I had some really interesting back and forth in email with Julie Tolentino, who sent more thoughts about her work, and the text I wrote about her 24 hour dance performance A True Story About Two People, recently here and here. Here’s a part of what she wrote:
“what captured me… was that you discussed the ‘leaving’. after the premiere of this work in NY, this was the most memorable and poignant experiences, as well as the most visceral and palpable. if there was any sensation that was heightened, it was as if i could feel the start of the departure between me and my [dance] partner – ages it seemed, before the partner would actually leave. or if i didn’t feel it, i was acutely aware of the palpable ‘exiting trail’ – the moment [of] the last separation of physical touch. i was shocked every time at the depth of sensation, the pliable withdrawing, the real sense of loss. also the manoever. what was slipping away in the form of composure and decision-making. also, it was as if i was a butt of my own joke, unplanned and unexpected…. i think i was surprised at the continued, still surprising density of those experiences in the berlin presentation.“
Watching Kate McIntosh rehearse in Leuven day-before-yesterday. The piece is called Loose Promise and it's a project that I've contributed some text to via a series of triggers/frames that Kate sent to myself along with a number of other writers (Deborah Levy and Mike Harrison included). Green carpet was one of the triggers; there really had to be a green carpet somewhere. Great watching the rather disparate fragments accumulate in the space and through the time of the piece, and great watching Kate accumulate the traces of the stories too through the actions and images that she's slowly building up around them. At this point the text itself – strewn as pages on the floor, folded in clumps, shredded in piles – is a major presence in the performance. Very often its under duress – torn, soaked, falling to pieces in her hands.
Still reading Steven Hall's The Raw Shark Texts which is also dripping in text – at the level of structure you're navigating layers of stories, and texts nested inside each other etc but as you drop into the vivid madness of the story itself you soon find characters hiding out in vast labyrinths of books, carrying stolen letters as psychic decoys, or throwing bombs made of fireworks and typewriter keys. In a beautifully Burrough's move (with echoes of his essays in The Job) Hall's central character periodically hides his presence in a room by placing dictaphones in its corners playing back tapes in which other people have been recorded as they talk or go about their their daily lives – the result a kind of identity camouflage.
There's a great pleasure reading strange, intelligent, funny and compelling fiction that happens to come from, and is at times set in the north of England. Some perverse pleasure in seeing your own landsacpe mythologised. With Hall and Tony White Sheffield Hallam University starts to look like quite a little contemporary fiction-factory. Raw Shark is very smart. There's a nod to House of Leaves, to Philip K. Dick maybe, and something of a David Mitchell-ness to it but there's plenty of originality, invention and wit in how its put together. I'm liking how these ideas books (like Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, Tom McCarthy's Remainder, Tibor Ficher's The Thought Gang…) are so full-on in embracing plot as a device – action and super-abstract ideas all tangled up with each other. It's an interesting moment.
Just now posted a new story to Barbara Campbell for tonights 1001 Nights Cast. Written on the move between Brussels and Graz, with a connection through Stuttgart. Pleased with the results, but not with the travel-sickness/nausea produced by trying to write in the van that picked us up from the airport. Ughhh. Barbara’s live webcast performance of the story will be at around 7pm, thereafter it will be added to the archive at 1001.
In the Barbican’s Panic Attack! Art in the Punk Yearsshow earlier this year M. and I saw this beautiful collage using postcards, made by John Stezaker. It’s hard to find the right words for what it does to the space. Opens it, doubles and triples it, folds it on itself, makes one see it again. Makes visible some hidden aspect, makes it unreal, shows how unreal it already was in the first place. Makes it a sign for something, shows how it was already a sign for something. Makes geometry from it, shows the geometry that was already there. I love the patchwork sky, in different shade, cut and recut. The pointing shadows. The policeman. The lovers. The bisected pigeons. The crowd. The repetition of the vanishing point. The repeated spiral of the steps, the fountain base, the circle of the Cola sign. The words GOLD and COLA. The plane picture. The general sense of arrested whirlpool, a vortex. Red. Yellows. Blues. The colours from another time, colours which at the time of the works making were most likely already from another time.
