Small Acts of Repair

Performance, Ecology and Goat Island

Stephen Bottoms, Matthew Goulish, Stephen Bottoms, Matthew Goulish

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415365154
  9780415365147
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134216826
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Goat Island are one of the world's leading contemporary performance ensembles. Their intimate, low-tech, intensely physical performances represent a unique hybrid of strategies and techniques drawn from live art, experimental theatre and postmodern dance. Small Acts of Repair: Performance, Ecology and Goat Island, is the first book to document and critique the company's performances, processes, politics, aesthetics, and philosophies. It reflects on the company's work through the critical lens of ecology – an emerging and urgent concern in performance studies and elsewhere.

This collage text combines and juxtaposes writing by company members and arts commentators, to look in detail at Goat Island's distinctive collaborative processes and the reception of their work in performance. The book includes a section of practical workshop exercises and thoughts on teaching drawn from the company's extensive experience, providing an invaluable classroom resource.

By documenting the creative processes of this extraordinary company, this book will make an important contribution to the critical debates surrounding contemporary performance practices. In so doing, it pays compelling tribute to committed art-making, creativity, collaboration, and the nature of the possible.

B1. PERFORMANCE

1.1 Environment

1.2 Response

1.3 Body

1.4 Time

B1.1 ENVIRONMENT

Minneapolis: February 27, 1992

KILLACKY: Hi, you're listening to Artifacts at KFAI Radio, and I'm John Killacky. Visiting with us today is Lin Hixson, the artistic director of Goat Island, who perform their show Can't Take Johnny to the Funeral tonight and tomorrow night at Hennepin Center for the Arts, Studio 6A. So welcome, Lin.

HIXSON: Thank you.

KILLACKY: I don't know if the listeners are aware, but Studio 6A at the Hennepin Center was a Masonic Temple. You said you seemed to be making the touring route of Masonic Temples these days.

HIXSON: Goat Island doesn't work in a proscenium situation. We're interested in dealing with space in different ways. So our pieces—Goat Island has done three pieces—in all of them, the audience plays an important part. Not directly, in that we do not drag you on the stage or anything, but we look at the audience as witnesses of the work. They're set up in this situation where they surround the work. In this particular piece, the audience is on all four sides. So what that means is when we tour, we end up in different spaces that can accommodate that, and the Masonic Temple has been one of those.

More Permanent Than Snow Lin Hixson (2004: 128–131)

Do you see the empty lot on the corner? The walked-over weeds on the ground. Imagine a playground filling it in. Remove the wall of the liquor store next door and sit down quietly in its place. Catch the ball thrown at you by the young boy and watch as the light fades. See five performers fall to the ground and hear the one reciting the alphabet. Don't forget to rebuild the liquor store wall when you leave. Hold the sum of all these places together. These are our lived-in conditions.

In the 1989 film Batman, a moon sits in the sky and a bat sits in the moon. When I sat in the theatre and watched the film, the audience applauded when seeing the bat in the moon. I did not understand the applause because I never saw the bat. I saw teeth. I foregrounded the background and backgrounded the foreground. Four golden teeth—two on the top, two on the bottom, on the edge of a pitch-black chasm—snarled out at me. I never caught the bat like the moon. Instead, a not-bat sat in my eye.

One of my tasks as the director of Goat Island when making a performance is to foreground the not seen and background the seen. To do this requires: (1) the formation of attention; (2) slowing the traffic of the mind; (3) an enclosed encounter area; (4) spaces between.

Throughout the 1950s, the Dutch architect Aldo Van Eyck foregrounded blind spots on the city map of Amsterdam. Neglected holes between buildings, formless stretches of land, abandoned urban lots were converted by his designs into playgrounds for children. When he embedded this neglected ground into a playground, formerly unseen spots came into view. Groups of citizens caught sight of them and said, “These are not playgrounds.” As a result of popular demand, during a period of ten years, Amsterdam built the unprecedented number of 734 playgrounds.

These were all spaces that were dead; spaces between buildings: a vacant lot, a waste space that had been bombed or destroyed or was derelict. But Van Eyck would just claim it as if it was the right shape, and design a playground according to the dynamics of that left-over space. So these are playgrounds that are like irregular triangles, or parallelograms, or wedge shapes, and people could look at these vacant, in-between spaces transformed into a playground, and say, “Oh, look what that made.” Retroactive retrofit; function adapts to its form. A playground.

