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Moving Backward, Forwards Remembering:
Goat Island Performance Group
Sara Jane Bailes
The first time I saw Goat Island’s work in the school
hall of a briny sea-town on the coast of Wales, I quietly,
comfortably, fell asleep. Actually, it was a slip into a
mild state of reverie, between sleeping and waking. That
threshold where, if lucky, we sometimes retrieve our dreams,
and dreaming feels like a kind of remembering. I felt safe,
secure, and utterly seduced. I’ve since had to wonder
at what happened, for in years of making and watching performance,
this had never occurred – this drift into a hypnotic
register. Fading in and out of The Sea & Poison
(1998) that night, I swooned into the unfamiliar folds of
a strange language; and perhaps this is an accurate way
to describe what the company brings to the spectator –
the gift of another language. They describe a world which,
like all experiences with things strange, is unfamiliar
yet coherent, difficult to understand and beautiful to behold.
It is a world full of subverted grammar and unruly syntax.
Goat Island release expression from the burden of meaning,
giving breath to the cramped spaces of live representation
by imaginatively reassembling its vectors and, arguably,
its very purpose. Time expands, something shifts; and the
world is not the same place afterwards. The company’s
commitment to fathoming the logic and aesthetics of a restructured
world is rare, precious even. As is waking to find yourself
in a hall full of people hushed, transfixed and forward-leaning,
as a small man meticulously plants a bean on his head, and
nurtures it lovingly with a watering-can.
Chicago-based performance group Goat Island has evolved
a performance language that is strikingly original and,
once witnessed, instantly recognizable. It is dominated
by a distinct movement vocabulary - an assemblage of what
sometimes look like backwards gestures threaded forwards
through time, displacing gravity, such as when the four
performers in the 1991 show Can't Take Johnny to the
Funeral run while lying flat on their backs, or catch
their own legs and hop forward in a self-restricting motile
sequence. An engagement with impossibility marks this physical
vocabulary, and with tasks that are difficult and awkward
to perform. The spectator feels caught in a strange loop-back
effect that throws perception off, with its uncanny combination
of grace and awkwardness, of stilted moves which appear
to draw the performers through narratives we only partially
glimpse. Performances combine movement, text, music, and
composed tableaux with the occasional incorporation of furniture
- the odd table, desk or chair - and poignant, functional
objects to invoke an event or to bring us more tangibly
into a particular fictive or historical world.
When Karen Christopher pumps and then hoists to her back
a hazard yellow canister with an attached spray gun in The
Sea & Poison, we sense immediately that something
is awry in this measured world, where the performers' ungainly
but eloquent frog-like movements already hint at deformity.
The marked-out arenas in which they perform - usually flanked
by the audience on two, three, or four sides - are bare.
But soon the space is inscribed with the movements and patterns
they make, punctuated by breath as it slows or pants the
body through exertion. By 15 minutes into the show, the
room no longer feels empty, pounded by the residue of this
physical labor, and the image of the four members' extended
jumping sequence. Elevating themselves vertically in pogo-stick
leaps, they work in a square, one arm folded up behind their
backs. Through this movement - part gymnastics, part punk,
but then again, not really of either world - they begin,
cease, and begin again, following their own collective course.
These shards of scenic and choreographed interplay appear
as remnants of another system, another world, half-lived
and half-hoped for. And somehow, we as audience are caught
in the imaginative space between these two states. Together,
these aesthetic strategies make up a minutely organized
schematic for un-telling stories. Things unravel and drift
apart, only to fall squarely, evenly into place with mathematical
precision.
The company formed in 1987, and has undergone several changes
in its membership since. The current ensemble - Karen Christopher,
Matthew Goulish, Mark Jeffery, Lin Hixson, company manager
CJ Mitchell, Bryan Saner - have collaborated since 1996.
(Note: changes to company membership have taken place since
this essay was written. Please see list of current members.)
They have now completed their second full-length work together
(Goat Island has completed 7 performance pieces in a 14-year
life), which premiered in Vienna, June 2001, and in Chicago
Spring, 2002. The show is currently touring while the company
simultaneously develop their next performance. Titled
It’s an Earthquake in My Heart, the piece was
focused initially by a study of immobility, cars and accidents,
and the tension produced by arrested or derailed movement.
