Take Time, Take Care and Do As You’re Told?
Josephine Machon
I write this as ZU-UK’s participation in the CREATIVE FUTURES Season (November-December 2023), as part of Sound/Image Festival 2023, enters its final three weeks of performances, and exactly two weeks after the close of the ‘Do As You’re Told?’ Symposium (12–14 November). This was a festival of research into audio-led, instruction-based performance practice in public and non-public spaces, curated by myself, Persis-Jadé Maravala, Artistic Director of ZU-UK, and Jorge Lopes Ramos, Executive Director at ZU-UK and Professor of Interactive Theatre & Performance at University of Greenwich. Hosted by Centre for Creative Futures in partnership with the Institute for Inclusive Communities & Environments at Greenwich, ‘Do As You’re Told?’ (DAYT?) was a 3-day programme of free talks, workshops and performances. Marking the opening of a season of international artworks, it incorporated ZU-UK’s Binaural Dinner Date, the 2022 Lumen Prize Winner, Radio Ghost, and the London premiere of Within Touching Distance.
(For those unable to attend, Gareth White’s overview provides an insightful summation.)
Instruction-led work has become increasingly prevalent in the field of performance that traverses participatory, digital and immersive practice, with the lockdowns of the global pandemic seeing to its rise in online formats. Given this, Maravala, Lopes Ramos and I saw a need to analyse the ethics of this work; to consider the politics, as much as the practices, of asking for, giving, and taking ‘control’. In the initial conversations that led to DAYT?, we were acutely aware that many of the aims, aesthetics and impacts of immersive and instruction-led practice had been circumscribed, certainly in the UK, by whiteness, maleness and middle-classness; in ideology, production and consumption. This raised important questions for us about who is seen to — or is ‘allowed’ to — instruct; who is invited in as audience-participant to follow those instructions; and how far the means and modes by which they are invited in are inclusive and accessible.
DAYT? aimed to address these questions and to redress the imbalance in representation through the ‘voices’ invited to debate the issues. It is for this reason the question mark is in there. It disrupts in its punctuation, creates a space for examining the intentions and outcomes of instruction-led work via direct participation in (so a collective questioning through) models of form. It also foregrounds the whys, hows, with-whoms and to-what-ends, do we do as we’re told within this practice? The works selected for the programme, included Silvia Mercuriali’s Wondermart, TAG’s The Other Market, with a presentation on practice by Extant Theatre’s founder Maria Oshodi. In addition to its London Season of work, ZU-UK shared Make-up Artist & Shaman (a paired, live-audio-instructed role-play exercise experienced through bone-conducting headphones) and Deceleration (a walking audio-experience that sped participants through prestissimo to grave to standstill, as a physical-psychosocial response to sustainable decision-making and climate change).
DAYT? prioritised the clandestine intimacy of audio-instruction received through headphones and the unspoken communication that might be shared through human touch. Consequently, Within Touching Distance formed a central conversation piece, both during organised discussion events and at informal interactions over refreshments and end of the day chats. It was noticeable how audience members, for one reason and another, were compelled to discuss their response.
Within Touching Distance
ZU-UK’s Within Touching Distance is a one-on-one encounter that combines an immersive VR experience and a spatialised binaural audio-world with a live, synchronised choreography of touch by a highly trained performer. This combination of sensory access points takes the audience-participant into their imagination while anchoring them through the neuroreceptors of their limbs. It’s a wholly embodied experience, which necessarily influences each audience-participant’s unique interpretation of the work. It fuses cognitive sense and physical sensing to activate presence, as ‘praesensing’ (from the Latin, prae, ‘before’, sensus, ‘feeling’, hence ‘presence’ to be ‘before the senses’). In work where tactile engagement is served by intimate audio and evocative visual stimulus, combined to exercise embodied imagination, it is the audience-participant’s praesence within the work that receives, interprets and acts. Extending this, Within Touching Distance, intentionally plays on both definitions of its titular term. It explores the actual experience of care through physical proximity and human touch, manifesting a sense of being that is literally ‘close to hand’. It also motivates ways of thinking and being that feel within reach, feel attainable. An understanding of the ‘virtual’ in this regard emphasises this further, played out through the participant’s imagination as triggered by the audio, more than the VR, as ‘the almost there’.
Caretaking abounds in the composition of Within Touching Distance; in concept and composition, in theme and action, in the quality of instruction and the nature of interaction. This enables the audience-participant to be carefully submerged then gently pulled out of its world (and, from here on there are spoilers in description for those who haven’t yet experienced this piece).
