lean-into

Notes from the introduction to a presentation by Sue Palmer and David Williams, as part of the 'Ecology and Environment' lecture series hosted by the Department of Theatre, Film and Television, Aberystwyth University, December 2012. With many thanks to Carl Lavery for inviting us ...

‘Everything’s a question of how you lean’ (John Berger)

We are ‘lean-into animals’ - that's our name for an imaginary band we have: and this is our first gig …

We've borrowed this term from Monty Roberts (the ‘horse whisperer’), who uses it to describe horses - they are also called by him ‘into pressure animals’. His core philosophy is about creating conditions for a horse’s learning, and then getting out of the way: a useful pedagogical model for us all ... 

Roberts has suggested that there are three spatial zones in our interaction with horses: (1) a zone of awareness (the furthest), in which one's presence is acknowledged, but it remains too far away to have an impact on a horse’s movements; (2) a decision-making zone (closer, although in the countryside it could still be quite a long way away), in which one can influence a horse’s movements and choices – this is the zone of most ground work and schooling with horses; and (3) an ‘into pressure zone’, also called the ‘lean-into’ zone. 

'Leaning-into' comprises a horse's leaning back into predators to protect themselves. Think of when a horse has its hoof on your foot - you push against its flank, it leans back; or if you want a horse to move away from a wall and you try to push it, it will push back. The term refers to an instinctive, passive/aggressive, defensive ‘leaning’ into the source of pressure (just as in touching the horse's flank with your heel). Of course there are many different kinds of pressure at play in working with and riding horses (from direct eye contact, to the bit), and many different kinds of responses. And this is a source of a great deal of misunderstanding and miscommunication when people start to work with horses.

Our partial understanding (and misappropriation) of this term comes from our own contact with horses, as well as dogs and cats (which we conceive of as lean-into animals too), and our own desire – for contact, meeting, sharing, and so on. I (mis)understand leaning-into as an improvised dance of responsiveness, a bit like Steve Paxton’s contact improvisation. 

For me, it is also a kind of dynamic suspension between falling and flying, an im/balance provoked that leads to adjustments in one’s default settings. It suggests following the gravitational pull of an-other - ‘what grabs you’, your interests - letting it take you to see what it does, rather than trying to explain it (away) or collapse it into some pre-existing grid of 'knowledge'. It’s related to placing attention outside of yourself there-where-you-are, giving over some of your weight to this ‘elsewhere’, meeting and riding its currents and contours. So it’s about encounter, accompaniment, and displacement off one’s own axis towards an engagement with aspects of the world: ecologies of (inter)connectedness, if you like. 

John Berger has also written about leaning, in ways that explore the relations between riding a motorbike, writing and living (in To The Wedding, Pages of the Wound and elsewhere). In these texts, he considers the relations between inertia, gravity, energy, momentum and grace:

“Everything’s a question of how you lean … If anything on wheels wants to corner or change direction, a centrifugal force comes into play. This force tries to pull us out of the bend into the straight, according to a law called the Law of Inertia, which always wants energy to save itself. In a corner situation it’s the straight that demands least energy and so our fight starts. By tipping our weight over into the bend, we shift the bike’s centre of gravity and this counteracts the centrifugal force and the Law of Inertia! … Speed has everything to do with mass and weight, and is often though of as brutal (and it can be), but it can also whisper of an extraordinary tenderness’’.

For me, as someone interested in writing - writing's difficulties and possibilities, what it can do - it is also about relations between the ‘leanings’ of lived experience/events  and writing. Berger also writes about the differences between riding a motorbike and writing a poem:

"Writing a poem is the opposite of riding a motorbike. Riding, you negotiate at high speed around every fact you meet. Body and machine follow your eyes that find their way through, untouched. Your sense of freedom comes from the fact that the wait between decision and consequence is minimal ... Poems are helpless before the facts. Helpless, but not without endurance, for everything resists them. They find names for consequences, not for decisions. Writing a poem you listen to everything save what is happening now ... On a bike the rider weaves through, and poems head in the opposite direction. Yet shared sometimes between the two, as they pass, there is the same pity of it. And in that ... the same love".

So two quite different modes of experience, usually thought of as mutually exclusive. Two different kinds of attention, intuition, embodiment, exposure, 'weaving', translation, serious play. Riding - related to speed, mechanics, a short circuiting of the time lapse between internal impulse, reflex/decision and consequence: a visual, tactile, rhythmic, intimate engagement with the outside world and its material phenomena. Writing - slow resistant work, the site of memory, association, a listening internally that removes one from the here-now. Berger endeavours to bring these two apparent 'opposites' into conjunction, suggesting the possibility of them meeting and connecting fleetingly in tenderness, compassion, love.

