tout bouge

In the late 1970s Simon McBurney studied English at Cambridge University, where he was a performer and writer in the Cambridge Footlights alongside Emma Thompson, Hugh Laurie and Annabel Arden. After graduating, he trained at the Jacques Lecoq school in Paris before returning to London in 1983 to co-found Theatre de Complicite with Annabel Arden, Marcello Magni and Fiona Gordon. After almost thirty productions in the past twenty years, many of which have toured extensively, Complicite has established itself as one of Europe’s most popular, critically lauded and influential theatre companies. Successfully navigating the apparent divide between avant-garde experiment and a popular mainstream, Complicite has become known internationally for the physical dexterity and darkly comic inventiveness of its collaboratively devised work (1), and the fluid dramaturgies of its productions of classic texts (2) and adaptations of contemporary fiction (3). As artistic director of Complicite, McBurney has directed almost all of the company’s shows in the past ten years to produce a body of work of remarkable focus, energy and diversity. At the same time, he has continued to work internationally as a freelance theatre director and an actor in both film and television (4)

Having trained as a performer with Lecoq, McBurney brings an embodied understanding of the predicament of performers to his work as a director, and in particular to the necessity for collaborators to generate a common language. At the outset of any devising process - and all of McBurney’s work should be viewed through the lens of devising, including the work on existing texts (5) - his primary concern is to try to invent the conditions for invention through the preparation of bodies, voices and imaginations: ‘I prepare them so that they are ready: ready to change, ready to be surprised, ready to seize any opportunity that comes their way’ (McBurney 1999: 71). A number of McBurney’s long term collaborators also trained with Lecoq, and they share a certain shorthand in terms of exercises, discourses and dispositions towards the making of performance. Over the years, however, Complicite has become an increasingly loose alliance of collaborators rather than a permanent company, with new members joining those with some greater continuity for particular projects. In addition, McBurney’s freelance work brings him into contact with actors largely unfamiliar with the unpredictable and difficult joys of devising, the occasional terrors of setting off into the unknown and getting very lost. In recent years, for example, he has directed productions for the National Actors’ Theatre in New York (Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui in 2002, with Al Pacino, John Goodman and Steve Buscemi), and with members of Tokyo’s Setagaya Public Theatre (The Elephant Vanishes in 2003).

McBurney happily admits to the legacies of Lecoq in his work: the centrality of the ensemble as a kind of multi-headed storyteller, swarming and shoaling as one multiple organism, ‘like a flock of starlings’ (McBurney 1999: 74); the ideals of embodied lightness and disponibilité as prerequisites for the emergence of forms and images in complicitous play, of emotion from motion, of laughter that is both celebratory and critically corrosive; the creation of suggestive, incomplete forms that invite imaginative complicity from spectators, activating their creative agency; above all, an amplified quality of attentive listening to and engagement with rhythm, tempo, musicality and the dynamics of space as core components in elaborating and evaluating live theatre:

‘an analysis through the use of movement of how a piece of theatre works: how it actually functions in terms of space, in terms of rhythm, almost like music in terms of counterpoint, harmony: image and action, movement and stillness, words and silence’ (McBurney 1994: 18).

At the outset of a rehearsal process, particular emphasis is placed on the establishment of a play space, with all sorts of objects, materials, research documentation, games and other rule or event-based practices available for individual and collective exploration; McBurney has used the word ‘playground’, and often reiterates a connection with team sports. The precise nature and use of texts, music, objects and other scenographic materials within a production, as well as the detailed texture of its compositional weave, are all determined over time in the studio according to a pragmatics of what seems to support and feed the emergence of a shared, deep-breathing ‘world’. In broad terms, the devising model stems from Lecoq’s autocours, a heuristic pedagogy of the imagination in collaborative making contexts, a flexing and toning of the ‘muscle of the imagination’ in search of a ‘moment of collective imagining’ (McBurney 1999: 71). On another level, it relates to the informed sink-or-swim predicament of street theatre and stand-up, or the patient immersive hot-house of certain choreographic or physical theatre practices that endeavour to spatialise the topographies of internal journeys. On yet another level, perhaps less visible but materially constitutive, McBurney’s modus operandi is informed by the psycho-physical attunements, layerings and expressive unfoldings afforded by a close study of Feldenkrais technique with the remarkable teacher Monika Pagneux.

Aesthetically and dramaturgically, McBurney is no less catholic in his sources for stimulus, drawing in particular on aspects of Brook, Meyerhold, Brecht and Kantor, as well as the neo-expressionist dance-theatre of Pina Bausch and Josef Nadj, the transformative manipulations of object-theatre and puppetry, the spatio-temporal polyrhythms and mobilities of film languages, and the critical intelligence of John Berger’s fiction, to create something unique in contemporary popular theatre. For McBurney’s work since the early 1990s proposes a distinctly European, multi-lingual poetic integrating image, narrative and a choreography of bodies, objects and space to produce a contemporary Gesamtkunstwerk. Within this symphonic form, the creative agency of performers and their bodies comprises the very foundation for a compassionate celebration of the extraordinary in the everyday and the marginalised, and an articulate humanist enquiry into a ‘politics of the imagination’ (McBurney 1994: 22).

One of McBurney’s most remarkable attributes is his facility for creating images that defamiliarise and redirect the geometry of conventional, received attention to reality, and etch themselves into our imaginations. Here ‘image’ is not simply pictorial representation or coup de théâtre, but rather a complex, dynamic syntax allying and layering movement, rhythm, text, music and object, engendered by the poetic logic of the forms and narratives at play within a production: image as the fusion of form and content in an embodied if fleeting ‘world’. Mnemonic, for example, is haunted by the ambiguities of new technologies of communication (the mobile phone) and recording (video). The phone line breaks up at moments of intense ‘proximity’, painfully reinstating distance and absence, and memory is replayed and fast-forwarded repeatedly, as if it were a VCR, in an obsessive search for the ‘real’ and for ‘origins’. At times the discontinuous rhythm of the remote control or the edit suite consciously determines the staging itself; live sequences are ‘rewound’ at vertiginous speed and replayed again and again in a cycle of repetitions with difference.

McBurney’s dramaturgies of emergence and dissolution allow highly focused ‘image-worlds’ to appear from the deployments, interactions and transpositions of bodies and objects, to crystallise into ephemeral sharp-edged form before their constituent elements are dispersed and returned to a state of energised potentiality. In The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol, for example, an explosive manipulation of wooden planks is used to represent the dynamics of desire and the precarious uncertainty of refuge as Jean and Lucie make love in a ‘barn’. In Mnemonic, a broken wooden chair (already a mnemonic-by-association for the main character Virgil’s father and his absent lover) is puppeted then laid out to represent the leathery remains of a 5000-year-old Neothilic ‘iceman’ recently discovered in the Tyrolean Alps. With the economy of a haiku, a white cloth is thrown over it, and the chair becomes a glacier. Since the elastic temporalities and magical metamorphoses of The Street of Crocodiles, in which the laws of Newtonian physics seemed to be momentarily suspended as books flapped and flew like birds, and a spectral figure strolled vertically down the back wall and into the space, displacement, connectivity and the fluidity of memory and identity have become recurrent themes in McBurney’s work. Accordingly, in all of his productions the material components of scenography are encouraged to mutate and recompose, to displace, transform and reinvent themselves temporarily, adopting ephemeral configurations and identities within a theatre language that itself is always migrating, transforming, always on the move. The only constant is change, the protean ‘play’ of people and things in their becomings: tout bouge (6). As the father says in Street of Crocodiles, ‘The migration of forms is the essence of life’.

From his early days in knockabout clown-inflected work to more recent investigations of alienated, sped-up hyper-modernity using sophisticated video mediation in live performance (Mnemonic, The Elephant Vanishes), McBurney has returned consistently to material of substantial existential gravity, political resonance or ethical complexity. Anxiety about mortality, for example, in the painfully funny A Minute Too Late (1984), in part a response to the recent death of his father; the fragility of imaginative life under repressive regimes in The Street of Crocodiles (1992), which directly referenced the murder of the Polish writer Bruno Schulz by the Nazis, and in The Noise of Time (2000), in which Shostakovich’s String Quartet no. 15 in E Minor was re-membered in the context of Soviet history and the composer’s troubled life under Stalinism; exile, desire, loss and the slipperiness of relations between history, archaeology and memory in Mnemonic (1999); the tyrannies of extremism and xenophobic fear in The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, McBurney’s New York production offering an explicit critical engagement with the brutish ideologies of a hawkish and morally bankrupt US administration.

McBurney seeks to contest and affirm - often at the same moment – and his work might be characterised paradoxically in terms of both its philosophical seriousness and its consistent lightness of touch. Within these tragic farces, celebration coexists with desolation, reparation with separation, reverie with nightmare, grace with gravity. In McBurney’s best work, the social and aesthetic act of collaboration itself eloquently affirms the vibrant creative potential of encounter, attention, imagination and connective energy, while the transience of the theatre event and of the forms that are its building blocks asks us to engage with the precariousness and transformative potentialities of our own lives as social and creative beings. ‘We have to invent our own circumstances, as we have now to reinvent our theatre’ (McBurney 1999: 77).


Footnotes
(1) These include Put it on your Head (1983), A Minute Too Late (1984), More Bigger Snacks Now (1985), Anything for a Quiet Life (1987), Burning Ambition for BBC2 (1988), Mnemonic for both theatre (1999) and radio (2000), and The Noise of Time (2000) with the Emerson String Quartet.
(2) Dürenmatt’s The Visit (1989), Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (1992), Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1997), Ionesco’s The Chairs (1997).
(3) The Street of Crocodiles (1992), adapted from texts by Bruno Schulz; Out of a House Walked a Man (1994), from Daniil Kharms; The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol (1994), from John Berger’s Pig Earth; Foe (1996), from JM Coetzee; To the Wedding (1997), from John Berger, for BBC Radio 3; Light (2000), from Torgny Lindgren; The Elephant Vanishes (2003), from Haruki Murukami.
(4) As an actor, McBurney’s film credits include Sleepy Hollow, Kafka, Tom and Viv, Mesmer, Cousin Bette, Onegin, The Last King of Scotland, and the title role in Eisenstein.
(5) ‘There is a curious and very different sensation when you apparently have something in your hands – a play – and when you have nothing but fragments, scraps and imaginings when you are devising; yet strangely I feel I start from the same place: until I start to feel and experience something, there is nothing’ (McBurney 1999: 67).
(6) Tout Bouge (‘Everything moves’) was the title of the lecture-demnonstration Jacques Lecoq performed internationally to great acclaim from the late 1960s onwards. As McBurney points out in his foreword to Lecoq’s The Moving Body, it was also ‘a central tenet of his teaching’ (Lecoq 2000: x).

References
McBurney, Simon (1994). ‘The celebration of lying’ (interview), in David Tushingham (ed.), Live 1: Food for the Soul, London: Methuen, 1994, pp. 13-24.

McBurney, Simon (1999). Interview in Gabriella Giannachi and Mary Luckhurst (eds), On Directing: Interviews with Directors, London: Faber and Faber, 1999, pp. 67-77.

Lecoq, Jacques. The Moving Body: Teaching Creative Theatre (trans. David Bradby), London: Methuen, 2000. Foreword by Simon McBurney.

Theatre de Complicite. Complicite Plays 1 (The Street of Crocodiles, The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol, Mnemonic), London: Methuen, 2003.
_______________________________________________________________

Text first published as 'Simon McBurney' in Maria Shevtsova and Shomit Mitter (eds), Fifty Key Theatre Directors, London and New York: Routledge, 2005, 247-52.

Photograph: Simon McBurney in Renny Bartlett's film Eisenstein (2000).

For Theatre de Complicite website, see here

working (in) the in-between

(an essay about contact improvisation and ethics,
in memory of my friend anne kilcoyne)


With reference to an ethics of alterity as elaborated by Emmanuel Levinas, this essay will explore contact improvisation as a site for a playful and tactical negotiation of inter-subjectivity. As social praxis, contact improvisation can embody and inhabit the spaces between a range of conventionally hierarchical binaries, most of which constellate around the pairing 'self/other', perhaps the core opposition of Western onto-theological philosophy (1). The boundaries between these supposedly discreet terms can be destabilised in contact, allowing what are often conceived as oppositional borderlines to become dynamic and porous thresholds in an ethical economy of exchange and flow. And it is from Hélène Cixous's rather breathless articulation of such an economy at work in écriture féminine that I borrow my title:

" ... working (in) the in-between, examining the process of the same and the other without which nothing lives, undoing the work of death, is first of all wanting two and both, one and the other together, not frozen in sequences of struggle and expulsion or other forms of killing, but made infinitely dynamic by a ceaseless exchanging between one and the other different subject, getting acquainted and beginning only from the living border of the other: a many-sided and inexhaustible course with thousands of meetings and transformations of the same in the other and in the in-between" (2) .
___________________________________________________________

Con()tact: 'Cooperation becomes the subject'

"The open horizon of my body. A living, moving border. Changed through contact with your body" (Luce Irigaray) (3).

Contact improvisation has its roots in the pedestrian (task-oriented) practices of American post-modern dance in the 1960s, social dance, release techniques, martial arts (particularly Aikido) and sports (4). Its initiator in the early 1970s, dancer and choreographer Steve Paxton, conceived of it as an 'art-sport'. Contact is a non-hierarchical duet movement practice in which improvising partners share an attitude and an ideal of "active, reflexive, harmonic, spontaneous and mutual forms" (5). The vocabulary of these forms is flexible, inviting the moment-to-moment specifics of relatedness, leverage, speed, (dis)orientation and so on to be re-invented with each partnership on each occasion. As Paxton suggests, if both parties' intent is "minimal", and their sensing of intent "maximal", then "cooperation becomes the subject - an 'it' defined by the balancing of inertias, momentums, psychologies, spirits of the partners" (6).

By working around and through the vectors of an ever-changing point of contact between their bodies, each person gives and receives weight, passes and receives information through touch, accepts or provokes imbalance and regains (an always already temporary) 'extra-daily' balance (7). This nomadic and hybrid point of contact, which I will call con()tact, generates momentum and movement(s), as the partners endeavour to discover and work along "the easiest pathways available to their mutually moving masses" (8).

In contact - in life - no two bodies, no two qualities of energy are alike, or even consistent. As Mark Minchinton suggests:

"Of course, the giving and receiving of weight are not neutral things. Not all people give weight in the same way, even if they share the same physique. There are differences in the intensities of weight and support. People can be said to have intensive or extensive, flowing or blocked, centred or peripheral energy. Their physiques, experience and individual psychologies will go some way to determining the manner in which they use and are used by their bodies" (9).

Indeed no one body is identical with-in itself, it is always ghosted by its 'others'; intensive alternates or coexists with extensive, flowing with blocked, centred with peripheral. As soon as a body in relation has flow it is not in flow. What's more, each body-self will be further displaced and marked by contact with the unfixable alterity of the other, as well as by the dynamics and intensities of the third party in the dance, the point of con()tact: that fugitive and always temporary 'centre' and 'edge' common to both yet outside both, a 'blind spot' through-in-with-around-for-and-by which the two bodies orient their play.

In his article 'On Ambiguity', David George describes the dynamic, relational space between the two terms in any binary that creates out of difference "a third state of pure potentiality":

"All binaries need now investigating not for their deceptively reassuring ability to be collapsed into stable - and static - units, but the very opposite: that all binaries are 'really' hidden - and dynamic - triads. Because any two terms necessarily postulate the notion of 'relationship' as the necessary - third - factor which simultaneously separates and joins any two related forces or factors ... The crucial factor here is not how many ways two different units can relate to each other, but recognition that this 'third element' is not a unit but an axis, not an entity but a state of being, less a relationship than an act of relating" (10).

Writers from many different disciplines have attempted to articulate this 'third party' in the self/other binary. For Michel de Certeau, for example, it constitutes a "frontier region", "the space created by an interaction" (11); for Deleuzian psychoanalyst and artist Bracha Lichtenberg-Ettinger, it is the "metramorphic borderlink", "the becoming-threshold of borderlines" (12); for Luce Irigaray, it is the "angel-as-intermediary" in an ethics of sexual difference (13).

Hélène Cixous describes it as the "non-place", the possibility of a contestatory écriture féminine: "the breach, the opening, the entrance ... the entire surface of the domain, [which] enervates the limits and the traces, blurs the localisations ... the migrant that can be found everywhere" (14); for the poet Octavio Paz, it is the paradoxical space of writing, the "dizzying repose" of "worlds in rotation" that temporarily converge (15); for post-Jungian psychologist James Hillman, it is "the place of soul" and "soul-making" that de-means and dismantles the Cartesian cogito (16); and in Japanese aesthetics, it is the 'filled emptiness' of Ma (17).

