the zoo at night: beautiful mutants

 

 ‘… like all people who feel uncomfortable in an uncomfortable world, you want to make a map. Well let me tell you it is difficult to make a map in splintered times when whole worlds and histories collide’ (1).

It is a little puzzling to revisit the archival traces that linger from a performance that occurred almost a quarter of a century ago, in search of ‘what happened’: working note books, drafts, photographs, some video fragments, drawings, the programme, reviews, photocopied extracts from associated readings (2), and the odd object, including a blue paint handprint on a square of thick, water-stained canvas, a leather Arlecchino half-mask, and a finger-length luminescent peacock feather. It’s puzzling because the work itself and its processes are of course largely irrecuperable from these things, and the stories my cortex hums to me are of uncertain status at such distance in time, closer to fiction, or perhaps dream. The live event slips in and out of focus, some sequences and details still vivid, brightly lit and ‘hot’ in my memory, others largely defused or eroded over time.

However my memory of the place of the event - the New Fortune Theatre - feels remarkably immediate, embodied, animate; and as I write on this winter’s evening in my home in Somerset, England, in an instant I can cross the world and be there again. It’s a place I still feel I know well. Perhaps its clarity and intensity in my memory in part result from having spent a number of years working from an office in the English Department at UWA that looked out directly on to this space; perhaps in part this is the mnemonic residue of all those hours spent exploring its sculptural geometries and volumes, its live zones, sight lines, the movement of light and shadow over its surfaces. In what follows – a reworking and expansion of some earlier reflections on the production co-written with my core collaborator and friend Barry Laing, with extracts from the performance text – my memories of this place, its architectural and affective particularities, its agencies in the making of a performance, are at the very centre. 

                                                                                                David Williams

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 The trigger source for the Ex-Stasis Theatre Company’s production of Beautiful Mutants, commissioned by the Festival of Perth in 1993, was Deborah Levy’s novel of the same name. Initially the novel was adapted by David Williams and Barry Laing into a performance text/script, which passed through seven written drafts before being submitted to the company. The sequence of 24 episodes in this seventh draft then became the starting point for the material outcomes of the performance itself, which were collectively devised with the full ExTC company (3).

Beautiful Mutants, Levy’s first novel, marks the beginning of her transition as a writer from theatre to fiction, and its textures (linguistic and imagistic), tonal shifts of register and fluid narrative structure mine and extend many of the attributes of her earlier texts for performance. It is a work of vast imaginative range and depth set in the crumbling world of late 1980s capitalism and commercialism, characterized by one of Levy’s protagonists as ‘the age of the migrant and the missile’. (4) With the scope and dexterity of a cinematic vision, Levy hunts in unexpected places and moves easily among the shadows in the lives and fractured minds of people exiled from themselves, displaced geographically and psychologically: their culture too near for comfort, the land of their dreams sometimes too far to realize. In a world of rampant materialism, competition and consumption, the city – Thatcher’s London - becomes a ‘zoo’, peopled and echoing with squeals of desire, dances of obsession and dreams of flight.

ExTC’s production was gathered around and written into the specificities of the performance site, the New Fortune Theatre at UWA: a schematic ‘reconstruction’ of an Elizabethan theatre, with triple balconies on all sides of a large thrust stage, an audience ‘pit’, and a second open space behind the regular stage – and all open to the sky. The architecture of the New Fortune, familiar to both directors, was instrumental in the conception and development of the work from the very outset. We felt that its multiple zones, framings, layerings, its possibility for something akin to the mobility of cinematic close-up, long shot and depth of field, for montage and fluid dissolves of location (5) could inform and focus the emergent dramaturgy of the performance as a whole. Although we would have limited access to the theatre during the devising process, we tried to conceive of the space as protagonist, material and medium, rather than as passive ‘receptacle’ or container for our imaginings. And secretly we played the game of asking ourselves what it wanted, how it could flare into a different visibility by a shifting of the geometry of attention. Ideally the event could both ‘fit’ with the logics and possibilities of the site and at the same time be in a relation of tension or critical friction with it, the performance’s forms and materials somewhat ‘ill-fitting’ in terms of the site’s received conventions and languages (as we perceived them, at least). So the theatre itself as a particular space-time to refer to, align with, push against, hold present. Ultimately, with a view to being playful in a purposeful way, we sought to defamiliarise the space and make its latent dynamics and potentials active and apparent. To this end, the usual orientation of the space was turned through 45 degrees clockwise, with an L-shaped block of seating placed on two sides and two levels, thereby configuring a ‘new’ performance space privileging proximity, encounter and sensory imbrication, as well as a looking anew/askew on a known space at an unfamiliar angle of incidence, its centre line now running from downstage right to upstage left. In addition, the space usually designated as audience ‘pit’ in the Elizabethan configuration was sealed and flooded with water to a level of over a meter in depth. This pool area, the thrust stage and all three levels of the balconies were used by the performers throughout.