Maybe the notion of 'leaning-into' also relates to some texts I’m working on at the moment about falling, and the relations between adjusting balance in the orientation of ‘leaning’, the point of suspension, and the irretrievable moment(um) of falling. James Hillman writes about falling into the underworld, into psyche; Helene Cixous writes about falling into the 'school of dreams'. Falling as deepening, growth: a ‘falling into place’. 

Where do representation and writing ‘lean’ and where do they ‘fall’? Or, more broadly, to borrow a phrase from Herbert Blau, how does one navigate some ‘liveable unison between panic and grace’?

Today we are going to talk about some of our own leanings, what and where we ‘lean-into’ in recent projects we have worked on individually …

For further details of Sue Palmer's projects, with links to video materials, see here and here 

For footage of Little Tich leaning, see here (thanks to Sophie Nield for the link)

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.
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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).

shuttle 14: crystallize

'To get back to that metaphor of Oz ... through the force of the twister, you're propelled to this central image ... The people go there, the child and the scarecrow, to the Emerald City of Oz which is a palace - but essentially a crystalline buildup ... to me, on a kind of fairy-tale level that's indicative of something ... I don't exactly know what the actual building of Oz looks like. Oz, like Atlantis, is this difficult place ... a vanishing point, you know' (Robert Smithson, 1970) 
_________________________

The Crystal Land

"I turned on the car radio: '... countdown survey ... chew your little troubles away ... high ho hey hey ...'. My eyes glanced over the dashboard, it became a complex of chrome fixed into an embankment of steel. A glass disk covered the clock. The speedometer was broken. Cigarette butts were packed into the ashtray. Faint reflections slid over the windshield ... Under the radio dial (55-7-9-11-14-16) was a row of five plastic buttons in the shape of cantilevered cubes. The rear view mirror dislocated the road behind us. While listening to the radio, some of us read the Sunday newspapers. The pages made slight noises as they turned; each sheet folded over their laps forming temporary geographies of paper. A valley of print or a ridge of photographs would come and go in an instant. [...]

The quarry resembled the moon. A grey factory in the midst of it all looked like architecture designed by Robert Morris. A big sign on one building said THIS IS A HARD HAT AREA. We started climbing over the piles and ran into a 'rock hound', who came on, I thought, like Mr Wizard, and gave us all kinds of rock-hound-type information in an authoritative manner.We got a rundown on all the quarries that were closed to the public, as well as those that were open.

The wall of the quarry did look dangerous. Cracked, broken, shattered: the walls threatened to come crashing down. Fragmentation, corrosion, decomposition, disintegration,rock creep, debris slides, mud flow, avalanche were everywhere in evidence. The grey sky seemed to swallow up the heaps around us. Fractures and faults spilled forth sediment, crushed conglomerates, eroded debris and sandstone. It was an arid region, bleached and dry. An infinity of surfaces spread in every direction. A chaos of cracks surrounded us. [...]

As we drove through the Lincoln Tunnel, we talked about going on another trip, to Franklin Furnace; there one might find minerals that glow under ultraviolet light or 'black light'. The countless cream colored square tiles on the wall of the tunnel sped by, until a sign announcing New York broke the tiles' order ..."

Extract from Robert Smithson, 'The Crystal Land' (1966), reprinted in Jack Flam (ed.), The Collected Writings of Robert Smithson, Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996
_________________________

"Entirely lifeless, based on nothing but the dynamics of inorganic chemistry, the crystal nevertheless is said to 'grow'. It invades and coats a surface with absolute indifference, like mould or rust. And yet, unlike either of these - organic or inorganic processes - it is not necessarily an entropic process. While a mould might exploit the decay of a dead tree that it grows on, or while rust signifies the alteration of iron as it is exposed to air and water in a process of oxidisation, the process of crystallisation is one of resolution; it is what happens when the internal chemical instability of the copper sulphate solution resolves itself through the formation of the crystal.

Perhaps it is also significant that in the process of crystallisation, transformation is achieved through an internal process rather than external application. In a biological process such as the growth of a mould, the transformation of one sort of matter into another requires some external input of energy or outside substance. Similarly, with an inorganic process such as rusting, the process occurs only through a combination of external elements - the presence of oxygen and water. By contrast, crystallisation is an ordering of molecules within the crystal solution itself.

Crystallisation, then, is the purest expression of a self-contained, self-producing process of matter which goes from internal instability to stability, indifferent to materials and energies outside of it. In the iconography of Roger Hiorns' work, it is the clearest expression of the auto-generative theme that runs throughout. In the context of Harper Road, and of the crystallisation which has overcome an entire space of habitation, it is also the most absolute contrast to the processes of life and of living that this space bears witness to. [...]

