tamper (the play in it)

‘The playing of the game is the playing of the game with that object, and the object of the game is therefore in part always to undertake a forensic trial of the object’s possibilities. One plays with the object in order to put its properties and possibilities in play, to discover and determine what play there is in it’ (Connor 2011: 123)

‘The children seem to be fighting, but they are merely learning to inhabit their country’ (Barthes 2007: 47)

My contexts here are in my own past: a childhood playing sport with genuine pleasure and commitment, while never really taking it fully seriously. I still conceive of it as a joyous folly, a kind of absorbing, immersive absurdity (1). As Steven Connor suggests in A Philosophy of Sport, sport is ‘triumph and disaster; everything, nothing; important, unimportant’ (Connor 2011: 48). The initial trigger for this revisiting of aspects of my past from over 40 years ago came in a file of school reports (from the ages of 5 to 18) handed to me by my father with a sigh about 18 months ago. These distilled, haiku-like assessments of a child’s abilities and aptitudes are illuminating and rather troubling in their fragmentary and elliptical account of an education in the 1960s and 1970s, its expectations and ‘tamperings’, its stratifying of different orders of ‘knowledge’, its explicit reiteration of what is valued and privileged, of what constitutes ‘success’ and ‘failure’, and the extraordinarily partial perception and construction of a young self-in-process. Clearly I was failing to understand that particular ‘game structure’, its rules and protocols. Ultimately the reports offer a litany of disappointment at my apparent lack of interest and attention in most classes (apart from art and music), with far too much staring out of the window, dreaming, chatting, an approach that is deemed altogether ‘maddeningly casual and easy-going’. They include this Latin report at the age of 9: ‘He has tried all the spivvish tricks, and has only now discovered that work is the best solution’ (what tricks were they?); and a despairing summary comment from the headmaster when I was just 11: ‘At present he is rather a stupid and idle boy. Despite our best efforts, I’m not sure we will ever be able to save him’. These failings are consistently offset and partially mollified, it seems, by my rather pointless sporting prowess – for example, this from a report on ‘games’ at the age of 12: ‘David is an expert thrower and an accurate bowler of considerable skill, but he lacks discipline and is not capitalizing on his gifts’ … (2).

In what follows, in part I am interested in reclaiming and valuing something of what the choreographer Alain Platel has called ‘suppressed virtuosities’ - redundant, devalued or forgotten techniques, currently functionless embodied skills or areas of expertise: in my case, in particular between the ages of 7 and 18, eye-hand coordination, and a peculiar aptitude for play with a variety of balls, bowling, throwing, catching, kicking, hitting, as well as an array of fairly esoteric techniques for ball tampering in cricket matches. Also in the back of my mind hover some attributes prized in the aesthetics of Italian football. Of the three vital ingredients required for the most accomplished football players and teams, Italian aficionados suggest that the unruly passion of English football lacks all three. These qualities are: technica (technique, skill); fantasia (the ability to do unpredictable and surprising things with the ball, inspired instinct, imagination, flair); and furbizia (cunning, guile, slyness, a tactical bending of the rules, aspects of gamesmanship).

*****

‘He obviously enjoys acting – on and off stage!’ (School report, aged 16)

Cricket is a game of infinite repetitions, and attenuated discontinuous rhythms - long periods of apparent low-level activity (or even non-activity) and sudden flarings of intensity, in a durational game structure of great complexity that enables significant ‘play’ and unpredictabilities within that structure (including, for example, its porosity to the material effects of weather, cloud cover, wind etc.). For Steven Connor, like all ball games it is ‘a choreographed meteorology of speeds and durations’ within which the ball acts as ‘the switcher and transmitter of these speeds’ (Connor 2011: 77).

Over a period of about eleven years, I spent a significant amount of time during the spring and summer months playing school cricket as a medium-paced ‘swing bowler’ or ‘seamer’, a specialist in the production of unpredictable movement, swerve and bounce. As a bowler, one endeavours to set up the conditions for unpredictability, always projecting an object both related to and independent from you on a forward trajectory into the future, towards the ludic, agonistic encounter with the anticipatory and reflex skills of a batsman. My particular abilities, which remain at some level wholly mysterious to me, were ‘late swing’, a sudden alteration in the rate of change of the ball’s trajectory, amplified bounce or ‘kick’ off the pitch’s surface, and a cut-back off the seam at the moment of the ball’s striking the pitch, suddenly redirecting the ball in a different direction from that of its original swing through the air. To paraphrase Connor, the aim of this particular game was to play with your opponent by trying to prevent them from playing (with) you (131).

In all ball sports, the nature of the ball is paradoxical: inanimate and animate, object and subject, it seems to move in and out of its own agency; and in its passage and exchange, its status as intermediary, it weaves relations and constructs complex entanglements and intersubjectivities. The cricket ball’s structure comprises smooth leather surfaces on two halves of a sphere, with a raised, stitched seam encircling it; in this way, uniformity is combined with an element of unpredictability (Connor 2011: 138). The physical mechanics of swing (the ball’s ‘movement’) are intimately related to the transformation of the ball in time, its mnemonic registering of its histories of contact and collision, the biographical traces of what happens to happen to it; for ‘the cricket ball is designed to soak up accidents of all kinds’ (142). Over time its flawless, smooth surfaces roughen and soften slightly, the seam loosens and becomes uneven, and the object assumes a ‘lunar asymmetry’ (ibid).  In some ways, the ball mirrors the pitch itself, a ‘sphere, as it were, rolled out’ (139), a flattened and extended smooth surface that in itself becomes worn, marked and damaged over time by the contingencies of the game; it decays into ‘a scarred cartography of accidence’ (59). This gradual entropic deterioration of the idealized, immaculate integrity of two of the game’s core structural elements – ball and ground – is actively assimilated within and exploited by the game structure of cricket; and this growing material imperfection serves to compromise predictability and thus multiply the possibilities for a bowler keenly aware of the game’s intimate imbrication in processes of change over time.

