shuttle 10: stars

‘Galloping horses of the departed century, I will consult ashes, stars, and flights of birds’ (Czeslaw Milosz, ‘The Unveiling’, from The Rising of the Sun)

'We are both storytellers. Lying on our backs, we look up at the night sky. This is where stories began, under the aegis of that multitude of stars which at night filch certitudes and sometimes return them as faith. Those who first invented and then named the constellations were storytellers. Tracing an imaginary line between a cluster of stars gave them an image and an identity. The stars threaded on that line were like events threaded on a narrative. Imagining the constellations did not of course change the stars, nor did it change the black emptiness that surrounds them. What it changed was the way people read the night sky' (John Berger, And our faces, my heart, brief as photos)
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'... Look: the Tower of Babel and the Felicity of Tents; up there are highway robbers, and doves bringing ambrosia to the gods, and the twin horsemen of the dawn;     up there the daughter of the wind, mourning for her husband lost at sea;     the Strong River is there, and the Palace of the Five Emperors, the Kennel of the Barking Dogs, the Straw Road, the Birds' Way, the Snake River of Sparkling Dust;     up there are the nymphs who mourn their brother Hyas, killed by a wild boar, and whose tears are shooting stars;     there are the Seven Portuguese Towers, the Boiling Sea, the Place Where One Bows Down;     look: the Ostriches Leaving and the Ostriches Returning and the Two Ostriches who are friends;     Cassiopeia, Queen of Ethiopia, who thought she was more beautiful than the Nereids, is there, and her hapless daughter Andromeda, and Perseus who rescued her with the head of Medusa swinging from his belt, and the monster, Cetus, he slew, and the winged horse Pegasus he rode;     there is the bull who plows the Furrow of Heaven;     up there is the Hand Stained with Henna, the Lake of Fullness, the Empty Bridge, the Egyptian X;     ...     up there is the Butcher's Shop, the Easy Chair, the Broken Platter, the Rotten Melon, the Light of Heaven;     Hans the Wagoner, who gave Jesus a ride, is there, and the lion who fell from the moon in the form of a meteor;     up there, once a year, ten thousand magpies form a bridge so that the Weaving Girl can cross the River of Light to meet the Oxherding Boy;     there are the braids of Queen Berenice, who sacrificed her hair to assure her husband's safety;     up there is a ship that never reaches safe harbor, and the Whisperer, the Weeping One, the Illuminator of the Great City, and look: the General of the Wind;     the Emperor Mu Wang and his charioteer Tsao Fu, who went in search of the peaches of the Western Paradise, are there;     the beautiful Callisto, doomed by Juno's jealousy, and the goddess Marichi who drives her chariot led by wild boars through the sky;     there are the Sea Goat, the Danish Elephant, the Long Blue Cloud-Eating Shark, and the White-Bone-Snake:     up there is Theodosius turned into a star and the head of John the Baptist turned into a star and Li Po's breath, a star his poem make brighter:     there are the Two Gates, one through which the souls descend when they are ready to enter human bodies, and the other through which they rise at death;     there a puma springs on its prey, and a Yellow Dragon climbs the Steps of Heaven;     up there is the Literary Woman, the Frigid Maiden, the Moist Daughters, and the Head of the Woman in Chains;     there is the Thirsty Camel, the Camel Striving to Get to Pasture, and the Camel Pasturing Freely; there the Crown of Thorns or the crown that Bacchus gave Ariadne as a wedding gift;     look:     the Horse's Navel, the Lion's Liver, the Balls of the Bear;     there is Rohni, the Red Deer, so beautiful that the moon, though he had twenty-seven wives, loved her alone;     up there the Announcer of Invasion on the Border, the Child of the Waters, the Pile of Bricks, the Exaltation of Piled-Up Corpses, the Excessively Minute, the Dry Lake, the Sacks of Coals, the Three Guardians of the Heir Apparent, the Tower of Wonders, the Overturned Chair;     up there is a cloud of dust kicked up by a buffalo, and the steamy breath of the elephant that lies in the waters that surround the earth, and the muddy water churned by a turtle swimming across the sky;     up there is the broken circle that is a chipped dish, or a boomerang, or the opening of the cave where the Great Bear sleeps;     up there the two donkeys whose braying made such a racket they frightened away the giants and were rewarded with a place in the sky;     there is the Star of a Thousand Colors, the Hand of Justice, the Plain and Even Way;     there is the Double Double;     there the Roadside Inn;     there the State Umbrella;     there the Shepherd's Hut     there the Vulture;     look: the Winnowing Fan;     there the Growing Small;     there the Court of God;     there the Quail's Fire;     there St Peter's Ship and the Star of the Sea;     there:     look:     up there:     the stars'.

