an encounter is perhaps

a meeting with d.b. indos, zagreb

‘The only aim of writing is life, through the combinations which it draws’ (Gilles Deleuze)

‘Every word was once an animal’ (Ralph Waldo Emerson, via Ben Marcus)
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JUST A QUICK
From: David Williams
Sent: Tuesday, April 27 2004
To: Ivana Ivkovic, Una Bauer
Subject: group dynamics, zagreb

Hello Ivana and Una,
I hope all’s well. Just a quick request in relation to my participation in the Zagreb symposium: would it be possible to have some maps of the city please? Also I will be trying to intersect Ric’s workshop walks with animal trajectories: could you let me know if there is a zoo in Zagreb? Is there a natural history museum?
I would like to try to meet someone who has an animal (domestic or not): could be a pet, or could be a horse, pig, chickens, other farm animals – or even something more ‘exotic’ (like a tropical bird). Anyone who interacts with animals. Do you know anyone? Or do you know someone who might know someone? Any email or other contact details would be VERY helpful. Ideally I could get in contact with them before I come to Zagreb, and try to talk with them as the starting point of a possible network of people-and-animals.
Look forward to meeting you both.
With best wishes, David

***

From: Ivana Ivkovic
Sent: Tuesday, April 27, 2004
To: David Williams
Subject: Re: group dynamics, zagreb

Dear David,
We can have a good map of Zagreb waiting for you when you arrive, or would you need it in advance? There is a very good map in pdf with close up possibility here. The ZOO is where it is written Maksimir (large green area in the north-east of the city). The natural history museum is very small, but in the city centre.
I think Una has a cat :-) but I just heard of a friend of a friend who own some snakes yesterday. I am sure we can arrange something. I will ask around.
See you in Zagreb soon, Ivana Ivkovic
________________________________________

I WANTED A FORM

‘I wanted a form as obsolete yet necessary as the weather […] Who is to circumscribe the geography in which thinking may take place?’ (Robertson 2002: 21, 25).

My recent research has drawn on elements of contemporary philosophy and cultural theory in an attempt to explore the mutable parameters of performance, or its heart. It has proposed performative mappings of certain unpredictable, energetic events ‘in proximity of performance’, to borrow Matthew Goulish’s phrase: the shifting point of contact in contact improvisation; fire energetics and their implications for writing about the active vanishings of performance; place as contested and heterotopic; skywritings, a proliferative critical historiography of ways in which skies have been conceived, contested, and practised in contemporary art and socio-politics, and their implications for a performance epistemology; and in particular alterity as productive event in human/animal interactions. In these texts, I have endeavoured to explore more performative modes of writing critical histories. So, for example, I have attempted to write about what resists historiographic inscription - the qualitative, the fugitive, the unpredictable, the overlooked – and in this way minimally ‘to redirect the geometry of attention’, to borrow a phrase from Joan Retallack. Such redirection goes hand in hand with a conviction that one can never recuperate a disappeared world, one can simply try to write (into) a new one, try to find a form for what Paul Celan called the Singbarer Rest ('the singable remains'). The act of writing therefore seeks to ‘do’ or perform something of the moment(um) or affect of movement in absent bodies, or at least to rehearse aspects of the ambiguities, pluralities, displacements and ephemeralities of live performance through the conjunction of diverse modes of writing and voices, intertextual citation, linguistic slippage and fray, a poetics of repetition and accumulation, the tropes of the fragment and the list, and so on. I conceive of this writing as a material discursive practice, in which the page is a public space for enactments or instanciations of critical performance, rather than a matter of formal (or modish) ‘style’, or writing to be consigned to the ‘merely’ creative; to quote Retallack once again, ‘a space to be playful in a purposeful way’.

The evolving trajectory of this work reflects a gradual displacement from the relatively ‘solid ground’ of theatre studies and theatre history towards more fluid and tentative articulations of the shifting ‘lie of the land’ in an expanded field of contemporary performance and its intersections with philosophy. This trajectory marks an unravelling of conviction as to theatre as the singular site of concern, and at the same time a growing fascination with present process, conditions, practices, perceptions ‘in the middle’, and ways of thinking through performance as interactive and ephemeral event. Perhaps these materials also suggest a certain scepticism about particular claims to knowledge and its ‘finishability’, and, to borrow Jean-François Lyotard’s terms, a desire to become a ‘philosopher’ rather than an ‘expert’ (Lyotard 1984: xxv), to know how not to know with interrogative momentum, to travel between different modes of knowing (and not-knowing) in a relational field.

‘Ordinary human beings do not like mystery since you cannot put a bridle on it, and therefore, in general they exclude it, they repress it, they eliminate it – and it’s settled. But if on the contrary one remains open and susceptible to all the phenomena of overflowing, beginning with natural phenomena, one discovers the immense landscape of the trans-, of the passage. Which does not mean that everything will be adrift, our thinking, our choices, etc. But it means that the factor of instability, the factor of uncertainty, or what Derrida calls the undecidable, is indissociable from human life. This ought to oblige us to have an attitude that is at once rigorous and tolerant and doubly so on each side: all the more rigorous than open, all the more demanding since it must lead to openness, leave passage: all the more mobile and rapid as the ground will always give way, always. A thought which leads to what is the element of writing: the necessity of only being the citizen of an extremely inappropriable unmasterable country or ground’ (Hélène Cixous in Cixous & Calle-Gruber 1997: 51-2).

When I was invited to participate in the Group Dynamics symposium in Zagreb in May 2004, feeling somewhat lost, my initial questions related to orientation and connectivity, and to a desire to try to register traces of the unmapped and the ephemeral: animal encounters and trajectories, secret places, small acts of kindness, dreams of else/w/here and other/wise. In what ways might one ‘collaborate’ in a city never visited before, a city where one doesn’t know anyone, in a language one doesn’t speak? What kinds of meetings are possible? Given how easy it would be to get lost, what might one find? I knew I wanted to remain connected to the symposium and at the same time fall out of it into this unfamiliar city. I knew I wanted to allow the occasion for the unforeseen by giving over some degree of agency in the city, through encounters with others (a provisional micro-version of ‘group dynamics’) and through a process of drift. A ‘purposeful drifting’ that requires patience, an attentiveness to detail, to multiplicities and connectivities. ‘The multiple must be made’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1987: 6). Knowingly not knowing what it is ‘about’ at the outset, what is being looked for, just staying close to whatever rule/game/attempt structures are in operation, or whatever ‘desire paths’ open up, and attending to figures and trajectories and repetitions and alliances as they occur, listening actively, letting them take shape in a relational space. Tracking something emergent, trying to go for the ride, knowing it will always be a few necks ahead of the rider. These shapes and patterns may be fictional (‘made things’), but the ways in which we represent them can have a variety of functions: aesthetic, critical, ethical, affective, epistemological, historiographic. And as Tim Etchells writes in Certain Fragments, it’s not always a matter of ‘describing a situation so much as placing the reader in one’ (Etchells 1999: 23).

