Australia

When words and phrases formulate themselves in my mind, I occasionally sense I’ve been visited by divine inspiration. Language is outside me and floods itself into my consciousness. I am the docile audience for life’s forces. I watch paragraphs take shape. Other times, though, I am a world-maker: sentences are sutured together deep inside me and I firmly, aggressively, choreograph their dance.

‘Imagination is a theatre of sorts,’ writes Alison Croggon. Her reflections offer us a thinking-through of thought-making, thought-creation; a play between memory and invention, how feeling shapes itself into words. For some artists, imagination is visual: ‘thought is so much closer to image than to language,’ reflects ‘Vita’ in Ceridwen Dovey’s novel In the Garden of the Fugitives. Not so for Croggon. Croggon’s internal theatre is ‘a place of rhythm and touch,’ it ‘bears the imprints’ of every conversation, every experience, she has had. She offers us a meditation on consciousness, how a mind makes itself apparent to itself.

But the spaces Croggon describes are not always solitary. She imagines a peopled one too, a meeting of multiple minds, multiple theatres of imagination, ‘inarticulable galaxies.’ She writes: ‘we become ourselves by becoming other, strange and familiar at once.’ There are images and sounds in this theatre, and sometimes there are words too, but not always. For Croggon, she finds herself extending out towards others, a never-quite-reaching, residing in places of the perpetually-unknowable, ‘beautiful reminders of all the worlds that are not me.’

disclaimer:

we never felt as though we belonged to the world of theatre. preferring to couch our practice in participatory performance and public intervention. the artform lineage we fell in love with 20 years ago slipped somewhere between political activism, live art, and experimental practice. we always saw it as a stunningly audacious creative home with no walls and the freedom to take risks and we liked it that way. it allowed us to situate ourselves outside on the streets, gave us license to misbehave with form and content and, most importantly, it led us to think about the deeper potential of audience as our creative comrades, not as spectators but activators; like sleeper cells waiting for a phone call as their trigger to sneak outside and turn the world upside down.^[1]

play, as in games, is our weapon of choice. we use games to encourage participation and as a thin veil to get away with some collective sly mischief. in the guardian online article ‘20 predictions for the next 25 years’^[2] jane mcgonigal imagines a future where games serve a social purpose beyond entertainment, enabling problem solving through cooperative play. could playing a non-competitive board game offer a framework towards implementing a universal basic income? could playing an escape room scenario offer a solution for the geo-politics of climate change? could immersing yourself in a vr minecraft experience help explore the ethics around in-vitro meat and synthetic foods? games as a tactical tool for critical enquiry into real world issues excites us a great deal. as we project our imaginations into this future we see the possibilities of new technologies undermining old forms of cultural, political power and a seismic shift of belief in the value of creativity to tackle major systemic problems. we see a new politic of collaboration based on the collision of skill sets from across industries and sectors. we see bold acts of civic improvement through civil disobedience with citizens directly affecting the change they want to see. we see ourselves on the front line with them.

‘a game for world leaders to play’ is an impossible work we would dearly love to make. perhaps not right now but at some point in the next 25 years. getting it out of our heads conceptually has been a lot of fun. we hold onto this imagined work with an equal degree of fear and excitement, the best combination of feelings when trying to make new work.

^[1] pvi collective are anti capitalists and don’t use capital letters

^[2] 20 predictions for the next 25 years, no. 10, gaming: ‘we’ll play games to solve problems’ – jane mcgonigal, the guardian, 11 january 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2011/jan/02/25-predictions-25-years.

In Sickness and in Health.

I think theatre is sick.

Or is it our leaders who are sick?

Like you, I never felt that I belonged in the theatre, but then nor was I for the street. I have always been a little bit afraid of theatre, or bored by it, but I think I am more afraid of the street.

A tendency to shyness and/or the history Modernity has bequeathed me a fear of being found loitering – a woman in the street is a figure of ambiguity. Call me old fashioned, but I don’t want anyone asking me what I am doing here, all alone.

Is that why I cannot belong in theatre? Why I have to burrow into my books?

But after reading pvi I am not quite done with live art. Really alive art. I am thinking that there could be a theatre of the inner body – not some kind of fake simulation, but an investigatory theatre of the lungs, the bones, the bowel, the heart.

This is not a new move of course. There have been journeys into the body in theatre and performance. Artists have swallowed tiny cameras; an eye on the end of a tube has gone in search of illuminated polyps projected onto gallery walls. There have been surgical events in the gallery – incisions, facelifts, implants. Much has been made of tissue cells and sutures, of magnifying glass.

But I lack confidence in this body as theatre. I have little faith, but a smidgeon of hope – for example, I will never stop hoping that I might see my father again, although he is dead 10 years this September.

Is that too much to hope? After all, theatre likes to deal in fake characters, idée passé. Maybe theatre can bring my dad back, clad him up in his thick grey suit, tie his tie and lace his shoes and prick him and poke him … and, well, push him out on stage, where he will have to watch where he steps because he has a bad leg because of a hemiplegia from a botched operation on his brain a very long time ago. (I remember the uneven seam arcing across his cauterized skull, like a fault in the ground. The soft left side of his face sliding downwards, like a collapsed cliff.)

I am not quite sure how theatre will bring back my mother. How will she enter? A shift in genre? Stage left on a palanquin with her four children upholding her? Or will she totter in on heels, already tipsy, diaphanous, her curls stiff with Schwarzkopf spray?

I like the idea of a palanquin. There are some people – families, for example – who need to hide things. I am all for a theatre of the interior, for a theatre of stealth and thievery.

I do like your games, pvi, and I believe The Hague is almost ready for such a proposition. But first we must determine the health of these World Leaders of ours.

I have outlined my suggestions for interior investigation below.

But they worry me, these games of ours. In what modality will we play them? Are we allowed to laugh? Is this serious play: I dare you to touch the electric fence.[1]

MRI: A game for world leaders to play

The intention is exploratory. What will we find? And in the world of medical over-servicing, there is every chance we will find something.

