(For Reid)

[περὶ μεγέθους ἡλίου] εὖρος ποδὸς ἀνθρωπείου

[Concerning the size of the sun: it is] the width of a human foot.

-Heraclitus, fragment DK B3

Diogenes Laertius (IX, 7) says that Heraclitus said, ‘The sun is the size that it appears.’

-T.M. Robinson, Heraclitus: Fragments

What if the world is a room; what if the room is as large as the world?

What, then, of departures from the world, when being-with transforms, in a shock, into was-with, or having-been-with? What of a room that, once left, can no longer be re-joined?

We have scriptures for this room, where mattering is met by expiration: to value the mattering of what happens in the room means to witness the eventuality of, and to rehearse for, one’s own death. To breathe in that room, as in the world, is work. To watch as others breathe: this counts as work, too. Mattering means to move ineffably toward departure. Mattering together, as a case of being-with, means to dwell in a mood dreamt up between the subjunctive and the future-perfect: a grounded “if,” a will-have-been. This is the room’s domain; this is how the room craves its own heft.

The sun is the width of a human foot in every way that matters. The sun is also the swell of presence, its mass the weight of a life. The sun is the heat of loss, and the flame of grief, and the sear of debt. The sun foretells an end. But while it burns, it makes sense of itself and of us: “In these dark times […] where the light falls / Makes a kind of meaning, / Which is being, by another word.” The room gleams, bright as a welder’s torch, fierce and untamed in its slow transformations, urgent in its resounding call as it dreams of its own demise.

1

In Balzac’s work a word or a cry is often sufficient to describe the entire character. This cry belongs essentially to the theatre.

-Émile Zola, “Naturalism on the Stage”

In the 1880s Richard von Krafft-Ebing published 45 case studies that comprised the first volume of his monumental Psychopathia Sexualis. A previously unimaginable panoply of preferences was suddenly visible: apparently much of what we humans like to do is perverse.

Earlier in the same decade, Émile Zola declared that the theatrical stage should be harnessed to that accelerating carriage called Naturalism, “the impulse of the century.” Shattering convention in its wake, Naturalism had already redefined the Modern novel in the service of analysis, particularly of a human’s behavior in the context of her “proper surroundings.” The application of the so-called “scientific method” to the drama of social situations would allow Zola and his fellow “followers of the truth, anatomists, analysts, explorers of life, compilers of human data” to reimagine the theatre in a sense closer to how the anatomists used the word: as a forum in which to dissect and observe, with eyes particularly trained to determine the normal and pathological relations between part and whole.

What makes me who I am? For Krafft-Ebing and many of his contemporaries working in the “sexual sciences,” no detail was too insignificant to matter in determining an individual’s psychological profile. His Case 10 “sometimes laughed to himself and did silly things.” As a child, ladies with silk gowns featured regularly in Case 121’s dreams. Case 123 liked to kiss flowers. Like Clara Lo’s concussion or Jessica’s overuse of ointments, the accidents and peculiar habits of a life might, for a “compiler of human data,” mean as much or more in drawing character than one’s career, family, and moral purpose. What Naturalists and Sexologists shared was a faith in this kind of atomizing investigation as a technique by which otherwise invisible secrets and connections might be brought into the light.

2

In the theatre, we can allow ourselves to risk mistaking correlation for causation: the theatre is the space perhaps ideally suited to what Tony Kushner playfully calls “pretentiousness” (“a good play…has a bursting omnipotence up its sleeve”), in which we use the details of life to posit grand, even conspiratorial, theories and trace preposterous networks. Filling the stage with as much of the world as could fit (as in Jez Butterworth’s recent hit play Ferryman, which comes complete with a live goose, a rabbit, and a baby) was often Naturalism’s way of allowing spectators to create a causal narrative out of a chaotic microcosm, which is ultimately an act of pretension, and of theory. Such acts abide in the theatre: Krafft-Ebing deduces that “the case of Henry III shows that contact with a person’s perspiration may be the exciting cause of passionate love.” The play’s the thing that catches the culpability of sweat.

Scanning Mikesch’s cast of characters, we can immediately recognize an enactment of Kushner’s provocation in favor of a generative form of pretentiousness, which, “if it’s done well, performs a salutary parody of carving out, in the face of the theorilessness and bewilderment of our age, meta-narratives, legends, grand designs, even in spite of the suspiciousness with which we have learned, rightly, to regard meta-narrative.” In Angels in America, Kushner gave us such a meta-narrative; in her Dramatis Personae, Mikesch gives us the ingredients to make our own. The highly-reductive composition of her characters – like Balzac’s, they can contain everything in a word or a cry – necessarily begs for us to make our own interconnection, patterns, architectures, systems. That process is almost forensic: we begin by positing questions about the elements in the list. How many Big Macs did the Hamburglar have to steal before he got his name, and from whom? The Would-Be Butcher? Is that why he’s only a Would-Be? And thus named, how could the Hamburglar ever appear as something other than himself?

The extreme austerity of Mikesch’s classifications, unlike those of the Sexologists, suggests not only that the characters in this Dramatis Personae are fungible, but that they are also capable of transformation. Precisely when does a draft become a vow? Is the Single Bed a form of Largesse or a Prank? Does it matter whether the Scenester or the IT Guy designs the Sitemap? Mikesch proposes not only that the theatre is the proper surrounding in which to see what’s in a name, but also to ask (or ask us to ask) what forms these names might otherwise take, or have taken.

3

When I began, I was not sure which among all the foul harassers, molesters, traducers, swindlers, stranglers, and no-goods I’ve known were going to make the final accounting.

