From black box to open air spaces: ways in which actor/audience may respond to space

We decided to explore some of the ways in which the actor and the audience responds to space ranging from black box to open air spaces. I was instrumental in formulating this research question. I also suggested to Veroniki who looked at the history of the actor/audience relationship to space to start her exploration looking at that very fine moment in the ancient Athenian agora during which Thespis in his uniquely solitary gesture breaking the age-old tradition of the Dionysiac choral teleturgy gave rise to what was later called theatre. She also looked at the origins and evolution of Diderot’s concept of the Fourth wall while Emek using Wekwerth’s experiment as her starting point and a couple of practicals devised by all of us investigated the way audience’s proxemics may bear on performance meaning-making. Clement furthered this exploration by looking at non-conventional site-specific locations and the interpersonal distances between performer/spectator and spectator/spectator. I am quite pleased about our presentation. The time we invested - despite the difficulties of finding mutually convenient times for our meetings - reflected our enthusiasm. Its flow was quite natural and the argumentation felt cohesive. The fact that we used real performances as case-studies and a couple of practical demonstrations using other MA students as audience members added strength and conviction to our investigation. 

I focussed for my part on the actor-space relationship using real case-studies and the theory of phenomenology. Following Garner escaping the neo-Aristotelianism that’s chained western critical theory in the realms of abstract conceptualizations phenomenology re-embodies, materializes the dramatic text; embodiment not just as a teleological aim of the playtext but as an intrinsic component of it. Although theatrical spatiality and the performing body can be said to have concerned the avant-garde primarily, materiality and corporeality was emphasized a lot in the realist tradition against the contradicting loyalties of verisimilitude and illusion. (102) Three books by Merleau-Ponty (1962, 1964, 1968) changed the established western thinking reclaiming the lived body’s centrality in the constitution of experience. Following Zarilli (665) “it was with [his] description of the intertwining that characterizes the body’s fundamental relationship to the world through the surface body” that “the experience of the lived body may best be described s a ‘chiasm’ - braiding, intetwining, or criss-crossing-” Zarilli building upon Leder’s post-Merleau-Ponry model trying to account for “why the body as a ground for experience ...tends to recede from direct experience” suggests four modes of embodiment: firstly the surface body and the recessive body; the former is the fleshy body and “ecstatic” “in that the senses open out to the world” (656) while  the recessive body is visceral and its sensations are harder to pin down or be expressed linguistically, “this is the (metaphorical) body of ‘blood’, suggesting that depth dimension of experience ‘beneath the surface flesh’” (660). Furthermore there are the aesthetic inner bodymind and the aesthetic outer body: the former touches through breathing both the surface and the visceral and it is this body that various traditional or contemporary actor-training techniques aim at developing. Finally the aesthetic outer body “dually present for the objectve gaze and/or experience of an audience, and as a site of experience for the actor per se.” (664) 

Following Garner (51) stage/performance is inherently dual: i) a spectacle objectified for a perceiving spectator and ii) a phenomenal space subjectified and embodied by the actors, so subject-object are mutually implicated in this duality at the centre of which is the human body. Phenomenology redefines theatre as a perceptual encounter between consciousness and its object, the theatrical space; theatrical spaces are ‘bodied’ doubly i.e. they comprise bodies within a perceptual field but also they are ‘bodied forth’ in terms of a body not as perceptual object but as perception’s originating locus. Phenomenologically speaking the actor submits his body to the animating current of a text into an illusionary being (134-5). Attitude and action are inseparable in a play but not in a novel because the human body’s presence cannot be easily de-emphasized in space.  (97)

