Emergency

Question 1.     Where did the Breathing Rocks come from?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Queer telling: Telling it queer to queer its tale!

REFERENCES and ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Move On-line:

Stage 1: You’re on mute.

Stage 2: How do you get those cool backgrounds?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References cited

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

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

// RUN

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

> Message SCORE001 >

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

[03] post 1349620762:

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

…

I feel so alone

…

Why won’t anybody respond[1]

> Interpret as Chaos_Map >

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

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

// DRIFT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Translation_Error >

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

// REBOOT?

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

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

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

[4] Goldsmith, 36.

[5] Goldsmith. 41.

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

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

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

traces of me are what remain in this container


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is music in the water, Jacob thinks.

***

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

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

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

Works cited 

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

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

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

Concrete Syntax

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Dozen Cocktails — Please

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

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

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

The Gift of Disaster

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

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

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

Works Cited:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Works Cited:

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

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

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

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

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

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