By physically imitating the chase and pursuit patterns of
a car accident, and incorporating specific sequences copied
from Pina Bausch’s seminal dance piece Café
Muller, the company create connective passageways that
open into larger themes. With Earthquake, the company
acknowledges the German choreographer’s place and
influence on their work. Since the late 1970’s, Bausch’s
dances, created for and with her permanent company Tanztheater
Wuppertal, have influenced groups such as Goat Island,
who strive to discover an original theatrical vocabulary,
and one that evolves through a sustained creative working
process that incorporates spoken text, movement, and gesture.
Bausch’s performance aesthetic, at once tender and
brutal, emerges at the intersection of dance and theater,
and pushes hard into the limits of both. It suggests physically
and emotionally charged ways to narrate desire and, specifically,
the love and loss of relationships, ricocheting between
moments of mournful tragedy and the extreme comedy that
often accompanies such desperate moments. In Earthquake,
Goat Island use the physical efforts and conditions of making
a performance to explore the territories of memory and the
aftermath of destruction. These are common themes in their
work, which engages with some of the major social and geopolitical
issues of our times - the incomprehensible destruction of
war, our refusal to acknowledge atrocity, and our irresponsible
plundering and poisoning of the planet. They ask, what does
it mean to live within the repeated aftermath of catastrophe?
To survive the traumatic event? And we wonder as we watch,
how it is that we surrender to this strange language, as
if we knew it from another time.
Alongside the ongoing labor of their lengthy devising/rehearsal
process - usually a period of one and a half to two years
- the company holds summer schools in Chicago and various
locations in Europe, sharing their collective methods with
students and artists who work in disciplines ranging from
architecture to poetry. The courses are less taught than
led by the company members, who provide an elaborate scheme
of tasks, exercises, lectures and fieldtrips from which
the participants’ collaborative installations and
performances evolve. As an extension of this practice, their
work with children in local schools investigates the community-building
aspects of performance-making, creating structures of value
in a collaborative and playful learning environment.
Goat Island’s aesthetic and political values evolve
continually under the acute guidance and intricate sensibilities
of director Lin Hixson. Hixson’s extensive performance
art background in LA (she was influenced by Rudy Perez among
others, and in 1990 worked with Rachel Rosenthal) informs
a praxis insistent on interdisciplinarity. In rehearsal,
they work from many sources, such as personal narrative,
documentary footage, found images or observed and copied
gestures (such as the Bausch movements), and fragments of
text. This approach encourages work that resists the usual
hierarchy of formal features consistent with traditional
theater practice, or the development of meaning through
linear narrative. Instead the performance unfolds as a network
of associations. As with other collaborative performance
groups who prefer an egalitarian approach to making work
(such as Lucky Pierre, also Chicago-based; Elevator Repair
Service in New York; and Forced Entertainment in England),
the role of the director is functional and necessary, in
helping construct the interior world of the performance,
and assess its overall shape. Despite this, the performers,
alongside Hixson, are responsible for the conception, research
and writing of the work, and each member brings her/his
own found and formed material to the process. In the 1996
How Dear to Me the Hour When Daylight Dies, specific
personalities who bare significance within the broken narratives
of the twentieth century became a focal point; for example,
Amelia Earhart's television appearances, and in particular
her clipped delivery, interested Karen Chrisopher. A route
of inquiry became apparent for The Sea & Poison,
when Bryan Saner recounted the incident of his finger being
bitten by “a small creature” on a camping trip
in the Grand Canyon. The following morning, Saner’s
arm was streaked red from wrist to elbow. As one of many
narratives concerned with the altered states our bodies
undergo when poisoned, the story informed the final performance.
In many ways Goat Island’s work sits more comfortably
in a genealogy of performance art rather than theatre, though
such categories are, in any case, unstable and contextual.
Their use of written/spoken text is spare, especially in
earlier pieces such as Can’t Take Johnny to the
Funeral, where long, durational movement sequences
are punctuated by brief, verbal exchanges. The texts used
are both original and found, the latter borrowed directly
from sources such as film, TV or literature. Often these
echo with the histories of their origins. Testimonies are
delivered, those ‘truthful’ inscriptions we
rely on to bring us authenticity, and that we hope will
bring us closer to the experience of something ‘real’,
whatever that might mean any more. At the same time, this
harried juggling of events and people in their performances
problematizes the distinction we tend to make between fact
and fiction. Gradually, this illusive division fades, or
is, for the duration of a performance, no longer applicable.