From Eliot Weinberger, 'The Stars', in An Elemental Thing, New York: New Directions Books, 2007, 174-6

Images: (top) - 17th century celestial map, 'Planisphaeri coeleste', by the Dutch cartographer Frederik de Wit

(bottom) -  the Milky Way in the night sky, photographed by Steve Jurvetson, Black Rock Desert, Nevada, 22 July 2007

the idea of south

'You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it' (Annie Dillard 1988: 31).

During the Olympics, I've been reading about Antarctic explorers - I'm not really sure why. Perhaps it's the terrible weather here in Devon, combined with associations leaking from the inescapable nationalist rhetoric of 'heroic' endeavour from the BBC in Beijing. Certainly some possibility of a vicarious 'outside' and 'elsewhere' as an antidote to despondent peering out at the rain from the sofa during yet another medal ceremony with oh so jolly national anthem accompaniment.

In particular, I've been looking at David Thomson's fine book about Scott, Shackleton and Amundsen (2002), Scott's journals, Apsley Cherry-Garrard's The Worst Journey in the World, Trevor Griffiths's screenplay for The Last Place on Earth, Sarah Wheeler's Terra Incognita, Francis Spufford's I May Be Some Time, and collections of Frank Hurley's and Herbert Ponting's remarkable photographs of Shackleton's Endurance and Scott's Terra Nova expeditions respectively. Finally, and much less familiar to me, some material about the Australian geologist Douglas Mawson, whose 1912-13 trek with Mertz and Ninnis during the Australasian Antarctic Expedition is perhaps (alongside Shackleton's journey from Elephant Island to South Georgia 3 years later in 1916) the most bewildering story of them all.

The bare bones of Mawson's journey, set in inconceivably harsh blizzard conditions 'among rolling waves of ice', are as follows: Ninnis's sudden disappearance down a crevasse with the dog-drawn sledge containing most of the team's provisions - the two others peering down the crack in the ice to see nothing but a dog on a ledge 150 feet below, still alive but its back broken; 315 miles to get back to base - enough food for only 10 days, but nothing for the dogs; an improvised tent using a tent cover, some skis and sledge struts; the gradual cull of dogs for food during the return journey, everything consumed, including the paws (stewed); Mertz's death en route, probably hastened by Vitamin A poisoning from eating dogs' livers; Mawson's fall into a crevasse, his sledge wedging in the ice above his head, then hauling himself out by the rope from which he dangled; his eventual arrival back at the base, Cape Denison, with his ship the Aurora having already departed and now just a dot on the horizon; when the men who had stayed behind to look for him eventually found him, unrecognisably bedraggled, they asked: 'My God, which one are you?'; and finally, another winter spent in the huts before the Aurora's eventual return. Mawson's story is genuinely astonishing, humbling, and at times oddly funny in pitch-dark ways that remind me of Joe Simpson's Touching the Void.

A few notes on what lingers for me from this bleak but fascinating reading:

* the mythic shape of some of these narratives, and their interrelations with the constitutive myths of 'nation', 'empire', 'patriotism', 'heroism', 'leadership', 'manliness', 'nobility' (already rehearsing some of the core drives that would lead to mass carnage and suffering in the first World War); the power of these stories in our imaginations, and at the same time the futility and absurdity of so much of what actually occurred, and the muddle of motives;