In terms of design, the core components were located in the pool: a metal ‘island’ with hinged struts, allowing transformation from a cage in the shape of cupped hands, a claw or a closed bud, into, say, an unfolding sunflower (see episode 3, ‘The Age of the Great Howl’, below); a bridge – a spine, a trestle of bones – with articulated metal supports, which could also be manipulated; a silk and bamboo structure known as ‘the pupa’, a tubular tunnel that snaked around the lip of the thrust and into the water like some massive grey intestinal tract or larval invertebrate; a network of rope and chain rigging, onto which spectators were invited to tie small handwritten notes of desired release, like prayer flags; and the water itself, able to suggest a tropical blue lagoon, a black lake of indeterminate depth, or a sulphurous burning reservoir. The water offered reflective and scriptable surfaces, mirrorings, doublings, and endless possible dis/appearances, dissolvings and re-makings. In its saturated metaphoricity and material fluidity it was conceived as the unstable space of memories and desires, of buoyancies, rips and drownings – in the words of the South African writer Breyten Breytenbach, water as ‘the soul of the mirror’ (6).

In this complex and dynamic space were elaborated the major roles upon which the performance turned. Lapinski, a Russian immigrant conceived on the marble slab of a war memorial, who leaves her home for a foreign land: an ‘island’, another place, an elsewhere. She smokes, conjures the martyrs and ‘love demons’ who haunt her, befriends a Poet, loves a Painter called Freddie, and tells stories. She is a kind of narrator, her voice pervading and animating the space of all the others, their stories enacting her story in turn:

Life is a perpetual to and fro, a dis/continuous releasing and absorbing of the self. Let her weave her story within their stories, her life amidst their lives. And while she weaves, let her whip, spur and set them on fire. Thus making them sing again. Very softly a-new a-gain (7).

In the flat above Lapinski, whose ‘otherness’ particularly confounds him, lives the Revenger. He exists crawling between earth and sky, swimming sometimes, mostly treading water, but burning with the struggle to turn his drownings into dreams. He is frightened and he doesn’t know why, he wakes in the mornings afraid and there’s no one there to tell; but incredulously and comically he is determined to be ‘master of his own fuck-ups’, and most of all amused by his own bitter jokes.

The Poet works on a hamburger production line in a factory on the edge of an urban wasteland – the ‘Meatbelt’, the brown underbelly of the city – with Lapinski and other women, sleepwalkers, blood under their finger nails. Among them is Seashells, a woman who can hear the sea, has visions, and loses her hands to the beast of the machine. In the Poet’s eyes, whole continents flicker as she transports herself, her workmates and the audience across thousands of imagined miles, through borders of every kind, no passports required. She has learnt the art of metamorphosis:

The night shift is nearly over. Soon we will return to each other after our long separation. We will be startled by the distance we have travelled, even though we are standing shoulder to shoulder in the same room. (8)

Freddie is an artist who glories in his own delusional ruminations on Lenin, Freud and Dali. He is a ‘lover’ fragmented by impossible past loves, including Lapinski, who realizes himself in the very moment of his immolation in the voracious lust and flaming mouth of Gemma the Banker. The Banker finds liberation in hatred and destruction. She is ‘love’s arsonist’, a Kali-like corporate raider who loots the city and every possible sexual scenario; ultimately she torches the Zoo in a maniacal, necrophiliac apocalypse of passion and pain.

   

Krupskaya, Lapinski’s shape-shifting cat, prowls through these stories and spaces, transformed by them variously into a grandmother, a corpse, a blow-up doll, and other shadows and reflections between worlds.

The form of the work emerged from these darkly comic and sometimes violent stories of exile and dislocation, and the possibilities afforded by the performance space. Dramaturgically and scenographically, the intention was to engender a cinematic fluidity that enabled radical jumps in space-time, sudden migrations, interweavings and collisions of discrete image-worlds: a kind of dissident, critical surrealism. The performance posited a cartography of multiple or possible selves using an episodic structure to speak of the pathologies of cultural ‘death’ and the possibilities of imaginal ‘life’, and the transitional spaces between. Conceptually, these transitional spaces were orchestrated as rips, tearings, overflowings, bleedings, ecstasies – formally suture, montage, jump-cuts – in an attempt to articulate an increase in the buoyancy of the imaginal pool we are always already swimming in.

