*

I am walking thru fog with S, taking him to school. It’s early morning, the sky is still pretty dark in fact and the fog is very thick – an expanse of dense whiteness. From nowhere a guy appears on the pavement ahead of us. A slouching bloke in his work-clothes, looking old and tired already – one hand grips the handle of a large open can of white emulsion paint, the other clutches a paltry still-wet paint brush. Like he has been out there all night, just mixing and painting the fog that we are walking through, just finished his job and now heading home while we start the day.

*

Chat:

^{T. 16.26:}

y. i dunno. looks like it might be kind of chic but empty clever to me

^{V. 16:26:}

the reviews are saying dark and gloomy and pessimistic

^{T. 16:27:}

oh well. guess that cld be a good combo.

This is the piece I mentioned before; the programme note I wrote to introduce Jerome Bel‘s forthcoming presentations at Sadler’s Wells in London.

*

Nothing flows but everything follows.

Towards the beginning of Jerome Bel’s the show must go on (2001) as well as during some intense moments in his later work Veronique Doisneau (2004), we are invited to stare at the bare stage – at the expanse of black dance floor, so many metres by so many metres — which so often plays the unremarkable part of an invisible nothingness in contemporary theatre and dance. We have time to look, look and look again. Nothing happens. Time does its thing. We look some more. Even what’s commonly taken for nothing, Bel seems to remind us, is very often something.

Or start like this. Since I first saw Jerome Bel’s work more than ten years ago it has had a special place in my heart and in any map I might make of contemporary performance. Each of his projects, though they differ enormously, creates a rigorous, puzzling and engaging experience at a very particular intersection of dance, theatre and contemporary art. Often exploring the structures of presence, language and representation, each work celebrates the combination of the entirely obvious and the absolutely extraordinary – sculpting a piece of time through which boredom and banality knot and unravel, only to dissipate around a flickering core of amazement.

Or start like this. In one part of his book Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, the French writer Georges Perec gives instructions on how to look at a city or a street.

“Note down what you can see.” he writes, “Anything worthy of note going on. Do you know how to see what’s worthy of note? Is there anything that strikes you? Nothing strikes you. You don’t know how to see.

You must set about it more slowly, more stupidly. Force yourself to write down what is of no interest, what is most obvious, most common, most colourless…. Don’t say, don’t write ‘etc’. Make an effort to exhaust the subject, even if it seems grotesque or pointless, or stupid. You still haven’t looked at anything, you’re merely picked out what you long ago picked out. Force yourself to see more flatly…”

The ambition here – that of seeing flatly, of seeing more slowly, or more stupidly – is supremely present in Jerome Bel’s significant body of work created since 1994. Each of his performances – which combine their formal obsessiveness with wry and dry humour – are governed for the most part by the observance of a simple rule, task or idea. There is, to use simple terms, the show with the ten household objects, the show with the pop songs and the dances that literalise their lyrics, the show with the four naked performers, the show where he interviews another dancer, the show where all four performers are pretending to be someone else, and so on. Through the dramaturgical exploitation of the simple limits he sets up, Bel pushes us to look again and again at the things which we have forgotten how to see. Of course it’s not the scene of a Paris street that he directs us to, but rather stuff that’s just in front of our noses – the stage itself, the combination of human bodies on it and those arranged looking at it, the properties of clothing or domestic objects, pop music and classical music, language and its relation to the world, theatre and dance themselves; their expectations, logic and construction. And time perhaps; we get to see time.

Time is key in Bel’s stage-economy, as is an eye for systems. Everything takes its time.

Nothing flows, but everything follows. We go piece by piece. Methodically. Each new image, utterance, action or sequence either arises or breaks playfully from the pattern established before. The stage is a little empire of signs. We watch them shifted, shunted, rearranged. Additions and subtractions, escalations and reversals. Questions leading to answers, to more questions, more answers. Big pleasures in small things. Small things grown large by their context. The delights of transformation. The absurdities of repetition. Machinery and human behaviour. There’s always something calm and human scale about the proceedings in any case; a softness and a humour which cut through, or cut against (or inhabit or inhibit) the systematic.

Above all perhaps, we get to understand something we know but are prone to forgetting; that one thing is different to another. We become re-attuned to detail. We see for example, that the red that smudged lipstick leaves on human skin is not the same red produced when skin is slapped.  Or we notice something simple, with a shock that seems almost stupid; that a man lain on the floor beneath a blanket is not the same thing as a man lain on the floor without one. Or we see again, only vividly, as something simple and present, that what reads in one culture (say white European) is not at all the same as what reads elsewhere (say Thailand, in traditional Thai dance). We’re made to spend time with these facts, made to look at them better, flatter, more stupidly. There is no delirium; there’s little that might pass for abandon. Indeed, no matter which of Bel’s performances you look at, after each unfolding action, image, dialogue or exchange, there always comes a breath, a silence. This punctuation – a second or two of stillness, a measure of unfilled time – is an imperative beat which nods both to the comedian’s double-take and wait for laughter, and the philosopher’s pause for reflection. Silence. And waiting. These are points to which we always return while witnessing Bel’s pieces. Silence in which the possible multiplies. Silence in which the distribution of the sensible is remade. Silence in which we are left thinking, aware of the space which we are left to fill.

