Double Dialogues - lines of flight

Rather than present a performance and then expound on it, or introduce the performance with a theoretical proposition, or even place the performance within a discursive context as a lecture might do, it was decided for this project to embed the theoretical paper within the performance and have it spoken by one of the performers, in this case the writer. As writer of the proposal, performance and paper, I am keenly aware of the continual flux between ‘observer’ and ‘participant’ status at play in this project, with neither state ever free of contamination by the other.

The performance, "Forgetting Schneider: Imagining Another," was created by Peter Snow with performers Peter Fraser, Michael Coe and Katherine Northey and had original music by Thomas Reiner. A photographer, Jesse Marlow, was invited to take pictures of the performance. The spoken paper, "Imag(in)ing the Inbetween," was written and delivered as part of the performance by Peter Snow. The project as a whole might be characterised as an exploration of how ‘lines of flight,’ as multiple, relational and open-ended series of imagined and enacted image intensities, could be a means of making and thinking about a performance.

This written paper attempts to accomplish several things. Firstly, it tries to capture some of the diverse kinds of performance writing - proposal, performance, performance text and theory - involved in the project. To that end, the article is divided into the following sections: Section I documents the proposal for the project; Section II gives a short description of the performance; Section III is a record of the spoken paper; and Section IV is a short discussion of intercorporeality and embodiment, the central theoretical investigation of the project. (This theoretical critique expands notions indicated in the proposal which were not able to be dealt with in the spoken paper for ‘performative’ reasons - in particular those of time, rhythm and aesthetic.) In this way there is an attempt to bring out some of the relations between differing modes of writing/performance.

Secondly, the article aims in part to underscore the performative dimensions of the project. To emphasise the dialogic relations between practice and theory that were at play throughout the process, different fonts are used in later sections to distinguish, for example, what was spoken in the performance from what has been added in this re-writing.

Thirdly, the article develops ‘inbetweenness’ as a theorising of the manifold relations at play in a performative arena, and proposes it as a theorising of embodiment in performance. It was hoped in the original planning that this prospect would be shown in the aesthetic of the performance of "Forgetting Schneider" and briefly pointed to in the spoken paper in its performative context.

What follows is the exact text of the proposal which was tendered for this project. Partly this is for readers to see something that practitioners know only too well, namely, how performances modify proposals and how proposals constrain performances and partly it is to bring out some of the relations between these two performance practices.

I envisage making a new, short theatre work taking as starting point the figure of the returned WWI German soldier, Schneider, who suffered such intriguing debilities that he could knock on a wall if close enough but not even move his arm if too far away, and kiss if kissed but not experience sexual arousal. I imagine this strand, or trajectory, as a sequence of visual images, some longer, some shorter, all dealing with intensities of Schneider’s lived experiences. If he talks, these patterns will be new texts. This particular part of the work could perhaps be characterised as ‘physical theatre’ and will be performed by Peter Fraser...[brief curriculum vitae at the time follows including "Body Weather" at Lake Mungo].

I would like to make another trajectory, or ‘line of flight,’ to weave in and out of Schneider’s journey, composed largely of songs, of lullabies, of remembered and imagined melodies, of silence. These revolving patterns would be based on sounds, not on texts, and would involve improvised singing on compositional motifs. The performer here would probably be singer Catherine Northey, with the music to be composed by Thomas Reiner of the Department of Music at Monash. There could be well be another pattern to be woven in here, perhaps fragments of recorded text on the metaphysics of lived experience from Kant and/or Peirce, though these could (also) be part of Schneider talking.

These two strands will be counterpointed with a sculpted installation of ‘Home,’ at present conceived as a perspex cube with life-size mannequin figures. It could be that the figures will be made and installed during the performance, and so provide both a soundscape and another ‘line of flight,’ this time of real actions in real time. Maybe there will be more cubes, to be filled as desired. Possibly one will have water with a floating body...? The work overall will investigate, among other things, exile, identity, aloneness, imagining (others), and family...

In this paper, I would like to theorise performance and performing as being processes that take place largely in the ‘in between.’

