per miracolo

April in Sicily, and a swift trip from our base in the Alcantara Valley to Taormina on the east coast. An exquisite (if hyper-touristy) hill-town with Etna on one side, and the straits of Messina and Calabria on the other. Near the centre of town is an eccentric little museum in a 14th-century palazzo where the Sicilian parliament used to sit hundreds of years ago: the musty Museo Siciliano d'Arte e Tradizioni Popolari. All sorts of odd bits & pieces, the unquestionable highlight being an extraordinary sequence of 25 panel paintings from the late 19th century, representing an array of grisly deaths narrowly escaped, due to miraculous saintly interventions (Christ, the Madonna, St Peter, St Sebastian etc.)

Some terrible and rather surreal fates are avoided, and indeed staged, in these naive retablo images. People falling off horses. A child falling off a carousel. A bull falling off a wall. A woman tumbling through a ceiling, another from a bridge into a river. A blinding with a ball during a tennis game, and with an arrow during an archery class. A gaggle of nuns attacked by a knife-wielding lunatic in classical fencing pose.

A horse crushed by a train, its rider tossed to one side. A celebrant at a religious fiesta trapped under the cart bearing a saint's relics. An early football injury, in a game apparently played by teams of extras from the RSC. Wild cats ('gatti arrabbiati') attacking a group of chefs, and a woman, her breast bared and bloodied in fine Catholic iconographic fashion. A rider thrown from his horse by a charging bull. Shipwrecks. A blood-red lava flow from Etna halted - per miracolo, as ever - by a rather ponderous and perruqued St Agata in an auratic circle of smoke in the sky.

Cumulatively, the effect is both alarming and hilarious. A strip cartoon catalogue of disasters and panic, like a score for a sequel to Lone Twin Theatre's Daniel hit by a train, in which only the Catholics are saved.

Photographs from Taormina © David Williams, April 2009

First posted in April 2009

only you

1.  Dominique Mercy, in Pina Bausch’s Nur Du (‘Only You’), viewed from the wings backstage at the Barbican in the summer of 2012, just prior to his entrance for his final solo, the final sequence in the performance

He spends three or four minutes in the wings offstage silently marking the solo-to-come in a very reduced, minimal fashion, while smoking throughout. He wears a brown suit, open jacket, white shirt, tan leather shoes. As he goes through the solo in distilled form, the movements barely bubble up to the surface; the focus is internal, on what is to be done. So, for example, what will be a wide arcing sweep of an arm is here just a soft unfolding of a wrist and hand. Then a slow flexing of his neck and shoulders, and one last check of his shoelaces, ensuring they are perfectly taut and neat. A pause, cigarette still in hand. Then, at the moment of his entrance into the performance space, he takes one final long drag of his cigarette, stubs it out in an ashtray on a table just offstage – then walks into the performance space blowing smoke directly in front of him. So that as he appears in the lights, he moves into and then trails a luminous grey-blue cloud around his face and shoulders. In this way his own exhalation creates a dynamic medium which is stirred by his movement through it. It parts and folds in wisps behind him. As if he were carried by it, floating. 

 

2.  Al Pacino, in David Mamet’s American Buffalo, London in the early 1980s

His entrance for his opening scene is through the door of the junk shop from the (fictional) ‘street’ beyond. The shop bell jingles and there he is, palpably in character: nervous, edgy, ‘difficult’. Immediate and unrestrained applause for the actor, who has now paused at the top of the stairs leading down into the space. He drops out of his character, his body changes shape and energy as he acknowledges the applause, a small bow and hand acknowledgements. As silence gradually returns, he then folds seamlessly, mysteriously back into character and begins to walk down the stairs to start the scene. But after two or three steps he trips and falls, slipping down a couple of stairs on to his ass. An audible intake of breath from the audience, a collective whince. This second fall out of character produces a slightly different body shape; another Pacino appears, momentarily ruffled, vulnerable, disarmed. He gets up quickly, then smiles self-consciously at some relieved laughter and scattered applause from the audience, sympathetic, willing him on. He dusts himself down, and carefully moves down the remaining stairs, settles again. Some fresh applause, supportive, expectant. As silence returns, he folds back into character, precisely and legibly the same architecture and fidgety energy as at the top of the stairs when he first appeared, and the scene is underway again …

