The
collaborative bog
A glass of water
on the table is not a glass of water in the sand dunes,
nor is it a glass of water under a descending human
back. I want to explore
a micro moment in a collective performance presented
at “Unsettling Conversations,” a wonderfully ‘edgy’
conference held by the Faculty of Education at the
University of British Columbia in the summer of 2006.
In preparation for the conference, our collective,
a team of graduate students under the initial facilitation
of faculty member and drama/literacy specialist Carmen
Medina, trudged through the bog of a collaborative
process with no parameters other than the title of
the conference.
Our conversations were
indeed unsettled. Individuals would spring to action
with confidence and vitality, inspired by a breath-taking
idea, only to be met with troubled expressions weighted
with scepticism. Creative impulses would periodically
pierce through the fog of our ‘don’t-want-to-appear-like-a-control-freak’
manner of engaging with each other. In one moment the
dancer in our group would leap about the middle of the
room demonstrating an embodied concept, in the next,
an overhead projector was hauled out casting illuminations
of more ideas under construction. A graduate student
would dramatically fall to the floor proving a point
with kinaesthetic exclamations, another would complain,
“we need a focal point,” and so it went for several weeks.
Suggestions of images, sounds, movements, and texts were
tossed into the playing field with the best of intentions.
We were all relentlessly polite, overly analyzed, hyper
respectful and progressing very, very slowly, if at all.
As many ideas propelled us in a multitude of directions
there were countless more kept under wraps.
This ‘bog’ of hypersensitivity and often, restrained impulses carried
on until one day one of us slammed a fist down (uncharacteristically)
and shocked us all into production. As a result, the
performance became a window into this constrained, troubled,
and yet exhilarating collaborative arena. I consider
this paper to be a moment of reflection revealing the
complexity and vitality of the creative process in collaboration.
Although it is tempting to re-visit this journey as a
whole as my recollections begin to gather momentum, I
am committed to write about a 27 second moment, a meta-performance
within the presentation.
Interruption
I can feel the thick
silence of the room. My hair creates a curtain over my
face, drawing my focus inward. My breath is slow and
steady. I can distinguish barely audible groans that
seem to help sustain the muscularity and precision of
my movements, I can see through my peripheral sightline
that my colleagues are descending in their chairs at
the same tempo. I can feel the wetness of a smashed tomato
under my left foot and the remains of the one in my hand
will soon drop to the table as I begin to release the
muscular tension in my torso in its slow sustained (10
minutes) journey of collapse. I have a long way to go
before complete surrender to gravity. Not only are my
muscles in the lower part of my body starting to retaliate
but my mind is becoming anxious knowing the various obstacles
on the table of which I was standing on; glasses of water,
tomatoes, papers, will need to be navigated without conscious
intent along the (arduous) way. My body has almost completed
its journey of descent as it moves from a sitting position
to recline. This is one of the most challenging points
in the descent as my abdominal muscles are engaged full
throttle in supporting the weight of the torso as it
incrementally and smoothly descends towards the table...
Sandbags
and tea cups
For a long time now I have been interested in the work of visual artist
Robert Longo (1986) and, in particular, his Man in the
City Series, a series of stunning models dressed in urban
I-mean-business apparel—crisp white shirts, tight black
skirts and pants completed with ‘don’t-mess-with-me’
stilettos. Soft objects were thrown at the models and
the resulting photos captured the authenticity of the
body kicking into the protective survival mechanism—with
eyes closed, head flung back, elbows raised in the immediacy
of protectiveness. A buckling and crumpling of austerity
was captured through moments of instinctive impulse.
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Man in the City |
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Photographer Robert Longo |
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I had brought Longo’s
work to the collective and was eager to demonstrate what
I loved about his images. Could we, I asked them, create
a piece that embodies the authenticity of our collaborative
engagement together?
My work as a dancer/choreographer
for the last 30 years has always embraced the authenticity
that lives inside of risk. Often I would build this state
into my dances. For example, in one dance, I asked the
dancers in my company to first have their heads shaved
on stage as the audience was arriving and then move through
the choreographed adagio balancing small china tea cups
on their heads (the programs stated if the cups should
fall the performance would be suspended for a moment
while the shards of porcelain were swept away from their
bare feet).