The dense, dark cobalt blue of Seizure, its implacable and complete smothering of the straight lines of the original flat, seems to express a blank indifference to the troubles that afflict human building and human dwelling. If Seizure had continued its growth, one might imagine how the angles of the space would progressively disappear, as the crystals continued to grow inwards, towards each other. Ingrowing, like a crystal geode, this former space of human habitation - with its worn lino and peeling paint, with all the marks left by a living person - would be filled up, would disappear, transformed into pure crystal growth, with all signs of former human habitation obliterated. And with its cave-like floor, undulating with compacted crystals, Seizure suggests a return of the geological and inorganic world of prehistory. Rather than the complex and unstable relationship between human beings and their own built world, Seizure offers a lifeless form which, with its poisonous and lacerating surfaces, cannot even offer the primitive human shelter of a cave.

Auto-generative, inward-looking and ingrowing, independent of human intervention and human touch, Seizure contains Hiorns' fascination with the metaphorical potential of the inorganic, and of the strange life of inhuman processes. 'Seizure' might indicate the recovery of something that is rightfully owned, or a moment of paralysis or sudden arrest in the processes of a living organism. Here, in this flat that has become not a cave but a crystal geode, it is as if the living space of modern humanity is being reclaimed by the inorganic. While a more conventionally Romantic ecological narrative might imagine the reclamation of human space by organic nature - ruins overgrown by plants and trees - Seizure expels even organic nature in favour of the inorganic, choosing simple molecular growth over that more complex and curious molecule, DNA.

Seizure's perversely inhuman spectacle doesn't present us with the scene of a modern world, derelict or abandoned, or a futuristic fantasy of the ruins of a bygone civilisation. Instead it negates this human world and its human-scaled architecture, filling interior space with hard, inert matter, reclaiming it from those who have given it up. Seizure's paradoxical existence lies in the fact that, like any crystal geode, it has to be cut open to reveal its internal order and complexity, its hidden opulence and dazzling colour. In other words, the very act of seeing its internal form assumes a human presence; yet in this scenario, it is the human witness to the crystallised space which has become alien. No longer a derelict space of modern human habitation, Seizure positions the human spectator itself as trespasser. Seizure's internal order is a physical phenomenon before it is a visual one - by entering it one brings to it one's own human sense of visual, aesthetic value as if it were an intruder. However much we think of it as an artistic spectacle, Seizure remains indifferent. All it does is grow, in darkness. [...]

In this poisonously downbeat cultural atmosphere, it is not hard to grasp how Seizure resonates, even as it remains indifferent. Seizure's entropic, mineral and inhospitable formation, independent of human will, echoes all of our worst moments of doubt about what a world without humans would mean. The machine for living in has stopped. There are no signs of life. Art enters in".

Extract from JJ Charlesworth, 'Signs of life', in Roger Hiorns: Seizure, London: Artangel, 2008
_________________________

Images: (top) 'Iberian quarry no. 3', photograph by Edward Burtynsky. For Burtynsky's website, see here. (Bottom): Robert Smithson's drawing, 'Map of Broken Clear Glass (Atlantis)', 1969

For further details of the conception and making of Roger Hiorns' Seizure, a 2008 Artangel commission in South London, see here and here

a thing being done

An interview with Peter Hulton,
by David Williams and Ric Allsopp


DW: Peter, since 1977 you have edited and produced 5 series of Theatre Papers [1977-85] and then 5 collections of Arts Archives [1993-2001], and it’s an extraordinary body of work: traces of processes, dispositions and trajectories in the making of theatre, dance and a wide array of contextual practices. I think of them as a kind of plural and thoroughly use-ful map of diverse making cultures and thinkings-through-performance. Today I wanted to ask you about you in all of this, how you’ve kept going in such a productive, patient and self-effacing way, what your engines and goals are. First of all, can you remember how you started, what your triggers were?

PH: I can remember very clearly two moments when I started. With the Arts Archives and the audio-visual side of it, it was just by chance seeing the single gesture that a student of Laban’s made; it had been filmed at Dartington, and was in the archive there. When I saw this gesture, I thought if only one could understand the thinking and perceptual orientation that had arrived at the point where somebody, in this case a student, could engage in a movement or a gesture. Behind this one single gesture one can hear thoughts, ideas, perceptions and orientations, and I was so intrigued to hear more.

With the Theatre Papers, I had one of the original editions of Towards a Poor Theatre, the volume published in Sweden by Eugenio Barba. I was at university, and I remember one Sunday evening, sometimes I used to go and treat myself to a fry-up at the Shelbourne Grill Hotel in Dublin; I was by myself and I took the book in. And the first thing I looked at were the photographs of face masks, and I just didn’t understand a thing; I wasn’t studying theatre, I had no training in that area. I was absolutely intrigued, and started reading a little of what this man was saying in the book. And I thought, goodness, here’s the same person not only putting words down on paper but also somehow enabling these men and women to produce extraordinary facial images.

