04

Emergency

April 2020

Theatres and arts institutions around the world have closed their doors and shuttered lights, interrupting premieres, runs, and rehearsal processes. Festivals are postponed, seasons suspended. The theatre is closed, yet the theatre keeps performing. Performances work their way out in our private thoughts or distanced conversations, in makeshift configurations across media. We imagine a release, […]

  • Prologue

    Theatres and arts institutions around the world have closed their doors and shuttered lights, interrupting premieres, runs, and rehearsal processes. Festivals are postponed, seasons suspended. The theatre is closed, yet the theatre keeps performing. Performances work their way out in our private thoughts or distanced conversations, in makeshift configurations across media. We imagine a release, a gathering together, an encounter with the sublime, a small act of repair. So, as communities fragment into socially distant parts, we propose a festival of imagined theatres alive to this state of emergency.

    In putting forth an “emergency” issue of Imagined Theatres we name both the occasion of our meeting and a mode of emergent becoming. The Oxford English Dictionary offers an obsolete understanding of emergency as “the process of issuing from concealment, confinement.” So, too, we see this as an ongoing process, reviewing submissions as they arrive and issuing small groups of imaginary performances week by week from our confinement. Around the world people have been ordered to shelter at home, while leaving those without shelter or far removed from home exposed to a virulent atmosphere. Our private spaces, once concealed backstage, now appear as backdrops to remote conferences and classrooms, to virtual happy hours and dinner parties.

    We find ourselves, as the dictionary tells us a little further down, at “a juncture that arises or ‘turns up’; esp. a state of things unexpectedly arising, and urgently demanding immediate action.” Donald Trump may falsely claim that “no one could have expected this” though experts have long imagined the possibility of a pandemic, even rehearsing its course in simulations. But the lived experience of these conditions is another matter. What actions are available to us on these narrowed stages? What kinds of immediacy might we find in our newly hyper-mediated exchanges? Who gets to be live in “real time” when clogged networks decompose streaming videos, classrooms, conversations into pixelated clouds? Perhaps we cluster nightly on Netflix or Hulu waiting for the wheel to stop spinning, the movie to start playing again. Perhaps we watch performances online, as theatres and institutions open their archives to the public, or construct novel versions of live radio drama, concerts, dances, dramas. Perhaps we struggle to find a signal, sitting in library parking lots or holding our phones just so that we might connect to a public server. And, as if we needed reminding, the OED closes by defining emergency as a “political term, to describe a condition approximating to that of war [sic]; occasionally as a synonym or euphemism for war; also state of emergency, wherein the normal constitution is suspended.”

    Imagined Theatres began as a platform for artists and thinkers of the stage to explore acts that resources, conventions, or the contours of reality deemed impossible or impractical; that landscape has shifted drastically over the last months. Imagined Theatres also originated out of a need to experience performance while living far from the people who make it; we are all living in that place now.

    We will keep reviewing and publishing submissions in waves as long as the emergency remains in force, adding to this archive in biweekly iterations during our collective confinement. Join our mailing list for news of each release and send us word of your own performances. Together, let us explore what theatre can do in this moment and what it will emerge to become.

     

     

  • It is March, 2120.

    A theatre researcher (and Chekhov lover) discovers the derelict cloud server where the lost theatre productions from the pandemic era have been languishing for nearly a century. Before they were saved, these video and audio plays–countless in number and primarily recorded on a primitive platform called Zoom–were threatened by mass digital extinction. The researcher examines the salvaged recordings, arguing that they, as the veritable subatomic particles of the New Theatre, are more than worthy of our exploration.

    Here is an audio entry from her field notes:


    About the Authors
    Masha
    (Echos of a Cherry Orchard that never was, a Seagull that never was, and other performances lost to the pandemic all meet in an uncertain future.)


    Love of mine, someday you will die.
    A respiratory disease, maybe.
    A train.

    We could have been two women sitting at the edge of a lake
    Looking at dead seagull.
    Which one of us killed it?

    Or we could have been two women,
    One in black smoking a joint and
    One with a water bottle and a ukulele
    Waiting for the show that’s about to start.
    One lady in black.

    Or one woman, an actress, playing another woman –
    Another woman just returned from Paris.
    She ate alligator there; she is bad with money.
    She sounds like a child nesting in the bottom of a well.
    She teases a young schoolteacher for being too romantic.
    She wants to be the girl out of time with the invisible dog.

    2020 we could still be there.
    We’d have to be outside, though.
    We have to wear masks and only one of us can touch the gun
    Between bouts of disinfectant.

    2120 we could still be there.
    But the audio would be decayed.
    A broken string, maybe.
    And the technology to play it would be lost.
    And I might not remember your name anymore.
    Or the name of the person who wrote that beautiful program note.


    About the Author
  • A theatre foyer. Night. It is empty. The doors are locked. But if there were a woman there…

    If I didn’t know you and were to wait for you after the show.

    In the foyer with the wooden floorboards and the jelly snakes where I have stood, smiling, waiting, so many times before.

    Maybe she waits outside, under the covered awning. A cool breeze. Mosquitoes. Because there are always mosquitoes here. Something about the plants. Or the sea.

    You know I used to live on this street. Down on the next corner, the corner of Robe  Street. I lived in a flat with Helen. She had a pet rat called Ernesto and a laugh that sounded like a water bubbler. It was in that flat I saw the ghosts across the road one morning when I’d been up all night. In that big, fancy place that I think at that time was owned by the Theosophical Society. I saw the ladies in their white dresses on the balcony. I miss living in a place with a balcony. Aspect makes life bigger somehow.

    She might be on the balcony suddenly. One of those tricks of theatre magic. Or we see the ladies in the white dresses. Far off. They are hard to make out. But they are there.

    So if I were waiting for you I’d of course be wondering what you will think of me. From what I’ve learned, you are young and fierce, almost zealous. You are a hero, a martyr, a virgin (possibly). You are cast in many lights. You are talked about incessantly and endlessly. You are building a pyre. You are being examined. You are burnt. You are dead.

    She is walking. A crowd follows. Or she walks alone. Turns her head now and then. She thought someone was following. But.

    We could walk past the place where I lived with Helen. She isn’t there anymore. She died a few years after I moved out. And I know that because she came onto the books of a palliative care agency where I was working. It was a weird moment. The ethics of it. I talked about it with the nurses and social workers at the agency and they said it would be okay to get in touch. I did. I went to visit. By then she was not very conscious. I held her hand because her partner said she liked that. He said afterwards she’d been pleased I’d come. She died the next day.

    In Helen’s room. Someone else lives there now. One at a time, the audience sneaks in, trying not to wake the person who lives there now. Hoping not to scare them.

    I suspect you would make me feel inadequate. No. That I would make myself inadequate in comparison with you.

    Once everyone has been through, they wait outside. It’s fully dark now. The air smells of sea salt.

    My partner says I shouldn’t compare myself to other people. I wonder how many people say that to other people, trying to make them feel better, in the course of a day. I wonder how many of them are men saying it to women. I wonder if comparison is such a bad thing. How else do we know who we are except by who we are not and who others are? I understand that constant negative (I am worse) or positive (I am better) comparison can make people’s souls turn ugly but I don’t think we can stop it all together. And I’m not sure that we should.

    She has lost the audience. Has she? She has forgotten where she is leading them and why. If she keeps going down this street they will get to the McDonald’s and there has been a cluster. A McCluster. Not at this one. Still. It would be irresponsible.

    You are always portrayed as thin and muscular. A girl who is like a boy. A girl who is a girl unlike most other girls. A girl who could be a role model for other girls who want to be less like girls and more like boys or just different kinds of girls.

    Moving quickly now, a rising urgency to get back to the theatre. Past the flat where she lived with Helen.

    I wonder about the ethics of telling you about Helen. That is her real name. She was a real person. She didn’t give me permission to write about her. She played an important role in my life. I was in my early twenties when I lived with her and she would have been around thirty. There is something about living with an older woman (not old, just older) when you are a young woman trying to figure out who you are and how to live in the world. Helen was happy in herself. She had a round body and went dancing a lot and had many lovers.

    Outside the theatre. She looks at the poster for the show. One corner is peeling away. How long ago was it put up? What will happen to the show now?

    What about the ethics of everybody telling me about you? You were a real person. You didn’t give us permission. What do you think about who you’ve become?

    She stands very close to the door. She puts one hand up to the door. The red door.

    If I waited in the foyer for you after the show and you came out, a bit timid but mostly curious, you would get a lot of love. Theatre people are generous like that. They’d tell you how great you were and what an amazing story you have and how inspiring you are. You’d stand, a bit bewildered. The red door would be open to the St Kilda night air. You’d wonder what to do next. What does a dead martyr do after a show? This is where I’d get worried. Would I be able to show you a good time, keep you entertained? Would our encounter satisfy you, or would you thank me politely at the end of the night and then disappear? Preferring to go it alone. Out into the streets of Melbourne. Or back to the theatre. How would you feel about sleeping where you’d died? Night after night.

    She steps away.

    I suspect that maybe I would find your intensity annoying. Irrational. That I perhaps would have little patience for it. But that wouldn’t stop me wanting you to like me, to find something similarly intense and worthwhile in me.

    She is alone. Everyone has gone. For a drink. Or just home. To their houses.

    I’m pretty sure this is what would be lacking.

    She should leave too.

    And I’d want to keep in touch but maybe you wouldn’t. And I’d say, well, here’s my number, call me any time. I can help with things like introducing you to people or finding a place to live. But you wouldn’t need me.

    There is no point waiting. The theatre is closed. Was the show cancelled? Or did it go on? Is this a memory or an absence?

    That’s what I imagine anyway.

    But she can’t quite bring herself to walk away. What if…

    While I’m standing in the foyer wondering if you are going to come out at the end of the show. Or if…


    About the Author
  • Twilight, at the Edge of the World, Earth, 2138

    A gigantic tree, with exposed roots crisscrossing, penetrating, and mixing with the cave’s stony skin, becomes the tree-cave’s hybrid torso and head, the tree’s over-sized crown its leafy hair.

     

    Scene I:          Caught Breaths

    Labored whirrs, sputtering spasmodically like coughs provoked by old phlegm, echo inside the cave.

     

    Scene II:         Storied Breaths

    On the rocky clearing squats a small gathering of people. An elderly matriarch with an elongated hornpipe curving all the way to the ground faces a semi-circle of children who range from teens to toddlers. The elder starts chanting and clapping, rocking her body rhythmically in gentle circles while she passes her hornpipe counterclockwise to the children.

    The oldest child blows the hornpipe once and speaks, “This is my time to talk to the Rocks, our Breathing Rocks, lest they forget who they are.” She tells how her parents took her to see the twin rocks for the first time and how she placed her palms on the rocks to feel their warmth and rhythmic movements.

    “I felt happy to meet the Rocks and drew an elk on their skins,” said the second oldest child after ze took the turn to blow the hornpipe twice. “They are our living ancestors and protectors; they are the lungs for our home tree-cave; they are our talismans. They hold our wills and consciousness; they keep us remembering.”

    When I had a fever that would not go away, my father took me to see Ah Ma.” The elder nods her head and joins the child in the scene. “Ah Ma took me to the Rocks. She raised me up and put me in the chasm-chamber in between the rocks. It was warm, and I loved being squeezed by the breathing rocks. I stayed there for a long time, listening to the rocks humming, like a lullaby. I felt much better.”

    The children continue their story relays. In turn, each blows the hornpipe and carves into it with a flat stone to mark their places. Their blowing and marking increases in number as the hornpipe passes through each younger storyteller. Words with wings soar amongst the chants and orations, marvels and whispers, and little songs here and there. A great assemblage of flora and fauna appears in thin air — from hummingbirds to snakes; giraffes to whales; beetles, bees, bats, and butterflies; from tulips and lavender to rosemary and mushrooms; from lemons, mangoes, to bamboos and banyan trees; from assorted pebbles to a special marble — a wondrous natural universe, seen through these children’s eyes, is tattooed on the surfaces of the Breathing Rocks.

     

    Scene III:       Renewed Breaths

    The setting sun paints the sky with variegated clouds, which merge with the autumnal alpine landscape and extend their colorful splendor to the far-west horizon. The hornpipe — now renewed with multiple rounds of fresh markings — circles back to Ah Ma, who receives it with a smile and a bow. She begins playing a tender melody with the hornpipe. Teenagers drum on their bodies and the ground with twigs, pinecones, stems, and gravel, while the toddlers who cannot yet practice their stories with words begin to crawl, swing, stomp, clap, and dance to the tune of the hornpipe.

    Ah Ma marks her own presence on the hornpipe with the flat stone. She then leads the children to the cave, where the children’s parents wait with lanterns, torches, candles, neon necklaces, and self-illuminating wristbands. The adults clear away the tendrils and vines that partially block the cave’s mouth. They pause in front of the immense Breathing Rocks. The children help their parents cleanse the dusts, debris, and fungi off the rocks, as if they were brushing the tree-cave’s twin molars, exfoliating their breasts, or detoxing its humongous lungs. Refreshed and energized, the rocks are ready to receive the newly adorned hornpipe, which Ah Ma gently places into their chasm-chamber.

    None of the people inside the tree-cave hold their breaths — this is, after all, an exercise for flowing breaths — while they wait for the Breathing Rocks to wake up, speak up, or cough up. Perhaps sonorously, or merely audibly, or, to some, imperceptibly, the Rocks inhale and exhale, expanding their girths, broadening their volumes, or flexing their fibrous mineral-muscles. And then they take a very deep breath.

     

    The End:        Hopefully Never! Or, One Second before “Never Say Never!”

     

     

    An impression of Ah Ma with the Breathing Rocks inside the tree-cave, captured by spirit photography. Image by Rita Stern Milch.

     

     

     

     


    About the Author

    Question 1.     Where did the Breathing Rocks come from?

    Dr. Stone (Dokutā Sutōn, 2019) — a Japanese manga (2017-19) and anime (2019) series that my teenage son curated for our Home Dinner Theatre marathon — begins with a global apocalypse in which all of humanity, together with swallows, becomes suddenly petrified. To dramatize what happened after this world-wide impasse, the manga-anime first resurrects a teenage scientist, Senkū Ishigami, who wakes up 3,700 years after the inciting pandemic by the accidental intervention of bat excrements and nitric acid dripping down in a cave. He then proceeds to revive other humans. With stone swallows as his initial test subjects, this teenage prodigy develops the revitalization elixir — aka, the miraculous vaccine — to rescue his fellow earthlings from their rocky exoskeletons. Senkū also utilizes his retained scientific knowledge to bring living comforts (ramen, glasses, windmills, rudimentary cell phone towers, etc.) to their terrestrial abode, which has long been reclaimed by jungles, rivers, muds, insects, reptiles, and other animals.

    I doubt that any “first-run” global readers and viewers of Dr. Stone foresaw the impending arrival of COVID 19, the first pandemic that I’ve experienced. Among the worst symptoms caused by the coronavirus is the sense of drowning in one’s own bodily fluids, making the patients unable to breathe. This fact reminds me of the historical plagues described in The Theater and its Double (1958) by Antonin Artaud, who observed that the Bubonic Plague mostly affected two organs: “the brain and the lungs,” those corporeal sites responsible for people’s consciousness and will.

    While stressing the mysterious kinship between humans and swallows, Dr. Stone still holds an anthropocentric premise, which regards humans’ becoming-stones as a “plague”-induced prison. What if stones were alive? Would humans be able to evolve organs that generate both consciousness and will, plus certain granite sentience, in order to sample, embody, or at least empathize with stone lives? Or, would we humans simply refine our senses of wonder so as to perceive and acknowledge the movements of breaths in hitherto unlikely objects and places?