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Organs
Photographer Jens Hemmel
Dancers – Thomas Eisenhardt & Lars Ottosen
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Shedding
Photographer Daniel Colins
Dancer – Kathryn Ricketts
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Another example entailed
covering the stage with sandbags creating a state of
emergency in the dancer’s playing field both with associative
images as well as the dancers’ reality. Holding balance
on one leg with an unpredictable shifting in the foundation
creates the necessary tension in the dancer’s reality
thus integrating the concept of inherent tension. The
props (sandbags and tea cups) and actions (balance and
sustained movement) created a necessary tension within
the dancer that was then transmitted to the audience
cultivating immediacy, an urgency and most importantly
an astuteness where I believe transformation occurs.
Urgency/safety are tenuous concepts, privileging the
unknown and affording profound possibilities.
My stage managers were
constantly reprimanding me: “next time can you consider not using real sand—not using real porcelain
and couldn’t you not have one of your dancers play
the role of the blind man in that particular part?” My answer only fuelled
their constant exasperation. The tension that lives inside
of crisis and the risk that is entailed in holding and
navigating that tension is what produces the vitality
that actually fuels the work. Tennessee Williams once
wrote of this tenuous relationship in an introduction
to one of his plays. The trajectory from his sudden success
of Glass Menagerie shot him from the single dingy bulb of off/off Broadway to the bright
neon of expectation. A lavishly furnished penthouse was
to host the commission and expectation of his next great
work but instead came desolation of inspiration and cigarette
burns in the carpet. Williams (1947) wrote,
The sort of life
which I had had previous to this popular success was
one that required endurance, a life of clawing and scratching
along a sheer surface and holding on tight with raw fingers
to every inch of rock higher than the one caught hold
of before but it was a good life because it was the sort
of life for which the human organism is created.
I was not aware of
how much vital energy had gone into this struggle until
the struggle was removed. I was out on a level plateau
with my arms still thrashing and my lungs still grabbing
at air that no longer resisted. This was security at
last.
(New
York Times, 1947)
Relocation to a small
shack in New Mexico recovered this absent vitality thus
enabling the creation of William’s next work Street
Car Named Desire.
In my examples of teacups
and sandbags there is a notion of bringing authenticity
to the construct of the stage. What I loved about the
audience’s engagement with the teacup or the sandbag
pieces was the engagement.
They stopped unwrapping the lifesavers, stopped coughing
for fear of coughing, stopped rattling the programs,
and indeed for even a moment stopped breathing, there
is a genuine impulse to engage on an immediate and yet
deep plane. Breath suspended. These are the openings
in performance—the ruptures in our conventions of spectator/performer
that I was and am currently the most interested in.
I enthusiastically convey
the value in these arrests to my collaborative team working
on the Unsettling Conversations conference piece as I
speak to the space/time vitality within these crisis
points. I demonstrate the first 3 minutes of a slow descent
to the floor, my arms hang limp, as my limbs shift gently
reallocating weight as gravity slowly devours my mass.
A slow descent is just that, as we would watch sand steadily
drop in an hour glass, we witness gravity pour through
the muscle tension of the body pulling the muscle mass
down to the floor increment by increment. It is not possible
to move into this journey without embracing an altered
state of consciousness as the room recedes and a heightened
sense of internal awareness is replaced. During my demonstration
to the group, I transcended in descent from the florescent
and linoleum of the seminar room and when I opened my
eyes and stood up I could see that the event had also
provoked a ‘state’ in the room. Time had slowed down,
critical analysis had taken a ‘coffee break,’ and breath
had deepened— our thick politeness had shifted. The demonstration
inspired an ensemble of varied descents in our performance
at the conference, Gravity in Fugue,
a kinaesthetic cacophony of earthbound pioneers searching
for a silent, collective voice.
A
continued interruption
I recall the moment
before this slow movement descent in our performance.
I had just finished delivering a poem exploring the substance
of creative process as having no core—
How To Eat A Poem
Don't
be polite.
Bite in.
Pick it up with your fingers and lick the juice that
may run down your chin.
It is ready and ripe now, whenever you are.
You do not need a knife or fork or spoon
or plate or napkin or tablecloth.
For there is no core
or stem
or rind
or pit
or seed
or skin
to throw away.
