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”?

Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Missing Samovar

(with apologies to Kyle–and William–Gillette)

Where is the samovar, my dear Watson? There is no samovar, I can hear you saying, and you’re perhaps technically right, but as we look at what’s clearly in front of us, it’s evident that there is a samovar shaped hole stage right; squint and you too can see it. As we watch the “fine family” seated there, I’m reminded of the negative space between two faces that becomes a wine glass in that immediately recognizable optical illusion. While this isn’t typically the type of trompe l’oeil in which the theatre specializes, it’s appropriate given the centrality of the “illusion of convergence caused by distance,” which is also not typical theatrical fare. But this realism, these tables, and Tolstoy cement us firmly in a Chekhovian universe, the worlds of the servants and the masters both entirely separate and simultaneously intertwined. The servants are perhaps Rabelaisian or Falstaffian interlopers here, but their presence is utterly necessary. It is indeed Firs who outlives the catastrophe of the destruction of the Cherry Orchard, serving as witness to the end.

But Holmes, when finding myself audience to this moment of fin de siècle realism, and this non-illusory train, my mind automatically turns to cinema, and what Martin Loiperdinger has called “cinema’s founding myth,” the oft-repeated story of the audiences fleeing in fear from the train appearing to crash through the screen at screenings of Louis Lumière’s L’Arrivée D’un Train En Gare De La Ciotat. Loiperdinger suggests that this is actually perhaps an imagined theatre of its own, since there is no contemporaneous evidence to demonstrate its veracity. Mustn’t we consider the possibility that this is all merely the imagination of an overzealous newspaper reporter?

Ah, as you yourself noted in “A Case of Identity,” Watson, when we have “realism pushed to its extreme limits… [too often] the result is, it must be confessed, neither fascinating nor artistic” and so, as I suggested, we must “never trust to general impressions, my boy, but concentrate yourself upon details.” What you’ve clearly missed is the question of the imagined time of the theatre. So here we are in Russia, with a train destroying the audience, and we have immediately leapt forward 100 years or so to October 23^rd, 2002, in the Dubrovka Theatre. On the positive side, for Masha, Olga, and Irina, we have finally made it to Moscow; although in the words of those Chechnyan hostage-takers who themselves appear to cite Chekhov, “we have nothing to lose. We have already covered 2,000 kilometres … Our motto is freedom and paradise. We already have freedom as we’ve come to Moscow…” Indeed, the advent of realism out of the ashes of melodrama perhaps demanded that eventually the train destroy the audience, while the real of the stage continues on. As I said in our very first adventure together, “where there is no imagination there is no horror,” and it is precisely the theatre that allows for that collision of time and space—all because of that missing samovar and the thundering 9:14 to Moscow.

From the start, she asks: What would it mean for theatre to produce a living wage? She dreams of a world in which the making of things—metaphor, movement, breathing and breath—would extract from surplus a structure that more robustly sustains the lives of all of those who live and work within it. She sketches that world as if thinking, and dreaming, and feeling, and love were made fully accessible, were more fully valued, as tools of all trade. She stares at her screen. What would this take? Her fingers trip over numbers, doing their sums; then they freeze. She deletes, deletes again. She abandons all math, its logics too restrictive for the world she’s invoked.

But they beckon her back, those numbers: and she sets in place a scheme that would make this world both the dreamed-of and the done. Tax all who have excess not for war but for art—or for beauty, shared feeling, provocation, or whatever theatre may set out for itself to do. Make theatre as a system of roads, or bridges, or power lines strung from every pole: core to the infrastructure, the heart, the goings-on of the social world. Essential trumps exceptional, she thinks, in a world so wholly steered by cost. She rewrites austerity as, instead, the obligatory cost of to live.

Throughout, she demands: What would it mean for theatre to be a living wage?

She turns from her screen, sees the world as it is.

When she wakes, she tries again. It all comes out the same. She sleeps, wakes again: writes the same. And again, and again. It would all be so simple; it is all so viable, so imminently concrete, but for will. But for will.

