only you

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

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

 

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

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

  

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

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

 

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

games to chase away fear

Some of the questions, invitational triggers, and 'games' devised by Pina Bausch for her performers to explore while devising the performance Valse (1982):

- Set a trap for someone
- Think of a simple phrase, say it without words
- Tell a story using sounds
- A photo album: poses
- Defend yourself
- How to kill an animal
- What can you do with one hand?
- Razor blade
- Invent a new peace sign
- Games to chase away fear


- How do you open a boiled egg?
- What do you think others want to change in you?
- Something for which you could use a drum roll
- Pairs in love walk in the street touching each other: how?
- A song about a tree
- You have to pack very quickly, you only have a tiny case, you don't know how long you'll be away: what do you take?
- Mark injurable parts of the body on your partner: show why they are injurable
- Your reactions when someone makes plans for you
- An exercise to make yourself stronger
- White handkerchief
- Express delight in six notes
- Leg art
- Plan revenge
- Erect a monument to someone
- An animal kills another: how?
- Curiosity
- Five laws for marriage
- Which parts of your body do you prefer to move?
- What does an animal say when caught in a trap?
- Magical formulae
- Ways in which you amuse yourself on your own
- Back to the wall
- Different ways to warm yourself
- Babies' movements
- What do you do to babies?
- Play a game with your own body?
- Animals' games
- Distress signals
- Pas-de-deux with two fingers
- Degradation
- A goodbye pose
- A sign for good luck
- A dance phrase addressed to your bed
- Up to me
- Do something for when you want to be loved
- What are you best at?
- Softening
- The plan's no longer working
- Mini-twist
- The language of curtains
- Photos for eternity
- Look who's there!
- A game to do with time
- Make something go away
- Parental advice
- What do you have of your parents?
- Summer
- An important thought in a rainstorm
- The way in which you hold on to someone when you're afraid
- What do you only do alone?
- A love poem
- Here's a bear, and you have to make it laugh
- Small, smaller, smallest
- Where is it?
- Carress
- They used to embrace like this ...
- Games with a piece of string
- Do something with your nostalgia
- Throw yourself into someone's arms
- Ports and ships
- A mini-show for oneself
- A bagatelle for an audience up there
- Fear of messing something up
- Look at an object with malice
- Excuse me
- Make a movement of expiration
- Shame
- A little movement you make when you have goose-flesh
- Hiss
- What you need to survive
- Waiting for news
- Pity yourself
- I hope we'll see each other again
- Wanting to escape
- Good news
- Have a good journey
- Go on, just a little burp
- Reflect on something to do with wind
- Be modest
- A hymn
- A baby massage
- The language of curtains

Translated by David Williams: from Raimund Hoghe, Pina Bausch: histoires de théâtre dansé, Paris: L'Arche, 1987

Photo: Detlef Erler

the tears of things (for pina)

'I'm not interested in how people move, but in what moves them ... We are very transparent. The way somebody walks or the way people carry their necks tells you something about the way they live or about the things that have happened to them. Somehow everything is visible - even when we cling to certain things ... Everything I do is about relationships, childhood, fear of death, and how much we all want to be loved' (Pina Bausch).
_________________________________________________

In no particular order, some images, culled from a reservoir that has coloured and buoyed my imagination for 20 years or more. These (and others) are indelibly etched into my psyche, and they proliferate and animate still: in my 20s and 30s, this work changed everything for me...

A group of women scurry across a leaf-strewn floor in pursuit of a man who plays the same short extract from Bartok's Bluebeard on tape. Rewind, replay, shuffle. Later, a slow somnambulist dance of partners, the women bowed and passive, their faces hidden, the almost-naked men masquerading their bodies - performing body-building poses to the audience, displaying them to both comic and alarming excess (1).

A woman in her underpants walks through a field of carnations playing an accordion. Around the edge of the field, guards patrol with alsatians on leashes. Later, Lutz Forster 'signs' the Gershwin song The man I love. Comedy and pathos in this overlaying of nostalgic heterosexual song and signing. The overlay doubles and re-doubles the song's lyrics, making them un-familiar and re-writing them. The male body mimes and 'tells' - through an iconic corporeal discourse of a possible love to which a dominant ideology is metaphorically 'deaf'. Forster himself is both source and site of the narrative, and detached from it, consciously showing/dis-playing it to us (2).

A group of besuited men repeatedly touch a solitary woman (Meryl Tankard) like a child - pinch her cheek, tousle her hair, pat her. Cumulatively over time, their actions constitute a kind of rape; intimate, patronising 'affection' is defamiliarised through repetition to reveal the shadows this infantilising tactile economy suppresses (3).

