Far from claiming the ‘more’ that expertise seems to imply, my notebooks serve as documents that remind me that at many, if not most, moments in the history of this training and performance making, I did not ‘know’ what I was doing. Of course, I
thought I did, and indulged in a desire to know — often, for example, performing a mask of ‘authority’ when confronted with the task of ‘teaching’ — but these are not the same thing. It would seem an act of disingenuousness to claim that I did know (what I was doing) now. Where the devising of the Rapture performances is concerned, at best, I had strategies — heurism and analogising, for example — albeit reinforced by practices drawn from my books and training. These seem to have allowed me to not know what I was doing and to continue doing it. It occurs to me long after the event that the methods and practices developed by the people with whom I trained are all in some way conceived with precisely this understanding in mind: that performance often stages itself as a practice of moving from the (ostensibly) ‘known’ to the ‘unknown’ — not the other way around (see p. 46 above). The question, problem and possibility of maintaining the tension, or anxiety, or epiphany induced by this movement became a central figure in the research I have undertaken for this post-graduate program.
Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled and re-ordered in every way conceivable.5
I first read Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millenium in 1996 while preparing to teach one of my first few independent performance workshop for actors and dancers. My black books spread all over the desk and floor in front of me, Calvino’s notion of a ‘combinatoria of experiences’ seemed to gather their sprawl into a promise of possibility. The possibility that a re-ordering, shuffling, re-visioning and re-imagining of their contents might emerge as a ‘remembering/re-membering’ of performance practice that was not only ‘mine’ — nor Monika Pagneux’s, nor Gaulier’s — but a ‘third thing’. Calvino also helped me remember something I had read in 1993 before
undertaking any professional training of any kind — Paul Virilio’s The Aesthetics of Disappearance. In it, he cites Baudelaire:
Countless layers of ideas, images, feelings have fallen successively on your brain as softly as light. It seems that each has buried the preceding, but none has really perished.6
The workshops that ensued were a series of three that I developed, re-made and transformed over a number of years following: Pleasure & Presence, Defying Gravity, and Little Tyrannies, Bigger Lies. Each turned on ‘tropes’ or themes that Virilio and Calvino had helped me re-think in relationship with the vast bodies of work I had glimpsed and experienced directly in training and working with Gaulier, Pagneux, Complicite, Pantheatre and Anzu Furukawa. That this re-thinking allowed me to re-make my training experiences, and myself play the role of ‘teacher’ in turn, invokes the reason for Virilio and Calvino’s appearance in this writing at this point. I did not understand that training then — as I entered and exited the studio each day — in the ways I imagine I do now. I will attempt to give examples of some of these understandings here in relationship with the making of the Rapture performances. I have chosen to approach specific examples of practical work derived from Pagneux, Gaulier et. al. via Calvino and Virilio not least because Calvino’s notion of “indirect vision”7 allowed me to see, and ‘see through’, training experiences that were perhaps
too ‘close’ and opaque at the time. ‘Indirect vision’ as a strategy and principle is close to the work of Philippe Gaulier, Theatre de Complicite, and also Pantheatre. Similarly, Virilio’s ideas on speed, gravity and the ‘fall’ wind their way through my understanding of the practices I inherited from Anzu Furukawa and Monika Pagneux. My teaching has also allowed me a certain ‘distance’ on my own subjectivity in the face of performative tasks which has provided a renewed facility in ‘folding back’ these understandings into my own performance practice. Hence, the inclusion of an account of my recent pedagogical practice detailed above (see ‘The Knife and the Stethoscope’, pp. 150–155).
6 Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance, (New York: Semiotext[e], 1991), p. 29. 7 Calvino, Six Memos, p. 4. & passim
Rapture, Rapture II and Rapture III might be seen as ‘excursions’ in the tropes of ‘defying gravity’, ‘tyrannies and lies’, ‘presence and absence’, ‘subjectivity’, ‘knowledge and truth’, and ‘discourse’ itself. These tropes are heuristically derived
from my training experience and from wide readings ‘around’ performance making. Calvino and Virilio, and all of the ‘significant others’ touched upon in earlier sections of this writing, often provided the conceptual framework, while Gaulier, Furukawa and others provided the ‘physical ground’ and practical applications necessary for devising the solo works. I say “works” now, but one of the problems and the point of the research was to investigate in what ways, by what means, and what processes subjectivity is ‘made’, rendered, or realised — if it ever is in these terms. Borrowing from Barthes, I might otherwise say that the Rapture performances are not ‘works’ at all. Like the fragments of Barthes’ amorous discourse, the solo performances are discursive in the sense of their ‘runnings here and there’. ‘Discourse’ is not only of the order of what is written, or ‘spoken’. The eye, and therefore my ‘I’, may discourse where the mouth and words ‘say nothing’. Hence, the body may discourse. Imagination ‘discourses’. Rapture, Rapture II, and Rapture III were initially conceived as structures (not works) with and in which to test and experiment with the tropes mentioned above. In this sense, it was hoped they might constitute the intersection of many ‘syntactical’ collisions, or image repertoires — a kind of choreography of multiple voices, ‘persons’ and affects.
In the same way that it is possible to think of the contents of my black books as “distributional but not integrative”8 (as is possible with the life of any subjectivity), the
solo performances might be seen as a series of syntactical arias — ‘sign-tactical’ arias: a collection of utterances, and not (necessarily) progressive analyses. The image-repertoires for Rapture, Rapture II and Rapture III are extensive and interwoven. In one way, derived from my own ‘doubled’, subjective history — and strategically passing that history through practices and conceptual positions aimed at de-substantiating the ego (read singular ’Self’) — each one is like an elegy: a kind of ‘serious’, sometimes (faux) solemn meditation on subjectivity, and an ambiguous, (comical) lament for the passing of a unitary self. The solos, and this writing in turn, playfully entertain lots of ‘little deaths’. There is epiphany in this — and there is also