In contact improvisation, the point of con()tact - the dynamic fulcrum of what some contacters call 'mutual weight dependence' - becomes an ambiguous but palpably 'real' third party in the duet: an-other axis that both joins and separates the two partners, a hyphenated space of pivotal torsion, "a sort of rubbing together of spaces at the vanishing points of their frontier" (18). Con()tact cannot be resolved in (homeo)stasis. As it shifts, 'it dances' (the two partners) from and in the in-between:

"This is a paradox of the frontier: created by contacts, the points of differentiation between two bodies are also their common points. Conjunction and disjunction are inseparable in them. Of two bodies in contact, which one possesses the frontier that distinguishes them? Neither. Does that amount to saying: no one? ... The frontier functions as a third element. It is an 'in-between', a 'space between', Zwischenraum ... A middle place ... a sort of void, a narrative sym-bol of exchanges and encounters" (19).

As 'it dances', con()tact marks the flux of partners' proximity and distance by tracing spirals around the surfaces of their bodies; at the same time, partners employ skeletal supports and levers within the their own and the other's bodies. Both bodies therefore need to be segmented and multi-directional in terms of impulse, action and attention. In addition, they can become open to a synaesthetic blurring in the sensorium, facilitated by their adrenalised status (20); for here tactility can become an-other seeing and listening, peripheral vision an-other touch.

Contact is dependent upon and celebrates these surprising, risky and pleasurable detours of difference; the improvised 'saying' of what is 'said' is radically contextual, relational. And the literal and metaphorical point of con()tact, as in-between or go-between, is another space in which the 'I' is both implicated and (re-)conceived; it is the articulation of meeting-in-difference. For each of the partners, con()tact constitutes the possible coexistence of form and spontaneity, rules-of-the-game and dance, cause and effect, centre and margin, proximity and distance. It is the 'play' with-in the obdurate 'fixity' of corporeal identities, its 'give', its supple-ment, its différance (21); the unstable borderlands where an ethics of alterity occurs.

As a result, contact can radically dis-orient one's constituted sense of self, as if 'self' it-self leaks, unravels or frays; it becomes impossible to locate intentionality, source of impulse and so on with any stability. As Trinh Minh-ha writes, here "identity is a product of articulation. It lies at the intersection of dwelling and travelling and is a claim of continuity within discontinuity (and vice-versa)" (22). Ultimately in contact, identity as a concern can give way to a quality of inter-personal listening that is both active and passive, quiet but not quietist, an actively meditative (23) quality one might call patient attention: a festina lente consciousness of a self-in-process that is unmappable (u-topian) through any conventional cartography, and more-than-one (24), endlessly (un)weaving itself through its acceptance of the pressing responsibility of relatedness. In this way, Contact can be a site of becoming, although it necessitates the deposition of a totalising ego, and a disposition that recognises the radical provocation and pleasure of moving elsew-here and other-wise.
___________________________________________________________

con-
prefix, of Latin origin. The form assumed by the Latin proposition com (in classical L., as a separate word, cum) before all consonants excepts the labials ... The sense is 'together, together with, in combination or union', also 'altogether, completely', and hence intensive (25).
___________________________________________________________

Face-to-face with Levinas

"The irreducible and ultimate experience of relationship appears to me to be elsewhere: not in synthesis, but in the face-to-face of humans, in sociality, in its moral significance ... First philosophy is an ethics" (Emmanuel Levinas) (26).

In this discussion of contact as an ethical practice, 'ethics' is taken in the French-Lithuanian-Judaic philosopher Emmanuel Levinas's sense of the word, as the exigency for a negotiation of an inter-subjective responsibility to re-cognise alterity. This responsibility, for Levinas, is inordinate, irreducible and infinite, a being-for-the-other before oneself. As Simon Critchley explains:

"Ethics, for Levinas, is critique; it is the critical mise en question of the liberty, spontaneity and cognitive emprise of the ego that seeks to reduce all otherness to itself. The ethical is therefore the location of a point of alterity, or what Levinas also calls 'exteriority', that cannot be reduced to the Same" (27).

Levinas's critique of humanist essentialism inverts the hierarchy implicit in what he refers to as the 'egological': the ontic imperialism and ethnocentrism of the narcissistic self/other binary, within which the ego-self is demarcated psychologically and corporeally in terms of proper(ty), capital and ontology. Ethics destabilises the assumed self-sufficiency of être pour-soi, Cixous's 'Empire of the Selfsame' (28).

In what Levinas names the "face-to-face" (29), the unique encounter with an-other where ethics occurs, the 'ego-I' (homogeneous, self-contained and either deflective or recuperative of difference) is dislodged from its centrist axis in a dance of contiguity with difference:

"The face is a demand ... a hand in search of recompense, an open hand ... It is going to ask you for something ... The face is not a force. It is an authority; authority is often without force" (30).

In the 'awakening' of the face-to-face, the assimilationist ego-I is provoked off-balance by con()tact with an-other; this "event of oneself" occurs only when the ego defects, and one gives oneself to the other, bears the other's weight (31). In this way the self can be (re)made continuously in contextual and interlocutory proximity ('Saying') rather than in any constative and sedimental History ('Said') (32).

The face-to-face eschews synthesis (the Same, the 'final solution') in favour of the asymmetrical and dialogical (the play of difference). The tact-ical 'saying' of the dance of ethics, "the explosion of the human in being" (33), requires a stretching towards con()tact in the in-between. A folding into the diachronic time that is the (im)possibility of both proximity and distance, into that "most passive passivity" that "coincides with activity" (34). Into the 'meanwhile' between the diastole and systole of a heartbeat that cannot be said, but can only be ef-faced by death:

"The interval between the I and Thou, the Zwischen, is the locus where being is being realised. The interval between the I and Thou cannot be conceived as a kind of stellar space existing independently of the two terms which it separates. For the dimension itself of the interval opens uniquely to the I and to the Thou which enter into each meeting" (35).

Levinas interrogates and disrupts the tyranny of an egological 'either/or'. His call to responsibility asks: What are the relations between my freedom, the freedom of the other(s) and justice? Does not my narcissistic and imperialistic claim to possess (to have) freedom deny the other's (and indeed my) possibility of being in freedom? Must my proteophobic (36) ego perpetuate the 'war' of mechanistic resistance and counter-resistance, all inter-personal con()tact reduced to the insistent click-click-click of Newton's chrome balls? How do I prevent the in-different murderousness of my ego's self-constituting drive either to deflect and exile the difference of what-is-not-I, or to ingest and erase it by recuperation? By persisting in being-for-myself, do I not kill? (37)

"The true problem for us Westerners is not so much to refuse violence as to question ourselves about a struggle against violence which, without blanching in non-resistance to evil, could avoid the institution of violence out of this very struggle. Does not the war perpetuate that which it is called to make disappear, and consecrate war and its virile virtues in good conscience? One has to reconsider the meaning of a certain human weakness, and no longer see in patience only the reverse side of the ontological finitude of the human. But for that one has to be patient oneself without asking patience of the others - and for that one has to admit a difference between oneself and the others" (38).

Significantly for this discussion of contact improvisation, Levinas tells us that "The whole human body is more or less face" (39). The face, like con()tact, is "what one cannot kill, or at least it is that whose meaning consists in saying: 'thou shalt not kill'" (40). The face, like con()tact, is uncontainable and unsythesisable alterity; it "leads one beyond" (41), outside the fortified parameters of a self constituted as integral, full(y present), a totality. It brings this self face-to-face with the vulnerability of other-ness, both outside and with-in. In this way, the face, like con()tact, comprises a "wind of crisis ... [a] spirit - which blows and rends, despite the knots of History which retie themselves" (42).
___________________________________________________________

'I am I in the sole measure that I am responsible'

"The expression 'in one's skin' refers to a recurrence in the dead time or the meanwhile which separates inspiration and respiration ... It is a restlessness and patience that support prior to action and passion. Here what is due goes beyond having, but makes giving possible. This recurrence is incarnation. In it the body which makes giving possible makes one other without alienating" (Emmanuel Levinas) (43).

In the face-to-face encounter, the other's alterity demands that I accept responsibility (response-ability), that I respond. To his/her call, "Where are you?", my-self replies, "Here I am". Me voici (44), 'here is me'. Here my-self is in the accusative (me); and subjectivity itself, in its claim to essential and autonomous 'totality', is under accusation. 'I' is un sujet-en-procès ('subject-in-process/-on-trial').

Levinas protests against totalisation by locating responsibility for the other (ethical inter-subjectivity) as the fundamental structure of subjectivity. Responsibility here means "having-the-other-in-one's skin" (45), and "I am I in the sole measure that I am responsible" (46). In order to sense the heteronomous singularity of self-as-process, and to let go of nostalgia for the totality of ego-as-essential-being, Levinas proposes:

"One must understand the subjectivity of the subject beyond essence, as on the basis of an escape from the concept, a forgetting of being and non-being. Not of an 'unregulated' forgetting ... but a forgetting that would be an ignorance in the sense that nobility ignores what is not noble" (47).

In other words, individuation is an ethical (self-) forgetting, an actively chosen detour from egology that invites a continuous re-membering and re-making in relation. So in Levinasian ethics, I (re)orient my-self through con()tact with an-other; 'cooperation becomes the subject' (Paxton). In this context, Arthur Rimbaud's "I is an other" (Je es un autre) can slide from a figure of alienation to a site of potentiality and multiplicity, towards Kristeva's "polymorphic body, laughing and desiring" (48); and the threat and negation of Jean-Paul Sartre's aggressively objectifying 'Look' (le Regard) can give way to mutual and interactive regard.

However, as Simon Critchley points out, Levinas recognises that the ethical relation of the face-to-face cannot ever be self-sufficient, hermetically sealed within an apolitical private space removed from the public sphere. Levinas insists that ethics is always already social and political, for "the third party (le tiers) looks at me in the eyes of the other"; and it is this 'third party' who "ensures that the ethical relation always takes place within a political context, within the public realm ... [T]herefore my ethical obligations to the other open onto wider questions of justice for others and for humanity as a whole" (49). The inter-personal is political.

Like con()tact, the face-to-face does not endure; it must be recommenced perpetually:

"The Zwischen is reconstituted in each fresh meeting and is therefore always novel in the same sense as are the moments of Bergsonian duration" (50).

'Freedom' here is finite, difficult, it stammers as it makes itself up-and-over; although paradoxically the call to justice in responsibility for the other, and the rupturing of the ego-I's assumed self-identity it entails, are contiguous with in-finite possible futures: "At no time can I say: I have done all my duty" (51).
___________________________________________________________

tact -
I.a. The sense of touch; touch. b. fig. A keen faculty of perception or discrimination likened to the sense of touch.
2. Ready and delicate sense of what is fitting and proper in dealing with others, so as to avoid giving offence, or win good will; skill or judgement in negotiating difficult or delicate situations; the faculty of saying or doing the right thing at the right time.
3. The act of touching or handling (52).
___________________________________________________________

Touch as 'inter-face'

"Where does it come from? From both. It flows between.
Not held or held back by a source.
The source already rises from the two caressing"
(Luce Irigaray) (53).

It is clear that the enveloping epidermal surface of the body is particularly receptive to information from both inside and outside; skin constitutes a radically ambiguous limens between endogeny and exogeny with-in the world. And touch as contact sense is in a privileged position to entertain in coexistence both activity and passivity, mind and body, self and other. As Elizabeth Grosz suggests in Volatile Bodies, in informational terms touch is impressionistic, successive and momentary (i.e. diachronic), its perception of qualities - shape, texture, heat, energy etc. - comparative and differential; it is "a modality of difference" (54).

Inter-personal touch is coincidence in non-coincidence, an irreducible inter-lacing; it is reflexive and potentially reversible, it folds back in on itself in asymmetrical exchange. For touching by definition entails being touched. Both self and other participate and are implicated at the point of con()tact; both toucher and touched experience the dialogics of being both toucher and touched. It is for this reason that Merleau-Ponty locates touch as the locus classicus of what he calls the "double sensation":

"This is the twisting of the Möbius strip, the torsion or pivot around which the subject is generated. The double sensation creates a kind of interface of the inside and the outside, the pivotal point at which inside will become separated from outside and active will be converted into passive" (55).

Touch and balance are the two key senses in the practice of contact improvisation. Partners touch each other, the floor and "themselves, internally" (56), and employ the informationally dense tactility of con()tact to orient themselves in relation to (im)balance and gravity:

"The point of contact is focused on ... because a lot of the training is to do with allowing your partner to sense your leverage potential through touch. What you can do, what you can support, how you might move - potential that exists in position; and at the same time vice versa, you are sensing your partner's level of potential, he [sic] is sensing your's, so you are moving ... mutually sensing by touch what is available to you through that medium" (57).

In addition, the practice of contact encourages a very particular form of visual perception that one might describe as 'tactile': non-possessive and open, in which peripherality, a receptive 'softening' of vision, has primacy over focus:

"For many people vision is a kind of tool which reaches out and grabs things ... It's a probing instrument. For other people, it's a receptive instrument ... Peripheral vision training is partly to allow the world to enter, because it is softer, not so much a tool as focus is. Peripheral vision is more apt to allow you to hear and feel" (58).

So the practice of contact actively blurs and interrogates the conflation 'eye/I' of a totalising scopic epistemology and economy (59).

Levinas also privileges the tactile over the visual, locating the primordial proximity of the touch or 'caress' as one exemplary manifestation of ethical inter-subjectivity. For the caress actualises a con()tact with an-other that can neither overwhelm nor fuse with alterity, but can reveal the diffusion and vulnerability of the self-in-relation. For touch, the first sense to develop in the human foetus, is "an expression of love that cannot tell it" (60):

"The caress is a mode of the subject's being, where the subject who is in contact with another goes beyond this contact ... The seeking of the caress constitutes its essence by the fact that the caress does not know what it seeks. This 'not knowing', this fundamental disorder, is the essential. It is like a game with something slipping away, a game absolutely without project or plan, not with what can become our's or us, but with something other, always other, always inaccessible, and always still to come (à venir)" (61).

Never completed, never exhausted, always to come. As Zygmunt Bauman has suggested, the future (l'avenir) - like alterity, like con()tact - cannot be grasped; one's illusory 'hold' on it can never tighten into a grip (62). Both 'given' and 'hidden', its virtual outline can only be touched or brushed in a way that can neither possess nor 'know', but can still make (a) difference.