“TLC has a reputation for mesmerizing theatrical imagery, physical theatre and devised experimental work. It has performed in several European theatre venues and International festivals.” In 2011 the Company presented Sophocles’ Antigone at the Riverside Studios and then in the summer the company was invited to present this production in the Ancient Greek Drama Festival in Cyprus. As I am currently performing in the Oresteia with some of these actors I have interviewed them in an attempt to trace the way in which their physicality responded to these two different theatrical spaces. With no expeption all admitted in an almost confessional tone that although they rehearsed in the same rehearsal space for both versions as soon as they found themselves in the open air theatre for their dress rehearsal their body conciousness was awaken and heightened, they experience a strong sense of connection with the theatrical space situated within the wider natural environment feeling that their body entered a state of natural responsiveness opening out to the outdoors space. They experienced what could be perhaps best be described for want of a better term a magic touch as if being in contact with the stones, the earth, the star-lit sky; they felt as if they were part of a ritual transcendence. “In ritual perfromance transmitters are always among the most important receivers of their own messages” and “in ritual the transmitter, receiver and message become fused in the participant” (Rappaport 249-52). They, therefore, could connect more honestly to the archetypal nature of their dramatis personis, their kinesthetc journeys into their characters’ felt more truth-bearing and sincere. They experienced an enhanced visceral quality in their embodiment, i.e in their recessive bodies  as defined above and also in what Zarilli calls the outer aesthetic body also defined above, a felt degree of awareness and self-realization. New elements/layers were found spatially and the process was felt entirely non-analytical but magical. For example, Johan who played the role of the blind seer reported that in the riverside shows he found it a lot harder to pretend to be blind as it were with his full seeing eyes open but in the ancient ampitheatre he was so inspired by the space that he connected deeper with the blindness of his seer and its ability to ‘see’ with no eyesight. Their vocal delivery also felt more naturally-flowing, due to the excellent accoustics of the ancient amphitheatre even a couple of actors who suffered severe sore-throats could still be audible without any unnecessary straining of their voice. 

These accounts made me think of Anne Halprin’s working definition of ritual which following Ross (52) “both enbraces and contradicts traditional anthropological definitions” “as a nested relationship to sensory life, beginning with experience then moving to body, story, symbol, and finally arriving at myth” (53) It is no coincidence that when in 1957 Cunningham and Cage visited the Halprins at their home, Cunninghamn praised Halprin’s outdoor dance studio “for its capacity to affect a change in the performimg consiousness of the dancer” (54) “Aside from the obvious openness in the architectural arrangement there is another freedom for the dancer. There is no necessity to face front, to limit to focus to one side.” (Cunninghamm 72) Halprin “was very delibelately trying to get her performers to use the whole space of the theatre” (54) “A theatre whose ... setting is a landscape where audience and performers fuse” (58). These feelings and thoughts about the open air amphitheatre performances were shared by all the interviewed Antigone performers. They all also emphasized the extreme sense of freedom they felt in their performing bodies during the night, as all performances took place in the evening well after the sunset which they had, however, watched been in the theatre for their warm up, which they found very naturalizing and even purifying. These accounts resonate with what Allain (206) in his study of the Polish theatre of Gardzienice calls “a corporeal relationship between earth and heaven”, an “initiatory purification before work” (64) that encourages an altered consciousness, a distancing and a preparatory function [that] “can be equated with the pre-liminal phase of a rite of passage” (66)

In 1979 Staniewski redefined theatrical space: “I do not mean yet another ‘closed circle’ fortified by dry rules, rituals. I so not mean another stage. By space I mean an area and the substance of the land and the substance of the sky, bound by that area.” (quoted in Allain 51) “The daily life of Gardzienice in Poland moves between two worlds. They have resources in the city of Lublin [...] in contrast is the base in the village of Gardzienice, where most of the creative work happens at night.” (Zarilli 200) where “in summer the windows and doors are thrown wide open [with] no sense of division in the work spaces between outdoors and indoors. Morning exercises take place on the meadows or in clearings throughout the forest.” (201) At the heart of its training is night-running. “For Golaj, ‘night-running has its own poetics...its space...it liberates [the actor], making aware of others, “naturalizing” him both by heightening his conciousness of nature - the pulse of the earth and shooting stars” - (Golaj 55 quoted in Zarilli 205). Similar feelings were shared also by the Antigone actors when performing in the open air. Eleonora Duse (1858-1924) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleonora_Duse) springs to mind here: «To save the theatre, the theatre must be destroyed, the actors and actresses must all die of the plague. They poison the air, they make art impossible. It is not drama that they play, but pieces for the theatre. We should return to the Greek, play in the open air; the drama dies of stalls and boxes and evening dress, and people who come to digest dinner.»

  The differences between the black-box and ancient ampitheatre Antigone performances as attested and outlined above seem to corroborate these spatial links in the ways the actor’s body engages with the environment which are not just ‘ergonomic’ forllowing Pearson (171) but also causal in the Kantian sense. In The Critique of Pure Reason Kant (146) says that “every substance must contain in itself the causality of certain determinations in another substance, and, at the same time, the effects of the causality of that other substance, that is, substances must stand in dynamical communion, immediately or mediately, with each other.” Every perfromance is a closed society of such substances. Phenomenologically “up to a point a play is a series of givens, in the sense that givens, appearing ex nihilo, are gratuitously posited; then the givens become receiveds, that is to say the established and limited alphabet with which the play must write its unfolding inscription. Thus the arbitrary is gradually converted into the inevitable, and thus the impression of a highly critical causality arises...[which] creates the illusion of a word whose every detail is temporally and spatial linked: in short, a world permeated with causality”. (States 134-5) Gesture is not the kinetic imprint of a thought on the actor’s body but a process revelatory of this body’s presence, chironomy and stage movement feeding on the dramatic text rendering the invisible visible through the body. (97) The case-studies discussed here showed that the actor’s physicality feeds also on the performing space and the wider environment. 

