Calling out of context by Joachim Hamou

Calling out of context This publication is framing a specific types of transdisciplinary work and working economies situated between theatre and visual art.

The collection is assembled in a more or less linear historic timeline but could be read or assembled in many other ways. The purpose of this publication is to be a source of inspiration for other practitioners, students and curious minds.

Calling out of context

Joachim Hamou Reading manual

4

François Piron On Guy de Cointet

6

Marcela A. Fuentes Theatre as event: the politics of interruption in Vivi Tellas’s documentary theatre 14 Rudi Laermans Sound/voice/imitation: on/around What Nature Says

by Myriam Van Imschoot 36 Ivana Müller We are still watching

56

Laura Luise Schultz A theatre of shared space, and the right to a place in society 68 Signe Frederiksen and Joachim Hamou UIP27 82 Paula Caspão Let’s walk around here and call it ‘study’

Cally Spooner Indirect language

122

94

4

Reading manual This publication is the outcome of a research project supported by the Danish Arts Foundation in collaboration with the Danish National School of Performing Arts. Out of the artistic research that lasted almost two years came a film called UIP27 that I’m revisiting in this book. Instead of producing an academic discussion of the work I preferred to use the publication to frame specific types of transdisciplinary work and working economies that influenced me and in which I would situate my own artistic practice. In this way I hope the book can in turn be a source of inspiration for other practitioners and students.

The collection is assembled in a more or less linear timeline but I have to stress here that it could be read in many other ways, so there is no need to start at the beginning. Every article has a short introduction that helps contextualise the project addressed in the article and its writer. The last chapter is a play by visual artist Cally Spooner which allows this book to also function as a script.

Enjoy the read, Joachim Hamou

6

François Piron is a curator with a particular sensibility for theatrical and text-based work. This is also the reason he is assembling the first compilation of the French conceptual artist Guy de Cointet’s textual work. Guy de Cointet had a very specific and atypical approach to performance and theatre in his work as a visual artist in the 1970s and early 1980s.

In the following conversation François talks about Guy’s work, and more specifically about his migration from visual artistic practice to a pure theatre practice.

François Piron

On Guy de Cointet In conversation with Joachim Hamou

François: Drawing a chronological line through Guy de Cointet’s artistic life, one could say that he was a person who felt that he was an artist but didn’t know exactly what or how to start, so he began with painting. That is the kind of thing you do when you want to start an artistic career.

But Guy was very interested in writing so he painted a lot of texts; fragments of text, part of texts and quickly this formalised into a coded language. He codifies the text using different and more or less elaborate encryption systems like writing backwards, from right to left, from bottom to top or mirroring the texts.

On Guy de Cointet

8

At the time there were many literary movements working with rather ludicrous encryption systems where letters would be changed in the alphabet or words would be replaced with new ones and Guy became part of this movement. However he felt that his paintings weren’t particularly interesting as such but that they became much more interesting if one read them as scripts. Very soon he began to stage his paintings. The paintings existed as accessories for a narration where an actor would begin to decrypt the painting or tell the painting. This is the way that Guy approached the theatre and began to develop more and more complicated narrative systems. Soon the paintings became obsolete, he did not need them anymore; they were no longer the centre of attention.

Gradually, he developed a kind of theatre where the encoding and encryption became part of the narration, inside it, rather than the subject of the narration.

That’s basically the story of Guy de Cointet; someone coming from the visual arts and moving towards the theatre. His ambition was really to become someone who makes theatre. Joachim: So was he also the director of his own creations? François: First as a necessity, being insecure financially. Guy was not working in a context such as the theatre where there is a division of labour. He wrote, made the paintings and organised the performances. This all happened mostly in galleries and art spaces before he gradually produced in the theatre. So yes, he mostly did everything himself.

But there were two sides of his work; the period in Los Angeles, where he lived and where he was more known as a visual artist — meaning he was mostly involved in the art scene. And then the French part, where he didn’t live, but where his contacts were more within the theatre world. In France he did collaborate with theatre directors.

So he had a double life, split between visual art in California and more classical theatre in France. Both parts influenced each other in his work. Joachim: So in his

François Piron

performance work in the galleries does he relate to the specific situation, being in a gallery, or is he just trying to perform a theatre piece that happens to be staged in this space? François: After all we were in the Seventies when there was a real desire to break with genres. For example, you would see how the theatre was moving towards performance and the other way around. So there was something altogether more relaxed about the boundaries between disciplines. In the theatre you would not have five acts marked with a gong, things were more fluid. Sometimes performances were presented in galleries, sometimes in public spaces and not always with a typical theatre audience. Rather this is an audience that can tolerate a 28-hour concert with La Monte Young or a never-ending happening.

But strangely Guy’s work is more conventional than many of the experimentations of that time. We are far from the body art experiments of Paul McCarthy for example.

Guy produced more conventional types of performance with characters, entries and exits, things that mimic the classical Boulevard Theatre. Except they were outside that designated environment, he displaced something that in Paris would be considered almost reactionary to a place where no one had those cultural references, with beautiful actresses in high heels and dress suits declaiming the dialogues in a slightly theatrical way and in a smilingly bourgeois setting. Except that all this happens in a hippy environment that has no connection to all those cultural connotations. So the values this could produce elsewhere are lost in translation.

The return of this aesthetic to Paris produced something entirely different. The accent was put upon his weird writing; the coded language; non-narrative, non-dramaturgical, without endings or beginnings etc. This is what would stay with people. They would not notice the strange aesthetic. The Parisians are more conventional, whereas in Los Angeles the aesthetic of Boulevard Theatre is completely

9

On Guy de Cointet

10

strange and exotic. There the dominant reference point was body art, where everyone smeared themselves with ketchup and ended up entirely naked. So the appearance of feminine air hostess types with theatrical proclamations were considered very strange and intriguing. Joachim: Researching a bit on the works and texts of Guy de Cointet, I have the impression that this language you talk about is very coded indeed and the strange thing is that it often feels like reading a sitcom or something made for TV. Could you explain more about his writing specifically?

François: It does resemble sitcoms a bit sometimes but I’m not sure it was intentional. Guy de Cointet was French and he wasn’t that fluent in English when arriving in Los Angeles. He wasn’t very outgoing, he was a bit shy but he wanted to improve his English. So lets try to imagine someone that doesn’t speak English very well and wants to write better then he speaks. What does he do? He watches TV and copies the expressions.

But actually his own heritage was literature and French culture and this is something that we have come to understand later, that all his writing was pastiche; it’s only citations borrowed from other books. There is a lot from proper literature and some from schoolbooks, manuals and tourist guides. But it’s always cut and pasted. And everything is cut and pasted in English, a language that he did not master. So he didn’t entirely understand the connotations and effects and then he mixed this with French things that he did understand well but copied from English editions. For example, there would be texts from Raymond Roussel, Guillaume Apollinaire and stuff like that. He knew the texts well in French but could not control them that well in English so all together it created this very artificial quality in his writing. And when they were performed it could almost sound as if people were speaking like parrots or as if the texts came from somewhere else. So when I talk about encoding in his writing I mean this aspect, its unnaturalness, everything is completely artificial. Joachim:

François Piron

So what was the economics of this? Was it the kind of work that was sold as artwork or did he get commissions.

How did it work? François: It evolved during his career.

In the beginning there was absolutely no support, which doesn’t mean there was no ambition. In the first performances he produced he found an actor that was rather famous at the time called Billy Barty. Billy was in various TV series and this was important for Guy, he wanted people who were famous, people from the media that were already known. Of course he couldn’t pay for this so it was more people that he met and somehow persuaded to participate. Sometimes these people were not actors but had a good look; beautiful feminine women that could incarnate those feminine characters that he was so fond of, for instance. There was always this 1950s Hollywood fantasy.

Joachim: Is there a resonance between his paintings and his theatre work? François: Progressively one replaced the other. He stopped making paintings. Commercially there continued to be some invitations for exhibitions so he continued to make some drawings and he sold quite well from the mid-1970s and onwards. The theatre on the other hand didn’t bring him much. It cost a lot but brought in very little. So he sold his drawings, which were always texts, coded texts, mirrored texts, etc.

Even if he enjoyed this, in his notebooks he only talks about theatre. He really wanted to make theatre. The visual arts were more of a pragmatic necessity for the money that they generated. Joachim: Did he finance his theatre work himself with the income he made from the artworks? François: In terms of financing, he also got invitations to universities and other institutions. In France in the early 1980s he was invited to produce in theatres like the Théâtre du Rond-Point, in a more classical context, with salaries and budgets. In the end he worked only with professional actors in France. Many of them were young actors who were already gaining prominence. In the last play he staged in Paris, called Toutes Les Couleurs,

11

On Guy de Cointet

12

he worked with actors like Sabine Haudepin, who was in François Truffaut’s films, and Fabrice Luchini, who had worked with Éric Rohmer, people who had a certain hype.

Joachim: Is this also a sort of pastiche, making the work look authentic by using famous actors? Like a sort of cut and paste? François: I think it’s a way of succeeding and participating. To use the people that ensure a certain success; the young actors that you were supposed to work with. Guy de Cointet died rather young, he wasn’t even 50 years old, and he had a lot going on. He was invited to different theatre festivals, the one in Avignon for instance. He was just at the beginning of a career shift. Coming from a somewhat underground scene he was suddenly becoming recognised, he was blooming. Joachim: Was this happening when he returned to France? François: Yes, it was also because of the return to France that he had left for Los Angeles 20 years earlier. What is interesting in the work of Guy de Cointet is he was someone who found his form. And the form his art took didn’t follow the path on which he had started. He thought of himself initially as a visual artist but it’s the texts that fed him in his work and eventually he found a form in the theatre, on the stage.

All this is very empiric, nothing was anticipated and most importantly there was no context. That’s what was really interesting, there was zero context. He made things without being pushed or encouraged by a pre-existing scene.

Nothing at the time resembled what he was doing.

He created a system of importation and exportation from one context to another, the imaginary French to the Californian reality. And he influenced enormously his surroundings, both close and far; the people who actually saw the things that he did and others who only heard about them.

There were many artists that held very powerful memories of his work. He altered the dominant artistic narrative at the time. What was considered avant-garde at the time was body art and conceptual art, Guy de Cointet arrived with something completely camp, maybe conceptual art,

François Piron

but, in this case, conceptual art in pastel-coloured tights and melodramatic Boulevard Theatre recitations. The whole thing was rather absurd and no one else did this at the time. Joachim: Did he equally influence the theatre scene in France when he returned? François: I don’t think so. The French theatre no, but the Californian performance scene for sure. That’s clear. The influence of Guy de Cointet is evident in many artists such as Morgan Fisher and Mike Kelly. But he was also an importer of literary influences; I think that if there had not been Guy de Cointet in Los Angeles there would not have been Raymond Roussel. The way Guy talked about Roussel was just as strong an influence as the books themselves. He became an alien reference influencing the visual arts in Los Angeles.

13

14

Marcela A. Fuentes is a performance artist and assistant professor of Performance Studies at Northwestern University in the United States. Her research focuses on the interplay between body-based performance and technology in contem­ porary activism. She is particularly interested in exploring the unfolding of performance as a disruptive event and so it’s no surprise that she has a special fascination with Vivi Tellas’s work. Vivi Tellas is a performer and director who emerged out of a more traditional theatre scene.

In her essay, Marcela focuses on Vivi Tellas’s historical political work and displacement strategies after the fall of the dictatorship in Argentina. However, it is important to say that Vivi Tellas is in no way just a historical icon, on the contrary she remains very active with both her own productions and the cultural scene in Buenos Aires and abroad.

Marcela A. Fuentes

Theatre as event: the politics of interruption in Vivi Tellas’s documentary theatre To halt the day.

There is an enigmatic politics, perhaps never developed, That pins its revolutionary hope on something just like this: The interruption, the break, The absolute suspension of the course of things, Of the course of time.

José Luis Brea, ‘To Halt the Day’ 1

Theatre as event

16

Argentinean theatre director and curator Vivi Tellas uses unusual materials and techniques to create theatre as event, that is, theatre as a process of emergence or live happening rather than representation or illustration. Now firmly placed in the non-European documentary theatre corpus, Tellas makes pieces based on real-life stories that she stages in ways that facilitate the emergence of ‘true’ moments within the highly-codified ‘now’ of the theatrical experience. Beyond the fact that, as a cultural genre, theatre is defined by the co-presence of performers and spectators, Tellas’s work focuses on ‘eventhood’ as a particular ‘charging of attention’ into the present of meaning-making.2 Tellas is one of the most innovative artists that emerged in post-dictatorship Argentina in the mid-1980s when theatre practitioners took over nightclubs and warehouses to experiment with genres such as cabaret, solo performance, image theatre and environmental theatre. Following the military dictatorship that had deemed group activities suspicious and consequently regulated or banned them, the return of democracy in 1983 unleashed the desire to break down the separation between performers and the audience and to blur the lines between music, the visual arts, poetry and theatre.

Tellas’s theatrical adventures include raw or debased materials such as poorly written plays, professional routines, ordinary family pictures, and unconventional museums. I first encountered Tellas’s work when I saw her 1989 Festival de Teatro Malo (Bad Theatre Festival). The festival featured works by an unknown playwright discovered by a friend of Tellas’s in the library of the set designer Saulo Benavente. Tellas’s staging respected every typo and grammatical mistake written on the page as a score of its own kind. In this theatrical experiment with the materiality of ‘bad writing’, Tellas laid out the groundwork for what would become her signature style. Leading a generation of artists interested in deconstructing realism and theatre’s

Marcela A. Fuentes

make-believe through live performance, Tellas’s documentary theatre is rooted in an exaltation of the ordinary and the marginal, and a fascination with the awkward performance of unskilled doers. Both aspects of Tellas’s work connecting art and life are sites for the emergence of eventhood or ‘charged attention’ on and offstage, the moments of ‘break’ of life’s flow and theatre’s predictability.

After the Festival de Teatro Malo, Tellas’s investigation on performance and eventhood as a way of revitalising theatre took on a collaborative form. Following her prolific beginnings in the underground theatre movement of the 1980s, in the 1990s Tellas was appointed to two executive positions: first as founder and director of the Center of Experimental Theatre of the University of Buenos Aires and later as director of the state-run Sarmiento Theatre.

During these posts Tellas conceived Proyecto Museos (Museums Project) (1994-2000) and Biodrama. Sobre la vida de las personas (Biodrama. Concerning People’s Lives) (2002-2008). Both projects set in motion a collective/collaborative inquiry into systems of representation in a postdictatorship context in which official narratives about the nation and its recent past were called into question.

In Proyecto Museos, Tellas commissioned directors to explore non-artistic museums as spaces that stage official versions of knowledge and national identity. The openended, exploratory nature of Proyecto Museos was reflected in the title, which can be read as oxymoronic: whereas the idea of a ‘project’ conveys process, incompleteness, and perhaps even failure, the term ‘museum’ evokes an edifice of truth whose only investment in instability and movement relies on the horizon of progress. Using theatre as a space for the emergence of the event instead of a space for the documentation of the historical event, in Proyecto Museos the participating artists deconstructed the foundational gestures that gave life to a particular national identity. In the introduction to the series’ catalogue released in 2001, Tellas laid out the premises on which the project was founded:

17

Theatre as event

18

Museums (Project) has three purposes: to look at the city differently, to relate theatre with a historical setting, and to consider the political decisions certain forms of exhibition entail... After beginning the Museum Project, the questions began. They are the questions that inevitably arise when, [to] investigate theatre... [we confront it] with something else: another texture, another substance, something foreign to it. I suspect that theatre and museums have something in common, a similarity which makes them both disturbing and uncanny: the disappearance of real time... Maybe each director sees in this project the chance to offer new life, a second chance, to these objects condemned to live in stillness, condemned to be remembered.3

Through performance, Proyecto Museos restored temporality to a cultural practice that relies on fixing time through objects.4 Putting museums in relation to theatrical practice, that is, in relation to a ‘foreign texture’ that operates a certain degree of friction similar to Bertolt Brecht’s ‘distancing effect’, artists rendered transparent the invisible codes of memory transmission at play in official museums. Museum narratives of truth were redefined as ‘settings’ or art(i)facts, in a gesture that signaled that behind every fact there is fiction, a framing dramaturgy.

After assigning non-artistic museums to the participating directors, Tellas programmed a series of three museums per year. The overall project took place between 1994 and 2001, and it was presented in five annual series: I. 1995: Museum and Historical Research

Division of the Federal Police, Natural

Science Museum and National History Museum

Marcela A. Fuentes

II. 1997: Penitentiary Museum,

Museum of Dentistry and Money Museum III. 1998: Museum of Aviation,

Telecommunications Museum and Railway Museum IV. 1999: Forensic Museum of the Judicial

Morgue, Pharmaceutical Botany Museum

and Museum of Optics V. 2000: Museum of Weapons, Creole Museum

and Museum of Technology

What characterised Tellas’s museum choices is that the 15 museums that were part of the Proyecto Museos were rarely visited spaces and, in most cases, people did not even know they existed. Tellas first, and theatre practitioners and spectators later, learnt through this project that institutions as disparate as the penitentiary and a money-making bank had a space of their own in the city. To explore these unconventional museums as ‘a theatrical text’5 directors organised workshops. This approach implied a semiotic reading of the various levels such as object disposition, lighting, indexicality, etc. in which museums convey meaning, similar to the way theatre communicates meaning through placement in space, lighting design and costumes. In the workshops, directors, together with actors and collaborators, established their entry points to the particular house of knowledge they were assigned to. Through their creative take on a particular section, an object, embodied epistemologies, taxonomical incoherence, and the like, artists defined the kind of knowledge they were to produce about these truth-making machines. After these conceptual and aesthetic explorations, the final outcome, the mise en scène, was presented not in the museums themselves but at the Centro Cultural Ricardo Rojas in Buenos Aires where the Center of Experimental Theatre directed by Tellas was located.

In Proyecto Museos artists worked both with what their museum exhibited and with what it excluded, with

19

Theatre as event

20

crystallised presence and concealed absence. Artists also addressed the imaginary constructions represented by each museum. Luciano Suardi’s piece, La Víspera (The Day Before), for example, embodied a certain notion of failed progress as encountered in the Museum of Technology, and Luis Cano’s and Beatriz Catani’s rendition of the Creole Museum, Todo Crinado (All Hairy), centred on a very tangible, albeit bizarre, notion of crafted nativeness through the image of a composite gaucho, Argentina’s iconic male figure. The titles of the pieces helped spectators grasp the artists’ theorisation of the museum’s workings.

Emilio García Wehbi’s piece, Cuerpos Viles (Despicable Bodies), based on the Forensic Museum of the Judicial Morgue, highlighted the peculiarity of the bodies claimed by the state and the museum’s performativity as ‘a postmortem sentence’.6 As part of the history of the Judicial Morgue, the Forensic Museum exhibited the bodies of alleged criminals and ‘outcasts’: workers, domestic workers, unemployed people and seamstresses. As García Wehbi discovered during his visit to the museum, many of the people who ended up at the Judicial Morgue had recently migrated to the country when the institution was founded in 1927. In the performance’s programme notes, García Wehbi situates the museum in the larger history of museums as instructional devices: At the Morgue Museum, you will find a large concentrated dose of homophobia, xenophobia and misogyny in 25 glass display cases. It is a museum to power, designed on Lombrosian ideology,7 where high school students see an obscene exhibition of fascist ideas.8

García Wehbi’s statement describes the racist casting of the museum’s subjects that is integral to the institution’s formative mission. In his critical reading of the piece, Alan Pauls analyses the way in which Cuerpos Viles

Marcela A. Fuentes

simultaneously stages all the work involved in ‘presenting’ death (everything the Museum of the Morgue keeps backstage), and also the entire apparatus of identification, indexing and control — that rite of juridical-police theatre — that makes contemplating death’s work something dangerously akin to an education or an aesthetic delight.9

Pauls’ commentary prompts two questions that connect the practice of staging the nation to theatre practice: what is the significance of a museum instituted around the exercise of cutting open (forensics) marginal bodies as evidence of the biological root of criminality? What does it mean that the Museum’s name, Forensic Museum of the Judicial Morgue, refers both to the judiciary, the institution of law, and to a practice (forensics)? Pauls accurately defined the Museum’s gesture as ‘a postmortem sentence’, a performative system of classification of proper and improper citizenship that García-Wehbi animates critically by making a performance about the nation as a theatre of racial inclusion and exclusion. By cutting open the Museum, García Wehbi denounces the racist practice of aiming to reify criminality as bodily destiny rather than socially determined event.

Theatres and museums require participants, more precisely, spectators. Proyecto Museos’ pieces staged a critical reading of the discourse carried out by museums, troubling the narrative established by the institutions’ founders and curators. While the logic of the traditional museum relies on artifacts and documents as ‘matters of fact’ or evidence, in Proyecto Museos artists focused not only on artifacts but on the museum’s presentation itself to deconstruct the plots that are integral to history as a sociopolitical fiction. Theatre practitioners redefined the relationship between museum spaces and objects as epistemic repositories by displacing the museum to a

21

Theatre as event

22

theatrical space where the stillness of artifacts and timelines was challenged via the dynamics of ephemeral performance and shared time-space.

As the Proyecto Museos artists themselves recount in the series’ catalogue, in most cases, their trip to the museum ended in a profound disappointment about the aesthetic and intellectual qualities of those spaces. Artists then capitalised on this feeling artistically by engaging the underwhelming materials with an analytical rather than referential approach.The excursion to the museum, then, became a true laboratory for an inquiry about theatre beyond theatre, an inquiry in which artists used theatre as a lens to explore the nature of museum objects as impostors, as performers of truth-making. Approaching museums as a performative practice that creates rather than merely illustrates realities and identities, artists also pointed out the museum’s unwillingness to account for the exclusions that are integral to its taxonomic exercise. Through liveness and embodiment Proyecto Museos animated the connection between the museum and its double.

In his piece titled Museo Miguel Angel Boezzio (Museum Miguel Angel Boezzio) performed in 1998 and based on the National Museum of Aeronautics, playwright and director Federico León focused on the museum’s ‘failure to account’ by instituting his own museum. Leon’s piece/ museum centred on the life of a veteran of the Malvinas/ Falklands War. In Leon’s piece, the performance is not a critical commentary on the museum; the performance is the museum. In the performance/museum Miguel Angel Boezzio, who happened to be an amateur actor, lectured onstage and guided the audience through his living memories. Boezzio performed as a source of first-hand knowledge contesting the logic of the museum as an archive of dead objectivity.

When León visited the National Museum of Aeronautics he was drawn to the special section dedicated to the Malvinas/Falklands war, a war launched by the military in

Marcela A. Fuentes

1982 against the British occupation of the Malvinas islands.

León recounts that the museum presented the disastrous defeat of the Argentine military as a series of triumphs by the air forces. León wrote: ‘defeats presented as triumphs’.10 Choosing a conference format, León centred his piece on Boezzio as a presentation of a ‘live ex’.11 In the same way that the original museum enacted a distorted account of events focusing on some aeronautical triumphs and not on the war as a total event gone wrong, in Museo Miguel Angel Boezzio León and Boezzio staged minor milestones in the life of the protagonist, backed up by documents as proof of authenticity of Boezzio’s status as an ex.12 The piece was framed by Boezzio’s credentials: the soccer diploma he obtained in a tournament organised in the asylum where he lived for 11 years after the war; his typing certificate; his license for handling chemicals; and his accreditation as a gas station attendant, amongst other documents. It was Boezzio who decided, in real time and on site, the timing and duration of each micro-episode of the performance. By introducing a real person accounting for his life in first person, León’s museum, Museo José Luis Boezzio, investigated the relationship between life events and the live event.13 Tellas’s next collective project, Biodrama. Sobre la vida de las personas was launched in 2002 right after Argentina’s economic collapse. For this series Tellas invited theatre practitioners to create performance pieces based on first-hand stories of ordinary people. From 2002 to 2007, 11 plays were performed, all based on the life of real people, including a rural teacher, migrants, a female bodybuilder, and a sports champion. There was also a show dedicated to pets, the best examples of theatre as event because they are not be able to perform as other than themselves.14 Parallel to the emergence of political subjects such as those who converged in neighbourhood assemblies during the 2001-2002 economic crisis, the unemployed workers who took over their bankrupt factories, or the female

23

Theatre as event

24

picket-liners who blocked roads in the north of the country, Biodrama brought attention to new agents and narrators of history.15 Playwrights and directors fleshed out various approaches to Tellas’s proposal to recover personal life as a unique, singular, enigmatic experience that resists mediatisation and disturbs its hegemony with specific forces like the formless, the raw, the everyday, and the insignificant [...] forces that are perhaps never so intense as when they unfold in the live present of the theatre.16

Each production articulated a concrete proposal on how to reach experiential, situated knowledge, defining the singularity of specific ‘ordinary’ lives through a performance framing or interruption of that life’s flow. In this sense, whereas Proyecto Museos used performance to trouble the matter-of-fact narratives conveyed by artifacts, Biodrama focused on ordinariness, on life as performance, to enliven theatre beyond second degree representation.