___________________________________________________________

Notes and references

(1) Although I risk reinstating them by speaking them, these binaries include: subject/object, identity/difference, fusion/fission, closed/open, active/passive, leader/led, demand/response, cause/effect, full/empty, momentum/inertia, stable/unstable, balance/imbalance, gravity/lightness, art/sport, mind/body, sight/touch, proximity/distance, inside/outside, centre/margin, here/there.
(2) Hélène Cixous, 'The Laugh of the Medusa', cited in Trinh. T. Minh-ha, When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics, London and New York: Routledge, 1991, p. 142.
(3) Luce Irigaray, Elemental Passions (trans. Joanne Collie and Judith Still), New York: Routledge, 1992, p. 51.
(4) For a detailed account of the sources of contact improvisation, see Cynthia J. Novack, Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and American Culture, Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1990. For a comparison of Aikido and contact, see Steve Paxton, 'Contact Improvisation', Theatre Papers: The Fourth Series, 1981-2 no. 5, Dartington: Dartington College of Arts, 1982, pp. 4-5, 9.
(5) Steve Paxton, 'Contact Improvisation', The Drama Review 19:1, p. 40.
(6) Ibid, 41.
(7) For a discussion of 'extra-daily balance', see 'Balance', in Eugenio Barba and Nicola Savarese (eds), The Secret Art of the Performer: a Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology, London and New York: Routledge, 1991, pp. 34-53.
(8) Steve Paxton, 'Contact Improvisation', The Drama Review, op. cit., p. 41.
(9) Mark Minchinton, 'Notes towards Improvisation as a Body without Organs', in Writings on Dance 10 ('Knowledges/Practices'), 1994, p. 48.
(10) David George, 'On Ambiguity: Towards a Post-modern Performance Theory', Theatre Research International
(11) Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (trans. Steven Rendall), Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984, p. 126.
(12) Bracha Lichtenberg-Ettinger, 'The Becoming Threshold of Matrixial Borderlines', in George Robertson, Melinda Mash et al. (eds), Travellers' Tales: Narratives of Home and Displacement, op. cit., p. 44. Metramorphosis "deals with transformations in emergence, creation and fading-away, of I(s) and non-I(s), and with transformations of the borderlines and transgressions of the links between them ... Metramorphosis has no focus, it is a discernibility which cannot fix its 'gaze', and if it has a momentary centre, then it always slides away towards the peripheries. In such an awareness of margins, perceived boundaries dissolve in favour of new boundaries; borderlines are surpassed and transformed to become thresholds ... Metramorphosis accounts for transformations of in-between moments"; ibid, pp. 44-5. Italics in original.
(13) Luce Irigaray, 'Sexual Difference' (trans. Seán Hand), in Toril Moi (ed.), French Feminist Thought: a Reader, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987, pp. 126-7. See also Elizabeth Grosz, 'The angel as intermediary', in Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1989, p. 161-2; and Margaret Whitford, 'The between and the angel', in Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine, London and New York: Routledge, 1991, pp. 163-4.
(14) Hélène Cixous, in Un k. incompréhensible: Pierre Goldman, Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1976, p. 33; quoted in Verena Andermatt Conley, Hélène Cixous, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992, p. 49-50.
(15) Octavio Paz, The Monkey Grammarian (trans. Helen Lane), New York: Arcade, 1990, pp. 153-9.
(16) See James Hillman in Thomas Moore (ed.), A Blue Fire: the essential James Hillman, London and New York: Routledge, 1989, p. 121.
(17) "Ma, a cultural paradigm, is the empty space in a tea bowl, what is left unsaid in a haiku poem, the sound/silence ration in music, the foreground/background distance in an inkwash painting, the moments of repose in a Noh drama"; Vicki Sanders, 'Dancing and the Dark Soul of Japan: an Aesthetic Analysis of Butoh', in Asian Theatre Journal 5:2, Fall 1988, p. 161.
(18) Michel de Certeau, 'Spatial Practices', in The Practice of Everyday Life, op. cit., p. 113.
(19) Ibid, p. 127.
(20) For a discussion of the implications of the endocrine system in contact, and in particular the dilation of time, see Steve Paxton, 'Contact Improvisation', The Drama Review, op. cit., p. 41; and 'Contact Improvisation', Theatre Papers, op. cit., p. 12 passim.
(21) "Différance is the systematic play of differences, of the traces of differences, of the spacingPositions (trans. Alan Bass), Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981, p. 27. Italics in original.
(22) Trinh T. Minh-ha, 'Other than Myself/My Other Self', in George Robertson, Melinda Mash et al. (eds), Travellers' Tales: Narratives of Home and Displacement, London and New York: Routledge, 1994, p. 14. My italics.
(23) Cf. Buddhist meditation master Sogyal Rinpoche, quoting Jamyang Khyentse: "'Look, it's like this: when the past thought has ceased, and the future thought has not yet risen, isn't there a gap? [...] Well, prolong it: that is meditation'". The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, London: Random House, 1992, p. 75.
(24) Cf. The "nighttime consciousness" that James Joyce celebrates in Finnegan's Wake, a consciousness that inhabits the space "between twosome twiminds", and enables "two thinks at a time". Quoted in Richard Kearney, The Wake of Imagination: Ideas of Creativity in Western Culture, London: Hutchinson, 1988, p. 368. Cf. also Octavio Paz: "Our most intimate reality lies outside ourselves and is not our's, and it is not one but many, plural and transitory, we are this plurality that is continually dissolving, the self is perhaps real, but the self is not I or youhe, the self is neither mine nor your's, it is a state, a blink of the eye, it is a perception of a sensation that is vanishing, but who or what perceives, who senses? ... the self that perceives something that is vanishing also vanishes in this perception; it is only the perception of that self's own extinction, we come and go ...": The Monkey Grammarian, op. cit., p. 55. Italics in original.
(25) The Compact Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.
(26) Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo (trans. Richard A. Cohen), Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 1985, p. 77.
(27) Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992, pp. 4-5.
(28) See, for example, Cixous's 'Sorties', in Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman (trans. Betsy Wing), Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986, p. 78 passim.
(29) See for example, 'Ethics and the Face' in Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity (trans. Alfonso Lingis), Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 1969. For a useful summary of the 'face' and its place in Levinasian ethics, see Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, op. cit., pp. 85-92.
(30) Emmanuel Levinas in Tamara Wright, Peter Hughes and Alison Ainley, 'The Paradox of Morality: an interview with Emmanuel Levinas', in Robert Bernasconi and David Wood (eds), The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other, London and New York: Routledge, 1988, p. 169.
(31) "The defection of the ego, or already the defeat of the identity of the ego ... can finally be said to be the event of the oneself"; Emmanuel Levinas in Seán Hand (ed.), The Levinas Reader, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989, p. 122. Levinas returns again and again to metaphors of weight-bearing, to describe ethical responsibility; e.g.: "The self is a sub-jectum; it is under the weight of the universe, responsible for everything ... supporting the weight of the non-ego ... Impassively undergoing the weight of the other, thereby called to uniqueness, subjectivity no longer belongs to the order where the alternative of activity and passivity retains its meaning"; ibid, pp. 105-6.
(32) Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, op. cit., p. 42. Simon Critchley defines the 'Saying' as "my exposure - corporeal, sensible - to the other, my inability to refuse the other's approach. It is the performative stating, proposing, or expressive position of myself facing the other ... It is a performative doing that cannot be reduced to a constative description [the Said] ... The Saying is the sheer radicality of ... the event of being in relation with an other": The Ethics of Deconstruction, op. cit., p. 7. Italics in original.
(33) Ibid, p. 121.
(34) Emmanuel Levinas in Seán Hand (ed.), The Levinas Reader, op. cit., pp. 104-5.
(35) Emmanuel Levinas, in Seán Hand (ed.), The Levinas Reader, op. cit., p. 65.
(36) I am borrowing this neologism from Zygmunt Bauman, who coins it to refer to "the confused, ambivalent sentiments aroused by the presence of strangers ... the apprehension aroused by the presence of multiform, allotropic phenomena which stubbornly defy clarity-addicted knowledge, elide assignment and sap the familiar classificatory grids ... Proteophobia refers therefore to the dislike of situations in which one feels lost, confused, disempowered. Obviously, such situations are the productive waste of cognitive spacing: we do not know how to go on in certain situations because the rules of conduct which define for us the meaning of 'knowing how to go on' do not cover them": Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, Oxford: Blackwell, 1993, p. 164. Italics in original. The apprehension familiar to many people in the practice of Contact relates at least in part to Contact's 'delinquent' provocation to 'knowing how to go on'.
(37) In an essay called 'Ethics as First Philosophy', Levinas foregrounds the political implications of his ethical interrogation of one's 'right to be-for-oneself': "My being-in-the-world, or my 'place in the sun', my being at home, have these not also been the usurpation of spaces belonging to the other man (sic.) whom I have already oppressed or starved, or driven out into a third world; are they not acts of repulsing, excluding, exiling, stripping, killing?"; Emmanuel Levinas in Seán Hand (ed.), The Levinas Reader, op. cit., p. 82. Cf. Simon Critchley: "For Levinas, I would claim, ethics is the disruption of totalising politics ... The philosophy of Levinas, like that of Adorno, is commanded by the new categorical imperative imposed by Hitler: namely 'that Auschwitz not repeat itself' ... Levinasian ethics is a reduction of war"; The Ethics of Deconstruction, op. cit., p. 221.
(38) Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence (trans. Alphonso Lingis), The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981, p. 177. Quoted by Richard A. Cohen in his introduction to Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, op. cit., p. 14.
(39) Ibid, p. 97. My italics.
(40) Ibid, p. 87. Italics in original.
(41) Ibid.
(42) Ibid, p. 118.
(43) Emmanuel Levinas in Seán Hand (ed.), The Levinas Reader, op. cit., p. 98. Italics in original.
(44) Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, op. cit., p. 100.
(45) Emmanuel Levinas in Seán Hand (ed.), The Levinas Reader, op. cit., p. 6.
(46) Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, op. cit., p. 100.
(47) Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, op. cit., p. 177. Quoted by Richard A. Cohen in his introduction to Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, op. cit., p. 15. Emphasis in original.
(48) Julia Kristeva, About Chinese Women (trans. Anita Barrows), London: Marion Boyars, 1977, p. 19. Quoted in Alison Ainley, 'Amorous Discourses: 'The Phenomenology of Eros' and Love Stories', in Robert Bernasconi and David Wood (eds), The Provocation of Levinas, op. cit., p. 72.
(49) Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction, op. cit., pp. 225-6
(50) Emmanuel Levinas in Seán Hand (ed.), The Levinas Reader, op. cit., p. 65.
(51) Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, op. cit., p. 105.
(52) The Compact Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.
(53) Luce Irigaray, Elemental Passions, op. cit. p. 15.
(54) Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1994, pp. 98-9. Emmanuel Levinas described his friend Maurice Blanchot's literary writing as providing "above all a new sensation ... a new tingling in the skin as it brushes against things"; Levinas in Seán Hand, The Levinas Reader, op. cit., p. 153. Cf. Hélène Cixous's repeated recourse to metaphors of tactility in her accounts of Clarice Lispector's writings - a 'tact-ful' naming that keeps the other 'alive': "How to bring forth claricely: going, approaching, brushing, dwelling, touching; allowing-entrance, -presence, -giving, -taking" (Hélène Cixous, 'Coming to Writing', and Other Essays, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1992, p. 64). Cixous champions Lispector's ability to be "in touch with the instant", and asks: "But how do we obtain this lightness, this active passivity ... this submission to the process?" (ibid., p. 113).
(55) Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies, op. cit., p. 36. Emphasis in original.
(56) Steve Paxton, 'Contact Improvisation', The Drama Review, op. cit., p. 40.
(57) Steve Paxton, 'Contact Improvisation', Theatre Papers, op. cit., pp. 7-8.
(58) Ibid, p. 17, 7.
(59) For a detailed analysis of ocularcentric discourse and some of its critical dissidents, including Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, see Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: the Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
(60) Noreen O'Connor, 'The Personal is Political: Discursive Practice of the Face-to-Face', in Robert Bernasconi and David Wood (eds), The Provocation of Levinas, op. cit., p. 67. For an interesting critical reading of Levinas's notion of the 'caress', see Luce Irigaray, 'Questions to Emmanuel Levinas: on the Divinity of Love', in Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley (eds), Re-reading Levinas, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991. Irigaray locates Levinas's caress as subsuming sexual difference within ethical difference.
(61) Emmanuel Levinas, 'Time and the Other', in Seán Hand (ed.), The Levinas Reader, op. cit., p. 51. According to Edith Wyschograd, Levinasian touch is not 'really' a sense at all: "it is in fact a metaphor for the impingement of the world as a whole upon subjectivity ... To touch is to comport oneself not in opposition to the given but in proximity with it": Edith Wyschogrod, 'Doing before Hearing: on the Primacy of Touch', in François Laruelle (ed.), Textes pour Emmanuel Levinas, Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1980, p. 199. Although I accept Wyschogrod's reading, in con()tact the implications of 'real' touch are no less 'real' for their saturated metaphoricity; there cannot be any clear-cut separation, for its movement functions psychologically, phenomenally and metaphorically.
(62) Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, op. cit., p. 92. Cf. Chantal Mouffe on democracy as unfinishable becoming: 'The experience of modern democracy is based on the realisation that ... there is no point of equilibrium where final harmony could be attained. It is only in this precarious 'in-between' that we can experience pluralism, that is to say, that this democracy will always be 'to come', to use Derrida's expression, which emphasises not only the unrealised possibilities but also the radical impossibility of final completion'. From 'For a Politics of Nomadic Identity', in George Robertson et al (eds), Travellers' Tales: Narratives of Home and Displacement, London: Routledge, 1994, p. 112. 14:1, 1990, pp. 79-80. 5:2, Fall 1988, p. 161.
_________________________________________________________________

This text was first published in Australia as 'Working (in) the in-between: contact improvisation as an ethical practice', in Writings on Dance 15 ('The French Issue'), Winter 1996, pp. 22-37.

Photo: Steve Paxton, 2004

a free space frees

Peter Brook's CICT has visited Australia on two occasions. For the first of these, in the late summer of 1980, the Adelaide Festival hosted a trilogy of performances: Ubu, The Ik and Conference of the Birds. Viewed as a sequence, this body of work was in reality one three-part play, a conceptual and thematic whole reflecting recurrent concerns and agendas. Ubu, an explosive conflation of Jarry's anarchic cycle, was a "rough" performance that bobbed along with the playful violence of a silent movie or a children's game. The Ik, a sparse study of the tragic demise of a Ugandan tribe, was played out by the brittle human debris of the material and spiritual wasteland Ubu leaves in his wake: a sad and bitter song of disillusion and defeat - the world as it is for so many. Finally, Conference of the Birds, an 800 year-old Sufi Pilgrim's Progress, described a magical and arduous journey in search of sense and self. Having recognised the implications of an Ik world, a group of birds set out to look for something more. A glimmer of optimism - the world as it could be, a possible future. Read in this way, the trilogy recounted an epic fable revealing humanity's greatest enemy to be humanity itself, yet rejected the despair of nihilism and even outlined a way forward. We shared a mythical narrative trajectory from the desolation of rampant materialism and egotism towards reintegration and healing: a utopianist journey towards life.

For its second visit to Adelaide, early in 1988, the CICT staged The Mahabharata, another trilogy synthesising aesthetic, ethic and thematic concerns. That year, the production was also performed in Western Australia, as part of the Festival of Perth. As he had in Avignon, Brook rejected conventional festival venues for The Mahabharata in favour of disused quarries: in Perth, the Boya Quarry, a spectacular granite amphitheatre in a network of abandoned quarries in the hills about thirty minutes east of the city, and in Adelaide, Anstey's Hill quarry, a luminous chalk bowl cut into the flank of a hill - also the site of the company's Festival performances in 1980. Brook freely admits that it was this devastated - and devastating - location that first gave him a taste for such spaces. Yet there are certain qualities common to almost all spaces Brook selects for productions, both inside and in the open air, and to a significant degree these qualities have their origins in the Bouffes du Nord, the CICT's Parisian base.

First of all, each quarry possesses a dynamic spatial configuration encouraging a direct, immediate and fluid relationship with an audience. In Brook's terms, they are therefore "living spaces". Although the configuration focuses upon a central playing area, each remains non-specific and open, rather than referentially closed: "free spaces", to borrow Brook's favoured term in recent years. At the same time, these are shared spaces - literally and metaphorically - all-embracing environments or frames that deny the artificial separations and hierarchies of conventional bourgeois theatre buildings. The amphitheatrical seating means that many members of the audience remain visible to each other, a part of the "spectacle" experience. Even during the performance, spectators are not in fixed positions, for Brook's scenography is filmic, shifting perspectives. These places endeavour to operate as interactive microcosms, perhaps even as temporary eco-systems. Places of contact and meeting. Places of both individual and communal experience. Brook's ideal remains one of "reuniting the community, in all its diversity, with the same shared experience", by finding theatre forms which enable a community to taste communitas.

Second, without for a moment denying the self-evident beauty of these spaces, their allure is almost Zen-like in its ascetic minimalism, starkness and economy of means. The apparent lack of decorative pretension - the quality of roughness - perhaps reinforces that celebration of both physicality and imagination, and the nexus between the two that Brook's theatre generates for audiences and performers. Bodies and senses are somehow massively implicated and engaged, and our awareness of them is amplified synaesthetically. The earth smells, the breeze tastes, light continually repaints the textured fissures of the striated rock face, which in turn both colours voices and acts as a sounding board for music and other acoustic elements. More immediately, the seating is invariably functional and far from luxuriant. Brook himself has declared that "in a theatrical experience, the least important element is comfort .... comfort deforms the vitality of the experience". Undistracted by the trappings of so many theatre buildings, one feels alert, available and present, and our imaginations are freed to assume an active role. It is then up to Brook's elliptical, interactive realism of suggestion onstage to engage our complicity and participation in our imaginations, inviting us to experience spectatorship as a celebratory and empowering action.

So each space seems to operate as an amplifier, enhancing and focusing receptivity. Furthermore, the spatial configuration itself is a kind of energy magnet, a sympathetic receptacle for simultaneously locating oneself in an immediate environment and a wider cosmic frame. A number of spectators at The Mahabharata in Perth remarked on the "peopled" or "haunted" feel of the Boya Quarry. It is surely no coincidence that it has been the meeting place for a local coven. Its genii locus are palpable. Here, the epic space becomes an omphalos, an earthing point for transformational activities and experiences, for the magical invocation of spirits - or performing, and energising performance. (In the Boya quarry, a remarkably flourishing tree is growing out of the scree at the base of the granite wall: a natural focal point and another literal element that assumes metaphorical dimensions in the spatial and theatrical context).

