Open

Write your own gloss before you read mine.

(Asking that is a losing battle, I know.)

A gloss defines a work. It limits liminality. A neither-animal-nor-human goat-man enters dressed like a goat-woman. A good gloss would contextualize that neither-nor, binary-defying figure.

I bet yours would.

When you read the stage direction describing all the figures walking by, you started seeing connections or constructed randomness so that you had already decided what the play meant before the first speech.

Put that in your gloss. (Which I know you will not write.)

It is so tempting. The figures represent so many interesting corners of our culture. The progression to titanic cultural emblems like E.T., Gandhi, Mr. Monopoly, and a barista suggests a forward momentum of meaning, meaning, and more meaning.

Why are we always in such a hurry to reach significance? When you saw the characters were Latinx half-goats what did you think that meant? Some portrayal of how non-white people are dehumanized? Some immigrant drama? What is more dehumanizing—being half-goat or being limited to socially relevant drama because one is not white? Or for that matter having some gloss-writer assume that you the reader are not yourself Latinx?

At what point in your reading did you decide, what was meant?

Did you google the playwright? I could give some matte bio that will make you cry. Do you want to know that Mr. Goblen was a barefoot, underclass, B-boy who dropped out before starting middle school and with nothing more than natural talent pulled himself up by his bootstraps? That would make this play a narrative of social criticism and satire of the ethnic caste system of America.

Or I can give you a glossy bio where he is an Ivy League wunderkind dropping classical references in a timeless fantasy riffing on the iconography of Ancient Greek mythology for the amusement of other Ivy Leaguers.

Is the significance only in ? Is it in the author’s life? Or is the significance in our experience of the work? Can I change your experience with my gloss? It is so hard. The habits of all our schooling push us toward definitive interpretation ASAP. We want to advocate for what we see in the play.

But reading here, you are alone.

The significance you construct has no currency. No one will ask you for Kid Ends Play spoilers in the break room tomorrow. You cannot recommend “imagined theater” for production. Maybe you can tell a friend, but do you really think they will click the link to come here?

If you did write your own gloss (like I asked), tuck it away.

Let all your possible meanings roam free.

I google the word “ambisexual.” For a minute, I wonder if it’s the same word that Ria from Hinge has used to describe her sexuality, which I later decide is also my sexuality, but it’s not. Ria and I are “ambiamorous”—which I also had to google, which made me feel like a middle-aged queer, and also made me think of fish: gilled homosexuals breathing underwater together, sometimes in pairs, sometimes in groups.

But ambisexual is something else—akin to bisexual, but more precise. I think of my friend, Irit, who identifies as a “historic bisexual”—which is to say, Yes: I was bisexual once, before I knew there were infinite genders. Now I mark the limit of language, yet I refuse to alter history. Irit is a good archivist, which is why she makes hauntingly beautiful films from her dead father’s super 8s.

In the Oedipus myth, the King is said to have solved the riddle of the Sphinx: “Which creature has one voice and yet becomes four-footed and two-footed and three?” to which he replies, “Man,” resulting in the death of the Sphinx either by murder, suicide, or autosarcophagy (depending on the source). And yet: some believe there was a second riddle that followed the first, something about two “sisters” giving birth to one another, “night” into “day,” “day” into “night.”

I am reading about this on Wikipedia while I am texting with Joan—alternating between the phone and the screen. Joan has recently been on a date with a sad, thin vegan man who is mourning the loss of his ex. Joan is the ex of my no-longer-sad and perennially omnivore friend, Jane, who mourned the loss of Joan for many years but then one day took the literal garbage out to the curb of her Park Slope home on 9th Street—the contents of which included everything Joan had ever given her minus the black leather jacket which she bequeathed to me and requested I never wear in her presence.

I tell Joan about Ria, and Joan tells me about the tarot reading she had the week before. Dante is a homosexual, who speaks, according to Joan, “in a very dry gay way” when he makes his predictions about your fate. Normally, I would doubt such things carte blanche, but I recall my friend Jeni telling me about Dante years prior, and how all his visions have come to fruit. Dante tells Joan that she will fall in love in the month of October or July—a man with a child—and also that her friend, which is me, will find love before she, and that she will be happy to hear it.

And she did. And she was.