'What the map cuts up, the story cuts across’, wrote de Certeau (1984: 129). Location and identity are produced as much through narration as through what already exists; they are more to do with doing than knowing. Perhaps this was an opportunity to rehearse and play-fully refashion some fragments of those heterogeneous personal mappings that we are continuously making up and over, and out of which we constitute our-‘selves’. So, a kind of fluid performative ‘auto-topography’ that could create provisional senses of self and of space and place (rather than the ‘self’ or the ‘world’ occurring preformed, as if they were pre-existent entities rubbing up against each other). Space, time, self as ‘a multiple foldable diversity’ (Michel Serres), a field of flows and intensities: spacing, timing, selfing. Here a dynamically spatialised (and fictionalised) self-in-process can perhaps fray just a little the dualist territorial imaginaries of inside and outside, of self-identity in opposition to alterity. So, a philosophy and practice of passage, rather than of ground or territory. If the continuity of identity is secured through movement and the capacity to change, rather than the ability to cling to what is already established, then my interest here was to explore simple strategies for loosening the grip of the logics of mastery and opening towards an engagement with the transitional passages, networks and inter-subjective flows of an ‘animal geography’.

Certain core questions recur throughout this work: 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)?
_________________________________________

INTERRUPTION 1

‘There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are the things we don’t know we don’t know’ (Zizek 2004: 9).

I’m quoting the words of that rather slippery philosopher/cartographer of modes of knowing, former US Secretary of State for Defence Donald Rumsfeld. As Slavoj Zizek points out in his book Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, Rumsfeld forgot to add a crucial fourth term – the ‘unknown knowns’, the things we do not know that we know – in other words, very precisely the unconscious, the ‘knowledge which does not know itself’ – ‘the disavowed beliefs and suppositions we are not even aware of adhering to ourselves’ (ibid: 10). These can’t be controlled, because we’re unaware of their very existence. Perhaps attentive immersion in certain activities – talking, writing, playing, drifting, dreaming, the event of encountering an-other – can generate frictions and short-circuits to unsettle or jolt them, allow us to glimpse their contours out of our peripheral vision. Perhaps one can learn how not to know what one is doing and still keep on doing it, knowing that the unconscious will always make a fool of the expert. The ground will always give way.
________________________________________

I JUST REMEMBERED

From: Una Bauer
Sent: Tuesday, April 27, 2004
To: David Williams
Subject: Re: group dynamics, zagreb

Dear David,
Hi again, I just remembered something that was sort of, right in front of my nose. There is this wonderful artist Damir Bartol Indos working and living in Zagreb, and he has a dog, and is, in general, very much interested in animal behaviour (doing his new piece of wolfs/dogs). He would be a great person to talk to – I already called him to tell him you might be contacting him … I realised most people I know are into cats, but domestic cats that don’t leave their houses, I don’t know if that’s a problem. JT is a friend of mine who has 2 cats … and then there is also a good friend MS, who is also very much into cats – just talked to her – she would also like to be part of what you are doing
Is that ok for the beginning?
Best, Una
p.s. by the way, I live very close to the zoo … if not in one.

***

From: kugla
Sent: Friday, April 30, 2004
To: David Williams
Subject: RE: re. visit to Zagreb

dear david
must be tuesday or friday, we shall use school bus. i have phone from laguna, i am every day in contact with una. my phone-mobile is …
see you, dbi
_______________________________________

AN ENCOUNTER IS PERHAPS: INDOS

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

It’s just before dawn on a Friday morning in early May, and I take a tram across Zagreb to a meeting with Croatian performance maker Damir Bartol Indos. People heading to or from work, the murmur of the city waking up, and my head still thick with sleep. The tram takes me east along Ilica through the city centre at Trg bana Jelacica, with its towering equestrian statue and its flapping explosions of pigeons, and out past the twin temples of specular mythologising and aestheticising - the zoo and the glass folly of the Dynamo Zagreb stadium, home of the Bad Blue Boys - towards the terminal point of tram line 12. All I know is that I have to look out for ‘a big man with a small dog: you can’t miss him’. In the preceding days, whenever I’ve mentioned to local people that I will meet Indos, who has a reputation as a performance maker in Croatia, some reactions suggest that he is perceived as something of an anomaly, someone on the ‘wilder’ edges of the contemporary Croatian performance scene; almost all reactions convey a sense of respect and a certain wariness, as if I don’t really look as though I know what I’m getting myself into (and I don’t). He is to be taken seriously, it’s clear. As I wipe the sleep from my eyes, and try to unfold into the day, it feels a little like a test of my resolve, this request to meet so early and so far away. And it feels like a falling off the map.

As the tram trundles along, I look in my notebook at some preparatory fragments I’ve listed about wolves, two of which now stand out: an old Italian good luck saying, In bocca al lupo! (Into the jaws of the wolf!); and the fact that Dante placed those who had committed the ‘sins of the wolf’ in the eighth circle of hell in his Inferno - seducers, sorcerers, hypocrites, thieves – I wonder what version of ‘wolf’ is being constituted there ... And I look at an image of the Earth sent to me by my friend Sue, taken from the Challenger space shuttle shortly before it broke up on re-entry in the skies over Texas: at the cusp of night and day ('between dog and wolf', as is said in French), a beginning and an end, constellations of lights in West Africa and central Europe, Greenland and Iceland adrift like clouds in the dawn sky …

When the tram eventually comes to a stop around 5.30, I see big man and little dog on the other side of the road, and wave, delighted they are there. We shake hands, and Indos introduces me to Indi, the former street dog named after Indiana Jones. The bond between Indos and Indi is self-evident, and the dog creates an instant connectivity for us two men. Both interested in philosophy, performance, animals; both born in the same year, thousands of miles apart in opposite hemispheres. I am suddenly fully awake and we head off through the cold morning air.

As the sun comes up, we walk the dog in the grounds of a local school for more than an hour. Round and round a paving circle, through the grass, past the graffiti on the playground walls: a swastika and a scrawled ‘fuck off’ in amongst the indecipherable tags. Man and dog as machinic assemblage, ‘the shift of a centre of gravity along an abstract line’. As we walk, Indos tells me about Indi’s earlier life as a stray, about the forthcoming performance of Man-Wolf (now less than a week from its opening) and past projects with his company DB Indos: House of Extreme Music Theatre (HEMT), about his interest in animals, the friend of a friend who lives in Zagreb with two wolves, his horror at the condition in which some animals are kept at the zoo, the story of him cycling past Franjo Tudman’s unfinished folly of a football stadium shouting ‘You are fucking crazy!’... At one point, he stops and says, ‘I will talk for two hours about me: and then you will talk about you’ … Later I tell him a little about Donna Haraway’s Companion Species Manifesto (which I have brought with me to Zagreb), about Deleuze (he’s heard of him, but not read anything), in particular the notion of becoming-animal and his critique of Freud’s ‘Wolfman’, as well as my interest in the animal discourses of performance, criminality and social conflict ... And I tell him about Antoine Yates who lived with a fully-grown 350 kg tiger in his Harlem apartment until he was badly bitten while trying to protect a stray cat he’d adopted – he pulled the tiger’s tail when it attacked the smaller cat, and it turned on him and sank its teeth into his thigh (or did I tell that to someone else in Zagreb? I was brim full of animal stories in Zagreb, a whole mob inside me, in pursuit of what?) …