The lovely Vlatka has three shows coming up in New York which seems unreasonable to me. Two of them even have openings on the same night, tonight. She has work in Cut Away at Anna Kustera Gallery, 520 West 21st Street which runs to Feb 16, 2008. She’s also one of three people in the new show at White Columns, 320 West 13th Street (Enter on Horatio Street, between Hudson and 8th Avenue) which runs from Jan 10 – Feb 16, 2008. White Columns has the beautiful collages I previewed a while back, as well as her To Nothing charts, and a lovely piece to take-away. Vlatka’s also in the same show as me – Skipping the Page – at The Center for Book Arts, 28 West 27th Street, 3rd floor which runs from Jan 18 – March 29, 2008.

While I’m on the dates thing. The current season at Sadler’s Wells in London is pretty amazing. In the next couple of months they’re showing four evening’s (11, 18, 25 and 26 of Jan) comprising the whole trilogy of minimal and really inspiring duets by Jonathan Burrows and Matteo Fargion – Both Sitting Duet, The Quiet Dance and Speaking Dance – pieces I wrote about a good while back. Sadler’s Wells is also presenting almost the entire back catalogue of the French conceptual choreographer Jerome Bel from Nom donné par l’auteur (1994) to Pichet Klunchun and myself (2005). Again it’s extraordinary, important work, and so great to see it brought together and celebrated here. Finally they have Pina Bausch in the programme presenting a double bill of Café Müller (1978) alongside Le Sacre du Printemps/The Rite of Spring (1975). Can’t do the whole lot (too far, no time) but very much looking forward to making the trip to catch some of this stuff.

They asked me to write something, a kind of short intro to the Jerome Bel pieces. Scratching the surface really but I’ll be posting the whole of it tomorrow.

Meanwhile I had a lot of fun writing for Barbara Campbell’s 1001 Nights Cast again yesterday. On a whim (inspired by the first line that came into my head after seeing the prompt) I took a break from the kind of comical-brutalist second-generation Endland stories I’ve typically been doing there. I really want to do more of those.. and I’m harboring plans to do something rather longer set in that world (I use the word advisedly and with a whole lot of quote marks as I picture Mike Harrison reading.) In the meantime you can find the rather more breezy and ironic $2900-dollars-a-night over at 1001. The fucked-upness is coming from a different place in this one.

Reading and really enjoying The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, some kind of bleak and funny post-modern diaspora saga by Junot Diaz. The frame of reference (linguistic and cultural) is beautiful in its mixture; the contemporary characters caught between their (nightmarish, semi-mythical) Dominican Republic cultural heritage on the one hand and the alien wasteland of 80s New Jersey on the other. Here and there in the Spanglish (I sometimes understand by inference, or not at all) you find characters sketched by comical nods to Dune, Tolkien, Marvel Comics or even A. E. Van Vogt (whose book Slan I guess I havent seen much mention of since reading it as a teenager). The vibe is nerdy meets smart crossed with shit-talking at a party; conversational but quite happy to dip into detail on some aspect of Carribean culture and history.

In fact it’s especially the direct/bad tempered and from time-to-time abusive-staccato of the footnotes on the Dominican Republic that are super enjoyable. “You don’t know that we were occupied twice in the Twentieth Century…”, the narrator taunts explaining something at one point, only to console in the same sentence, “…don’t worry, when you have kids they wont know the U.S. occupied Iraq either“.  In related spirit a general level of flashy badmouthing is meeted out to latter-day Dominican public/political figures – Tujillo is “a portly, pig-eyed sadistic mulato who bleached his own skin… our Sauron, our Arawan, our Darkseid…”, whilst Balaguer started out as “one of El Jefe [Tujillo’s] more efficient ringwraiths” but in the period of his own rule is “…a Negrophobe, an apologist for genocide, an election thief and a killer of people that wrote better than himself…”

Diaz’ own contemporary characters –  a fat nerdy kid Oscar and his punk sister Lola  – born to a powerhouse of negativity/Dominican-immigrant single-mother Beli, don’t always fare much better, perpetually shadowed by intimations of Fuki (a curse) and often described with perversely enjoyable skepticism and disdain. Oscar has a rough adolescence; “scrambling his face into nothing you could call cute, splotching his skin with zits.. too dorky, too shy, and (if the kids from the neighborhood are to be believed) too weird.” Another character (suitor to Beli) is framed like this; “there is something about the binding, selling and degradation of women that brought out the best in the Gangster”.  Diaz can be a great enthuser too though – brash and funny – Beli, for example, gains a cleavage that is something “so beserk that only a pornographer or a comic-book artist could have designed it with a clear conscience”.

