At the turn of the twenty-first century I lived in outer boroughs; first Brooklyn and then Queens.  Subways took me to work on The Hilly Island (Manahatta; Manhattan) via tracks that crossed one strait of the River that Runs Both Ways (Muhheakunnuk; The Hudson River) before slipping down under a twentieth-century midtown. Our offices were on the 21^st floor of a building across from the Sheraton New York Times Square. Below, in the hotel’s basement, a friend’s uncle from the Dominican Republic worked in the laundry room. Down and up, midtown is vertical geography. The Working Group had the goal of attempting to carve out a small space for genuine intellectual collaboration in the face of the inevitable fallout from Track Two, carril dos. Track One—the language is the US government’s—was to assassinate Fidel Castro. Track Two, socavar el régimen via “people to people contact,” which cast as suspicious all academic connections. Vaya, cualquier relación. For three years I traversed cubicles, looked down from giant windows on tidal regimes, and flew to Cuba on local carriers that departed from gates roped-off from the rest of Miami International Airport. A week before 9/11 I left New York. A decade passed. A friend, older than me, liked to chide it’s later than you think, chilling if cheap. I returned to New York. One afternoon I left my new apartment on the border of Muhheakunnuk’s hurricane evacuation zone. When I exited the subway the buildings and sidewalks were the same, though no longer familiar. I looked at the clinic address on my phone. As I passed through the entrance on 52^nd street and my body torqued through the same security turnstiles, the uncanny return clicked. Elevator doors opened onto the 22^nd floor and onto a bright waiting room with southern views of the city: the same views as I had taken in many years before, but also not. The doctor’s office was a mix of taupe healthcare technology and shopworn décor. New York is expensive things teetering atop or stuck inside decaying infrastructure. The anesthesia was pleasant—no sense of time passing—and when I awoke eggs had been withdrawn.  

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Year 166.666 It is known that in the dense green Sierra of the Pacifico in Mexico, there are rituals that involve jaguar-man in combat. The soil has been tilled for the new siembra (sowing), it is time for celebration, a new cycle begins. A loud crowd gathers in the middle of the plain, Jaguar-men are waiting around the circle, they are warriors, they wear boxing gloves sometimes, but others just bandages wrapped around their knuckles. The jaguar-head has a wide-open mouth, two eyeballs glowing in the dark. This ritual is ancient, it has been passed down through generations, it has survived colonial times. The first two jaguars step inside the circle, and the combat begins with some weak, loose moves, but slowly, the adrenaline takes over, and the soil claims the need for blood to have a good harvest. A single punch cracks the jaw of one fighter’s opponent, their bodies twist, the muscles shocked, tremble, and finally, sweat and blood spill out into the ground.   Knockouts On another stage close to the border in Laredo, on the side of Mexico, a thirteen-year-old boy without resources started boxing as an amateur. Yes, one of the greatest glories of Mexican Boxing, el señor Luis Villanueva Paramo, the eternal, the immeasurable, and only champion: Kid Azteca! Tepito, the toughest barrio of Mexico City, saw the birth of Kid Azteca. This place is considered a cultural vortex, the heart of Teotihuacan. He migrated with his mom and brother to Nuevo Laredo in search of a better life; there, he discovered boxing as a ritual. Kid Chino his first nickname morphed into Kid Aztec, for his first combat in the USA when and where he emerged as an Aztec warrior. He survived two hundred combats and achieved one hundred and fourteen knockouts. One hundred and fourteen destroyed jaws. Pain, blood, and sweat stained the ring. He was known for his deadly hook to the liver. The ritual was organized into a spectacle that generates money, the ritual is now a sport mainly for men's entertainment. The desire to beat, to watch, to rage, to laugh, and to suffer through pain is collective. We need idols, we need warriors.   Release the jaguar What does the fighting life mean? Who needs to enter a battle and who watches? There are stages at home, where a sole dusty black punch bag hangs somewhere on the patio. The intimacy of rage, of releasing anger, of trying to break something or someone, there is no direct opponent. Who is your opponent? Is it an entity beyond the human, is it an oppressive system, is it life itself? Being bañado en sudor, being wet with your own sweat, being a wetback, sweat, and labor are connected, the hands bleed, the body keeps fighting beyond its own capabilities, and there is an energy that rises from the warrior's ancestors, that keeps the beaten body moving despite extreme exposure to the sun, the hands are working the field. Maybe this is another form of ritual, maybe it is just another way of fighting back and release the jaguar.

The Border as Parergon   . . . every analytic of aesthetic judgment presupposes that we can rigorously distinguish between the intrinsic and the extrinsic. Aesthetic judgment must concern intrinsic beauty, and not the around and about. It is therefore necessary to know—this is the fundamental presupposition, the foundation—how to define the intrinsic, the framed, and what to exclude as frame and beyond the frame.

Jacques Derrida, “The Parergon,” October (Summer, 1979)

  In his essay on Kant’s concept of the “parergon” or ornament Derrida famously interrogates the status of the aesthetic as the necessary mediator between pure and practical reason. Even as the aesthetic seeks to challenge the violence of instrumental reason, defined by the ontological bifurcation between individual consciousness and the external world, it carries forward its own form of monological closure. Thus, Kant struggles to differentiate those modes of experience that are “intrinsic” to the aesthetic and those which are merely accessory. In this manner, Derrida’s analysis gestures towards a series of interrelated divisions; between art and vernacular culture, between art and activism, and between the artist and the broader public. Inside and outside, purity and impurity, art and not-art have become defining oppositions across the broader history of modernism. The US/Mexico border crossing offers a cognate geopolitical expression of this binary system. The border crossing is a liminal zone; a zone of mediation between two rationalist systems. It is a space of containment and canalization; of passage and the denial of passage; of inspection and surveillance, of sudden movement and inexplicable delay. But it is also a site of provisional community; bound together by shared subordination to the spatial contingencies of the state. What does it mean to “intervene” in such a space, far from the comfortingly familiar constraints of the institutional art world against which an “ornamental” criticality is so often acted out? EDT 3.0’s play Social Echologies is performed within and beyond the border crossing. In the final act, the “Palindrone” hovers in the air, linking the two sides of the border through movement and transmission. Beneath it a singer entertains the slowly moving line of cars, accompanied by a boom box. Not far away Annabel Turrado methodically shaves down a large block of ice, creating raspados in the hot sun. Here “ICE” is melted down into refreshment for thirsty travelers awaiting the crossing. The pun and the palindrome co-exist as forms of wordplay. While the pun is defined by a generative dilation of meaning, in which one referent shadows another, the palindrome is defined by repetition and mirroring, as meaning remains unchanged from either direction. It suggests an ontological dynamic of sameness that parallels echo-location, in which the searching voice, like narcissus, is in dialogue only with itself. Social Echologies speaks of our transformation from “a species with roots” to a “species with antennas,” from a self defined by reciprocal integration with the world around us, to an identity that passively receives transmissions from a broadcasting center. The border zone is predicated on the containerization and fixity of subjectivity, between Mexican and American, between legal and illegal, between one self and another. The work of Annabel Turrado and EDT 3.0 ask how we might recover our rootedness in a broader community of resistance, while retaining our autonomy from the petrified forms of identity imposed by the border itself.

But we sit in the tension between lived time and that standardized time measured in uniform ticks, a standardized time which moves incessantly toward the future under the banner of progress. Think instead about the quiet when the sun goes behind the horizon and darkness overtakes the land? The silence of a virgin world sets in, the  silence of a world gone to sleep. We lost along the way to register the qualitative difference in the perception of  time. We could draw on so many examples to substantiate our loss. Take for example Jeremiah  29:11 - 12, which talks of God having known us before birth. Man is a materialization of an indefinite process that started elsewhere. That we are in transit, in Swahili we say, tuko njiani. In Life And A Half, Sony Labou Tansi writes of such a virgin world. This virginity is the source of question to man, a “hollow fullness” in which everything shows you, with an invisible finger, man’s solitude in the infinity of the unconscious. Such a huge hopelessness leads to the act of naming, and makes man the inventor of philosophies to explain the receding void that is eternally present. But that hollow fullness is ever there, no matter what. Our relation to it is virtual, fictional and non-causal in every sense. As long as there is life, we are in sync with it, and only come off of it when we die. In Ubuntu philosophy, we say "I am because we are, you are because I am." You and I are an extension of a one-another-ness, part of a larger whole, a community, a link in the many chains of networks - your life forms the community’s life. We are the nodes, extensions, and time extends them. Even my own death cannot stop the community’s life. Community life and time will still go on, merged into each other, embedded together. My own death stops nothing. If I die now, at the same instant, many more are born. This is how life and time perpetuate each other in continuity. Time is each of us, it exists as long as we exist. Imagine it as infinitely expansive. No past, no future. No yesterdays - what we have is an expansive present now.  

I am taken with shape at the moment. The momentum of shape. Possibly abstract.  Surreal— The arrow of inquiry. The boxing of argument that leads to entrapment. A room with four walls, floor, ceiling and equal space between them. A stage is a room actually.

The cubist script of misshapen pieces asks, how could the form of dialogue / monologue on the page translate unseen into action?— with the standard conflict / crisis / resolution?  How could the audience realize the shape of language as relationships evolve?

How could history be presented as something that is still here?  Recently the Oglala Sioux tribe blocked Christian missionaries from the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota for preaching Jesus while excluding Lakota beliefs. The past appears as disembodied snippets in a field plowed for other crops. As if pokeweed.

On the plains there is land and sky a tree-line along the creek. There in the distance— a house— cubed. Recently I bought an ice cube tray that was in the shape of a cube with sections for the changing form of water from fluid to frozen. Water also can be transformed into the shape of boiling, which must happen on stage at a high point in the drama. What other possibilities? The exploration of shapes that words make. The interruption of words that should follow unbroken in a sentence. The enjambment of the subject on one line separated from its verb on the next line with other contexts that pull it away from its object. The same disruptions our world is in.

A theatre saturated by ghosts is, unfortunately, often orchestrated only by a reading of Derrida’s hauntology that leaves those spirits trapped in a state of recitation until their vibrations collapse in on themselves. His is a process by which nostalgia is felt for promised futures that never came to be and therefore results in (re)visitations by spectres of staunch anachronisms. Too often they are less than shades on tracks, less than stringed marionettes -- all color has been bled out and only sepia-toned ache remains. Instead, the ghosts of a remembered theatre glide out of an abyssal darkness with the music of deep time. They all carry banners of terror, despair, ecstasy, love, and laughter like a fantastical crusader horde becoming the very foe they’ve sworn to slay. They crowd the frontiers. In the absence of exposition, the defiance of reason, and an insistent dangerous sexy nonsense, they occupy virtual space like a catastrophe of heavenly angels. It is like a Dürer illustration of Dante with infinite concentric circles, but shrouded in grey-black darkness and filled with a voluptuous excess rather than a cold, stoic joy. This remembered space is not zombified. Nor is it even penitent. It surrenders to the deluge that accompanies it.   *          *          *   The infinite sepulchers marking the surface of the remembered theatre show the form of two. They are transi tombs and both visible effigial representations rest with the assumption that the “true” body lies in the earth below. Some saw a body go in once. None can see it now. You might feel it under there in your own bones, but cannot easily verify. This is a third leap to be taken. The fourth and final one is the reconstruction of any of these countless bodies. And this (re)creation can only happen by taking into account the previous three forms and adding any story/history/legend/presumption/bias that the visitor makes. The result is a fourth form created in reflection of the creator. Countless figures and countless visitors – unfathomable and fabulous co-creation. Effigies in a theatre of sepulchral past can continue to change. They simultaneously act and are acted upon. They possess body and texture – the kind of texxture (à la Renu Bora or Eve K. Sedgwick) that carries the various histories of the object and the objects that made up that object. The marks of contact remain and evolve over time. There is work to making effigies. The effigy seems to surrogate for the thing that once was. Just as there are many perspectives of the original, so too are there countless surrogates. Effigies must be made. Even unwillingly. And surrogates must act and be acted upon.   *          *          *   In the rich darkness of this remembered theatre, I whisper my secrets to it and it rolls back.  I whistle out music from cracks in my mind, the notes ring out – full then hollow – full of leaves and crisp pastness before draining away with a deeper pang of loneliness than before. I whistle again, longer and louder, and it washes away lonelier still. The dark and the dust are preconditions for re-membering. This imagined theatre gives space and body for such work to continue anew and differently with each repetition.

read Crankie, the following words, and imagine being a theatre audience is not as natural as it seems. Among the many expected tasks to be accomplished, the most problematic—yet indispensable and intuitive—one is to act along with those on stage and commit to the construction of an invisible wall. As if that is not challenging enough, now experiment with read it, theatrical by itself, as if the premise of physical reality could be disregarded. Unlike an audience, readers neither bother to hide in the dark, nor have any moral concerns about being an omnipotent peeper. The violation, however tactfully concealed under this act, is nearly as condemned and acknowledged compared to that of watching due to its nature. read the small black strokes, drift, the eyes, sucked into the brain, and in there the space, the action, and the audience is one. read to look at the invisible, we witness the perpetual cycling of death and reincarnation as our eyes caress the words, only to find a vitality so strong it burns, an uncanny intimacy…how she had lived…lived on and on…[1] in pure isolation, read ........., Words. right, phew, all relieved. no breath, not a human being, not a character growing flesh and skin, so thin, in the Reality. yes… eyes wide open…cannot stop…right back stares… certain vowel sounds…What?...who?...no!...she!.......the buzzing?.....yes.......all dead still but for the buzzing[2] read those imprisoned. On or off stage, we are no different on either side of the wall. Cannot go on. Thought you were safe, didn’t you? Now the space is filled with disturbance, and the darkness encompasses an anxiety of full exposure. read shadows: the perfect metaphor for a half-being, with the ability to simultaneously become and decease, to be, just shadows, forming and disappearing, always there and not there, talking to somebody and to no-body, screaming to get out and sinking right back in. read theater? Are imagination and performance contradictory? Is it problematic to assume that a script is to be read? How is a script, a “theater to be made,” considered theater at all? Should we create a world with no limits on a physical stage, or at least present that infinity? Is watching (in comparison) more ethical? Why do we immediately accept, or ignore the theatricality of presentation and representation in any form? read the crankie. How cruel: paper is not more organic than the human body, and the crinkling sound only reminds us of what it was, then melted, and then reformed, so are words. what could stand in between us? What…who?…we?…no!           Is it problematic to assume that Crankie and the following words should be “read”?   Being a theater audience is not as natural as it seems. Among the many expected tasks to be accomplished, the most problematic—yet indispensable and intuitive—one is to act along with those on stage and commit to the construction of an invisible wall. As if that is not challenging enough, now experiment with reading.   It is theatrical by itself, as if the premise of physical reality could be disregarded. The violation, however, tactfully concealed under this act, is nearly as condemned and acknowledged compared to that of watching due to its nature. Unlike an audience, readers neither bother to hide in the dark, nor have any moral concerns about being an omnipotent peeper. The words are sucked directly into the brain, and in there the space, the action, and the audience merge into one.   To read is to look at the invisible. Readers witness the perpetual cycling of death and reincarnation as their eyes follow the lines, only to find a vitality so strong it burns, and an uncanny intimacy, generated from pure isolation.   It is not real.   Right…phew…all relieved…no!... words are moving…eyes wide open…stares back…What? . . . who? . . . no! . . . she![3]   Not real. Not a human being, not a character growing flesh and skin in “the reality.” Just shadows, forming and disappearing, simply be-ing, always there and not there, talking to somebody and to nobody, screaming to get out and sinking right back in.   Where is the wall? The emperor is not wearing any clothes. We are no different from those imprisoned on stage. Now the space is filled with disturbance, and the darkness encompasses an anxiety of full exposure. Cannot go on. Thought you were safe, didn’t you? Thought you were in charge, with your body hiding in the dark and your eyes still in your control. Forget about acting, just blend into the shadows—the perfect metaphor for a half-being, with the ability to simultaneously become and decease.   Are imagination and theater contradictory? How is a script, a “theater to be made,” considered theater at all? Should we create a world with no limits on a physical stage, or at least present that infinity? Is watching (in comparison) more ethical? Why do we immediately accept, or ignore the theatricality of presentation and representation in any form?   How cruel: paper is not more organic than the human body, and the crinkling sound only reminds us of what it was, then melted, and then reformed.   What?…who?…we? …no!     [1] Samuel Beckett, The Collected Shorter Plays (New York: Grove Press, 1984), 206. [2] Beckett, 204. [3] Samuel Beckett, The Collected Shorter Plays (New York: Grove Press, 1984), 204.  

You waste time watching old commercials on YouTube, scrolling through them, half-heartedly remembering the way you felt as a child, how you must have felt – you don’t really remember at all. It’s a memory of a feeling you could have had or should have had. You cover the camera on your laptop and hope Jeff Bezos isn’t watching you. The Cindy Crawford Coke commercial is actually a Pepsi commercial: you remembered the shape of the Coca-Cola bottle even though the can is the whole point of the ad. You aren’t one of the little white boys in that commercial either, or a cowboy smoking Marlboros. But you still want to be as cool as a rum and coke. And just as popular. You post thirst traps, trash for other people to look at – and maybe do more with – while refusing to take the kitchen trash to the curb. You wait for people to inflate your ego with little images of hands clapping, of fire and hearts and eggplants and peaches. Of little red faces sweating with their tongues out and the occasional little yellow face making a shocked O. They’re not shocked and neither are you but talking about sex with strangers kills time very well. You waste time sending memes to every acquaintance you think will think they’re funny and even some who you know won’t laugh at all. You don’t vacuum. You do not water your plants. You think about how they need water. You don’t do the dishes. You don’t read the book you were going to read. You watch TikTok videos of drag queens. You waste time playing games on your browser. You play games on your phone. You do the Wordle. You waste time clicking through a series of pages that advertise Power Couples You Didn’t Know Were LGBTQ+. You already know all of them, except for the ones who are not actually famous and definitely not power couples. You tie your sneakers and take yourself out to the curb. It’s hot and humid and you cool your face with an ice cube that melts rapidly on contact with your face. You go back inside and scroll through Instagram, Grindr, Snapchat, Twitter, X. You wait, face melting.  