     

    Question 2: The children are humanity’s hope everywhere, but who is Ah Ma?

    “Ah Ma,” a pinyin translation of the Chinese term of endearment for “grandmother,” is an elder who loves to sing and dance, make music, practice qigong, tell stories, and teach. Since she has lived the healthiest and longest, she has accumulated the most knowledge about the earth; its rare herbs and ordinary plants; the iridescent flowering mushrooms; the hidden nectar in translucent seedlings, which she deciphered from the dialects of bees. She can imitate the flight kinetics of eagles, the choreography of dolphins, and the pernicious trickery of poisonous microbes. Ah Ma heals living creatures, human or otherwise —metabolic, vegetal, or mineral; hermaphroditic or else — by listening quietly to the Breathing Rocks and collaborating with their happy moods and good will.

    Ah Ma holds in polyamorous adulation the chasm-chamber in between the twin breathing rocks — the voluptuous spaciousness in their heart center — like a welcoming cleavage; like a cordial vagina; like a seductive womb.

     

    Question 3: What’s the tense for the verb, “to remember”?

    My understanding about the nature of memory is indelibly shaped by Harold Pinter’s skepticism: “We are faced with the immense difficulty, if not the impossibility, of verifying the past. I don’t mean merely years ago, but yesterday, this morning” (1962, 11). Thus, to remember my past, I curate experiential fragments, editing and montaging bits and pieces retrieved from my mnemonic nerves and composing them as instantaneous imagined theatre scenarios, as everyday cinemas tilted toward the fantastic, the ineffable.

    Similar to Ah Ma, the children all have their favorite memories about the Breathing Rocks. As days, weeks, and months pass, the breathing rocks forget to remember all the happenings — depressions and elations, reveries and procrastinations, joys, tedium and sorrows — of the collective pasts from their human charges. The rocks’ forgetfulness figures as excessive dirt: dust and grime that amasses into an inoperable abundance. To help their granular guardians remember is to initiate the cycle of cleaning and sorting for the Breathing Rocks. The rocks need the liberty of expansive space and accessible archiving to breathe freely. The children re-perform their remembered encounters with the Breathing Rocks to supply the gravelly duo with dramatic matter.

    To remember is, therefore, almost always in the present tense – a spinning theatrical now.

     

    Question 4: Why do you use a Greek word in the title?

    When I first learned about Stoicism from Seneca the Younger, I encountered the beautiful term “pneuma,” an inherited Greek word that may be translated into English as “the vital spirit, the breath, the soul, or the creative force of the universe.” As a bilingual cultural reader, I immediately related “pneuma” to “chi/qing/氣” in Chinese, a word for “the air, the breath, the energy of the cosmos.” Just as the Roman Stoics conceived of all bodies in the universe as one, so the Chinese ancient elders chose the word “Tao/Dao/道,” to signify the oneness of all beings in heaven and Earth, from the ocean to the event horizon.

    The word 道 is comprised of two verbal parts: (1) sho/首, meaning “the head,” a shape that looks to me like an eye [mu /目 ] with eyebrows and hair; and (2) the radical for zou / 走, meaning “to walk,” “to move.” By the word’s ideogrammatic logic, I appreciate that its ancient Chinese wordsmith conceived of the cosmos as an interconnected liminal time/space and being as movements of thinking, learning, pondering, pausing, feeling, dreaming, remembering, forgetting, grieving, despairing, calculating, playing, walking, running, dancing, and breathing.

    To name my imagined theatre piece with a Greek term, “Pneuma” — when using “Breaths” in English or “Qi” in popularized Chinese pinyin may suffice — recalls the queerness in me.

    Queer telling: Telling it queer to queer its tale!

     


    REFERENCES and ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

    1. I wish to acknowledge my indebtedness to Ashtin Natshi Wang, who first introduced me to Dr. Stone (Dokutā Sutōn, first aired, July-Dec. 2019); to Gardner Henry Stern, Mikki Benjamin, and Rolf Hoefer, among many other friends, who helped my texts flow better with judicious editing; and to Dr. Lyn Lockhart-Mummery, who has ever directed my gaze towards the sliver-linings.
    2. See Antonin Artaud, “The Theater and the Plague,” in The Theatre and its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958), pp. 15-32.
    3. See Harold Pinter, “Writing for the theatre,” in Complete Works: One (New York: Grove Press, 1976), pp. 9-16.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     


    About the Author

    We find ourselves gathered together at a Tree of Life whose leafy hairs bear a crown. The symbolism of the Crown is not lost on the group. Those participating in this ceremony of rebirth are the child survivors of the great Earth catastrophe. They seem to know intuitively the appropriate gestures to make to summon the awakening of the planet’s life force, to know the healing energies that accompany the gestures with loving words of memory and of wisdom. The children know that the rocks are their ancestors. The children have brought with them to this incarnation an infinite memory of time and space from other lives in which they were being prepared, both for this moment and for their special spiritual mission.

    Breathing is the way that the rebirth of the planet is summoned. The group hears the coughing coming from the cave and the rocks, which are being detoxified, throwing off the ashes of the years of near-death so that they can respond to the children’s love and memories of the powers they once embodied when they were healthy and breathing freely.

    Frequencies of sound accompany the breathing “medicine” as an elderly woman with a hornpipe enters and passes the instrument around to the children so they can speak the words that will evoke memories and remind the sacred rocks of who they were and how powerful they can be again once they have awakened to the touch and the sounds of the children’s signatures and voices. The children take turns with the hornpipe and speak of their private memories and desires, reminding the rocks that through breathing they can be revived. At the same time, the inscription of their names and drawings on skins leave marks upon the rocks, a healing patch of love that will channel beads of etheric frequencies into them and open the passageway to a renewed life.

    Naturally, the lungs are most important for the revival of breathing. The children remind us that the rocks are their ancestors and also the lungs for their tree-cave home. The children and the elderly healer—Mother, Ah Ma—speak volumes in silence.  They remind us that those who were disempowered in the civilization that suffered through this final disaster at the edge of the world, the elderly and the children, are precisely those who possess the spiritual knowledge and understanding necessary now for resurrection. Accompanied by the prayerful memories of the children, the frequencies of the hornpipe communicate clearly with the nonhuman world, so that the animals of many species and the growth of the new Garden of Life will be drawn out of their safe hiding places and burst into emergence and flight over the land, blessing it with their returned presence. We see this emergence mirrored in our own time, when we were all quarantined and the space was cleansed on Earth so that the animals could return to find sustenance and the love that the previous tenants of the Earth did not shower upon them. In Pnuema, that era has begun to fade into history. Those were the millennia when the humans possessed all the power and did not understand that the Earth was alive, as were all forms of life upon Her.

    The spiritual ceremony was the manifestation of inborn memory from ancient times before toxic chemical medicines existed, when all life forms recognized they were interconnected and that they could heal themselves and each other in these caring and beautiful ways. The hornpipe restored to the cave, the rocks reveal that their breathing is now healed, and the parents of the children are summoned.

    The parents were in the dark during these proceedings. They wear jewelry that lights up in the darkness. They were not invited to participate in this ceremony. They will surely become aware of the powers inherent in other generations, that the children and the elderly possess the wisdom of resurrection in our time.

    All human and nonhuman beings—all life forms—breathe deeply and experience a millennia-long relief after being deprived of the nurturance of Planet Earth. The parents of the new generation, the elderly from previous generations, still use devices to infuse life into the cosmos, but the children from the most ancient pre-patriarchal cultures have carried forth into this incarnation the normal usage of human and natural sensibilities—touch, music, memory, and love—for the most powerful of healings ever … the resurrection of the (almost and nearly-dead) Planet Earth right at the Edge of the World.


    About the Author
  • notes for a performative lecture

    I go on a ten-day silent meditation retreat. I return. A friend asks me what it was like. I say that if I was an actress it would be a great way to prepare for a part. He asks, “Why?” I say, “When you meditate for that long parts of you disappear – there’s less ‘you’ to get in the way, more space for something else to come in” (that’s a guess; I’m not an actor). He asks, “Have you ever read The Mystic in the Theatre?” I say “no,” and then I read it. It’s about the life of Eleonora Duse. She meditated. I also learn that Duse and I are interested in the same medieval mystics.

    In the archive I become obsessed with her hands. It’s not hard to see why. Everyone was obsessed with them. But critics and audiences had actually seen them, or were transported by them, or healed by them, or felt heard by them. What was it, exactly? And now I’m wearing an archivist’s white gloves and taking digital pictures of a photograph of a plaster cast of Eleonora Duse’s right hand.

    She was an Italian tragedienne. She was the first modern actor in the Western World. She played the transitions, acted between the words (most often the words of terribly written plays). She was not afraid of silence. She was said to shape-shift before audiences. By all accounts, she was a shaman. Duse’s superpower: her capacity to disappear, leaving only her plaster hands as evidence that she was a material presence in the world. Disappearance. Reproduction. She knew the theatrical drill.

    She leaves the stage in 1909. “To save the theatre, the theatre must be destroyed,”[1] she says in 1912.

    May 1915: Italy enters World War I. Duse refuses to entertain the troops on the frontlines. She goes instead to sit with the soldiers – writing letters for them, holding their hands, delivering packages, listening. She stays in a hotel close to the warfare during one visit. When she returns, her hotel is a pile of rubble. Bombed. Her timing was always impeccable.

    Letter dated 15 December 1915, to Enrichetta, her daughter in England who we now have evidence was a British spy: “I have done everything in life between one departure and another —the heart has remained motionless, turned toward that suffering, that light, that thing that is everything and that is nothing.”[2]

    This is what I am after, I think, as I follow her hands. Evidence of where theatre is really taking us, has always taken us.

    Duse studies the new “silent medium” (her term): “All is seen, experienced: documents, evidence in hand – a news item. The exterior of a poor life, displayed by machine, every evening the same way.” “Nothing of what is not seen and weaves a life.”[3] The first moving images on cinema screens display a terrifying number of corpses, sentient and celluloid. What to do with all of those missing bodies?

    To Enrichetta, June 1916: “the realization of film is a spiritual problem.”[4]

    Medieval art is the answer to her spiritual problem. Another language for connecting with missing bodies (?). 1916, Duse films Cenere (Ashes). She treats filmic images like tableaux vivant, living pictures (or corpse pose?). Duccio’s “Descent from the Cross” (ca. 1308-1311) and Giotto’s “Lamentation” (1306) find their way into the film.

    We teach students that theatre is reborn in the churches of medieval Europe. For all we know it is reborn a thousand times in a thousand places during those pesky “Dark Ages.” This time, though, theatre is reborn through a popular musical number about a missing body. “Whom do you seek?” the angel sings to the Marys (usually three, but this is negotiable). “Where’s Jesus?” they sing back. “He’s where he said he would be: not here, but not not here,” the angel belts out before telling them to spread the good news.

    Disappearance. Reappearance. Disappearance. Reappearance. This death does history like theatre. Duse patiently wrings the very life out the dusty tragedies she performs to play with a death like this. When she does, her audiences follow her hands all the way to oblivion. “Life is not cinema,” she writes to Giorgio Papini.[5] Neither is death.

    In 1918, Duse tests positive for the “Spanish Flu.” (Federico Garcia Lorca later writes of her duende, play and death her forte.) She survives and returns to her plays in 1922. She needs the money. The theatre had not died, but it most definitely kills her.

    April 1924: Outside in the rain, unable to get in through the locked stage door. Drenched. First influenza. Then pneumonia. She dies at age 65. In Pittsburgh. She is performing Marco Praga’s La Porta Chiusa, or The Closed Door. Play and Death.

    To Enrichetta, 1917: “You who live in a high intellectual environment, do not believe that your mother follows the Church, or chooses the Middle Ages just because I have chosen something from the thirteenth century. Not at all. On the contrary, it is very modern, as everything recurs, wars, illnesses, beauty and ugliness, greatness and the stupidity of the world.”[6]

    Image use by permission of University of Glasgow Library, Archives & Special Collections.

     


    [1] Qtd in Symons, Arthur. Eleonora Duse. London & New York: Benjamin Blom, 1927, p. 3.

    [2] Qtd in Weaver, William. Duse: A Biography. London: Thames & Hudson, 1984, p. 301.

    [3] Qtd in Weaver, William. Duse: A Biography. London: Thames & Hudson, 1984, p. 305.

    [4] Qtd in Pagani, Maria Pia “Duende Has No Age,” in Eleonora Duse and Cenere (Ashes): Centennial Essays. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2017, p. 94.

    [5] Qtd in Vacche, Angela Dalle. Diva: Defiance and Passion in Early Italian Cinema. Austin: U of Texas, 2008, p. 138.

    [6] Qtd in Sica, Anna & Alison Wilson. The Murray Edwards Duse Collection. Milano: Mimesis Edizioni, 2012, p. 97.


    About the Author

    The author is working on a series of performative lectures under the large umbrella title The Dying Arts. The lectures are written for a course that is never taught because the discipline in which it might be delivered does not yet exist. Beginning with the last lecture and moving backward, the “course” follows two parallel trajectories: the alleged death of theatre arts in higher education, and the synchronicities that led the writer/performer to end of life doula work, hospice care, and healing practices. Thinking the two together through various artistic mediums, mystics, artists, and creative practices, the lecturer unwittingly begins to undo her academic training only to be led in circles, or in a loop, back to a middle space between disciplines, between artistic mediums, and between life and death. While she attempts to teach her students the value of staying in this transitional space of unknowing, she, herself, finds it almost impossible. It begins with the story of how theatre – one of the longest living art forms, purportedly “dying” for over one hundred years – might be unmade, and unmake us, so that we can begin to intuit that the space where play and death remain in a state of near-permanent tension is the space necessary for understanding our collective present-tense.


    About the Author
  • ***

    Audience members start to gather at Gate 5 of Haifa Port.

    Once they all gather, a very old Capitan stands in front of them.

    He lights up his flashlight and starts to walk into the port, without saying a word.

    (A kind of “follow me.”)

    The lights of the entire city shut off. A total darkness, apart from the Capitan’s flashlight.

    The audience follows the narrow light beam. They arrive at a small pier.

    The Capitan is boarding the audience onto rubber boats, one at a time. From that moment on, each member of the audience is in their own boat. Alone.

    (Wearing life jackets, of course.)

    The boats set off together in unison, under a starry night sky.

    The boats arrive at a floating barge, upon which the Palestinian Philharmonic Orchestra is seated.

    (Wearing life jackets, of course.)

    It turns out that the Capitan is no other than Maestro Zubin Mehta.

    The audience is staring at the city of Haifa in the dark. Time passes.

    **

    A single downtown crane lights up.

    The Philharmonic starts playing the piece you forgot was your favorite.

    A crane in the Bat-Galim neighborhood lights up for a moment and shuts off.

    30 more cranes from Haifa Port light up, their arms starting to move in perfect unison.

    150 more cranes from around the city join in a choreography that moves between darkness and light, east and west, south and north.

    The cranes break their unified movement and start to move in different directions.

    Possible structures are being created by their movements. Different shapes, sizes, and contour lines. They offer in their movements all of the cities Haifa could have been. Cities are formed and buried immediately.

    A choreography of temporary structures.

    From time to time, on their way to creating another passing formation, the cranes “accidentally” crash into a permanent building.

