Yes. No. A bit. Not Really

Performance, Sophiensale Berlin, Germany 2010 / Collaboration with Christina Ciupke and Boris Hauf 
Funded by the Berlin Senate Cultural Affairs Department and supported by Goethe Institute

In my mind and on my mind are two different things. You are on my mind, but in my mind there is.... the sun on my back, the sound of the traffic, the balance in my bank, the feel of your ambivalence, a sudden tension at the base of my skull, my unpredictable impulses, the uncomfortable feel of somebody's breath sitting behind me, the smell of the day before, the reflection of light on the ground in front of me, the small, white flower whose name I have forgotten... it's a constant dialogue .... while talking to myself, my senses are doubly alert, waiting to catch what comes next with a logic that is hidden from me... somebody is coming closer, I am watching carefully, she is still walking in my direction, the sun is blinding my sight, other people are passing, I lost her – she was bleached out – like a too bright spot in a photograph. I ask myself has the day invaded the night or the night invaded the day?

Article about the performance by Ric Allsopp

 Walking Backwards: choreographic images, forgetting and the utopia of the present

 Ric Allsopp

Introduction

In an attempt to engage with the poetics, mechanisms and technologies of forgetting within performance, and how they help us to understand the event and reception of performance, I want to bring together some ideas that might allow us to rethink what is at stake in the event of performance itself - especially where that event is produced primarily through bodily means in forms of choreography or dance. I want to discuss ‘choreographic images’ not in a normative sense as the systematic and coherent patterning of movement phrases in a time- based aesthetic object of performance; but as an integral and inseparable relationship between movement and inscription – between what disappears or is forgotten, and what remains, and how each of these terms modifies the other: the forgotten forming, as it were, the negative space of what remains; the choreographic image as an emotional rather than representational dynamic.

This paper assumes that mechanisms of forgetting are integral to a choreographic conception of the relation between movement and memory, and of performance as a means of embodying images and experiencing the play of recollection and forgetting that constitute our experience of the art work. It considers Walter Benjamin’s anticipation of ‘a utopia in the heart of present’ and his conception of the materiality of history, as a means of engaging with aspects of contemporary performance practice and its relation to the choreographies of physical and affective blind spots. (1)

The physical blind-spot that extends behind our backs is an area both forgotten and confronted (paradoxically) through actions of walking backwards. Walking backwards is both a metaphorical and literal engagement with the endless space behind our backs and the necessity of forgetting as a means of shaping and reshaping our perspective on the world. The body is a moving proprioceptive technology that is continually altering our perception of, and our engagement with, the world and as such is an embodiment of a continually transforming relation between technology, memory and experience.

The paper makes some tentative connections between Benjamin’s perception that ‘image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation’ (Passagenwerk); the poet Charles Olson’s idea of image as that which turns in the caesura or gap between rhythm and knowing, between place and action, between meaning and matter;

Joseph Beuys’ ‘actions’ as transformations of material and thought; and Carolyn Nakamura’s analysis of magical operations and their kinship to art and memory. (2)

 Yes. No. A bit. Not Really.

I would like to suggest a reading of a recent choreographic work Yes. No. A bit. Not Really (2010) by the musician Boris Hauf, the film-maker Lucy Cash and choreographer Christina Ciupke, that was shown at Sophiensaele in Berlin last October (2010). On seeing the work in performance, I was intrigued by the way that Walter Benjamin’s idea that ‘each now is the time of a particular recognizability’ or moment of recognition (Rokem, 1999: 144), was visible in the work in parallel with the idea that the image of the present moment is also both a form of forgetting and reconstructing: that we walk, or ‘face’, backwards and forwards at the same time, that we do not simply evoke the past but transform it as it in turn transforms us, and that such potential transformations (and their actual and affective consequences) operate not only at the level of the art work (aesthetics), but also at the level of the everyday. The relationship between the formal aesthetic aspects of the work and the everyday movements that it both invokes and utilises also suggests a feeling, on the one hand, of endless flows of movement that produce an emotional and almost tangible sense of space; and, on the other, a perception of formal and legible rhythmic shapes that frame and contain the work.