(Merriam, 1990)
I recite the poem aloud
as I simultaneously devour a large, luscious tomato—I
am standing barefoot on a long conference table in order
to make my point completely clear. The table is ‘conference’
set, covered with white linen and punctuated with tumblers
of water, paper, and pens. This is the perfect territory
for the academic paper delivery—‘formal academic–performative’—but
not this time, there is mess and disruption that replaces
the pristine scene. I finish splattering tomato guts
from my emphatic last line, sputtering pulpy red bits
in all directions. I am only vaguely aware of a mixture
of expressions in the room ranging from shock, admiration,
and disbelief, even repugnance. I then join the others
in the slow pull to the floor…
We created a collective
time capsule, time slowed down, stood still, and then
seemed to hover, contained and yet determined. It was
approximately at the 7 minute mark when my weight unexpectedly
shifted forward and then back again, marking the final
excruciating stretch of the journey. An essential rule
of this exercise—or as I like to call it, this ‘kinaesthetic
prayer’—is to remain true to the physical path as bones,
organs, muscles, and breath collectively navigate gravity,
surface, space, and time. My body had chosen a path that
involved extreme attention towards stabilizing my core.
I was reclining on the table—feeling the remnants of
my tomato extravaganza on my legs—controlling my upper
body in its slow descent to the table—when a slight draft
indicated that something quick had moved in and then
out of my kinaesthetic sphere. I marked a difference
in the audience’s engagement and knew that something
had changed. I was not sure what had happened but knew
that it was a significant moment and it indeed it was. A
glass had been removed.
The moment of intervention
was almost imperceptible in terms of my descent but time
altered perspectives in this event, magnifying each micro
impulse. Like a strawberry seed in a tooth, I knew a
minuscule shift had caused a magnanimous effect. This
particular audience member must have been swift and lithe
as a cougar when he sprung from his seat and efficiently
extracted the glass of water from behind my back, confident
that by his action he had just prevented a potential
disaster. A heroic intervention! This is the moment that
resonates still.
This penetration of
the fourth wall shifted the defined positions in the
room between spectators and performer to what? Perhaps
an awakening of an unsettled conversation... A rupture
was created, we were no longer operating within two forms
adjunct but rather had entered a liminal space of meaning-making,
and there was no turning back turning back to what had
been unfolding prior to his intervention.
Not
to worry—in my opinion this is the moment where creative
inquiry begins; this is the point which philosopher David
Appelbaum (1995) calls the stop. We as spectators and audience are attending to the habits of the
conventions of performance, peeling back known surfaces
and unwrapping the safety of spectatorship.
Sur-face is inter-face.
Surface is a reminder of relation, a tangible sign of
the fact that inner and outer mutually penetrate each
other and that the distinction is a functional convenience.
Surface is a concentrated meeting ground, a place where
centrifugal and centripetal tendencies are momentarily
held in balance.
(Appelbaum, 1995,
81)
A
welcome intervention! Or was it?
This audience member
had predicted a moment, or perhaps many, of extreme unsettledness.
Let’s speculate what this/these could have been? What
or who had he rescued? The glass could have toppled onto
the floor, shattering, thereby disrupting the presentation,
alarming the audience and myself. Or perhaps I would
have simply knocked the water glass over—soaking both
the white tablecloth and myself—and proceeded without
interruption into a final but soggy position. Either
scenario, my descent would have been an event occurring
simultaneously within and outside the performance as
the audience was, by my body’s proximity to the glass,
already alert to the tenuous relationship between the
glass and me. Will she sense the glass and avoid it?
Will she topple the glass over? What is going to happen?
By his decision to actively
remove the glass, this audience member invites us all
to ponder and speculate around the possibilities of engagement
between the glass of water, the performer, and the spectator
who actively enters with intent into a performance. Who
is to say the glass had not already been an active partner
(despite its quick abduction by a safety conscious audience
member) throughout the presentation by reason of its
relationship with my descending body? If I had actively
sensed the glass in my descent and slowly averted my
path, the glass would have still played a significant
role. Would my path of descent have been entirely different
had the glass been absent?
The audience member’s
choice of action to intercede on my behalf reminds us
of our own choices of engagement as members of an audience
within performative events. At any moment anyone of us,
spectators all, might engage actively within a performance.
