I went to Vienna to do a lecture in TQW's great Precise Woodstock of Thinking series - 50 lectures over ten days by a collection of usual and not-usual suspects on the topic of The Future of Dance and Performance. Writing the lecture was a bit of a torture, and led to at least a couple of days of my recent time in New York being consumed in curses. I found an angle I could work in the end though (the process of finding perhaps relates a bit to what I wrote here about performing Quizoola!) and I was more than happy with the result. My general line was to doubt the past, to suspect the imagined capacity and mock the vanity of our hold on the future and to focus instead, on the present, presentness, now. This from the lecture, not the end, but heading in that general direction.
Language. I love words in a room, in the space between persons. This room, the one we are in now. Words that bring us closer, you and I, you and they, and those which force us all apart. Language for performance is that maybe – not so much a matter of writing, as one of speaking. Speaking is always bodied, provisional, temporal. Always performance. Now.
She speaks. And could stop speaking. Could be made to stop speaking. Could fail in speaking. That perhaps is a glimpse at the vulnerable the heart of performance. That it could stop. No book is going to stop. Movies rarely do these days. Few sculptures stop. And yes, the internet jams, the computer freezes but that’s another matter I think. But performance – performance can always just drop dead there right in front of your eyes, clam up, fall over, dissolve and that fact is written all though it, all over it, no matter how much denied. Now I am talking about frailty not language. But perhaps those two are more connected than I thought.
Words I wanted to write about. The failure of them – the struggle of them, the always present attempt to arrange them, to line them up, here now, in the here and now, in such a way that they make something happen, the fight or flight in the mouth and the brain to make sense with/of them, words. The constant stumbles in language, the digressions, the sudden energies of excitement – the sudden clarification of a purpose, the finding of an idea – and the subsequent lostness, vagueness, the fracture of hesitation, faltering, the hysteria as you or I and these words lose their way.
Words I wanted to write you about. How they summon things into the room, imagined presences, scenes, images. The complicity of those moments in which we hear something and make it happen in our minds eye. The way that words work make and surf the now, pulling us closer, forcing us apart, unfolding. No past and no future, each new word in the sentence always the same word in fact, always now, now, now.
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Also in the Vienna Woodstock my friend Christine Peters made a lecture, in which she quoted a letter from Buckminster Fuller included in his book Critical Path, (1981) . Fuller wrote the letter to a ten year old boy, who'd written to him asking about "thinking and doing". The letter goes like this:
Dear Michael,
Thank you very much for your recent letter concerning "thinkers and doers."
The things to do are: the things that need doing: that you see need to be done, and that no one else seems to see need to be done. Then you will conceive your own way of doing that which needs to be done -- that no one else has told you to do or how to do it. This will bring out the real you that often gets buried inside a character that has acquired a superficial array of behaviors induced or imposed by others on the individual.
Try making experiments of anything you conceive and are intensely interested in. Don't be disappointed if something doesn't work. That is what you want to know -- the truth about everything -- and then the truth about combinations of things. Some combinations have such logic and integrity that they can work coherently despite non-working elements embraced by their system.
Whenever you come to a word with which you are not familiar, find it in the dictionary and write a sentence which uses that new word. Words are tools -- and once you have learned how to use a tool you will never forget it. Just looking for the meaning of the word is not enough. If your vocabulary is comprehensive, you can comprehend both fine and large patterns of experience.
You have what is most important in life -- initiative. Because of it, you wrote to me. I am answering to the best of my capability. You will find the world responding to your earnest initiative.
In the brief cross town car ride M. mentioned she was going to China soon. Did she speak Chinese? Yes she said. She'd lived there five years. How come? Oh she'd passed through Shangahi when travelling, age 19, and somehow got stuck there, waitressing, trying to save money for a ticket home. Five years. We turned a corner, the traffic got complicated. J. said it reminded him of a song. About a piano player. Also trying to get home. Could not remember who by. We thought Tom Waits. M. agreed, still focused on the driving. We never found out more about Shanghai or what had happened there.
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Over coffee next day R. said he'd grown up in Houston, a NASA kid. His dad was a NASA engineer. Doing what exactly? Turned out his dad ran one of the teams charged with bringing the crippled Apollo 13 back to Earth. Calculating orbits to swing the ship around the moon. 1000's of calculations all done by hand since no computers big or fast enough back then. His dad got a Presidential Medal. J was two years old. 1973. I knew the year already cos as a kid I'd watched the whole thing from England in back and white. Those static voices don't go away. Those pensive men in shirts and ties at desks, staring at screens. It was a weird loop of time - or more some strange shift of proxemical relation to those event - to be sat there in diner with R, eating pancakes, discussing the part his dad played in all that.