* the degree to which the 'great white south' seems to have appealed as a site of wholesome, untarnished 'purity', 'perfection' and possible 'salvation' for many of the British explorers (including Scott), those rather 'boy's own' conservative men unable to deal with the complexities and changes afoot in the 'civilised world', its 'order' threatened by disarray in the face of the contradictions of modernity. In relation to solitude, Annie Dillard quotes Plotinus, 'the flight of the alone to the Alone' (1988: 48). With these men there is the sense at times of mythical quests in the fulfilment of destinies, or allegorical journeys into the sublime in which 'pilgrims' are obliged to perform some kind of terrible, futile penance - but for what?;

'The Pole of Relative Inaccessibility is "that imaginary point on the Arctic Ocean farthest from land in any direction". It is a navigator's paper point contrived to console Arctic explorers who, after Peary & Henson reached the North Pole in 1909, had nowhere special to go. There is a Pole of Relative Inaccessibility on the Antarctic continent, also; it is that point of land farthest from salt water in any direction. The Absolute is the Pole of Relative Inaccessibility located in metaphysics. After all, one of the few things we know about the Absolute is that it is relatively inaccessible. It is that point of spirit farthest from every accessible point of spirit in all directions. Like the others, it is a Pole of the Most Trouble. It is also - I take this as given - the pole of great price' (Dillard 1988: 19).

* I am struck by the genuinely extraordinary qualities of people like Douglas Mawson, or Tom Crean and William Lashly, and the flawed ambiguity of so many others entertaining and internalising the severely compromised myth of 'heroism' and the idea of south - Scott, Teddy Evans, Shackleton, etc.;

* the inadequacy of many of the British explorers' understanding of the possibilities and predicaments of animals in these horrifying conditions: the incompetence and sentimentality in their use of dogs and ponies, despite advice from the Norwegians (Nansen and others) - and the gradual becoming-animal of Scott's abject Polar party, man-hauling their way to their deaths - unaccommodated man, bare life, reduced to the most bestial of states physically, and yet oh so disarmingly calm and dignified - so 'English' - in their discovery of failure and in their dying (of landscape and weather);

* the actual material implications of the weather conditions for the human body and mind, beyond the stiffness of upper lips clouded by 'frost smoke': depression, cramps, freezing sweats, swollen limbs, bleeding gums from scurvy, shivering fits ('until I thought my back would break', Cherry-Garrard), diarrhea, mental confusion, exhaustion, snow blindness, the blackened festering tissue of frostbite on noses, fingers and toes, hypothermia, etc. The mystical quietism of the naturalist Edward Wilson - 'I can never forget that I did realise, in a flash, that nothing that happens to our bodies really matters' (Thomson 2002: 148). On the horrors of frostbite, Frances Ashcroft writes: "When freezing is rapid, needles of ice may crystallise inside cells, puncturing cell membranes. If ice crystals rub together, they may physically tear the cells apart, which is one reason it is not advisable to rub frostbitten areas' (2001: 72);

* the radical perceptual disorientation of white out, of the ganzfeld of absolute 'smooth space': 'Smooth space is occupied by intensities, wind and noise forces, and sonorous and tactile qualities, as in the desert, steppe, or ice. The creaking of ice and the song of the sands ... Where there is close vision, space is not visual, or rather the eye itself has a haptic, non-optical function: no line separates earth from sky, which are of the same substance; there is neither horizon nor background nor perspective nor limit nor outline or form nor centre; there is no intermediary distance, or all distance is intermediary. Like Eskimo space' (Deleuze & Guattari: 479, 494).

* the shocking suddenness of loss of life: on Scott's Discovery expedition, for example, Seaman Vince, wearing inappropriate boots, sliding helplessly from the ice into the sea, never to be found (like Evans, like Oates); and then there's the dog Osman who was washed overboard during the Terra Nova's journey south from New Zealand, only to be thrown back onto the deck by another wave;

'My name is Silence. Silence is my bivouac, and my supper sipped from bowls. I robe myself mornings in loose strings of stones. My eyes are stones; a chip from the pack ice fills my mouth. My skull is a polar basin; my brain pan grows glaciers, and icebergs, and grease ice, and floes. The years are passing here' (Dillard 1988: 49).