And yet. Like the woman in Schoenberg’s Erwartung (Expectation), who waits for her lover at night in the forest, I am waiting still. I am waiting, and watching, and wondering what it means when something is in the cards. Like Medea—a woman gone mad with betrayal, who slays her two young sons in an act of revenge or salvation (depending on the source), their lifeless bodies strewn across her lap as she flies away in a golden chariot sent to her by her grandfather, the Sun—I, too, want to know if endings are truly overdetermined from the start? Because our art is scripted, Yes; and our bloodlines, cursed. But let’s also remember that theater, like life, is so very live, so anything can happen, and will, and might. This is what my friend Lindsay calls the “the contingency of liveness,” to invoke the provisional nature of our craft. And let us also here remember that ambi is a loanword from Latin, as in both (ambivalent) and around (ambient): multiple things can be true at once. Someone has to take out the garbage, but who and when and where and how are not yet set: the riddle, in other words, may very well be that something can be both fated and free.

::accOmpaniment::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

COuld exOrcism fOllOwing dispOssessiOn (e.g., the 1898 Treaty Of Paris… OperatiOn BOOtstrap… hurricanes María, FiOna… ) recOnfigure dispOssessiOn theOretically, practically, paratactically? Aftermath, exOrcism: “the expulsiOn Or attempted expulsiOn of a suppOsed evil spirit frOm a persOn Or place;” dispOssessiOn: “the actiOn Of depriving sOmeOne Of land, prOperty, Or Other pOssessiOns, usually by way Of trickery Or theft.”

—————————————————————————————————————————————————————–As in the Earth rOtates On its Own praxis.

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

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::draw, drawn raw incOnclusiOn::

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

-Black Hole Hollow, another audience residency call

In 2021, we were invited to be in residence at Black Hole Hollow Farm on unceded Abenaki land. Nicole Daunic, our host, had distributed a call inviting artists to create performances to share with another audience—to reimagine who we might be performing for…and with.

The invitation, she explained, was “shaped by a curiosity about the critical role of creative embodied practice in the process of unsettling forces of human exceptionalism” that, she continues, “imbue modes of ‘life’ shaped through the illogical logics of colonial violence, extractive capitalism and white supremacy.”

We spent five days investigating the habits—physical, sensorial, and ideological—that shaped our embodied relations with our surroundings and more-than-human others. The resulting scores in this Theatre are intended as an ambivalent archive, an earnest offering, an incomplete acknowledgement, an unsettled placing, a nourishing burial—a “preyer.”

I witness an ant spiral endlessly along the edges of a clover leaf, its movements growing lethargic yet determined.

During a durational practice of playing dead, we remain relatively still under a hazy sun and realize that the smoke from the wildfires blazing in California has come to greet us.

Buried in the foothills of Black Hole Hollow in 1800, Rhoda Blommers, a fellow settler, would become a key collaborator. In her ongoing decomposition, she showed us one way to trouble the oversimplified binary between a human and non-human audience. Simultaneously, she reminded us of the histories of European settler colonialism that informs our arrival to this place. Rhoda’s life is marked—by a headstone on the land—and retold—in a brief newspaper article published in the New England Homestead in 1965. In death, her body continues to settle into the earth.

We talk about how humans are often rendered at the top of the food chain, but at Black Hole Hollow, we receive frequent reminders of the ways we are always becoming food to other beings. Ticks and mosquitoes feed off our blood. Gnats find moisture in our tear ducts. Fungi make homes in our shoes and skin after heavy rains. Rhoda, who seems at once to be roving around and slamming cottage doors, while also spreading the nutrients of herself in the dirt, continues to remind us of place in the midst of a multi-course meal. We come up with a working title of Preyer in attempts to hold onto this awareness that we are also food, and that our movements are intended as an offering.

In these scores, excerpted from a larger collection, we tangle with an inherited choreography of human-centeredness, which is inseparable from the colonial logics that separate beings according to physical and imagined characteristics. We contemplate the ways we have been cast as repeaters of this choreography and explore a few ways to disobey it and imagine otherwise. Our preyer is that this might help us to perceive things that are obscured within vertical, rational, objective, and objectifying praxis, and perhaps to re-situate ourselves more respectfully in relationship to more-than-human kin.

