1. Voids.

In some of your writings you have indicated a desire to make work that overflows its frame. Yet this performance (which for me did overflow as a result of its density) is punctuated and interrupted by numerous silences, absences and voids. Some resisted being filled by the audience, others invited it. It also seemed to me that the performance enfolded, and made a void of my time between the two performances. Did you have to negotiate this tension between overflowing and void, and if yes, how did you do it?

Karen:

Fear of death grips us and makes us do things we wouldn't otherwise do. Silence reminds us of our ephemerality, of our end, or of the day things stop for us or for everyone. Silence allows us time to think: about ourselves, our seat, the people opposite, or the fleeting thoughts and associations we are having in relation to the performance we are watching. Some people experience a kind of falling into the void of silence, others find a space opening up and filling with thoughts. For some it is terrifying to be left with our own devices, our own thoughts. Waiting for something to happen brings on existential crisis. This is why the doctor's waiting room has magazines. So when we stop and signify the void I think we are signifying death and contemplating it and our own imperfections. And we are becoming used to this. If we become used to it, it becomes less something that provokes fear and more something that provokes contemplation.

I also think the overflow, of which we have many, requires a void nearby to which it may flow and in which it may combine with other available information. I think negotiating the tension between the overflow and the void is something that happens by trial and error. Over a long time of watching and mulling over the material and living with it and dreaming it and reading for and writing about it, patterns and flows become apparent. It takes time and attention. It takes practice. It is also a matter of delicacy so patience and getting it wrong a lot are part of the plot as well.

2. Slow.

In relation to the question on voids, the experience of the performance for me was one of many contesting durations, amounting to a slow evening, not so much for its speed but for my painstaking negotiation of these durations. Do you feel that your work is slow in this way? Do you have to work at being slow? What for you is the value of slowness?

Karen:

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. Slowness allows for the time to be here and now, where the moment and the experience of the moment can occur almost simultaneously.

3. Solutions.

Your work has always seemed prescient in its relation to the mood and problems of the moment they are performed. Of the works of yours that I have seen, instead of simply reflecting that mood you seem to be offering a solution or a way out of that mood for yourselves and the audience through the activity of the performance. Is this a deliberate strategy of your work?

Karen:

I don't entirely know what you mean by mood. I would agree that we are working something out in front of the audience rather than simply presenting it. That's part of what makes each performance somewhat open, complete only in the combination of audience and performance and different in each head.

4. Repair.

Kafka, speaking of which books we should read, said 'A book must be the axe to the frozen sea inside of us'. Your starting point with this piece was to question our place in a damaged world and our aptitude at repairing it. I want to ask how and what can performance repair? What is the value of repairing against replacement and recovery (both in terms of from sickness and of things lost)? Is a concept of repair endemic to performance?

Karen:

Right now it feels like all performance is repair. The thoughts and 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.

5. Spirals.

As with the voids and durations in the performance there is a tension established by the recurring concept of the spiral in the piece that has the capacity to draw in, or throw out depending upon your relative position to it. However the spiral emerges from the Fibonacci sequence, an elegant mathematical formula which itself produces the golden mean, the aesthetically satisfying proportional structure. I wanted to know how spirals informed the process of making the piece and why they appear to be so prevalent?

Karen:

clockwise and counterclockwise
the doing and the undoing
most things can be reversed-torture cannot
most damage can be repaired some cannot
to twist
spiral seems to figure this in space

6. Aggregates.

A further presence within the piece and its process is the poet and poetry of Paul Celan, whom you focus on because of his interest in repairing language. The similarity between your work for me is clear as both attempt to restore either language or experience after destruction from the remains. Celan said that a poem is making its way towards something, I see his practice of creating word aggregates also in this light, as heading towards something. What is it you find of value in this process?

Karen:

Aggregates represent the simultaneity of experience. There are word aggregates but there are also image aggregates and one personage upon another and another until the overlays are playing with the possibility of presenting one person or idea layered over another to see them interleaved or as one chain of thought or as something which we carry through as we learn about them and they become part of us.

7. Inspiration.

Finally: for me 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 that had repaired itself on night two. You quote Cixous in one of your articles as saying 'our mistakes are leaps in the night' and Weil argues that the inspiration is the primary means of growing roots. I wanted to ask whether you could try to articulate for me where inspiration might take place within your work, and what its value is for you?

Karen:

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. Lillian Gish said she already had 7 unhappy endings and we do too and so the coincidence puts us in the mind to use that text for the end changing it to fit our needs but keeping the part that sparked our attention. Little pleasures lead us on and the ones that begin to speak to each other stay and form the web of the piece.

Footnotes to Questions:

1: Derrida died this weekend. I have a book of his called 'The Work of Mourning', a collection of his eulogies for his friends, many of whom were philosophers. What does it mean to read a book of eulogies by a man whose obituary you read the night before, to both overflow in the experience of his love and respect for his friends, while tracing the outline of the void created by the loss of this entire network of people?

2: In February I was given three giant African land-snails, by my brother, they appear to move and eat very slowly. Recently they bred and then swiftly laid eggs, which hatched almost immediately producing sixty-one additional miniature but otherwise independent Giant African land-snails. The snails would also seem to be silent, but I have come to realise that while they are quiet they are far from silent. In the night, I can hear if they are active and what they are doing. I would have know that the eggs had been laid, if I had been able to recognise the faint but distinct sound I heard coming from their home that night. Contrary to popular belief I would argue that snails are very quick and very noisy.

3: My favourite Kurt Vonnegut quote is from Slaughterhouse Five, he was asked what kind of novel he was writing, he replied 'an anti-war novel', the reply came back 'Why don't you write an anti-glacier novel instead?'. I think it would be an excellent task to attempt to create an anti-glacier performance.

4: When I was a child I would get the Flu once a year in March. Each time after about five days of sickness, I would have the same lengthy nightmare, after which I would immediately feel better. For several years this pattern, and the dream were identical until I stopped getting sick. I began to look forward to this horrific nightmare, and I named it my recovery dream.

5: Last year a Chinese student of mine had given me a comic book called The Spiral Curse, she had translated the dialogue in the text sporadically by sticking thin slivers of text onto the pages. The story concerned a town and it population who were the victim of a spiral curse. In the book peoples eyes became spirals, there were spiral tornados, people became snails with spiral shells, people were killed in automotive accidents and their bodies left in spiral shapes, eventually the entire town rebuilt itself into the shape of a spiral. The end of the story was unclear as the translations included in the text became fewer and fewer as it proceeded.

6: In relation to Paul Celan's word aggregates, one of my favourite words is Eucatastrophe, apparently coined by JRR Tolkien, it means the sudden and unexpectedly happy ending of a drama.

7: At a recent discussion of performance, someone said that what made performance valuable was the possibility that something might go wrong. I began to wonder, what if the value of a live action were instead conceived of the possibility that something (beyond any intention) might go right.