The stuttering meander of our conversation is continually (and pleasantly) interrupted by Indi and his encounters with other dogs and their owners: always a formal and polite introduction by Indos of the ‘English man with an interest in dogs’, and then easy exchange around the dogs as they play. Lola, recovering from sickness and foolishly friendly; Koya, who has had gastritis and colitis, with her young maths teacher owner on a bike. Indi is delighted at every meeting. When no other dogs are in sight, Indos pretends he can see someone coming and calls out other dog names to Indi; the dog stops still, ears cocked, and scans the park for the newcomer, then realises it’s a game, and bounds off again. ‘And if I see a dog running, it is just as much the run that is dogging’ (Bataille) … Then we drop Indi home, Indos organises breakfast for his parents and daughter, before we join her on the school bus that will take us across town to the Waldorf/Steiner School near Novi Zagreb. Every day for the past seven years Indos has worked as a volunteer warden accompanying his daughter and other kids on their way to and from school; he makes this journey twice a day, and everyone knows him. He says this is ‘soul-work’. At the school, there are ducks in a pen, and a rabbit struggling in the arms of a young girl. I ask if I can take a photograph, and girl and rabbit are momentarily still. Bobo, a teacher at the school, talks me through the year 4 introduction to animals through looking at morphological variations; he shows me exquisite pastel drawings of a human, an octopus, a mouse, an eagle. Through illustrations of the relations between form and function, the Steiner pedagogy invites a recognition of both connection and difference. Meanwhile, Indos is collecting bottles of what he calls ‘apple acid’ for his personal use: home-made cider or juice …

He has bought sandwiches and some water, and, skirting a dead dog in the middle of our path, we eat our breakfast as we walk towards a vast rubbish tip a mile or so from the school, the site of Zagreb’s detritus since the Second World War. Indos calls it ‘the mountain’: an apocalyptic place, as if something terrible has happened’, he says. The repressed and abandoned of the city, its waste trundling out here in incessant convoys of trucks. A chaotic archive of the broken, the unwanted, the redundant, the forgotten: a monumental collection of fragments, shards of memory, the residual traces of the city’s discarded pasts. A fleet of earth movers scurry across the slopes of this wasteland, burying the most decayed material beneath a thin layer of soil. Layered temporalities and rhythms: the trucks, countless seagulls wheeling overhead, some huge pigs feeding on the flank of the hill, the invisible and attenuated processes of decay. ‘They plant grass, trees: in winter it is perfect for snowboarding’, Indos says with a wry smile, then: ‘It makes something conflicted inside me’. Bird song and gull cries as the trucks rumble. He tells me about methane build-ups within this mass of refuse, how some years ago a huge explosion scattered rubbish far and wide across the Southern suburbs of the city. We talk about the toxic stench that drifts across his daughter’s school and on to the concrete blocks of Novi Zagreb; about the leaching of toxins from the tip into the market gardens at its edges and into the River Sava. Then he tells me of his desire to make a performance here, and points to a spot high on a crest. I imagine him dancing like Tatsumi Hijikata, almost naked in a sea of trash, peering through his glasses at the birds and the other mountains on the horizon behind the city.

As we walk towards the concrete housing projects of Novi Zagreb en route to Indos’s studio, we pause to watch a chicken and a cat sharing a piece of bread on the street. The gulls circle overhead ‘like shoals of fish, like water’, says Indos: a multiplicity and a singularity, a molecular aggregate. Then, with a laugh: ‘That is group dynamics – many in one! That’s the real symposium, up there!’ The conference of the birds. ____________________________________

From: Una Bauer
Sent: Thursday, April 29, 2004
To: David Williams
Subject: a poodle

Here is another guy who wants to talk to you: Adam S – a musician, he has a poodle
Best, Una
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INTERRUPTION 2

‘A flight of screaming birds, a school of herring tearing through the water like a silken sheet, a cloud of chirping crickets, a booming whirlwind of mosquitos … crowds, packs, hordes on the move, and filling with their clamor, space; Leibniz called them aggregates, these objects, sets […] Sea, forest, rumor, noise, society, life, works and days, all common multiples; we can hardly say they are objects, yet require a new way of thinking. I’m trying to think the multiple as such, to let it waft along without arresting it through unity, to let it go, as it is, at its own pace. A thousand slack algae at the bottom of the sea’ (Serres 1995: 2, 6).
_______________________________________

From: Una Bauer
Sent: Friday, April 30, 2004
To: David Williams
Subject: animal thing again

David,
What do you think about a child taking part in your animal thing? I thought of M’s daughter who is 8 or so, and she has a turtle? I haven’t asked M about it, but perhaps …
Una
_______________________________________

DO YOU KNOW WHICH

Do you know which animal you are in the process of becoming and in particular what is becoming in you […] a whole mob inside you in pursuit of what … ? (Deleuze & Parnet 1987: 76).

It’s not long after 9.00 a.m., and we walk along a muddy path towards Indos’s studio, at the back of a semi-derelict club once trashed by skinheads, Indos tells me, for showing communist films. ‘Skinheads are not political enough, they wear costumes not uniforms’. This leads him into a discussion of Gandhi’s philosophy of ahimsa, and of the paradoxes of non-violent protest: ‘perfect for the police or the army, but maybe one must fight with skinheads’. When we walk around the side of the club towards the work space, Indos forewarns me: ‘no toilet, no heating’. At Indos’s invitation, I relieve myself in the waste ground at the back as he opens up and prepares; I smoke a cigarette, write some notes. And some mental connection is tentatively made between Indos, this context on the margins and Brian Massumi’s resistant ‘strategies for becoming’: 1. Stop the world (becoming begins with an inhibition); 2. Cherish derelict spaces (holes in habit, cracks in the existing order); 3. Study camouflage (seeming to be ‘what you are’ in order to ‘pass on the inside’); 4. Sidle and straddle (when in doubt, sidestep, remain marginal: move sideways through the cracks towards ‘the place of invention’, the dynamic in-between of transformational encounter); 5. Come out (‘what one comes out of is identity’) … (Massumi 1992: 103-6).

Inside, a tiny semi-industrial space, perhaps a garage originally. It’s a minefield to negotiate a route across the playing area towards some simple raked seating, only 3 or 4 rows. It looks like the wreckage of some Constructivist scenography; the space is covered with wooden industrial palettes, dozens of car tyres scattered randomly or in piles, loose bits of timber and small tree branches, scraps of paper, two ancient reel-to-reel tape machines and speaker system. Indos fumbles with his glasses, puts them on in order to tinker around and then cue the sound for the rehearsal of Man-Wolf. He hands me a package of photocopied materials, which will be distributed to spectators in this ‘anti-symposium’, as Indos describes it with a smile. The bundle of papers includes a contextualising programme note in Croatian and English, listing performers, textual and audio sources, and offering a rather elliptical account of the event-to-come: ‘Performers establish their otherness using tools, shaping beauty, establish their otherness from their animal Ur-forms using psychoanalysis, transcend to a state in which they pose questions, arrive to conclusions about the uniqueness of various forms of existing and perishing’. As well as trade journal descriptions of wooden palettes and torches (both of which are to be used in the ‘lecture/demonstration’ performance, the programme note informs us, ‘in order to build a stage object: wolf territory’), here are also: cartographic representations of ‘howling sites’ (the estimated range of audibility of individual wolf cries in a territory in Minnesota); an analytical zoological text entitled ‘Use of faeces for scent marking in Iberian wolves (Canis lupus)’ – Indos pronounces faeces ‘fakes’, and completely confuses me for a moment; materials about social order, expression and communication in wolf packs, including texts with line drawings about wolves’ facial expressions (‘high ranking’, ‘anxiety’, threat’, ‘suspicion’), about wolves’ tails as indicators of mood and status, about the presentation-withdrawal of the ‘anal parts’, and a very graphic text called ‘AND FAMILY LIFE’ describing vulpine coitus, tying and ejaculation. Finally, there is an extract from Freud’s case study of the ‘Wolfman’ (‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis’, 1918), including the Wolfman’s well-known dream.

