night flying

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

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

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

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

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

stony ground, but not entirely

As an undergraduate student of French and Drama at an English university in the late 1970s, with a furrowed brow and a cigarette-fueled enthusiasm for Camus, Genet, Ionesco and above all Beckett, I possessed a much thumbed and annotated copy of Martin Esslin’s The Theatre of the Absurd. Esslin’s book became a point of reference and orientation for me at that time, mapping and distilling certain thematic and formal patterns of which I felt I had intuited something without being able to organise those feelings into anything resembling coherent thought. 

At an impressionable, receptive period it was foundational for me, offering a window into affective landscapes of theatre, as well as leading me towards a wide range of other texts and readings. Initially it also spawned a bunch of adjectives that provided a kind of shorthand for complex ‘worlds’ and structures of feeling, words to be tossed around in undergraduate seminars and conversations as if there was a knowing, nodding consensus as to what they actually meant: ‘Beckettian’, ‘Kafkaesque’, ‘Pinteresque’ etc., as well as ‘absurdist’. 

Ultimately, and more productively, it helped seed a life-long interest in the ‘unlessenable least best worse' and ‘nohow on' of Beckett’s writings. The late Herbert Blau once located Beckett’s work as ‘the locus classicus of the problematic of the future' - and, on this hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of World War 1, as conflict continues unabated in various war zones around the world, Beckett will be a shadow companion in what follows:

‘Let us do something, while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed. Not indeed that we personally are needed … But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late!' (Vladimir in Waiting for Godot).

I still have that original copy of Esslin’s book, although until recently I had not opened its battered covers for many years. Almost forty years later, it is frankly disarming to revisit this text via the filter of my underlinings and scribbled notes, encountering these barely decipherable invitations to read and think as ‘someone else’ once read and thought. For these sub-Krapp marginalia offer the perspectives of a dimly remembered and prematurely world-weary nineteen year-old, his (my) unconvincing performance of hip Left Bank-ish anomie concretised in an omnipresent, decaying donkey jacket stuffed with papers and books (no carrots or pebbles), and an impenetrable micro-climatic pall of (‘Camusian’) smoke. 

I was clearly seduced and somehow affirmed by what I took - in my limited understanding of existentialism as a philosophical style, a grey cloak of ideas to be tossed over young shoulders and worn - to be revelatory representations of impossibility and inertia, of the inadequacies of reason, language and received regimes of the self, of disenchantment and meaninglessness in the face of mortality. In retrospect, I had little sense of the gravity and matter of such thoughts in and as lived experience.

Over the next few years, increasingly and joyously immersed in the chaotic, dissident explosion of new popular music at that time, and associated leftist politics, I came to read some of these plays as proto-‘punk’ manifestations, affectively rhythmed and charged mechanisms to prise the lid off the blind assumptions, repressed power-plays and dead-ends of naturalised middle-class ‘normality’ and conformity, education, culture, science-as-progress, entrepreneurship, meaningful action, the future. (One of my notes in the margins of Esslin’s book comically reads ‘Cf. Pistols?!’). In their defamiliarising shocks to thought and conventional aesthetic values, as much as in their pitch-black humour, these plays seemed to have a critical status politically and socially, both presenting lived situations as uncomfortable, uncanny image-worlds – how it is - and implicitly positing the possibility of and need to conceive of how it might be, otherwise, in a ‘world to come’. 

I began to realise that these were not exclusively essentialist metaphysical myths of nihilism and despair, scorched ahistorical outlines of the inevitability of the house burning down and total collapse through proliferation or entropic diminution, but also and at the same time abrasive, startling, excavatory calls to question and think and reimagine what Beckett in his short text ‘Enough’ characterised as ‘stony ground but not entirely’. Calls to make meaning where it apparently recedes and dissolves – in paradox, contradiction, oxymoron, double-bind, the uncanny, the im/possible, the Unnamable - or to learn how to live with not-meaning (1). Esslin suggested as much, perhaps, but somehow the insistent privileged framing of these plays, via a very particular conception of absurdity as anguished existential ontology, has served to insulate and defuse their potential critical, political charge.

So. Now. What/how one might live in relation to others. What/how one might be. What/how one might do. At this place, at this moment in time, all mankind is us. Whether we like it or not. 

Extract from an essay on Beckett and ecology, 'The ruins of time (I've forgotten this before)', published in the autumn of 2015 as part of a collection reappraising Esslin's Theatre of the Absurd in the light of contemporary environmental concerns and perspectives
 

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(1) It was only much later that I came across Adorno’s negative dialectics and other critical perspectives contesting an ‘absence’ of meaning in Beckett: “Beckett’s plays are absurd not because of the absence of any meaning, for they would be simply irrelevant, but because they put meaning on trial; they unfold its history’ (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 1970). See also Stanley Cavell on Endgame as: ‘not the failure of meaning (if that means the lack of meaning) but its total, even totalitarian success – our inability not to mean what we are given to mean’ (in Must We Mean What We Say?, 1996).

life forces

Over the past decade or so, in her solo and collaborative work in live performance and film, Jane Mason has explored ways in which the movements of bodies and objects can create ‘image worlds’ of great affective resonance and tenderness. These dynamic architectures of memory, loss, and longing combine dance, text, song and music in patterns of images that slowly align and unfold to suggest passage ways through felt times and spaces of a rhythmed intimacy and intensity. Usually triggered by some aspect of her own lived experience, these ‘worlds’ invite a quiet attention to detail, and an active slowing down into present process. Over the years, many of Jane’s images have lingered with me and etched themselves into my imagination – for in their exquisite precision and mystery, paradoxically they seem to invite and activate something of the life forces within our own memories and associational fields.