1. Take off all your clothes and put on the pale blue gown (arms first/tie at the back).
2. Put on the headphones and lie on the table. You must remain very still, as the machine is extremely sensitive to disturbance.
3. Don’t worry about those heavy lead weights on your lower limbs; they will hold you still in case you want to get up and leave.
4. Don’t leave.
5. And don’t look around. I can assure you everyone is represented, and they are all hearing the same thing, more or less.
6. I have to say, some of you look very small and old without your clothes. The body is so much more insubstantial and yet more real in the flesh. How can that be?
7. The women – there are a few – are the most at home in their gowns.
8. Keep still, please. We are now going to raise the bed on which you are lying and press a button to move the platform into the magnetic resonance imaging machine. The strange pulsing noise you hear inside the tunnel is not the sound of some alien invading force bent on world domination – fingers off the button, now! – but the sound of hydrogen atoms emitting a radio signal which is measured by a receiving coil. I assure you, everyone is hearing the same thing.
9. We are looking for dis-ease, for something malevolent, terminal, something that will cause you to falter, something that will render you unfit for the job ahead.
10. Chances are we will find it.
11. Here we go.
12. Some of you are shaking. One or two are crying. Why are you so worried? You are all in this together. You could have talked to each other in the change room; you could have exchanged nervous pleasantries, put each other at ease, agitated for a collective protest to such invasive procedure, refused to undress. But you chose not to.
13. And now look where you are: all alone in the scanner.
14. And it’s not looking good.

[1] Eisen, G., 1990. Children and play in the Holocaust: Games among the shadows. Univ of Massachusetts Press.

Notes from the floor

(Transcribed from the sound designer’s notebooks, final rehearsal, date not marked)

So, we’re on the floor for this new show. Not new because it hasn’t been done. A new type of show. The start time is translated for the 37 global time zones, but we can’t actually run the show – we’ll just slip side-ways from where we are (meetings, email, home, commuting, reading, talking, making) to where we’ll be to start be-ing. And there’s a huge spatial sound design.

In a satellite lecture for ACMI, Peter Weibel was asked ‘What is the future of cinema?’ He starts, “When images are transmitted directly into the brain … oh, but that would be sound.”

So, we’re running a 48 channel system through the space and the audience sit on a mesh floor above eight of the loud-speakers. The others sit on three levels around and above the audience, concealed inside the shadow lines. We can produce vistas, point sources, and project sound images into the minds of the audience. It goes black and I track David’s footsteps over the stage. Glad we changed his shoes to leather so we can hear his path, and the cue; his final steps crunch into a recessed tray of sharp pebbles layered over a resonant box. The 12 miniature blue-tooth microphones in the tray shoot off every footfall or shuffle into granular lines we process and spatialise in the theatre.

The mics across his body amplify every breath, rustle, or shift in position. The audience can barely see him, but his body extends to their ears. It’s intensely intimate with no space between us – just a shared sound-filled presence.

On-line a binaural mix from the theatre – the pebbles, the body mics, his voice, the spatialisation – is projected in a stream for headphones and a multi-channel mix for spatial sound systems in theatres, arts spaces, and museum spaces around the globe.

Since 2018 we’ve worked as a sonic-spatial ensemble: 2 source navigators, 4 spatialisers, and a spatial director. We rehearse in semi-darkness enough to see the table of data-controllers and heighten our auditory imaginations to better auralise (think visualise) sonic geometries and landscapes. Each syllable of David’s voice becomes a volumetric entity. Orbiting morphemes from every word stay draped throughout the theatre.

The sonic bed lingers as sounds from the pre-show audience queue rotate in pianissimo layers through the theatre; a cough, a shuffle, a ‘hmm’, murmurs from people who were somewhere and are now here (hear?). Peripheral auditory awareness is speeding and my attention is like a still focal point. Each time dp tries a line from Sam B we snapshot the utterance and stream it to the sonic vortex building in the space. Our headphone mixer signals ‘gravity moment’; the sound makes it difficult to tell which way is up.

David keeps on with the Sam B syllables – each try, fail, try, drops another layer into the surrounds and this incessant movement drives to stillness.

WAYS TO LEAVE THE STAGE

Exit stage left 

Disappear into a cloud of smoke 

Fall back on your fallback career

RUN!

Get upstaged by something more interesting 

Fade into obscurity 

Walk off

Put a tack in your shoe so you walk differently. Siphon money from your bank account until it’s all in cash. Find a crowded city where you can rent an apartment cheap. Disappear into the crowd. Build a new employment history, starting with temp or construction jobs. Think of a new name. Start calling yourself this new name. 

Miss your cue

Exit stage right

Insult someone in power

Be pulled apart by dogs 

Be trampled by dinosaurs

Be pursued by a bear 

Flee, vanish, go AWOL, take off

Quit 

Don’t come on in the first place 

Be a mediocre performer 

Be mediocre

Blend into the background 

Get into army camouflage 

Get into the army

Withdraw

Go back in time 

Abdicate yourself of any responsibility 

Say sorry 

Atone for your sins 

Undo your wrongdoings 

Un-fuck the world

The title promises not just degradation but “appalling” degradation. Some potential spectators feel a frisson of anticipation and check their smartphone’s storage in preparation for the photographs they will take. “Pics or it didn’t happen,” as the saying goes though Instagram will likely delete these images, on the grounds that they are “violent, nude, partially nude, discriminatory, unlawful, infringing, hateful, pornographic or sexually suggestive” (Instagram 2018). Other would-be audience members recoil in anticipated horror, outraged at the implied violence and the invitation to voyeurism. Perhaps they will start a social media campaign and an online petition, demanding that the producers cancel the performance, issue an apology, and examine the internal processes that led to this work being programmed at all. Still others are somewhat dismayed that everyone is interpreting the title so literally when it is so clearly conceptual! They also note that neither the supporters nor the critics have seen the show and that as a result we find ourselves responding to the response without having had a chance to encounter the work itself. For my part, I feel bemused, even benumbed. I have seen this show before.

Perhaps one reason for my fatigue is that contemporary public life in Australia presents endless “scenes of appalling human degradation.” Over the past five years, I have witnessed 12 asylum seekers die in the country’s offshore immigration detention centres, taking the death toll of Operation Sovereign Borders to 73 and the number of border-related deaths in the 21st century to 2,015 (Doherty, Evershed, and Ball 2018; Monash 2018). I have witnessed prison officers assaulting Aboriginal children in their care: grabbing their throats; kneeing their stomachs; throwing them against walls; knocking them to the ground; hurling fruit at them; forcing them to strip naked; tear-gassing them; and in one infamous case hooding a 17-year-old boy and shackling him to a chair (ABC 2016).