This meant expanding the notion of dramaturgy to encompass the process of casting and the logic of the pieces. For example, to make their piece, Los 8 de Julio. Experiencias sobre registros de paso del tiempo (On July 8th. Experiences about recording the passing of time), premiered in 2002, Beatriz Catani and Mariano Pensotti launched a call for people who shared actor Alfredo Martín’s birth date: 8 July 1958. The directors circulated the call through one of Buenos Aires’ main newspapers as well as by email. The performance presented different ways of documenting temporality: video, photos, and painting. Each performer — a total of three people were chosen — was assigned a particular way of documenting the passing of time. The piece also included interviews with street demonstrators, recorded on 8 July 2002 in Plaza de Mayo, a crucial protest

Marcela A. Fuentes

site. Thus, Los 8 de Julio was an aesthetic appropriation of real life as political intervention that cited other embodied actions taking place offstage. Although on a small scale, Biodrama mobilised various forms of relationality between artists and the public that contributed another layer to the social experimentation taking place in neighbourhoods, financial institutions and factories in response to Argentina’s economic collapse.

Following the performance series that focused on the lives of ordinary people as seen by invited artists, Tellas deepened her investigation of biodrama, expanding the term from a specific curatorial function to a methodological, instrumental use. Although Tellas’s work has been influenced by groups such as Rimini Protokoll, her conceptualisation of the relationship between life and theatre, or of life as theatre, has taken this line of inquiry a step further. ‘Biodrama’, a term coined by Tellas that resonates with ethnographic research and social performance analysis,17 entails an exploration of theatricality outside of theatre proper, focusing on ‘that threshold where reality itself seems to start making theatre’.18 Tellas calls that threshold — that I associate here with the notion of interruption or a halt that introduced this essay — Umbral Mínimo de Ficción (UMF, Minimal Threshold of Fiction). Watching life unfold through a performance lens, Tellas identifies kernels of fiction that generally go unnoticed but that deserve the sensible augmentation that characterises theatre. Engaging the course of someone’s life through an aesthetic framework, Tellas singles out the event through a ‘quality of attention’.19 However, not everything that belongs to worlds actually experienced by real people draws Tellas’s attention.

Taking elements from conventional drama as a reference, Tellas sets the parameters that determine the UMF.20 For example, in the context of what she calls ‘Family Theatre’, a subset of her documentary work, Tellas explores ‘great theatrical themes’ in family history, namely, deception,

25

Theatre as event

26

appearance, secrets, betrayal, love and death. Tellas asks, ‘is one’s family the first theatre we go to? Is it the first theatre we perform in?’21 Tellas’ UMF measures aspects that connect life and art such as storytelling as the arrangement and presentation of facts; character, recognisable in the idiosyncrasy and expertise that inform a professional role; and repetition, as idenfiable in the retellings that transform stories into myths. Tellas also scans for UMF in behaviour, not just stories, vivisecting everydayness through the performers’ disclosure of their ‘quotidian expertise’, that is, carefully crafted or imposed ways of doing.

In her Proyecto Archivos series, staged since 2003, Tellas presents characters from her life, either from her family or from extra-theatrical activities she embarked on, such as a philosophy study group or driving lessons. Tellas explains her technique for recruiting performers as a form of abduction: ‘I approach them and I say “I want to do a piece with you about you.” And I give them a card that says I’m a theatre director. This is the moment of the kidnapping.’22 What characterises the ‘kidnapped people’ or the performers of Tellas’s Proyecto Archivos, is that, although they are not actors, they work in relation to a public such as students, patients, or dancers in a night club. Although everything that takes place on stage ‘has been excavated from the continuum of their lives’, Tellas explains that what happens onstage happens for the first time, and ‘it is an event that — like every event — has no name until it happens’.24 The first piece of Proyecto Archivos, Mi Mamá y mi Tía.

Teatro de familia (My Mom and My Aunt. Family Theatre, 2004) staged at Tellas’s studio, featured Graciela and Luisa Ninio, Tellas’s mother and aunt. When people arrived at the studio, Tellas introduced the performers as ‘the first case of the Proyecto Archivos, my mom and my aunt’.24 The piece starts with a typical eventful action, a happening rather than representation: Graciela and Luisa play the lottery, emphasising the here and now of theatrical

Marcela A. Fuentes

experience through a game that is not pre-scripted. The light design set the tone of the piece: the table on which Graciela and Luisa play the lottery is lit by a lamp that made the table resemble a dissecting surface. After the opening game scene, Luisa and Graciela seamlessly break the fourth wall and dance to a Sephardi tune (their Jewish heritage is a big part of the stories they retell) to then show pictures from the family album. Family pictures become the tool through which to share anecdotes and customs from their past together as sisters such as their mother’s habit of editing out people she didn’t like or the time when they ‘performed as Catholics’ so that they could wear the communion dress.25 From time to time Tellas intervenes, entering the stage to hand the performers objects or interrupting from the audience to ask questions that prompt the emergence of something ‘fresh’ in the scene: a detail, a joke, an unusual meaning assigned to a minor event. The performance works through a succession of happenings randomly assembled in a sequence. Within each scene there are event-moments such as ‘thinking’, for example, that are used to bring awareness to the theatrical experience rather than being expressions of dead time.26 Tellas’s choice of untrained performers is crucial to her event-aesthetics as ways of punching a hole in the accepted knowledge about theatre. She explains her fascination with unskilled performers as a way of accessing unconditioned experience: What is seen onstage is something fragile, with many errors. You see how people try to do something, you see how they fail, how they go back and try it again [...] And at the same time there is a kind of innocence: random, unforeseeable situations that mesmerises me are constantly being produced. They aren’t conditioned experiences, as they are when what you’re seeing onstage is a skill or a trade.27

27

Theatre as event

28

Besides unskilled performance, in Mi mamá y mi tía another way to augment the theatrical experience is through the demonstration procedure, a task that is at the core of the performers’ impetus as a will to share stories. The performance is, thus, a joyful recounting, the emergence of a singular world.28 Tellas’s choice of including ‘bits of life’ onstage is both aesthetic and political: for an artist who was part of the generation that challenged the imposition of neoliberal policies by military force in the period of the 1976-1982 dictatorship, theatre provided a productive space to re-(e)valuate life and to foster the appearance of specific bodies and issues. In contrast to traditional understandings of documentary theatre as a genre concerned with both embracing and questioning the authenticity of historical documents,29 a re-writing of the official archive without necessarily involving real witnesses of the event, in Tellas’s pieces the evidence of the authenticity of what is presented on stage are the bodies of the protagonists. In ‘Bodies of Evidence’, Carol Martin writes: In documentary theatre, the performers are sometimes those whose stories are being told.

But more often than not documentary theatre is where ‘real people’ are absent — unavailable, dead, disappeared — yet reenacted. They are represented through various means, including stage acting, film clips, photographs, and other ‘documents’ that attest to the veracity of both the story and the people being enacted.30

In her pieces, Tellas presents the bodies that she does have, that is, those she encountered in her daily life. However, Tellas’s approach to realness is radically different from reality TV’s aesthetics, where the camera’s mediation and the genre’s peculiar dramaturgy spectacularises people’s lives, tapping on the practice of surveillance as

Marcela A. Fuentes

entertainment. Because Tellas’s pieces are centred on the performers’ self-disclosure of ways of doing and thinking to an audience that resonates with what is being shown, her work distances itself from reality TV’s exposition that makes people appear as the objects of the gaze rather than subjects of their own discourse.

After Mi Mamá y mi Tía, Tellas’s subsequent archives followed a similar structure: table, presentation/demonstration mode, absence of conflict, situations that lead to an eventful action, the telling of a particular event in someone’s life, and a closing banquet evoking the world of the people onstage. In confronting themselves with the reality of the stage, the protagonists engaged in a performance of embodied memory; they exhibited ways of doing that in many cases such as in Escuela de Conducción (Driving School), a piece about three driving instructors, entails a particular positionality and use of the body. Tellas’s archives function as repositories of quotidian practices that the artist identifies as worlds that are about to disappear or modes of living that became obsolete because of technology, a change in social habits, market demands, and the like. In this regard, Tellas states: I think that although it wasn’t my intention, all the archives touch on the problem of the extinction of a world, a sensibility, a way of life. [The Proyecto Archivos plays] are plays about ‘the last ones that...’, about ‘what remains of...’ a kind of disuse that (becomes) incredibly poetic... There is something deactivated in those experiences that become extinct and what is de-activated always becomes poetic. Extinction is a UMF. 31

Focusing on habits and professional routines that she considers about to become extinct, Tellas generates a poetic mode of attention, a particular kind of record that aims

29

Theatre as event

30

to slow down ephemerality paradoxically through embodied memory transmission. Several scholars such as Paul Connerton and Joseph Roach have studied performance practices as forms of embodied memory. Building on these theorists, and challenging those who see performance as a vanishing act, Diana Taylor conceptualises performance as its own memory system rather than a system exclusively defined by its presentness. Taylor differentiates between a system based on material records ‘supposedly resistant to change’, that is, the archive, and what she calls ‘the repertoire’, defined as composed of ‘all those acts usually thought of as ephemeral, non-reproductive knowledge’.32 Although Taylor affirms that the repertoire and the archive are equally mediated, the repertoire records and enacts memory through a ‘constant state of againness’.33 Thus, under Taylor’s productive distinction between these two systems of transmission and preservation of knowledge, Tellas’s archives would be reframed as ‘repertoires’ or body-to-body forms of knowledge preservation and transfer. In any case, beyond the issue of classification, what informs both thinkers, Taylor and Tellas, is their interest in permanence through ephemerality, or performance’s capacity to account for that which happens (the event) and that which remains (embodied memory).

Tellas’s work intervenes in theatre proper from its very own ontology as a phenomenon characterised by liveness and emergence and not just by repetition. Drawing from extra-theatrical materials (museum practice, life events, and family stories), Tellas’s theatre is both an interruption of the performance of self in everyday life (exploring the way in which subjectivity and nationalism are enacted), and simultaneoulsy an interruption of theatre as a system of representation. This gesture not only entails an aesthetic quest responding to a drive towards experimentation; it is also a political intervention on and through theatre as a system of valorisation.

Tellas’s productions are interruptions of cultural systems

Marcela A. Fuentes

and ideologies such as museums as stagings of national patrimony, and of regular lives as peculiar dramaturgies.

Tellas’s pieces gesture towards an undoing of conventional dramatic theatre while positing theatre as the proper ground for a different ethics of value that challenges official national history and the concept of lives worth honouring. Tellas’s documentary theatre is an artistic inquiry into theatricality in daily life that contributes to revalorising apparently uneventful lives on stage while simultaneously revitalising theatre practice.

31

Theatre as event

32

Notes 1 De Llano and Gutiérrez, 2001. My translation.

2 As we will see later, such phenomenological engagement with eventhood does not mean an assertion of theatre’s authenticity or unmediated nature. Even though documentary theatre focuses on real stories and/or documents, it uses presence and ephemerality to re-articulate the relationship between fiction and non-fiction. For an elaboration of eventhood in relation to multiple temporalites, experience, and abstraction, see Heathfield, 2004.

3 Proyecto Museos, series catalogue.

4 On archival memory as practice, see Schneider, 2001.

5 Proyecto Museos, series catalogue.

6 Proyecto Museos, series catalogue.

7 Cesare Lombroso was an Italian criminologist who stated that criminal tendencies were inherited and that they could be detected following concrete physiognomic traits of the suspects’ bodies.

8 Proyecto Museos, series catalogue.

9 Ibid.

10 León, 2005.

11 León, 2005.

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid.

14 Sentáte (Sit) is the title of the pet performance directed by Stefan Kaegi, a Swiss director whose work with theatricality and daily life inspired this stage of Tellas’s ouvre.

15 For a performance analysis of artistic interventions in relation to protest art and grassroots movements during the Argentine economic crisis of 2001–2002, see Fuentes, 2012.

16 Tellas’s Biodrama programme notes. My translation.

17 Goffman, 1959 and Schechner, 1985.

18 Pauls, 2010.

19 In his essay ‘Situation and event. The destination of sense’, Tyrus Miller, building on Hannah Higgins’ reading of John Cage’s work and Fluxus events, states that the event is ‘a special quality of a listening, attending consciousness that conveys the status of “event” onto an otherwise ordinary, even meaningless happenstance’.

(Franko, 2007). Whereas this definition seems to suggest

Marcela A. Fuentes

that the event is in the eye of the beholder, Alain Badiou defines the event as a truth that ‘punches a hole’ in an ordinary situation, a truth that emerges by breaking from accepted knowledge. By claiming that the event can only be determined in retrospect, as when we come to consciousness that something that happened constituted a historic break or game changing situation like ‘falling in love’, Badiou’s definition coincides with Miller’s. For both authors, the event is not something that ‘is’ but that is signaled as being one. For an excellent discussion on theatre and eventhood within neoliberal ‘theatre for change’ enterprises, see Wickstrom, 2012.

20 I read this as Tellas’s parody of scientific discourse.

21 Personal communication. 8 March 2008.

22 Pauls, 2010.

23 Pauls, 2006.

24 Sosa, 2004. Introducing Tellas’s mom and aunt as a ‘case’ in an archive project has a problematic resonance with the practice of exhibiting humans in world fairs. For an account on such ethnographic practices as precursors of intercultural performance art, see Fusco, 1994. Like the Forensic Museum, ethnographic exhibits of humans from ‘distant cultures’, Fusco argues, functioned as the alleged evidence of white European supremacy.

25 Excerpts from the Proyecto Archivos performances are available on YouTube. www.youtube.com/ watch?v=vvJBtnd2-PI (accessed 31 October 2016).

26 An example of this is when Graciela and Luisa share the meaning of Sephardi sound bites with the audience, with Tellas as a prompter who asks them to bring up particular words that she finds interesting or funny. As they improvise the list they suddenly run out of examples, try hard to remember more, and then decide on the spot to move on.

27 Sosa, 2004.

28 When I interviewed Tellas in Buenos Aires at the beginning of 2008 we discussed the issue of politics in her work.

Even though she said she didn’t consider her art to be directly political, she brought the conversation to the context of the military dictatorship and described Argentina as ‘a country where life has no value’ (in reference to the kidnapping, torturing, and murder of political dissidents during the 1976-1983 period).

This opened a new direction in my exploration of Tellas’s theatre, which is usually approached with an emphasis on aesthetic experimentation.

33

Theatre as event

34

29 Martin, 2010.

30 Martin, 2006.

31 Pauls, 2010.

32 Taylor, 2003.

33 Ibid.

Works cited

Bléfari, Rosario, ‘Caza Teatralidad’, Página 12, 4 January 2008.

Connerton, Paul, How Societies Remember, Cambridge, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1989.

De Llano, P., Gutiérrez, X. L., (eds.), En tiempo real. El arte mientras tiene lugar, Fundación Luis Seoane, A Coruña, 2001.

Franko, Mark (ed.) Ritual and Event. Interdisciplinary Perspectives, London, New York, Routledge, 2007.

Fuentes, Marcela A., ‘“Investments Towards Returns”: Protest and Performance in the Era of Financial Crises’, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Vol. 21, N° 3, September 2012.

Fusco, Coco, ‘The Other History of Intercultural Performance’, TDR: The Drama Review, 1994.

Goffman, Erving, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Woodstock, N.Y., Overlook Press, 1973, c1959.

Heathfield, Adrian, Live: art and performance, London, Tate, 2004.

León, Federico, Adriana Hidalgo (ed.), Registros. Teatro reunido y otros textos, Buenos Aires, 2005.

Martin, Carol, ‘Bodies of Evidence’, TDR: The Drama Review, Vol. 50(3), 2006.

Martin, Carol, ‘Introduction: Dramaturgy of the real’, Dramaturgy of the Real on the world stage, Basingstoke, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Pauls, Alan, ‘Kidnapping Reality: An Interview with Vivi Tellas, Dramaturgy of the Real on the world stage, Basingstoke, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Marcela A. Fuentes

Proyecto Museos, Buenos Aires, Libros del Rojas/ Universidad de Buenos Aires, 2001.

Roach, Joseph, Cities of the Dead: circum-Atlantic performance, New York, Columbia University Press, c1996.

Schechner, Richard, Between Theatre and Anthropology, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985.

Schneider, Rebecca, ‘Performance Remains’, Performing Research, 6.2, 2001.

Sosa, Cecilia, ‘Cuéntame tu vida’, Página 12, 17 October 2004.

Taylor, Diana, The archive and the repertoire: performing cultural memory in the Americas, Durham, Duke University Press, 2003.

Wickstrom, Maurya, Performance in the blockades of neoliberalism: thinking the political anew, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

35

36

Myriam Van Imschoot is a performance artist who is obsessed with the voice.

A great indication of her eclectic work is the deconstructed website, that I was told runs under her curatorship on selfdeveloped open software and which now also hosts collections of sound poetry: www.oralsite.be/ In the article presented here, sociologist and writer Rudi Laermans writes about Myriam’s show What Nature Says.

To introduce Rudi, Myriam wrote such an excellent introduction that I think it is best to leave it as a whole. So I will just give a very short description of What Nature Says. It is a performance in which the performers use only their voices to produce sounds that are imitations of natural phenomena. The audiences perceives the composition twice, under very different conditions. In one instance they see and hear how the performers are producing the sounds, and in the other they only hear this produced live in a darkened room.

Myriam Van Imschoot on Rudi Laermans: My relationship with Rudi dates back to the early 1990s, when we both ventured into our first writings on dance. We were aware of each other as writers as we both articulated responses to an emerging new generation of choreographers and artists (Meg Stuart, Vera Mantero and later Boris Charmatz etc.). The difference was that Rudi was older, a highly esteemed essay-writer on art, a sociologist, who had already been promoting Pierre Bourdieu, Michel de Certeau in Flanders, if not initiating them. Rudi belonged to an intellectual circle of excellent thinkers–writers that cultivated the essay as an art form; many of their texts appeared in the visual arts magazine De Witte Raaf (Dirk Lauwaert, Bart Verschaffel, Frank Vandeveire, LIeven Decauter, etc.).

This landscape of essay-writing was a very titillating one for me — non-orthodox, nonacademic, hard-core genuine thinking...

Rudi was the only one to really get lured into writing about dance. By the mid-1990s we started collaborating on some collective writings/lectures, etc. Rudi was confident in his theoretical inclinations, but looked for dialogue and perspectives that would cover dance history and other performance analysis.

I was a young person with no other credentials other than being skyrocketed to write in the national newspapers on dance, performance, art, and did so under the attentive and appreciative gaze of a widening readership.

History was already then a passion, and it became a good tandem to write on the crosssection of our interests. We operated at the

37

38

same time, in the same climate, same city, in response to the same artistic upheavals and events. We enjoyed our collaborative efforts.

The distinction between us was never an opposition nor black and white, we danced with our words and thoughts. We were also amongst the first teachers at P.A.R.T.S. ( Performing Arts Research and Training Studios in Brussels), where I taught dance history and Rudi focused on culture, sociology and art theory. We were together in the same philosophy salon, and anyway Brussels is really a small city with communities interlacing in more than one way. Liking the same bars helps of course.

I didn’t expect Rudi to follow me when I left behind the world of writing and academics and started to make my own work. But he did.

Rudi’s essay ‘What Nature Says’ is the first time he has written about my work. It’s typical of his style: to pair observations, grounded in spectatorship, with an array of theoretical connections/associations, while never having the latter override or vampirise the performance. Rudi's style is affirmative, definite, nearly authorative I would say as it pulsated with a strong ‘vouloir-dire’, to make a mark, to re-mark and make something clear to himself while thinking loud enough so that it enters the social sphere of public debate.

Rudi Laermans

Sound/voice/ imitation On/around What Nature Says

by Myriam Van Imschoot

0.

You attend a performance and you know the artist. After it finishes, you exchange a few first impressions with her, then comes the kind request to stretch these into an essay. This is not unusual. Art criticism is regularly an expression of friendship (which is different than a doing a favour for a friend), but also entails an underlying attitude of symbolic exchange. You’ve seen and/or heard a work, and you give something back; you do this not just out of friendship for the ‘author’ but also for the work.

Sound/voice/imitation

40

A work that speaks to you always addresses you in a two-fold way. It creates a set of sensory impressions that evokes meanings, that incites you to ‘read’ or interpret.

And often it evokes numerous ‘side-thoughts’, associations that borrow from the seen or heard and that relate to a generally multi-layered context that is inhabited with metaphors, concepts, echoes of other artefacts…

The ambiguity of the address is located in the work itself. Each work that matters is of course singular, but at the same time articulates one or more — sometimes even many — general issues. Art criticism must unfold this dialectical tension, if necessary beyond the point that attention to the particularity of a work begins to conflict with the interest in the broader issues that it also raises.

As a performance, What Nature Says by Myriam Van Imschoot cannot be univocally categorised. Perhaps the most apt description is of an onomatopoeic radio play for the human voice that can also partly be seen (a new kind of opera perhaps?). But the performance is also a peculiar choreography that evokes a range of heterogeneous associations. About how we relate to our sonorous surroundings while often not listening to them; about the relationship between hearing and seeing; about the human voice and its mimetic power; about… Any review or any critical essay is necessarily unfinished. ‘That which is finished, has not been made’ (Paul Valéry).

1.

You’re somewhere, it can be anywhere, and you close your eyes. Your surroundings become a mere soundscape: sounds are all that you perceive. Some are easily recognisable, others can be identified with varying degrees of certainty only after some time, and some simply remain sound puzzles: dumb, sonorous hieroglyphs. That’s how quickly one can actively create a physical experience of disorientation (dépaysement) on the spot, and passively undergo

Rudi Laermans

it. No need to travel; you only need to slightly disrupt your normal sensory relationship with the world. You need to suspend the primacy of sight.

Sounds of course have autonomous physical characteristics. They are loud or soft, harmonious or dissonant, shrill, dry or scratchy… However, they derive their everyday meaning primarily from their origin. Hence we want to know the cause or source of a sound, be it a person, animal or technical artefact. Therefore, unless it concerns music, we are usually less interested in sounds as such, but more in their sources (this is different in the case of images, including unsolicited images that intrude from the surroundings). In short, listening is often an exercise in sonorous archaeology, in discovering — with the help of our reason or logos — the arché or origin of a sound. In this, we ultimately must rely on our eyes. They must provide conclusive information regarding the origin of a sound when we are unable to locate it routinely.

2.

What Nature Says is a hybrid double performance. One part is aural. You take your place, the room darkens, and you listen — although you may also, as far as the changing darkness allows, look at the sound engineer who is concentrating on synthesising and balancing sounds using a not-so-large mixer. Depending on the assigned order in which you experience the double performance, you may or may not know that the sounds are being produced live in another room. Even if you don’t know, after a while you begin to suspect that they are coming from people imitating ambient sounds. Indeed, you can regularly identify in what is being heard the bending of a human voice or the sound of breathing: a metallic sound, for example, that does not sound fully mechanical or lifeless. But is the imitation happening live in an adjoining room or are you hearing a recording? You can’t see the source of the sound, so

41

Sound/voice/imitation

42

it remains guesswork. If, however, you’ve already seen the other part of the performance, the sounds that you’ve previously seen being performed never become a completely autonomous soundscape. Again, primacy of the visual over the aural, but this time mediated by short-term memory: what you hear continues to receive meaning from what you have just seen.

The successive sounds are often easy to identify. You can hear (the imitation of) grunting pigs, buzzing mosquitoes, a plane, passing cars and motorbikes (the sound of passing traffic), all kinds of birds, a human scream… Some sounds do not lend themselves to quick categorisation unless you are suddenly inspired to switch interpretative frameworks, to situate the presumed environment, and thus the potential sound source, no longer in a well-known world, but rather associate it with, for example, a noisy war landscape. What Nature Says calls for such a sonorous imagination, for the ability to aurally move about in environments your ears have never directly perceived. This requires you to make use of a personal memory of aural impressions that are totally mediatised. Thanks to film, television, YouTube and other mass media, we know how a dry canon shot or clattering machine gun fire sounds. This second-hand hearing or second-degree listening derives its plausibility from the medial standardisation of sounds.

3.

In our relationship with the world-as-sound, we continually make use of a cultural hearing aid that transforms mere noise into meaningful sounds. You spontaneously order and interpret sounds from your surroundings by placing them in more general categories on the basis of their sources or causes (all culture is second nature). Then there is no longer a sound environment marked by silence or — its opposite — overabundance. Your ears capture human voices, traffic, the hum of a refrigerator or whatnot.

Rudi Laermans

A metamorphosis of sounds into symbols or signifiers, into carriers of known because they are recognised — or at least recognisable — meanings: we always and everywhere transform ‘nature’ into culture, the world into a meaningful environment. This is one of the possible meanings of the title of Van Imschoot’s production.