(Matthew Coulish 2003)

Goat Island rehearses and performs in a gym in a church on a basketball court. Red and black lines outline the game and the playing area on the floor. Each time we start a new performance, we mark our performing area on top of the game with taped lines. The lines foreground the performance site and background the basketball court. Eight performance works now sit in the basketball court. The floor holds the worn away remains of 15 years of work:

1987	Soldier, Child, Tortured Man. A large rectangle. Four lines.
1989	We Got A Date. An alleyway. Two long lines.
1991	Can't Take Johnny to the Funeral. A boxing ring. Four lines.
1993	It's Shifting Hank. A rowboat. Four lines.
1996	How Dear to Me the Hour When Daylight Dies. A small rectangle next to a large square. Seven lines.
1998	The Sea & Poison. Two sides and two walls. Two lines.
2001	It's an Earthquake in My Heart. A Chevron sign with one side tilted out. Eleven lines.

2002. We work on a new performance. Its lines on the floor stand out with fresh tape. Twenty to thirty schoolchildren from the childcare center three floors below run across the floor. The children pause within our taped lines and say “you lose.” Catch the ball thrown at you and watch as the traffic slows. Focus on the free-throw line until a woman's foot replaces it. Listen as James Taylor sings “Fire and Rain” and “Sweet Baby James” as the woman stands on one foot for 377 seconds.

We began this latest work with the question of repair. We looked at repair manuals from the 1950s for we could not find any current repair manuals in Chicago bookstores. The United States no longer repairs. It “disposes of” instead.

Van Eyck's work seemed integrally related to this idea of repair, but how could we communicate that just with space? We thought, what if there are actually two grids at work, and the audience is seated on one, and the two house shapes marked at either end of the stage are skewed to a different one? You get the sense that the performance is happening in a kind of skewed thoroughfare. Like a performance that has resulted by accident, within these pre-existing, criss-crossing grids.

(Matthew Goulish 2003)

1 Van Eyck playground: before and after.

Photographs © courtesy of Amsterdam Municipal Archives

If you look at a map of Amsterdam with Van Eyck's playgrounds, you see that the city is not a collection of buildings but is defined by the spaces in between. The map recalls Piet Mondrian's “starry sky” paintings, in which the artist moved away from a monocentred composition toward a randomly distributed galaxy of points. Van Eyck, influenced by Mondrian, viewed the idea of the city as an open-ended pattern, a constellation of situationally arising units, bound to time, accident, and circumstance. He was also influenced by Camillo Sitte, the nineteenth-century Viennese urbanist who recommended city configurations that bring about protection, and the slowing down of fast traffic. Van Eyck's redesign of Amsterdam's open areas turned individual voids into connections between people and between cognitive frames. Protected encounter areas were foregrounded. Traffic slowed. The focus of attention shifted from remote vistas to localities of site. Classical geometric forms sat within anti-classical patterns. Children hung off rectangular steel bars, played in triangles of sand, climbed half circles, and ran in three dimensional “starry sky” patterns.

Place. Placeless. Other place. Two places in one. Two-ness with two ones, one shifting forward then back to he seen; one shifting back then forward to be not seen; there is no place not the reflection of others. It is the reflected others we must discover.

(Edmond Jabès qtd in Waldrop 2002: 154)

It's snowing. Van Eyck watches it fall. The snow covers sidewalks, streets, trash, weeds, and empty lots. The cars stop. There is silence. Children run by and throw snowballs. Catch one. A trick of the sky has made these children lords of the city for one afternoon. They move freely—thoughts gone away. Van Eyck stands and does not move. The snow melts. He waits. A playground emerges in need of repair and surrounds him. Then the lights fade. It is time to go. There are many things to be afraid of but don't be afraid of the dark. Re-build something before you go. Listen as you leave. Van Eyck's speaking. He says, “How do we give children something more permanent than snow?”

In the field of social ecology, men like Donald Trump are permitted to proliferate freely, like another species of algae, taking over entire districts of New York and Atlantic City; he “redevelops” by raising rents, thereby driving out tens of thousands of poor families, most of whom are condemned to homelessness, becoming the equivalent of the dead fish of environmental ecology.

(Félix Guattari 2000: 43)

I've never actually read that book Towards a Poor Theatre, but for us there was never any question of a set. We knew that the actual room itself was going to become our set— that it [the performance] was always going to be pretty much us, and what we were wearing, and what we were saying. And also I loved playing with lighting, and I knew how to do that pretty cheaply. So we've carried those things with us in terms of production values: that's really become our aesthetic. We've gotten a little bit more money, but we don't use it to buy set pieces very often, unless it's a really good investment, because if we do, people won't get paid.

