39 Microlectures

In Proximity of Performance

Matthew Goulish

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134612390
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

'A series of accidents has brought you this book.
You may think of it not as a book, but as a library, an elevator, an amateur performance in a nearby theatre.
Open it to the table of contents.
Turn to the page that sounds the most interesting to you.
Read a sentence or two.
Repeat the process.
Read this book as a creative act, and feel encouraged.'
39 Microlectures: In Proximity of Performance is a collection of miniature stories, parables, musings and thinkpieces on the nature of reading, writing, art, collaboration, performance, life, death, the universe and everything. It is a unique and moving document for our times, full of curiosity and wonder, thoughtfulness and pain.
Matthew Goulish, founder member of performance group Goat Island, meditates on these and other diverse themes, proving, along the way, that the boundaries between poetry and criticism, and between creativity and theory, are a lot less fixed than they may seem. The book is revelatory, solemn yet at times hilarious, and genuinely written to inspire - or perhaps provoke - creativity and thought.

1. REPETITION

1.1 A misunderstanding

1.2 Learning to read

1.3 W

1.4 Proliferation and suffering

1.5 Multiplicity

1.1 A MISUNDERSTANDING

A few years ago, a producer whose name was Rollo made a special trip to see a performance of Goat Island’s piece It’s Shifting, Hank. Afterwards he wanted to give us his reaction, and I was elected to talk to him. I can summarize the conversation now as follows:

Rollo said: What is the reason for all this repetition?

And I said: What repetition?

Although at the moment I had no idea what he meant, I did sense that a significant insight lay somewhere at the heart of our misunderstanding.

Take for example the process of memorizing an alphabet. Is the act of recitation repetitious? One says one letter, and then another, and then another. But if all the letters are different, one could say there is no repetition. It is only at the point where a letter returns, and we recognize its return, that familiarity has occurred. But is even that a repetition? Perhaps the letter returns changed by time and events, altered by the nature of the intervening letters. At this point, can we say that there has been an occurrence of music?

To state the problem: what some see as a single moment repeating, others see as a nonrepeating series of similar moments. The difference in perception indicates not only how closely one is prepared to examine any given moment, but also a basic difference in philosophy. As John Cage said in his “Lecture on Nothing”, “Repetition is only repetition if we feel that we own it.” To restate the problem: does one see the repeating/nonrepeating moment as occurring inside of or outside of a language? Because with his invocation of ownership, Cage perhaps refers not only to possession, but also to understanding, recognition, and especially familiarity. An authority on dance, whom we may refer to as an informed viewer, upon seeing a dancer perform two similar moves, may conclude, “The dancer repeated the step.” One who is ignorant of dance and claims no ownership of its language, whom we may refer to as an ecstatic viewer, at this same moment might say, “The dancer performed two similar movements — the first in one place in the room, the second a little later in a different place in the room." The differences observed by the second viewer might seem so insignificant to the first viewer that he chose to ignore them altogether, concentrating instead on the larger patterns which conform to the language of dance which he feels he owns.

At this point we must question the dancer’s intention. A creative artist, just like a creative audience member, may function as informed or as ecstatic, or may switch back and forth at varying moments of the performance. But if the artist’s intention is to step outside of the language to the extent that such an action is possible, and function creatively as an ecstatic over a sustained period of time, then no difference between two moments is insignificant. Stepping outside of familiar languages requires an attempt not only to generate a new language, but also to reinvent the very notion of familiarity.

The Scottish composer James MacMillan once described his style as the repetition of ideas of deliberate limitation. Through the course of the composition these elements either remain constant or gradually, integrally transform, depending on their nature. MacMillan, a spiritual composer, has related this process, in content and structure, to religious ritual. For the purposes of this series of microlectures, I will relate it to a different ritual, maybe a metaritual, between the performance and the audience. Processes of repetition and differentiation, of microelements combining and recombining to generate familiarities, leads us into a ritual of the possible occurrence of learning.

1.2 LEARNING TO READ

In her novel Summer Rain, Marguerite Duras told the story of Ernesto, the oldest of the children of a suburban family of Italian immigrants living in France. Ernesto left the school in the middle of his first lesson and refused ever to return. Later a series of events transpired in which he learned how to read.