So I suppose in both instances it was the density of intelligence, in the widest sense of that word, that was within these phenomena. And I was interested to find out if there were ways of meeting this intelligence in some way or other. It seemed to me that most of the publications I’ve come across over the years in their various formats did little to help me in this respect. In Theatre Papers, it was always a question of giving the voice to the practitioner, to hear the ideas, thoughts, insights, experiences that had informed their work. As simple as that.

DW: That’s been a consistent principle throughout, that you make a space available for the voices of others ...

PH: Yes, it’s about them being allowed to be intelligent about their practices, in their own manner, in their own language, their own pace of thought, their own set of references and nouns and verbs and images. And likewise in Arts Archives, that sense of voice, not only occurring within the practices but also giving space for them to articulate what they do. I once worked with Joan Skinner, spent time with her doing the work. There we were at the Greenwich Dance Agency with all these distinguished dancers of one sort or another who had come to work with this famous lady. And there she was, at one point in this extended period of work, saying ‘And now we will do spongey dance’. If I had invited such a gathering of people to do a spongey dance, it would have fallen on dead ground. But precisely because she had worked with this group over a number of days, because she breathed the way she breathed, and because of all that phenomenally complex set of circumstances that make Joan Skinner who she is, she was able to say this and everyone was enabled to do a spongey dance! [See Arts Archives, 3rd archive, 1996-7, no. 2: ‘An Introduction to Skinner Releasing Technique’].

I’ve always been interested in how people speak of what they do: their language, but also the rhythms of speech and its spacings. With Arts Archives, the video enables a registering of the silences, the gaps, the travellings that go on in someone’s mind before they produce a word or sentence. I’ve almost come to the conclusion that there are no such things as methodologies, there are only teachers. At the end of the road, what is occurring are these fine, subtle meetings of people through spaces and times and breathings where nothing is being said at all; these elements are every bit as eloquent and interactive as anything else. And that kind of material evidence of practice can’t possibly begin to be annotated, recorded, documented in published print form. I’ve always been astonished that more people don’t seem to wish to attend to that kind of thickness of interchange that is going on; for a great deal of informational and perceptual richness is occurring in these interchanges.

DW: One thing that strikes me about Arts Archives is that they are extraordinarily information-rich resources in terms of dispositions towards pedagogy as dynamic process and communicative exchange. Qualities of watching and listening, which reside in the kinds of gaps you’ve referred to. Arts Archives and Theatre Papers seem to have a multiple pedagogic function, both in terms of thick descriptions or registers of teachers-in-process as it were, and as secondary research resources for students, researchers, teachers, practitioners to be used in different ways. Is one of your core concerns with the practices of teachers teaching?

PH: I know they seem like that, and of course many of the situations I observe involve a teacher, workshop leader or artist inviting people into aspects of their work that they feel are central and can be shared with somebody else. I am very often there at those points, and of course I’m intrigued by the manner in which they do that. But actually I don’t have in my head such a clear notion of what these materials are. And in a way the pedagogic aspects are only part of being on a journey, if you like. If I wished to touch something at the heart of the project I’m engaged in, I don’t think I would describe it in that way.

Let me tell you what I hunt. I risk getting into strange territory here, but let me try. What I love to see more than anything else is people at work in operation with imagery. I don’t have any fancy notions of what imagery is, it’s very open; I define it simply as possibilities rendered present. In a workshop, it’s like going fishing; you wait, and of course often you don’t catch anything. Sometimes you catch little ones, not that they are unimportant at all. Sometimes you’re there when a bigger one is being caught, not by me I have to say. I’m a witness, or through what I’m doing a participant in the fishing activity. Sometimes it is so evident that a person or a group of people, through many different means, techniques, orientations towards what they are doing, and within many different contexts, are arriving at or touching a point where they are in operation with imagery and imagery is in operation with them. I don’t define that in terms of any particular theatrical or performance form; I’ve been witness to it in the widest possible array of forms. Although of course the forms themselves contribute to these moments, and the ways in which they are generated.

I have to admit I don’t go to theatre any more, unless it’s free. It sounds terrible, I know, but the reason why I don’t go is because the disposition and formal arrangements of what theatre has so often become in our society simply don’t allow for the accessing of these particular operations or indeed for the witnessing of them. For me, the place where I can witness them, or be party to them, is often found within pedagogical situations, within the processes. It’s almost as if these processes, when they are really happening, are crying out for different contextual places within which they can happen. Our culture in the West is beginning to find alternative sites where these phenomena might appear, but only rarely do you find them in theatre.