With its initial trigger in some boxes of photographic slides taken by her father some years ago, Life Forces develops this work of mining, uncovering, transposing and inviting, and opens up new landscapes of be/longing. Developed in close collaboration with a film maker, a writer-performer, a visual artist and a dramaturg, Life Forces offers a meditation on memory’s place in the face of uncertain futures, on place and home and their resilient fragilities, on the utopian impulse to ‘build’ together and to let (it) go, on the arcing electricity of connection and the drift of dispersal, and on transformation and change as the core ground of being, the ‘life force’ that links everything and everyone.

Short text written in the wake of various collaborations in recent years with the wonderful Jane Mason, and in response to her new performance piece Life Forces, prior to a showing of work-in-progress at Siobhan Davies Studios, London, in early July. With Jane Mason (choreographer/performer/writer), Phil Smith (performer/writer), Magali Charrier (film maker/animator), Sophia Clist (sculptor/designer), and David Williams (dramaturg). Tour from autumn 2014

messages in the pulse

'To be empty, free. Doing nothing. Yet not quite. Little blessings arrive which they collect. 

For the most part these blessings are memories yet it is misleading to say this, for, at the same time, they are promises. They collect the remembered pleasures of promises which cannot apply to the future which they have gladly vacated, but somehow do apply to the brief, empty present. 

The promises are wordless and physical. Some can be seen, some can be touched, some can be heard, some can be tasted. Some are no more than messages in the pulse. The taste of chocolate. The width of her hips. The splashing of water. The length of the daughter’s drenched hair. The way he laughed early this morning. The gulls above the boat. The crow’s feet by the corners of her eyes. The tattoo he made such a row about. The dog with its tongue hanging out in the heat. 

The promises in such things operate as passwords: passwords towards a previous expectancy about life. And the holidaymakers on the lakeside collect these passwords, finger them, whisper them, and are wordlessly reminded of that expectancy, which they live again surreptitiously'.

Extract from a text by John Berger, read by him at the Serpentine Gallery's Memory Marathon, London, 20 October 2012

shuttle 21: (in place of an) ending

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

shuttle 1: what will be ...

‘ … can't tell what's right, better hit the ground running …’

(Calexico, ‘Quattro’)

‘We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world’ (Robert M Pirsig, Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, New York: Bantam, 1981, p, 6)

"American cars invariably carry the names of animals, or aggression and, if possible, a combination of the two: Impala, Thunderbird, Stingray, Mustang, Firebird, Charger, Corvette. In Albuquerque I hire a beast, a powder-blue Ford Mustang, and slipping a cassette into the stereo drive out along the interstate into the New Mexico desert. 

The desert seduces us with the idea that we can start out over again, begin from zero: a myth dear to the hygienic rationality of pure reason and not completely absent from the demonic aestheticism of Nietzschean thought. But it can also suggest the idea of the infinite, the infinite language of Jewish thinking where, unlike the rational finality of Greek logos, we are always dealing with the question of what will be: an infinite future that conceals its origins, where the inscription of sense never concludes; for writing “is not a mirror. To write is to confront an unknown face’ (Edmond Jabès).  

In the end we recognize that there is no possibility of going back, of starting over again. All we can do is confront ourselves and our histories. In the clear light of the desert, where our actions are overexposed, where, among the bits and pieces of our existence, time and space dissolve into one another and the wind blowing up from the past uncovers patterns in the deposits of our lives, we find ourselves in a landscape where there is no interpretation seemingly powerful enough to present itself as the unique truth. 

The metaphor of the desert – a privileged topology for the nomadic sentiments of modern thought – can also become the place where we get lost, where our existence is swallowed up and cancelled. For the moment, the only truth on which we can rely is the immediate contact between the asphalt and the wheels of our car as we move between towns, motels, TV screens and billboards, elaborating local “maps that matter”, travelling down the provisional road we construct between what has already occurred and the possible …"

Iain Chambers, Border Dialogues: journeys in postmodernity, London & New York: Routledge, 1990, 87-8
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'"In the Mojave Desert, on the border of Nevada and California stands a phone booth. The glass is shattered and the frame has six bullet holes". Each day, there are over one hundred phone calls from every single continent, most often wrong numbers ... "Over the past few years, the aluminum phone booth, which is owned by Pacific Bell, has become the great switchboard of the world".

It is the focalisation point of the multiple solitude of the invisible community inhabiting the limbs of virtual space. Sometimes, as if by miracle, someone answers: "I am here", and the unknown caller replies: "I'm glad you're there, that you answered".

Paul Virilio (quoting Jean-Paul Dubois), 'The Twilight of the Grounds', in The Desert, London & New York: Fondation Cartier/Thames & Hudson, 2000, 111
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For driving music, see here: a video of Quattro by Tucson residents Calexico

For an earlier post about driving to work elsew/here, through the deserts of West London, see here