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465 Sentences for June, 2001
Goat Island Collaborative Journal Project
Friday, June 1st
1: Mark – 1 sentence
Chicago: Can you feel an earthquake halfway around the world?
(00:10, rainstorm, corner of North/Clark – a goodbye).
Saturday, June 2nd
2: Matthew – 2 sentences
Arrival and two white moments: we dangle between the best
of all possible alternatives, as in the airport lobby, changing
out of brown and into white shoes.
We find our way to the shadowy Jüdenplatz, night has
arrived soothing and underappreciated, we walk around Rachel
Whiteread’s holocaust memorial, we find it offcentered,
surrounded by red candle glasses, two police cars, Orthodox
Jews dispersing after an event, we find it white, an inverted
library, a landmark, an ending.
Sunday, June 3rd
3: Karen – 3 sentences
At an old café, an extravagant grey-haired career
waiter exclaimed “immortal woman.”
The choir boys were not in rows but crowded around.
Because of our state of mind yesterday, today we have only
red bell peppers and strawberries (red like the uniforms
of the Austrian Airlines flight attendants) to eat with
our bread and butter.
Monday, June 4th
4: CJ – 4 sentences
“Let’s just be quiet for a minute.”
Mark woke at 4am, a light fixture exploded with a sound
like a gunshot (an event which seemed to confuse the birds),
movements occupied space, sounds occupied time, batteries
are running low, five lights switched off, then sleep.
“Was that a knocking at the door?”
Six small steps equals two large steps, and your hand extends
mathematically.
Tuesday, June 5th
5: Lin – 5 sentences
This day, at noon, was lifted out of light and placed in
the tall, black room of The Künstlerhaus Theater.
It took six hours to construct thirty lighting cues for
our performance It’s an Earthquake in my Heart.
It took six seconds for the computerized lighting board
to snatch them away.
In the hour before night, we began again from the beginning.
Scott’s prerecorded, boomed voice stopped diversionary
conversations with a “Hey”.
Wednesday, June 6th
6: Bryan – 6 sentences
When I woke up this morning my left hand seemed familiar
to me. We put on wet clothes for the photo shoot and a jackhammer
disrupts the concentration of the civil war rehearsal. The
German nickel metal hydride rechargeable batteries run for
23:19 in our fans with the sound tube attached, but we decide
to go with Adrian's suggestion and take Bryan's sound tube
out to give it a longer life. Then at 4:00 we began to look
forward to performing the work. The Dress rehearsal goes
very well and it feels like the premiere for us because
Hortensia and Katrin and other Festival staff come to see.
Katrin says she would not change a single second.
Thursday, June 7th
7: Bryan – 7 sentences
A short from water left over by cleaning women on our cook
top blows the main circuit in our whole floor of our apartment.
We cook pasta on the slow burner and the pot handle breaks
and pasta falls to the floor, but Teresa is amazingly calm.
At the Künstlerhaus, the confetti sticks to the floor
and Mark, Lin & Scott spend hours cleaning it; there
is talk of getting plastic confetti.
After the show we discovered that the over ride switches
that keeps the flame fans running if the light burns out
were set wrong and that is why our flames were so weak.
We noticed that the audience was still applauding so we
went out for another bow.
After the show Adrian said of the audience: “It was
like we were trying to slowly fill a bucket with water and
someone was drilling a hole in the bottom from the underside.”
Hortensia said she was crying at the end of the show.
Friday, June 8th
8: Lin – 8 sentences
Outside our apartment, in the courtyard, two locust trees
are dropping yellow-green seeds without stopping. They fall
as the confetti falls in our performance. It gives me solace
to know these trees will be throwing their seeds at the
same time we are throwing are confetti in front of Viennese
audiences.
A zen monk said in response to a devotee’s despair
at not being able to calm his mind and keep it from anxious
wandering, “Don’t worry. While your mind wanders,
the trees and rocks are meditating for you.”
Jim Bauerlein, a man I had not seen for seventeen years,
appeared at the theater tonight at 6PM as we were preparing
to perform. He was with his partner, Emma and had just returned
from Budapest where a day earlier at 1AM, they threw the
ashes of Emma’s deceased father into the Danube. He
fell to the water, formed a long cloud just above the surface,
and floated downstream.
Saturday, June 9th
9: CJ – 9 sentences
You ask yourself: “are we afraid?”
We are always falling, each step a fall, we cut
our knees, our elbows, our fingers, blood hardens into scabs
on our skin.
Up in the trees, a bird arrives, a branch
was waiting for its arrival. If it didn’t happen now,
it would happen in the future.
the past is now part
of my future
the present is well out of hand
Eyes are vacant and bruised, electrical connections to
overhead cables sparkle in the night sky. What were you
expecting to find?
The tree follows the bird. This must be
the future.
Sunday, June 10th
10: Karen – 10 sentences
Tomorrow they kill the man who bombed the Oklahoma Federal
Building. A survivor who’d almost been hit by the
axle from the truck bomb says: I will always hear that axle,
I’ll always remember that axle whirring toward me.
During our dinner the hard rain began and we went to the
window to see it fall in the courtyard. The other head sticking
out the window was Mark’s across the way, he took
our photograph.
Waiting backstage for the last ever Vienna audience that
will half leave in scorn haste and half shout bravo at the
end of the show, I listened to the sounds around me: air
and water from the bodies of Matthew and Bryan, from the
building, circulations of liquid and gas.
The red railing rushes up four flights as I will when this
performance is over.
After the show sandwiches and packing. The theatre bartender
loved the performance and brought sandwiches to us saying:
I love it when people like you come here.
My eyes pressed closed, CJ curled toward me asleep first
and clacking his teeth, I try to gentle them. I counted
the red shirts in the audience and they press harder and
harder until the sound of the rain takes over and I surrender
to the chase of dreams.
Monday, June 11th
11: Matthew – 11 sentences
The smallness of Beethoven’s bed surprises us, because
his head has always seemed so big.
Three places where I have seen brown and black hooded crows:
1) the Scottish Highlands, 2) here in Vienna a) flying,
b) walking in the park, c) perched on the corner of the
Music Museum roof, 3) painted 436 years ago in Breugel’s
Hunters in the Snow.
“I disagree with my friend about your production;
she hated it completely, while I hated it partially.”
“Congratulation: your performance was great, (only
the ending was too ‘concrete’ for me –
if I’m allowed to say this).”
“It’s like watching a magician who doesn’t
know any magic.”
A blackbird sings in the Köstlergasse 5 courtyard every
morning at 5:30, every evening at 9:30, and after every
rainstorm; a bird that has not given up on Austria.
In the Künstlerhaus café, we discuss replacing
the two mechanic dialogues appropriated from the film The
Umbrellas of Cherbourg with insurance sales training
dialogues appropriated from the film How to Live in
the German Federal Republic by Harun Farocki.
At 7:00 Harun Farocki himself sits at the table next to
ours, where two journalists interview him on this evening’s
premier of his new film Die Schöpfer der Einkaufswelten
– he wears a wristwatch with two dials.
We begin our lecture at 8:15 for an attentive audience of
thirteen (fourteen if you include the sound technician),
and by 9:15 our work at the Vienna festival is finished:
es geht so schnell wie ein augenblick.
These doubts I feel, are they mine or Austria’s?
Whether one smuggles a small or large package across a border,
one breaks the law.