There is always a residue, even in the merely aural part of What Nature Says. In everyday life you usually ignore this sonorous waste unless it evokes the connotation of ‘possible danger!’. The unheard is not heard because it isn’t supposed to be there. Either it is too well known: insignificant background noise, banal sounds unworthy of attention; or it is unknown: an unclassifiable sound that is able to irritate precisely because it remains unidentifiable (‘what a weird sound!?’). In one of his essays, Walter Benjamin in passing uses the term ‘optical unconscious’ for everything in our seeing that we routinely overlook, find visually repelling or repress because it could disrupt our normal ‘scopic field’ or flood it with too many visual stimuli. However, there is also an aural unconscious that is closely related to the distinction between the heard and unheard.

Jacques Rancière coined the phrase ‘le partage du sensible’ for the anything-but-natural sharing and division — the double meaning of ‘partage’ — between what is or is not perceived within a society. The sharing/division between the legitimately perceivable and the differing, illegitimate residue, determines whether people, things, statements, sounds… are a part of the common or ‘le commun’, or that which is collectively visible or audible that regulates individual perception. What Nature Says calls into question the dominant ‘sharing/division of the audible’. The production implicitly urges a reordering of this and thus alludes to a possible politics of ‘the audible’. Noise pollution has been a public issue for some time now, but this negative attitude does not immediately provide the basis sought for a different, more inclusive politics of sound that redistributes the sharing/division between the heard and the unheard.

43

Sound/voice/imitation

44

4.

At a concert, the experience is usually also audiovisual. You look at the performers on stage who theatricalise the live performance a bit (the classical music conductor) or even strongly and emphatically (the sphere of popular music, within which there are various performance styles corresponding to the different genres). If the relationship between the music and its performance tends toward a physical zero degree, as in the case of laptop concerts, visuals are usually added. As if experiencing the music together is never enough to hold one’s attention, and the sounds themselves are insufficient and therefore unable to create a collective focus.

The listening part of What Nature Says creates a rather unusual, quasi-experimental situation. Aside from the sound engineer, the theatre and the other bodies around you, nothing can be seen. Within the darkened theatre, your gaze falls — partly literally but above all figuratively — into a black hole: nothing is presented to be seen. As a result, the listening bodies do not join together to form a group, and there is also no distinct collective attention.

The near absence of melodious sounds (of rhythms or melodies, however broken or dissonant) and, especially, of food-for-the-eye, makes it hard for the listening bodies to know how to behave: the physical postures assume all possible forms. A snapshot of the slumped, lying or hanging spectators could evoke many things, but probably not the idea of a concert audience. We indeed are not used to listening in a concentrated way to everyday ambient sounds, and at the same time also ‘having nothing to see’.

As if the aural part castrates the gaze and thus ex negativo demonstrates that we need visual stimuli to feel physically comfortable while listening. Listening to your own listening can be physically challenging, and even slightly to very uncomfortable.

Rudi Laermans

5.

We usually hear with our eyes: the visual frames the context for auditive: what we see directs what we hear. There is, however, a crucial limit to the subordination of listening to looking. The range of our ears, after all, extends further and is spatially more comprehensive than that of our eyes.

You can hear what you do not see because, unlike sight, the perception of sounds is not tied to frontal and immediate proximity. In short, sounds can be aurally near and visually remote. Our sonic environment is therefore always potentially more mysterious than the visual: you hear an unfamiliar sound, but you cannot detect the cause. Hence, the possibility of an auratic sound, or a sound aura: a difficult to identify sound that as a mere sound suddenly attracts and holds the attention, however briefly. Auratic sounds are rather rare. This has less to do with the world around us and more to do with to our sensory relationship with it: while listening, we are often intentionally deaf. It appears to be no coincidence that Walter Benjamin, who forged the expression ‘aura’ into a philosophical concept, emphatically limits this essentially topological notion — ‘a distance, however near it may be’ — to the visual.

Every culture creates an aurally meaningful environment or, with a wink to Roland Barthes, a sonorous studium, a set of meaningful — because familiar — sounds, a doxa of acoustic commonplaces. The auratic sound or the sound aura, on the contrary, is of the order of the sonorous punctum: a ‘dissonance’ that cannot be interpreted or localised which briefly fascinates, a non-musical sound that suddenly appeals for a reason you cannot immediately identify. To what does the sound appeal? The world contains dissonances that can be consonant in a way incomprehensible to us: the momentary discovery of ‘the audible’ as potential, of the world as a richness of sound that suddenly singularises into a literally idiotic, meaningless noise.

So why the persistent and pervasive idea, extending across

45

Sound/voice/imitation

46

cultures, that enlightenment and self-knowledge are always a matter of looking (insight), and not also of listening? Of the right images, but not also of the right sounds?

Of other pronouncements about the world, but not also of other compositions with the sounds it offers for free?

6.

The other part of What Nature Says is audiovisual. You hear and you see, and especially: you get to hear and see, a visual and audible effort is made — the fundamental pact of the performing arts. Accompanied by Myriam Van Imschoot — often with microphone in hand — five performers mimic ambient sounds from the world outside, isolating the purely aural part. On rare occasions the performers use mechanical devices to imitate a sound; they more often use other body parts to manipulate the air flows, which in turn are modulated by the larynx via the vocal cords. However, without the air flows, no sound at all would come out of one’s mouth. Hands or an arm in front of the mouth change an already physically produced sound. Similarly, for example, the chest can be beaten while making a sound. Of a totally different order are the relatively numerous moments in which abdominal movements or angular postures influence the air flows in the body — produced and controlled via respiration — and thus directly affect the produced vocal sounds. What Nature Says indeed regularly presents a vocalisation of the total body, one visibly engaged in the making of the sounds in such a manner that these sounds cannot only be attributed to the larynx. You therefore might just as well speak of an emphatic ‘embodiment’ of the voice that visualises a usually scarcely observed dimension in the human voice, dragging it from the background into the foreground. The result can best be described as ‘hear-see-song’. This often has something burlesque about it: slapstick bordering on the grotesque.

Rudi Laermans

Towards the end, in the dramatic juxtaposition of the imitated sounds, there is a sonorous plot that you hear better in the auditive part. A buzzing sound turns into inarticulate, monotonous vocals; then to the sound of a clattering brook is added the echo, first of a single voice, then multiple voices, that speak a foreign language (it resembles the hyper-fast ritual muttering of a short prayer). The passage does not fracture experience, but creates a reflexive loop between the object and subject of the performance.

Human vocals are imitated, and at the same time — as in most of the other scenes — the voice in this mimesis is also the main instrument. Though this is not entirely true.

The standard vocal microphones and the central, hypersensitive MS microphone pick up the sounds made, which the sound engineer — in the other, temporally coincident part — mixes into a synthesis and sends through a surround sound system. The performers do not hear this final composition: they are, as it were, deaf to how their work sounds elsewhere. Apart from tweaking by the sound engineer and the placement of the speakers in the listening part, this auditory inability has much to do with the autonomy of the technical artefacts that mediate the actions of the performers and the final result. The microphones, in particular the central MS microphone, capture sonorous details that escape human hearing. They are, so to speak, the better listeners: as is often the case, here again technical artefacts give the merely human impression of (aural) realism a hyperreal surplus. This surplus audibility can be heard even better in the listening part. Thus two different sonic landscapes correspond with the two parts of What Nature Says. In the audiovisual part, the performers share their proverbial deafness with the audience; and the ‘aural enlightenment’ experienced by the audience in the listening part is above all a technological one. The production thus indirectly honours the specific capacity of ‘mute’ artefacts, to make — as quasi-subjects — a difference in the human world.

47

Sound/voice/imitation

48

7.

Time and again the voice is situated at the bewitched intersection of materiality and post-materiality. Slavoj Žižek grants it a ‘spectral autonomy’ with respect to the body, and in A Voice and Nothing More, Mladen Dolar speaks of a plus-de-corps: the voice is more-than and no-longer body. It links the body with something else, a je ne sais pas quoi that is difficult to gauge using the diverse notions with which we describe the different modalities of ‘being’ (such as substance or matter, or also consciousness).

Roland Barthes, in his famous essay on ‘The Grain of the Voice’, which treats the singing voice, also uses a variant of this tenacious cliché. The hyper-trained singing celebrates the paradox that controlled physical activity — via breathing and the larynx — results in a series of euphonic sounds that are totally non-physical (‘heavenly’, ‘unearthly’… ).

Barthes’ preference on the other hand is for a voice like that of baritone Charles Panzera, one that to some degree breaks through the musical studium and in which a physicality (foreign to the studium) still resonates. ‘The “grain” is the body in the voice that sings’, writes Barthes — but that merely confirms that the singing voice preferred by him is also an uncanny interface or, in logical terms, a remarkable disjunctive conjunction of materiality and post-materiality.

The seemingly paradoxical nature of the voice is based on a fallacy. The physical voice, which is actually a combination of several organs within the vocal body, is considered equivalent to the sounds emitted. This is not logical (a cause is different from the effect produced), and seen physically, it also falls short. After all, the sounds heard are a matter of air vibrations and are therefore always also determined by the acoustic properties of the room in which they resound. In short, vocal sounds are outside the body and require the autonomy that characterises all sound. There is therefore nothing strange about the relationship between the human voice and the vocal sounds

Rudi Laermans

it produces. Both quite simply are located in different physical contexts. Both the speaker or singer who identifies with the self-made sounds and the observer who links voice and vocal sounds, are thinking too humanistically.

8.

With ever new metaphors and phrases, in Genèse, Michel Serres encircles the original idea that the world is primarily noise, a disorganised swarm of sounds: Being = audible chaos. The contrasting speculation is much older and says that there exists a music of the celestial spheres. Behind (or in) the jumble of sensory impressions is hidden a fixed cosmological pattern, an eternal structure that in essence is organised sound: Being = listenable music. Either mere sound, or euphony: either sounds and nothing more, or sound patterns. What Nature Says pursues the noise option and stages our environment alternately as noisy buzz and erupting sounds that harass our ears as sonorous projectiles. Noise indeed is not homogeneous, but rather a vibrant and lively mixture: we inhabit an ever-mutable soundscape that is a heterogeneous mix of sounds produced by animals, air movements, technical devices, people… The title of Van Imschoot’s performance suggests that for us moderns (or postmoderns, or hyper-moderns), this hybrid blend is actually our primary sonorous environment.

We have long since surpassed nature, in the traditional sense. The fact that our environment — freely borrowing from Bruno Latour — is a versatile assemblage in which both subjects and objects — not least technical artefacts — possess the ability to act or to make a difference can, above all, be heard. And although a score is missing and in fact the swarm reigns, noise from the environment does not always sound like a sonorous mess or formless mush. ‘Order out of noise’: the literally contingent event of two or more sounds interacting with one another in an unplanned way that instantaneously creates an aural force

49

Sound/voice/imitation

50

field from which a figure briefly emerges, a quasi-form shining through, that could not have been devised. It is precisely these almost-compositions that Van Imschoot has first passively recorded, in order subsequently to select a number of ‘scenes’ from the collected sound corpus and combine these with one another. While her sound montage — or her sound dramaturgy, her composition — is based on the type of appropriation of found material that was the hallmark of the artistic avant-garde, it primarily is of the order of affection: she documents the being affected by intermingling sounds.

What Nature Says combines two different relationships with the sonorous environment (which also play a role in the distinction between the world-as-noise and the worldas-music). Either you hear passively: you give yourself over to the sounds around you; or you listen actively: you are a knowing and ordering individual focused on underlying motives and relationships. Either primacy of the object, or of the (culturalised) subject: either mimesis or logos.

In What Nature Says, mimesis predominates. Imitating the sounds collected from the world outside as faithfully as possible is the focus of performing, which then also unwittingly recalls the Aristotelian proposition that mimesis is both the beginning and the principle of all art. Especially in the audiovisual part, the performance of the series of onomatopoeic sounds also has a childlike quality, because, in their games, children often take great pleasure in mimicking adults, animals, artefacts… Children’s games, as Walter Benjamin notes in his short essay ‘On the Mimetic Faculty’, are one of the refuges in modernity for the human ability to make oneself equal to one’s surroundings.

At the same time, this ability remains the core of all human experience. Those who experience something, give themselves over and ‘de-subjectivise’: one becomes something or someone else, however briefly, by identifying physically with an ‘outer’. All mimesis, and a fortiori all experience, imparts knowledge through embodiment. In this, ‘sensuous

Rudi Laermans

knowing’ and ‘sensuous Othering’ go hand in hand, notes Michael Taussig in Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses.

9.

Aristotle connects the voice, in the generic sense, with the animalistic. Animals have phoné, they have a voice and can produce sounds that express emotions in a direct way.

People also have this ability, but the human voice, viewed from an Aristotelian perspective, is precisely plus-de-voix, more-than and no-longer voice because it is a compound of phonè and logos: in the meaningful sound, voice and language blend into a new entity that emancipates humankind from the animal. This creates a surplus of accuracy or clarity (logos therefore means both language and reason).

However, the synthesis does not destroy the autonomy of the two constituent elements. In humans, voice and language are not solidly or structurally, but loosely coupled.

We always remain ‘phonetic beings’ who are capable of making meaningless sounds with our voices, may even enjoy doing so, and possibly also succeed in surprising others with these sounds. The voice or, more broadly, the vocal body, was and remains the primordial sound instrument.

In onomatopoeia, the vocal body directly refers to the outside world. It quotes reality, of course in a different medium, but without the intervention of the linguistic or symbolic order. Language strongly structures our thinking as well as, more importantly, human communication and sociability. As such, it also dominates the use of our vocal body. But again this can detach itself from language and become pure phoné, metamorphose into a ‘sound organism’ that either programs itself, or allows itself to be programmed by imitating sounds. Viewed in this way, What Nature Says says something crucial about human nature: our voice is not locked up in ‘the prison-house of language’ (Frederic Jameson).

51

Sound/voice/imitation

52

10.

In the audiovisual part of What Nature Says, a very distinct choreography unfolds. In their imitation of sounds, the performers often assume strange positions and make very unusual gestures. They play their bodies as instruments, which often amounts to physically pulling and dragging themselves. At times it seems as if the sounds produced from the lower layers of the vocal body must be dug up, or that physical boundaries need to be shifted. At the same time, the five performers continually check the distances to each other and the microphones, or they gingerly patter across the floor in an effort to make no unnecessary extra noise. In short, like the tuning of their voices and sequencing of their movements relative to each other, the generated movements are functional. They primarily serve the score and, as such, have no formal or aesthetic autonomy. Yet a choreography unfolds at the same time, but one that is partially unintended, one that was not conceived as such. ‘The choreographic’ in What Nature Says is the direct derivative of a sonic (rather than a musical) orientation, without, however, functioning as mere supplement.

On the contrary: indeed for the viewer-listener, the gestures or poses produced and their sometimes bizarre sequences effectively spin off into a movement text. You are constantly aware of their instrumental character or use, but their visual power or sensory impact does not coincide with this utility. This partly has to do with the often ‘forced’ or physically demanding nature of the movements, causing them to almost automatically draw attention to themselves — to how they are made and to the body-work needed for such. The partially unintended choreography that What Nature Says also is, therefore can literally be called poetic. Its singularity, and also its intensity, lies in doing or making (poiein) movements.

The performers also regularly theatricalise their bodywork, albeit always minimally. An emphatic smile here

Rudi Laermans

that underlines the somewhat crazy position taken; a near-grimace there that gives witness to the physical effort needed to produce a sound. The performers make vocally functional movements, and at the same time they often represent this production. They do not simply do so, but they also exaggerate slightly: their doing is sometimes a ‘making see’. In this way a zone is created in which the movements are at the same time task and gesture, purely purposive and played, directly involving self or body, and aimed at the audience. They thus do not immediately gain expressiveness and expressive power: the subdued theatricality remains too much within the register of imitation.

In the moments when the performers visibly theatricalise movements, they indeed especially mimic physiognomic stereotypes. They briefly appear to be mimes, only to then concentrate fully again — or even to disappear — in the task at hand. Clownishness is the asymptotic boundary to which What Nature Says constantly gravitates but that the performers never transgress.

11.

Each form of imitation is necessarily a failed attempt at complete sameness. ‘The law of identity and difference’ also fully applies to imitation: mimesis succeeds more or less well. In short, the mimetic capacity refers to a being able to resemble, and not to a complete becoming-the-same. Mimesis results in analogies or similarities that are stronger or weaker, never in mere reproductions of perfect copies. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, partly inspired by the reflections of Roger Callois on mimicry, state that for centuries, identifying was the dominant way to control the world. Through the imitation of animals and events in among others collective rituals, people were able to gain power over them precisely because in the process of identification, their strength transferred to the identifying

53

Sound/voice/imitation

54

group. By mimicking a lion for example, people became ‘as strong as a lion’ and could better confront the aggressor.

The question of whether this is a form of magical thinking is not really relevant. What matters most is the combination of passivity and activity. The submission was directed by a ‘will to power’: the imitation was part of a mastering of that which was imitated. Strange dialectic, indeed: the subordination that characterises each act of mimesis, took place with a view to its reversal.

For mimesis not aimed at control — a non-cannibalistic mimesis — Marcel Mauss’s idea of the symbolic exchange, or the exchange of gifts and counter-gifts, is perhaps the best model. You appropriate, for example, a sound from the surroundings (without ever really being able to own it), and you give it back to the world with a voice. The sound is a gift from — let’s assume — the world, and you give yourself over to it: you produce a rendition, in which you at the same time add something (your own voice) and thus also create a counter-gift. ‘When one vocalizes a sound, one gives it to one’s own voice, in order to give it its own voice’, notes Steven Connor in Dumbstruck, his cultural history of ventriloquism. ‘What is initiated in onomatopoeic voicing is the world’s own capacity to give voice, in an enactment of the possibility that things in the world might be being capable of and characterized by speech, and that the sounds of the world might be being uttered by it.’

Of course, someone who mimics the sound of a rattling door does not really give voice to the door. But the act does allude to this possibility — to a world in which things speak because we mimingly cause them to speak in a non-human language. It’s a wonderful idea because it represents the coming together of ambient sounds and the human voice in vocal mimesis as a possible bridging — even a synthesis or reconciliation — of the traditional opposition between object and subject. This is also the silent but ever-present vanishing point of What Nature Says.

56

Ivana Müller is a choreographer stretching the notion of choreography into many different disciplines. She usually works in collaborations, both in the writing and production processes. In this conversation we had she is talking about a performance called We Are Still Watching or more specifically the version she made for the Venice Art Biennale 2015. She addresses not only her own production but also the Biennale and the visual art economy and specificities.

Before reading this conversation I think it would be helpful to have a short description of We Are Still Watching: the audience enters a big stage where chairs have been arranged in a circle (or square actually). The audience is taking their seats as a staff member tells everyone that the people sitting on seats n° 25, 19, 15, 30 will start the performance by reading the text that is under her/his chair.

There will be notes on how to proceed in the text. Then the member of staff leaves and the audience is left alone.

Ivana MĂźller

We are still watching

The background Initially the piece was made for a theatre context and it was a part of a long-term research project that was called Encounters (2011-2012). The idea at first was to investigate the place of theatre as a place of different encounters, a platform for different kinds of dialogues: the one between spectators and performers, between the stage and the back stage, between the text and the image, practice and representation‌ those fundamental relations.

We are still watching

58

The other point of interest in Encounters was the place of the voice, both in theatre and outside of it. What does it mean: to have a voice? What do we represent and how are we represented, both on stage and in society… questions like this.

So before the Venice Biennale, where you saw the performance, We Are Still Watching was performed for around three years in different theatres and festivals.

Okwui Enwezor and Luz Gyalui (curator and assistant curator of the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015) got to know about the performance when it was performed at the Crossing the Line Festival in New York. Venice Biennale is the first and the only visual art context in which the piece has been performed so far. But of course by repositioning it in the context of visual art and more specifically to the Venice Biennale there were some important changes made to the piece. In general, the text of this performance changes and evolves with every new presentation, no matter where it is performed, but even more so in this context.

First of all the references to theatre that existed in the original piece were replaced by references to visual art… specifically the economies within the art market and how that affects the live performance. I don’t know if you remember but in the piece of the Biennale there was a part saying, ‘imagine we are all a work of art… and there is a collector, who buys us… and we have to perform every Thursday afternoon when his guests are coming’.

This, of course didn’t exist in the original version where we spoke more about different economies specific to the theatre and, for example, the questions were more like… do you think the sound of the sea would sound better if we performed this in an opera house…

There were some other structural differences in the two contexts. One of them is time. In the theatre, when people come to see a piece, they buy a ticket and following the theatrical contract, so to speak, they know that they

Ivana MĂźller

will spend an hour or more in the venue watching together, with the others, the same show from the beginning till the end. That is the time they are ready to give for the work to be seen and therefore to exist. That is also the time they want to take in order to have an experience (personal or collective) of the work. The situation of the visual art context is very different.

You know that at the Venice Biennale, and this must be the same in other big exhibitions, I guess, a spectator, I was told, spends on average no more than 30 seconds per work of art. Of course these are only the statistics, but you see what I mean, this is the kind of engagement time people have in a context of an exhibition. Checking it out, more then really looking at it. Especially in the Biennale where there is such a multitude of works.

So for We Are Still Watching I insisted that people really spend an hour doing the piece together and actually, I guess, that became the most political thing about this piece in the Biennale.

The idea was once you decide to engage with it you should stay until the end. And this was clear and transparent for all the participants before they decided to do it.

That was a very challenging condition but somehow it all worked out, as most of the scheduled performances really happened. The piece was performed four days a week, during seven months.

Another very important question for the staging of the piece in Venice was the one of language. We always change the language of the text according to the community that performs the piece. And this is not only connected to the national context. In other words, if we present the performance in Dresden, for example, the text is in German.

But for instance in Berlin we performed it in English, because the community that comes to see the performance there is very international, not everyone reads and understands German.

59

We are still watching

60

So it was important to decide in which language we should perform the piece in Venice. What is the lingua franca of the visitors of Biennale? Or should there not be only one language. English is, obviously, the language of the art community around the world and it was most likely that the majority of the visitors could speak it. On the other hand, it is also an ‘imperialistic’ language of global communication and business, a language that, in some ways, dominates us… which was a less than charming thought.

It was clear that a lot of the people who’d come to visit the exhibition wouldn’t speak English, or at least speak it enough to dare to read it out loud in front of other people, in a public context. This meant that while opting for the English I would exclude those who are not the majority, the linguistic ‘minorities’ so to say… and this was very difficult to accept.

So there was this other possibility to create different versions of the text: Italian, English, German, Arabic, Chinese, etc. and to perform it with different groups of spectators.

But this was even worse. This meant to group people together according to their national background and not give them the possibility to mix with the others. And aside from this, practically it was impossible to make this happen… to find, for example, a minimum of 11 Chinese-speaking spectators at time to do a Chinese version in the middle of August in Central Pavilion of Giardini was a task demanding serious magician skills.

So finally, we opted for English.

You see, this language issue raises a lot of political questions about globalisation, the international art market, the impossibility of doing 100% the right thing once you start dealing with only one linguistic code for everybody, trying to respect their personal traditions at the same time etc.

A lot of these issues I am telling you about are in the text of the Biennale version of the piece… they are addressed directly during the reading.

Ivana Müller

Another structural change to the piece was that I had to lower the minimum number of participants. In the theatre version 20 was the minimum number of people that had to participate in order for the piece to work. In the Biennale version it was 11.

So this means that something in the protocol of the script reading was simplified. And it’s interesting to notice that from all the presentations that took place in the Biennale only two were stopped because one or two people decided to go out and there were less than 11 people in the room so it was not possible to do it anymore. Most of the time people really stayed there and tried to go to the very end. Maybe also because they had the ‘responsibility’ for the entire group, not only for themselves.

It is important to say that a challenging aspect of staging We Are Still Watching in Venice was to set the rules and anticipate all sorts of protocols through which the piece could be performed during those seven months. I was there only in the first week and later on a couple of days here and there. But the rest of the time the piece had to be restaged by the people that worked with the Biennale.

And I have to say that the Venice Biennale is not an institution that is very used to staging performances. Their experience is much more concerned with the display of objects. So there were a lot of negotiations about where to do it and how to do it. At first I wanted it to be in the Arsenale but in the mean time they had constructed an arena in Gardini as the place for all of the performances so it had to be set there, as part of a non-stop programme with many performances from morning to evening.

I had worked with seven young art students from the Academy of Visual Arts in Venice, each of them responsible for the restaging of the piece for one month. They were really amazing. But in the beginning, it was not that obvious. Some of them spoke very basic English and, as you might remember, every time, at the beginning of the

61

We are still watching

62

performance, they had to give an introduction in English to the participating spectators. So we rehearsed. And rehearsed. And rehearsed… And I don’t know how it all went, but I guess that it was fine.

Working with a curator After I was initially contacted and invited most of my communication was with the assisting curator Luz Gyalui. She lives between Paris and New York so we could meet in Paris and she had very interesting thoughts and ideas about the work and we talked a lot about the idea of common and the participation. Then we also talked about all the issues of the display, the language, the content and the amount of times that the piece would be performed.

When we started to work more concretely, a couple of weeks before the opening, I realised that this context was indeed very different from all the working contexts I ever knew before. For example, for the setting of the performance in the space we had only a couple of hours because there were so many other artists that needed the same space.