A ZU-UK host welcomes me, checks in to see how I’m feeling and to flag themes and expectations of interaction. I’m ushered into a small waiting area which instigates a quietening of time and space, away from the business and busyness outside of this encounter. I’m guided to the edicts and ethics of engagement, relayed equally through direct clarification from my performer-guide (female, wearing a fern-green dress that places her somewhere between Nursery Nurse, Matron and Care-home Practitioner) and an otherworldly soundscape received through headphones that both reassures and entices me into the world. This stage allows for an opt out, which is also reiterated later, reminding me of what to do if, at any point, I should become physically or emotionally uncomfortable within the piece.
My guide takes me to a bed, with primary-coloured-dinosaur cotton sheets, sits me down, helps me remove one shoe, two shoes, and earrings that might get in the way. She assists me into soft and expansive brushed cotton tartan pyjamas (reassuringly warm and snug over my own outfit). I’m invited to get into the bed where VR goggles and earphones are placed on my head and, once comfortable, I’m laid down and my (virtual) eyes blink, slow, heavy, close, blink again and the hands and feet which I now see through the lens are those of a child, me become child, and my maternal bedtime routine begins. There’s a story, finger counting, arm squeezes, a lullaby, gentle cheekbone kisses, with visuals received through the goggles perfectly accompanied by the exact corresponding physical touch. The expert choreography, a precise and gentle ‘handling’ of the sequence, stimulates my neural pathways to layer the audio-visual encounter.
I enter a dreamworld, taking a journey from infancy across school-age into adulthood. Corridors repeat and lead me through nursery, school, workplace (recalling those endless, characterless corridors of Severance, a production that is itself so much about [the need for] memory, human contact and care). There is a repeated return to the charcoal-black waves of a liminal ocean, ominously and reassuringly lit by a lone lighthouse, evoking an ageless consciousness that holds both dreams and nightmares, upon which floats the accumulations of a life lived. There’s a moment where I come within imagined touching distance of death before I’m awakened and physically brought back into my body, which is now in its old age, and I virtually and physically embody what it is to require care and be cared for. It is a virtuoso experience that closes with a remarkable reveal where, like the costume of my performer guide, even the dinosaur sheets beneath me, without me leaving my mattress, have been magically transformed to those of my hospice bed.
This is a journey and a world that, despite sharing the same visuals, audio and choreography for all sighted and hearing participants, is necessarily also unique to each of us as it relies so heavily on the audience-participant’s own memory and inner visions, and equally on their response to and associations with touch. (For those who are visually impaired the light shifts of the display can be accompanied by the option of a live audio-description; an aspect that is being developed by, writer and director, Maravala.) The virtual reality artwork is designed through a patient-led process, informed by Maravala’s lived experience within a mental health unit. For me the journey was a sensory imagining from that shut-eye moment which plunged me into a mind’s-eye-wide-openness shaped by the audio rather than the images received through the virtual lens. The corridors which finally took me to the waiting areas of a hospital, while the audio instructed me to the imagining of my own approach to a possible death, conjured an end-of-life experience that wasn’t at all unpleasant. Guided to imagine the memory that I’ll return to as I enter that corridor of light, it was peaceful, life affirming, and reminded me of what matters most.
To practice this type of thinking could support an acceptance of aging and death that reflects rather than rages. It acknowledges the potentials of seeking calm, of valuing that which is slower, of taking time and care in our life choices to allow for the nurturing of all else that matters. And here, righteous raging might be exercised in active aging. It’s an experience that makes me attend to the movement from being within touching distance of a way of being, to making it happen by doing in daily practice. By listening and responding to these instructions in this performance I’m led to imagine that. Imagine that; an encounter that trains the individual to imagine ways in which a society can activate a slower, calmer, nurturing way of being that can be implemented for each other within its systems of care. It’s within touching distance.
Within Touching Distance, as my experience and those forementioned conversations indicated, is a powerful artwork that touches an audience-participant’s sense of being and engaging in the world. As a practice/research project it moves beyond this individualised encounter in its investigation into how instruction-led performance can inform healthcare research and practice. It demonstrates the significance of the arts to scientific research and the impact of live performance with VR as an incomparable tool for healthcare training strategies.
My experience resonated with how I responded to Adrian Howells’s The Pleasure of Being: Washing, Feeding, Holding (2011), which I write about in depth in James Frieze’s edited collection Reframing Immersive Theatres — the politics and pragmatic of immersive performance (Palgrave Macmillan 2016; it also includes a chapter by Maravala and Lopes Ramos). Both works activated felt time within the event, a sensory quality which I feel again in my recall of each event. It’s a fusion of time brought about by the contemplation of my own past, present and future. Both inspired a connection with lives that exist around me. Both activated memory through touch-led, instruction-inspired, imagination. Both, took me to active contemplations of birthing, living, aging, and dying, all wrapped in the pleasures, politics and pragmatics of care.