Before I have really had any time to read this material, Indos begins to set the scene as if this were a performance for an audience of one, then proceeds to talk and run through it on his own. He runs it in sequence, demonstrating certain episodes with his own actions and those of the other (absent) performers, at times enacted in a walk-through shorthand, with fill descriptions as he locates with a gesture where specific events will take place, at times performed at a massively heightened level of intensity and energy. The shift between these modes is often almost instantaneous, the jar of sudden gear-shift quite bewildering; Indos has that disarming capacity to transform himself utterly in a split second from quiet practical description to embodied actions and vocalisations of a blowtorch intensity, a white-hot flaring into appearance, a teetering dance of borderline possession; it’s like flicking a switch between Brechtian guide and Artaudian martyr signalling through the flames. A long circling clenched dance with a song that gradually evolves into wolf-like howls. A rolling contorted action on top of a circle of wood balanced precariously on an uneven pile of tyres: ‘the surface is alive’, he remarks. A sequence in ‘what we call English gibberish’ – a hilarious nonsense parody of a chewing-gum American draaaawl. These actions interspersed with taped sound of a wolf keening, a layered wolf chorale, a crackly recording of Yvette Gilbert singing in French about a woman walking along the street followed by the dogs she attracts, extracts from an audio-lecture by wolf zoologist Fred Harrington describing his encounters with timber wolves, a variety of bird song samples and a frog …

As the sounds play, Indos is entranced, attentive, his gaze fixed into the distance. I feel at ease with the tape material somehow, and almost drop off for a moment; Indos doesn’t notice. But as my head snaps up again, I find myself once more astonished at this 47-year-old man-child-performer-philosopher-giant- old-soul playing and mapping and writhing and howling and singing in a deserted workshop, the door wide open framing a patch of early morning waste ground. I have never witnessed anything quite like this in my life. As an event, it unseats me, this something-taking-place, this someone-going-through-something. A haecceity, inseparable from an hour, a season, an atmosphere, an air, a life ... This is a landscape of the trans-, of passage. Like fire, Indos is a ‘shaking up of myriads’ (Serres 1995: 103). At the end, we sit in unembarrassed silence for a few minutes, drops of sweat falling from Indos’s nose, then he jumps up to pack things away, locks up, and once more we walk, this time at high speed, towards the city. I laugh as he pulls out one final sandwich, wrapped in foil and a paper serviette with a cartoon fluffy sheep on it: ‘the most better sandwich last!’ We pass a man training an alsatian on the grass between streaming lines of traffic, a flower memorial on the verge where some accident has occurred, and it begins to rain softly …
_______________________________________

INTERRUPTION 3

'The animal might interrupt writing, as if demanding something of us, but writing can’t catch the animal, though it tries. You’d think a quotation might pin it down. A quotation, after all, like an animal, is a literalism. And like an animal, according to Benjamin, quotation is a mode of interruption. ‘To quote a text involves an interruption of its context’. The writing that allows itself to be interrupted by the animal is the writing that understands the complications of context, offering itself as fractured, scattered, corrupt, misdirected, multiple, elsewhere, other. The writing that would pay respect to the animal acknowledges the animal, gives place to the animal. Except even these are metaphors, and the animal is too literal to give itself up like that. That is its dignity, ‘to be shaped, sir, like itself, and it is as broad as it hath breadth: it is just so high as it is, and moves with its own organs: it lives by that which nourisheth it, and the elements once out of it, it transmigrates’ [Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale]. Which is to say, the animal is like nothing on earth. Writing, it appears, can barely cope. Even if the animal can be trained it cannot be scripted’ (Kear and Kelleher 200: 88).

***

With special thanks to Una Bauer, Ivana Ivkovic, Ric Allsopp, Alan Read, Adrian Heathfield, and in particular Indos for his great generosity: In bocca al lupo!


References
Allsopp, Ric (1999). ‘Performance Writing’, Performing Arts Journal no. 61, 21:1, January, 76-9
Bataille, Georges (ed.) (1995). Encyclopaedia Acephalica: Critical Dictionary, and Related Texts, trans. Iain White, London: Atlas Press
Butler, Judith (1993). Bodies that Matter, London: Routledge
Certeau, Michel de (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall, Berkeley: University of California Press
Cixous, Hélène in Cixous & Calle-Gruber, Mireille (1997). Rootprints: Memory and Life- Writing, trans. Eric Prenowitz, London: Routledge
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix (1987). A Thousand Plateaux: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
Deleuze, Gilles and Parnet, Claire (1987). Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson & Barbara Habberjam, London: Athlone Press
Etchells, Tim. Certain Fragments: Contemporary Performance and Forced Entertainment, London: Routledge
Haraway, Donna (2003). The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness, Chicago, Ill.: Prickly Paradigm Press
Heidegger, Martin (1971). Poetry, Language, Thought, New York: Harper and Row
Kear, Adrian and Kelleher, Joe (2000). ‘The Wolf-Man’, Performance Research 5:2 (‘On Animals’), Summer, 82-91
Lyotard, Jean-François (1984). The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoffrey Bennington & Brian Massumi, Manchester: Manchester University Press
Lyotard, Jean-François (1991). The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington & Rachel Bowlby, Cambridge: Polity Press
Massumi, Brian (1992). A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press
Nancy, Jean-Luc (1997). The Gravity of Thought, New Jersey: Humanities Press
Pollock, Della (1998). ‘Performing writing’, in Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane (eds), The Ends of Performance, New York: New York University Press, 73-103
Robertson, Lisa (2002). ‘How Pastoral: A Manifesto’, in Mark Wallace & Steven Marks (eds), Telling it Slant: Avant-Garde Poetics of the 1990s, Tuscaloosa, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 21-6
Serres, Michel (1995). Genesis, trans. Geneviève James & James Nielson, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press
Schmidt, Natalie Crohn (1990). ‘Theorizing about performance: why now?’, New Theatre Quarterly 7:23, 231-4
Sinclair, Iain (1997). Lights out for the Territory, London: Granta Books
Zizek, Slavoj (2004). Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, London & New York: Verso
____________________________________________

Originally published as 'An encounter is perhaps: a meeting with DB Indos, Zagreb 2004' in Frakcija (Croatia), no. 36, October 2005, pp. 18-35. Text published in English & Croatian - © David Williams/Frakcija

the body is a scar of the mind

The lord chisels still,
so don't leave your bench for long
(Gilbert & George, 'The Laws of the Sculptors', no. 4, 1969).



I spent the weekend in London at a 2-day Manifesto Marathon event at the Serpentine Gallery. Over 50 presentations, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, were given in Frank Gehry's agora-like pavilion outside the gallery in Hyde Park. Despite the cold in this glass-roofed wind tunnel, which by late on Sunday had turned the event into a muffled scarf'n'gloves durational epic, there were some very stimulating contributions and interventions.