Of course, public life is not solely national. So, alongside Australia’s scenes of appalling human degradation, I have witnessed Erdogan in Turkey, Orbán in Hungary, Putin in Russia, Netanyahu in Israel, Trump in the United States, and so on. The strong men are on the march. I have witnessed the bombing of Syria and the drowning of its toddlers. And I have witnessed the world’s indifference to most of it. Could the theatre be more degrading than any of this? Even if it could, why would we want it to be so? Why would we want theatre to participate in this economy of horror and humiliation? Yet having rehearsed this litany of atrocities, I realise that I am no longer numb. Instead I am tingling, as my flesh and conscience slowly come back to life, pushing through the pins and needles. What was I thinking when I started writing this gloss? Who is that woman in the first paragraph, so jaded and bored? Even when I have seen a show, I have not really seen it. And there is always more to see. I start reading.

Relief floods over me. It’s written by a woman; it features a woman. Perhaps this will not be so bad. Perhaps there will be a feminist twist. Perhaps the play will contemplate the impossibility of such a twist. I read on. The woman on stage is wearing “flat shoes” and is “very neatly dressed”. She could be me! Or perhaps not: she is sporting trousers and I hardly ever wear those. Enter a man, and then exit. Enter another man, and then exit again. Enter all the men – every male protagonist you have ever seen strut and fret his hour upon the stage – and they do not exit. Here come the balding and the bearded (hint, they are often one and the same). Here comes the patriarch and his son. Here comes the heir apparent and his bitter brother. Here comes the romantic suitor and his less handsome sidekick. Here comes the beggar and the mad king, the jester and the wise boy, the child prodigy and the enfant terrible. Here comes the young man on the make and the old man on the prowl. Here comes the charmer and the bully (hint, they are often one and the same). Here comes the working-class man newly redundant and the middle-class manager who made him so. Here comes the draft dodger and the war veteran, the jock and the nerd, the surprise success and the one who was always most likely. Here comes the crusader, the conviction politician, the conniving advisor, the bagman, the murderer, the one who had an affair, the alcoholic, the recovered addict, the geezer, the good bloke, and his best mate. Here comes the artist and the abuser (hint, they are often one and the same). Suddenly, I am in the mood for degradation. Let the appalling abuse begin.

But wait, a mistake has been made. Oh no. Oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no. Doesn’t this woman know that she can’t afford a mistake? She must work twice as hard for half the opportunities; there will be no second chances. Will the men laugh at her mistake? Inevitably. Will one of them help? Condescendingly. It’s okay. She can handle it. Look, she is talking now. Oh, she speaks French. Sigh. Of course she does. That explains why she’s described as “very elegant.” For the Anglophone woman, the French Woman^TM seems designed precisely to humiliate her, since French Women Don’t Get Fat; French Children Don’t Throw Food; French Women Don’t Get Facelifts; French Women’s Secrets to Feeling Beautiful Every Day; French Women’s Secrets for Ageing with Style and Grace; How Those Chic French Women Eat All That Rich Food and Still Stay Slim; A Woman’s Guide to Finding Her Inner French Girl; French Women Don’t Sleep Alone; What French Women Know: About Love, Sex and Other Matters of the Heart (Hyde 2014).

This current French Woman of the Theatre reminds me of another—Hélène Cixous. I recall the line:

Nous vivons devant le rideau de papier, et même souvent en tant que rideau. Mais ce qui nous importe, ce qui nous blesse, ce qui nous fait sentir que nous sommes les personnages d‘une aventure immense, c‘est ce qui se passe derrière le rideau. Et derrière le rideau il y a la scène nue. (Cixous 1987)

(We live before the paper curtain, and often as curtains. But what is important to us, what wounds us, what makes us feel we are the characters in an immense adventure, is what comes to pass behind the curtain. And behind the curtain there is the naked stage.) (Cixous 1994, 152)[1]

Please, as if French women have paper curtains! Surely, French Women Decorate in Organic Linens? In any case, the pulling of the curtain here makes me feel like a fool. Of course the scenes of degradation are going to happen offstage or, more accurately, onstage but out of view. It’s the oldest theatrical trick in the book. It predates the book. The Ancient Greeks knew that our imaginations would have those men doing things far worse than the theatre could ever stage.

Yet the spectacle of “rotat[ing] two concentric squares of chairs” suggests that theatre’s degradation may be rather more banal. Yes, it is degrading because it stages suicides, infanticides, matricides, patricides, blindings, beatings, rapes, and violations. Yes, it is degrading because it renders its artists impoverished and precarious, stranded mid-career with no savings or health insurance and few prospects. Beyond that, though, theatre degrades as a computer does: slowing down, glitching, getting caught in strange interminable loops. Its users download upgrades only to find that the software and hardware are no longer compatible. The cursor blinks, the hourglass drains, the pinwheel spins, the blue screen of death appears and becomes a black mirror. Once theatre was the original black mirror, offering dark reflections of ourselves interspersed with backlit scenes from other worlds. Now I am not so sure.

Theatre has been, depending on who you read, a mirror, a window, a hammer, a haven, a release valve, a rehearsal for the revolution to come, a redressive ritual for the wrongs that were done, and an alternative archive for precious cultural knowledge. To borrow from Cixous again:

[L]e Théâtre c‘est le lieu du Crime. Oui le lieu du Crime, le lieu de l‘horreur, aussi le lieu du Pardon. … Pourquoi aimons–nous si immédiatement, si éternellement certaines œuvres de théâtre ou d‘opéra ? Parce qu‘en nous montrant nos crimes au Théâtre, devant témoins, elles nous accusent et en même temps elles nous pardonnent. (Cixous 1987)

([T]he Theater is the place of Crime. Yes, the place of Crime, the place of horror, also the place of Forgiveness. … Why do we love so immediately, so eternally, certain works of theater or opera? Because by showing us our crimes in the Theater, before witnesses, they accuse us and at the same time they forgive us.) (Cixous 1994, 154)[2]

No wonder theatre is having a meltdown! The system cannot help but overload, crashing under the weight of hope and expectation. Theatre, you have too many tabs open! Now there is an internal fatal error and as a result kernel panic. The operating system cannot safely recover without major data loss. The result is man-beetles rearranging chairs and a woman drawing a curtain across the stage and saying:

Je suis désolée mais vous devez partir.

(I’m sorry but you need to leave.)

In this way, the fourth wall is breached but a fifth wall is erected. The strong men would be proud.