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Walking from the apartment each morning V. and I are conisseurs of the day. Stepping out of the air con for the first time we are like "nice" or "yeah not bad" - savoring the air - or "really hideous" or "too close" or "not so bad as yesterday" - offering up our opinions all the way along the street, like trigger happy wine tasters, experts of the summer or something, until at the end, past the garage and the empty lot haven of rats, of it we've reached a kind of consensus.
Last week I was with Jim Fletcher and Kent Beeson in Portland for performances at PICA's wonderful TBA festival curated (for the last time) by Mark Russell. Jim performed the monologue Sight Is The Sense... and Kent joined us for a run at the 6 hour Forced Entertainment improvised questions and answers performace Quizoola! Here's something I was writing yesterday, about one particular part of the latter.
In response to the question 'Which objects have appeared in your dreams?' Jim starts with naming a few things, going slowly from gun, houses, cars and rivers, to stairwells, doors, seas. At first I think I am going to cut him off, but I'm tired and so far as I can tell I miss the moment for that. Half a minute later I change tactics, look down to make a joke that I am going to go through the papers looking for more questions as he continues - as if his answer of no interest. Standard tactics. Do that for a while, as he's still working away on his list. Bit later I look back up from the papers, and watch him - Jim's eyes focused in middle distance as he continues to talk. I'm smiling a bit as I am watching him I think, enjoying the care and attention and self-absorption he has as he does that, despite the earlier display I made of mock indifference or impatience. There are many moments in the performance of Quizoola! where you try one thing, and then a few seconds or a minute or two later you try something else, a mild kind of 'cycling the possible responses', scratching the surface of things, looking for something you can use or work with more substantially. You're naked in this process - I guess everyone can see that you're hesitant, unsure. It's OK. Nothing comes in any case. I watch him, he keeps listing - more objects that have appeared in his dreams. Paper, books, glasses, a mirror, roads, a suitcase. I look out at the people watching. I look out. People seem happy enough listening. It's a kind of break from the back and forth of the Q&A, doesn't need the same energy. The room seems very still. I keep thinking that I'm going to stop him. But, looking down at the papers again now I don't know when to do so, or how and I'm aware that a kind of hole has appeared in the performance. A landmark feature of a negative kind, a black hole. Knives, trees, boats, dogs, bags, tables. He keeps listing. As he goes I'm half listening, but I guess I'm also more or less focused on thinking of ways out of this situation, my mind erratically scratching around in the dust and dirt of the moment, looking for 'a good idea', a question to ask - a way out. It's possible to think of diving in with a question that would scold him for taking so much time and space with this - Do you think people want to know all this stuff? Are you afraid of being boring? - but nothing of that sort seems quite right and I let it pass. Mostly I'm full of inertia, faintly sad in a way, as he's listing all those banal objects and we're all sat there listening. Now - with a distance of some days and some thousands of miles - I'm not even quite sure how I stopped him in the end. It wasn't a put down for sure.. I used that later, a few questions further in, rounding on him for taking so much time with his dreams. But at the end of the listing thing itself I just don't remember how I stopped Jim and moved on to another question. Strange process of the Quizoola! performance - that you are so focused on the momentary interaction you are trying to make, but so endlessly, so serially, that they start to blur and erase each other. Every moment is a decision or a change moment, part of a flow maybe, something you can intuit for sure, but nonetheless each and every moment is a crossroads, a chance you have to take or not take. - Afterwards, overhelmed by the sheer accumulation of these decisions, so much of what you have done is lost to you, work buried in it's own dust, ceilings collapsing but you don't know who's in there. Later, in the bar you can't even remember what you did, what you said, what led from one thing to another. It's gone.
More great quotes on the dead over in the comments at Mike Harrison's Ambiente Hotel blog.
First Chiles Samaniego guessing which quote Mike was thinking about back here:
[...] the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead, that only occasionally, in certain lights and atmospheric conditions, do we appear in their field of vision.
And then Mike himself following up my comment with this one:
“…Evan told tales of the dead… who knew they had been cheated of what was due to them and tried to return to life. If you had an eye for them they were to be seen quite often, said Evan. At first glance they seemed to be normal people, but when you looked more closely their faces would blur or flicker slightly at the edges. And they were usually a little shorter than they had been in life…” [p74/5, Mike's ellipses.]
The reverse perspective in the first is so beautiful. And in the second it's the banality that's great. That the dead are "usually alittle shorter than they had been in life" is laugh out loud funny I think. Reminded me of an old line I wrote but (so far as I recall) never yet used - that radio broadcasts from beyond the grave had been picked up, but that it was mostly nothing remarkable, mainly gardening programmes.
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Weird (and extremely scary) kind-of empty stage at the Republican Convention during a video tribute to Cindy McCain here.
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