Ernesto must have been between twelve and twenty years old. Just as he didn’t know how to read, so he didn’t know his own age.

In the space under the ground floor of a nearby house, a kind of shed that the people who lived there left open for the children — there, by the central heating pipes under some rubble, the smallest of the brothers found the book. He took it to Ernesto, who looked at it for a long time. It was a very thick book bound in black leather, and a hole had been burned right through it by what must have been some terribly powerful implement like a blowtorch or a red-hot iron bar. The hole was perfectly circular, and around it the rest of the book was unscathed, so it must have been possible to read what remained of each page. The children had never seen a book so cruelly treated before. The youngest brothers and sisters cried.

In the days that followed, Ernesto entered a period of silence. He would stay in the shed all afternoon, alone with the burned book.

At that point in his life Ernesto was supposed not to be able to read, but he said he’d read some of the burned book. Just like that, he said, without thinking about it, without even knowing what he was doing. And then he stopped bothering with whether he was really reading or not, or even what reading was – whether it was this or something else. At first, he said, he’d tried like this: he took the shape of a word and arbitrarily gave it a provisional meaning. Then he gave the next word another meaning, but in terms of the assumed provisional meaning of the first word. And he went on like that until the whole sentence yielded some sense. In this way he came to see that reading was a kind of continuous unfolding within his own body of a story invented by himself. And thus it seemed to him that the book was about a king who reigned in a country far away. The king was a foreigner, a very long time ago, and he spoke of chasing the wind.

Ernesto told his brothers and sisters, who said to him: “How could you have read it, stupid, when you don’t know how?”

Ernesto agreed: he didn’t know how he could have read the book without knowing how to read.

He took the book to a teacher who had university degrees and a definite age: thirty-eight. The teacher said that it was a story about a king.

1.3 W

This fragment of a retelling from Duras’ Summer Rain concerns our problem of learning and repetition in two ways: first, it blurs the distinction between the ecstatic and the informed – Ernesto’s private invented story yields the ‘correct’ meaning as confirmed by the teacher, but it also yields something more – the sense that the words not only mean, but also live, and effect an irreversible change on the reader. Second, the story introduces a conduit between the words and their meaning. The conduit is the body – Ernesto’s body, as he comes to see reading as “a continuous unfolding within his own body” – and also the body of the book itself, burned, damaged, and scarred. Our dialectics of repetition and nonrepetition, of ecstatic and informed have begun to be replaced by a different set of concepts yielding even more possibilities – the encounter between reader and book – the interaction of the internal differences of reader and book – through a discovered ritual of learning, initiates a momentary becoming, as reader becomes book and book becomes reader – and afterwards the internal differences have changed both, through an unfolding.

I remember as a child forming a personal relationship with the alphabet one letter at a time. I had twenty-six flashcards, and one by one I’d memorize the name of the letter on each card. A B C formed the simple first triad, D E F the almost as simple second. G was the first letter of my last name, although for some reason it always reminded me of my father. Since the most dynamic and flashy characters seemed crowded at the end, I’d work backwards at times from Z Y and X – a triad so exotic its members rarely, I was told, appeared in words at all. As a memorization device for each letter presented itself, the seemingly infinite catalogue of symbols grew smaller and more manageable, and began to collect meanings, my own invented meanings as well as those apparently shared by the rest of English-speaking America.

Over the course of my learning, a pattern emerged. The names of the letters always resembled their sounds as they occurred in a word. The letter T was called T because it made a T sound, as in CAT or HAT. The letters Q and U almost always appeared together and made Q and U sounds as in QUIET or QUIT. But suddenly I encountered the problem of W.

This letter not only defied explanation, but it also presented myriad contradictions. Why was it called W? It made the sound wah, not the sound W. W wasn’t even a sound, it was a description of the way the letter looked. If we were going to call this one W, why not call it instead double v? Why not call it M upside-down? For that matter why not call X two crossed lines, or O circle? W contradicted the pattern. Furthermore, it was the only letter which contradicted the pattern. Thus I found it impossible to remember.