Works Cited

Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). 2016. “Dylan Voller: Timeline of Teenager’s Mistreatment in NT Youth Detention.” ABC. July 27, 2016. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-07-26/timeline-of-vollers-mistreatment-in-detention-centres/7661788

Cixous, Hélène. 1987. “Le lieu du Crime, le lieu du Pardon”, L’Indiade ou l’Inde de leurs rêves, et quelques écrits sur le théâtre. Paris: Théâtre du Soleil, 1987, pp. 253-259. Reproduced: “Le lieu du crime, le lieu du pardon,” Théâtre du Soleil, https://www.theatre-du-soleil.fr/sp/a-lire/le-lieu-du-crime-le-lieu-du-pardon-4018

Cixous, Hélène. 1994. “The Place of Crime, the Place of Forgiveness.” Translated by Catherine MacGillivray. In The Hélène Cixous Reader, edited by Susan Sellers, 149–56. London: Routledge.

Cixous, Hélène. 1995. “The Place of Crime, the Place of Forgiveness.” Translated by Eric Prenowitz. In Twentieth Century Theatre: A Sourcebook, edited by Richard Drain, 340–44. London: Routledge.

Doherty, Ben, Nick Evershed, and Andy Ball. 2018. “Deaths in Offshore Detention: The Faces of the People Who Have Died in Australia’s Care.” Guardian, June 20, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/ng-interactive/2018/jun/20/deaths-in-offshore-detention-the-faces-of-the-people-who-have-died-in-australias-care

Hyde, Marina. 2014. “French Women Don’t Get Fat – Or Live in Actual France.” Guardian, 17 January 17, 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/17/french-women-cliche-francois-hollande-stereotype-the-french

Instagram. 2018. “Terms of Use.” Last modified November 1, 2017. https://help.instagram.com/1188470931252371

Monash University. 2018. “Australian Border Deaths Database.” Last modified June 15, 2018. https://arts.monash.edu/social-sciences/border-crossing-observatory/australian-border-deaths-database/

Notes

[1] Catherine MacGillivray’s translation. Eric Prenowitz translates it as: “We live before the curtain of paper, and often even as the curtain. But what matters to us, what wounds us, what makes us feel we are the characters of an immense adventure, is what happens behind the curtain. And behind the curtain there is the naked stage” (Cixous 1995, 341).

[2] Prenowitz has it: “[T]heater is the place of Crime. Yes, the place of Crime, the place of horror, also the place of Pardon. … Why do we love certain works of theatre or opera so immediately, so eternally? Because by showing us our crimes at the Theatre, before witnesses, they accuse us and at the same time they pardon us.” (Cixous 1995, 342–43).

1. a dialogue for one

– Every word I’ve ever said has been inked by a man with a silly hat.

is not said whilst wearing a hat, but we should have seen a hat previously

2. audience

As if in a library

sh

sshh

sssshhhh

sh

sh

sh

sh

sh

sh

sh

sh

sssshhhhhhhsssshhhhhhssshhhsssshhhhhhhhhhhhh…..

sh

sh

sh

shsh

ssssssssshhhhhhhhhhhh

sh

3. interruptions for 4 players

1. What have you to say about a certain tree which is near to your village?
2. Not far from Domremy there is a tree that they call ‘The Ladies’ Tree ‘-
3. I’m sorry is this the only name for the tree?
4. No, no it’s not the only name for the/ tree
5. What are the other names for the tree?
6. If you just/  let me finish
7. Don’t be hostile

2. I’m not…. I’m just saying that… if you let/ me finish
3. Just say the name/ of the tree
4. The name /of the tree is
5. Don’t interrupt
6. I wasn’t interrupting/, I was just trying to tell you the name of the tree
7. You were interrupting. Why /are you being so rude?
8. I wasn’t/ interrupting I was trying to tell you the name of the tree
9. You were /interrupting.
10. I’m just
11. Look you’re doing it again!
12. I
13. Stop
14. I
15. Stop
16. I
17. Stop

1.What is the name of the tree?

2.The tree is sometimes called The Ladies Tree and /others call it

1. You’ve already said, you said that already
2. I know I have
3. Then why say it again?
4. I just hadn’t finished
5. Well…..go ahead
6. ……The tree is also called The
7. Sorry could you repeat that last bit
8. Point of order
9. What
10. Could you repeat the last sentence
11. The tree is also called The….
12. Thank you
13. Sorry. Please continue.
14. Yes the tree is called the Ladies Tree/  and also called
15. You’ve already said that
16. I
17. Point of order
18. What?
19. Would the minister stop interrupting the witness
20. I haven’t been interrupting/ the witness

4. Don’t argue. You have/ several times interrupted the witness and I’m asking you to stop. See it’s happening now, point in case. Minister. Minster. Minister. Minister. MinisterMinisterMinisterMinisterMinister
5. I have not been interrupting the witness I have been pursing a line of questioning, she is being hostile. All I want to know is the other name of the tree. What is the name of the tree? The tree. The tree. treetreetreetreetreetreetree

2. (very quickly) The tree is called the Ladies Tree/  and also called the
3. That was unintelligible
4. Sorry.
5. That was unintelligible please repeat that last sentence

1. Case in point
2. Point of order

Please repeat that last sentence

2. Fairy
3. I’m sorry
4. Fairy Tree 

    

    

4. something durational

Is it boring?

Who cares, at least boring is something

Boring can be interesting

Maybe boring isn’t interesting

Maybe that’s interesting

No

5. to be performed as a sexual act

the production should look expensive

the performer should be made to feel very powerful

the audience should feel turned on

You are an adonis

You look striking

You are an adonis

You are an adonis

You are an adonis

Can you see me?

How do I look?

Your. beauty. has. no. limits.

Sublime

Stay still tea gan

Your. beauty. has. no. limits.

Your beauty has no limits.

you are on the precipice of greatness

you are on the precipice of greatness

you are on the precipice of great. ness.

Art.

Your life is a work of art.

Your life is a work of art.

Your life is a work of art.

Your life is a work of art.

Raw

Meat

Do you like fine dining

So you want to enjoy your life

You would like. to . enjoy. your life.

Yes

Develop for a taste for the exotic.

Wagu

Kipling

We all want what you

5 year old grain fed tasmanian bred beast.

5 year old grain fed tasmanian bred beast.

20 year old cop de ora enge enough for the table.

Service with a smile.