But we sit in the tension between lived time and that standardized time measured in uniform ticks, a standardized time which moves incessantly toward the future under the banner of progress.

Think instead about the quiet when the sun goes behind the horizon and darkness overtakes the land? The silence of a virgin world sets in, the  silence of a world gone to sleep. We lost along the way to register the qualitative difference in the perception of  time.

We could draw on so many examples to substantiate our loss. Take for example Jeremiah  29:11 – 12, which talks of God having known us before birth. Man is a materialization of an indefinite process that started elsewhere. That we are in transit, in Swahili we say, tuko njiani.

In Life And A Half, Sony Labou Tansi writes of such a virgin world. This virginity is the source of question to man, a “hollow fullness” in which everything shows you, with an invisible finger, man’s solitude in the infinity of the unconscious. Such a huge hopelessness leads to the act of naming, and makes man the inventor of philosophies to explain the receding void that is eternally present.

But that hollow fullness is ever there, no matter what. Our relation to it is virtual, fictional and non-causal in every sense. As long as there is life, we are in sync with it, and only come off of it when we die.

In Ubuntu philosophy, we say “I am because we are, you are because I am.” You and I are an extension of a one-another-ness, part of a larger whole, a community, a link in the many chains of networks – your life forms the community’s life. We are the nodes, extensions, and time extends them.

Even my own death cannot stop the community’s life. Community life and time will still go on, merged into each other, embedded together. My own death stops nothing. If I die now, at the same instant, many more are born. This is how life and time perpetuate each other in continuity.

Time is each of us, it exists as long as we exist. Imagine it as infinitely expansive. No past, no future. No yesterdays – what we have is an expansive present now.

Can Anybody See Hamlet?

The readers open a website entitled Imagined Theatres.

There they read the telescoped description of an imagined performance.

The title of the performance is not revealed but it begins with a performer in dark clothes entering holding a skull.

The further activities of the audience that evening are considered, concluding with the observation that it didn’t even occur to anybody in the audience that the skull was a Hamlet reference. Clearly this is supposed to be a fantasy production, possible only in the imagination.

At least some of these readers may feel, as I do, that this description is not that obviously a fantasy. One can certainly imagine a performance no more unlikely than this one, in which the audience was composed entirely of pre-school children or of adults from a culture in which Hamlet icons were unknown (there indeed are such). What makes theatre possible is the assumption that the audience, as a whole, will recognize the same cultural referents, although of course they may react to them in individual ways.

Certainly one can imagine an audience that does not recognize a skull as a Hamlet reference, just as one can imagine an audience that does not recognize a soldier on stage, or a priest, or a throne. One can imagine anything one likes, but there is nothing special about Hamlet. The real point is that theatre depends on a communication of referents. One can arbitrarily remove any single referent–from a skull to a crown–from a culture in imagination, but then the entire culture is changed, not just the referent. In such a culture, for example, no one backstage would have even thought of sending on a skull in the first place.

In fact some readers will find a useful approach to this imagined paradox in one of Borges’ most provocative short stories, “Averroes’ Search.” The story tells of the frustration of the medieval Islamic theorist who is translating Aristotle into Arabic and encounters the word “theatre,” a concept as unrecognizable to him as the Hamlet skull is to this theatre’s hypothetical audience. Like that audience in the concluding paragraph, he wanders the streets, having a variety of experiences, but like them, never reaches his goal (a theatre in both cases).

Borges concludes that his own attempt to reconstruct the thoughts of Averroes from available fragments was perhaps as futile as Averroes’ attempt to understand the concept of theatre from within a culture that lacked that concept. The reader may wonder if this Hamlet/skull proposition may be considered another consciously paradoxical attempt to describe an impossible performance by removing a cultural assumption that makes possible the operations of theatre itself? And finally, of course, what epistemological position does that give to this present commentary in challenging the strategies of that proposition? Certainly a confused one.

THIRTY[1]

[1] As a curtain call is the conventional conclusion to a play, “Thirty” is used in journalism to signal the end of an essay.