For performing, I will draw on the model of body as performed in "Body Weather" (a form of Buto originating with the Japanese dancer Min Tanaka) where bodies are seen as multiple, receptive and changing. They are also seen as permeable and unbounded, ‘raw,’ and thus open to the multiple influences of weather where weather is conceived as a multivalent, capricious, cyclic and unpredictable system of forces occurring ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ bodies. Bodies and the world (as weather) therefore are claimed to be interpenetrable, capable of infinite difference and endless change.

I would like to question whether such an account could extend to other ‘bodies in performance’ and will propose that we need a notion of intercorporeality to deal with this issue of the multiple and changing relations between bodies in performance. To facilitate this, I open a dialogue between the phenomenology of lived experience of Merleau-Ponty, where bodies can be seen as networks of social relations in the world, and the notion of body in Deleuze and Guattari, where bodies are seen rather as flows and intensities and where ‘lines of flight’ are theorised as imagined and actual capacities for action.

For performance I would like to utilise the pragmatics of C.S. Peirce, in particular the metaphysical categories of experience. I will argue that our experiences of performance, both as performers and as spectators, can be theorised using his categories of firstness, secondness and thirdness, allowing us to account for the imaginative processes undertaken in the creation of cultural lives. It is these ‘lines of flight,’ somewhere between the poles of fictionality and materiality, that seem to me to be at the heart of the creative enactment of our culture we call performance.

What follows is a necessarily truncated set of descriptions of the performance at Theatreworks or, should I say, of some of the images of the performance as they appeared to me from the stage. This was only the second time the piece had been run, and this précis is undoubtedly affected by my having watched the images develop in rehearsal and by my watching, from the stage, all of them unfold together. I was in the work and, like the audience, could not watch everything.

The performance ended up comprising five independent, but simultaneous, trajectories. We could describe these trajectories as lines of action or sequences of image intensities or ... even as ‘lines of flight.’

One performer, the sculptor/technician, swept and began to set the space while the audience were entering. After opening the shutters and the side door to let in the natural light, he brought on a chair and placed it off-centre in the spill of light from the open door. He placed a cooking table down-left near the audience, a sculpted figurine of a mother and child up right, and an iron framed cube off-centre up-left. He led in another performer, all in white, and seated him on the chair. This was the soldier/patient Schneider. He left and motioned a third performer to come on and stand up-left near the back wall behind the frame. This was the speaker. He then went to his table, put on his headphones, motioned to the other performers to continue and proceeded to cook a cake; then, interspersed with reading from a text to the nearby spectators, he sang quietly to himself, timing and monitoring the performance.

Throughout the performance, Schneider moved...from the chair to the floor, from the walls to the door. The movements were very varied, some awkward, others lyrical, some sharp and savage, others slow and sustained. Many were layered and occurred simultaneously. Many were repeated. Most stopped abruptly as his attention was diverted to another place and another series of movements began. He marched, saluted, sang, shouted, crept, hid, floated, crawled, smoked, tapped his body, sat, and looked... At one point he sank to the floor like a dog and panted, as the singer had done before him.

The speaker moved very slowly down to the frame, stepped inside it, and remained there for quite some time, moving mouth, legs and torso almost imperceptibly. At one point he left the frame and walked forward to the cooking table to deliver the spoken paper. Rather than speak after the performance about the performance, it was decided to incorporate the paper in the performance and to deliver it accordingly. While he spoke, quickly and quietly, the other performers continued their actions.

The fourth performer, a singer, beginning in the audience, delivered recurring atonal motifs at intervals while moving around the space, from object to object, from performer to performer. Between the sung motifs, again at intervals, were audible breathing patterns. At one point, up centre, after she had passed the mother and child figurine, she sank to the floor and panted vigorously. After inspecting the speaker in the frame and taking tea with the sculptor, she resumed her seat in the audience.

Each of these ‘performances’ was developed independently of the others, mostly through improvisation. Shortly before the performance, the four trajectories, or ‘lines of flight,’ were allowed to run simultaneously. There was no attempt to fix connections between the patterns. On the day of the performance, an invited photographer wandered around at will taking stills of the presentation. His trajectory was unplanned, generating new and unexpected relations.