Third, connected to the above, these numinous spaces possess a quality of weathered, textured humanity, the locations themselves literalising the passage of time - the "fourth dimension". They are like silent witnesses, bearing visible traces of their pasts like stigmata. As former work places, they are worn and scarred, marked by life, or to borrow a phrase from a Shakespeare sonnet, places of "unswep't stone besmear'd with sluttish time". In the present, however, their former functions are redundant, anachronistic, now no more that a spectral presence. Any space's functional status as "place" shifts as it is redefined through time, until it becomes a kind of palimpsest. Here a dead space is reanimated, phoenix-like, from the ashes of a senescent industrialism, infused by play with the possibility of future histories, of a "Becoming". So we come to see space (and by extension other aspects of reality) not as static, but as process, in a state of flux: active, generative, interactive and, potentially, transformatory for us.

In this context, Mohsen Mostafavi and David Leatherbarrow's wonderful book On Weathering: The Life of Buildings in Time provides an illuminating account of the idea that whereas architectural "finishing ends construction, weathering constructs finishes". The two authors celebrate both the memory traces that remain of a building's "pasts" and the "possible futures" created by weathering after construction. They locate a building's "continuous metamorphosis ... as part of its beginning(s) and ever-changing "finish"". In other words, they suggest, "weathering brings the virtual future of a building into dialogue with its actual present, as both are entangled in the past". Their argument has great resonance in relation to the nature of Brook's chosen performance spaces.

Similar dynamics have pervaded all of Brook's productions since the inception of the CICT in the early seventies, particularly with reference to their dramaturgy and mise en scène. Structurally, they celebrate the free play of concentration and dispersion, settlement and diaspora. In The Mahabharata, for example, temporal and spatial dimensions were fluid, virtual and mobile, as open and free as they were in Elizabethan theatre. Time and space were endlessly redefined, effortlessly compressed or distended in an instant. Time was represented as pulsional and discontinuous. Twenty years passed because we were told they had. The moment of Bhishma's death was extended, linear time itself was decelerated and dislocated, through a hallucinatory use of something akin to the cinematic technique of slow-motion. As a director, Brook's consistent ability to animate the dynamics of space, and in particular the interstices separating figures in in non-Euclidean space, owes much to the "power of expansion" that Henri Matisse proposed as a prerequisite if paintings and drawings were to communicate. With room to breath, actions extend beyond themselves spatially, like ripples in a pond.

Brook's ideal of theatrical representation as a whole remains one of heterogeneity, plurality and flux - "suggestion", rather than what is fixed or closed. In The Mahabharata, objects and actors were invariably mobilised referentially. Bamboo screens could be animated and instantly redefined in play to become shields, shelters or death-beds. Actors as storytellers were free to step in and out of roles, inhabiting a free space of continuous slippage between illusion and disillusion; in this way, Bruce Myers played Ganesha playing Krishna in a story composed by Vyasa.

I believe that such exploration of representational forms entails a radical critique of inherited, theatrical codes and discourses ("dead spaces"). The fluidity and indeterminacy of Brook's aesthetics of suggestion in some sense disrupt and sabotage the received conventions of naturalism and its imposed ways of seeing. Such a working critique opens up and releases interrogative and utopian impulses ("free spaces") in relation to individual and social life, both within and beyond the theatre. As spectators, we are invited to negotiate and inhabit those liminal spaces - between, say, illusion and disillusion - dynamic spaces of make-believe. Spaces of potential, within which what Eugenio Barba has called "the dance of thought in action" can take place.

Fourth, these settings tend to be outside or on the fringe of the conventional cultural geography of a city, and most can only be reached with effort. In Perth, most spectators travelled by bus through the suburbs and into the hills, then scrambled up a heavily wooded path to the awesome quarry itself. This "extra-ordinary" journey away from the centre to the margins, an act of literal and metaphorical dis-placement as well as dis-orientation, became amplificatory in itself. Unquestionably, it served as a phenomenological shift of gear or rhythm change - creating expectation, animating the imagination, and cementing a sense of communitas without erasing subjectivity. It was an initiatory breach away from the familiar, an "ec-centric" itinerary that took us beyond the parameters of the everyday. We made a journey to start another 'journey'.

Finally, and crucially, each space's particular identity is articulated. As with his performers, Brook brings a sensitive quality of listening to a space and allows its voice to speak. And there is invariably a connection invited between the volume, mass and rhythm of a space as an environment and the performance itself. For Brook, it seems that the space itself must provide an account or expression of the core thematic drives of performance material; in this sense, any performance must be "topical" (i.e. intimately related to topos, place). Space and decor are synonymous in Brook's undecorated places. In the case of The Mahabharata in Australia, we were furnished with the perfect frame for a narrative about a civilisation caught at some indeterminate transitional mid-point between the dissolution of crisis and reconstruction. In turn, this frame mirrored a mise en scène that subverted and rewrote itself endlessly. As with the Bouffes, the marks of demolition or incomplete renewal were inscribed in the very texture of the quarry spaces. Furthermore, the form of these spaces allowed for a continual slippage between epic spectacle and intimate encounter - like the intercutting of longshot and close-up in cinematic montage - around which the performance as a whole was rhythmed.

In addition, these were elemental spaces for an elemental fable. As spectators we were constantly encouraged to allow a rich and amplified metaphorical life to emerge from concrete materiality and our interior imaginative responses. So, during all-night marathon performances in both Perth and Adelaide, the gusty winds with which performers struggled heroically assumed a special status. The battle onstage took on cosmic proportions, for the heavens themselves seemed implicated - and yet one never lost sight of the fact that this was just wind. It became impossible to distinguish between the artifice of illusion and "reality". Similarly, the synchronisation of the performance's ending with the first rays of dawn on the quarry stone heightened the sense of renewal and rebirth. Such a cyclical trajectory located the narrative as myth; it universalised, unlike the linear time-and-space of bourgeois naturalism, for example, within which chronological time insistently remains the corollary of Euclidean space. One felt this to be a new day for a new world, in which, perhaps, to remember Artaud's vision of "the highest possible idea of the theatre" as being "one that reconciles us philosophically with Becoming".

Indeed, all four elements were omnipresent, active and protean, mobilised as a scenographic base for the performance as a whole. The beaten red earth of the egg-shaped playing space - Mother Earth, source and end of all, as well as the storyteller's milieu in an Indian village; the free-flowing water of a river beside the back wall - the holy Ganges, the river of heaven, as well as the goddess ancestor or the protagonists; the enclosed water of a pool at the spectators' feet - fixed, sterile, a reflective surface to mirror the action, a place for refreshment and ritual ablution, a place to die; naked candle flame as generative transformation, invocation, purification, and illumination, and sputtering ball of flame as weapon, force of ignorance, threat to humanity; and finally, the air that we share with the performers and the sky above us - the creative and empowering spirit of inspiration, the wind of passion, the breath of life. In traditional Hindu cosmology, there are five elements in all: earth, water, fire, air or wind, and space (akasha). Each of them is linked with our five senses: earth - nose - smells; water - tongue - flavours; fire - eyes - colours and forms; air/wind - skin - touch; and space - ears - sounds. This perhaps explains the sensory impact of such an open-air staging. And in Australia, the elements seem very immediate, uninsulated, of palpable impact on the ways one leads one's life and sees the world. Here too space might be conceived of as a fifth element.

Perhaps above all, it is the liminalities and paradoxes of these impure spaces that appeal to Brook: "What is most important is this element of impurity ... For life is composed of all sorts of different aspects, which are massively mobilised by dynamism, contradiction and conflict .... We need to reclaim this kind of impurity in the theatre, because it is the very mark of life. When seen as a fundamentally positive value, it becomes the inevitable reference point". As I have already suggested, an enormous array of what appear to be binary cleftings inscribed in the places themselves are left unresolved, and as spectators we are encouraged to explore and inhabit the gaps, to live the contradictions. As a director who resolutely refuses closure at every level and celebrates the opening of possible worlds in performance, Brook has always favoured the idea of "both/and" over "either/or". For him, the universe is actually a complex and contradictory "pluriverse". Consistently, he has endeavoured to find ways out of fixed authored spaces of all kinds, to break through restrictive boundaries, thereby opening up a transgressive and multivalent space. Like dharma in The Mahabharata, a plural space of ambiguities, within which power is dispersed from any single authorial text, any closed singular meaning. I should stress that this is an active productive space of pleasure which empowers spectators as generators of meaning(s). As Roland Barthes reminded us, reading - or spectating - is writing.

In this way, at least on a superficial formal level, Brook appears to be a post-modernist (although in reality he is of course one of the great humanists of late modernism). For part of his project is to explore and prise open some of the cracks in the empty space of modernism which in turn become new spaces of possible futures - indeterminate, porous, dialogical, endlessly in flux. In his work, he takes us from a notion of empty space as void or tabula rasa - a blank page passively awaiting the inscriptions of some colonising or legitimising "author", part of the Enlightenment myth of order prevailing over chaos - to a deconstructivist notion of free space as the site of the play of potentiality and dynamic plurality, tirelessly self-subverting and reconfiguring. Even the titles of Brook's two major books describe this trajectory, i.e. from the "empty space" to the "shifting point". Brook's "free space", therefore, becomes the site of a radical re-cognition and re-orientation.

So, in this instance, the quarries are both natural, found spaces ("raw", in Levi-Strauss's terms), and at the same time artificial reconstructions ("cooked"). Even the rock face in Adelaide was retouched with ochres to alter the space's tonality and texture. They are both rural and urban, often the city's lights remaining visible in the distance. They are both abandoned, redundant, out of use, and yet reclaimed, functional. Work places and play-grounds or playing-fields. Old and new. Demolished and renovated. Enclosed and open. Bounded and unbounded. Private and public. Intimate and epic. ‘Rough’ and ‘holy’. And centrally, in a mythical teatrum mundi within which microcosm and macrocosm are indissolubly intertwined, these spaces are both literal and metaphorical, encouraging spectators to be the site of a dynamic interplay of interiority and exteriority, subjectivity and objectivity. Such irresolution can generate a heterogeneous density of experience that startles, awakens and liberates. A free space can free ...

In an Australian context, the metaphorical resonance of quarry settings is further heightened by a connection with Aboriginal cultures that Brook has chosen to make explicit. The existence of these cultures is the focal point of his interest in Australia, making it a "land of origins", a "source". During the CICT's visit in 1980, he travelled to a number of Aboriginal communities in the "red centre" near Alice Springs. Subsequently, he invited tribal members from remote desert settlements in the Idulkana and Papunya regions to performances of the trilogy in Adelaide. In this context, the quarry setting offered a concrete image of different cultures' relationships to the same environment.

Brook conceived of these communities as representing a space of potentiality to the company and to white liberal audiences in general; at the time, he described them as "a very important example of what could be". Their presence demanded a recognition of qualities under direct threat from the encroachments of so-called civilisation. A recognition of forty thousand years of cultural tradition, partially intact despite the genocidal regimes of invaders and continuing institutional disempowerment, which still constructs Aboriginal culture and history as blank space; of an organic bond between the cyclical and plural time-spaces of myth and the everyday, between life and art; of a more sensitive and symbiotic relationship with the environment. For Brook, these guests offered a mirror to The Ik, now a new text with an amplified energy when played before such an audience in this gouge slashed out of the earth. One was invited to link the Aborigines' imposed deracination from tribal lands and sacred sites with the Ik claim to a life in union with their environment and its holy places: "We would not exist without the mountain, and the mountain would not exist without us ...."

For traditional Aboriginal cultures, environment constitutes a series of texts or a book. Their myths of creation, sacred teachings and cultural histories are inscribed in the land itself. Its features record, Braille-like, the exploits of pre-historical ancestors, which can be endlessly read and re-animated in the present. Landmarks are "nothing less than the bodies of the totemic beings, or items connected with them, transformed into individual waterholes, trees, sandhills, ridges, and other physiographic features, as well as into rock alignments and sacred rock-piles". By journeying through these free spaces, law and lore can be re-made and re-membered through narrative song cycles - psychogeographical itineraries that map cultural spaces and identities, pasts and possible futures: landscape as "inscape".

In this light, The Ik became an overtly cautionary tale, a vision of the dangers of obliging any people of ‘quality’ to shed that quality. Inevitably, The Mahabharata simmered with more parallels and intertexts. Performances occurred within (literally) the space of the dominant culture's exploitation and desecration of indigenous peoples' holy books. Yet, as I have tried to suggest above, the transition from work location to "play-ground" opens up new, transgressive spaces.

Later that year, in an impassioned article for The Sunday Times in London, Brook posed a series of questions that - like the land rights issues from which they emerged - still hang in the air, thirteen years on:

‘Will the Aborigines also be destroyed? Or will they win their legal battles? Will they be preserved and assimilated? Will they survive in isolation as anthropological curiosities? Will they find a way of integrating their traditions into a new way of life? A young Australian who has lived with the tribes in the North tells me of the beauty and complexity of their customs, of the force of their spirituality. “The Aborigines never meet white people of inner quality”, he says. “They want to know if such people exist”. Back to the other Australia, the Australia of beautiful cities, of generous friendly people, very appreciative of our performances. One of them says, “You're lucky! I've lived here all my life and never seen an Aborigine”.

In the intervening years, thankfully Aboriginal peoples have assumed a heightened "visibility" for all Australians, although little has been resolved. In 1993, the Australian High Court passed the historic Mabo legislation, which formally recognised "native title" and, to the horror of farmers and mining companies, particularly in Western Australia, overturned once and for all the notion of terra nullius upon which all former title legislation was founded. So the "empty space" was inhabited after all ... It remains to be seen exactly what this legislation means in practice. Since the election of a Liberal government in 1996, a government seemingly intent on undermining reconciliation processes as symptomatic of Labour's 'political correctness', Mabo is under threat.

In the middle of the CICT Mahabharata, Dharma posed a number of initiatory riddles to his son, the Pandava prince Yudhishthira, during his exile in the forest. Part of their exchange went as follows:

Dharma: "Give me an example of space".
Yudhishthira: "My two hands as one".

And this brings us to the real challenges of the spaces explored by The Mahabharata in an Australian context. In theatre, what is invisible can be made visible, the seeds of fragmentation critiqued and at the same time difference celebrated. In the utopian free spaces of play at least, coercive and delimiting ways of seeing can be subverted. Re-making our histories means re-visioning and re-making ourselves. Only then can theatre once more become necessary, as social and spiritual meeting place. For all Australians, "our two hands as one". A free space frees.
________________________________________________________________

Unpublished essay, originally written in Perth, Western Australia, 1993.

Photograph: Julio Donoso - The Mahabharata at the Bouffes du Nord, Paris, 1987.

See also David Williams (ed.), Peter Brook and the Mahabharata: Critical Perspectives, London and New York: Routledge, 1991; and David Williams (ed.), Peter Brook: A Theatrical Casebook (2nd edition - revised and updated), London: Methuen, 1992; and my essay ‘Assembling our differences: bridging identities-in-motion in intercultural performance’, in Simon Murray & John Keefe (eds), The Physical Theatres Reader, London & New York: Routledge, pp. 239-48.


References

Artaud, Antonin. The Theatre and its Double (trans. Victor Corti), New York: Grove Press, 1958.

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space, Boston: Beacon Press, 1969.

Brook, Peter. "Les lieux du spectacle", L'architecture d'aujourd'hui, October-November 1970.

----- "Espaces pour le theatre", Le Scarabée International, Summer 1982.

----- "Lettre a une étudiante anglaise", in Timon d'Athènes (translated and adapted by Jean-Claude Carrière), Paris, CICT, 1978.

----- "The Living Theatre of the Outback", The Sunday Times, 17 August 1980.

Carrière, Jean-Claude. The Mahabharata, London: Methuen, 1986.

Gould, Richard A. Yiwara, Foragers of the Australian Desert, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1969.

Mostafavi, Mohsen and David Leatherbarrow. On Weathering: the Life of Buildings in Time, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1993.

the idea of south

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

© David Williams

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

acts of public dreaming (1)

Starting in early September, two friends - Donna and Tim - are walking 222 miles in 21 days, from London to Dartington College of Arts in Devon. It is the mirror image in reverse of a walk Donna first made in 2001 as part of a remarkable final-year student project. Donna and Tim have invited others with a connection to Dartington to share sections of this new journey with them: ex-students, existing and former members of the teaching staff - their perceptions, memories and associations will be gathered in conversation en route. The final arrival at Dartington, timed to coincide with the opening of this year's MA Festival, will involve a collective farewell, for Dartington is changing, merging, moving - metaphorically and literally.

Here is an extract from a letter of invitation sent out to a wide range of people by Donna:

The walk is a reverse-tracing of the route I took as a third-year theatre student in October 2001. In the context of the, then very recent and, dramatically disorienting events of September 11th, I decided to walk home. I was exploring the idea of walking as a measure of space and time - a way of negotiating both geographical and social landscapes. And so along the way I asked those I encountered; "What is Important to You?” Collecting these voices as a measure of feeling and opinion at a very confusing and troubling time.