Highlights for me, in no particular order, included: Nicolas Bourriaud, talking about the polyglot 'time-specific flightlines' of an 'alter-modernity'; Gilbert & George ('The Laws of Sculptors: Ten Commandments for Ourselves'), G&G giving the perfect economical performance of G&G; Marina Abramovic ('An Artist's Life'), conducted by Abramovic as a kind of reiterative chorale for a large group; Agnès Varda, in full costume as a dancing potato; a hilariously provocative Adam Pendleton, with an Amire Baraka inflected prowl called 'Black Dada' that included the phrases: 'aah, the white people; we ate you'; and the curiously impressive sneer, 'shalalalalala, man: fuck you, motherfuckers'.

My friends in SpRoUt, with an elegantly formal choreography of placards and beautifully crafted texts about multiplicity, with occasional banjo accompaniment; Charles Jencks & Tino Sehgal, both of whom separately interrogated the very notion of the manifesto in the 21st century - Jencks in particular with great wit in terms of its impossibility today without irony, and the need for a 'critical modernism' within which anger, laughter and serenity are conjoined; Jimmie Durham ('for the first time in history, we now have the chance & responsibility to meet each other' - the stillness of his gaze over his shoulder as a trio of birds chirruped past); Jonas Mekas, showing exquisite slides of strips of film, the projector's carousel miked up as hypnotic minimalist soundtrack.

The architect Claude Parent, playfully/seriously proposing a new architecture for Paris and London after their disappearance beneath the flood waters; Ben Vautier, staging a large number of Fluxus-related scores; a collaborator of Rem Koolhaas whose name I missed, calling for a renaissance of functionality and simplicity, 'a new type of modernism' in the face of the 'icon-excess' of cities such as Dubai, its skyline a copy-filled 'representation of cultural greed'.

The ever present Gustav Metzger, apparently immune to 'auto-destruction' himself, contextualising this current event through slides of earlier manifestos from the 20th-century avant garde, as part of what Obrist characterised as 'an urgent resistance to forgetting'; Vivienne Westwood, who looked fantastic in haughty Elisabeth Ist mode, although she rather drifted on a bit in her looong text proposing a notion of a trans-historical 'objective' self; Mark Wallinger, with an extremely funny and astute text, somewhat compromised by its being filtered through his deeply uneasy monotonal reading; as well as Richard Wentworth ('Da Do Ron Ron'), Karl Homqvist (You Blew Up My House'), Mark Titchner, Jean-Jacques-Lebel, and the extraordinarily intellectually energised 91-year-old historian Eric Hobsbawn.

Yoko Ono was a large part of my reason for being there - she's one of the great heroes - and in the end she stole the show. It would be all too easy to dismiss her intervention as naively idealistic - and to parody it cynically - but as always her proposition was deceptive in its apparent simplicity. It generated challenging thoughts in terms of the nature of resistances to the event of encounter; in particular here her invitational pedagogy of the imagination hovered around economies of the social/relational. I take her play-fulness seriously, for she creates 'restless spaces' (to borrow Jane Rendell's words), spaces that ask questions of our relations with each other and with the world, and gesture at possible futures. In this context in London, her 'onochord' involved us learning a simple morse-like call & response of torches flashing the words 'I love you', the 'onochord' video, a brief video of details within a photograph of her with John Lennon, then an invitation to a free-for-all dance with Yoko, immediately met by 50 or so running jumping people (including me). Music suddenly pumping, with a tiny buoyant Yoko, huge grin on her face, going for it in the middle of the crowd. A frenzy of camera flashes and bobbing bodies. In a matter of minutes, she transformed the formal separations inscribed in the chilly thorougfare of Gehry's structure into a little vortex of energy, fleeting encounters and exchanges. Her beautiful groove with Jonas Mekas. She took people's hands and danced with them. Some people hugged her in the melee. At one point she took my hand and looked me square in the eye. I couldn't stop grinning. Everyone was grinning. And that was it; she was off into the night, in her top-hat and white scarf, shades still perched on the end of her nose, leaving us with the words: 'The body is a scar of the mind'. Blimey. Now that's enough of a manifesto for me to be going on with ...

*****

On the way back to the train station on Sunday, I popped in to a Shell garage shop on the Bayswater Road, looking for some short-term sugary fuel for my flagging scar of the mind - and bumped into Ian Wright, classy ex-football player and impassioned, one-eyed TV pundit. You know, Wrighty: Sean's dad. In worryingly oafish fashion, and for reasons that remain mysterious and probably not worth disinterring, I said with a little too much enthusiasm: 'Ian Wright! You're a legend, man!' (I very nearly said 'leg end', like I used to say to my brother as a kid in mock football commentaries when we knocked a ball around; but at least I managed to edit that one). Ian laughed and waved cheerily as he headed out the door to his glimmering silver BMW at a jog, patting his pockets for his keys. All you need on a Sunday, jesus, a nutter down the garage. What was I thinking? I blame it on the combination of declarative manifesto overload, cold bones, Mars bar and surprise. And maybe a slightly misplaced re-emergence of Yoko's universal love, and of her suggestion that we 'keep sending the message / to the end of the year / and beyond':

from ships
from the top of the mountains
from buildings
using whole buildings
in town squares
from the sky
to the sky
(Yoko Ono, 'onochord', 20o8).

As he drove off, Wrighty paused for moment in the forecourt to flash his headlights in the familiar rhythm. I - love - you, he signalled. Then he was gone in a silvery blur.

*****

Photographs (from top): Gilbert and George; the original book version of Vivienne Westwood's manifesto; bouncers outside the Gehry pavilion, Mark Titchner in the background; Marina Abramovic and collaborators; one of the SpRoUts (Hannah); Adam Pendleton, with Jean-Jacques Lebel seated in the background; Ben Vautier; Mark Titchner; part of the glass roof in the Gehry pavilion; Yoko Ono x 3; one of the Sams from SpRoUt; Tracey Emin in the original book version of Vivienne Westwood's manifesto. All photos © David Williams

let it shine

And time gets somewhat muddled here
But no matter, no matter
Here come the events all tumbling down
(Nick Cave, ‘The Witness Song’)

Breakfast in a Californian motel. At the self-service counters, an unfamiliar array of food including a metal trough of despondent-looking burgers, fried potatoes, a variety of bagels, cheese sauce from a machine that looks like the base of a vacuum cleaner, and a griddle for making waffles as big as a Frisbee next to a bowl of ‘raspberry syrup’. Never eat anything bigger than your head.

Tim pours himself a whopping glass of the waffle mixture thinking it’s some kind of lassi.

In today’s local paper, the Daily News, a story about the new ‘Civic Musical Road’, a quarter-mile stretch north of Los Angeles. Its asphalt is grooved to play Rossini’s ‘William Tell Overture’ when you drive along it in a Honda Civic at 55 mph, the local speed limit. It’s engineered precisely for the Civic’s wheel base and tires. No mention of what it sounds like when played by a big fuck-off SUV cruising at 80. Local residents aren’t impressed; at a distance, they say, the road produces a high-pitched rhythmed drone that keeps them awake at night, and that all in all it’s far from ‘civic’. Other ‘singing roads’ have been built in South Korea, Japan and Holland, I read. I wonder what songs they sing …

Elsewhere in the same paper, alongside a story entitled MEGACHURCHES EVOLVE WHILE CONTINUING TO GROW and an ad for a cemetery plot for sale in the Hollywood Hills (‘“Eternal Love” section, lot 5322, $3200’): “Heaven is no longer viewed as an exclusive place by many Americans, according to a new survey from Baylor University. When researchers polled US adults about who – and how many – will get into heaven, 54 percent of respondents said that at least half of average Americans will make it through the Pearly Gates. But 29 percent said they had no opinion about the fate of the average American, a figure that mirrored those who thought ‘half or more’ of non-religious people would make it into heaven”.