Like The Pleasure of Being: Washing, Feeding Holding, the intimate temporalities of Within Touching Distance established a unique durational aesthetic. Duration in work such as these encompasses a specific quantity of time that is repeated for all participants yet is never exactly the same for any due to the praesence of their bodies, their memories, their imagination at the centre of the experience. It offers an experience of the uncertain edges of the temporal-plane; a heightened sense of being inside and outside of time. It is an encounter with the ways in which a perception of time — like the corridors and oceans that VR realm depicts — can follow a linear journey while simultaneously ebbing and flowing in space. The temporal-play accentuates the embodied narratives that are triggered within, and exist beyond, the timeframe of the event. In turn, this tempor(e)ality intensifies a state of being in the immediate and consequent interpretation of the work.
The connections I draw, the experiences I had that remain, the memories I returned to within both one-on-one encounters, point to the way in which works like these, composed and realised in ways that deploy touch as an intrinsic mechanism for engagement and medium of interpretation, invite audience-participants to co-create the work, to connect profoundly with ourselves, with our lived experience, with a deep sense of being. In turn, through this, we connect with broader themes, narratives and potentials that offer ways of being in society, in our immediate and wider worlds that might contribute something positive, humane, and reciprocal in our daily acts of caregiving. In Within Touching Distance, the shaping of the imagination through the audio-visual so it takes contemplative flight (just as it’s told), coupled with the tacit guidance, through tactile instruction that physically supports our interactions within the experience, provides a figurative and actual indication of what it is to give and receive care. The comfort and reassurance of touch within this encounter was a means of assisting us in doing as we were told, and a model of active care through human interaction.
Take Time, Take Care, Take Courage
With contemplative leaps in mind, I close as I opened, by noting where I’m at temporally and in temperament as I write. My participation in DAYT? repeatedly took me to Bayo Akomolafe and Marta Benavides‘s open letter (2020), which offered sound counsel about what to do when times are urgent; ‘slow down’. All of the instruction-led performance works curated within DAYT?, in varying ways, required that participants slow down, notice others and our relation to others, our situations and surroundings, note related decision-making and actions. In attending to these details, we were invited to think beyond ourselves and to extend a duty of care to our communities and environments; those that are immediate, personal and local, along with those that are global. In this way, DAYT? echoed this instruction to slow down and valorise care. Like the quiet pre and post encounter waiting room of Within Touching Distance, the symposium overall created a space for this.
DAYT? circumnavigated a small but significant world of instruction-led practice and related this to the wider environmental and political world in which it exists. At the centre of this, Within Touching Distance, summoned the worlds that exist within us and the daily choices we might practice related to caregiving. DAYT? emphasised the agency we might activate through being and being together in these turbulent times. So I turn again to Akomolafe and Benavides, who also instruct us to take courage, to notice the intimate, to reclaim our power, to be praesent in the world;
‘[T]he urge of the times is not to fix a broken system, but to acknowledge our inherent power to summon other worlds….Our cultures teach us that in turning to each other, we become disruptive to old realities and hospitable to new ones. Because we will not co-create the world by proxy, we need to turn to ourselves again, and rekindle the realness we have lost….Now is the time to ‘retreat’ into the real work of reclamation, to re-member again our humanity through the intimacy of our relationships’.
Further information and tickets for ZU-UK’s works at the CREATIVE FUTURES London Season available via: https://zu-uk.com/creativefutures/
The ‘Do As You’re Told?’ Symposium foreshadows the book project, ‘Do As You’re Told?’: Conversations with ZU-UK About Instruction-based Performance Practice. Edited by Josephine Machon, Persis-Jadé Maravala and Jorge Lopes Ramos. Conceived in 2019, we’re defining it as a ‘slow publishing’ project. We’ll keep you posted when it surfaces.
Josephine Machon is Associate Professor in Contemporary Performance at Middlesex University, London. She is the author of The Punchdrunk Encyclopaedia — 1st Edition (Routledge, 2019) Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance (Bloomsbury, 2013), (Syn)aesthetics: Redefining Visceral Performance (Palgrave Macmillan 2009, 2011), and has published widely on experiential, immersive and interactive performance. Josephine is Joint Editor for The Palgrave Macmillan Series in Performance & Technology, which includes her own co-edited collections in this area in its catalogue of titles. Her broad research interests address the audience experience and the creative intersections of theory and practice in performance.