As I stared at the flashcard W, I knew that a problem had arisen for which logic and reason provided no solution. Three choices presented themselves. I could rename W in an attempt to bring it more in line with the other letters. This was the pedantic option. I could initiate a lifelong boycott of W, and all words containing it, to protest the inconsistency. This was the rebellious option.

The third choice was the most practical, but also the most frightening. I could accept W, and change myself. I could alter my notion of the alphabet. After all, what value is there in relentless consistency? Isn’t the alphabet more interesting with one letter that refuses to conform to the pattern of the other twenty-five? I could go on building words, and one day even sentences and paragraphs, using W as though it were just another letter, but all the time remembering its difference. An unfolding took place inside my body. I knew then the third choice was the road that lay ahead for me, and also I had some inkling of its consequences. I must become W.

1.4 PROLIFERATION AND SUFFERING

What we call learning is a process through which signs change, subject becomes object, and truth unseparates from the reality to which it refers. What we call learning may arise through a process of repetition. What we call repetition presents an instability of differences. What we call repetition presents a permeability of identities. The individual meets the collective. A repetition that touches its limit may constitute a learning. A repetition that surpasses its limit may produce a proliferation. Proliferations always threaten order. Proliferations we find in the worlds of plants, insects, geology, the subatomic universe, the sea. But among the world of humans in the twentieth century, the exemplary limitlessness has been the capacity for cruelty, for destruction, for the proliferation of suffering.

Masuji Ibuse wrote in his nonfiction novel Black Rain of how Mrs Iwataki searched Hiroshima for her husband August 10, 1945, two days after the atomic blast. Mrs Iwataki’s recollection:

I went straight to the hospital.

Actually it was the national elementary school building, and when a sergeant who seemed to be acting as an orderly took us into the classroom we found that every inch of the floor was covered with the injured. I had no idea where my husband was. The soldier who looked like an orderly called, “Medical Reservist Iwataki! Where are you?” So I called out too, “Hiroshi! Are you here, Hiroshi?” Something seemed to grip my chest. It was difficult to breathe. There was no reply.

Then I saw a hand raised feebly. His face was swollen to twice its normal size, and his right ear was covered with gauze.

One thing struck me as strange – when one patient groaned all the others would start groaning at the same time. It was an uncanny sound. Perhaps I shouldn’t say it. But it was for all the world like a chorus of frogs starting up in a paddy field.

1.5 MULTIPLICITY

Between repetition and proliferation, there remains a third phenomenon. It is perhaps the most pertinent phenomenon to my misunderstanding with Rollo, as stated in the first microlecture of this series. I will try to approach it through three examples.

Example No. 1

In 1963, American composer Morton Feldman wrote a piece of music which he dedicated to his friend and fellow composer Christian Wolff. The composition might be described as two or three instruments playing two or three notes very softly for two or three hours. When listening to it, some hear repetition, others hear difference — a phenomenon possible only through the composition’s severe limitations. Christian Wolff, when asked why Feldman had dedicated the piece to him, had this to say about it:

"I think what Feldman had in mind was — he’d been to Cambridge twice when I was there. The first time he met me, he came into my room. I was staying in one of the Harvard dormitories, in an old-fashioned building, old-fashioned room with a very high ceiling. And I was sitting at a desk with books all around, and my nose — I’m short-sighted — my nose very close to the paper. And he came in, and he saw me there. And then we had a very nice time. I had organized a concert in which his music was played. And then, perhaps five, six, or seven years later, again there was a concert. And Feldman again decided to come up. In those days Feldman very rarely left New York. It was very unusual for him to go anywhere. This was quite special. And my address was once again this very same place. And he knocked on my door, and there I was in exactly the same situation he had seen me in five or six years before."

Example No. 2

If we picture our lives taking place on a calendar — a desk calendar, the kind with one date on each page, and all the pages stacked up — if we picture each day of our lives taking place on the surface of one of these pages — and we drill out and remove a core sample of this calendar at any particular moment — for example, the moment when one wakes up in the morning and gets out of bed — then we line up all these moments in a row — one could see oneself in a kind of film, each frame of which shows a different picture of one getting out of bed in the morning. In this way, one could say, “I am always waking up. I am always getting out of bed. Every time it’s different. This is my life."

