A k i n d o f n o t h i n g n e s s
“I f t h e w o r l d h a s a l r e a d y e n d e d - h o w c a n o n e r e s p o n d b u t i n r e s i g n a t i o n”
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What I am proposing
Is an interrogation
Into a world of thought
That takes history as law
That distorts the reality of now
And freezes us.
[This has already happened]
The next 5 minutes is a response to research into the history of site,
Identification with society,
Violence as a product of system
And the need to remind ourselves
That the only thing we will ever know
Is what is happening right now.
Acknowledging connections between violence, intense identification with community, and irrelevance of history to allow an exploration into the beauty of minute-by-minute personal experience, coincidence and play.
We build, a physical past, constant reminders of events and ideas of which we can never entirely understand.
Robert Bevan, in The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War refers to Hannah Arendt who has argued, “The reality and reliability of the human world rests primarily on the fact that we are surrounded by things more permanent than the activity by which they were produced”.
There is an absurdity in the permanence of and identification with site, versus the temporal nature of the actions of people.
On the other hand Bevan quotes, Eric Hobsbaum, who suggests that “History is the new material for nationalist, or ethnic, or fundamentalist ideologies, as poppies are the raw material for heroin addiction…If there is no suitable past it can always be invented, The past legitimises. The past gives a more glorious background to a present that doesn’t have much to show for itself.”.
What then, are we to think of life today if history is exposed as so manipulated and removed from our own realities that it becomes no longer relevant at all?
What does it mean when so many monumental sites serve as reminders of a past reality. What is the obsession with a history and view of the world that places us in a permanent post-mortem?
Bevan links this strong identification between people and a built environment, and identification with community, to expose consequent violence towards the ‘other’ as a reaction to this.
… The consequence of the intensification of identification with a community also results in its corollary – the definition of those outside the group as ‘the other’, whose ‘otherness’, is commensurately deepened by this intensification. All conflicts, whether clearly ethnic, or economic or expansionist, invoke the notion of the other…It is the emphasis on the differences between those within and those outside the group that leads to the devaluation of outsiders and their material patrimony. This dehumanistion is an essential step towards making it acceptable to dismantle an enemy’s heritage, to maltreat and eventually kill them…
So if we see history as represented by; and if we are connected to history through repetitive ritualistic exposure to; built environment, and identification with environment works as a catalyst to an intensification of identification with a group, which consequently leads to the devaluation and therefore potential violence towards ‘others’, we arrive at a point where identification with society breeds a culture of fear and a tendency towards violence. Violence is repressed with an illusion of security, and security (systematic control over society) feeds on a heightened (and therefore, arguably, illusion of a) sense of violence…
In The War on Terrorism and The Terror of God, Lee Griffith introduces a background to common uses of, and attitudes towards, “Apocalypse” (in literature and practice) today. He then refers to the ‘poststructuralist’ school of philosophy, which suggest that we, in a way, are already living in a post apocalyptic world:
“If the world has already ended, how can one respond but in resignation? Of this school of thought Robert Jay Lifton writes,
…We speak of living in an age that is not only post-modern but also post Freudian, post-Marxist, post-communist, post-ideological, post-revolutionary, post-colonial, post-war (whatever the war), post-Cold War, post-historic, post-narrative (in terms of literature), and post-figurative (in terms of art). Within the realm of the post-modern there is talk of what could be the “post-author” and the “post-self”. Although these posts are often meant to serve as springboards for renewals of one sort or another, the terminology nonetheless leaves us in a kind of nothingness, in more or less permanent port-mortem. The world is frequently experienced as already dead, requiring only the clearing of debris”.
There is sense in this acknowledgement of today as frozen in a permanent state of history. Sense that allows us to also to acknowledge the relevance of now, the relevance of our own personal, minute by minute experiences, and open up a world that explores, not the consequences of the past, but the beauty in this very moment.
It should be our job as spatial designers, performance designers, performers, to understand first, your self, secondly, the person next to you and thirdly, the space you are in.
Theatre becomes a machine of separation. We are constantly asked to negotiate spaces that define us as one particular role and therefore highlighting the opposition of the other and removing the significance of our selves in time and space.
Performance design and the designing of spaces dressed purely for interaction between bodies and minds should be an experimental design of relationships and essentially constant social experiment.
b r i e f
It is because of this response that I am against traditional audience obedience in a theatre setting and are tasked to design an immersive performance scenario that likens to the large-scale installation environments of Signa Sorenson – who deals with a marrying of falsity and reality, allowing stories to unfold from fictional roles in collision with live experience; and Punchdrunk, who explore empowerment of the audience through the adorning of masks in sites that allow free-roaming play and constant discovery.
· I am to experiment with the notion of Theatre as ‘free space’ as opposed to play space to shift from a set of rules in a pre-determined game, into events that resonate as reality….
· …Whilst exploring the notion of a world presented to us as post-happening to accentuate conversely the relevance of presence – lived personal experience – coincidences and happenings.
· The public and performers, removed from their titles of audience or actor, are participants, detectives in a self-sufficient space where the results of happenings are free to accumulate over time – not emphasised as a reminder of past events, but as a consequence of past happenings.
· How can post-happening be exposed in a way that turns attention to now?
· What spaces/ objects/ light/ sound/smells/ sights/ materials speak to us of post-happening?
· What unspoken languages may be employed to design the space?
· The space needs to impose nothing but suggestion, to open up to limitless possibilities for interaction and experience that explores this overwhelming condition of post-happening and it’s relationship to happening.
· [Are areas of the space activated only with the presence of participants so intersection and separation of spaces are linked directly with their inhabitation?]
· Clock time must be irrelevant, the performance may span an undetermined period of time as it passes through it’s natural evolution and rhythms, to an end.
References:
Bevan, R. (2006). The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War. Reaktion books Ltd: London.
Griffith, L. (2002). The War on Terrorism and The Terror of God. William B Eerdmans Publishing Company: Michigan, Cambridge
Bibliography:
Bevan, R. (2006). The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War. Reaktion books Ltd: London.
Griffith, L. (2002). The War on Terrorism and The Terror of God. William B Eerdmans Publishing Company: Michigan, Cambridge
Koudelka, J. (2008). Invasion Prague. Thames & Hudson: London, Paris.
Mbaine, A.E. (Ed.), (2006). Media in Situations of Conflict: Roles, Challenges and Responsibility. Fountain Publishers: Kampala.
This text was presented as a multi-layered video piece,
the audience were invited to pick a 'trinket' with blank tab attached and a pencil, to do with whatever they wished.
The object in their hands is an intended distraction, it is whatever you want it to be, it's the initiator of an afterthought that realises that what could have been happening could have been so much more immersive and less frustrating than the over manipulated pre-recorded video piece and begins to comment
on us as passive entities conforming to fit within a context, assuming automatic roles as watcher or maker:
(video not wanting to upload today - will try later)
