Process,
Repair and the Obligations of Performance: Goat Island's
When will the September roses bloom? Last night was
only a comedy.
By
Philip Stanier. 2005.
Written for Dance Theatre Journal. Download
this document as a WordFile
or as a PDF.
A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. Franz
Kafka, Letters to Friends Family, and Editors.
Why don't you write an anti-glacier book instead? Kurt Vonnegut,
Slaughterhouse Five.
Process (Passing through).
I first encountered Goat Island's When will the September roses
bloom/Last night was only a comedy at a work in progress showing
in 2003. Split into two blocks, the audience faced itself across a
space divided into small rooms by tape on the ground. The company
wore high starched collars reminiscent of Puritans, and had their
limbs supported by cardboard crutches, standing for long periods with
their legs lifted into the air. I remember company member, Bryan Saner,
falteringly explaining the principles of clockwise and anti-clockwise
with the aid of a giant cardboard wheel. As I watched, I imagined
the performance to be a creaking wooden house, carrying the traces
of everything that had once occupied it, and so worn down by the wind
and full of gaps, that it was a performance that you experienced by
passing through. Goat Island had been making September roses
for a year, and they would work on it for another year before I would
get the opportunity to see it in its completed form in 2004, but by
then I had only partial memories of what I had seen.
This extended process of creation and contemplation, is vital for
Goat Island and any audience engaging with the work. The company gathers,
arranges and transforms material from multiple sources, (in this case
the writings of Paul Celan, Simone Weil, W.G. Sebald, James Taylor
songs, minimalist music, the silent movie star Lillian Gish and her
film 'The Wind') in a process Bryan Saner has described as 'Creative
research and assembly' (Goat Island, Unnumbered pages:2000). Through
this two-year process, the company explore a set of concerns through
engagement with the material to attempt to instigate the creation
of understanding of the performance, within the performance itself.
As company member, Karen Christopher, points out:
We are working something out in front of the audience rather than
simply presenting it. That is part of what makes each performance
somewhat open, complete only in the combination of audience and performance
and different in each head. (Christopher, Unnumbered pages:2004)
I witnessed the result of this process a year later to find that September
roses was now designed to be watched twice over two nights. The
material of the performance was incredibly dense and layered with
sequences of movement and text evolved from the numerous sources,
cohabiting in the moment of performance. The first night of September
roses was a difficult, fragmentary and faltering experience, punctuated
and interrupted by numerous silences, absences and voids. The performance
negotiated the tension between the dense overflowing material and
the silences, by having some voids resist being filled by the audience's
thoughts, while others invited the instigation of memory or the imagination.
As the evening progressed, scenes were declared missing, uncomfortable
silences occurred, blind spots in vision were demonstrated and at
one point an imagined exchange between Paul Celan to Edmund Jabes
was referred to, 'I will not translate you, our silences are too different'.
All of these moments slowed my experience and comprehension of the
performance, and I was compelled to repeatedly contemplate the event
in retrospect.
The academic Sarah Jane Bailes, has said that 'Performance is the
articulation of time through space' (Bailes, Unnumbered pages:2004)
and this is apparent in Goat Islands' process as well as their performances,
slowness is crucial to the company as member Karen Christopher has
stated:
Slowness is part of our process and is a reaction against speed. Collaboration
is a slow process and devising is a slow process for us. On top of
this, we are manipulating the viewers' sense of time by going at other
than usual paces and using improbable time signatures. A quick understanding
of circumstances or ideas often misses depth and complication, so
slowness is also away of allowing complexity into the work. (Christopher,
Unnumbered pages:2004)
On reflection it seems as if the making of September roses
was present in its enactment, but always flickering from visibility
to invisibility. I was also aware of the echoes of previous works
making their presence felt, my memories of earlier Goat Island performances
I had seen, or only read about, being triggered by the event I was
involved with. As such, the experience of the first performance was
one of many contesting durations, amounting to a slow evening, not
so much for its' pace but for my unavoidable negotiation of these
durations. The inclusion of the poet Paul Celan in the piece, as a
source and as an enacted presence, is suitable given his interest
in repairing language. Celan's poetry and Goat Island's performances
both labour to restore language or experience from the remains of
destruction, and via the negotiation of the voids left behind, which
must be either be filled or left as they are. In a statement on poetry,
for which I have substituted the term performance, which I think is
equally applicable to the performances of Goat Island, Celan said
the following:
For a [Performance] is not timeless. Certainly it lays claim to infinity,
it seeks to reach through time - through it, not above and beyond
it… [Performances] in this sense too are underway: they are making
toward something. (Celan, 396:2001)
It would seem that every aspect of the work of Goat Island is slowly
passing through time in this manner, and that the value of this slowness
is to resist a culture of speed and the commodification of time, where
experience is simplified and cheapened. In this way Goat Island shift
the experience of time from something that is simply a means of measuring
experience, to our passing through time as the experience of
being in and of the world itself. An experience in which we are complicit
with the unique vibrations, silences, densities and voids found in
the fully-lived moment of performance.