According to articles 2.2.9 and 42.3 in the laws of cricket (sections concerning the alteration of the condition of the ball in the International Cricket Council’s formal ‘Code of Conduct’), the bowler and fielders are permitted to clean and polish the ball, sustaining its shine. They are prohibited, however, from using any other aids apart from bodily fluids – sweat, spit – and their own clothing (ICC 2017). One side of the ball is polished and carefully maintained, while the other is allowed (or caused) to deteriorate, therefore creating increased drag - ‘turbulent flow’ - on that side during its movement through the air as it travels along the line of the seam; in this way, the friction on the rougher hemisphere produces a bending of the line of flight – the swerving movement of a ‘curve-ball’.

‘Ball tampering’ is a term that refers to illegitimate means of gaining advantage by accelerating the deterioration of the condition of the ball, thereby unfairly interfering with the ‘orderly’ aerodynamics and legibility of its trajectory, and increasing swerve and unpredictability. There are long histories of tampering, documented since at least 1918 (see for example Birley 1999: 217, 316); and whenever it is exposed, it is decried as ‘not cricket’, ‘not playing the game’. In professional contexts it results in substantial fines and penalties. For example, the England captain Mike Atherton was seen on TV using dirt in his pocket at Lords in 1994; the Pakistan captain Shahid Afridi was captured on camera biting the seam in a match against Australia in 2010; and the wonderfully named South African bowler Vernon Philander was caught gouging the ball with his nails in 2014. In 2016, Faf du Plessis, the South African captain, was fined his entire match fee from the second test against Australia when TV images revealed him applying sugary saliva from a sucked mint to the ball. Most recently, during the fourth Ashes Test in Melbourne, Australia, in late December 2017, the England bowler Jimmy Anderson was recorded by Channel 9 TV cameras running his fingernails along the quarter seam of the Kookaburra ball, although any intentional ‘foul play’ was subsequently denied and dismissed by England officials as ‘Pommie-bashing’ gamesmanship.

In my early teens I was taught how to ‘work the ball’ (we never used the term ‘tamper’) by a warm, funny Yorkshireman who was the school cricket coach, a retired England and county cricket player celebrated as a canny, unreadable swinger and seamer. I was a sweet sucker and sugary polisher, although the ball was sometimes scuffed or further shined covertly by a couple of frotteur teammates in the field on its circuitous route back to me. I think I conceived of this as just part of the game and its tactics, an amoral adolescent understanding and play-ful acceptance of furbizia: a minor amplificatory tweaking of the ‘give’ in structure, the craft in ‘crafty’, and the meaning of ‘in mint condition’ …

Tampering techniques aim to produce subtle modifications of the game’s core object. Typically there are three core modes of tampering – picking and lifting the seam, roughening one side of the ball, and shining the other with concealed materials. Less commonly and more mysteriously, marking or scuffing the surface of the pristine, polished side, or picking, lifting and fraying the finer quarter seam that bisects that unblemished hemisphere, can also produce what is known as ‘reverse swing’. An inventory of tampering tools might include: for polishing and shining, Vaseline (concealed on one’s trousers, forehead or a handkerchief), lip balm, hair gel, sunscreen, saliva from sucking sweets; for roughening and scuffing, trouser zip, studs, dirt or gravel, or throwing the ball into the ground; and for lifting seams, finger nails, penknife, nail clippers, metal bottle top, zip. Each of these interventions has to be realised invisibly, and gradually, so as not to attract undue attention. The umpires have the right to inspect the ball at any time, to verify its integrity and the credibility of its gradual wearing and minor deformation as part of the game’s material knocks and frictions; and indeed they can decide to replace the ball with one of similar age and condition prior to tampering if the ball in play is deemed to be excessively damaged.

So tampering involves deception, simulation and disguise, discreetly and necessarily concealed within a performed and illusory pretense of playing by the rules and ‘playing the game’, while incrementally introducing a kind of sinister deviation in the predictable and orderly, a swerve of difference in repetition. Steven Connor suggests that cheating in such contexts is an affront to sport’s claimed ontology. For, he proposes, ‘sport is in its essence zealously non-symbolic and unillusory’, and its function is ‘to provide a place and an occasion from which all possibility of simulation has been scorched away, and in which one can be sure that whatever happens will reliably and irreversibly have happened’ (Connor 2011: 175). In some ways, perhaps there is an echo here of those absolutist claims made for performance art as manifest action and event, the actual happening of the ‘real’, in contrast to the subterfuges, shapeshiftings and tawdry pretense of a particular (and limited) conception of theatre, with its purported privileging of the underhand over the manifest, of seeming over being.

Postscript

Two months after submitting this text for publication, ball tampering briefly became the focus of the international media, and triggered the performance of a great deal of indignant moral outrage, as if the fact that such tactics could be at play within the game of cricket was the most unforeseen and alarming of revelations. During the third Test match between South Africa and Australia in Cape Town in March 2018, television cameras and live-feed monitors in the stadium picked up Australia’s Cameron Bancroft rubbing the ball with a mysterious yellow object that he then concealed, with comically inept sleight-of-hand, down the front of his trousers. Approached by the umpires, Bancroft showed them a dark grey sunglass pouch from his side pocket, and no penalty was imposed at that time. However the close-up images of Bancroft’s actions had been widely disseminated, and the heightened media attention prompted an immediate investigation. Subsequently Bancroft and Australia’s captain Steve Smith admitted that in fact there had been an attempt to interfere with the ball’s condition, using sand paper as an abrasive tool, and that the tampering plan had been hatched during a lunch break by a ‘leadership group’ within the Australian camp. Formally charged with improper conduct by the ICC, Smith and Bancroft were heavily fined. In the wake of the players’ admission, the Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull (‘it beggars belief’) and a range of international commentators publicly condemned the players’ actions, and a formal investigation was undertaken by Cricket Australia. Ultimately Smith, Bancroft and David Warner, the Australian vice-captain (a notoriously aggressive competitor, and the apparent instigator of the tampering plan) were found guilty of cheating, lying and bringing the game into disrepute; they were sanctioned with lengthy bans from all international and domestic cricket. In addition, the Australian coach Darren Lehmann resigned. On their return to Australia, all three beleaguered players gave tearfully apologetic press conferences to the international media, in which they spoke of their shame, their failure as ‘men’, ‘leaders’ and ‘role models’, and their commitment to forthcoming reviews of the team’s culture and the conduct of professional sportsmen.