-Jean Carroll

As I read this list of characters, I can’t help but be pulled towards one particular way of finding relations between them, though the possibilities suggested by Dramatis Personae are infinite. Her list begins by first describing and then simply naming human types; it then graduates from the human to the subhuman (in the moral sense), and ultimately away from the human altogether (things, feelings, concepts). I can’t help, though, but notice that this stage is filled mostly by hideous men (The Furnaceman; Waiters in a Fight; The Mama’s Boy) and the things that tend to adhere to them in the world (The Ire; The Boat; Offense vs. Defense; The Second, Third, Fourth & Fifth Business). I find a Heroine and an Actress (specifically “My Actress,” suggesting Mikesch’s own presence in the cast); and Soltero, single though his name implies he should be, has a daughter (perhaps the product of The Moan). Otherwise this is a man’s world. From this perspective Mikesch’s list of characters seems to describe nodal points along a vast system of male crime – each represents a manifestation of that diffuse force of toxic masculinity whose strafing of our culture has become all too visible in the last few years. Here it is the cry not of the perpetrator but of his victim that is sufficient to describe the entire character.

Beyond its apparent determinism, though, Dramatis Personae seems to ask us – in an almost Brechtian way –  to imagine how these particular forms of aggressive male energy have taken form, which might also let us imagine how they might have been formed otherwise. Is watching Anthony Bourdain what causes the Noise Musician to rip off Lo’s clothes, or is it what prevents him from becoming The Stalker? As parts of a list, these names are fixed; and in their radically reduced fixity, they are paradoxically also more open to becoming each other. The theatre is not the world, especially the more it fills up with everything we think we know: as Brecht showed us, its basis in (and suspension of) human gesture allows the spectator to recalibrate significations, especially social ones.

4

Almost buried three entries from the end of this pile-up of characters, I find one name that sounds familiar, like it comes from the world I inhabit: Almanzo Wilder. This man, it turns out, was the husband of Laura Ingalls Wilder, who immortalized him in her series of Little House on the Prairie books. Wilder was not, in any account I can locate, a bad man. On the contrary, he was an almost archetypal Perfect Man: quiet, brave, sensitive, loyal, “representative of the time and culture in which he lived.”

The name Almanzo may derive from the Old German “precious man.”

“Madrachod” (the 28^th entry in Mikesch’s list) is a slight inversion of “Madarchod,” which in Hindi is an expletive that means motherfucker.

What makes me who I am, or lets me become what I am not?

Works Cited

Carroll, E. Jean. “Hideous Men.” The Cut, June 21, 2019, https://www.thecut.com/2019/06/donald-trump-assault-e-jean-carroll-other-hideous-men.html. Accessed July 11, 2019.

Krafft-Ebing, Richard von. Psychopathia Sexualis. First US Edition, Berman, 1900.

Kushner, Tony. “On Pretentiousness.” Thinking about the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness. Theater Communications Group, 1995.

Zola, Émile. “Naturalism on the Stage.” Playwrights on Playwriting: from Ibsen to Ionesco, edited by Toby Cole. Cooper Square Press, 2001, pp. 5-14.

In these nimble and supple instructions for a girlish and transgender theatre of love, stage directions reach out, reciprocal in their care, decoration, and attention, like a stage crafted, taken apart, and made in-the-act of being woven together again, rather than directed: torn from a former position and placed mise-en-scène as such. The truth is in the bruises of attraction and remedial fellow feelings too. Dysphoria—from the Greek dusphoria, from dusphoros, meaning hard to bear—is a felt and perceptible thing; and if we imagine more theatrical scenes of transgender girlhood out of and into love, we might find sensual resourcefulness and new postures and directions for living more interior and exterior life. This is all tragic and gorgeous to me: that in heartbreak and after a fall, the most ethical and therapeutic thing for trans girls to do is become better attuned to the staging of our love stories and enshrine them in girlish and relational art and decoration. A young Adorno in a cute one-piece bathing suit fangirling over Schubert’s heartbroken music for four (or more) hands: “The right response is tears.” ^[1]

^[1] Theodor Adorno, “Schubert (1928).” 19th-Century Music 29.1 (2005): 3-14.

The purple flowers known as Speedwell are at once soft and spiky. Given full sun and loamy soil, they attract butterflies and birds in fields, gardens, and along roadsides across the hemispheres. Known by some to be medicinal, they can speed wellness, or perhaps bring about a kind of healing speed: live faster.

Conventional theatrical narratives can hold our queer, non-binary, non-monogamous, non-reproductive intimacies in only the weakest of embraces. Our speeds and intensities don’t distill well to two-hours traffic; instead we layer our bodies and futures together compost-like across the drying grasses and flowers left behind last season and the season before. All at once. Already. Again.

So are you two still together? she asks, they ask, grandma asks. Will our love stories ever resolve, they wonder, will they come to a head at some point like a mountain peak or a vast plateau or will they stubbornly revolve in spinning sequences of not-quite-endings, hapless or half-hearted attempts to cut cords left over from the last vow-less beginning?

In Pryor’s imagined theatre, queer time slips by, evading the more orderly registers of graduate education, publisher deadlines, and the production calendars of experimental performance. In this place, queer and transgender subjects grow sideways through settler-colonial modernities, trying on crisp new suits and new love languages, living through both inherited traumas and the ones we create fresh in the spaces between us. Is any human trauma ever actually new? Pryor’s characters sense that it is good for soft and spiky life forms to “sit close and look out” towards the dystopic or hopeful futures offered up by live performance’s disappearing promise of alternative belonging. As Pryor’s narrator experiences time slipping, energy being redirected and reabsorbed, the audience apprehends, wave-like, the rising urgency of abject or subaltern subjectivity being co-created through vibrant systems of people and their cultivated plants and places.