The ancient Greek word for ‘acting’ is hypocrisis i.e. under-crisis, meaning ‘response’ literally to a crisis, political, social, religious. Following our explorarion this response is also spatial. Thespis’ archetypal solitude may be the fate of every true actor who, desiring the union of his body with his breath and a text, the union of the visible with the invisible, he is destined to an almost irretrievable exile. This is, however, the essence and starting point of every dialogical gesture with an audience always mediated through the perfomance space.

References

Cunningham, Merce, Lecture demonstration on Anna Halrin’s Dance Deck, Kenfield, CA. Unpublished manuscript from Halprin’s personal archive, 1957.

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, transl. F. Max Müller, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday 1961. Print

Maurice Marleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1962. Print.

--- The Primary of Perception, Evanston: Northwestern University Press 1964. Print.

--- The Visible and the Invisible, Evanston: Northwestern University Press 1968. Print.

Garner, Jr, Stanton. Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1994. Print.

Golaj, Mariusz, “Dawno temu w Gardzienicach” In Kontesksty-Anthropologia, Kultura- Ethnografia, Sztuka, Warsaw: Instytut Sztuki, 1991.

Rappaport, R. A. “Ritual” In Folklore, Cultural Performances and Popular Entertainments, ed. R. Bauman, New York: Pxford University Press, 1992, pp. 249-60. Print.

Ross, Janice “Anna Halprin’s Urban rituals”. In The Drama Review, 48. 2, n 2 (2004): 49-67. Print.

States, Bert O. Great Reckonings in Little rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theatre. Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1985. Print.  

Passow, Wilfried, and R. Strauss. “The Analysis of Theatrical Performance: The State of the Art” Poetics Today 2.3 (1981): 237-54. Jstor. Web. 9 Mar. 2012.

Pearson, Mike. Site Specific Performance. London: Macmillan, 2010. Print. 

Phillip Zarrilli (ed.) Acting Reconsidered. London and New York: Routledge, 1995. Print.

A Disappearing Number: memory, identity, fractal

A Disappearing Number is a case study for the embodiment of Nekyias. The term is Homeric and denotes journeys into the under- and other-world through which a series of unexpected encounters, past, present and yet to come, are generated; John Berger, McBurney’s mentor, in his ‘Twelve Theses on the Economy of the Dead’ writes: 

The dead inhabit a timeless moment of construction continually rebegun...Until the dehumanization of society by capitalism, all the living awaited the experience of the dead. It was their ultimate future. By themselves the living were incomplete. Thus living and dead were inter-dependent. Always. Only a uniquely modern form of egotism has broken this inter-dependence.

Inter-dependence is a word at the core of this poetics. Live and screened bodies collide with texts, numbers, time and space to generate memory constantly rewound or fast-forwarded repeatedly, as if it were a VCR, in an obsessive search for identity and beauty in that universe of timeless intertwining between the living and the dead. There is a fluid use of movement, sound/music design, video and text with at times deliberately ambiguous time structures, some of which are theatricalized simultaneously on the stage. Numbers and numerical patterns embodied through movement sequences become the key tool in this infinite search for connections. 

The play dramatizes the story of a “most romantic collaboration” between Cambridge mathematician Godfrey Harold Hardy and a 26-year old Indian mathematical prodigy called Srinivasa Ramanujan, whose work on the mock theta function and on modular forms is key to explaining string theory, a grand unifying theory currently put forward by physicists. Mathematics is brought to life with playfulness and is expressed through scenic and movement sequences. Mathematical formulae are articulated through the different rhythms of the performers’ bodily movements in combination with words and video projections being layered to build up the various interlocking stories. 