Can Anybody See Hamlet? The readers open a website entitled Imagined Theatres. There they read the telescoped description of an imagined performance. The title of the performance is not revealed but it begins with a performer in dark clothes entering holding a skull. The further activities of the audience that evening are considered, concluding with the observation that it didn’t even occur to anybody in the audience that the skull was a Hamlet reference. Clearly this is supposed to be a fantasy production, possible only in the imagination. At least some of these readers may feel, as I do, that this description is not that obviously a fantasy. One can certainly imagine a performance no more unlikely than this one, in which the audience was composed entirely of pre-school children or of adults from a culture in which Hamlet icons were unknown (there indeed are such). What makes theatre possible is the assumption that the audience, as a whole, will recognize the same cultural referents, although of course they may react to them in individual ways. Certainly one can imagine an audience that does not recognize a skull as a Hamlet reference, just as one can imagine an audience that does not recognize a soldier on stage, or a priest, or a throne. One can imagine anything one likes, but there is nothing special about Hamlet. The real point is that theatre depends on a communication of referents. One can arbitrarily remove any single referent--from a skull to a crown--from a culture in imagination, but then the entire culture is changed, not just the referent. In such a culture, for example, no one backstage would have even thought of sending on a skull in the first place. In fact some readers will find a useful approach to this imagined paradox in one of Borges’ most provocative short stories, “Averroes’ Search.” The story tells of the frustration of the medieval Islamic theorist who is translating Aristotle into Arabic and encounters the word “theatre,” a concept as unrecognizable to him as the Hamlet skull is to this theatre’s hypothetical audience. Like that audience in the concluding paragraph, he wanders the streets, having a variety of experiences, but like them, never reaches his goal (a theatre in both cases). Borges concludes that his own attempt to reconstruct the thoughts of Averroes from available fragments was perhaps as futile as Averroes’ attempt to understand the concept of theatre from within a culture that lacked that concept. The reader may wonder if this Hamlet/skull proposition may be considered another consciously paradoxical attempt to describe an impossible performance by removing a cultural assumption that makes possible the operations of theatre itself? And finally, of course, what epistemological position does that give to this present commentary in challenging the strategies of that proposition? Certainly a confused one. THIRTY[1]                 [1] As a curtain call is the conventional conclusion to a play, “Thirty” is used in journalism to signal the end of an essay.

What might it mean to explore performance in a multi-species arena by choosing to engage a multitude of more-than-human modes of perception, values and desires assembled and co-mingling together on this ancestral Abenaki land?

-Black Hole Hollow, another audience residency call

  In 2021, we were invited to be in residence at Black Hole Hollow Farm on unceded Abenaki land. Nicole Daunic, our host, had distributed a call inviting artists to create performances to share with another audience—to reimagine who we might be performing for…and with. The invitation, she explained, was “shaped by a curiosity about the critical role of creative embodied practice in the process of unsettling forces of human exceptionalism” that, she continues, “imbue modes of ‘life’ shaped through the illogical logics of colonial violence, extractive capitalism and white supremacy.” We spent five days investigating the habits—physical, sensorial, and ideological—that shaped our embodied relations with our surroundings and more-than-human others. The resulting scores in this Theatre are intended as an ambivalent archive, an earnest offering, an incomplete acknowledgement, an unsettled placing, a nourishing burial—a "preyer." I witness an ant spiral endlessly along the edges of a clover leaf, its movements growing lethargic yet determined. During a durational practice of playing dead, we remain relatively still under a hazy sun and realize that the smoke from the wildfires blazing in California has come to greet us. Buried in the foothills of Black Hole Hollow in 1800, Rhoda Blommers, a fellow settler, would become a key collaborator. In her ongoing decomposition, she showed us one way to trouble the oversimplified binary between a human and non-human audience. Simultaneously, she reminded us of the histories of European settler colonialism that informs our arrival to this place. Rhoda’s life is marked—by a headstone on the land—and retold—in a brief newspaper article published in the New England Homestead in 1965. In death, her body continues to settle into the earth. We talk about how humans are often rendered at the top of the food chain, but at Black Hole Hollow, we receive frequent reminders of the ways we are always becoming food to other beings. Ticks and mosquitoes feed off our blood. Gnats find moisture in our tear ducts. Fungi make homes in our shoes and skin after heavy rains. Rhoda, who seems at once to be roving around and slamming cottage doors, while also spreading the nutrients of herself in the dirt, continues to remind us of place in the midst of a multi-course meal. We come up with a working title of Preyer in attempts to hold onto this awareness that we are also food, and that our movements are intended as an offering. In these scores, excerpted from a larger collection, we tangle with an inherited choreography of human-centeredness, which is inseparable from the colonial logics that separate beings according to physical and imagined characteristics. We contemplate the ways we have been cast as repeaters of this choreography and explore a few ways to disobey it and imagine otherwise. Our preyer is that this might help us to perceive things that are obscured within vertical, rational, objective, and objectifying praxis, and perhaps to re-situate ourselves more respectfully in relationship to more-than-human kin.    

  ::accOmpaniment::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::   COuld exOrcism fOllOwing dispOssessiOn (e.g., the 1898 Treaty Of Paris… OperatiOn BOOtstrap… hurricanes María, FiOna… ) recOnfigure dispOssessiOn theOretically, practically, paratactically? Aftermath, exOrcism: “the expulsiOn Or attempted expulsiOn of a suppOsed evil spirit frOm a persOn Or place;” dispOssessiOn: “the actiOn Of depriving sOmeOne Of land, prOperty, Or Other pOssessiOns, usually by way Of trickery Or theft.”   -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------As in the Earth rOtates On its Own praxis.   COuld exOrcism apprOximate dispOssessiOn? As in when exOrcism=dispOssessiOn, mirrOring triggers the shutter-shudder: Of language. As in nOt-nOt-pOssessiOn. As in nOt quite in pOssessiOn of prOperty (“mama’s baby, papa’s maybe,” spilling Over intO Spillers into Gumbs). As in nOt pOssessiOn Or (self-)sOvereignty flagged as (sOcial) bOdies. As in languaging≠langue≠languish. NOne the less; NO One, the less. “ExOrcism”’s injunctive, a subjunctive embOdiment. A-subjunctive, speaking: Dear future we’s/Here is the flag/here is the steeple/Open the dOOrs/see all the peOple. (((((((per Vicuña, Instan—audience))))))) Revenge. ScOred. “For lOwer-cased americans.” ZOng! (Philip)!!!!!!!!!!! Relationality---Harris + MOten—Black sOciality. With a peace of chalk, draw a free-speech zOne. With a piece of chalk, re/draw a pOrtal. V=(1/3)πr²h. On the OccasiOn Of the equatiOn, set the cOne aside. PeOples-mic up. POst/preOcupémonos. Script “An AbbreviatiOn of the Treaty Of Paris 1898” (to remember verbatim, Overrated): Querida Rayuela/ DOn’t skip a single letter/GrOunded, write “venganza” On the wall/DOn’t put the chalk dOwn, rite On. In Lumpérica’s plaza (Eltit), the waring Of the flag. At a plaza, unbOxed: MicrO-expulsiOns, micrO-explOsiOns. COntact, cOntract cOntractiOn/s. Five centimeters, dilated, dilating… use tape tO uncage, rib to de-rib. Un-Cage. Mega. PhOne. “Make it matter.” As in “ActiOn and gathering can make a plaza Out Of street cOrners, stOOps, driveways… zOOm rOOms…” Rx for a script: On a bOx. Drapery. EchOlOcate cOmputer(s), built-in text-to-speech tOOl. Or/O, peOples, mic up. We are nOt a “system vOice.” As in cOmmit to MOrrison’s rememOry: “InstructiOns for taking textual phOtOgraphs” (GOnzález-ROdríguez). After math, undOcumentatiOn. BOdies, unfurling. Dance, dance, revOlutiOn (Park HOng).   ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::draw, drawn raw incOnclusiOn::

I google the word “ambisexual.” For a minute, I wonder if it’s the same word that Ria from Hinge has used to describe her sexuality, which I later decide is also my sexuality, but it’s not. Ria and I are “ambiamorous”—which I also had to google, which made me feel like a middle-aged queer, and also made me think of fish: gilled homosexuals breathing underwater together, sometimes in pairs, sometimes in groups. But ambisexual is something else—akin to bisexual, but more precise. I think of my friend, Irit, who identifies as a “historic bisexual”—which is to say, Yes: I was bisexual once, before I knew there were infinite genders. Now I mark the limit of language, yet I refuse to alter history. Irit is a good archivist, which is why she makes hauntingly beautiful films from her dead father’s super 8s. In the Oedipus myth, the King is said to have solved the riddle of the Sphinx: “Which creature has one voice and yet becomes four-footed and two-footed and three?” to which he replies, “Man,” resulting in the death of the Sphinx either by murder, suicide, or autosarcophagy (depending on the source). And yet: some believe there was a second riddle that followed the first, something about two “sisters" giving birth to one another, "night" into "day," "day" into "night." I am reading about this on Wikipedia while I am texting with Joan—alternating between the phone and the screen. Joan has recently been on a date with a sad, thin vegan man who is mourning the loss of his ex. Joan is the ex of my no-longer-sad and perennially omnivore friend, Jane, who mourned the loss of Joan for many years but then one day took the literal garbage out to the curb of her Park Slope home on 9th Street—the contents of which included everything Joan had ever given her minus the black leather jacket which she bequeathed to me and requested I never wear in her presence. I tell Joan about Ria, and Joan tells me about the tarot reading she had the week before. Dante is a homosexual, who speaks, according to Joan, “in a very dry gay way” when he makes his predictions about your fate. Normally, I would doubt such things carte blanche, but I recall my friend Jeni telling me about Dante years prior, and how all his visions have come to fruit. Dante tells Joan that she will fall in love in the month of October or July—a man with a child—and also that her friend, which is me, will find love before she, and that she will be happy to hear it. And she did. And she was. And yet. Like the woman in Schoenberg’s Erwartung (Expectation), who waits for her lover at night in the forest, I am waiting still. I am waiting, and watching, and wondering what it means when something is in the cards. Like Medea—a woman gone mad with betrayal, who slays her two young sons in an act of revenge or salvation (depending on the source), their lifeless bodies strewn across her lap as she flies away in a golden chariot sent to her by her grandfather, the Sun—I, too, want to know if endings are truly overdetermined from the start? Because our art is scripted, Yes; and our bloodlines, cursed. But let’s also remember that theater, like life, is so very live, so anything can happen, and will, and might. This is what my friend Lindsay calls the “the contingency of liveness,” to invoke the provisional nature of our craft. And let us also here remember that ambi is a loanword from Latin, as in both (ambivalent) and around (ambient): multiple things can be true at once. Someone has to take out the garbage, but who and when and where and how are not yet set: the riddle, in other words, may very well be that something can be both fated and free.

Write your own gloss before you read mine. (Asking that is a losing battle, I know.) A gloss defines a work. It limits liminality. A neither-animal-nor-human goat-man enters dressed like a goat-woman. A good gloss would contextualize that neither-nor, binary-defying figure. I bet yours would. When you read the stage direction describing all the figures walking by, you started seeing connections or constructed randomness so that you had already decided what the play meant before the first speech. Put that in your gloss. (Which I know you will not write.) It is so tempting. The figures represent so many interesting corners of our culture. The progression to titanic cultural emblems like E.T., Gandhi, Mr. Monopoly, and a barista suggests a forward momentum of meaning, meaning, and more meaning. Why are we always in such a hurry to reach significance? When you saw the characters were Latinx half-goats what did you think that meant? Some portrayal of how non-white people are dehumanized? Some immigrant drama? What is more dehumanizing—being half-goat or being limited to socially relevant drama because one is not white? Or for that matter having some gloss-writer assume that you the reader are not yourself Latinx? At what point in your reading did you decide, what was meant? Did you google the playwright? I could give some matte bio that will make you cry. Do you want to know that Mr. Goblen was a barefoot, underclass, B-boy who dropped out before starting middle school and with nothing more than natural talent pulled himself up by his bootstraps? That would make this play a narrative of social criticism and satire of the ethnic caste system of America. Or I can give you a glossy bio where he is an Ivy League wunderkind dropping classical references in a timeless fantasy riffing on the iconography of Ancient Greek mythology for the amusement of other Ivy Leaguers. Is the significance only in ? Is it in the author’s life? Or is the significance in our experience of the work? Can I change your experience with my gloss? It is so hard. The habits of all our schooling push us toward definitive interpretation ASAP. We want to advocate for what we see in the play. But reading here, you are alone. The significance you construct has no currency. No one will ask you for Kid Ends Play spoilers in the break room tomorrow. You cannot recommend “imagined theater” for production. Maybe you can tell a friend, but do you really think they will click the link to come here? If you did write your own gloss (like I asked), tuck it away. Let all your possible meanings roam free.    

From CNN (20 June 2086):  Muties Use High-Tech to Evade Border Police   From CNN (1 October 2086):  Border Patrol Installs Smellers to Detect Illegal Border Crossings   From CNN (20 December 2086):  Illegal Muties Use AI-generated Smells to Avoid Detection   From CNN (15 February 2087):  National Guard Deployed to Border Use AI-powered Intention Detectors to Counter Mutie Threat   From CNN (8 April 2087):  Mutie Threat Grows as Illegal Border Crossers Deploy Reality Distortion Shields   From CNN (12 June 2087):  Army Reinforces Border Patrol with Distortion-piercing Super-AI   From CNN (5 August 2087):  Illegal Muties Use Worldwide AI Network Against Border Army   From CNN (10 October 2087):  Supreme Overlord Trump VII Sends 100,000 Members of Human-Supremacist Militias to Join Border Effort   From CNN (6 December 2087):  Border Mutants Reportedly Using Telepathy to Evade Capture   From CNN (17 January 2088):  Every Satellite Ever Deployed Commandeered to Fight Illegal Border Crossings   From CNN (4 March 2088):  Human-Supremacist Armies, US Army Fighting Each Other at Border   From CNN (5 May 2088):  Border Czar Reports Historically Highest Rate of Illegal Crossings   From CNN (17 July 2088):  Muties Harness Energy of Newly Discovered Ancient Civilization   From CNN (2 September 2088):  US Army Joins Human-Supremacist Militias to Form Super-Force to Combat National Guard at Border   From CNN (18 November 2088):  Victorious National Guard Rebrands as US Army as Border Wars Continue   From CNN (6 January 2089):  Muties Use Mind Control to Become Invisible, Increase Number of Illegal Border Crossings   From CNN (20 March 2089):  Entire Output of Every AI Datacenter on Earth Harnessed to Fight Illegal Border Crossings   From CNN (9 May 2089):  World’s AI Systems Inexplicably Print “Chinga La Migra”   From CNN (20 July 2089):  “Sons Of Zardoz” Militia Threaten Nuclear Warfare to Stop Illegal Aliens at Border   From CNN (3 September 2089):  Entire State of Texas Obliterated as “Proud Mechs” Militia as Detonate Hydrogen Device at Border, Vow to Stop Illegal Crossings   From CNN (15 November 2089):  Muties Battle Mechs at Border as Illegal Border Crossers Use Eighth Dimension Turbo-Encabulators to Avoid Detection   From CNN (9 January 2090):  Entire Southeast of US Becomes Wasteland as Mutie Agitprop Turns Mechs, Nukes against Border Alliance   From CNN (25 March 2090): Illegal Border Crossings Continue Upward Trend...

[audio mp3="http://imaginedtheatres.com/app/uploads/2025/04/Cartas_Despedidas_Gaines.mp3"][/audio]

As residents of Upstate New York we are marked by the fraught specters of the border and enemy within. Trump’s antagonistic struggle with neighboring Canada, 170 miles north, summons the complexity of the disturbing phantoms haunting the land on which we live. From New York to Canada, the fraught apparitions of the rent promises of history arise at every crossing.

Historic road signs about one mile from our home, mark our rural Town’s prideful acknowledgement of its Haudenosaunee heritage.  We think back to the open Indigenous Territories when the waters and lands on either side of the St. Lawrence River served as shared grounds for the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy. Vibrant cherry orchards and four sister’s gardens provided plentiful provisions along with the fruits of territorial hunting and fishing.

These are now distant memories rendered fraught by disturbance of the utopic visions of the past. Today, one of the sacred burial grounds of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy remains unceremoniously covered by the original nineteenth-century buildings of Cornell University. Other signposts across our Finger Lakes Region mark the prior savagery of the 1779 Sullivan Campaign that aimed for the “total destruction and devastation” of Haudenosaunee settlements. Following the destruction of their vibrant villages and peoples, the remaining Haudenosaunee were then restricted to six miles on each side of the St Lawrence River by the Halimand Treaty of 1784, which now constitutes the border of Canada and the US.

The specters within do not wane. Right down the road from our house are New York historic signs marking the slave graveyard in our community’s backyard. In contrast, across the county are the more heroic markers in front of nineteenth-century homes. Everyday citizens, from Hanniah Wilcox and Nancy Ann Price in Freeville to Harriet Tubman in Auburn, bravely harbored those fleeing the traumas of the enslaved.

What is now Trump’s contested border of trade and profit has served both as the remaining territory of the Haudenosaunee as well as the aspirational goal of the prior routes of the Underground Railroad and the subsequent resistance to the Vietnam draft. Just as our homestead marks the fraught legacy of its history, Canada served then, as it does now, as the contrasting beacon of hope from the enemy within.    