This piece invites the reader into greater speed, speed not rushed but layered and simultaneous, speed realized in a good way: speedwell. Despite theatre’s familiar conventions, time does not obey Aristotle’s unities or trace the angles of Freytag’s pyramid. Future Perfect offers the contradictory proposal that, though time is not linear, we are still running out of it. Better hurry.

July 2019. An afternoon in early summer, just after the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. There is a slight cooling in the air after dark that speaks of possibilities.

Lights up: a spotlight on the page of Jaclyn Pryor’s Future Perfect. May 2015.

Let us linger in 2015 for this moment, the time in which this performance exists and existed. It is the setting for this internal memory play in which the performer’s memory is not shared. We are following HE, who is perhaps sitting with us in the audience. We are in his skin as we participate in the ultimate example of “placing the private in public,” as Pryor writes. The stage directions here describe the future, what will come to pass, and what has already passed for these characters between the time of the play’s setting and the time of the play’s writing. Stage directions more often reveal the past and present of a given character, but they can also venture into the realm of the present. Here, the stage directions spend more time in the future than the past, easily shifting through queer temporality by donning parentheses.

(And what of the parentheticals? These are past pasts, moments configured as past (and passed) even to the characters in 2015. This is the pertinent past that passes through the future HE as the future and past connect to form the pieces of a more complete narrative. Future perfects and past imperfects merged together by the now past, but at one time, present, HE in October 2019.)

The DRAG QUEEN continues to sing, ignorant of the play taking place in the audience, or removed from the audience. It is still May 2015. As we read about what HE is thinking and has experienced, we relive – or, in point of fact, experience for the first time – what this one particular performance means for someone else. HE, and WE, share an embodied mind for the short space of the DRAG QUEEN’s song.

Cut your way out or stay. The command might remind us of instructions from a horror movie with the Jigsaw Killer. You and your companions are trapped in a room, and you are given an ethical test that disguises the horror of psychological and physical torture. This is all the more troubling because it is unclear who makes the painful cut, whose hand grabs the knife and makes an incision in the murky membrane that surrounds this audience. And if we do not know who it is that cuts, we know even less who bleeds, who screams, who experiences the pain of this performance.

If the setting of act one reminds us of Saw, with its screaming, its blood, its gash in the wall, From Here to There’s second act appears less horrifying. The corpses in “Post” are pleasant, “charming”; they wait patiently and even enjoy themselves. Gabelmann imagines a period after death where the former self can simply relax, coolly listening to gentle folk music and smiling blissfully. This scene recalls a happier version of the meticulously painted, wooden puppet audience who stares motionless at the stage in Leonid Andreyev’s Symbolist drama Requiem (1917).

The amusing skeleton sequence of act two, however, takes on grimmer shadows in act three of From Here to There. Gabelmann’s final sequence is not without humor, but it is without bliss or transcendence. The performers here are many of us, blending in and disappearing – like a good actor into a role – into a faceless, meaningless life. It is a life in which everything is performed. “Mid” has no beginning and no end, and upon reflection one can see that this is true of all three acts of From Here to There. There is a terrifying repetitious quality to each of these pieces and the piece as a whole; it is as if one isn’t sure how one got involved in this life, but one must keep living it, wearing oneself out until it is over, dancing for an audience that isn’t even really paying attention.

From Here to There might be imagined as a Beckettian piece about the desperation of life’s brevity – They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more – but it makes even more sense as a Millennial portrait of terror. Adulting: it’s all very American and middle class. The painful, terrifying birth that forms the piece’s first act is an entry into blood and suffering. One disappears into a desk job in the faceless glass city and none of it is real. Repeat. The only rest imaginable is a retirement community of carefully cleaned skeletons listening to folk music and turning a rictus of contentment toward a stage with an uncertain, faltering performer.

But let us return to the roles of performer and audience that Andreyev’s twentieth-century play asks us to interrogate and that Gabelmann’s piece addresses for the twenty-first. If, in “Mid”, the actors are living lives and saddling themselves with debt, then who is the audience buying tickets? And who is this confused young woman running the box office? I suspect that the answer to this, too, can be found in the second act of From Here to There, and that the hesitant guitarist with the song about the soil and the confused would-be ticket-seller have a great deal in common. Indeed, it seems to me that both the musician and the box-office person find themselves faltering when faced with their audiences – a bit like one of the Jigsaw Killer’s victims as she tries to make a decision that might save her life. The confusion experienced by both of these figures as they address their separate choruses of faces is the lonely fear of not knowing what to do or how things work but being forced, all the same, to continue. It is the terror of being abandoned on a stage without a script – what theatre people call the actor’s nightmare – but still being asked to stand out from every other performer at the cattle call, every other person at the job interview. The box office manager looks at the theatre patrons and has no idea how to respond. The musician sings soulfully. But is it any good? Is it any different from anyone else? Is anyone even listening? The musician doesn’t know.

In her 2017 book Duty Free Art, Hito Steyerl describes the distinction between signal and noise as an organizing principle for the data-fueled society of our moment, but not only for the society of our moment. Signal versus noise, she suggests, has been operative practically since we began sorting sound into meaning; it’s just that now, humans are less frequently the ones distinguishing between the two.[i] On the judgments of computers processing at great scale hang consequential things like life and death and human connection and the future of nationhood and the safety of individuals and populations as a whole.

Dakota Parobek’s Correspondence is, at first glance, a little signal and a lot of noise. At the most pedestrian level, our literary minds are unaccustomed to assimilating receiving numbers as part of a dramatic text, but in Correspondence, long strings of digital code vastly outnumber recognizable words. “All text is visible and/or read,” Parobek’s opening stage directions instruct, forestalling any temptation on a director’s part to make supposed sense out of alleged noise on the audience’s behalf.