Example No. 3

This reminds me of one of the Tales of the Hasidim as retold by Martin Buber. A man moved to a room in a house in a new city. On his first night, he heard wedding music and the sounds of celebration from the house next door. “How wonderful,” he thought, “the daughter of this house is getting married.” He made this assumption because it was the custom in the small town he had come from, for the wedding to take place in the house of the bride’s family. But the next night, he again heard wedding music and celebration. This time, he thought, “How strange. But there must be two daughters in this house, each married a day apart.” However, the pattern continued, and he heard wedding music and celebration each day for the week. Finally his curiosity overcame him, and he knocked on the door and asked the man, “How many daughters live here anyway?” “No daughters live here,” said the owner. “Then how has it come to pass that a wedding has taken place here every night this week?” The owner explained, “We rent this place out for wedding parties, and we do an excellent business.” The man returned to his room next door. That night, he heard wedding music and celebration again coming from the house. “How wonderful,” he thought, “to live in this world of weddings.”

What is a moment? A moment consists of a small action in a small amount of time in a particular place. The moment exists inseparable from the action, the time, and the place. It is that action at that time, for that amount of time, in that place. Some philosophers might call a moment like this Being (with a capital B). What happens then when a moment repeats or nonrepeats? A recognizable pattern of time/place/action quality emerges in a perceivable proximity, with clearly shifting detail. Maybe we can now say something new has appeared: the moment has multiplied – and through its multiplicitness, it has begun to accumulate meaning, or history – an alphabetical history, a musical history. It repeats, and it does not, in conformity with its own qualities of multiplicity. In this way, the many moments become one, and the one moment becomes many.

2. CRITICISM

2.1 The example of glass

2.2 The example of windows

2.3 The example of rain

2.1 THE EXAMPLE OF GLASS

Each time we experience a work of performance, we start over almost from nothing. Despite recognizable trends, we face infinite differences – individual or cultural details, opposing traditions, idiosyncratic forms and settings, all kinds of aesthetic extremes.

Where do we begin, how do we begin, to engage a critical mind?

This question does not limit itself to performance. It relates to all art forms. In fact, it applies to all human endeavors and perceptions, from the humanities to the sciences to the practice of everyday life. Irreducible complexity seems to characterize the late twentieth century itself.

As a result, each field structures itself by propagating its own specialized vocabulary so that its practitioners might share some basic concepts. Yet each field necessarily interfaces and intersects any number of other fields, sometimes even spawning hybrid fields. Even the purist, in order to reach any depth of understanding on any given subject, must confront conflicting discourses. A serious student of performance thus might encounter the terminology of theatre, literature, music, psychology, architecture, anthropology, and biology, among other disciplines.

One might say that we face a landscape of vistas opening only onto more vistas. On the threshold of this landscape we might pause to recall the writer Isaac Babel who described his grandmother’s sobering admonition when, as a child, he told her he wanted to grow up to be a writer, and she replied, “To be a writer, you must know everything.”

Faced with the impossibility of the task of knowing everything, we sometimes feel the desire to reject intellectuality altogether in favor of passionate expression. Such expression may take the form of the urgently political, the assertion of a solidified identity, or the following of individual inspiration wherever it may lead. And yet even these roads, if sincerely followed lead back to the discourse of complexity.

We have no choice but to accept this terrain, with the hope of discovering its exhilarating creative possibilities. Such acceptance requires a softening of the dividing lines between traditional differences: artist and critic, passion and intellect, accessible and hermetic, ...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• 39 MICROLECTURES
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1. REPETITION
• 2. CRITICISM
• 3. PEDAGOGY
• 4. BEGINNINGS
• 5. HAIR
• 6. WOMEN AND DIRECTING
• 7. TECHNOLOGIES OF DYING
• 8. HOW DOES A WORK WORK WHERE?
• 9. THE KALEIDOSCOPIC SELF
• 10. THREE NOTEWORTHY DEPARTURES
• 11. FAILURE
• 00. TO THE READER-2
• SOURCE NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INTRODUCTION TO THE INDEX