* the arrogance and chauvinism of some of the British sponsors and of members of the Royal Geographical Society, and their outrageous dismissal of Amundsen as some kind of dodgey dilettante-cum-'cheat', rather than the consummately prepared & emotionally uncluttered pragmatist in his element that he seems to have been;

* the anachronistic language of repressed Edwardian men, so often unable to communicate their fragilities, fears and desires to themselves, let alone each other: Scott's use of the phrase 'up queer street'; Shackleton's insistence on curtains for the beds in the shared hut in order to allow men to 'sport their oak' in private;

'One wonders, after reading a great many such firsthand accounts, if polar explorers were not somehow chosen for the empty and solemn splendor of their prose style - or even if some eminent Victorians, examining their own prose styles, realised, perhaps dismayed, that from the look of it, they would have to go in for polar exploration' (Dillard 1988: 22-3).

* the elaborate (and profoundly understandable) activities generated to distract and amuse during the uncomfortable, long periods of waiting: illustrated lectures, 'scallywag competitions' (whatever they were), theatrical performances with cross-dressing, football on the ice, the printing of a paper (the South Polar Times) - the weird inventiveness and playful resilience of human beings in the most extreme of conditions; and the surrealism of the determination to retain some kind of (middle-class) 'normality' despite everything, e.g. the Christmas meal Scott and the others had lugged onto the ice plateau en route to the Pole - although they were fast running out of supplies, they enjoyed pemmican and horse meat stew, with onions, curry powder and biscuit; a sweet hoosh of arrowroot, cocoa and biscuit; plum pudding, and finally raisins, caramel and ginger. Happy Christmas ...

'Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand - that of finding workable compromises between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us ... I have, I say, set out again. The days tumble with meanings. The corners heap up with poetry; whole unfilled systems litter the ice ...' (Dillard 1988: 30, 47).


References
Alexander, Caroline (1998). The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition, London: Bloomsbury
Ashcroft, Frances (2001). Life at the Extremes: The Science of Survival, London: Flamingo
Bickell, Lennard (2000). Mawson's Will, Hanover NH: Steerforth
Cherry-Garrard, Apsley (2003) [1922]. The Worst Journey in the World, London: Pimlico
Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Felix (1984). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia, Minneapolis: Univ of Minnesota Press
Dillard, Annie (1988). 'An Expedition to the Pole', Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions & Encounters, New York: Harper Perennial, 17-52
Griffiths, Trevor (1986). Judgement over the Dead, London: Verso
Mawson, Douglas (2000). The Home of the Blizzard: A True Story of Antarctic Survival, Birlinn Ltd.
Ponting, Herbert (2004). With Scott to the Pole: The Terra Nova Expedition, 1910-1913 - The Photographs of Herbert Ponting, London: Bloomsbury
Spufford, Francis (1996). I May Be Some Time, London: Faber
Thomson, David (2002). Scott, Shackleton and Amundsen: Ambition & Tragedy in the Antarctic, New York: Thunder's Mouth Press
Wheeler, Sarah (1996). Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica, London: Vintage

© David Williams

For an outstanding article on the RSA Arts & Ecology website by the writer Tony White - about Antarctica, Shackleton, climate change and opera - see here. My thanks to Barbara Campbell for the link.

smell the rat

I have just spent a Sunday morning reading the paper, and now I wonder why. How much of my life has been spent ploughing through the so-called 'news'? What am I after? It's certainly a very eccentric mode of reading - partial, skimming, distracted, occasionally lingering when something catches my attention and engaging in a more focused way before moving on. A reading environment designed for the minimal attention span ... After so many years I know the geography of the papers well, and make for those sections that may be interesting. I follow a slightly schizo trajectory, unwittingly creating unlikely conjunctions and collages in time, space and matter: arts, sport, politics, conflicts and injustices, telly pages, obituaries, anomalous occurrences etc., and a swift scanning of other stuff via the shorthand of images and headlines: ARREST OVER SHIP-CAT KILLING / BIRD FORCES PLANE TO LAND / DOG OWNERS TOLD TO STOP USING STARFISH AS FRISBEES / CHEDDAR MAN ATTACKED BY BULL etc etc. Sometimes I cut out an item, and put it in a teetering pile of cuttings: usually Mafia references, Italian politics (the latest installment in Berlusconi's dexterous avoidance of criminal prosecution etc.), climate change and weather anomalies, animal stories, book or film reviews. In truth I don't do very much with this vast collection of fragments, a piecemeal archive of where my attention has hovered in the past; it tends to gather dust and offer sustenance to an assortment of tiny paper-munching creatures ...