But lest we be tempted to mistake apparent illegibility for abstraction, Parobek also offers a drama with a setting and characters and a plot: Two friends are trying to find one another during a catastrophic snowstorm in northern Kentucky. Their names are Friend #1 and Friend #2: like signal and noise, they exist only in relation to one another. Stage directions (or voice-over announcements, or projected text) inform us that massive snowfall is expected in the counties surrounding Louisville, the counties close to the Ohio River that marks Kentucky’s border with Indiana.

I have never been to Kentucky, but I wanted to see what Parobek meant. I found these counties on Google maps in fractions of a second. Their URLs reflect coordinates in geographical and digital space:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Shelby+County,+KY/@38.2260193,-89.6973558,6z/data=
!4m5!3m4!1s0x8869b841b6710047:0x345961b6387fd759!8m2!3d38.1778076!4d-85.2308414 

Maybe these letters and numbers help me imagine a catastrophic snowfall in Shelby County, KY, or the action in Correspondence. But really the numbers aren’t for me. They’re for my laptop. Which is the implication of Parobek’s text: a performance language that gives an internet view of the world, not a human one. In a forthcoming essay, Jacob Gallagher-Ross coins the term “interface theater” to describe performances that stage the digital device’s view of reality—instead of, or in dialogue with, the human view. Correspondence does this to a certain extent. We’re not expected to know what the long strings of numbers mean, just that Friend #1 and Friend #2 are talking through them or with them or both. The numbers are for devices, and for those devices to continue making sense of those numbers, they need continual access to power and memory and server space. These are resources that, as the artist Trevor Paglen has pointed out time and again in his photography and public lectures, do not float in a metaphorical “cloud” but instead rely on enormous cables and server farms whose power needs are contributing to the climate catastrophe that may even be one of the root causes of disaster-level snowfall in northern Kentucky. Thus do Parobek’s sound and signal follow one another in a loop, rather than opposing one another in a binary.

But Parobek’s world of digits is more complicated, and evolving still. Some of the numbers have meanings (there are codes indicating each friend is present, waiting, in a state of attention). In fact, Friend #2 waits for Friend #1 for a long time, maybe forever. “The final sequence continues ad infinitum,” notes Parobek, recalling the alluringly endless repetitions that closed many of the short dramatic texts in Suzan-Lori Parks’s 365 Days/365 Plays.

In Parks’s 365 Plays, repetitive stage directions often signaled either unending catastrophe (in one, an endless series of veterans returns from an endless series of wars) or an aperture looking toward utopia (in one of the collection’s “Constants,” meant to be performed at any point in the cycle, one unnamed person watches over another so they can rest, for as long as that may take). Parobek’s stage directions are similarly active and similarly expansive. As the two friends wait, stage directions take over and address the audience directly. “THE WORLD HAS BECOME A HAZARD,” they explain. “LIKE HOW IT WAS BEFORE WE WERE HERE.” The part of the play that we thought was background: that’s the story. Not our signals or our noise. Not us. This is a play for the end of the Anthropocene, where driving snow and sentient computers survive us all.

[i] Hito Steyerl, Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War (New York: Verso, 2017), 31-38.

Over the course of A Reproduction something feels familiar yet strange—increasingly both—until it slides into the category of our brain built by Saturday morning cartoons. The language is halting for both the thin white man and the athletic-build great Dane, this week’s mystery having plunged us into the depths of existential ennui characters must feel as they live every day, as pictures of themselves, inside a box of repetition.

How does a person know oneself, when faced with a reproduction or a re-presentation of the self? How can one track one’s own origin, when the current experience is so immediate and present? I know at one point in my life I was shorter than I am now, but I can only ever see a re-presentation of myself reflected back. My actual self feels no taller or shorter than it did when I was twelve. My body may have aged years and years, but my sense of my location in myself is as constant as when I was sixteen.

The thin man and the great Dane spend their lives (can they be called lives if they have no relation to time?) journeying narrative mysteries and then re-journeying those same mysteries with every re-run of each episode. With each retreading of each story, do they form a groove in the narrative fabric of the universe? What’s gained in cycling and re-cycling the bottom of this barrel?

It used to be that when you played a cassette tape or a VHS, each trip the tape took through the machine wore down the invisible grooves of data, so that every visit to that story became less and less clear. They say that the more you remember memories, the less accurate they become. In the “real”,  world, this world of plastic and terabytes, nothing really dies or decays anymore. With each journey for the thin man and the great Dane, the journey has no impact on the data itself.  Nothing changes.

The more I travel this story with them, the more and more familiar it becomes; more and more a part of my imagination, and less and less what it was when I encountered it.

‘Only those who survived can remember for they alone know the smell of burning flesh and a day is coming when no one will actually remember this smell, it will be nothing more than a phrase, a literary reference, an idea of an odour. Odourless therefore.’[1]

[1] Jorge Semprun, in Shivaun Woolfson’s Holocaust Legacy in Post-Soviet Lithuania: People, Places and Objects (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014), 4.

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

As a scenographer, I approach the depicted war-torn interior as an abandoned mise-en-scene: inscribed with layers of narratives, traces of time and haptic remnants of past violence and trauma. The mise-en-scene belongs to the aftermath of ethnic conflicts in the former SFR Yugoslavia, which took place in the early 1990s.

The event has taken place, and the domestic site I encounter represents its authentic scenographic afterimage. Material and immaterial inscriptions of the past events define the space as highly theatrical. The absence of human figures is not an obstacle to the theatricality of the depicted moment.

Scenographically speaking, space and event are thoroughly interlaced. Space assigns validity to events and narratives, and it acts as a proof that an event has taken place. The captured space physically incorporates traces of violently interrupted human inhabitation.