Tuesday, June 12th
12: Mark – 12 sentences
Today I try and train my eyes to focus in quiet. I have
moved from quiet luxury to another brown room where sounds
of early morning street vendors and lorries wake me. The
french windows have been opened fully since the move and
this morning I awoke to brilliant sunshine pouring onto
my face.
I took myself to the Applied Arts Museum this afternoon,
an opportunity to experience the Viennese arts and crafts
movement from previous years, showings of rococo and baroque
lace, glass and numerous furniture pieces. My other interest
in this space was due to the museum inviting artists such
as Jenny Holzer and Barbara Bloom to transform and readapt
and recontextualise the historical spaces.
I encountered a retrospective on American artist Dennis
Hopper, here I see America once more lifted through graffiti
and violence, of America I saw this past Christmas in LA.
A raw quality I left behind 12 days ago in zip code 60616.
In the park I sit after this experience to see a group of
tourists, a group of fifty or more, I take a photograph
of them being photographed. In and amongst the daisies a
teenage school party lie in the grass, their teachers unable
to control and move them along.
At home now after a day of being outside watching I continue
to watch flicking through the channels. I switch to CNN
to see the Spanish Prime Minister and George W. Bush giving
a joint press conference. The Prime Minster talks of his
open disgust towards the death penalty in the United States,
George W listens with interpreter in his right ear - an
awkward silence.
Wednesday, June 13th
13: Matthew – 12 sentences
14: Bryan – 1 sentence
Yesterday we walked to the double flakturm at Ahrenburg
Park.
The flakturm constructions, 1) as quickly built Nazi ammunition
storage towers capped with anti-aircraft gun platforms,
offer an undisturbed window into history – monumental,
utilitarian, primitive with visible poured-concrete mold
lines, modernist; 2) since Vienna, with demolition impractical,
has mostly decided to ignore them, present an unsurpassed
example of architectural blankness; 3) at Radetzky, Apollo,
Neulig, and Augustiner appear in the International Directory
of Haunted Places.
The poet Paul Celan lived to compose language which fascism
would find indigestible.
This morning as we plan workshops (introductory exercise:
create and enact an impractical gesture) a repairman
interrupts our meeting to inspect our room for water damage,
and departs with the polite remark, “Sorry for disturbtion.”
I learned a new word: erdbeeren (strawberries).
I learned it in the market, where, when I bought pistachios,
the vender told me he would be asleep tomorrow.
Christine explains this is because tomorrow is a holiday,
the Ascension, when businesses close, as they did for Pentecost.
Christine, an Austrian friend of CJ, gives us a guided tour
of the Sammlung Essl museum where she works, an impressive
Heinz Tesar building, then takes us to a restaurant in Nußdorf
where “the rites of Viennese Jause are performed.”
Bryan stood perfectly still for thirty minutes watching
a video of a 1998 Hermann Nitsch performance in the gallery
devoted to the ritual’s exuviae.
Architektengruppe, who also designed the underground system
in Vancouver, have overseen the design of the Vienna U-bahn
system since 1971.
With Christine’s guidance, we ride the streetcar back,
it is night, we crave this experience as it happens, we
try to comprehend it, we have received a generous gesture,
we watch the streetcar follow its tracks, it has us inside,
it describes a bright line through darkness and foreign
territory.
In Bryan’s monologue, his childhood recollection of
the rain, through five repetitions, becomes replaced from
the end forward by a second monologue, a philosophical description
of Pentecost (in Judaism, Shavuot), as an inverted Tower
of Babel, wherein a disruption (“disturbtion”)
in the fabric of reality sets into motion not chaos but
order, and understanding between foreigners.
§
Late at night on the streetcar three Viennese beer drinking
men in togas enter and on TV we watch the blues brothers
Jake and Elmo speak German.
Thursday, June 14th
15: Mark – 12 sentences
16: CJ – 2 sentences
I begin to think of scrambled language. What if we were
to write words on card and cut them out placing them directly
into people's ears. I’m wondering what a sentence
would look like in different nation’s ears? What words
would become shortened, what phrases longer or shorter?
A week after we performed Earthquake the performance
space is transformed, Lin, Matthew and I head to the theatre
space after a meeting with ‘Vivvy,’ an Argentinean
director in the cafe. It has become interesting to speak
in one's own language and yet the pattern is broken so that
some sort of hybridity occurs. Another language is spoken
between people we meet whose first language is not English.
I become increasingly concerned that I have not learnt another
language.
Before the Argentinean show, Hortensia, the festival curator
and Beatrice, director of the theatre company give an unannounced
conference. There are no earpieces, a dialogue and translation
from Spanish into German, I become increasingly interested
by the form of this dialogue. A poor version of the USA/Spain
press conference, two leads and two microphones attached
to the leads coming out of a karaoke amplified.
What would it be like to do an English/American translation?
§
Most of the shops on Kärntnerstrasse are closed because
of today’s holiday, yet the street is bustling with
pedestrians as usual. My walk through Vienna is obliquely
documented in the background of different video recordings
being shot by many of those I pass, as I follow routes now
well known, occasionally venturing down other streets after
first checking their outcome on my street map.
Friday, June 15th
17: Karen – 12 sentences
18: Matthew – 3 sentences
What’s that? It contains the sound of metal, it contains
the sound of wood, it contains the sound of scraping one
against the other, a trough. Together, every time we hear
it, it interrupts our meeting with a question?
We have been intrigued by the old elevators in this building
and by their elegant movement within their cabled chambers:
wooden boxes with etched glass windows, suspended within
metal cages glide silent and smooth behind latched doors.
Now one of us darts out of the meeting into the hall—we’ve
unraveled another mystery over time.
If the elevator is moving now, then the wooden trough we’ve
identified as the source of the scraping is in fact housing
some kind of kind counter weight or other mechanism for
our lovely decorated elegant elevator with the quiet charm.
The rustic scraping of weathered wood and hard metal parts
hidden on the outside of the wall is heard not during the
ride but elsewhere in the building through open windows
during meetings and tea or showers or laundry or while trying
to get sound from an old television with worn out buttons.
History and patterns console the present. No proper history
or pattern can be discerned at the outset of our performance—when
a pattern is set it lasts too long or too short, it is smashed
or left behind for another. It is the chaos of the marketplace,
it is the open air produce market in a foreign land in which
no one speaks your language, even the measurements are strange.
The first time out you buy the wrong fruit, pay the wrong
price, get the wrong amount. You have to look at it for
a while before you can see what you are looking at, before
you can trust there is something there for you.
§
Expend minimum effort, internal and external – perform
the shadow of an impractical gesture.
Creatures in The Last Judgement triptych by Hieronymous
Bosch, alphabetized and rated in order of preference (1=favorite,
15=least favorite):
Bearded head with red hat, clawfeet, lizard tail, wheel
ears – 12;
Birdheaded on crutches – 1;
Blacksmith – 14;
Clarinet nose – 3;
Dark head in flower with many legs – 7;
Feather-capped head with feet – 2;
Head with playing card in mouth on insect body – 15;
Helmeted head with legs riding fish – 6;
Legs and face protruding from arrow-pierced egg –
5;
Orange potbellied with blue face roasting human –
4;
Spiny blue insect – 8;
Stove-bellied in shadows – 13;
Swordfish-headed with tambourine – 9;
Walking bowl with head inside – 10;
Walking hollow bottom half of dinosaur with monkey inside
– 11.
