with a horse, there is no doubt that energies circulate and ‘the subtle is touched’. The question is whether we have the (animal) eye to perceive the detailed ‘matter’ of these tact-ful exchanges and flows, without the need to laminate them with, and ‘read’ them through, theatrical situations and narratives of the kind to which Bouissac refers. As Wilhelm von Osten discovered, what is ‘in evidence’ is determined above all by ways of seeing.

WHAT CAN A BODY DO? BECOMING-ANIMAL

‘One does not conform to a model, one straddles the right horse’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1987:286).

Each Théâtre Zingaro performance is structured around a series of encounters, dialogues, singular interactional events (‘haecceities’) (3):

‘An encounter is perhaps the same thing as becoming, or nuptials [...] an effect, a zigzag, something which passes or happens between two [...] intermezzi, as sources of creation’ (Deleuze & Parnet 1987:6,28).

These encounters, ‘doings in the now moment' (4) in which the ‘saying’ takes precedence over the ‘said’, offer the possibility of what Deleuze calls ‘becoming-animal’:

‘In an animal-becoming a man and an animal combine, neither of which resembles the other, neither of which imitates the other, each deterritorialising the other [...] A system of relay and mutations through the middle’ (ibid: 50).

Consider, for example, the becoming-horse of Alexis le trotteur - ‘never as much of a horse as when he played the harmonica’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1987:305), and of Little Hans, so absurdly oedipalised by Freud (ibid: 257 ff). Or of Nietzsche, bareback-rider of unbroken thought, whose collapse around the neck of a flogged horse in Turin in 1889 was both a final s/tumble into madness (a becoming-hoarse) and, according to Milan Kundera, an apology to the horse for the barbarity of Descartes’ soul-less machinations (Kundera 1984:290). Nietzsche’s final break with human society thus occurred at the moment he wrapped himself around an animal face, and put the horse before Descartes.

Each of the Zingaro encounter-events emerges from Bartabas’s training processes, his pragmatic re-cognition of the particularities and differences of individual horses, what is ‘quick’ in them as opposed to dead: their ‘music’, qualities of energy, intensities, sensitivities, dis-abilities; their affects and their circulation in relation to an-other. Like Deleuze with reference to Spinoza, he asks, ‘What can a body do?’

‘You have not defined an animal until you have listed its affects. In this sense there is a greater difference between a race horse and a work horse than between a work horse and an ox’ (ibid:60).

Thus, for example, Bartabas never obtains a particular horse to realise a specific activity (as in equestrian sports: a thoroughbred for speed, an Arab for endurance, a Selle français - the French warmblood - for jumping etc.). Initially attracted by a face, an eye, a coat, a rhythm, a quality of attention, an aberrant behavioural energy, he works with horses of many different kinds: Andalusians, Lusitanians, Hackney ponies, Anglo-Arab crosses, Percherons, Friesians, Akhal-Tekes. Many of them are bought cheaply from the corrida or the army, because they were injured or unable to do what their owners required of them. Some are salvaged from abattoirs and knacker’s yards. Most have been damaged in some way (like Bartabas, with both of his legs shattered in a motorcycle accident when he was 17), and considered physically or temperamentally flawed.

A delinquent, biting Hackney pony Félix (le monstre), purchased from a dealer in Milan; in Éclipse, he dances a sinuous slow-motion pas de deux with Bartabas, their bodies circling and intertwined. Vinaigre, an aggressive Lusitanian originally bought at the age of 7 ‘because of his head’, had been deemed untreatable on account of a floating fragment of bone in his pastern; after two years of training and osteopathy he calmed down, and now, at the age of 16, Bartabas considers him one of the finest ‘dancers’ in the company. A lame and formerly unrideable Anglo-Arab, Mitcha-Figa, was bought for the ‘radiance’ of his coat and the attentive mobility of his ears. Quichotte, an Ortigon Costa Lusitanian bought cheaply from a corrida rider who found him wholly unresponsive, has become the performer of percussive airs-above-ground sequences and the reverse canter. And Zingaro, the black Friesian stallion who gave his name to the company, who took part in almost 2,000 performances until his sudden death from a ‘twisted gut’ during the US tour of Eclipse in early 1999; acquired by Bartabas at the age of 1, this most imperious, playful and unpredictable of horse-performers was never backed during his 17 years of life, and trusted no one except for Bartabas.

In preparation for the most recent Théâtre Zingaro performance Triptyk, and for the first time, Bartabas has spent about two years working with six Portuguese/Lusitanian horses, all of them blue eyed albinoes, through herd (‘choral’) interactions in the same space. In general, however, he trains each horse individually over a long period of time through an interactive floor technique sometimes called ‘tackless’ training, or ‘free lungeing’: a listening ‘beyond the ear’, rather than a ‘whispering’. He shares a space with them, a close-up, haptic, smooth or ‘nomad’ space, with its imperative for a tactile or ‘animal’ eye (5). With them, through what he calls ‘a series of controlled accidents’ (Arvers 1991:19), he explores very fine, improvised dances of the im/possibility of contact, riding vectors, negotiating thresholds, sometimes dynamically, sometimes with an almost imperceptible slowness. He listens, watches, calls, attends to or provokes an impulse-based dialogue through a step, a shift in the angle of the head or gaze, a tension in the shoulders, a run, a sound, a pulse.