So what is it I find within these processes? I really don’t want to give the impression of being an essentialist in this area, because what I am witnessing is as much a part of me and my performative engagement with whatever it is as it is part of the particular context of the particular person or people. It’s a very contextualised and complex moment, and very often the highly mediatised form through which I’m watching it further blurs it. But I do think that during these moments - I call them moments, but they can have some duration in time - and into these moments come all of the philosophical, aesthetic, artistic and intelligent activity that I wish to have there with it. I feel that when someone is really operating with imagery and imagery is operating with them in the sense I described, in these moments the potential for the conjunction of real intelligence and practice is most apparent: most explicit and implicit, if you like. Somehow the activity and the space within it allows for that, allows it to take place. So I find it immensely rich from that point of view.

There are other reasons I find these times so formidable. When they occur, I get an inkling of what for me is an emerging issue. At these moments I actually perceive an activity that allows forth a human person in relationship to imagery, imagery here as I’ve described: possibility rendered present. When I see this really at work, these moments shift or develop the performative moment away from what could be considered to be a very anthropocentric set of circumstances and concerns, towards something which allows in this fantastic evidence of a person in relationship to ‘world’: it could be the world of imagery, it could be the world of world, it could be a world. I see people negotiating, dialoguing, listening, being in a kind of ecological, streaming balance between the things that enable this moment to have the power that I think it has. And in such moments I feel that performance is beginning to reclaim something of the kind of power I think it does have, and probably always has had somewhere. In the real sense of the root word dromenon, the drama, which is ‘a thing being done’. The moments can be very fleeting or an entire performance, and it really doesn’t matter what kind of imagery it is: matrixed, non-matrixed, fragmented, or whatever. A thing is being done, and it’s being done with me as part of the performance, as well as with the performer, as well as with the imagery, the ‘thing’. A thing is being done which has all of the concrete existential evidence of the person, the tree, the cat, or whatever.

And then I think of the enormous intelligence, subtlety, fluidity at play, what Deleuze talks about in terms of the ‘plane of consistency’, immanent ‘continuums of intensity’. These moments, which I call ‘anthropomundic’, occur as close to that plane of consistency as any I ever see. And I’m astonished at the human person’s abilities and facilities in bringing to this moment all that they do bring. I’m reminded how rich that is in comparison to the streamings and intelligences and bases for decision-making that we might make in society to produce our educational system, for example, or our political systems, or our relational senses between each other. And at these moments when the things I’m on the hunt for emerge, I’m consistently amazed at how they remind us of the possible streamings.

DW: So these ‘anthropomundic’ moments are supra-subjective events: a flaring into appearance of the person, of the imagery, and of their dynamic and unfolding interrelatedness.

PH: Yes. I only use this word to myself; it’s a shorthand way to hit my head on the thing, to keep reminding myself. To say think of that, even if you don’t know what it means. By stepping on to that stone in the middle of the pond, somehow you see things from slightly different angles. Shorthand words like ‘anthropomundic’ are just little provocations, ways of stepping sideways and making sure I can stand there for a little while and have a look at something, think about something. And I find it rather pleasurable and productive.

I’ve just been teaching a course about the avant-garde at Bristol University as a sort of academic locum, and it’s been really interesting to revisit some of this work. You begin to develop shorthand views of what happened, what these people were after, how it evolved, the recurrent concerns and motifs. In the end you abstract yourself off to a series of wholly indefensible generalisations, but which are very useful reminders to me about some of what went on and where things are at the moment. Ignoring for a moment who or what the ‘avant-garde’ was or is, and accepting that I’m operating at a kind of hysterical shorthand level, let me convey my sense of the five gifts of the avant-garde. One of them, for better or for worse, and Deleuze describes it far better than I can, is the question of becoming; this shoots through and on, underpins everything. Another is a problematic rather than a gift, and it’s the question of narrative, non-narrative and spaces in-between in all their manifestations. A third gift, which is entirely indefensible although it makes some sense to me, is the notion of the thing itself; if I say that piece of shorthand to myself, I can rest happily on it for a while and gather sustenance from it. A fourth gift would be the body and issues of embodiment. And the fifth is the anthropomundic.

Ric, you remember years ago we talked at Dartington about an ecology of theatre? Well, I’m still hunting that one down, and have a slowly growing sense of how one might understand or practice this question of ecology; and the anthropomundic is really a question of ecology and ecologies of practice. For hundreds of years, so much of our art making in the West has been what I would call anthropocentric. Since the last century, the ‘avant garde’, drawing upon all sorts of influences and cultures, has reintroduced something of what I’m calling the anthropomundic, which is an image ecology between anthropos and mundus. Mundus not just being things - trees, flowers, animals, people, material objects - but also images, in their diverse manifestations. Between those two terms there are enormously dynamic streamings. Ostensibly Arts Archives is about very anthropocentric work, it could be seen in that way as simply watching people; but in the moments I’m looking for, it moves way beyond any question of anthropocentricity and you get a sense that you’re entering the realm of the anthropomundic.

