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I went with a friend who hadn’t seen
much performance work. After the show we were drinking at
the bar, trapped in a hesitant, stuttering conversation.
Finally she said, “It was difficult to watch. But
not without its pleasures. There was something of me, and
of my world in it, reflected back. Small things …
but also something fundamental … I can’t say
what. I’ll have to think about it … Maybe I’ll
know in a day or two.” The statement seemed replete
- I had nothing else to add. We finished our drinks and
went off into the night.
Where to begin when speaking of the work of
Goat Island? A company whose art practice is bent against
the very idea of beginnings and endings, whose spare performance
aesthetic seems at times so dense and complex that it trips
up your tongue and ties it in knots. But I must say something,
so why not start in the experience itself: extreme self-consciousness,
physical discomfort, confusion, frustration, near boredom,
vague recognition, deja-vu, fleeting identification, strange
epiphanies, an entranced or mesmerized state, a creeping
accumulation of emotions, subterranean alteration. Perhaps
you have felt one, or some, or all of these conditions while
watching the work of Goat Island. You might also have found
these things ‘difficult’, against some other
desired effect. Traditions of watching within live arenas
may lead us to expect that such experiences should and will
have been cut down or out. And when we find ourselves inside
them, that voice in our heads - at once natural and deeply
conditioned - tends to ask, “I have paid for this.
Where is the pleasure? What is its meaning, its utility?”.
Goat Island’s work holds you inside the duration of
these experiences, then asks you to return to them again
and again. It asks you to suspend your viewing habits and
stall that inner voice, to linger openly in its moments,
which are difficult to evaluate, identify and know. Made
in and against a high capitalist culture where speed has
become an agency of value, time often seems to slow or extend
in their work, giving a space to its constituent elements
so that their relations are exposed. Each performance quietly
requires you to phase-shift your perceptions, and move into
a state of being with the work that is sensory, associative,
contemplative and unresolved. This work is not without its
pleasures. Despite the dominant metaphor of performance
as labour, its use of physical endurance, regimentation
and repetition, the work is also full of play: spiraling
logics, ingenious sparks and spontaneous meanings. Running
under the surface of its routines is a dry wit, that is
made manifest in the work’s momentary dark ironies,
its confusions of sense, and its recognition of human foibles
and strangeness.
There is however, something more at stake
in Goat Island’s formal, perceptual and sensory ploys
and their careful alteration of their spectators. Their
aesthetic is deeply engaged with an ethics of performance.
This ethics has been present in much of their previous work,
but in It’s an Earthquake in My Heart it
is an explicit matter of content. As with their immediate
contemporaries such as the Wooster Group and Forced Entertainment
their aesthetic arises from a sustained practice of living
with the material with which they work, so that a ‘final’
piece takes the form of an organic melding of elements,
a life-world which the performers inhabit. Earthquake
is an enacted meditation on the art of living, a work that
does the asking of that timeless ethical question “How
to live?”. Over the long gestation of a performance
piece Goat Island sift through, copy and transform multiple
sources: fragments of text, sound, images, objects and gestures.
One such source for Earthquake was Harun Farocki’s
extraordinary film How to Live in The GDR: a collage
piece which edits together found footage of product tests
conducted by machines, interspliced with recordings of a
range of professional, therapeutic and personal training
sessions. One might think of Goat Island’s work as
a similar practice, but utterly without an instructional
objective. For what we see in the work is a group of performers,
re-moving themselves from the daily flow of life in order
to enact a considered rehearsal of that life, oriented towards
its improvement. Here the similarities end. Goat Island’s
repetition of habitual practice is one which utterly undoes
its logic in order to excavate its hidden structures of
meaning. One might say then, that Goat Island’s ethics
of performance is resident both in their process of creation
and their aesthetic: the two are inseparable.
The approach to making a performance work
is one which does not set out with identified objectives
of meaning, but involves instead a negotiation of intentions
and knowledges through collaborative practice. Though the
work is clearly marked by Lin Hixson’s directorial
imprimatur, their process is more free from hierarchies
than most contemporary companies and reflects a complex
collective conversation. Sources enter the evolving aesthetic
and are then interrogated within it, until their place and
relation is solidified. Here their use of sources is akin
to the use of found objects in visual arts practice, in
the sense that rather than being directly sought out, sources
seem to come towards the artists. There is a deliberate
giving over of the aesthetic to these objects, whose continued
presence is negotiated through a communal process. This
is perhaps best described as a process of hearing and response
in relation to the members of the group and the sources
that arise through them. They do not set out to deliver
the meaning of their work, but rather they undertake a process
of the discovery of meaning in their work, and implicate
their spectators within this process. (It is no accident
that as an audience we watch ourselves watching the work
- the round or traverse staging makes us a physical and
visual dynamic within it). One might say then, that they
are working without rules, in order to find the rules of
what will have been done. The dependency of the aesthetic
upon this exploratory lived practice contains an ethical
dynamic, not simply because of it’s use of relation
in collaboration and its negotiation of sources through
collective processes, but because the orientation of these
processes is towards the discovery of otherness. This is
both an unearthing of the otherness of the other members
of the group (the qualities that emerge in their givings,
their unconscious performances), and also the alterities
of meaning resident in the combination of materials with
which they work. In this sense the work becomes an examination
of the collective unconscious of the group and its products,
and through the group, an examination of the political unconscious
of the culture from which they come. The aesthetic implicates
its audience in this social and cultural questioning, and
invites us to continue its labour.