  

3.  Patti Smith, Pyramid Stage, Glastonbury Festival, June 2015

In an amorphous noise transition between ‘Gloria’ and a cover of the Who’s ‘My Generation’, with the Dalai Lama and his entourage watching wide-eyed and smiling from one side of the stage, she runs across the stage trailing her long white hair, a wild teetering edge-of-balance kind of run. She trips and falls heavily, spilling the mic - then surprisingly quickly gets back to her feet, retrieves the mic, spits copiously, and shouts as she lurches back towards the middle of the stage: ‘I just fell on my ass, but I don’t give a shit cos I’m a fuckin’ animal!’ Then it’s unstoppably into a ragged, clattery ‘People try to put us d-down …’, before she starts to rip out her guitar strings one by one, yanking them off with her bare hands, grimacing; they make little strangled electric wails and pops. It looks like it must really hurt.

 

Texts invited by Vlatka Horvat for her performance Third Hand, commissioned as part of the Goat Island exhibition and archive ‘We have discovered the performance by making it’, Graham Foundation for Advanced Study in Fine Art, Chicago (April 2019), IN>TIME Performance Festival; and at the Chicago Cultural Center, June. Supported by City of Chicago’s Year of Theater program. Photo of Dominique Mercy by Ari Rossner

the sea: wave 6

Lulled by the Sea’s roll and curl, its breath synced with mine, I return to my dream of floating far from land, the boat long gone, just me and the Sea and the sky. A me-shaped hole in the vastness of the Sea, two turbulences enmeshed with each other in a nameless place on no known map. The tight breath and anxious splash and oh-my-God of my earlier corkscrewing desire to stand up and out of the water and see where I am, to orient myself, are now released. Soft. My thoughts are fluid, nomadic, provisional: they flutter and drift and unravel in a waking that is brushed by wet sleep, carried on the currents of association, very small, very quiet, a slow swarm, the little by little suddenly. I have the impression the Sea can somehow hear my thoughts.

In the Mandaean sect in the region of the Iran-Iraq border, newly ordained priests marry a cloud, a stand-in for a wife in the other world. The Mandaeans’ holy scriptures tell the story of Dinanukht, half-man, half-book, who sits by the waters between the worlds and reads himself … (1)

Movement and transformation. The resilient persistence of matter, its survival, its memory - and yet the bottom line is that the only constant is mobility, change. It’s all circuits and flows in the mortality of forms, and the unpredictable migrations of their constituent parts. There are the remains of sea creatures in deserts and on mountain tops. Shells on Everest. And a tiny bead of sweat on a forehead might contain something of the exhaled vapour of another person or creature from long ago and far away. A glass of water here now is informed by the past. Perhaps it holds molecules evaporated from a glacier, a tree, tears, mist, snow, fog, ice, a cough, the gurgle of a new-born child ‘trailing clouds of glory’ or someone’s final sigh. Maybe even molecules from Archimedes’ bath water. Countless micro-moments of time, from yesterday or centuries ago on the other side of this blue ball, potentially co-existing in the same small container. The glass itself was once sand. It’s almost promiscuous, this co-mingling, and there’s joy in that thought.

I was born by the river in a little tent

Oh and just like the river I’ve been running ever since

It’s been a long, a long time coming

But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will (2)

Researchers estimate that 12 million tons of Sahara dust drops out of the air onto the Brazilian rainforests of the Amazon basin every year. Great plume-like vortices of aeolian sand that rise from the desert and drift west, only the finest phosphate-rich particles making it across to South America. Shamans too ride on whirlwinds; the way out of the world, or into another world, is through the vortex … (3)

If we could only let go of our compulsion to dress transience in mourning, and instead confer value on impermanence and change, might we not inherit the earth? Why not lament (briefly) the very notion of permanence and move on? ‘God’, ‘Truth’, ‘Progress’ - looks to me like these are all cover stories, formative human delusions. Funny stories to tell ourselves, aren’t they – funny peculiar if not funny ha-ha. Let their heart-break go. Why not? It would be an act of kindness. Of realistic optimism. And an occasion for invention. We’ve been pointing in the wrong direction. Let’s use the fact of transience for our fictions. That’s the way to turn a death story into a life story. If you want to be remembered, give yourself away. La la laaaa la laaaa lalalaaaa, oh yes it will.

