Something Other dialogue (10)
Some six months ago, when I sat down to write the ninth instalment of this dialogue, everything I thought I was going to say disappeared at the computer, pushed away by a more pressing need to respond to your writing (number 8) and its reflection in the book I’d been reading (Matthew Goulish/39 Microlectures). I find it hard to articulate spiritual or non-rational thinking, not least because it’s so discredited, but I’m convinced that words are a mysterious force, finding me when they know I need them — but also refusing to emerge until their time is ripe. Those April thoughts have waited patiently, and their moment is now.
What’s the trigger? I spent the weekend on a retreat organised by performance-maker Leo Kay, consultant/programmer Jessie Teggin, artist Fiona MacDonald, James Turner of Glimpse, a new community of “commercial creatives” (shudder) seeking to shape “glimpses of a better world that’s possible”, and climate campaigner Iris Andrews, surrounded by writers, artists, activists, scientists, futures strategists, a shaman, all gathered to think about human relationships with nature. (Before I say anything else: OH MY GOD IT WAS AMAZING. Life-definingly so. Also important to note: of the organisers, I knew only Leo, no surnames were exchanged, and at the point of writing it was only through google that I found out who Iris and James are and what they do. It felt genuinely non-hierarchical in that way: all armour put down, all status removed.) Although our eyes were constantly being drawn outwards, to the landscape, to a non-anthropocentric sense of animation in nature, inevitably I found myself thinking inwards, to the experience of nature that is knowledge of the mind, understanding of the body, and humans’ connection with each other. The basic stuff of performance, you could say.
What I was thinking about back in April was physical memory, muscle memory, the unwritten memories of performance that are embedded inside bodies — whether those of performers or audience. I once had a really interesting conversation with Nicola Shaughnessy, an academic based at University of Kent, in which she introduced me to the idea of kinaesthetic memory, and how audiences absorb work with their entire bodies, not just through ears and eyes; limbs responding to movement as though contemplating how it feels to do that movement themselves. It’s research I’d like to know more about.
A similar idea is explored in the Siobhan Davies Dance work Table of Contents, a collaborative and semi-improvised durational piece that responds to and reanimates the company’s archive, in ways that, to quote the programme, acknowledge how “we carry within us the deeply embodied memories of past choreographic works we have seen or performed”. I saw Table of Contents in the upstairs studio at the Siobhan Davies building in April and loved it, passionately. In a sense it’s the antithesis of the work that we do: here, the remembered work isn’t recorded in written texts but recollected in speech then danced, or re-danced, or new-danced, reshaped with bodies maybe as a revival, maybe as a tribute, maybe as a conversation with what took place then. In doing so, the memory becomes a new work (Peggy Phelan’s “something other”, perhaps), and in that way, this is exactly the work that we do: record the performance, translate its memory into our own medium, in doing so holding some breath in its lungs, keeping it in some way (a)live.
Table of Contents is such a piquant challenge to me: what are the ways of documenting live performance that transcend what we know and practice, that might write the body’s response into them, and not just that of the mind? I think often of a question dancer/choreographer Wendy Houston asked — was it at the Live Art Almanac launch in July? — about how to get away from language, or at least circumvent it, how to “write” instead of write about work. Megan Vaughan’s emoji review of Teh Internet Is Serious Business is one answer; what are others? Apart from re-enactment, what media might non-verbal documentation involve? Charcoal illustration? Long exposure photography? An accumulation of detritus: the bits of keratin chewed from the nails while watching, the tissue sodden with tears and now dry? And if we still write, because it holds us in thrall, how can we bring those different ideas into its textures and rhythms?
(As an aside, in my absolute favourite element of Table of Contents, Matthias Sperling introduced the choreographic concept he calls “for now, this”: while working out what to do next, he moves, in a small way, maybe just touching thumb to forefingers, or lifting an arm and repeating the gesture. For now, this…; and now, this… It felt like an excellent model for living in its uncertainty, discursiveness, flexibility, its willingness to trust in process, just doing, not worrying about right or wrong.)
So: since April I’ve been thinking about embodied memory, and this weekend on the nature retreat I was introduced to a different kind of memory, the concept of remembered futures, and the possibility of bringing a desired future into being through collective imagining. Brace yourself, because CONTAINS QUANTUM PHYSICS. On Sunday morning, “strategic analyst and futures thinker” Hardin Tibbs gave a talk that made a chandelier of cartoon light bulbs go off above my head. I’m going to translate it into embarrassingly cod-scientific language and probably get all the actual physics wrong, but in a sense that’s irrelevant: the point is the wave of new energy it’s brought to things I’ve long been thinking.