The resulting interrelationships between words, bodies, images seem to theatrically embody Hardy’s assertion that “mathematical ideas are arranged somehow in strata, the ideas in each stratum being linked by a complex of relations both among themselves and with those above and below.” (17). As any game of word association may reveal we are innately inclined to search for patterns as we live surrounded by them. And as Ruth, the Mathematics lecturer, says at the beginning of the play: 

To find the hidden pattern [in a sequence of numbers] you sometimes need to look at them in a new way.” (A Disappearing Number 21) 

It is at this point where imagination links with memory. McBurney writes: “What fascinated us in considering mathematics, was how we marry our own impermanence with mathematical permanence, how we situate ourselves along the continuous line of humanity and time, and how we might find ways to express permanence and infinity in another form.” (www.complicite.org.uk) The six-year old McBurney had known just such an infinity in the stars lying on an ancient canvas sheet on his back gazing at the night sky with his brother and sister

, as had Complicite writer, John Berger (1984): “We are both story tellers. Lying on our backs, we look up at the night sky. This is where stories began, under the aegis of that multitude of stars which at night filch certitudes and sometimes return them as faith.” (8) 

Like Mnemonic, this production has many short interweaving scenes structured in ways akin to a screenplay running with no intermission. Cinematically shaped and paced, it explores the relationships between real and screened bodies and between representation, imagination and desire in complex and richly imaged modes. At its heart lies McBurney’s almost obsessive preoccupation with memory. It is no coincidence that he directed Endgame (2009) taking the part of Clov; he has always been fascinated by Beckett, this great dramatist of memory, who wrote one of his early essays on Proust, the great novelist of memory. As Suzan Crane points out: “The mental process of memory takes on corporeal form in the brain, but this physical form is invisible to the naked eye: memory becomes sensible and visual through imaginative recollection and representation.” (1-2) Remembering is an act of “thinking of things in their absence” (Warnock 12).” Phenomenologically speaking the act of remembering in this production is embodied via the presencing of the language of mathematics and the spatiotemporal and corporeal components of its numerical structures. The actors’ bodies are constantly framed against video projections of numbers and places as if suggestive of the ongoing interaction between flesh and abstraction, between live and mediatized bodies and spaces, between transparency and opacity, between presence and absence. Hardy is shown to live the orderly life of a Cambridge don while 

Ramanujan’s wild creativity is conveyed through tabla music and dance movements, and his character is sometimes divided into two actors, one of whom writes down equations while the other dances out the thought process. The choice of tabla (Indian drums) for Nitin Sawhney’s score also integrates the idea of mathematical creativity into the music, since the patterns of tabla music are themselves mathematical and involve precise calculations. (Campos 331)

There is then this interplay of the phenomenological transparency, availability, livedness of the human presence expressed both linguistically and kinetically, and the awareness of absence and dys-appearance in the abstraction of the mathematical language and the tabla musical patterns: a post-structuralist phenomenological collision with the very livedness of the human body.

At the centre of this clash between the mortality of the human body and the infinity of mathematics is the search/quest narrative for a home and an identity. According to Hall (1993), there are at least two concepts of ‘natural identity’, the first positioned either traditionally within a shared history and heritage or as a result of “the act of imaginative rediscovery” of the “hidden histories” of what we are (393), the second situated within the deep difference of “what we have become” (394). In the latter sense identity transcends time and place, belonging both to the future and to the past, and is constantly transforming, evolving. It is not eternally fixed in some essentialised past, but rather subject to the continuous ‘play’ of history, culture and power. 

This certainly holds true in this production. Just as in Mnemonic, “space and place dissolve and reform instantaneously. The various ‘stories’ are played through and across the space of other stories. The transformation of objects and bodies is central to the idea that we humans carry pasts concretely within our container-selves, in our brains, our postures, our nakedness” (Reinelt 375). 

Al: (Looking at her name badge.) Where are you from ... Surita?

SURITA: London ... Ealing.

AL: Before that?

SURITA: Greenford. Where are you from?

Al: Los Angeles, California.

SURITA: Yeah, before that?

AL: New York, New York.

SURITA (Grinning.) And before that?

AL (Grinning back.) Baltimore, Maryland. (Pause.) But my parents were born in Bombay.

SURIT: Mumbai.

AL: Bombay. They got married and they moved to New Jersey and then we all moved to Baltimore just before I was born. So, I’m an American.

SURITA: I’m British.

AL: Before that?