You waste time watching old commercials on YouTube, scrolling through them, half-heartedly remembering the way you felt as a child, how you must have felt – you don’t really remember at all. It’s a memory of a feeling you could have had or should have had. You cover the camera on your laptop and hope Jeff Bezos isn’t watching you. The Cindy Crawford Coke commercial is actually a Pepsi commercial: you remembered the shape of the Coca-Cola bottle even though the can is the whole point of the ad. You aren’t one of the little white boys in that commercial either, or a cowboy smoking Marlboros. But you still want to be as cool as a rum and coke. And just as popular.

You post thirst traps, trash for other people to look at – and maybe do more with – while refusing to take the kitchen trash to the curb. You wait for people to inflate your ego with little images of hands clapping, of fire and hearts and eggplants and peaches. Of little red faces sweating with their tongues out and the occasional little yellow face making a shocked O. They’re not shocked and neither are you but talking about sex with strangers kills time very well.

You waste time sending memes to every acquaintance you think will think they’re funny and even some who you know won’t laugh at all. You don’t vacuum. You do not water your plants. You think about how they need water. You don’t do the dishes. You don’t read the book you were going to read. You watch TikTok videos of drag queens.

You waste time playing games on your browser. You play games on your phone. You do the Wordle. You waste time clicking through a series of pages that advertise Power Couples You Didn’t Know Were LGBTQ+. You already know all of them, except for the ones who are not actually famous and definitely not power couples. You tie your sneakers and take yourself out to the curb. It’s hot and humid and you cool your face with an ice cube that melts rapidly on contact with your face. You go back inside and scroll through Instagram, Grindr, Snapchat, Twitter, X. You wait, face melting.

read

Crankie, the following words, and

imagine

being a theatre audience is not as natural as it seems. Among the many expected tasks to be accomplished, the most problematic—yet indispensable and intuitive—one is to act along with those on stage and commit to the construction of an invisible wall. As if that is not challenging enough, now experiment with

read

it, theatrical by itself, as if the premise of physical reality could be disregarded. Unlike an audience, readers neither bother to hide in the dark, nor have any moral concerns about being an omnipotent peeper. The violation, however tactfully concealed under this act, is nearly as condemned and acknowledged compared to that of watching due to its nature.

read

the small black strokes, drift, the eyes, sucked into the brain, and in there the space, the action, and the audience is

one.

read

to look at the invisible, we witness the perpetual cycling of death and reincarnation as our eyes caress the words, only to find a vitality so strong it burns, an uncanny intimacy…how

she

had lived…lived on and on…[1]

in pure isolation,

read

………, Words.

right, phew, all relieved.

no breath, not a human being, not a character growing flesh and skin, so thin, in

the Reality.

yes…

eyes wide open…cannot stop…right back

stares…

certain vowel sounds…What?…who?…no!…she!…….the buzzing?…..yes…….all dead still but for the buzzing[2]

read

those imprisoned. On or off stage, we are no different on either side of the wall. Cannot go on. Thought you were safe, didn’t you? Now the space is filled with disturbance, and the darkness encompasses an anxiety of full exposure.

read

shadows: the perfect metaphor for a half-being, with the ability to simultaneously become and decease, to be, just shadows, forming and disappearing, always there and not there, talking to somebody and to no-body, screaming to get out and sinking right back in.

read

theater? Are imagination and performance contradictory? Is it problematic to assume that a script is to be read? How is a script, a “theater to be made,” considered theater at all? Should we create a world with no limits on a physical stage, or at least present that infinity? Is watching (in comparison) more ethical? Why do we immediately accept, or ignore the theatricality of presentation and representation in any form?

read

the crankie. How cruel: paper is not more organic than the human body, and the crinkling sound only reminds us of what it was, then melted, and then reformed, so are

words.

what could stand in between us?

What…who?…we?…no!

Is it problematic to assume that Crankie and the following words should be “read”?

Being a theater audience is not as natural as it seems. Among the many expected tasks to be accomplished, the most problematic—yet indispensable and intuitive—one is to act along with those on stage and commit to the construction of an invisible wall. As if that is not challenging enough, now experiment with reading.

It is theatrical by itself, as if the premise of physical reality could be disregarded. The violation, however, tactfully concealed under this act, is nearly as condemned and acknowledged compared to that of watching due to its nature. Unlike an audience, readers neither bother to hide in the dark, nor have any moral concerns about being an omnipotent peeper. The words are sucked directly into the brain, and in there the space, the action, and the audience merge into one.