The aim of these inter-subjective encounters - which are event-based rather than structural, like much contemporary science and like Lyotard’s ‘dissemiotic’ theatre of energetics (Lyotard, 1976) - is to elicit trust and confidence, and to both encourage and witness the flaring into appearance of each horse’s particular differences. The ideal is that self-generating, forward-moving impulsion and centredness that equestrian theorists call ‘self-carriage’: a practised and decided body rather than a docile body. If, for behavioural scientists, the horses’ actions are simply hard-wired, Bartabas talks of learning through a common ‘birthing’ (co-naître), while in the same breath insisting that: ‘The more one knows, the less one feels’. These interactions are the means and material function of a choreographic devising process that takes between two and three years per performance. They represent a tactical singularity, an ephemeral exchange, the possibility of passibilité: Jean-Luc Nancy’s term for the respons-able activity of reception, the capacity to be affected by the irruption of presence. A delirious and deterritorialising provocation to ‘love the elsewhere of the other’ (Cixous 1997:94) through qualities of attunement, of answerability, of an ‘animal eye’/’I’. A becoming for both parties that is always ‘in the middle’.

‘I am at a rather delicate moment in my life. My relationship with the horses has become so intimate, so private that sometimes I wonder whether I’m reaching a stage of incommunicability. I no longer ask myself whether what I’m doing is ‘successful’ or not. In my personal research, I constantly feel ahead of what can be achieved with the Zingaro company. One life will not be enough to achieve what I would like to invent with horses. [...] The last few months of training have excited me so much that for the first time I’ve realised that I could let go of performing in front of audiences, I could give it away and stop directing Zingaro tomorrow. Then I would just shut myself away with three horses, working with them every day - but sparing them the cruel and contradictory requirements of daily performances in which what is most beautiful and rare is hardly ever seen’ (Bartabas in Garcin 1997:91).

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Unless otherwise signaled, all translations are by David Williams. With heartfelt thanks to Bartabas, Manolo Mendes, Rachel Williams and Alan Read. This essay is dedicated to these animal others, to BJ, and to the memory of Zingaro; Non olvidaré la luz de los caballos (Pablo Neruda).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Notes

^[1] ‘Women and animals are represented as cohabitants of similar symbolic space - a kind of amorous disciplinary laboratory in obedience, tricks, and often bizarre balancing acts. [...] Women and animals are seemingly trapped in a place of endless misrecognition where they cannot gain access to symbolic space or to a re-cognition that proffers verification in a discourse of power’ (Schutzman 1998:136). For a comparison of the disciplinary regimes of equestrianism and patriarchy, see Griffin (1982). For an exhaustive critical account of constructions of animality in Western philosophy, see de Fontenay (1998).

^[2] On display in the Théâtre Zingaro salle d’acceuil in Aubervilliers is a large sculpture of a centaur playing a violin, an object first used in performances of Cabaret Équestre. On both human and animal torsos, the ribcage covering the area of the heart is exposed, as in an anatomical écorché. Bartabas (l’homme-centaur, as he has often been called by French journalists) was the model for the human torso and head. The current Théâtre Zingaro logo is a violinist-centaur based on this sculpture. For Jorge Luis Borges, the centaur is ‘the most harmonious creature of fantastic zoology’ (Borges 1974:37).

^[3] Deleuze and Guattari describe ‘haecceity’ as ‘a mode of individuation’ consisting ‘entirely of relations of movement and rest between molecules or particles, capacities to affect and be affected [...] the entire assemblage in its individuated aggregate that is a haecceity [...] It is the wolf itself, and the horse, and the child, that cease to be subjects to become events, in assemblages that are inseparable from an hour, a season, an atmosphere, an air, a life. [...] A haecceity has neither beginning nor end, origin nor destination; it is always in the middle. It is not made of points, only of lines. It is a rhizome’ (1987:261-3).

^[4] This phrase is used by Phillip B. Zarrilli to describe the goal of Asian performer training regimes in which performance techniques are ‘encoded within the body’: ‘the state of accomplishment (Sanskrit, siddhi) in which the doer and the done are one [...] a state of stillness in motion [which] frees the martial or performing artist from “consciousness about”, preparing him for a state of “concentratedness” [...] doings in the now moment’ (Zarrilli 1990:131,134). Such bodily enculturation and its holistic accomplishment is wholly pertinent to both horses and riders in classical equitation/dressage.

^[5] ‘The first aspect of the haptic smooth space of close vision is that its orientations, landmarks, and linkages are in continuous variation; it operates step by step. [...] The eye that beholds them [has] a function that is haptic rather than optical. This is an animality that can be seen only by touching it with one’s mind, but without the mind becoming a finger, not even by way of the eye’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1987:493-4).

The full version of this article was first published as ‘The right horse, the animal eye: Bartabas and Théâtre Zingaro’, in Performance Research 5:2 (‘On Animals’), Summer 2002.

For a short video interview with Bartabas about the work being performed at Sadler's Wells, see here.