On the TV, Sarah Palin on the campaign trail wading brashly into an approximate pronunciation of the words Ahmedinejad and nookular; OJ’s trial in Las Vegas; mysterious stop-start ball games, and Ryder Cup golf; endless ads in which competing products are dissed in order to persuade ‘the average American’, ours is so much better than yours (this also seems to be the model for much of the political campaigning pre-election) … Meanwhile, always and everywhere, a wash of FM music radio. There’ll be no justice if the Eagles make it to Heaven.

*****

'All the silence of San Narciso - the calm surface of the motel pool, the contemplative contours of residential streets like rakings in the sand of a Japanese garden - had not allowed her to think as leisurely as this freeway madness' (Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49)

Places pointed out to me by a South American cab driver as he drives down into LA from the hills - in one section there are seven lanes of freeway in both directions: - That’s the San Fernando valley, ‘the valley, as in valley girls. That’s where I live. It’s the 4X capital of the world’. - That’s where Arnie Scharzenegger fell off his Harley. (‘Didn’t even have a license, man. Dyou know what we call him? Asshole. Cos he can’t pronounce asshole’). - Over that way’s where Rodney King was beaten by the cops. - That’s the Hollywood Forever Cemetery (‘Busby Berkeley’). - That’s ‘the famous Capitol Records’. - That’s where River Phoenix died (‘you heard about that?’). - And this is ‘the heart of what we call Hollyweird’. - That’s ‘the famous Pink’s Hot Dogs’. - ‘Hey hey what have we here? And this is where the Hispanics play soccer in the street’.

Ain’t there nowhere to run, ain’t there nowhere to go?
Yeah, look to the sky, Daddy-O
There is a light that shines over this city tonight
There is a light that shines over this city tonight
Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine
(Nick Cave, ‘There is a light’)

I’m astonished by the degree to which my conception of the look, feel and physical topography of LA is constituted by film, TV and fiction. Film in particular has colonised my imagination, and I look through its lenses. I ‘know’ so much of this city, somehow I recognise it and yet I’ve never been here before. Even the names of suburbs and streets trigger all sorts of stuff: Venice Beach, Santa Monica, Pasadena, Compton, Pomona, Ventura, Wilshire Boulevard, Sunset Boulevard, Cielo Drive. Everywhere the ghosts of Raymond Chandler and Philip Marlowe, The Big Sleep, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, Farewell My Lovely, Polanski’s Chinatown, David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and Lost Highway, Crash, Magnolia, Colors, Boogie Nights, The Big Lebowski, LA Confidential, LA Story, Heat, Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, Short Cuts, the Terminator films, Blade Runner; not to mention a lot of TV-despite-myself viewing including Baywatch, Beverly Hills 90210 and the irony-free weirdness of American Idol. Then there’s Charles Bukowski, Joan Didion, Brett Easton Ellis, James Elroy, Elmore Leonard, the brilliant Nathanael West …

And my god it’s vast, this city, an apparently infinite sprawl of almost 500 square miles in a beach-side desert bowl on the Pacific Plate beside an unstable fault line, the San Andreas, running through the ‘Pacific Ring of Fire’.

On the third day of the LA riots in 1992, in the wake of the initial acquittal of the four LAPD officers charged with ‘excessive force’ in their brutal treatment of Rodney King, King himself went on TV to say: ‘People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along? Can we get along? Can we stop making it, making it horrible for the older people and the kids? ... It’s just not right. It’s not right. It’s not, it’s not going to change anything. We’ll, we’ll get our justice .... Please, we can get along here. We all can get along. I mean, we’re all stuck here for a while. Let’s try to work it out. Let’s try to beat it. Let’s try to beat it. Let’s try to work it out’.

*****

Somewhere I read that one of LA’s many sister cities is Lusaka, Zambia, where I spent the first 13 years of my life. This surreal connection completely baffles me. I can make no sense of it at all.

*****

I met a beautiful, gentle man with bitten finger-nails who had looked after Kathy Acker during her last months of life. I met a dog with bright blue eyes who posed for a photo. I saw a road sign that said HOPE above a red traffic light. I saw a silver metal-clad building, its outline against the night sky like sails, like waves - or maybe more like hefty nuns in a brawl, using buckets as weapons. I met a fiery old man, his eyes rimmed with thick black makeup running down into his beard, carrying a cardboard hand-written sign: HOMELESS VIETNAM VET 69 70. I saw signed photos of Bill Clinton and of Bush Snr buying donuts in the same donut shop, shaking the hand of the rather generously proportioned Mr Donut; it seemed both ex-presidents had written ‘Thankyou for great donuts’, but, on closer inspection, I realised both were signed identically by the donut man himself (were the ex-pres’s in fact delivering donuts, spending their retirement days baking?) I saw a huge man with spider web tattoos all over his hyper-pumped arms, cradling a Chihuahua in a diamante collar. I heard about a college course called ‘GYST’ (Getting Your Shit Together). I saw the uncannily empty and manicured streets of Beverly Hills. Outside the 'freak show' in a seaside suburb like Paignton on acid, I saw a turtle with two heads and a dog with five legs. I saw a mobile phone transmitter disguised as a palm tree. I saw graffiti where SHAG ME had been crossed out and replaced with FUCK THE BRITS! I watched a dazzling basketball slam-dunk in a beachside game: an inverted man hanging from the basket’s frame, upside down & shouting for a full minute, while the crowd went wild around him. I read about ‘naked short selling’, and watched the stock markets crash on TV. I saw a barrel of a man up to his chest in a swimming pool, bourbon & coke in one hand, cigarette in the other, gesticulating & flicking ash dismissively as he did deals on a mobile phone wedged between shoulder and ear (‘that's a bit louche’, David said poolside, eyeing the water with suspicion: uncharitably, I had him down as a small-time porn baron organising a shoot for the Louche Bros). I passed a man on the boardwalk playing electric guitar on a motorised skateboard, a mini-PA balanced behind his feet. I watched a man with thighs broader than my chest - the world’s 6th strongest man, supposedly - straining over weights for a new record, fit to explode, then finally breaking away disgusted; the bar hadn’t even moved. I saw Spiderman buying an ice cream.

Somehow I never saw the HOLLYWOOD sign. But I did see Nick Cave at his shamanic sharpest in the Hollywood Bowl, with the Bad Seeds ablaze, and it all made perfect sense for a couple of hours or so.

*****

Like Pynchon's San Narciso, so many bits of Los Angeles felt like 'an incident among our climatic records of dreams and what dreams became among our accumulated daylight, a moment's squall-line or tornado's touchdown among the higher, more continental solemnities - storm-systems of group suffering and need, prevailing winds of affluence'. It 'had no boundaries. No one knew yet how to draw them' (The Crying of Lot 49).