In this context, we conceived of images as polyphonous ‘worlds’: collocatory syntaxes conjoining words, physical actions, music, sound and the rhythmed articulation of space – images as dynamic sites of possibility. The ‘images’ were thought of as the visible/audible/palpable intersections of these sites. In this way we understood the pool as a tabula rasa re-definable under different lighting conditions, revealing its depth or solidifying into an impenetrable, black void. The performers swam beneath its surface, emerging from darkness into the dreams or nightmares of their own stories, disappearing, then re-emerging in the memories of others.

The water, and the metal, wood, earth and canvas of the set and its structures – such as the bridge linking the front of the auditorium to the thrust stage – were ‘playable’. They served as musical instruments and pliable forms. The water deflected, reflected and re-animated sound, light and the performers’ actions. In ‘The Age of the Great Howl’, the bridge, which served as one of the sites for the Meatbelt, was played with iron bars for percussive and melodic effect, alongside pre-recorded sound and the thrashing of water. In episode 21, ‘Zoo Apocalypse’, the water was set aflame – fire over water – as were metal, wood and cloth dispersed throughout the space. The pungent odour of fuel and black smoke mingled with human cries and animal murmurings as the flickering shadows kept time with destruction:

The zoo at night is the saddest place. Behind the bars, at rest from vivisecting eyes, the animals cry out, species separated from one another, knowing instinctively the map of belonging. They would choose predator and prey against this outlandish safety. Their ears, more powerful than those of their keepers, pick up sounds of cars and last-hour take-aways. They hear all the human noises of distress. What they don’t hear is the hum of the undergrowth or the crack of fire. The noises of kill. The river-roar booming against brief screams. They prick their ears till their ears are sharp points, but the noises they seek are too far away. I wish I could hear your voice again. (9)

The spoken words of the script were one of a number of ‘textual’ components embedded in these composite images. For example in episode 17, ‘And All for Babies with Bone Disease’, the Revenger tells stories that collapse time and space while the figure of his father, enacted by the performer who plays the morphing Krupskaya, presides over his demise from a second balcony. Drifting piano music, the hollow sound of drips and a distant helicopter threaten the primacy of the spoken/written words.

In addition, we located a series of speakers in and around the performance areas to allow the soundscapes to ‘travel’ through and around, spatialising the movement of sound within the architecture of the theatre. One of the central audio images which recurred in different guises throughout the performance was of a helicopter with searchlight, circling ever closer, before hovering in the night sky above the space, finally careering out of control and being ‘sucked’ into the water with the performers (see below, episode 24, ‘This Does Not Exist’). The performers enact roles of ‘see-ers’, and the ‘seen’; they are able to transport themselves, but they are policed, living under the watchful eye and scorching light of equally possible repressions.

Finally, the particularity of the theatre space itself introduced a wholly productive unpredictability in two ways. Firstly, the weather became an active component of unfolding image worlds, particularly wind – warm gusts and eddies animating flame, smoke, cloth, hair, sounds - and the occasional summer shower, droplets disturbing the surface of the water as if it were reaching boiling point. Secondly, in all of the performances the theatre’s resident peacocks chose to remain present throughout, exquisitely languorous and bejeweled onlookers, uncharacteristically silent, taking up various positions on the balconies like baroque azure extras quietly performing an-other audience. This porosity in the parameters of space and event, their openness to the uncontrollable dynamics of the context (the allowing in of both a meteorological and animal ‘outside’), seemed to amplify and thicken the resonance of images, giving them further immediacy, body and carry.

David Williams and Barry Laing thank Deborah Levy for her encouragement during the production process. All photographs are by Marcelo Palacios.

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EPISODE 1: EXILE IS A STATE OF MIND

The first image of the performance. Soundscape: piano music, a lament, emerging from a sound of sampled water droplets, as the performers who play Lapinski and Krupskaya walk slowly into the space from opposite sides and meet on the bridge. Krupskaya carries an old, battered and threadbare umbrella, inverted above her, like a bowl; a black cloth over her shoulders, like a shawl. She gives the umbrella to Lapinski, who slowly spins it above her head to create her own ‘snow-storm’; from the umbrella white feathers swirl and settle on her shoulders, the bridge and the water below. At the same time, Krupskaya wraps her head in the black cloth, for a few moments becoming the ‘grandmother’, bidding Lapinski farewell.

Both figures then step quietly out of this space, down from the bridge and into the water, as the journey to a foreign land begins. Lapinski moves through the water with the umbrella, looking straight ahead. While she wades, she trails Krupskaya in her wake. She is a ‘corpse’, floating concealed underneath what is now a black shroud: her dead ‘mother’ – a memory, a weight. As Lapinski approaches the metal cage, Krupskaya is released, floating abandoned for a few moments, then re-emerging to dance serenely in the water with the cloth. The umbrella floats nearby, like a monstrous damaged lotus.