In How Dear to Me the Hour When Daylight Dies,
we hear the amplified words of Mike Walker, the Fattest
Man in America who, after fighting in Korea, developed a
pathological appetite and reached “the unreal weight
of 1,187 pounds”. Walker’s pathetic speech and
self-exhibitionism – originally released on record
and intended as a warning to others that they might avoid
his fate – is croaked into a microphone by Karen Christopher
as the splay-legged, prostrate Walker. The character Mister
Memory (from Hitchcock’s 39 Steps), played
by a bespectacled Goulish, stands at an upright microphone,
his head feverishly nodding as he splutters factual remnants
in a broken chronology of the 20th century: "Pablo
Picasso paints the Guernica; Porsch designs the
Volkswagen to the requirements of Adolf Hitler; the Pabulan
tribe saw the telegraph and they built a tiny replica so
they could talk to the dead." And throughout it all,
Bryan Saner’s MC attempts to order the events, much
as we try to make narrative sense of our own and other’s
lives. Walker’s defeated tale of a descent into obesity
is as humorous as it is tragic. But what lingers in the
image of Walker’s stagnant body is the trauma of war,
an un-heroic casualty who fails to show up in our history
books, and instead makes it into the Guinness Book of
Records.
In The Sea & Poison, the central motif of
toxins and contagion allow for a consideration of the destruction
and deformity humankind has inflicted on the planet. The
work directly references the Gulf war and the invisible,
insidious damage wrought on Iran and Iraq. It gestures to
the proliferation of deformed animals – frogs in particular
– and contamination across the globe. At one point,
plastic frogs pelt down over Mark Jeffrey’s extended,
back-bending body, and litter the space. A hand-held light
concealed in his hand flashes like a beacon, a warning,
so that the image is at once risible and disturbing. Earlier,
we see what appears to be white insecticide raining down
on Christopher, ageing her in an instant as she becomes,
briefly, the mother of a deformed Iraqi child. The same
deadly substance marks out a square on the floor that, through
the duration of the performance, increasingly suggests an
isolated space of contagion. A fragment from Hamlet
- the poisoning of Hamlet’s father in the orchard
- is delivered with arch Shakespearean gravitas. And we
segue, who knows at what point now, to the nostalgic jingle
of an old Camay soap advertisement with its promise of "a
smoother, softer skin", crooned at us oh so sincerely
by Bryan Saner. A letter from an unknown soldier who, we
assume, never made it back – “Dear Mother, I
am at the foot of a bone bridge…” – arrives
from a place we can’t possibly know, but think we’ve
already been. We’ve seen the movie, read the book,
or caught that newspaper fragment in transit. Things resonate;
they feel familiar enough. This figure of the soldier, emblematic
of troubled, unfinished pasts, returns as a poignant thematic,
from their first show, Soldier, Child, Tortured Man
(1987), through to their recent work. The undead seem to
infiltrate the staked-out arenas in which Goat Island
perform, and this emphatic reminder of human lives lost
makes the performances fragile and haunting. We are moving,
sometimes, amongst the ruins of things, while at others
a life we had not yet realised seems to begin.
Music is intrinsic to the work, often used to shift focus
and mood rapidly. Musical intervals punctuate the beginning
and ends of sections; and here, too, a mix of eclectic and
unpredictable tunes (prerecorded or occasionally sung) accompany
the tight, visual score. Songs juxtapose images, as with
the cheery eruption of Doris Day’s Che Sera, Sera
in How Dear To Me, during a quiet, choreographed
gestural sequence of trembling hands and tic-like head movements.
At other times the music cradles what we see, as when the
wistful, frail cadences of Gavin Bryar’s Jesus’
Blood Never Failed me Yet fade in to accompany Mister
Memory as he intently circumscribes the rectangular space
during the lyrical, fading sequences of the show. In fact,
a Goat Island performance text resembles a musical score
with its subtle structure, its phrasing orchestrated by
tempos and melodies that become cumulatively apparent through
refrain and nuanced alteration.
The repetitive and sometimes exhaustive movement sequences,
as blunt and coarse as they are fragile and tender, are
the company’s hallmark. They function adjacent to
other narrative structures in the work, counterposing moments
of quietude and stillness. The aesthetics of the work is
clean and spare – the performers wear overalls, or
khaki shirts and trousers resembling uniforms, with sensible
footwear. Things are utilized for their symbolic or poetic
value, as with the propeller fan that Christopher as Amelia
Earhart holds in front of her, or Jeffrey’s flashing
light that signals contamination, and Goulish’s bean
and watering can suggestive of growth and renewal in The
Sea and Poison. As quickly as they appear, props are
tidied away, as in a childish game of make-believe where
boredom soon overcomes enthusiasm. They create an atmosphere
that is both playful and utilitarian, and it is a world
strangely at odds with itself. Nothing distracts from these
poised images, suggestive as they are of the half-forgotten
memories immanent within each performed moment.