At the printer shop for shirt signs – red lettering
on white cloth to be sewn to my shirt backs – constant
reminders of the piece’s structure: PART 1 TUESDAY
MORNING; PART 2 53 YEARS EARLIER; PART 3 TUESDAY EVENING;
it now seems these three parts concern the limits of memory
and religion (PART 1) the limits of imitation and learning
(PART 2) and the limits of memory and religion after a crisis
(PART 3).
Saturday, June 16th
19: CJ – 12 sentences
20: Lin – 4 sentences
Christine and Bernard were expecting most if not all of
Goat Island to come to their apartment at 4.30pm on Saturday
June 16 for coffee and cake. Karen and I, however, had understood
that Christine and Bernard’s invitation was limited
to ourselves. After we arrive, everyone is embarrassed in
their own spoken and unspoken ways when the misunderstanding
is discussed. The dining table holds enough cake for ten
people, and is surrounded by more than four chairs, which
is all we need.
Bernard attends to his espresso maker, and delicately places
fresh cups of coffee onto the saucers which rest in front
of us. Later, Bernard holds an unopened bottle of Austrian
wine for a few seconds of quiet contemplation. He smoothly
uncorks the bottle, and pours a small quantity into his
own glass, which is swirled and smelt and sipped before
he announces his satisfaction. When I watch Christine and
Bernard, I am reminded of my friends Chris and Lexi who
now live on the Welsh borders; how they move through their
apartment, prepare food and drink, communicate with each
other.
We talk of those who take a different path from that expected
by their parents, and I don’t have a story to contribute
to that theme.
The trajectories of a life may be summarized as a kind
of narrative, but in the experience of one moment to the
next do we ever imagine that a story is unfolding?
Earlier, during our morning walk, we made stops to buy
organic strawberries, the UK Guardian newspaper, and some
small moleskin covered notebooks, and these items which
we carried in paper and plastic bags back to our rented
apartment were satisfying to us.
Early afternoon, we went to an exhibition of Dennis Hopper’s
photographs, paintings, collages and sculptures, each piece
like a journal entry, a framed moment revealing place, time,
climate; surfaces which overwhelm all thought and which
spread out beyond the frames we have constructed for them.
§
Today Matthew, Mark, and I rode the train from Vienna to
Melk to see the famed Baroque Abbey that stands on top of
the village like an insatiable giant. There is no mention
of the war in The Melk Abbey guidebook, only the following:
“March 13, 1938 brought new clouds across the monastery’s
horizon. Even though the monastic community was pushed together
in a small part of the building, the monastery was able
to escape dissolution.”
Sunday, June 17th
21: Bryan – 12 sentences
22: Karen – 5 sentences
It’s Sunday 7:00 a.m., young people with the look
of the night on their faces are at the Grafin & Savoy
cafes having beer for breakfast. Teresa, Jake and I ride
the U1 to Spitelau & walk past the Farndarme factory
past the university to Franz Joseph bahnhof. From there
we take a train going north past countryside with high green
wheat fields and grape vines, past Tulln where the conductor
calls out the name of Egon Schiele, past Absdorf-Hippersdorf,
past mountains to the west, past Kirchberg van wagen, past
a garden with an open umbrella in it lying on the ground,
past Essdorf/Straff, Hasersdorf am Kamp and Krems an Danau.
At Durnstein, we walk up to the old ruined castle, eat
a picnic lunch and look down at the Danube river valley.
We stood in the cell that reportedly held King Richard captive
until his minstrel Blondel set him free. Down in the village
below, church was just letting out and a gang of kids were
practicing their kung fu kicks and other fantastic movement.
We walk up and down the main street and go for a walk along
the river. The kids know how to navigate the street; we
see them at one end of the village and then at the other
end, enacting an exact rerun of their play each time we
see them. The group huddles in close, then breaks out into
running flying kicks and disperse into the stream of tourists.
We also repeat our walk back down to the river. Riverboats
with more tourists come and go and I think about Mark Twain
and the perpetual act of a river flowing. We are tourists
and drift down river and off to sleep until a commercial
tug barges past going upstream with a huge wake.
§
We found the hidden bookshop only after an infusion of
caffeine and sugar in the café Diglas (big wide windows
open full to the street, fringed lampshades tickled in the
breeze, faded red velvet seats, dark wood, satisfaction).
The book shop was special. It was down a lane, in a courtyard:
photography, architecture, design.
Images that remind me what I think, access stored thoughts,
beliefs, hidden understanding (code breaking, breath-taking,
unburying): a line stretches down the highway; views of
the ocean; the light as it comes through water, through
glass, through leaves, through fringe on a café lampshade
just inside the open window.
CJ takes my picture as I write this, we get up and walk
out of the courtyard.
Monday, June 18th
23: Lin – 12 sentences
24: Mark – 6 sentences
Once I thought I had to be a one self. Perhaps it was the
question posed to me as a child. “What will you be
when you grow up, young lady?” The question required
one answer like a stationary dot on a map locating one town
from another, say Willow Brook from Burr Ridge. It pointed
one direction.
“An archeologist,” I replied.
It did not take long for this singular archeologist self
to dissolve as I negotiated being my brother’s sister,
a waitress, and a major in political science (for a while);
dance (for a while); education (for a while); sculpture
(for a while); and performance (for a while). Do you really
know where Willow Brook ends and Burr Ridge begins?
“It is precisely because definitions of the self
have changed that the traditional genres that speak for
the self … are being subverted and reinvented to accommodate
contemporary experience of being a person – a zone.
The sense of independence must now include, where it hasn’t
been replaced by, a sense of interdependence,” says
poet Lyn Hejinian.
And so I think it is with the performers in It’s
an Earthquake in My Heart. They travel through the
landscape of the piece and pause between Miss Ritmer, Hijikata,
Karen, a wounded soldier, a phantom child, Michael Caine,
Matthew, an insurance salesman, Mr. Kopchinsky, a car, Mark,
Bryan, Señor Wences.
§
I have decided to answer questions posed to us in the future.
I try and begin to understand where and how we live; it
appears important to discuss and respond to what we see
around us, of what we try to (not) understand. This may
be observation, a memory recall that somehow enters into
our world. It feels like we try to recreate the invisible
in the everyday - so that we begin to acknowledge and see
what is surrounding us. I have now become confused by what
I see around me. I have to begin to learn what is placed
in(visibly) again.
Tuesday, June 19th
25: Lin – 12 sentences
26: Mark – 7 sentences
Eleven changes to It’s an Earthquake in My Heart
made in Vienna for Zagreb.
1. Matthew will wear a shirt in Part 1 that says on the
back of the shirt “Part 1. Tuesday Morning”.
1. Matthew will wear a shirt in Part 2 that says on the
back of the shirt “Part 2. 53 Years Earlier.”
1. Matthew will wear a shirt in Part 3 that says on the
back of the shirt “Part 3. Tuesday Evening.
1. An insurance scene taken from the German film How
to Live in the German Federal Republic will replace
the first scene from Umbrellas of Cherbourg and
interrupt Mark’s driving commands.
1. An insurance scene taken from the German film How
to Live in the German Federal Republic will replace
the second scene from Umbrellas of Cherbourg and
interrupt Mark’s driving commands.