 Yes. No. A bit. Not Really. (2010) is described as ‘a collaborative composition that proposes connections between rhythm, image, sound and movement in an intimate setting for a small audience’; and its title perhaps already suggests some everyday answers to forgotten questions. The programme notes instruct the reader on the art of choosing a seat:

To choose your seat we invite you to view the polaroids in the foyer. Each photograph has a number below, which is the number of a seat. Please select a number from below a photograph that draws your attention and find the corresponding seat number amongst the chairs in the Hochzeitssaal.

I walk up to the foyer on the first floor and see approximately 50 polaroids of the urban everyday displayed on the wall. I choose number 320 – a polaroid shot across a table top with a lamp, a sign saying ‘silence’ and an indistinct figure seated on the other side of the table. I forget now why I was attracted to this particular image. The polaroid images signify, as much through shape and texture as through their contents, the immediacy of the everyday.

They give an additional sense of a displacement between ‘here and now’ and a closely parallel ‘here and now’ that is taken into the performance and that informs or disturbs the seated spectator. We are called up stairs to the Hochzeitssaal where we find a more or less square space (about 10 x 10 meters) bordered by chairs (each numbered) with an entrance at each corner. The floor is yellow. What follows now is what I remember of the performance itself, an act of remembering through writing that incorporates associations, anticipations, and always already a process of forgetting.

Three performers walk backwards slowly around the outside of the perimeter/ audience. Three performers lying on floor – the transitions from walking to crawling to lying. A rectangular blanket. A pair of trainers - individually placed under the corner of the blanket. Walking backwards around outer and inner perimeters of the space. Some diagonals.

Looking backwards. Looking upwards, looking sideways - occasionally looking at each other. Enigmatic smiles. Who are these figures? There is nothing hesitant here. Only smooth transitions in direction – forwards and backwards; backwards and forwards; from the vertical to the horizontal; from the horizontal to the vertical. The rhythms of walking in silent movement. The formal construction of a memory theatre - but without content? The polaroids on the wall vaguely remembered. All three performers lying on the floor on their sides – sleeping, then turning; sleeping then turning. Under the blanket, pulling the blanket, folding the blanket. A repeating harmonic sequence – meditative and soporific – itself a memory. The movement is linear and angular. There are few curves except when lying on the floor. Looking across at the audience. Moments of recognition transform (like the sound score) into the feeling that nothing is there, the figures inhabit a different space-time, different historical moments. The ‘utopia of the present’ - a moment of ‘crossing’ from here to there, a chiasmus, a constant moving into context.

Heidegger understood technology as an act of revealing (1993: 307-342). What is it that the technology of forgetting that unfolds through this performance, that the three moving bodies reveal and how? What is it that remains? Perhaps what remains is precisely the movement of emotion itself, the constant, small-scale fluctuations of remembering and forgetting, that map the movements and revelations of our everyday experience. I would like to locate the remembered fragments of this performance – those fragments that have remained through the process of forgetting that I have just evoked or yet again re-assembled, in a number of ways: through what remains as two resolved images – walking backwards, and the blanket – that emerge in relation to the moving body, in other words as choreographic images; and to discuss in a number of ways how these two images ‘remain’ through the processes of forgetting.

The first image then is ‘walking backwards’, reversal and retrograde movement as a formal compositional strategy and as a means of displacing and disrupting attention and expectation. It is a considered movement; a movement that resists turning. Yet to move or walk backwards is not a pedestrian or everyday movement. It ‘excludes’ the turn, the rotation around an axis, the frontality that predominates in our everyday movement. It is more or less exclusively a sacred, ritual or aesthetic move.

The second image is the blanket as a portable, foldable, enfolding space; as warmth, as heat, as security, as boundary and cover, as a point from which movement is both initiated and terminates with its myriad associations. As a textured ground that interacts and modifies the planar space marked by a boundary of seated spectators, or backward moving walkers.