SURITA: My parents were born in Uganda. They left in 1972: they were exiled. My grandparents originated from Gujurat. So, I’m Gujarati. (59)

Her grandparents appear in a diagonal line behind Surita as Ramanujan, now migrating to Cambridge, passes down the line to swap places with Al and Surita. These embodied and visual displacements are a recurrent component of Complicite poetics. Like the worry beads of Simonides in Mnemonic, fluid and multiple in their migrating identities:

You know, my worry beads are not Greek, they’re Turkish. My grandfather was a Greek refugee from Turkey. He was speaking Turkish better than Greek, I speak Greek better than English and my son speaks English better than Greek. Here is my little boy. He looks like his mother but only the face because inside he’s like me. (176)

In Mnemonic’s programme note McBurney in a way reminiscent of John Berger, writes: “We live in a time where stories surround us. Multiple stories. Constantly. Fragmented by television, radio, print, the internet [...]. We no longer live in a world of the single tale. So the shards of stories we have put together, some longer, some shorter, collide here in the theatre, reflecting, repeating, and evolving like the act of memory itself.” A Disappearing Number also starts with a lecture which is more of a comical double act between a ‘narrator’ revealing the duplicity of the stage by mocking the actress who plays Ruth, a nervous Maths lecturer:

I’m Aninda, this is Al and this is Ruth. (Pause. His accent changes.) Actually, that’s a lie. I’m an actor playing Aninda, he’s an actor playing Al and she’s an actress playing Ruth. But the mathematics is real. It’s terrifying but it’s real. (23)

As Campos (329) points out this prologue has a dual function: to disperse the audience’s fears about being lectured, and to draw parallelisms between abstraction and imagination. But apart from that, phenomenologically the exposure of the duplicity shows that “the intimacy of theater is not the intimacy of being within its world but of being present at its world’s organization under all constraints, visible and invisible, of immediate actuality.” (States 154) Against the reality of the audience witnessing the play as an illusion of an unreal world there stands the terrifyingly beautiful reality of mathematics. Yet it is only via the theatre that this act of collective imagining/remembering can take place when Aninda looks at the audience and asks them to think of a number:

And what I like about the theatre is that we are all able to imagine the same thing at the same time, just as now ...  (Pause.) Now I want you to imagine that Al is in India, and this plastic chair is a taxi in Madras. (25)

Then Aninda and Al step through the screen, their silhouettes instantly transported to Chennai, outside the temple situated at the end of Ramanujan’s street. Aninda points Al towards the temple:

In one structure we can see all reality, the inter-dependence of everything. He looked at this every day of his life. It was just opposite his house from where, in 1913, he wrote his first letter to G H Hardy. (26)

Then we hear the voice-over of Ramanujan and as Al freezes in Chennai, Aninda reappears through the screen to address the audience directly:

This has not happened to Al yet, but it will happen, it’s in the future. (Beat.) And now I want to go forward into the past. (26)

Upon her exit the temple disappears. Through an episodic structure of constant magical metamorphosis, where chairs become taxis or bundles of papers resemble a baby, we are taken backwards and forwards in time and space following Al’s Nekyia, as he tries to cope with the sudden loss of his wife Ruth as well as inhabit her fascination for Ramanujan. These tales of metamorphosis, distantly echoeing the Ovidian tales, could be read as resonating Tutter’s (2011) point in that they constitute a way of mitigating unbearable realities, especially loss. “The poetic and aesthetic reworking of the regressive, magical experience of metamorphosis restores it to the symbolic world of metaphor: for reparation, remembrance, and return.” (427) Space and time and Ramanujan’s mathematical sequences thus become metaphors for continuity, infinity, braiding and transformation, annulling the presence-absence dichotomy. In Ruth’s voice-over we hear that: 

There are no gaps between the numbers, like there are no gaps in time and space; they are continuous. And if time is continuous, then we are linked to the past and future. And if space is continuous, we are linked to the absent. (30)

Al’s family name is Chronos which in Greek mean ‘time’; so the theme of mortality through four different deaths (Hardy’s, Ramanujan’s, Ruth’s, and Ruth’s and Al’s stillborn child) runs as a constant counterpoint to the mathematical notions of permanence and infinity. In a series of comical phone calls to an Indian-based call centre, Al desperately attempts to change the name associated with his mobile number while plunging in and out of literal and metaphorical voyages in order to enter and inhabit his dead wife’s world. Convergent infinite series serve as a metaphor for the impossibility of union among humans. Al moves towards Ruth and she walks past him through the screen. The company follows her, passing one at a time in darkness. The screen starts rotating incessantly and through the voice-over we hear a young woman’s reminiscence:

I remember standing on the rail of the boat as it pulled away from India. And my parents were both crying and crying and India was getting smaller and smaller and all the lights were getting dimmer and dimmer. They were crying because they knew they would never see her again. (39)

