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)