There was no time possible or no planned time, I don’t know, to really try things out. It all had to work out from the first go. So it was quite nerve-racking in all. The first time we saw the real installation of the set in the space was during the opening, when spectators were performing.

The economy Ah, this was also very different. In theatre, whenever you present your work you get a fee. Not only because you are physically there but also because your ideas are ‘being performed’. This is not the case in visual arts contexts, where the economy is still based on the tradition of displaying objects… and not ideas. Which, of course, in reality changed a long time ago. I have many colleagues that do

Ivana Müller

performance work in museums and I know that these issues are being addressed and changing slowly, but there’s still a very particular idea of the value of work in the visual art context and the economy related to it. Of course in my piece there are no performers, it’s the spectators that are the performers and of course they are not expecting a payment… in fact they are paying to perform. But still, for me it’s disturbing that as a visual artist you don’t get a fee when you display your ideas in the public space… and that this is considered as normal.

I guess, in that sense, the working context of theatre is more ‘fair trade’: nobody ever got rich in the public theatre, but everybody gets paid a little bit.

The choreography in all this We Are Still Watching functions also on the level of a gathering… it’s a mini event. I clearly made it through my choreographic practice, with the choreographic tools that I always use. The way I treat language, for example, is very different from the theatre traditions, which are dealing more with a certain psychologisation of the characters or trying to tell a story. I think that the different elements that I use in my work are always somehow connected to producing movements in space and time. You know, you can also choreograph and move thoughts and ideas. You don’t necessary have to choreograph legs and arms.

The idea of community and the questions about it also come from my experience as a choreographer. When working on dance or theatre pieces you always work with the others, you work collectively, within a community; the idea of commonality is really essential in this practice, almost on a daily basis. It’s not something I think about consciously all the time, but I guess I create from those practices and experiences. It’s my background and I naturally relate to that as an artist.

63

We are still watching

64

Developing a piece As most of my pieces, We Are Still Watching was created collectively. First of all I asked three other colleagues and friends to work with me on the writing of the text: Andrea Bozic, Jonas Rutgeerts and David Weber Krebs. I had quite a clear concept of the piece to start with, but I realised that for the writing of the specific text it was very important to hear different voices during the creation and consequently resonating in the final version. This piece would have been very different if I had written it by myself.

The challenging and exciting part of the work was to anticipate all those different people who would read the text. We couldn’t know if a specific line would be read by a man or a woman, if it would be a known person or a totally anonymous spectator. So it was nice to have between the four of us some kind of idea about a ‘possible community’ helped by the very physical quality of each of our voices.

This became a very rich process; when you have four people around the table multiplying every point of view and input. This multifaceted way of working, having different voices tuning into a ‘music’ that they can create together, has always interested me.

Eventually when we had the first draft we did readings with friends so we could see how the material behaved.

That was another level of ‘collaboration’.

For me, the idea of a spectator is present and important, from the beginning of the creating process till the end.

In the beginning I am, I guess, the spectator for whom I am performing; I perform for my critical and excited mind, I am me trying to convince myself, that a certain idea is strong enough to be developed into a concept, and the concept into a work. The next spectators in the process are the people I talk to often, friends, and collaborators.

Their gaze will be essential in the development of a work.

And then the next ones are the people you have to convince in order to get the money. Then the rehearsal starts

Ivana MĂźller

and a new set of spectators arrive: friends and colleagues that will comment on the finished work. And then finally the premiere comes and the work is exposed to the ‘real’ spectators. And all of those different spectators collaborate on the piece.

So going back to the writing process of We Are Still Watching, in many ways you can say that the piece is continuously written and performed through collaborative processes. Even though in my case it is very clear from the beginning that I will have to make the decision about the final form and carry that responsibility. So I prepare the frame and ask people to contribute.

Documentation We Are Still Watching has actually never been documented in the usual way, using video or audio documentation. The only visual documents that exist are from a performance that was made with people who attended specifically to be photographed/videotaped. And I never wanted to make a video document of the piece because it is really an ephemeral experience of a momentary community. And the people attending the performance most of the time are not performers so they are even more sensitive to the presence of a camera in the space. The idea that you could be watched by someone who is not participating in the show and is not present in the same space betrays the very contract that this performance proposes; we are alone in the space and whatever happens here is only shared between us and remembered by us. And then there is of course the question of the rights of the images that would force us to ask every single person for the rights of reproducing the images they appear in. There are, of course, on the internet images and short videos that people have made themselves during the performances in different places. In Venice there were television companies that wanted to document parts of the show and me refusing was a

65

We are still watching

66

big surprise for them. It almost became a problem. They simply couldn’t understand. A nice thing however in Venice was how the complicity was played out between people who participated in the performance. Usually, when we perform the piece in theatres we always have a talk afterwards with the spectators, and those who wish can stay and talk about their experiences and ask questions about the piece. After all, it is not a very common event in life, to perform a piece with 50 strangers. This talk couldn’t be organised in Venice but people recognised each other when visiting the rest of the exhibition, and some of them started to talk to each other spontaneously.

About participation This whole idea of participation is very complicated.

It’s not an easy topic to talk about because it depends so much on the situation and the context and it is also a topic that has been so polluted by fashionable social politics… so to be honest, it’s a slippery slope.

I must say that before working on We Are Still Watching I really hated participatory theatre. Very often the ‘participatory’ pieces I have seen were quite problematic. They often proposed performative structures in which a group of ‘rehearsed professionals’ asked a group of ‘non-rehearsed amateurs’ or so called ‘real people’ to take part and execute a dramaturgy that was imposed and unknown to them. And this is very similar to how all of the power structures (media, government, markets) organise ‘participation’. So most of the time, when watching those who ‘participate’ around you, you start to think about problems of stage fear, amateurism and so on, problems that are not very interesting really. And often you ask: why? So one very important proposition of We Are Still Watching is that during the performance there are no authorities present in the space: no author, no rehearsed performers, and no technicians… All of the people present in the space are

Ivana Müller

on the same level. Everybody is reading the script for the first time, everybody is reading badly and everybody is in the same situation. And people have a lot of space and time to reflect upon the actions they want to take or not.

And if they want they can leave. If they don’t want to read they don’t have to (although this is very difficult to do with everybody around you expecting you to do it). The whole piece is actually questioning the idea of participation.

Of course when you do this kind of project you run the risk of creating a paradigm that does exactly the same as the paradigm you want to criticise.

I hope however there is space in this piece that goes beyond that, for example the idea of the ‘author’ changes thought out the piece… and there are moments at which one can ask: who is in fact writing this piece?

This all depends on the community that performs the piece. It’s a different type of event every time, depending on the energy of people, the synergy between them, the kind of presences that certain voices within the community have, whether they know each other or not…

I think a lot of work today, especially in the museums, is being done for the spectator, so the spectator can feel that he or she is participating or being close to where the performers are, that he or she is being immersed within the work. For me this is very problematic. There is a certain process happening that could be seen as turning the museum into entertainment parks and I think this is dangerous because some fundamental relationships might be put into question. It is true that today a spectator has to work a lot. It’s like you negate the fact that the spectator is already engaged in the work when they are simply watching it. I think it is good to question and challenge the institutions but not necessarily to produce a simulacrum of ‘togetherness’. I think that often in all this, the role of the spectator has been underestimated.

67

68

Laura Luise Schultz is expanding the field between theatre and performance in her research on avant-garde and contemporary art and theatre. At a conference a few years ago she described how, as a historian of avant-garde theatre, she feels an obligation to develop a feminist approach in her research and draw attention to neglected female artists and feminist perspectives in art and theatre. Laura’s work as an associate professor in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Copenhagen has always focused on how to activate history. This is also what makes her a unique and knowledgeable voice in contemporary criticism and writing.

Laura Luise Schultz

A theatre of shared space, and the right to a place in society

Rethinking art institutions as public spaces for action and negotiation requires that we actively address the power relations that are always present in a collective space and are structuring and delimiting every interaction that takes place in that common space. Even if we want to question and redefine existing power structures, we need to acknowledge their presence and take them into account when trying to act differently.

A utopian strategy of trying to install a space completely devoid of any preconceived or pre-existing power structures seems to me a dangerously naĂŻve approach

A theatre of shared space

70

that will, paradoxically and in direct opposition to the intention, only cause us to relapse into the most basic and primitive power structures, for example those defined by gender and social capital, or even by perseverance and self-confidence.

Theatre as a public space for negotiation and direct address We usually praise the physical presence of the theatre and the direct contact and exchange between actors and audience, which this presence makes possible. Since the 1990s, theatre artists have increasingly explored participatory and interactive formats, precisely challenging the conventional division between stage and house, actors and audience, in an attempt to reactivate and explore theatres as common and public spaces.

It is rare, however, that a conventional theatre performance concludes in a direct address to a politician, who happens to be present at the performance, as it happened recently when on Friday 18 November 2016 the cast of the Broadway musical Hamilton addressed vice president-elect, Mike Pence.

Ironically, that Friday afternoon I had insisted in a discussion with my first year students that art is a mode of thought and a public discourse that negotiates whose experiences are recognised in society, and whose are not — in short, negotiating the distribution of the sensible, as Jacques Rancière would have it. Theatre takes part in this public exchange and locates it in buildings that traditionally provide a specific kind of highly ritualised public space.

As such, and as recognised by artists and thinkers from ancient Greece and up until today, theatre provides a certain kind of public space for what is ultimately an ongoing battle over the right to a place in society: whose experiences and actions are legitimate, and whose utterances are offensive to moral or judicial law.1

Laura Luise Scultz

At the same time, theatre is of course itself a social space that sanctions social status and power structures.

As men of power have always been well aware, from Plato to Schiller and modern day politicians, theatres are spaces where power is not only debated, but also exercised and paraded. Where Plato wanted to expel the poets from his perfect state, later philosophers like Schiller wanted to educate the people in the theatre — whereas the eighteenth-century nobility simply wanted to show off and were sometimes even seated on stage during performance, when they were not partying in the boxes.2

The fourth wall and direct address in the theatre The morning after our discussion in class on theatre as public space, I woke up to the Guardian’s story of how the cast of the musical Hamilton at Broadway’s Richard Rogers Theatre during curtain call after Friday night’s performance had addressed US vice president-elect Mike Pence, who was present in the audience. If it seems appropriate enough for a coming vice president to attend a performance about an American founding father, it nevertheless seems strange for someone like Pence, who stands for conservative bigotry and violation of gay rights, to visit a hip-hop musical where the cast is ‘pointedly diverse’ as the Guardian phrased it, starring actors of different ‘colours, creeds and orientations’ as they themselves phrased it in their address to Pence.3 While the audience booed the VP elect, actor Brandon Victor Dixon insisted that ‘there is nothing to boo here, ladies and gentlemen, we are sharing a story of love’ and continued: ‘vice president-elect Pence, we welcome you here, and we truly thank you for joining us here at Hamilton — An American Musical, we really do. We sir, we are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents, or defend us and uphold our

71

A theatre of shared space

72

inalienable rights. We hope this show has inspired you to uphold our American values, and work on behalf of all of us. All of us. We truly thank you for sharing this show, this wonderful American story, told by a diverse group of men and women of different colors, creeds and orientations’. 4 This was not exactly what I had in mind on Friday afternoon when I was teaching, but it was nevertheless a surprisingly substantial reminder that theatre is indeed a public space, which may be activated and reactivated in spite of the extremely strict conventions of this space, including the division between stage and audience by an invisible fourth wall. Later that Saturday, Donald Trump, hate preacher par excellence, created laughter and incredulity on social media with his demand for an apology from the cast of Hamilton, and his strange allegations that the cast had been harassing Pence, and that ‘The Theater must always be a safe and special place.’5 As one witty soul posted on twitter: ‘Donald Trump is so mad at theatre he’s building a fourth wall.’6 Now, here is one wall, Trump does not need to make the Mexicans pay for, since it was of course the ever-present fourth wall in the theatre that the cast of Hamilton so idealistically chose to stick their necks through that Friday night during curtain call — which in any case is the one brief moment where the fourth wall is momentarily perforated for a highly ritualised mutual recognition between actors and audience of the presence of each other. But despite all the attacks on it through time, even successful ones, the fourth wall is still standing, and this is precisely what makes the speech of the Hamilton cast so interesting.

It is rare, these days to experience a theatre stage used to directly address a politician the way we saw Dixon and the united cast of Hamilton address Pence.7 Despite theatre practitioners’ and scholars’ recurrent claims about theatre’s direct contact with the audience, its ability to act and react fast to political and public issues, and their stressing the directness and presence of theatre,

Laura Luise Scultz

we actually seldom see this kind of direct address. It is strange, in a sense, that the fourth wall is still that solid, since relational aesthetics and interactive practices have defined both visual arts and theatre since the 1990s, and of course Bertolt Brecht and the avant-gardes have attacked the fourth wall for the last 100 years.

A postdramatic theatre of shared space According to Hans-Thies Lehmann, it is even one of the main characteristics of postdramatic theatre that it is a theatre of shared space — a theatre that challenges the fourth wall and stresses the fact that not only the artist, but certainly also the audience is present, and they are present in the same space, a shared space, which is a real space, that Lehmann calls das TheatReale. With different postdramatic or relational varieties of community theatre, interactive theatre, conversation pieces, etc., artists have insisted on the reality of the theatre space as a common and shared space, breaking down the fourth wall between actors and audience, stage and house, fiction and reality. Yet still the fourth wall works as a discursive structure, governing everything that takes place in a theatrical space.

Some artists have gone even further and questioned the basic structures of theatre: not only the idea of performance as an organic work of art, self-contained and separate from external realities, but also the architectural structures and financial systems that support this concept of art as a work — rather than for example just work, labour. For that is of course the function of the fourth wall: to turn a time-based, performative art form into a commodity that may be paid for. Almost like a solid object, a work is a thing that may be clearly distinguished from its surrounding reality.

So when artists try using the theatre space in different ways, and for different formats than the classic two-hour performance, they must necessarily address and expose

73

A theatre of shared space

74

the discursive structures governing the theatre space at their concrete, material foundations. It might be a simple gimmick like opening the doors to the street or to the back stage areas in order to make the audience aware of how the building works as a frame, governing the expression on stage, literally dividing the space into what we see and what we do not see. Thus exposing the building’s different functions also means drawing attention to invisible labour behind the stage and different groups of staff — like Frank Castorf’s use of the Volksbühne choir of workers from the canteen, the offices and the workshops in his performance of Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger. Or like Joachim Hamou’s bringing on stage a group of asylum seekers, he is currently working with, who drift in from a backstage kitchen that is made visible through an open door during the second act of Gertrude Stein’s What Happened. In this performance, Hamou also introduced a lawyer discussing copyright issues with regards to the production’s faithfulness to Stein’s text, thus stressing both the material, architectural as well as the legal conditions for the performance.

And of course it may also mean literally using the theatre space and performance time for public exchange — for example to share information on where to gather free food in urban areas, and how to prepare it, as in Hamou’s section of the collective performance Project Farming on Danish agriculture (called LAND). Or inviting real farmers to answer questions from the audience, as in Christian Lollike’s part of the same production.8 What is significant for strategies like these is that they draw attention to the material and discursive conditions for a theatrical work, thus actually challenging the whole concept of the theatre performance as an organic work of art distinct from sociopolitical realities, as demonstrated in the conventional obfuscation of the technical and physical labour involved in the production. These relational strategies even threaten to challenge not simply the fourth wall, but the basic unit of theatre, the format of the

Laura Luise Scultz

performance as an entity, a work, and a separate object in space and time.

Significantly, in her otherwise favourable review of Project Farming, one of the most competent contemporary Danish theatre critics, Monna Dithmer, remarked that Hamou’s room for shared experience on urban gardening and foraging was too unfocused. However, Hamou’s ‘room’ was actually a very elaborate programme of talks, actions and workshops involving experts on the farming industry, food waste and water ecology, among others. What the audience experienced during the performance in the evening was only a small part of this huge effort to actually connect in a very direct way to the industries involved in the field of farming in its broadest sense. No doubt, parts of the audience did not immediately recognise it as theatre, because it did not comply with the usual formats of theatrical performance. Where we could immediately sympathise with the individual farmers on stage trying to make their farms pay, Hamou widened the scope to the complexities of food industries and environmental sustainability, thus providing a more complicated discursive opening of the theatre towards a sociopolitical context.9 But Hamou not only opened the discursive field of theatre towards different social spheres of economy and politics, he also opened the concrete space of theatre for new ways of engaging with an audience in a more open-ended and less preconceived way. Norwegian theatre professor Knut Ove Arntzen calls it ambient theatre, this approach to theatre as a shared space, where the artist provides an environment for being together, a space where attention is decentred rather than centred around one main action or focal point. Ambient theatre may be difficult to recognise as theatre, because its political attitude lies in this challenge to the strong one-point perspective traditionally cultivated in Western theatre.

75

A theatre of shared space

76

A theatre of potentiality In his article ‘Theatre of Potentiality. Communicability and the Political in Contemporary Performance Practice’ German theatre professor Nikolaus Müller-Schöll refers to Jean-Luc Godard’s distinction between political films and films produced in a political way. Applying Godard’s distinction on theatre, Müller-Schöll argues that political theatre accepts and reproduces Western theatre’s institutionalised conventions, and thereby its inherited ideological legacy; whereas theatre produced in a political way consistently questions these very conventions, including the whole Western order of representation with its dominant phallogocentrism. Turning to Walter Benjamin, Müller-Schöll further defines this questioning as an insistence on the mediality or theatricality of any utterance.

The conventional ‘realism of cinematic narration’ tries to smooth out or cover up the very act of representing, including those moments of non-performing that always interfere with any performance. These moments are covered up in favour of an illusion of pure presence. As opposed to this smooth, Hollywood-style illusion, theatre produced in a political way actively draws attention to the sharing of space, language and time, since it is this sharing of the material conditions of communication that provides the disturbances and interferences, which inevitably open up representation towards the Other — that which can never be completely controlled in communication and transmission. Müller-Schöll offers several exemplary cases of different ways to draw attention to the act of representation itself, including: questioning ‘the architectural frame of the theatre and thus the manipulation of the spectator’s gaze’ as in Wanda Golonka’s production of Sarah Kane’s 4:48 Psychosis; ‘exploring the division of any medium in itself’ by creating a ‘tension between the semantical and the lexical or rhetorical level of the spoken language’ as in Laurent Chétouane’s production of the same play; and

Laura Luise Scultz

finally by ‘exploring time’ as in Theaterkombinat’s 36-hour presentation Massakermykene, where the theatre is ‘both infinitely dissolved and extended’. Müller-Schöll concludes that this theatre of shared space is a theatre of potentiality, a theatre that inevitably points to what cannot become actual but ‘stands within the shared time for another time which will never be present’.

Responsibility and power in a shared space The political for Müller-Schöll seems to be the ability to recognise within the theatrical metaphysics of presence and community that which is absent — that which we cannot represent. He emphasises that the absent can only make itself present as potentiality, as a self-reflective exploration of the medium itself, of sharing as such: ‘Conceptualized as being-with, as the shared being, what is common in any “we” is thought of as irreducibly ambiguous, never present, never representable.’ (Müller-Schöll, 2004). According to Müller-Schöll, alterity can only be addressed as ambiguity, as the interferences within the medium itself of the different layers of materiality and representation; and as the interferences within a shared space, time and language between participants reflecting critically on the present conditions of sharing and ‘being together with’.10 This is why collaborative or participatory art is not simply a question of providing a space for interaction. It is rather a question of orchestrating the sharing of that space. How is it possible to create an environment where people engage critically as well as equally?

In order to create a truly democratic space, where divergent voices, including the timid ones, are actually heard on equal terms, if perhaps not in unison or even in equal measure, the artist must take responsibility for the division and sharing of the space, both literally and on a discursive level.

77

A theatre of shared space

78

This is the value of the ambient performance space created for example by German theatre and film-maker Thomas Martius in Las Venice, a collaborative work that he did with his former professor at the school of Applied Theatre Research in Giessen, Andrzej Wirth. Thomas Martius visited Wirth in the sinking laguna city of Venice, Italy, and they formed the idea of doing a project on Venice, Italy and The Venetian, a casino hotel in Las Vegas, built as a replica of Venice, Italy. What they explore through the touristic medium of the video camera is actually how the two cities merge as equally authentic or in-authentic installations that both cast the visitors in a certain role as actor-spectators, whom Wirth and Martius call ‘vactors’.

They explore how the hand gestures of the tourists change with the (at that time) new digital cameras, how everybody watches themselves see, how they themselves as artists are reflected and mirrored in endless rows of windows while recording the others watching, visiting and acting.

I saw the work performed as an essayistic performance in Copenhagen in 2005, where the films were projected in an over-layered way on the walls of the performance space, while Wirth and Martius were sitting in the midst of the projection, conversing with each other and the audience on the topics of acting, looking, watching. It was ambient theatre, signified by a very relaxed and improvised performer attitude, but it was also a critical project conducted in a very democratic vein, where the live dialogue between audience and performers was superimposed on the recorded voices of the performers and ‘vactors’, while everybody present in the room was in turn inscribed into the projected film.

Similarly, in his project UIP27, Joachim Hamou provides a complex negotiation of the intermediality of the medium itself that Müller-Schöll implies in his insistence on the complex interferences between the layers of the shared space. UIP stands for ‘United Israel Palestine’ and the film is set in a future scenario where the conflict is

Laura Luise Scultz

administered by an international UN-led court. Based on a series of public debates, and involving several experts on the topic as well as professional actors, the film explores the contrast between the legal system and the personal motivations of families involved in conflicts over the land.

By superimposing the different media of film and theatre, different levels of fiction and reality, combining actors and everyday experts, and different formats of production and presentation, Hamou creates an extremely dense space, an open-ended performance, where new possibilities and unexpected meanings and meetings may emerge.

This is a radically democratic space, where the different voices and inputs of the participants are heard through the scripted parts of the performance. The complexity is reached by means of a low-key, somewhat understated approach from the artist, who precisely by listening and taking responsibility for the organisation is able to make everybody responsible for a work that is truly political, not only in its content or form or approach to the theatre, but in its very organisation and conception.

79

A theatre of shared space

80

Notes 1 In his treatise on the Attic tragedy, Tragedie og bystat, Christian Dahl argues that the Greek tragedies precisely negotiate the conflicts between the exclusive polis, consisting of free men participating in the political and judicial processes of democracy taking place in the public sphere, and the inclusive polis, including all the other subjects living in polis without any democratic rights: women, slaves, and children, whose lives are usually confined to oikos, the private sphere. In the tragedies, conflicts arise when these two spheres collide, typically when women interfere with public matters — like when Medea kills both the royal family and her own children after being deserted by her husband Jason for the young princess, and subsequently banished into exile by the king.

Thus, Jason’s messy love life destroys political stability, but the conflict is not simply about love and betrayal, but about survival and the threat of deportation faced by Medea and her children.

2 See for example Larry Shiner’s chapter ‘From Taste to Aesthetics’ for a humorous presentation of how an eighteenth-century audience had to be taught the right attitude towards art. The new bourgeoisie must learn to demonstrate the correct sentiment an intimate but unaffected attitude towards art — as opposed to a false reaction of wildly gesticulating affectation.

3 cf: Joanna Walters, Joanna: ‘Trump demands apology from Hamilton cast after Mike Pence booed’ www.theguardian. com/us-news/2016/nov/19/mike-pence-booed-athamilton-performance-then-hears-diversity-plea

4 Washington Post: www.washingtonpost.com/news/artsand-entertainment/wp/2016/11/21/hamilton-actoron-the-casts-speech-for-pence-theres-nothing-toapologize-for/?utm_term=.e65d969f28a1

5 Donald Trump on twitter, quoted after the Guardian: www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/nov/21/hamiltonactor-defends-speech-mike-pence-donald-trump

6 President Goodtime, 20 November 2016: https://mobile. twitter.com/SethGoodtime/status/800406880661209088

7 Which is surprising, by the way, since politicians regularly use theatre as a public space to demonstrate their good breeding and exhibit their cultural capital, one of the oldest functions of theatre as a social space.

8 Project Farming, Caféteatret, Copenhagen, 3–31 March 2012.

Laura Luise Scultz

9 It is clear that in many contemporary forms of politically engaged theatre, activites, which were previously considered to be research conducted prior to the realisation of the real work, i.e. the performance, increasingly need to be included as central parts of the work itself. As such, the performance becomes only one small part of a larger work or net-work that manifests itself in many different actions, processes and events —and in different venues and spaces. Experiments made during daytime seminars may be as important as the presentation of the results in the evening’s performance.

10 Müller-Schöll borrows this sense of ‘being together with’ from Jean-Luc Nancy (Müller-Schöll, 2004).

References

Arntzen, Knut O., Det marginale teater, Laksevåg, Alvheim og Eide akademisk forlag, 2007.

Bishop, Claire, ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, October, N° 110, 2004.

Dahl, Christian, Tragedie og bystat, Copenhagen, Museum Tusculanum Forlag, 2010.

Dithmer, Monna, ‘Jeg en gæld mig bygge vil’, Politiken, 5 March 2012.

Jackson, Shannon, ‘What is the “social” in social practice?