The words of Meister Eckhardt: ‘the humble man is he who is watered with grace’ …

Beginnings and endings, all endings in reality new beginnings. Hourglasses eternally emptying out and being turned over again and again. At first the Earth was a smouldering sphere condensed from interstellar gas, its atmosphere a toxic soup of hot vapour. For maybe half a billion years. Then eventually as the Earth began to cool it rained for maybe 12,000 years, and the Sea came into being ... As we fade and die, us humans, the hot-house internal fever of our living bodies begins to cool from its regular 98.6 degrees Farhenheit, and eventually we become food, then soil, then … The spilling of seeds …

In the past, when people died at home, a lighted match was applied to the big toe. The toe would blister whether the person was dead or still alive; but if they were dead, the blister would fill with gas and burst.

After he died, Alexander the Great was shipped back from Babylon in a vat of honey. Nelson came back to England from Trafalgar in a keg of rum. A temporary suspension, of matter and time.

There’s an invisible haze in the air and in the water – the water in that glass, this Sea, that sky-mountain cloud, in all water – a haze of stuff too small for these eyes to see: the dust of anything and everything, the ghostly traces of what is carried in the wind and the rain and the rivers and here, right here in the Sea. Dancing sediment. Ejecta. Dejecta. Rejecta. A kind of soil, life’s compost. Trace elements of Newton’s apple. Or of Darwin’s busy worms, their castings the source of his consolation and inspiration in his final years of life: blind machines for making soil (aren’t we all?); digestion as restoration, the life destruction makes possible. (‘Never say higher or lower’, Darwin once wrote in the margins of a book).  We regularly inhale air-borne fragments of vehicle tires. Possibly dinosaurs. Dodos. Certainly powdered insects’ wings. Powdered people. Debris dispersed and afloat and en route to who knows where. How to read and map and re-member these atomised histories, and our place in their foldings and unfoldings and becomings.  ‘Galloping horses of the departed century, I will consult ashes, stars, and flights of birds’. (4)

‘Air routinely carries intimate fragments of rug, dung, carcasses, leaves and leaf hairs, coral, coal, skin, sweat, soap, silt, pollen, algae, bacteria, spores, soot, ammonia, and spit, as well as salt crystals from ocean white-caps, dust scraped off distant mountains, micro bits of cooled magma from volcanoes and charred micro-fragments from tropical forest fires. These sorts of things can add up. At dusk the particles meet rising water vapour, stick together, and fall: that is when they will bury you. Soil bacteria eat what they can, and the rest of it stays put if there’s no wind. After thirty years, there is a new inch of topsoil … We live on dead people’s heads […] Time: you can’t chock the wheels. We sprout, ripen, fall, and roll under the turf again at a stroke: Surely, the people is grass […]’. (5)

A thousand years ago, in silent-order Benedictine monasteries, monks communicated through hand signals. If you wanted honey, you put your finger on your tongue. If you needed a candle, you blew on your index finger … Where are those breaths now?

It was said of Confucius, and there was no higher praise: He knows where the wind comes from. It was said of Lao-Tzu that he spent 81 years in the womb before being born …

Everything is still, everything moves. Floating here, treading water, pulled down by my body’s weight, buoyed up by a cushion of liquid. Up-down, gravity and lightness. The im/possible dance. Everything that is dances this dance. The structure of a day. Organic life cycles. Weather systems. Social histories. Religions. Civilisations. Mushroom cloud. Smoke from a cigarette. A glance. A memory, bursting to the surface like the fin of a fish, then gone. Every breath is in itself a wave, a weather system, a life cycle of rising up and falling away. The inhalation can be a falling away, the exhalation an effortless rising up. Body weather. The wind in my heart – the dust in my head. Internal oceans, deserts, fronts, cloud formations, floods, droughts, turbulences, seasonal lows and highs. A synoptic chart of the soul, written in and on the body. Upside down, inside out.