    All of the Still buildings on the horizon are standing like gravestones waiting to be smashed by the cranes’ movements.

    The city’s skyscrapers collapse.

    The performance ends when the cranes recover their perfect unison movement, in time with the ocean waves underneath the rubber boats.

    *

    Until they all stop forever.

     

     

     

     

     

     


    About the Author


    About the Author

    A time-specific work
    It happened during the pandemic, when private, physical, intimate time was subjected to “state of emergency” regulations. While scrolling through my feed, reading about the severe blow to Israeli democracy, I saw an invitation from “Haifa.it” – the Haifa Municipal Theatre’s young troupe headed by director Itai Doron. Although I lacked mental space for yet another Internet artwork, I clicked. I listened. The narrator’s voice sounded familiar. Gradually, I recognized it – it belonged to Maya Omaia Keesh. I was moved. I remembered her admissions interview for the theatre program at Haifa University, to which she arrived from her native village in the Golan Heights (the Syrian Heights pre-1967). Captivated by Omaia’s storytelling, I dove into the work.

    A city-specific work
    “Cranes” launched Haifa.it’s “Impossible Theatre Festival,” which Doron initiated under the inspiration of Imagined Theatres. It is a site-specific performance entwined with images and stage directions performed as speech-acts, a narration that produces a kind of audio tour. Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks stress that site-specific performances “are inseparable from their sites, the only contexts within which they are intelligible.” In “Cranes,” the site-specific is subjected to two-fold mediation – through both digital format, including animation and text, and the activation of the imagination – rendering the viewers and action “dependent” upon the conditions of the city. Therefore, my reading of the work includes elaborations addressed to the reader as a tourist of Haifa.

    A “wounded city”
    Located in northern Israel, Haifa extends from the Mediterranean Sea to Mount Carmel. Its topography divides it into three areas of distinct character: Pisgat Ha’Carmel, or the peak of Mount Carmel and its higher slopes; Hadar Carmel, the historical center of the Hebrew city; and the Lower City, the Palestinian city at the foot of the mountain near the sea, which flourished under the British Mandate. It is one of eleven cities in Palestine-Eretz Yisrael stripped of its Palestinian character post-1948. In the words of Karen Till, it is a “wounded city,” which has suffered both the physical and symbolic destruction of its urban space. In mere days in April 1948, expulsion, intimidation, and the gunfire of Israeli armed forces diluted the number of Palestinians in the Lower City from 70,000 to 3,000. Ousted from their homes, many waited on the port for ships headed to Lebanon. Jewish immigrants and refugees eventually populated the empty houses. Since then, the destruction machine of Hebrew Haifa has worked to erase the Palestinian city. But cities are not static. Starting in the late 1990s, demographic, economic, and cultural processes, as well as Haifa’s investment in the urban renewal of the Lower City, have cultivated this urban space as an arena for Palestinians’ struggle over the “right to the city.” Their activities and cultural resistance, partly through the arts, have helped turn Haifa into Israel’s “Palestinian culture capital.”

    “A place without a place”
    “Cranes” depicts the Palestinian exodus from Haifa. The rubber boats, says Omaia, arrive alongside a barge carrying “Palestinian Philharmonic Orchestra players.” A surreal performance unfolds in the sea. The musicians “start playing with the Captain as their conductor, who turns out to be none other than Maestro Zubin Mehta” (a well-known Indian conductor affiliated with the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra, a stronghold of national Jewish culture). The confusion of parts – a Palestinian orchestra with an Israeli conductor – subverts the regimentation of Palestinian citizens of Israel. According to Foucault, the space of a watercraft directly exemplifies a heterotopic space: “a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea.” The heterotopic space is formed through its affinity to real (non-utopian) spaces that represent additional, possibly contradictory, real spaces. The motion of the watercrafts forms a tension between utopian and dystopian space: are they moving away from the city or toward it? Is this an exile or a homecoming? Omaia’s mother tongue is Arabic, imbuing her Hebrew narration with Arabic musicality. Thus, a space of linguistic exile, the hybridity of Arabic and Hebrew, is also illustrated.

    A seascape
    A seascape image designed by Amir Gurfinkel shows a monochromatic frame of six cranes as delicate as children’s building blocks. Positioned horizontally, they “play the part” of undulating boats. The design employs a machine that creates motion in the sky to mark a watercraft moving in the sea. Like a watercraft, the crane is a heterotopic structure denoting a construction site. In Hebrew, the root of the word “cranes” (menofim) is “view” (nof) and therefore contains the plural word “views” (nofim). The Hebrew word for “view” or “landscape” is also the root of the word “elevating.” Thus, the title “Cranes” hints at the idea of viewing Haifa from above.

    A “panorama-city”
    De Certeau’s “Walking in the City” offers a dichotomy between two perspectives of a city: one from a bird’s eye view and the other through the lens of those “down below,” in the streets. The panoramic view of Haifa is a panoptic projection that purports omnipotence. It freezes the city’s mobility, transforming it into a sort of a picture. The breathtaking view of the port and bay from the west, or from the spectacular Bahai Gardens, is the asset that Haifa offers its tourists and upper class residents. From the prestigious Denia neighborhood at the top of Mt. Carmel and the adjacent Haifa University building (32 stories high), one can see skies, seas, and ships on the horizon, along with the two giant chimneys of the oil refinery, a true ecological threat, lit as colorfully as a circus at night. Since the Mandate period, this mountaintop view has been designated as a means of control and power.

    The choreography of an urban apocalypse, or “lines of flight”
    Like a skilled El-Hakawati (“storyteller” in Arabic), Omaia knows-yet-does-not-know where the story leads. She tells of industrial cranes rapidly reproducing against the Carmel landscape, depicting the city as a construction site. For a while, the cranes move in unified, regulated composition like rubber boats, but as the choreography unravels, these temporary structures eventually destroy the permanent city structures. Thus, the constructed image is partly apocalyptic (“the city skyscrapers collapse under the swing of the cranes”) and partly an image of “lines of flight,” movements of deterritorialization that stimulate meditations on dynamic, unstable identity and “flight” from a single, permanent meaning.

    “Impossible Theatre Festival”
    The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has literally brought the world to a halt. “State of emergency” regulations have had primarily spatial implications – the space is closed, stripped, supervised, and so is the movement within it. Through screens, we encounter images of urban space – cultural and routine sites – made desolate. This horrible view epitomizes the sweeping disruption of everyday life. The “Impossible Theatre Festival” by Haifa.it,” inspired by Imagined Theatres, provides a significant “line of flight” for its members and community. It is as if these interrupted times have encouraged or even forced Haifa.it to keep moving, imagining, and insisting on artmaking, despite the limitations of social distancing.


    About the Author
  •  

    for any number of performers
    duration and tempo variable

     

    Instructions to the performer(s)

    – At any tempo, recite the names of 500 20th and 21st century musicians.

    – The names may be free-associated and spoken in any order, but must not be memorized.

    – Do not recite the names from a sheet of paper. Avoid risk-averting aide-memoires (projected text, cue cards, mnemonic memorization, audio piped into an in-ear monitor, etc.). The names should be familiar to you and embody music you know and love.

    – Amplification is optional; speak (and/or sing) so your audience can hear you. Do a dry recitation only if it suits you; if the names (and/or concomitant associations) are beautiful to you, make them beautiful.

    – Do not preface the performance with any comments or introductory notes. Just go. Optionally you may conclude your performance by stating “500 Icons. Thank you.”

    – To count exactly to 500, you may enlist an assistant to give a discreet signal, or finger some pebbles (or beads) stashed in your pocket or devise any other furtive method to keep count cardinally. This is optional.


    Notes 2006

    Apart from indicating areas of interest, bias, expertise, adoration, and ignorance, 500 Icons offers a way for musicians to perform a musical autobiography, at once outlining, seeking, and improvising a musical genealogy or at least conveying the fecundity of 20th and 21st century music. A composition for musicians and others who love and know music, I hope the allusions and associations as well as the contrast of known and unknown names in 500 Icons will percolate in the ears of listeners and performers.


    Postscript 2008

    I did not know of Robert Ashley’s tape piece In Sara, Mencken, Christ and Beethoven There Were Men and Women when I composed 500 Icons, though in this work, the words are the music. 500 Icons is a close cousin carrying a debt to contemporary poets who employ inventories in their work, notably Vanessa Place, Kenneth Goldsmith, and Robert Fitterman as well as John Barton Wolgamot, and of course, the inclusion of evocative catalogues from the assorted lists (genealogies, laws, inventories, Temple dimensions, etc.) that permeate the Bible to various chapters harbored in Moby Dick (“Cetology,” “the Grand Armada,” “Measurement of the Whale’s Skeleton”).

    I believe 500 Icons to be most effective performed solo, however the score reads “for any number of performers” in case a group manages to realize the piece without devolving into competitive, name-dropping recitation, comical antiphonies, or other theatrical actions that defer attention from the names. Limiting names to 20th and 21st century musicians (composers, performers, improvisors, etc., I deliberately did not provide a definition) is a rhetorical tactic aimed at excavating the recent past; a performer who cannot name 500 Icons (or at least makes the attempt) is not likely to (be mature enough to) perform the piece anyway.

    Documented performances by a single performer, especially over the course of several decades, of 500 Icons might prove useful to scholars as well. Accidental repetitions, mispronunciations, and flat-out failure by falling short of naming 500 Icons is not encouraged yet should be accepted—and in retrospect, welcomed by the performer.


    Postscript 2020

    A decade down, this piece has opened unexpected treasure. Many names named in my own performances have since died, several of them during the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020. Written while the internet was becoming a stupefying catalog, 500 Icons may eventually harken back to a forgotten form of perception.

     

    1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

     


    About the Author

    When Daniel Sack sent me the score for Chris DeLaurenti’s “500 Icons,” the first thing I thought of is the list of names included in the gatefold notes for the Mothers of Invention’s first album, Freak Out! (1966). (Perhaps I made the connection because I was unconsciously reminded of the title of Frank Zappa’s 1971 film 200 Motels.) There are not 200 names on the list, more like 150, but I think the list could be regarded as a textual performance of “500 Icons.” Clearly, such a performance lacks the dimensions of “500 Icons” that relate it to performance art, endurance art in particular, but perhaps something of that experience passes on to the reader of the liner notes since reading a long list of familiar and unfamiliar names takes time and requires a certain commitment. I imagine that one of the hazards of performing “500 Icons” is the difficulty of avoiding repetition, which requires remembering which names one has already spoken. Although the context is different, the experience of reading a long list of names also involves the receding of the earlier names into (and perhaps out of) memory as one presses on.

    At any rate, the intention behind the Mothers’ list seems to have been very close to DeLaurenti’s suggestion that an exhaustive list of names can constitute a musical autobiography or genealogy. It is an open question whether the list is an index to the group’s collective sensibility or primarily to that of Frank Zappa, the band’s leader and composer of all of the songs on the album. In violation of the interdiction of introductory remarks in the instructions for “500 Icons,” The Freak Out! list is headlined: “These People Have Contributed Materially in Many Ways to Make Our Music What it is. Please Do Not Hold it Against them.” By retroactively reframing this list as a performance of “500 Icons,” I am treating a set of program notes intended to elucidate a body of music in some way as music in itself.

    As per the instructions for “500 Icons,” the list focuses on contemporary figures, including composers with experimental tendencies like Pierre Boulez (who would later conduct some of Zappa’s compositions for a recording), Mauricio Kagel, and Karlheinz Stockhausen alongside jazz musicians such as Eric Dolphy, Roland Kirk, and Charles Mingus. Given Zappa’s fondness for 1950s R&B, it is not surprising to find some prominent figures from the post-war Los Angeles scene, including saxophonist Big Jay McNeely and the musician and club owner Johnny Otis. The names of a number of West Coast radio disc jockeys also appear: Hunter Hancock, Wolfman Jack, and B. Mitchel Reed. Would they, should they count as “musicians”? Although DeLaurenti states that he “deliberately did not provide a definition” of the term musician, this statement follows immediately after the parenthetical list “composers, performers, improvisers, etc.” What does that etcetera make possible? Does it open the door as wide as does Christopher Small with his concept of “musicking,” outlined in the book Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1998) in which virtually any relationship to the production or consumption of music makes one a “musicker” (my term, not Small’s)? Or would I have to argue that the composer of a piece in which “the words are the music” should be able to appreciate the rhythmic verbal art of the classic disc jockeys the Mothers name and be willing to count them as musicians?

    More surprising, at least to me, than the presence of classical, jazz, and R&B musicians on the Mothers’ list are appearances by figures such as David Crosby and Joan Baez, whose folky earnestness might seem to be at odds with Zappa’s own snarky demeanor. In a way, this statement and the previous paragraph constitute an exercise in hermeneutics, since I am reading a list published over 50 years ago at the start of the Mothers of Invention’s career against a horizon formed by my knowledge of the entirety of Zappa’s eventual oeuvre and my sense of the musical persona he presented and refined over the years. As DeLaurenti suggests, such a persona can be defined autobiographically or genealogically, presenting the musician’s current identity as a sedimentation of past influences and associations, as does the Freak Out! list. At the same time, however, any performance of “500 Icons” is a presentation of musical identity in the present tense, as it stands right now, constituted through the act of performance itself.

     


    About the Author
  • A stagehand enters, dressed in black, focused on the iPhone that she/he/they is/are carrying onto the stage. The stagehand sets the iPhone down on a central spot, gives the audience a look of importance, and exits. If it is not the most advanced iPhone, it is simply important that the stagehand believe it to be the newest and most expensive member of the iPhone empire and treat it as such. Sacred light on the iPhone. Maybe some angelic music?

    A human person enters through the lightning port of the iPhone. They are dressed like an average person in the Apple store nearest to the theatre. They seem as surprised by their entrance as the audience.

    Human Person: Is this my iPhone, or am I its human?

    Human Person attempts to get back into the lightning port, instead pulls out a seemingly infinite number of iPhones, tablets, and laptops from their pockets, forming a stack of digital detritus.

    Human Person: Repeating my question. Confused.

    A Non-Human Person enters through the lightning port of one of the other devices. They look much like the human person except for one specific detail. Is it the inhuman glow of their skin? Is it the slightly unfocused look in their eye? Is it a slight robotic quality in their movements? Whatever it is, it is the only thing that separates them from Human Person. Human Person and Non-Human Person, who are standing six feet apart, look at each other. Human Person notices that Non-Human Person is not like them but ignores this out of politeness. They both nod in acknowledgement of their shared personhood. Human Person is happy to see another person, regardless of their humanity. Non-Human Person has learned that Human People like to be acknowledged and smiled at and so obliges. The two of them put their phones away and, maintaining their distance, step together into the back wall of the theatre, which has now become a computer screen. They instantaneously pop up onto the screen, just the two of them. Their projected/real faces turn to look at each other on the screen and touch hands through the boundary of their images. 

    (Remember those car commercials that ended with the whispered voice of the brand’s tagline ostensibly trying to beckon the viewer to purchase through the promise of speed? This next part should remind us of that.)

    Voice, human or not: Zoom zoom.

    Suddenly the Zoom screen begins to fill with twenty iPhones “looking around” at each other. They appear in gallery view. Some are old, some are new, some have cases to show individuality. The Brady Bunch theme song plays. The iPhones nod repeatedly, first in unison, then at their own tempos for some time. At just the right moment, Human Person and Non-Human Person reappear in the gallery view. They each reach through the screen frames and pick up one of the phones. They turn to each other while the images of the phones flicker.