Only just now Googling Stezaker I realised that I already knew his work via Vlatka, who’d pointed out these collages he made of faces. See also here.
I find it strange how potent these are. For some reason I think I should be immune to them, but instead of that I’m gripped.
My video show One Hundred and Three People at Sketch in London opened this last weekend and runs until 6 November. Image above is from the new work 100 People.
Meanwhile Hugo has work in a show at Hansard Gallery in Southampton. Live Art on Camera shows the work of photographers who’ve documented seminal performance art events from the 1950s to the present in Europe, the United States and Japan, including (amongst others) Marina Abramovic and Ulay, Dona Ann McAdams, Stuart Brisley and Leslie Haslam, Hollis Frampton, Ana Mendieta, Peter Moore, Ohtsuji Kiyoji, Adrian Piper, Tony Ray-Jones and Carolee Schneeman. As part of Hugo’s contribution you’ll find two images from Forced Entertainment’s And On The Thousandth Night…. The ongoing photography project he and I are doing together – Empty Stages – is also on view there at Hansard via DVD.
Tony White has a great new story at Barbarba Campbell’s epic 1001 Nights Cast called Do you hear that? I’m doing another contribution to it myself this Friday 21st. Added to the usual writing-to-a-prompt-and-against-a-time-limit restrictions on this occasion comes the fact that I’m going to be at airports/on planes and trains en route between Brussels and Graz for most of the allotted writing-time. We’ll see how that works.
Forced Entertainment‘s First Night is at Kaai Theatre in Brussels for one night only this Wednesday, 19th at 20.30 as part of Kaai’s 30th Birthday celebrations. That Night Follows Dayis back on the road again – in Graz from 21-23rd September, kicking off the Steirischer Herbst festival. Full tour list at the Victoria site linked above.
Mike Harrison wrote a nice response to my piece last week about Julie Tolentino in which he floats the idea that my writing somehow remakes the performance itself. I’m pretty fascinated with this because it chimes with how I’ve been thinking about one strand of my writing on/around performance. I’m interested in the way that in writing one can set things down – the what happened, the structure, the time-frame, the relations made and developed in a performance – unfolding an annotated schematic of these things on the page in such a way that the working/dramaturgy of the event becomes not just clear but (via a kind of unpacking) somehow manifest again.
The above may be connected, somehow, to the fact that I’ve often made a kind of equivalence between the dramaturgy/unfolding of a live event in respect of the audience and the way in which writing works on a reader over time (word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, page by page). I’m tempted to see each as a kind of process of unfolding, and I’ve always thought (at least since Certain Fragments) of any writing that uses the word ‘I’ as a kind ‘staging oneself for the page’. In each case its the control and flow of information, the strategic deploying of signs and space that makes the work what it is; a machinery that makes a certain kind of encounter possible, and which structures it in a particular way.
Reading Steven Hall's The Raw Shark Texts, which Vlatka kindly Amazoned in my direction. Getting frightned now (by the book, not by the gifts).
*
Vlatka described a guy outside her apartment building, waiting and taking a call on his cell, while his dog scratched round at the edge of an empty lot. When she walked past she heard this:
"What I'm saying to you is that you need a protagonist for this story. There needs to be someone that these things are actually going to happen TO."
Discussing this with Adrian and Hugo we're gripped by the thought of what the story this phone-guy is referring to might be like in its present, criticised form – an arrangement of things (incidents, scenes, events?) that somehow aren't happening to anyone at all? This could be a good book.
Round Hugo's in Shoreditch the overheard fare is a bit more gold-type chains, blurred tattoos and white knuckle. Bloke on the steps of the pub in a gleeful narration to his mates: "'Look, I says' to him, 'I'm sorry you CUNT…'"
Sometimes wearing a scarf and a polo coat and no makeup and with a certain attitude of walking, I go shopping or just look at people living. But then you know, there will be a few teenagers who are kind of sharp and they'll say, "Hey, just a minute. You know who I think that is?" And they'll start tailing me. And I don't mind. I realise some people want to see if you're real. The teenagers, the little kids, their faces light up. They say, "Gee," and they can't wait to tell their friends. And old people come up and say, "Wait till I tell my wife." You've changed their whole day. In the morning, the garbage men that go by 57th Street when I come out the door say, "Marilyn, hi! How do you feel this morning?" To me, it's an honour, and I love them for it.