This record of the spoken paper keeps very close, in form and content, to the text of the spoken paper. Everything in small case, bold type was spoken as part of the performance. The few lines in small case, but not in bold type, have been added for clarity. The lines in italics are selected images of action to underline the continuing performance context.

(The way the spoken text is laid out hints at the rhythmic pattern of enunciation, which contrasted sharply with the tempos of the other three performers. The text was articulated quickly, evenly and fairly quietly.)

not the historical Schneider,

the returned World War I German soldier

who could knock on a wall if close enough

but not even move his arm if too far way

who could kiss if kiss but not experience

desire

but our performative Schneider, here

configured as in a thirty foot sphere,

his arm floating, becoming a moth,

turning to look over his head

and the world turns with him

until he falls over

Schneider

who cannot remember

killing a rat in the trenches,

or lying on his comrade in No Man’s Land

as they take it in turns to protect each other from the shells...

"We imagine this trajectory or line of flight as a

sequence of visual images ...

all dealing with intensities of Schneider’s

lived experiences..." (from the performance proposal)

And so,

gesturing towards Peter/ Schneider, still seated, smoking, looking...

we chart a dis-organised life...a revolutionary life...Woyzeck perhaps...de-territorialised...with not so much increased or decreased but radically changed capacities for action.

And while collecting our material,

our performative images for our imagined Schneider

- somewhat ironically we are imagining, and imaging,

what it would be like not to be able

to imagine -

we discover, in Rare Books, the ‘real’

Schneider, the brain damaged

patient, performing for his psychiatrist

investigator, Goldstein -

The speaker turns towards Schneider, still seated ... looking over his head

The singer repeats an earlier motif, very quietly

(i) ‘...direct damage causes a rise in threshold of

excitation. The receptivity of the patient is reduced.

It takes him much longer to react.’

A photograph is taken, Schneider hasn’t moved.

(ii) ‘If excitation has occurred ... it spreads abnormally

and lasts an abnormally long time -

it "perseveres" - and "perseveration" occurs

predominantly when the performance has been

difficult for the patient.’

Another photograph is taken...

(iii) ‘...performances [of the organism] are influenced to

a much greater extent than normally

by external factors ...

they are deprived of former experiences [memory]...

external stimuli acquire an abnormal importance...

the "distractability" of the patient [is] not inattention, but its opposite

a morbidly exaggerated attentiveness.’

Yet another photograph is taken, this time of the speaker...

(I wonder, am I now Goldstein?)

(iv) ‘Modification of the patient’s performance results

predominantly from a blurring of the sharp

boundaries between "figure" and "ground".’

The speaker moves to a position behind Peter/ Schneider/ the patient’s chair, and continues to quote the performance investigator.

‘Habitually,’ says Goldstein to his/ the imagined spectator,

‘we ignore the background of a performance

and pay attention only to the figure. This is

faulty observation for both background and

figure are intimately interconnected.

Neither can be properly evaluated without the other.

Correspondingly every change of background will

produce a change in figure.’

‘...after cortical damage there is sometimes

ìinversion, where the figure becomes

background and the background figure.’

the singer

who is by now preoccupied...perhaps remembering her journey

"We would like to make another trajectory,

or ‘line of flight,’ to weave in and out

of Schneider’s journey, composed largely of songs,

of lullabies, of remembered and imagined melodies, of silence.

These revolving patterns would be based on sounds, not on texts,

and would involve improvised singing on compositional motifs."

(from the proposal for the performance)

And so we have an epic narrator, a Penelope/ Ulysses, at home and in exile...

who pants like a dog and sinks to the floor, in memory of childbirth, and of war,

who passes the sculpted figurines in her wanderings and looks into the frame of water,

who visits the sculptor and takes tea and cake... who watches and walks...

me too... I am watching... and Michael... and Peter...

and even Jesse, unplanned as he is.

gesturing to the other performers

the sculptor/ tech and the floating speaker

the sculptor, having taken off his earphones, has now completed clearing the space, and sits in front of the audience, monitoring and timing the speaker’s performance...