Repair.
After watching September roses on the first night I had a fitful
nights sleep as my mind tried to process the dense event along with
the rest of my life. I thought about the performance through the following
day, and that night I expected to find the experience much as I had
found it the night before. I was tired and not expecting my second
engagement with the material to be radically different. On the second
night, the piece unfolded and blossomed in front of me, and it was
as if the performance had repaired itself overnight. The experience
flowed and material was approachable, familiar and open. To watch
the performance was now a comfortable and pleasurable experience.
The move from night one to night two was like moving from the resignedly
impossible attempt to repair, on night one, to a hopeful performance
on night two.
This change was the result of switching the order of the two central
sections of the piece, other smaller changes to the content and structure,
and my contemplation of the piece overnight. As a result, moments
such as when Karen Christopher gives an account of Lillian Gish's
burnt hand and Matthew Goulish danced subtle canine movements to the
song 'Don't be afraid of the dark', gained significance on second
viewing as a result of their brevity.
In retrospect it feels as if the two parts of the performance now
framed the intervening night and day, dovetailing together and engulfing
and making a void of them, as if that time had been annexed into its
own separate duration, away from the rest of my life's flow. As if
the performances were a respective inhalation and exhalation leaving
the space of my life in between. Accordingly, I now consider my experience
of September roses, from the work in progress showing in 2003
and through both nights in 2004, as a single event with three manifestations,
a prologue, 1st part and 2nd part. Moreover, the year between the
prologue and the main event, and the night and day between the first
and second part are as vital and as much a part of the performance
as any of the silences and voids that occupy the event it self. In
those extended intervals the audience goes home, but the performance
does not stop, as it is carried and contemplated by the audience until
the opportunity arises to encounter the next part.
The starting point for September roses was to question our
place in a damaged world and our aptitude at repairing it. Not the
accelerated cycle of replacement common within capitalist culture,
or recovery wherein the original state of being is restored and the
fault or loss is forgotten, but rather repair which leaves your awareness
of the fault in place. I recently learned from the BBC television
show Restoration, that it costs more to maintain a building
as a ruin, that to restore it. It seems that contemporary culture
is dominated by both accelerated disposability and an unhealthy fetishization
of ruins. In response to this September roses offers an aesthetic
of lightness and repair, with its cardboard props, the exposed fragility
of the performers bodies, and moments when languages capacity to create
and renew is repaired through the performance of animal sounds. In
repairing itself from night one to night two, the performance encourages
the audience to interact with the piece ecstatically and to engage
in a process of repair themselves.
Right now it feels like all performance is repair. The thoughts, ideas
and emotions that are worked out or rehearsed, provide a thought-scape,
or background for life's everyday questions or problems. They are
the big problems, the philosophical questions, as well as the small
stumbling blocks that we go through life figuring out. The events
that we witness, or perform, or hear about provide the material we
use to understand what our lives are. This understanding leads to
strategies of repair. We are constantly in repair it is the natural
state of our organisms to work at repair. The moment a break in the
skin appears, the body begins to repair it without us even thinking
about it. The eyes repair voids, and patch together blind spots and
empty spaces between bright images. Everything we do is attempting
to make whole what is not. (Christopher, Unnumbered pages:2004)
Obligations and Gifts.
