how do I make a performance

What is needed:
Interaction between two people
Is this performance?
Something very live or permeable
A surprise
Something funny
Can we reenact something?
Can we reveal something?

I need some kind of proof.
Proof of nearness or distance, proof of the effect of it, proof that we are all in the same room, proof that we are related or how are we related.

Maybe something personal. Maybe letters from home.
Where is the horizon? How do I get there?

Latitude is easy to chart by the moon and the stars.
A sailor needs a good clock to establish his longitude.
He needs to know what time it is back home.

What is the purpose of figures and calculations when it and time and property are all relative? Does my presence signal any kind of ownership?
How do I write this down? How do I show you that I am real? That this is me?
What can I tell you you don’t already know?
Is this the smallest tree you have ever seen?
Bonsai.
Wabi sabi.

Need a tree.
Miniature
Need the small car.
Small car travels the cityscape.
Need the feed to the video monitor.
Need my rear view mirror.

Grass.

The grass is greener if I describe it to you.

Objects may be closer than they seem.

I might need to name them. And mis-name them. Or re-name them.

I might need to tell you this is a tree and this is a car and this is a rug and this is a hat and this is a weapon of mass destruction and this is cancer and this is what is behind you.

performance response

I saw a performance recently. A dance performance. It was an improvisation on specific themes, themes that had been researched over a year-long process of preparation for a series of improvisational performances. I was asked to lead one of the post-show discussions. A friend of mine had seen the show the weekend before and wrote an exhaustive report on the experience. This was intended to assist me in my position as discussion leader on the following weekend. What follows is my attempt to return the favor as she was curious how the show had changed.

As I sat watching the performance it occurred to me that I wanted to do a creative response to it. I thought I should get what audience was left at the end of the post-show discussion out of their seats and onto the stage and have them perform for 10 seconds a movement they liked or remembered or to perform for 10 seconds a movement in response to her performance. I thought it would be nice to reflect back what we saw and for Molly to see the audience perform. I knew it would need exactly the right conditions though and so I didn’t go through with it. I felt the conditions weren’t right. The discussion went long and we were being asked to wrap up quickly.

Molly came out before the show and made a kind of introduction. In her introduction, which I think was a bit different than her introduction on the first weekend (source: Molly herself), she said something like:

We are very close here and I can see all of you and you can see me sweating up here. It might make you feel self-conscious if you want to look at your program or shift in your seat. Don’t worry I will not interpret your actions.

This focussed our awareness of the situation. Not only did she come out with her towel and her water but then she started speaking directly to us and then she indicated explicitly our situation in relation to each other. Her specfic words fore fronted our situation whereas we might have taken it for granted.

Later, between sections of her show, she cleaned up a spot of sweat on the floor saying: I’m going to clean up a spot where there’s a lot of sweat. Our closeness, her use of breath and the changing of expression like cloud shadows across her face all contributed to the feeling that she was creating an experience for all of us to have together. This has a different effect than another kind of plan, a plan to tell us something we don’t know, for example, or a plan to dazzle us, or to transport. There was no transportation. And I felt the performance was delivered with humility (this may, in part, be because she felt her first weekend didn’t go so well—or maybe it was explicitly her intention). I mentioned something about this in the post-show discussion referring to the beginning in which she had begun speaking to us very softly. She said her entrance had been different the weekend before, when she had entered with a much grander attitude. This simplicity and humility was something that she aimed for the night I saw the show and I felt glad that I mentioned it and the effect I thought it had on how we saw her show. It caused us to read in a very close and personal way.

At a certain point she was making a move that seemed to link the tip of her toe with the tip of her fingers I thought: She’s a puppet of herself.

She came to some slow sections in which her slowness seemed to indicate she was approaching something or that there was something impending. It felt like a liminal place, a threshold from which she could take off in an unexpected direction. It was creating a possibility of change.

During the discussion one woman said to Molly:

There was a point when you leaned against the wall when everything came together. The wall was not supporting you, you were supporting the wall.

I didn’t have that same feeling but I knew the point she was talking about. What strikes me here is that someone was feeling so connected to the performance that these kinds of notions were spontaneously constructed in the mind.

I thought about a number of things. I thought maybe it’s interesting to look very specifically at what an improvisation is for the audience. One aspect of this experience is connected to the quality of not-yet-happened that live performance has over film. In improvisation it is even more so since the terrain has not been set over and over again in repetitions meant to learn the material by heart. But also it made me think and feel: isn’t everyone a writer, isn’t everyone an actor, isn’t everyone a dancer, isn’t everyone a waitress, isn’t everyone the sheriff, isn’t everyone the garbage collector?