A distant dog bark in the soundtrack greets Lapinski as she climbs into her ‘new world’ – an island, a cage. As the music slips underneath, she slowly looks around her at the audience, and begins to tell Lapinski’s story:

           

LAPINSKI: My mother was the ice-skating champion of Moscow. She danced, glided, whirled on blades of steel, pregnant with me, warm in her womb even though I was on ice. She said I was conceived on the marble slab of a war memorial, both she and my father in their Sunday best: I came into being on a pile of corpses in the bitter snows of mid-winter.

On my fifth birthday, my father stole a goose. He stuffed it into the pocket of his overcoat and whizzed off on his motorbike, trying to stop it from flying away with his knees. We ate it that evening. As I put my first forkful into my mouth, he tickled me under the chin and said, “This does not exist. Understand?” I did not understand at the time. Especially as my mother stuffed a pillow full of the feathers for me, and soaked the few left in red vegetable dye to sew onto the skirt of her skating costume.

At the age of twelve, when my parents died, I was sent to the West by my grandmother. She said it was for the best. I was to stay with a distant uncle. When I asked my grandmother why he had left, she said, “Because he is faithless”.

The ‘mother’ has disappeared into the water, and now reappears in deep focus, walking quietly along a side balcony and off into the distance, a blue light painting the plastic shroud that rustles around her: the memory recedes.

Which is how I came to be here. Where women were rumoured to swim in fountains of sparkling wine dressed in leopardskin bikinis. I unpacked my few clothes, books, photographs, parcels of spiced meat, and wept into the handkerchief my grandmother had pressed into my hand. It was embroidered with one scarlet thread with my name – L. A. P. I. N. S. K. I.

The music has dropped out altogether.

            Exile is a state of mind… 

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 Notes

(1)  The Poet in Deborah Levy, Beautiful Mutants, Jonathan Cape: London, 1989, p. 16. Republished by Penguin in Early Levy, a volume with her novel Swallowing Geography, in 2014.

(2)  This pool of loosely related materials, reflecting our fascinations at the time and informing our approaches to some degree, include an annotated copy of Ted Hughes’s poem/film treatment Gaudete, sections of Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse and of Breyten Breytenbach’s Confessions of an Albino Terrorist, two short stories by Gail Jones – ‘The House of Breathing’ and ‘Modernity’ - and essays about the dance-theatre work of Pina Bausch.

(3)  Beautiful Mutants was first performed at the New Fortune Theatre in Perth on 9 February 1993. The project was conceived and directed by David Williams and Barry Laing. The performers were Mandy McElhinney (Lapinski), Felicity Bott (Krupskaya), Barry Laing (‘Duke’, the Revenger), Andrea McVeigh (The Poet), James Berlyn (Freddie, the Painter), Anne Browning (Gemma, the Banker), and Kate Beahan (Seashells). The devising process also implicated the designer Ricardo Peach, lighting designer Margaret Burton, sound artists John Patterson and Andrew Beck, costume designer Bruno Santarelli, and the production manager Mark Homer.

(4)  The Poet in Deborah Levy, Beautiful Mutants, Jonathan Cape: London, 1989, p. 11.

(5)  Although these are characteristics of Shakespearean dramaturgy, film was our central metaphorical and aesthetic stimulus here for an approach to image making in the theatre.

(6)  Breyten Breytenbach, All One Horse: Fictions and Images, Faber & Faber: London, 1989, p. 14.

(7)  Trinh T. Minh-ha, ‘Grandma’s Story’, in Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism, Indiana University Press: Bloomington 1989, p. 128.

(8)  Episode 14, ‘One Body’, ExTC adaptation of Deborah Levy’s Beautiful Mutants.

(9)  Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body, Jonathan Cape: London, 1992, p. 135.

Extract from 'Space as protagonist, material, medium: Beautiful Mutants', by  David Williams and Barry Laing, a longer text with extracts from the performance text, published in The New Fortune Theatre: That Vast Open Stage, Perth, Australia: UWA Press, 2018. Eds. Ciara Rawnsley & Robert White

a new fire (unknown fields)

'The sun. The desert. The sky. The silence. The flat stones. The insects. The wind and the clouds. The moon. The stars. The west and east. The song, the colour, the smell of the earth. Blast area. Fire area. Body-burn area'

(Don DeLillo, End Zone)

Am just back from a wonderfully provocative and engaging day-long symposium at the Architectural Association in Bedford Square, London: 'Unknown Fields: from the Atomic to the Cosmic' - an open forum prelude to an adventurous 'nomadic design studio' field trip for architecture students and others, taking them from the Chernobyl exclusion zone and Pripyat to the Baikonur Cosmodrome and on to the Aral Sea. The fourth in a series of annual expeditions organised by Liam Young & Kate Davies (as Unknown Fields), this year's journey marks the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's first manned space flight and the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster. Earlier Unknown Fields 'trajectories' involved field trips to the Ecuadorian Amazon and the Galapagos Islands (2008), the Arctic Circle (2009), and the West Australian outback (2010).