    Momentary darkness. (I mean a second of a blackout.) When the lights come back up, Human Person and Non-Human Person are standing in front of us, still six feet apart. They pull out their devices and dial. Sound of phones ringing. Both persons answer. We hear an undeniably human voice. First a few. Then hundreds. Then thousands. Then all of the human voices in the world, all at once. Spotlight on their faces and their personhoods.

     

    End of Play.


    About the Author

    Bess Rowen is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Theatre at Villanova University. She recently completed her PhD in Theatre and Performance at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her work focuses on what she terms "affective stage directions," which are stage directions written in ways that engage the physical and emotional responses of future theatre makers. While at CUNY, she was the recipient of the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Public Humanities as well as a Graduate Center Dissertation Fellowship. Her article “Undigested Reading: Rethinking Stage Directions Through Affect” can be found in the September 2018 volume of Theatre Journal, which was also covered in Episode 27 of "On TAP: A Theatre & Performance Studies Podcast." Other articles can be found in The Eugene O'Neill Review, The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, and Emerging Theatre Research. Her avid interests include stage directions, theories of gender & sexuality, female playwrights, Irish theatre, and theatrical riots.

    The Move On-line:

    Stage 1: You’re on mute.

    Stage 2: How do you get those cool backgrounds?

    Stage 3: Wow, look at those cool theatre history/painting/Happy Birthday banner/old family photo images!

    Stage 4: I’m just turning off my mic and camera but am listening. (Straightens office, paints nails, cooks)

    Stage 5: Can we play games in here? We need a break!

    Stage 6: (I need to get out of here …)_

     

    The relentless screening of our lives during this Spring of 2020 – whether through teaching, hosting meetings and social events, having cocktails, watching something together, or doing creative projects – distances us but is also pulling us closer. It is reminding us of all the human voices in our lives, in the world.  It is a platform for these voices, for questions, for images, for actions.

    Our screened faces become a little uncanny, human but also non-human as the technologies glitch, mirror, are slightly out of focus, “slightly robotic.” Theatre artist Richard Maxwell’s 2010 Ads gave us a “live” performance of ghostly actors, performing monologues seemingly in front of us, but also not — they were projected via the 19th century Pepper’s Ghost technique (an optical illusion of projected images). Bodies both absent and present. In Cyborg Theatre I wrote (about Ads) that: “physically confronted with a live theatre with no actors, I understand it… at a level that precedes the languages necessary to understand because they are, perhaps, still the future.”[1] The future is here, but it was also the past — our stages of technological understanding precede us and haunt us into our futures.

    We have been globally presenting as our technological selves, wanting to walk through the screens to hug and comfort and protest and stand together. We are “Zooming” on our computers, tablets, and phones, acknowledging, as Bess Rowen writes, our shared human/non-human personhoods. Even as we recall the technologies that have transported us in the past — to other landscapes in other worlds with other people — we struggle to find the languages to understand the future. As we emerge through the technological transition, the phone shifts from a device for diversion or connectivity to a human/nonhuman extension of our eyes and ears, a means of amplification.

    Will these cyborgean human/nonhuman persons — us all — create a future in which our voices — however crackling, tinny, or glitched, however muted by social or technological interference — are heard?

     


    [1] Parker-Starbuck, Jennifer, Cyborg Theatre: Corporeal/Technological Intersections in Multimedia Performance (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, 2014), 92.


    About the Author
  • ———
    on Thur, Apr 09, 2020, at 07:45 AM,la tagueuse élégante <catharine.cary@free.fr> wrote:
    Dear Dadpop,

     

    So I have this idea.  I am imagining I have the run of a small theatre’s lobby for a year. By painting, papering, drawing and writing, gluing, designing, pasting, and adding on its walls, I imagine that after a year, after many shows and many patrons walking in and through, the theatre lobby will be one square meter smaller, its walls containing all the ideas, all over each other, wrapping from the interior, like the reverse of wrapping yarn around a ball.  The ideas become architecture. If I were to do a design, it would look like this:

     

    smaller
    My question: if the lobby were
    10 square meters
    15 square meters
    or
    20 square meters
    for each of these scenarios, what would be
    the thickness of my “tapestry” have to be,
    to take away 1 square meter total?
    Let’s assume the door is 60 cm. wide.
    can you calculate that?
    love and appreciation from,
    your troublesome second daughter
    ———
    On 10 Apr 2020, at 00:19, John W. Cary <divotness@fastmail.comwrote:
     
    The “lost area” figures you are requesting are a function of perimeter. The lost area is the product of perimeter and the thickness of your tapestry. Thus area alone is insufficient data.

     

    For example, at 20 sq meters, if your room is 10×2 meters, the perimeter is 10+2+10+2 or
    24 and the lost area 24 times the thickness of your tapestry. If the room was instead 40×1/2 meters, the perimeter is 40+40+1/2 +1/2=8 1and the lost area is 81 times the thickness of your  tapestry. Obviously, the long skinny room would result in a thinner layer to make up 1 sq meter lost. I need width and length to do the calculations.
    Dad

     

    ———
    On Sat, April 11, 2020 at 11:19 AM, la tagueuse élégante <catharine.cary@free.fr> wrote:
     
    hi again,
    the estimated width of the room is 3 meters and the length 5 meters, can
    you figure it out now? Right nOW!!!! before you get on your plane?   My proposal is due on Thursday! thank you so very much,
    xx

     

    ———
    On Sat, April 12, 2020 at 00:19 AM, John W. Cary <divotness@fastmail.comwrote:
     
    If the room you have in the theatre lobby is 3 x 15 meters, the total area is 3×5=15m2.The net length of the tapestry is 2x(3+5-2t)= (16 – 4t) m, where t is thickness of the the tapestry and reduction is made for corner overlap.
    The lost area (you want 1 sqm) is the net length x t = (16-4t)t or 16t-4   t squared.
    At lost area equal to 1 sqm, 16t-4tsq = 1. Simplifying to 16t-4tsq-1=0. Dividing by 16 yields t-1/4tsq-1/16=0.
    Assuming t is small, we can discount 1/4t(sq) as “too small to matter,” then this reduces to t-1/16=0 or t = 1/16 m or .0625m or 6.25cm at 2.54cm/in, that works out in the American system to about 2 1/2
    inches.  as a check, our estimate of net length is 16t so the lost area should be 16 x . 0625 which equals exactly 1 sq m.
    This may be correct.
    Dad

    About the Author

    This text responds to the call for “makeshift configurations across media.” In Imagined Theatres 04, “we imagine a release.” But surely this imagining is forestalled. Even the title of this piece provokes feelings of close quarters and claustrophobia: the smallness of the world when it shrinks rather than amplifies.

    Let’s be clear: “the emergency” is not only the pandemic, but also how this event has made visible so many fractures and heightened levels of criminal negligence, in the United States and elsewhere. The responses have often been hyperbolic, ridiculous – or they would be if images of red-neck militias didn’t go viral. In my world, there is a hyperactive drive towards video streaming and the mania of everyone jogging, as if to keep us all fit for capitalism’s imminent return. We should just stop for a while. Bojana Kunst’s “A letter to the performance artist” writes about the need for imagination and creative practice to be aligned with “caring with the conditions of life for all” (2020). And we must not forget that the virus is biopolitical and that the existential problem of the overheating Earth is still with us.

    THE WORLD GETTING SMALLER imagines the theatre as an organic-cybernetic art installation in which the presence of theatre is an accretion growing into its walls. The longer it is there and the more “skin-in-the-game,” the smaller the space becomes. The references to our situation are seen in the mathematical framing of the piece: one thing leads to another and space is thickened and flattened. Such a theatre might function like a democracy wall: paste on the ideas – the more the better – then gather the people and debate!

    Democracy Wall? 14 Street Union Square subway December 2, 2016. Photo: Peter Eckersall

    But one can’t be too sure. The times are not democratic. I think of August Strindberg’s dystopian morality play, A Dream Play (1901), in which Agnes, the daughter of the God Indra, visits Earth to see the extent of human suffering with her own eyes. In a scene with an impoverished Lawyer and a woman named Kristine, Agnes experiences first-hand how poverty and suffering defeat all attempts to keep the darkness at bay. Kristine is seen trying to paste over the gaps in the window frame of the rickety Lawyer’s office:

    DAUGHTER: Poor, poor human beings! And this pasting! (She bows her head in silent despair)
    KRISTINE: I’m pasting. I’m pasting. (1981: 229)

    Like A Dream Play, THE WORLD GETTING SMALLER is about the monotony of pasting: the accretion of layers equals the shrinking of space. The text includes an urgent request to the writer’s mathematically inclined father to solve the equation of space: “Right nOW!!!! before you get on your plane.” The speedy-slow of now, ideas seeping into walls and thickening, the insistence on immediate production – all intensifications. The piece draws our attention to how so many things are made as the outcome of the need to keep busy – and maybe these things don’t always help.

    More distance, more space, less pasting over the cracks.

     

     


    References cited

    Bojana Kunst, ‘Lockdown Theatre (2): Beyond the time of the right care: A letter to the performance artist.’ https://neu.schauspielhaus.ch/de/journal/18226/lockdown-theatre-2-beyond-the-time-of-the-right-care-a-letter-to-the-performance-artist. Accessed May 13, 2020.

    August Strindberg, Five Plays. Translated by Harry G. Carlson. University of California Press. 1981.


    About the Author
  • —– ACT 1.0 —–

    [01] post SCORE001:

    Unix timestamp decode: 2020-04-08 13:47:04
    Message uses UNKNOWN encryption algorithm. Message adapted by author. Suggested algorithm: Message=Score > Interpret as Chaos_Map… > Perform as Score_001.





    M̷̅̃̈̏͐̐̈ͭ̄̾͊ͯ͏̥͕̗̹ä̵̙͎͙̞̼̗͎͔͙̜̙̜͕̩̽͂͟ͅr̷̡͙̬̰̟̪͖̥̘̰̔ͤ̂̍̏ͦ̒͊ͤ̏̈́ͯͩͫ̔͑̽̒́̀k̾ͣ̑ͩͯ́ s̷̸͓̳͈̯̪̖͖̫̘̫̬͌͋͑̌ͨͣͤͣ̅̋͂̿̀̉͗͛̃̅͂̀͜͡lą̢̱̮̣͕̠̼̤̮͖̰̹̰̟̻̲̫͈̮ͯ͋̿̈́͗͛ͦ̎̐̈ͨ͐̍̚v̶̢͎̞̘͙ͦ̏ͤͣ̊͑͊͆͢͞e̅s̴̪͔͙͕̪̺̺͔ͥͥͮͫ̾͒̿ͬͧ͌ͣ̾ͣ̾̀ͩ̏͘͘͟ o͒͑ͨͤ̑ͦ̄ͧ́͏̶̡̮̙̜͔̮ṉ̡̘̼̲͈͚̱͉͕̤̉̑͂ͬ̚͢͝ ̶̧̲̤̭͇͈͓͈͓̣̲̜̰̘̥̰͔͙̥͌͐ͣ̔͒̏ͭ̈̏̒́͜͞t̵̙͓̪̗̫̤̼͎͎̙̬̗̰ͦ̒̾ͥ̚͢ͅh̵̠̩͍̼̙͕̝̙͕̫̼̗͇̻̭͕̺̔̐̌́̈́́ͭ͗̎̀̉̄͗̄͘͜͞ͅè̢̢̈ͧ̽ͣͮͣͧ͑͛̆͜͞҉̤͉̯̻̭̺͙̦̲̭̟̫̫͓͙̳ͅͅ ̵͍̫̠̳̙̝̦̮͗͊̑͌̄͊̓ͧͦͣͦͣͯ̆̕͞͡͠ͅs̵͕͔̥͖̉̈́̍ͤ͛ͯ̂͑ͭ͂ͥͫ͘ͅt̢̩͕̙̣͓͈͓̿̽ͯ͛ͥ̅̇ͬͭ͊̈́̿̈́̿͗̾̿ȏ̴̪̪̞̜̬̖͚̥̦̱̼̞̼̜͈̒͐̚ņ̙̟͕̺̙̞̪̙̱̪̖̹͙̮̗̭̯ͧ̈́ͯ̋̉́͂̾ͥ͟ȩ̾̍͛͌͏̟̻͎͚̯̣͉̟̝̩̯͚̺͙̱͔̫̹s̵̢̻͚̩͇̼̳̗̘̦̮̻͉̝̟̥͓̦̱̈́̈͊̃̀ͩ͆ͯ̀ͬ̅͆ͪ̋͌ͨ.̶̞͎̝̜̼̱̪͙̤̜̫͖̈ͦͪ̂͊͌͢͢͝ m̵̵̶̥͍͍̥̳̔͊̿ͬ̈́͊̄̏͂̌͗ͫ̏͟͞ǫ̝̺̞͎̥͎̣̱͔ͮ́̇ͬͪͮ̋͢ű̶̶̵̙̞͉̤̥͔͎̺̳͎̻̯̭͎̻̬̇ͣ̂ͧ̆͐͢͝t̴̨̡̲̹͔̗͇̹͍̬͚̖̦̝͔̗̟̟͙͗ͭͨ̉̽ͩ̈̈̏̽͑͋͑ͯ̾̚͠ͅḩ̛̲̠͈̬̦̯̑̀̅͑ͫ͗̽ͩͪ̎̓s͊͌̾ͦ̒͂̄͐̐̐͒͆̄̋̉ ̓̽̈́ͣ̀͂̈̉ͬ͋͂ͨ̿̍̎̓͢҉͏ a̡̡̬͔̼̳͍̤̙̞͈͎̗̺̞̮͖͉̣͑̽ͨ̌ͮ̉̔̂͝͡g̋ͯͯͤ̉ͣ͌ͥͣ͆̌̎ͦͥͮ͏̟̘̭̪̯̜̻̯̩̞̟̩̗̩̳̞̖̩͠a̶̶̵͌͌̏̊ͭ͒͊̔̿̐̋ͥ҉҉̗̯̗̗͍̯͎͍̣͍̺̲̙͉p̴̢͕̗̬͚̗̟̫̺̩ͬ́̒ͮ̍̂͜ͅe̓͊̓ͮ̍̇̎ͪ̒̽̆ͮ̅̀̍̆̽͂͟͝҉̰̱̣̟͓̱̜̙̠͓̹̟͍̜̖.̡̘͎̘͔͔̣̪̥̬͉͎͈̥̇̅ͦͤ̎̎ͤ̂̕͠͝ ̵̸̷̥̣̬͕͓̭̥̳͇̼̟͙̘̦̼̣̬̳ͬͣͩ͒͠͠ Ṫ̵̵͈̥͎͇̹͕̟̳̱͒ͩ̋ͣ̉͂̌̓͛̈͡͠h̴̪̗̦͈̭̄̋ͩ̽̑́̊̾̍̊̃ͨ̈́̂̓̇̓ͯ̕e̎ͧͤ͒̿͗ͭ̾ͩͫͦ̑̆ͦ͆̏̚҉̪̳̖͎̭̼͔̯̦͉̜̗̹͍̀ ̡̣̗͉͓̾͂̔ͨ̽̊͂ͬ̽ͣ͊̕͢s̷̸͓̳͈̯̪̖͖̫̘̫̬͌͋͑̌ͨͣͤͣ̅̋͂̿̀̉͗͛̃̅͂̀͜͡lą̢̱̮̣͕̠̼̤̮͖̰̹̰̟̻̲̫͈̮ͯ͋̿̈́͗͛ͦ̎̐̈ͨ͐̍̚v̶̢͎̞̘͙ͦ̏ͤͣ̊͑͊͆͢͞e̅ ȩ̵̧͖̯͖͎̰̜̩͈̥̩̥̫̩͖̤ͮͥ͊͗͑͂̀ͫ̀ͩ̀̀͟x̧̒̌̄́̚̕͞͏̬̠͙͙͎͓̣͈̘͕͚͉̭̬͈̼̙p̵̪̩͕̗̞ͧ̐́̈ͯ͆͗̊̕͟ę̴̳̱̱̘̦̰̮͉̘̲͕̻͓̤͚̞̜ͧ̊ͤ̓͜͞c̶̷͕̲̟̩̮̣̠̫̆̇͗̅͌͗ͤtͭ̔͋̋ͩ͌̚͏̘̰̭̠͈͚̳̜̹͖̝͍̱́͡s͊͌̾ͦ̒͂̄͐̐̐͒͆̄̋̉ ̓̽̈́ͣ̀͂̈̉ͬ͋͂ͨ̿̍̎̓͢҉͏ f̢͈̭̯̯̻ͤͤͧ̍̚̕l̴̵̡̨̰̬̞̺̳̯͖͎͛ͥ̃͌͂̈̑͒̇̉a̡͕͎͙͉͍̼̹̠̲̞̤̖̩͌ͪ̏̎̆̍̉͐̇͛ͥ̏͌͊͊́́͠͝m̵̢̛̫̟͕̥͇̠̲̰̭̙͇̰̣̮̭̹̿̂͌̂̒͂̚͘͜ͅȅ̴͚̝̱̦̥̜͕̩͙̮̄̈́ͪͤ̈́́̋̓ͮ̇̂̎̽̐̎ͬͦ͗̕͢͠





     

    —– ACT 2.0 —–

    [02] post ANALYSIS_Protocol:

    Unix timestamp decode: 2020-04-08 13:54:38
    Running message decryption algorithm: Define language units > Split > Translate > Reconstruct.

