be a mountain

‘To sit, to listen, to be, to observe, to breathe, to think, to remember – the most urgent choreography’ (Lepecki 1996: 107).

‘Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will sense them. The least we can do is try to be there’ (Dillard 1998: 10).

***

Deep space

For two years in the mid-1980s I lived on a mountain in Australia, some miles to the west of the national capital Canberra. My rented home on the mountain – Mount Stromlo - was one of a number of 1950s single-storey wooden houses in a small community attached to a major observatory. A little further around the mountain towered half a dozen huge, brooding, domed telescopes. My neighbours were astronomers, astrophysicists, PhD researchers, computer engineers; they usually worked at night, and I rarely saw them out and about during the days. This was a place of deep looking of a specific kind. Initially established as a solar observatory, research at that time was focused primarily on galactic astronomy, notably supernovas and the rate of change of cosmic expansion, as well as the monitoring of space weather. To walk at night amongst the structures housing the reflector telescopes was an uncanny experience. These silent monolithic sentinels would suddenly crank and whir into life without warning, their slowly revolving aluminium domes winking in the moonlight as they opened to the infinite pearl-strewn intricacies of the night sky. Once I lay on the ground beside them, looking upwards, trying to imagine something of what they were seeing.

Awakening: ‘the 10,000 beings’

‘Don’t be a mountaineer, be a mountain’ (Snyder 1999: 20).

Lucy Cash and Simone Kenyon’s short film How the earth must see itself (a thirling) offers a distilled, poetic mapping of an area of mountain terrain – Glen Feshie on the western side of the Cairngorms in Scotland – through embodied engagement with and perceptions of its particular material attributes and energies. The film concerns itself with modalities of seeing, sensing and knowing, ecologies of place making, an explicitly gendered economy of respectful attention and exchange (in sharp contrast to the ‘heroic’ assaults, conquests or catastrophes of so many mountaineering narratives), and a resonant wonder that both recognizes the provisionality of its understandings and affirms the abundant complexity of a wilderness environment which exceeds the cognitive reach of the self. In image and sound, it proposes to displace any singular perspective in favour of a more modest, contemplative, ecological immersion in the protean dynamics of present process.

The film draws on and refashions material developed for a series of live performances directed by Kenyon with a group of women collaborators, their work inspired by Nan Shepherd’s astonishing book The Living Mountain, originally written during the second World War and first published in 1977.  Shepherd’s book might be read as a kind of modernist mystic’s love song to a place she knew intimately, and the amplified sensory attention and devotion of her enquiry are in many ways tonally and thematically reminiscent of Annie Dillard’s exquisite writings about Tinker Creek in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Both women elaborate a grace-ful pedagogy of seeing and sensing. And while Shepherd’s Presbyterian materialism perhaps offers a particularly Scottish counterpoint to Dillard’s ecstatic questioning pantheism, both seek a profound interpenetration of body, consciousness and place – they are thirled (1) - that undoes the self and sets it in motion, casting it into an unfinishable, contoured endeavour to understand an abundant, auratic here-and-now that will never fully give away its abiding mysteries.

In his perceptive introduction to a recent edition of Shepherd’s slim volume, Robert Macfarlane characterizes her writing in terms of ‘a compressive intensity, a generic disobedience, a flaring prose-poetry and an obsession (ocular, oracular) with the eyeball’ (Shepherd 2011: xiii). Consciously or otherwise, Cash and Kenyon appear to have conceived and moulded their film at least in part in the light of these qualities, and they condense fragments of Shepherd’s acutely pensive text to accompany and guide us in voice-over through the film. Spoken by the Scottish performer Shirley Henderson, these voicings are marked with a distinct gender, accent, timbre, and a flinty, weathered grain (in Barthes’s sense, grain as the body in the voice) that reminded me of Linda Manz in Terence Malick’s Days of Heaven (I can think of no higher compliment). Like Manz’s, Henderson’s voice is indeterminate in terms of age and historical time, as if archetypal – a benign revenant version of the pre-Christian Cailleach of the highlands, perhaps. And what she says come to us in a dream-like close-up, at times whispered, little more than shaped breath, like thoughts on the threshold of consciousness and at the cusp of articulation. Hers is the voice of an old soul, like Shepherd’s: faraway and so close.

The film as a whole seems to be discreetly rounded with sleep, framed by the very first voice-over words we hear in terms of the fresh perceptions activated when one emerges from a night spent on the mountain. From its opening blurred pan across the dormant body-like folds of the Cairngorms, set against a misty skyline, one might perhaps conceive of the film itself as a soft, porous ‘awakening’ into an attuned, uninsulated receptivity in an immersive, quasi-animist present. ‘Noone knows the mountain completely who has not slept on it. As one slips over into sleep, the mind grows limpid. The body melts. Perception alone remains. One neither thinks nor desires nor remembers. There is nothing between me and the earth and sky’. And the mountain itself seems to stir into flickering life – a sprig of heather dancing softly in the breeze, a scurrying beetle, the astonishing feel-stretch of a caterpillar exploring a budding twig, the play of light on a spider’s web. The film’s closing fade-to-black, set alongside the sounds of a women’s choir and bird song, returns us to the darkness of (a different) sleep.