Live jazz

Live jazz

Live jazz

Live jazz

Live jazz

Live jazz

Live jazz

Live jazz

Live jazz

Velour curtains

And real candelabra chandeliers

Enough for the table

Quail brain

A tailor made tuxedo

She should sing your song

You want french cologne

You want tibetian silk boxer shorts

Enough for the table

Enough for the table

Slow roasted kipler dill trim skinny dipped pasta on the side Slow roasted kipler dill trim skinny dipped pasta on the side Slow roasted kipler dill trim skinny dipped pasta on the side Slow roasted kipler dill trim skinny dipped pasta on the side

You want sea stars

Enenemies

Sting Ray

Tiger Shark

Whale

Whale

Whale

whale

Killer

Whale

You want a galaxy of fish

A bio system

A bio system

a food chain

a living living food chain in my big big

Big big aquarium

Live jazz

Live jazz

Live jazz

Live jazz

Live jazz

Live jazz

Live jazz

Live jazz

Live jazz

She’s very good

Very talented

Even the little fish are dancing

Yeah

Cabaret

Yeah

The fish the fish are singing and dancing

Slow roasted duck roasted angel hair pasta skinny pasta

It had to be you

It had to be you

I wandered around

Finally found

Somebody who

Could give me a thrill

Could pickle my dill

It had to be you

Wonderful you

Wonderful you

It had to be………..

suckling

sucked

trimmed

tort

terrific

six pack

iron

fisted

you

It had to be………..

suckling

sucked

trimmed

tort

terrific

six pack

iron

fisted

you

It had to be………..

suckling

sucked

trimmed

tort

terrific

six pack

iron

fisted

you

It had to be………..

suckling

sucked

trimmed

tort

terrific

six pack

iron

fisted

you

It had to be………..

suckling

sucked

trimmed

tort

terrific

six pack

iron

fisted

you

you. can. do. anything.

You can be that guy!

That. guy.

That. guy.

You can be that guy!

Your. beauty. has. no. limits.

You. are. an. adonis.

What’s adonis?

You have god like super natural beauty

You can part the sea with those looks

I’m not kidding

You could look at the sea and it would split in two

You should have fish

You should have gold fish

You should have an aquarium.

You can have the great barrier reef

Where do you buy that?

Reef

I want a piece

I want a thousand year old piece

Some exotic little fish

I want something that changes colour

Really little fish

I want really glory fish

I want the ones that hide in the sand

I want the ones with blow holes

I want flippers

I want gills

There you are

As long as those eyes are soft

You can have anything you want

My friend

As long as that skin is line free

You can have anything you want

Any time any where

Aquarium

Bubbles

Ten Mill Glass

Bullet Proof Glass

Wall to wall

En suite

ten Nemos

twenty Nemos

Yeah

yeah

Could I have 30 Nemos

You can have 40

You are an adonis

Get closer

You are perfect

You have a tight arse

You have great abs

You are so natural

you are so carefree

You are so so deep

Are you free tonight?

Are you free tonight?

FFFF I’ll do the thinking

FFFF I’ll do the thinking just be

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF

Do you like ormolu

It is so right now

effortless beauty

If you were FFFFFFFFucking care free

Care free cars

Do you like them?

Blue Liquid BMW

Personalised plates

Wet

Wet

Wet

Wet

Ormolu

Ormolu

Mazarati

FFFFFF

FFFF

Blue

Steele

Bon         sai

Re                              bock

Pump

F

F

F

Japan

F

F

You do

FF

You like japanese food

Hey there’s that carefree natural beautiful young man

It’s free mother fuckers

Get a fish

Get a gold fish

Get an aquarium

Sea eneminines fucking

Disrupt – Drastically alter or destroy the structure of…. In this case, theatre. By political apathy, or evolution, time, fashion, apathy, market forces. Like the well-made play of another era, traditional skills of the playwright are out of fashion, no longer needed, set aside. Disrupted. Drastically altered, perhaps even structurally destroyed. I don’t care. Playwriting and theatre-making aren’t the same thing. The playwriting isn’t important. The theatre-making is.

Burnie, on the North West coast of Tasmania was once called Emu Bay. There were actual emus when the Van Diemens Land Company first came, but the emus are extinct now, the cultures of original inhabitants of the land displaced by stern Christianity. The 20^th century was about factories, the paper mill, toxic chemical spills, layoffs, financial and social disadvantage. Now the port, the woodchip exports and former senator Jacqui Lambie, Burnie’s beloved daughter (heart-on-sleeve working class political aspirant, xenophobe, bachelorette, battler), live cheek by jowl with academics, greenies, and now ubiquitous bearded baristas, surrounded by a wild landscape of indescribable magnificence.

I am new to the neighbourhood. I’m here to design a festival for this community, and theatre will be at this festival’s heart. My gut tells me that in a place like this, theatre can still matter. Sitting together and telling stories matters. If our theatre is insipid and toothless it’s our fault, and that matters too. Responding to the insidious violence of word weaponry in the world outside is the beautiful violence of word weaponry in theatre.

Words matter. Language matters. Language and words aren’t the same thing. Language is a contested thing for the Traditional Owners of Tasmania’s North West. We will create, choose, design for our festival a theatre language with whatever it takes to connect people. Whatever it takes to welcome, to let conversation flow inside and outside the performance space, to share ideas and feelings, to share time, and breath, and human experience. The language we create for our audiences will peel back our equipoise, show our raw flesh, expose our terrible secrets, celebrate our best selves and the epic in the banal, make visible our nocturnal ramblings, stir us to irrational fury, move us to tears of joy and wound the heart.

It won’t be formal. It won’t be expensive. It won’t be grand. Our festival will be Burnie itself, a meeting place for real people and great art experiences amid local streets, beaches, industrial precincts, workplaces, suburbs and civic spaces. Our theatre languages – not one, but many – will reflect the myriad visual, physical, social, musical and storytelling lives of our place and time, in the local vernaculars.

This is personal, it’s now my neighbourhood too.

There won’t be a playwright anywhere near it. But there will be theatre, and theatre makers everywhere.

Lindy Hume is the artistic director of Ten Days on the Island 2019 and 2021

4 July 2018

Bagryana Popov’s imagined performance pushes her ongoing theatre project with Chekhov’s drama to the limits of where life and theatre converge. I loved her production of Uncle Vanya for such a convergence; I viewed the first iteration in Avoca. It was performed in a house that was as near as possible to a late nineteenth-century Russian house – a historic wooden two-storey house imported from Sweden and assembled on the banks of the Avoca river under gum trees. The production started in the front yard and, slowly over two days, we moved with the characters through the house and out into the back yard. In the breaks, environmentalists gave talks – Chekhov’s Astrov had multiplied. This was a long way from the contained theatre of a Chekhov play presented over a couple of hours and yet it was the same play. Instead, the audience was living with the characters in that house.