Both images involve and enfold moving bodies as themselves a double-inscription of action and object; bodies that relate and entangle action and object, transforming and being transformed through the blanket as a portable space, a moving boundary; through walking backwards into the blind spot. How does what remains persist?

Images

Walter Benjamin observed that ‘[h]istory breaks down into images, not into stories’. (3) In ‘The Gift of the Past’, Emily Jacir & Susan Bucks-Morss observe, in relation to Walter Benjamin’s famous ‘caption’ for Klee’s painting Angelus Novus (1920), that

the passing presence of the material world and of human happiness in it leaves us with the metaphysical necessity of affirming transitoriness because only in passing is the truth available to us. It’s image is time-sensitive. (2011: 34)

The same case can perhaps be made for choreographic work, for the transitory nature of movement ‘in passing’. The dance, the moving, stepping body in passing may leave little trace of its presence. It creates its images (that which persists/ remains/ transforms) ‘in movement, in passing’. Its image – the ‘holding’ or residual image that is produced for, with, by the spectator becomes more defined through the process of forgetting as over time it sheds its excess, or perhaps leaves only its ‘excess’. We remember only the essential image and not the surrounding details. Gradually the work resolves into its holding images – for instance the rhythm of walking backwards, the unfolding of the blanket.

The movement of the body that gestures, inscribes, or paints, or sacrifices invokes through its ability to turn: the tropic action that invokes both memory and forgetting (returning those aspects that have been lost, forgotten, shed, disregarded) and brings to life for an instant of recognition (in Benjamin’s sense of the constellation that forms the image) the conditions that hold the image. This ‘place’ or marker of turning or returning operates too as a basic principle in Olson’s projective poetics where topos (place) / typos (registration) / tropos (action) form the movement and dynamic of a physical process from which image moves outwards. In his early positional poem ABCs (2) (1949) image is formed of a dynamic between place and its recognition -

one sd:

of rhythm is image

of image is knowing

of knowing there is a construct

This dynamic constitutes the technology of the ‘topos’, as a ‘place’ system in a memory theatre, where image works continually in two directions: back to rhythm/ causation and forward to knowing/ recognition, a place of ‘invention’ which in the commonplace tradition was associated with ‘movement about a field’, locating images and ideas and finding their living connections; the work, as Olson proposed, of ‘composition by field’ in which form was never more than an extension of content: a disposition of images where ‘nothing takes place but the place itself’.

This dynamic field has a resonance with Benjamin’s ‘denkbild’ or ‘thought-image’ that ‘performs a thought through an image that has come to a muted, silenced standstill’ (Rokem, 2010: 172). This is exemplified in his caption for Klee’s painting in which the Angel of History is irresistibly blown backwards into the future by a storm from paradise, constantly redefining that place from which movement proceeds as he ‘seems about to move away from something he stares at.’ Choreography, rather, leaves us with another mode of ‘thought-image’ – perhaps here a ‘bewegungsbild’ or ‘tanzbild’ – that is in movement as ‘choreographic image’. Olson suggests as much in Syllabary for a Dancer (1952) where ‘[d]ance is an object and an action. It is simultaneously an object and an action’ (4) it is the intertwining of the bi- directional movements of thought and of body that produce a ‘choreographic image’ whether that is sensuous or representational.

 After-effects

The second way of considering what remains is as ‘after-effect’. Here the idea is that the holding image of the body (that which remains) resolves itself and becomes perceptible as what I am tentatively calling the ‘choreographic image’; yet not at the moment of its production, but through the passage of time that constitutes a process of forgetting.

 In his discussion of Joseph Beuys’ ‘Actions’ Gregory Ulmer notes that in Beuys’ case, the objects that he uses ‘produce the effect of reference, but without referring to anything. Or rather, the reference is now supplied by the recipient, who in response to the stimulus, produces it out of himself’. (Ulmer, 1985: 251) The attention of the work shifts from the question of ‘who speaks’ to the issue of ‘who receives’ – that is, how we as participants or spectators are able to read the work as image - in this case bodies walking backwards; the displacement of a blanket. Ulmer notes that Beuys’ object-actions are

expressly intended to function by means of an after-effect, working thus directly with ‘the time of understanding’ [...] [O]ne has to experience Beuys’ works from the proper distance in time as integrated by the operation of memory’ (1985: 252)