The highest responsibility of the artist is to hide beauty. (John
Cage in Goulish, 82:2000)
The philosopher Simone Weil makes numerous appearances in September
roses. In her 1952 text The Need for Roots she is concerned
with how the neglected notion of human obligations comes before a
consideration of rights, and suggests that the fulfilment of obligations
would be beneficial, as it would address the principle problem of
society, its lack of roots. For me the work of Goat Island, and particularly
September roses engages with human obligations and the obligations
of live performance, by endeavouring to undertake repair, lives up
to its obligation by functioning as a gift:
What imposes obligation in the present received and exchanged, is
the fact that the thing received is not inactive. (Mauss, 15:1954)
Goat Island have spoken of their interest in the impossible, and when
watching September roses I was put in mind of the quotes by Kurt Vonnegut
and Franz Kafka, with which I began this piece. Kafka's search for
a literature that could transform with a wounding blow, matched against
Vonnegut's statement on the futility of art in the face of the seeming
inevitability of conflict. Goat Island's work is for me striving to
achieve what Vonnegut was told was hopeless, without the need for
wounding as suggested by Kafka, the impossible gift of an anti-glacier
performance. I would argue that September roses attempts to
do this by giving time. The time invested in the performance by the
company, is matched by the demands of time and contemplation made
by the piece upon its audience. This demand of consideration, for
the conceptual repair of the performance, is paid back by the discovery
of time and inspiration within the piece. The contemplation of the
September roses leads to an expansion of the experience of
its duration, and a spiralling production of possible meanings. In
this way September roses is active, fulfilling its obligation
to the audience of repair through the audience. As a result, in September
roses, repair is an obligation of performance, for both the company
and the audience. The surplus events and associations that arise from
the performance repairing itself, is inspiration, the very thing that
Weil argues fosters the creation of roots. In this way, inspiration
is instigated and roots are created, through the obligation of repair
and the gift of time that performance undertakes:
What it gives, the gift, is time, but this gift of time is also a
demand of time… There must be time, it must last, there must be waiting
- without forgetting. (Derrida, 41:1991)
Towards the end of the performance, a speech that could open the rehearsal
of a Broadway musical, is repeatedly delivered by Mark Jeffery. Slowly
the speech disintegrates, shedding words, until all that it left is
a call to song and dance and humanity. This is followed by a solo
chorus-line dance by Litó Walky, to a twisted version of the song
'The Great Pretender'. This section, distorted and full of gaps, is
the missing opening of the performance, it is also the happy ending,
that Karen Christopher as Lillian Gish declares they were forced to
end the show with. Here in the final moments of the performance we
find the beauty hidden within the work of Goat Island, and can understand
their obligation to create a performance in which beauty is hidden
even from themselves in process, only to be discovered in an unfolding
moment at the end of the show that leaves behind inspiration:
I think the inspiration comes from watching ideas in motion and the
meanings branching across disparate elements and the bridges and doublings
begin to make suggestions and point to where our attention goes next.
When our ideas begin to pop because of catastrophic shifts caused
by surprising similarities or convergences then we are inspired by
the work and begin to follow paths we never predicted for ourselves.
(Christopher, Unnumbered pages:2004)
The poet Paul Celan had a technique of creating word aggregates, one
of his most famous is breathturn, 'isolating the space between
the inhale and the exhale, the microscopic void that touches death
in each moment of life' (Goulish in Goat Island, Unnumbered pages:2004).
As a concept, breathturn, sits at the centre of the root of
inspiration, which finds its linguistic root from the Latin Spirare:
to breathe. It also finds a place in relation to the two-part structure
of September roses and the performance's vital impulse towards
repair; an impulse that I continue with this piece of writing and
my ongoing engagement with the work of Goat Island. However, I find
that the vitality of September roses, far outweighs its mortality.
The breath of the performance was one of life, survival and the capacity
to repair.
Accordingly, September roses is not a performance that I can
forget, as it is an event that lives and breathes through me. As this
event continues, I labour to connect my experience of the performance
to the experience of my life and the world around me, to reconcile
densities with voids and fulfil the obligations of the performance.
I try to utilise September roses' gifts of time and the unfolding
of inspiration, to seek the potential of performance; that it may,
through repair, discover beauty.
Sources.
Bailes, Sarah Jane (2004) Report on a Process: Being in Waiting,
in Blazevic, Marin and Goulish Matthew eds. Goat Island: When will
the September roses bloom? Last night was only a comedy. Reflections
on the Process, Frakcija Perfoming Arts Magazine No. 32, Part
1, Summer 2004
Celan, Paul (2001) Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan,
Trans. Felstiner, John. London:W.W. Norton
Christopher, Karen (2004) Unpublished Correspondence with Philip
Stanier, Unpublished Source
Derrida, Jacques (1992) Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money, London:University
of Chicago Press
Goat Island (2000) 'Letter to a Young Practitioner', at www.goatislandperformance.org/writing_L2YP.htm
20/1/04
- and Northside Preparatory High School (2004) North True South
Free, Chicago:Goat Island
Goulish, Matthew (2000) 39 Microlectures: In Proximity of Performance,
London:Routledge
Kafka, Franz (1978) Letters to Friends, Family and Editors,
New York:Shocken
Mauss, Marcel (1954) The Gift, London:Routledge
Vonnegut, Kurt (1969) Slaughterhouse Five, London:Vintage
Weil, Simone (1952) The Need for Roots, Trans. Wills, Arthur.
London:Routledge