On first ‘awakening’, we are drawn into proliferative life and movement in image and sound, registers of the teeming material world often referred to in Buddhist literature as ‘the 10,000 beings’. We slip (at first I wrote the verb ‘plunge’, but that’s much too sudden a trajectory for this study in slow perception) (2) – we slip gently into a world of dynamic complexity, delicacy, precarity, resilience and interconnectedness, and over time we come to sense a tacit invitation to ‘think like a mountain’, to borrow Aldo Leopold’s celebrated phrase. For the film perceives and maps this mountain massif as an intricate ecosystem, a biodiverse web of agencies, interrelations and interdependencies between earth, rock, flora, fauna, water, weather, sky, all of them intertwined and in process.

As the film unfolds, our orientation through seeing and listening pulses between crystalline resolution and out-of-focus, proximity and distance, extreme close-up and wider context. The camera knowingly makes of our vision a modality that is imperfect and provisional, its rhythms contrapuntal and discontinuous, its points of view shifting. At moments the materiality of the 16 mm film and the camera’s mediation of seeing interrupt the ‘natural’ quality of these images, declaring their contingent madeness. A range of evanescent visual textures and effects, both deliberate choices and chance mechanical accidents happily embraced, briefly undo the integrity and singularity of the filmed image, destabilising the authority of the camera’s claim to truth, its ‘mastering’ of reality. These include frame slippage – the split-frame judder that registers those spaces between frames that are usually invisible to the viewer – the flaring micro-tempests of light leak, over-exposure and solarisation, shifting unstable focus and the sense at times of a softer peripheral vision, and the foggy blur of halation around certain objects, like breath on a mirror. Although superficially reminiscent of the work of certain other contemporary filmmakers in terms of their heightened engagement with film’s textural materiality (for example, Ben Rivers, Guy Maddin or Mark Jenkin), in Cash’s work, in addition to her activation of duration itself as material – an analogue to the deep time of the topography of this place - the very act of seeing is foregrounded as mercurial, unpredictable and dynamic, entailing an active process of negotiation of the partial and the compromised. In this way, the film enacts a kind of formal equivalence to Nan Shepherd’s own nuanced phenomenological insights in The Living Mountain as to the unsteady provisionality of vision, its morphing multiplicity and its inevitable implicating - literally, ‘en-folding’ - of other senses in embodied processes of experiencing and (always partial) meaning making. In particular, hearing and touch.

Never silent, the film’s complex sound track invites a kind of somatic ‘deep listening’, to use Pauline Oliveros’s term. It layers Henderson’s voice over a montage of bird sounds (corvids, a cuckoo, a skylark), the chattering flow of a small stream, footfalls in heather, a tiny crunching like infinite insect legs scurrying across pine needle debris, the soft thwoosh of bodies falling, and the continuous movement of wind and air, which at times suggests the tidal susurration of a distant spectral sea. In addition, a choir of women sings Hannah Tuulikki’s meditative vocal score, its compositional arc rising gradually towards collective celebratory flight towards the film’s ending. Combining sonic materials that are both spatially close-up and further afield, this heterogeneous sonic environment elaborates a detailed topography of holistic entanglement in a textured braiding of elements, sensations, creatures and perspectives. ‘For the mountain is one and indivisible … all are aspects of one entity: the living mountain’ ...

Look out

‘I knew when I had looked for a long time, that I had hardly begun to see’ (Shepherd 2011: xix).

The mountain observatory that was my home in Australia all those years ago was a designated place of looking in other ways too. At weekends during the summer months, I worked a 6-hour solitary shift as a fire ‘watcher’, spending a sustained chunk of daylight hours at the top of a tall circular metal lookout platform on one side of the mountain. In this windowless space high above the pine canopy there was a tall chair, a curved bench table, a logbook, binoculars to scan the surrounding ranges and valleys for any trace of smoke, a phone and a 2-way radio to file hourly reports to a central fire office in the city. I remember maps, a radio for weather reports, and a printout detailing different kinds of smoke plumes and how to read their specific colours in terms of the combustible materials involved. At the top and bottom edges of the framed panoramic field of vision were compass points etched into a metal strip, a version of the old 32-point wind rose. The direction of any smoke seen in the distance could be gauged relatively accurately by suspending a line vertically through the field of vision and aligning the plume with the compass coordinates above and below. A number of such readings from partner lookout points in the area, with intersecting fields of vision, would enable the central office to triangulate and fix the whereabouts of the fire. The semiotics and mapping of smoke.

My rhythm was to scan steadily and formally, backwards and forwards across the 180 degrees of visible landscape to be surveyed, then step away from the binoculars to rest my eyes in a softer drifting mode of looking, an undirected hazy pan of reverie or a jump-zoom in on something much closer at hand. A tuning in and out. Whenever I was distracted from the methodical, meditative engagement with what lay in the scalloped distance, it was triggered by registering change of some kind, something ‘fleet and fleeting’ as Annie Dillard might say: the interruption-event of a boisterous flock of white cockatoos, a loping wallaby or kangaroo foraging in the undergrowth at the base of trees nearby, an unfamiliar insect or spider alongside me in the lookout space, a caterpillar edging forward hesitantly with invisible information, a shift in the cloud cover, the breeze, temperature or light on my face.