I am suggesting here that this idea of the ‘after-effect’ can also be used to understand or account for the choreographic image – especially where this is produced without reference – that is through the kinetic of the body itself. Ulmer affirms that Beuys’ objects are

both what they are (their qualities motivate the concept attached to them) and stimulation for the general processes of memory and imagination. At the primary level, the object does not ‘transfer a message’ but moves the spectator - remaining open in its reference, the object evokes associated memories that are motivated less by the qualities of the object than by the subject of reception: the theme of a work like Fat Corner [...] is not immanent in the material and is not accessible by means of interpretation but only through its appeal to the observer’s associative memory. (1985: 251)

 This associative memory (at the level of individual engagement with the process of the image) is linked to the effect of forgetting, the return of the choreographic images that a work such as Yes. No. A Bit. Not Really produces, the after-effect working with the ‘time of understanding’ defined as a ‘sufficient’ distance. We can note also that remembrance in Benjamin’s terms aims not simply to evoke a moment from the past, but aims to transform it. The ‘modifying’ effect of remembrance – ‘it is the instrument of the retroactive effect of the present on the past; because of it historical time no longer appears irreversible’ (Mosés, 2009: 121) This echoes Olson’s spatial image of history as a field rather than as a chronology.

 Perhaps also we can imagine here the passing of time as itself a ‘blind spot’; the time it takes to forget the non-essential details of the image and to ‘re-member’ - literally to piece together the image as a constellation of ‘now’ and the associations gathered around the image itself - or for the image to form itself over ‘sufficient time’. ‘Time’ here considered not as rhythm but as a part of the necessary mechanism that Olson’s projective poetics suggest of how image leads to knowing and from thence to a construct. This is not the speed of commodification – the instant referential or gratifying image - but the after-effect of something that both moves us and disturbs us. The writer Peter Handke experienced in relation to Beuys’ work that ‘[w]hat hits home is the after-effect of the transformed objects which complete the field of association [that the spectator brings to the work]’ (quoted in Ulmer, 1985: 252). The ‘intensity’ of image is then its capacity to hold for the individual these after-effects in tension.

 It is also interesting to note Beuys’ own view of ‘action’ as consisting ‘in and for itself another word for the nature of movement [...] I ground the action character in my work: to find the beginning of movement in the world’ (Ulmer, 1985: 255); where does movement begin; how does movement itself shape our relations to the contexts that we define and which define us. The movement of inscription and the inscription of movement that is revealed inside the choreographic image joins together material and thought in ways that do not demonstrate ideas, but embody ideas. Beuys’ ‘object-action’ as a double inscription is paralleled in the choreographic images of Yes. No. A Bit. Not Really through the double inscription of the body which interrogates in turn the materials of walking and its displacements in order to discover their ‘own’ properties.

Magical Operations

Finally we can consider that the choreographic body and the non-referential images that it creates might be considered as or in terms of a magical operation: an operation that is set in motion and that (like the body itself) is never complete in so far as it always exceeds the limits of its own representations.

As I have tried to suggest, the body in performance can be considered in both Beuys’ and Olson’s sense as an object-action. In The General Theory of Magic the anthropologist Marcel Mauss (1902) affirmed that ‘magic is as much a way of doing as a way of thinking’. (5) The practical operations of magic provide a parallel, counterpoint and correspondence to poetics – the act of making – that is perhaps of particular interest to any discussion of how contemporary performance practice may be factured. Carolyn Nakamura’s analysis of magical operations provides a means of considering from another position the choreographic image, and the Beuysian sense of the moving non-referential body as an ‘object-action’ (Nakamura, 2005). It also has some resonance with Irit Rogoff’s notion of ‘looking away’ as a radical means of spectatorship: in so far as the choreographic image constitutes a turning away from normative perceptions of the body as a representation that points elsewhere, or that stands in for something else. (6)