Was his action a performative event? A performative disruption?
Or simply a disruption by an audience member who could
not bear the tension of remaining in his seat, to see
how things would unfold as others were doing? He was,
by his actions, stepping simultaneously in and out of
performance.
I am grateful for this
provocative intervention to our performance even though
I know it caused great perplexity within the intervener
and those watching. Evidence of this consternation was
extracted from my email correspondence with the audience
member who had removed the glass. I asked him how he
felt about his action.
It was a risk to move
the glass and look like a fool or hero... or ignore the
glass and potentially injure a friend and have a heavy
conscience. I decided to bring it to the attention of
other spectators and ask them what I should do.
He then asked me an interesting question,
Did you not notice
the water glass in the performance or did you
perform this as a test for the audience?
(permission granted from audience member)
A test for the audience? Now this is an interesting concept. The presence of the glass had
not yet entered my kinesphere (psychical proximity) to
be noted so I can’t answer whether or not I would have
used the glass to play with the audience. Nothing was
constructed in this descent other than my commitment
to be in the astute ‘presence’ to embrace the unexpected.
The removal of the glass was like a rupture in the sustained
silent journey of my body in descent. Miller (1986) writes
about a rupture in our continuum as a gift. I see the
continuum as being our habits and in this case the habit
of how we view performance. Miller writes of Jacques
Lacan who proposes that our history is implicated within
an emptiness created by rupture in this continuum (Miller,
59).
The important
thing is that at a given moment one arrives at illusion.
Around it one finds a sensitive spot, a lesion, a locus
of pain, a point of reversal of the whole of history,
insofar as it is the history of art and insofar as we
are implicated in it; that point concerns the notion
that the illusion of space is different from the creation
of emptiness.
(Miller, 1986,
10)
The removal of the glass
calls attention to the complacency we are accustomed
to as spectators. This is the give-it-to-me-ness that
constructs the chasm between audience and spectator.
In the removal of the glass, the chasm was bridged. But,
I wonder, in the interruption, in the act of entering
into the performance to remove a perceived impediment
to the performance, was the performance enriched or disrupted?
What about the tension of anticipation, held within the
actions embodied by the performer in relationship to
his or her context, surroundings, environment? The engagement
of audience became focused on whether or not I would,
in my descent, topple the glass of water or deftly avoid
it by sensing its presence and altering the course of
my descent. The relationship between the audience and
I was similar to that in my earlier choreography between
the dancers and audience members as they sat on the edge
of their chairs waiting for the teacups to fall.
Celant (1998) writes
about performance artist Laurie Anderson as someone who
dismantles the conventions of performer/spectator relationship
by constructing what he calls a ‘passage.’
All of Laurie
Anderson’s work is directed toward attempting to divine
the principles of an “other” performativeness, where
the stage is not a threshold that cannot be crossed,
but rather a passage, an access to a dialogue between
the vital core of life and the audience as a whole. Every
event, musical or visual, is for her, an open, transparent
instrument not only bound to her identity, but ready
to dissolve, to give way to a powerful current of real
energy. She thus keeps a distance from the visual ostentation
of self and narcissistic self-gratification and favours
instead the irruption of a hidden condition of being.
This brings Anderson, in her relationship with theatricality,
to conceive the stage space as a participatory perimeter,
in which the profound reality of life offers itself to
perception and to the gaze of all. (Celante, 1968, 15)
The borderless region
created in this dialogue between watcher and performer
is also reflected upon in Heidegger’s analogy of
the jug; the potter who shapes the jug does not only
mould the clay but shapes the void, the emptiness, “The
vessels thingness does not live at all in the material of which it consists, but rather
in the void that holds it" (Bhabha, 1995, 19).
The void in this case
was the space created in crashing the fourth wall, the
invisible wall protecting the spectator from “active”
engagement. In this moment of the performance there was
an inversion of perception in our cognitive patterns
where Heidegger claims that we begin to decipher signs
in a new way. To see the void as emptiness embraced by
a tangible form is to be misconceived by the signs. The
void is in fact neither fixed with form nor freed by
emptiness but is holding a temporality that is understood
by artist Kapoor as the potentiality of expanding the
‘available space.’ This collision of the recognizable
and familiar with radically new ways of recognizing signs
is what cultivates this third liminal space. Bhaba (1998)
writes about the tension between the relationship between
spectator and performer (i.e. spectator/performer) as
both a doubling and displacement.