Comparing experiments in performance’, The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Lehmann, Hans-Thies, Postdramatisches Theater, Frankfurt, Verlag der Autoren, 1999.

Martius, Larry, Las Venice, http://lasvenice.de/lasvenice/about

Müller-Schöll, Nikolaus, ‘Theatre of Potentiality.

Communicability and the Political in Contemporary Performance Practice’, Theatre Research International, Vol. 29, N° 1, pp. 42-56, 2004.

Rancière, Jacques, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, London, Continuum, 2004.

Shiner, Larry, ‘From Taste to the Aesthetic’, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2001.

81

82

Signe Frederiksen is a visual artist whose work is primarily performance and textbased. She assisted me throughout the process of my research and production of the film that we are talking about here.

It’s not fun writing about oneself but a short introduction could be; Joachim Hamou is working mostly with film and performance, based on longer collaborative processes with a social agenda.

For a better understanding of the following conversation I think it’s important to give a quick summary of the film: ‘UIP27 is staging a courtroom drama in a near future in Israel/Palestine. The whole territory is now occupied by the United Nations who have implemented an inter­ national truth and reconciliation process.

The different protagonists in the courtroom are all trying to adapt to the new order.

But violence and difference is thriving and the international crew is feeling increasingly displaced while they are at the same time producing a new colonial hegemony.’

Signe Frederiksen and Joachim Hamou

UIP27

Signe: In order to prepare for this conversation, I rewatched your film, UIP27, and I was reminded of the experience of making it. I guess I mostly thought about the process — we will get back to talking about the film — but I was so involved in the realisation of it that this is what comes first. For me it was a rather important experience. There were a lot of unexpected and improvised situations, and a great deal of innovative solutions. Of course this was, to a certain extent, due to the economic reality of the project.

But I also felt that it was part of a strategy or methodology, which was rather inspiring. For instance, I feel a kind of

UIP27

84

ownership towards the project, and I think that many of the other people involved felt the same. It was a way of working that made people feel engaged, and you, as the director, were also very receptive to people’s input. Maybe I am also impressed by this working method, because I come from more of a visual arts context, where it’s usually the artist working and deciding alone. I imagine that in the theatre, maybe there is a tradition of openness towards collective work. Joachim: From what I know of the theatre the way of working is different because people have very specific functions. There are actors, scenographers, technicians, audience hosts, costume designers, hairdressers, etc. And all these different functions have to work together. But at the same time you have a kind of vertical communication: the author provides the ‘raw material’, which is then interpreted by the director and then communicated on to the actors that eventually communicate the play to the audience. This vertical communication reminds me of trickle down economy, and I don’t think it is very interesting. But what does work within the theatre is that all these functions are integral and this is a good context for collaborations. I think that the completely ‘open’ room that people fantasise about, especially within the art scene, is a very bad starting point for an exchange. First of all there is no given reason for being there, and then you are suddenly asked to ‘do’ or ‘mean’ something, which mostly just creates anxiety. So you end up having the same people, the most confident in the group, communicating all the time. I think if one has to collaborate it’s important to know from which position one is participating. Signe: I guess I was wondering if there was a method to begin with? For me, in the beginning it felt like a rather confusing production, but as we went along I saw that things somehow worked out and that there were a lot of unforeseen merits to the involvement of lots of people. So, I guess I was thinking that this is a way of working you developed through previous projects? Joachim: In relation to

S. Frederiksen and J. Hamou

actors, I have worked a lot with improvisation, which has been a rather wild experience. The interesting thing is how improvisations can be a great source for generating material that can be used in the performance. So I have great faith in processes that are more or less improvised, because they provide a lot of opportunities and material. As long as there is mutual trust and no judgment towards what is being done, the opportunities are endless. The exciting thing about working with actors is also their access to a psychological register. This was something I was really looking for in connection to the film. We know the conflict; I mean the territorial and colonial conflict in Palestine and Israel. We already have examples, stories and the testimonies, which are also in the film. But it’s the psychological dimension that we don’t seem to grasp. Signe: Yes, in a way the film is about the relationship between the juridical dimension and the personal experience, or the relation between the political and the personal involvement, you could say. I think the structure of the film shows this too.

The main story is the court case, but then there are several parallel stories in which we follow the characters present in the court. Joachim: I like it when you enter a public space as orchestrated as the courtroom is, but it then ends up just being a container for all the personal stories and life experiences. Signe: The film being made was one thing and I could imagine what it would look like eventually. But at the same time there was the production, which was also played out in front of an audience. I am talking about the debates and public film recordings. It created a state of constant negotiation that I think is also a part of the final result, if one considers the film being the final product. Joachim: I totally agree and I thought it was a very interesting dimension. How the live events that were recorded for the film, had a strong impact on the actors’ way of playing. I think one can sense that the actors are addressing an audience rather than a camera. It made me think of something I read about Rainer Werner

85

UIP27

86

Fassbinder’s way of directing; he asked the actor not to illustrate a king, for example, but rather to illustrate how the actor imagines that a poor person would illustrate a king. So the actor has to play on a superficial idea, which creates a flatness, which then again is being filled with the actor’s intentions and reactions. In this way the characters are both stereotyped but also more vulnerable. So, if we go back to the film, in some of the close-ups, one can see that the actors are performing for someone beyond the camera, they are talking a bit to loud, etc. Signe: There is a kind of double orientation, towards the camera and the audience. But then again, the audience is also aware of their position as an audience of a film production that in itself is a performance. This constant shift in focus opened up another awareness, as I also started to observe everything very attentively. Like some of the conversations backstage for instance, they also became a part of the event. I mean, my awareness was really heightened. Joachim: Do you have an example? Signe: Some actors for instance had personal stories that somehow reflected the narrative of the film, directly or indirectly. For instance, when Richard Shusterman was talking with Nasreen Aljanabi Larsson about her father. Nasreen’s father had been a fighter in the Palestinian resistance, and he could have been one of Shusterman’s subjects. They would also have been practically the same age. So some of the people involved could relate directly to the conflict, whilst others like Anders Mossling or myself were perhaps more distant observers. People got involved in the project and also had to submerge themselves in the material. These situations aren’t part of the film, but they were an important part of the project. Joachim: Some people have said that they miss this dimension in the film, that I should have documented this social and political aspect of the production of the film. Maybe it could have been interesting, but I also believed that this would be apparent in one way or another, that the process would leave some marks on the film.

S. Frederiksen and J. Hamou

And I don’t think the film would have ended up as it did, if it wasn’t for the process. I mean, we didn’t film in a studio.

The court case scenes were filmed at the theatre Inkonst in Malmö and it was programmed as part of the exhibition Society Acts at the Moderna Museum Malmö. Likewise, in Brest, we built a set directly inside Passerelle Centre d’art contemporain. Here the recordings were also programmed as public events, and the set was part of an exhibition at the art centre. To expose the recordings as a public event also put me in a performative situation. I’m quite used to the position, with the kinds of project I regularly do, where I’m both host and subject. I like this position actually, which is about creating coherence in the space. But it was actually a difficult task in these institutions, because the spaces are so big and people have a tendency to observe from as far away as possible. And then of course there were so many other things to handle with the recordings.

Retrospectively I think that there should have been someone else, who had the role of being the host. Signe: One of the things that has also made it through to the film is how you can see beyond the sets, the actual space we are recording in, the walls of the art centre or the empty seats in the theatre, for example. I think the set design was an important player, with its very obviously theatrical aspect. This is also emphasised by the fact that in the film we only see ’reality’ once, in Tel Aviv in the very last scene.

What were your thoughts about this? Joachim: Well, that brings me back to the very beginning of the project. It was in 2007 when I was visiting Israel and Palestine. I started to think about the territorial conflict as a separate narrative, as a fiction. Back then I wrote a play called Post-Holocaust, inspired by Berthold Brecht’s learning plays. It came out of a 10-day trip to the West Bank. People saw me taking notes and began to give me advice of who to talk to and where to go. I followed the advice and it more or less took me around the whole West Bank. In Brecht’s learning plays the situation is always a moral dilemma that one can

87

UIP27

88

solve with either communist or bourgeois logic. My play was also written this the way. The idea is that you actually enact both logics. So you could act as the Jewish settler or a Palestinian doctor or again a European NGO donor. Four people could do the whole play. I then began to think of a film version of the play. Since then the project lodged in my head. Eventually a friend of mine told me to write the film as a play. It was a brilliant idea, not because I wanted to give up the film, but because in the process of writing a play you reduce the scenes to those that are essential. But also because in the theatre the whole territory of Israel and Palestine remains a projection for the viewer. I was inspired by Federico Fellini’s movies where the set design is completely obvious, making it theatrical, but at the same time allowing the viewer to project their own idea of a space into the film. I think this is an interesting extra layer in the film’s language. Signe: Maybe it’s obvious but why did you decide to place the drama in a future scenario?

Joachim: It was a decision I took in order to be able to address some of the problems that can occur when you try to talk about the Israel–Palestine conflict. Like identity politics, which is really an obstruction. People will use numbers for instance saying things like ‘the Gaza attacks in 2009 weren’t as bad as the media reports, because in reality there were only 1200 dead and not 2000’. As if this would make it any better! For me it was important to avoid this kind of argument. I did this by displacing the conflict into the future and creating a situation where both parties, Israeli and Palestinian alike, were under a new, alien occupation, that being the United Nations. I also wanted to address the occidental Christian position. And seriously, it’s not very difficult to imagine that something like a new occupation, could happen, evolving out of the increasingly dangerous and demagogic political situation in Israel. This framework also gave me the opportunity to address some of the problems with international jurisdiction. By relocating the whole situation to the near future it was possible to

S. Frederiksen and J. Hamou

have conversations with people who would otherwise feel that they couldn’t take a stand. I think the experiment was rather exciting because suddenly people started to talk. So there could be two or three part conversations between an Israeli, a Palestinian and a British lawyer for instance about how one would open a session in an international court in Jerusalem with a French judge. Signe: It’s almost like a therapeutic trick where one can talk about a conflict if it’s displaced. And at the same time it’s a projection into the future where a court case is treating a conflict rooted in the past; that is, in our present time. So, it’s a manoeuvre that enables us to think and talk about it with a certain distance. Joachim: One of the criticisms I have had of my own work lately is that I administrated and documented a lot of positions without taking a position of my own, or rather without promoting it. So I felt that it was necessary not only to assume my own position in the UIP27 project, but also to make it visionary, actually proposing something or at least imagining something. If one doesn’t propose anything it makes it a lot more difficult for others to propose something different. Signe: So do you feel the reaction to this project has been stronger? Joachim: I actually anticipated more reaction. I imagine that the lack of a clear narrative and a conclusion makes it difficult to take a stand. All the characters are somehow both victims and perpetrators. Signe: Maybe it’s also because of all the projections onto this territory and conflict, not only from people living there but also from people like me; total strangers. Joachim: For me it was important to somehow make the conflict physical. To work with the physical impact, from violence to erotic . It’s very relevant.

When you go to Israel or Palestine you feel the presence of fear everywhere and it’s a very physical experience. The physical impact of the wall and the physical bullying at the checkpoints and by the soldiers are the most obvious examples. Then there is the stress created by all types of fear; from suicide bombers to ‘price-tag’ attackers or

89

UIP27

90

stabbings to well contaminations. Or the kind of everyday experiences such as the buses in Jerusalem not stopping at the Damascus gate which is where you have to board the bus to get to Ramala — forcing you to walk the last part.

Another example I saw was some orthodox Jews walking out of the old city in Jerusalem. They had to go through a passage where there were only Arabic markets. The owners of the stores walked out and narrowed the passage forcing the Jews to get closer together. In dead silence they sped up, passing through as fast as possible. At the same time, in Tel Aviv for instance, it’s very flirty and sexually liberated. It’s like one tension is taken out on the other.

I had this idea that the body is also a territory that is being negotiated in all kinds of ways; its part of a territorial economy. Signe: That’s maybe why the judge is the most ambivalent, or bizarre, figure in the film. What were your thoughts about her? Joachim: I think it’s important who is actually playing the role. It would have been very different if it were Stine Steengade, who is this Danish actress who I originally planned for the role. It was also very obvious when we did the voice over. It would have been an entirely different voice, and Mireille Perrier had a lot of ideas about what to say and not to say. This leads back to the talk about the actor’s interiorised logic, a logic that they create with their characters. But that doesn’t answer your question. I think the French judge in the film embodies the dilemma of having power and at the same time being the most vulnerable person. She lives under constant protection but is at the same time ruling over people with whom she doesn’t share anything. The character embodies this dilemma and I thought it was interesting that this was shown in an ambiguous way. Signe: To me she is at the same time the most ambivalent and the most touching figure. You also present a figure like Shusterman who plays himself, both as a person and a character. I guess this emphasises the future scenario as a frame for the project. It creates a rupture between Shusterman as a person and the character he

S. Frederiksen and J. Hamou

plays in the film. Joachim: It was interesting to see how Shusterman dealt with both the reality of the project and his ambition of being an actor in a film. It forced him to assume his position both as an Israeli and a soldier. Something I think he had not been confronted with in a long time. Signe: It seems important that the project had so many of these meetings that constantly negotiated the different layers both in the performance and the personal.

Joachim: Definitely, and there are numerous examples of scenes in the film where we experienced tension, sometimes even extreme tension, between the participants but also sometimes funny or surprising relief. For instance, the scene in the hospital where Nasreen watches over her beaten up boyfriend who is in a coma, and the boyfriend’s father enters. In that scene we had casted a Syrian guy, like Nasreen who is also Syrian, only that he was a supporter of Assad and Nasreen is not. It took less than ten minutes before they were in a heavy argument. He left and we had to find someone else on the spot. I wanted someone who could talk Arabic even if he had to play a Jewish man who happens to speak Arabic. We had to make some desperate phone calls, but eventually we found a Tunisian man who ended up doing the scene. He spoke Arabic alright, but when I asked him to say the opening line, ‘Shalom’ in Hebrew, we all realised that he was also fluent in Hebrew. He never revealed his cultural identity and no one made any comments about it. After all we had a scene to do. But seriously; what were the chances that we would stumble upon a Tunisian Jew, exactly as he was supposed to be in the film, in Denmark? The whole experience put everyone under great stress and tension and maybe that’s why it became such a strange and strong scene? Signe: The project has evolved through different forms, from the visual arts context to theatre and film. As I mentioned, this was a part of the project’s economy, as each institution that hosted the project also participated financially. But I was wondering if this means of production created any

91

UIP27

92

problems? Joachim: Well, it’s funny how different institutions appropriated the project differently. At one point, the Copenhagen DOX film festival stepped in and communicated the project as a documentary film. And for the Moderna Museum Malmö the project became an opportunity to work with Inkonst. They both promoted the project as an interdisciplinary co-production even though one promoted the project as an art piece and the other as theatre. Signe: Do you think the project could adapt to any institutional narrative, or is there one that you feel more at ease with? Joachim: The goal was very clear; to make the film. And to be self-critical, I think that this focus made me miss out other things during the process. I mean for instance if I hadn’t been making the film, I would have been much more observant about certain problems, such as the communication with the audience, the distance to the set etc. Signe: I think that in the film it is also clear that the project was spread out in different formats and narratives. The way it is edited and the way a lot of different stories are added on to one and the other.

And this also reflects the way we worked. During the production I often lost track of the film’s chronology, not only because we recorded things non-chronologically, but also because this was the nature of the project; navigating across different layers of narrative, production forms and institutions. It’s this complexity that I really like about the project as whole.

94

Paula Caspão is a choreographer and researcher with a special interest in text and movement. For Paula, a text is a movement and a text can activate different situations both physically and intellectually, in other words: text is choreography.

Paula practises this in a very direct way in her writing as well as her staging of both private and professional meetings and collaborations. The following text is a strange hybrid of a manual, information, poetry and script. It is the result of several processes including a walk in Lisbon with a colleague. As a reader one has to constantly renegotiate which level of narrative to follow, making it altogether an active (reading) experience.

Paula Caspão

Let’s walk around here and call it ‘study’ This text is a tour across re-composed excerpts taken from: diaries of an outdoor-study-practice and research-affects: an inter-choreographic perspective.

An assemblage of documents on situated forms of thinkingpractising research developed in the frame of T-Fi Cabinet collection 2015-2016.

Reading preliminaries Moving around very slowly, read the following excerpt aloud and record it (voiced slowly but not as slowly as the movements you are making in order to move around). Then play it in a loop while you read the rest of the text.

Imagine a night with very little light.

The first autumn leaves have started to follow.

You are in some kind of field. You... are a field.

All of a sudden, you see a light go on and an

Let’s walk around here

96

announcement starts flashing in your direction: ‘by settler-colonial registers, a rock out­ cropping in the forest or desert or on the moon is not living. But an actor, dancer, artist, or museum employee performing on, or as a rock in a forest or desert or gallery is live’ (Schneider 2015: 11). The lights go off. You are in a forest of which you are not sure you will ever get out. You move very slowly.

Your feet feel like walking over water. You are haunted by an image of Lake Placid. Every two or three or four steps, your feet or your hands bump into an obstacle and either you fall, or you are forced to deviate from the direction you wanted to keep. Sometimes it’s the leg of a table, other times the arm of a chair; other times a footnote, at the bottom of a page.

Eventually, after what felt like a long while, you see a couple of stars and you realise that the forest is clearing. Either it was a hallucination or it has become another place.

If, at that very moment, somebody asks you: ‘What do you know about that forest? (Was it a lake? A page? A room?)’, you will most probably answer that the only thing you know is an (un)certain way of crossing it, of passing through. And that is a knowledge that you have acquired as you moved across it, your feet and tongue tripping — as it moved across you.

A knowledge that will never remain exactly what it seems to be, or become exactly what it might have been. An exuberant economy of trans-­ position, inter-mediality, and transformation runs permanently in the background of every corner of our lives.

Paula Caspão

Places, situations, fields One of the things you will notice if you pass by is the smell of resinous substances. Pine trees: stone pine and maritime pine (Pinus pinaster and Pinus pinea). Some of the branches have acute angles, others curved; greenish tones, some pale grey, some intense green. Some dense rounded canopies, others pointing in many contradictory directions at once. Cicadas, depending on the time of the day, their persistent minimalist song coming out of their vibrating drum-like tymbals. Listen, in-between: the breeze or wind in the leaves. Look around, inhale the air, lungful: some drops on the way, perhaps, if that cloud over there thickens.

Another thing you will have noticed is that as you read, these lines — or part of them — start to move out of here.

To places located (inside and outside) of certain parts of your body and surroundings, not always at the same speed.

From there they follow their ways, more or less transformed, to other areas with or without trees, indoor places with more or less windows, outdoor landscapes, more or less humid buildings, passageways towards more or less predictable destinations, ecosystems with several modes of existence — performing gestures and rhythms that we wouldn’t be able to orchestrate from this distance.

If, after a while, you turn back to retrace your path, you will notice that the pines are no longer the same, the commas are no longer hanging on the same terms, trunks and terms have changed skins. The cicadas are silent. A bird comes in the picture. A cat passes by. Two, three, eight.

Certain spots of the landscape are missing, the smell moves in other directions, perhaps the wind has changed.

Or the light technicians. Or the intensity of the lines.

Taking a closer look at the working and production modes of my theoretical and artistic related practices of the last five years, I have been trying to figure out the social relations they may imply, and the economies they

97

Let’s walk around here

98

have been moving within, or have possibly generated. In recent decades the ‘academy’ has been facing dramatic shifts and budgetary cuts. Under neoliberal education policies across Europe and North America (as well as across emerging economies), ever more universities now organise themselves after (and with) corporations in the hunt for maximum profit. As a consequence of the increasing economisation of knowledge in universities, the old democratic ideal of the academy as a public good, a public space of experimentation and exploration, a space reserved for moments of ‘speculation, expansion, and reflexivity without the constant demand for proven results’ (Rogoff, 2008), seems to be vanishing. Not surprisingly, the global process of redesigning higher education systems tightening the interface between universities and business, has been directed towards quantifiable outcomes. In the meantime, the lives of students, professors, academic and/or artist researchers doing research in the academy resemble more and more a competition arena that fosters anxiety and individual careerism, rather than common grounds to build knowledge together.

One of the few things I am sure of is that I am a ‘transversal thing’. Both in my personal and professional life, moving across fields and places has always been a source of joy, rather than a matter of discomfort, despite the frictions and collisions that the fact of crossing borders often implies. Yet of late I have been experiencing an acute need to resituate my beloved transversal practices of the last years within the current financial, technological, informational, creative capitalism, and the corresponding dominant knowledge economy and knowledge management that has been expanding across western world(s) and beyond — so much predicated on mobile and transversal forms of creativity, on processing, connecting and transplanting information; redesigning, retransplanting, reconnecting, expanding expanding expanding. Often softly imposing a life-long social choreography of self-organising

Paula Caspão

malleable networking, and a never-ending combination of skilling with de-skilling and re-skilling. In this set up, there seems to be little time to really pay attention to the ecologies of our practices, their social effects — not only there where they take (and make) place as they materialise, but also there where they will take (and make) place afterwards, rematerialising in more or less visible ways.

Following this thread, it is clear that a closer look at the working and production modes of my current artistic and related theoretical practices can help me understand the material and immaterial complexity of the social relations they imply, and the economies they have (inevitably) been moving within, at least partly. And yet I know I will go on working in transversal modes, transposing tools (and plants) across fields and landscapes, for many reasons that have to do with how I want to live everyday. Because displacement (sensorial–intellectual–cultural–geographic displacement) — call it a certain kind of ‘tourism’, if you will — is where I get joy from. Because displacement, and even a certain kind of mis-placement — something like a constant artificialisation of ‘original’ frames and fields — is what I believe makes sense not only for my aesthetic practices (taken as inherently social), but also for wider social processes, not confined to human sociabilities.

Some years ago, moved by the need to displace my (so-called) theoretical work from the position of authority that is generally attributed to work that is recognised as knowledge production, I started to search for a way of referring to ‘my field’ of activity, a way of situating what I really like to do, i.e. merge theoretical with fictional and choreographic modes of research, composition, and presentation. In order to welcome the methodological intersections and intrigues I often find (lose) myself in — and emphasise the specific poetics and life forms implicated in any circumstances of research and/or composition, be it more academic or artistic, more theoretical or practical, I started imagining some kind of mental space, something

99

Let’s walk around here

100

like a secret drawer labelled T-Fi (standing for Theory-Fiction). Eventually I ended up founding T-Fi Cabinet (2016) — an exploratory field of miscegenation between fictional and theoretical practices, with T-Fi resonating with the Sci-Fi of Science Fiction, and cabinet recalling the heterogeneity of items one can find in promiscuous coexistence in any cabinet de curiosités.

With this step, I clearly wanted to move the emphasis from the results — from knowledge as (already produced and validated) knowledge — to its very conditions and (hi)stories of production: not only the required practical devices, all sorts of material and immaterial apparatus and tools, but also the ecologies, life forms, relationships, and specific positions and gestures that such works need to take shape — and which they also produce. To be sure, the stance of T-Fi is to be understood as a way of directing our attention to the very geographies and poetics of knowledge and study — how it is done, where and when; and, most importantly: with whom. T-Fi thus aims at calling more attention to what knowledge, research, study practices bring (do) to the world, than to their final objects, as they tend to be reified (and often affirmed as truths). T-Fi also aims at diversifying our ways of knowing, researching and studying; the ways in which we relate to our ‘objects of study’, that is to say, our ways of living with what we study, as we study. In short, T-Fi appeared little by little as a way of acknowledging that we always work collectively, even when we work alone. For what(ever) we do is always activated by multiple agents of disparate sorts — human and nonhuman, from several places and times — that we have the bad habit of not recognising as co-authors, and of which we know very little. In this sense, T-Fi addresses authorship and so-called ‘knowledge production’ from the perspective of less visible, unruly collaboration forms, namely by exposing the ways in which an author not only collaborates with her fellow human makers and perceivers, but also with many other things, which are generally

Paula Caspão

not attributed any authorial — performative, affective, effective — powers.

Since then, I have very often found myself explaining to peers that what I want to propose is not that everybody should be making fiction instead of making theory, or something like that. Rather, my position is that of making theory as (if it were) fiction. More precisely: I can only accept to do research in academic frames and be some sort of theory maker, if I take it and reclaim it as fiction. Aligning theory with fiction has been, for me, a way of asserting both fiction’s and theory’s power to produce change, and not as a way of doomsaying theory in absolute or general terms.

In T-Fi, fiction is not opposed to the (so-called) real. It’s not an escape from reality, which would spare us the effort of ‘facing reality’ (of which fiction is often accused). Fiction is not an unrealistic projection with no hold on reality. Rather, in T-Fi fiction is to be taken as a real operation that often allows reorganising the real and, if we’re lucky, to get out of realities that (im)mobilise, out of the kind of realities that prevent people from ‘imagining the real’, i.e. from thinking beyond what is already (supposedly) known.

In this sense, fiction is considered both as a mode of problematisation and as a mode of modification of the real.