Years ago, when I first went to Dartington, I had never been trained in theatre or anything related, and I really didn’t know why I’d been appointed to train these teachers or actors or dancers. I had no idea what to do. I spent a long time in the studio just moving chairs and bits of furniture around, or drawing the curtains, doing simple task-based activities because I had an absolute horror of anybody role-playing. I really didn’t understand or like anything to do with acting. After many years, I’ve come to the realisation that this anthropomundic quality is not determined by the kind of imagery that people are working with, it can happen in a moment or an entire play of Chekhov as well as with Yvonne Rainer doing a task-based activity. It just isn’t predicated on those kinds of image distinctions at all. That’s interesting to me, for it has meant that even within the highly anthropocentric nature of most Western theatre since the Renaissance there are occurrences of this other relationship and process, vestiges if you like. The thing being done has returned in the twenty-first century, and the avant-garde is partly responsible for reminding us of that, and reopening the possibilities.

If what I’m talking about has any relevance at all, then what kinds of sensations, perceptions, trainings, modes of preparation does one need to engage with in order to come by this anthropomundic relationship? And for me these are profoundly interesting questions. For example, in my work as a teacher over the years, I’ve become aware that there is a very simple faculty that people have great difficulty working with, myself included: and that is, how does one listen to the implications of material? Of course it involves the dialogue with oneself, but somehow it’s more than that. How do you allow the implications of material you’re working with to reveal or disclose themselves in an alignment with you? Because we impact upon our environment, our world, our images so much, we have an enormous difficulty in allowing this to occur in and to us. Do you know the word syzygy? It means a conjunction or alignment, as in planetary alignment. When you see people working with materials, they make repeated compositions of one sort or another, and more often than not they are laying too much on the materials, or laying too much on their own bodies. There is a reverse procedure which throws up something akin to syzygy, where you come into alignment with the material. Through and along the alignment come all the streamings. If you’re not in alignment with your image, whatever that image is, whether inside or outside or both, then you won’t hear it speak to you.

RA: If I look at the list of Arts Archives, one way I can see it is in terms of your eye moving from 1993 to the most recent one you’ve made. There is a consistency of your eye looking at this work. That process of placing yourself in alignment with the material you’re working on is like a mirroring; you’re doing it, but you’re also trying to find out what it is, what that relationship is inside the material you’re looking at. I wondered whether you’d come to any thoughts about this? What have you gleaned about that in terms of how you’re beginning to look? How does the experience now direct you to look at particular pieces?

PH: Well, two things to say about that. One is that my way of looking within Arts Archives is mediated entirely by the technology I use ...

RA: It’s not entirely: it’s heavily mediated, of course, but you still have lots of choices ...

PH: I do, but to be frank the more I work it, the more I realise how mediated it is. Which is fine, and I have to work with the grain of that. At the moment I’m working on a CD Rom with a French dancer, Dominique Dupuy. Let me describe the experience of beginning to make that. I’m there in a workshop situation, which is one I’m quite familiar with. He has a radio mic on him, I have earphones so I can pick up what he’s saying. The camera is framed of course, and utterly predetermined in terms of what it’s framing, how close or far, the speed of approach, how it’s moving, and so on. My eye perceives through technology, as does my ear. And you can only get it once, it’s very hard to edit this kind of material and try to overdub afterwards. I try to be in the flow of what’s happening, to listen closely to the degree that I can to some extent prefigure where it will go; and this is my second point. As he’s speaking, I’m already thinking about what it is that the lens must already be moving towards watching. I find it exhausting, but when it works, in a sense I’m filtering, and as he speaks I’m already moving towards his foot, say. If I’m connected to it sufficiently, aligned with it, I prefigure the logic of where to go next visually. That’s when it’s really working. As I described earlier, the moment of Joan Skinner’s instructions, the spacings of her words, and the thickness of information in the gaps, you can’t overdub any of this; or if you do, it turns into something completely different, and you have to recognise that.