Second Act 

As we were walking on it, Laura once asked me why is the track behind the university’s old gym blue, and not red like other tracks? My reply: of course, in this place, the track is blue, because it is an anti-communist track. This premise engages one possible history of border-as-dilemma: how anti-communism is an unevenly yet mutually constructed and awkwardly shared political unconscious in the murky era/region oxymoronically termed Pax Americana, which plays a big part in shaping perceptions of both cultures and individuals. Laura’s question led me to see myself against my conscious political choices as walking on more than one such anti-communist track at once, both literally in the class-revealing locations of my morning fast walks and in my overall life path. Walking back into my apartment, in an older building on a gentrifying block, how do I perceive myself? If I have any self-awareness, I have to perceive myself and know I am perceived by others as a Western, “American” (read US), white, female, white-collar foreign worker and apartment-owner from the US, as a living symbol of encroaching neoliberal gentrification, even if this would never be named as such by my friendly neighbors. Laura’s questions for me are thus utter dilemmas. First, I cannot perceive myself as Mexican, Chinese, or Taiwanese because, given the history of colonial capitalism that shapes experience and perception in the places I have lived, such a claim would be an appropriation and ultimately denial of how I am perceived by others and what possibilities that perception affords me. Second, not to recognize how I am shaped by long experience in Taiwan and in the US near the Mexican border is possibly an even more pernicious form of denial, and risks upholding the also colonially derived monolithic notion of culture that Medina critiques. What I’ve learned so far is that while national borders are tools of neoliberal exploitation and should not be reified as given designators of culture, because the multifaceted border is a technology of the partitioned world I inhabit, it has a historical reality that I must face in order to perceive Laura at all: much relating necessarily happens on many borders at once, and there is nothing monolithic about this or the historical realities that have put it in place. The non-monolithic nature of cultural frames can still be a tool of the reified border.  In such a layered context of dilemma I can only try to refuse both self-ethnicizing appropriation and the reification of cultural difference as mutually constructed border affirming projects of the ongoing Cold War. Perhaps recognizing this condition and its limits affords what possibilities there are for care.

Special Scene

Laura, I would like you to go to a gentrified area in Taiwan and walk around, asking random people questions, and then do the same thing in a less gentrified area. In these places, how do you perceive yourself? How do you perceive others and how others perceive you? How do you perceive Amie?

[video width="1920" height="1080" mp4="http://imaginedtheatres.com/app/uploads/2025/05/Nation-Against-Nature_Gloss_Forman_2025-1.mp4"][/video] MEXUS: Geographies of Interdependence     MEXUS re-imagines the continental border between the United States and Mexico without the line. MEXUS dissolves the border into a bioregion whose shape is defined by the eight binational watershed systems bisected by the wall. MEXUS also exposes other systems and flows across this bioregional territory: tribal nations; protected lands; croplands; urban crossings, many more informal ones, 15 million people, and more.

  Throughout my childhood I would often wake up startled to not know where I was. I  would see the room, see all the furniture and the teal light on the walls, and fall into a circling panic of confused surroundings: where am I, where am I, where am I. Last night that happened, I woke up at one moment and was caught there, couldn’t think even of my daughter’s name, just kept saying the names of my sisters—Natalie and Nicole—though I knew there was another little girl. I couldn’t figure it out. The sensation of emergency prompted me to want something I knew was impossible. I later read about Pan’s magic on man, half man and half goat, unkempt and shaggy, evoking the rupture of rapture and impossible impulsivity. His pipes refuse the discipline of meter, key, and modality; he makes the irresistible music of morning birdsong and the wind humming like a collapsing teal light through the red canyons. Panic. Clubbed in the darkness. A Light somehow somewhere. The gods offering a chance, waiting to delight in the watchful sleeping man that I am. I would wake up so often as a child in that panic. Then one day I realized that that hadn’t happened to me in many years. I wondered what it was that brought it on and what it was that beat it away. I assumed it was the instability of my early life, the fact of constant movement, and the restless sleep of being prey, fleeing local circuits of migrations outstretched. Once I grew predator the necessity of that panic went away. But now I see that was all wrong. The Great God Pan has not gone away—Plutarch misheard the divine proclamation; Augustine, burning, burning, was mid forest but afraid; and the child I was had seen more than I allowed—I did not stop to see how I had pulled away. Later that night, after I composed myself back to self-recognition, I had another dream to instruct me not to pull away. I entered a laboratory that was vaguely satanic, with a scientist there vaguely enthroned. He offered me an apple, an invention of his he said, and I took a bite to find that it was filled with milk. A shock to taste the milk of the apple but also what a delight, so creamy and crisp at once. All very primordial—embodied but completely fantastical—the forbidden fruit of course but also the milk which is the burden of women forevermore for having tasted the fruit: to have to bear children and feed them. And there I was, taking the invention, coming upon it, finding it, and coming in a sexual sense too. These things we call cosmic powers are the waters let free on a laughing world. I am in my bath even as I write this now. Even the Titans had to take the light’s rush from Pan’s syrinx with unwavering seriousness. This thing of dreams that is a dreadful grandeur and wild joy forever, pouring into us, as Keats said, from heaven’s brink.  

Nycticorax nycticorax

They say astronauts, upon viewing Earth from space, experience the “overview effect”—a sublime sensation induced by the perception of Earth as a unified whole, an undivided system without borders. From the distanced vantage point, borders are rendered utterly absurd.

Try explaining borders to a bird. They travel without papers because the sky has no sovereign; they carry lost souls to the afterlife, brazenly crossing the most securitized of all borders. They are residents of everywhere, of nowhere, hollow-boned creatures opportunistically riding wind currents, in flocks that render visible rising columns of air.

*

At dusk, years after the infamous congress, when the regal tricolored heron vanished from the pond, the black-crowned night heron became the guardian of the swamp. Nycticorax nycticorax—“night raven” in ancient Greek—was a species found on every continent except Antarctica and Australia, whose sole citizenship was The Night.

Perched on the edge of the water, on the concrete embankment, the Nycticorax stood stock-still, seemingly hunched, staring at me with one red-ringed eye. Perhaps because it bore an uncanny resemblance to the eponymous heron in the Hayao Miyazaki film The Boy and the Heron (except for the neck—its neck was stout), I silently asked the Nycticorax where he planned to take me.

“The door…”

Yes, the pond was a door, one that opened only at the crepuscular hour.

“In it you will see…the death of your mother.”

“What?”

“Just kidding—this isn’t a Miyazaki film, you fool!” 

The Nycticorax was trolling me.

“Are you the simorgh I’ve been looking for…all this time?”

“Pssh—enough with this cryptid hogwash! Did you really believe you would find answers to your metaphysical questions in a Florida marsh?”

“Should I consider you then…a bird of ill-omen?”

The Nycticorax looked heavenward, opened its beak, and began gagging…croaking, gutturally. Then it turned to me and vomited up a half-digested fish, which it thrust toward my feet. Never had I smelled anything so foul.

“Nobody understands me. When I crossed into this realm, the misnomer became my name.”

“And your eyes?”

“The story of my eyes? When I was a juvenile, they were yellow. My red eyes reflect light, enabling me to see at night, whereas you see only gradations of shadow.”

The Nycticorax continued to gaze at me through a single vampiric eye.

By then, it was night.

“Make me a citizen of the nuktos!” I cried to the air.

The Nycticorax began to disappear. In its place there was only the red-ringed eye, resting like a marble on the pavement.

The eye began to swell until it was the diameter of a sewer lid. The red ring began to turn, cutting a hole in the fabric of reality like a cosmic can-opener. As it inched clockwise, a seam of red light grew until the circle was complete and the fragment of Florida that had been hole-punched fell soundlessly into the pond.

The portal opened.

I jumped into it. And that is how I became a citizen of The Night.

Maribel Bello’s poetic-dramatic-dialogue, “[:micro borders para territorios alien or fake]” demands that we inhabit uncertainty, misunderstanding, discomfort, and irregularity. This is true because it focuses on the relationship between a “visa F” daughter pursuing her PhD in the US and her “mojado” father, which has been fractured “tras 15 años de separación” due to undocumented migration, but also because the language, genre,  style, and even the font of the piece is constantly shifting and unstable. As such, “micro borders” requires that we occupy the condition of migration and the role of the migrant in the aftermath of forced family separation and tentative reunification. Like the relationship between hija y padre in “micro borders,” neither the condition of migration nor the piece itself follow a coherent narrative or point towards any kind of resolution. They are irregular, a word that Bello refers to when she introduces the father as one of the two “personajes” of the poetic-dramatic-dialogue, alongside la hija. The notion of “lo irregular” stands out because it is one of several examples in the piece of a word or idea that could seem to mean one thing but actually means another; that refers to multiple meanings at the same time; or that could be written in either Spanish or English. Bello tells us that the father, who migrated from Puruagua, Guanajuato to Tej/xas (she layers the x over the j as if correcting her language from Spanish to English), continues to live there “de manera ‘irregular.’ la irregularidad no tiene que ver con su legalidad, sino con su deseo de volver. quedarse.” It is telling that Bello is compelled to correct any assumptions about the father’s irregular status in terms of his legal right to be in the US. We understand that the father is undocumented, since the daughter “tiene el privilegio de una vida visa” while he constantly fears deportation and cannot leave the US. But the true meaning of his irregularity lies in his conflicting desire to both return to México and to stay in Texas; to be with the daughter he has finally reunited with and to be with his other children who remain in México. The contradiction that the father lives reminds me of the condition of being “ni de aquí, ni de allá” that many migrants and Chicanxs/Latinxs identify with, but his undocumented status legally bars him from occupying either American or Mexican space. For the father, to be “ni de aquí, ni de allá” is a literal condition that never has the privilege of metaphor. Such irregularity persists and multiplies throughout the piece, constantly highlighting barriers that return us to the conditions of il/legality and undocumentation. But the irregularity of migration and the migrant condition also reveals unexpected possibilities. Although family reunification is certainly an expected reason for migration, Bello proposes a means of reunification that the media and general public rarely consider, through the daughter’s PhD studies with her “visa F.” Postgraduate study becomes more than just a path to a degree or career, it is way to control the process of migration, making it legal and choosing the location to be close to the father. Dominant media narratives don’t accept the image of a young mexicana, mestiza, latin-ex, hispana, chilanga daughter pursuing a PhD in the US, or having choice and control over their migration process. And yet, despite the choices and control available to her, the daughter’s emotional – and metaphorical – barriers stemming from migration resemble those of her mojado father. Just as the father’s un/documented status is uncertain – for he can never be sure what “la nueva ley esa” will mean for him – the relationship between father and daughter is uncertain. Their relationship, which bears the trauma of 15 years of separation, is contingent upon not talking about certain feelings and emotions, although the daughter especially feels constrained because of her legal status. Bello lists the forbidden feelings and emotions between hija y padre in the piece, but crosses out the word conflicto, possibly as a sign of the missed opportunity to explore her trauma and pain with the father. Despite, but also because of their common trauma, hija y padre are unable to truly communicate with each other. The things they cannot talk about are mostly in Spanish: “frustración,” “culpa,” “rabia,” “ira;” with just a few in English: “sadness,” “privilege,” perhaps representing feelings and conditions that the father would be less able to understand. A few of the things they cannot talk about could be read in either Spanish or English: “trauma,” “status legal,” perhaps representing feelings and conditions that affect them both, across borders. But the distance between hija y padre is much more prominent throughout the piece, variously reflected through their roles as “personajes” in a performance-like setting, the intersecting and clashing vertical and horizontal text, or the scribbles and black blobs at the bottom of each page. Thus, “micro borders” insists that not only are the dominant narratives about undocumented migrants and migration usually wrong, their “real” or true stories are very often illegible and unknown, even to the migrants themselves. Bello demonstrates the illegibility and irregularity of these stories and relationships through the black scribbles and blobs at the bottom of each page. When the father finally asks his daughter, “hijita, tú, cómo estas?,” there is only one acceptable answer: “bien good.” But the illegible, unspoken truth literally lies beneath the question in a form of a menacing black ink blob, precariously balanced on the thinnest line of text. While the black blob may be illegible, it is definitely visible, revealing the trauma that la hija, el padre, and all migrants and family members touched by un/documentation hold inside, waiting to burst forth.                

piedra   Cabe la posibilidad de que el negativo de esta fotografía se corresponda con el registro invasivo de una ceremonia ancestral. Por tanto, no es un obelisco el que miramos, sino una piedra de quince por diez pies excediendo el horizonte. Un bloque de granito tallado por el sol. Yace en mitad del paisaje como para protestar: no nos moverán. En plural. Sin fantasmas, sin quemaduras, sin sombras. Los primeros en advertir sus dimensiones son los microorganismos en torno a la piedra que se dejan ver sin que puedan mirarse hacia adentro. Lagartijas repudiando el plástico. Antílopes llevando en sus hocicos cuerdas de embalar. Buitres sobrevolando algún animal en proceso de descomposición gracias al esmero de las hormigas. La luna que se aleja en sentido opuesto a la oscuridad masiva y los insectos.  Cada mañana, la piedra registra huellas de pájaros, cangrejos y coyotes. A veces aparecen las marcas reversibles de ríos lejanos, como vetas que revelan su antigüedad y todo lo que se dejó atrás: sube la cadera, mete la barriga, no hables para poder cruzar. En el negativo de la imagen, la piedra parece un fetiche cuya singularidad es incapaz de obligarnos a mirarla de otro modo. Que los hombres la carguen a trocha abierta y la coloquen a la mitad no subrayaría ningún cambio de paradigma. Vista a lo lejos, la piedra puede ser :solo en apariencia: un monolito derivado de la extracción, una modalidad jurídica, un ejercicio de gobernanza. Pero un sarcófago, como la muerte, siempre contiene la latencia de lo vivo. Y la fragilidad del sistema siempre está sostenida por la fuerza del sistema.  Es entonces cuando percibimos que la piedra ha sido arrancada de otra vida que no ha llegado aún pero que vuelve. Liberado el ojo, la piedra, por la imparidad de sus limos, relata lo que tardó millones de años en sedimentarse para adquirir esas formas. Hay que contar los pasos, saber su posición relativa, acercarse a ella, cavar un hueco en el lugar exacto y dejarse enterrar, como lo dice el rito.  Primero es la voz como una forma de reorientación, cuando el cuerpo se mueve sin mapa, empujando la carne hacia abajo. La voz nunca es presente sino resonancia libre de costuras: nunca lo que entra por el oído tiene origen nítido o contornos estables. Menos develar que seguir el rastro hacia la inminente mutación ambiental. No es pararnos en la punta de la piedra para ver las montañas de un país y las colinas holográficas en el otro, una prueba de la línea divisoria y su fragilidad discursiva, no. Ni las criaturas mullidas por los químicos para las cuales la fantasía de la frontera no es opción. Tampoco las relaciones asimétricas que determinan la exclusión histórica de la piedra misma (la piedra no está en busca de trabajo).  Es sentir en el empeine el leve movimiento del subsuelo, los ritmos retoñantes que se anteponen a la velocidad del capital a punto de invocar la depredación. Procede luego tocar su línea interminable, catar su sabor húmedo, oler las flores de sus bordes, amar su casa oscura donde buscamos refugio. Hundir la mano en la hoguera de la roca y tocar sus huesos que soportan lo mismo que la noche soporta las máquinas de matar. Después, dejar que la piedra amarre nuestras lenguas para untarnos otro idioma. Desarrollar el deseo pero nunca el método. Asegurar que la imagen reflejada en su granito muestre el mismo rostro del día anterior y de todos los días anteriores a éste. Tirar al cielo la ira del duelo, los sufrimientos que nos rompen, para que la piedra caiga al rumor del río, una manera de suturar la herida, de limpiarlo de las aguas residuales. Toca entonces, finalmente, escuchar a la piedra, sus esquinas remotas cuya capacidad de desvío narrarán la larga letanía de su peregrinaje.  

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  I was drawn to Cog•nate Collective’s response for its attention/tension in relation to the complexity of “border narratives” and the way that language moves, transforms, and transfigures. The contrast between the intimacy of the anecdotes that open their piece and the generalizations of the graphics struck me as particularly poignant, especially in relation to the border as a site of dehumanization, the border as an horrendous act of resignification. I responded with language and image, using collage because of its insistence on materiality, its disruption of representation.

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!  

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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.

                 

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.

El teatro es memoria y resistencia… un lugar donde expresamos nuestra mirada frente al mundo y le damos sentido a nuestra existencia. (Perdón la tardanza y lo breve, han sido meses extraños y de mucha carga laboral)

-mail de Paula González como respuesta al teatro de Catalina Devia

  Si Catalina Devia pone el mapa de tela deshilachandose al centro de su teatro, Paula González responde con su propia glosa deshilachada.“El teatro hace Chile”, incita Devia, y el mail en que Paula González responde es de agobio por la pandemia, por la carga de trabajo, por la vida que acontece sin pausa mientras la incertidumbre nos rodea. El teatro está cansado y nosotras, las personas que de él y en él vivimos, estamos cansadas. Si no podemos vivir sin un teatro vital, y a pesar de esto seguimos vivos, me pregunto ¿por qué existe el teatro entonces? Sobre su vocación elegida, la dramaturga chilena Isidora Aguirre dice: “Una representación teatral es un acto de amor”, como respuesta a una de las preguntas de Andrea Jeftanovic en Conversaciones con Isidora Aguirre a propósito de su vocación.^[1] La entrada a su diario íntimo, fechada el 15 de octubre de 1954, agrega: “Pienso que el teatro resume todas las artes, todas convergen hacia él, y es la vida misma la que se reproduce en el escenario”. El teatro no ha estado más que como un fantasma durante la pandemia, pero antes, en pleno estallido, salió de la sala y se hizo puro cuerpo y pura calle. En esa contradicción habitamos el teatro aún como un acto de amor. Como dice Devia, se hace en el teatro, se deshacía, se rehacía, abría los ojos, se convertía en un estar con, en un cuerpo común informe, orgánico, lleno de pulsiones que no podían ser más que presentadas. Leo a Devia y González como dos mujeres que trabajan en el teatro, que viven del teatro, que enseñan teatro, que habitan desde el teatro y a su vez producen un repertorio para que como nación imaginada existamos fuera de él. Volviendo a Aguirre, pienso en la insistencia de hacer teatro incluso cuando este no es reconocido, y vinculo el trabajo de Devia y González con el de Aguirre cuando el año 1957, la revista Ercilla sacaba una nota titulada: “10 compañías bisoñas ante el público. Autor favorito es una mujer”, pues esa sorpresa por el quehacer femenino en ese Festival Nacional de Teatro Aficionado, en que Aguirre estrenaba tres obras presentadas por las compañías que venían de todo Chile, sigue resonando en nosotras tantos años después. Recientemente, Maritza Farías, Lorena Saavedra y Patricia Artés han publicado Evidencias. Las otras dramaturgias, por editorial Oxímoron (2021), en el que hacen un trabajo de investigación y rescate de 12 obras escritas por mujeres en Chile, entre ellas una de la propia Aguirre, y en la que agregan una lista de 119 obras estrenadas y escritas por mujeres. Por si alguien dijo que eran pocas. Devia y González imaginan un país, uno con las mujeres en el teatro, y con el teatro se hacen cuerpos, cuerpos de mujeres que hacen teatro y que levantan imaginarios, posibilidades de ser y hacer, desde el diseño o la dirección, que luego espectadoras, críticas, teóricas, ensayistas, otras mujeres tomamos como punto de inicio para nuevos archivos que emancipan un territorio fijo, aislado y masculino. En este año de cuarentenas, de crisis, de incertidumbre ante una pandemia global, ansío ese teatro, el que se está moviendo y que nos está haciendo, como un acto de amor, como diría Aguirre. ^[1] Conversaciones con Isidora Aguirre (Santiago: Ediciones Frontera Sur, 2008), 72.  