Seven years later Dartington College is undergoing a major transition. Officially it has already merged with [University College] Falmouth; within two years Dartington College of Arts, at Dartington, will cease to be. Like many others, I feel a need to acknowledge this ending/transition, to reflect on what Dartington is, and has been, and to try to better understand what a change like this means.

It is difficult to know what will be lost and what will be transplanted; it is difficult - not only because of the political and practical complexity of moving an institution - but because Dartington is so many things; its multiplicity and contextual specificity are essential to the experience of its students and intrinsic in its pedagogical approach. And so, walking back ‘home’ to Dartington, we will be asking our companions; "What is important about Dartington College of Arts?" perhaps by simply asking people like yourself "What IS Dartington College of Arts?"

We would like to invite you to join us for a day or a morning to walk and talk about your experiences of Dartington and the significance of the college from your own unique perspective. With your permission we would like to record these conversations to use in an installation at the Dartington MA show at the end of the walk (25th – 27th Sept) and with a view to later using the material as part of a documentary film about the college.

I have pasted below a schedule outlining our route. If you are able to join us please suggest a day that would be best for you, and if possible a second choice in case everyone suggests the same day! On the last day (Day 21) we are expecting a fairly large group to walk with us. We will arrive at the college in silence and perform a simple collective action, as a gesture of goodbye. This will coincide with the launch of the MA platform and we will encourage our fellow walkers to stay and see the MA work. You will be very welcome to re-join the walk with us on this last day – please let us know if you would like information about this final event.

Very much looking forward to walking with you.

All best,
Donna and Tim

Prelude: Rotherhithe - Westminster
Day 1: Westminster - Heston 11.5 miles
Day 2: Heston - Runnymede 11 miles
Day 3: Runnymede - Bracknell Forest 13 miles
Day 4: Bracknell Forest - Hook 15.5 miles
Day 5: Hook - Overton 15 miles
Day 6: Rest
Day 7: Overton - Longstock 14 miles
Day 8: Longstock - Salisbury 14.5 miles
Day 9: Salisbury - Fovant 11.5 miles
Day 10: Fovant - Shaftesbury 12 miles
Day 11: Shaftesbury - Horsington 11.5 miles
Day 12: Rest
Day 13: Horsington - Illchester 14 miles
Day 14: Illchester - Crewkerne 12 miles
Day 15: Crewkerne - Fordwater 10 miles
Day 16: Fordwater - Beer 12 miles
Day 17: Beer - Sidmouth 9 miles
Day 18: Rest
Day 19: Sidmouth - Starcross 11.5 miles
Day 20: Starcross - Kingskerswell 14 miles
Day 21: Kingskerswell - Dartington MA Show 10 miles

London to Dartington route: - 222 miles

Amongst those who have accepted Donna and Tim's invitation to walk with them are members of Propeller and Deer Park (Donna was a founding member of the latter company), Alan Read, Gregg Whelan & Gary Winters (Lone Twin), Dan Gretton & James Mariott (Platform), Emilyn Claid, John Hall, Simon Persighetti, Misha Myers, Josie Sutcliffe, Peter Kiddle, Simon Murray, Joe Richards, Claire Donovan, Alan Bolden, Tracey Warr, Jerome Fletcher, Sue Palmer and me. That's quite a collection of feet. And there's a substantial history of walking as part of a creative practice at Dartington over the years.

Unfortunately my old friend Ric Allsopp, who I've known for almost 25 years - he was one of the core reasons for my own return to Dartington from Australia in the late 1990s - will not be able to take part; he's working elsewhere throughout this period. Yesterday Ric emailed me a copy of his response to Donna's invitation:

Dear Donna, Thank you for your invitation which David also had mentioned to me. I had hoped to be able to join you to walk and talk - but I'm afraid the dates just don't work out for me. So - best of luck with the project. I'm not sure if I actually have anything to say about Dartington - a thirty year involvement in the College leaves me with the feeling that it is time to walk on. 'Dartington' will remain as it always was - an unstable set of ideas and acts of public dreaming; an opportunity to engage with some extraordinary people who more than occasionally managed to share a radical educational and arts ethos and way of doing things which gave rise to challenging, absorbing and uplifting work - work that will continue to define and disturb and resonate with contemporary arts practice. Best wishes, Ric

Today I received a map of the route from Sidmouth to Star Cross. Mainly along the South West Coastal Path - past Chit Rocks, Tortoiseshell Rocks, Big Picket Rock, North Star, Otterton, Aqueduct, The Warren, South Farm, Nature Reserve, Budleigh Salterton, Otter Cove, Dangerous Area, Straight Point, Sandy Bay, Orcombe Rocks, Conger Rocks, The Maer, The Point, and finally the ferry across the Exe (floating over something underwater in mid-estuary called Great Bull Hill) to Starcross ... I'm looking forward to these 11.5 miles already.

In the winter of 1973-4, Werner Herzog undertook a three-week solo walk from Munich to Paris, in order to try to prevent his friend the film historian Lotte Eisner from dying ('Our Eisner must not die, she will not die, I won't permit it. Not now, no, she is not allowed'). When he finally met Eisner at the end of his journey, he said to her: 'Together, we shall boil fire and stop fish ... Open the window, from these last days onward I can fly' (Of Walking in Ice).

During September, I'll post more about Donna and Tim's walk as it unfolds across southern England. I wish them big skies, energy, cool feet and open hearts.
_____________________________________________________

P.S. I've just been to the local village library to drop off a book I've had for over a year and still haven't read. It's an eccentric library, locked in a previous age; and it's dominated by a surprisingly large crime section. No computer, no library membership card, just an elderly volunteer hunched over a desk in the old school room - she records transactions longhand in a ledger. You tell her what you've got, then your name, and she flattens out the page of the ledger with a papery hand before writing it down very very slowly. The name of the woman in front of me in the queue was Julie Andrews; Julie had an Ian Rankin novel called Exit Music. And the previous borrower, as registered in the ledger, was D. Copperfield, who had taken a book called Wild Walks.

© David Williams

Photos: top - Blundstones ('since 1870'); middle - tech rehearsal of Deer Park's see you swoon, Junge Hunde Festival, Antwerp, 2004; bottom - Joseph Beuys, La rivoluzione siamo noi, 1972

goldleaf goose, sublime suchness

an unfinished and unfinishable a-z,
for simon whitehead
_______________________________________________________________

‘Every word was once an animal’ (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

‘Why not then continue to look at it all as a child would, as if you were looking at something unfamiliar, out of the depths of your own world?’ (Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet)













Absence Action Age Agency Air Amplifier Animal Appearance Architecture Arrival Artefact Attention Awake Awareness Aura Autumn

Back Badger Balance Beach Beginning Belonging Between Beuys Biofeedback monitor Bird Blackthorn tree Blaze Body Bog Bonemap Boot Border Boundary Bow Branch Breath Bricolage

Canopy Cardiovascular Cartography Cat Cell Chaos Child Choir Choreography City Cloud Coastline Cold Collaboration Collect Colour Community Compassion Composite Composting Complicity Connectivity Consciousness Contact Contemplation Context Country

Damp Dance Darkness DAT Dawn Daydream Daylight Disappearance Dislocation Decay Deep map Departure Dérive Desire path Detour Détournement Digicam Digital delay Direction Dirt Distance Ditch Document Documentation Dog Dowsing Drawing Drift Drone Dwelling Duration Dusk Dust

Ear Earth Echo Ecology Edge Elegy Elsewhere Elvis Embodiment Encounter Energy Environment Ephemeral Exchange Excursion Expectation Expedition Experience Extraordinary Event Everyday Eye Extremity

Face Farm Fear Feather Feedback Feral Field Filltir Fire Flotsam Fluidity Flux Foot Footprint Fork Found objects Fragility Front Fulton Funeral paths Fungus

Gaffer-tape Gentle Geography Ghost Gift Goldleaf Goose Gorse Granite Grass Gravity Ground Guitar

Habitat Hand Haunt Hawthorn Hazel Heel Heal Heart Hedgerow Helium balloon Here Hide Hill Histories Home Homing Hoof Hope Horse Horsehair Hotspot House Hybrid

Identity Illuminate Image Imaginary Immersion Improvisation In-between Indeterminate Inside Interaction Installation Interconnection Intervention Intersection Intimate Invisible Interstices Itinerant

Journey

Kinetic Knee Knowledge

Landscape Lane Leaf Left Legs Ley lines Lichen Lifeworld Light Line Lippard Listening Llyn Location Long Lost Lungs

Manoeuvre Map Mark-making Material Maybe Mediation Meditation Memorial Memory Message Microphone Migration Mile Mind Mix Mnemonic Mobile phone Mobility Monitor Moss Movement Mud Music Mythology

Narrative Navigation Nature Neighbourhood Network Night Not-self Now and now and now

Oak Observe Ode Omission Online Opening Ordinary Orient Other/wise Ownership Outside

Palimpsest Passage Past Paper Path Pathways Participation Pavement Paw Peat Pet Petal Petrified oak Phone Pigeon Pilgrimage Pitch Place Plant Plastic animals Play Pony Possibility Potato Poplar Prayer Preseli Presence Private Process Projection Proximity Public Pull

Quarry Quebec Question

Radio mic Rain Ramble Raw Reality Reception Recollection Recycle Red Refuge Relationships Relic Remains Remote Repetition Research Residue Resonance Return Retreat Reverb(eration) Right Ritual River Road Roam Rock Root Route Rhythm Rowan tree Ruin Run Rural

Salt Sapling Scale Score Sea Season Sediment Seed Self Senses Senitised Sensorium Shadow Sheep Shelter Shoe Site Sky Skyclad Skyline Slate Slow Smell Snyder Social sculpture Silence Silver birch Sitting Solnit Somasonics Song Sonic material-image-energy-soup-map-ecology Sound Soundscape Space Spirit Spore Spring Stalk Standing Star Stem Step Sticks Stomach Stone Story Stray Street String Studio Stuffed goose Summer Sublime Suchness Sun Symbiosis

Table Tail Tarmac Task Telekinesis Territory Text Texture Then There Thought Timber Time Topology Torch Tormentil Totem Touch Trace Track Trail Trajectory Transformation Translocation Transmission Travel Tree Twig Twilight Tycanol

Uncertainty Unconscious Undergrowth Urban

Vibration Video Virtual Visceral Vision Vulnerability

Wah pedal Wales Walking Wall Wander Water We Weather Weight Wilderness Wind Wind turbine Window Winter Witness Wooden horse Woods Wool Work

X-marks-the-spot X-roads

Yap Yearn Yellow Yes Yew Yin Yang You Ystwyth

Zenith Zero Zigzag Zodiac Zone
_______________________________________________________________

afterwords

‘Memory and oblivion stand together, both are necessary for the full use of time … We would try to encourage those who intend to struggle against the hardening of the imagination (it threatens all of us) to not forget to forget in order to lose neither memory nor curiosity. Oblivion brings us back to the present, even if it is conjugated in every tense: in the future, to live the beginning; in the present, to live the moment; in the past, to live the return; in every case, in order not to be repeated. We must forget in order to remain present, forget in order not to die, forget in order to remain faithful’ (Marc Augé, Oblivion, 2004)
__________________________________________________________________


Text originally published in Simon Whitehead, Walking to Work, Cardiff: The Arts Council of Wales/Shoeless, 2006, 62-3

Photographs: Simon Whitehead

For Simon Whitehead's untitledstates website, see here

blow wind blow

‘Say weather take this adult from its box’ (Robertson 2001:14)

In those art practices that most engage me, there is always weather. An environment in process, a ‘field’ rather than an ‘object’. An invitation to predictive interpretation of signs, patterns, behaviours in atmospheres characterised by complexity, variation, possibility, anomaly, disturbance, ephemerality, unfinishability; the core dynamic lies in the relational axis between stability and instability. An implicatedness in sensory, phenomenal events: temperature, wind speed/direction, humidity, pressure, atmosphere, resultant phenomena of various kinds (e.g. optical). Weather is always contextual, and at the same time in the ephemeral spatio-temporal events that characterise its happenings the local is invariably implicated in the trans-local. Where does the weather begin, and where does it end? ‘Any event is a fog of a million droplets’ (Deleuze & Parnet 1987: 65).

Blow Wind Blow / You are my Sunshine / California Sun / I Don’t Care if the Sun Don’t Shine / Just Walking in the Rain / After the Clouds Roll Away / The Wind Cries Mary / Come Rain or Shine / It’s Raining / Jamaican Hurricane / Let the 4 Winds Blow / Stormy Weather / A Place in the Sun / The Summer Wind / Uncloudy Day. (Playlist from ‘Weather’, the first episode of Bob Dylan’s recent US broadcasts as a DJ on ‘ Theme Time Radio Hour: dreams, schemes and themes’).

Consider weather’s centrality in histories, politics, cultures, economics, science, bodies, identities, emotional lives. Today our media is full of weather and/as catastrophe: the floods, droughts and other eruptive anomalies, the ‘storms from Paradise’ of global warming throwing us all backwards into the future. Then there’s the potency of weather in the imagination: different poetics of weather. Hovering in my mind is a cloud of artist-practitioners of weather, their noses to the wind, including authors of haiku (with its obligation to include kigo, a season or weather word), Walter de Maria, Robert Smithson, Robert Morris, Nancy Holt, James Turrell, Denis Oppenheim, the Harrisons, Gary Snyder, Andrei Tarkovsky, Bill Viola, Olafur Eliasson, Tacita Dean, Min Tanaka (‘body weather’), Richard Long, Simon Whitehead, Lisa Robertson, Ben Marcus (author of the terrifying ‘The Weather Killer’, 1998). And what of weather and/as consciousness? Both involve dynamic, non-homogeneous environments forever in process, mutable, an ever-changing flux of micro-events in a relational field of infinite complexity …

As a most pervasive, protean and powerful force, perhaps weather suggests a dramaturgy of unfolding through a ‘logic of intensities’, an ‘eco-logic’, concerned ‘only with the movement and intensity of evolutive processes. Process, which I oppose here to system or structure, strives to capture existence in the very act of its constitution, definition and deterritorialisation’ (Guattari 2000: 44). Here we are close to Lyotard’s ‘theatre of energetics’, in which what appears is ‘the highest intensity … of what there is, without intention’ (Lyotard 1997: 288).

Philosophy sometimes intertwines promiscuously with meteorology, particularly in Lucretius, Spinoza, Nietzsche - perhaps above all in Deleuze whose staging of thought is a veritable becoming-weather. The shock of thought as lightning strike, the book as perfect storm and weather-factory. Consider the lexicon of Gilles the weatherman: the thisness of the concept, its event; difference and repetition; relations of speed and movement, symptomatologies of force; immanence, assemblage, anomaly, multiplicity, rhizome; connectivity, encounter, flow; the outside, the fold; intensity, sensation, ‘non-subjectified’ affect; haecceity, becoming-molecular, ‘a Life’. It’s all there.

Of course all outdoor site work necessarily engages with the unpredictabilities of weather, either opening itself to the generative possibilities of weather’s creative agency within the work – weather as co-author of events in contexts where site is conceived as active medium - or (fruitlessly) trying to deny it entry to the site as ‘container’/ backdrop. But what about encouraging weather indoors? In studio or gallery-based practices, weather can occur in the form of phenomenal events generated, deliberately or otherwise, by a particular set of conditions. Sometimes weather’s intervention is formally representational and consciously framed as artifice: e.g. the hosed indoor ‘rain’ in Brith Goff’s Gododdin, 1998, which seems to have been generative both in terms of its excess in the scenography’s ‘material imagination’ and of an invited recognition of the predicament of performers. Or, more complex in terms of perception and embodied immersion, Olafur Eliasson’s installed Weather Project in the Tate’s Turbine Hall (2003), with its sublime indoor ‘sun’ and haze of ‘clouds’, and its elaboration of an anomalous behavioural ‘field’ indoors. At other times, weather’s presence represents an opportunist preservation of the by-product of felicitous accident: e.g. raindrops falling through the broken glass dome of Peter Brook’s Bouffes du Nord and landing in a small pool in The Mahabharata.

On other occasions, weather’s apparition is both more artificial and actual, more wonder-ful for the nature of its contrivance. I think of the creation of clouds in a number of Lone Twin performances, enactments of a poetics, economy and ecology of transformation, circulation and inter-connection, in which Gregg Whelan and Gary Winters’s hot sweating bodies literally steam to become further imbricated in the hydrological cycle. The clouds actualise an ephemeral passage that soon dematerialises, leaving in their trail a palpable density of associations and metaphorical after-lives, as well as a certain poignancy, an absence. (‘The cloud, then, is no more than this: I’m missing something’ - Barthes 1978: 170. Italics in original). At a time when the cumulative actions of human beings are becoming a ‘force of nature’, clouds and rain always contain traces of other histories, other bodies, elsew/here. Like the best stories, weather always creates an ‘electrified periphery’ (Marcus 2004: x).