I have become increasingly interested in using this CD technology. The workshop videos I make are much more delimited than what a CD can give you. The physical phenomena of the computer screen, what you can do with it and how it engages people, are very different. And it allows you greater analytical space to watch something, return to it, flick forward or back, come off at different angles from it; it’s more rhizomatic than arborescent, to borrow Deleuze’s terms. In a very simple way, it allows you to manipulate material and to journey through it individually in a rather different way from video where one has to guide the viewer to some greater degree. So with this CD technology, slowly I would like to move away from those situations like workshops, which is where I’ve been with my camera for the past eight years or so. I would like to take another set of angles on this material, to place my eye in relation to it in a slightly different way using CDs and, if I had enough money, DVD and mpeg2 compression. CDs offer a site of reflection or meditation for the person viewing somebody’s work; or at least one would like to believe they do. I would love to be able to encounter work with people in a much more personal and specific way. I once made a video of Julyen Hamilton working in the space [Arts Archives 2nd Series, 1994-5, no. 5: ‘Dance Improvisation’] in which Julyen dances and talks about dancing at the same time; and I was always intrigued by that possibility even though it was just video. I suppose I want to work with people just to celebrate the ways that they are in the world that inform their making, what they see, what they think, their perceptions and how these surface in their work.

All you can do with this stuff really is treat it as a gift back to life, put it back out there. One of the nice things about what I’ve been doing is that I’ve enjoyed the strategy of the medium I’ve used. I enjoy the fact that there’s a catalogue, so people can choose what they want if they want it. I like the strategy of a video or a CD, rather than say a book or journal. Not that books or journals aren’t useful, but Arts Archives and Theatre Papers are an entirely different strategy. They get into nooks and crannies with the distaste that they deserve. [Laughter]

DW: They have very different kinds of circuits and flows of dispersal, and somehow they enable different connectivities. I remember a few years ago in Western Australia, there was a small new dance and contact gang who treated some of the Theatre Papers a bit like samizdat. They passed around these papers, and photocopies of them, and the materials seemed to take on a little quiet role of provocative anti-toxins, or toxins, I’m not sure; they entered the bloodstream.

PH: It’s interesting in terms of circulation, because their effect is not immediate, it seems to me. They also have a knack of reappearing after about ten years, they begin to appear in people’s bibliographies. They come back into another area of circulation, if you like.

RA: How was it to rework Mary Fulkerson’s Theatre Paper as a CD Rom? [Arts Archives, 4th series, 1998-9: ‘Release: Language of the Axis’]. You first worked on it with Mary in 1978, and it must have been a very different strategy for CD.

PR: Well, that was my first CD effort, and it was very crude. It was a different strategy, of course. But it hasn’t been taken up at all. When 'Language of the Axis' first came out in print, it went out to a community of people, and was circulated widely, and I knew that was happening. Arts Archives don’t go to communities of people because I don’t think they exist in the same way as they did then. They go to individuals, the cultural situation is much more atomised now, and they also go to communities of people working in higher education, in training and institutional research contexts. And in a very tiny way I suspect that these kinds of materials have contributed to the recognition that practice can be a legitimate subject for research, that its bodies of knowledge are indeed worthy of scrutiny. That was certainly part of an underlying subversive strategy from the very beginning, to distribute these materials in such a way that they might play their part in extending academic notions of research. At the same time, over and above the actual content of a video or paper, perhaps it helps enhance the reputations of the artists concerned, it helps get them work, and they are able to use these materials as tools in applications for funding, and so on.

I think you have to use a ‘Bavarian-type cunning’, as Brecht would say, in pursuing these kinds of projects. I fully support any material strategy which can help declare the practice. If there is a biosphere of practices or images, let’s call it a ‘practicosphere’, then it’s under threat from so many different things within our society. Not least of which might be the revenge of the intellect upon experience that plagues so many of our university courses. Resistances and suspicions about other kinds of knowledges which cannot be conveyed in discursive ways remain entrenched. The gesture made by the Laban student I mentioned earlier on was in its own right a fragment of knowledge. And I believe there’s a huge bank of knowledge in what I’m witnessing.

DW: One of the things I like about Arts Archives is a proposition included in the brochure. It reads: ‘It is the policy of Arts Archives to include as much material as is practical in order that the viewer or reader may edit according to interest’. As well as being an encouragement to engage with these materials in the ways one finds useful, this seems to be a recognition of their unfinished quality, rather than claiming that this is, for example, the ‘definitive’ video about kalarippayattu, the Alexander technique, breath and the voice, or whatever. The archives offer an array of materials that are to be re-used, re-fashioned, re-edited. Am I right in thinking there’s a seed here for your recent interest in the possibilities afforded by CDs, in terms of a greater agency for the watcher or reader, and relatively a greater fluidity on the level of the materials themselves?