The static nature of the captured moment does not exclude it as a product of a theatrical process. The distinct nature of this theatricality is embodied in an awareness that the mise-en-scene is not staged and designed. Instead, it is a product of a real violent actions performed during the war.

This space allows a telling search through narratives of intimate spaces shaped by war. It exposes unitary, intimate experience of a spatial narrative – a location charged with traumatic experience. My presence in this space redefines its meaning, and reorients it as an active material in comprehending the collective traumatic past. By being present in this mise-en-scene long after the events have taken place, I am physically, sensually and emotionally in touch with the embodiment of traumas experienced by all of us who are explicitly and implicitly linked to this history. An unknown woman’s bedroom emerges as a physical manifestation of trauma and a genuine place of memory.

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

Redactions began with a fanciful notion: what if I could ask an abstract form—what exactly are you saying? I turned this into an assignment—loosen the mind that makes shapes and colors and ask it to pour out, to lay out, their meanings into words. Then place them side by side, abstract form and supposed meaning. This is a futile exercise, of course. The correspondence never holds, and we are grateful for this. But it is useful, it clears some assumptions—that these things which speak to us necessarily speak to others, that there is a way to separate things “just as they are” from what we imagine them to be.

And why redaction? A redaction announces that something has been covered over, erased, obscured. If I won’t say it, at least I wear the marks of what I won’t reveal. Redactions are in the air too, aren’t they? They mark our times—unspoken, possibly unspeakable acts covered over more or less successfully.

Redactions are text drawings that follow a set of rules for their creation, akin to constraints I use while choreographing dances. I create movement sequences alongside the drawings, thinking of each movement as a stand-alone “utterance.” They come together as spoken text and movement in performance. The visual pieces are 9 x 12 inches, watercolor, ink, and graphite on paper. Redactions is being developed in collaboration with The Chocolate Factory Theater, Los Angeles Performance Practice, and artist press Gravel Projects.

Who goes with Caesar?

SETTING

The hold.

A thick and layered darkness. A heavy odor of smoke. A periodic foul wind.

Where one might imagine a stage there is a deep pit. In it a shallow pool of dark liquid and ordinary objects stained with blood, urine, and feces, among them: a once-white pocket square, a ladder, a nylon rope, a parrot perch, a broom, eight hundred thousand machetes, a garden hose, a metal shop stool, a plastic bucket, a wire hanger.

Flickers of white and colored light, suggestive of a series of static visual images, are projected from behind a cerecloth scrim.

The sound of children playing, i.e. a schoolyard at recess.

TIME

Summer evening. The present.

(LEADER addresses the congregation.
Leader speaks unseen. The voice surrounds all gathered.)

LEADER (V.O.)
Like any predator in the wild, by instinct Empire kills to eat.
Its agents and offspring—pale and swarthy, brute enslavers, nobles, and legislators alike—come conquering to subdue, maim, and kill multitudes.
We assure you, there is no excess for We are ravenous: We savor by degrees each sudden and slow-cooked death until We ourselves succumb or are slain and portioned out. And even then, We hunger. Ours is a different kind of eating.

(beat)

Come . . . let us descend . . . and . . . touch
At present . . . smoldering . . .
Caesar . . . replenished . . . to fall . . .
Growing . . . another’s heart . . .
A . . . vessel . . . looming . . . a sword

(CHORUS addresses the congregation.

Chorus descends to hover inches above the pit.
The bodies of Chorus are barely perceptible. The voices emanate from the pit.)

CHORUS (V.O.)
Truth is a kind gesture
And forgiveness, a fierce . . . and . . . violent . . . skill
Acquired through trial and hardship.
I have befriended my rage, my beauty, and the strange character foisted upon me.
Presumed incompetent, I remain unimagined
And thus, cautious with hope and wishes.

(Leader and congregation enact a ritual call and response.

Leader speaks unseen. The congregation (comprised of Chorus and PEOPLE) hovers, bodies barely perceptible, above the pit.)

LEADER (V.O.)
What is your name?

PEOPLE (from memory)
I am the warm sea.

CHORUS (V.O.)
I am the sail and compass.

PEOPLE (from memory)
I am the blue shadow of you. I own the fat lips, the flat nose, the bristling. I own the tight spiral, the padlocked dumbwaiter, the wool-grey strongbox.

CHORUS and PEOPLE (in unison)
Your longing and jubilant blackness.

LEADER (V.O.)
Who entrusted you with these riches?
Who bestowed upon you the mark?
Who called you to the hold?

(Chorus and People walk a labyrinth, levitating above the pit.)

FOUR
The Harvest.

(Chorus addresses the congregation.

The bodies of People meld into the darkness. The bodies of Chorus are barely perceptible at start then gradually meld into the darkness. The voices emanate from the pit and the canopy of the heavens.

The canopy rustles.)

CHORUS (V.O.)
Before you are manifest the four portions of your inheritance—
Its myriad divisions beginning with these:
Four paths, four pillars, four elements, four principles.
Four messengers, four trials, four suns, four virtues.
Four causes, four judgments, four powers, four truths.
Four humors, four boundaries, four questions, four rituals.
Four faces of conquest,
Four faces of war,
Four faces of famine,
And four of plague.

Four mysteries,
Four commandments,
Four axes of dimension,
Four fixations of belief.

The four chambers of your mammalian heart.
Its four stomachs.
Its four tongues.
Its four rows of teeth.
Its four columns of eyes.

(FIN.)

In Act Three, Scene One of Lucy Prebble’s 2009 play Enron there is a restaging of the destruction of New York City’s Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. Prebble’s text reads:

September 11th 2001.

They improvise their responses.

Eventually . . .