1. Mark will wear glasses in Part 1 and Part 3.
1. Mark will not wear glasses in Part 2.
1. Three lines will be edited from the Phantom Child text.
1. One line will be added to the final Civil War scene.
“I know about killing. It should not be so easy”.
1. Mark and Bryan will look at one another after they bump
in the car chases – Part 1.
1. Bryan will look at Mark when he does the Puppet Head
jump after he says the line “Now let’s talk
about something that’s easy to understand”.
§
Vienna, another commentary day of questions posed to us
in the future from Zagreb.
We begin to understand what values are inscribed into the
body through observation of ritual however small or tiny
it may be. I wonder if the structuring of the everyday during
childhood has given me the foundation to encounter life/art
with. The simplicity of eating meals around a family table
3 times a day. To learning small tasks around the house,
of scrubbing and chopping vegetables form the garden during
harvestime. The instructions appear to have prepared the
mind and body to work within disciplined language, remembering
actions and gestures becoming transcribed into the body.
To understand dedication.
{On June 19th, Veronica Kaup-Hasler gave us four
questions, related to It’s an Earthquake in My
Heart, for our journal project.
What is a hand?
What is dance?
What is structure or mathematics and your relation to it?
What is a bow? (in reference to the repeated bent-over posture).}
Wednesday, June 20th
27: Bryan – 12 sentences
28: Karen – 8 sentences
We ride the train south to Zagreb. I talked with a Slovakian
microbiologist who said “There is a beast sleeping
inside us and we don't know when it will wake up.”
The hand is the object that transforms the trees into chairs.
The hand proves our intelligence. Perhaps our own mind created
or evolved our hand. We conceived of a stone tool or a computer
and needed a hand with an opposable thumb to build it. Hundreds
of bones and muscles in the hand work with the brain to
create a tool that fits into the hand and assists the mind.
The scientific reasons are not enough to explain the existence
of our hands. At a casual glance they look like hooks or
carpenters tools and yet they are living things. These are
my hands yet they are not the same hands I had as a child.
I once heard that we replace the cells in our bodies every
7 years; so perhaps I could think that this is not my hand,
but that I am just using it for a short time. If I were
careless with this logic I might think the hand does not
belong to me and I would be less responsible with it.
§
The train to Zagreb from Vienna, outside the window the
poppies in the fields are red. And there is a red door into
the hillside. What lies behind it I can’t say: storage,
a shelter? From the train it’s just a red door in
the side of a grassy hill I try to make sense of—I
imagine opening it to the rich soil under the grass but
a deep hole opens up and earthen steps lead down into the
ground. It’s so dark that’s all I can see.
No, it’s Slovenia outside, the lampposts look like
trees. This isn’t odd, they are trees. What’s
odd is that they haven’t been made to look more like
posts, stripped of their twists and curves, their small
bumps.
Thursday, June 21st
29: CJ – 12 sentences
30: Lin – 9 sentences
Part 1 – What is a hand?
With the right hand pointed away from the body, palm upward,
you will squeeze out the negative energy - this is known
as ping energy, and is often concentrated in the
body’s extremities, the hands and feet. Using the
thumb and first finger of your left hand, squeeze your right
hand lightly. Apply this pressure at the base of the right
palm, and, maintaining this light squeezing pressure, follow
the line of each finger from that point to each fingertip
in turn. The action is similar to that of squeezing an almost-empty
tube of toothpaste. Repeat these instructions for the left
hand. This will expel the ping energy,
and refresh the body.
Now, look at your right hand: it does not move.
Imagine your hand is a carpenter’s tool, and place
it over the head of a small child while it is sleeping:
neither the hand nor the child move.
The voices cry out, distracting you, but the hand is steady,
and held out as the body drops: the hand does not move.
When the pain is at its mildest, in the early morning,
the hand can be used to write your stories: but when you
look closely, it does not move.
The hand protects, punishes, nurtures, manipulates.
The hand is a leaf, the body a tree.
§
Today is longest day of the year.
They have opened Stonehenge to revelers.
There is an eclipse in Africa.
It is the first day of our two-day workshop in Zagreb.
Visnja
Irena
Mirsolav
Ivan
Petra
Domagoj
Ana
Slaven
Marija
Vjeran
Ivana
Anna
Mario
Barbara
Yasuo
Tatianna
Mirna
Davor
Tatianna stops by at ten in the morning, to practice on
the piano in the theater where we are holding the workshop.
She stays and participates in the workshop instead. At three
in the afternoon, as we are leaving, we look at the empty
stage, and hear piano notes in the air. Tatianna, unseen,
has begun to practice offstage.
Friday, June 22nd
31: Karen – 12 sentences
32: Matthew – 10 sentences
After a life of hard work the body no longer straightens.
I saw old women in Japan, after years of work in rice fields
their backs remained in a bent position, they looked at
the ground.
When I dislocate myself to look at we four performers as
we slowly traverse the performance space bent at the waist
I see us resigned, restricted, resolute, we march taking
little space, making few waves or ripples trying hard not
to be noticed. But also: People as cars, as machines, as
facilitators of tasks, of work. Backs humped like the roofs
of cars. A slow game of imitation. This is the way the model
cars move on the model highway that cuts through the model
forest in the model hills. This is the way GM convinced
the city of Los Angeles to do away with the cable car.
The hand controls, protects, advises. The hand is the emissary
sent from the main body to explore, to test, to determine,
to control. The hand shows, the hand demonstrates, the hand
is action. The hand imitates; a mouth displaced.
§
Today commemorates the 1945 liberation of Zagreb, Mario
teaches me the salutation “smirt fascismu, sloboda
naradu” (death to fascism, liberation to the people),
and we watch CJ on the guest sofa of Good Morning, Croatia
before we start workshop day #2 with short site performances
at the dormitory complex.
Miroslav, Vishnja, and Ivan stage their piece on the vacant
café terrace, where their concentration and quietude
draw my attention to the hum of the rooftop ventilator fan
– “The ventilator in the corridor hums distractingly,
but not offensively: I started weeping (almost): ‘If
only for the purpose of listening to that ventilator, I
want to go on living, but, above all, my friend
must live.”
A dry wind accelerates at 4:25, as a #12 streetcar –
blue with beige trim, a silver roof, no advertising yet,
a lone passenger leaning out a window – glides its
metallic glide past the hotel on Savska Street.
Two 13-year-old boys sneak around the gym, whispering, trying
to watch our rehearsal (we work the part 1 changes), and
eventually they muster the courage to take two seats in
the back row.
This sadness I feel, is it mine or Croatia’s?
Unlike this writing project, whose structure sits accidentally
at the same table as its substance, our performance has
a form which grew from understanding its complex relations
– atipodal approaches to morphological fact.
“Hello, Goat Island! You are becoming inhabitants
of Zagreb,” it’s Milko the critic; we stop to
talk on the streetcar tracks, then over lunch he tells us
he has written a play, set in ancient Greece, wherein every
one of the 5,000 words spoken by the actors begins with
the letter p, “but WITH SENSE!” and the waiter
places a plate beside him and says, “Your watermelon,
professor.”