Two dinner-suited men, smug, self-congratulatory, mask-like smiles, posturing an image of suave gentility, wealth, sophistication. Then they squirt or dribble little fountains of champagne from their mouths - straight up, splashing down over their faces and suits, 'wetting themselves', like children. A kind of critical comic display of the infantile drives that underlie and inform their masquerade (4).

An environment of towering, bristling cacti, peopled by a discontinuous dream-like array of figures. Couples waltz. Passers-by pass by. A woman in bra and pants hangs immobile and upside down, her body apparently suspended from a cactus's spikes. A man force-feeds a woman, like a goose, coercing and constructing her; she lies inert. A man in a balaclava wheels another woman around the space in a glass tank of water; it's uncertain whether she has drowned or is dreaming, her body literally floating through space. A man in a skirt, shades and a leather jacket dances alone. A woman with two black shoes in her mouth struggles repeatedly to lift herself from the floor. A blindfolded man dances alone, a tea bag held over each eye by a red cloth, his partner a tea towel. Then there's a dancing pantomime walrus, and a group standing as if ready for a rather odd family portrait: a masked woman (one of those 2-dimensional Victorian paper cut-outs sometimes used for parties); two others beside her, their hats suspended above their heads, as they wriggle to fit inside them; and a slumped woman on a chair in front, her hair covering her face (5).

A man struggles across a field with an enormous wardrobe balanced precariously on his back. A drunken woman with a bottle in her hand shouts and lurches at the centre of a flock of sheep; the sheep respond to her every move, instantly and collectively, her impulses rippling out through this animal corps de ballet. A man, gravity-bound, chases a flock of starlings as they swoop and soar. Dominique Mercy in a ball gown, pinned to the wall of a room by a model helicopter hovering in front of him, buzzing him, its whirring blades pushing an updraft under his skirt (6).

A woman with impossibly long limbs and hair, a spectral somnambulist presence in a white night slip, dances through a maze of tables and chairs in a deserted cafe. A man clears her passage, his attention to his task all-consuming and selfless (7).

The everyday defamiliarised. The image as aggregation: the conjunction of bodies, objects, rhythms, music, space as psychic landscape. Even smell (the peaty earth in Rights of Spring). Bachelard's 'material imagination'. Brecht's gestus ablaze, signalling through the flames (8). Accumulation and repetition (what repetition?) Masquerade. The voyeuristic economy of spectating: the 'dis-play' of performing. Montage. E-motion: the continuous leak of affect. Excess. A corrosive theatricality. Irreducible ambiguity. Layers of fragmented narrative. Reversals. Ec-static exposures, uninsulated. Identities on the move. Possible worlds. The heart-land laid bare, in its resilience and fragility.

Love's work, its grain, its shapes.
The tears of things.

_______________________________________________

Notes
(1) Bluebeard.
(2) Nelken.
(3) Kontakthof.
(4) Two Cigarettes in the Dark.
(5) Ahnen.
(6) Die Klage der Kaiserin ('The Lament of the Empress').
(7) Cafe Muller.
(8) 'Gestus is at once gesture and gist, attitude and point: one aspect of the relation between two people, studied singly, cut to essentials and physically or verbally expressed. It excludes the psychological, the sub-conscious, the metaphysical unless they can be conveyed in concrete terms' (Brecht).

Images: Pina Bausch (photo by Donata Wenders, 2004); Nelken at Sadler's Wells, 2005 (photo by Tristram Kenton); Ten Chi, 2004.

To watch Lutz Forster's The man I love (from Chantal Akerman's 1982 film One day Pina asked me...), see here

For a listing of other Pina Bausch materials on YouTube, see here

Obituaries for Pina Bausch: Guardian, Independent, Times, New York Times

dad (6): crawl

I enjoyed your little film, Dad. Thought you were great! It's hilarious.

Which film?

You know, the village cricket film. It's lovely. I saw it on YouTube. (49-51 secs.)

Oh yes.

Fine bit of eye acting on your part, it's brilliant.

Oh good. Blink and you'll miss it.

I thought you stole the show!

Most of me is on the cutting room floor, as they say. He was here for hours.

It's a nice film, really well made.

Yes he's very good. Very professional.

Yes, you can tell. We both really liked it ... I'm in a couple of performances in coming weeks, weirdly. First one's on the main stage at the Barbican next weekend. Quite daunting.

Oh, what's that?

It's a Pina Bausch performance.

Who?

Pina Bausch. You know, you sent me a cutting once saying, 'This is the sort of thing you'd like'. German choreographer, one of my favorite artists ever, really. She died a couple of years ago.

Oh. B.A.U ...

... S.C.H. Bausch.

Thought so. I'll look her up. Do you have to dance?

Not really. The dancers dance, and do all sorts of things; they're astonishing. I'm in a kind of chorus of men, twenty of us. Extras, really. An odd mixed bunch. We do bits and pieces. I get my shirt off and iron it. I crawl. I polish my shoes ...