Ken Lay comes out to give a speech.^[1]

This is how it went down in Rupert Goold’s staging of the play: there is a projection of the towers engulfed in smoke. A cloud of some glittery substance meant to index ashes and broken glass falls from the lighting rig. Several members of the suited ensemble stumble forwards in slow motion, miming leaps from 100 storey windows, flailing their arms slowly, mouths open in silent screams.

Famously, London loved Enron and New York City hated it. In an article in The Guardian, British theatre critic Michael Billington attributes its failure on Broadway to New York theatre’s “conservative instincts.”^[2] But Nicole Gelinas, writing in City Journal, notes how audiences enjoyed the first half of the play, with its velociraptors and light sabers. Once the representation of 9/11 hit, “shocked audience members launched a quiet but seething strike”, withholding their laughter and applause.^[3] Patrick Duggan writes that “because of the conditions of its operation—the encounter of live bodies that gaze upon each other, the theatre might be considered an ethically dense and complex space, especially when attending to questions and representations of trauma […].”^[4] It strikes me that an audience’s withdrawal of affective labour upon the performance of a representation of historical trauma might indeed be a kind of ethical encounter. No, the New York audience said, this is too much. Or, this is not enough.  

Is theatre ever up to the task of representing trauma? As Duggan’s body of research on contemporary trauma theory and performance has noted, trauma itself has a dimension of repetitive performance—trauma marks an original event that is only accessible through “delayed psychic returns.”^[5] He identifies a subset of performances he calls “trauma-tragedy”, which reflect the structures of trauma, rather than the actual event. But Goold’s interpretation of Prebble’s stage direction “September 11 2001” is not in this camp. Like the sinking of the ship imagined in John Thornberry’s A Night to Remember, the material indexicality of the theatre—the way often shabby, flimsy things point to “real things”, like glitter pointing to the ashes of the Twin Towers—transforms trauma into burlesque.

Thornberry’s piece imagines a staging of the sinking of the Titanic (though the word is never used) within the confines of the proscenium arch. We first encounter a tumbling, sinkable Molly Brown: “A well-turned-out matron in a maroon evening gown, replete with diamonds, pearls and a sable stole, tumbles down the tilted deck like an out-of-control child on a playground slide.” The spectacle continues in this fashion with items and people tumbling into the sea, in a manner that reminds the reader of Buster Keaton and Lucille Ball’s encounters with the material world, and by extension, Henri Bergson’s work on laughter (provoked by something mechanical encrusted upon the organic). Like Goold’s attempt to represent 9/11, the representation soon begins to strain and push the theatre itself past its breaking point. The audience is submerged in the wooden ocean. But then again, in witnessing such an event, perhaps it was already too immersed to return to shore. Thornberry’s audience, unlike the New York audience witnessing Prebble’s Enron, cannot withhold their affective labour, they cannot go on strike. They can only scream for help.

^[1] Lucy Prebble, Enron (London: Methuen Drama, 2009), p. 159.

^[2] Michael Billington, “Enron’s failure shows Broadway’s flaws”, The Guardian, May 5, 2010, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2010/may/05/enron-broadway-close-early.

^[3] Nicole Gelinas, “Why Enron couldn’t take Manhattan”, City Journal, May 13, 2010, https://www.city-journal.org/html/why-enron-couldn%E2%80%99t-take-manhattan-10729.html.

^[4] Patrick Duggan, “Others, Spectatorship, and the Ethics of Verbatim Performance”, New Theatre Quarterly: NTQ, 29: 2 (2013), pp. 146-158 (p. 147).

^[5]  Patrick Duggan & Mick Wallis, “Trauma and Performance: Maps, narratives and folds”, Performance Research, 16:1 (2011), pp. 4-17 (p. 5).

In [UNTITLED]Water, Perspex, Soil, etc., Kate Attwell imagines a theatre that is past irony. The auteur at the heart of her text yearns to close the gap between the art object and herself, the art star. At least, she wants the appearance of having forsaken aesthetic detachment. And we’re with her. (I am with her.) After all, there is no room for deadpanning when it concerns million dollar art “commissions.” Not that it was ever easy to be ironic about producing massively-scaled performances before—we get a sense that there was indeed a time before since so much has been declared “dead” by the art star. But even in the halcyon before, the time of the living, large crowds generally preferred unruly expenditures of euphoria or anger to that of pure disinterestedness. In the present time of [UNTITLED], acts of gathering cannot be fathomed. (Like the climate crisis suburban constituents were once unable to imagine—too busy taking selfies and buying comestibles in bulk—no one knows how to collectively gather, even though images of crowds remain as readily available as pornography.) No one gathers en masse in the new now; like a theatre past irony, it can no longer be performed in real time.

The art star in The Pool works backwards. She searches for the crowd as if it were a fossil from a previous era for which there is no longer an equivalent. This is not interpretation so much as it is sacrifice, bodily sacrifice with each inhalation of smoggy air, each hand dug extraction of earth. (She is assumedly digging for our benefit not to motor her international career. Yes, irony and clean air got stamped out, but art world ego survived the crossing from the time before.) And yet, even she cannot reconstruct public assembly, but digs her way by hand to the present, the new now, and the infantile age of the dead crowd. In searching for the agora, the closest the art star can come to conjuring a crowd is a viewing tank in which motionless children are durationally suspended in the water from the neck down. In another context, living time, this would have been a parodic gesture of a too, too precious artist with money to burn and kids to exploit. In the new now, it is the closest thing to collective embodiment.