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  Theatre is memory and resistance...a place where we express our views in front of the world and give meaning to our existence. (Apologies for the lateness and brevity. These have been strange months with a great deal of work.)

-email from Paula González in response to Catalina Devia’s theatre

  If Catalina Devia puts an unraveling cloth map at the center of her theatre, Paula González responds with her own unraveling gloss. “Theatre makes Chile,” Devia offers as a provocation, and the email message in which González responds is strained by the pandemic, by the burden of work, by a life that continues without pause amidst uncertainty. The theatre is tired, and we, the people that live from and in it, are tired. If we cannot live without a vital theatre, and yet in spite of this, we are still alive, I wonder: Why does theatre exist at all? When asked of her chosen vocation by Andrea Jeftanovic in Conversations with Isadora Aguirre, the Chilean playwright Isidora Aguirre answered, “A theatrical representation is an act of love.”^[1] In her diary entry from October 15, 1954, she adds, “I think that theatre sums up all the arts; all converge in it. It is life itself that is reproduced onstage.” The theatre has been no more than a ghost during the pandemic, but before, at the height of the protests, it left the auditorium and became an entity composed simply of bodies in the street. Yet even in this, theatre remains for us an act of love. As Devia says, in the theatre, one makes, unmakes, remakes, discovers, and becomes part of a shared organic and undefinable form, driven by forces that can only exist in presence. I read Devia and González as two women who work in theatre, who earn a living in theatre, who teach theatre, who lead lives based on theatre, but who also produce work that lets us exist outside this theatre, as an imagined nation. Returning to Aguirre, I think of the insistence upon making theatre even when not recognized. I link the work of Devia and González to that of Aguirre, when recalling that, in 1957, the magazine Ersilla published a piece titled: “10 New Companies Before the Public. Most Popular Writer is a Woman.” The surprise of seeing woman’s work featured in the National Festival of Amateur Theater, in which Aguirre premiered three plays performed by companies from all over Chile, continues to affect us women so many years later. Recently, Maritza Farías, Lorena Saavedra, and Patricia Artés published Evidences: The Other Dramaturgies, with the press Oxímoron, in which they save from obscurity and also analyze 12 plays written by women in Chile, including one by Aguirre herself. They also put together a list of 119 productions of plays written by women – just in case anyone says that there had not been many of them. Devia and González imagine a country, one with women working in theatre. Through theatre they create bodies–the bodies of women. These form a theatre that introduces imaginaries and possible ways of making and doing through design or direction; female spectators, critics, theorists, essayists, and other women use this to start new archives that emancipate a fixed, isolated, and masculine territory. In this year of quarantines, crisis, and uncertainty in the face of a global pandemic, I long for that theatre, one which moves us and makes us– like an act of love, as Aguirre would say. ^[1] Conversaciones con Isidora Aguirre (Santiago: Ediciones Frontera Sur, 2008), 72.  

Una hija ¿Dices que el teatro es un medium? Este cuento yo ya lo viví. 

A girl

You say that theatre is a medium? 

I already lived this story. 

[caption id="attachment_1233" align="aligncenter" width="700"] Casa de infancia [Childhood home] - Purén - IX Región - Chile[/caption]Estas mujeres me ayudaron a atravesar el bosque. 

These women helped me go through the forest.

[caption id="attachment_1238" align="aligncenter" width="700"] Abuela – Mamá[/caption] Conocí el mar a los 15 años, tarde, lo sé, no me hizo falta antes, creo. 

I first saw the ocean at age 15 -- late, I know. I don't think I missed it before.

Caperucita Roja [Little Red Riding Hood], 1883, Gustave Doré, pixelada  ¿Sabes que es lo que más me gusta hacer en el teatro? Entrar a la sala oscura, como boca de lobo, caminar muchos metros sin golpearme con nada, orientarme en el vacío hasta llegar al interruptor y prender la luz. No sé nadar, pero aprendí a ver en la oscuridad.

Do you know what I like to do most in the theatre? Enter the dark hall, dark like the mouth of a wolf, walk many meters without bumping into anything, orient myself in the emptiness until I get to the switch and turn on the light.

I don’t know how to swim, but I learned to see in the dark.

 

Las preguntas, las mariposas y la espectadora

¿Qué ve la espectadora cuando no ve nada?, ¿Qué ve la espectadora cuando ve lo absoluto?, ¿Y si el teatro atravesara a la espectadora como un chiflón?, Y si, al final, ¿la espectadora se transforma en mariposa?

1.  Qué ha de ser aquello que la espectadora vea cuando nada vea. La imposibilidad de la representación y su convocatoria irrenunciable comportan, además, la condición imaginaria. La imposibilidad habilita y es precondición de la imaginación. La acción de representación como acto, principalmente imaginario, nos permite tocar el imposible. Lo sabe la espectadora.
2. La representación cuenta tanto con el más allá, como con el más acá de la medida de distancia justa. La imposibilidad y, por tanto, carácter imaginario de las miles de mariposas, no es suficiente para afirmar la representación, es preciso que el teatro atraviese a la espectadora como un chiflón o, en su defecto, que exista al menos la potencia de que aquello ocurra. Que la atraviese el edificio, la disciplina, la tradición, que la atraviesen todas las disputas históricas sobre lo que es y lo que no es teatro. La espectadora no cuenta sólo con miles de mariposas volando, cuenta además con ese atravesamiento.
3. Nada. No hay absoluto visible ni tremendo representable y, a pesar de todo, lo Real. La espacialización de la pregunta en la página podría leerse como vacilación, intermitencia, alternancia, énfasis, no sé. Es que lo absoluto que se revela o se nombra no va nunca sin titubeos. Lo Real (Lacan), que no es ni el nóumeno (Kant), ni solo pedazo de carne sin lenguaje, se apunta con un dedo también titubeante que no logra nunca marcar una dirección estable. Nada, la espectadora no ve nada, pero sólo ahora puede latir con fuerza la cosa, el punctum (Barthes), el absoluto innombrable del ser arrojado allí, a su angustia de espectadora.
4. La imposibilidad de devenir mariposa cierra el desfile de imágenes, haciéndonos recordar que el acto de representación no es sino un imposible al que no podemos renunciar. Habilitar esa reflexión implicaría hoy sobre todo una pregunta por la recepción. La espectadora, que tiene tantas opciones como cualquiera de transformarse en mariposa, es sobre quien recae la pregunta.

La distancia entre quien se da a ver y yo, que veo, tiene algo de obscena. Obscena sin duda. Porque la distancia justa es obscena por el marco y la perspectiva de todas las circunstancias dadas. La distancia superada por acercamiento es obscena por el sudor y la temperatura corporal de la crueldad. Y, la distancia superada por alejamiento, es obscena por redundancia, por exceso de historia, de libro y de horror.

La espectadora nos permite preguntar.

   

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Questions, butterflies, and the spectator

What does the spectator see when she sees nothing? What does the spectator see when she sees the absolute? And if the theatre goes through the spectator like a draught of air?  And if, in the end, the spectator transforms into a butterfly?

1.  What could it be that the spectator sees when she sees nothing? The impossibility of representation and its evocation carries with it, additionally, the imaginary condition.  Impossibility enables and is the precondition for imagination. The action of representation as an act of performance, mainly imaginary, allows us to touch the impossible. The spectator knows it.
2. A staging has available the afterlife as much as the life of the right degree of exact distance. The impossible, and therefore imaginary, nature of thousands of butterflies appearing on stage necessitates that the theatre penetrate the spectator like a draught of air or, if not, that there at least be the potential for such a thing to happen. The potential that it penetrate the building, the discipline, the tradition, that it penetrate all the historical debates over what is and is not theatre. The spectator doesn’t only have thousands of butterflies flying; she also has this penetration, whether she knows it or not.
3. Nothing. There’s no visible absolute or tremendous that can be staged, and despite everything, there’s the Real. The question’s position on the page could be read as vacillation, intermittence, alternation, emphasis–I don’t know. Because the absolute that reveals or names itself never goes without hesitation. The Real (Lacan), that is not the noumenon (Kant) nor just a piece of flesh without language–points with  a finger that also hesitates, that never succeeds in signaling a stable direction. Nothing, the spectator sees nothing, but only now can she forcefully beat the thing, the punctum (Barthes) the unnamable absolute of being thrown there, to her anguish as the spectator.
4. The impossibility of becoming a butterfly closes the parade of images, reminding us that it is impossible to renounce the act of representation. Granting this reflection would entail, today above all, the matter of reception. The question falls back upon the spectator, who has so  many options,  including transforming herself into a butterfly.

The distance between the presentation of one who gives himself to be seen and, me, the one who sees, is somehow tainted by the obscene. Undoubtedly obscene. Because the correct distance is obscene; because of the context and the perspective of all the given circumstances. The distance narrowed by getting closer is obscene because of the sweat and the corporeal temperature of cruelty. And the distance surpassed by moving away, is obscene with redundancy, with an excess of history, of books, and of horror.

The spectator allows us to question.

   

 

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Para Coca

 

Y de pronto un día los espectadores se convirtieron en actores, los actores en actrices las actrices en protagonistas los protagonistas en historias y las historias invadieron las plazas.

De pronto un día la memoria se hizo cuerpos, los fantasmas granos, los recuerdos estallaron y el tiempo comenzó a andar.

De pronto un día el teatro abandonó la sala, nuestros ojos se volvieron oídos, mirar se transformó en escuchar, y escuchar en tocar. De pronto nos tocamos y nos dejamos de tocar. De un día para otro dejamos de mirar y a otros les estallaron la mirada. De un día para otro todo se volvió escucha mientras los antiguos héroes enmudecían.

De pronto un día nos encontramos

desparramando infectando inoculando contagiando diseminando contaminando dispersando  esparciendo

volviendo todo teatro

convirtiendo en evidencia los efectos

un día de repente algo de esto sucedió

 algo nos pasó

todxs nuestrxs cuerpxs habitaron el gran teatro del mundo

 

Aunque nos atemorizó

 

Pero ahí estaban los amigxs

de pie

en la plaza

entre tanta destrucción

ahí

lxs amigxs

al fin es lo único en pie

diciendo que ESTO es cierto

   

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For Coca

 

And suddenly one day the spectators turned into actors, the actors into actresses, the actresses into protagonists, the protagonists into stories, and the stories invaded the town squares.

Suddenly one day memory turned into bodies, ghosts into seeds, memories exploded, and time began to move.

Suddenly one day theatre left the auditorium, our eyes became ears, looking transformed into listening, and listening into touching. Suddenly we touched and we stopped touching. Overnight, we stopped gazing and others had their gazes exploded. Overnight, everything became listening while the old heroes fell silent.

Suddenly one day we found ourselves

scattering infecting inoculating transmitting disseminating contaminating dispersing spreading

everything becoming theatre

turning effects into evidence

one day all of a sudden something like this happened

something happened to us

all our bodies occupied the big theatre of the world

 

Although it frightened us

 

But there were our friends

standing up

in the town squares

amidst so much destruction

there

friends

at last the only ones standing

saying that THIS is true

 

Dice Leonart. Un teatro como un país. Un teatro de carne. De obscena diversidad. Un teatro que nos mirara. Cochinamente. Un teatro cara de raja. Un teatro con la urgencia del presente. Un teatro necesario. Leonart desea un teatro que es un cuerpo, apasionado, excesivo, luminoso, desfachatado --insolente, incluso--, nostálgico, infinito, poderoso, consciente de sus flaquezas y debilidades. Quiere un individuo que nos mira, que nos devuelve la mirada, una mirada que nos devela. Cómo nos miran quienes nos conocen en lo profundo, cual madre, matria; ¿unx mismx? Es un teatro de Orson Welles; ese de La Dama de Shanghai; de la sala de los espejos donde se devela quién es el asesino. Un teatro que tiene la escala de la persona y de la multitud y, mientras nos refleja, también nos envuelve. ¿Qué significa este teatro compadre de palmadita en la espalda, cómplice? Sabemos del teatro espacio, del teatro lugar, del teatro concepto, del teatro medio, pero este teatro individuo es inédito. Uno que no sólo emociona, sino que se emociona. Un teatro que podría salir a la calle y poner su cuerpo preñado de presente y a punto de parir un futuro nuevo y urgente.  

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  Leonart says. A theatre like a country. A theatre of flesh. Of obscene diversity. A theatre that would look at us.  Crudely. A dickhead’s theatre. A theatre with all the urgency of the present. A necessary theatre. Leonart desires a theatre that is a body, impassioned, excessive, luminous, shameless—even insolent—nostalgic, infinite, powerful, conscious of its frailties and weaknesses. He wants one that looks at us, that returns our gaze, a gaze that reveals us. How do those who know us deeply look at us? Like a mother, motherland--like oneself? It is a theatre from Orson Welles; from The Lady from Shanghai; the room of mirrors that reveals who the assassin is. A theatre at the scale of one person and of a multitude, and, while it reflects us, it also envelops us. What does this complicit, complacent theatre mean? We know about the theatre as space, the theatre as place, the theatre as concept, the theatre as medium, but this personified theatre is novel. A theatre that not only thrills others but becomes thrilled itself. A theatre that could go into the street and submit its body, pregnant with the present  and ready to birth a new and urgent future.    

EL ECO DE LA CALLE BUSCANDO A LA GENTE / UNA LACRIMÓGENA USADA / UN ESCENARIO VACÍO ¿Dónde se fueron todos? ¿Aló? ¿Aló? Daría lo que fuera por un spam en la cabeza Daría lo que fuera por sentir que los ojos De la gente Lloran por mí Como si les hubiera dado una escena emocionante Como si se estuvieran cagando de la risa

El 31 de diciembre de 2020, el Instituto Nacional de Derechos Humanos emitió el informe anual donde se da el número de personas que resultaron heridas durante el estallido social en Chile. Contabilizados desde el 17 de octubre al 30 de diciembre, se registraron 3.554 personas lesionadas: 2.874 hombres, 416 mujeres y 264 niños, niñas y adolescentes. De entre estas personas heridas, 2.081 personas sufrieron lesiones por disparos: 1.615 fueron impactados por perdigones, 230 impactados por lacrimógenas, 185 impactados por balines y 51 personas fueron impactadas por balas. 359 personas sufrieron daños oculares. 335 presentaron trauma o lesión en sus ojos, y 24 de ellas sufrieron el estallido o pérdida del globo ocular. Gustavo Gatica, estudiante de psicología de 21 años, puso el cuerpo y perdió ambos ojos. El teniente coronel Claudio Crespo se desempeñaba el 8 de noviembre en la Prefectura de Fuerzas Especiales de Santiago como jefe táctico de la intervención Sur, bajo la denominación de Gama 3. Cerca de las 18.10h, en la esquina de Vicuña Mackenna con calle Carabineros de Chile, un grupo de manifestantes gritaba consignas contra la policía y lanzaba elementos contundentes a sus vehículos. Crespo se parapetó contra el muro de un edificio y, apuntando hacia donde se ubicaban los manifestantes, disparó la escopeta antidisturbios calibre 12 directamente al tercio superior del cuerpo de los manifestantes impactando a la víctima a una distancia de 24,5 metros. Gustavo Gatica quedó con trauma ocular severo:estallido del ojo izquierdo y contusión grave en el ojo derecho. El 8 de noviembre, Crespo fue autor de 170 disparos con la escopeta de perdigones y de 43 con la carabina lanza lacrimógenas, según consta en los registros de Carabineros de Chile. Ese mismo día, contraviniendo el protocolo, Crespo descargó en su computador de trabajo personal los videos de la cámara GoPro que portaba. Una glosa podría explicar o aclarar un texto. En esta glosa no ha sido posible aclarar la acción abominable de un oficial que dispara ciento setenta balines a los ojos de unos jóvenes manifestantes, ocasionándoles lesiones irreversibles para destruirles sus vidas.  