PH: Yes, I think you’re right. Maybe I wrote that to suggest that if you’re bored, you’ve got a fast-forward function on your VCR. But I’d hate for the videos to be seen as packaging a practice with any claim to exclusive mastery or closure at all. When I make copies of the videos to send out, I just rewind them to a point mid-stream and go in there to check if they are working properly. So I have an enormous memory bank of little snippets from each of the videos, and that can be as informative as editing the whole video. I would like them to be tools for people’s work.

You know, when I hear from people out of the blue and I send materials out around the world, I feel that these things are somehow going to settle into some fertile ground. I always feel the seed is going to spiral down and rest there and be taken further into something else. Perhaps what I least enjoy is bulk orders from university libraries; I’ve just sent a large number of videos from all of the archives to a university, and I know that they risk just sitting on the shelves collecting dust. And I don’t have quite the same experience. But what does sustain me there is that someone by chance, by happenstance, might just take one off the shelf, put it in the VCR for fun, and might see something that touches them, gives them impetus. Even if someone rejects it, that defines a little bit of their own impetus to move forward or elsewhere.

DW: There is also a historiographic edge to what you’ve been doing for over twenty years now; these are oral and visual histories of often quite marginalised practices. I remember having a conversation with Mick Gordon, the director of The Gate in London. He asked why I wrote about ‘famous’ people, rather than the ‘true heroes’ of performance making, and then proceeded to list the kinds of people you’ve worked with on Arts Archives or Theatre Papers: the semi-secret and often barely visible engines and triggers for all sorts of practices, which hover on the brink of disappearance in our product-oriented culture. Do you conceive of this as one of the functions of these materials? As a sort of loose, serendipitous, and very partial mapping of processes and practices, all of them invitations to pause and look again, that inform so much of what hardens into forms and comes at us in high visibility institutional contexts. For versions of them are often co-opted and used in these sponge-like commodity contexts.

PH: Well, I don’t think I’ve ever conceived of this project in terms of the relationship to an energising substrata such as you’ve just described. On the other hand, I have conceived of these materials as part of a dynamic oral culture of connections, exchanges, knowledges. There used to be a debate about how to document oral cultures without immobilising or destroying them. But of course they are strong enough to go on in their own ways, they are resilient and evolve. Sometimes you meet someone like Andrei Serban - on one level a celebrated director with an international reputation, on another someone who works with stick exercises in the training of performers. [See Arts Archives, 4th Series, 1998-9, no. 4: ‘The use of sticks in performance training’]. And the stick exercises themselves belong to the kind of area you’re referring to, bedrocks of particular knowledges that are shared and travel in an ‘invisible’ way, they don’t belong to Andrei. Their movements and connections operate rather like oral cultures. And all sorts of specific exercises circulate in this way, they are handed on and transformed according to needs and contexts; they are not owned by anyone. Over the years I’ve observed thousands of different practices. Do I use them in my own work? I might use one or two that I know about, not intellectually or by observing them, but by bringing them into my own practices in a substantial way, having the touch to understand and develop them. These are not recipes for people to follow. Sometimes you see a knowledge at work, you hear an echo, and something is possible. That’s what I mean by my suggestion that there are no such things as methodologies, there are only practitioners.

RA: This relates to what you said earlier on about alignment, and it reminds me of something else you once said which has stayed with me. You talked about the ability to be able to ‘hang around things’. An ability to circle around something until it reveals what it is. It’s a quality of listening.

PH: Yes. When you make your Fire Table performances, Ric, you have thought about them of course, but in a sense the pieces declare themselves to you; it’s two-way traffic. It’s a dialogue, a balance within our psyches and physicalities. I see it in Dominique Dupuy’s way of being in his body, for example: it’s not simply a question of letting outside in, and it’s never only inside out. The anthropomundic is the dialogue and exchange of two-way traffic. I would almost call it a touch; touching something on the outside means being touched by it, and this is another way of perceiving alignment. Part of the etymological root for the word ‘touch’ relates to something that ignites: touchstone, touchwood. Touch that fires. The congruence and conjunction of inside and outside, which I find touching, moving. I can recall the anthropomundic just by feeling the air on my cheek...

I very much like Deleuze’s description of the plane of consistency. He says that if you’re off it, you’re either early or late, which is related to speed. And then he talks about ‘affinities’; you’re either there with it, or you’re not. And that’s a little what I see, that underneath the organisational composition one senses connections with this plane, people working or beginning to work in touch with it. And they do.

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Interview recorded in May 2001, Exeter, England.

First published in Writings on Dance 21 ('Ecologies of Practice'), Summer 2001-2, Australia, 12-19

Peter Hulton is director of the Arts Documentation Unit, Exeter, England, and editor of Arts Archives. He is a Research Fellow at the University of Exeter. For information about Arts Archives, please contact Peter Hulton at 6A Devonshire Place, Exeter EX4 6JA, Devon, England. For online catalogue, see here