From the perspective of a European audience member, the
landscape experienced here is quintessentially American,
whatever that means; and the point is that it means differently
to us all. Yet, those diverse interpretations we all cultivate
are thrown against a shared sense of largeness, the breadth
and openness of this enormous landmass and its vast skies,
and the wish-fulfillment of so many already bedded into
its vexed and modern history. And, too, within these worlds
of difference thrown up before us by the company’s
meticulous process of discovery, certain narrative threads
morph and repeat. This performance world, as detailed as
it is abstract, widens out like an expansive montage, reverberating
with the multiple voices of America that haunt our collective
memory of the last century, a century marked by a preposterous
number of face-to-face battles and wars, and characterized
by mass cultural amnesia. The tableaux Goat Island
present us with so frequently address what (or who) is missing,
what lingers just beyond the frame, beyond conscious recall.
As witnesses, we are reminded of the persistence of forgetting
as it competes with - and often survives - our ability to
remember. The four performers move through these worlds
with a dead-pan solidarity, which underscores the wily humor
of their work.
During a Goat Island performance, things become apparent
retrospectively, or in the between spaces of tightly-knit
temporal and spatial configurations. In this way, the work
echoes the process of history - the way we assimilate and
order events as facts as we look back. Our lives are narratives
we construct in retrospect, embellished by our present-day
thoughts and past experiences. The performance space delineated
by the company fills with the residue of many layers and
textures, suggestive of meanings which will only become
apparent through repetition. Matthew Goulish’s intent
hand-movements at the beginning of How Dear to Me
- arms held out straight in front of his body at chest level,
the left hand rubbing small, circular movements on the right,
pausing, then rubbing again - seems to summon or else remember
something external to the performance itself. Later, when
this movement recurs, Goulish is joined in this gesture
by the three other performers. First isolated and perplexing,
it takes on meaning as it repeats, not because we understand
it better, but because in the spaces between repetition,
meaning has already transformed. This quiet revolution of
form, emphasizing the return to an original place of inquiry
or enchantment, is typical of the way the group develop
a shape, mood or idea, which then comes to structure a piece.
Appearing a second time, Goulish’s movement already
feels at home; and it is we who have found a place to store
it, and who now hold it in memorium. In this way, Goat Island’s
performance praxis draws attention to the processes of recognition
and familiarity, reminding us how easily we become accustomed
to (or, as easily, resist) the strange or the unfamiliar,
how quick we are to rearrange the past to accommodate a
future. Inevitably, we plot our own, private journey through
these resurrected and broken events.
At the beginning of How Dear to Me, a soldier
steps out of the darkness and tells us "All we have
left is our faith in each other". For Goat Island this
sentiment is key. For each member of the company, performance
is an ethical practice, defined by a belief in the value
and efficacy of collective work and collaboration. In his
book 39 Microlectures: in Proximity of Performance,
Matthew Goulish writes, "Maybe when we began our little
performance company, we thought a perfect performance could
dismantle a bomb". Acknowledging, with an irony that
charms, the potentiality of small acts, as well as the interconnectedness
of things great and small, Goulish reminds us of the company’s
critical investment and ambitious belief in the political
and actual currency of performance. This profound commitment
is worth heeding, in times where politics is often strategically
separated from the arts, when arts funding is dwindling,
and when artistic as well as private practices are heavily
patrolled. Goulish’s reflection hints also at the
risk performance involves: the risk of making things as
hard for the spectator as they are for the performer; the
risk of failure; and above all, the risk of truly committing
to a better, more peaceful world.
Goat Island performances create a space in which to reckon
with our simultaneous and shifting positions as perpetrators
and victims in one another’s stories. Exploded narratives
spill out as overlapping memories, dreams, and with such
longing. Surprising and awkward associations confront us;
we learn that things do not already mean, but that
meaning is contingent. We are all complicit in making the
world. Hopeful, this performance work proposes other orders
and worlds, gathered out of the illness and beauty of our
lives. "I wanted to dance Hamlet in a world of frogs"
says Goulish’s nostalgic theatre manager in The
Sea & Poison. The images pile up, but tell us nothing.
We are responsible for our own understanding, our own creative
and critical response. Goat Island sends many messages;
but ultimately for me, the power of their work lies in its
gentle but firm reminder that we must all become authors
of our own.
Originally published in New Art Examiner, July/August,
2001. Revised for Alternative Theatre Website/Daniel
Mufson, November, 2001.
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