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  On December 31, 2020, the National Institute of Human Rights published its annual report with the number of persons injured during the social uprising in Chile. Between October 17 and December 20, 3,554 persons were reported injured: 2,874 men; 416 women; and 264 boys, girls, and teenagers. Among these injured persons, 2,081 people suffered gunshot wounds: 1,615 were wounded by buckshot; 230 were affected by tear gas; 185 hit by pellets and 51 people were hit by rubber bullets. 359 people suffered ocular injuries: 335 had trauma or lesions in their eyes, and 24 of them suffered “el estallido” or loss of an eyeball. Gustavo Gatica, a 21-year-old psychology student, put forth his body and had his eyes put out. On November 8, Lieutenant Colonel Claudio Crespo of the Prefecture of Special Forces in Santiago served as the chief tactician of the Southern intervention, under the banner of the Gama 3 unit. Around 6:10PM, on the corner of Vicuña Mackenna and the Carabineros de Chile street, a group of protesters shouted slogans against the police and threw blunt objects at their vehicles. Crespo took refuge against the side of a building and, pointing toward where the protestors were located, fired his anti-disturbance 12 gauge shotgun directly at the torsos of the protestors, impacting the victim at a distance of 24.5 meters (approximately 80 feet). Gustavo Gatica was left with severe ocular trauma: destruction of the left eye and grave contusion in the right eye. On November 8, Crespo was responsible for 170 discharges of his shotgun and 43 with his tear gas launcher, according to the Carabineros de Chile registry. On that same day, going against protocol, Crespo downloaded videos from the GoPro camera he wore to his personal work computer. A gloss might explain or clarify a text. In this gloss, it has not been possible to clarify the abominable action of the official who discharged 170 rubber pellets into the eyes of young protestors, inflicting permanent injuries that would destroy their lives.  

En octubre del año 2019 Chile empezó a arder de a poco, violentamente, como nunca imaginamos que ardería. Y pensamos que no sería posible volver a pisar un escenario de la misma manera en que lo habíamos hecho antes. Nuevamente los militares y policías estaban torturando gente, estaban matando, violando, sacándoles los ojos a las personas. Fue entonces que se nos apareció el horror y el arte se llenó de preguntas sin respuesta. Y dentro de esta incertidumbre sobre la función del arte, la masiva performance de Un violador en tu camino del colectivo LASTESIS  me ofreció  una certeza  después de tanto tiempo. Porque ahí, en la calle llena  de miles de mujeres que sentíamos lo mismo, verbalizando lo  que estaba escondido en nosotras, algo empezó a arder verdaderamente, y entonces nada volvió a ser igual. Qué todo arda es volver a esa sensación de final, de que todo lo que ya existe no se sostiene, y de que el silencio guardado por años ahora explota como un grito. La forma del collage me hace inevitablemente pensar en un vómito, en echar  un conjunto de elementos que enferman y envenenan nuestros cuerpos, manchando todo a su paso. Lanzo hacia afuera todo lo malo, para poder comenzar a sanarme. Un poco de patriarcado, un poco de racismo, un poco de transfobia, un poco de arribismo, un poco de lesbofobia: todo en trozos de papel mezclado sobre la mesa, listo para ser quemado y para desaparecer. Sin embargo, vomitar está tan mal visto que intentamos no hacerlo nunca. No se puede vomitar en la cena familiar, ni en la reunión de apoderados, ni en la entrevista de trabajo. Porque todo lo que se sale del margen no debe ser visto nunca, que no se nos vea la sangre, que no se nos vea el sudor, que no se nos vean las lágrimas, ni menos que se vea nuestra rabia. Botar la rabia hacia afuera es lo que nos transforma en monstruos. En el video hay un apagón, y de fondo una voz de mujer nos dice un conjuro, lanza un maleficio donde por fin se muere el orden establecido, se queman en la hoguera los opresores, los que desde siempre han contado la historia hegemónica, y es solo entonces que se podrá, por fin, empezar de nuevo. Y entonces, ese hombre blanco heterosexual cis dejará de ser el protagonista de la historia, y los profesores en las salas de clase dejarán de estudiar solamente autores varones, y los autores varones dejarán de sentirse con la autoridad de crear a los grandes personajes femeninos del teatro universal. En el video también aparecen carteles con distintos tipos de frases: “Las mujeres, a la sombra”, “Los hombres, más ventajas”, “Es un aluvión de nostálgico romanticismo”. Es a través de estas ideas desde donde se ha creado el mundo. Para mi, Qué todo arda evoca una imagen, cientos de brujas quemando sacerdotes en la hoguera, quemando sus documentos oficiales y sus leyes en una fogata masiva. Pero no son las brujas que inventaron los hombres, son otras brujas, no son las que vuelan con escobas, ni las que usan gorros puntiagudos. Son las verdaderas, las que sangran, las que paren en la tierra, las que se aman entre ellas, las mujeres transgéneras, los hombres transgéneros, las mujeres que son libres.  

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  In October 2019 Chile began to burn little by little, violently, like we never imagined it could burn. And we thought that it would not be possible to step on a stage in the same way we had before. Once again the military and the police were torturing people; they were killing, raping, blinding people. It was then that the horror appeared to us, and art filled with questions without answers. Amidst this uncertainty about the function of art, the mass performance of the collective LASTESIS, A rapist in your path, offered me long-awaited certainty. Because there, in the street filled with thousands of women who felt the same way, verbalizing what was hidden within us, something began to truly burn with irrevocable consequences. Let everything burn returns us to that feeling of the end, when everything that already exists cannot sustain itself, and when the silence kept for years now explodes like an eternal scream. The form of the collage makes me inevitably think of vomiting, releasing the sickening elements that poison our bodies, staining everything in its path. I throw out all the bad to start to heal myself. A bit of patriarchy, a bit of racism, a bit of transphobia, a bit of social climbing, a bit of lesbophobia: all are scraps of paper mixed together on the table, ready to burn and disappear. However, vomiting is improper behavior and to be avoided at all costs. One cannot vomit during a family dinner, nor in a meeting of managers, nor in a job interview, because excess should never be seen. They should not see our blood; they should not see our sweat; they should not see our tears; and never our rage. To release our rage would turn us into monsters. In the video there is a blackout and from the depths, a voice casts a spell, a curse that at last dooms the established order, burns the homes of the oppressors, ones who have always controlled the telling of history. Only in this way can we finally start again. And so, that white cis heterosexual man will no longer be the protagonist of history, and teachers in the classrooms will no longer teach only male authors, and male authors will no longer feel they have the authority to write the great female characters of the theater. In the video, too, signs appear with different phrases: “Women in the shadow,” “Men. More advantages,” “It’s a flood of nostalgic romanticism.” These are the ideas from which the world has been created. For me, Let everything burn evokes an image: hundreds of witches burning priests at the stake, burning their official documents and laws in a massive bonfire. But these are not the witches that men invented; these are other witches. They do not fly on brooms or wear pointy hats. These are the true witches:, the ones who bleed, who give birth in the dirt, the women who love each other, transgender women, transgender men, women who are free.  

Trying to Land...

  I keep circling around the question—can “success” be possible without it being achieved on the backs of others? What are rebellious actions, now that everyone (including those who have resisted for such a long time) is being forced to rethink and “disrupt”?   Will those who have a history of thinking outside normative ways of working be swallowed and left invisible as bigger voices and institutions “pivot” and appropriate their strategies with no consultation? How can we be activists for those who are underrepresented, advocates for change, and continue to provoke thought when all of these actions are quickly absorbed back into a never-ending spiral of narcissism, marketing, and capitalism?  How to get over the guilt of making or promoting your own shit when there is so much going on in the world? And how to go deeper than simply positioning your event as a fundraiser for other causes?! I keep asking myself: are you being transgressive in a way that is contributing something new to the conversation… or are you just being an asshole? Can we be “considerate assholes”?? Testing boundaries while simultaneously offering context and support around experiences that are potentially challenging or uncomfortable? But what to do when all the considerations become overwhelming? And how can we reconcile with the realization that our personal ideas of freedom may be someone else’s trauma or nightmare? Are we responsible for the fact that our decisions have real consequences and may cause harm?     What does “safety” imply when the most important works are not “safe” experiences in the traditional sense of the word? Can those who have the emotional capacity hold spaces where audiences and artists can be comfortable with risk, and open to the possibility of changing their minds? (This seems to be the thing folks are most scared of these days).  Can we take more care in our invitations? Be more transparent about what is being offered, communicate why artists are being invited, and provide more clarity about the conditions while acknowledging all of the messy problematics, the feelings, and complications in the proposal? Like peeling back the layers of an infinite onion, it’s hard to not be discouraged by the unsatisfying feeling that we are never going to get “there” —But what if we surrender to the fact that we will never arrive? That there will always be a new “there”? That it’s our job to constantly uncover every new dominance that forms and the new realizations of what is being excluded, what’s missing? Can we be happy in this kind of work? Or is it a recipe for permanent unhappiness? And how to support those who do not want to participate, who need to take time, who don’t want to immediately return to “normal”?  Can we valorize this newfound sense of “not doing” as an important way of being? (and of working?) Will all this time for reflection inspire action that will be felt both in the short and long term or will we just continue to eat our own tail?  

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“Scare Quotes Forever!!”  

What if anything is possible? What if our home is in the theatre? What if these dark rooms have allowed us to be free from the tyranny of the mundane?  Have cleared our minds and opened our hearts?  What if these dark rooms of waiting where our friendships formed, our drinks overflowed, and our open hearts broke became suddenly dangerous? What if the way that we cared and created empathy vanished in an instant? Would we find it in a Zoom waiting room? Would we recreate it in our streets in protest marches and banners? Or would we simply crawl further into ourselves and away from one another? What if anything is possible? Performance lives for so many of us in the moments where we see and are seen, where we feel and are felt. We have created, we have observed, we have waited. Yet. We are, in this waiting, reckoning with the realities of when, where, and how our curated performance palaces have been blind and unfeeling—where our intentions have been wholly separate from our impact. What if anything is possible? What if you have never felt cared for or seen by live performance? What if our cutting-edge curation, our form-destroying festivals, our seasons of brave new work, our bridge-building concerts, have never spoken to you or about you but instead made it clear that we don’t want you around? Made it clear by the signals of our unspoken rules, our drink minimums, our ticket prices, and our inability to imagine a world that could include your story? What if that exclusion was the point? What if? Anything is possible. So much lost in this waiting. So much revealed. So much undone. So much planted. What beckons us from this stage? What must we create in this present to take care of one another in a new way? Can theatre not be dragged down by its logistics, its unending waste, its determination to prioritize a singular narrative, its partnership with white supremacy? Can theatre move into a moment, a movement? Someday the curtain will rise and who we were in this present will be on full display. What did we make? For whom?  As we redefine space and time as a human collective, can we reimagine how to create a sustainable artistic community that understands how to build care for one another into the process and make that process of creation a sacred breath? In and out. Up and down. Flexible. Necessary. Rooted in relationship. Anything is possible.

Withness, without us

We had seasons, festivals, and tours, we had work days and evening performances and opening and wrap parties. If something fell off pace, it merely got left behind. See you next cycle, try to catch up. What happened once we all disappeared together?  The last performance I saw/managed before The Kitchen closed to the public was an open secret. The worst kept secret. Ralph Lemon staged the third iteration of his Rant performances as part of Okwui Okpokwasili and Judy Hussie-Taylor’s curated series for Danspace Project. It was a secret because the audience was meant to consciously be there. Someone wanted you there; maybe it was Ralph or another performer, maybe it was The Kitchen or Danspace. Kevin Beasley created the booming soundtrack through his own sound system that provided much more power than a small black box theater needs. Ralph, Okwui, and Samita Sinha’s voices reached over the beats. Dwayne Brown, Mariama Noguera-Devers, Stanley Gambucci, and Paul Hamilton danced in unison, and Darrell Jones stepped out from his seat in the audience for a solo. The air was humid with sweat, and the performance was followed by a lot of hugging. I was closing down the building so I let everyone linger afterwards for as long as they wanted. There was time, people didn’t feel in a rush that night. A few months later, Ralph wrote briefly on the work for MoMA’s website and lamented the luck of this occurring before we all scuttled into our apartments and hid away. Why was this particular, not quite public/not quite private performance blessed by timing, and not others? There is no trace of this performance on our website, where so much performance is now presented, because it was a secret. It was made to remain within our bodies. We didn’t know that many other future performances would be erased, but in another way, and would have to live on in our imaginary. Rant is an iterative score filled with expressions of rage and freedom, created by Black and Brown artists in a dark space within an institution. There’s accumulation, but no peak. (Maybe it’s all peak.) I’m reading Tara’s score of performance notes as a gathering of past shared moments. We’ve fallen out of time for months now. If we can’t even remember what day it is, how can we share time? Conjuring the past has been such a comfort. It can feel like it’s only grief and rage that bring us together now, not in the darkness of the black box, but in the hot summer sun and on our small screens that will contain us for a long while. We’ve been with ourselves for many months now. Without our routines, we can often feel like our bodies are these emptied theaters. We’re not useful. We’re not housing the senses and the other bodies that fill us up. But as Tara writes, “change is only legible in relation.” If it wasn’t clear before, universal grief doesn’t exist. Universal rage doesn’t exist. We’re beside ourselves right now. Togetherness needs to remain relative. 

CONCEPT of landscape

I am a smoker. I am also a father. I do not have any outdoor space in my apartment, so I end up smoking by the front window. Admittedly, this does not fully stop smoke from getting inside the flat. But it does make me feel less guilty. We are in lockdown. Not the best time to quit smoking. We are at Week 5. At the peak, the experts say. And, at this point in the story, kids are supposed to be spreading the virus like wildfire. The window looks over a street in Brussels. In the rhythm of my addiction, I start to see these five minute breaks as short contemporary art performances. Will someone pass by? How will they be dressed? Will they have a funny walk? How drunk will they be? Are they aware that an audience is watching? Back to reality. Most of the passers-by are homeless or refugees. Everyone else has a safe place to hide at the moment. The lockdown has made inequalities even more visible. Humans who did not manage to jump on the fast boat of capitalism have ended up stranded in the deserted city, while others managed to reach their second property on time. It’s Week 6. Suddenly priorities appear clearer than ever. For the passers-by in front of my window, it is survival: finding food, a bed, and an alternative way to create resources. Whatever that may mean. It is most certainly a performance in itself. It is a sunny weekend. It is Week 7. Helicopters are flying over the neighborhood. Police killed another youngster. Protests erupted and I see young guys running down the street, most certainly trying to escape cops. Other audience members have joined, watching from different buildings and angles. The killing was not filmed. So protests will not spread around the world, yet. But the ground is boiling here also. The world will begin changing fast. Cursors will shift and radical ideas will be talked about as possible futures. Hopefully. The post office at the end of the street has reopened. Clients have to wait outside in a line, respecting a 1.5 meter physical distance. This means the line stretches to my window. Suddenly the performance has become an ensemble piece. What attitude do you adopt in the line? How long will this last? Are we at Week 8 or more? Slow movement has replaced the previous catwalk-like rhythm. Soon, regular speed will return and there will be too many things happening at the same moment to be able to spot the meaningful details. One could define the word “concept” as an abstract idea. From Week 9, I chose to look at the future as a concept and the view from my window as a landscape. Wikipedia informs me that “the character of a landscape helps define the self-image of the people who inhabit it and a sense of place that differentiates one region from other regions. It is the dynamic backdrop to people's lives.” The backdrop is in place. The performers will arrive. Together we return to the art of living. And we will do our best to pretend we have not been transformed. [caption id="attachment_959" align="aligncenter" width="836"] Photo courtesy of the author.[/caption]

The Time of the Now

[caption id="attachment_953" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Dries Verhoeven, "Fare Thee Well!" (Oslo). Photo courtesy of the artist.[/caption]  

I am writing these lines after my first academic year at New York University in Abu Dhabi, one year after the last edition of Fast Forward, the site-specific festival that I imagined and curated for Athens as a critical response to the multifaceted “crisis” in Greece. I am writing these lines during a dematerialized summer shrunk to a disembodied liveliness and to a distanced sociality across space-times. While I am struggling to imagine a theatre that matters. As I always did. But now it seems that it needs to matter differently. It seems that it needs to address differently the urgencies that exist in the here-and-now, present but often latent, confined in between the anxieties of the creation time, the precarious conditions of the production system, the institutional imperatives, and the contested sponsorships. Does the fact that it needs to “matter differently” mean that we need to invent “new” forms and subject-matters? To challenge any exoticization through alienation? To decolonize originality and authenticity? To reconsider sustainability but also post-humanity? To privilege theatre as a social process instead of theatre as commodity? I honestly don’t know.

I am writing these lines as I need to imagine something in order to make it. Theatre is always, for me, a porous, relational common ground where discursive events go hand in hand with poetry and radical aesthetics. Theatre is a translocal space of togetherness, a collective state of mind where unimaginable forms of engagement and emancipation can potentially emerge. Theatre-as-commonality reminds us of the essential role that theatre has played in all times: from the ancient city-states to the struggles for freedom and justice in our “short century” and the ongoing fight for a world that matters — for all, equally.

I am writing these lines thinking that we need perhaps to unmake theatre in order to imagine it  — to un-make means, Homi Bhabha writes, “to release from repression, and to reconstruct,  reinscribe the elements of the known.”[1] Does that mean that theatre shall assume the responsibility for the unspoken? Shall we collectively envision cultural events that transcend the way that we have shaped our “global” art world? Could we rethink the role of the curator as a public servant at a moment when we don’t even know what “public” means? Is it possible to identify and dismantle the power relationships that shake the artistic field both on the inside and the outside? Shall we reconsider the distribution of resources beyond postcolonial concepts such as the Global South, or essentialist approaches to interculturalism? I honestly don’t know. I am only thinking that we need to re-imagine it.

     

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[1] Homi Bhabha, "The World and the Home", Social Text (1992, n. 31/32), 146.

‘Only those who survived can remember for they alone know the smell of burning flesh and a day is coming when no one will actually remember this smell, it will be nothing more than a phrase, a literary reference, an idea of an odour. Odourless therefore.’[1]               [1] Jorge Semprun, in Shivaun Woolfson's Holocaust Legacy in Post-Soviet Lithuania: People, Places and Objects (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014), 4.  