In truth, the art star is in thrall to her own bloated masterpiece, even if she did cut the project a few meters short. Anyone who digs for that long has bypassed a restrained, “cool” evaluation of the situation—the situation being our planet, which tipped, long ago, past crisis and into its manufactured death throes. The only work left is to build the graves and bury the dead. This is a different kind of art labor than the conceptual virtuosity demonstrated in Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991). The shark is dead; the school children are drowning but alive. This is “nonlife” pace Elizabeth Povinelli, a living death in which the four chambers of the heart continue to pump in the presence of planetary extinction. In the new now, the sky has fallen on our heads. We need not contemplate death as a high gloss referent, since life itself barely persists in Perspex.

While it goes unmentioned, the art star has always harbored a distaste for Hirst and his removal from his own material processes. Not that she could have gone it alone. She is grateful to her energetic project manager, competent nephew, the helpful parents, excited teachers, docile children… (The point is Hirst never got his hands dirty in the time before.) And yet, a nagging question remains for the art star: why assemble to witness “nearly drowning” children in the floating performance installation when everywhere we witness children actually drowning? Clearly, there’s a confusion of priorities, but no one can doubt her respect for materials, her physical commitment to the work, the “big build.”

Gloss 1

What the hell?

The text of this theatre is a fragment that might (or might not) be sample code for the US National Security Agency’s XKeyscore search and analysis software. The leak was subsequent to, and independent of, the documents provided by Edward Snowden.

What makes this text an Imagined Theatre?

Code is written for humans, not computers.

Code is written to be performed, not read. The residue of these performances appears on the screen.

Code acts within a network. Adjoining layers in the software stack play the roles of Latour’s actants.

Code is vibrant, consisting of automata that both execute and observe performances within the network.

When I write code I imagine my audience—my users—and choose words to shape how they think. I also employ code written by others, imagining those writers—their values, goals, and blind spots—as I conjure a performance combining their work and mine.

I can’t read code.

Yes, I know. It’s called the third rail of interdisciplinarity.

Gloss 2

Why isn’t this theatre a computer science problem?

In a career of reading code I have felt delight, annoyance, rage, bafflement, and a few times, joy. Here, I was surprised at my admiration—and envy—for how clean, elegant, and expressive it appeared. But, for the first time, I also felt nausea.

The discipline of computer science doesn’t give me the tools I need to talk about how my world changed once I imagined a theater in which that fragment performed.

What’s so special about this code?

Taken at face value, the code shows how to parse internet searches, web addresses, and HTML pages that refer to the The Amnesiac Incognito Live System (TAILS), an operating system ostensibly “advocated by extremists on extremist forums.”

The example shows how to capture the behavior of anyone on the Internet, in this case, people looking for TAILS information in Linux Journal.

That’s me. Along with many fellow computer scientists, I’ve played around with TAILS. And I’ve read the TAILS coverage in Linux Journal.

Surveillance gets a lot more real when they’re looking at you.

Gloss 3

How does nonmaterial performance help me understand this theatre?

The concrete performance of code has a physical dimension—electrons, waste heat, pixels lighting up on a display—but focusing on the material stuff obscures what the XKeyscore authors imagined: a world in which human activity can be abstracted to the point where mass surveillance becomes feasible, thus fulfilling their ethical imperative.

To engage with this new world, we focus on the unseen, abstracted, imagined—the nonmaterial—networked performances of vibrant code.

Nonmaterial performance provides tools for the laity to pry open a system that captures every text message, financial transaction, internet search, and email.

Gloss 4 

Why does this theatre matter?

The act of imagining has consequences.

The authors of XKeyscore wanted to prevent bad people from doing bad things. Because code is vibrant, this fragment also perturbed the world in unintended ways, changing the performance of people—bad and not—who understood XKeyscore’s implications.

I shifted from being an unwitting actor to becoming a self-conscious performer and spectator within a vast rhizome of performances. And my behavior changed.

This fragment does not perform in isolation; it draws its power from the intertwined networks of code in which we are all embedded.

And, delightfully, the fragment is vibrant: an actant achieving a life independent of its origin. What perhaps started as a hurried note from a classified presentation has become part of the global conversation about ubiquitous, state-sponsored surveillance.

Nonmaterial performance employs performance studies, actor-network theory, and vibrant matter to critically engage with the cultural construction of code, exposing its embedded values, goals, and blind spots.

I. Extinction

In the plastic theatre, all is possible. To buy and preserve, fresh and smooth. But it is also toxic. Micro-toxic, hiding in the shiny texture. Plastic calls on us. To ignore how it is made and how it is disposed of – dumped – but never gone. All the plastic produced is still here, on this cling-film covered earth. In the age of extinction, plastic is what is left. Plastic legacy, plastic archeology. The plastic theatre is one that manufactures and consumes its own extinction.

II. Plastic Wants

Plastic colonises. Or plastic materialises colonialism. It matters the narratives of oppression, supremacy, entitlement, empire, extraction. We take your art, your culture, your aesthetics (the ‘Western’ theatre is based on appropriation) and we give you our used up, thrown away, no-longer-useful, poisonous plastic.

As the Global North exports our plastic, exports our extractivism, our capitalist accumulation, the smooth texture of plastic hides the differentiated bodies and inequalities it reflects. Who dumps on whom always depends on race, class, gender, and political capital. The convenient, the easy, the disposable but also the life-saving and accessible. Minor players such as the straw are banned while oil companies sponsor the theatre.

III. ‘Nearly Human’

A plastic theatre is flexible and malleable. The binaries we use to categorize have been breached, broken, exploded. We are porous and we are now plastic. We produce it, consume it, eat it, absorb it, excrete it, and feed it to our offspring in our breast milk. We are not bounded and secure, bordered and safe. We are vulnerable and exposed with different bodies exposed differentially. We are already plant-mineral-animal-water-plastic.