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.

Say the first Performance Theorist in our cast of characters has a friend. Say she is a theorist of vibrant matter. Say she asks, “Does life only make sense as one side of a life-matter binary, or is there such a thing as a mineral or metallic life, or a life of the it in it rains?”

The theorist of vibrant matter never unpacks this rich and suggestive question. She’s packing for a trip to Death Valley.

If we did unpack the question, we might take a different trip—as theorists are wont to do—in French. That language gives us two different constructions potentially equivalent to it rains: il pleut (closer to the English it rains or it’s raining) and il y a de la pluie (more like, there is rain).

There is a potential shift when we move from the former construction to the latter. Maybe we are no longer so prominently invited to wonder after “a life of the it.” In moving from French to English, let’s put aside the proposed translation of the second construction, there is rain. Let’s use instead one or another awkward—generatively awkward—transliterative approximation: It has there rain. Or it has there raining. Or worst, by which I mean best, of all, it has there a performance of rain.

In this case, the it that we have to consider is not one to which we are likely to attribute life in the usual senses. It has there a performance of rain—or, to stick us even more firmly in what some may take to be a dead zone, it has there a performance of rock. What, exactly, are the elements that constitute the performance in question?

There is a there, or location; there is a thing (it). The thing, precisely situated in its scenic environment, is endowed with a quality (performance), arguably predicated on the thing’s placement in the scenic environment. And that quality of performance, that having (rather than being?), redoubles the thing-ness (rather than life?) of the thing. It, the rock, is—of rock. We may point to this it, and its of rock-ness may be attributed descriptively, by a sensate observer. Yet the observer’s presence is not strictly required for the thing’s “having of performance” to unfold, processually, in time’s duration.

The extent to which this commentary strains semantics and syntax is an index. It points to our linguistic resources’ relative impoverishment in helping us to grasp how a scene (whether of rocks, or otherwise) may be possessed of, may have, performance. All the same, we may grasp how performance is directly related to, indeed resultant from, the presence of the thing in the scene. And so grasping, we may grapple, epistemologically, with the presence of the thing and the quality of performance in the scene without necessarily granting, ontologically, any specially marked vibrancy, vitality, liveliness, or agential action to the thing.

In rock performance, there is motility. There is theatre. Whether there is agency or action is a question for the ages and their ghosts.

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.

Let us remember how to live through forgetfulness. In his short study of marcel proust, the lone book written during his abbreviated academic career, Samuel Beckett posits that “the man with a good memory does not remember anything because he does not forget anything. His memory is uniform, a creature of routine, at once a condition and function of his impeccable habit, and instrument of reference instead of an instrument of discovery.” There is a lesson to be learned here about acting, which, like living, requires us to forget our part in order to implement the “instrument of discovery.” Actors who do not forget what they are supposed to do sacrifice their liveliness to habit. And, as Beckett tells us elsewhere, “habit is a great deadener.”

The first of these imagined theatres replicates the past perfectly, but it is a past that never completes its form, a past that retains an uncertain relationship towards the future it was always touching. It must, in other words, keep forgetting itself in order to keep desire moving. That is the way with nostalgia, which fractures us afresh with every passing day. Such memories are overworked, overexposed, and yet never held in hand. We may rehearse them daily, but we will never get the scene down correctly, never get in the habit. Something is just beyond us, over the horizon, the door standing ajar. The intense privacy of this first theatre means that it will only work for “you.” Each feature is designed with your attention in mind.

The second theatre moves the art of forgetting into a public sphere, teaching us once again how to behave as if for the first time. The mistake, the forgotten line – these puncture our habits of watching and acting with sudden appearances of life unscripted. We wonder at these irruptions of potentiality in any performance we attend. This theatre is a studio for the art of forgetting, where trained professionals practice for our pleasure, so that all of us, in turn, might forget our social selves and roles. The repertoire of our daily lives, its routines and phrases, systematically abandoned. What actor has not been asked: “How do you remember all those lines?” Instead, we will ask: “How do you forget all those lines?”