Earthquake is perhaps the company’s
most complex work to date. It leaves behind the long durational
actions of earlier pieces such as Can’t Take Johnny
to the Funeral and It’s Shifting, Hank,
and the more character-based and scenic devices of works
such as How Dear To Me … and The Sea
& Poison. These traits are replaced with a restless
aesthetic, whose theatrical, choreographic, and actional
elements are densely interwoven, so that the work is constantly
changing shape. Framing itself as both a life-lesson and
an account of an actual earthquake, the piece then proceeds
to lose its espoused plot and flit and fall through a series
of vaguely recognisable but intimately connected scenarios;
moments from a childhood, a revelatory hallucination, an
instructional radio show, a dialogue with a dying man, a
call from a phone box, a church ceremony. The amorphous
‘scenes’ of Earthquake and its leaps
of time give the impression that the whole work is a kind
of communal re-treading of an unstable landscape of memory.
It would seem that in this piece the dilemma of ‘how
to live?’ is rephrased as ‘how to remember?’.
These questions are pursued through a highly physical enactment,
so that the question of remembrance is itself always a matter
of embodiment, of physical residue and resonance. What is
left in the body by events? Why must the body re-trace its
memories? What new sense is unearthed in this somatic replay?
The heightened physical nature of Goat Island’s
work and it’s ambiguous formal status perturbs categorisation.
It’s hard to locate this work as dance (a label the
company reject), though it is certainly choreographed movement.
In Earthquake, the formal status of this movement,
is even further undermined by Goat Island’s explicit
copying of multiple but minute sequences from the work of
dance-theatre practitioner Pina Bausch. As with all of Goat
Island’s copying, there is a pronounced translation
into a different context and language. Perhaps the best
that we can say of its physical language is that it draws
on the traditions of ritual theatre, dance, ‘real-time’
action and task-based performance to create a unique synthesis
of these forms. This results in a kind of faltering physicality
that is poised between stasis and flow - think of those
strange revolving animate tableaus, or the moments where
performers get heavily stuck in the groove of a particular
gesture. It’s no accident that the performers occasionally
seem to be moving like puppets, or rehearsing a set of moves
that they do not yet know. The movement is exposed as a
repetition. We are watching them learning how to move. That
the performers only ‘half-inhabit’ the movement
is crucial to the work since it creates a question over
the source of the movement and the performer’s volition.
Their physicality seems to originate simultaneously from
outside and inside the performer: from some notional instruction,
pattern or plan, but also from a psychic force, which grips
the performer within a repetition of a gestural form. This
unresolvable ambiguity opens the question of the cause of
human action, poised between interior (psychological) drives
and exterior (social or cultural) determinations.
Watching their rehearsals over these last
few months, I have often felt that the ideal position from
which to see Earthquake when it is finally finished
would be from above. Here the full extent of its intricate
patterns, its complex spatial and physical logics might
be better mapped. But this is of course Goat Island’s
point: the ideal place is unavailable. There is no location
from which to see the work in totality; there are only subjective
and partial positions, fragments of a whole, that remains,
no matter how many times you see the work, stubbornly out
of reach. The gestures they use often seem to have a dream-like
symbolism: body-forms whose meaning is inchoate, but which
seem to repeat lost states and emotions, as if they were
shards of body-memory. Goat Island are enacting a radical
form of commemoration: one that returns to phenomenal memories
in order to undo and reform the memory found through thought,
language and image. Their uncanny aesthetics, forever combining
the animate with the inanimate, performs an incomplete recovery
of senses and feelings found between mind and body, self-image
and self-experience. In this respect one can think of Goat
Island’s work as a kind of physical testimony, but
one that side-steps and comments on the foundations and
pitfalls of contemporary testimonial culture; the belief
that we can return through a cathartic telling to an authoritative
version of a traumatic event, the belief that in this telling
we might arrive at an essential or truthful version of our
selves. And though it sometimes uses spoken testimony, the
work is less concerned with the delivery of buried truths,
than it is with the opening of the process of their finding.