    […]Splitting language units[…]

    Mark // slaves // on the stones. // mouths // agape. // The slave // expects // flame

    ACTION FEED:

    Units from SCORE001: translated to: Language_Bulgarian.

    Units parsed from Language_Bulgarian to: Language_English_UK. Executing output:

    Mark:

    She gave me that, too.

    slaves:

    The one who’s been in the way of being in Nedorazliva and unattached. From this city, who contacted the one who contacted the one who contacted the one who contacted the one who was in this city.

    on the stones.:

    And to give up that to take a walk from this town, which has passed, that it is better to devote himself to getting this. From this town, from 1998.

    mouths:

    And to pray that I will be struck, that it is better to devote myself to this, that it is better to devote yourself to this to be struck by this. She gave me this town, too.

    agape.:

    And on that day, from 1998 onwards.

    The slave:

    From this city, take advantage of what I inherited. And to Polûbâ, and pray to show up in what is better to do.

    expects:

    This city is being made and headed for – from this town that has been arguing with me, it will get something.

    flame:

    And intervene. From the one who’s been through it, it’s better to get it.

     

     

     

     

    N.B. The ACT 1.0 coded text is derived from Reddit thread content /r/f04cb41f154db2f05a4a/. Thanks to the lead user and subsequent contributors.


    About the Author

    // RUN

    Collaborating with technology, or at least supplanting some of our own creative capacity, requires a setting of processes and rules. As humans, we speak of rules that are ‘there to be broken’.

    > Message SCORE001 >

    :looks akin to a soundwave, or a topological map. Inspires and invokes movement, whether auditory or physical. Appears as if the words are the epicentre of a kinaesthetic energy, pulsing out in beams of symbolism and potential meanings. In the shape of potentiality – a distant message is transmitted, waiting for an answer.

     

    [03] post 1349620762:

    Unix timestamp decode: 2012-10-07 10:39:22

    I feel so alone

    Why won’t anybody respond[1]

     

     

    > Interpret as Chaos_Map >

    : a method of producing random and unrepeatable combinations, either as an interactive tool for users to create their own performance scores, or as an instruction guide on how this could be achieved.

    One such Chaos Map, in mathematics, is that of ‘Alfred’s Cat’ which works on the basis of image manipulation, applying the same formula to manipulate the image repeatedly and sequentially. In effect this is akin to folding a piece of paper, folding it again, and so forth. Once it undergoes a certain number of manipulations, it eventually returns to the original image. This means that an output image is not true-random, but a randomised selection of one of its discrete manipulations (like a numbered frame of a movie). [2]

     

    // DRIFT

    In his book Uncreative Writing, Kenneth Goldsmith brings into the digital arena the words of Guy Debord. Goldsmith suggests that Debord’s concept of Détournement ‘is a way of taking existing objects, words, ideas, artworks, media, etc., and using them differently so that they become entirely new experiences.’[3]

    Via Debord’s related concept of the Dérive one ‘meant to renew the urban experience by intentionally moving through our urban spaces without intention, opening ourselves up to the spectacle and theater that is the city.’[4]

    The original aim: to create an algorithmic score that instructs and provokes a web-based ‘derive’.

    As familiar as our urban movements are, our cyber-ramblings tend to be equally prescribed … We could break out by randomly clicking from one link to another, viewing a Web surfing session as dérive.[5]

    My virtual journey began on a website of ‘random generators’. A generator called ‘random biggest mysteries uncovered on reddit’ led me to a Reddit thread from 2012 in which a user nicknamed ‘f04cb’ filed multiple posts, containing fragments: a series of numbers, encrypted codes for other users to crack. Over the following 7 years many people contributed to the code-cracking exercise:

    /u/Kylix: … post titles are in Unix Timestamp format. … It is possible that the columns/rows are jumbled up to throw off the decryption tool, or the “garbage” could be used to form a picture, but not confirmed.

    … Yep … I think Base64 is the right code, but this person may be encrypting using a modified version of it. I’m also starting to think this could simply a substitution cipher … haven’t had time to test it yet…[6]

    The number sequences themselves, or cryptographs, turned out to reveal hidden messages, such as those at the top of this page. In one specific post f04cb had used plain text, saying: ‘please help us’[7]. When viewing the source-code for this post’s webpage, a longer message could be found buried in nonsensical symbol and lettering, embedded within the webpage source-code[8] itself. This message was scrambled and obscured.

    This ‘garbage’ was ‘used to form a picture’: the obscured text was appropriated as the basis for this score. I have less interest in figuring out how the text was scrambled, instead taking this as the basis for creating a new language, or code, of its own. The message was pasted into a word document, ‘slices’ of the message were randomly selected, then these sliced fragments were processed through the software’s inbuilt translate function. The findings were such that the symbols could be read as ‘English’ when translating into specific non-roman languages. As Bulgarian was the first I had discovered, by the law of dérive, this was the ‘language’ for re-coding the text. The Bulgarian phrases were then translated back into English, to produce a new détournement of these language-fragments.

    Some human capacity of manipulation was then applied to achieve combinations that were more ‘aesthetically’ or linguistically pleasing, and a new ‘original’ text-image was crafted for ACT 1.0. It is important, perhaps, to consider that the project really began at the point where the ‘please help us’ post’s source-code was manipulated by a human user in the first place: in the layering of ‘human’ language within that of the abstracted mechanisms of the ‘View Source’ page itself. Once a new user comments on the post thread this also then appears within the source-code of that page.

    A now-original code-message in ACT 1.0 is fixed. It is a fixed image that marks one possibility out of a multitude of others. The very slightest of alterations to the scope of each ‘slice’ of this (or the source) text can produce wildly different outcomes. The resulting performative text in ACT 2.0 is just one example of the possible outcomes thereafter.

    The performance score includes an abstraction of its process, as an algorithm in itself, so that future readers might also ‘decode’ its making and perform detournements, producing their own versions of the text. Different slices can be selected, rearranged into different orders, or perhaps a combination of both. With the addition of parsing these through another compatible language, this project has vast but finite possibilities that can be manipulated by following its process (one might think of these as small acts of disrepair?).

    Perhaps, hereafter, an algorithm could be generated to automatically run various combinations of these variables…

    Translation_Error >

    Without the assistance of chaos, Nedorazliva might never have come to be.

     

    // REBOOT?

     

     

     

     

     

     

     


    [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/f04cb41f154db2f05a4a/comments/6uqkwv/decryptions_of_all_messages/

    [2] https://www.jasondavies.com/catmap/

    [3] Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age (Columbia University Press, 2011), 38.

    [4] Goldsmith, 36.

    [5] Goldsmith. 41.

    [6] https://www.reddit.com/r/GetMotivated/comments/15lqsz/reddit_get_motivated_help_us_solve_this_mystery/

    [7] https://www.reddit.com/r/f04cb41f154db2f05a4a/comments/115niq/1349729397/?sort=old

    [8] https://www.reddit.com/r/f04cb41f154db2f05a4a/comments/115niq/1349729397/?sort=old


    About the Author
  • a distance investigation on writing and transmitting scores (2016-present)

     

    Couchscore works with and through distance to make a choreography possible even when the performers – and the audience – are not in the same physical place. We started by considering the apparent absence of the body as a potential for a de-localized presence. We referred immediately to the Web and its specific capacities: so not only the power of simultaneity in video calls, but also the possibility of creation through a focus on distance, interaction, sharing, co-presence. To dig deeper into these aspects we chose the score as our main tool and common ground, as a means of developing structures to be tested in front of a webcam and co-executed on Google Hangouts. We wrote a score for bodies, webcam, and viewers. It defined a sharing of time and of a decentralized space – not the one and only space of the event but one possible space of simultaneous events and spaces. In the same way, while performing the score, our executions are three possible interpretations of the original score: the aspect of transmitting a score came into play. The simultaneous executions of the score on Google Hangouts can be viewed both by directly taking part in the hangout or through a youtube link to the live streaming. Starting from the feedback collected from the viewers, the score is updated and so it evolves continuously, making the audience an active part of the creative process.

    The following text is a collection of scores used during the process. It shows the evolution, also in the writing structure, of the instructions that we gave ourselves to establish and develop a relationship through the camera. The score started with some initial directions and evolved gradually, according to a meticulous work of redefinition, observation, action of the body moving in a specific setting during a specific time frame. The score is meant to be executed, and its written value is relevant only to the performers, while the audience watches its embodiment. It has also worked as documentation of the process so far as it has evolved through 13 iterations.

    The specific vocabulary developed by the performers became a code, internal to the research group. The writing has been here adapted for a clearer comprehension for the reader. The scores are composed of different kinds of instructions that concern the quality of movement during the execution, but also moments when the three bodies must be coordinated in space and time. We called these moments “appointments.” The score can be interpreted with great latitude by the performers, but the appointments define exact tasks and movements to accomplish.

     

    Score_01

    Without being visible in the frame of the shot, make a (common) sound to determine the start of the execution.

    Place the camera very close so that the shot focuses on one body part. Never show your face and head in the shot.

    Start crossing the field of the frame with your hands – your feet have to be the last part to enter and leave the frame. It should be as if your whole body were unfolding, expanding horizontally.

    During the crossing, pause for at least three breaks, with the aim of playing with shapes, forming diagonals which will relate one’s body to the framing and to the objects in the frame. (It can become at times an almost photographic kind of work with slow transitions from one composition to the other.)

    One of the three breaks has to happen when half of the body is within the frame. For some seconds after this break, work actively only with the half of the body that is not visible in the frame.

     

    Score_02

    As Score_01 with the following variations:

    Appointments

    → Bestiary appointment (at 4:00 min): using different parts of the bodies, the performers compose a single body across the four google hangout windows. [1]

     

    Score_03

    As Score_02 with the following variations:

    Space

    → Highlight the depth of the space.

    Time

    → Relate each break to the activity of the other miniatures (on the other screens) focusing on the dynamic of co-presence across all the bodies. Each break is an individual response to what the other performers are doing.

    Movement

    → Use extreme zoom to shift focus between single body parts and a wider graphic writing of compositional space. Use zoom to exit from the frame, to change the scene, to incorporate black screens in montage.

    → Actions starting in one miniature are then developed by the others.

    Appointments

    → Visual appointment (between 4:00 and 7:30 min): half of the frame is filled by the body, the other half by the space.

     

    Score_13

    As Score_03 with the following variations:

    Space / Element of complexity

    → Individual tasks: Alessio – change of framing (tracking shot and zoom); Elisa – accumulation of new elements in the framing; Francesco – change of an element already present in the framing (ex. shifting carpet).

    Time

    → Allow for a collective break (all the three bodies stopping at the same time) or for the possibility of one body stopping while the other two develop a similar movement dynamic with different body parts.

    Movement

    → Use noise to make your own image bigger. You can  deliberately create a collective break (all the three bodies stop at the same time) or stop your body while the other two are developing a similar movement dynamic (in terms for example of speed).

    Appointments

    → Hanging arm (3:30 min): different dynamics of swinging.

    → Speed appointment (5:30 min): repetition or different dynamic of one movement.

    → Time appointment (7:30/7:45 min): foot zooming in/out, coordinated with others.

    → Mountain appointment (8:30 min): entering and exiting in a cannon.

    Ending

    → Alternation of screens without bodies, thus isolating the transformations of the scenic landscape that have happened during the performance.


    NOTES:

    [1] Bestiario (bestiary) is an iconographic representation from the Middle Ages of imaginary beasts usually composed of parts from different animals.

     

    SAMPLES:

    Behind the scenes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGGeYs_wx8U

    Score 09 at Arnolfini (UK), 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lOZbzQSzjc

    Score 12 at Garabato Theatre (IT), 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Du9r9Fwqg64&feature=youtu.be

     

    traces of me are what remain in this container
    
    
       when I close my eyes, this apartment is a faded light
         when I close my eyes, we begin to doubt
           2D, 3D, 4D, 5D, 6D, 7D and you said
             there was no curtain, we made the right decision
               to escape, I said
                 on the tip of your fingers
                   is my subconscious, or my intuition
                     which is not given, it is taught
    
    
    

    This score needs the help of another person and at least 2 more screens (you can use your phone as one screen). It demands some level of exposure. You need to:

    1. Document yourself every day over the coming two weeks. The material that you document can take the form of a video, or any other visual or audio material that makes sense for you. The documentation shall represent various encounters during your day, in somewhat of a casual form.
    2. By the end of the two weeks, gather your archive and collage it into an assemblage of media of different durations.
    3. The gathered media shall be presented on several screens across your apartment, preferably in surprising locations, such as: inside the fridge, under the bed, inside the closet, on the toilet.
    4. Alongside the screen that would present your archive, you are asked to record an audio guide to accompany the tour of your apartment, in which you explain the videos and add further information about the place and about its afterlife. Use your imagination to describe the future of your apartment, its subsequent inhabitants and its composition in 100 or 1,000 years.
    5. You must leave your apartment to expose the archive via zoom or another platform for live streaming. Ask someone else to serve as the operator of the event. They will walk the online viewers through the empty apartment, playing the audio guide as well as the various media located across your flat. The operator will not appear on screen themself.
    6. At the end of the performance you will knock on the door of your own apartment and the viewers will get to see you visit your own home as they have just done. In conclusion, read for them the text that is at the top of this page and invite them to make their own traces of me are what remain in this container score.

     

    *The score was thought of and developed alongside Esther Manon Siddiquie.