One Saturday afternoon, I fell asleep up there, I’m not sure for how long. Looking out just folded slowly and softly into a looking in. When I woke up with a start, flushed with self-consciousness as if someone or something might have seen me sleeping, above all I was anxious as to what I might have missed; I immediately looked up and out. And I saw that it was almost dusk, and that there were no visible smoke plumes, and that everything had been transformed utterly and remade while I wasn’t even looking. And I saw ‘in a blue haze all the world poured flat and pale between the mountains’ (Dillard 1974: 41) …

***

Almost twenty years later in January 2003, long after I had left Mount Stromlo, in the height of a summer drought a devastating firestorm consumed the mountain utterly, sweeping through the pine forests on its flanks and destroying five of the telescopes, their aluminium domes, mirrors and lenses literally melted away, along with years of research data. The fire also razed to the ground many of the research buildings and houses, including my former home, and the lookout tower. The residents were given 20 minutes warning for their evacuation. Only one telescope survived the inferno.

Seeing touching

‘I walk out; I see something, some event that would otherwise have been utterly missed and lost; or something sees me, some enormous power brushes me with its clean wing, and I resound like a beaten bell’ (Dillard 1998: 14).

Like Shepherd’s book, Cash and Kenyon’s film activates a perceptual and conceptual terrain that sits astride a number of apparent binaries: looking/seeing, proximity/distance, small/large, subject/object, human/non-human, material/immaterial, speed/slowness, deep time/the present moment, knowing/mystery, sleeping/waking, living/dying. In both book and film each of these is unstable, in flux, the axis of a potential becoming. Each term is implicated in the other. To this list must be added the core pairing of seeing/touching, a conventional Western clefting that is actively frayed and then repurposed in this film. The women performers – quietly receptive explorers of and somatic witnesses to the mountain - embody the vibrant connective tissue in the space between these two kinds of perception.

As a range of writers, philosophers and phenomenologists have suggested over the past half-century or so – Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emanuel Levinas, Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, Elizabeth Grosz and others – touch, the first sense to develop in the human foetus, involves a corporeal doing that exposes the sensitivity, porosity and vulnerability of the self to the world. As act and metaphor, touch represents the impingement of the world as a whole upon subjectivity; and touching locates oneself in proximity with the givens of the world, rather than in opposition to them. At the threshold of inside and outside, touch as encounter and interface with the more-than-oneself, the event of another. Touch as a modality of difference.

As the film unfolds we see one, then three, then five women on the mountain: Jo Hellier, Claricia Parinussa, Caroline Reagh, Keren Smail and Petra Söör. Their clothes - hand-knitted jumpers, leather belts, trousers, an elegant contemporary version of what women hikers would have worn half a century ago – reflect the textures, shapes and colour spectrum of their surroundings. They appear to belong in the mountain. They practice movements and states of being-in-place that are akin to what are known as ‘The Four Dignities’ in Chinese literature, fundamental modes of being mindful and present (‘at home’) in one’s body: Standing, Lying, Sitting, Walking. First we see one of the women standing immobile, dwarfed by a tree, contemplating its soaring presence, before softly placing her hand on its trunk and stepping ‘into’ it. Then the women as a group, walking slowly and silently through the heather. We see their eyes seeing, their bodies sensing, feeling the air on their skin and through their hair. At one point they lie folded in the heather, their arched woolen backs like scattered boulders that slowly stir into movement. A hand dips into running water, lingering with its energy and temperature, drinking them in. Another hand, then bare feet, carefully explore the qualities and architecture of thick spongey moss. The pleasure of tender exchange in the rust-coloured moss’s give and return, the responsive dance of toucher touched in the flesh of the world. Subsequently the women perform a simple collective choreographic cycle of organic emergence and return, appearance and disappearance: individually rising from the heather, standing, swaying in the breeze, gradually provoking imbalance by bending backwards and inverting their perception of the world - ‘unmaking’ the habitual - before finally letting go and falling back softly to earth. At times the camera adopts the fallers’ point of view, tracking the backward slide of their visual field across the sky.

Ultimately perhaps the film invites us to see a range of tactile encounters in proximity, with a view to the experience of the film itself offering the viewer an engagement with a haptic space rather than a singularly optical one. No opposition is established between these different kinds of sensing; instead the film encourages us to recognize the possibility that the eyes can see - and the ears hear - in a tactile fashion, apprehending and lightly brushing the epidermis of the world. If we are to find a trajectory ‘into’ any environment through open embodied contact, it seems to suggest, our journey will necessarily entail something of that pulsing world entering and taking (a) place within our own internal topography. For the edges of our bodies are membranes for two-way traffic …

So let us take time, make space.

Dissolve the mind, walk out of the body.

Allow what’s out there to in-here.

That’s the invitation, the most urgent choreography.

‘Lick a finger; feel the now’ (Dillard 1998: 99) …

***

Footnotes

1. Online Scottish dictionaries offer an uncertain etymology for the term ‘thirl’, with possible links to the words ‘through’, throw’, ‘thirl’ (a hole, aperture, nostril), ‘hurl’, ‘thrill’ and ‘thrall’. Formally, as a noun or verb ‘thirl’ suggests the creation of an interconnecting hole or passage way, a perforation that enables an intersection and interpenetration between spaces; the sensations and symptoms of intense emotion, physical stimulation or piercing cold (trembling, tingling, throbbing, vibrating, a literal and figurative ‘thrilling’); and a binding connection to a particular place (see DSL). The glossary appended to Shepherd’s book simply contains the following short entry: ‘Thirled, bound, tied’ (Shepherd 2011: 114).