Though it’s from a very different universe both the mix of voices and the negativity thing set me thinking about my own tactics in Endland Stories and elsewhere (Lisa, protagonist in the first story of that book for example, is “an unlucky misery guts with a hidden gift for brilliant ideas”). There’s something so charged about the act of creating figures who at the same time you dismiss, threaten or paint-as-doomed. It’s a method that perhaps strikes at and immediately doubles the process of making-through-writing. It’s tense too, at least in Diaz’ book. I’m worried about Oscar, even though I guess the title has pretty well given it away.

What’s interesting for me also is reading a book like this that really does ‘generations and family history’ – small characters in a time of big change – it’s a genre that I more or less never go near (except maybe via Marquez). Seeing it done so well though – very now, no reverence,  a lot of play, and a kind of light-touch cool self-consciousness alongside really sharp politics and vivid characters – has made me think about it all over again. Diaz’ shift of voices for different sections of the book – jumping and tracking back through family generations, and between figures in the story – reminds me a little bit of David Mitchell too. All good. I didn’t finish this one yet but I already Amazoned his earlier short story collection called Drown.

P.T. Anderson interviewed about his new movie There Will Be Blood.
A beautiful quote about editing:

You learn that omitting things is the same as writing things.

*

A while back I wrote a definition of choreography for Corpus and now the complete issue, with definitions from 52 of the usual and not so usual suspects, is up online. Some great contributions there – lots to explore in English and German. For brevity there’s Jonathan Burrows;  Choreography is about making a choice, including the choice to make no choice.  For more extended playfulness try this (below) from Superamas. The Corpus site won’t let me link to individual entries so I’m quoting in full here, with apologies, since otherwise finding this is hard.

Superamas:

I was reading a novel of Dashiell Hammett, “The Gutting of Couffignal”.

(…)
“Stop!” I ordered.
“I shan’t,” she said, but she did, for the time at least. “I’m going out.”
“You’re going out when I take you.”
I thought: Choreography is the art of giving orders.

She laughed, a pleasant laugh, low and confident.
“I’m going out before that,” she insisted good-naturedly. I shook my head.
“How do you propose stopping me?” she asked.
“I don’t think I’ll have to,” I told her. “You’ve too much sense to try to run while I’m holding a gun on you.”
Choreography is the art of being obeyed: no drama, no psychological matters, only shapes and moves. Like for a military parade, you decide and off they go.

She laughed again, an amused ripple.
“I’ve got too much sense to stay,” she corrected me. “Your crutch is broken and you’re lame. You can’t catch me by running after me then. You pretend you’ll shoot me, but I don’t believe you. You’d shoot me if I attacked you, of course, but I shan’t do that. I shall simply walk out, and you know you won’t shoot me for that. You’ll wish you could, but you won’t. You’ll see.”
Her face turned over her shoulder, her dark eyes twinkling at me, she took a step toward the door.
“Better not count on that!” I threatened.
The point is: how to grasp the reality which always escapes from our will and our understanding. Why this rather than that? Is choreography a means to be more objective? There is always a part of the “indeterminable”, of the “not discernible” in things.

For answer to that she gave me a cooing laugh. And took another step.
“Stop, you idiot!” I bawled at her.
Her face laughed over her shoulder at me. She walked without haste to the door, her short skirt of gray flannel shaping itself to the calf of each gray wool-stockinged leg as its mate stepped foward.
Choreography is a projection. It is based on the gaze of the spectator.
It’s the onlooker who decides if what he sees is not only what he sees but also a piece of art with choreographic qualities.

Sweat greased the gun in my hand.
When her right foot was on the doorsill, a little chuckling sound came from her throat.
“Adieu!” she said softly.
And I put a bullet in the calf of her left leg.
Here we are! One can easily take a part of reality and reframe it, and doing so in a specific context, can create a choreography.
She sat down – plump! Utter suprise stretched her white face. It was too soon for pain.
I had never shot a woman before. I felt queer about it.
“You ought to have known I’d do it!” My voice sounded harsh and savage and like a stranger’s in my ears.
“Didn’t I steal a crutch from a cripple?”
So does Superamas: Choreography is a dirty business.