    About the Author
  • for all prisoners of love

     

    ACT I

    FADE TO BLACK:

    FADE TO MOVIE SCREEN DISPLAYING BALCONY:

     

    we open on a man in his thirties standing on the balcony, he looks out at the city as fairy lights twinkle in his eyes and all over frame. the audience is becoming restless — they want blood. the man turns to us, staring down the camera with a smile.

     

    BALCONY

    No balcony.

     

    there is no longer a balcony, the man falls through the flags of denmark, canada, england and mexico. the audience cheers — the man is only to be saved by a large pile of dollars. he pats himself to be sure he is not hurt then gets up and walks away to: a scorched new york — the audience boos but also gives a standing ovation as we see our film screen getting bigger and bigger: “THE END” it proclaims.

     

    BALCONY

    No balcony.

     

    WE FADE TO BLACK:

     

     

     

    ACT II CONTRA LE BALCON

    Soundtrack: Pigeons Are Black Doves (2017, Cauleen Smith)
    Word-images projected onto La Isla de Manhattan:
    SARS-CoV-2 like snowflakes or
         dust motes or Mardi Gras 
    beads unstrung            ash 
    falling          tiny planets 
    orbit a Xmas tree
            ornaments      lit up 
    in a window across the 
    street                 (catty 
       corner 
    north           by northeast)
    
    

     

    As the sun sets, families roost on balconies. Like pigeons. Unlike pigeons. They flock to the cheering, pounding pots and pans with the backs of wooden spoons.

    Photographer #1 (click, cluck):
    Merciiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii
    iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii
    
    Horns honk (solidarity sans PPE).
    
    Photographer #2 (casi unx cacerolerx; six degrees____________six feet of separation):
    Reality, TV?! “Who was that unmasked Man?!” 
    
    The numbers (“What a roaring!”):
    
    
    Chorus: Twinkle, twinkle,
                   as Empire is to State,
                       allusion is to illusion.
                   “The beginning is near.”
                               Dum, dum.
                                   TAN, TAN
    
    
    
    
    
    
    ACT III

    Scene 1:

    [From somewhere in the hot zone]

    The Balcony stares at the high tower of Empire with its constantly shifting candy-colored dreams. Is the Empire attempting to communicate its state of needs, its state of reclining beyond the unknown unknown, its antenna calling forth tik-tok-ing times that touch the empty but deep blue sky, as if trying to remember something it has lost or never really had?

    Time to take our tempo-sure!

    We Zapatistas have always worn our masks.

    To cover ourselves from the spittle of Empire states.

    Scene 2:

    [The Balcony stands and sings]

    Stop plaguing me with your faulty questions, stop plaguing me with your aping power demands, stop plaguing me with your overreaching wildfires and flaming fake-outs. Apocalypse was worth a smoke once. Now even that song is no longer worth the transmission it came in on:

    Oh Empire, Oh Empire(s), your just-in-time scales don’t make a lick of sense now, or even then, or the day after tomorrow. You are just another care-worn virus too ill even to infect itself.

    [A very long Pinter pause]

    Scene 3:

    [The Balcony whispers to the balcony next door]

    We are all related to tinny-tiny-things that touch-us-with-out-us; they are more us than we are. We sing of the body eclectic and await our self-imposed care to open our doors, our pots and pans, our hallways, our codes, our slow drifts, our contagious etymologies:

    care (v)

    Old English carian, cearian “be anxious or solicitous; grieve; feel concern or interest,” from Proto-Germanic *karo- “lament,” hence “grief, care” (source also of Old Saxon karon “to lament, to care, to sorrow, complain,” Old High German charon “complain, lament,” Gothic karon “be anxious”), said to be from PIE root *gar- “cry out, call, scream” (source also of Irish gairm “shout, cry, call;” see garrulous).

    Scene 4:

    [The Balcony washing its hands while singing: “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair”]

    No matter what orange stupidities crawl out of Empire’s faulty towers trumpeting.

    We Dis(c)obedience dal balcones will continue to become attuned to other colors out of space beyond your Empire’s overreaching quarantinas-without-vision.

    We Balconies will continue to sing our endless songs, our revolutionary shouts and pings:

    “Other worlds are possible even in impossible times!”

     

     

    (re) membering the balcony—a response in 9 associations

     

    1. The Other Balcony per Genet is not the first time Marcos has appeared in a production of the Balcony. It was in 1986. That was the year Joanne Akalaitis directed a production of the play “set in Latin America,” including a character of the same name. Her production was inspired by a 1984 visit to a maternity hospital in a former bordello run by the police for general Somoza. She ultimately hired Ruben Blades to write the soundtrack. Akalaitis’ rather misguided “Pan-Latinamericanism” aside, her performance leaned into the scenes of revolution, restoring some of the political content that was often excised.[i]

     

    1. Akalaitis’ production was roundly critiqued. Her choices seem to have failed to make evil explode on stage because they satirized a satire.[ii] Frank Rich was particularly disappointed by the production’s gesture to Latin America. Perhaps reacting to the program note that cites conditions in El Salvador, he writes: “Genet’s extraordinary work, written in 1956 and ageless, reaches a shocking nihilistic crescendo that completely obliterates a director’s parochial agenda; it’s a play that bites off history in 2,000-year cycles, not in passing headlines.”[iii]

     

    1. But passing headlines were important. 1986 was the year that Reagan gave a famous speech justifying aiding rebels against the leftist Sandinista government, which had previously overthrown General Somoza, a dictator who had for a time been propped up by the US.[iv] It was also the year that Reagan’s US Surgeon General published the first report on AIDS. A year away from AZT and the birth of Act Up, the death count by the end of the year was 24,559.[v]

     

    1. The Dominguez-Carroll production of The Balcony notably calls this play a play without distance. They resist abstraction by listing the demographics of COVID deaths in the US and literally collapsing the balcony as a stage for the theatrical possibilities of contemporary Fascism. It should be noted that Genet’s inspiration for The Balcony was the regime of Francisco Franco and the mausoleum in the play was based on one for Franco. No distance; no abstraction.[vi]

     

    1. It is clear that Genet’s play explores the dynamics of Fascism, but today, might this play also speak to the rhetorical strategies that link anti-democratic populism and Fascism under the most savage of capitalisms? Today, catering to a politics of resentment, male charismatic leaders pit the people against the elite without any structural analysis that would reveal the real conditions of oppression, or a truly liberational discourse. One must only review the end of The Balcony’s scene 7 — where Mark’s authoritarianism and desire to “write a poem to the glory of wrath, rebellion and war” overwrites Roger’s desire for a poem hailing “freedom, the people and their virtue” — to see the mechanics of a dangerous turn.[vii] Their femme heroine, it should be noted, is conspicuously absent.

     

    1. Benjamin Moffitt lays bare the faux antagonism between the media and populist leaders in our contemporary moment when he states: “Although populist actors often claim to hate the media….we know that this is empirically not true. Some of the most successful cases of populism in recent years have come from leaders who literally own or control the media.” And later: The hatred of the media that populist leaders often profess is thus perhaps better acknowledged as hatred of the media that opposed them or is critical of them.[viii]

     

    1. It should be noted that the history of populism in the Americas is deeply entwined with the history of the balcony. The balcony of Evita Peron’s casa rosada is ground zero of populist imagining that sutures elite actors (en los dos sentidos) to the affective loyalty of los de abajo—a perhaps noble impulse gone horribly wrong. But in the Dominguez-Carroll world, the balconies reject the lies of media. Can this imagined theatre be a way out? I hope so.

     

    1. And what of the tactics of revolutionaries and their co-option? The cacerolerx is a way to say no when words are not working or cannot be said. Remember: Chile, Montreal, Argentina, amongst others. Today, the banging of pots and pans are greetings for nurses and health care workers being sent to slaughter as they care for the victims of a genocidaire. I detect an irony in “casi unx cacerolerx,” and it stings. This play recognizes “the explosion of evil” as a present reality.

     

    1. But to return. Genet’s play ends in post-revolutionary regression and the offstage sound of machine gun fire. The Other Balcony per Genet does not. Instead it ends with subcomandante Marcos’s words: “Other worlds are possible, even in impossible times.” And that is where I will end, too.

     

     


    [i] See Andrea J. Noureyh, “Joanne Akalaitis: Post Modern Director or Socio-Social Critic,” Theatre Topics, 1.2 ( Sept. 1991): 183.

    [ii] See Barbara Rugen, “Rev. of The Balcony,” Theatre Journal, Vol. 38.4 (December 1986), 473-475, Arthur Holmberg, “Rev. of The Balcony,” Performing Arts Journal, Vol 10.1 (1986): 43-46, Frank Rich, “Theater: The Balconey at Harvard,” New York Times, January 23rd, 1986: C19, and Alan Bunce, “Circus-like Production of the ‘Balcony’ dilutes Genet’s ironies.” Christian Science Monitor. March 4, 1986. Accessed online.

    [iii] Rich, C19. Rugen comments on the program note on page 474 of her review.

    [iv] The Transcript of Reagan’s speech was printed in the New York Times. March 17.  1986: A12.

    [v] Statistics are available on the AMFAR website. Accessed May 28, 2020 at https://www.amfar.org/thirty-years-of-hiv/aids-snapshots-of-an-epidemic/

    [vi] This anecdote is well known, but can be found in Jeannette L. Savona, Jean Genet. London: Macmillan Press, 1983: 77.

    [vii] Cite Jean Genet, The Balcony, translated by Bernard Frechtman,  in Nine Plays for the American Theatre, edited and with an introduction by Harold Clurman. New York: Grove Press, 1981: 351.

    [viii] See Benjamin Moffitt, The Global Rise of Capitalism, Stanford, CA: Stanford U Press, 81-82.


    About the Author
  • It must be with the sound of bells,
    bells that play longer than usual, which we perceive more clearly
    because our senses have been resting for a long time now.
    We listen to them with more devotion.
    The general feeling is neither happiness nor sadness.
    The action takes place using only what is already at hand,
    only with what is necessary.
    In a single place and at a single time, shared by everyone.
    Without horizon.
    Everyone must keep an object in hand,
    and it must be chosen because it smells as yourself.
    The costumes must be things that have not left the house,
    that haven’t reached the outside,
    because of this they are safety garments,
    which protect you without shutting you in,
    wrapping yourself in a continuous embrace.
    Walking will be lunar, like walking on polenta.
    Everybody feels observed in their empty rooms.
    There is no contact between bodies.
    Initially one can hardly see because of the fog, the perception of
    forms will be blurred by smoke, the mind will need to foresee the objects
    and the actions.
    During a difficult scene, to fill a void, one can utter the words
    “too much.”
    The duration of this show is unknowable. Maybe there will be time to learn
    another way to live on stage.
    There are no hours in the day anymore.
    Once entered, it is unknown whether it will be possible to get out,
    but for sure it will be possible to attend.
    A beam of light turns on.
    Everyone imagines looking outside
    at the sun cutting the windows, not the wall.
    A warm waft is left out,
    as the sound of daily life displaced.
    The noise of people.
    Wind blowing.
    They look for themselves where they are not.
    Until everybody gathers at the center, around the same constraint.
    Somebody asks, “What does one need to live?”
    Only then nobody feels alone anymore.
    All recognize themselves as part of the group,
    and finally embody it.
    Everybody imagines returning to a savageness,
    to their minimum,
    imagines becoming a plant.
    It needs light.
    All the lights in the theatre turn on.
    Applause.
    Dark.

    About the Author
    The people who wrote me were not aware;
    they didn’t know that everything would become a show.
    I didn’t tell them they would be the protagonists,
    the Dramatis Personae, who would act on stage through their thoughts,
    their words, their images. The machinists, the sound technicians.
    The scenographers.
    From beginning to end it would be about them.
    Together they would be part of a choir.

    I choose not to tell them because I needed a strategy,
    albeit an unorthodox one, to bring things out.
    Not the usual ones, but the true ones.
    Not Those Things you mention at the beginning of a phone call to a friend,
    but rather the ones you hide.
    Not Those Things you can simply leave out,
    but rather the ones that come back.
    Not Those Things you can explain clearly,
    but rather the ones you lack words for.

    I asked everyone to stop, to sit in one room of the house,
    to darken the outside, to turn themselves inside out
    and to behold that dark as well, stay in it, wait, don’t overthink,
    and start writing. To write together this show about isolation.

     

    For the past month I have collected sentences and thoughts connected to this moment that people have freely shared with me by email. Normally I use them as inspirational material for my daily practice of night drawings as part of a “Diary of the Isolation,” but I have started to conceive of these sentences as lines and descriptions from an imagined theatre piece. The boldface text is selected from this broader collection of emails.

    About the Author

    Silvia Costa’s works convey impressions that may have briefly crossed our mind, or may linger permanently inside us. These drawings seize encounters, enclosing them in a gesture that at the same time unfolds, narrates, tells a story, names “what is.” Minimalistic, they show humanoid figures without eyes or ears, and – most importantly – without sexual attributes; they stage beings on a white background, with no individual identity, gathering thoughts in short captions that line their silhouettes.

    Silvia’s operation also expresses how the art of a woman, as “unexpected subject” (to quote Carla Lonzi), is not only set apart because of the feminist themes it deals with – like body, sexuality, domination, exclusion, power – but rather for the ways in which it experiments and imagines her own identity as being always traversed by other entities, as something giving and receiving, something closing and opening.

    These sketches play a very serious game, putting themselves in harm’s way: with the specific practice of drawing, it is possible not only to transpose an emotion and its feeling, but also to broaden the logical possibilities of thought and of the hand that carries it. A hand also has a way of thinking of its own. With our hands we hold objects, things we can carry with us; we can hold someone else’s hand, let them guide us, or be the ones who guide. Drawing offers a way to relate that is not just visual and rational, but also haptic, meaning tactile and sentient.

    Drawing possesses the capacity to express time and movement. In this regard, drawing is closer to disciplines such as dance and music than to painting or photography. While photography stops time, freezing forever an instant, drawing—such as Silvia practices—flows with time, operating with hand and pencil not just a translation but also a transduction. In other words, it brings the gesture’s kinetic nature from the register of conscious action and willed movement to the ground of a subconscious and material flow, a durational becoming. Sewing the line to the mind, and sometimes the mind to the line, it approximates what anthropologist Tim Ingold calls a suturing action.

    I like looking at Silvia’s drawings from this perspective, as a creative process that isn’t the projection of an existing and fully formed idea on any kind of medium, but rather the expectancy, a dialogue between our own being and the material substance of our bodies and of surrounding objects – a process of cooperation, in all the meanings of this term. To correspond and cooperate with the world through drawing is to practice, following Ingold again, a graphic anthropology, an anthropography.

    If we look at these drawings more closely, this anthropography is sometimes somber, sometimes ironic and giddy. It is a movement that simultaneously investigates encasing and opening up, hiding and revealing; it is a movement always on the boundary line of dichotomies, denied in their apparent juxtaposition.


    About the Author

    The tracing of this show of isolation and for isolation stems from the exchange that in recent months Silvia has had with the voices of friends and strangers. They have sent her epigraphs and verbal suggestions which she then transformed into drawings. This arrives as an outgrowth of the process inaugurated by Sono Dentro, a three-day event in which she collected from visitors their memories of lived experiences and sensations. She synthesized the raw material of these memories into drawings that showed a sort of amplified identity.

    Silvia’s creativity has always been eruptive, as if she were freeing ideas from a state of detention. Once in the open, she does not treat these ideas as her own; they already belong to everyone, to everything. Even when she designs futures, they are ancestral. In her plots (whether drawings or works for the stage) there is a kind of free-floating intentionality without subjective origin. Current conditions have made a convergence more evident. In fact, the projects that she imagined during the quarantine in March and April 2020 concretize what is already a method for her: working on and incorporating constraints.