2.  René Daumal: ‘There is nothing quite like the mountains for teaching slowness and calmness’ (Daumal 2010: 19).

References

Dictionary of the Scots Language (DSL). ‘Thirl’, entry in the online ‘Scottish National Dictionary (1700-)’, https://www.dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/thirl_v1_n1

Daumal, René (2010. Mount Analogue, New York: The Overlook Press

Dillard, Annie (1998). Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, New York: Harper Perennial 

Lepecki, André (1996). ‘Embracing the stain: notes on the time of dance’, Performance Research 1:1 (‘The Temper of the Times’), Spring, 103-7

Shepherd, Nan (2011). The Living Mountain, Edinburgh: Canongate Books

Snyder, Gary (1999). The Gary Snyder Reader, Washington DC: Counterpoint

Photo at the top: Stuart Lindenmayer - Mount Stromlo, burnt out observatory at night, 31 August 2017 (remains of one of the original telescopes, which now exists alongside new observatory facilities). Wikimedia Creative Commons license

This essay was originally written as a response to a film by Lucy Cash. Entitled ‘'The most urgent choreography’: reflections on seeing and sensing in How the earth must see itself (a thirling)', it was commissioned by Lucy Cash in 2019

---

listen

One can look at seeing.
One can’t hear hearing.
Can one listen to listening?

I asked you to come so that we might talk about it. I asked you to come so as not to be alone in thinking about it.

Last summer, I wrote the following fragment. It started out as a map of the mechanics of hearing. Hearing is not at all the same as listening, I know, but hey it’s a start:

“Auditory canal to tympanic membrane to the chain of auditory ossicles (hammer, anvil, stirrup) to the labyrinths of the inner ear and the cochlea (snail). An epic micro-trajectory through membraneous, bony and fluid connectivities involved in the process of ‘transduction’ – that is, the translation of the complex frequencies and intensities of sound waves into electro-chemical signals. The intimate immensity of these intricate architectures, and the poetics of their namings: hammer, anvil, stirrup, snail. The construction of surreal conjunctions, assemblages of the organic and inorganic, the artisanal, the disciplinary and the animal. The rhythms and sounds of the points of contact in a smithy’s forge, in equestrian training, in the passage of a snail, and the trace in its wake”.

Noise is the forest of everything. Some people hear music in the heart of noise. And sound itself is surrounded by its own sound.

There are many ways to listen.

“Words are everywhere, inside me, outside of me … I hear them, no need to hear them, no need of a head, impossible to stop them, impossible to stop. I’m in words, made of words, others’ words, what others … the whole world is here with me, I’m in the air, the walls, the walled-in one, everything yields, opens, ebbs, flows, like flakes. I’m all these flakes, meeting, mingling, falling asunder, wherever I go I find me, leave me, go towards me, come from me, nothing ever but me, a particle of me, retrieved, lost, gone astray, I’m all these words, all these strangers, this dust of words, with no ground for their setting, no sky for their dispersing, coming together to say, fleeing one another to say, that I am they, all of them, those that merge, those that part, those that never meet …” (Beckett)

The wireless imagination … Voices surface, peel off, tone after tone, tones stored in history: his master’s voice, the roaring rally, the frightened child, the dying parents, the secret sigh, the quiet hello. And all for free, without the blue-folding crackle of monetary exchange …

How to bring attention to things without bringing things to attention?

Let us inhabit a large modern city with our ears more attentive than our eyes. Let us see and touch and smell and taste with our ears. Let us let sounds be themselves.

Sometimes speaking produces little more than ‘the shadow of speech’, as Maurice Blanchot suggests: ‘a language which is still only its image, an imaginary language and a language of the imaginary, the one nobody speaks, the murmur of the incessant and the interminable which one has to silence if one wants, at last, to be heard’.

So I will be silent for a while. For 4 minutes 33 seconds, perhaps.
But remember that there’s no such thing as silence. There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. Every milieu is vibratory. There is always something to hear, always something to see.

Silence is all of the sounds we don’t intend. Accept any interruptions. And silence always involves a silencing.

'I have a sound inside me that scratches to itself and I am not allowed to listen. When I open my mouth, it is a hum that dogs notice, and they come to me and wait' (Ben Marcus).

A PERIOD OF SILENCE

Thank you. It’s surprising (is it?) how much can come out of what we call ‘nothing’. If we listen.

The sounds of things say on the level of that which is not yet knowledge. And all matter sounds all of the time. We know that the lilies are extremely busy.

What is the sound of a hair breaking free from a scalp, and falling to the floor? Or the sound of ants walking in the grass? What is the sound of a cumulonimbus cloud forming, of dust rising and settling, of a pheromone released, of an eye blinking and refocusing? What is the sound of an object in a photograph? What is the sound of hope? The sound of light? And is the memory of a sound, the sound of memory?