The idea of theatre as a lived reality has become part of our twenty-first century experience as the boundaries between reality and performance come unstuck, and theatre’s imaginative foyers are reconfigured. The widespread uncertainty – “this cannot be happening” – over actual news and its faked simulacra; the horror about politicians and others who tweet rather than think their random hateful thoughts; and inactivity as the changing climate threatens the homes of the global poor. But there is something unexpectedly reassuring about how Bagryana imagines her life as theatre, perhaps because of the surprising continuity that I have found in Bulgaria where the remnants of two 8,000 year-old-houses are preserved in Stara Zagora. A type of lived theatre that globally connects Australia to Russia and Bulgaria in the nostalgic idyll of the Krivina house of Bagryana’s childhood somehow seems vividly real.

I think of a gnome and I think of a silver gelatin photograph by Ricky Maynard called Heart Break from his 2005 series, Portrait of a distant land. The distant land is the north-east of Tasmania, but looking across the water to the mainland. A man stands in waders, looking out to the sea. His whole body fits underneath the horizon line. He’s in the water, standing in it, but his image is reflected in it too. He’s not up to his neck, he’s up to his whole entire body. I think about the ceramic gnome (peeping toms, neighborhood watch, painted eyes that follow you around the room) being pulled out of Phillip’s car, how the gnome is transplanted from nowhere in particular to someplace else.  And then I think of Ricky Maynard’s image where the man is part of the sea, in under it, of it.

Gnomes are an empty way to mark colonial space, all ceramic rim and air inside. The fictional colonial figure of the hysterical woman in nonsensical fits of speech seems like a way to avoid real genocide of colonial past. Spirit communication sounds abstract when unhinged from actual frontier violence. I think of Hanging Rock and Amy Spiers’ ongoing project to get rid of Miranda in Miranda Must Go, to remove the ‘white vanishing myth’ of Picnic at Hanging Rock and instead look at the actual losses and trauma at Hanging Rock for Aboriginal people. Picnic at Hanging Rock was a fiction written in 1967, set in 1900. Are the gnomes in on some sort of pantomime parody? I am also reminded of traditions in Tasmanian colonial houses where British convicts brought their fears and superstitions with them: shoving old boots and clothing up chimneys, or in windows and doorways, passages where spirits could travel, to stop them. Superstition can be used to scramble and avoid, making truth shimmer or disappear.

Gnomes are on repeat; they are more than twins, they are copies of copies. Phillip has hidden them with some furniture he doesn’t want and prints of his work up a staircase in a storage cupboard. He’s organized them like the Mona Lisa, eyes all facing the front, watching, waiting.

Looking at these gnomes through Phillip’s eyes, fantasy seems to have everything to do with history.

Mayu Kanamori’s imagined theatre piece challenges us to reimagine the racial politics of Australian theatre cultures. On the one hand, her play’s ideas intend to disrupt the white dominated theatre stage in Australia and give space to the bodies and stories of people of colour. On the other hand, Kanamori unsettles hard forms of ethnic identity that arise in response to persistent forms of exclusion and marginalisation. She strikes a carefully considered balance between two quite opposing positions, and in the process asks important questions about what racial representations are possible in Australian theatre.

Choosing to remove racial or ethnic markers from the script allows directors of Kanamori’s play considerable freedom in casting ethnically diverse actors. Diverse representation over several performances of the play (by ethnically and gender diverse directors) would create a polyethnic theatre experience with overlapping subjectivities and multiple reference points of identification. While the script offers a particular structure of feeling, the ethnically diverse interpretations would allow for unexpected and no doubt challenging lines of affiliation between physically and culturally different individuals and groups. While the first iteration of the play may create, in the audience, attachments to particular bodies playing particular characters, subsequent iterations would encourage audiences to delink themselves from those attachments and reorient their investments in characters and bodies. This unique performance structure has the ability to cultivate, in the audience, a truly diverse attitude towards casting and theatre performance.

Kanamori avoids creating a scenario where the voices of a particular ethnic group monopolise the representational and thematic aims of the play. By taking the focus away from the concerns of her own ethnic and diasporic heritage, she enables a multiethnic representational politics that is quite unusual for theatrical pieces that attempt to comment on race. The traditional structure is one that develops coherency around one particular ethnic identity and experience. The multiple forms of attachment and identification alluded to earlier mean that audiences do not have the safety or security of investing in one particular construction of ethnic experience.

Having said all this, by giving directors license to make their own decisions, and by keeping her own identity anonymous, Kanamori creates a situation where the interconnections between interpretations will be unplanned, spontaneous, and potentially confrontational. The lack of curatorial decision-making to connect performances is an experimental move that leaves open all sort of possibilities. Interconnections will develop on their own during the course of the performances, and audiences will be doing the work of creating lines of affiliation between interpretations.

The openness of this structure does run the risk of producing a conceptually incoherent performance with few interconnections between interpretations. This raises the question of whether theatre pieces that engage with race as a concept should direct audiences towards particular kinds of arguments. And if there are inexplicit arguments about diverse casting and performance in this imagined piece, will they be evident to audiences? I imagine that Kanamori would want to direct attention away from self-fulfilling arguments, preferring, rather, unpredictable possibilities and unforeseen ways of understanding race and ethnicity. It is the risk involved in leaving open the conceptual meanings of this play that is its creative strength. Without this risk, we cannot imagine new ways of performing racialised bodies in Australian theatre.

In my poem The Future, which I perform in my solo Dancing with Strangers (Marrugeku 2018), I write:

The future is a place where we reside

in dreams corresponding

possibilities, notes unheard

seeping out of recesses (of our mind)

In this phrase I am alluding to the fact that there was a time when we were not colonised and when we lived very different lives as Aboriginal people. Now we have an interesting relationship with ourselves, our past societies, and to contemporary Aboriginal and western societies as a whole.

These time scales are imaginary and it is through our imagination that we can think of alternative possibilities to current cycles of dysfunction and dislocation in our communities. Our generation is interacting more and more with the idea of decolonization, interpreting this word in many different ways and using it for survival. It can mean a diversity of things for distinct Aboriginal peoples. What is understood as colonised is viewed through many different lenses and judged according to that individual or community.

Reimagining black futures and pasts and what we can do to make these into new realities is necessary at this time, especially with the looming threat of global warming. I think that sometimes we can get caught inside the trap of imagining that our choices are dictated by what we imagine to be real.

Decolonisation is deconstructing our understanding of the choices we have to make, and making them.