Most of the time I leave the newspaper feeling dissatisfied. I tend to feel as though I've been 'had', and am left wondering quite what is the nature of the habitual impulse to give over chunks of countless days to this activity. There's certainly something about not wanting to 'miss' things. Even a rather peculiar sense of responsibility, or 'civic duty', an unspoken sense of 'needing to know' in order to be 'in touch' with the world in which we live and thus to be able to take some sort of position (i.e. to wave yet another opinion, often little more than a re-staging of a received, second-hand thought). Of course this 'rationale' falls apart instantly with even the slightest of reflections, revealing its fatuousness and perversity. We know how ideologically loaded and coded every newspaper is. Their titles claim otherwise, inevitably, although all are loaded and rather laughable truth claims: the Guardian (of truth, objectivity, reasoned debate), the Observer (unproblematic reflection of what is), the Times (just as they are), the Independent (free of ideological agenda), the Mail, Telegraph and Express (communicating information swiftly and directly to you the reader), the Sun (a ray of illuminating clarity oh yes). We know that it's not 'knowledge' that is gleaned from this sprint through information and opinion; in itself most journalism offers little more than simplified constructions of 'truths', each of them presented as a realist narrative, like old-fashioned 'history'. These narratives are elaborated from particular vantage points, with assumptions, agendas and blind spots naturalised and (semi-)concealed. So should we not learn to read the paper critically as a kind of post-modern fiction, an elliptical cartography of fears and desires afloat in the cultural and psychic 'air', in themselves constitutive of that very 'air'? To treat them not as registers of 'what happened', but more as a kind of textual seismograph of some of the narrative shapes and shadows at play in our culture?

In particular I have come to view with suspicion the triggers that are employed to attract attention and make stories, and their affective repercussions: their tendency to fuel the paranoid, the conspiratorial, the prurient and voyeuristic, the outraged, and at the same time to induce a sense of a radical lack of agency, an impotence in the face of the 'world'. What is gained from accessing the detail of an unprovoked stabbing frenzy and the subsequent beheading of a sleeping passenger on a Canadian bus? Or of the discovery of a British girl's torso in a suitcase in Brazil? Or of the shooting of a honeymooning couple in Antigua? Or of the threat of a new wave of CJD cases in Britain? Or of 'evidence' that even 5-year olds are at threat from self-harm? What is the nature of the 'pleasure' in reading these stories, all of them from the past few days? What do they feed, and cause to proliferate? Potentially such narratives of violence, horror or fear are reanimated in some form or other in every reader's consciousness. They are seeded in us and inhabit us; their dis-ease becomes part of our psychic landscapes, part of the tone-poem our cortex hums to us, part of our sense of what it is to be here now. And meanwhile, all sorts of other things in our worlds are 'missed' as we fail utterly to be here now, our attention forever elsewhere, addicted to distraction ...

The writer Annie Dillard is critically perceptive on this, as on so much else. She asks: "Why are we watching the news, reading the news, keeping up with the news? Only to enforce our fancy - probably a necessary lie - that these are crucial times, and we are in on them. Newly revealed, and we are in the know: crazy people, bunches of them. New diseases, shifts in power, floods! Can the news from dynastic Egypt have been any different? [...] The closer we grow to death, the more closely we follow the news. Year after year, without ever reckoning the hours I wasted last week or last year, I read the morning paper. I buy mass psychotherapy in the form of the lie that this is a banner year. Or is it, God save us from the crazies, aromatherapy? I smell the rat, but cannot walk away. It is life's noise - the noise of the news - that sings "It's A Small World After All" again and again to lull you and cover the silence while your love boat slips off into the dark". (Annie Dillard, For the Time Being, New York: Vintage, 1999, 31-2).


© David Williams

Photo at top by Lewis Hine: '12 year old newsboy Hyman Alpert, been selling for 3 years', New Haven, Connecticut, 1909

daniel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

alice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Extracts from rehearsal journal, Berlin, March 2006)

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