It begins with a fundamental principle of particle physics, the Observer Effect; to quote from wiki (sorry!): “For an electron to become detectable, a photon must first interact with it, and this interaction will inevitably change the path of that electron.” Or, as Hardin put it, a quality of the observer comes into what’s observed. How beautiful is that as an expression of the relationship between performer and audience! It’s exactly the basis of Theatre Club: that since every performance is imbued with the qualities brought to it by its audience, the audience is as capable of interpreting or explaining the work to each other as the artist is to them.
Hardin moved on to the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics first proposed by John Cramer in the mid-1980s in response to the (wiki again) “quantum paradoxes” of the Uncertainty Principle (deep breath, clinging to wiki: “any of a variety of mathematical inequalities asserting a fundamental limit to the precision with which certain pairs of physical properties of a particle … can be known”). As Hardin explained it, a key question is how does a wave of energy arrive as a photon, and the suggestion is that an electron sends out a call for energy as a wave, which is received in not one but a number of possible futures, all of which respond with their own waves — photons seeking their past from the future. Or, in the wiki formulation: “the source emits a usual (retarded) wave forward in time, but it also emits an advanced wave backward in time; furthermore, the receiver, who is later in time, also emits an advanced wave backward in time and a retarded wave forward in time. A quantum event occurs when a ‘handshake’ exchange of advanced and retarded waves triggers the formation of a transaction in which energy, momentum, angular momentum, etc. are transferred.”
Writing this down I have no idea what I’m talking about, or if indeed I’ve got this right, but the key thing is that this works against Newtonian principles: we think of all energy travelling the way it does through a line-up of dominoes, this hitting that and then that and then that, a linear understanding of cause and effect. And what the transactional interpretation proposes is that energy travels back and forth in time. From this Hardin posits, in a tempting mixture of scientific interpretation and mysticism, that our future already exists, or futures rather, a shimmering set of holograms; and the more energy we can send to the most positive version of it, the more chance there is of its energy connecting with ours. I find this such an exquisite and hopeful idea. His argument continues that consciousness isn’t human alone, but universal: there is a superconsciousness intervening in time, an energy that is psychological, and the negative consciousness of humanity is sometimes what prevents its best reaching us.
He went on to refer to a study by an American social scientist, Paul Ray, who argued that there are three groups in society: traditionals, modernists, and cultural creatives (another horrible phrase). One of our exercises over the weekend was to identify the values of cultural creatives: we came up with a belief in non-hierarchical social organisation, cross-generational learning, difference and equitable understandings of it; a belief in art, nature, generosity — a set of values distinctly opposed to those of capitalism and neoliberalism, basically. According to Hardin’s rough calculations, cultural creatives now make up almost half the population, yet feel isolated, not least because they don’t self-identify as part of a larger group. (Nods of recognition through the entire gathering at that one.) He also believes that we’re at a transition point, the values of traditionals and moderns descendent, the values of cultural creatives ascendant — and that accounts for the tensions and ugliest resistance of these times.
I found this a really compelling account of where we are — especially having just finished reading Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark, a reminder to beleaguered activists that neither are they alone, nor are their achievements, however small in scale, irrelevant or forgotten; and also an illumination of perhaps unappreciated alliances, between traditionals, moderns and cultural creatives, towards the latter’s values — but what’s more fascinating is Hardin’s belief in an already existing future just waiting for our message. And that it exists as an imaginative act: whether consciously on the part of humans, or consciously on the part of nature/the universe. This is the central question: what is the information loop that enables the future to tell us how best to reach it? What is the scope for action in the present that takes inspiration from this future vision?
We’ve been talking recently about the why of our work: why write about, or in relation to, or proximity with, performance? And the thought that made me so giddy on Sunday is that maybe quantum science, of all flipping things, albeit as filtered by Hardin, supports us in our answer. So much of the work that we love is concerned with imagining that better future — even if it doesn’t do so explicitly. It has embedded within it those values of difference and equitability and generosity, it rejects the principles of growth or heterogeneity or unilateralism. In watching it, we receive into our imaginations an image of that future, holographic to use Hardin’s notion, and in writing about it, perhaps we strengthen the contours and colours of the hologram; perhaps, not only that, we pass it on, communicate it to others, who hadn’t been able to witness its human incarnation, so that they can hold it in their minds, too. (Suddenly I’m thinking of the Victorian theatre technique Pepper’s Ghost, with us as the mirrors transmitting a ghostly image of the work to another audience.) Hardin was so clear on this: the more energy we give to imagining that future we want, the more clear its holographic image is in our minds, the more likely that the energy emitting from that reality in the future will connect with ours. And maybe writing about, or in relation to, or in proximity with, performance, is the best way we’ve found of dedicating energy to that future world, offering and waiting for its handshake.