 In her discussion of magical sense in relation to apotropaic objects - objects having the power to avert evil influences or bad luck (from Greek ‘to turn away or from’) - Nakamura argues that conventional interpretations in archeology that are oriented towards explanation and meaning, ‘fail to get at the most compelling aspects of ancient magic, exactly that which makes it magical’ (2005: 21). Her approach has, in my view at least, a resonance for performance work that (intentionally or otherwise) stands outside of, or on the margins of normative perceptions of the body in movement - the ‘choreographic image’ as I figure it here

- to the non-referential aspects of the moving body in performance, such as the work offered in Yes. No. A Bit. Not Really. Nakamura notes that, in such circumstances

[w]hat is required is an evocation of magic that aims directly at the caesura between meaning and matter and delves into the shadowy processes of materializing experience, belief and value’ [...] We should consider then, not a logic but an aesthetics of magical practice, as a particular way of making sense (Gosden, 2001). And this way of doing engages a radical materiality that not only enacts the mutual constitution of subjects and objects, but provides the condition for such discursive practices.’ (2005: 21)

Thinking of choreographic images in the terms I have tried to set up here the ‘allure of the thing lies in the way in which it can never be completed, never be fully or perfectly discovered; and it is always set in motion, propelled by human relations’. (2005: 23) In this way the choreographic image always ‘exceeds its own narration’ and reveals the ‘extra-semantic function of the magical object’. Nakamura points to the kinship between the processes of magic, of art and of memory:

In this way, the magical object does not merely represent. It presents. This presentation, as not reproducing or inventing but a capturing (Deleuze 2003:48) conjures a force that exceeds the totality of the complex relations and ideas that produce it.’ [...] These human-thing transactions trace an economy of the present in the sense that they do not seek a reconciliation of opposites, but rather a preserving of disjunction.’ (2005: 23-4)

To conclude, the ‘choreographic ‘image’ that emerges from (or that is held within) the kinetics of the body itself – the act of movement without reference – carries with it the fullness (but not the completion) of the presence of the body. Not ‘what it is’ but ‘how it is’. If, as Mikhail Bahktin asserted ‘[t]o be means to communicate’ and that the movement of such an exchange presumes a sensuous intimacy between the outside world and ourselves, then ‘to be means to be for another, and through the other, for oneself.’

‘[W]onder is central to a mode of understanding that is ‘capable of grasping what, in ourselves and in others precedes and exceeds reason’. (Pettigrew 1999:66) Bodily sense is key here, since it can know something more than words express. The ‘trick’ of magic then, lies in attaining the unknown by disorganising all the senses; in effect, it acts to deregulate relationships that are rigorously regulated by normative cultural forms. The aesthetic experience of magic seeks the recovery of correspondences between people, things and places in their undifferentiated unity, a unity that becomes obscured through “habitual modes of perception”. (Harrison 1993: 180). In this way magic aims at the perceptual movements that continually render meaning rather than at meaning itself. (2005: 25-26)

What we see as a continuity (taking Benjamin’s point about the deadening continuity of a history that resists transformation) is continually disrupted through the act of forgetting – that momentary or gradual loss that provides the decisive break that creates the world anew and produces a ‘utopia in the heart of the present’.

 ***

Acknowledgements

This paper was first given at PSI17 ‘Camillo 2.0’ as part of a panel on ‘technologies of forgetting’ in Utrecht (May 2011); and subsequently as a illustrated lecture for MA SODA at HZT, University of the Arts Berlin in July 2011.

Notes

1.  See Walter Benjamin, 1940/ 1999; Stéphane Mosés, 2009: 108; Freddie Rokem, 2010:

141-176

2.  See Walter Benjamin, 1999: N3,1, pp. 462-463 quoted in Rokem, 2010: 144--145; Charles

Olson, 1970; Gregory Ulmer, 1985: 225-264; Nakamura, 2006: 18-45.

3.  Quoted in Jacir & Bucks-Morss, 2011: 26

4.  First published in Maps 4 (1971) pp. 9-15

5.  Quoted in Nakamura, 2006: 21.

6.  See Irit Rogoff, 2005: 117-134.

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