With this in mind, I decided to commit more thoroughly to activating and exploring situated modalities of knowing and ‘un-knowing’, of ‘riding equivoques’ — still making academic theory to a certain extent, but refusing the authority claim that is generally implicit in the term ‘academic research’ or ‘theory’, in order to move from knowledge into acts of knowing (to use Rogoff’s words again).

I don’t know very well. But I have been trying to find ways to vary my experiential relation to knowledge, inhabiting writing-research as a choreographic architectonic practice — questioning the usual architectures of accessing, generating and living with knowledge. Exploring and shaking the position of the researcher within choreographic practices, not only in relation to art objects and art processes, but

101

Let’s walk around here

102

also through the very ‘site of writing’ — developing modes of attention to all the places, architectures, gestures, and affects it implies. Arguing for writing research as an affected and affecting situated practice. This does not necessarily amount to resituating knowledge and theory making ‘in the body’ or in ‘my body’. Affect is not confined to bodies.

Rather, it moves in-between; and not only between bodies but between many things, spaces, times.

Summer (study) in the city 10 July 2015. Pauline arrived in Lisbon very early in the morning, to develop a form of research–talk–walk– stretching–along–shores with me. She came from Paris via Vigo, in Spain, in one of those pocket-sized planes for short distances, which squirmed all the way between Vigo and Lisbon. We had breakfast on the balcony staring at the trees of Monte Agudo in Penha de França, and then I searched for a map of the city, to draw a red dot on the street where Pauline would be staying. Rua de São Gens, near the viewpoint Senhora do Monte. It’s summer. The only time Pauline will not see tuk-tuks over there will be at sunrise (if lucky).

The map of Lisbon I found for Pauline in the drawer had a hole, right where Quinta dos Lilases, Quinta das Conchas and Quinta do Lambert should be. The hole included Azinhaga do Vale, Azinhaga da Musgueira and Azinhaga de Entremuros. I only know the names of these places ‘in the hole’ because in the meantime I have found the missing part of the map I gave Pauline on that day in another drawer. That part — ‘the hole’ — happened to have the subway lines in the back, which explains the fact that it must have been torn off to be put in my wallet at some point, in times when smart phones were not around. If it weren’t for this manoeuvre (certainly performed on autopilot), I would never have remarked those areas, whose names evoke a past full of intriguing vegetation, and over whose histories

Paula Caspão

I started to cogitate and fantasise since, in-between the lines of other studies.

11 July. In each mail we exchange, Pauline tries to use Portuguese words she has heard here and there. For instance, ‘A teja!’ for ‘See you in a while’ (Até já, in Portuguese; writing it without the accent on the ‘a’, it becomes like a female version of the Tagus river, which is a male noun: O Tejo). The (now female) Teja becomes the title of this period of research–talk–as–you–walk. But the road to Teja is neither linear nor flat, so before we get there, we’re on our way to Carpe Diem, on Rua de O Século, more precisely down Rua Augusto Rosa, on tram 28. Bad idea on a Saturday in July, but it was on our way and there we are. Standing, crushed against tourist human bodies and their photographing telephonic devices. The 28 passes right in front of Sé, the Cathedral, and we laugh without commenting.

Through the open window, the amazing mirage stares at us: before the cathedral, a sun tanned young man, naked torso, leaning on a bicycle, in an assumed strategic pose of exhibition: look, precious goods an unlimited smile for the passengers of tram 28.

At Carpe Diem, on Saturday, 11 July, from 2 p.m. to 8 p.m., Carla Cabanas and Nuno Lisboa present a film series based on the exhibition project of the artist (Cabanas) — Celtis Australis L. (2015-at Carpe Diem Art and Research.

2 p.m.: Vertigo, Alfred Hitchcock 4.20 p.m.: La Jetée, Chris Marker 5 p.m.: Sans Soleil, Chris Marker 6 p.m.: Les Plages d’Agnès, Agnès Varda 8 p.m.: Toute la Mémoire du Monde, Alain Resnais

103

Let’s walk around here

104

We arrived just before 6 p.m. to see Les Plages… but the projections were late and we ended up watching a good part of Sans Soleil. I had forgotten this magnificent piece of sci-fi geo-anthropology. I have to see it again soon. Respond to it, somehow.

He used to write me from Africa. He contrasted African time to European time, and also to Asian time. He said that in the nineteenth century mankind had come to terms with space, and that the great question of the twentieth was the coexistence of different concepts of time. By the way, did you know that there are emus in the Île de France?...

He wrote me that in the suburbs of Tokyo there is a temple consecrated to cats. I wish I could convey to you the simplicity — the lack of affectation — of this couple who had come to place an inscribed wooden slat in the cat cemetery so their cat Tora would be protected.

No she wasn’t dead, only run away. But on the day of her death no one would know how to pray for her, how to intercede with death so that he would call her by her right name.

So they had to come there, both of them, under the rain, to perform the rite that would repair the web of time where it had been broken.

He wrote me: I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember, we rewrite memory much as history is rewritten.

How can one remember thirst?* * From Sans Soleil, found in: www.markertext.com/sans_soleil.htm (accessed 25 November 2016).

Paula Caspão

13 July. Avec soleil. Despite the heat, we are going down Rua Augusto Rosa on foot, to catch the boat to Cacilhas.

To cross the Tagus, at last. Zigzagging down the street in search of shadow, grazing the walls all the way through.

As we zigzag, we get into considerations about experiencing the Lisbon topology under the sun. We make nebulous analogies between our syncopated movements choreographed by the physical need for shadow, and the constantly interrupted course of our thoughts and investigations, sometimes forever lost, sometimes taken up elsewhere, in any case transformed, suddenly (re)appearing with unrecognisable faces. We want to get rid of the myth of laborious rigour that is (supposedly) required by any serious research process, in order to make place for other forms of ri(rrr)gour. With no pretensions to discover or innovate. Though breaking rigid methodological schemas often (still) represented by a flawless progression moving linearly between a starting idea, a hypothesis, a field of inquiry, conclusions, feedbacks. And suddenly it’s as if the image of the ‘outdoor research’ we have given ourselves to is slowly opening up doors onto the fortuitous, operated and animated by unexpected actors, including toponymy, jellyfish corpses floating in the Tagus and stray cats, which demand to be taken into account within a process of study that assumes itself as a situated play between specific places and (dis)placements, a product of manifold circumstances. Accordingly, the objectivity of any subsequent theoretical construction can only be ‘situated objectivity’. Right now in an aquatic environment.

We cross the Tagus, Tejo, Teja. The feminist, postcolonial, and post-marxist contributions have insisted on the relevance of paying attention to the conditions of knowledge production, always ‘cooked’ under specific circumstances, architectures, and relationships. We go up to the riverside garden of Almada, known as ‘Boca do Vento’ (Wind’s mouth).

We have Teja’s breeze on our skin and the Lisbon colours looking at us from the other side. Golden Gate (the bridge,

105

Let’s walk around here

106

trans-located, you see) is on our left. With my bare feet, I hold the sheets where we printed Pauline’s text, exhaustively describing her current process of work. We discuss the video documenting the ‘réception performée’ she has presented in June, in Paris: VOULOIR CROIRE ENTREVOIR #29.

Performed reception. Huh. Naming a working format — a performative literary genre, a modality of critique — that gives me a lot to think about. How does it differ from an artistic performance? And does it have to differ? We looked at Lisbon on the other bank. Some banal comment about how beautifully the light hits the colours of the façades gave rise to another name: a ‘Venice-like-lecture’… Can you imagine?

Venice kind of. Marco Polo says to Emperor Kublai Khan: ‘Every time I describe a city, I am saying something about Venice’. More commonplace you die. And yet, commonplaces, clichés, banalities, anecdotes, chimeras of all sorts do work with us all the time.

Taking the voices of the chimera into account, considering the participation of the chimera in a process of research, writes Juliet J. Fall, as she tells us how a shrub in the Durham botanic garden, the irruption of hybridity, embodying the in-between, could change the whole theoretical framework of her research. A chimera illustrating, on the one hand, the crosshatches and hybridisations of knowledge and, on the other, the chimerical dimension of spatial entities. Taking into account that ‘other’ voice often allows a denaturalisation of the dualistic discourses that separate natural entities from cultural entities, objective and scientific entities from subjective and social entities.

12 August. Jumping to the Epilogue. I’ve got news from Pauline: Lisboa me manquait l’autre jour, je suis sortie de chez moi et j’ai marché jusqu’au Sacré Cœur, j’avais besoin de gravir une butte ! En haut, une horde de touristes, ‘c’était genre le

Paula Caspão

miradouro qui était en haut de la rua São Gens’... j’étais contente d’être là.

Les côtes et les descentes me manquent, cette sensation dans les mollets, dans les pieds, cette manière de marcher.

The other day I missed Lisboa, I went out of my place and I walked to Sacré Cœur, I needed to climb a hill! Up there, a flock of tourists, ‘it was kind of the miradouro that was at the top of Rua São Gens’... I was glad to be there.

I miss the edgeways and the descents, that sensation in the calves, in the feet, that way of walking.

I am sitting on the grass with my legs bent, under the trees of the garden of Boca do Vento (rather windy, you see), opposite a conférence genre-Venise. Under my bare feet, Pauline’s sheets try to fly away. I can’t let them go yet. I read the fragments that my feet do not cover: Words compel me. For me they are a gesture, they draw the geographical charts of my performative desires.

They help me build a space in which I can move.

They help me cracking the stage, finding a place there.

If I make a recollection of the gestures that marked me in the performances I saw, I can say that with all those gestures I acquired a choreographic repertoire that allows me to perform an infinitude of choreographic combinations.

PERFORMED RECEPTION — This formula appears.

The performed analysis of a work appears next.

I wanted to let go of the term ‘critique’

107

Let’s walk around here

108

in my thesis, but I now think that I have to keep it instead, give it a sense that suits my views, an operative sense.

Turn critique into/making critique.

Reading Pauline’s lines, a fragment of a much-loved text by Isabelle Stengers comes to mind. ‘Reclaiming Animism’. I’m not going to check the accuracy of the formulation, something like: ‘a metamorphic effectiveness in the coming together of heterogeneous elements’.

Couldn’t resist. Had to check. I went to the text, flipped pages, reread parts. Old habits have crocodile skin. Sometimes it works, can’t deny it. Look at what I found: Writing is an experience of metamorphic transformation. It makes one feel that ideas are not the author’s, that they demand some kind of cerebral — that is, bodily — contortion that defeats any preformed intention. (This contortion makes us larvae, as Deleuze wrote).

However, when the text is written, taking an ‘unchanging form’, it may well impose itself as being of human provenance — even giving the impression that it can be the vehicle for accessing the intentions of the writer, for grasping what he ‘meant to communicate’ and for what is ours to ‘understand’.

Indeed, once ‘written down’ (lying down, just look at this here), ideas tempt us to associate them with a definite meaning, generally available to understanding, severing the experience of reading from that of writing.

This can be taken as an invitation to abandon any reading, writing, research and study criteria that wish to surpass the complicated coalitions in which one writes, studies,

Paula Caspão

thinks, produces what is called ‘knowledge’, or any other performance / object / lecture of the kind.

15 July. We met at Miradouro do Monte Agudo, just behind the house. There were no tuk-tuks at the time, not yet. A month later I saw the first one, Ferrari red. I don’t want to be negative, but it was there. I don’t feel like expanding on this subject. Pauline has been developing a consistent practice of detailed description of the performances she attends, a relevant practice for any critical exercise. But I don’t think that a traditional critic takes the trouble to practise it in the way Pauline does, in the absence of any qualifying comment or judgment of value. Incredible tapestries come out of Pauline’s exhaustive description practice, displaying a very impressive rigour. Another of Pauline’s consequent practices, for the time she is in Lisbon: trying out a maximum of toasts, those crusty and cheesy toasts that can be eaten all over the city in several cafes; those from Monte Agudo esplanade, with tomato and goat cheese, were well classified, but please don’t spread the word, vade retro tuk-tuk.

In the Miradouro we discussed one of Pauline’s description exercises, from the solo of choreographer Rita Quaglia Une hypothèse de réinterpretation (2008), created as an echo/filter of another piece, with the title: 9, a piece by choreographer Loïc Touzé (2007)*. * ‘Une Hipothèse de réinterprétation’ (a reinterpretation of the piece titled: 9) can be situated between a documentary and a performance; it is set up to evoke a work conceived for several interpreters by means of a (re)writing made by one single person (Rita Quaglia). It questions both the memory of the choreographer and that of the performers who participated in the creation of 9, whom Quaglia interviewed to understand how they had tackled the choreographic proposals of the work, and how exactly they had worked in each presentation, so as to make choreographic intentions readable. More information here: www.loictouze.com/index.php?art=11 (accessed 25 August 2016); short video excerpt: www.numeridanse.tv/en/video/748_une-hypothese-dereinterpretation (accessed 29 October 2016).

109

Let’s walk around here

110

As I read Pauline’s description my attention got sucked into a tunnel, as if it had been programmed to produce a set of selected fragments. Passing through the filter of my own obsessions of the moment, out of Pauline’s filter (translating Quaglia’s filter translating Touzé’s interpreters, Quaglia as a spectator and re-interpreter of her own spect-action), all of it re-filtered in Penha de França on 15 July 2015, around 4 p.m. in the afternoon, and filtered now with you, dear reader. Layers. From Pauline’s textdescription, which can be heard as a kind of ping-pong Pauline-Quaglia, I only kept bits and pieces: I’m going to show you (this is Pauline [who starts describing Quaglia’s speech and actions]: Gets a table and drags it to the stage; makes a miniature set design of the piece. Covers the table with a white paper, like a paper tablecloth, tears off what she needs and keeps the rest apart) Quaglia: This space is completely white. What distinguishes it are the two dead angles, one on each side (Pauline: On each side of the table she installs an A4 sheet folded in two, to represent the dead angles) Quaglia: Behind the dead angles, the performers sometimes disappear, but remain very active (Pauline: As soon as the table is covered she rips it off, so that it looks like a lightly made set up model, something of an amateur rather than an expert) Quaglia: From time to time some come back (Pauline: She moves to the centre of the table) but are immediately hit by lines, and then spread across the space, though this time on different levels (Pauline: She puts her knee and left hand on the table, lowers herself, stays in a position that seems uncomfortable, and maintains the pose) Quaglia: And they

Paula Caspão

look like stills. And the space freezes and they crystallise and there is music... You can feel the erosion of the stone. The cliffs crackling, the mountains rising and blurring at the same time. We see the snow melting, starting... suddenly there’s a tree (Pauline: ...), immediately followed by others (Pauline: Leaves the pose and takes the shape of a tree) Quaglia: We are in a forest but we don’t know whether it is just appearing or disappearing.

Siesta time. Pauline in the hammock, on the balcony. Me on the couch, in the living room. Flies flying in circles in between. Cicadas full on in the trees outside, no fooling around, it’s summer (in the city). [pic. 1 →

Bonheur Peugeot]

Une petite cure de flou is a book by Philippe Garnier (2002) that is quoted up there (out of here, with the flies?). It’s good to know these things. What you see in the picture is page 27 of a book by Sandra Kühne (2014) that has been colonising my mental space these last days: BLANK SPOT CARTOGRAPHY. Whether or not you have read Une petite cure de flou, dear reader, it’s in this very space here that we (mis)encounter. It’s like these lines. Like the flies swirling around.

One minute they’re there, next minute they’re gone. Things constantly bifurcate, transform, disappear, persist, change names and bodies and minds: ghostify.

HERE is where I am, we usually say. Only, HERE is a complicated hetero-topo-graphy. The double (multiple) lives of time, of space. Of every-thing. HERE is where the experience of this walking-conversation, as a method for (more or less) artistic research and study implying all sorts of vandals and other smugglers of mental space — starts unfolding more on your side than on mine. In incessant

111

Let’s walk around here

112

re-organisations, along alliances with several landscapes that are not just the backgrounds where we act. Allow me therefore to imagine you, dear reader–walker–visitor–listener–spectator, as an inhabited place as well, as an ecosystem for a myriad of agents, many of them non-human and even inanimate, have you imagined. (I am thinking of current research on the non-human part that co-constitutes us, our microbiome). Wherever you-we are. I-we not only act, we are also acted upon from the very inside, I am a place and a home, here many things I completely ignore live and die. Apparently, the human body consists of several other thing-bodies (‘it-bodies’), including bacteria, viruses, metals. And (t)here we are, living and studying around, as if we knew where we are(were), and ‘how many’ and which kind of ‘where’ we can be(come). Made of so many kinds of parts and pieces, matters, microbes and ideas, so many inhabited areas, some brand-new, others so much older than us; some passing by, some staying a bit longer. That shows that this piece of work is not exclusively of human origin. Not mine. It doesn’t really belong to us. Neither to me nor to Pauline, nor to you, nor to the authors that I have been paraphrasing and (mis)quoting here, or the ones you will need to call to mind in order to (mis)interpret this to the end. The ‘author’ is a provisional colligation whose list of accomplices will always remain in an elastic state. A required mode of existence not only to think and write, but also to move out of here and (re)tell things around. Because both the writers and readers of any piece of research are concrete and fragile beings who depend upon all sorts of supports: they need to eat and drink several times a day, go shopping, the loo, walk from table to table (tables of many kinds, mind you), worry about the cats they see wandering around, and whether they will keep benefitting from research funding or whether they’d better open a gluten-free toast business in Lisbon; they stick papers on the floor to plan their next steps, scrape and scratch, apply another layer of words, plant radishes,

Paula Caspão

write in recesses and crevices of the mind and in many other nooks and niches that infiltrate places without having been invited, and in the middle of all this crap they are often distracted by the song of the cicadas. Wait a minute, the song of the cicadas? That’s a poem by the Australian poet Roderic Quinn, a leading member of The Dawn and Dusk Club, an Australian bohemian club of writer friends from the late nineteenth century, who met for drinks and camaraderie. Click here to listen: www.poemhunter.com/ poem/the-song-of-the-cicadas/

18 July. On the road. Five of us. We went to the beach. Fonte da Telha. The best swim ever and an endless walk on the wet sand, with the cliffs all along. With her feet surrounded by tiny waves coming and going, Pauline found a format — a ‘collage type’ kind of thing — to experiment with as a mode of writing her PhD dissertation, on her return to Paris.

21 July. I open my mailbox, news from Pauline. I see there’s a picture to illustrate the subject. And a title:

BONHEUR PEUGEOT PLAGE BEACH

[pic. 2 →

PEUGEOT HAPPINESS

FLY]

Re-capitulate Re-place Re-situate Re-field

Writing research as a mode of rehearsal Elspeth Probyn wrote that ‘the question of writing per se has tended to be brushed aside in the guise of “writing up research”’ and ‘while the pretence of academic writing

113

Let’s walk around here

114

as purely objective might be fading, there’s little thought about what will replace the dominant mode of “writing up”’ (2010).

What happens when the ecologies implied by the very operations of writing research — their social, spatial, choreographic, architectural, affective qualities are acknowledged as relevant to the constitution and conveyance of the research contents they are supposed to stand for?

From the close-up to the glance, from the caress to the accidental brush — as Jane Rendell has described other possible positions implied in critical writing — can the usual positions of academic research and ‘writing up’ research be challenged, re-moved from their usual places as forms of knowledge with a static point of view, tending to rigid here and now locations?

And what may other forms of making-writing-research look like? Is it possible to imagine other relations between the objects and processes that I (we) study — be they more or less of the artistic realm — and my ways of writing research — be it artistic research or academic research?

I mean, relations that would be allowed to endanger the certainties and authorities of academic research, to complicate and trouble them? On my best days I daydream. It goes as follows: perhaps academic writing could become more sensitive to the criticality of its objects of study.

In order to know not so much what their meaning is, but rather to get to know what those objects of study can tell that disturbs our linguistic certainties and the powers they grant us. A more risky relation, but a necessary one, as Bruno Latour suggests (2003) — for from the moment we admit the complexity of things; from the moment we admit that such a complexity produces a confusion that cannot be eluded but should rather be integrated in our exercises of analytical critique, ‘we are bound to get lost’. According to Latour, it is in this sense that looking for a critical distance is a bias that can only be good for so-called ‘critical persons’, whereas ‘criticality can only be achieved in

Paula Caspão

the state of passionate interest towards an uncertain and surprising solution’. Latour considers that ‘critical persons cool down their objects’, for ‘they prefer to feel critical rather than taking the criticality of small details into account’ — in order to not compromise their critical judgement. In order not to blur the identities of the subject with the identities of the object, ‘critical persons’ prefer to dismiss any detail that would risk introducing any amount of the unexpected or agitation, conflict, controversy, a shaking of positions.

Still, such a relation implies not only becoming sensitive to the criticality of one’s objects of study. It implies, as well, becoming sensitive to the affective potential of criticality displayed by one’s discursive operations. Namely, becoming sensitive to the ways in which a specific text acts its saying; becoming sensitive to the ways in which a text shows what it does; becoming sensitive to what a text does to me when I read or hear it; becoming sensitive to what it makes you feel or helps you doing as you write it; to what I can do with it as I spit it out, and to what you can do with it as you hear it across the air, trying to stick to parts and particles of your minds–bodies–gestures.

This is where it may be interesting to recall the notion of ‘rehearsal’ from some experimental choreographic practices I have been working with. For the mixed temporalities implied in those rehearsal modes remind us of something that we may be in need of, in these times of ‘projective temporality’ (Kunst, 2012). That something is a combination of ‘experimentation’ with ‘repetition’, with recapitulation (a combination that implies staying longer with things, providing them with the conditions for them to unfold their many sides, not knowing too soon where they could be going and asserting that indefinite duration as a sustainable state of things). From here I would like to raise the question about how to smuggle some more of this ‘rehearsal’ mode — as an experimental way of assembling bodies and things that commits to paying attention

115

Let’s walk around here

116

to combinations that might seem lateral and insignificant — into the university, into fields of academic knowledge and theory, critique proper and theoretical writing.

Practices where ‘erring’ — ‘getting lost’, ‘missing the mark’, ‘calculating wrongly’, ‘not knowing where to go next but nevertheless going’ — could work as rigorous methods of study — following André Lepecki, in his reflections on dramaturgy in the field of contemporary dance (2011) — getting us out of assumptions about the ‘right’ and ‘professional’ way of practising our practices.

A word for the end would be: recast research, theory and research writing as fictional rehearsal modes. Reclaim writing research (artistic or non artistic) as a mode of oblique recapitulation, as a mode of queering constituted knowledge, as an always situated combination of in-andoutdoors collective study and (implicitly choreographic) studio work, which cannot be predicated upon demands of transparency and communicability.

A short video for the end would be: Stefano Harney On Study, interviewed by Tim Edkins (July 2011): www.youtube. com/watch?v=7wIoBdY72do/

Stefano Harney and Fred Moten have been using the term STUDY to talk about practices of the undercommons within (and without) the university. In case you don’t have a Wi-Fi connection or the required device to access it online right now, you can read it here: Well, [study] is a concept, and it’s also a kind of practice that we can undertake — and that we do undertake — in the university and yet, at the same time, if you were to ask: what’s the one thing that you are not able to do in the university? The answer might well come: ‘you’re not able to study’. Because when you think about what study is, in the way that

Paula Caspão

we understand it as a practice, we’re talking about getting together with others and determining what needs to be learned together; and spending time with that material, spending time with each other, without any objective, without any endpoint, without any sense that we will ever escape our feeling that we are permanently immature, premature, without credit... and in a kind of mutual bad debt to each other, which we don’t intend to be paying. A kind of circumstance in which we come together and we’re feeling that we want to learn together. That kind of study, which is disconnected from credit; which is disconnected from individual accreditation; which is disconnected from the notion of instrumentalism; from completion; from leading to something directly... that kind of notion of study, for us, seems almost impossible in the university, given all these demands.

And yet, we know that study goes on, because there’s a thing in the university called the student. And somehow within the student there resides, despite all these imperatives to graduate, to get credit, to get a job, to do well, to compete... despite all of that, somehow there’s a collective desire... to study, where study is not connected to any of those senses but rather to a collective self-development; rather to an idea that the reason why we’ve come together is to try to share and develop our sense of ideas in history, philosophy, etc. etc. It’s almost impossible to do and yet it’s necessary to do, and it happens all the time.

But it almost always happens against the university; it almost always happens in the

117

Let’s walk around here

118

university but under the university, in its undercommons; in those places that are not recognised, not legitimate, among those people who are doing something they’re not supposed to do; or that are doing something that we neglect, or that we vaguely understand as not really fitting, as not really contributing.

That’s where study occurs, most often, and where it has to occur, and also where it’s welcomed; where those who want to do it are welcomed. It’s in the undercommons that one is always welcome to join and be part of that study.

Study is also a kind of bad debt to each other, a kind of bad debt that you don’t intend to repay. So it stands as the opposite to something like student debt, around which there’s always the notion that there has to be recovery and job and credit and payback, just as the notion of the credit as the completion of a certain step on the way to being able to get that job and pay back that money — has to be discarded when we begin to talk about study. So, for us, study is that movement, that practice that goes on all the time in the university, for the university but against the university. And when we use study in that way, we mean not to say that it can only occur in the university; we mean to say that it’s a kind of gathering of intensities, because the university is such a gathering of resources. But one of the things about studying is that once you begin to do it with others you can begin to recognise where it’s going on elsewhere, beyond the borders of the university. And that’s crucial because it’s necessary to know that people are trying

Paula Caspão

to study all the time; they’re trying to get together, trying to become in bad debt to each other, trying to enter into a world in which they don’t have to produce a result, they don’t have to get credit, where they can remain in the space.