The symposium, shoe-horned uncomfortably and bum-numbingly into the Architectural Association's tiny library, brought together an intriguing group of presenters - artists, writers, film makers - to discuss the legacies of technologies' past optimisms, cultural manifestations of the possibilities and fears around nuclear power and space travel, and some of the emerging scenarios in our collective environmental and political future(s) and imaginings.

Leading off in the 'Atomic' section of the symposium, the Oxford-based environmental anthropologist Peter Wynn-Kirby described Japan's evolving cultural relations with nuclear power - the continuing paradox of fear and need - with reference to Godzilla movies and other stagings of post-war nuclear trauma, performative workings-through of what Susan Sontag called 'imagination of disaster' (in a 1965 essay in which she explains fantasy functionally as a process of 'inurement'). Wynn-Kirby touched on the horrifying story of the Japanese tuna trawler the Lucky Dragon no. 5, unwittingly caught in a blizzard of radioactive ash in March 1954 after the vast 'Bravo' thermonuclear test by the American military in the Pacific near Bikini atoll in early 1954, and the radioactive trail they took back to port in their contaminated catch, boat and blistered bodies. He also provided invaluable contexts for contemporary reworkings of anxiety in the wake of the Tohoku/Fukushima disaster via accounts of the fear induced by radiation's uncanny invisibility, default governmental and industry denials and cover-ups, the discourse of nuclear power as 'clean and green', the problems of waste disposal (Zonabend's 'filth everlasting', Hall's 'ultimate litter') in the light of most people's 'forward time horizon' of approximately 100 years, rather than the thousands of generations that constitute a nuclear half-life. After tracking the volume and trajectories of trans-national flows of nuclear waste, he offered a terrifying listing of disposal and dispersal strategies for such waste adopted or proposed thus far, including sea dumping/ejection into space, dumping on the Antarctic ice sheet, insertion into tectonic plates, embedding in 'inert silt' at the bottom of the Pacific, and long-term 'containment' in repositories such as Yucca Mountain in the USA.

The poet Mario Petrucci, author of the brilliant act of re-membering Chernobyl, Heavy Water, presented an intellectually energised paper entitled 'Chernobyl and the stories of knowledge', touching on e.g. denial as a synergy of four factors or 'pests' - the 'destructive meme', 'radical inertia' (deeply ingrained resistance to change, adapted and modified from Ivan Illich), the 'framed question' (with an agenda, assuming only certain possible 'answers'), and 'unaccounted positive feedback' (the nuclear industry as an accelerant on resource requirements); art as transformation with the potential to dent radical inertia, shed light on unaccounted positive feedback, create 'meme-proof' experiences (irreducible to single meanings, thriving on ambiguity) - art as something that might help us 'bear it' and 're-boot consciousness'.

As well as a critique of short-termism and free-market economics, Petrucci was exploring how artists might 'understand' Chernobyl in all of its actively destructive psychic gravity; he posited a model of knowledge as qualitative, engaging intellect, imagination and a responsibility to bear witness (to re-member, so that those who have been 'exposed to the invisible should never become so'). If both art and science contain 'alertness nutrients' and 'psychic nutrients', he suggested, we might approach them with the quality of attention Levertov demanded: 'poets must give us imagination of peace to oust imagination of disaster'. He quoted the Australian poet Les Murray: 'Only poetry recognises and maintains the centrality of absolutely everywhere'. Petrucci's final words were a request to us to expand skepticism to include skepticism towards our own doubts, and a loop back to a quote from David Bohm he had cited earlier: 'Studying the distractions is part of the process'.