"These two strands will be counterpointed with a sculpted installation of ‘Home’ ...it could be that the figures will be made and installed during the performance...an image of actions in real time... Maybe there will be other cubes, to be filled as desired... Possibly one will have water with a floating body" (from the proposal)

As you saw, ‘home’ became a cut-out figurine of a mother and child -

sculpture became cake [I hope you enjoyed the slice you were given] -

and water became a hexagonal fish bowl

needing 1000 litres of water, 3 hours to fill and weighing a ton. Needless to say it would have disappeared through the floor and taken my frozen body with it

and so abandoned to become a frame ...

Always in performance there is a shedding, a dying every moment.

the performing space is now clear, apart from Schneider who remains seated ... staring at the ceiling

the sculptor/ tech still sits in front of the audience timing the presentation

the singer continues to watch, humming quietly

the speaker continues

"In this paper, I would like to theorise performing and performance as processes that take place largely in the ‘in-between’." (from the proposal for the paper)

Mediation is the crucial question.

performing

‘body as performed in Body Weather

the Buto originating with the Japanese dancer Min Tanaka

where bodies are seen as multiple, receptive and changing...

constructed as permeable and unbounded, ‘raw,’

and thus open to the multiple influences of weather;

where weather is conceived as a multivalent,

capricious, cyclic and unpredictable system

of forces occurring ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ bodies...

bodies and world as weather therefore are

interpenetrable, capable of infinite difference

and endless change.’

(from the proposal for the paper and see Snow [1995])

For us, performing images are found from improvisation...

from imagined sensations or intensities...

often, but not only, on the surface of the skin...

and the technique of omni-central imaging, which I have described elsewhere,

allows many different and perhaps overlapping images to be placed in

different parts of the body at once...

for Peter as Schneider... one arm floated as if a moth... the head swivelled following the light... the back arched in pain... the legs crept across the mud... while for the person in the frame... [who later became the speaker]... the torso floated as if in water... the legs swayed as in wind... the eyes moved from figure to background... and the mouth gaped open as mud rushed in.

and we do not ask who or what is doing the integrating -

which is to reinstate Ryle’s ‘ghost in the machine’

and the hierarchy of the organised individual;

rather, we understand this capacity for imaging

partly as momentary intensities,

and partly as a rapid oscillation between these sites of intensity,

and what is mediating...

our capacity for imaging

‘Imaging’ for us is both imagining and enacting,

where the former is already corporeal, and the latter always open-ended.

and maybe this notion of embodiment could extend

to other bodies in performance,

perhaps at a gross ‘molar’ level between a performer and what is performed

even at the ‘molecular’ level of the microprocesses of a performer

between one rhythm of thought and another

and so we propose a notion of

‘intercorporeality’ to deal with

this issue of the multiple and changing

relations between bodies of performance

and between parts of bodies...

perhaps bodies as networks of relations

corporeal, psychic, social

‘to open a dialogue between the phenomenology of lived

experience of Merleau-Ponty’ -

and Merleau-Ponty used Schneider as a central figure

in a performance of his own

the Phenomenology of Perception

The singer looks at the speaker or is it the sculptor?

movements of becoming

movements away from identity

Schneider

The sculptor/ tech motions to the speaker to wind up, time is running out.

so to the making of our piece

where four lines of flight are allowed to interweave -

to become spirals of chance associations

linkages -

looping back on themselves,

circling in a similar groove,

stretching far forward, revisiting from a new perspective,

and the relations happen by chance

and the sensitivities to these relations

are built in as a methodology

so that our awarenesses of our own body and of others

and of what is happening between them is always changing ...

the linkages are momentary, provisional and unplanned

maybe this is no different from any work -

only quantitatively so, there is more of it -

it is as if de-territorialisation is being instituted as a working aesthetic...

many bodies... many lines... many trajectories.