They come together,
in this uncanny relationship, by virtue of the difference
that holds them apart; a contest between surfaces, elements,
materials or meanings that conjures up one, or the other,
through a ‘third’ dimension. This is the dimension of
doubling and displacement.
(Bhabha, 1998,
19)
The
conflict between the forms of performance conventions
rests on the habits of perception and actions opposed
to boldly moving into the uncharted territory.
There is a moment
in which personal or cultural history stands before two
diverging pathways. One leads to a repetition of the
known, the tried and true, the old, the established.
It is safe, secure and stable. The other finds a renewed
importance in the unknown, the uncharted, the new, the
dark and dangerous. Unfettered by accepted categories
of thought, it might be immediately hidden away from
view, out of fear or repugnance. The moment I speak of
is not choice in the sense of deliberative reason but
an action that choice stands on.
(Appelbaum, 1995,
16)
The removal of the glass
left an imprint with those of us in the room. A trace
of that particular history remains, inviting us all to
question. We were provoked to venture into a new questioning
of relationship and responsibility between spectator,
performer, and action. This brings me back to Jacques
Lacan's writing of “the moment one arrives at illusion…”
(Miller, 10, 1986). Lacan speaks about illusion not as
misconception but rather as a disruption—a suspension
of patterned historical associations—to problematize
the obvious, the habitual and in this way to bring new
understandings to our points of view. Physicist Piet
Hein recalls an incident that exemplifies this way of
understanding illusion. In a conversation to Einstein,
Piet Hein reflects;
A physicist is
walking along a beach and sees a five-year old child
throwing flat stones onto the sea, trying to make them
skip. Each stone makes no more than one or two hops.
The physicist remembers that he, in his childhood, was
very good at this game. So he shows the child how it
is done. He throws the stones one after the other, showing
how to hold them, at what angles to cast them, at what
height over the surface of the water. All the stones
thrown by the adult skip many times: seven, eight, even
ten times.
“Yes” the child
then says, “they skip many times. But that isn’t what
I was trying to do. Your stones are making round circles
in the water, but I want mine to make square circles.”(1968,
n.p.)
Einstein responded in
the following way:
Give the child
my compliments and tell him not to be concerned if the
stones don’t make square circles in the water. The important
thing is to think the thought. (as cited in Barba, 1995,
92)
This is what Appelbaum
(1995) refers to as the stop.
Appelbaum believes that the stop lives in the interstices of action and that it rests in the moment before the
action creating an arrest which is the fuel for transformative
moments. Katsuko Azuma, Japanese Noh master, writes about
this stop as a motive to achieve the same quality of physical/emotional astuteness.
“Kill the breathing.
Kill the rhythm,” Katsuko Azuma’s master repeated to
her. To ‘kill’ breathing and to ‘kill’ rhythm means to
be aware of the tendency automatically to link gesture
to the rhythm of breathing, speaking and music, and to
break this link. The opposite of linking automatically
is consciously to create a new connection. (Bhabha, 1998,
32)
Appelbaum (1995) also
speaks about awareness as action unto itself when viewing
the divide between patterned and repeated habits and
the unknown. This awareness is seen as the action of
choice. Pina Bausch (1984), German choreographer, reflects
upon her interest in dance as being in the
body not with the body. She watches her dancers with great satisfaction even though
they may be absolutely motionless on their chairs. Homi
Bhabhi writes about our notions of stasis and action
merging when “the material and non material tangentially
touch” (1998, 18) If we can look beyond the illustration
we allow the material in this case the body, to transcend
this to a new plain of meaning. Kapoor speaks to this
through the word availability.
In the end it
has to do with issues that lie below the material, with
the fact that the materials are there to make something
else possible; that is what interests me. The things
that are available, or the non-physical things, the intellectual
things, the possibilities that are available through the material. (as cited in Bhabhi, 1998, 18)
This notion of working
through a material, penetrating the surface of the obvious
does not imply that the material itself is a transmitter
or vehicle as my body is not solely the delivery person
to the metaphor below the surface. It is rather
the technique that locates the interstitial space, the in-between temporality,
or as Viktor Shklovsky would say “the act of making strange”
(as cited in Heathcote, 1984, 127). This is the dynamic
space of stillness, the brimming of emptiness where conflicting
spaces meet to form new meanings. This is when the dance
has the courage to be motionless.