The wind in the trees, the oxygenated ocean of air in which we swim or sink; an economy of exchange, inside and outside touching and blurring, like lovers. The tree-like structures of the lungs, of blood vessel and nervous systems, of river deltas and tributaries, of lightning strikes, synaptic connectivities and divisions. The arc of a thought. Like lovers.

Resemblances, analogies, metaphors: ‘like’ does not collapse difference and create the same, for the in-between is unstable, potential, the coexistence of near and far, like and not-like, identity and difference. The Sea is like the sky, the desert like the Sea, only … different. Like is a gap. Everything happens in the gap. Mind the gap, you could fall into it.

It is said that when the philosopher Empedocles (the originator of the concept of the four elements: fire, air, water, earth) dived into the spurting liquid magma of Mt. Etna’s crater, his own ‘Eureka!’ moment at the age of 60 or was it 109, the volcano promptly spat out one of his bronze shoes …

Falling down. Falling sick. Sinking. Coming up for air.  Climbing back up. Standing up. Settling down. Falling in love. Free falling. Rising into love. Defying gravity. Gravity rises, lightness falls.

‘We don’t fall in rows like hay, but we fall. Once we get here, we spend forever on the globe, most of it tucked under. While we breathe, we open time like a path in the grass. We open time as a boat’s stem slits the crest of the present’. (6)

Oh there been times that I thought I couldn’t last for long

But now I think I’m able to carry on …

Treading water. Leaving no trace. A little dance written on the wind.

Did you know that camels, the great anomalously-shaped, grace-ful ‘ships of the desert’, the two-humped Bactrian model like mobile model mountain ranges, leave oh so delicate lotus pad-prints in the sand for the wind to wipe away? (7)

Everything is still, everything moves. Sea. Sand. Sky. Air. Pulse. Breath.

It’s been a long, a long time coming

But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will …

---

(1) Eliot Weinberger, ‘Mandaeans’, An Elemental Thing, New York: New Directions, pp. 100, 103.

(2) Sam Cooke, A Change is Gonna Come, 1964.

(3) Eliot Weinberger, ‘The Vortex’, An Elemental Thing, op. cit., 2007, p. 126.

(4) Czeslaw Milosz, ‘The Unveiling’ (from The Rising of the Sun), in Collected Poems: 1931-1987, London: Penguin, 1988, pp. 124, 153.

(5) Annie Dillard, For the Time Being, New York: Vintage Books, 1999, pp. 124, 153.

(6) Annie Dillard, For the Time Being, op. cit., p. 203.

(7) Eliot Weinberger, ‘The Sahara’, An Elemental Thing, op. cit., p. 186.

life in the day

'When I was a child I always felt as if I was on the verge of discovering something. I thought that if I was patient things would show more of themselves than other people could see. Looking at the colours in an ice cream I caught my breath just as if I had jumped into cold water up to the waist: they had somehow been made fluorescent by the sky at Skegness: it had entered them. After that, appearances had for me a kind of perilous promise, an allure, an immanence. Most children feel like that, I suppose'.

*****

'So we went, as he put it, arseholing down the M6 with the radio turned up full: AC/DC, Kate Bush, Bowie's 'Station to Station' already a nostalgia number. 

How many times, coming back after a hard day like that, has there seemed to be something utterly significant in the curve of a cooling tower, or the way a field, between two factories, reddened in the evening light, rises to meet the locks on a disused canal? Motorway bridges, smoke, spires, glow in the sun: it is a kind of psychic illumination. The music is immanent in the light, the day immanent in the music: life in the day. It is to do with being alive, but I am never sure how. 

Ever since Gaz had fallen off into the sea I had felt an overpowering, almost hallucinogenic sense of happiness, which this time lasted as far as Bolton'.