A photograph is taken...of the singer in the audience

the spectator

and there are the lines of the spectators,

oscillating between figure and ground,

as prodded by Goldstein,

making ‘sense’ of the axis between performance and culture,

utilising their own imaginative processes in the creation of cultural lives.

perhaps spectators, as well as performers, utilise the Peircean categories of experience:

of firstness, flickering between the poles of qualities and potentia, in imagining what might become;

of secondness, vibrating between action and resistance, to sense what is at risk; and of thirdness, oscillating between purpose and mediation, to conjecture why (see Snow [1997]).

so that watching performance, as performing,

is not a fixed essence

but also a creative line...

not to create possibilities that this performance is for this and about that,

in a desire for signification, for identity, for fixity...

but to stay with the momentary associations...

to remain in the in-between...

for it these liberating lines of flight...

‘somewhere between the poles of fictionality and materiality, that seem to me to be at the heart of the creative enactment of our culture we call performance.’

The sculptor leads Schneider off, just as he had led him on at the beginning

the speaker takes his papers and leaves the space

the singer follows

the photographer remains

(IV) Critique

(In this section the text in bold type recapitulates, and thus re-writes, some of what was spoken in the performance, and therefore already recorded in section III. The text in plain type develops a post-performance critique relating to several of these performative moments. Some of the plain text is also a re-writing, in this case of previous textual moments in this article.)

Lines of flight

The proposal for the performance opened as follows: "We envisage making a short theatre work taking as starting point, and as one strand, the figure of the returned WWI German soldier, Schneider, who suffered such intriguing debilities that he could knock on a wall if close enough but not even move his arm if too far away, and kiss if kissed but not experience arousal."

As you saw, ‘home’ became a cut-out figurine of a mother and child; a flattened out configuration embodying, as puppets and mannequins do, the possibility of living without the idiosyncrasies of enacted existence. The sculpting became making a cake [I hope you enjoyed the slice you were given], and if not wholly in real time, accidental enough for spectators to witness blobs of buttered flour being scattered to the floor while listening to snatches of Montaigne imagining himself as his text. And the water, well we found a hexagonal fish bowl needing 1000 litres of water, 2 hours to fill and weighing a ton. Needless to say it would have disappeared through the floor and taken my frozen body with it. It was abandoned to become a frame. Always in performance there is a shedding, a dying every moment.

For us, performing images are found from improvisation... from imagined sensations or intensities... often, but not only, on the surface of the skin... and the technique of omni-central imaging, which I have described elsewhere (see Snow [1995]), allows many [different and perhaps overlapping] images to be placed in different parts of the body at the same time ...for Peter as Schneider...one arm floated as if a moth... the head swivelled following the light... the back arched in pain... the legs crept across the mud... while for the person in the frame ... [who later became the speaker] ... the torso floated as if in water... the legs swayed as in wind... the eyes moved from figure to background... and the mouth gaped open as mud rushed in.

And as we note the interplay of the lines of flight of the performers we could also note the interweaving of the proposal and this performance; how for example ‘line of flight,’ the key theoretical phrase in the proposal, became the title of the conference; and how this naming framed and thus altered not only this performance but perhaps all the others that weekend (see Phelan [1993]). There are many modes of writing and re-writing performance. And there are many interweavings between these modes. Between writing a proposal and writing a performance, between writing a performance and writing a paper, there are many modalities of in-betweenness. And as proposals become [transfigured into] performances and performances ‘become’ writings of, on, or about performance, there is always something which cannot be captured, something in excess. In this way, a ‘line of flight’ is both what is imagined and what is enacted, and yet more, always more. A ‘line of flight’ is an imaging, a spiral of fragile intensities, performative, always in the process of becoming.

‘Imaging’ for us is both imagining and enacting,

where the former is already corporeal, and the latter always open-ended.

For us, imagining an intensity is already to be in the process of enacting it, while to enact is always to retain or keep alive the imagined intensity.

Imaging is a momentary living, an intensity, which is also a burning up, a dying.

Imaging is a living and a dying every moment.

Imaging then, we would claim, is both a description of a performing practice and a metaphor for embodiment in this kind of performing.

Imaging, imagining and enacting, embodying.