Notes

1. An earlier version of this material was presented as part of ‘The Things They Do’, an event curated by Joe Kelleher and Nicholas Ridout at the Barbican, London in July 2016, in response to the major retrospective exhibition by Ragnar Kjartansson at the Barbican Gallery.

2. A decade before my arrival, Derek Jarman attended the same secondary school. In his bleakly withering account of its educational ideologies and disciplinary regimes, he characterizes his experiences there in terms of ‘a vicious fraudulent gentility’ that ‘masks a system of bullying and repression, coupled with a deliberate philistine aggression towards learning and intelligence, which are only acceptable if saturated with the muddied values of the rugger pitch … The aggression carries over into many aspects of the teaching which serves not only to enlighten but to repress. A systematic destruction of the creative mind, called ‘education’, is underway … A subtle terror rules, thoughtfully preparing us for the outside world. I feel threatened, isolated and friendless – I’m hopeless at all the communal activities, particularly ball games’ (Jarman 1984: 51-2). Like Jarman, I found refuge in the astonishing openings and relative freedoms offered by the very same art teacher, an inspirational enthusiast and mentor to many ‘failing’ elsewhere; unlike Jarman, I was fortunate to be able to find other pleasures and enduring friendships in the complicities, physical release and escape that sport allowed, for some.

References

Barthes, Roland (2007). What Is Sport? (trans. Richard Howard), New Haven: Yale University Press.

Birley, Derek (1999). A Social History of English Cricket, London: Aurum Press.

Connor, Steven (2011). A Philosophy of Sport, London: Reaktion.

ICC (International Cricket Council) (2017). ‘Regulations – Playing: Code of Conduct for Players and Player Support Personnel – Effective September 2017’, ICC Rules and Regulations: KeyDocuments, accessed 10 December 2017.

Jarman, Derek (1984). Dancing Ledge, London: Quartet Books.

Images

1. Seam: photo David Williams 

2. Old hand, new ball (‘whispering death’): photo Sue Palmer

3. A tampering toolkit: photo David Williams

First published in Performance Research 23: 4-5, 'On Reflection: Turning 100', October 2018: commissioned text for special 100th double issue of the journal

space time angles

As an artist and teacher of performance practices, I spend quite a lot of time in studios with people in general trying to make things. I am a party to their processes from the word ‘go’ to the moment at which it is shown live, if that’s the goal. In the bulk of my teaching that’s what it has been, in Australia, at Dartington and at Royal Holloway. Hopefully I am present and attentive to those people finding a way, finding forms, shapes and structures that they can work with, and trying to see where that flounders, where it's buoyant, where something moves freely amongst them and therefore in relation to me watching. I try to give them a little bit of guidance, where possible, but also to give them a bit of courage when something happens. Usually, often, ‘when something happens’ means that at some level I am engaged more than just as a pair of eyes with a brain attached to them; it feels much more embodied and implicated than that.

As well as performing, I also work as a dramaturg with dance people, with people somewhere in between dance and theatre, and then with Lone Twin. This job can take many different forms but essentially it involves a lot of watching and responding, always in the light of what it seems might be possible for that person or group, always trying to pitch any responses at a level that would encourage something that seems to be going on to develop fruitfully. So there’s a whole array of different kinds of watching that go on in teaching and in working as a dramaturg (and of course in performing). In addition, I am also a fairly seasoned spectator. I have watched a lot of performance over the years, and I have been involved in making a lot of performances. And of course there are different orders of watching and listening involved in actually making and performing ... When people talk about ‘kinaesthetic empathy’, the empathy is both kinaesthetic and affective and it is very hard to separate those things off; indeed they seem to be absolutely entangled. The cliche that one is ‘moved’ by something feels quite palpably real and lived in all sorts of ways: motion, e-motion.

Another spectating and 'doing' activity that informs my relationship to all these things is sport. From being able to walk and run to around the age of 24, I guess I did that more than anything else. At whatever level one arrives, there are all kinds of empathies as a spectator that come out of simply doing that activity every afternoon or evening for 20 odd years, in one’s spare time. I spent years of my life kicking, throwing, catching, running, falling over, usually in relation to an object that moves predictably, a round ball, or unpredictably, like a rugby ball. I fundamentally believe that that set of experiences and deep oafish pleasures for me inform a huge amount of my understanding of and my feeling for related things to this day.

When I go and watch a football match at Arsenal, I am often surprised by the kind of things people in the stands say and what that reveals or suggests as to what they read in what's going on. For example, quite often people are extremely critical if somebody tries something and it doesn’t work, rather than being sympathetic to the endeavour. Yet one can still see a thought which has not been realised because of a whole variety of conditions, often extremely minimal. Its 'failure' might be the result of some kind of blurring of the concentration because someone was moving very fast: the lack of peripheral vision at that particular angle, or the ball moving in a particular way that made it slightly unpredictable, and unplayable. Empathy informs a capacity to 'see' all of those things: the architecture of a body, its movement through space, its relationship to those variables, the speed at which things are unfolding, the moment when something goes awry, what has been attempted if not realised – and somehow those things seem very legible to me at times.

