taking a line for a walk

The following text was written for my friends and sometimes collaborators Malgven Gerbes and David Brandstätter, two Berlin-based choreographer-performers. It is a response to their performance work Notebook, which will be performed at the Internationalisches Festival des zeitgenössischen Tanzes der Landeshaupstadt München in Germany in October 2010.

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Taking a line for a walk (for malgven & david)

The memory of movement.

If I think back to when I first spent time in a studio with Malgven, two things struck me. First, her energized drawings in her notebook – usually architectural configurations, spaces materializing on the empty page before your eyes. A new page, a new drawing. She used paper so freely, I once suggested to her that she was hungry for space. Secondly, her remarkably patient attention to detail in moving, the economy and clarity of her impulses, the dynamism of her stillness. Her embodied lightness reminded me of a phrase Paul Valéry once wrote, about being ‘light as a bird, not light as a feather’. On paper and on the dance floor, she inscribed space with self-sufficiency and the lightest of touch; images appeared, and then dispersed. Erasure as release, return to potentiality.

If I think back to when I first spent time in a studio with David, he seemed to be a horse to Malgven’s bird. A more animal presence, an unpredictable energy flaring like magma. Watching, smiling, prowling, jumping. He struck me as extraordinarily sensitive, a live wire - and what animal behaviourists call a ‘lean-into’ creature, yes, like a horse: tactile, relational, capable of great generosity and stillness.

In Notebook, Malgven and David are both engaged in mark making, conjuring up ephemeral architectures and dynamics, places and rhythms. She draws with her uncannily precise movement and her gaze, sculpting space; he draws with rice. A white Fuji-mound of rice unfurls like a ball of string, and the line is taken for a walk. At first it registers rectilinear spaces, there and not there, shadow traces of remembered or possible architectures established for Malgven’s embodied inscriptions - and then wiped away with the lightest of touch. After a while, in my mind at least, the rice becomes something more complex and elemental, like weather: rain drops, snow, wind, then waves unfolding across a shore with a hiss.

Only the barest of means are employed: two people, a broom, the floor as scriptable surface, the rice – a homogeneous singularity and a granular multiplicity. The rice is both wave and particle, like light.

Attention is amplified. Stillness moves.

Inevitably I think of calligraphy, Zen gardens, and the (di)stilling of the ego to a deep-breathing economy of form. I think of the term ‘ma’ in Japanese aesthetics: the ‘empty’ space in a bowl that is the ground for form’s appearance; the depth in an ink-wash painting; the silence in music; the active space of potentiality between things. According to ‘ma’, emptiness is active and full to overflowing.

I think of Freud’s Wunderblock, in English often called the ‘mystic writing pad’, the surface for memory’s inscriptions and erasures, the notebook for the work of consciousness.

And I think of William Blake: ‘To see a world in a grain of sand …’

In Julien Crépieux’s video images, his camera another notebook of mnemonic inscriptions, other lines are traced in light. As dusk falls over London and the contrails of planes dissolve in the night sky, in my mind’s eye I remember and see again the trajectory of a tiny old dog, and the passage of a small inquisitive child; the flex of tree trunks in a forest in the wind; a ship skirting the coast of a Japanese island; the choreography of litter in the Seoul traffic.

The movement of memory.

Photographs from early R&D work at Potsdam Tanzfabrik: David Williams. For further information on Malgven & David's work, see their website here

shuttle 16: drawing

'Drawing figures, is figured.
Drawing pulls, pushes, tugs, drags.
Drawing is friction, gravity.
Earth draws, is drawn, draws maps.
Sun draws, draws shadows, photos.
Moon draws tides'
(From Roberto Chabet's exhibition Lines on Drawing, 1999)

'A line, an area of tone, is not really important because it records what you have seen, but because of what it will lead you on to see' (John Berger, 'Life Drawing', in Jim Savage (ed.), Berger on Drawing, Cork: Occasional Press, 2007)
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'On an ancient lake bed located on the western side of Death Valley National Park, boulders that weigh up to 700 pounds sail across the almost perfectly flat terrain, leaving grooved trails in their wake ... Each of these furrows chronicles a rock’s journey, ranging from a mere few inches to nearly 3,000 feet. Some tracks manifest in straight bold lines, while others coil back on themselves in sinuous arcs.

Despite a century of scientific investigation, this curious phenomenon has confounded the geological community and park visitors alike. To this day, no one has ever seen the rocks move. But in lieu of eyewitnesses, countless theories have been put forward over the years in an effort to explain the reasons behind the migrations.

One early suggestion was that the rocks were driven by gravity, sliding down a gradual slope over a long period of time. But this theory was discounted when it was revealed that the northern end of the playa is actually several centimeters higher than the southern end and that most of the rocks were in fact traveling uphill.

Though no one has yet been able to conclusively identify just what makes the rocks move, one woman is coming closer to solving the mystery. For the past ten years, Dr. Paula Messina, Professor of Geology at San Jose State University in California, has made it her quest to understand what has bewildered geologists for decades. “It’s interesting that no one has seen them move, so I am kind of sleuthing to see what’s really going on here,” says Dr. Messina.

