Best line overheard on the street this week:
'but you were kissing a girl, you were kissing a girl, I saw you kissing a girl'.

*

"I want you to slow it down... Everything slower, much much slower. As slow as it can be. In fact you should hardly move at all."

Seems like I've been endlessly recommending Tom McCarthy's novel Remainder to people that I've bumped into, so now I'm extending that process here. The narrator is a man made super-rich overnight with the compensation pay-out that follows an accident involving "something falling from the sky". He soon puts his fortune to work orchestrating re-enactments - initially of banal scenes from his own past. The reconstructions change shape, scale and ambition but often involve the purchase, alteration and re-decoration of entire buildings, as well as the continuos employment of many actors/re-enactors, and technical people, on call 24 hours a day to (for example) be 'the lady that passes him on the stairwell whilst taking out her trash', or to be in the team shoving reluctant cats out of cages onto a neighbouring roof at particular moments to complete that all important detail in the picture.

There's some Ballard in there (= obsessive slow motion and staring at the texture of concrete) but also an enjoyable reminder of what I liked about Tibor Fischer's The Thought Gang - a kind of boisterous but somehow deadpan approach to narrative, full-on absurdity in no-nonsense prose. Like Fischer's book Remainder is good in the plot department (which Ballard never was/is) and Tom's book is great on people too - the narrators enthusiastic facilitator/assistant Naz is a terrific foil to the protagonist, comical and otherwise.

You're never quite sure what the narrator is chasing in Remainder but whatever he seeks to reconstruct it's not long before his interest moves on. I'm still haunted by the image of him ordering one complex re-enactment in a warehouse, with three teams working shifts around the clock, so that he can visit it any time day or night. He drops by a few times and is pleased with the work but soom gets preoccupied and somehow neglects to stop the warehouse. It's weeks later that the ever-efficient Naz reminds him 'The warehouse.. The warehouse is still running'. Very nice.

Amongst other things I was writing about Meg Stuart's Re-visited and about Johnathan Burrows' Both Sitting Duets, about different people's stories at Barbara Campbell's 1001 Nights Cast and about a visit to Thomas Hirschhorn's installation Stand Alone. I was writing about That Night Follows Day, the performance I made with Victoria involving a cast of seventeen children, and about watching rehearsals for Edit Kaldor's new performance. I was quoting Georges Perec, Gordon Craig and random spam and email fragments, I was linking to a fantastic video of John Cage on a game show in 1950-something and describing a trip to a chaotic Berlin Museum of the Wall. At some point I was even describing my dream of a performance that probably couldn't be staged in real life, for technical reasons.

Frightening was the main word that came to mind watching the run through today, at least when I wasn't laughing. We were pushing the edges when we made First Night back in 2001 and the piece doesn't seem to have mellowed. I had shivers several times, as well as a strange alternation of flashbacks and memory blanks - thinking 'oh yes, I remember' one moment and then 'er, was it always like this?' the next. Three performances in London at Toynbee Hall starting Friday 8 June - details here.

Following the Dream of a Performance posting on Monday, Ant Hampton from Rotozaza mailed pictures of a couple of texts by Gordon Craig.

"Your staircases thing yesterday immediately reminded me of a Gordon  Craig 'vision', and i started looking for the book, but couldn't find  it. Later it turned up at B's place and I went home with that and a whole pile of other books i'd lost... What's really strange is that  it's written more or less in the style of a notebook / blog entry,  and then today I'm reading your 'dream of a performance', an idea   also very in sync Craig's 'stage visions'... I'll stick the whole page in here - you probably have this already. i find the way he  writes quite endearing, if not always that 'clear'.."

Ant's amusing pragmatic solution to sending me the text; to take pictures of the book (you can see his hands there, to the left) doesn't work so well at the size of picture I'm using here, so I've retyped a couple of the nicest passages below. I don't really know Craig's writing but from this stuff it seems like an interesting, anecdotal, slighlty antique take on some good ideas. If you want to read more the book Craig On Theatre is edited by J. Michael Walton and you can find it on Amazon here.

Ant is heading to Minneapolis today to present Rotozaza's table/headphone performance Etiquette. It's at the Guthrie though I'm not sure about exact dates and times... so I guess use Google if you happen to be in the area and want to attend.

"There are two kinds of drama and... they are very sharply divided. These two I would call the drama of speech and the drama of silence  and I think that Maeterlink's streams, fountains and the rest come under the heading of the drama's of silence - that is to say dramas where speech becomes paltry and inadequate... If we pursue this thought further we find that there are many things other than nature which enter into this drama of silence. [For example]... architecture. There is something so human and so poignant to me in a great city at a time of the night when there are no people about and no sounds. It is dreadfully sad until you walk till six o'clock in the morning. Then it is very exciting. And among all the dreams that the architect has laid upon the Earth, I know of no more lovely things than his flights of steps leading up and leading down, and of this feeling about architecture in my art I have often thought how could one give life (not a voice) to these places, using them to a dramatic end.. And so I began with a drama called The Steps. This is the first design, and there are three others. In each design I show the same place but the people who are cradled in it belong to each of its different moods."

*

"Here we see a man battling through a snowstorm, the movements of both snow and man being made actual. Now I wonder whether it would be better if we should have no snowstorm visualised, but only the man, making his symbolical gestures which should suggest to us a man fighting against the elements. In a way I suppose this would be better.

Still I have some doubts; for, following that line of argument in its logical sequence, then, would it not be still more near to art if we had no man, but only the movement of some intangible material which would suggest the movements which the soul of man makes battling against the soul of nature? Perhaps it would be better to have nothing at all."