    In the drawings, liquid bodies gravitate, matching themselves to a singular material element with which they create an energy field. The individual melts or wedges, sprouts or rains in their Room. Pivotal figures and materials are dust, gold, black holes, beams of light, roots, a desk, a window. Looking at Silvia’s images one can imagine a sound coming from nowhere.

    It is the fantasy of a body discovering new relationships with itself.  Silvia wants to be where there are no dimensions, neither internal nor external. This is how It would be about us almost becomes an oracle of which she is the medium.

    We witness bodies enveloped in private and atomized worlds, caught between abandoning themselves to an inhuman nature and stiffening into icons. They arise from the SOS messages called out by the voices of others, the echoes of their boldface fragments re-composed into a silent choral work.


    About the Author
  • When you leave you leave the windows open and the doors    and because the house sits by the sea      by first light a film of sand gilds the floorboards and the kitchen chairs

                                                  in the upholstery the mites unconcernedly devour and shit

    and a moth turns fluttering in a pillar of light in the stairwell

     

    sand eddies in over days       and weeks            rounding  blurring
    mirrors cloud and tarnish in the bathroom and the hall        and a spider skitters over last year’s news in the kindling box

     

    on a summer night with a full-moon tide the weeping crack in the sea wall goes and the water comes in six inches deep    scalloping the sand in the kitchen into a shallow bowl from the dishwasher to the ironing board
    a hermit crab tugs determinedly on a sprig of dandelion snagged
    on a hinge    his claws cause minor avalanches

     

    pipes freeze and thaw              ghosts in the walls
                              mold then moss in the upstairs closets
    and then when

    the biting edge of a hurricane peels back the roof and the light comes in         the shell of your house weathers like the ribcage of a whale

    it smells of dirt and salt in the bathtub drain

     

    swifts roost in the shattered chimney   and the scarified pits left by raccoons in their latrine beside the bookcase   crack open and unfurl     roots blind down and sideways    a pale tendril reaching up
          and   in four springs   it’s wreathed in white              and a branch holds out a bruise-blue plum through the window like a lantern

    in the wavering shade of the screen porch an elfin-faced fox lays down to die       and when she does
    her belly blooms black with maggots and flies        a crow nuzzles her snout with his sharp dark beak

     

    the wind keens through the rafters                the steady heart-sound of the sea

     

     

    and you return      years older now and gray   and stand in what was once the doorway
                            holding    absurdly    a broom.

     

     


    About the Author

    Jacob – for that is the name given to him although he does not know it any longer – stands at the doorway, at once the surveyor and the surveilled. He is fully awake now – extricated from the gossamer threads of subconscious alertness that edge the algorithm of sleep. He instantly recognizes what woke him – a blue whale calling out to her pod. The thought bubbles briefly and then floats offstage.

    This is a dark place. The deepest part of what will be, given time, the South Pacific. Given time everything has a name including time. Jacob, who does not recall his name, remembers time.

    Lost she is, he thinks of the whale, and makes a mental note to forget these facts. The most difficult of propositions: to remember everything so that one can completely forget. And yet, this is the task, as far as Jacob can remember.

    The whale moves closer now. Jacob is still some muscle but mostly memory. His hands are already turning digital. His heart and his brain resemble those from the old days and the ones that will come thousands of years from now. The whale knows this and focuses on the flutter of Jacob’s gridwork of gills. Imagine, she thinks to herself.

    Offstage, the seaweeds work on the thick plastic bricks of the dome that Jacob inhabits. An out-of-place, Lego refuge. A submarine igloo. Each ridged brick embeds neural networks that have to be carefully disassembled. The task of forgetting has to be in tandem with Jacob’s own shape-shifting. A micron is the coagulation of two decades. That is something!

    Already, the amniotic fluid of the sea is darker. Jacob is beginning to shed zeroes and ones, setting the dark seabed ablaze. That is what the whale has come to see. She is not afraid. Whales find each other by their songs.

    There is music in the water, Jacob thinks.

    ***


    About the Author
  • A virus, which is dressed in a yellow jumpsuit, dances.

    A virus, which has a long and thin mustache, dances.

    A virus, which is really two dogs and a maid, dances.

    A virus, which is 55 years old and lives in the Highlands, dances.

    A virus, which is crazy rich, dances.

    A virus, which shimmers and refracts, dances.

    A virus, which says aloha, dances.

    A virus, which is maybe the last reincarnation, dances.

    A virus, which is just a cyborg, or any tree, or any animal, dances.

    A virus, which is a notebook and some juicy apples, dances.

    A virus, which is a giant Siamese palace, dances.

    A virus, which is a helicopter landing, dances.

    Viruses,

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    , dance.


    About the Author

    How does a virus dance? The virus in a yellow jumpsuit might, perhaps, jump and kick its legs up in the air, before landing on the ground with a loud “hai-chah” exclaimed; the virus with the thin and long moustache might stand in one corner and stroke his moustache whilst gyrating to the rhythms of the music; and the 55-year-old virus that lives in the Highlands might do anything it likes, though most probably with its movements affectively flattened.

    This dance score takes its inspiration from recent scholarship on yellowface and whitewashing practices, engaging with Felicia Chan’s definition of whitewashing as “the logical extension of yellowface, once cultural representation became divorced from human agency and subjectivity, i.e. ‘hollowed out,’ and began to be consumed as commodified artefacts” (Chan 2017: 45). The pandemic has been racialised, oft-referred to as the “Wuhan virus” and the “Chinese virus”, and anyone who passes as Chinese (or, really, of East or Southeast Asian descent) in the western world has been Othered and, in some cases, physically assaulted, violently denying them of their sense of self.

    Here, borrowing from Richard Dyer, disco dancing offers a heightened and queer way to resist these racialized and racist patterns with a new choreography: “Its eroticism allows us to rediscover our bodies as part of this materialism and the possibility of change” (Dyer 2006: 108). The spectres of whitewashing may gesture towards a lack of imagination in the representation of “Asian-ness” but there is also an asymptomatic dance. On the one hand, such empty white space raises questions about how, following Peggy Phelan (1993), the unmarked might diffuse nefarious representational tropes. On the other, the empty space also points towards the incalculable scale of the situation, not just to the (largely invisible) rising death toll of the pandemic, but also to the widespread scale of violence towards people who might pass as East and Southeast Asian in the western world.

     

     

    Works cited 

    Chan, Felicia, 2017. “Cosmopolitan Pleasures and Affects; Or, Why Are We Still Talking about Yellowface in Twenty-First-Century Cinema,” in Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media 14, pp. 41 – 60.

    Dyer, Richard, 2006. “In Defense of Disco 1979,” in New Formations 58, pp. 101 – 108.

    Phelan, Peggy, 1993. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, London: Routledge.

     

     


    About the Author
  • It looks like a small house, but is more like a utility shed that stands at the edge of the parking lot. The place inside is just big enough for a stool, a desk inside the plexiglass partition. Window. Not much else in there—a traffic cone under the ledge, a clock radio, a hotpot, a calendar from the lumber yard, a punch clock.

    Most people who park in this lot have a permit, so either the attendant waves them in, or sometimes there is no attendant, just the shack and a sign that says “permit parking only, please.” Except Sundays, which are free, but the lot is empty on Sundays and the shack has its door closed.

    At night, when most of the cars are gone, a man drives up in a green van and parks right by the hut. He is usually wearing a brown velvet tuxedo. He opens the door to the hut with a key, steps inside, and turns on the light in the little building.

    When he steps out of the hut, he is carrying the stool that is kept by the ledge inside.
    Puts that down.
    Stands on it and whistles.

    One little horse, a falabella (not much bigger than a big dog), comes out of the hut.

    He whistles again and another little horse comes out.
    Then another.
    And another.

    Then there are 12 little horses standing in a circle facing the man who is now standing on the stool. He holds his left hand up, extends his pointer finger and makes a circle motion above his head and all the horses make a full circle, this time nose to tail. The man whistles again and the horses start walking in concentric circles that get smaller and smaller until the innermost horse has to step up on top of the horse immediately in front of him.

    This continues until the horses have formed a tower, one on top of the other.

    When the man in the tuxedo steps down from his stool, the top horse jumps down and walks back into the hut, followed by the next and the next. He puts the stool back in the hut, turns the light off, shuts the door.

    The man in the brown tuxedo gets back in the green van and drives off.

    Something like this happens when most of the cars are gone.


    About the Author

    Concrete Syntax

    At the end of the service, we were all requested to form a circle and greet the person parked next to us.  It took some time to get all the cars aligned. The luxury sedans were jockeying for position rather aggressively. And the smaller coupes were trying to avoid the much larger utility vehicles, which, due to the size differential, required their drivers to crane upward out the window to converse.

    Everyone steered clear of the oil-streaked hatchback with its glass shot out, its engine vibrating like a jackhammer. The church is committed to the principle of unity and equality of all, except for them.

    Once the pairings were settled, the matter of who should be required to clamber over to the passenger seat to hear the other driver, which had not been clarified beforehand, caused much confusion and delay. Some, like myself, had deliberately avoided parking too close, requiring some additional maneuvering to bridge the distance, the cumulative rumble of idling engines having made it progressively difficult to hear.

    One driver was so angry about this that he nearly blew the roof off his convertible.

    Across the way, I noticed a red minicar that had gotten stuck with a Prime Mover, one of those mammoth homes-on-the-move that one never sees parked. I thanked the Lord that it was not me in that minicar.

    The driver with whom I was partnered was unable to lower his window, which required him to communicate with nonverbal indicators that I could not understand. My lack of comprehension caused him to pantomime in an exaggerated fashion, like a burlesque. I adjusted the zoom on my ocular fittings, then opened the door, causing a part  to fall out, but this only seemed to frighten him and he drove away.


    About the Author
  • I need to summon the spirit of Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven to help me send nudes.

     

    Lights up on a small house just outside Tallahassee, Florida.

    A woman stands alone in her living room wearing a bathrobe, iPhone in hand. She closes her eyes and removes her robe. She holds the phone in her right hand, as far away from her body as possible. She smizes. Pose. Snap. No. She can see the creases on her forehead. She turns to a large mirror.  She stands to the side and sucks in her belly. Pose. Snap. No. She hates how low her boobs hang when she turns to the side. She faces forward again and uses her upper arms to draw her breasts together. Pose. Snap. No.

    WOMAN: I need to summon the spirit of Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven to help me send nudes.

    The woman recently got divorced. She filed the paperwork a week before the pandemic turned serious in the United States. Her ex moved out the day before the lockdowns started.  

    She is trying to adjust to single life and quarantine life at the same time. She created dating profiles, a Tinder, a Hinge, but sees little point in using them since she cannot actually meet up with anyone due to social distancing. Former lovers have reached out via Instagram since she publicly announced her divorce. She contemplates sending them nudes. She imagines that it might be fun. Sending them nudes feels safer than starting something new with a stranger.

    Only problem with sending nudes is, the last time she was single and sending nudes, she was under 30 and now she is over 30 and the nudes just are not the same. She feels she has to hold her boobs together in every photo, because they fall so far off to the sides now (but then it looks awkward if she holds her boobs together in every photo). She has stretch marks on her hips. The backs of her arms jiggle. The nudes just are not the same.

    The woman wants to summon the spirit of Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven: Dada poet, divorcee, performance art pioneer, and nude art model extraordinaire. She imagines the Baroness will help her pose and will impart some much-needed moxy.

    To summon the spirit of the Baroness, the woman lights a candle, burns some sage, and places four tin cans on the ground. In the center of the four cans, the woman places 2 postage stamps, a tail-light, some Wrigley’s spearmint gum, a pussywillow kept clean, a block of stolen cheese, and some pubic hair.

    WOMAN: I summon the spirit of Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. Baroness, the only one living anywhere who dresses Dada, loves Dada, lives Dada. Dada, dada, dada, dada

    The Baroness appears. She wears a tin can bra, a tight-fitted bodysuit, a working taillight on her rear, and a bird cage with a live bird in it over her head.

    BARONESS: Ich werde Ihnen zeigen, wie man die Akte sendet!

    *The sound of an incoming message*

    A text message arrives on the woman’s phone; it’s someone from Hinge.

    BARONESS: What is this?

    WOMAN: A telegram. He says: have you found a quarantine partner yet?

    But the thing is, Baroness, I don’t know if I want a quarantine partner. You see, I just got a divorce and settling down again with some man I don’t even know seems a bit rushed. I would rather just send these nudes on Instagram to former lovers.

    BARONESS: PffttttttttT!! Braaaaaaahhhhhhh.

    WOMAN: But this man from Hinge seems like he has a great job. It might be nice to go over to his place and be his quarantine partner. Maybe he has a fridge with an ice-maker. Maybe he has Netflix.

    BARONESS: Raawwwwrrrrr. Then why did you summon me?

    WOMAN: I originally summoned you to help me send the nudes to old lovers on Instagram but then I got this message from a guy on Hinge who lives in town so now I am wondering if I should meet up with him.

    BARONESS: SEND THE NUDES!

    The Baroness undresses. This might take a while. The bird may escape the cage.

    BARONESS: Now, watch and learn. Brraaahhh.

    The woman readies her iPhone camera. The Baroness demonstrates a pose: the Baroness gets up on the woman’s ottoman, bends forward, puts her hands on her knees, lifts up her right foot, and gazes intently beyond the camera. Pose. Snap. Yes. Stunning.  

    The woman hands the camera phone to the Baroness. The woman demonstrates for the Baroness how to take the photo. The Baroness, always ahead of her time, gets it very quickly. The woman does as the Baroness did: she gets up on the ottoman, bends forward, puts her hands on her knees, lifts up her right foot, and gazes intently beyond the camera. Pose. Snap. The woman examines the photo. No. It is not right when she does it.

    BARONESS: You look like an aristocrat. 

    The woman nods in agreement.

    WOMAN: An old aristocrat.

    The Baroness has not been helpful.

    WOMAN: Can you just leave?

    BARONESS: I cannot go out the way I came in.  I live here now.

    The Baroness exits through the woman’s front door and goes out to haunt Florida as Florida Woman. 

    The woman is alone in her house again.

    *The sound of an incoming message*

    WOMAN: Hinge man says: I kind of want to play house. Come over. I’ll make you dinner.

    The woman, still unsure if this is safe on a physical level and unsure if it’s what she wants on an emotional level, opens Instagram and returns to the DMs from her former lovers. She thinks: these men have gotten older too (although she knows it’s more forgivable for men to get older than it is for women). But maybe she can forgive herself for getting older. Maybe she can send a nude.

    She gets on the ottoman, bends forward, puts her hands on her knees, lifts up her right foot, and gazes intently beyond the camera.

    Pose. Snap.