Then as the young woman moves off, the company entering and passing through the screen continuously they move back to the 20th century, their costumes changing too. These are tales of the embodiment of resonance and dissonance, of difference and otherness, of home and displacement. Derrida’s celebrated playfulness with the notion of ‘différance’ is apposite here. As Hall (1993) notes, Derrida’s use of ‘a’ rather than ‘e’ in the suffix is a deliberate anomalous marker. (397). As “ ‘differ’ shades into ‘defer’... [there appears] the idea that meaning is always deferred ...” (Norris 32) disturbing fixed semantic binaries within this infinite postponement of meaning. Meaning is, thus, over- or under-determined, diasporic, nomadic, contingent, never-ending, diverse, scattered, non-hegemonising, syncretic, an invariably renewable uncharted territory, a ‘New World’. Talking about the division of zero which troubled Ramanujan ever since he was a boy, Ruth says:

  And the only certain thing about this problem is that it is uncertain. The answer depends upon the way you look at it. (66) 

It is because this ‘New World’ is constituted for us as place, a narrative of displacement, that it gives rise to a certain imaginary plenitude, recreating the endless desire to return to ‘lost origins’. And yet this return to the beginning is like the imaginary in Lacan - it can neither be fulfilled nor requited, and hence is the beginning of the symbolic of representation, the infinitely renewable source of desire, a Beckettian cyclical universe: “a movement of metonymic endlessness of desire” (Watson 76), memory, myth, search, discovery -in short the reservoir of our cinematic narratives.” (Hall 402) 

AL: Where do you live?

ANINDA: India, Switzerland and London.

Al: (Grinning.) We are everywhere, huh? (84) 

The main aesthetics of the performance seem to reflect Ramanujan’s partition function concerning the number of ways a whole number can be divided into whole number parts. The stage is often divided by frequently shifting and revolving screens serving as a metaphor for both loneliness – the atomization of the displaced individual - and the constant search for connections, reconnecting past-present-future as a perpetuum mobile in the infinity of time-space.  Aninda quotes her auntie: “from death to death walks a man who does not see everything as being connected”. (84) Immediately afterwards Al is silhouetted against the projected sky while the light closes in around Hardy who rises from the middle of the plane. The light becomes part of the narrative too as it allows the sky to become the sea, and Hardy’s voice-over suggests:

When the world is mad, a mathematician may find in mathematics an incomparable anodyne. (74)

Campos proposes that: “The scenography underlines these cultural and physical divisions by isolating characters in different areas of the stage, cutting them off from one another by screens and lighting effects.” (331) Barbara’s voice-over speaking from BT Headquarters from an unspecified location disappears and is replaced by music. As Al looks at his phone under the sound of a plane the lights dim, and upstage at some distance, in half-light, like a shadow stands Ruth, as an embodied animated memory of Al’s. A little later after Ruth’s voice-over informing us of the infinity of numbers, time and space, distant light appears and Ruth herself enters; onto the screen behind is projected the action of the fore-stage but with a four second delay in order to give the impression of shadows. Phenomenologically, the mise-en-scène stages the interplay of Körper and Leib (following Plüge ctd. in Garner 109), i.e. the physical (biomechanical) body and the subjectively experiential perception-grounded lived body, a constant intertwining of the objective and the phenomenal. Furthermore, as will be shown in the discussion of Shunkin, there is a Jungian awareness of shadows in Complicite’s poetics. A shadow, following Jung, “is an unconscious complex defined as the repressed, suppressed or disowned qualities of the conscious self.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Jung) - as well as the material traces of inseparable past and present projections.

Here the shadows also represent spectres of repeating time.  The word “fractal” springs to mind. “If you take a photograph of the delta of a river, from space, you find the same pattern, self-repeating patterns ...” says the director in Mnemonic (137). The feature of “self-similarity” is a key for our understanding of this mathematical (but also artistic) concept. If one zooms in on a digital image new finer details will appear, in fractals; however, the same pattern repeats just like the infinite regress in parallel mirrors or the homunculus, albeit greatly detailed; and unlike geometrical patterns, fractals are immeasurable in traditional ways. As David Williams has pointed out: 

One of McBurney’s most remarkable attributes is his facility for creating images 

that defamiliarize and redirect the geometry of conventional, received attention to reality, and etch themselves into our imaginations. Here ‘image’ is not simply pictorial representation or coup de théâtre, but rather a complex, dynamic syntax allying and layering movement, rhythm, text, music and object, engendered by the poetic logic of the forms and narratives at play within a production: image as the fusion of form and content in an embodied if fleeting ‘world’. (250)

McBurney’s Bergsonian vital élan aesthetics is thus fractal in its composition. Bodies and objects used by these bodies are employed in imaginative performative landscapes and in a complex array of live or mediatized abstract structural patterns across all sensory modalities with a variety of “vitality effects” (Stern 55), i.e. 