"I would like to question whether such an account could extend to other ‘bodies in performance’ and will propose that we need a notion of intercorporeality to deal with this issue of the multiple and changing relations between bodies in performance. To facilitate this, I open a dialogue between the phenomenology of lived experience of Merleau-Ponty (1962), where bodies can be seen as networks of social relations in the world, and the notion of body in Deleuze & Guattari(1983), where bodies are seen rather as flows and intensities, and ‘lines of flight’ are theorised as imagined and actual capacities for action." (from the proposal for the paper)

Maybe this notion of embodiment, as a mediated relation between what is imagined by bodies and what is enacted, where one always implicates the other, and neither is assumed to be prior, where in posse, in the condition of being possible, is also in esse, existing; maybe this metaphor, developed for one kind of performing body, can apply to other bodies in performance. If ‘imaging’ characterises the relation between what is possible for bodies and what is actual, perhaps at a gross [molar or individual] level, it captures the relation between a performer and what is performed and at the [sub-individual or molecular] level of the micro-processes of a performer it describes the relation between one rhythm of thought and another.

For this notion of performance, as for Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, sensing is critical. For all performers sensing is crucial, it is a capacity which delivers a succession of heightened impressions. And we can ask whether this line of ‘sensings,’ this imaging, is a ‘line of flight’ in the sense of Deleuze and Guattari. As a line of flight it is revolutionary; revolutionary in going where it will, it is a kind of improvising. It transgresses boundaries and social fixities. It images and re-images worlds. It performs. Movements of becoming, movements away from identity. Schneider.

In all these cases what counts as body is neither fixed nor unitary, but rather multiple and changing. What matters are the relations between bodies and between parts of bodies. In this sense embodiment is more pertinent than body. However, the relations as described are all intercorporeal. Whether we are speaking of relations between performers or of relations between moments in the life of a performer, and whether these relations are concurrent or consequent, intercorporeality describes the crisscrossing network of interconnections at play in performing. Intercorporeality then, in capturing the in-betweenness of bodies in performance, captures the process of imaging, described previously as the ongoing relation between imagining and enacting. Embodiment as in-betweenness, as imaging, is also intercorporeality.

To conceive of embodiment as a network of relations, corporeal and social, is partly to invoke Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of lived experience. Merleau-Ponty (1962) utilised Schneider as a central figure in a ‘performance investigation’ of his own. For Merleau-Ponty, embodiment is being-to-the-world and the task of any theorist is to begin with descriptions of lived [and living] experiences; which experiences, we have already proposed, are also dying. We have also already theorised world as weather, as all the influences in and on bodies. Bodies are part of weather as they are in-the-world. But importantly for this argument we need to ask what is in-between body and world, what is mediating, and one proposal is skin. As we have already seen this is precisely one of the sites in performing of imagined and enacted intensities. By imaging intensities, performers are imaging worlds, worlds which are living and dying every moment.

...the relations between the lines of flight happen by chance and the sensitivities to these relations are built in as a methodology... Our sensitivities to our body and to other bodies and to what is happening between them are ever changing. The linkages in performance, as in the making, are perhaps momentary, provisional and unplanned. Maybe this is no different from any work...only there is more of it. It is as if deterritorialisation has become a methodology and a performance aesthetic, many bodies [improvising], many lines, many trajectories... desiring... blurring... spiralling... becoming...

Many lines of flight imaging many intensities...and infinite relations between them.

REFERENCES

Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Felix (1983) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, tr. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).

Goldstein, Kurt (1942) Aftereffects of Brain Injuries in War, Their Evaluation and Treatment: The application of psychologic methods in the clinic (London: William Heinemann).

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1962) The Phenomenology of Perception, tr. Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul).

Phelan, Peggy (1993) Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge).

Ryle, Gilbert (1949) The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson & Co.).

Snow, Peter (1995) "Situation Vacant: Lines of Flight and the Schizo-potential for Revolution" in About Performance I: Translation and Performance, ed. Tim Fitzpatrick (Sydney: University of Sydney Press).

Snow, Peter (1997) "‘Scoring A Role’ in Dis/Orientations," Australasian Drama Studies Conference Proceedings (Melbourne: Monash University).