Many scientists had dedicated much of their careers to the racing rocks, but the remoteness of the area kept their research limited in scope. No one had been able to map the complete set of trails before the advent of a quick, portable method known as global positioning. Dr. Messina was the first to have the luxury of this high technology at her fingertips.

In 1996, armed with a hand-held GPS unit, she digitally mapped the location of each of the 162 rocks scattered over the playa. “I’m very fortunate that this technology was available at about the same time the Racetrack captured my interest,” she says. “It took only ten days to map the entire network — a total of about 60 miles.” Since then, she has continued to chart the movements of each rock within a centimeter of accuracy. Walking the length of a trail, she collects the longitude and latitude points of each, which snap into a line. She then takes her data back to the lab where she is able to analyze changes in the rocks’ positions since her last visit.

She has found that two components are essential to their movement: wind and water. The fierce winter storms that sweep down from the surrounding mountains carry plenty of both.

The playa surface is made up of very fine clay sediments that become extremely slick when wet. “When you have pliable, wet, frictionless sediments and intense winds blowing through,” offers Dr. Messina, “I think you have the elements to make the rocks move.”

At an elevation of 3,700 feet, strong winds can rake the playa at 70 miles per hour. But Dr. Messina is quick to point out that sometimes even smaller gusts can set the rocks in motion. The explanation for this lies in her theory, which links wind and water with yet another element: bacteria.

After periods of rain, bacteria lying dormant on the playa begin to “come to.” As they grow, long, hair-like filaments develop and cause a slippery film to form on the surface. “Very rough surfaces would require great forces to move the lightest-weight rocks,” she says. “But if the surface is exceptionally smooth, as would be expected from a bio-geologic film, even the heaviest rocks could be propelled by a small shove of the wind. I think of the Racetrack as being coated by Teflon, under those special conditions.”

In science, hypotheses are often based on logic. But over the years, Dr. Messina has discovered that on the Racetrack, logic itself must often be tossed to the wind. “Some of the rocks have done some very unusual things,” she says. In her initial analysis she hypothesized that given their weight, larger rocks would travel shorter distances and smaller, lighter rocks would sail on further, producing longer trails. It also seemed reasonable that the heavier, angular rocks would leave straighter trails and rounder rocks would move more erratically. What she discovered surprised her. “I was crunching numbers and found that there was absolutely no correlation between the size and shape of the rocks and their trails. There was no smoking gun, so this was one of the big mysteries to me.”

What appears as a very flat, uniform terrain is in fact a mosaic of micro-climates. In the southeastern part of the playa, wind is channeled through a low pass in the mountains, forming a natural wind tunnel. This is where the longest, straightest trails are concentrated. In the central part of the playa, two natural wind tunnels converge from different directions, creating turbulence. It’s in this area that the rock trails are the most convoluted. “What I think is happening,” proposes Dr. Messina, “is the surrounding topography is actually what is guiding the rocks and telling them where to go.”

Some people have suggested attaching radio transmitters to the rocks or erecting cameras to catch them “in the act” in order to put an end to the speculation. But as Death Valley National Park is 95 percent designated wilderness, all research in the park must be non-invasive. It is forbidden to erect any permanent structures or instrumentation. Further, no one is permitted on the playa when it is wet because each footprint would leave an indelible scar.

As for Dr. Messina, she is content in the sleuthing. “People frequently ask me if I want to see the rocks in action and I can honestly answer that I do not,” she says. “Science is all about the quest for knowledge, and not necessarily knowing all the answers. Part of the lure of this place is its mystery. It’s fine with me if it remains that way.”

From 'Life in Death Valley: The Mystery of the Racing Rocks', Nature
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For a Wikipedia entry on the 'sailing stones' of Death Valley, see here. 'In a study published in 2011 it is postulated that small rafts of ice form around the rocks and when the local water level rises, the rocks are buoyantly floated off the soft bed, thus reducing the reaction and friction forces at the bed. Since this effect depends on reducing friction, and not on increasing the wind drag, these ice cakes need not have a particularly large surface area if the ice is adequately thick, as the minimal friction allows the rocks to be moved by arbitrarily light winds'.

shuttle 16:2: tracking

Photos by David Mcnew, David Roossien, Alberto Arzoz, Richard Misrach; tracks by animals including kangaroo rats, a desert tortoise, various insects, and vehicles; marks made in the Mojave, Imperial Dunes, Black Rock, Tenere/Sahara and Namibian deserts, and on the Bonneville Salt Flats, Utah

shuttle 10: stars

‘Galloping horses of the departed century, I will consult ashes, stars, and flights of birds’ (Czeslaw Milosz, ‘The Unveiling’, from The Rising of the Sun)