I’m surprised by the limited way in which some people who I imagine haven’t played much sport seem to watch sport, including some of the commentators on TV. You know, cries of 'Rubbish!' to Santi Cazorla, that sort of thing. Relatedly, I'm always intrigued by the relationship between those managers and coaches who have been quite accomplished sports players – footballers, let’s say – and those who weren’t, and therefore the differences in their possible understandings of the predicament of that individual or that group of people. The embodied knowledges and intutitions they may or may not be able to access. For me it is centrally about reading predicaments in a particular set of conditions. Maybe my abilities to understand and empathise with somebody’s predicament come out of sitting in studios, making work, being inside performances, watching performances, and playing and watching sport for much of my life.

At university, one of my core teachers David Bradby taught me a slightly old-fashioned mode of critical engagement called ‘close reading’ in relation to language, and this has been very useful to me in all sorts of ways. I learned from him an attention to the particularities of language, its rhythms, refrains, patterns, structures across time and space in writing. What writing does. I guess what a dramaturg practises at one level is a kind of close reading: of what movements are and what they do, how they relate to other elements, the weave and its effects. By 'reading' I don’t mean decoding towards some singular meaning, but a whole set of often ambiguous and contradictory effects or intensities, structures of energy that produce different things in me as a spectator. The work in the studio is like a proto-spectating, acting as a kind of barometer that reads the heat or feel of the texture. I think of those qualities, and of movement, very much as material, in both senses of that word.

I think that through sport, and through watching loads of stuff, lots of students and other practitioners, there are moments when I am able to be there and now with it. There is something like an amplified and sensitised empathy to many different things at play, and at the centre of that is what bodies are doing and what that produces in relation to other bodies, the space, the framing of the visible world, the audible world, the relationship with us, etc. And it's not necessarily a question of needing to know what the internal life of that is, its invisible logic, the intuitive or quite conscious scoring that goes on for a dancer: what Jonathan Burrows calls the 'internal song'. I’m always interested in those things, but not with a view to that thing being conveyed ... what's going on internally could be anything, because as we know there’s a mismatch between one’s internal life and what happens for somebody watching on the outside, what 'appears'. It’s all to do with what their actions do, and how to help someone recognise what that 'do' to me as a kind of foldback to them. So if I am ever interested in accessing their internal life, it’s only as a mechanism to help them have a fuller sense of what that seems to do for a third party.

At one time I was a gifted cricketer and at a certain point in my life people had me lined up to do this professionally as an adult. I played some representative cricket and then I had an injury and lost interest, particularly when I went to university. At other times I also played squash, fives and royal tennis, which is an extraordinarily complex game spatially and architecturally. It's played in an internal court with many different surfaces and textures. There are inert zones that you can hit the ball at and it will fall 'dead' off the wall, surfaces that you can hit which will rebound at a predictable rate, roofs that you can roll the ball along, etc. It’s very much about creatively reading architectures and surfaces and beginning to orient yourself and what you do with the ball in relation to these material effects. In a way it’s not unlike parcours but with a ball; you read and use the logic of architectural structures to play the game.

When I was very young, I played quite a bit of golf – and once every 10 years or so I still play with my brother; and that information from childhood is deeply encoded in my body. There is something remarkable in golf; it's the closest I have come to meditation outside of things that identify themselves as meditation. Similarly there is also something in football, and indeed in cricket, where everything external to what is going on right here, right now, falls away, and that's an extraordinary liberation at one level. A kind of immersion in present process. In golf that’s a singular activity, it’s just you and a club and a ball. But at the moment of settling down to strike a ball and to find a kind of flow that isn’t forced, they’re all the same thing (or not): you try too hard and you’ve stuffed it. You get in the way of ‘it’ doing it. It’s very Zen and the Art of Archery. That’s where I understood those things, in golf and in kicking, and in all of those activities associated with these sports: catching, kicking, throwing etc. To strike something with one’s foot, one’s head, or with a bat, or to bowl, or to hit a ball with a golf club – at times there’s a moment of profound stillness in and around the doing of that, and an absolute clarity which is very pleasurable for me (I'm someone who struggles with the privileging of the intellectual world at one level, and finds it hugely dispersed and distracting and off-balance). At such moments, I have felt absolute clarity in my ability to engage with the doing of that precise thing and not to be distracted by something else – those dumb bits of static: whether it will be good, whether people will like me if I do that, or who I am when I’m doing that. All that self-reflexive distraction – things that relate to a notion of self, to a notion of the quality of oneself, one’s abilities or non-abilities – they just fall away. And over time there are enough of such moments to make it significantly realigning in terms of one's sense of self; there is absolute calmness and clarity, and at its best or clearest, a joyous reunion with the thing that is being done. You are the thing that is being done; you are not doing it any more, it kind of ‘does you’. You can be a shit golfer and hit the ball very, very sweetly without effort five times in a round of golf and that will be enough for you to be full of joy.

I never took any of these things very seriously. Even though I was competitive I always thought they were joyously ridiculous as activities. I always understood and accepted the nonsense of sport, its fatuousness. Fundamentally it’s absurd and a bit pointless, both comic and serious, a 'folly' as Lone Twin suggest; and I very much like that about it. Of course it produces a great deal, with its intensities and emotions, its vectors and balls of energy, its alignments of perception, its very real and ephemeral pleasures; but it does not actually make a 'thing', it’s not productive in an instrumental way; it's a pure potlatch activity. It has no function other than in its doing and sharing. Sport is play, with all of play’s productive and non-productive attributes.