Human hearing is severely limited. We can only detect sound waves when they vibrate above 20 times and below 20,000 times a second. And many sounds are simply too small to be heard with the naked ear. They require another listening, a listening beyond the ear. They require the silence of an animal noticing.

Migrating birds can hear sounds as low as one cycle every 10 seconds, which they use to navigate. Blue whales use infrasound of around 20 hertz to communicate across vast subaquatic distances. Further up the frequency spectrum, male rats squeak rhythmically in ultrasound as they mate. Insectivorous bats create pictures in sound by using echolocating clicks at up to 200,000 hertz – at 200 clicks per second. At such frequencies they can perceive a midge 20 metres away. They can identify size, weight, flight speed, direction, and type of insect before plucking their prey out of the air. Dolphins can focus high-frequency ultrasound in bursts that function as sonic weapons. A targeted beam of ultrasound is emitted to resonate a fish’s swim bladder, stunning and fatally disorienting it. A cockroach uses highly sensitive hairs on its back to detect the air current created by the footfalls of another cockroach; it listens to variations and displacements in the movement of air …

La Monte Young wrote musical compositions that occur in the fluctuating spaces between acoustics, physiology, and imaginal cognition, often at the brink of human audibility: - Build a small fire in front of the audience. - Turn a butterfly loose in the performance space.

There are many ways to listen.

Chinese and Japanese incense connoisseurs say that they do not smell, but rather ‘listen’ to incense; their relationship to the resonance and transience of scents in their passage from materiality to immateriality is auditory. Sounds, like smells, are volatile, ephemeral; they appear and disappear.

Is listening intrinsically more passive, peaceful, respectful, open, democratic and spiritual than speaking? Or is it active, individualist, dissident, imaginative, grained and flawed, a partial redirecting of the geometry of attention that inevitably falls victim to hearing’s blind spots, as it were, its ‘acoustic shadows’? Isn’t listening itself particular, a mode of negotiation and mediation and interference, a desire-machine whose processes produce their own signatures, their own creative noise?

One might listen in such a way as to consider sounds according to their size. Erik Satie, for example, claimed he was a ‘phonometrographer’, a measurer of sound, rather than a musician or composer. He wrote: ‘The first time I used a phonoscope, I examined a B flat of medium size. I can assure you that I have never seen anything so revolting. I called in my man to show it to him. / On my phono-scales a common or garden F sharp registered 93 kilos. It came out of a fat tenor whom I also weighed’.

One might listen in such a way as to attune oneself to the inaudible signals saturating the air around us. The Pythagoreans, for example, believed in the orderliness of the universe, the reverberant ‘harmony of the spheres’, the hum of everything-in-its-right-place.

Or perhaps one might make oneself receptive through the prostheses of technological amplification. In the mid-Sixties, John Cage wrote a piece called Variations VII, in which: ‘There were ordinary radios, there were Geiger counters to collect cosmic things, there were radios to pick up what the police were saying, there were telephone lines open to different parts of the city. There were as many different ways of receiving vibrations and making them audible as we could grasp with the techniques at hand’.

Yoko Ono went even further, and accepted the inaudible into the technological: “Take a tape of the sound of the snow falling. This should be done in the evening. Do not listen to the tape. Cut it and use it as strings to tie gifts with”. So, a recording of an almost silent event using the technologies of listening, the results never listened to, simply given away. The sound of something that weighs almost nothing, that only faintly registers; nothing seems to change, just a weighing on the mind. The sound of thought as a gift. In the poetics of withholding, it’s the thought that counts …

Or one might make oneself receptive through imaginative engagement with the knowledge of what is really there, beyond the capacities of our ears. Michel Serres, for example, invites us to conceive of the sky not as tabula rasa, an empty space passively awaiting inscription, but as an ‘angel space’, a teeming communicational network, the arena of Hermes:

‘Look at the sky, even right here above us. It’s traversed by planes, satellites, electromagnetic waves from television, radio, fax, electronic mail. The world we are immersed in is a space-time of communication. Why shouldn’t I call it angel space, since this means the messengers, the systems of mailmen, of transmissions in the act of passing or the space through which they pass? Do you know, for example, that at every moment there are at least a million people on flights through the sky, as though immobile or suspended – non-variables with variations? Indeed we live in the century of angels’.

Or one might make oneself receptive through imaginative engagement with what might be there, or perhaps never was there, but just might have been there. Imagine the air itself as one vast swarming library on whose pages are written everything that has ever been said or whispered. According to William Burroughs, we have all accumulated ‘old war tapes. We have millions of hours of it, even if we never fired a gun. War tapes, hate tapes, fear tapes, pain tapes, happy tapes, sad tapes, funny tapes, all stirring around in a cement mixer of voices’.

One has to move in to move out.

I’m totally deaf in one ear, but if I listen carefully I can hear the sounds of my lover pulling her hair back in that way, touching her nose in that way, looking out of the window up at the sky in that way.

Right now I hear weather I hear water I hear snow I hear water everywhere it’s that kind of weather. I hear snow around I very nearly hear the moon and I hear the rain and I hear the mountains.

There are many ways to listen.
Accept any interruptions.