Extracts from M. John Harrison's novel, Climbers (Gollancz, 1989). 

For a fine article about Mike Harrison's work, see Richard Lea, 'M John Harrison: a life in writing', The Guardian, 20 July 2012, here. "A good ground rule for writing in any genre is: start with a form, then undermine its confidence in itself. Ask what it's afraid of, what it's trying to hide – then write that."

Photo by muskrat

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)

animal acts 1: horses

a flying and falling list
List. n. A border; a boundary (obs.); a destination (Shake.). A catalogue, roll or enumeration. Desire; inclination; choice; heeling over.

When suddenly Johnny gets the feeling he's being surrounded
by horses, horses, horses, horses coming in in all directions
white shining silver studs with their nose in flames
He saw horses, horses, horses, horses, horses, horses, horses, horses.
Do you know how to pony like bony maroney
Do you know how to twist, well it goes like this, it goes like this ... (Patti Smith, Land/Horses/Land of a Thousand Dances)

Pegasus, the Vedic gandharvas and the five kinds of Chinese celestial flying horses. Centaurs, ichthyocentaurs (centaur-fish), hippogriffs and sea-horses. Alexander the Great and Bucephalus, El Cid and Babieca, Napoleon and Marengo, Roy Rogers and Trigger. Mr Ed.

The nomadic horseback warriors of Scythians, Mongols, Tartars and Huns. The centrality of horses to the Islamic prophet Mohammed’s Jihad. The ‘wind-drinkers’ of the crusades. The fifteen horses Cortés took to the New World in 1519. The ‘iron horse’. The Suffragette Derby Day suicide. The twenty ponies who accompanied Scott on his ill-fated expedition to the South Pole in 1911. The estimated 375,000 British horses killed in the First World War. The game of buzkashi played by Afghan tribesmen. The padded mounts of picadors in the corrida. Red Rum opening shopping centres.

The privileged roles ascribed to horses in Siberian, Korean and American Indian shamanism. Ocyrrhoe’s becoming-horse in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Jonathan Swift’s equine Houyhnhnms and human Yahoos in Gulliver’s Travels.

The Italian trainer Grisone, author of one of the 16th century’s most influential equestrian treatises, Gli Ordini di Cavalcare, who recommended persuading a ‘nappy’ horse to go forward by tying flaming straw, a live cat or a hedgehog beneath the horses’s tail. The ‘Horse Latitudes’ and the Gulfo de Yeguas (‘Gulf of Mares’), areas of the Atlantic Ocean so named because of the numbers of horses who died and were thrown overboard during early crossings from Europe to the New World. The apocryphal terror of the Aztecs when one of Pizarro’s riders fell from his horse; it is said the Aztecs had believed rider and horse to comprise one indivisible creature.

The four horsemen of the apocalypse in the Book of Revelation: conquest, war, pestilence and death. 'And I heard, as it were, the noise of thunder. One of the four beasts saying: "Come and see". And I saw. And behold a white horse' (Johnny Cash, When the Man Comes Around).

Mr Green’s ‘equestrian balloon ascents’ in mid-19th century London, astride his favorite pony.

Théodore Géricault’s death from a horse fall. The flogged horses who (appear to have) triggered psychological crises in Nietzsche and Little Hans. King and Queen, turn of the century ‘diving horses’ who performed 10 metre, head-first drops into a lake at Captain Boynton’s Coney Island ‘pleasure grounds’. Jerry Brown, Cocaine, Kilroy: three of Hollywood’s best-known ‘falling horses’, all winners of the Craven Award for ‘humanely trained’ animal stunt performers. The dead white horse suspended from the raised Leningrad bridge, then dropped into the river, in Eisenstein’s October. The horse who s/tumbles down a flight of stairs in Tarkovsky’s Andrey Rublev. Maurizio Cattelan’s dead chestnut horse spinning slowly above the heads of gallery-goers, its spine arched unnaturally around the harness support under its midriff - like those horses shipped live from England to the abattoirs of France, for human consumption.

The direct descent of all thoroughbreds in the modern world from one of four Arab stallions brought to England in the early part of the 18th century: the Darley, Byerley, Godolphin and Helmsley Arabians.