Scenography is an open-ended concept, ‘… a sensory as well as an intellectual experience, emotional as well as rational.’[1]

  As a scenographer, I approach the depicted war-torn interior as an abandoned mise-en-scene: inscribed with layers of narratives, traces of time and haptic remnants of past violence and trauma. The mise-en-scene belongs to the aftermath of ethnic conflicts in the former SFR Yugoslavia, which took place in the early 1990s. The event has taken place, and the domestic site I encounter represents its authentic scenographic afterimage. Material and immaterial inscriptions of the past events define the space as highly theatrical. The absence of human figures is not an obstacle to the theatricality of the depicted moment. Scenographically speaking, space and event are thoroughly interlaced. Space assigns validity to events and narratives, and it acts as a proof that an event has taken place. The captured space physically incorporates traces of violently interrupted human inhabitation. The static nature of the captured moment does not exclude it as a product of a theatrical process. The distinct nature of this theatricality is embodied in an awareness that the mise-en-scene is not staged and designed. Instead, it is a product of a real violent actions performed during the war. This space allows a telling search through narratives of intimate spaces shaped by war. It exposes unitary, intimate experience of a spatial narrative – a location charged with traumatic experience. My presence in this space redefines its meaning, and reorients it as an active material in comprehending the collective traumatic past. By being present in this mise-en-scene long after the events have taken place, I am physically, sensually and emotionally in touch with the embodiment of traumas experienced by all of us who are explicitly and implicitly linked to this history. An unknown woman’s bedroom emerges as a physical manifestation of trauma and a genuine place of memory.  

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[1] Joslin McKinney and Phillip Butterworth, The Cambridge Introduction to Scenography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 4.  

EN  ESTOS TIEMPOS INNOMBRABLES El destino retoma su vuelo y con sus alas desvía el avenir, ese destino más poderoso que los dioses, bajo el cual los poetas dramáticos condujeron sus obras, es lo inesperado que se avista en el horizonte para la humanidad y la escena. A veces se afirma que el teatro está en crisis, que ha perdido su sentido, o que está al borde del precipicio del olvido, lo que es una alocución de un presente. Son las percepciones de quienes padecen las incertidumbres del oficio, dado que   el   amor, la ira,  etc. como la teatralidad, subsistirán más allá de los aconteceres de hoy, y se esfumarán cuando el planeta deje de girar alrededor del sol. La escena manipulada por la especie se hospeda en manos de quienes la capturan. A vece instrumentalizada sea por regímenes  dictatoriales, a veces  solo como un medio de mercado para la obtención del lucro, o como un lugar para enfrentar  la  ficción imperante, o tal vez solo para sumergirnos en el olvido, o para construir un luminoso saber y  congregarnos como tribu. Los deseos de la humanidad están poblados de quimeras que la hacen subsistir y le permiten continuar su existencia, pero que nunca logran plasmar en su plenitud. Desde “el amar a tu hermano como a ti mismo”, al ideal del “hombre nuevo” o al anhelo de la “fraternidad, igualdad y libertad”, o tratando de construir el reflejo de la palabra de un dios como eje del buen vivir. Y así cientos de bellos relatos que sólo arriban al enunciado de su historia. Ahí es donde la representación, el arte, les da vida, espíritu y materialidad a esos deseos sociales esquivos, podríamos decir que el teatro imaginado es tan múltiple    El arte logra señalar lo que no existe y hablar de lo no dicho, como develar o reafirmar la ficción imperante. Sin embargo no existe la solución buena o justa, no existe el “nunca más”, mientras el motor de un actuar de la especie sea enseñar a matar y construir armadas para aniquilar lo existente, no habrá obra que logre detener este accionar, habrá escenas que glorifiquen el heroísmo del rebelde, guerrillera o militar y otras que lo denuesten, pero ninguna logrará impedir el disparó de un gatillo. Por eso adoro las balas de la ficción ya que nunca han manchado de sangre el escenario. Ahí tal vez, el arte logré transformar a la especie, permitiéndole plasmar sus inacabadas aspiraciones, En el intertanto nos preparamos, sumando otras letras al alfabeto del lenguaje escénico, reelaborando las tradiciones y avistando una escena, que no podrá ser igual a la del ayer y que inundará las calles o escenarios, dando cuenta de una revolución cultural que ha hecho emerger el anhelo de otro constructo social. Continuamos, hasta lograr la inexistencia de los casos de todas, todos y todes los Matelunas. Será lo que está detrás del horizonte, lo que dilucidará el sentir de estas palabras.  

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  IN THESE UNSPEAKABLE TIMES   Destiny takes flight once again and its wings deflect agreement. This destiny more powerful than the gods, under whose aegis dramatic poets create their works, is the unexpected meeting place on the horizon for humanity and for the stage. The theatre is constantly thought to be in crisis. Said to have lost its meaning, or to be teetering on the edge of the precipice of forgetting, which is an allocution of the present. These are the perceptions of those who suffer from the uncertainties of their occupation. It is a given that love, wrath, etc., like theatricality, will subsist beyond the events of today, and will disappear only when the planet stops revolving around the sun. The stage, manipulated by the species, lodges in the hands of those who capture it. At times instrumentalized by dictatorial regimes, at times it is only a means for the market to obtain profits, at times a place to confront the reigning fiction, or perhaps to submerge ourselves in forgetting, or to construct a luminous knowledge and for us to congregate like a tribe. Humanity’s desires are populated with chimeras that make them subsist and allow them to continue to exist, but that never succeed in shaping their plenitude. Whether it is “love your brother like yourself,” the ideal of “the new man,” or the yearning for “brotherhood, equality and liberty,” or trying to construct the reflection of the word of God like the axis of the good life, hundreds of beautiful stories only get to enunciate their tale. This is where performance, art, gives life, spirit, and materiality to those aloof social desires.  We could say that the imagined theatre is as multiple as the diverse yearnings of each small group of human beings, and that thus, like every rite, it maintains its history in the present, yearning for the representation of the political-spiritual aspirations of humanity. As a means of unveiling or reaffirming the reigning fiction, art succeeds in pointing out what doesn’t exist and in talking about what is not said. Nevertheless, if the motor driving the species is being taught to kill and to construct arms with which to annihilate what is, the good or just solution doesn’t exist, “never again” doesn’t exist.  No play can stop such action. Scenes will be written to glorify the heroism of the rebel, guerilla, or soldier, and others that insult, but none of them can impede the shot that comes from pulling the trigger. I adore fictional bullets because they’ve never stained a stage with blood. Political theatre, like the curtain raiser of an ideology, has succumbed. The politics of art and the social impetus of creation is emerging, where, by means of artistic language, the discourses of the present manifest themselves. This happens in demonstrations where song, dance, projections, choreography, and literature on the walls construct social actions that pierce the “artistic fiction” to reveal a socio-political reality that establishes a different spirit of the age. There, perhaps, art will succeed in transforming the species, permitting it to shape its unfinished aspirations. In the meantime, we will prepare ourselves, adding other letters to the alphabet of scenic language, re-elaborating traditions and descrying scenes that cannot be the same as those of yesterday, and that will inundate the streets and stages, realizing a cultural revolution that has made the yearning for another social construction emerge. We continue, until we achieve the destruction of all the cases like Mateluna’s. It will be that which is behind the horizon, that which will explain the meaning of these words.

¿Y si no hubiera más límite que la imaginación? El teatro nos permite poner en escena lo que somos y sufrimos y también imaginar el país que queremos. Ampliar el arco de nuestra imaginación, aflojar los contornos, desplazar los límites, cuestionar y cambiar lo que está establecido. Replantear nuestros imaginarios colectivos  posibilita esperar siempre más y no claudicar. La representación puede hacer aparecer a lxs Otrxs, visibilizar un protagonista, darle el centro del escenario a quien siempre estuvo en la periferia. Puede contentarse con perpetuar las imágenes establecidas o emancipar la mirada. La representación puede retorcerse sobre sí misma hasta cerrarse o multiplicarse intentando dar cuenta de sus grietas. Reflejar lo que está más allá de lo imaginable puede ser una tarea dolorosa, pero pionera y necesaria. ¿Cómo llevar al Otrx a imaginar aquello que nunca ha visto directamente? ¿Cómo representar el dolor, la violencia, la opresión y el miedo del pueblo mapuche? ¿Cómo poner en escena aquello que está oculto tras los silencios, miradas y gestos, aquello que evita ser dicho, pero está latiendo entre los cuerpos? ¿El grito mudo, el desgarro interno de un territorio invisibilizado? El poder de la representación no es solo permitir visualizar mundos posibles, sino crear las condiciones para que estos  sucedan. En octubre 2019, aquello que solo unxs pocxs eran capaces de imaginar se volvió una visión colectiva.  Se imaginó un país donde la posibilidad de vivir dignamente no solo fuera el privilegio de unos pocos, donde el abuso no estuviera tan inserto en el sistema hasta hacerse invisible.  Y el grito se hizo carne en el colectivo.  La imaginación nos movilizó hasta que ya no hubo silencio, ni sumisión, ni miedo, hasta que ya no se pudo callar. Hasta que lo real exigió no ser menos que la imaginación.    

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    And if there were no limit to the imagination? Theatre permits us to stage who we are and what we suffer and also to imagine the country that we want. To amplify the arc of our imagination, to loosen the contours, to displace the limits, to question and to change what is established. To reconsider our collective imaginaries makes it possible for us to always hope for more and not give up. Representation can make the Others[1] appear, draw attention to a protagonist by putting at center stage one who had been on the periphery. One can content oneself with perpetuating established images or emancipate the gaze. Representation can turn in on itself until one has closed oneself off or multiplied oneself intending to count all of one’s crevices. To reflect what is further than the imaginable can be a painful task, but pioneering and necessary. How do you make the Other imagine that which they have never directly seen? How can you represent the pain, violence, oppression, and fear of the Mapuche people? How can you put on stage that which is hidden behind silences, looks, and gestures, that which avoids being spoken but is beating inside our bodies? The mute scream, the internal anguish of a territory made invisible? The power of representation is not only to allow us to visualize possible worlds, but to create the conditions for them to happen. In October 2019, that which only a few were capable of imagining, became a collective vision. A country was imagined where the possibility of living a dignified life was not only for the privileged few, where abuse was not so embedded in the system that it had become invisible. And the scream became flesh in the collective. The imagination mobilized us until there was no longer silence, nor submission, nor fear, until one could no longer keep quiet. Until the real demanded to be no less than the imagination.     [1] Translator’s note: In the Spanish original, Duarte uses the “x,” an orthography employed to degender Spanish words. 

 

El pueblo demanda, exige.
Se agrupa en lo performativo,
en lo público,
en los acuerdos visibles.

El pueblo hoy habita los intersticios del claroscuro.
0 y 1.

Cuántas ganas tenemos de salir del binarismo.

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The people demand, insist.
They assemble in the performative,
in the public,
in pacts that can be seen.

The people today live in the interstices of chiaroscuro.
0 and 1.

How badly we want to flee this binarism.

                                                                                                                        Septiembre 2020

Miro fascinado el video realizado por Ramón Griffero. Es un documental de la revolución que empezó en Chile el 18 de octubre de 2019. Reconozco las calles y los rayados de las paredes. El ruido. Hace calor y la gente está enmascarada. Eso pasó hace menos de un año pero parece historia antigua. Ahora no se puede protestar y las máscaras las usamos para detener al virus. Me gusta recordar esa sinfonía del desacato, ese amanecer colectivo. Prefiero eso a recordar los cuerpos heridos, sin ojos, que llenaban las salas de emergencias de los hospitales. Pero eso no se puede olvidar. En estos días he soñado con volver a la normalidad de la revolución, no a la normalidad de antes. Antes de la revolución había una inercia, una crueldad permanente, aplastante. La represión de la  revolución fue todavía más cruel, pero por lo menos estábamos en la calle. Hay gente que no quiere llamarla revolución. Prefieren decir que fue un estallido social, una revuelta. Yo prefiero revolución. Tiene más peso. Más fuerza. Además todavía no ha terminado. No sabemos si va a ser el nacimiento de una nueva sociedad, o lo mismo de siempre: otro día gris junto a Los Andes, otro día de muertos flotando en el agua. Sea como sea, lo mejor es arriesgarlo todo. Por eso también miro intrigado el video. No sé si veo una historia feliz. Hay caras felices, pero esa gente todavía no sabía nada de la plaga. No sabía que los mismos policías que les disparaban a matar, semanas después iban a ser los encargados de vigilar las calles vacías para salvarnos la vida. El virus ha justificado un nuevo estado policial. El virus salvó a la policía. EL VIRUS SALVÓ A LA POLICÍA. Me gusta ver esa felicidad ingenua de la protesta. Pero esa ingenuidad no va a ser suficiente ahora. Vamos a necesitar un poco más de desencanto y amargura. Vamos a necesitar un nuevo teatro. Lo que aprendimos de este proceso va a tener que ser pensado sobre nuestros escenarios. A veces el teatro necesita butacas y cuatro paredes. Cuando volvamos vamos a necesitar un nuevo teatro,   aunque esta espera es eterna. Supongo que muy pronto vamos a volver a sentir la euforia de marchar, pero no va a ser como antes. Va a ser una segunda oportunidad. Un regreso. Ahora vamos a estar más separados. No nos vamos a saludar de beso. Pero sí vamos a volver. Seguramente vamos a tener que ver este documental para recordar cómo éramos, cómo empezamos la revolución. Reconocer esa felicidad antigua nos va a servir, pero la victoria final va a requerir cierto rigor, cierta determinación. Creo que esa es la conciencia de la vida. El reencuentro de la tribu atomizada que finalmente se une y convierte el carnaval en un arma para desenmascarar la ficción de su época.  

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September 2020

Fascinated, I watch the video made by Ramón Griffero. It’s a documentary of the revolution that began in Chile on October 18th, 2019. I recognize the streets and the drawings on the walls. The noise. It’s hot and people are masked. This happened less than a year ago but it seems like ancient history. Now we aren’t allowed to protest and we use masks to stop the virus. I like to remember that symphony of discontent, that collective awakening. I prefer that to remembering the wounded bodies, without eyes, that filled the emergency rooms of hospitals. But it’s impossible to forget them. These days, I’ve been dreaming of returning to the normalcy of the revolution, not the normalcy of before. Before the revolution, there was inertia, a permanent and crushing cruelty. The repression of the revolution was crueler still, but at least we were out in the street. There are people who don’t want to call it revolution. They prefer to say that it was a social explosion, a riot. I prefer revolution. It has more weight. More strength. Moreover, it’s still not over. We don’t know if there will be the birth of a new society, or if it will be the same as always: another gray day next to the Andes, another day of dead bodies floating in the water. Whatever happens, the best thing to do is to risk everything. That’s also why I watch the video with intrigue. I don’t know if I see a happy story. There are happy faces, but those people didn’t yet knew anything of the plague. They didn’t know that the same police officers shooting to kill them would, weeks later, be responsible for patrolling empty streets to save our lives. The virus has justified a new police state. The virus saved the police. THE VIRUS SAVED THE POLICE. I like to see that naive happiness of the protest. But that naivete is not going to be enough now. We are going to need a little more disillusionment and bitterness. We are going to need a new theater. What we learn from this process will have to be considered on our stages. Sometimes the theater needs wings and four walls. When we return we’re going to need a new theater, although that hunt is eternal. I suppose that very soon we’ll once again feel the euphoria of marching, but it won’t be like before. It’s going to be a second opportunity. A return. Now we’re going to be more separated. We won’t say hello with a kiss. But we’ll return. Surely we’ll have to watch this documentary to remember how we were, how we started the revolution. Recognizing that former happiness will serve us, but the final victory will require a certain rigor, certain determination. I think that that’s the consciousness of life. The reunion of an atomized tribe that finally unites and turns the carnival into a weapon to unveil the fiction of its era.  

disclaimer: we never felt as though we belonged to the world of theatre. preferring to couch our practice in participatory performance and public intervention. the artform lineage we fell in love with 20 years ago slipped somewhere between political activism, live art, and experimental practice. we always saw it as a stunningly audacious creative home with no walls and the freedom to take risks and we liked it that way. it allowed us to situate ourselves outside on the streets, gave us license to misbehave with form and content and, most importantly, it led us to think about the deeper potential of audience as our creative comrades, not as spectators but activators; like sleeper cells waiting for a phone call as their trigger to sneak outside and turn the world upside down.^[1] play, as in games, is our weapon of choice. we use games to encourage participation and as a thin veil to get away with some collective sly mischief. in the guardian online article ‘20 predictions for the next 25 years’^[2] jane mcgonigal imagines a future where games serve a social purpose beyond entertainment, enabling problem solving through cooperative play. could playing a non-competitive board game offer a framework towards implementing a universal basic income? could playing an escape room scenario offer a solution for the geo-politics of climate change? could immersing yourself in a vr minecraft experience help explore the ethics around in-vitro meat and synthetic foods? games as a tactical tool for critical enquiry into real world issues excites us a great deal. as we project our imaginations into this future we see the possibilities of new technologies undermining old forms of cultural, political power and a seismic shift of belief in the value of creativity to tackle major systemic problems. we see a new politic of collaboration based on the collision of skill sets from across industries and sectors. we see bold acts of civic improvement through civil disobedience with citizens directly affecting the change they want to see. we see ourselves on the front line with them. ‘a game for world leaders to play’ is an impossible work we would dearly love to make. perhaps not right now but at some point in the next 25 years. getting it out of our heads conceptually has been a lot of fun. we hold onto this imagined work with an equal degree of fear and excitement, the best combination of feelings when trying to make new work.    

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^[1] pvi collective are anti capitalists and don't use capital letters ^[2] 20 predictions for the next 25 years, no. 10, gaming: ‘we’ll play games to solve problems’ - jane mcgonigal, the guardian, 11 january 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2011/jan/02/25-predictions-25-years.