IV. ‘Deafening Mesh’

As Stacy Alaimo would have it, the world is made up of fleshy beings that are corporeally connected. This means thinking across bodies and considering the wanted and unwanted ways in which the more-than-human world is in us. Environmental histories, presents and futures are in our bodies. Plastic in our bloodstream, skin, lungs, digestive system will not die, it will only recirculate across fleshy bodies. ‘Plastic spawns a bewildering variety of aquatic life’ with islands of plastic trash and UK rivers full of escaped plastic nurdles, breaking out of their manufactured prison and let loose to spawn. Plastic spawns, monstrous children, are not out there, they are in us. They are us. Plastic potently destroys the human/nature and nature/culture dualisms on which we have pinned so many of our hopes. The mesh of our plastic entanglements is inexorable.

V. Dark Ecology

A plastic theatre is deathless, staticky, sticky, silent. It is scary and strangely safe. Creepy and clinical but also ubiquitous. Our progress has led to our extinction. There is grief in this realisation. A dark optimism in facing the depths, in coming to terms with our dark legacy, feeling the sun on our grotesque faces. Understanding that progress has let us down. It has only benefited the few, the white, the hetero, the able-bodied, the wealthy, the powerful. Abandoning the myth of technology overcoming ecology, of human invention overcoming climate crisis, opens up other possibilities of living differently. Grotesqueness cast in another light can become something else. We are already living in this theatre of plastic. Now what?

Works Cited

Alaimo, Stacy. 2010. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Analyzing language as a sounding performance, we find that writing systems encode bodies in ways that both broaden the possibilities of performance and establish limitations. Each human language narrows the infinite range of vocal performance to a set repertoire of articulations in order to create an operable code. This paradox haunts performance as a space for freedom and a continuous call to socialization: There’s no single human language that makes use of every possible sound of the mouth—Spanish lacks the “sh” sound, English lacks the “ñ” sound—but this limitation creates a frame which makes possible symbolic relations for meaning building (house, household, housing).

A complicated version of freedom explores the potentiality of different languages—not for what they mean but for how they sound. How might a theatre piece take advantage of four different languages conceived as musical instruments, each one with its own unique potential?

A complicated version of freedom attempts to compose such a utopic piece. Analyzing different mappings of the sounds in Mandarin, Korean, Farsi, and Spanish, I arranged a composition that releases slow transformations that incrementally unravel different compositional games as a minimalistic vocal piece. After the phonetic aspect of the composition was realized, I asked the performers/native speakers to transcribe the work using their own writing systems. This led to a unique score written in eight hands: an impossible script for a single author. It is imperative to show its handwritten quality to fully convey the richness of such a collective labor. 

Between these spoken landscapes appear some discourses written by each performer in their own native language about what is it to be free in New York and what is it to be free back in their respective hometowns. A second performer imitates the initial speech in their own language, finding words that phonetically resemble the source but which unleash a completely different and unexpected new meaning. 

A complicated version of freedom is a theatre piece that pays homage to the best of New York City: its multiculturalism. To be together is to invoke a potentiality that we neglect by separating our communities. It might be complicated, but it is nurturing and fun. A complicated version of freedom is one possible way to play together in a global world without disregarding the singularity of our cultures that enrich us as humans.

This is the body I bring, thing among things. Into the room, blank white page—yet that sort of space is never the case. Just open your eyes: “let the room dissolve and recognize the cluttered landscape.” Once you do it “offers things up to you—and your body takes its place among them.” For D’Amato, the body, that sacred something, shares its being with things. There is no ghost in the machine removed from matter. Consciousness, that thinking thing, and the thoughts it thinks, are all just things.

A world of things. Things are not necessarily objects, for they require no subjects to act on them, to behold them, to think them into significance. In this world of things actions (movement, thought, perception) are also things. We delude ourselves to see them as different in kind than “Rusty screws. Vines, palms, pink flowers. Concrete.” These change too; even monuments change, given world enough and time. Their inertia only appears from the temporal perspective of human actions. Old rocks may regard us all as fleeting instances, mere actions in time. (Whereas insects who live a day may see us all as things, given, immutable.) Every thing is a process; every process is a thing. From where are you looking, acting?

Our temporary presence among other things passes on, dissolves, while resting for a little lifetime of days between things, relating to things. But this too often happens hungrily, imperialistically: driving and collecting things, processing and producing things, consuming and discarding things, representing things, trading things. The world of things can disappear into our economies of desire, burned up in subjective activity. But D’Amato’s dancer, you, can open a gesture that goes the other way: an act of “letting things be”—letting things meet you, and each other, without hierarchy or judgment. Not chaotically; with a kind of care that allows the soft thing of your body to avoid sharp edges, to sediment among things. Like the composite thing of the waterfall: “contour upon contour, a Russian doll. Rock face, spurts of water.” An ecosystem of things. Their interrelation is not dictated first of all by causality or intention. Rather, the “environment is flowering, you are flowering. Your body is part of a vast symphony.”

Then how do things appear? How can they matter in the realm of representation, or be distinguished as foreground? No need. D’Amato invites you—the perceiver, the dancer, the human, the sacred something—into specific, concrete moments of tension and release. A moving toward, a moving away from this thing, and that, and that. No perspective exists outside these things; perspective too is a thing, and meshes with things seen. Grounded in the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty or the choreographic scores of William Forsythe, D’Amato asks us to move into the encounter with the world without taking over or insisting on our presence standing out. Flow, grow, appear, disappear; to whom? Any “whom” is just another thing among things. The body from which any spectator sees is a “composite thing”: flesh, veins, bowels, behaviors, beliefs, bites, bits. The process of seeing is a composite thing too. And the emptiness between things is a thing. Rubbing up against each other (which is also a thing), things thing, and thinking things think about things, which is just their thing.