The New Zealand stallion Sir Tristram’s ritual burial, with his tail pointing to the rising sun. The continuing struggle over Phar Lap’s remains. The disappearance of Shergar. The White Horse of Uffington. The silver brumby.

The equine chronophotography of Etienne-Jules Marey and Eadward Muybridge. Byron’s Mazeppa. The Misfits. A Man Called Horse. Jean-Louis Barrault’s centaur in Around a Mother, as described by Artaud. Joseph Beuys’s ‘shamanic action’ with a white horse in Iphigenia/Titus. Bartabas and Zingaro. Lucy Gunning’s video work The Horse Impressionists. Forced Entertainment’s panto horse. Monty Roberts, the ‘horse whisperer’ ...

Horses and/as fertility, divinity, warfare, prestige, commodity, the instinctive, the irrational, an elemental force, the apocalypse, the ‘natural’ and ’free’. Horses as ideograms of energy, life-fulness, speed, sexual drives, the disorderly. Explosive danger-fear-nightmare- madness. Abject ‘beastly’ suffering. Kinetic and energetic event. © David Williams

nightfall

'Jump, for God's sake,
Jump like your life depends on it'
(Sandra Beasley, Theories of Falling, 2008).

A few days ago, I left work around 6.30 in the evening to walk to the bus - about a mile through the darkness. Heavy cloud, no moon, and by the time I reached the entrance to the Dartington garden I could barely see anything. No torch, dammit. I knew there were granite steps a few feet ahead of me, just above the Buddha statue, so I triggered my phone to try to light my way. Faffing about with the settings, I failed to find anything approximating the effect of a torch; instead, effectively I blinded myself temporarily. Seeing absolutely nothing at all now, I warily felt my way forward into the pitch black with my feet, and found the lip of the top step; I edged down step by step until I reached level ground. Then set off at a brisk pace into the night along the path I knew to be ahead of me. But I'd forgotten the stairs were divided into two flights by a small landing, and that there were still 7 steps to go. So I stepped into mid-air and dived into nothingness. For a split second I felt like some anoraky version of Yves Klein. Quite calm, just very wide-eyed, wide awake. Deceleration, expansion of a moment, then sudden rush back into the materiality of the present. With both arms outstretched I landed half on the path, the right side of my body sliding through the muddy earth of the empty flower bed right in front of the Buddha. My body was soft, relaxed, and my hands took much of the impact, so I didn't really hurt myself. I stood up quickly, checked my computer was still in my rucksack, brushed some muddy smears off my coat and trousers, slowed my heart with a couple of big breaths, then looked round for the Buddha. I couldn't see a thing but I knew he was right there, feet away, knew he'd seen me fly and fall and crash. I figured he'd have found it mildly amusing, and I smiled before turning away and setting off again towards the bus. I felt a bit of a plonker, but was somewhat impressed by my 51-year-old body's 'intelligence', the speed and effortlessness with which 'my' instinctive emergency responses kicked in. Nothing heroic in this, they simply took over and cushioned me from my-self. Clever.

En route to the bus I managed to find every conceivable puddle and mud pool in the darkness; in the end I gave up caring and just splashed my way forward. By the time I reached the bus stop, and the street lights, my shoes and trouser bottoms were drenched. I probably left a trail on the pavement.

When the bus arrived I jumped on board squelching audibly and asked for my ticket. I gave the driver the money, and saw that my hand was caked in mud - and indeed one side of me was a thick brown slick from shoulder down. Impressive. The driver looked at me rather distastefully. While he punched out the ticket, I turned into the bright glare of the bus; everyone was staring at me as though I was a malodorous vagrant who had just stirred from a snooze in a ditch. Suddenly I was visible, and being judged. I smiled, thought bollocks, and sat down for the ride. In my imagination I went back to the Buddha still there in the night, blissfully attentive behind that lichen patina. The things he must have seen over the years from his silent, discreet vantage point.
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Infinitely detailed ice patterns on Sue's car yesterday morning, the windows layered in feathery palm-like structures that refract the weak sunlight.

