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.
The remembered theatre used to be, and could be again, made of a simple composition. It begins with a worn and unsweepable wooden floor cloaked in faded red curtains. At the very center of the stage is a desperate, bright light. It haunts the heart of the space. It wants you to believe it is radiating out and upward along the soft fabric edges. Here the curtains are tapestries encrusted with generations of dust collected from countless audiences. Yet, all those multitudinous eyeballs were unable to see it accumulating in front of them, buzzing under the nails and in the pores. Eyes can only see the particles cascading in the glare of the light in shafts that seem to disappear. Few give a thought to where they vanish. They are content with magic.
Beyond the edge of the light, the shadowed folds of the curtains could drop off into an endless absence. But that dark could also crackle with possibility, charged with glee like a deep inhale verging on expulsion. That dark is bated with tension, with pounding and terrifying urges for ecstatic destruction that tear the body apart with painful laughter and wild, strange longings. This is how the shadows articulate the space.
It is a charge that swirls around, undeniable even to the adolescent pair concealed behind rows of chairs in the balcony fondling each other in a sweaty, smiling heap on the floor. They cannot breathe with the thrill of secret performance, alone and yet cosmically exposed in the dark. Even this pair, shielded from the ghost light, is submerged.
In a remembered theatre, light does not shine out but that does not imply the ghost light pulls inward. Rather, it is the shadow – fecund with sound and spirits and electricity – that floods slowly in towards the center. Contrary to sickly histories of settler conquests, the frontier is overpopulated. The periphery is thickly knotted with timelines as generations gather in velvety echoes like sound waves dancing around stone rafters. Between all the noise a deafening quiet pulls at the base of your skull until it completely envelopes the head with the suffocating thickness of velour curtains caking the cracks in your fingers with dust.
Enfolded deeper in the purple phosphoric haze of this Lynchian spectralscape is a vision of a theatre entombed. This is a space that transforms with each visitation and reflects with more clarity than any mirror. It is an endless landscape of sepulchers, a vast organic sprawl that defies any orders of emplotment. You cannot always find the mausoleum you seek but there are plenty for you to transform into what you need. Sometimes you arrive where you desired only to discover that it wasn’t what you thought. This space is all contrary planes enmeshed together in a thick rhizome of tree roots, fields of enigmatic stones and patches of grass, torches, brambles, and souvenirs of love or neglect. It is peopled by bodies in the ground and carved memories atop.
An effigy lying on a slab, staring up to the heavens with stony eyes: what does it see? Is its gaze fixed on pipes, scaffolding, and bright electrical lights searing back down? Is it straining to peek past the blaze to catch a private glimpse of the ceiling – its paint hanging off in moldy slices? Or is the firmament a heavy black mass, a glimmerless void with no depth or definition, its absence crushing?
Then the patience of ages will produce the soft hues of color, at first mistaken for film in the eyes until stars appear and multiply. The cosmos grows in intensity until the abrupt vastness of color and light undulates, becoming sky that flows like clear violent rivers to form surging mountains with explosions of steam and clear blue magma racing above as if the globe were spinning off its axis and yet crawling to a halt. The depth of time bubbles up as sensations fly and circles form and collapse to form again. Bodies burn to nothing in ecstasy and everything swirls and collapses and swirls again. It is high noon in a black hole and everything is flat singularity – a single note ringing until explosion as everything cries out. Falling through stars and mountains and falls and clouds and warm stone cooling in silence. The earth smells wet, full of rot and life.
This remembered theatre cannot represent that sky nor does it hope to. It does give new lives to those who have seen it; and many who never will. It wastes greatly – and recycles as it can –
making the most of rags and bones. The boundary and the center become whole – an infinity of loops without limit. The seeming paradox of this work is not dissimilar from the misperception that if theatre is a mausoleum then it must be a city of dead things, a receptacle for the inert. But the truth is that such a space of decay is also one of new possibilities. 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.