In Sickness and in Health.   I think theatre is sick. Or is it our leaders who are sick? Like you, I never felt that I belonged in the theatre, but then nor was I for the street. I have always been a little bit afraid of theatre, or bored by it, but I think I am more afraid of the street. A tendency to shyness and/or the history Modernity has bequeathed me a fear of being found loitering - a woman in the street is a figure of ambiguity. Call me old fashioned, but I don’t want anyone asking me what I am doing here, all alone. Is that why I cannot belong in theatre? Why I have to burrow into my books? But after reading pvi I am not quite done with live art. Really alive art. I am thinking that there could be a theatre of the inner body – not some kind of fake simulation, but an investigatory theatre of the lungs, the bones, the bowel, the heart. This is not a new move of course. There have been journeys into the body in theatre and performance. Artists have swallowed tiny cameras; an eye on the end of a tube has gone in search of illuminated polyps projected onto gallery walls. There have been surgical events in the gallery - incisions, facelifts, implants. Much has been made of tissue cells and sutures, of magnifying glass. But I lack confidence in this body as theatre. I have little faith, but a smidgeon of hope - for example, I will never stop hoping that I might see my father again, although he is dead 10 years this September. Is that too much to hope? After all, theatre likes to deal in fake characters, idée passé. Maybe theatre can bring my dad back, clad him up in his thick grey suit, tie his tie and lace his shoes and prick him and poke him … and, well, push him out on stage, where he will have to watch where he steps because he has a bad leg because of a hemiplegia from a botched operation on his brain a very long time ago. (I remember the uneven seam arcing across his cauterized skull, like a fault in the ground. The soft left side of his face sliding downwards, like a collapsed cliff.) I am not quite sure how theatre will bring back my mother. How will she enter? A shift in genre? Stage left on a palanquin with her four children upholding her? Or will she totter in on heels, already tipsy, diaphanous, her curls stiff with Schwarzkopf spray? I like the idea of a palanquin. There are some people – families, for example – who need to hide things. I am all for a theatre of the interior, for a theatre of stealth and thievery. I do like your games, pvi, and I believe The Hague is almost ready for such a proposition. But first we must determine the health of these World Leaders of ours. I have outlined my suggestions for interior investigation below. But they worry me, these games of ours. In what modality will we play them? Are we allowed to laugh? Is this serious play: I dare you to touch the electric fence.[1]       MRI: A game for world leaders to play The intention is exploratory. What will we find? And in the world of medical over-servicing, there is every chance we will find something.

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

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

Mayu Kanamori’s imagined theatre piece challenges us to reimagine the racial politics of Australian theatre cultures. On the one hand, her play’s ideas intend to disrupt the white dominated theatre stage in Australia and give space to the bodies and stories of people of colour. On the other hand, Kanamori unsettles hard forms of ethnic identity that arise in response to persistent forms of exclusion and marginalisation. She strikes a carefully considered balance between two quite opposing positions, and in the process asks important questions about what racial representations are possible in Australian theatre. Choosing to remove racial or ethnic markers from the script allows directors of Kanamori’s play considerable freedom in casting ethnically diverse actors. Diverse representation over several performances of the play (by ethnically and gender diverse directors) would create a polyethnic theatre experience with overlapping subjectivities and multiple reference points of identification. While the script offers a particular structure of feeling, the ethnically diverse interpretations would allow for unexpected and no doubt challenging lines of affiliation between physically and culturally different individuals and groups. While the first iteration of the play may create, in the audience, attachments to particular bodies playing particular characters, subsequent iterations would encourage audiences to delink themselves from those attachments and reorient their investments in characters and bodies. This unique performance structure has the ability to cultivate, in the audience, a truly diverse attitude towards casting and theatre performance. Kanamori avoids creating a scenario where the voices of a particular ethnic group monopolise the representational and thematic aims of the play. By taking the focus away from the concerns of her own ethnic and diasporic heritage, she enables a multiethnic representational politics that is quite unusual for theatrical pieces that attempt to comment on race. The traditional structure is one that develops coherency around one particular ethnic identity and experience. The multiple forms of attachment and identification alluded to earlier mean that audiences do not have the safety or security of investing in one particular construction of ethnic experience. Having said all this, by giving directors license to make their own decisions, and by keeping her own identity anonymous, Kanamori creates a situation where the interconnections between interpretations will be unplanned, spontaneous, and potentially confrontational. The lack of curatorial decision-making to connect performances is an experimental move that leaves open all sort of possibilities. Interconnections will develop on their own during the course of the performances, and audiences will be doing the work of creating lines of affiliation between interpretations. The openness of this structure does run the risk of producing a conceptually incoherent performance with few interconnections between interpretations. This raises the question of whether theatre pieces that engage with race as a concept should direct audiences towards particular kinds of arguments. And if there are inexplicit arguments about diverse casting and performance in this imagined piece, will they be evident to audiences? I imagine that Kanamori would want to direct attention away from self-fulfilling arguments, preferring, rather, unpredictable possibilities and unforeseen ways of understanding race and ethnicity. It is the risk involved in leaving open the conceptual meanings of this play that is its creative strength. Without this risk, we cannot imagine new ways of performing racialised bodies in Australian theatre.

WAYS TO LEAVE THE STAGE   Exit stage left  Disappear into a cloud of smoke  Fall back on your fallback career RUN! Get upstaged by something more interesting  Fade into obscurity  Walk off Put a tack in your shoe so you walk differently. Siphon money from your bank account until it’s all in cash. Find a crowded city where you can rent an apartment cheap. Disappear into the crowd. Build a new employment history, starting with temp or construction jobs. Think of a new name. Start calling yourself this new name.  Miss your cue Exit stage right Insult someone in power Be pulled apart by dogs  Be trampled by dinosaurs Be pursued by a bear  Flee, vanish, go AWOL, take off Quit  Don’t come on in the first place  Be a mediocre performer  Be mediocre Blend into the background  Get into army camouflage  Get into the army Withdraw Go back in time  Abdicate yourself of any responsibility  Say sorry  Atone for your sins  Undo your wrongdoings  Un-fuck the world    

I think of a gnome and I think of a silver gelatin photograph by Ricky Maynard called Heart Break from his 2005 series, Portrait of a distant land. The distant land is the north-east of Tasmania, but looking across the water to the mainland. A man stands in waders, looking out to the sea. His whole body fits underneath the horizon line. He’s in the water, standing in it, but his image is reflected in it too. He’s not up to his neck, he’s up to his whole entire body. I think about the ceramic gnome (peeping toms, neighborhood watch, painted eyes that follow you around the room) being pulled out of Phillip’s car, how the gnome is transplanted from nowhere in particular to someplace else.  And then I think of Ricky Maynard’s image where the man is part of the sea, in under it, of it. Gnomes are an empty way to mark colonial space, all ceramic rim and air inside. The fictional colonial figure of the hysterical woman in nonsensical fits of speech seems like a way to avoid real genocide of colonial past. Spirit communication sounds abstract when unhinged from actual frontier violence. I think of Hanging Rock and Amy Spiers’ ongoing project to get rid of Miranda in Miranda Must Go, to remove the ‘white vanishing myth’ of Picnic at Hanging Rock and instead look at the actual losses and trauma at Hanging Rock for Aboriginal people. Picnic at Hanging Rock was a fiction written in 1967, set in 1900. Are the gnomes in on some sort of pantomime parody? I am also reminded of traditions in Tasmanian colonial houses where British convicts brought their fears and superstitions with them: shoving old boots and clothing up chimneys, or in windows and doorways, passages where spirits could travel, to stop them. Superstition can be used to scramble and avoid, making truth shimmer or disappear. Gnomes are on repeat; they are more than twins, they are copies of copies. Phillip has hidden them with some furniture he doesn’t want and prints of his work up a staircase in a storage cupboard. He’s organized them like the Mona Lisa, eyes all facing the front, watching, waiting. Looking at these gnomes through Phillip’s eyes, fantasy seems to have everything to do with history.

I hang between the rich provocations evoked by this piece: the Past where longing, loss, nostalgia, iconic kitsch, arbitrary destruction, and ubiquitous violence mark a sense that we have driven so far past the sign to our intended destination that there is no point turning back now; the Present where versions of protest have become self-referentially harmful; and the Future where protest is absurdly institutionalized, but freedom remains tantalizingly elusive. This piece foregrounds the importance of the imagination, dreaming, and nightmares in relation to memory and time. However, it provokes two challenges in my mind: Firstly, how do we fold time, create what Fabian refers to as coeval “intersubjective time” (1983:24), which implicates the present in the past, the observer in the installation, and thereby make visible not only the legacies of the past, but also its processes? Jacqui Alexander refers to “palimsestic time” (2005:1); which layers time and thus asks us how to relativize what has gone before. Secondly, this piece provokes me to ask: how do we move beyond the representational and communicate surreal imaginings when societies in general and theatre in particular are trapped within systems of signs, epistimologies of knowledge and memories? Barad terms this “a representationalist trap of geometrical optics“ (2003: 802), which she argues ends up being an "infinite play of images between two facing mirrors [where] the epistemological gets bounced back and forth, but nothing more is seen" (Ibid, 803). How do we provoke audiences to see something new? On considering how to move this description of a performance to an authentic theatrical event, my immediate response is through radio. Then I could hear the text and make meaning in my own mind; give body, color, setting, meaning to the images that drift toward me. In my imagination, the significance of color, gender, age diminish as I place my own people and parallel stories alongside those I hear, or are suggested by voices. In my mind I can escape the representationalism of visual images of television, film, live theatre where the characters’ appearances replicate the world I already know. And here I reflect nostalgically on South African pre-1976, where families and friends gathered to listen to the ‘wireless’ on Friday nights, silently listening collectively to the stories and after excitedly discussing plots, characters and next episodes; or unpack the sports game we only saw in our minds through the commentators. Individually and collectively we constructed our own worlds through sound and our imaginations. How to achieve this in theatre? How can we challenge and fragment signs and epistemologies and so create the world anew?   References Alexander, M. Jacqui. (2005), Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory and the Sacred. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Barad, K. (2003) "Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28:3, 801-831. Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the Other: How anthropology makes its object, New York: Columbia University Press.

I imagine everything is possible. I've always done this. As a kid, I wrapped potatoes and put them in drawers. I've always enjoyed tasks—ones that lead to tangible outcomes and ones that don't. And I ran through the woods pretending I was a deer. I ran as fast and as far as possible, hopping logs, ducking branches, imagining I had four legs. And I kind of grew up in a bar—the one my grandmother owned and lived in, in Alaska. So amidst climbing the tree and watching the beavers, running the woods, kicking rocks and stacking wood and cutting fish, spooning one teaspoon of oil into each jar of kippured red salmon—I would listen to stories. Some I probably shouldn't have heard. True stories and made-up ones, jokes and drunken tales from neighbors, family, strangers. The stories and voices mixed with the work and our play, with our actions and the actions of the strangers (kind actions and also sometimes cruel ones), and with the clams squirting saltwater—cleaning themselves in the bucket where they were stored until the freshwater in grandma's pot boiled. I make dances now. And I see dance in everything—in the blood moving through our bodies, the synapses of our brains, the sway of trees, and the migration of fish. I see dance in the theatres of our world, in the community centers and gymnasiums and back roads and bedrooms. And I view our bodies as everything: culture, history, present, future at once. Out of respect for, and trust in, our bodies and collective memories, I give equal weight to story and image, to movement and stillness, to what I imagine, and to what I do not know. Sometimes I make dances that include feasting, stories (mine and those of others), volunteerism, performance. Sometimes I make dances that last all night. I make dances to conjure future joy. I make quilts upon which to host the audience and the dance. I make fish-skin lanterns to light us. (In actuality, a lot of us get together to make these quilts and lanterns.) I invite stillness, an awareness of the periphery. I invite you to turn your head to notice what is happening next to you. I adore endurance and struggle and know that sometimes struggle is not going to be resolved via physical manifestation. So sometimes the struggle is to stop. Let others care for what is being made, hold it. Invite others to be at and inside the core of the making. And we gather. To share food on the banks of Newtown Creek or Tuggeght Beach, at Foxtail Farm or Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center. We restore dunes by planting native shrubs, we clean oysters in the New York estuary, we daylight streams, clean up parks. These moments by my definition are dance, are theatre, are the sharing and making of story and life: action, purpose, non-purpose, possibility. We need this: time together and also time together, alone. It's so basic it makes my head spin. We need one another. We need one another in a sweat-inducing, vulnerable proximity and we need one another in a quiet, settled distance. We need time to let our stories settle and be heard. We need to practice telling them and by practice I just mean tell. We need to listen. We need the listening to intertwine with action—action we witness and action we take into and onto our bodies. We need to acknowledge where we are and whom we are with and what ground we stand, lay, sit on. It can be meticulous, this work. Or miraculous. Or both. I think it can be both. I imagine it is possible.    

Imagine making the kind of theatre that takes place in small rural towns in South Africa, where theatre and performance are not afforded much value. At the heart of this work is an exploration of what it means to synergise ‘mainstream’ and ‘community’ theatre in rural South African contexts; it is a theatre that seeks to blur these historical, geographic, and theoretical divides. The kind of theatre I would like to make views ‘community’ theatre not as lesser and inferior, but as vital in its own right. It does not conform to ‘mainstream’ theatre norms and traditions that are typically defined by the spaces and geographic locations in which theatre is performed; it does not necessarily rely on theatre buildings and geographic locations that are more easily accessed by those who have transport and are able to afford the price of a theatre ticket. ‘Community’ theatre is performed in townships in non-formal spaces such as church halls, market places, taxi ranks, and the like. The architecture of the space thus often allows for and encourages active physical audience engagement. What if we maintain that the power relationships between actors and audience are fluid and interchangeable? What if we posit that ‘mainstream’ theatre primarily emphasizes the role of the individual actor, the playwright and the director, as opposed to ‘community’ theatre’s emphasis on creative collaborators? And we see these as values rather than detriments? What if we endeavor to realise a model that embraces both under the umbrella of theatre and performance? Imagine a cross-community professional theatre:

• Site-specific theatre that involves working with people from different communities within small rural towns.
• Professional artists work alongside ‘non-proffessional’ community artists (artists who do not necessarily make a living out of performance).
• Community members are involved in the process as well as in the performance. It is cross-community in that theatre and performance provide a framework for conversations between different communities. These conversations occur during the creation process as well as during the performance.

Concomitant to this, is an interest in investigating what happens when memories contained within physical spaces and structures encounter external memories within particular spaces. For example, when memories of neighbours and the surrounding homes, converge with memories contained in the performed story, when geographical and psycho-emotional landscapes converge or collide. The kind of theatre I would like to see being made is not about master, single narratives, official memory, or the structured geographies of town, house, and work/economic space. Rather, it engages psycho-emotional landscapes, conversations, personal stories, embodied memories, communities, home and domestic spaces. This theatre informs the structure of the town; it permeates the geographic memory of the place. Multiple experiences, memories and stories are exchanged between, and within, different communities. Through site specific theatre and performance, I imagine embodied memories and personal stories are able to emerge and begin dissolving collective or official memory.   [1] Typically the price of a ticket to a theatre production in a ‘mainstream’ theatre house in South Africa, cost between 50 and 200 Rand, depending on where it fell on the graph that delineated ‘mainstream’ from ‘community’. [2] In South Africa, township refers to the urban living areas that, during Apartheid, were reserved for non-white South Africans. They were built on the periphery of towns and cities. Townships still exist in South Africa, post-Apartheid.  

For Wittgenstein, truly private definitions of words or symbols preclude intelligible meaning. Language is a kind of (public) theater. For instance, in Philosophical Investigations 1.257 he claims that "a great deal of stage-setting in the language is presupposed if the mere act of naming is to make sense. And when we speak of someone's having given a name to pain, what is presupposed is the existence of the grammar of the word 'pain'; it shews the post where the new word is stationed." Later, at 1.272, he states: "The essential thing about private experience is really not that each person possesses his own exemplar, but that nobody knows whether people also have this or something else. The assumption would thus be possible—though unverifiable—that one section of mankind had one sensation of red and another section another."    

Beetle Haiku

 

A word like "beetle"

can't refer to a critter

that only I know.

 

So a word like "pain"

must refer to something else

than my sensation.

 

What I alone feel

is, then, quite irrelevant

to the word's meaning!

 

Theatre as black box:

actors perform how pain feels.

Perhaps they're lying.

The Play had stood—A Loaded Gun   Like many of the exquisite impossible dramas in Jonathan Ball's Clockfire, Gun holds the funhouse mirror up to theatre, magnifying a conventional element until its inherent oddity becomes monstrous. When Anton Chekhov insisted that a gun appearing in the first act must go off before the play's end, he acknowledged the extent to which the tight causal structure he and his audiences inherited from the pièce bien faite converted theatre into an all too predictable time machine that generates its own future. From this perspective, a play, like a gun, is a well-oiled mechanism for potential violence. To put a gun on stage early in a play loads the play's chamber and cocks its hammer. Disobey the machine at your peril.   Ball begins by distilling Chekhov's maxim to absurd purity, offering a first act that is nothing other than the appearance of a gun. In the second act, the actors lavish the gun with the outsized attention it has already demanded. As surrogates for an audience's attachment to an onstage gun, the actors fetishize the prop and so contribute to its power. Andrew Sofer reminds us in The Stage Life of Props that a gun stands out from other stage properties in that its "power to destroy human time is potentially limitless." As players in a gun-driven drama, Ball's actors recognize the gun as their god, their prime mover, and also their oracle: they see their faces in its barrel but fail to read their fates.   The third act begins at the precise moment when blood emerges from the actors' noses, mouths, and ears. We might say, adapting Lessing's famous line from The Hamburg Dramaturgy, that they die of the third act. They are victims of the tyranny of dramatic closure itself, or perhaps of their own attachment to it. Like all figures on a stage, they sacrifice themselves at the altar of dramatic necessity. Guns don't kill people, plots do. The actors die, like Marie Curie in Adrienne Rich's "Power," denying their wounds came from the same source as their power. They revere the gun, but fail to realize that its ultimate power lies not in its detonation but in its "obvious potential," its capacity to generate virtual violence. The gun's power—like theatre's—is virtual in the oldest sense of that word, meaning full of power or potency, capable of producing a result in the future, and by extension, operating in effect rather than in reality.