Just as it does not matter that the story with which I began
this essay is not true. It is just a likely fiction. I played
a ruse to get you reading and to untie my tongue. What matters
is that it could have happened, that in its telling it opens
the possibility of a truth. In Goat Island’s work
this final truth remains forever inaccessible. This is the
hole that takes the name of ‘earthquake’ in
It’s an Earthquake in My Heart. And Goat
Island are at pains to point out that earthquake is just
a word for it, like ‘rain’ or ‘broccoli’,
or whatever word you choose. Earthquake is a good name,
but the hole itself remains unspeakable. Their silence enables
you to bring an idea of a hole to fill their hole. Perhaps
your hole is an actual earthquake, or a forgotten event,
a lost love, or a car crash; you can rest assured it will
be welcomed here.
It is possible then to think of all of the
actions that take place in Earthquake as given
and felt in the wake of some unspeakable and multiple trauma.
A sense of catastrophe hangs over the piece. This is why
the question “Are you afraid?” seems to echo
so resonantly throughout. The catastrophe has already happened,
but it may also return in the future. Is this why the performers
stumble and stall? The fear of return threatens to still
action, to paralyse the body, and to prevent a generative
movement. The life-rehearsal threatens to crash into the
stasis of death. But there is something else in Goat Island’s
invocation of the threat of stillness. The whole aesthetic
of Earthquake is filled with strange slides and
transformations: a hand falls like a dead leaf, a cloud
becomes a wedding guest, a walk follows the trajectory of
a car crash, confetti falls like hail, an electric fan circulates
like the blood inside a heart. These shifts may at first
seem to follow no particular logic, but it is soon made
evident that nature itself is being re-ordered through a
series of becomings. One source that found its way into
Earthquake, and is now buried in the depths of
the rubble, is Jean Luc Godard’s Weekend.
The film takes the motor car as a symbol of ‘civilisation’
and presents instead its latent catastrophe in the figure
of the traffic jam. The tail back soon becomes a monstrous
pile up. The social consequences of the car proliferate
into an orgy of alienation, individualism and violence,
and as the social order decays, the characters turn increasingly
towards their instincts in a kind of becoming-animal. You
might hear an echo of Godard’s film in Earthquake’s
rude car horns, but you are more likely to feel its trace
in the bodies of the performers. Goat Island take Weekend,
strip it of it’s psycho-sexual content, and turn it
towards the invocation of another kind of becoming: the
becoming-machine.
Perhaps this is the dominant logic of Earthquake’s
strange transformations from the animate into the inanimate:
the human becoming automata (the engine in the heart, the
body as a car). Here Goat Island suggest that our need and
incapacity to ask and find answers to that ethical question,
is traversed not only by the dilemma of memory, but by the
problem of the machine inside our hearts. How to live when
the late-capitalist complex has buried its mechanisms deep
inside our flesh? What to trust in if we cannot trust ourselves?
How to judge, if our judgement is always emoted? How to
feel, in the knowledge that our emotions are both genuine
and synthetically produced? Towards the end of Earthquake
Goat Island adjust their image of the engine inside the
heart, placing a burning flame at its centre. For me this
is the most shattering and haunting image of the piece;
the heart both fabricated and real; the flame, a flame of
passion but also of destruction. Could it be that the catastrophe
of which the piece speaks, the catastrophe in whose shadow
we must ask again and again ‘how to live?’,
is not simply happening to our hearts but coming from them.
How to live, then, with the knowledge that personal and
social destruction emanates from the same place as love?
It’s an earthquake, an earthquake in my heart.
Rather than as an origin, an initiative or
a beginning, the company often speak of the work as a response,
an answer to a call from elsewhere, either within or outside
of the self. For Goat Island making art is a life-practice
of rehearsal - something done again in the hope of making
it work - but also a reciprocal and unending cycle of call
and response, of gift and counter-gift between themselves,
and between themselves and us, the spectators of their work.
All we require is an attention to their echoing call and
the faith, perhaps, to proffer an answer.
Notes from a Process.
March 2001. Chicago.
Adrian Heathfield
Adrian Heathfield writes
on contemporary performance. He is the editor of Small
Acts: Performance, The Millennium
and the Marking of Time and co-editor of On
Memory, an issue of Performance
Research, and of the box publication Shattered
Anatomies: Traces of the Body in Performance.
His writing has also appeared in Hybrid, Performance
Research, Cultural Studies, Art and Design,
Connect, and Space and Culture. He is
a lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University
of Warwick in the UK.
Coming Undone
is included in Goat Island’s Reading Companion
to It’s an Earthquake in My Heart (see Publications
for more details), and will be published in a future edition
of Frakcija.
1. It's an Earthquake
in My Heart and this writing were completed before
the events of September 11th 2001, and though the imagery
of the work is uncannily resonant in relation to these events,
it is not reducible to them.
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