Working on a whole lot of this:

Water is the same thing as ice. In America things are bigger. America is a country. Some men have sex appeal. Blind people cannot see anything. Burglars are men that go into houses and take things which do not belong to them. Mist is like smoke but it comes without  fire. The telephone is an amazing invention. A mouse that is dead is sometimes called a specimen. Love is difficult to describe. Fire is what happens when things get too hot. A waterfall is an example of nature at its most beautiful. Marilyn Monroe was a movie star. Frank Sinatra was a singer. French is a language. A language is a set of words and phrases or signs that you can put together to create different meanings. People have names, sometimes they have the same name but two people with the same name are not the same person. The same person can only have one body. Two people cannot live in the same body. Sometimes more than two people share  a house. Tadpoles are the children of frogs. One deception leads to another. An escalator is a staircase that moves all on its own. An elevator is also known as a lift. A refrigerator is more commonly called a fridge. Masturbating is not bad for you. Hills are made of land that slopes upwards. A dress is a piece of clothing commonly worn by women. Eyes are organs designed for seeing. A table has four legs. A window is an opening in a room built by people so that they can look out of it. A hostage is a prisoner used to bargain with. A bargain is a deal or an arrangement where one person has one thing and the other wants it and the first person has something that the other one wants and they made an exchange so that each party is more happy. Silence is golden which means it is valuable or important. A fart is gas that escapes from a body. Torture is a way of hurting people, mostly so that they will tell you things you need to know. Some bridges fall down under specific circumstances. Lions can make interesting subjects for statues.

22 hours straight of traveling, with only fragments of sleep. For the rest delirium and boredom in incomplete measure. A movie you catch glimpses of in the darkness of the plane, miniature scenes without sound, floating in the seatbacks – rectangular stars in some blurred unknown or uncharted constellation. Another film you watch for maybe half an hour of before its in any case implausible plot turns to sleep or sand, or until the point at which the audio gets too broken by the insistent/cheery announcements of imminent landing and/or turbulence. Funny how the half finished stories are the ones that stay most inside you, barbed like fish-hooks, deep pathetic mysteries, lodged there in your consciousness. Even days later you can’t shake the overheard traces and vivid glimpsed figures which you take in osmotically throughout the journey; the whole burnt on the retinas, its soft parade of characters from stories you cannot properly read, and cannot either write. The stewardess with the pinched blank face. The grinning lumbering ogre/guy in white jeans, white sweat-shirt and white parka,  grinning at something you can’t decipher. Overheard dialogues. The kind-of-cute girl who, on the walkway to the plane, tells the inquiring-older-traveller that she works in D.C, actually, spent Xmas in London and is now heading to Split for New Years. The young woman who is calling some guy that she met here (or there?) on another trip and whose friend she just bumped into on the flight, leaving him a long message as she stands in baggage reclaim, explaining that she was in Argentina when he called her last month and that she hopes they can maybe connect in Germany. It’s all possibilities, incompletions, other people’s longings. On the longhaul portion of the journey there’s a brutal alternation of heat and cold, darkness and light (unfiltered sunlight and blinking florescent) in which the blindfold functions not so much as a means to block out disturbance as a diabolical partly-elasticated tourniquet for the brain. Editing consciousness, but badly. The visuals are cut, but the audio continues, ceaseless and tedious, even past the triple filter of red wine, engine drone and ipod. A baby crying somewhere up front. Low level bickering of a couple nearby. Long discussions between members of the crew and another passenger seated somewhere back and to your right whose repeated complaints about shooting pains in her neck, shoulder and left arm lead to speculation about if they should or should not disembark her in London for medical attention (starts in a barely controlled panic, ends with the Steward making either recommendations about physiotherapists in Nairobi or jokes about how he is *not* going to do CPR on this flight thank you very much). Or the long conversation between three other passengers seated on your immediate left on a later plane (two guys and a woman) about various pseudo-religious experiences they have had involving strange feelings, premonitions and mysterious lights etc. One of them talking for a long time about a set of green, yellow and blue lights he saw hovering outside one time, the lights moving in the sky, moving up and down, then eclipsing the sun, how his wife saw the same thing, controlled mechanical movement of the lights in the sky, could not have been a plane, clear as day, he went inside. In the bedroom he saw a miniature version of the same lights. They moved across the room he said and slowly traced a path up towards a crucifix they had on the wall. Green, yellow, blue. He could not explain. In the end you’re left with the pair of kids that boarded the plane in Split, the first looking grim, with one eye covered entirely with single sticking-plaster, the second looking brighter but carrying (ominously) a battered box containing the hospital game ‘Operation’ (ages 6 and up), or with the figure of a much older guy, in brown leather jacket, sat on a railing whilst waiting for his luggage in Zagreb, eyes only partly hidden by his aviator shades, his raised hand, his balding head and the start-up haze of smoke from his cigarettes. Your companion tells you that this is the Croatian Frank Sinatra, the famed singer idol of her parents generation. Unless he’s dead, in which case this guy before you now, alone in any case, traveling now without an entourage, is just the spitting image of him, the walking double of his previous and now faded glory.

[See a somewhat related text from some while back. This also seems relevant]