To read is to look at the invisible. Readers witness the perpetual cycling of death and reincarnation as their eyes follow the lines, only to find a vitality so strong it burns, and an uncanny intimacy, generated from pure isolation.

It is not real.

Right…phew…all relieved…no!… words are moving…eyes wide open…stares back…What? . . . who? . . . no! . . . she![3]

Not real. Not a human being, not a character growing flesh and skin in “the reality.” Just shadows, forming and disappearing, simply be-ing, always there and not there, talking to somebody and to nobody, screaming to get out and sinking right back in.

Where is the wall? The emperor is not wearing any clothes. We are no different from those imprisoned on stage. Now the space is filled with disturbance, and the darkness encompasses an anxiety of full exposure. Cannot go on. Thought you were safe, didn’t you? Thought you were in charge, with your body hiding in the dark and your eyes still in your control. Forget about acting, just blend into the shadows—the perfect metaphor for a half-being, with the ability to simultaneously become and decease.

Are imagination and theater contradictory? How is a script, a “theater to be made,” considered theater at all? Should we create a world with no limits on a physical stage, or at least present that infinity? Is watching (in comparison) more ethical? Why do we immediately accept, or ignore the theatricality of presentation and representation in any form?

How cruel: paper is not more organic than the human body, and the crinkling sound only reminds us of what it was, then melted, and then reformed.

What?…who?…we? …no!

[1] Samuel Beckett, The Collected Shorter Plays (New York: Grove Press, 1984), 206.

[2] Beckett, 204.

[3] Samuel Beckett, The Collected Shorter Plays (New York: Grove Press, 1984), 204.

A theatre saturated by ghosts is, unfortunately, often orchestrated only by a reading of Derrida’s hauntology that leaves those spirits trapped in a state of recitation until their vibrations collapse in on themselves. His is a process by which nostalgia is felt for promised futures that never came to be and therefore results in (re)visitations by spectres of staunch anachronisms. Too often they are less than shades on tracks, less than stringed marionettes — all color has been bled out and only sepia-toned ache remains.

Instead, the ghosts of a remembered theatre glide out of an abyssal darkness with the music of deep time. They all carry banners of terror, despair, ecstasy, love, and laughter like a fantastical crusader horde becoming the very foe they’ve sworn to slay. They crowd the frontiers. In the absence of exposition, the defiance of reason, and an insistent dangerous sexy nonsense, they occupy virtual space like a catastrophe of heavenly angels. It is like a Dürer illustration of Dante with infinite concentric circles, but shrouded in grey-black darkness and filled with a voluptuous excess rather than a cold, stoic joy.

This remembered space is not zombified. Nor is it even penitent. It surrenders to the deluge that accompanies it.

*          *          *

The infinite sepulchers marking the surface of the remembered theatre show the form of two. They are transi tombs and both visible effigial representations rest with the assumption that the “true” body lies in the earth below. Some saw a body go in once. None can see it now. You might feel it under there in your own bones, but cannot easily verify. This is a third leap to be taken. The fourth and final one is the reconstruction of any of these countless bodies. And this (re)creation can only happen by taking into account the previous three forms and adding any story/history/legend/presumption/bias that the visitor makes. The result is a fourth form created in reflection of the creator. Countless figures and countless visitors – unfathomable and fabulous co-creation.

Effigies in a theatre of sepulchral past can continue to change. They simultaneously act and are acted upon. They possess body and texture – the kind of texxture (à la Renu Bora or Eve K. Sedgwick) that carries the various histories of the object and the objects that made up that object. The marks of contact remain and evolve over time. There is work to making effigies.

The effigy seems to surrogate for the thing that once was. Just as there are many perspectives of the original, so too are there countless surrogates. Effigies must be made. Even unwillingly. And surrogates must act and be acted upon.

*          *          *

In the rich darkness of this remembered theatre, I whisper my secrets to it and it rolls back.  I whistle out music from cracks in my mind, the notes ring out – full then hollow – full of leaves and crisp pastness before draining away with a deeper pang of loneliness than before. I whistle again, longer and louder, and it washes away lonelier still.

The dark and the dust are preconditions for re-membering. This imagined theatre gives space and body for such work to continue anew and differently with each repetition.

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

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

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

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