In today’s paper, details of yesterday’s weather ‘around the world’; in a moment of drought I look for the presence of rain elsewhere and the local temperatures, scant details of the event of ‘nature’ in different urban contexts; Amsterdam (18), Brussels (15), Copenhagen (20), Dakar (28), Florence (23), Karachi (30), Milan (24), New Delhi (29), Oslo (17), Strasbourg (16), Warsaw (15), Wellington (7). Here today, ’bright spells, but showers are likely later (20)’ - so, another day of multiple weathers, but the showers haven’t materialised yet. Meanwhile, there are tropical storms in the north-west Pacific, one of them developing into a super-typhoon called Saomai which has just struck the south-east coast of China; I wonder what’s happening there right now? Multiplicity and difference in the pliable simultaneity of space. (Michel Serres has explored the fact that the French language uses the same word for time and weather, temps).

As Doreen Massey writes, space is ‘the sphere of the possibility of the more-than-one. Without space there is no ‘multiplicity’ in that sense … That is the meaning of space as a simultaneity of ongoing stories: that sense of ‘right now’. Right now there is someone growing mangetout for your table; right now there is chaos on the streets of Baghdad; right now it is just about noon on the West Coast of America (while it is already evening here in London)’ (Massey 2003: 114). Right now, as the sun falls, people are endeavouring to return to their shattered homes in Southern Lebanon. Right now severe rainfall has produced catastrophic landslides in North Korea. Right now it’s fucking cold and wet in Wellington.

The ‘weather-ed’ works I privilege as models are radically porous, they propose: let what’s out-there in-here. Take, for example, Yoko Ono’s ‘video sculpture’ Sky TV (1966), installed at the Indica Gallery in London. Like so many of her Fluxus-inflected conceptual works, which rehearse a pedagogy of the imagination, Sky TV exists first as an instructional text, a score, that can be effected materially or imaginatively in order for the work to be realised; the work will exist if it is ‘constructed in your head’. A camera is placed outside the gallery, focused on the sky, with a live-feed relay to a monitor inside. In ways reminiscent of Duchamp and Cage, this work undoes the integrity of the self-contained art object. It punctures the confines or boundaries of the gallery, and dis-places a mediated everyday; as with Cage’s 4’33”, questions of authorship, control, perception, boundary and the parameters of art come into play. It introduces a simultaneity of times and spaces, a composite rhythmed space-time, an interface. It invites us to apprehend and contemplate processes and unpredictabilities unfolding beyond the agency or ownership of an art commodity context, while paradoxically riding on the hypnotic allure of TV.

’This weather is the vestibule to something fountaining newly and crucially and yet indiscernibly beyond. Perhaps here we shall be other than the administrators of poverty …’ (Robertson 2001: unpaginated introduction).

And then there’s the verb, ‘to weather’, and the effects of weather(ing) over time. Brecht’s costumes at the Berliner Ensemble, sculpted and grained by bodies. The pitted back wall of the Bouffes du Nord, scarred by fire and water. The landscape of Beckett’s face. The scuffs, smears, stains, rubbings, wear, tear and other traces inscribed by humans and others into the very fabric of the urban and domestic, through the habitual, the unintentional, the accidental: the stuff of a forensics of anonymous histories and overlooked behaviours, and of deep mappings of location, occupancy, the passage of bodies now absent … (I am thinking in particular of performance maker and scholar Mike Pearson’s work on ‘archaeologies of the contemporary past’ and the ‘restoration of an absent present’: see e.g. Pearson 2006)


References
Barthes, Roland (1978). ‘Clouds’, in A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (trans. Richard Howard), London: Penguin
Deleuze, Gilles and Parnet, Claire (1987). Dialogues (trans. Hugh Tomlinson & Barbara Habberjam), New York: Columbia University Press
Guattari, Félix (2000). The Three Ecologies (trans. Ian Pindar & Paul Sutton), London: The Athlone Press
Lyotard, François (1997).’The Tooth, the Palm’ (trans. Anne Knab & Michel Benamou), in Timothy Murray (ed.), Mimesis, Masochism and Mime: The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary French Thought, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 282-8
Marcus, Ben (1998). ‘The Weather Killer’, in The Age of Wire and String, London: Flamingo, 81-7
Marcus, Ben (2004).’Introduction’, in Marcus (ed.), The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, New York: Anchor Books
Massey, Doreen (2003). ‘Some Times of Space’, in Susan May (ed.), Olafur Eliasson: The Weather Project, London: Tate Publishing, 107-18
Pearson, Mike (2006). ‘Marking time’, in Judie Christie, Richard Gough, & Daniel Watt (eds), A Performance Cosmology: Testimony from the Future, Evidence of the Past, London & New York: Routledge,
Robertson, Lisa (2001). The Weather, London: Reality Street Editions

First published as 'Weather' in Performance Research 11:3 (‘Lexicon’), December 2006:
© PR/David Williams. Reproduced here to mark yet another wild August day as gales rip through Devon & the south-west. Summer time ...

on dogs & goats & meanwhile

They say, if you dream an animal, it means ‘the self’ – that mess of memory and fear that wants, remembers, understands, denies, and even now we sometimes wake from dreams of moving from room to room, with its scent on our hands and a slickness of musk and fur on our sleep-washed skins, though what I sense in this, and cannot tell is not the continuity we understand as self, but life, beyond the life we live on purpose: one broad presence that proceeds by craft and guesswork, shadowing our love’ (John Burnside).


Dear S.

It is the evening, that transitional time the French language describes as entre chien et loup, between dog and wolf. Your face has made a gift of what it could leave behind of itself, and it is both dog and wolf, and I think to you in your absence and you are here and not-here. There are so many things I want to tell you. So many stories and connections, unfinished and unfinishable.

Did I ever tell you about Laika? I can’t remember. Like you, she is in my thoughts right now. In November 1957 when I was 5 months old, Laika became the first living creature to enter space, orbiting around the earth while I orbited my mother in extreme proximity. Found as a stray dog in the streets of Moscow, and chosen for her small size and even temperament, Laika was about 3 years old when she became the first cosmonaut aboard Sputnik 2, and an unwitting instrument of cold war politics: an understudy for man in the complex ideologies and developing technologies of ballistic missiles, satellites, manned-space flight. In Russian, ‘laika’ means ‘barker’ and is the generic name for a range of Russian dog breeds. In a Soviet radio broadcast a week before the launch, she barked into the microphone. The American press dubbed her ‘Muttnik’. Over a period of weeks, Laika was trained to endure launch and flight conditions. To adapt to the cramped space of the cabin, she was kept in progressively smaller cages for periods of up to three weeks. She was placed in centrifuges that simulated the vibrations and extreme G-forces in the acceleration of a rocket launch, and in simulators that reproduced the volume of noise within a space craft. Just before launch, Laika was sponged in a diluted alcohol solution and carefully groomed. Iodine was painted onto shaved areas where sensors were attached to monitor her bodily functions: blood pressure, breath frequency, heartbeat. She was fitted with a metal chain harness to prevent her turning around, and a rubber bag to collect bodily waste. There was a radio transmitter, and a television camera that doesn’t seem to have worked …

Shortly after the launch on November 3, one of the heat shields fell off, leaving Laika exposed to high temperatures. The early telemetry from the electrodes on her body show she was highly agitated (her pulse rate at three times the normal resting rate) and barking, although still eating some food. In the end, Laika seems to have died from trauma and dehydration after 3-5 hours; she was certainly dead by the completion of the 4th orbit. The dog circled the earth 2,570 times in her space capsule coffin, at a height of about 2,000 miles and at a speed of about 18,000 m.p.h..The capsule finally burnt up on re-entry five months after launch: 162 days of meanwhile, then dog-star. It’s only recently that the real nature and timing of her death have come to light. The cold war Soviet PR machine concealed the reality of her fate and constructed a fantasy version of Laika circling the earth, peering inquisitively out of the window at Earth for more than a week of carefree doggy flight. For 40 years, the official ‘history’ was that Laika had lived to see the 40th anniversary of the October Revolution, before dying peacefully. It is now clear that in reality she is the only living space passenger to have been launched without any intention of retrieval. There was no life-support system for long-duration flight, and no descent capsule. In fact it was planned for Laika to be euthanased after 10 days with a poisoned serving of food. Meanwhile in Soviet Russia plaques were unveiled, statues erected, commemorative stamps printed. There were brands of chocolates and cigarettes named after her, and now there are novels, band names and songs, films, website memorials with audio samples of Laika’s telemetry signals picked up from satellites, including her heartbeat. Laika has entered modern mythology and cultural imaginations as an unwitting hero/victim of our technological age and its political tensions. Four years after Laika’s flight, in April 1961 Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space aboard Vostok 1.

Thirteen other Soviet dogs went into space. Five died in flight. A puppy from one of Laika’s successors was sent to Kennedy by Kruschev, as a kind of cold war gift/taunt. In this period shortly before the first manned space flight and then throughout the 1960s, countless other animals were also involved in US and Soviet space missions: mice, rats, monkeys, cats, frogs, spiders, fish, crickets, snails, worms. On board the Space Shuttle Columbia’s final flight in 2003, in addition to the seven astronauts, there were silkworms, spiders, carpenter bees, harvester ants and Japanese killfish (as well as roses, moss and other plant life). Nothing survived the explosion at re-entry apart from hundreds of tiny worms known as Caenorhabditis elegans found alive on the ground in Texas: the humble nematode.

How dogged we are, the humans, the deterritorialised animal.

You remember I told you about my friends in Chicago, the Goats? I told them about you too (did I?): your name and its meanings, your journeys, your gradual blindness, your death, your burial under the slab of slate by the eucalyptus tree. I certainly showed them some video of you during your last summer of life: your left eye missing but still quick there somehow in the shadows, you looking up to meet the camera with the other eye as you lay resting in the dancing dapple of the shadow of a tree. You look peaceful in the video. Let sleeping dogs lie. I wish I had sung Jacques Brel to you: ‘Laisses-moi devenir l’ombre de ton ombre / L’ombre de ta main / L’ombre de ton chien / Ne me quittes pas …’

Well, since you left the Goats have made a performance in which at times they talk of dogs, and at times they become-dog. The performance is ghosted by animal life, there’s a diverse menagerie here filtered through a choreographic lens of ‘dogness’. Many of the age-old associations of dogs and their cultural roles hover around this work: companionship and fidelity, submissiveness and humility, dependence, tractability, tenacity, behavioural abhorrence, symbiosis, mediation and death. The ways in which they represent animality – and therefore humanity, for humans tend to make of animals the constitutive outside of human-being - are telling. Sometimes they offer playful domesticated impressions. Mark on all fours, snuffling and chewing a stick. Mark travelling through the space leading with his nose, his arm extended from his face along the floor like a trunk; he sniffs the floor as he crosses it, his fingers now nostrils searching and flaring, a sensory field actualised: he sees feelingly. Growls and bared teeth and barks. ‘The dog grinneth’: grrrr. At other times, it is less to do with imitation and more to do with becoming-other through intensive alliance, contagion or aggregation, in Deleuze’s sense: affinity rather than identity. The circulation of affects in relations of movement and speed. Zones of proximity and indiscernibility in the untimely processes of desire. At one point, someone (Karen I think, as Simone Weill) says: ‘God grant that I may become a dog’. There is a repeated physical score which sequences scratching, jumping, rolling: a stuttering pack choreography. Like Alexis the Trotter the horse imitator who was ‘never as much of a horse as when he played the harmonica’, Matthew is never as much of a dog as when he tells Tommy Cooper jokes or gives Bryan a glass of water wearing an elasticated band over his top lip: muzzle, restraint, torture instrument, facial wound, moustache. And Bryan is never as much of a dog as when he watches Matthew building his precarious cardboard table, then is deterritorialized from his role and almost runs to the aid of Matthew as he wrestles with the cardboard table that almost topples. Life, beyond the life we live on purpose. At such moments, there is a kind of diffraction of difference and connectivity in an event, and the other remains inappropriate(d).

Somewhere in the performance Bryan explains the mechanics of optics in the eye, and with enthusiastic hesitancy attempts gamely to demonstrate the phenomenon of the blindspot. He holds a finger in front of his face, fixes it with one eye as the other is held shut, then the other Goats move towards him and into his blindspot: ‘Right now the dog has entered my blindspot and I cannot see it anymore and it has disappeared’, he says. I thought of you at this moment. The blindspot as literality and as metaphor. Concealment. Dis-appearance. Now I see you, now I don’t. Doggone. And I thought of that ambiguous photograph of the British sailor Donald Crowhurst, who disappeared during a round-the-world race in 1969. In the grainy image, he gives a thumbs-up gesture to a film camera on board, a pretender’s performance of well-being by the chirpy sea-dog; and his left eye is blotted out by his thumb. A temporary partial blindness as he erases his capacity to see clearly and activates his blindspot. In reality he was far from being alright. He was all at sea, as we now know from the logs he kept on board; they reveal the critical gap between the fictional selves and locations he constructed in his radio messages for the media and his family at home, and the confused unravelling of his sense of both self and location. Ultimately, with no working chronometer to estimate his position and navigate, he became utterly disoriented, going round and round in circles in the South Atlantic and in his mind, a spiralling meanwhile as he suffered the torture of guilt and of a condition called ‘time-madness’. And still he sailed on, ever further into his blindspot and into dis/appearance . Part of his final journal entry before finally jumping overboard about 1800 miles from home reads: ‘It is finished It is finished IT IS THE MERCY’.

At one point in the Goat Island performance, Matthew quotes Jean Améry detailing the etymological roots of the word ‘torture’: from the Latin torquere, to twist, or torment. ‘What visual instruction in etymology’, he says, before describing the terrible details of an extreme experience of physical torture. In search of instruction, visual or otherwise, I look to the entry for ‘dog’ in the OED: 'Previous history and origin unknown. 1. A quadruped of the genus Canis, numerous races or breeds, varying greatly in size shape and colour … referrred by zoologists to a species C. familiaris; but whether they have a common origin is a disputed question … 3. Applied to a person; a. in reproach, abuse, or contempt: a worthless, despicable, surly, or cowardly fellow. b. Playfully (usually in humorous reproof, congratulation, or commiseration): a gay or jovial man, a gallant: a fellow, ‘chap’. 4. Astron. a. The name of two constellations, the Great and Little Dog (Canis Major and Minor) situated near Orion; also applied to their principal stars Sirius and Procyon: see DOG-STAR. b. The Hunting Dogs, a northern constellation (Canes Venatici) near the Great Bear. 5. Applied, usually with distinctive prefix, to various animals allied to, or in some respect resembling, the dog: e.g. burrowing-dog, the COYOTE or prairie-wolf, Canis latrans; pouched-dog, a dasyurine marsupial of Tasmania, Thylacinus cynophelas, also called zebra-wolf; prairie-dog, a North American rodent … 7. A name given to various mechanical devices, usually having or consisting of a tooth or claw, used for gripping or holding … 9. An early kind of fire-arm. 10. Name given to various atmospheric appearances. a. A luminous appearance near the horizon; also fog-dog, sea-dog. b. Sun-dog, a luminous appearance near the sun, a parhelion. c. Water-dog, a small dark floating cloud, indicating rain'.

So, definition as proliferation of signification. A word (and a species) of uncertain origin, sometimes applied to people in either derogatory or playful fashion. Astronomical constellations, formerly used in navigation. Other creatures with certain physiological similarities, one of those mentioned now extinct and another on the cusp of disappearance; Thylacinus cynepholas, also known as the Tasmanian tiger, was hunted to extinction in the 1930s, although there are still unconfirmed sightings to this day. Then mechanical grips/restraints, weaponry, and weather phenomena. A multiplicity within the singularity ‘dog’, all of these attributes and associations somehow swarming for me in the performance. ‘Every animal is fundamentally a pack’, Deleuze said somewhere. And Kafka once wrote: ‘All knowledge, the totality of all questions and all answers, is contained in the dog’.