You crawl ...

Yes, I love that bit. It's very immersive.

Oh.

It's a huge event, Dad. There's forty something people in it. It's part of a cycle of ten performances, all made by the Bausch company in different cities around the world. Santiago, Rome, Japan, India, Palermo - this one was first made in Lost Angeles, it's sort of a response to California. She was my favorite choreographer, beautiful. It's extraordinary to see them at work. They're super nice.

Oh good. What's it called?

'Nur Du', 'only you'.

N.O ...

N.U.R. new word D.U: it means 'only you' in German.

Oh yes. 'Nur Du'.

It's part of the programme of cultural events for the Olympics.

Ah, the Cultural Olympiad. What do they call this kind of thing - is it dance theatre?

Yes, exactly. I guess Pina Bausch was the core figure in dance theatre in Europe. 'Tanz theater'. It's a fantastic thing to do, I'm really excited. Just have to make sure I don't collide with some long-limbed dancer in full flight. Or fall off the front of the stage.

No, you don't want to do that.

There's a dangerous drop at the front lip. And it's quite dark. It would make for a spectacular one-off performance, a dive into the lap of someone in the front row.

What do you mean, you crawl? Is there a story?

Not a story as such, it's a sequence of images really. Some of it's like Surrealist painting, maybe. The crawling happens in front of these giant sequoia trees, there's a kind of forest onstage. All of us crawl - the people in the chorus, most of the Bausch dancers, in suits or frocks - very slowly through the space, with our heads down, while three or so of the dancers dance. There's music. It's like a dream image ... 

Oh. Do you have to rehearse?

Yes. Yes, of course.

And do you get paid?

Yes, I do, it's a proper performance. They're really well known, she's probably one of the most famous choreographers of the past 30 years or so. All sorts of people will be in the audience, she has serious fans: Alan Rickman, Wim Wenders ...

Bim who?

... you know, the director of 'Paris Texas'. Fiona Shaw, Antony Gormley. 

Antony Gormley. Oh.

I don't do much, probably 15 to 20 minutes out of three hours - it's a bit blink and you'll miss it too - but I'm really chuffed to be involved. 

Oh good. I'll look her up.

And then I'm supposed to be in another performance over the summer, at the Tate. It's a piece made by a young guy called Tino Sehgal.

Tina who?

Sehgal.

Tina Seagull. Never heard of her.

Him. Tino. S.E.H.G.A.L. 

S.E.H ...

... G.A.L. He's half German.

Ah.

You know the big entrance hall, the giant space on the way in to Tate Modern?

Yes, I've been there.

Well they've had a series of large scale commissions over the years for that space. Called the Unilever Commissions. You know, that guy who created the weather system, with a giant sun and clouds ...

Mmm, no.

Anyway, it's part of that series. Tino Sehgal has the commission to make something that runs throughout the summer. Starts in July. Three months.

And what do you have to do?

Well I'm not exactly sure as yet. I'll found out more next week, there's some meetings, I'll let you know. But he's a conceptual artist. He doesn't make things, objects; he makes events, encounters. He calls them 'constructed situations'. A while ago he took all of the art objects out of the Guggenheim in New York, and people walked up the spiral slope, one by one, led by a child, then someone slightly older, and so on all the way to someone really quite old at the top - the conversations there were about progress.

Oh.

For the piece at the Tate there's a big group of us, and I think we meet people who come in to the gallery and talk with them. It's structured at some level, but inevitably different depending on who you actually meet and how they engage, what they do.

So you talk to people.

Yes.

About what?

Well, I'll let you know more about it once I know a bit more. There are themes, topics, but a lot of it's improvised.

What do they call that kind of thing?

Mmm, I guess it's performance. Or probably conceptual art.

Oh.

He studied dance when he was younger, and something of that remains. But it's not really dance.

Oh. Do you crawl? (chortle)

No, I don't crawl ...

You'll have to be careful who you engage in conversation, you don't want to get involved with a psychopath.

A psychopath?

He might punch you in the nose.

What? How many psychopaths have you ever met in the Tate?

Well, judging by some of the art in there, there's quite a few around. Some of the art's psychopathetic.

Blimey. Just because you don't much like it - that's a preposterous thing to say. So because you don't like Mark Rothko's paintings does that mean he was a psychopath?

Oh, just trying to bring a bit of levity to the conversation.

Oh, right.

And I don't always understand the words you use. Your words mean different things. I have to use a dictionary.

Really?

You'll need to be careful who you talk to.

Have you not understood this conversation?

Yes yes, this sort of thing is fine.

Well then I can talk with people. I can talk with you.

Yes, but I have to analyse your writing.

Oh ... Oh dear. It's just a conversation, Dad.

[PAUSE]

And do you get paid?

[...]