The true void—out
of balance, caught between one temporality and another—becomes
such a gathering place that stands in an oblique relation
to itself and others. As a ‘diagonal’ event it is, at
once, a meeting place of modes and meanings, and a site
of the contentious struggles of perspective and interpretation.
(Bhabha, 1998, 30)
Shakespeare’s ‘removal
of ground’ is a beautiful example of the complexity,
depth, and treasure that lives in disruption, crisis,
and loss. “Like Hamlet’s Father, the ghost walks the night, wafting us to a more ‘removed ground’ (Bhabha, 1998,
23). Who is the ghost and who is the father? Who is the
spectator and who is the performer? Both Jerzy Grotowski
and Constantin Stanislavski, two of the most prominent
theatre figures responsible for the major shift in looking
at their discipline as theatre of transition,
speak about the contingencies at work in a performer
and the organic consistency of playing between ‘organization’
(the craft and skill demanded of an actor) and fortuitousness
(the availability to stop moments
in a performance journey). (Appelbaum, 1995).
In relation to my performance—the
craft is the intimate knowledge I have of my body and
its muscular capacity to sustain a 10 minute descent
and linger and yet to be available for the ‘fortuitous’
unexpected moments such as the removal of the glass.
Grotowski explains the voluntary disorientation we allow
as performers, the moving into a dark room to find the
furniture, which results in a dilation of our senses
and sensibility, an alertness that supersedes knowing
one’s lines. It would be useful to know if I, the dancer,
would have toppled over the glass. To know whether or
not I was indeed saved from a serious accident or the
performance disrupted by a spilled glass, water to be
mopped up, or whether the glass would have been gracefully
avoided in my descent. Or would yet another rescuer have
leapt to his or her feet to intervene? However, a far
more important inquiry and recognition is left in the
wake of the removed glass that is the as yet unresolved,
the unknowable, a challenging location for researchers
to dwell as Davis, Sumara, and Kieren (1996) acknowledge,
It is not easy for us to talk about moving forms and dynamic structures;
it seems that it is the nature of our language to freeze,
to fix, to isolate and to present in one word after the
other a thread of some interpretation of the world.
(166)
Although it seems the
ultimate of an ‘unsettling’ to finish a lengthy thought
process with such open-endedness, that is exactly what
I will do here and now. Is it not far more interesting
to be left with the resonating questions as to what would
have happened if the glass had not been removed and to
ponder what did happen as a contingent of this event?
It is precisely this query, these curiosities we carry
into our investigations that call forth in us the thirsty
pioneer who is relentlessly propelled forward towards
the quenching.
References
Appelbaum, D. (1995). The stop. Albany,
NY: State University of New York Press.
Bhabha,
H. K. (1998). Making emptiness. London,
England: Hayward Gallery and the University of Press.
Barba, E. (1995). The
paper canoe: A guide to theatre anthology.
London, UK: Routledge.
Celant, G. (1998). Laurie
Anderson: Fondazione Prada,
Milan, Italy: Nava Web spa. Industria Grafica.
Davis, A.B.& Sumara.
D. and Kieren T. (1996). Cognition, co-emergence, curriculum. Curriculum
Studies, 28 (2), 145–156.
Hein,
P. (1968). Jeg køber elefanten. Copenhagen,Denmark:
Berlingske Tidende.
Heathcote, D. (1984).
Drama in the curriculum: Material for significance. Evansten, Illinois: Northwestern University Press.
Longo,
R. (1986). Men in the cities.
New York: Harry N. Abrams.
Merriam,
E. (1990). Don’t Be Polite. Retrieved
from the Internet, December 2007. http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/poetry/eatpoem.html
Miller,
J. A. (Ed.). (1959–1960). The seminar of Jacques Lacan,
Book VII—The ethics of psychoanalysis. New
York: Norton.
New York Times, Drama Section, November 30, 1947. |