(Matthew Goulish 1997)

Portable islands Steve Bottoms

Glasgow, May 1994. My first experience watching Goat Island. They perform their 1989 piece We Got a Date. The audience is separated into two long, parallel tramlines, facing each other as if across a parade route. The four performers, dressed in school gym shorts and white T-shirts, repeatedly make their way up the lane in between, as if competing in some defective “sports day”—running, sprinting, bunny-hopping; one of them sometimes dragging himself on his belly, using his shoulders for propulsion, like the “fat kid” left behind, or like some stranded whale frantically flopping its way ever higher up the beach. At the end of each passing, the performers turn and run back behind the audience lines, looping back to their starting point. As they brush past me, sweat drips onto my shirt. The low-slung lights opposite are glaring in my eyes. For a moment I catch the eye of another spectator; we both look away as if stung. The performers pass again. I feel myself falling in love.

2 We Got a Date.

Photograph by Dona Ann McAdams. PS 122 at 14th Street Dance Center, New York City, 1990. Pictured left to right: Joan Dickinson, Matthew Goulish, Timothy McCain, Greg McCain

Within the existing literature on performance and ecology, there is general agreement that—as Bonnie Marranca has put it, “any elucidation of a theater ecology begins in the understanding of performance space” (1996: xvii). There is less agreement, however, about what such an understanding might entail. Marranca herself seems preoccupied with Gertrude Stein's notion of “landscape theatre,” in which the traditional, anthropocentric emphasis on human characters caught up in linear narratives is replaced by an alternative emphasis on the simple, simultaneous occurrence of events or images spread across the proscenium stage. Marranca sees in the work of Robert Wilson one realization of Stein's ideal: his Einstein on the Beach for example (1976), ran on for many hours without linear progression, and spectators could come and go from the auditorium as they wished. The play was simply “there,” like a landscape, to be viewed at leisure: “it is of no importance unless you look at it,” wrote Stein (1985: 122).

This last phrase, however, surely signals the limitations of the landscape approach from an ecological perspective. Human agency may have been displaced from the stage action itself, but spectatorship is more anthropocentric than ever: the landscape is only of importance if we choose to look at it. As Baz Kershaw puts it: “Whether landscape is seen as a source of rejuvenating contemplation (a feast for the eyes of the Enlightenment) or a source of spiritual renewal (succour for the soul of romanticism), it is always so at the service, ultimately, of man (sic)” (2000: 128).

Rejecting the visual mechanics of the proscenium stage, Kershaw has instead made a case for what he calls “an aesthetics of total immersion in performance” (1999: 194). By placing audience members within a designated environment (artificial or “site-specific”), rather than having them look in on it from outside, and by inviting them individually to navigate its contours, he proposes that “the dualisms of modernism … particularly those between body and mind, analysis and creativity, thought and action” may be “transcended” (1999: 214). At the same time, though, Kershaw acknowledges that such “environmental” performances can sometimes be disorientating and disempowering for audiences made to feel vulnerable in such circumstances. One might add, moreover, that the dualisms he mentions may simply be reinforced if the novel sensory experiences (or indeed the feelings of vulnerability) arising from such “immersion” overwhelm any tendency toward critical reflection. Meanwhile, Una Chaudhuri is critical of the claims made for so-called “environmental theatre” on the grounds that it tends simply to reproduce “the logic of total visibility” already inherent in proscenium staging (Chaudhuri 1995: 26–27). In an environmental performance, audience members may not see everything laid out before them, but they are granted the mobility to go around corners to satisfy their curiosity. The anthropocentric right to omniscience thus tends to be reinforced rather than challenged; the “environment” is rendered subject to spectatorial penetration.

Goat Island's approach to staging suggests one possible solution to this eco-spatial conundrum. Neither proscenium-based nor conventionally “in-the-round” (another convention whose logics tend to assume “total visibility”),...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Foreword
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Notes on the contents and acknowledgments
• Prologue
• A. Introduction(s)
• B1. Performance
• B1.1 Environment
• B1.2 Response
• B1.3 Body
• B1.4 Time
• B2. Process
• B2.1 Environment
• B2.2 Response
• B2.3 Body
• B2.4 Time
• C. Teaching
• A. On Pedagogy
• B. A Workshop o: To begin
• C. Letter To A Young Practitioner (2007)
• Epilogue
• Goat Island timeline
• Bibliography
• Index