And again, it’s not surprising that certain populations and communities have traditions of this kind of study, populations which traditionally have been marked by never really being able to get out of bad debt; one could return to the history of slavery: one thing that marks blackness is that no matter how hard you work, you’re never out of the debt.

That debt is part of you and part of your collectivity. Well that returns to us in study, to some extent. And study aligns us with all kind of communities where something remains of a bad debt: a debt that should never be paid, that can never be paid, that ought never be paid; that remains with us and circulates with us, and deepens as part of our study. That’s also what we mean when we talk about study as a practice.

119

Let’s walk around here

120

References

Fall, Juliet J., ‘Hétérotopies et concepts géographiques : pour une (play)mobilisation des approches hybrides et participatives’, Objectiver, Visualiser, Jouer : Comment Penser et Figurer l’Espace Géographique, Cahiers géographiques, N° 5, Geneva, Université de Genève, 2004. www.unige.ch/sciences-societe/geo/

Kühne, Sandra, Blank Spot Cartography, Zürich, Kodoji Press, 2014. http://perimeterdistribution.com/Sandra-

files/1114/4464/7660/Heterotopies.pdf

Kuhne-Blank-Spot-Cartography

Kunst, Bojana, ‘The Project Horizon: On the Temporality of Making’, Maska, Performing Arts Journal, N° 149-150, Vol. XXVII, 2012. www.manifestajournal.org/issues/regretand-other-back-pages/project-horizon-temporalitymaking

Latour, Bruno, ‘Critical Proximity or Critical Distance’, 2003. Unpublished pop article, available on Latour’s website: www.bruno-latour.fr/poparticles/ poparticle/P-113%20HARAWAY.html

Le Boulba, Pauline, unpublished texts / research period in Lisbon, 2015. www.danse.univ-paris8.fr/chercheur. php?cc_id=6&ch_id=334

Lepecki, André, ‘“We’re not ready for the dramaturge”: Some notes on dance dramaturgy’, Rethinking Dramaturgy: Errancy and Transformation, Murcia, Centro Párraga, 2011.

Marker, Chris, Sans Soleil, 1983.

Probyn, Elspeth, ‘Writing Shame’, The Affect Theory Reader, Durham, London, Duke University Press, 2010.

Quaglia, Rita, Une hypothèse de reinterpretation.

(In collaboration with Loïc Touzé, dramaturgic advice: Carole Perdereau, sound score: Henri- Bertrand Lesguillier, artistic and technical coaching: Lluis Ayet, coproduction: Centre Chorégraphique National de Marseille et le Centre National de Danse Contemporaine d’Angers, Centre Chorégraphique de Montpellier Languedoc-Roussillon, espace Bernard Glandier-Compagnie Didier Théron), 2008.

Rendell, Jane, www.janerendell.co.uk

Schneider, Rebecca, ‘New Materialisms and Performance Studies’, TDR: The Drama Review, 59:4, 2015.

Stengers, Isabelle, ‘Reclaiming Animism’, e-flux, N° 36, July 2012. www.e-flux.com/journal/36/61245/reclaiminganimism/

121

122

123

From the performance Tell Me by Guy de Cointet 1979. View of the performance at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, USA, 12 September 1979. Performers: Jane Zingale, Denise Domergue, Helen Mendez. Š Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Courtesy Guy de Cointet Society and Air de Paris, Paris.

124

Cuerpos Viles (Despicable Bodies), director: Emilio García Wehbi, Proyecto Museos (Museums Project) curated by Vivi Tellas.

Photo: Magdalena Viggiani.

Miguel Angel Boezzio performs in Museo Miguel Angel Boezzio, director: Federico León, Proyecto Museos (Museums Project) curated by Vivi Tellas. Photo: Guillermo Arengo.

125

Guido Valentinis, Carlos Toledo and Liliana Segismondi, protagonists of Vivi Tellas’s Escuela de Conducción (Driving School) from Proyecto Archivos (Archives Project). Photo: Nicolás Goldberg.

Graciela and Luisa Ninio in Vivi Tellas’s Mi Mamá y Mi Tía (My Mother and My Aunt) from Proyecto Archivos (Archives Project).

Photo: Nicolás Goldberg.

126

From the performance What Nature Says, the people in the photo are (left to right) Anne-Laure Pigache, Mat Pogo. Photo: Beata Szparagowska.

From the performance What Nature Says, the people in the group photo are (left to right): Jakob Ampe, JeanBaptiste Veyret-Logerias, Anne-Laure Pigache, Caroline Daish, Mat Pogo. Photo: Beata Szparagowska.

127

From the performance We Are Still Watching.

Photos: Nils De Coster.

From the performance We Are Still Watching.

Photos: Ian Douglas.

128

From the performance Las Venice. Photo: Thomas Martius.

129

From the performance Hamilton at Richard Rogers Theate, New York, USA. Source: Twitter.

From the performance LAND at CafĂŠ Teatret Copenhagen, Denmark.

Photo: Joachim Hamou.

130

From the performance UIP27 at INKONST/Moderna Museet Malmรถ, Sweden.

Photo: Laetitia Paviani.

From the performance UIP27 at Passerelle Centre d'art contemporain, Brest, France.

Photo: Jean-Christophe Deprez-Deperiers.

131

Stills from the film UIP27. Photo: Bo Tengberg.

132

Bonheur Peugeot. Photo: Paula CaspĂŁo.

133

FLY. Photo: Paula CaspĂŁo.

134

135

Cally Spooner, Untitled (2015), coloured pencil and ink on technical paper, courtesy of the artist and ZERO‌ Milan, Italy.

136

122

Cally Spooner is a visual artist and writer working at the crossroads between performance, sculpture and writing. I found this helpful quote in seeking to frame her work: Cally: ‘I always think living work could be defined by being largely undesigned; allowed to land where it lands, in the margins of last-minuteness. This means that most work that promises to be live just isn’t (like Britney’s Piece Of Me residency in Las Vegas or Cats, the musical — 34 years running).

On the other hand, a lot of things that are definitely not considered live can be more alive than anything that is (in theory) living. But I only learned this recently, by making more single-take and first-take films with casts and crews…’

The text that follows here is based on Cally’s reading of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. She is addressing the major questions and arguments in Merleau-Ponty’s writing through these dramatic texts that she also made into performances in many different contexts depending on production opportunities. Merleau-Ponty’s texts are hard to grasp and therefore Cally started with the parts she could relate to. This is also the reason for the acts being mixed up as they indicate where she started to read and write rather than where the act should have been in the narrative order. Here is the complete play as it’s assembled so far.

Cally Spooner

Indirect language Act 5 1952, an unarticulated space, page 60

A large rectangular table with several chairs in the centre of the space and in a corner the Narrator sits in an armchair, wearing a casual, decent suit. His legs are crossed, he leans back and inhales the smoke from a cigarette.

The Minister leans on the table with his back turned to the Narrator. His suit is unarguably suitable for politics and he holds a miniature painting in one hand, which he studies, using a magnifying glass.

From the tips of the Minister’s feet to the edges of space, there are photographic

Indirect language

124

reproductions of every single significant painting known to man. These have been printed individually, on separate paper sheets and arranged in rows, completely obscuring the floor. Neither man speaks, and after some silence, the Minister tucks his glass in his pocket and speaks to the Narrator.

Minister: Are you still here?

Narrator: Of course I’m still here. I’m just not sure how I’ll get out.

Minister: I’ll fetch someone. They’ll clear you an exit.

Narrator: No need. /He lights another cigarette./ I’m not in a hurry.

The Minister seems annoyed. He bends down to clear an exit through the sea of reproductions, then changes his mind.

Minister: I still don’t understand why you came.

Narrator: To speak with you. There’s something I need you to understand.

Minister: Your armchair politics I presume.

Narrator: Be fair.

Minister: I think I preferred you when you’d come here to talk about eyes and minds.

Narrator: That just leads to other things. And other things need to be moved through very quickly, because all of them count, and none are the point.

Minister: You’ve read my work. I can’t see how we’ll ever agree on this because for me, and for everyone else, these count. /He starts to stack his reproductions in piles on the table. The Narrator tries to help./

Minister: Leave it.

Narrator: It’s fine. There’s no order.

Minister: Yes, there is.

Cally Spooner

Narrator: Fine.

The Narrator smokes, and watches the Minister line up more reproductions on the floor.

Narrator: You know this isn’t helping us reach Act 8.

Minister: I’m not interested in Act 8. My position is here, and my work /indicates floor/ is working. So just go. Just leave.

Narrator: Fine.

The Narrator stands up, and edges carefully around the lines of reproductions.

Narrator: We’ll leave it for now, but none of us can make any progress until we resolve this. I’ll keep retuning to this exact point /indicates script/ until you let me lay out my argument…

Suddenly the door flies open and a woman bursts into the room. Theoretically she is about 113 years old, but she looks more like 25.

She’s neurotic, strangely dressed, and storms straight through 300 odd photographic prints, sending paper reproductions flying like dust clouds into the unarticulated air. The Narrator steps out of her way, and sits back down in a chair. He looks fairly pleased to see her.

The Painter faces the Minister and shrieks.

Painter:

You! Are intolerable!

The Minister sighs, drops into a chair, and looks exhausted. The Narrator silently passes him the cigarette box, which he accepts gratefully.

125

Indirect language

126

Painter:

Stand up and deal with this.

Minister stays seated.

Minister: Can I offer you a drink, madam?

Painter: You cannot. /She tosses her head./ There is a fraternity between us painters. /She indicates the image-strewn floor./ And I won’t be fraternising with you.

Minister: Well, I think I’ll take a drink. I’ll fetch someone.

The Painter spins around and points.

Painter: Sit! He sits.

Painter: Look. /Indicates floor./ Just look.

The Minister doesn’t look.

Painter:

It’s just too, too tragic. It’s the same problem.

All the time, for eternity, the same old problem … Even in death we all face this problem…

She jabs a finger in the direction of the Minister then suddenly seems exhausted, collapsing into a chair, and crying loudly and ungracefully. The Minister half-heartedly shuffles reproductions. The Narrator watches, amused, and after some time, the Painter speaks through muffled sobs.

Painter:

From the absolute dawn of time there’s been a camaraderie. Even the very first sketches, those markings on cave walls, there was a communication — a camaraderie — and an understanding,

Cally Spooner

and do you understand who those marks were made for? /She screams./ Do you?

Minister: You have indeed told me very many times…

Painter: For me! /She shrieks./ Those marks were made for me! And for every other painter that’s ever been born and ever will be born in the future.

Minister: A charming idea…

Painter: An unquestionable fact! /Faster/ Every gesture made is an attempt to communicate an experience of the world. /Faster/ Every sketch is there so that they can speak to us /gestures/ and we answer them through a metamorphosis of their gestures /gestures/ by which we… /she’s out of breath/ collaborate…

The Minister turns to the Narrator.

Minister: Collaborate?

Narrator: Don’t worry. She’s quoting. Page 60.

Painter: We’re a continuous unstoppable exchange /furiously/ and every one of us recaptures and renews the entire undertaking of painting in each new work!

Narrator: Page 60.

Painter: And all you /points/ make available /points/ are dead reproductions!

Narrator: Page 62.

Minister: It’s only right that your productions are widely available. You improve the world. You’re the spirit of humanity /he clutches a fist of pictures/ A revolt against man’s fate!

Painter: The only thing that counts are my actions /gesture/ and my activity /gestures/, and you compromise these with your… /kicks the papers/ …retrospection.

Narrator: Page 62.

127

Indirect language

128

Painter:

We look to the past because we first look to the work to come, and the only place you look is here! /You’re hysterical./ And you say and you see NOTHING. Minister: You know I think highly of you. I always have. But since you’ve become so… frustrated, I can hardy understand you. So please, let’s clear this up right here. Right now. /He leans back in his chair and looks the Painter in the eye./

What do you want?

Painter: Recognition.

Minister: You have that! /Indicates floor./ Painter: … This /indicates floor/ is not memory.

Minister: This is history.

Painter: This is forgetfulness.

Minister: This is reverence.

Painter: Your reverence is dismemberment and total externality.

Minister: I’m fully engaged!

Painter: No! /She screams./ Your attitude is wrong. /Sadly/ It’s so wrong. You’re not helping at all. /She puts her head in her hands and refuses to look. The Minister whispers tactlessly to the Narrator./

Minister: Narrator: Minister: Narrator: Minister: Narrator:

What shall I do with her? She’s turned up every day for a week and it’s always the same.

Maybe you should listen.

I’m listening and frankly she’s mad.

She’s an important hinge in the argument.

Your argument — not mine. Besides, I thought she was just a metaphor…

She is and she isn’t. /The Narrator speaks directly to the Painter for the first time./

Go on. You can keep going. /To the Minister/ This is her monologue.

Painter: I exist /pause/ first of all in my activity and this /she’s angry/ was never intended to

Cally Spooner

end up between your morose walls, for Sunday strollers and Monday intellectuals. Something /dramatic pause/ has been lost /angrier/ because my efforts have turned into works /indicate/ so that so many joys /she shrieks/ so much sorrow /she sobs/ weren’t destined to end up here /she shakes the Minister by the shoulders/ I am part of a community and you /pokes him/ add a false prestige to the products of this by ripping my efforts from the chance circumstance they emerged. You /pokes the Minister/ make everyone believe my work sprung from nowhere! /She pauses./ My work is never finished. /Gestures./ NEVER it’s always open, waiting to be picked up and joined by someone else. /To the audience/ I’m interpreting the world out of everything I have ever lived. I have been turning events /indicates space/ into expressions /clutches her heart/ I am communicating with the world /points to the audience/. Always.

Minister: This is a very old argument. /Under his breath/ And a very bad monologue.

Painter: Don’t interrupt.

Minister: … But madam, the public needs you! You’re their refinement in a world of disaster. Hope in a world of disease. A bit of charm in the chaos.

So please, let’s not do this. Let’s just leave these face-to-face confrontations behind, and then I can get on with my work, which is also your work, because all this /pauses/ live activity / pauses/ is exhausting, for all of us.

Painter: You’re detaching me from the world /faster/ and the chance circumstances that my paintings arose from. You’re converting my modest, living /pause/ historicity into official, pompous /pause/ history. /She slams her script on

129

Indirect language

130

the table./

Narrator: Page 62.

Painter: These /indicates floor/ are not flowers on the brink of a precipice…

Narrator: Page 63.

Painter: These /indicates floor/ are not some otherworldly miracles…

Narrator: Page 63.

Painter: … Because I am trying to speak!

The Minister tries to speak.

Painter: I am speaking! And you have transformed my efforts, which I created in the fever of life…

Narrator: Page 63.

Painter: … Into marvels!

Minister: And aren’t they just marvelous?

Painter: … They are NOT. They are a living communication with those who expressed themselves before me and those who will one day arrive to do the same. I am communicating! /She punches the air./ I am projecting forward by jumping back. And you /point/ freeze me in the past and treat my works as finished. But I /punches her chest/ am never finished.

Minister: Have you quite finished?

Painter: I am open! I am conversing all my experiences. I am responding! I am responding to the world… to the landscapes, the schools, the creditors…

To live in painting is still to breathe the air of this world, above all for the man who sees something in the world to paint. /She throws down her script./ And there is a little of him in every single man.

Narrator: Page 64.

The Painter turns on her heel, kicks a pile

Cally Spooner

of reproductions and storms off the page.

The Minister gazes vacantly into space.

He adjusts his tie. Reaches for his miniature then reconsiders.

Frankly, that was uncalled for. I’m not The Museum and she didn’t need to take that out on me.

Narrator: She’s hurt. /He shrugs./ You don’t understand her.

Minister: Of course I understand her. I know her infinitely.

And I know there’s a reason underlying her and the rest of her type’s work, and I know that meaning /he indicates floor/ needs to be found.

Minister:

/He returns to studying his miniature./

Narrator: You won’t find it in there.

They fall into silence.

Narrator: Besides. I didn’t come here to talk about her. I invited her to help me speak about something bigger.

Minister: You invited her!?

The Narrator looks guilty.

Minister:

That was entirely unnecessary. Do not do it again.

They fall in to silence for some time.

So you wanted to speak?

About History.

Please do.

I can’t without her.

Must you invite her?

Yes. She’s working in the world of perceived things.

Minister: Perception, again.

Minister: Narrator: Minister: Narrator: Minister: Narrator:

131

Indirect language

132

Narrator: Minister: Narrator: Minister:

In a way.

Very predictable.

I’m interested in the choice she made to ‘look’.

For God’s sake, we’re all looking… /He takes out his magnifying glass./

Narrator: She’s well and truly in the world…

Minister: We’re all in the world. /He’s irritated./ Pass me my notebook.

The Narrator reluctantly passes the Minister a large notebook. The Minister jots down an observation he must have unearthed from the miniature while the Narrator stares outside.

Narrator: Can we go outside and finish this there?

Minister: No. It’s not a warm day and besides, it’s really best that you leave. I’ve got so much on.

Narrator: We’ve not finished.

Minister: We’re on Act 5, you must have got somewhere…

Narrator: Yes, we got to the bit where you’re walling up the conversation that’s been flowing since the dawn of aesthetics by interrupting her perceptual transitions with your analysis.

Minister: That’s not me. That’s The Museum and besides, I’m not an analyst. I’m a humanist and this /indicates floor/ is democracy.

Narrator: These /points to floor/ are events.

Minister: Meaning is here /he picks up an image/. I checked.

Narrator: You know the works.

Minister: There are only works, and the individuals who give them meaning.

Narrator: There’s only activity.

Minister: There are only works.

Narrator: You’re turning in on yourself! /He throws a handful of reproductions into the air./

This is your constructed system. You’ve

Cally Spooner

destroyed originary expression! /Furiously/ And what, exactly, are you proposing? /Bangs the table./ All you’re doing is speaking. All you are ever doing is speaking.

So what /pokes the Narrator/ exactly /pokes the Narrator/ are you proposing?

Narrator: That culture /pokes the Minister/, meaning / kicks the floor/ and history /bangs the table/ are nascent. It’s an evolving conversation.

It’s never finished. And we should consider it as an original order of Advent. /He stands up./ A History /both stand up/ of Advent.

Minister:

Suddenly, the door opens and a young and extremely versatile phenomenologist, enters the room. The Minister and the Narrator are standing, face to face, and turn to see the new arrival.

Footnote: Excuse me.

The Minister and the Narrator stare.

Footnote: I believe you’ve just borrowed my footnote.

All exit to Act 6.

133

Indirect language

134

Act 1 1952, an unarticulated space somewhere between pages 39 and 45

The Narrator and the Writer sit at opposite sides of a table. They have been drinking coffee and arguing for nearly three years.

The Narrator, dressed in a casually decent suit, is tired of the Writer dominating their conversations with his strong opinions and latest publications.

Writer:

… So, let’s begin all over again. This doesn’t amuse anyone, neither you nor me. But I think, finally, we have to hit the nail on the head, and since critics condemn me in the name of literature without ever saying what they even mean by that, the best answer to give them is to examine the art of writing without prejudice.

And so, I’m asking simply this: /he pushes his

Cally Spooner

latest publication across the table/ what is writing? Why does one write? And for whom?

The Narrator glances at the book.

Writer:

… Now… we certainly don’t want to ‘commit’ painting, sculpture, and music ‘too’, or at least not in the same way… It’s quite one thing to work with colour and sound and another entirely to express oneself by means of words. /The

Writer:

… But the writer of prose, well, he can guide you. Because writing /he prepares a dramatic pause/ is exact.

Narrator sips his coffee./

The Narrator lights a cigarette.

Narrator: Exactitude /he inhales/ is overrated. Besides there are two sides to everything, especially language. And I’m certainly not here to talk about writing.

The Writer ignores him...

Writer:

… These expressive arts just can’t cut to the cusp like a well honed text. A poet has ducked out of the language instrument entirely, and the painter is even worse: utterly mute and generally stupid. The committed prose writer knows that words are actions. Action by disclosure.

But the expressive arts remain sloppily under-­ committed to our cause.

Narrator: You’re so out of date.

Writer: No more than you. /He indicates the general performance./ Do you actually think you’re communicating?

135

Indirect language

136

The Narrator bangs the table and upsets the coffee.

Narrator: I’m committed. And I’m communicating.

The Writer used to his outbursts, adjusts the cup on its saucer.

Writer: Ambiguously. /He tweaks the cup./ Narrator: But there’s good ambiguity and bad ambiguity, and there’s good ambiguity in expression /indicates his script./

Writer:

It’s not even finished! /Indicates script./ And it’s full of holes.

Narrator: It’s moving between things. And this is possible because of the holes. It’s the gaps that count and I know this from a very reliable course.

Writer: On? Narrator: General Linguistics /apologetically/ for beginners.

Writer: With that Swiss chap!!

Narrator: I need him. And you do too, if you want your ‘politics’ to reach further than your armchair, your journal and your painfully ‘committed’ writing. He’ll help us understand why we need to re-imagine history first /he lights cigarette/ as an inter-human thing /he waves away the smoke/ before we can even begin to make any progress /he inhales./ You see?

The Writer begins to look interested.

Suddenly, a Swiss Linguist enters. He’s almost 100 years old, but looks 35. His large moustache is neatly maintained and he’s carrying a tower of lecture notes. The Writer studies him with curiosity.

Cally Spooner

Writer: Apparently /yawning/ you’ve sketched out a brand new philosophy of history.

The Narrator jumps up.

Narrator: Well, you could have. But what you’ve started, I’ll finish.

Linguist: /Irritated and cross./ My work is a system (he pats his tower of notes). You don’t need to move anywhere but here /indicates notes./ Especially not through history.

Narrator: … But in the system /points to the notes/ the gaps between signs matter most…

The Linguist hesitates.

Narrator: Meaning emerges in-between signs. So it’s as much as what one doesn’t say…

The Linguist is silent.

Narrator: As by what is said…

Narrator: … And Language speaks when it doesn’t aim directly at the things themselves because meaning in Language is never a like-for-like correspondence. And that…

The Linguist tries to speak.

Narrator: Is speaking… /With complete conviction./ Which is exactly what you told me.

The Linguist is incredibly annoyed.

Linguist:

I did not! And I do not study what can’t be studied.

Language is here /indicates notes/ and what you’re proposing is completely uncontrollable. I

137

Indirect language

138

Narrator: Linguist: Narrator: Writer: Narrator: Writer: Narrator: Writer: Narrator: Writer: Narrator:

have a system /he clutches the notes/. And this /indicates the conversation/ is not it.

It definitely is.

It definitely isn’t. I know my own work.

I know my own ears.

There’s been a misreading…

I never misread.

You clearly don’t read. You won’t even write.

I write!

Without reading!

I’m reading right now!

Reading a misreading.

Just reading out loud!

The Linguist is getting upset.

Narrator: I’m writing /indicates script/ that my reading /indicates Linguist/ means that meaning / jabs the air/ is not in your writing /indicates Writer/ it’s here /indicates wildly/ because this /indicates audience, performance and players/ is language /page 39/.

Linguist: I’m going.

The Linguist exits and thrusts his lecture notes at the Narrator as he charges off the page. The stack falls to the floor, and the Writer picks up a diagram.

Writer:

Seems pretty clear to me. In fact, /looking closer/ I rather like this…

Narrator: It’s the ambiguous gaps between things. He said this counts…

Writer: Or maybe you’ve said too much. Either way, I’ve had enough of your bad ambiguity. Why you thought the poor chap could build you a brand new inter-human history, I’ll frankly never

Cally Spooner

understand. You really are complicating things, and I’m bored of your sloppy thinking. Let’s finish this later, page 81, I’ll see you there. Hopefully you’ll have committed to something slightly less muddled by then, and until that point, you are a writer…

He picks up his latest publication.

Writer:

Now write.

He exits.

The Narrator screws up the diagram and stares absently into a cup of cooling coffee until, quite suddenly, a Painter arrives at the door.

All exit to page 45, line 20.

139

Indirect language

140

Act 2 (Part 1) 1952, An unarticulated space somewhere between pages 45 and 47

A Narrator sits at a table, with his head in his hands, two cups of cooling coffee at his side. One has spilt in its saucer. At the doorway to the space stands a Painter.

Theoretically she is 113 years old, but looks 25. She cocks her head to one side, sucks in her cheeks, and looks enquiringly at the Narrator, who lifts his face from his hands and sees her for the first time.

Painter:

Hello /she slips into a seat and drinks the lukewarm coffee./ I’d heard you wanted to speak.

The Narrator is completely confused.

Cally Spooner

Narrator: … I’m not sure we’ve met… /the Painter continues to drink his coffee/ would you… like something… fresher?

Painter: I’m not bothered.