*****

On take-off out of LAX on a plane called ‘Mystic Maiden’, with the sun low over the Pacific, we flew out over the beach and the ocean, turned left on a wide arc south of Palos Verdes, Long Beach and Seal Beach, then inland between Santa Ana and Irvine. Due west past Palm Springs, over the Joshua Tree, across the state line and into Arizona. As darkness fell over the desert, past the twinkling lights of Phoenix and Tucson; much of the sky now blue-black, like Elvis’s hair. Then, with only the horizon alight, a luminous apricot strip way behind us, we flew into New Mexico.

I couldn’t drag my eyes away from the window.

By Roswell it was night.

Now who will be the witness
When you’re blind and you can’t see
Who will be the witness
When you’re all so clean and cannot see
Who will be the witness there
When your friends are everywhere
Who will be the witness there
And your enemies have ceased to care
(Nick Cave, ‘The Witness Song’)











(Belated flashback fragments from trip to LA, 13-21 September 2008. See earlier related posts in September: 'angels, 'winging it', 'shadow flight' - © David Williams. To listen to Phosphorescent's song 'Los Angeles', head here)

daniel

‘The work of hope: notes on Daniel Hit By A Train'

‘Health to you, and don’t forget that flowers, like hope, are harvested’
Subcommandante Marcos, Our Word is Our Weapon (2001)

For this new collaboratively devised work by Lone Twin Theatre, Daniel Hit By A Train, the second in a trilogy of narrative-based performances directed by Gregg Whelan and Gary Winters with the company of five performers, once again we started with material that seemed a little surprising for artists who have so often articulated their commitment to optimism and practices of hope. While the first performance Alice Bell (2006) was triggered in large part by the group’s process of sharing stories of displacement, separation and loss, for Daniel Hit By A Train we drew on a little-known 19th-century London memorial to people who lost their lives attempting to save others.

The ‘Watts Memorial of Heroic Deeds’, in Postman’s Park in the City of London, contains 53 plaques recording acts of impulsive bravery; and these became the focus of our improvisations, the lens through which we looked for forms, languages and rhythms. Taken together, the plaques comprise a catalogue of small disasters in the everyday, with momentous implications for the protagonists. Each plaque contains the bare bones of a story and of a collapsed, elliptical life: a name, a brief description of an action, a date. Some have the stark economy of an expressionist woodcut, for example: ‘THOMAS SIMPSON, DIED OF EXHAUSTION AFTER SAVING MANY LIVES FROM THE BREAKING ICE AT HIGHGATE POND, JAN 25 1885’. Others are small songs of impetuous selflessness; a few are disarmingly comic. Each of these cryptic fragments endeavours to remember the forgotten and to honour the attempt to intervene. And perhaps that’s one link with hope, and with Lone Twin’s work; they have consistently tried to honour the attempt.

Collectively these texts constitute a list, a form that Lone Twin has mined repeatedly and inventively over the past 11 years. The list as conjunction without continuity, as provisional and partial map hinting at lives and worlds, a kind of ruptured and unfinishable historiography that traces the contours and feels of lives and worlds. The list as resonant debris of the everyday, residual particles of the storm from paradise as we edge backwards into the future, like the ‘angel of history’. The Postman’s Park texts are in some ways reminiscent of other cumulative, serial texts that deal with everyday catastrophes – the anarchist Félix Fénéon’s remarkable Novels in Three Lines, for example, or the snatches of Berliners’ thoughts overheard by the angels in Wim Wenders/Peter Handke’s Wings of Desire. There are connections too with Andy Warhol’s obsessive engagement with the iconography and instruments of mortality in his Death and Disaster series. Perhaps above all I am reminded of a much-discussed passage in Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, a book awash with drownings, near-drownings and savings from the murky waters of the Thames. A much disliked character, Riderhood, is plucked unconscious from the river, then laid out in a nearby pub. “No one has the least regard for the man”, Dickens wrote, “with them all, he has been the object of avoidance, suspicion and aversion: but the spark of life within him is curiously separable from himself now, and they have a deep interest in it, probably because it is life, and they are living and must die”. In this way, Dickens suggests the mysterious allure of the ‘Life’ in life - life itself, beyond the particular individual – and his perception generates a complex, grained hope.

Lone Twin Theatre’s approach, however, combines a compassionate regard for the bottom-line human predicaments in these tragic stories, with a recognition that the most telling forms of respect and re-membering are often irreverent. True seriousness admits laughter and contradiction, and the task is to track the ‘Life’ in life to its lair, even in death. As a company, we have found some background stimulus in this regard in the forms and irreverent idioms of the medieval mystery play, the ‘dance-of-death’, the carnival procession, music hall, the village play, and other structures of popular community event. Memory in such contexts is the domain of hopeful and playful re-invention, rather than melancholy; irreverence is a sign of creative curiosity and experimental re-working. The rehearsing of 53 deaths here both admits to the fragility and contingency of human life, and celebrates our capacity to create multiple, temporary and provisional lives and worlds, and to share stories about them. So, theatre itself as a practice of hope.

In The Principle of Hope (1959), Ernst Bloch suggested that: ‘The work of hope requires people who throw themselves actively into what is becoming, to which they themselves belong’. What is the nature of the impulse to act at the moment of catastrophic accident? What drives someone into the fire, the path of the train or runaway horse, the sinking ship, the toxic pit, the sea/canal/pond/lake/river? What is at play in this instinctive self-forgetting? The triggers for action remain unknowable here. This list’s reiteration of selfless, active intervention and failure suggests something fundamental is at work here, another ‘story’ we hadn’t bargained for - and I’m not referring to some clumsily Freudian realisation of a suppressed ‘death drive’: quite the opposite. Some people seem to experience an unconscious compassion in the face of vulnerability and distress, a recognition that overrides conscious self-preservation. There is hopefulness at the heart of this recognition, in the attentive openness to the ‘becoming to which they belong’ (and Bloch’s phrase might well characterise Lone Twin’s body of work as a duo, as well as the ensemble work of Lone Twin Theatre). Such hopefulness is not betrayed by contingency and failure. For in the work of hope something of life is affirmed even in the dying - as it is in theatre, that most mortal of forms, forever hovering at the cusp of appearance and disappearance.

In her book Hope in the Dark (2005), Rebecca Solnit outlines her own pedagogy of hope, with hope conceived proactively, as an ‘act of defiance’: “Hopefulness is risky, since it is after all a form of trust, trust in the unknown and the possible, even in discontinuity. To be hopeful is to take on a different persona, one that risks disappointment, betrayal …Hope is not about what we expect. It is an embrace of the essential unknowability of the world, of the breaks with the present, the surprises … Expect to be astonished, expect that we don’t know. And this is grounds to act”. Solnit’s credo is one that might be applied to Lone Twin Theatre’s two performances thus far, both the single narrative arc of Alice Bell and the proliferative accumulation of stories in Daniel Hit By A Train. For here is a social practice that seeks, playfully and defiantly, to rub up against the unknowable and the impossible, the mortality of things and their ghosts, in search of sparks of life and other unforeseeable surprises. And always, at the very least, to honour the attempt.

