IMPLEMENTACIÓN DE LA PROPUESTA

153 _{Cameron, see the proscenium attached appendix pp.198–199. There are image references in the poem to the performance of ‘Las Sin}

Tierra—7 attempted crossings of the straits’ directed by Jill Greenhalgh for Teatro Nomad with artists Rosa Casado, Rocío Solís and designer Mike Brookes, Magdalena Australia, Brisbane Powerhouse, 2003, 6–16 April.

154 _{Sharp, a personal note from dialogues with Helen Sharp, Performance Practicum, Body Voice Centre, Footscray (see footnote 65).} 155 _{Cameron, the proscenium, attached appendix p. 183–184.}

A ‘symbol’ is “something which expresses through suggestion, an idea or mood which would otherwise remain inexpressible or incomprehensible; the meeting point of many analogies …”156 _{I understand a symbol as a syntax (the coming together of languages) in}

a kind of prismatic key. Meeting something equivalent it turns to open a locked thing. In creating meetings and putting otherwise inexpressible things together, the symbol activates. It not only stands for, it stands in (for me), so I might enter possibilities. Jonathon Marshall writes,

Cameron’s text is a dense weft of intertextual references and poetic images, including allusions to Alice in Wonderland, Gulliver’s encounter with the Lilliputians, Munch’s The Scream and others. Although Munch and the dream-like accessing of intense childhood memories and aestheticised traumas evokes Expressionism, Cameron’s realization owes more to late 19th-century Symbolist theatre, Odilon Redon and Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs Du Mal. Her simple, resonant performative presence is both anchored in and generated by the word itself. Cameron’s gestures and

movements are sparse, tending to shift between archetypal tableaux which she embodies, rather than enacting (even in an abstract fashion) the events or images she enunciates. As Cameron says, the proscenium space within which this recitation occurs is, in a sense, “literal”; the spoken word tumbles to the floor like a thick wet blanket of affect and metaphoric play. Like Redon, Cameron is seeking an ambiguous yet still recognisable world of palpable symbols which lies behind the particularities of her own experience, even as it inhabits her life.157

Marshall’s reference to Symbolism brings up the question of verisimilitude. But to what? What is not as relevant as how. How might

156 _{Macquarie Dictionary, 4}th _{edn, 2004, s.v. ‘symbol’.}

one exactly tell a sound on a mute canvas and how might I describe being swallowed and simultaneously swallowing an image? Jean Moréas who wrote the Symbolist Manifesto published in Le Figaro, Paris, 1886,

[P]roclaims the validity of pure subjectivity and the expression of an idea over a realistic description of the natural world. This philosophy, which would incorporate the poet Stéphane Mallarmé's conviction that reality was best expressed through poetry because it paralleled nature rather than replicating it, became a central tenet of the (Symbolist) movement. In Mallarmé's words, "To name an object is to suppress three-quarters of the enjoyment to be found in the poem ... suggestion, that is the dream.158

‘Suggestion’ might well be another name for resonance. Resonance includes without fixing by naming. It vibrates. It shudders. Esther Leslie writes,

For Adorno, the shudder is a primal component of experience, emerging just as humans began to conceptualise the world and differentiate themselves from amorphous nature (they shudder to think) … At the same time, though, the shudder is a manifestation of wonder and a recognition of the possibility of anti-egoistic human interrelationships with other or non-beings. Its twitching indicates a capacity for mimesis, for a connection between self and otherness.159

Resonance is alive, it moves. The intensely moving lines in Munch’s painting The Scream, suggest the thing enough for it to occur, to resonate (from the canvas) in the body of its audience. It is a question of a sound not yet sound. Everything moves. The scream resounds elsewhere, not there where it is but here where I am. There are meetings in the synaesthetic roar of silence, “a silence with

158 _{N Myers, ‘Symbolism’, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2000, viewed 28 June 2012,}

<http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/symb/hd_symb.htm>.

159 _{With reference to T Adorno & M Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1947, cited in E Leslie, ‘Shudder—Shutter—Shatter’, Animate}

teeth”160_{, in the house that swallowed her and the house that she swallowed. There is a denouement of resonances in cross-sensory}

metaphors such as these where a kind of gap speaks simultaneously with a kind of meeting. They do not need a name to be perceived. Resonance stretches across time and is immeasurable. Its multiplying affects are in procession. Something from many years ago may meet something newly struck; a memory may meet another memory. Resonance resounds again and again in newly born syntaxes of things being put together (or meeting). A symbol presents an entry point and a shuddering threshold.

That shudder in which subjectivity stirs without yet being subjectivity is the act of being touched by the other. Aesthetic comportment assimilates itself to that other rather than subordinating it. Such a constitutive relation of the subject to objectivity in aesthetic comportment joins eros and knowledge.161