Narrator: Oh… Painter: I would love to take a walk though. /She seems agitated./ It’s terribly… /she looks around the space/ hot. /She stares at her audience./ And far too overcrowded.

Narrator: Oh. /He stares at a coffee cup./ I hadn’t noticed.

Painter: Your type rarely does …with your nose in your writing. /She flicks the script./ Narrator: That’s not true. I’m not even writing.

Painter: Yes dear, I can see that /indicates script/ but it’s sweet you tried.

Narrator: No! I mean, I am and I’m not…

Painter: Ahhh. Some good ambiguity… not quite this… not quite that… /She drinks absently./ Narrator: What did you say?

Painter: What did I say?

Narrator: … About vagueness… and uncertainty…

Painter: Oh no, no, no. It’s not quite that…

Narrator: Not quite what?

Painter: Not quite that.

Narrator: Not quite this?…

Painter: Not quite really.

Narrator: Oh… Painter: But it’s sweet you tried.

They fall into silence.

Narrator: Painter: Narrator: Painter: Narrator:

You know /he pauses/, I’m writing…

Poor you. … But it’s just not working…

It never does.

But in some ways it is.

141

Indirect language

142

Painter: Writers block?

Narrator: I’m not sure it’s that…

Painter: Well it’s too easy to tell them it’s not easy to know where to start.

Narrator: I’ve started.

Painter: Nearly…

Narrator: … I have! But it’s just not saying what I wanted to say.

Painter: Well perhaps you should say nothing. Or something else entirely.

Narrator: I’m saying something else /he waves his script./

Painter:

Sometimes you are, and sometimes you’re not. /She pushes the script away and reaches for the remaining cup of coffee./

Narrator: Would you like a fresh one?

Painter: Not really — I hate the stuff. It’s just a prop… /She jabs the text./ You know that.

Narrator: … It’s not been easy…

Painter: It’s never easy.

The Narrator looks distracted...

Painter:

Something in the process of being accomplished can never really be easy… Not when your meaning isn’t quite here /she points to the performance/ or there /she points to the audience/ or then /indicate left/ nor now /indicates right/. Because… in such a case… /she looks thoughtful/ where do you go?

The Narrator isn’t sure.

Painter:

You go everywhere.

The Narrator isn’t sure.

Cally Spooner

Painter:

All at once.

The Narrator isn’t sure.

Painter:

Particularly in-between things.

The Narrator pauses...

Painter:

… And please don’t think you’ll ever finish.

The Narrator tries to understand.

Narrator: So… meaning is lateral. Or oblique… Running between words?

Painter: I wouldn’t know or care. I don’t deal in words.

Narrator: You deal with expression Painter: Precisely. And I am perfectly mute.

Narrator: Not exactly.

Painter: Absolutely.

Narrator: You’re communicating through language.

Painter: Not through words.

Narrator: But it’s not just words available… there are two sides to language…

Painter: … There are two sides to everything. Certainly there are two sides to painting too and I can tell you right now, someone who sits there with their nose up against my brush, observing me too close would see the wrong side of my work. /Page 45./ The wrong side is to look at the movement of my brush /gestures/ the right side is looking at the sunlit glade /gestures/ which that movement releases.

The Narrator cringes with the audience.

The Painter doesn’t care.

Painter:

Besides, I couldn’t possibly tell you about the

143

Indirect language

gestures I make. I’m not a designer. I never plan anything, and while I might choose one gesture over another, the meaning is never in the individual decision. It’s how the decision effects the whole.

144

She twists her hair.

Painter:

… So that the smallest divergence, /she moves the cup/ the slightest inflection /she tidies her hair/ the minutest of gestures /she wrings her hands/ means that things may be expressed through the smallest decisions, and the greatest amount of chaos, to change the meaning of something… completely…

The Narrator watches the painter.

Painter:

Meaning is found in the phase when something is being established /she looks the Narrator in the eye./ And you can’t look for this meaning like you’d look for a hammer to drive a nail…

The Narrator watches the Painter.

Painter:

… You should just grope about wildly, searching for the right tool… and hope that you’re instincts will work…

The Narrator watches the Painter.

Painter:

… Then, you’re making an attempt which invents itself /she pauses/ right there and then.

She stands.

Painter:

And while it’s possible that your language might

Cally Spooner

have some decisive privilege over mine, it’s only in trying out mine, as a parallel, that you’ll understand why, or why not. And so, here’s my suggestion: that you start to understand that there is a tacit language, in addition to yours.

Understand that I speak in this way and that a like-for-like communication of someone else’s words from page to stage is stifling for all of us.

She goes to leave.

Painter:

But to speak with someone else… to speak through them… To take up their gesture… /Look at me./ Well that’s much better.

The Narrator stays silent?

Painter : Do you really believe you’re saying anything at all?

The Narrator is completely silent.

Painter:

Good.

It looks like you’re getting somewhere. /She hands him the script./ But you’re not even nearly finished.

All exit to Act 3.

145

Indirect language

146

Act 8 1952, an unarticulated space.

Somewhere between page 77 and 80 with occasional diversions backwards and forwards into page 75 and 83

The Minister is still carrying a magnifying glass, and now also a scrapbook, into which he has pasted photographic reproductions of every significant painting known to man, in a very specific order. The Narrator is pacing the floor, exhilarated by the recently exited Historian’s magnificent Act 7 monologue on the indirect behaviour of history, illustrated with a vertical/horizontal conceptual maquette.

Narrator: Perception! History! Expression!… It’s only by bringing these three together that we’ll be able to put things in their proper perspective…

The Minister shifts his weight from one foot, to the other.

Cally Spooner

Narrator: … To recover history, in the true sense of the term, we need to model it after the example of the arts and of speaking. I know this!

Minister:

Just… Stop… You’ll wear out the floor…

The Narrator keeps pacing.

Narrator: … Every cultural expression is closely connected to every expression made before it, and this brings about the junction of the individual /he points to the Minister/ and the Universal /he points back to himself./

Minister: I want to go…

Narrator: No! /He blocks the way./ How many different people must I introduce you to before you realise it’s people that count /he nods at the scrapbook/ and not your inscription of history on history.

Minister: Frankly, that made no sense.

The Narrator waves his arms.

Narrator: I’m trying to show you.

The Minister looks away.

You could at least try…

You have no point!

There’s no single point!

Then why have you dragged me here /he stamps his foot/ via the most inefficient route imaginable!

Narrator: It’s a total gesture. A manifestation…

Minister: It’s an ineffective waste of expression.

Narrator: It is simply /he flourishes/ expression.

Narrator: Minister: Narrator: Minister:

147

Indirect language

148

The two men are becoming predictably angry, and turn their backs to one another. The Writer enters with his head poised, producing an effect of great arrogance amplified by an even newer edition of his latest publication, tucked deliberately under his arm.

Narrator: Writer: Narrator: Writer: Narrator: Writer:

You’re late.

I’m not.

I arranged a meeting!

I know /he yawns./ Please, sit…

I’ll stand.

He turns to the Minister.

Writer: Minister: Writer: Minister: Narrator:

Writer: Narrator:

Minister: Narrator: Writer:

Minister: Narrator:

Dragged in circles I assume?

I am profoundly dizzy and very annoyed.

He does that.

He’s taking it all out on me… /Turns to the Narrator./ I am NOT the Museum!

But your alternative without walls is just as bad! /Bangs the table./ You’re treating history like some external idol. /He bangs the floor./ That, is a poorly researched claim. /The Narrator shouts at the Writer./ Your writing is a hazard /turns to the Minister/ and so is your so very subjective /indicates scrapbook/ ‘collection’.

It’s for the public!

It’s all yours.

His collection /indicates Minister/ is a wild success. The public /indicate audience/ adores him.

His book /indicates Writer/ is a masterpiece… a very bestseller.

But… you’re using conquering languages…

Cally Spooner

You’re introducing unfamiliar perspectives, and it’s not helping them (indicates audience) confirm the perspectives they already have. Your system is not one of positive ideas.

Writer: Well please do show us your /with sarcasm/ oh so positive solution.

Narrator: I’m showing you.

Writer: Prove it.

Narrator: I CAN’T… The Writer and Minister look smug. The Narrator tries to look less deflated.

Narrator: It’s in the hollows of space… The hollows of time and… signification… trying to prove this would be like… trying to show you the movement in cinema, between immobile images… which follow one another… /He fumbles to light a cigarette./ You’ll just have to go with me. /He smokes frantically./ Just trust me. I can’t explain this. I just have to do it.

He attempts a few more gestures, smokes some more, then gives up and collapses in a chair

Writer:

If you learnt to use writing as your tool, your work would be simpler and you’d be far less… /he

studies

the

collapsed

Narrator/

exhausted… /He shakes his head./ You shouldn’t be trying to carry all your meaning yourself. Just put the meaning in words. They’re in our service.

Narrator: We live in speech and gesture and I assure you these aren’t tools for reaching some external end. They definitely are not /punches the script/ in our service.

Writer: We live. /Bangs the table./ And writing is

149

Indirect language

150

our shield to cope with Others. It secures our /coughs/ personal freedom.

Narrator: Speaking is the fabric we’re all folded into /he’s seemingly urgent/ and Meaning is generated by US moving through it, sometimes haphazardly, (gestures) sometimes gesturally … /gestures/ often inefficiently… /pause for effect/ together. Meaning is NOT in your utilitarian word play and not /he snatches at the scrapbook/ in formalism.

The Painter and the Footnote enter. After meeting several pages earlier they have developed a fondness for one another’s positions, and they’re conversing unstoppably, like very old friends. They pay little attention to the men.

Footnote: So, /he begins/ to quote Act 6, which hasn’t been written yet — in short they are haunted by the expectation of the moment at which it will finally be known just what the situation was.

Painter: Ahhhhhhh! /She gushes/ The expectation of one day knowing what one is actually doing!

Footnote: To continue /he continues/ — history is never created by what is inscribed in history, but which, insofar as it is truth, requires that transcription.

Painter: Ahhhhhhh! The open book! /She gestures./ Go on!

Footnote: To quote the epilogue, which hasn’t been written, and which he /indicates Narrator/ certainly hadn’t anticipated /he quotes/ — personal life, expression, understanding and history /he looks up/ advance obliquely…

Narrator: That’s my line!!

Footnote: … To quote Act 7, which still hasn’t happened

Cally Spooner

— men borrow from one another so constantly, that each movement of our will and thought takes flight from other men…

The Painter sees the Minister.

Painter:

You again!

The Minister looks terrified.

Footnote: … So it’s impossible to have any more than a rough idea…

The Painter glares at the Minister.

Footnote: … Of what is due to each individual man.

The Minister edges away from the Painter, then edges away from the Narrator too. The Footnote is oblivious to the crisis.

Footnote: … To quote Act 8, which is happening now…

Painter: Still fiddling with your pictures? /She snarls at the Minister./

Footnote: … My work simply adds to my obligation, as a solitary person, to understand situations other than my own. And through others…

Painter: Your dogmatic ordering is deflating our meaning! And you /to the Writer/ are constructing meaning where there is none.

Writer: Meaning is here /indicates his book./ Minister: Meaning is here /indicates scrapbook./ Painter: MEANING (she’s screams) IS HERE /indicates audience/ and I express myself, by dwelling in lives which are not mine.

Footnote: Lovely.

Painter: Wonderful.

151

Indirect language

152

The Writer quickly leafs through the script and triumphantly turns to the Narrator.

Writer:

They’re taking all your lines!

The Narrator doesn’t care.

Minister:

This is precisely what happens, /he makes a note in his scrapbook/ if you don’t keep yourself organised /he throws a sideways glance at the Painter./

Painter: I’d rather have nothing to do with your organisation!

Writer: And if you don’t control yourself he’ll strike you out of history /pauses/ then where will you go?

The Minister turns to the writer.

Minister: Writer:

Thank you.

My pleasure.

The Painter bursts into tears.

This is exactly the problem with Others /he looks the Narrator in the eye./ You’ve lost your autonomy.

Narrator: I guess it’s a dialogue…

Writer: Art can’t be reduced to a dialogue with the dead /indicates Painter/ and with men not yet born.

Narrator: That’s all there is! /He tries to comfort the painter./ Look what you’ve done.

Writer: You brought her. I’ve got no interest in this. /Gestures./ I’m writing for here, and only for now. My writing comes out of a need for the absolute /he gestures flamboyantly/. And a Writer:

Cally Spooner

work of the mind /he taps his head/ is indeed, an absolute.

Minister: Lovely.

Narrator: Firstly, no one understands what the absolute is /indicates audience/. Secondly /he passes the Painter a tissue/ the work of the mind is private.

Writer: Until it goes public /he waves about his latest publication./

Painter:

You’re /she curls her lip/ disgusting!

The Writer ignores her and snarls at the Narrator. The Narrator blows smoke and pretends not to care.

Writer:

And what /he’s angry/ have you made public?

The Narrator tries to restrain the Painter.

Writer: Another formless idea?

Painter: You just don’t understand.

Narrator: It’s something better than an idea. /He prepares to impress the Writer./ A matrices of ideas.

Writer: Well you’re 20 years too early and 20 years too late, /he turns his back on the Narrator/ and I still can’t see how you’ll find anyone with enough patience to pick their way through a ‘matrices’. Besides /he looks around/ where is it?

The Narrator indicates the performance, the players and the scripts.

Footnote: I think it’s right here.

Writer: There’s absolutely nothing to focus on. It’s impossibly unmanageable /he avoids the

153

Indirect language

154

Painter:

flailing Painter/ and you’re jumping all over the place. Furthermore, I’m almost certain that they /indicates audience/ have no idea why she /indicates Painter/ is here. You need to explain. /Furiously/ He will not explain, and I will NOT explain. I am here so long as there is something to be created! Everything I paint will be added to already created works and this doesn’t make the old creations useless /reconsiders/ nor do they exactly contain them… /She’s starting a monologue./

Narrator: Thanks, but … I’m not sure now’s the time…

Painter: … How dare you stop me in my flow! The time is now, and now and always I am looking back! And building on those who came before…

Writer: /Under his breath./ Filling in their failures…

Painter: Absolutely!

The Writer seems rather surprised.

Painter:

Writer: Painter:

And my attempt will FAIL /she collapses into a chair/ as soon as it’s built on later. /She looks fondly into the distance./ My painting will always be an abortive effort to say something… /She screams./ Which still remains to be said.

Now that /he snarls/ is plainly inefficient.

That /she flicks her hair/ is INFINITE potential. It means that the past is present. And YOU /points at the Minister/ only want me for my looks.

The Minister is so surprised he drops his magnifying glass.

Minister:

I can assure you I definitely don’t.

Cally Spooner

Writer: Painter:

She’s a fool. She’s talking about her form.

And you esteem my form so little by esteeming my form too much! It’s all you care about! … You don’t care about my trajectory, but it’s a veritable matrices of interconnections and reconnections. And not even you /she points to the Narrator/ seem to care anymore. /She weeps. The Footnote hands her a tissue./

Minister: This is a repetition of Act 5.

Narrator: … It’s not… /he pats the Painter halfheartedly on the back/… It’s a parallel, because your obsession with her formalism is no different to his literature of subject… you’re both separating the meaning of the work from its actual manifestation, and you’re destroying live activity. /The Painter passes him her tissue./

Narrator: And your externality is precisely why neither of you seem to get this.

Minister: We’ll get it when it’s finished.

Painter: He is NEVER finished /she sobs/…

The Writer rolls his eyes.

Painter:

And HE /points to the Minister/ is trying to master history!

The Footnote looks very intelligent and thoughtful. He walks calmly to the Minister.

Footnote: You are not the master of history. /He gently confiscates the Minister’s scrapbook./

You are affected by the history you make. History is action /he eases the Minister’s magnifying glass out of his grip./ It’s a past that is received, which preserves the relation between the horizon of expectation /he gestures

155

Indirect language

into the future/ and the space of experience. /He taps the Minister on the nose./

156

And you’ll only know the difference between expectation /pause/ and experience /pause/ when the first has changed into the second.

The Minister looks confused. Then everyone looks confused. The audience are getting fed up.

Footnote: To emerge from the narrowness of the human condition we each need to continually move towards self-clarification… By unfolding our perceptions of the world /he speaks to the audience/ in communication with others.

The Writer is completely annoyed and shouts at the Narrator.

I know, I know for a FACT, that you STILL don’t know what he’s talking about /indicates Footnote/ you brought him in too soon! He belongs in Act 6 and it’s not even written!

Narrator: I’m merging my technique with my ideology…

Writer: My technique… /he glances at the weeping Painter and the vacant Footnote/ is a better ideology than this.

Narrator: I have been told, by a very reliable Historian that in the old /faster/ the present subsists /faster/ and the past /stop/ is now understood. I have been told, by a very reliable course, that it’s the spaces and the movement between things that counts /faster./ Writer:

At this point the Linguist enters, and surveys the chaos. The Painter is crying, the Footnote is facing in the wrong direction, the Writer is misread and the Minister is unhelpfully outdated.

Cally Spooner

Linguist: What is this? What’s going on?

They all look.

Linguist: You’ve completely misunderstood my system. I already told you this. AND yet you insist on perpetuating a misreading and dragging everyone else into your chaos. What have you done to my project? And to yours for that matter? This /they all stand/ is a mess.

The Linguist turns on his heel, followed by every one of the Narrator’s references.

The Narrator stays sat in the middle of his matrices with a scrapbook of painterly reproductions falling to pieces at his feet, an existential publication bent at the spine, a linguistic diagram screwed into a ball, a horizontal/vertical maquette perched on the table, a General Linguistics guide next to his chair, a muddle of scripts, re-draftings, re-edits, ripped out pages, and photocopies with biro scrawled Post-it notes stuck to his feet.

His casually decent suit is crumpled, and his script falls to the ground.

He exits to the Epilogue.

157

Indirect language

158

Act 6 (Part 1) It’s 1952 an unarticulated space, somewhere between page 69 and 70

The Narrator and the Minister stand in a sea of paper. Backs turned to one another. An ashtray has spilt on the floor next to an extremely young and versatile Footnote. He is six foot two and dressed strangely, as if he partly expected to attend a formal dinner, but forgot to shave his beard, or finish getting dressed.

He picks up a reproduction.

Footnote: … Charming /he turns it upside down/ but still /he turns it again/ I’d appreciate a shout out.

Narrator: You got one! Page 70! /Reference 22./ Footnote: True /he moves to the window/ but I’m not sure I said that… No matter though… /He nods to the Minister./ Lovely day.

Cally Spooner

Minister: Narrator: Minister: Footnote:

Who is this /splutters/ extra!?

He’s a cameo.

He’s an intrusion!

I’m invited! /He pauses./ And I’m very much more than a number. But /he gazes outside at the Painter, who’s crying on a bench/

Minister: Narrator: Minister: Narrator: Footnote: Minister: Narrator: Footnote:

who was she? /Gazing./ Funny hair. /Scratches his head./ Good attitude. Lots of /he rubs his arm/ punch.

She’s unmanageable! Don’t touch her!...

She’s responsive!

Internal nonsense.

She’s intuitive!

She’s lovely.

Mad and unregulated.

She’s working stuff out…

Actually /he gazes outside/ I think she’s worked it out. Just back to front, which is perfect /he studies the upside down picture/ when none of the best things face forward.

The Narrator waits.

Footnote: … Making sense is never straightforward.

The Narrator waits.

Footnote: … Slippages are everywhere, so long as we interrupt, so that meaning is NEVER forever, especially not in history. History is newness /gestures/ absolute newness /gestures/ and that’s making sense /pauses/ I’d say.

Minister: Nonsense!

Narrator: /To the Footnote/ Thanks.

Footnote: Except… I never said that.

Narrator: … Oh /the Minister looks pleased/ Ok… / he’s confused/ But maybe in passing, or…

159

Indirect language

160

Elsewhere. Somewhere… Somewhere written? /He’s really confused./ I’m sure you did!…

Footnote: You need to keep your references better. I recommend notes. It’s not a compromise. Just practical. You can always ignore them later. But for now, I’ll give you this /turns to the Minister/.

The good things don’t stand /he stands./ They move /he moves./ And as soon as he arrives / points to the Narrator/ and her /referring to the Painter/ and this /points to the performance/, what was apparently fixed /he holds up a picture/ will be false /he screws it up/.

And we’re on the high road to true.

Minister: Leave it! /Snatches the paper./ It’s a perfect unity that belongs with the others!

Footnote: It belongs with the others /he messes the papers/ in a changing, communicative muddle.

Minister: GET OUT! Narrator: … Lets go. It’s pointless.

They leave the Minister fuming, trying to reorder his painterly events empirically, and exit into an enormous sunlit square backed by a magnificently imposing eighteenth-century three-in-one University, Library, Museum.

They find some grass, sit down, The Narrator lights a cigarette and The Footnote puts on his sunglasses.

Narrator: Can you keep going?

Footnote: Where?

Narrator: No… I mean… /he shields his eyes/ … to the future… and the past. To this idea, that history is never created by what is inscribed in history, but which, insofar as it is truth, requires that transcription… because we pick up on another’s

Cally Spooner

Footnote: Narrator: Footnote: Narrator:

Footnote:

Narrator:

Footnote:

gesture… And then we should somehow record that. Catch it. Then move on, but also move back, and unsettle what settled… What they settled… and… Stuff.

I can’t say that now you said it.

But YOU said it.

Impossible. I said something else.

You started. I continued that trail, and now it’s active /re-thinks/ or action /this is important/ I just need to know how /he’s getting flustered/ , because jumping back /leans back/ to move forward /blows smoke/, and changing the past /smokes/ to be in the present… /Waves away smoke./ Its /he squints/ confusing!

To return to the borrowed item, reference 22, which I don’t even know how you found, history is Advent /page 70./ Not ordered events.

It’s a promise, bought by someone else, who we probably don’t know, which will alter what we’ve got. Then we’ll do the same for someone else. Which means we need to keep flexible /he starts doing some stretching./ Keep moving /he jogs on the spot/. You won’t make sense by settling down… /he does some star jumps/ and you won’t find meaning, until you’ve made sense. And so /page 70/ Advent is a promise of events. /He stops jumping./ And History, is Advent.

It’s not clear for them! /He indicates audience./ So… /he tries to understand/ we’re haunted by the expectation of the moment when we’ll finally know just what the situation was, BUT, we never know… and we’re 40 minutes into the event!

I don’t do events. /Adjusting his sun-glasses./ I’m progressive.

161

Indirect language

162

Narrator: You cant back out! You spoke! You’re /pauses/ implicated.

Footnote: Meaning’s on the move. /He turns to go./ That’s all I know.

Narrator: But this /punch the script/ isn’t moving! And I already knew that!

Footnote: Repetition is lazy.

Narrator: I’m not lazy!

Footnote: Well someone is /indicate me/ and this project needs to get much more complex and so, unfortunately /he removes his sunglasses/, we’ll have to talk about God. Narrator: Really?

Footnote: … And how to vertically transcend him.

Narrator: Right…

Footnote: Only if we horizontally transcend history first.

Narrator: Ok… Footnote: And for that, you’ll need to meet the Communist.

The Narrator is excited.

Footnote: … But as he was double-booked.

The Narrator waits.

Footnote: Widely misread.

Waits.

Footnote: Stuck, in historically materialist traffic…

The Narrator looks crestfallen.

Footnote: … You will need to meet his influence instead.

The Narrator looks around.

Cally Spooner

Footnote: Which is wonderful news! Because here he is.

The Historian doesn’t enter. No one is ready for this theoretical upgrade. But, if he was here, he’d be 300 years old. He’d wear very clean shirts tucked into sensible high waisted trousers. He’d carry an enormous foundational guide for Phenomenologists and Marxists in one hand, and a conceptual horizontal vertical maquette in the other. This will look partly like a gate post and something like a minus object. The Narrator becomes extremely anxious, even at the possibility of the Historian’s arrival. He smokes, and frantically grabs for his notebook. The Footnote is sympathetic.

Footnote: Yeah. /He pats the Narrator on the shoulder./ Good luck with this one. /He hands him a pen./ Not the easiest to get along with. And for the sake of all our attention spans, yours and theirs, /indicates audience/ I suggest you call an interval.

The Narrator doesn’t object.

Footnote: And so /he clears his throat/, the performance will resume in a year. /Indicate me./ She needs to do a crash course. /He bows./ Thank you for listening to so many words, with so little action. After the break, we will be better.

All exit to the Interval.

163

Calling out of context Conceived and edited by Joachim Hamou

Designed by Bureau Roman Seban

Copy edited by Bella Marrin

Acknowledgments to All the authors, Moderna Museet and INKONST, Malmö (Sweden), Passerelle Centre d’art contemporain, Brest (France), Thomas Boutoux

Made possible by the generous support of

Printed by CPI Bussière

ISBN 978-2-918252-49-8

Published by Paraguay 26/28 rue du Docteur Potain 75019 Paris — France www.paraguaypress.com

Dépôt légal Avril 2017

Paula Caspão Signe Frederiksen Marcela A. Fuentes Joachim Hamou Rudi Laermans Laura Luise Schultz Ivana Müller François Piron Cally Spooner

ISBN 978-2-918252-49-8