(Text for Forced Entertainment’s Marathon Lexicon, co-curated by Tim Etchells & Adrian Heathfield; Mousonturm, Frankfurt, 2003, and Riverside Studios, London, 2004:
© David Williams/FE)

memory machine

'And when today he lights up a cigarette, he uses a flintstone and a fuse, like everyone else. "In a boat", he says, "that is the best way. The wind blows the matches out, but the harder the wind blows, the more the fuse glows" (Walter Benjamin, 'Spain, 1932').

Over the last week or so, I have been in Berlin, then working at the Tanzfabrik in Potsdam with two choreographers and a video artist. Berlin, with its historical layers, its open spaces, slow rhythms and laidback feel, its adventurous contemporary architecture alongside older buildings, is a perfect city for drifting, and S and I walked and walked. The city is ghosted by so much that lingers in collective European psyches: the rise of fascism and the Second World War, its post-war isolation, the wall and its collapse, the reunification of Germany. Then for me there are other layers from German film, from Christiane F and Wings of Desire to The Lives of Others. When I first went there, Berlin seemed melancholic, hovering on the lip of hallucinatory slips and tears in time; turn a corner past the grooviest little gallery you ever did see and there's one of the synagogues that was trashed during Kristallnacht, or the site of book-burnings by Goebbels's henchmen, or the pock-marks of bullets in walls, or Boltanski's golden bricks naming those who lived in the missing building erased by a bomb, or the line where the wall once stood, or the golden angel from where Bruno Ganz's angel surveyed mortal humanity in a divided city. And yet it is full of space and light, and change; there's a sense of optimism, of something beginning. Although officially bankrupt, the city feels dynamic and shifting, its sediments on the move, offering up a kind of archaeological mapping of 20th century histories and the morphing cartographies of the new Europe. It is a graffitied memory machine with an eye on the future, and it has creative juice.

Of the countless new buildings in the city, Daniel Liebeskind's zinc-covered Jewish Museum is perhaps the most astonishing, structured like a zigzagging bolt of lightning or an angular line of fire, with gashes in its blue-grey outer skin. Some commentators have read its form as a fractured and dispersed Star of David. (The photo on the left, from the museum, is a bolt of cloth produced by a German manufacturer and printed with the yellow stars the Nazis forced Jews to wear). During the development of this project, Liebeskind (ever the conceptualist) had drawn straight lines between addresses on a street map of Berlin around the museum's location, land abutting what was the line between East and West Berlin; in this way he traced invisible links between Kleist, Heinrich Heine, Walter Benjamin, Paul Celan and others to produce an 'irrational' matrix or constellation of Jewish culture here in the form of a distorted star. He also employed Benjamin's 'urban apocalypse' One Way Street as a structural model, its 60 sections incorporated into the zigzag. Liebeskind has called the project 'Between the Lines', and in part his conceptual and structural (one might say 'dramaturgical') starting point seems to have been two lines and their shifting relations: 'One of the lines is straight but fragmented, while the other is winding but never-ending ... They move apart, become detached and are perceived as being separated from one another. They thus reveal a void'. The spaces between cultures and their people, the trajectories of shifting historical 'destinies', producing an unstable relational axis of tensions and encounters. The straight line cuts through the zigzag, and creates a number of empty spaces: charged zones of remembering and forgetting, of contemplation and mourning, of potential and disappearance in the aftermath of what Blanchot called the 'utterburn of history'. In particular, the Holocaust Tower and the Garden of Exile, spaces of uncanny embodied affect. In their configurations, materials and relations to light, they do things to you. The 'fuses glow'.

In the vast, cold, concrete wedge of the Holocaust Tower, Liebeskind's 'voided void' with its unnerving door illuminating the passage of people entering or leaving, then shutting with a terrible click, daylight enters through a slit from the outside at the very top of a tightly angled corner (impossible to enter and inhabit this corner, like the bow of an abandoned ship). One looks up for the release of sky, of outside, and fragments of everyday sounds drift into the space - life goes on elsewhere, but one cannot see anything of it here. A kind of blindness. This looking up is a straining as if one is interred underground. A metal ladder runs up a side wall at the other end of space; but it is functionless, little more than an emblem of futile im/possibility, it's much too high to reach. It supports a few tiny, fragile spiders' webs. The walls are chilly. Everything in the field of vision is monochromatic, shades of grey. People's movements are slow, quiet, restrained, private; we look isolated and a little spectral in the shadows, tiny craning figures dwarfed by the monolithic brutal planes of this 80-foot high silo. Space as sculpture, memory as form, architecture as music - but here all decoration is cauterised, erased. A 'writing of the disaster' in bare concrete and light. A dead end.

Elsewhere in the building, there is a staircase that leads nowhere.

At the end of an underground passageway sloping upwards past minimal traces of shattered lives, a minimal selection of personal possessions and mementos of great intimacy: a child's tiny toy monkey, an exquisite typewriter, a sewing machine, letters, photographs - past listings of death camps and diasporic destinations from Sydney to San Francisco - at the end of this gradual ascent, a glass door leads to the Garden of Exile. 49 rectangular concrete pillars 10-12 feet high placed in a grid equidistant from each other with rectlinear passageways between them. The ground is angled, the pillars just off vertical, and one's balance is slightly thrown; it feels out of kilter, not quite 'right'. Oleaster is planted in the tops of each column, its foliage casting moving shadows over the grey surfaces; they soften the pillars somewhat and provide a kind of fragile shelter, a canopy of something displaced still living and moving. Again, a space of slowing down into associative memory and contemplation, its configuration producing palpable effects on perception, orientation, the angle of the spine, rippling movements of emotion around one's slightly altered axis. Body weather.