After the Macedonian performance, one of the few words of
which I understood was “smirt”, we discover
ourselves in the theater where we performed How Dear
to Me the Hour When Daylight Dies in 1996, then Marin
B. introduces himself and greets Mark with the words, in
reference to the injury, which Mark has apparently now forgotten,
that he (Mark) sustained in a 1999 The Sea & Poison
performance, “How is your head?”
Each new language contains new words: at 11:15 pm it rains,
I eat a toasted fried-cheese sandwich named Pohani Sir,
and if days had names, I would call June 22, 2001 Above
All My Friend Must Live.
We worked not knowing where what we did belonged, or whether
it belonged anywhere at all.
Saturday, June 23rd
33: Mark – 12 sentences
34: CJ – 11 sentences
I wake from a dream, in Part One of Earthquake,
- Tuesday morning ‘rain’ - instead of fans on
our hearts we have umbrellas opened out and twirling.
Tonight we have a dress rehearsal in the school gymnasium,
before this I take a walk to the old part of town to the
13th century church of St Marks. Here the ceramic mosaic
church roof tiles sweltered and melt in the brilliance of
sunshine. I stumbled upon a 'just married' couple, here
a crowd of people paraded and showered the bride and groom
in rose petals. From their hands came a memory of remembrance
for the future. I think of our small white circular confetti
paper we use in Earthquake, of how we transform and transpose
materials from the hand into the air an explosion - slowdown
and interrupt an archway of imminent celebration and disaster.
In the town square later in the day a brass band plays.
Yesterday was a public holiday for antifascism after World
War II, today a crowd gathers surrounding the band on all
four sides. Grown elderly men wipe tears from their eyes.
On the opposite side 7 elderly women all wearing 1960s plastic
framed glasses sang and clapped with their hands merrily.
I felt as if I had gone back in time 30 years. I bowed my
head and walked away.
§
Part 2 – What is dance?
In Part 2 of the performance It’s an Earthquake
in My Heart, with the other performers engaged in different
movements, Karen stands still. She bends at the knees, arms
held out by her sides as if for balance, slowly lowering
her body further and further downwards, until the upper
body starts to arch forwards, her knees touch the floor,
and soon afterwards her head to one side rests on the floor
– arms outstretched in opposite directions, also on
the floor, palms upwards. The position is held for what
seems like a long time. It is one point of many where the
amount of movement taking place in the performance exceeds
what we are capable of perceiving; we have to choose, sometimes
involuntarily, where to direct our attention. Karen’s
movement and position evokes personal prayer, ritual, supplication,
prostration, a giving of oneself to a higher power; this
individual dedication sits distinctly alongside the other
movement in the performance.
You notice that the fingers on the upturned palms are slowly
moving, and what seemed to be a static position actually
contains movement, and movement which links to Part 1 of
the performance, where Matthew, as the instructor of trainee
insurance salesmen, discusses how distracting and unnecessary
three fingers of his right hand are.
From this observation of Karen’s fingers I made the
following notes:
1. dance is a misleading word; movement
is better.
2. movement contains our history, traces of activities performed
by us or witnessed by us in the past.
3. movement is squeezed out involuntarily.
4. we extract from the body that which has been forgotten,
which lies dormant, which is traced in the arc of a hand,
the confirmation of a foot.
Sunday, June 24th
35: Matthew – 12 sentences
36: Bryan – 12 sentences
At 11:05 pm after our first Zagreb performance of It’s
an Earthquake in My Heart, I attempt to transcribe 5 minutes
of conversation at a café with Lin Hixson (director),
Scott Gillete (technical director), CJ Mitchell (company
manager), Karen Christopher, and Mark Jeffery (members),
and the Ghost of Morton Feldman (American composer).
Lin: The audience definitely stayed with it.
CJ: Unless they’re actively smiling or actively groaning,
everything in between is really hard to gauge – unlike
Vienna where 25% left on average a night – here we
had 117 seats and about 20 more people than that in attendance.
Scott: I moved the tech table back to make room because
they sat on every available surface, and this one woman,
I thought she was looking at me through the whole show,
until afterwards when she came over and picked up the Baudrillard
book I had on my table – she’d had her eye on
it all night.
Lin: Some people left tonight who really couldn’t
see, and I went down and apologized to them and told them
to try to come back tomorrow.
Mark: How can they say we’re bloody old fashioned?
Scott: A lot of people think the show has to fit into a
part of history.
Ghost of Morton Feldman: In fact, identification with a
historical position has an irresistable attraction for the
artist, in that it offers known goals, the illusion of safety,
the temporary knowledge that nothing succeeds in art –
like someone else’s success.
Scott: Just put a tv in the show.
Karen: People who are saying that are looking at it but
not seeing it.
Lin: They think we’re going to confront them with
boredom, like seventies New York performance art –
but we’re not putting raw meat on our heads.
Ghost of Morton Feldman: What is imminent, we find, is neither
the past nor the future, but simply – the next ten
minutes…we can go no further than that, and we need
go no further, because if art has its heaven, perhaps this
is it.
§
We take a walk past a house that I stayed in several years
ago (I notice that it has not received the repairs it needed
then) and on up until the cobble stone becomes a dirt trail
which leads into the hills north of Zagreb.
When Tatsumi Hijikata became a member of Goat Island after
his death (see Matthew Goulish’s book 39 Microlectures
in Proximity of Performance, p.10) he taught us how
to bow. Some cultures worship the sun but we pay our respects
and dance to the clouds. We began this performance by researching
cloud formations and sent balloons up to the sky. We looked
up and traced a drop of water as it fell down through a
cloud and used the levels as a formal structure for our
performance . . . a high section of standing; a mid level
section of bending over (bowing) which includes Hijikata’s
words; and a heavy weighted low section with water on the
floor. Tonight we performed It’s an Earthquake
in My Heart in Zagreb. In my is heart earthquake is
the literal English translation of the title in Croatian
(U mom je srcu potres). Visnja said it can be said
in other ways as can everything be said in more than one
way. The show goes well and the audience is magnificent
as they have transformed the gymnasium we are using into
a performance space. I spoke too soon at the end of the
show and we missed Mark's last line of the Civil War scene
which I am sorry about; so I will write it here: “I
know about killing. It should not be so easy.”
Lin is always first to meet us back stage after the show
and we talk about how it went and then Jake is next to bounce
in.
Monday, June 25th
37: Karen – 12 sentences
38: CJ – 12 sentences
39: Bryan – 1 sentences
All these rehearsals, all these imitations: life unceasingly
prepares its own disappearance. We suffer in advance of
suffering. We anticipate the struggle. We prepare ourselves
for the inevitable. We hope: Nothing can ever surprise us.
We were told by a friend it was a holiday, our guide in
Zagreb tells us it was a class in the “old system”
that she never took or doesn’t remember. She said,
it is from the old system, it was something in grade school—it
was called: Nothing can ever surprise us.
Will you put me in your performance? Will you be in mine?
It’s an Earthquake in my Heart looks inward,
it deals with subject matter you won’t trace to the
newspapers. Newspapers don’t report on the poetics
of everyday life and the ordinary task of surviving the
day in front of you. The disaster will appear in black and
white and maybe the follow up but never the rupture on the
internal landscape—the landscape of my heart.
§
Part 3 – What is structure?
1. When Part 2 begins, we remember Part 1; when Part 3
begins we remember Parts 1 and 2; throughout Part 3, we
remember Parts 1 and 2, and what we have already experienced
of Part 3.