The “ultimate performance” requires the agora, as it demands a democratic space in which every author is also every other person’s performer. The observer must be observable. The “ultimate performance” – to borrow from Immanuel Kant – is written “from the standpoint of everyone” – not privileging any one author.

We know that the agora still exists – without it, terror would have no force, as there would be no stage for its performance, no grey gestalt for its technicolour spectacle. Terror is a genre, its aesthetic of rupture curated through electronic means of distribution. (Terror’s bathetic cousin – the “flash mob” – is another proof for the agora’s currency, requiring/producing a similar gestalt.)

Though the agora still exists, it is populated very differently from how it was in previous decades. People still negotiate public spaces together – train stations, libraries, parks, markets; as well as privately-owned and controlled shared spaces – shopping malls, sporting grounds. Sometimes we congregate, though more frequently we aggregate, as different causes bring about our temporary proximity. This has not changed so much in decades. What is new is the omnipresence of thousands of screens – large, small, handheld, and cameras – handheld, or hidden overhead. All activity is drenched with media – inputs and outputs. Every public interaction up for instant capture, distribution, and private consumption; and every private moment constantly interrupted by the drip feed of minute-to-minute news updates and the “pings” of social media alerts.

While not an act of political terror, the mass-murder of pedestrians in the centre of Melbourne in January 2017 revealed a trail of surveillance across several media – Facebook “check-ins” the night before, tweets by people observing the perpetrator’s unusual behaviour, his brief “video-bombing” of a live news report earlier in the day, police air wing pursuit – none of which served to arrest this act of mass murder. Like a dispersed Greek chorus, these observers were unable to do anything but report the tragedy as it unfolded.

We are so overwhelmed by information that we are dead to the present. We are forgetting how to “bear witness” and forgetting how to inhabit our own privacy – without which, the concept of “citizenship” loses all power. As Zygmunt Bauman has observed, we have become terrified of privacy. Our identities are constituted through public display, and reward for this display. This is a problem for democracy – a problem for the agora. What is a public space without a citizenry?

The “Ultimate Performance” offers a kind of resistance to this new orthodoxy. It does so by placing value in the interpretive act and placing this act of interpretation in an ethical space. It demands presence – in body/mind. There is no single curator, but a distributed curatorship, to which everyone contributes. No proscenium, no audition, no credit card fees.

The performance ends with an act of writing, not of observations – “this is what I saw” – but of thoughts, “having seen some things, this is where my mind has taken me.” The space in which this occurs is “empty” – in between the temporal and the divine. Of course, it can never be truly empty, every space of being is always already populated, but we can understand this as a productive aspiration, rather than an actuality. Reflection, composition, and inscription occur in a single act – “the participant writes their thoughts” in a particular ethical context – the state of authorship – “next to their name.” This last point is crucial. Through the act of ownership of a piece of writing, a stake is claimed. This is what is meant by “bearing” witness. A gesture is made against solitude – a synthesis between “art” and “citizen” is achieved.

One can only wonder what other life forms will make of “The Book,” as humanity succumbs to what Francis E Dec referred to as “the INEVITABILITY OF GRADUALNESS: extermination!”[1] Perhaps it will appear to these life forms as do the paleolithic cave paintings appear to us today – their meanings, and even the drive behind their creation, fundamentally unknowable.

Bauman, Zygmunt, and David Lyon. Liquid Surveillance: a Conversation. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

NOTES:

[1] http://www.bentoandstarchky.com/dec/containmentpolicy.htm

Pieces for Sonia

Confession

I fall in love with my collaborators. I’m in awe of the source of their art. Sonia is easy to love. She’s inimitable, an unpredictable force in improvisation. Her use of language is textural; you can file your nails on it. I don’t really know what Sonia thinks of me. It doesn’t really matter. We share practice. I love her art.

Scene: The Last Beer in the World

The once resplendent ballroom above Flinders Street station, after the apocalypse. There is a shattered chandelier on the floor. There are weeds growing through the windows. There are no sounds of life from outside. In one corner, salvaged: a bed, a TV, a clothes rack, an esky. Sonia sits on a chair at a linoleum table drinking a beer. ‘This is the last one there is,’ she says to the audience.

Listening

Open up. Let go of professional, strategic ideas of right and wrong, beauty and fear. Listen with an ear attuned to what is speaking. Listen as though the world is listening. Listen like a Zen master, like a diary, like a friend, like an artist. Listen for associations, word play, listen for the joke. Always listen for the joke. Listen without effort, listen with love. Listen as only you can, with your own special accumulation of sensitivities. Listen with the pleasure your own ear finds as the words tumble, jumble, and digress.

Sonia: One

‘Sonia’ is a Russian name meaning ‘wisdom.’ Sonia can talk to anyone. Her work as an artist is an assault to bourgeois sentiment in art.

Scene: The Meet Up

A laneway behind a popular restaurant strip. Sonia stands smoking next to the bins. A man trails aimlessly up the street. She offers him a smoke. They smoke together.

Watching

My gaze radiates from the time and space of my body, locating what it doesn’t know, what is strange or novel. I watch as Sonia conjures competing representations of ability and fragility. I like to look at this. She offers mementos from her time and space: I notice her posture, movement, expression, her gaze returning or ignoring mine. I become part of her experience when I look at her. Her time and space, becomes part of my time and space.

Sonia: Two

Sonia doesn’t wait for approval. She takes pride in living-on-the-edge, but perhaps it causes some suffering also. From the margins, she observes. Sonia doesn’t observe wilfully, she does it intuitively. Her gaze observes brutality, mischievousness, the unacceptable in people and places – unflinchingly. What she observes, impresses upon her, and she revives this in the studio.

Scene: The Break Up

Faded aqua weatherboard Californian bungalow. Outer suburbs Melbourne. Afternoon. Furniture is being chopped up offstage and fed to a crackling fire. Smoke from this fire blows onstage. We can hear Sonia cursing.

Transcribing

Sonia carves words in time. I listen. She has a regional Australian vernacular. I’m on the side (trans – the other side); I’m the mechanist, the etcher, the stonemason. I write them down for her. She is writing her own myths of Australianness. Of honesty and loyalty. Of bootleg.

Scene: Dying wish

A suburban garage. The radio is playing Gold 104.3 FM. There is a bag of marshmallows on an old car bonnet: the ants are making a feast of them. The owner of the house and the car, a man, has tormented some children. Sonia is about to behead him with a blunt handsaw. He is pleading for his life. He begs. She asks him for his last request. He would like a marshmallow. She stuffs all the marshmallows, with the incumbent ants, and the packet, in his mouth. He chokes.