Programme notes for Lone Twin Theatre's Daniel Hit By a Train: premiered at the Brut im Künstlerhaus as part of the Vienna Festival (Wiener Festwochen), May 2008. Co-produced by Vienna Festival, ACE, British Council, Barbican/BITE, Leeds Met -
© David Williams. Lone Twin Theatre is Gregg Whelan, Gary Winters, Kate Houlden, Guy Dartnell, Antoine Fraval, Paul Gazzola, Molly Haslund, Nina Tecklenburg, Cynthia Whelan and David Williams

alice

In recent years, I have worked as a dramaturg with old friends Gregg Whelan, Gary Winters and their company Lone Twin Theatre, on the creation of a trilogy of performances. Two of those performances now exist: Alice Bell, which has toured extensively throughout Europe since its Brussels premiere in 2006, and Daniel Hit By A Train (2008), which premiered earlier this year in Vienna and will tour the UK in the autumn. The third and final part of the trilogy will be premiered in the autumn of 2009. The following two posts (23 and 24 July 2009) are programme notes written for the tours of Alice and Daniel: fragmentary maps of processes I still haven't fully digested, but am happy to linger with ...
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‘A falling together of accomplices’: Notes on the making of Alice Bell

* A story is fashioned in the wake of events, this is central to how human beings synthesise the chaotic multiplicity of lived experience; an examined life is a life recounted, a ‘life-story’. And yet the telling itself can be an event in itself - the fashioning, staging and communicating of a world here now. This is what we dance around repeatedly and uncertainly, finding our way, then losing it again. ’How to get the real into the made-up? Ask me an easier one’ (Seamus Heaney).

* Looking back over Lone Twin’s performance work, it seems there are recurrent principles or propositions at play, and they have an unspoken matter for us in what we are trying to make here in Alice Bell. So, for example, in each Lone Twin performance something simple is made strange, unfamiliar or difficult, then worked through in order to reach a sense of accomplishment. Each work is an ‘act of folly’, and yet somehow hope-ful and joy-ful, a ‘labour of love’ as Barry Laing has described it. For every work is a structure to make contact with people and to seek their help. The invitation implicit in these practices of hope asks: walk with me, talk with me, dance with me, meet me, be my accomplice for a while, share this with me, it will help me. Love requires effort and an acceptance of vulnerability. Be here with me now. Maybe it will help you too. There is always the possibility of joy.

* I’ve been reading Richard Kearney’s On Stories (2002), and his articulation of an ethics of storytelling and of inter-subjective imagination is compelling in the face of those millennial anti-humanists who declared the ‘end of narrative’ (as well as of history and ideology). ‘The story is not confined to the mind of its author alone’, he writes. ‘Nor is it confined to the mind of its reader. Nor indeed to the action of its narrated actors. Every story is a play of at least three persons (author/actor/addressee) whose outcome is never final. That is why narrative is an open-ended invitation to ethical and political responsiveness. Storytelling invites us to become not just agents of our own lives, but narrators and readers as well. It shows us that the untold life is not worth living. There will always be someone there to say, “tell me a story”, and someone there to respond. Were this not so, we would no longer be fully human’.

* Graffiti seen today on Berlin walls: ‘I’d rather laugh, all day’. And: ’My mother taught me well, so I rebel’. Also, alongside a stencilled banana: ‘One glass of water illuminates the world’.

* The politics and ethics of collaboration – everything is at stake in how we meet, listen, respond, how we are there with and for each other. How to live with others, loving something of their difference, their elsewhere? How to make the friction of difference part of the grain of a collective articulation? And how to invent the conditions for invention? How to invite people and forms and languages to come into conjunction, creating the time and space for them to co-exist? How to care for what we inject into the collective bloodstream, and to enable it to reverberate in ways that are more than the sum of its parts? How to be responsible for this story of love, transformation, betrayal and forgiveness, and to wear it on our sleeves with compassion and generosity rather than nudge-nudging and winking through the lens of a world-weary cynicism?

* Gathered around a laptop in a stairwell in Berlin, the only place we find to pick up a wi-fi signal on a Sunday afternoon, we watch online videos of the Gillian Welch/David Rawlings band, and of Bruce Springsteen with the E Street Band. These serve as points of reference in terms of investment, attitude, energy, presence. Something is palpably at stake in the work of it. As Gregg says, something is ‘crucial’, it’s not just a relaxed good time. Something has to be made to happen, and we recognise the engagement, the quality of attention and of listening. And we root for them, just as we do for Tim and Dawn in the final episode of The Office (another point of reference here). ‘You have to step it up out of the familiar’, Gregg says, ‘you have to step up to the plate’.

* In Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion, one of the central characters Patrick proposes a kind of dramaturgy of the band, where the interweavings of self and others within musical structures offer a model for dynamic, connective relations between the individual and the collective. Cornet, saxophone and drum ‘chased each other across solos and then suddenly fell together and rose within a chorus’. Patrick recognises how ‘each one of them was carried by the strength of something more than themselves’. Here the collaborative meeting place of the band is ‘perfect company, with an ending full of embraces after the solos had made everyone stronger, more delineated. His own life was no longer a single story but part of a mural, which was a falling together of accomplices … a wondrous night web’. This is a metaphorical mapping of possible inter-relations in the construction of both narratives and identities. Although we have long since left Ondaatje’s novel behind, nonetheless this musical ideal lingers on to ghost so much of what we seek as a company in this performance.

* In discussions about the speaking of texts Gregg and Gary talk of sentences as sculptural ‘objects’, each one an entity of a particular shape and weight to be placed alongside each other in a public space as if they were components of a ‘report’. Molly Haslund, who plays Alice Bell, describes her score as a performer as being made up of structures like karate ‘kata’, tasks of a particular form and rhythm to be embodied and fulfilled. I think of the poet Alice Oswald talking of each line in a poem as a stone, and of the poem as a ‘dry-stone wall’: a composite or aggregate entity, hand-made from found materials, within which each component has a certain self-sufficiency, a certain suchness, to be encountered and contemplated in relation to the whole.

* Peter Brook once said that, when his international group first started performing in Paris in the mid-1970s, people often asked them if they were amateurs. Although the performers were slightly miffed, Brook was delighted. He was after a kind of sophisticated children’s theatre comprising diverse, legible, storytelling forms and performers whose differences flared into visibility. ‘Amateurs’ in the old sense of the word: lovers of stories coming together to meet in the telling, each of them implicated in making it take (a) place in the present. This relates to something at the heart of my pleasure in working with Gregg and Gary, and now with this new company; here too ‘naivety’ and the ‘amateur’ are qualities to be worked and affirmed and celebrated, and it’s often uncomfortable in terms of my own received ideas. It’s like hanging out with two disarmingly smart (and hilarious) kids whose perceptions unsettle and surprise, and invite me into elsewhere and otherwise. An encouragement to think and re-think through shifting position and unexpected contradiction, rather than the surface rearranging of prejudices that so often passes for thinking.

(Extracts from rehearsal journal, Berlin, March 2006)

Programme notes for Lone Twin Theatre's Alice Bell. World premiere: Beurrsschouwburg Centre for the Arts, Brussels, as part of the Künsten Festival des Arts, May 2006. Co-commissioned by Sophiensaele, Berlin; Künsten Festival des Arts, Brussels; The Maltings, Farnham; and Nuffield Theatre, Lancaster. Supported by ACE, German Federal Cultural Foundation, Tron Theatre Glasgow - © David Williams