complex qualities of animation. [...] [which] are not emotions but kinetic dynamics (rushing, ambling, smoothing). They combine what Laban movement analysts call “efforts”, including temporal pattern and speed, intensity of effort and force, quality of weight, and amount of flow or tension. Inherent in all activity, vitality effects are the way that life manifests as qualities of energy, related to what Sheets-Johnstone calls “originary kinetic liveliness” (qtd. in Sklar 42). In their changing patterns, vitality effects are the “activation contours” (Stern 57) of experience. (Sklar 42)

Deirdre Sklar suggests that vitality effects “are inherent to both embodiment and thinking, and that they interweave with the sensorium in the cultural construction of meaning.”(42) In A Disappearing Number the extreme exuberant physical articulacy of these experiential contours is choreographed through ‘collisions’ between bodies, texts, spaces and objects, engaging with the chaos which is unknowable yet full of patterns; “Fractal patterns ... [that] tell us about the inherent value of living in a world that springs beyond our control.” (the Measure for Measure programme, as ctd. in Holland 327). 

It is no coincidence that at the beginning of Mnemonic the audience members - who had been offered a bag with an eye mask and a leaf upon entering the show - were asked to blindfold the eyes using the mask, then to hold the leaf in their hands and remember. Re-membering, i.e. putting the parts back together, is an act of reintegrative embodiment. Approximate fractals displaying self-similarity within finite scales occur in nature. Like the leaf, earthquakes are fractal, as are heartbeats; the organ of memory is the heart. Memory drives us through these embodied Nekyias, these journeys into otherness and the Nether world where past, present and yet to come is fused to produce this alchemical theatre magic; unlike Chinese paintings where a single subject is framed by an empty space, “in traditional Balinese paintings, there is no single path to the subject of the work. There is no single narrative. There is no perspective. Far and near appear the same. Past, present, and future are simultaneous.” (Gillitt qtd. in Banes 196) Such Nekyias, like traditional Balinese paintings, may have multiple subjects, an intertwining of the real and the fantastical, and a flagrant violation of temporal, causal, and character unity. Like the string of the three threads that Ramanujan and all Brahmin men wear across their body to represent thought, word and deed intertwined. “Numbers ... are also a source of patterns

, and this theatre, following Hardy’s vision of creative art, is simply searching for patterns with which to understand the isolation it portrays.” (Campos 332) The final image is that of Ruth in voice-over in a site uncovered by an archaeological dig:

(The company spread across the stage, each in their own small pool of light. ANINDA pours his AUNT’s ashes into the river and each member of the company pours salt.) ‘What reconciles me to my own death more than anything else is the image of a place: a place where your bones and mine are buried, thrown, uncovered together. They are strewn there pell-mell. One of your ribs leans against my skull. A metacarpal of my left hand lies inside your pelvis. (Against my broken ribs your breast like a flower.) (AL places the chalk on the floor in front of him.) The hundred bones of our feet are scattered like gravel. It is strange that this image of our proximity, concerning as it does mere phosphate of calcium, should bestow a sense of peace. Yet it does. With you I can imagine a place where to be phosphate of calcium is enough.’ (91)

Bodies are the key component of Complicite’s poetics and their pulse is this proximity reached through separation, like the numbers the mathematicians call ‘magic’ because they appear where one least expects them for reasons nobody understands. “How can something you don’t understand be beautiful?” (42), asks Al. The answer comes from Ruth:

  we may not know quite what we mean by a beautiful poem, but that does not prevent us from recognizing one when we read it. (42) 

The scene is “anthropomorphized”, and becomes not only “the mathematics of love” but also of beauty and of ‘nostos’, the physics and metaphysics of a post-modern Odyssey, of a grand narrative recovered, of an Ithaca found, of a nostos, i.e. a homecoming: 

RUTH. The only place I feel at home anymore is with you. (60)

barefoot (or my Master's written reflection on a contact improv exam)

In ‘Body, remember…’ Cavafy (107) poeticizes the idea that memory originates in the body. To recover the body’s primordial memory Contact Improvisation focuses inwardly enabling a return to the familiar made unfamiliar: the body as a bio-mechanical enactor of movement with its inherent pathos. 