Coffee with Sonia

Make a time. Hope for the best. Meet her with radical openness, meet her with a sense of encounter, a sense of drama, a sense of the unknown. Be aware that you may not survive the encounter.

What is possible or impossible to perform  

I imagine a rock-star,

a theatre rock-star,

a hooligan theatre rock-star,

standing on stage in the middle of a stadium.

The stadium is packed – the kind of packed where further back the faces become pixels,

Impressionist-painting-dots which you can’t quite make out in the multitude.

The multitude is shouting. You can’t hear them.

They are in kind-of-slow motion, like stock-video-footage of a background stadium crowd

where there is no sound but you know that they are shouting.

It is like – but it is not – Woodstock, or Live-Aid,

where the politics are part of what makes it sexy.

And it is like – but it is not – Beyoncé, or Rage Against the Machine,

where the sexiness brings people to the politics.

The rock-star is singing or saying something,

but you can’t hear them for the shouting

(which you also still can’t hear).

All you can hear is this vast, pulsating, slow-motion silence.

~~~

It feels clichéd to write of silences being loud.

Of silences that shout.

But it seems that I have to. Because I read Joe’s rock-star theatre script and for me, the silences in it scream.

I sit inside them for a while. In the impossible breadth of the tyranny-that-scares-me-most. In my impossible distance from those-who-shape-the-world; in how impossibly everywhere fascism and T-Rexism appear to be.

There is a kind of must-do-something scream that has long sat deep in my chest – not quite where my heart is but near there, towards the back of my ribcage and woven around my breath.

Sometimes it is quiet. Sometimes it swells.

Sitting in the gaps and silences of imagining a theatre that–

                                                                                 which we do by–

                                                                                                –it squeezes me inside-out.

When I think of changing the world – and how art, how theatre, might do this – the answers are so complex that I still find them to be beyond words.

But I sit for this moment in the audacity of imagining. And it feels gloriously, painfully loud.

~~~

I imagine knowing what to do. And doing it.

I imagine my voice stepping into the silence that follows a T-Rex roar

without waiting to be asked.

I imagine it cutting through the billboard-bustle and ad-banner-scrolling

and next-best-things-you-should-click-on – cutting through, cutting in.

I also imagine it cutting out – making space for other voices from the multitude.

I imagine words falling from my fingertips like rice from a bulging sack

that has finally been slit open.

I imagine theatre as the knife.

~~~

On the other side of the shouting, there are the fascists. The T-Rex tyranny. The king-of-the-island roars that we believe to be real.

Do fascists care about affect? It is a good question. I think they do, and I care about that very much. Fascists are masters of affect, dealing in movements built on blind furies of feeling. I remember reading, in my first year of studying performance, Richard Schechner’s writing on Hitler and the mis-use of theatrical presence (2002: 216); citizens mobilized to unthinkable acts, swept up in the act of un-thinking through feeling. I remember my sense of what theatre is and can be expanding, and feeling chilled by the responsibility. So many different ways for tyranny to show its face.

As a sometimes-theatre-maker this still unsettles me. And I stay wary of using affect as a tool of persuasion for political ends.

But artists deal with affect in myriad ways beyond this. Marianne Van Kerkhoven describes dramaturgy in the contemporary moment as learning how to handle complexity (2009: 11), the antithesis of a simplistic, un-thinking roar. And she writes – more eloquently than I can paraphrase, so I am borrowing her words – of the possibilities this complexity opens up for navigating culture and creating change:

We can throw stones at each other over the wall separating the two gardens, or we can be forced under control to bring down the wall and declare that all the gardens from now on are one single park. But other alternatives are possible. Approaching each other takes a long time. Perhaps we have to grow a hedge or some bushes instead of the wall. Where the wind can pass through, where between the leaves we can have whispering conversations. We can make small doorways in the hedge, openings where the bushes have disappeared because we cross them and wear them down so many times. We have to give time to the talks, so that slowly hesitation and fear can turn into clarity and pleasure. Sometimes it will succeed, and sometimes it will not. Will we get somewhere? We’ll see if we get somewhere.

(Van Kerkhoven, 2009: 10)

Do fascists care about moments of connection that offer the possibility of understanding the world in different ways? I am much less quick to answer.

~~~

The rock-star steps back from the microphone.

I read their lips as they whisper:

‘We have to at least try.’

I shout, silently, mouthing my words in the slow-motion rock-concert crowd, that I agree,

standing tall and raising my cheeks to the wind.

And, with a sudden sense of the absurd, I realise why it is silent.

The stadium is a theatre, and the wind has taken our words.

It it impossible. And perhaps a bit whimsical.

But for today, for this moment, that is the performance, the grand theatrical device:

thoughts whipped from our mouths to the sky, through the smog, through the drizzle,

through the hedges and hedgerows in the fields around the stadium,

to pass through and encounter and tangle-in-complexity and whisper.

Around me, I feel the multitude grow louder.

Through the silence I imagine I can hear them all –

not just those closest to me, not just those similar to me –

everyone in the stadium, right to the farthest speck-like pixels at the back.

When my words return to me, they will have passed so many others on the way.

I imagine sifting through them, finding all that they encountered.

Finding perhaps, (im)possibly, the beginning of a collective shout.

Finding bruises and new shapes and smooth edges.

Finding corners knocked off of the letters.

Finding traces of fallen leaves.

~~~

On my bookshelf, I have the same edition of Theatre of the Oppressed that Joe does. While not nearly so sexy, here is a very-safe-for-work photo of it in a hedge.

Science tells us that T-Rexes did not roar (Riede et al, 2016). We just imagine that they did.

(Of course that has little to do with the sharpness of the their teeth.

But bear with me. It is a metaphor.)

If we come back from the impossible fancy of flying words,

we are still standing in the stadium in silence.

I imagine the roaring of our collective silence

being louder than the dinosaurs.

We have to at least try.

I imagine trying.

I imagine that succeeding is possible.

References:

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2009.

Riede, Tobias, Chad M. Eliason, Edward H. Miller, Franz Goller, and Julia A. Clarke.”Coos, booms, and hoots: The evolution of closed‐mouth vocal behavior in birds.” Evolution 70 (2016): 8, pp 1734-1746.

Schechner, Richard. Performance Studies: An Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Van Kerkhoven, Marianne. “‘European Dramaturgy in the 21^st Century’ A Constant Movement,” Performance Research. 14: 3 (2009), pp 7-11.