T. texted me after rehearsals to check out this Richard Meryman interview with Marilyn Monroe (in the Guardian, reprinted from Life, August 1962) which finds her in some kind of epic rambling mode, describing the strange space of her life, equal parts vivid and totally unreal – like the opening sequences of Blue Velvet. Fantastic looping sentences, changes of subject and reported dialogues. Great text.
Back at HKW in Berlin last month during the same programme as Vlatka‘s This Here And That There, I got chance to see Julie Tolentino’s great performance A True Story About Two People. In it Julie (who’s worked frequently with Ron Athey) dances barefoot and blindfolded for 24 hours continuously on a square of grass, inside a small mirrored booth. Strange that so simple piece as this one can multiply complexity in all directions as soon as you look at it, but I guess so much of my favourite work in performance (or in art more generally) is like this; clear, consequential, following a logic and irrefutable on the one hand and layered, rich, and (basically) bewildering on the other. Those two states, those two facts, sat side by side/on top of each other/overlaid at all times. Yes/And.
Visitors to the gallery are invited (by cards on a table next to her booth) to join Julie on the square of grass and dance with her, one at a time. If there are no takers she dances alone, whilst at other times there’s almost a queue, and very often there’s a small crowd of onlookers. This process goes on for 24 hours, a melancholy dance marathon for a single contestant with a constantly shifting (and sometimes absent) dance-partner. Throughout the work, music – country and western, ballads, torch songs, all sorts – slips from the speakers in the booth itself, the songs gliding in and out of each other, mixed to a landscape with the sound of crickets whose chirping adds its weight to the modest suggestion of the grass – that we might think for a moment of outside, of night, and of some other place than here.
Viewed from the outside the mirror panels of the booth let you see into it, though what you see is shot through, from time to time and depending on your angle of view, with reflections of the gallery, yourself, and passersby. Step into the booth through its open side, to dance though and the scene is very different. From within, as you’re dancing, the three screens are perfect mirrors, thanks to which you don’t see outside anymore. There are no more other people – only yourself, and her together, distorted, reflected and re-reflected – the two people of the title (now you and her, no longer her and a stranger) are doubled or multiplied out from your bodies as a series of moving images, phantoms, wraiths, memories, optical illusions. You feel, smell, touch, see her, but at the same time glimpse this shifting three-sided horizon of your dancing versions.
Seen after 12 hours of this work Tolentino cuts a frail figure in the booth, moving vulnerably, softly, made something of an object by her sightlessness. Reversing this impression though she retains both a strength and a privacy, like she’s able to deal, content in the fact that she’s alone and unknowable – a blank resilient figure. Hard to be sure if she is the victim of the economy she has set up (or mirrored) or if she is its master, hard to know if she serves this machine of encounter or if it serves her in some way. One’s sense of what levels of compulsion, work, need, desire, banality, sadness or joy govern the transactions that take place here is something that’s constantly shifting. Yes/And.
There’s been a fair amount of ‘for an audience of one’ work in performance in recent years and I’ve often had my doubts about it as a mode; it can seem like just too handy a short-cut to intimacy and affect, a route in which the formal decision too-often outweighs or doesn’t even speak to the content. Here though, in Julie’s work, as in Franko B‘s unforgettable Aktion 398, the formal decision and the content are the same thing, completely indivisible. It is what it is; a frame, a space in which a meeting takes place, an opening to possibility and to another person. And I guess A True Story About Two People isn’t ‘for one’, or isn’t really about two people in any case – its about the construction of two, its impossibility, its resonance and its possibility as an act in social space. As I write to a friend shortly afterwards:
“Intimate and totally public, contact but no contact at all, a meeting of some kind, but one that takes place basically inside your own head.. And the whole of the time in there is an occasion for a conversation with yourself of course, about this space of encounter, about holding and moving with another person… About watching and being watched, about what is and what is not.