Liebeskind's garden directly prefigures some of the formal and affective qualities and implications of Peter Eisenman's Holocaust Memorial on Cora Berliner Strasse near Potsdamer Platz, which was opened six years later than the Museum in 2005. There too you move in canyon spaces between concrete slabs on uneven sloping paths the width of a human body, but an explosion in scale as occurred. No longer a garden, for only a few isolated trees are planted in a proliferative field of grey slabs - over 2,500 of them. When you enter the memorial, you disappear into the slabs, as if engulfed in ossified grass or a vast frozen grey wave, and the city recedes. Inside there are shafts of light, shadows, cobbles and gravel, walls of infinitely shifting textures and greys, fleeting glimpses of other people, kids running and playing. In some ways, it seems an anonymous empty environment from which the personal has been erased. Underground, shadowing the memorial on the surface, is an information centre about the Holocaust: the Room of Dimensions, the Room of Families, the Room of Names, the Room of Sites ...

The fifth and final void in Liebeskind's building houses the Israeli artist Menashe Kadishman's installation Shalechet ('Fallen Leaves'). More than 10,000 flattened, round, mask-like faces cut from thick sheet steel, frozen into expressions rather like Munch's screamer, or emotionally blanked, lie scattered on the floor of another towering empty space, and we are invited to walk on them. Schematic eyes, nose and mouth, yet somehow individual and vulnerable (much more so than the sheep Kadishman has so often painted). All of them the same, anonymous, and yet slightly different - in expression, shades of autumnal rusting, sheen, scarring. ('The face is only the frozen moment of the rising oars or their dip into the sea' - Edmond Jabes, The Book of Questions). One becomes hyper-aware of the implications of one's weight and movement as the negotiation of this uneven, peopled surface inevitably generates sudden metallic groans and clankings amplified by the space. Dissonant, angular trajectories. Some people move imperceptibly slowly, hesitantly, trying to be light, careful, silent - to be attentive to the implications of their actions in this field of ruins, and present to the recognition that their weight, their life rests on the silent screams of others; others scamper in, posing for photos with one of the heavy heads in their hands as if it is laughing with them. Snap. At the far end people disappear under an overhang and dissolve into shadow. It feels like a setting for a piece of expressionist dance, for the terrible beauty and psychic dis-ease of Pina Bausch's tanztheater. I imagine a woman with long hair emerging quietly from the shadows and running, running, then walking, standing still as a tree, waiting, listening to voices, listening eyes open, breathing.

I am reminded of that tone-poem in Beckett, maybe Waiting for Godot: 'All the dead voices. They are like sand, like leaves ...'
_________________________________________

Later, in an old communist apartment block in Potsdam, I watch the exquisite videos Julien made in Japan and South Korea, and a compellingly weird documentary about North Korea. I read Junichiro Tanizaki's In Praise of Shadows: some beautiful perceptions and propositions about the shadowy depths in lacquerware, Japanese architecture, beneath the skin in faces - although at times it reads uncomfortably like the grumblings of a reactionary old man in an imperialist culture that was both fading and on the eve of war. And I take notes from an interview with Tanaka Min, who my collaborators visited on his farm in Japan. Min describes his 'ambition to extend the horizon of a fleeting moment' and his 'sole aim - simply to be a sensitive surface':

In Western dance, they are fascinated by only movements. All the time nice movements. Is this dance? I think that dance is not visible ... I do not dance in the place, I dance the place. Place is where I am able to stare at my own corpse ... We have not yet really been born. We are forever imperfect ... Molecules that produce energy are tempted to dance thanks to the interaction between subterranean magma and life on earth. I am just there, caught in the exchange ... My work, when finished, leaves nothing behind; I stay with ever changing life, and will leave nothing behind ...

And this, from a transcription of a conversation with Tatsumi Hijikata:

Hijikata: Which came first, form or life?
Kazue Kobata: The latest theory says the indispensable condition was the replication of isomorphic genes made possible by micro-particle clay.
Hijikata: Oh, form invites life; life plunges into form.
© David Williams

anima(l) mundi: bartabas

With the arrival of Bartabas to perform The Centaur and the Animal at Sadler's Wells this week, in collaboration with the Butoh practitioner Ko Murobushi and four horses, I'm pasting below some extracts from an article I wrote over 10 years ago. An account of some of the exquisite encounter-events Bartabas staged with horses in the work of his Paris-based company Théâtre Zingaro, and in particular in his training.
________________________________________________

‘The construction of the human is a differential operation that produces the more and the less “human”, the inhuman, the humanly unthinkable. These excluded sites come to bound the “human” as its constitutive outside, and to haunt those boundaries as the persistent possibility of their disruption and rearticulation’ (Butler 1993: 8).

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

[...]