A final thought. When the Goats mention Simone Weill’s surname, they pronounce it ‘while’, as if referring to an in-between space-time: a suspension or waiting in the gap, the gap itself the dynamic relational axis between two terms in a binary, making of them a triad. Dogs do an enormous amount of semiotic and performative work for us, and representations of dogs have often been used to figure cultural change and negotiate the borderlands in-between. As a species in part defined by different modes of relationality, the dog is ‘an animal that emerges between others’, and as such ‘presents special challenges to species-centred notions of history’; in myth, they are ‘markers of thresholds, especially those that lead to forbidden territories’. Most notably the contested spaces between nature and culture, and the uncertain transition between life and death. For John Berger, dogs are the ‘natural frontier experts’ of ‘the interstices between different sets of the visible’: ‘Their eyes, whose message often confuses us for it is urgent and mute, are attuned both to the human order and to other visible orders. Perhaps this is why, on so many occasions and for different reasons, we train dogs as guides’.

In French, however, Weill is pronounced ‘veil’, like the concealing fabric employed in an act of modesty, mourning, disguise or revelation (Salome). Or the clouding or obscuring of vision in an imperfect eye: ‘She had been born with the veil in her eye. She had been born with the veil in her soul … Seeing was a tottering believing. Everything was perhaps … Do I see what I see? What was not there was perhaps there. To be and not to be were never exclusive’ (Cixous).

Everything is perhaps.

My love to you,
D


References
Berger, John (2001). The Shape of a Pocket, London: Bloomsbury
Burnside, John (2002). ‘Animals’, in The Light Trap, London: Jonathan Cape, 18-19
Cixous, Hélène and Derrida, Jacques (2001). Veils (trans. Geoffrey Bennington), Stanford: Stanford University Press
Dean, Tacita (1999). Teignmouth Electron, London: Book Works
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (trans. Brian Massumi), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
Kafka, Franz (1999)[1922]. ‘Investigations of a Dog’, in Nahum N. Glatzer (ed.), The Complete Short Stories of Franz Kafka, London: Vintage/Random House, 278-316
McHugh, Susan (2004). Dog, London: Reaktion Books
Tomalin, Nicholas and Hall, Ron (1995). The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst, Camden, Maine: International Marine


Originally published as ‘L’ombre de ton ombre: on dogs and goats and meanwhile’, in Frakcija (Croatia), June 2005, no. 35. Commissioned for Part 2 of Goat Island’s ‘Reading Companion’ to When will the September roses bloom? Last night was only a comedy. Film still of Donald Crowhurst from his own footage: Arena, BBC, 1993. Text © David Williams

welcome to dreamland

I will not help you with this. You have to ‘deal’. Which means cope with un-meaning. Or with the possibility of un-meaning. Or cope with me not coping. Or with me not meaning. The trembling of this moment … (Tim Etchells)

About three years ago I was asked to give a presentation at a gathering in Lancaster to mark the 20th anniversary of Forced Entertainment: what follows is an edited version of it. In many ways, it was a bit of a surprise to find myself there in Lancaster. A pleasurable one, yes, I was chuffed to be there, but a surprise nonetheless. I don’t regard myself as any kind of ‘expert’ in this context (or any others for that matter). For over half of Forced Entertainment’s more than 20-year existence, I wasn’t even living in Europe, I was on the other side of the world in Australia. I only came back to work in England at the end of the 1990s. So for a 13 or 14 year period, I had no direct contact with these people and this growing body of work. Whatever impressions I formed were the fruit of (at the very least) second hand information and experiences - and the same can be said of a small number of other influential presences shadowing my psyche; they are part of my memory and of how I constitute myself, they hover around the edges of the stories my cortex hums to me about who and where I am, I recognise them but I couldn’t claim to ‘know’ them.

In the case of Forced Entertainment, in Australia I saw the odd grainy copy of a copy of an often quite baffling video, decayed flickering traces drifting ever further from the ‘events’ they purported to register, the cassettes exchanging hands like a rather dodgey samizdat from another world. I also came across the odd text by Tim Etchells: sharply perceptive and interrogative, challenging, dissident, very funny and a bit arsey in ways that reminded me of something of what I missed of England, and of what was absent from so much of the performance I was able to see. In addition I heard the odd story from my old friend Claire Marshall, who is a long-term member of FE; we met sometimes when I came back to England for work or family reasons. She once sent me a video of Marina & Lee, and I showed it to the programmers at the Perth Festival of the Arts, who were quite evidently bemused and thought I was having a bit of a laugh.

And then a lot of word-of-mouth: that generative connective tissue that thrives on the unstable blur between memory, desire, fiction, and all sorts of assumptions and projections about what-it-is-one-would-like. In the early 1990s, for example, Phil a friend from Perth in Western Australia traveled to England, and somehow found his way to Sheffield to see Forced Entertainment’s retrospective trilogy Welcome to Dreamland: (Let the Water Run its Course) to the Sea that Made the Promise, 200% and Bloody Thirsty, and Some Confusions in the Law about Love). On his return, it was clear that something had happened to Phil. And that something was still happening for Phil. He burst into my house wild-eyed and waving a programme from the performances, ranting about angels and skeletons and wigs and dead people and the interruptions and not-knowing-whatthehell-was-going-on and the shouting and the weeping and the overload and the mess and the aching aching beauty of it all…. In the end he just flopped into a chair, took a deep breath and with a quiet melancholic seriousness said: ‘Jeeeez Dave mate, you’d have fuckin loved it!’

Somehow these mediated fragments made rather a lot of sense to me in Australia, with its lopsided grins and its displacements and its savage histories and its collective amnesias and its surreal wildlife in-the-everyday and its cultural frictions and its combative politics and its freak weather systems and its apocalyptic fires and its national ‘Sorry Day’ and its skywriters marking the vast indifference of the scriptable blue with ephemeral words like ‘GREED’ and ‘YES’ and ‘WE’, yes the blue of the sea and the blue of the sky, and now not even the sky but the memory of sky, and the blue of the earth in your lungs. I was living in a city where there were shops with names like ‘Bloody Cheap Strides’, and graffiti like ‘Chica! Estas fuerte!’, and ‘More than repair, everything is in need of mercy’. I had visited places with names like ‘Burnt Shirt’, ‘Catastrophe’, ‘Infinity’, ‘Useless Loop’ and ‘Paradise’. And I was fascinated by all those failed Australian explorers, setting off into the vast interior of this island continent in search of their projected desires (in particular imaginary inland seas), losing their way, and ‘dying of landscape’: they are part of the constitutive mythology of Australia. And then all those 19th century convict escapees from Sydney, heading west through the Blue Mountains towards the Red Centre, a line of flight to freedom, or so they thought: it was said that China lay on the other side of these mountains …

Then in early 1999, shortly after arriving back in England, at a time of major transitional uncertainty in my life personally, professionally and culturally - around that time I first read Tim’s book Certain Fragments, started to see some of the Forced Entertaiment shows, started to meet and talk around these events, then took part in a couple of workshops, and got to know a little bit more of these people and their work. And that’s pretty much it.

So my contact with Forced Entertainment over these 20 years has been sketchy, inconsistent, fragmented, at a distance, far more imagined than actual, but no less formative or real to me for all that. It feels as though I’ve been in some long-distance conversation with them across time and space for quite a while. And certain aspects of what they may have done and do indeed seem to do have marked my thinking, writing, teaching, making, playing, and dreaming in fundamental ways. It feels as though their fingerprints are all over my imagination - which is a slightly scarey thought: you don’t really where those digits have been, do you? … And so, as a stand-in for an absent ‘expert’, all I can hope to do is continue that conversation, and rehearse some sense of how these fingerprints have changed my perspectives – how they’ve shifted the angles and shapes of my perception, attention and energies to some degree: try to describe some of the patterns they form for me, how they feel, what they do, what they ask, what they enable. Not all of my stories will be true, but perhaps some of them will be good. A good story and a true story are not at all the same thing. And that suits my purposes here just fine ...
_________________________________________________________________

An enquiry into the word 'we' (1)

Imagine. A naked man in a monkey mask, with white feather angel wings on his back, is squatting up a tree. A woman stands below, trying to persuade him to come down.

She offers him glass beads
She offers him PJ Harvey
She offers him an intimate secret
She offers him a banana
She offers him a list of other more modest trees, bushes and shrubs
She offers him a small act of kindness
She offers him a barely veiled threat
She offers him a list of things that go up and must come down
She offers him a magic trick
She offers him a hat
She offers him a home
She offers him a real good time
She offers him the vegetable of the day
She offers him words of wisdom
She offers him a single entendre
She offers him a small companion animal
She offers him the involuntary sounds of her body
She offers him an incomplete collection of back issues of Vogue
She offers him a variety of weather conditions
She offers him an obscene vetriloquism act
She offers him an impression of Bjork
She offers him a seismograph of her heart
She offers him flying lessons
She offers him descriptions of imaginary places
She offers him Pina Bausch
She offers him a crime that is bound to work
She offers him Archie Gemmill’s goal against Holland
She offers him a right old mess and a good kicking
She offers him a glimpse of the place where the nothing shows through
She offers him Edith Piaf
She offers him the big long breakfast thing
She offers him a medley of chimp calls and bird songs
She offers him her hand against the glass of a window
_________________________________________________________________

Liars and thieves

Dear Claire

Someone once sent me a rather poor photocopy of a photo of you - in Hidden J, I think, it was a show I never saw. In the photo - and you’ll know the one I mean - you’re wearing a black dress and a cardboard sign tied with string around your neck, with the word LIAR written in capital letters. You look vulnerable and isolated adorned by this material textual object, 'othered' as if the sign has been coercively imposed. In some photos of you in this show, a slightly blurred Richard Lowdon is lurking in the background, his eyes directed towards your back, and his presence seems to confirm this coercion. Yet the nomination LIAR remains ambiguous, and any stable reading skids. You do seem to be located as A liar, if not THE singular liar. At the same time the word and your gaze also point outwards to any readers of the sign, and the term can attach itself to anyone who witnesses – perhaps to be freely accepted and shared in complicity: aren’t we all liars anyway? – or it can be received as accusation. Who? Me? Nah.

The photograph came to me at a time when petty criminals were being publicly shamed in some states in Australia. A boy who had been caught shoplifting in a glossy new mall in Canberra was punished in the children’s court by being obliged to stand every Saturday outside the ‘scene-of-the-crime’ in the shopping centre wearing a T-shirt with the word THIEF printed on it. Within days of his sentencing, this civic stigmatisation had been co-opted and dispersed as thousands of identical T-shirts were printed, distributed and worn around the shopping malls of Canberra.

Whenever I’ve seen this image of you, Claire, and it’s often been reproduced, I’ve wanted to undo this solitude, and have tried to imagine (it’s not so hard) a proliferation of liars on street corners and in courts of law, in shopping centres and front gardens, in railway stations and pubs and theatres and art colleges and online. A community of liars, with no way of ever knowing if any of us were telling the truth.

Love to you, D
_________________________________________________________________

An enquiry into the word 'we' (2)

'”We” is a performance art. But how does one learn what to do together? How to be, once again, bodies in public, together, guardians of each other’s shame, looking the part? Where do the steps come from? […] But once we know the rules of the game, we can think about our performance, we don’t have to worry about the game. We take some things for granted so that we can take other things for something else' (Adam Phillips)
_________________________________________________________________

Walkthroughs (1): rude cement fart o nite

What happens if you bring a group of people into a city they don’t know, let them loose on its streets, encourage them to fall off the map and get lost? What are the stories and lies they might tell? What might they find? What possible worlds might they imagine? What desire paths might they create? What invisible cities are interwoven with this one? What other places can migrate here? For the city is multiple, mutable, layered, and always in the process of being ‘made up’...

In April 2000, Forced Entertainment invited 13 people to participate in a workshop, led by Robin Arthur and Claire Marshall. Dancers, video makers, performance makers of different kinds, the odd teacher. Only one of them was familiar with Sheffield. Over a ten-day period, this ad hoc group was introduced to some of the recurrent propositions and strategies of Forced Entertainment’s working processes, with a view to generating a site-specific durational performance as the culmination to the workshop: Saturday Night at the Grosvenor Hotel. I was one of the 13.

We did a lot of walking in and around the city, maps in hand. We interviewed each other about what we had seen, the traces of places we carry within us, places in our memories and dreams. We described to each other the places we believed they were thinking about, and the people and objects that ghosted those places. We collected objects, textual fragments and vast quantities of photographic traces; we used them to invent stories and tell bare-faced lies.

My notebook of that time is full of odd lists: The list as conjunction without causality, elliptical cartographies and historiographies, overflowing through accumulation, always in excess, and always incomplete, partial. Too much and too little. In particular here, there are lists of fragments of gags, trigger words or punchlines - trifle deaf / wide-mouthed frog / boomerang that doesn’t come back / what’s grey and comes in pints / Al Caprawn / why couldn’t the sea urchin see 'er chin / 2 freemasons having a bath / William Hague walks into a bar / brass belly button / my girlfriend’s writing a novel in her sleep / why couldn’t the viper viper nose / Carrie was always a troubled child / Doctor Doctor I’ve got a pastie on my head. Also, street names I lifted from the maps of Sheffield: Blonk Street, Blast Lane, Blue Boy Way, Carsick View Road, Carsick Grove, Jaunty Lane, Nodder Road. And lists of mystics, criminals and dictators I thought about claiming to have encountered in the streets of the city: Gurdjieff, Krishnamurti, Pol Pot, Sri Baba, Myra Hindley, Mme Blavatsky, St John of the Cross, the Emperor Bokassa, Squeaky Frome, Reggie Kray. In the end I claimed to have met Charles Manson in a baker’s shop, and Jesus on the ring road, asking for directions to the Sheffield suburb of Paradise.

Collectively we drew maps of the city and marked on them the sites of events, memories, hallucinations, desires, possible dis-placed places: the Agamemnon Sporting Club and Drop-In Centre, the Clytemnestra Massage Parlour, the Mark E Smith Ward for the Criminally Insane, the River of Blood, Nirvana Avenue, Berchtesgarden Villas, The Odessa Steps, The Hanging Gardens, The Winter Palace, The Silk Route, Attention Deficit Disorder Drive etc.

Our base and performance space was the Grosvenor Suite, a vast tacky ballroom in the Grosvenor Hotel in the centre of Sheffield. On the wall by the entrance to this space was one of those grooved boards with white felt lettering, spelling out who’d booked the room: FORCED ENTERTAINMENT. Every day we rearranged these letters to make obscene or nonsensical anagrams – for reasons that remain murky, the only one I remember is: RUDE CEMENT FART O NITE. Every morning when we returned to the space, the letters had been put back in the right order by some invisible nocturnal hand.

We tried on a lot of old Forced Entertainment costumes, the sloughed skin of ghosts. We told jokes in many languages, until generic formats started to collapse and migrate into other jokes, producing rambling broken narratives in search of a laugh forever deferred. We shuffled objects and furniture and lights in our space until we found a configuration that contained a kind of tawdry tension.

‘Acting’s allowed as long as you can’t see it’, Rob said.

Out of the debris of material produced, we elaborated a structure for a 6-hour durational performance. A tiny stage at one end of the cavernous ballroom, all silver and blue tinsel tat and bright lights; in the middle, a huge dance floor scattered with empty chairs, its outline ringed with fairy lights; then the spectators at the other end of the space, perhaps 30 metres from the performers, in an area of chairs and long white tables, with video monitors relaying extreme full-face close-ups of events on stage.

The event looped around a recurrent 3-part structure: (1) a fractured stand-up routine at a microphone onstage, with absent punchlines, possessed ramblings, lonely visions, driftings and stumblings and failings through sorry gags that had themselves fallen off the map into a kind of disoriented yearning - appeals to be heard, to be loved, to take (a) place; (2) an interrogation/interview from a shadowy figure at a table on the dance floor about ‘the city’ - now a composite palimpsest of desire, imagination, possibility, unabashed lie and the actual here now - it’s only a short walk from Campo Street past Netto’s the supermarket to the collapsed church next to the lake with the immersed statues, only a short drive from Cafe Uno in Ecclesall Street to the crossing point in the wall and the desert beyond; and finally (3) improvised dance marathon routines in teams - like the gags, broken pleas, temporary alliances unravelling into further dispersals, mis-matchings, attenuated mechanisms for losing the way, then briefly finding it, then losing it again. Stand-up and dance marathon sections were conducted at 16 rpm, the gramophone giving us Mrs Mills on Valium. The interview was conducted in silence.

