be a mountain

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

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

***

Deep space

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

Awakening: ‘the 10,000 beings’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Look out

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

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

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

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

***

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

Seeing touching

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

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

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

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

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

So let us take time, make space.

Dissolve the mind, walk out of the body.

Allow what’s out there to in-here.

That’s the invitation, the most urgent choreography.

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

***

Footnotes

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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