To the Wagnerian distinction between light and sound CI adds the touch world in which us in duet, in alliance with the floor, became the composers of our ‘musique concrète’: an intimate chamber play of ‘found’ movement made proprioceptively, i.e. perceiving our positioning-moving through an experiential dialogue where feeling was investigative through the skin-bone-flesh sensitivity animated by breath. Permeating the whole body by stripping stylized illusionist accretions, touch became the connective tissue, a deep generative structure calibrating movement using anatomy/weight; psoas muscle released and tailbone unlocked, for example, a lever is created with the pelvis triangle pushed up, maintaining an erect torso/head configuration, a contact platform formed for the partner on top, then compressing/supporting her with one hand, her free hip rotating up across my body until standing. The entire range of touch in this sequence directs the bodily reflexes through an instantaneously randomized interplay of give-and-take of gravity, release and momentum, strength and vulnerability. Touch impulsing a body area enables my partner to respond by opening this area up towards the impulse pathway. Touch opened up multiple sensory avenues framing the flickering image/motion and subverting it as fast as it was projected as in the back-to-back, head-to-head, hip-to-shoulder pathways, with cubist-like shapes spontaneously formed by our bodies creating a shifting figure-drawing in dance. The juxtaposition/simultaneity/interdependency of impulses/responses exchanged in time/space felt open-ended, free-associative. Peregrination and circularity driving our movement rather than linearity, our dance was ‘rhapsodized’ through a spherical sense of space with no preset syntax/semantics. The physical truth of touch made our movement supportive and supported, visceral, free from the concern for attractive partnering yet emotionalized, even sensual, at times. Loss of touch, unless instigated as a wilful suspension of intimacy, led to awkwardness but it was touch again that allowed us to recreate and sustain impetus. Riding on it I got lost in its forces, embracing that disorientation arising from letting things happen. The more I plunged in this dialogical listening to my partner’s body despite or even because of my tiredness, the more I came close to ‘seeing through the body’, ‘listening through the skin’ (Novack 189), i.e. to coenaesthesia “the diffuse internal awareness of bodily existence, caused by the interaction of numerous unlocalized sensations.”

A compositional multi-focal flow thus emerged often as a palindrome punctuated by stillness and sudden vigorous or gentle weight shifts, falls/rises with biomechanical immediacy as in the ‘aeroplane’ sequence whose fluidity necessitated not only the 90̊ heel-straight leg but also a mutuality in momentum/inertia, requiring us both to be unfixed, susceptible, impromptu, in readiness to initiate/receive/develop the kinetic offer. It is this uncharted dialectic ongoingness of touch and weight organized within Laban’s icosahedron which results in flow that pries open logicality to make room potentially for exquisite vertiginous disorder. With both partners I experienced moments where our dance felt Protean/metamorphic through the neuromuscular systems of two yielding softening bodies enacting this polysemous activity-receptivity dialogue, gauging the possibilities for continuing to move following the point of contact. Overcoming the fear of falling or hurting, in the end I felt arriving at a plateau of weightlessness, exuberance, a sense of magic even transmitted through the hereness of our pounding feet or the rhythmic pulse of our touching body parts. Using my shoulder as a lever and the other arm as supporting frame to roll on the floor or to a reverse somersault, everything changing unpredictably took us on trips that just as suddenly assumed a funny state as in t’ai chi’s ying-yang polarities where one concept changes fluidly into its opposite. It felt as if via this mutually modulated flux of playfulness and kinetic imagery my ‘reptile brain’ was awakening, a mesmerizing sensation that generated for me a high pitch of intensity, a stepping out of time/space into that shadow-state between consciousness and sub-consciousness.

Re-conceptualizing the body as a sign per se CI’s responsive body aesthetic, countercultural to the expressive body, empowered my physicality in both centred and off-balance modalities. I should like to develop it particularly exploring centrifugal force in more adrenalised states off the ground as well as solo improvisation. The ‘voice’ of my performing body has certainly benefited from greater depth, softness, resonance, responsiveness, lightness, spinal agility. CI’s ‘effortless effort as the genuine source of power’ (Banes 119) is a revelatory metaphor for art and life not in-the-proscenium but in-the-round. Its poetics is liminal, boundary-crossing, a no man’s land inhabited by both Self and Other, confounding the presence and the distance, the inner and the outer. Through CI I have gained and will further explore in my practice ‘yahaku’: meaning ‘emptiness’ in Sanskrit, it is the undrawn space in the sumi-e Japanese monochromatic painting, the unacted act in Noh, the unworded word in poetry. A nothing that becomes the fountainhead of possibility, a free-wheeling, raw, messy nihil full of potential that tears into the preciousness of one’s material to birth a dignity and a beauty in the smallest nuance of touch, move, sound, glance, smell.

References

Banes, Sally. Terpsichore in Sneakers, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1987.   

Cavafy, Constantine. The Collected Poems, Oxford: OUP 2007.

Novack, Cynthia. Sharing the Dance, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press,

1990.

my showreel