2. Could structure be a question and not a statement?
3. Could structure be a process that we move within?
4. Does structure rely on repetition, on echoes within
the performance?
5. We create structure through recollection.
6. A cross section of the head’s structure reveals
memory.
7. Interruptions occupy space within sentences: the text
of the sentence is a structural foundation.
8. A structure undermines itself and its foundation
9. A structure is comprised of diversions.
10. The boy holds the man,
The eyes vacant and bruised,
Hands are moving clouds.
11. The dancer is exhausted.
12. Two bodies collide in a rainstorm.
§
Petra said: The slow repetition of the rain text is a collection
for the unconscious logical cycle of the car rising and
the tree falling.
{On June 25th, Natasha Govedic, theatre critic,
gave us three questions for our journal project.
Do you find art being a distinct theological discipline,
where dedication, vocation, not to mention spirituality
is of utmost importance?
Are you concerned in some activist projects outside theatre?
I would also like to ask each performer individually, what
is her/his attitude of ecology?
How does the group work in terms of hierarchy and some aspects
of preparing and rehearsing performance: who is choosing
the theme and selecting the material; how often do you meet
and rehearse?}
Tuesday, June 26th
40: Matthew – 12 sentences
41: Lin – 12 sentences
42: Mark – 2 sentences
People cannot expect to live an ecological life when they
detest insects.
Every morning in Hotel Inter-Continental Zagreb room #1213
Lin hung her nightgown on the bathroom inside doorknob,
and after she’d left the room I moved it to the wall
hook because things hung on doorknobs disturb me, and she
didn’t notice – but yesterday as I repeated
the task and looked at the squarish wall hook, a type we
do not have in the US, I felt something stir inside me:
will this be what it means to miss a place?
The shirt signs evoked a new theatrical experience for me
– laughter at my back.
I perform only for the as-yet unborn child of the most attentive
audience member at any given moment – this thought
came to me during last night’s show, and at times
I felt that attentive future presence, and felt connected
with it as by the string of a musical instrument, tuned
not too taught or slack, helping me focus “beyond
the ridiculous husks and boundaries” of my abilities,
this audience, this life.
In the morning, we attend an open rehearsal of a dance piece
by Bad Company at which I learn the word microphona
and the phrase sto je bilo.
Lin said the linear movements and intentions of the dancers
evoked presences – a different ghost for each performer.
In response to the first part of the piece, I drew a diagram.
Identifiable Muzak Tunes Heard in the Hotel Inter-Continental
Zagreb, alphabetized and rated in order of preference (1=favorite,
15=least favorite):
Can-Can Song – 13;
Cherish – 10;
Close To You – 11;
Day By Day – 8;
Evergreen – 6;
It’s Yesterday Once More – 15;
Love Is All Around – 1;
Love Me Tender – 7;
Man of La Mancha – 14;
People Who Need People – 9;
Sentimental Journey – 2;
Seventy-Six Trombones – 12;
Something Stupid – 5;
‘Till There Was You – 3;
Until It’s Time For You To Go – 4.
Departure: yesterday from the hotel room window I could
see the train passing; now from the train window I see the
hotel passing.
Lexicon of Croatian Words and Phrases Learned, alphabetized
and rated in order of preference (1=favorite, 15=least favorite):
blitva (dalmatian cabbage) – 1;
book (hello/goodbye) – 7;
dovizenja (goodbye) – 15;
izlaz (exit) – 13;
lipanj (June) – 8;
microphona (microphone) – 5;
nije izlaz (not an exit) – 3;
pohani sir (breaded cheese, sometimes in sandwich form)
– 10;
ribarska vecer (fisherman’s dinner) – 12;
rucak (lunch) – 6;
sloboda naradu (liberation for the people) – 11;
spivanic (nap) – 2;
sto je bile (what happened) – 14;
ulaz (entrance) – 9;
zajutrak (breakfast) – 4.
Between rising and falling mountains, like a succession
of curtains constantly raised and lowered before the eyes,
the train compartment with us inside crosses precisely the
border between Central and Eastern Europe.
The landscape instinct buries biography.
§
I have some thoughts for Bad Company.
Who is it that hangs like ether alongside your breath as
you twist your leg or open your mouth, wide?
Someone once told me she thought a dancing body was a no-body.
I had the opposite feeling when watching you.
A hand swung up into the air with a wave sent forth to
an unknown time –
A man falling flat to the ground like a plank balanced ever
so lightly on its end until
the balance no longer holds
These could only be done by very particular some-bodies.
And I left rehearsal holding a bit of each of you like soil
taken from land as a memento.
You evoke worlds otherwise unlocatable as if a map criss-crossed
a yard
where my father long dead mowed the lawn
where my mother long dead cut rhubarb
where my uncle long dead leaned over to swat a fly
I have recently become an advocate of understanding less
(to become stupefied) in order to
see more.
§
Zagreb 05:45
Does a dance become a body bowed over a train or airplane
connecting European landscapes?
1. Years and years of Austrian family Christmasses planted
in backyards disappear with a traintrack eye,
2. Silver birch electricity pylons flickering – 30,000
feet in the air – 22:35, hello London.
Wednesday, June 27th
43: Bryan – 12 sentences
44: Mark – 12 sentences
45: Matthew – 3 sentences
This is a terminal event. A rehearsal for dying where the
ending is the beginning and we try to learn how to leave
some things behind. We get to the end of a line we have
been standing in all morning and on the other side is Tom's
microphone on a stand unplugged and amplifying silence.
Today there is a live video feed from a camera mounted under
the jet. Our shadow on the ground gets smaller as we get
higher and the higher we climb in the air the faster our
shadow crosses the fields and forests below us. We cross
several fields in a second and the farmer is startled by
the shadow that flickers darkness over his mower. Then suddenly
the live feed video is replaced by an animated colossal
airplane flying over a map of the whole world. We follow
a dotted line that stretches out in front of us across the
ocean, following a long line of our fore fathers and mothers
who have made this trip before us.
I think about the color red as the zero moment of consciousness
and fear, of stop and blood and stuck and the beginner’s
mind.
We near O'Hare and the live video returns but cuts out just
before we touch the landing strip of American land. The
flight attendant said they turn it off for safety reasons.
Perhaps it is so those who have weak constitutions will
not be startled at sight of touching the earth.
§
London: I have had to come back to renew my work visa at
the US Embassy. I stay with a friend and recent Goat Island
film collaborator, Lucy Cash (formerly Lucy Baldwyn). We both have one of those
brilliant London days hopping on and off red buses, lots
of catching up to be done.
We take ourselves to the Serpentine Gallery to see two exhibits
of Rachel Whiteread and Daniel Libeskind. The Whiteread
exhibit demands a certain specific time frame I had forgotten
about; a clear detail of materials that has counterbalance
by the use of the sculptress casting familiar objects –
bed, bath, mattress. The evocative nature of this work is
by the language of memory, it takes time for it to arrive,
a casting of a bed base brings a tear to my eye and I can't
say why.
Outside in the garden is a pavilion cafe designed by Libeskind,
we take a coffee break. The Chevrolet Goat Island ‘earthquake’
space was partially influenced by the group viewing his
Jewish Museum in Berlin. We were sitting contained within
a fabric metal structure that looked as if natural forces
had pushed the structure out to an angle of 35 degrees.