‘Give yourself enough rope to hang yourself’, Rob told us.
_________________________________________________________________

An interruption about knowing: Gregg's story

My friend Gregg Whelan of Lone Twin told me about going to see Pina Bausch at Sadler’s Wells a few years ago. He’d never seen a Bausch show, and he’d never been to Sadler’s Wells; in fact he confessed he’d never been to what he called ‘a proper posh theatre’. Anyway, he was having a drink in the bar beforehand, checking out the surroundings and the punters, dressed up to the nines. Suddenly his attention was caught by an unusually loud laugh, and everyone turned round … to see Simon Callow wading through the crowd in a dinner jacket, holding a glass of champagne aloft in front of him, with a rather beautiful young man following him in his wake. There’s Simon Callow, everyone said. Gregg was surprised at how round and glowing Simon was. Then everyone started to move into the auditorium, and eventually settled into their seats. Everyone was in, and there was a low and expectant hubbub. Then at the last gasp there was a mini-kerfuffle behind him and everyone turned round … and Simon Callow came in at high speed down the aisle, still carrying champagne glass, still with young man in tow, then proceeded to squeeze along a row past dozens of seated punters with a series of excuse me’s and beaming smiles and muffled laughs. It’s Simon Callow, everyone said. Then just as Simon & friend sat down bang in the middle, the lights started to fade to black. Gregg started to applaud. He thought it was brilliant. So this was the world of Pina Bausch ...
_________________________________________________________________

An enquiry into the word 'we' (3)

Imagine. A naked woman in a monkey mask, with white feather angel wings on her back, is squatting up a tree. A man stands below, trying to persuade her to come down.

He offers her gleaming things from the other side
He offers her an Elvis move
He offers her a comic fruit
He offers her his inner clown, called Peanut
He offers her a pint and a takeaway
He offers her spurious origins for his scars
He offers her a peacock cry
He offers her Thom Yorke dancing
He offers her a view from space
He offers her the dream about the horse in the shopping mall
He offers her a new identity and no questions asked
He offers her a shoulder, and a neck, and some arms
He offers her a soft landing
He offers her a fish with eyes like wells
He offers to disappoint when the chips are down
He offers her a melancholy shuffle and a stifled burp
He offers her a swift rub-down with an oily rag
He offers her a ride on a pantomime horse
He offers her a variety of silences
He offers her a map of the world, scratched on the ground with his toe
He offers her an orchard and a lake and a lame excuse
He offers her a crime that is just bound to work
He offers her a volcano
_________________________________________________________________

Walkthroughs (2): ‘And in that failing is your heartbeat’

In retrospect, the legacy of this workshop (and of other encounters with the company’s work) takes shape for me in five core sites that linger on in my thinking and practice:

First, something about a compositional process. It’s a topological process, where topology is (in Michel Serres’s words) a ‘science of proximities and ongoing or interrupted transformations’. Here is Serres talking about his own multi-modal journey towards an unstable ‘map’: ‘When you are working on relationships that are in process, you’re like a man who takes a plane from Toulouse to Madrid, travels by car from Geneva to Lausanne, goes on foot from Paris towards the Chevreuse valley, or from Cervina to the top of the Matterhorn (with spikes on his shoes, a rope and an ice axe), who goes by boat from Le Havre to New York, who swims from Calais to Dover, who travels by rocket towards the moon, travels by semaphore, telephone or fax, by diaries from childhood to old age, by monuments from antiquity to the present, by lightning bolts when in love. One may well ask: ‘What in the world is this man doing?’ There are dilemmas in the mode of travelling, the reasons for the trip, the point of departure and the destination, in the places through which one will pass: the speed, the means, the vehicle, the obstacles to be overcome, make that space active. And since I have used diverse methods, the coherence of my project is suspect. […] In fact, it was always a matter of establishing a relation, constructing it, fine-tuning it. And once established, thousands of relations, here, there, everywhere – after a while, when you step back and look, a picture emerges. Or at least a map. You see a general theory of relations, without any point focalising the construction or solidifying it, like a pyramid. The turbulences keep moving. The flows keep dancing’ (111-12).

In this context in Sheffield, composition involved the generation of masses of fragments (which Blanchot calls ‘the little by little suddenly’) through drifting as a means of uncovering versions of what’s there. This requires patience, an attentiveness to detail, to multiplicities and connectivities. Knowingly not knowing what it is ‘about’ at the outset. Tracking something emergent, trying to go for the ride, knowing it will always be a few necks ahead of the rider. I’m sure this must have been something like the process of WG Sebald, whose works dance around unnamed polycentric subjects that are only ever implied.

Second, something about the relations between space, place and identity. ‘What the map cuts up, the story cuts across’, wrote Michel de Certeau. Location and identity are produced as much through narration as through what already exists: more to do with doing than knowing. This kind of work provides opportunities to rehearse and play-fully refashion those heterogeneous personal mappings that we are continuously making up and over, and out of which we constitute our-‘selves’. So, a kind of fluid performative ‘auto-topography’ that creates senses of self and of space and place (rather than the ‘self’ or the ‘world’ occurring preformed, as if they were pre-existent entities rubbing up against each other). Space, time, self as ‘a multiple foldable diversity’ (Michel Serres), a field of flows and intensities: spacing, timing, selfing. Here a dynamically spatialised (and fictionalised) self-in-process perhaps frays just a little the dualist territorial imaginaries of inside and outside, of self-identity in opposition to radical alterity. A philosophy and practice of passage, rather than of ground or territory. If the continuity of identity is secured through movement and the capacity to change, rather than the ability to cling to what is already established, then this work proposed simple strategies for abandoning the logics of mastery and letting elements of outside in-here.

Third, something about politics and the political. The FE work struck me as overtly political - in the micro-politics of its collaborative processes, the complex authorship in the elaboration of its forms and languages; in its critical engagement with the task of ‘bearing witness to the dreams and failings of a culture’ (Tim’s words in Certain Fragments); in its ambiguously contestatory relations to a range of conventions and expectations in theatre; in its obsessions with the urban; in the ethical complexity of the situations it creates for its spectators and the agency it grants them as makers of meaning in the proliferative play of signification. In a notebook I once wrote, ‘Forced Entertainment are the bastard children of Brecht and a drunken panto horse. Poor old horse’.

Fourth, something about dramaturgy. In his book The Postmodern Animal, Steve Baker writes about contemporary art practices involving animals or animal representations, where ‘things appear to have gone wrong with the animal, as it were, but where it still holds together’. He discusses strategies of imitation where the disguises are tawdry, compromised, incongruous conjunctions, coming apart at the seams, active reminders of difference, and perhaps of a certain shame. With reference to Deleuze & Guattari’s word ‘rater’ (to spoil, ruin), he coins the term ‘botched taxidermy’ for such practices, giving examples under thematic headings which sound like a taxonomy of Forced Entertainment strategies: ‘Mixed materials … ‘Stuffed’ animals not as taxidermy but as toys … Other uses of ‘wrong’ materials … Hybrid forms … Messy confrontations … Taxidermic form reworked … Finally, tattiness …’. I think of Roland Barthes on the body, and how to write it: ‘Neither the skin, nor the muscles, not the bones, not the nerves, but the rest: an awkward, fibrous, shaggy, ravelled thing, a clown’s coat’.

As Baker points out, ‘botching’ (and the related term ‘bodging’) don’t necessarily always mean utter ruination or abject failure, the wrecking of something. ‘It can also mean sticking or cobbling something together in a makeshift way, an ‘ill-finished’ or clumsy or unskilful way, with no attempt at perfection but equally with no implication of the thing completely falling apart’. So it’s related to assemblage and bricolage, and the knowingly open display of ‘faulty’ technique: a creative procedure in the generation of the provisional, the informal, the recycled – instances of the inexpert that are ‘questioning entities’ (to borrow a phrase from Jacques Derrida).

Now, I’m not just referring to all those shonky animal disguises and uncertain animal/human hybrids in Forced Entertainment shows: Cathy in the dog costume in Showtime, the panto horse that gulped whisky through an eye socket and cans of lager through the join between the two halves of the costume, and danced in its own lagery piss in Pleasure, the recurrent gorilla suit with or without head, and so on. I’m also thinking of the structures and tonalities that seem to characterise so many of these shows: messing with received and overly-familiar and overlooked representational forms, displacing them, defamiliarising them, turning them inside out and on their heads, messing with their anatomies, abusing them, taking them apart, stitching them up (in both senses) and reanimating them as comic or pathetic or psychotic or narcoleptic or drunk or incompetent or conspiratorial or inventive revenants in a different context here-now. Everything staggers on the lip of falling apart, yet it somehow still holds together. It was this tension that was happening to Phil when he burst into my house years ago, and he couldn’t resolve it. It’s a core ambiguity and complexity in this work, which one might call a fucked-up-and-yetness. This ‘and-yetness’ (which is political in its invitation to possibility and connectivity) takes many forms compositionally and affectively, from the melancholic, the poignant and the corrosively comic to the most astonishing micro-events of a flaring into appearance.

Which brings me, finally, to something about the 'event'. What is the nature of the event, and of ‘eventhood’? Natalie Crohn Schmidt has reflected on notions of event in the discourses of 20th century science and their further exploration in post-Cagean aesthetics: ‘In science it has come to be understood that the event is the basic unit of all things real – that energy, not matter, is the basic dictum. In the increasingly widespread perception of reality as endless process, performance, not the art object, becomes primary […] performance is an event rather than an object’. The notion of ‘event’ is much discussed in contemporary philosophy, notably in the work of Emmanuel Levinas (‘the event of alterity’), Jean-Luc Nancy (the notion of passibilité), Gilles Deleuze (the concept as event), Alain Badiou (ethics and event), and Jean-François Lyotard (the event as ‘non-mastery of self over self’). Lyotard writes of the event’s capacity to exceed and undo the cognitive reach of the self: ‘Because it is absolute, the presenting present cannot be grasped; it is not yet or no longer present. It is always too soon or too late to grasp presentation itself and present it. Such is the specific and paradoxical constitution of the event. That something happens, the occurrence, means that the mind is disappropriated. The expression ‘it happens that…’ is the formula of non-mastery of self over self. The event makes the self incapable of taking possession and control of what it is. It testifies that the self is essentially passible to a recurrent alterity’ (Lyotard, The Inhuman, 1991, 59).

In the early 1980s the performance theorist Herbert Blau asked how one might ‘effect the liberation of the performer as an actor who, laminated with appearance, struggles to appear’? (Blau 1982, 257). The struggle is all, ‘at the dubious end of ideology, at the possible end of history, when our lives are still dominated (incredibly) by the prospect of an actual disappearance. All theatre comes against the inevitability of disappearance from the struggle to appear. The only theatre worth seeing – that can be seen rather than stared through – is that which struggles to appear. The rest is all bad make-up’ (ibid, 298).

So what happens at those moments of a flaring into visibility through appearance, of an ephemeral visitation in the active vanishing of performance? like that of a ghost (une apparition) erupting through the walls of appearance to take (its) place? At the intersection of visible appearance and invisible happening, dream and event, the ‘doing’ and ‘the thing done’ (Elin Diamond), what then appears, and to whom? How might one make space for something akin to Lyotard’s theatre of energetics, in which what appears is ‘the highest intensity […] of what there is, without intention’? (‘The Tooth, the Palm’, 1997). I don’t have the answers, and ‘the turbulences keep moving, the flows keep dancing’ - but it seems Forced Entertainment (and others) return again and again to related questions: in particular, in terms of a desire to create situations in which we are encouraged to watch the people in front of us, at risk, ‘not representing something but going through something’. ‘Staying inside difficulty’. At such moments, as Tim suggests, ‘They lay their bodies on the line … and we are transformed – not audience to a spectacle, but witnesses to an event’ (Certain Fragments, 49).

The last word goes to Tim Etchells in a text called ‘We seek the unsought misfortune’ (2004), which itself forms part of Matthew Goulish’s text ‘Peculiar Detonation: The Incomplete History and Impermanent Manifesto of the Institute of Failure’:

'I am in love with you. I want you to see me. I want you to see me without filters, without frames, borders, deceits. I want us to meet in this time. In this moment to abandon expectations. Defences. Limits. To breathe. And I want you to be wary. To be aware that your gaze judges and prescribes me. And that my gaze is also judgemental. That I do not love or trust you. How could I? I do not know who you are ...
Presence. The moment. The now.
Thrown back on your own devices. I will not help you with this. You have to ‘deal’. Which means cope with un-meaning. Or with the possibility of un-meaning. Or cope with me not coping. Or with me not meaning. The trembling of this moment ...
To put it very simply: You get up here (you come up here) and you fail. And in that failing is your heartbeat, and in that failing is you connected to everything and everyone'.
_________________________________________________________________

An enquiry into the word 'we' (4): 'Good evening, Sheffield - Is there anyone there?'

Q. David, you’re on the tallest building in the city: what do you see?

A: I see a stadium with its lights on. I see a deserted soccer pitch on top of a hill. I see the disused steel works and a huge mound of tyres. I see a canal system like arteries running through the city. I see the ring road. I see a motorway bridge across a gorge. I see roof gardens. I see a block of flats in the shape of a honeycomb. I see a field of ashes. I see an eagle perched on a rock on top of the multi-storey carpark, staring. I see two men in blue boiler suits walking along the river’s edge. I see the peaks in the distance. I see the sky. I see seven hills. I see seven dwarves outside Debenham’s waiting for it to open. I see seven samurai directing traffic. I see seven seasons in one day. I see seven people dying from smoking related illnesses. I see trousers with seven creases. I see seven fingers on one hand. I see seven steps to Heaven. I see seven seas. I see seven tombstones with the word YID scrawled on them. I see myself at the age of seven.

Q. You mention Debenham’s. You’re driving past Debenham’s in a speeding car, heading for the desert. What do you see?

A. I see pedestrians scattering, it’s a pedestrian precinct. I see Isabella Rossellini coming out of the HMV shop with a DVD - looks like the first series of ‘Twin Peaks’. I see the lady of the bridge. I see a statue of an angel with one wing missing. I see a man eating a kebab. I see a black dog chasing a white plastic bag. I see the engineering works on Matilda Street. I see the scene of the crime.

Q. Do you know what’s the best place to be when the rains come?

A. On top of the tower in the old radio station, it’s a stopping point for the small fleet of craft that takes to the water as it rises. When the rains come, whole suburbs disappear; and when they recede whole communities are revealed, they return to life, churchbells ringing. Ghost cities perfectly preserved. And the desert is carpeted with flowers.

Q. Do you know the big wall? What’s on the other side?

A. I’ve only been there once, and that was a couple of weeks ago. There’s a memorial to all those people who died. It was the anniversary. Flowers, scarves, messages. I went with my spray can ... to leave some thoughts. There was no one else there apart from a woman, who said to me, ‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ … And beyond that, well, there’s “a wreck of a place. There are three gates standing ajar and a fence that broke off. It is not the wreck of anything else in particular. A place came there and crashed. After that it remained the wreck of a place. Light fell on it”.

And now I have some questions for you: - Is there anyone there who has ever been penetrated by a traffic cop? Is there anyone there who has ever defended a dog in a court of law? Is there anyone there who has ever danced with a life-sized cut-out of Adrian Heathfield? Is there anyone there who has ever tried to murder someone by sneaking up on them with two Bic lighters, then held one to each nostril and released the gas? Is there anyone there who has ever been trapped in a lift with an entire rugby league team? Is there anyone there who has ever felt love for a whippet? Is there anyone there with their own teeth? Is there anyone there who feels pain? Is there anyone there with a heart? Is there anyone there?

Is there anyone there?


References
Baker, Steve (2000). The Postmodern Animal, London: Reaktion Books
Blanchot, Maurice (1995). The Writing of the Disaster (trans. Ann Smock), Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press
Blau, Herbert (1982). Take up the Bodies: Theatre at the Vanishing Point, Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press
Etchells, Tim (1999). Certain fragments: contemporary performance and Forced Entertainment, London & New York: Routledge
Etchells, Tim (2004) ‘We seek the unsought misfortune’, in Helmer & Malzacher 2004: 264-5
Helmer, J. & Malzacher, F. (eds) (2004). Not Even a Game Anymore: The Theatre of Forced Entertainment, Berlin: Alexander Verlag
Lyotard, Jean-François (1991). The Inhuman: Reflections on Time (trans. Geoffrey Bennington & Rachel Bowlby), Cambridge: Polity Press
Lyotard, Jean François (1997). ‘The Tooth, the Palm’ [1977], in Timothy Mottram (ed.), Mimesis, Masochism, and Mime: The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary Thought, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 282-8
Serres, Michel & Latour, Bruno (1995). Conversations on Science, Culture and Time (trans. Roxanne Lapidus), Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press


Edited version of ‘Welcome to Paradise (you’d have loved it)’, opening keynote address at symposium to mark the 20th anniversary of Forced Entertainment (’We are searching for a theatre that can really talk about what it’s like to live through these times’: A Forced Entertainment Symposium’, Lancaster University, 2004. All presentations recorded & held by the National Sound Archive, London). Photograph of Claire Marshall in Hidden J © Hugo Glendinning/FE. Texts © David Williams. My thanks to Hannah for her help with this material. For Chris Kohn's RealTime review of the Lancaster symposium, see here.

smell the rat

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

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

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

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

© David Williams