Next up was the film maker Michael Madsen, whose recent documentary Into Eternity focuses on the Onkolo Nuclear Waste Repository in Finland. Madsen provided contexts for his remarkable film about Onkolo (which means 'hiding place'): as a self-monitoring construction design to contain some of Finland's nuclear waste, intended to last for up to 100,000 years, and thus 'possibly the first post-human structure' (a quotation from a critic's review of his film); the finite life-span of our own civilisation, and the impossibility of imagining that far into the future (and therefore of acting wholly responsibly). Madsen went on to offer a swift history of radiation since the 1880s, with 'knowledge' at every point assumed to be 'complete' before new unforeseen elements were discovered to destabilise the parameters of the known. Before showing the trailer to his film, with its bewildering account of this peculiar subterranean 'afterworld', he talked of nuclear waste as 'a new kind of fire', the first humans have encountered in our species' history that is inextinguishable (quoting the nuclear physicist Dr Hans Bethe?); and of the emergence of a 'nuclear priesthood', 'protectors' who 'know' and act on our behalf.

Will Wiles, author of Care for Wooden Floors and a forthcoming book Toxic Tourism, explored our culture's fascination with such places as Chernobyl, Pripyat, Baikonur and the Aral Sea, referencing Christopher Woodward's In Ruins and Brian Dillon's notion of 'ruin lust', from the Romantics' sublime apocalyptism to a post-industrial return to the monumentality of ruins in the work of, for example, Robert Smithson and Gordon Matta-Clark - Spiral Jetty as a 'dialectical ruin' projected into the future in deep geological time. Wiles alluded to Virilio's Bunker Archaeology (with its analysis of 'aberrant monuments' reflecting a loss of faith in modernism), the Mir Space Station ('ruins of the future', the discarded waste products of civilisations and ideologies), the work of Jane & Louise Wilson, and the wave of urban explorers and art photographers (e.g. Christopher Payne's abandoned asylums). Discarded systems and technologies, and a sense of loss at their passing, with an attendant appraisal of current systems: the rust belt, old mental health infrastructures, and the grander ruin of Soviet civilisation (with its grand project of 'taming nature' - and class), with Pripyat as 'the Vatican of ruins'. If (Soviet) modernism's sense of control - its huge-scale interventions 'to make the world a better place' - was now lost, then an outline of the post-human seems to inhabit the devastated ruins of control.

After a short and frankly borderline bonkers presentation by Oliver Goodhall ('Nuclear is good'), an anomalous pro-nuclear presence in this company who looked so far out of his depth that for much of his presentation I, and others, took it to be a not-very-good parody by a rabbit caught in the headlights (was this an adventurous, dialogic choice in terms of the event's curation, or a ludicrous misfire? hard to tell, although Oliver wasn't really up to the task of a genuinely provocative counter-discursive intervention in the context), it was on to the extraordinary Swiss scientific illustrator and activist artist Cornelia Hesse-Honneger, one of the core reasons (along with Petrucci, Madsen and Louise K. Wilson) for my presence at the symposium on this first day of my annual leave.

For many years, Hesse-Honneger has been making detailed taxonomic drawings and paintings of mutated insects, their deformities the result of exposure to mutogenic chemicals, in particular low-level radiation. As well as detailing the ways in which true bugs (her 'favorite' bio-indicators) and other insects have been 'disturbed' - deformed feelers, wings, eyes etc. - she mapped the evolution of her own work before and after Chernobyl, and in particular her systematic projects around nuclear power stations in Sweden, the Swiss Alps, France, the Ukraine, the UK etc. These ongoing studies focus on the gathering of quantitative data and the production of qualitative material in her exquisite paintings of insects and plants in those areas where the weather trajectories down-wind of nuclear power stations and reprocessing plants overlap.

In 1990, she spent just 10 minutes in Pripyat, in a silence without birds, with only the music from loudspeakers.

Hesse-Honneger was at pains to differentiate between the toxicity of low doses of 'artificial' (man-made) radiation and 'natural' radiation (e.g. in the granite-rich geologies of South-West England or the Alps), and to point out the degree to which the 300,000 + publications by independent scientists about the harmful effects of low-level radiation from Chernobyl have been systematically devalued and ignored by state- and industry-sanctioned scientists, and the funding of those researchers rendered 'difficult'. Ultimately she brought her presentation to a close with a series of wholly alarming images of facial deformities in Iraqi children, the victims of the obscenity of depleted uranium weaponry, and a forceful account of the degree of such contamination (and resultant deformities) in Afghanistan and areas of the former Yugoslavia, as well as in uranium mining communities in Africa, Australia and the USA. Nuclear waste, she suggested, was now dispersed and located within human beings, to calamitous effect.

The 'Cosmic' section of the symposium felt significantly curtailed, an after-thought in the shape and weight of the day; a number of advertised speakers weren't able to attend (artist Alicia Framis, designer Regina Pledszus, 'experience designer' Nelly Ben Hayoun), and the looser-than-loose managing and chairing of earlier sessions meant that the day was hours behind schedule, time was running out on the room, the energies of those attending were flagging, etc. The critical mass and gravity of the 'Atomic' presentations created a kind of imbalance overall, and we never really made it off the ground in this second part.