We became immediately aware of his use of the infinite,
the skyline, the framing of grass, tree, fence becoming
transformed. I imagined performing Earthquake in
this outdoor space, wishing everyone else was here. Reminder
to myself, bring in Godard’s Band a Parte
to rehearsal in the future.
§
On the return flight we have the exact same seat configuration
as on the excursion, a symmetry disrupted only by air, and
we think about how much has changed, but wouldn’t
swear to the details, were this the time or place for them,
since one may reasonably question only that which can give
an answer.
The man behind me in the US customs re-entry line with an
ID that reads UNMIK (United Nations Mission In Kosovo) tells
me, “The more you learn the more you understand how
little you know,” appeasing only briefly the irritation
born of doubt.
We await more sleep itself awaiting more days.
{On June 27th, Mario Kovac, student of theatre directing
at the Academy of Drama Arts in Zagreb, gave us two questions
for our journal project.
Regarding the fact that the piece in a way and partially
seems to speak of childhood nostalgia and collective memory,
I would like to know whether the fact that it is not aware
of some motives and specific (almost local) cultural or
community codes (but also songs, TV serial etc that the
group refers to and that the ordinary American recognizes
easily), does somehow “handicap” the Croatian
and generally “non-American” audience?
Where does all this energy and will-power (which I sincerely
admire) comes from, since Goat Island is not your only work
place?}
Thursday, June 28th
46: Mark – 12 sentences
47: Bryan – 12 sentences
48: Karen – 4 sentences
Today I have taken a four hour coach trip north of London
to reach my family home. On the bus I ask myself over and
over do we create memories of non existent places, places
of the imaginary, for my body remembers and yet my mind
has forgotten.
On the bus we go through small market towns, (there appears
to be silent death in these English towns, retail shops
closing down, shops for let), and yet further along the
road brand new high streets are being created through vast
out-of-town shopping malls. I feel as if my memory collapses
back and forth between an America I know, an America I observed
through TV screen and the dead high street submerged by
what appears to be a lost present. I haven't returned to
the UK for nearly a year, do things normally move forward
this quickly or have I taken myself back and revisited this
place I knew 20 years ago when I was eight years old?
There is a quiet, fields lay empty, vast clumps of crimson
poppies bleed and memorialize the fields. There are no animals
to be seen, the horror of the foot-and-mouth epidemic is
viewed through a glass bus window. I feel compelled to ask
questions to people to put on a fake American accent so
they won't think I'm stupid. I try to make sense of the
quietness. Confusion and memory ignite the body, history
of the American civil war of the buried dead in Vicksburg,
Mississippi, of a large mass grave in the English countryside.
There are numerous scars in this landscape I have never
witnessed before.
Down the country lane where my family live we drive through
disinfected straw in the car, at the front door to the house
is a disinfected mat to wipe your feet on to stop the spread
of the disease, welcome home Mark.
§
I wake up at 3:30 am and spend the morning trying to distinguish
between trivial and important details and then notice a
wart on my left hand ring finger.
An email from Zagreb asks about theological discipline I
am not sure that art is, but I think that collaboration
is a theological discipline. In the sense that God for me
is a community of Humans working together. I think that
the viewing of these performance works can be a theological
discipline in the sense that in the theater audiences are
collaboratively engaged in a meditation of sorts to become
a part of the work with their understanding. We are on the
edge of failure and misunderstanding and mis-communication
and these are the places where God is thought to enter.
I think that spiritual events occur when knowledge is gained;
where people are allowed to sit quietly and listen until
a thought occurs. In Earthquake the textural references
to theological biblical literature come from a translation
of verses from the book of Acts by Michel Serres, referring
to the Pentecostal event of experiencing tongues of fire
while meditating as a group. We have found this text to
be important enough to include because it refers to a reversal
of the disaster of mis-communication between nations. Again,
here I believe that approaching God or God-like states begins
with a community of Humans. A true community of Humans assumes
communication with words, language and actions that accept,
understand and even encourage differences. There is also
another theological connection which is the commitment and
dedication to the use of the human body in our performances
because it is through the human body that I think we make
our main connection to whatever God is.
{On June 28th, Marin Blasevic, editor of Frakcija,
gave us one question for our journal project.
My question goes to the whole group but also to Karen in
particular for three "situations", in which she
was involved during the first performance of "Earthquake"
here in Zagreb, have made me think of your relationship
to the audience. The first one was during the opening "scene"
and it was, in some way, I suppose, deliberate: the eye
contact (while Karen keeps turning around).
Two other cases were accidental: first Karen slightly hit
somebody in the first row while running with her wooden
"shoes" and in her next run approached to the
spectator for a second and apologized (even touched him/her,
as far as I can remember... btw, the next day Mark also
accidentally hit somebody sitting almost in the same place,
but did not interrupt the flow/flux of performance... I
do not think he was supposed to do it, but the question
would be was he aware of it and did it disturb him in some
way, does he remember it? do you/does he think it disturbed
the particular spectator? is he/she, the spectator, expected
to allow physical contact of that kind, even if it was not
meant to happen, and even if it was far away from intentional
"aggression"?).
Later, Karen is waiting "backstage" and the loud
sound of the car trumpet (sorry, I do not know the correct
word) obviously annoyed a little girl who was sitting in
the audience. The little girl put her arms on her ears and
Karen noticed this. And then, it seemed to me that I saw
a sweet smile on Karen's face.
Now, the question would be: what do you think/feel about
the communication, or should I better say - interaction,
with the audience, whether it is deliberate or accidental,
whether it has an effect on your concentration/focus (only?),
or effects the whole emotional/mental/intellectual/organic
complex of the specific moment while performing, or even
does leave traces on the whole performance. Or, is it without
any effect? Did you ever think of investigating more direct,
physical, verbal etc., contact, communication, interaction
with the audience (beside the almost "organic"
experience that your performing calls for, at least on the
first and the most intensive level of reception, just before
that moment of provoking "inner images", and long
time before the interpretative and intellectual reflection
starts to condense)? If you have already worked on that
"border" before "How dear to me..",
which was the first performance of yours I have seen, why
have you stopped? If you avoid it, why?
Of course, when people leave your performance loudly and
slam a door, what kind of "resistance" do you
feel? What would happen if some of you would become so irritated
that she/he interrupts the performance and shouts: "could
you please vanish without so much noise?", or even
"could you do it a little bit louder", or, "sorry
we did not WALTZ for you"?}
§
In the performance I have a line, I say: There are real
children in the world. In the moment of performance the
small child got out of her seat and put her hands in the
water that my costume was waiting in. I smiled at her, I
wanted to engage with her to bring her into the performance,
I thought if she were engaged with the performance she would
leave my costume alone. I blew the car horn, she put her
hands over her ears, she got back into her seat to watch
the rest of the show.
Friday, June 29th
49: Lin – 12 sentences
50: Matthew – 12 sentences
51: CJ – 5 sentences
In 1972, I majored for one semester in dance at The University
of Oregon and failed. I could not point my toes properly
and I could not copy and perform the complicated dance patterns
in Belinda Cartwright’s Intermediate Modern Jazz class.
In 1984, I saw Pina Bausch’s company perform in the
Olympic Arts Festival in Los Angeles. I was mesmerized by
the personal, quirky styles of each performer; the varied
physical types; the different ages; the many mother tongues.