I have some odd abilities. For instance, I can for throw balls, or stones, very hard and a very long way. I don't know why. I guess it comes out of hours of chucking things as a kid, somehow endlessly fascinated by the arc of a trajectory, the curved flight through the air, the triangulation hand-eye-there. From the age of 7 to 18, I endlessly won silly competitions about throwing cricket balls. Like golf, or kicking a ball, it’s something to do with not getting in my own way and understanding the notion of not trying. There’s a kind of effort and aligned connectedness in playful visualisation that doesn’t impede your capacity to just get on and do that thing. Alain Platel of Les Ballets C de la B once talked of a fascination with something he called ‘suppressed virtuosities’. Those things we are extremely good at, but that no longer have a value, no current purchase as an activity. Throwing is one of them for me and I rather like the fact that I have this completely functionless capacity. I value its lack of value and its anomalous redundancy.

As a result when I see people who are very good at whatever their thing is, whether it's David Beckham taking a free kick, or a friend at school who could manipulate his face in a hyper-gurning way, or my friend the performer/choreographer Jane Mason moving, I recognise they have a particular set of capacities that I don’t have. I can see that Jane has a range of possibilities, and my not being able to do them somehow amplifies radically my sense of what a body can do. The horizon expands ever so slightly, and I find that very exciting. In Jane’s case, her particular quality might be the capacity to ride very close to some kind of intuitive hunch – without having to decode or understand intellectually, to explain it away. She’s very adept at that, and it takes various shapes. And so the nature of the conversation that seems possible with her is rooted in a kind of empathy for the proposition that she can run close to felt impulses she really doesn't need to know in a way she can verbalise. And I love and respect that, and try to encourage her to do that.

Of course if you play team sports you get to know your own capacities at some level: what you’re not so 'good' at, what you are 'good' at. Not necessarily intellectually ‘know’ those things, but you have a felt sense of them. And you also start to read what other people can do and where their capacities are; and so you create the conditions where that capacity can be activated usefully. It’s absolutely similar to working with a group of performers, whether they are dancers or theatre people. It’s somehow creating the conditions for the individuals within the collective to recognise, value, extend and develop their own capacities, and to find a complementarity in relation, so that collectively they can produce something that is more than the sum of its parts and that’s live here and now. Years ago I remember seeing early Theatre de Complicite shows, and talking with Simon McBurney about sport – and he made a similar set of connections between sport activities, team, playing field, structures in space that have restrictions and therefore encourage play, tactical possibility and game structures inside the restrictions. That’s what enables play, the parameters, the friction. It’s like the give in a bicycle chain; it has a structure, but it also has ‘play’ in it in that other sense of ‘give’. For me there was always a strong connection between sport, play and performance making.

I remember reading a beautiful article about footballers by Richard Williams in The Guardian, in which he writes in particular about the Portuguese player Luis Figo and Zinedine Zidane. It was in part about why one might conceive of them as ‘artists’. Richard Williams had been a music writer before becoming a sports journalist; he’s written a book about Miles Davis, for example. He’s one of the few journalists who has a real feel for rhythm, space, tears and shifts in space, relations of connection and counterpoint, etc. – those elements that are central to my relation to watching sport. Anyway, Williams wrote a memorable phrase in this article: ‘He [Zidane] sees space and time and angles where we see only confusion.’ The ‘we’ that he refers to is perhaps the untutored eye, the kind of a person who perhaps isn’t sensitised to those kinds of elements and processes going on. He suggests somebody like Zidane makes such things palpably apparent. A change of direction that opens up that part of the space where it was blocked. That shift in angle, that cut-back pass that opens up a gap in relation to that vector of that body moving at that speed, through what looks like a chaotic scrimmage, into a new configuration of space. So it’s a kind of choreographic practice at one level, an enabling managing of space for people to flair into the thing that they do very well. Which is thrilling and illuminating,  of course. There are very few people who make such dynamic elements and possibilities as visible as Zidane sometimes did: a kind of pedagogy for spectators.

For what it's worth, an edited transcript of an interview with David Williams by Dick McCaw, a version of which was first published as 'Space and time and angles: learning how to watch' in the journal Theatre, Dance and Performance Training 5:3, 2014, 350-3. Image just above: Anthony Gormley, 'Trajectory Field', 2001

black dog, white dog

Amores Perros (film). Dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2000

‘Deliver my soul from the sword: my darling from the power of the dog’ (Psalms xxii, 16)

The Spanish title of the Mexican film Amores Perros translates as ‘lousy love affairs’ or more literally, ‘dog loves’ (Smith 2003: 9): ‘amor es perros’, ‘love is dogs’. In English-speaking countries internationally, where the film’s representations of dog fighting were controversial, it was released with the subtitle ‘Love’s a bitch’. Set in Mexico City, the film interweaves three narratives of love, desire, betrayal and loss, each of its three ‘chapters’ connected by an explosive car crash that implicates the central characters. In each episode, extreme situations are fueled by aberrant, destructive (‘animal’) behaviour, and violence simply serves to generate violence.

The working title of Guillermo Arriago Jordán’s original script was ‘Black Dog/White Dog’ (‘Perro negro/perro blanco’, quoted in Smith 2003: 32), and the tripartite narrative structure is informed by a complex web of doublings, in particular between rich and poor, and human and animal. This somewhat Manichean structure (which owes a great deal to television melodrama) is undercut by the ambiguous moral status of the characters – both human and animal - and the interpenetration of narratives, with some formal repetition of the same sequence from differing perspectives: the car crash, in particular. Although the meanings of events become unstable and proliferative, nonetheless a particular moralistic vision resides, a poetic justice of ‘pride before a fall’ and of violence revisiting its perpetrators and ‘biting them back’.

A core component in the construction of this contemporary morality tale of troubled mexicanidad lies in its representation of dogs. For they are centrally involved in all three episodes, and numerous parallels are established between human protagonists and their canine companions. All of them are imbricated in dog-eat-dog economic systems and their attendant anomie and violence. All of their identities are fragile and damaged, and they transform and unravel in the reiterated narrative arc of an enforced reversal of status (existential, moral, economic, and so on).