Nonetheless there were three engaging contributions, beginning with a short and quietly enthusiastic presentation by comic illustrator and animator Paul Duffield, reflecting on the impact of Carl Sagan's series Cosmos and continuing SETI research on his approach to visual storytelling, in particular in his visual poem Signal. Then on to Mark Pilkington, 'UFO folklorist', curator, editor of Strange Attractor, occasional contributor to the Fortean Times, and musician, who sprinted through some of the core ground of his stimulating and often hilarious road trip book Mirage Men: A Journey into Disinformation, Paranoia and UFOs. From the development of covert military technologies during the Cold War, via Kenneth Arnold's sightings of UFOs in 1947, and an increasing number of flying saucer stories and films (including The Day the Earth Stood Still, 1951), to a perceived intelligence and security problem, the classified RAND document of 1950 entitled 'The exploitation of superstitions for the purposes of psychological warfare', the CIA's increasing involvement, and the planting of stories in the media triggered by the RAND proposals (e.g. the April 1952 issue of Life magazine with its cover shot of Marilyn Monroe and the title 'There is a case for interplanetary saucers'). A heady and hugely entertaining cocktail of institutional paranoia and psy-ops disinformation strategies, 'black' military technologies research, conspiracy theories, ufologists and popular culture forms. One sensed he could have gone on for days.

Finally, the British artist Louise K. Wilson offered a brief introduction to aspects of her own work; sensitive to the fatigued overload of her audience, Louise cut her presentation short while still managing to cover a lot of ground and articulate a number of generative ideas. The notion of an artist's 'passport of admission' to sites, many of them contested or largely inaccessible; Kim Sawchuck's notion of 'bio-tourism', trajectories into internal spaces through e.g. MR scans and dream registers; Virilio's 'museum of accidents', and the body's own flaws and faultlines; Steve Goodman's 'sonic warfare' and 'the politics of frequency'; 'auralisation', as a sonic equivalent to visualisation; the stimulus provided by Danish sound artist Jacob Kirkegaard's Four Rooms CD (2006), recorded in abandoned social spaces in and around Pripyat - a swimming pool, a church, a theatre auditorium, a gymnasium - using a version of Alvin Lucier's mirroring acoustic techniques to explore these spaces' psycho-acoustic qualities, the spectral traces of inaudible and invisible dangers.

Louise described her approach to locations via something akin to auscultation: an attentive and patient listening in to an architectural body, a documenting of the specific acoustic signatures of ruins, a gathering of reverberant 'impulse responses' often from derelict Cold War sites: a decommissioned Cumbrian missile site, Orford Ness and the National Trust's 'continued ruination' policy, Woomera and Nurrungar in South Australia, Aldermaston.

As we left, almost 3 hours after the scheduled ending of the symposium, Louise was setting up a contact microphone workshop for the Unknown Fields trajectory travelers, who were leaving the following morning; she played some recordings of limpets moving in hyper slo-mo on a rock, liquid and percussive sounds like the accelerated machinic groans and cracks of icebergs - them limpits are sure as hell busy. Cornelia Hesse-Honneger stood up to formally warn the travelers that Chernobyl still posed very real risks to health, and that they should take every precaution - air filter masks, clothes and shoes to be abandoned on emerging from the site, etc.: 'Don't touch anything'. Liam Young and Kate Davies smiled, said it's fine, every person will have full kit, a protective body suit, a face mask, gloves, we're on top of it, it's all fine. On my way out, in the doorway one of the students was asking Hesse-Honneger for some final advice: 'So do you think it's possible to take samples from the Chernobyl site? I'd very much like to'.

Text written in July 2011

lean-into

Notes from the introduction to a presentation by Sue Palmer and David Williams, as part of the 'Ecology and Environment' lecture series hosted by the Department of Theatre, Film and Television, Aberystwyth University, December 2012. With many thanks to Carl Lavery for inviting us ...

‘Everything’s a question of how you lean’ (John Berger)

We are ‘lean-into animals’ - that's our name for an imaginary band we have: and this is our first gig …

We've borrowed this term from Monty Roberts (the ‘horse whisperer’), who uses it to describe horses - they are also called by him ‘into pressure animals’. His core philosophy is about creating conditions for a horse’s learning, and then getting out of the way: a useful pedagogical model for us all ... 

Roberts has suggested that there are three spatial zones in our interaction with horses: (1) a zone of awareness (the furthest), in which one's presence is acknowledged, but it remains too far away to have an impact on a horse’s movements; (2) a decision-making zone (closer, although in the countryside it could still be quite a long way away), in which one can influence a horse’s movements and choices – this is the zone of most ground work and schooling with horses; and (3) an ‘into pressure zone’, also called the ‘lean-into’ zone. 