Perhaps the strongest part of the piece is/was the moment of leaving her. When to leave? After a few songs, after a period of time? At least after the time when it feels like ‘something’ happened or something was exchanged. It can never be the right moment of course. I think I waited for the end of a song. What felt strong was that I looked for here eyes – to negotiate the departure – and then of course realised that, thanks to the blindfold – her eyes were not there. So I had to say goodbye by means of slowly letting go my touch.”
Watched from the outside some visitors seem to talk a lot. Others not so much. From the look of it they ask lot of why’s, how long’s and how are you’s. I’m guessing. But it looks like the small small negotiations of the ‘being there’. Physically one can see that there are the questions of what to do with the hands, how close to be, of where to go with the feet. The problem of tall persons (she is short). The problem of people that are too enthused (she is tired). Some are smiling. Some serious. Some easy. Some almost rigid. As for the movement itself; some dance with a little comedy in their step, some with moves in grinning quote marks. Or a raised eyebrow, that sends the eyes out to those watching outside, as if to say “Oh, yes, look at me. I am doing this. Dancing with her, here, in this place now…”
All those ways of engaging with the piece are possible, and a part of it of course. But they’re also a kind of avoidance, a way somehow not to be there. The piece, at its heart, wants to draw you into a space of intimate proximity with another human being – based on dancing, touch and movement – and asks simply (in full complexity) that you spend time there. Both times I took off my shoes and went in to dance with Julie I talked with her at first as we danced – the how’s it going, the this and that. The second time in, I even told her a story I’d remembered as we’d danced before, something from an old performance, a love story. But then I shut up, which for me at least was a kind of surrendering to the being there, to the thing of it. It was only then, in a certain way, that the piece started in earnest. You dance, move, hold. Hugo Glendinning took the pictures above and many others, without my even noticing. You think, drift, watch the mirrors, maybe close your eyes. You wonder – about her and how it is, about you and what this is, this contact. You think – about other dances you did here or there, or other dances you did not do here or there. Its a small space that you’re moving in (literally and as metaphor), but it goes down deep. It can be sad, ordinary, delightful, tender, awkward. Shifts in between all these things, tries to find what it is, this meeting between you and her, surrounded by ghosts/reflections. It’s an economy of taking and giving – that you give something to her by dancing, and that you take something too, the balance uncertain, in constant negotiation.
The goodbye is the marker moment, as I wrote already. Because then you have to deal with the fact that she’s not ever in it on the same terms as you were, that she’s locked in it in fact, since whilst you can leave she’s in it for good – a production line of sorts, in which many others like you come and go, to look, hold her, talk, dance, and leave and that she alone stays, dances, continues – trapped in one sense and way stronger than you in another. Yes/And.
Someone is texting you repeatedly with the same unsigned message, at all times day and night. It says simply:
I DO NOT EXIST
If you ignore the message it still comes again. If you reply there's no direct or consequent response. Invariably though, at some point, minutes, hours or, on some occasions days later, the same message just comes again. It keeps coming.
I DO NOT EXIST I DO NOT EXIST
This goes on for a month or two, maybe longer. It's freaky at first but you get used to it somehow and adjust your routine to take account of what's happening. You turn my phone off at night and in the morning collect streams of identical texts. You check your phone only sporadically, tell friends not to text you because it only leads to confusion as real messages are so often obscured by the deluge. You consider changing numbers, and find yourself involved in long complicated conversations about if its possible or not to block communications from particular places.
I DO NOT EXIST I DO NOT EXIST I DO NOT EXIST I DO NOT EXIST
A few times you even call the number from which the messages are emanating and which you don't recognise at all. But on calling it you just get some kind of number-error message. No voicemail, not even a ring, like this number is itself a phantom, something cancelled, something impossible.
Your phone beeps, or trills or clicks. You check the message:
