"First just one came out, then two, then three, four, five, six, seven, but there were more than that in total. We had a dozen machetes, a dozen knives and some axes and pots with us. We gave these to them. Not by hand, but by leaving them on the beach. We said to them, 'Come closer' but they didn't want to. They said to us, 'Go further back, further back,' so we did."
John Vidal in The Guardian on the Earth's 'lost tribes' here.
"The fierce morning heat was a memory. The afternoon haze had come and
gone. It was the cool of dusk, with shadows stretching as the sun
dipped below the Andes. And Hugo Chávez was still talking. The clock
showed it was just after 7pm. The Venezuelan president had started at
11am, more than eight hours earlier - a new record. He looked into the
camera and grinned: 'The first time in history'."
Working ugly and hard in Bergen on the FE show, towards very early work-in-progress next week. Work days are 13 hours, there are no breaks to speak of and food is either dialling pizza or running to Spa to get stuff and coming back straight away. All 'meals' are taken whilst meeting, watching video or otherwise continuing to work. People sleep here and there on the floor or in their chairs as we work, the occasional succumbing to exhaustion more or less an accepted part of the routine. Not a good way to live.
I found a fragment I wrote last year or maybe the year before, describing one part of what goes on as we're trying to make something at this stage:
"...the process, whilst in conversation, or alone, of mentally 'running' imaginary or speculative bits of the show to see if they work. Often this seems to happen in relation to transitions between sequences - trying to figure out if a certain way of getting from one piece of material to another is plausible. So... in the tiny stage of your head you're placing figures and picturing the end of the one scene and thinking 'he does that and she says that' and then thinking 'that happens, and so and so says such and such' and then, moving figures around for the transition 'x says y and then a moves to b and then...'
Always constructing these very specific (if hazy on inspection) 'versions' and all the time, as well as the detail, trying to see if it 'feels right'. What's amazing to me is how knackering a long day of talking is, especially if you're doing a lot of this (which you could call screening of mental rushes) - it reminds me so much of computers faced with the task of rendering complex moving scenes... Your brain is really working. And it puts you in a very weird relation to the world too - because all the time you are somewhere (in a room, in the studio, sat in a café) you're also largely somewhere else. In this unfolding head-space which you're conjuring, making stuff happen with this cast of figures you have to shift and shunt around the stage. Very weird..."
"Callanan’s work explores apparatuses of power. Gathered here are the responses to his mass letter writing. Each letter poses a deceptively simple question or even inane rhetorical statement and the collected responses reveal the absurdity of bureaucracy and the egos of those that claim power.
Collected here are a selection of responses to a series of letters mailed between 2004-06, ranging from the bemused response of the Secretary to the Archbishop of Canterbury to the question “When will it end?” to appreciative letters from the offices of President Mubarak of Egypt in response to the declaration “I respect your authority”.
Callanan has some very nice projects documented on his site greyisgood. One of the letter-writing ones - called Confirmation That You Still Exist - is also documented in full there. For it "Letters were written to UK leaders, appointed leaders, and representatives. Confirmation was sought of their existence. This was done under the 'Freedom of Information Act 2000'."
The desperate dryness and bureaucracy of the responses from Buckingham Palace through the Houses of Parliament contain a kind of residual melancholy, with the entities compelled by law to respond to a request that is effectively meaningless. I think what's beautiful about his work is the utter blankness of the statements or questions he employs - there's a kind of monosyllabic theatre to them, which seems far from the extended or baroque forms of letter-writing, video and telephone pranksterism we're more or less drowning in these days.
"I confirm.." writes one weary official in response to Callanan "...on behalf of the Department of Health, that Patricia Hewitt, Secretary of State for Health, still exists."
My friend Misri wrote making some connections to the Julie Tolentino writing I did a while ago about her performance A True Story About Two People, here. She's writing about it in terms of contact improvisation, which really wouldn't have occurred to me, since its way off my territory. But reading this now I can see how much sense it makes as a refference point to the piece.
"It reminded me a lot of the questions and challenges that arise when I am doing/teaching Contact Improvisation... a form I have practiced for the last twenty years or so and which I've taught the last few years. Your conversation reminded me of how skin or muscle or sweat touch triggers associations of momentary and short lived intimacy, how in a jam you can have a long changing involved physical dance exchange with a stranger and they are not strange anymore and you never see them again. And how leaving a dance is always a moment - significant. Although it does happen a lot, so you get used to quick byes, slow byes, sort of good byes only to say hello again in a later dance. And it can be momentarily painful, a relief, a loss, a good ending, a quick exit. And the hellos, the moment of making contact and then following the point of contact as a duet can also be tentative - a getting to know, a slow and often importantly clumsy exploration of what moving is possible. Fast beginnings can be good too, but is more rare - often fast beginnings are a cover up for allowing the new awkwardness of the meeting and the strange sensation to filter in. A bit like what you said about talking to Julie as you danced to start with - which can mask sensation/just being there. Yeah - good old words. Nancy Stark Smith, one of the founders of CI spoke to me in an interview of how in her teaching of the form - 'the first move is into sensation' . I like the confusion that is triggered, although it can be hard as well."
Officially I am here to speak about dramaturgy and will do so in a voice that lends itself to such a task, here, sat at the desk, perhaps with some quotations and examples, making statements or constructing theories. Unofficially though I might well slip or break the ranks I establish...
As if all discourse were a matter of surfaces. A surface being a code, an agreement, a formal instruction expressing expectations about what will be said or otherwise expressed here and how. And as if our dramaturgy might be the controlled and deliberate setting up and then cracking of these surfaces, the slow and/or rapid breaking of these agreements, the dynamic play between what is legally, officially said here, and that which is not meant to be said, that which is denied in the situation, that which is too much or too little for the context, that which is illegal, literally ‘obscene’,
As if now, having said this much of my lecture I might say without further warning, that at the airport this morning I was suddenly and unaccountably extremely tired of all this travel and that I would have paid good money then and there for the flight to be cancelled which would have provided an excuse that I could not be here now to speak about dramaturgy. Or as if I might say now that I scrolled thru the texts in my phone as I sat there at the airport, looking for something and that by accident I read what X wrote me as she sat in a café on such and such a street in such and such a city and that I was suddenly thinking of her…
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