It guess I’m saying I experienced a leveling of the playing field. And instead of the fancy virtuoso performing for the humbled masses we were a group of people who agreed to sit and watch and listen and experience (give our attention to) what one of us created in the room in front of us. And I think performance like this is what I strive for and what I enjoy when I see it. Often in cases where this kind of dynamic is in place, the experience is enjoyable even if the performance is not so good. It is similar to when you see family or friends perform. It is enjoyable and the quality of the performance is a separate issue. We need more and more of what binds people together and makes them feel like friends and family. [During World War II American Secretary of War Harry Stimson, who had been to Kyoto a couple of times and couldn’t bear thought of destroying it and the people and culture there he personally admired, argued to take it off the list of bombing targets. He hadn’t been to Nagasaki. We never really want to bomb our friends.] In every little experience in our immediate environment there is an analog in the big world. If we can do our small work well and set the kind of example we want to see in the larger world, we are doing something toward a better global community.

Um, I think that’s what I had to say about it.

some of the words on last

Last words: Strategies v. Tactics
[from panel on Strategies vs. Tactics through the lens of lastness as it pertains to the last days of the perfomance company Goat Island]

I hear the word strategy and I hear the word tactic and I think.
I think: money and strength and soldiers and marketing and games of war, I think war. I think: politics. Think: life or death. Think: survival. Think.

If not this, then what.

Think: I have a plan and it will result in my happiness.

And then think what we are doing here.

Absence. Avoid absence. My absence and those I need around me. My things. Think what is missing. What have I lost? How can I go on? What has taken my happiness? Why do I feel so alone?

Here in this country we are not, in the theater, on solid ground. In performance even less so. Performance is by its nature ephemeral. It dies the moment it is born and must be born again each time. It does not continue except as it resonates within the people who take it in.

We have no power over death.

This is the end. Everything we have is going to change. All of our instincts and those of our ancestors were to focus on survival. Survival in the primitive sense means finding a sustainable way of life and then protecting it. Change is not desirable. Change requires new plans, new dangers to learn, new obstacles to sustaining life. Get a plan and keep it going. That is our animal goal. But we are more complicated than that and we can change and change brings fresh ideas and new horizons.

How do we change? How do we resist the force of nature, the objective to save our habits, to bend to a plan that is safe?

Change comes to us in two ways: change that we choose and change that we cannot avoid.

Ultimately it is “nothing” that we are afraid of and that “nothing” represents loss and it represents death but we have to move toward difficulty we have to go beyond our fear of death and transform it using the power it has over us.

In response to the decision to end I think I said good, that explains the past few months. I think I said good, that solves my unsolvable problems. I will simply allow them to remain unsolved, that’s how I will solve them. Then I said: It must be my fault. This radical change is coming about because I am intolerable. I have grown a stench about me so strong that the people I work with can no longer continue in my presence. They will break up now and then reconfigure without me. This is easy enough to think about. Then I thought depth charge. There is no way I can survive in this new world. Then I thought I need something to wipe away my tears. I can’t breath. I am lost. The whole of my life is over with this change.

Just as the haiku composer avoids direct revelation of its subject, Goat Island has a silence at the heart of our work which the audience fills with its own material. And just as an afterimage flashes on the white space of a clean piece of paper so do the events of our performances project into the pauses embedded there for their development and imprint.

I remember the empty moments of my youth as if that is where the nurturing of my life took place. What thoughts came together in the moment from which I have an image of a sky ringed by tall grasses with only the sound of the wind as it whispered through them or the moment on the sparkling beach in which I looked up from the sand and my whole world seemed to have healed in the circle grown so small around me that day? A day in which nothing happened.

Simone Weil, the French philosopher, wrote: “To love truth means to accept the void and, as a result, to accept death. Truth is on the side of death.”

In the United States right now there is a kind of irrationality born of fear. People are acting out of it. Fear of death grips us and makes us do things we wouldn’t otherwise do, make choices we wouldn’t otherwise make. In our piece When will the September roses bloom? Last night was only a comedy Goat Island performs silence. Silence reminds us of our ephemerality, of our end, or of the day things stop for us or for everyone. As an audience, 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.

When, in performance, we stop and signify the void we are signifying death and contemplating it and our own imperfections. And we are becoming used to this. If, over time, we become comfortable with it, it becomes less something that provokes fear and more something that provokes contemplation.

each wave, momentary

the roll, the kick
narrow winding
bridge arching
sand outstretched

each wave, momentary
the waves, continuous

It happened again, green
soft, bright, new first time
this air was breathed
the morning caught in its clear fine round
drops of water lined up on the blade of grass.