Philosopher Martin Heidegger's concept of the "ready-to-hand" suggests an unconscious operation turning object into process, through the figure of the tool. I've been thinking about Black presence within varied histories of the United States as an operationalized manifestation of tool; as a presence created "ready-to-hand" as an extension of the will to power that white systems of domination and capitalisms enjoy. Black presence in the US continues to be operationalized as a method of quantifying and qualifying; distinguishing and diminishing; denying, exploring, and wondering at. Seldom celebrated or allowed a full measure of complex humanity, Black presence occurs contingently, made manifest as legislation for access to voting and quality schools; as protest and disruption; as ludic celebration destined for transference and disappearance. Theatre tends to operationalize Black presence as well; to treat it as a cypher or a ghost in the machine.   When is Blackness ever unmarked? Black presence inevitably seems to mean in and of itself, as a thing that can be mobilized by others.   August Wilson's plays resist this tendency, through a surplus of wordplay. In the way that Shakespeare's characters are not marked as white, necessarily; not materialized in terms of racial dynamic (excepting Othello, of course), Wilson's theatre proposes Black presence without Black subjugation. Allowed to speak, at great length and depth, toward the terms of their own conception, Wilson's characters instrumentalize language to confirm their ability in the world. Wilson's theatre, like Shakespeare's, doesn't seem to care about who we are watching it, listening to it, experiencing it. Black presence becomes ontological fact, rather than alternative othering.   With words as tools employed among each other, the Black people breathe. We debate, we assemble, we disagree. And inevitably, we establish rap music, to emphasize the ready-to-hand of language.  

Philadelphia-based artist John Peña began his creative project entitled "Letters to the Ocean" in 2003. Every day, he wrote a letter to the ocean, put the letter in an envelope, sealed it, addressed it, wrote his own address on the top left-hand corner of the envelope, pasted a stamp on it, and put it in the mail. The letters were returned by the post office, with various official "return to sender" stamps or notes to the effect that "no such place exists." One envelope was returned with a note saying: "The ocean is no longer accepting mail." John Peña has over 3000 returned letters, which he has exhibited in various shows and galleries.   Intriguingly, all the letters identify a single location as their intended destination. Every one of them is addressed to: "The Ocean, 5 miles S Westport, Grayland, WA 98547." When I asked John about this, he wrote: "I always send it to the same place. I have considered sending it elsewhere but I really like the idea that the ocean is so vast and ubiquitous that if I send a letter to one part of its body, it'll eventually hear about it." He later added: "Also, I came up with it because it is near a nice little spot I used to camp out near the beach."   John's image of the ocean as a vast, ubiquitous, and above all fully networked body is not only apt but of increasingly urgent consequence. The vastness of the ocean is rapidly moving, in human consciousness, from the status of an empty cliché to the basis of a statistically verifiable planetary emergency. As the landmasses we inhabit reveal their dependence on and vulnerability to oceanic conditions—reminding us, as Thoreau said long ago, "that the earth is not continent but insular" we awaken to the realization that our star-gazing species knows much more—and spends much more on knowing—about outer space than about the ocean. As James Nestor writes, "If you compare the ocean to a human body, the current exploration of the ocean is the equivalent of snapping a photograph of a finger to figure out how our bodies work."   Yet the ocean is speaking to us loud and clear, with superstorms and tsunamis and bleached coral reefs, apparently responding to the "messages" we've been sending, in the form of oil spills, toxic dumping, overfishing, and islands of plastic waste the size of Texas (the Great Pacific Garbage Patch). One imaginative response is to speak for the ocean, imagine what it's saying to us. A recent public service video has the ocean scarily scolding us in the stern voice of Harrison Ford. John Peña's approach is the opposite: he addresses the ocean, privately, incessantly. "Ocean Oration" is located somewhere in between these two contrasting options. It has us imagine ourselves receiving messages from the ocean, but the messages are not as loud and clear as the one we heard from Ocean Harrison. Rather, they are enigmatic, intriguing, promising messages. They draw us towards a new language: an emerging system of signs, rhythms, and feelings. As we listen and try to decode the messages, they offer each one of us unforeseen gifts.    

In writing about black experience, scholars often center upon the compulsory visibility of diasporic African bodies. As a consequence of centuries of human bondage, legal limits on citizenship rights, and stereotypical popular representations, brown complexion—inaccurately labeled "black skin"—has been accorded a monitored status. A police officer is more likely to stop a motorist; a prosecutor to seek a tougher sentence; a shopkeeper to follow a customer if the stopped, accused, and followed has been recognized as black. It is for these reasons that writings on racial identity often emphasize the excessive attention (and violence) that greets the black body in innumerable public settings. This emphasis can be seen in sociologist W.E.B. DuBois's theorization of "double consciousness," the "sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity." It appears in author Ta-Nehisi Coates's "letter" to his son in which he observes, "In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage."   In critically engaging the attendant experiences of blackness, it can be helpful to spotlight an individual. Focus on a person. Tell his or her story. Try to relay the perspective of folks who inhabit environments in which others look upon them with distrust, disgust, skepticism, and often fear. Share the anxieties that surface from knowing that they could be the target of violence, a verbal or physical assault, because of their skin complexion. These personal accounts, anecdotes, memories, and stories can be gathered to create a mosaic of a diverse community united by similar experiences of race.   The arts have played a significant role in relaying embodied black experience. In literature, authors have long understood that a novel offers an opportunity to mine the psychological interiority of characters in a manner unparalleled by other artistic media. Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, for example, grant the reader the chance not only to see the world through the eyes of their protagonists but also to hear their comments on the many slights, injustices, and outright prejudices that they encounter. On the stage, playwrights (and production teams) have attempted to offer a sense of embodied black experience by creating characters who speak openly about their perceptions on the world in which they live. For example, the character Wolf, in August Wilson's play Two Trains Running, observes, "every nigger you see done been to jail one time or another. The white man don't feel right unless he got a record on these niggers." Always aware of the precarity of blackness, he warns others, "you always under attack."   In Character imagines a scenario in which anyone can gain access to the experience of being seen and treated as black. It invents a way to encounter history, including the past abuses that targeted diasporic Africans. From one perspective, In Character is a far-fetched play. No theatre is going to invite audience members to don the flesh of another person and role-play "black person." From another, the play could happen but with a slight difference in staging. Immersive theatre is gaining in popularity. In addition, virtual reality (VR) technology seems to improve with each new year. It is just a matter of time before an enterprising developer creates a way for us to put on VR goggles, assume the stead of a captive, and experience the hold of a slave ship. The result will be a form of theatre.  

The stage/performance space is black.

It is black.

And lit with fire, with flames of crimson and ochre, indigo, African violet, bitter lemon and aloe-green.

 

The stories,

few of whom have been on stage before,

articulate

in eleven,

or fifteen,

or twenty,

different languages.

Including Karoo, Modjadji, koringtaal,

and the sound of two

oceans making love.

 

The stories

stomp,       gesture,       contemplate,       wail,

spit,       cajole,       teach,       interrogate

and laugh their asses off.

As one story finishes, a new generation takes it place.

  Everyone listens.   We breathe in.

We exhale.

We do it again.  

And again.

 

And again.

 

And again …

 

It is hard to dream in my country now; the dry air makes it hard to do so. We are all swimming in the desert not realizing that we are blind. We cannot see the difference between water and sand. It is because we have accepted and made normal what is not meant to be. Our wounds rushed the healing process; they did not heal, now the wetness of the wound is showing off. We pretend we can’t see it. We think of excuses that will get us through the day. It’s because we were told to take it slowly, one day at a time.   The theatre I imagine for South Africa understands the past and acknowledges how our history has wronged some South Africans. For a very long time we have been made to believe that when you speak a certain language (English), when you do theatre in that language, it is accepted. It gives the work a certain professional status. In this country we have eleven official languages and yet it is rare to see Xhosa, Zulu, Sotho, and all the other languages on stage. The theatre I imagine for South Africa speaks many languages. The theatre I imagine for South Africa claims and gives a mouth to a voice that has been hidden, silenced, kicked to the side. It has lost its dignity, and far worse — it does not believe itself a story worthy of being told. The theatre I imagine for South Africa restores that dignity and gives it a home. It speaks about the beauty of a nation, the richness of the land. About material beauty, beauty in spirit, and the depth of culture. I long for texture—a true reflection of our existence. Different voices to be heard. I hope for a future that creates space for all with enough means for us to do that. All these different ingredients form the dish that is my imagined South Africa.

To be alive as a black woman in theatre.   We can no longer waste our energies trying to be heard. We exist, we have been existing and we can longer afford to be someone's developmental project. We can no longer afford to be boxed. No longer allow the gate keepers to use us as bodies of convenience. We have been talking transformation, inequalities. It is tiring. Until we DO US we will always be that convenient black woman for the day.

Since my inception (at the university) my motive for being an artist has always been a socio-political one -- it was not to be a super star in television soapies, or to be famous, but to go back to my community and use creative arts as a transformative tool for the people. This seed was planted long before my professional encounter with theatre and my formal training; it was planted in high school arts and cultural activities where the use of arts was simple: for the mobilization, conscientization, and politicization of the students and the community at large. After my graduation, and after three years of acting training based on an individual approach, I resuscitated that original driving motive of theatre. I was first reminded of what is art in society and what is society in art, what is its purpose and the aesthetic that supports that purpose. I then imagined myself in the past: a couple of decades ago, just graduated from various life experiences, formalized and informal institutions, from interactions of various philosophies and pedagogues of creatives arts and theatre, all mixed up with the fast beating heart of cultural aesthetics that is subconsciously embedded deep in my African being and can only be accessed by metaphors and in fragmentation of incidence, representations, and presentations. These are the stories from my grandmother and mother, these are my poems, metaphors and idioms from my father, they are the smells, and tastes that remind me of home, and their absence in any form of engagement stimulates homesickness. I need them to understand my world.

In his Metamorphoses, Ovid tells how Daedalus, master craftsman, artist, and architect, created the Labyrinth at Crete so cunningly that he was barely able to escape it himself after he had built it. Daedalus was then imprisoned in a tower to prevent his knowledge of the labyrinth from spreading. With escape routes via land and water obstructed by Minos, he constructed two immense sets of wings that he and his son, Icarus, might use to flee by air. He warned his son not to fly too close to the sea, lest the water soak the feathers, nor too close to the sun, lest the heat melt the wax holding them together. But Icarus forgot himself in his airborne elation, the burning orb melted his wings, and he drowned in the sea. A father laments the consequences of his creations, which do more harm than good.

What would it mean to imagine a festival dramaturgically? Can the frenetic, experiential, inherently polyvocal qualities of a festive “vibe” be effectively reproduced on the page? Or does the dramatic mode, with its demand for a singular structural progression, do inherent violence to the multifaceted ways in which festivals perform? These philosophical questions for the theatre intersect with the materiality of a postapartheid South Africa that increasingly understands itself as a festival capital, as a place where “creative cities” form a central focus of current economic policymaking. In this context, my imagined theatre attempts a double-move grounded in the specificity of the tiny dorp of Grahamstown during the annual National Arts Festival. It begins by converting the theatrical audiences that “take in” festival shows into objects of theatricality, a preparatory move that implicates spectators as participants in the production of the city aesthetic that follows. Articulations of this aesthetic take place in the next two “vistas,” a term which I have chosen over “scenes” because they require no sense of dramatic arc, and because they allude to a kind of futurity untethered from the stringency of the now. Instead of a logical progression of dramatic action, these vistas are self-contained worlds that seamlessly pass into and out of one another through shifting audio-visual aesthetic paradigms (the vistas, in fact, are interchangeable and can be reiterated into infinity). I based this imagined theatre off three years of ethnographic observation of Grahamstown’s “11 Days of Amazing!” I combined images, people, and stories I recorded during this fieldwork with my own take on pressing civic tensions: the securitization of city space, the neoliberalization of the festival organization, the racialized bifurcation of street arts and theatergoing. Perhaps those who have attended the Grahamstown festival may see something of their experience represented in these grounded details; but, in some ways, the idyllic Grahamstown constructed here, bears little resemblance to the Grahamstown of today—it is utopic, meant in the best sense of the word. Festinos always seek a mythical “vibe,” a special affect created when art feels exciting and fresh, when diverse performance traditions intersect, when racial and socio-cultural barriers wither away to allow fleeting moments of communality. By momentarily embracing the tyranny of the dramatic form I hope I have created some semblance of the atmospheric qualities of the best moments of today’s festival vibe, while also emplotting an aspirational vision of a vibe yet to come.

IT STARTS: To Neil:[1] I could never, Neil I could never be (3000 strong the throng voicing some sort of struggle song all the time it’s my body they carry along lay it down low in the grave as they lift up high my name), THAT could never be me, I don’t have it in me. I’m not the man that martyrs are made from. The wrong song book so no Sousa, no Sontonga, no glory no wonder at the way I may have lived on if I had lived on. No, nothing but the wonder and the why’s as they examine my eyes locked forever in perpetual distance (into the future and farther, modeled as a modernist Guevara), more then just a man’s eyes now, more than man size, now I become more then just a man, I become canonized, categorized as a comrade of the cause, I become the cause, I cause what is to come, what is to be, that’s what your eyes say to me and I know to be, Neil, that could never be me. Neil, me, Neil, I? No. Too much I kneel already. Prostrate position under the weight of whatever I still carry from when you first lent your weight to what would be mine … my whiteness carries a weight without the worthiness that yours did where your skin was an open page to write resistance on. But, mine is a closed cage there is no distance from. Neil, under your weight I have to kneel, and dream of your fight to never kneel. Neil, your weight continues to bend backs of those that carry a cause forward coz four words work where whole poems have failed, four words like: “Hasta la Victoria siempre” simply they say: we carry the weight heavy until light streams into what seems perpetual night, like dreams do. Neil, I’ve dreamed you. Neil, you might’ve dreamed me. But Neil, I could never be you. Neil, before you never was I as bruised by what white is, before you never was I as confused by what white is, before you was a whiteness you challenged with patient wisdom, kneel before you with the hopes of being blessed with similar vision. Now your eyes are static signs of how short a lifetime can be. Now I know that what they show is it’s not in me to kneel, So, To Neil: We miss you and your mysterious mind. All the wisdom it held we would reveal. Until then, a tribute to Neil.   STAGE DIRECTION: SHIFT THE LIGHTS [Reduce presence; sink into self; contained in a corner; stoic and static and:] Voice (of Neil?): “It was never going to be isolation that did me. This isolation they used, intending to abuse me into bruised sanity was never going to work. I was too used to isolation and its usefulness to me and my wanderings within. There was isolation in everything I had made mine, including my mind. Isolation was a friend. It’s in the way that my soul’s weighted: to be isolated is no danger to me. It’s where I’m found most free: in me and my world’s work. There was their danger: my world’s work. There was their world: my work’s danger was that their world wanted less of me. Irony really. There wasn’t much of me to begin with. Just enough to work its way into their fears, to get under their skin. They couldn’t understand a man working within their world but working against them, from within their world, from under (from within) their skin. When you’re white you can go either way. When you can go either way you usually go away from what’s white. At least I did. There was the fright: white man goes wrong way. Catch him. Contain him. Put him away. Let him be alone…without knowing that that’s exactly where he wanted to be…isolation would never end me…it had to be something else...some other sort of suffocation if I wouldn’t suffocate myself.” [1] Neil Aggett (1953-1982) was a white South African medical doctor and trade union organizer who died while in detention after being arrested by the South African Security Police.

What accounts for the astonishing proliferation of "performing cats" on the Internet? The current consensus, according to Bryan Lufkin in Gizmodo, is that cats don't seems to be performing. Whereas dogs are like shabby vaudeville front-cloth comedians, constantly looking at the audience and begging for approval, cats are the Naturalistic, fourth-wall ideal actor in furry form. Dogs are Seth Rogen, cats are Heath Ledger. Cats simply behave: they don't seem aware of whether this behavior is "twice-behaved" or not. Minou Arjomand's Animal Friendship: A Docudrama presents three of the Internet's most popular cat videos live onstage. The subtitle, "a docudrama," provokes us to consider the relation of documentary theatre, and by extension, the theatre itself, to reality. it is, of course, an impossible piece. Watching cats on the Internet is pleasurable specifically because the minute-long YouTube clip reframes "natural" behavior as performance: Maru playing with a box becomes a spectacular circus act. But the animal onstage becomes a theatrical problem. As Nicholas Ridout writes: "the impropriety of the animal on the theatre stage is experienced very precisely as a sense of the animal being in the wrong place" (2006: 98). It is in the wrong place because it cannot have intended to be part of the dramatic fiction, and thus troubles the "psychological illusionism" of the stage. For Ridout, these moments point back to the economic conditions of the actor's labor, for the animal does not participate in these conditions. More accurately, it has different economic conditions - a treat upon completion of a trick - an economic model that in some ways seems far preferable to profit-share. Despite their troubling nature, this hasn't stopped theatre makers from putting animals onstage. Horses, cats, dogs, and other nonhuman animals have appeared in the theatre of Romeo Castellucci. In 2010, French theatre company Footsbarn presented Sorry!, which featured, intriguingly, a "Dressage of Cats" by Marie Werdyn. When I quizzed producer Leanne Cosby at the Barbican (who co-produced the London presentation of the piece) about this aspect of the performance she was rather more circumspect: "the cats just walked across the stage ... Some nights they did, some nights they didn't." The Belvoir Theatre's stunning adaptation of Ibsen's The Wild Duck, played within a plexiglass box, featured a live duck that flapped its wings at inopportune moments, interrupting monologues by splashing water over the actors. However, Animal Friendship, by re-presenting celebrated instances of cat performance, goes beyond these examples of the animal onstage. It raises issues of acting in documentary theatre: if these cat videos are taken to be documentaries akin to nature programs, would different cat-actors be performing in the staged piece? And if cat-actors are acting in Animal Friendship, what do we value in their performance? Is it simply that they go through the motions of riding a Roomba or jumping in a box, or that they create the psychological illusion of this act taking place for the first time and its associated emotions; joy, terror, pleasure? This impossible piece, then, makes us question what it is we desire and value from the actor in the theatre. Is it that they simply represent "reality"? Or that they betray some excess, some remainder of intention and will-to-please - what we might call "theatricality"?