'We are both storytellers. Lying on our backs, we look up at the night sky. This is where stories began, under the aegis of that multitude of stars which at night filch certitudes and sometimes return them as faith. Those who first invented and then named the constellations were storytellers. Tracing an imaginary line between a cluster of stars gave them an image and an identity. The stars threaded on that line were like events threaded on a narrative. Imagining the constellations did not of course change the stars, nor did it change the black emptiness that surrounds them. What it changed was the way people read the night sky' (John Berger, And our faces, my heart, brief as photos)
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'... Look: the Tower of Babel and the Felicity of Tents; up there are highway robbers, and doves bringing ambrosia to the gods, and the twin horsemen of the dawn;     up there the daughter of the wind, mourning for her husband lost at sea;     the Strong River is there, and the Palace of the Five Emperors, the Kennel of the Barking Dogs, the Straw Road, the Birds' Way, the Snake River of Sparkling Dust;     up there are the nymphs who mourn their brother Hyas, killed by a wild boar, and whose tears are shooting stars;     there are the Seven Portuguese Towers, the Boiling Sea, the Place Where One Bows Down;     look: the Ostriches Leaving and the Ostriches Returning and the Two Ostriches who are friends;     Cassiopeia, Queen of Ethiopia, who thought she was more beautiful than the Nereids, is there, and her hapless daughter Andromeda, and Perseus who rescued her with the head of Medusa swinging from his belt, and the monster, Cetus, he slew, and the winged horse Pegasus he rode;     there is the bull who plows the Furrow of Heaven;     up there is the Hand Stained with Henna, the Lake of Fullness, the Empty Bridge, the Egyptian X;     ...     up there is the Butcher's Shop, the Easy Chair, the Broken Platter, the Rotten Melon, the Light of Heaven;     Hans the Wagoner, who gave Jesus a ride, is there, and the lion who fell from the moon in the form of a meteor;     up there, once a year, ten thousand magpies form a bridge so that the Weaving Girl can cross the River of Light to meet the Oxherding Boy;     there are the braids of Queen Berenice, who sacrificed her hair to assure her husband's safety;     up there is a ship that never reaches safe harbor, and the Whisperer, the Weeping One, the Illuminator of the Great City, and look: the General of the Wind;     the Emperor Mu Wang and his charioteer Tsao Fu, who went in search of the peaches of the Western Paradise, are there;     the beautiful Callisto, doomed by Juno's jealousy, and the goddess Marichi who drives her chariot led by wild boars through the sky;     there are the Sea Goat, the Danish Elephant, the Long Blue Cloud-Eating Shark, and the White-Bone-Snake:     up there is Theodosius turned into a star and the head of John the Baptist turned into a star and Li Po's breath, a star his poem make brighter:     there are the Two Gates, one through which the souls descend when they are ready to enter human bodies, and the other through which they rise at death;     there a puma springs on its prey, and a Yellow Dragon climbs the Steps of Heaven;     up there is the Literary Woman, the Frigid Maiden, the Moist Daughters, and the Head of the Woman in Chains;     there is the Thirsty Camel, the Camel Striving to Get to Pasture, and the Camel Pasturing Freely; there the Crown of Thorns or the crown that Bacchus gave Ariadne as a wedding gift;     look:     the Horse's Navel, the Lion's Liver, the Balls of the Bear;     there is Rohni, the Red Deer, so beautiful that the moon, though he had twenty-seven wives, loved her alone;     up there the Announcer of Invasion on the Border, the Child of the Waters, the Pile of Bricks, the Exaltation of Piled-Up Corpses, the Excessively Minute, the Dry Lake, the Sacks of Coals, the Three Guardians of the Heir Apparent, the Tower of Wonders, the Overturned Chair;     up there is a cloud of dust kicked up by a buffalo, and the steamy breath of the elephant that lies in the waters that surround the earth, and the muddy water churned by a turtle swimming across the sky;     up there is the broken circle that is a chipped dish, or a boomerang, or the opening of the cave where the Great Bear sleeps;     up there the two donkeys whose braying made such a racket they frightened away the giants and were rewarded with a place in the sky;     there is the Star of a Thousand Colors, the Hand of Justice, the Plain and Even Way;     there is the Double Double;     there the Roadside Inn;     there the State Umbrella;     there the Shepherd's Hut     there the Vulture;     look: the Winnowing Fan;     there the Growing Small;     there the Court of God;     there the Quail's Fire;     there St Peter's Ship and the Star of the Sea;     there:     look:     up there:     the stars'.

From Eliot Weinberger, 'The Stars', in An Elemental Thing, New York: New Directions Books, 2007, 174-6

Images: (top) - 17th century celestial map, 'Planisphaeri coeleste', by the Dutch cartographer Frederik de Wit

(bottom) -  the Milky Way in the night sky, photographed by Steve Jurvetson, Black Rock Desert, Nevada, 22 July 2007

sky lines

The first contrail in the sky above West London on 21 April 2010, after the period of plane-free skies generated by the ash cloud from the Eyjafjallajokull volcano in Iceland ...

And a NASA geosat image from 11 May 2010, showing the volcanic ash cloud's line of continuing drift towards the south-east ...