The first dog we encounter is the ambivalent Cofi, a black mongrel with more than a hint of Rottweiler: a devoted pet, a vicious killer, and, as an indomitable fighter, a meal ticket for Octavio (Gael García). He exploits the dog’s ferocious fighting abilities for financial gain before Cofi is shot during an illegal fight in an abandoned swimming pool by the aggrieved owner of his opponent. In the film’s opening scene, a high-speed chase sequence that culminates in the first of four perspectives on the car crash, Octavio’s friend Jorge desperately tends to the wounded dog in the back seat of Octavio’s speeding car with a group of gun-toting gangsters in pursuit.

Then there is Richi, the white poodle of model Valeria (Goya Toledo), the beautiful mistress of unfaithful, married advertising executive Daniel. Richi is utterly infantilised by Valeria who confers on him the surrogate child role that Deleuze and Guattari disdainfully dismissed as that of ‘the Oedipal family animal, a mere poodle’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1987: 250). There are evident metaphorical echoes in the fates of the model and her pampered lapdog as both of them fall dramatically from ‘grace’. Valeria’s demise is prefigured in her initial, innocuous, high-heeled trip on a hole in the shiny parquet floor of the new ‘dream home’ apartment Daniel has bought for her. In the wake of her car crash and subsequent surgery, eventually a gangrenous leg is amputated, and she is callously abandoned by her advertising company as the model-of-choice for a perfume called ‘Enchant’. Then with the swift and self-destructive collapse of her relationship with Daniel, she falls out of the world into devastated isolation as an invalid. Similarly Richi the poodle disappears into the hole in the floorboards, a ‘wound’ in the polished and orderly surface that has now spread, like Valeria’s gangrene. In turn, the dog falls into an ‘underworld’ of darkness, disorientation, horror and abjection. His scuffling subterranean whimpers as he tries to escape the rats proliferating just below the surface parallel Valeria’s psychic state, her slide into dismembered inarticulacy in a black hole of despair, buried alive with no possibility of escape. In Arriaga’s script, although not in the finished film, Valeria has terminated a pregnancy fathered by Daniel, and the loss of her ickle poodle represents another child, another ‘limb’ lost.

Finally, an itinerant loner, hitman and former guerrilla El Chivo (‘The Goat’: Emilio Echevarría) moves through the city with his entourage of stray dogs, a makeshift ‘family’ of mongrels including Flor (‘Flower’), Frijol (‘Bean’) and Gringuita: his ‘babies’. For much of the film, his attentive and generous co-existence with this ragged assortment of dogs sits in stark opposition to the dispassionate brutality of his work as a contract killer, and their interdependent companionship as outsiders lends frail dignity to Roger Grenier’s perception that: ‘A pet is a protection against life’s insults, a defence against the world, the somewhat vain conviction of being truly loved, a way of being both less alone and more alone’ (Grenier 2000: 23).

The fourth and final version of the car crash is seen from El Chivo’s perspective, and it is the only scene in the film in which the central characters from all three narratives coincide (or ‘collide’). It is also the trigger for a proliferation of parallels between narratives. Octavio is dragged bleeding and broken from the wreck of his car, leaving a trail of blood on the ground like so many of the dogs we have seen hauled from the dog fights. While his friend Jorge lies bloodied and dead in the front seat, Valeria screams and smears blood on her car window as her shattered body flails to break free from its entrapment in her shattered car. These most vulnerable, animal moments of ‘bare life’ are staged in public. The dog Cofi is dumped on the street with his open gun-shot wounds, then retrieved by El Chivo who carries him home and nurses him back to health: an echo of Daniel caring for the crippled Valeria. Finally El Chivo’s entire ‘family’ of dogs is slaughtered by Cofi, a horrifying massacre of the innocents that constitutes a traumatic turning point for the Lear-like vagrant: a transitional moment of reckoning en route to some sort of redemption. Ultimately he spares Cofi, renounces his life as a contract killer, and at the end of the film walks away with the loping dog into a parched, grey, featureless wasteland, an old man and his dog setting off towards a symbolic desert and an uncertain future beyond the city.

In a documentary supplement to the DVD about the making of Amores Perros, director Alejandro González Iñárritu reaffirms the metaphorical parallels and moralities enacted in the film’s narratives: ‘In this film, love and relationships with dogs are very deep. Dogs slowly resemble their owners, all owners look like their dogs and vice versa, and here dogs redeem humans, as in El Chivo’s case. There is a grand lesson in that sense’ (‘Behind the Scenes’, Amores Perros DVD 2001). He also discusses the controversial dog fighting sequences, an entirely masculine domain in the film, a theatre of harrowing, excessive machismo in which human beings fight vicariously through their canine stand-ins, then literally with each other. Each encounter is like a car crash in miniature, its impact substantially heightened by Martín Hernández’s soundtrack which interweaves ambient traffic noises, dog barks, and music. In his insistence on the humane nature of the treatment of the dogs in the filming of the fight sequences, González Iñárritu foregrounds the illusionist capacities of framing, shooting and editing, and the actual safety of those involved : ‘the same way I’d avoid hurting somebody in a car accident’ (quoted in Romney 2000). In this way, he forges a conscious connection between the dog fights and central car-crash. Perhaps inevitably, González Iñárritu tried to downplay the attention the fight sequences attracted internationally: ‘I wanted to make a film about Mexico City, where there are millions of dogs. The dogfight is a cruel reality. But more than the fights, we were interested in the relations between dogs and people’ (in Romney 2000).