    About the Author

    A Dozen Cocktails — Please

    No spinsterlollypop for me — yes — we have
    No bananas — I got lusting palate — I
    Always eat them — — — — — —
    They have dandy celluloid tubes — all sizes —
    Tinted diabolically as a baboon’s hind-complexion.
    A man’s a —
    Piffle! Will-o’-th’-wisp! What’s the dread
    Matter with the up-to-date-American-
    Home-comforts? Bum insufficient for the
    Should-be wellgroomed upsy!
    That’s the leading question.
    There’s the vibrator — — —
    Coy flappertoy! I am adult citizen with
    Vote — I demand my unstinted share
    In roofeden — witchsabbath of our baby-
    Lonian obelisk.
    What’s radio for — if you please?
    “Eve’s dart pricks snookums upon
    Wirefence. ”
    An apple a day — — —
    It’ll come — — —
    Ha! When? I’m no tongueswallowing yogi.
    Progress is ravishing —
    It doesn’t me —

    Nudge it —
    Kick it —
    Prod it —
    Push it —
    Broadcast — — — —
    That’s the lightning idea!
    S.O.S. national shortage of — —
    What?
    How are we going to put it befitting
    Lifted upsys?
    Psh! Any sissy poet has sufficient freezing
    Chemicals in his Freudian icechest to snuff all
    Cockiness. We’ll hire one.
    Hell! Not that! That’s the trouble — —
    Cock crow — silly!
    Oh fine!
    They’re in France — the air on the line —
    The Poles — — — — — —
    Have them send waves — like candy —
    Valentines — — —
    “Say it with — — —
    Bolts!
    Oh thunder!
    Serpentine aircurrents — — —
    Hhhhhphssssssss! The very word penetrates
    I feel whoozy!
    I like that. I don’t hanker after
    Billyboys — but I am entitled
    To be deeply shocked.
    So are we — but you fill the hiatus.
    Dear — I ain’t queer — I need it straight — —
    A dozen cocktails — please — — — —

     

    (Written between 1923 and 1927; published posthumously in 1983 in Sulphur 6.)

  • March 18, 2020
    Chicago

     

    Performance as we know it and as we need it has always had an element of the impossible. That element has become more prominent.

    Like many people, we had grand plans a few days ago. We planned to fly to Rijeka, Croatia, in May to continue work on Aquarium, our large-scale performance project in collaboration with Helsinki-based artist Essi Kausalainen. We have nearly completed its composition, in advance of its scheduled premier in November. We planned to present a lecture/performance in August in Turku, Finland – a version of the event pictured below that we held in Fullerton Hall at the Art Institute of Chicago on February 14th – featuring  guest reader Sherae Rimpsey, and Essi’s costumes that transform performers into particular sea creatures, endangered and charismatic: Elise Cowin as Eyelash Seaweed and Bryan Saner as Lesser Electric Ray.

    We planned to perform Scarecrow at the University of Surrey in London in September. Now, like so many people, as we wait to learn the future of all of our plans, we turn our attention to matters of care, of service in whatever way we can, and of health, physical and mental.

    Our work has always adhered to certain guiding creative principles. One of these proposes that every stage as we find it, no matter how small, requires a smaller stage within it. Reduce the field in order to claim it as your own, to specify and situate yourself as a figure within it, to make the resistive terrain more manageable. If the setting strikes you as too small for your work, shrink it even more. In this way we have always considered the impossibilization of performance a necessity, a tactic of escape to the inside. As a practicality, the impossible reveals how even the most intractable problem arrives with its own set of strange, renewing possibilities.

    In one generative case, back in May 2019, we made a performance called –recline somberly like fallen heroes–. We created it with and for Millie Kapp and Matt Shalzi, and presented it at Regards, the Chicago gallery, in response to a suite of paintings by Matthew Metzger. We built a raised platform, the largest the gallery could hold, with a surface of 5.5 feet by 11 feet. As preparation for that work, Lin Hixson, the director of Every house has a door, composed a poem titled 12 Choreographic Couplets, a list of impossible directives for the dancers to actualize on that tiny stage. Here is an excerpt:

    Remove a tear from my face.
    Put it back.
    
    
    Flee and let out a yelp.
    Come back home.
    
    
    A swallow lands on the bridge of your nose
    Then sets sail.
    
    

    Now the principle of impossibility takes on more urgency, and brings to mind once again Gilles Deleuze’s famous phrase about ethics: that we may find ourselves not “unworthy of what happens to us.” What creative channels reveal themselves now in this season of the new impossible? In this time and space of hyperimpossibilization, where do we locate the live? I began writing this a few weeks ago, in a different world, as a simple update on our activities and plans. Now it arrives in this unexpected form, but at the expected time, in early April – that is, now – coincident with the disaster. Can we compose a performance that sails to you across a virtual arc, like these words, with the harp vibration of a telegraph, and no risk of contagion? How do we shrink this microscopic stage?

    If distancing always affirms that which it distances, then social distancing affirms the social – my bond to my nearest neighbor, across the divide. In this zone of isolation, how do we gather? We find our way as we find ourselves, flung apart, groping in the new twilight, signaling across the expanse. How do we prepare for the day when we will re-enter, dancing through the eye of a needle, the vast evacuated theatre?


    About the Author

    The Gift of Disaster

    This morning I received an email from Greek theatre director Elli Papakonstantinou. While sheltering on an island, she wrote a manifesto, “Theatre of Seclusion,” and has been working on a version of Antigone for online platforms. She invited me to join a broadcast of her piece. Of course, I will oblige. In a great triumph of digital capitalism, all social interactions have been fully mediatized. Last week, we had a zoom hang-out with a group of friends. We sat in front of our computers and phones for a couple of hours, chatting with drinks in our hands. And then, when I saw some of them in person, we stayed a few yards from each other, raising our arms as if to embrace each other, and hugging the air instead. It felt more awkward than “clinking” with our wine glasses over zoom.

    After almost three weeks of “sheltering in place,” I noticed that an entire layer of language has been sliced off from my life. The texture of language consists not only of words, but of touches, gestures, bodily postures, smells, ambiance, and even the weather. Language is much more than chains of signs consisting of signifiers and signifieds. If language is not just a system of linguistic signs, then its purpose can’t be just communication. The image of a smaller stage within a stage reminds me of the argument that language is not merely an instrument for the exchange of thoughts. Jean-François Lyotard observed that the theory of language as a means of communication implies “that there are persons who exist independently of language and use it as pilots use their airplanes. Language would be the plane and then there would be someone to pilot it. But we do not control language.” If we don’t pilot language, we don’t pilot performance either. The impossibilization of performance as a form of public communication makes possible, or rather enables and activates, an important function of performance which knows nothing about communication, and couldn’t care less about it. It is not the performance of pilots, but of poets and mystics, and of all of us when we talk to ourselves as we cook, walk, daydream… Language as a non-instrument seems to me the smallest possible performance stage we can claim. Once we get there and make ourselves comfortable, we discover that it is also the largest possible stage.

    If the pandemic is a deep disturbance of language, that is not only because its expansive, non-semiotic dimension has been annihilated, but also because its projective nature has been cut off in one fell swoop. Matthew’s strategic use of the word “disaster” speaks of this loss. There is nothing spectacular about this epidemic. Deserted streets of Menlo Park, CA, which are these days even deader than usual, remind me of Maurice Blanchot’s thought of “the calm of disaster” as “the annihilation of noon.” Like Matthew and Lin, I cancelled all of my plans for the next few months, and who knows, maybe for even longer. I miss my plans. They informed the way I think and speak. Again, Blanchot: “To think the disaster […] is to have no longer any future in which to think it.” All of a sudden, the future tense is becoming much more conditional than it ever was. The construction of sentences no longer requires “will” and “shall,” but also “if” and “when.” The conditional tense is just an excuse for thinking about the future, because we can’t. Without even noticing, I am beginning to practice a temporal askesis which is keeping me not only within the four walls of my home, but also in the imperceptible confines of the present. And the moment we realize that we are no longer the pilots of our life but the prisoners of the present, that’s when the plague strikes. Now I finally begin to glimpse the full proportions of Artaud’s words I have read and repeated so many times, about theatre being born when “the dregs of the population” start performing acts “without use or profit.” Performance is the acceptance of the gift of disaster.

     

     

    Works Cited:

    Artaud, Antonin. 1958. The Theater and Its Double. New York: Grove Press.

    Blanchot, Maurice. 1995. The Writing of Disaster. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

    Lyotard, Jean-François. 1992. “That which Resists, After All, an Interview with Gilbert Larochelle.” Philosophy Today (Winter): 402-4017.


    About the Author
  • We are making a show on a bus.
    It is cliché. But it is a bus.
    A bus of imagined motion, levels, bodies, flesh, circus
    A bus where ropes become poles
    Hoops become benches
    Straps become windshields
    A mess of bodies tangled and untangled
    Driven through static space
    We are making a show on a bus. About a bus.

    Shift.

    I think about how long it has been since I’ve been on a bus.
    I think about the last time I was on a bus.
    I think about how the last time didn’t feel like the last time I would be on a bus
    For so long

    The conscious and unconscious touch of hands
    The way skin and imprints change
    The way seats seem seeped in danger
    Poles pulse with particles unknown. I feel unsafe
    I think about the way I tried for kindness
    But performed paranoia
    I think about shifting gazes
    Fearful eye contact
    Contact felt / feels like too much.

    We were making a circus show.
    On a bus. About a bus. Transforming a bus.
    Muscles, bodies, flesh, holding each other up
    Supporting and exporting and transporting
    It felt cliché
    On that bus.

    On my couch
    In my home
    On the floor
    J e r k y f r o z e n move/ment
    Pores to pixels
    On a screen
    Bodies untangled
    Words making shapes
    Recalculating routes of our
    Static Bus.


    About the Author

    Alexis Shotwell ends Against Purity (2016), with a discussion of two stories both written by Hiromi Kawakami. Very briefly, the first story, “Kami-sama” (meaning “God Bless You”), describes the ordinary interaction between a bear and the narrator, and ends with the bear asking for a hug, which the narrator consents to give. The second narrative offers a revision: the story arc remains the same, but Kawakami introduces an “unpicturable kami [god] into the frame: the god of uranium” (199). The bear and narrator’s interaction is marked and complicated by a “nuclear imaginary,” where fear of radiation exposure shapes the bear’s request for a consensual hug, but the mundane everydayness of their walk by a river persists. We keep living. In this current moment, when touch is more conscious, more present, less available, how apt these revisions and the subsistence of mundane life and complicated contacts seem.

    Circus culture is infused with care, consent practices, and support. We are used to holding each other up. Now without touch, without apparatuses, without our shared space, our understanding of presence, performance, and play is necessarily being remodeled. Live circus performance has shifted and with it elements of care and consent in our performance and training practices have consequently transformed.

    A new virtual world. We pulse with possibilities, grounded in grief and loss. We smile and zoom and meet and talk. But we mourn what is out of grasp. Cancelled shows and cancelled income. Cancelled classes, practices, training sessions. In these new online spaces, our training environments shift, mutate, and extend commitments to consent and support in isolation. Circus care expands as we perform virtual spotting: online training, and verbal modifications, check ins, and daily messages, open spaces for crying, for trembling, for helpless laughter and excitable fear. We reach across borders.

    We refuse an impulse to put on-hold and opt instead to hold each other from afar, shifting our definitions of productivity and product, alongside precarious timelines and futures. In these collaborative moments of new digital realities, geographies and maps are recalibrated and queer time (Muñoz, 2009) feels more alive, an investment in a future not yet knowable, unnameable sensations of a present not quite here.

    Our bus was never meant to move, but our bodies were meant to touch. A new world, if only for a moment, necessitating another deep full breath.

     

     

    Works Cited:

    Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. NYU Press, 2009.

    Shotwell, Alexis. Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times. University of Minnesota Press, 2016.

     


    About the Author
  • A female voice 
    
    Hello
    Pause 
    
    Hello
    Longer pause 
    
    Hi
    Hey hi
    Hey hey hi
    Hi hey hi
    Hey hi hey hey hi
    Hello there
    Hey
    Hey hey hi hey
    Hey hi
    Hey hey hi
    Hey hi
    Hey hey hi
    Hello hi
    Hello hey hi
    Pause 
    
    He counts his steps.
    He weighs the food on his plate.
    He calculates the shortest route.
    He estimates the days he must spend in despair.
    He overestimates his mother’s love.
    He under-estimates the perfect cloudy days.
    He delimits an imaginary mustache on his face every time he looks into the mirror.
    He determines all there is to being drunk.
    He evaluates his employee’s productivity using a software called KILLMESOFTLY.
    He scales every morning after he takes a dump.
    He expands his franchise.
    He measures the length of his fingernails before he cuts them.
    He assesses the risks of drowning in bankruptcy.
    He generalizes “I like’m dumb blonde”.
    He speculates in stocks.
    He organizes his closet, starting from the left is Blue Monday.
    He identifies with the homeless man resting on the corner of King St. and Nelson Mandela.
    He controls his feelings.
    
    Some’d say he’s a madman.
    Some’d say he’s a mathman.
    I’d say he’s a thirsty man
    For the dark liquid below.
    I’d say he’s obsessed with stories
    Made up by numbers.
    Preoccupied with automatization of storytelling,
    He dreams, dreaming of his leg.
    He calls me Moby.
    He calls me Dick.
    He reckons his sight of my skin, white.
    He marks me white.
    He marks me
    Snow
    Chalk
    Milk
    Light.
    I fully reflect and scatter all the visible wavelengths.
    On his phone screen I eat up all the red, blue, and green light.
    Yet he’s blind to my cry.
    
    Hey hey hi Hey hey hi
    Hi hey hi
    Hey hi hey hey hi
    Hello there
    Hey
    Hey hey hi hey hey hey hi
    Hi hey hi
    Hey hi hey hey hi
    Hello there
    Hey
    Hey hey hi hey
    Hey hi
    Hey hey hi
    Hey hi
    Hey hey hi Hey hey hi
    Hi hey hi
    Hey hi hey hey hi
    Hello there
    Hey
    Hey hey hi hey
    Hey hi
    Hey hey hi
    Hey hi
    Hey hey hi
    Hey hi
    Hey hey hi
    Hey hi
    Hey hey hi
    Hi hey hi
    Hey hi hey hey hi
    Hello there
    Hey
    Hey hey hi hey
    Hey hi
    Hey hey hi
    Hey hi
    Hey hey hi
    Hey hey hi
    Hi hey hi
    Hey hi hey hey hi
    Hello there
    Hey
    Hey hey hi hey
    Hey hi
    Hey hey hi
    Hey hi
    Hey hey hi
    
    The whale disappears into whiteness 

    About the Author
  • It starts when clearance is given. The house is opened. People begin to drift in.

     

    All tickets for the performance are complementary. There are no row or seat numbers. No restricted views. No places reserved for VIPs.

     

    Every kind of body is here. Couples and singles. Groups and parties. Some may have to stand.

     

    Everyone has seen the title. Read or heard the programme note. An act of gathering is all that has been planned.

     

    The work continues. The theatre becomes full. With both bodies and a sense of potential.


    About the Author

    I have spent a large proportion (if not all) of my career in the theatre directly and indirectly exploring its position as a place of meeting. I think all my works and writings have addressed, address or contain ideas connected to this in some way. An audience undertaking an act of gathering – even if it is just an audience of one – is for me a primary and inescapable element of my practice. A sense of something collective and collaborative. Of people together in space and time.

    I can think of examples of theatre without many things – without actors, without lights or sound or costume, even without a theatre. I can’t ever think of an example of theatre without an audience, though. Even if it is just me sitting here reading or thinking to myself, as you may be with this now.

    The difficulty and complexity as well as the simplicity and clarity of this – the togetherness in it – feels central to everything I write, do, make and teach. In designated theatres. In lecture halls. In rehearsal and teaching rooms.

    I type in circumstances where this act, along with the possibility it presents to me, has been suspended. I am missing it. It’s probably inevitable that in my attempt to contribute an imagined theatre what I find myself imagining is an audience.

     


    About the Author