HORSE SENSE

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

ANIMA(L) MUNDI: BARTABAS AND THÉÂTRE ZINGARO 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CLEVER HANS 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LOUSY ACTORS: ‘THE THING WHICH IS NOT’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WHAT CAN A BODY DO? BECOMING-ANIMAL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

____________________________________

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

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderson, Laurie (1994). Stories from the Nerve Bible: A Retrospective 1972-1992, New York: HarperCollins

Arvers, Fabienne (1991). ‘Zingaro: entretien avec Bartabas’, Théâtre/Public no. 97, January-February, 19-26

Berger, John (1980). (1984). ‘Animal world’, in Richard Mabey (ed.), Second Nature, London: Jonathan Cape, 1984, 96-100

Bouissac, Paul (1981). ‘Behaviour in context: in what sense is a circus animal performing?’, in Sebeok and Rosenthal 1981:18-25

Borges, Jorge Luis (1974). The Book of Imaginary Beings, London: Penguin Books

Breytenbach, Breyten (1990). All One Horse, London: Faber

Budiansky, Stephen (1997). The Nature of Horses, London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson

Butler, Judith (1993). Bodies that Matter, London and New York: Routledge

Ciupa, Karine (1997). ‘Bartabas: des chevaux et des hommes’ (interview with Bartabas), Cipria Magazine, July-August, 76-9

Cixous, Hélène (1997). Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing (trans. Eric Prenowitz), London and New York: Routledge

Corre, Anne Pauline (1997). ‘Bartabas n’est pas un mauvais cheval’ (interview), Paris Turf, 18 November, 14

de Fontenay, Elizabeth (1998). Le Silence des bêtes: la philosophie à l’épreuve de l’animalité, Paris: Fayard

Deleuze, Gilles (1977). ‘Nomad thought’, in David B. Allison (ed.), The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation, New York: Delta, 142-9

--- (1995). Negotiations: 1972-1990 (trans. Martin Joughin), New York: Columbia University Press

--- (1998). ‘Literature and Life’, Essays Critical and Clinical (trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco), London: Verso, 1-6

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1987). A Thousand Plateaus (trans. Brian Massumi), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet (1987). Dialogues (trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam), London: The Athlone Press

Eyquem, Catherine and Ekanga Shungu (1997). ‘L’homme qui écoute les chevaux’ (interview with Bartabas), Passions de Femmes, March-April, 37-41

Garcin, Jérôme (1997). ‘Bartabas s’éclipse au petit galop’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 3-9 July, 90-1

--- (1998). La Chute de cheval, Paris: Gallimard.

Griffin, Susan (1982). ‘The show horse’, Made from This Earth, London: The Women’s Press, 88-93

Grotowski, Jerzy (1990). ‘Performer’, in Schechner, Richard and Lisa Wolford (eds). The Grotowski Sourcebook, London and New York: Routledge, 1997, 374-8

Hediger, Heini KP (1981). ‘The Clever Hans phenomenon from an animal psychologist’s point of view’, in Sebeok and Rosenthal 1981:1-17

Heidegger, Martin (1971). Poetry, Language, Thought (trans. Albert Hofstadter), New York: Harper and Row

Hillman, James (1997). Dream Animals, San Francisco: Chronicle Books

Levinas, Emmanuel (1985). Ethics and Infinity (trans. Richard A. Cohen), Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press

Lyotard, Jean-François (1976). ‘The Tooth, the Palm’ (trans. Anne Knap and Michel Benamou), Sub-Stance no. 15, 105-110

Moore, Thomas (ed.) (1990). A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman, London: Routledge

Nancy, Jean-Luc (1991). The Inoperative Community, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

--- (1997). The Gravity of Thought, New Jersey: Humanities Press

Neruda, Pablo (1972). ‘Caballos’, in Extravagaria (trans. Alastair Reid), London: Jonathan Cape, 86-9

Oliveira, Nuno (1988). Reflections on Equestrian Art (trans. Phyllis Field), London: JA Allen

Pascaud, Fabienne (1997). ‘La fièvre du cheval’ (interview with Bartabas), Télérama no. 2478, 9 July, 34-5

Ronel, Avital (1994). ‘Hitting the streets: Ecce Fama’, Finitude’s Score: Essays for the End of the Millennium, 63-82

Salino, Brigitte (1999). ‘Les chevaux de Bartabas s’apprêtent pour un nouveau sacré’ (interview with Bartabas re. Triptyk), Le Monde, 25 December

Schechner, Richard (1988). Performance Theory, London and New York: Routledge

Schutzman, Mady (1998). ‘A fool’s discourse: the buffoonery syndrome’, in Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane (eds), The Ends of Performance, New York: New York University Press, 131-48

Sebeok, Thomas A (1979). The Sign and Its Masters, Austin: University of Texas Press

Sebeok, Thomas A and Robert Rosenthal (eds) (1981). The Clever Hans Phenomenon: Communication with Horses, Whales, Apes and People, New York: The New York Academy of Sciences

Swift, Jonathan (1985). Gulliver’s Travels, London: Penguin

Velter, André (1998). Zingaro, suite équestre, Paris: Gallimard

Zarrilli, Phillip B (1990). ‘What does it mean to become the character: power, presence, and transcendence in Asian in-body disciplines of practice’, in Richard Schechner and Will Appel (eds), By Means of Performance: Intercultural Studies of Theatre and Ritual, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 131-48

---

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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