As Smith points out in his monograph about Amores Perros (2003: 59 ff), critical responses varied enormously, reflecting national emphases and obsessions. So, for example, in dog-loving Britain, censors, critics and the RSPCA tended to focus centrally on the brutality of the dog fights, locating them as the purported ‘content’ of the film (a response that González Iñárritu was at pains to deny), thereby displacing the fictional instances of human suffering represented. There are contesting realities at play in the exchanges between the director and his British critics, who questioned the relationship between what is represented as ‘real’ and the reality of processes and actions on the film set; the bottom-line reality for them related to the apparent baiting or goading of live animals.

In the face of the initial misgivings of the British Board of Film Classification, González Iñárritu insisted it was all make-believe, simply an illusionist construction of the real: ‘the camera lies’, he reminded his knockers, ‘we used hand-held cameras to make it look a lot more dramatic. The dogs were just playing’ (quoted in Smith 2003: 60). In the recording of the fight sequences, animal combatants reportedly wore clear plastic gumshields to protect themselves and prevent them from hurting each other. Other dogs were sedated and made-up to ‘play dead’. The documentary supplement on the DVD includes a startling sequence that perhaps lends some support to the director’s play-ful perspective; two snarling dogs hurtle at each other in what seems to be unbridled, pent-up aggression, then as they meet one of them immediately mounts the other from behind and tries to have hurried, animated sex with it. Yet it’s hard to tell whether this is libidinous play or utter confusion on the dog’s part; it seems somewhat disoriented and fried by the heat of the situation.

Further ambiguities abound. According to González Iñárritu, the film’s dog trainers Larry Casanova and Ernesto Aparicio are ‘respected in animal welfare circles’ (Romney 2000), and used their own animals. However in the same interview he admits: ‘Thirty per cent of the people in the movie are real people from the dogfighting world, and we used some real fighting dogs. It’s shown the way they do it […] The people can be dangerous […] but I don’t judge them. For them it’s like bullfighting or going fishing – for them it’s natural, something you do on a Sunday’ (ibid). Furthermore, González Iñárritu admits that he was afraid of handling the dogs himself, for some of them were all too obviously dangerous: ‘These dogs are real motherfuckers’ (ibid). As opposed to make-believe motherfuckers, I guess. It seems he was not wholly convinced that all of the dogs on the film set were ‘just playing’ …

References
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (trans. Brian Massumi), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
Grenier, Roger (2000). The Difficulty of Being a Dog (trans. Alice Kaplan), Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Romney, Jonathan (2000). ‘Going to the dogs’ (interview with Alejandro González Iñárritu), The Guardian, 22 August
Smith, Paul Julian (2003). Amores Perros, London: British Film Institute (BFI Modern Classics)

skywritings: an intro

‘When you are working on relationships that are in process, you’re like a man who takes a plane from Toulouse to Madrid, travels by car from Geneva to Lausanne, goes on foot from Paris towards the Chevreuse valley, or from Cervina to the top of the Matterhorn (with spikes on his shoes, a rope and an ice axe), who goes by boat from Le Havre to New York, who swims from Calais to Dover, who travels by rocket towards the moon, travels by semaphore, telephone or fax, by diaries from childhood to old age, by monuments from antiquity to the present, by lightning bolts when in love. One may well ask, ‘What in the world is this man doing?

There are dilemmas in the mode of traveling, the reasons for the trip, the point of departure and the destination, in the places through which one will pass; the speed, the means, the vehicle, the obstacles to be overcome, make that space active. And, since I have used diverse methods, the coherence of my project is suspect. [...] In fact, it was always a matter of establishing a relation, constructing it, fine-tuning it. And once established, thousands of relations, here, there, everywhere - after a while, when you step back and look, a picture emerges. Or at least a map. You see a general theory of relations, without any point focalising the construction or solidifying it, like a pyramid. The turbulences keep moving. The flows keep dancing’ (Michel Serres in Serres and Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture and time, University of Michigan Press, 1995, pp. 111-12).
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This is a collection of texts and images about some of those things that 'quicken the heart' in various ways, or at least my heart: contemporary art - in particular, contemporary performance, music, film, writing, and visual arts - people, politics, places, animals, collaborations, encounters, walking, the weather, the sea, Sicily, and so on. So, traces of recurrent fascinations and obsessions, as well as occasional detours and dead ends. A partial register of the present's unfolding, and of some of the shapes it has taken in the past and could take in the future. Perhaps it's part of the delicate and ongoing struggle to work out what Herbert Blau once called ‘some liveable unison between panic and grace’; so much of what I write and am interested in seems to be. I start this blog without any particular 'goal' or focused intention, other than a desire to play in purposeful ways, to share some stuff and allow it to go where it will. And a recognition of this curiously enabling paradox: ‘The things I tell about myself that are true seem most like lies to me’ (Elias Canetti) ...

In the back of my mind, there's also this hilarious dismissal from Don Paterson's The Blind Eye: 'You've made a blog ... Clever boy! Next: flushing'.

At the outset I'm not at all sure what this blog will become; I certainly have a strong sense of what I don't want it to be - in particular, a diaristic accumulation that assumes the stuff of my everyday life to be oh so interesting in itself, or an exercise in self-promotion. My hope is that it's more something to do with the informed wandering of the drift, as a walking-reading-writing practice. In Lights out for the Territory (1997), Iain Sinclair writes: "Walking is the best way to explore the city: the changes, shifts, breaks in the cloud helmet, movement of light on water. Drifting purposefully is the recommended mode, tramping asphalted earth in alert reveries, allowing the fiction of an underlying pattern to reveal itself". This ‘fiction’ can have many functions: poetic, ethical, political, critical, topological …

I sense the linear time-line structure of the blogging format may not be the most important here; it might be much more to do with trying to create the conditions for the emergence of connections and patterns, 'figures' in the writing and images, over times and spaces that are discontinuous, backward/forward, foldable, tearable, re-writable.
 