Then last night, the rare conjunction of a crescent moon with Jupiter and Venus in the clear night sky, three of the brightest objects visible from Earth. We see it as we drive home, and stop to watch from the road side. At first, the moon was transformed into the outline of a nippled breast by Venus protruding from its edge; gradually Venus separated from the moon to leave three discreet planetary bodies in drifting relation. From our earth-bound perspective they seem close together, although in reality we look past the moon's edge to planets million of miles away - the moon at 239,000 miles from Earth, Venus at 94 million and Jupiter 540 million. Astronomers suggest a similar conjunction occurred in June of 2 BC, and various religious scholars and astrologers have connected this event to the birth of Christ (the star of Bethlehem). It seems such propitious conjunctions also relate to the 'Chemical Wedding' of Rosicrucian and Alchemical traditions. Mmm. I just thought it was beautiful, hypnotic.

Now, this is a night to walk home through the garden, I thought. You'd be able to dance down those steps and wink at the Buddha. He'd probably wink back, he sometimes does, the Enigmatic Dude with one open hand up and one down.

'The sun glows by day; the moon shines by night; in his armour the warrior glows. In meditation shines the brahman. But all day and all night, shines with radiance the Awakened One' (The Dhammapada).

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Fall guy

Nightfall (1971) - Bas Jan Ader
Black and white film, 16 mm, silent Duration 4'16"

"BJA stands in a garage behind a concrete paving slab. On the floor to his left and right are illuminated light bulbs. The camera records BJA frontally from a fixed position. After approximately one minute BJA picks up the heavy concrete slab and raises it onto his left shoulder. He the shifts the block onto his left palm and holds it like a serving tray. All of this is accomplished with great difficulty due to the weight of the slab. He throws the slab onto the light bulb on his left, smashing and extinguishing it. He remains standing in the middle for a while, picks up the slab again and repeats the entire process on his right-hand side. As the second light bulb is extinguished the scene turns to black" (84).

*****

Bas Jan Ader, in an interview from 1972: "I have always been fascinated by the tragic. That is also contained in the act of falling: the fall is failure. Someone once said to me: I can well imagine that you are so obsessed with the fall; that's because your father was shot. That is obviously a far too anecdotal interpretation. Everything is tragic because people always lose control of processes, of matter, of their feelings. That is a much more universal tragedy ..." (14).

*****

In his master's thesis (1967), Ader proposed to explore the meaning of 'fall' and its complement 'rise'. These two terms were sub-divided into categories:

1. Humpty Dumpty - fall guy - the egg suspended above the sky, and the use of the bicycle before and after its unexplained misfortune.
2. Sue Falls - table your feelings - the congratulatory letter to the Eiffel Tower and the leaning table, about to be sawed through, which contains this letter.
3. Plans for a dangerous journey and Niagara Falls ... (15-16).

Extracts from Rein Wolfs (ed.) Bas Jan Ader: Please Don't Leave Me, Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen / London: Camden Arts Centre, 2006. To see Bas Jan Ader's Nightfall, and some of his other 'fall' films (from the roof of his house, a bicycle into a canal, a tree branch into a stream etc.), see 'Selected Works' here

sight fall - the time of light

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

Translated by David Williams 

'After the nuclear disintegration of the space of matter, we have finally arrived at the territory of the time of light' (Paul Virilio)
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Laurence Louppe: In the course of your pedagogic activities, Paul Virilio, you have become interested in dance notation. This fact, in conjunction with the importance of your work, prompted us to enquire about your perspective on a field that is still rather misunderstood.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DD: How is this moment of evaluation inscribed?

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

LL: One must also attain vertigo ...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DD: Why do you want to point that out?

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

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

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

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

PV: It's the trajectory.

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

PV: It's a parabolic trajectory.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PV: Absolutely.

LL: You feel this falling when you give birth.

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

LL: And it'll weigh differently too.

PV: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DD: One's own death.

PV: Yes, one's own death.

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

PV: That's a completely different discussion.

DD: There's a sort of disproportion …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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