In 1999, I gave the four members of Goat Island dance segments
on video taken from Pina Bausch’s company. I asked
them to copy the movements and bring them to rehearsal.
In 2000, I watched rehearsals for our performance It’s
an Earthquake in My Heart. I was mesmerized by the
failure of Bryan, Karen, Mark, and Matthew to achieve the
filmed version of Bausch’s choreography. Each one
seemed to be reaching for a gesture outside of themselves
while performing the gesture with themselves – a process
of self-quoting and citation from another source, simultaneously.
I liked the idea that we would never get these movements
right; that we were staging a failure. With the inability
to succeed, we were given a stuttering. We were given fragility.
We were given unstable possibilities.
§
To resist the violence of dullness, precision; to resist
the violence of war, slowness.
Immobility in space becomes immobility in time, motorization
becomes forgetting, memory a traffic jam.
Although close, we see it as through a telescope.
There is no joy in leading people to a place where they
already are.
Arrange the whole in parts, arrange the parts in sections,
arrange the sections in moments, structure the moments,
carefully allow appropriate disruptions.
Perfect a frame to contain every accident.
We have two modes of repetition: internal (alignment of
intention) and external (alignment of appearance).
The volition of every action leaves an imprint on the mental
continuum, where it remains a potentiality until meeting
with condition favorable to its maturation, whereupon it
awakens and produces an effect compensatory to the original
action.
Impose a structure (mathematics) onto a substance which
resists it (behavior).
Reveal the dimension of the familiar, a still hand –
a benediction.
As when with distance constellations emerge from infinite
single points, we leave the year half over, the month of
June behind.
Every fraction, a difference.
§
We are in transition, eyelids heavy in the evening.
As night falls, the house turns to darkness.
A walk after dinner with Karen.
Tiredness is in our bones.
Thoughts and conversation come sporadically, we are mostly
silent.
{On June 30th, Sergei and Nikolina Pristas, members
of the performance group Bad Company, gave us 8 questions
for our journal project.
1. Performers of Goat Island give an impression of great
dedication and concentration on the material they are performing,
as if they are closed within this organism that we call
a performance. What is your attitude towards the audience,
and on which level does the exchange take place?
2. Do you build the structure of individual scenes (chains,
series, complications) according to some extrinsic models
or do they spring out of specific characters of the themes,
motives your dealing with...
3. How do you specify your roles in the performance? On
which level is a role organized and unfolded?
4. There is an impression of “workness” throughout
the performance. Your costumes look like working suits,
is this fact connected to your approach to your work (performance)?
5.Why, of all choreographers, Pina Bausch? Considering that
you present two radically different if not opposite theatre
positions, so...
6. How did you approach the choreographic material taken
from, as I understood, Pina Bausch's several choreographies?
You couldn't have included everything in your performance,
so what was the criterion for you, for your choice?
When you choose, how do you treat the material from that
point on?
7. It is clear that one of the starting points for your
work is always autobiografical and individual, but does
it ever happen the other way round, in the sence that the
material of the performance starts invading your autobiography
and as such maybe enter your next performance?
8. There is an impression of great importance of "chance"
during the process of work even though it doesn't show at
all in the performance itself, quite on the contrary...}
Saturday, June 30th
52: CJ – 12 sentences
53: Karen – 12 sentences
54: Lin – 6 sentences
Katrina Horne – Tender
Installation at The Spareroom, Chicago
Can I eat quietly?
Can I eat peacefully?
What is happening to the food inside me?
an installation to be viewed one at a time
To be given space for oneself, public space given to one
person for a time. It feels like a gentle coercion or provocation.
A one to one relationship with the installation, the two
spaces of the installation. No one else to relate to, to
make a connection with, to locate myself against, to share
the experience of the installation with, even by eye contact.
The illumination of the central nervous system, a transparency,
a lightness, a fragility is echoed across x-rays, a hazy
video projection, rubber balloons, exposed floor structure.
How is it possible to fill space with presence? Candle
light suggests a vigil, a memorial. Do x-rays reveal health
or illness?
How ill will I be when I’m 50? 60?
Weaknesses will cultivate bacteria, disease.
§
A viewer wonders about the role of the audience in a Goat
Island performance and about moments when the performers
seem to look at the audience.
In The Sea & Poison I made a specific point
of looking at the audience, the moment was about coming
eye to eye with witnesses, I had to make eye contact. Other
times it is essential not to puncture the membrane that
surrounds the performance and maintains its climate.
In It’s an Earthquake in my Heart, with
the audience all the way around the performance: 1) The
viewer runs the risk of being the object of the look, 2)
Being looked at, the audience becomes just as aware of their
own reactions as they are of the performance itself.
We are just people in the same room. A small child does
not understand the performance in the same way an adult
does, and since experiences imprint children so deeply I
felt it important to acknowledge her with a small smile.
We all see the child – she, along with the rest of
the audience, is part of the performance and perhaps we
all feel better if the child is not sacrificed to an intolerant
performance. The moment in progress is the most important
moment. The people who are there are creating that moment
and in ways we are never sure of so are people who are not
there.
The phone rang in the audience, one woman’s phone
rang and she turned it off. Because we are all so close
everyone must embrace this event, it cannot be ignored.
The next few moments were filled with the movement of many
other hands reaching into pockets and bags for phones to
turn them off.
§
The evening is warm.
In Chicago, in my neighborhood, people sit on their doorsteps.
Someone is bouncing a basketball over and over.
A constant rhythm like the rhythm I carry from Zagreb when
we were waiting in a school gym to perform a late show and
a multitude of men bounced basketballs outside, in a cement
yard, over and over again.
This is only a recollection.
Like a bird it leaves no trace of its wings in flight.
§§§
Source Notes
2: sentence 1 – Give My Regards to Eighth Street
– Collected Writings of Morton Feldman, B. H.
Friedman, ed., page 13, Exact Change, Cambridge, 2000.
9 – “the past is now part of my future, the
present is well out of hand” - joy Division, “Heart
and Soul”, from the album Closer
13: sentence 8 – The Demons, Heimito von
Doderer, R. & C. Winston tr., page 160, Sun & Moon
Press, Los Angeles, 1993.
13: sentence 10 – Vienna – A guide to recent
architecture, Ingerid Helsing Almaas, page 100, Ellipsis,
London, 1996.
23 – The Language of Inquiry, Lyn Hejinian,
page 235, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los
Angeles, 2000.
32: sentence 2 – The Language of Inquiry,
page 377.
32: sentence 10 – Give My Regards to Eighth Street
– Collected Writings of Morton Feldman, page 22
35: sentence 8 – Give My Regards to Eighth Street
– Collected Writings of Morton Feldman, page 21.
35: sentence12 – Give My Regards to Eighth Street
– Collected Writings of Morton Feldman, page 32.
40: sentence 4 – The Demons, pages 18.
40: sentence 11 – The Demons, pages 547,
583.
40: sentence 12 – The Cold of Poetry, Lyn
Hejinian, page 129, Sun & Moon Press, Los Angeles, 1994.
45: sentence 1 – The Cold of Poetry, page
127.
45: sentence 3 – The Cold of Poetry, page
128.
50: sentence 8 – The Noble Eightfold Path –
Way to the End of Suffering, Bhikku Bodhi, page 20,
Buddhist Publication Society, Seattle, 1994.
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