For the first few weeks in July/August 2008 I will include some slightly older materials alongside the new: to try to provide some contextual 'ground' (for me and for any readers); to allow some patterns and trajectories to start to emerge - perhaps through the 'labels' - and then either linger, morph or disperse; and also to help me to orient myself a little in the unfamiliar terrain of this blogging space. From then on, who knows? 

A word about the links in the right hand column. In my initial hyper-enthusiasm, I included over 100 links, but this had a rather vertiginous effect: an overload. So I'll select 20-30, and endeavour to switch them around from time to time. They will be pretty mixed: artists, activists, writers, film makers, friends, and any other stuff I've found interesting in one way or another. I'll also embed other links into some of the posts themselves. 

Finally, in part I hope to try to use this blog in ways related to one of Annie Dillard's core propositions about writing in her exquisite book The Writing Life (1989): "One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes".
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By way of a beginning, here's part of the introductory text - 'something to do' - from a presentation called skywritings that I've returned to over the past 6 or 7 years in different forms and places in Australia, the USA and England. Perhaps, in its uncertain enumeration and its citational circlings, it gives something of the flavour of what's at play:

"It's something to do with embodiment, emplacement, perception, with ephemerality and unpredictability, with circuits and flows and connectivities, with process, change, multiplicity, and with the works-in-progress that all becomings make of identities. Something to do with relational unfoldings at the present’s speed, with what Clifford Geertz described as deep hanging out, and with the possibility of what Matthew Goulish has called slow thinking. 'To sit, to listen, to be, to observe, to breathe, to think, to remember – the most urgent choreography’ (André Lepecki). Something to do with spending too many days in a studio, too many nights in a studio – and finally feeling like someone in a spacesuit who has been farting for some time but has only just realised that the same old stuff is circulating: a recognition of the need for different wind, for ‘new routes away from home’.

It's something to do with maps and their gaps, with the beautiful absurdity of the World Meteorological Organisation’s 2-volume standard reference work, the International Cloud Atlas. Something to do with the meaning of the word 'oceanography', and the impossibility of 'writing' (-graphy) something as protean as the sea. And it's something to do with Michel de Certeau’s suggestion that “what the map cuts up, the story cuts across”.

It's something to do with that photo of me at the age of 6 – a me I barely recognise - a blur of arms and legs high above the swimming pool, high above the treetops, having sprinted off the diving board clutching my inflatable rubber ring: so brave, and not so brave. With standing on a hill north of Melbourne scanning the sky for signs of rain, the rain that would fill water tanks and the lake from which the animals drink. With rotating 360 degrees on Ugborough Beacon on Dartmoor, just behind my home, and palpably feeling the fish-eye effect of what James Turrell calls ‘celestial vaulting’, the folding curve towards the horizon. With halogen torchlight sweeeping across a field in Victoria, Australia, and projecting the shadow of a cantering horse on to the hillside. With poppies in October, ‘a gift, a love gift, utterly unasked for by a sky’ (Sylvia Plath). It’s something to do with that bloke who kept bees who lived next door to my dad, and with my friend Swen’s conviction that the rhythm of Paignton is blue.

It’s something to do with the little-by-little-suddenly, the make-haste-slowly and the instability of weather systems, and the poetics of the namings of meteorological phenomena: the dew point, funnel clouds in tornadogenesis, the ‘eye’ of a hurricane, dust devils, snow devils, hailshafts, the ‘leader’ and ‘return stroke’ in cloud-to-ground lightning, rain shadows, heat lag, storm tracks, halos, coronas and parhelia (also called ‘mock suns’ or ‘sun dogs’), moonbow and fogbow, sunpillar, the glory, the green flash. Something to do with my friend Myriam who writes to me, from the depths of her continuing illness, that she will try ‘not to be under the weather, but to be the weather’. Something to do with the word ‘twi-light’ and two French expressions for dusk: the sonic event of the word crépuscule, and the transformative threshold of entre chien et loup, between dog and wolf. It’s something to do with Billy Bragg singing Woody Guthrie, and “there’s a black wind blowing through the cottonfield, and oh how funny it makes me feel, baby, sweet thing, darling” ...

It’s something to do with Roland Barthes describing ‘difference’ ... “the very movement of dispersion, of friability, a shimmer; what matters is not the discovery, in a reading of the world and of the self, of certain oppositions but of encroachments, overflows, leaks, skids, shifts, slips ...’. And it’s something to do with Gilles Deleuze’s affirmation of attempts to think life beyond the human – ‘to make life something more than personal, to free life from what imprisons it’.

It’s something to do with a journey I made to “a wreck of a place. There were three gates standing ajar and a fence that broke off. It was not the wreck of anything else in particular. A place came there and crashed. After that it remained the wreck of a place. Light fell on it” (Anne Carson, ‘Short Talks’).

It's something to do with Peter Greenaway's inclusion in his 100 Objects to Represent the World of a cloud and a crashed aircraft, and it’s something to do with one of Prospero’s 24 volumes in Greenaway’s film Prospero’s Books, ‘A Book of Motion’: ‘This is a book that at the most simple level describes how birds fly and waves roll, how clouds form and apples fall from trees. It describes how the eye changes its shape when looking at great distances, how hairs grow in a beard, why the heart flutters and the lungs inflate involuntarily and how laughter changes the face. At its most complex level, it explains how ideas chase one another in the memory and where thought goes when it is finished with’ ( Peter Greenaway).

It's something to do with Edmond Jabès’s Book of Questions, in which he writes: ‘The sky begins ankle-high. In walking we cleave the sky of the earth. Elsewhere there is the sky of stars, of the sun’. ‘Is it the same sky?’ ‘Are you the same from head to feet?’

And it’s something to do with: ‘not even the sky but a memory of sky, and the blue of the earth in your lungs’ (Paul Auster)".









© David Williams