'Leaning-into' comprises a horse's leaning back into predators to protect themselves. Think of when a horse has its hoof on your foot - you push against its flank, it leans back; or if you want a horse to move away from a wall and you try to push it, it will push back. The term refers to an instinctive, passive/aggressive, defensive ‘leaning’ into the source of pressure (just as in touching the horse's flank with your heel). Of course there are many different kinds of pressure at play in working with and riding horses (from direct eye contact, to the bit), and many different kinds of responses. And this is a source of a great deal of misunderstanding and miscommunication when people start to work with horses.

Our partial understanding (and misappropriation) of this term comes from our own contact with horses, as well as dogs and cats (which we conceive of as lean-into animals too), and our own desire – for contact, meeting, sharing, and so on. I (mis)understand leaning-into as an improvised dance of responsiveness, a bit like Steve Paxton’s contact improvisation. 

For me, it is also a kind of dynamic suspension between falling and flying, an im/balance provoked that leads to adjustments in one’s default settings. It suggests following the gravitational pull of an-other - ‘what grabs you’, your interests - letting it take you to see what it does, rather than trying to explain it (away) or collapse it into some pre-existing grid of 'knowledge'. It’s related to placing attention outside of yourself there-where-you-are, giving over some of your weight to this ‘elsewhere’, meeting and riding its currents and contours. So it’s about encounter, accompaniment, and displacement off one’s own axis towards an engagement with aspects of the world: ecologies of (inter)connectedness, if you like. 

John Berger has also written about leaning, in ways that explore the relations between riding a motorbike, writing and living (in To The Wedding, Pages of the Wound and elsewhere). In these texts, he considers the relations between inertia, gravity, energy, momentum and grace:

“Everything’s a question of how you lean … If anything on wheels wants to corner or change direction, a centrifugal force comes into play. This force tries to pull us out of the bend into the straight, according to a law called the Law of Inertia, which always wants energy to save itself. In a corner situation it’s the straight that demands least energy and so our fight starts. By tipping our weight over into the bend, we shift the bike’s centre of gravity and this counteracts the centrifugal force and the Law of Inertia! … Speed has everything to do with mass and weight, and is often though of as brutal (and it can be), but it can also whisper of an extraordinary tenderness’’.

For me, as someone interested in writing - writing's difficulties and possibilities, what it can do - it is also about relations between the ‘leanings’ of lived experience/events  and writing. Berger also writes about the differences between riding a motorbike and writing a poem:

"Writing a poem is the opposite of riding a motorbike. Riding, you negotiate at high speed around every fact you meet. Body and machine follow your eyes that find their way through, untouched. Your sense of freedom comes from the fact that the wait between decision and consequence is minimal ... Poems are helpless before the facts. Helpless, but not without endurance, for everything resists them. They find names for consequences, not for decisions. Writing a poem you listen to everything save what is happening now ... On a bike the rider weaves through, and poems head in the opposite direction. Yet shared sometimes between the two, as they pass, there is the same pity of it. And in that ... the same love".

So two quite different modes of experience, usually thought of as mutually exclusive. Two different kinds of attention, intuition, embodiment, exposure, 'weaving', translation, serious play. Riding - related to speed, mechanics, a short circuiting of the time lapse between internal impulse, reflex/decision and consequence: a visual, tactile, rhythmic, intimate engagement with the outside world and its material phenomena. Writing - slow resistant work, the site of memory, association, a listening internally that removes one from the here-now. Berger endeavours to bring these two apparent 'opposites' into conjunction, suggesting the possibility of them meeting and connecting fleetingly in tenderness, compassion, love.

Maybe the notion of 'leaning-into' also relates to some texts I’m working on at the moment about falling, and the relations between adjusting balance in the orientation of ‘leaning’, the point of suspension, and the irretrievable moment(um) of falling. James Hillman writes about falling into the underworld, into psyche; Helene Cixous writes about falling into the 'school of dreams'. Falling as deepening, growth: a ‘falling into place’. 

Where do representation and writing ‘lean’ and where do they ‘fall’? Or, more broadly, to borrow a phrase from Herbert Blau, how does one navigate some ‘liveable unison between panic and grace’?

Today we are going to talk about some of our own leanings, what and where we ‘lean-into’ in recent projects we have worked on individually …

For further details of Sue Palmer's projects, with links to video materials, see here and here 

For footage of Little Tich leaning, see here (thanks to Sophie Nield for the link)