"Future thinking" for Import/Export workbook of Hebbel (2012)

When I think about the future I get stuck. Not stuck in the sense of completely void of an imaginative capacity for tomorrow or even blocked because of an aversion towards speculating the outcome of processes and events. I like to make candid conjecture on way things might unfold, I like to give opinion, gamble and guess around as much as the next person. As an artist I can, sometimes, imagine the trappings of potential (future) worlds or conceive of a collection of significant things, some words, gestures, images that seem to make sense in dialogue or juxtaposition and propose a new kind of logic or way of understanding things. It feels pretty essential to the job to deal in future thinking – to approach the unfamiliar, to visit the unknown, to sneak up on the ‘not yet seen or thought about in that light’ and try to give it some form or try to make it tangible for others – to bring it into the present.

So the future is desire: it is thought, the wanting of something, the conjuring up of potentialities. And this kind of projection into the future feels possible up to a point.

But when I think about future on a grander scale, when I think about the future of the planet, of humankind, or of capitalism for instance, I become stuck by what I know, by the models I know and perform within now. It’s hard to escape, practically impossible to really step outside to and take a look at how it’s actually moving along. We are already inside and performing the dance. Even when we have the illusion of experiencing the new it is always all just flux, adaptation, and transformation – never a new dance.

So I make these small shifts from the now or the appearance of now into the possibility of latter on but never too much latter, it is always the immediate future, the next step and doesn’t tend to stretch further than my own estimated life span. I become stuck by death, by my own inevitable lack of a future. I can’t escape it. It’s another one of those models we know and can’t imagine overcoming or leaving behind.

The future happens in little steps, incremental little changes in directions, small gestures towards the unknown. The dance is happening now. It is not exactly going forward, nor is it going in circles. It can’t be reversed because we don’t remember all the steps or somebody wasn’t filming the whole time, in any case, there is no way of repeating it and why would we want to? The future is an improvised dance with merely the illusion of a structure or score.

"Shared homes" for "Are we here yet?" Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods (2009)

Thinking about ‘the house’ in Highway 101 Vienna and immediately recognizing how many scenes or various clusters of disparate yet intimately connected movement material came to be known as ‘the house’ during our travels on that highway. Finally, not so much the name assigned to the diverse structures we worked within but rather the act of bodily dissemination through those structures – spreading out the body through rooms, leaving bits of information, traces, presences. Presences that perhaps came back (or we summoned back) to haunt us later in the ‘bona fide’ house designed by Anna Viebrock for Visitors Only. If the rehearsal process for generating material for the house of Visitors Only was about seeing, relating and struggling with presences that were in actual fact not there, then the production of movement for ‘the house’ of Highway 101 came about through a practice of not seeing, ignoring and passing by the presences that were there.

But wait, that’s confusing because we were working with the notion of ‘ghosting’ in the initial rehearsal phases of Highway 101. In the bare space not yet occupied by set or material, Meg encouraged us to establish the memory or the feeling of a presence in space by creating a pattern that would reveal the ghost in the moment of its deviation. This could be thought of as a process by which one builds a recognizable or familiar pattern that can be disrupted to produce the unfamiliar or unseen – a ghost. The examples Meg used to illustrate the kind of thing she was looking for set out some of the tools we could employ and gave an impression of the emotional tone we were dealing with. We quickly grasped the significance of ‘the look’ – the way in which one directs a look into an empty space and imbues it with a presence that is lost or that left long ago. The mechanics of how this process actually works are hard to describe and probably can’t be pinned down to any kind of technique but rather have to do with a temperature we all began to agree upon – a melancholic tone that seemed to pass from one body to another. There were other tools too – something to do with trying to involve another body in the action you were engaged in by sending a signal: leaving an arm unspoken for in space or creating restrictions upon your own movement to suggest some sort of negotiation in the action – something that reads like, ‘I am not alone in this’. These tools were not as obvious as I am making out though, and improvising in this way still demanded a fast and imaginative thought process in order to build up our catalogue of ghostly manifestations.

So later, when we moved into our Viennese Highway 101 house, the one with the façade of an abandoned office building-cum-1970’s storage room, we began that long and wonderfully lonesome process of establishing our endlessly repeatable patterns alongside those of the ghosts we could see but chose to ignore. We were inhabiting the house, treading the ground and roaming through its rooms so that patterns and behaviour which could possibly constitute a ‘character’ or a certain disposition might emerge. And all the while not seeing each other – seeing through each other. The quality of those extended improvisations was very meditative – special to spend so much time together in a house, crossing paths without ever acknowledging another person in a deliberate way. Meg watched those paths and patterns ‘forever’, giving critical feedback so that we could re-enter another durational improvisation and in that way, slowly allow the choreography to materialize. Some bits sticking, other bits falling away, timings and connections forming to make a whole. Repetition not only helped to fix the melancholic mood, that ghostly atmosphere within the choreographic structure of ‘the house’, but also worked on some kind of spatial memory mechanism – the reason why Meg could jump in and replace me during the general rehearsal when I didn’t make it out of the tunnel?

Hmmm yeah, running backwards down a 70 metre long tunnel into a concrete wall (repeatedly), improvising with spirits and dream acquaintances in a two storied house that has no front wall and human size holes in the floor, pogo dancing without any padded or armoured protection suits are all instances where a risk-taking but accident prone person might encounter a fair portion of both pleasure and pain. Damaged Goods creation phases engaged with these kinds of practices quite effortlessly and it’s still a mystery to me how we, as collaborators, revelled in some of these potentially hazardous tasks. Equally impressive and despite this was the feeling of protectiveness and care that developed between the performers (especially) during the ALIBI creation when we devised movement material on the limits of extreme physicality and violence. Perhaps the very nature of the subject matter we were working with was answered by a profound mindfulness we felt towards each other in response. However, this kind of intense sharing and care was probably also cultivated through another kind of ‘house’ that developed – that of the studio space: a different kind of home but one where all sorts of related activities came about that bled into and out of official work time, play and general fooling around and that eventually fed back into the improvisations as small edits of conversations or reproductions of shared actions.

Thinking about ‘the lounge’ in Highway 101 Vienna now and how the close proximity of the audience members demanded an odd duality in our approach to performing: trying very hard to fit in so that one can then choose not to fit in at specific moments. It wasn’t so much about holding the attention as it was about letting it go – merging with the audience as mutual observers so that a series of small disclosures could take place again and again. I imagine us reclining on sofas and discussing what might denote an act of dissent in our living room context or even how a subversive exploit might emerge from the simple act of observing others. We are drinking sponsored (free) beer from the fridges installed in the lounge; this much is sure and the circulation of ideas between all collaborators is at its most fluid and dynamic. In this process we work individually or with Jorge León, Stefan Pucher or Meg – taking advice and suggestions from every source because we not only find ourselves in new territory but we feel the fragility of the material and the vulnerability of our own bodies in dialogue with the spectators. It is slow work too and much later we come to realize that we have been producing and developing a certain social language that interacts with the spectators without ever making direct physical contact with them. We become adept at speaking this language and performing the catalogue of variable actions in various blue-carpeted lounge settings. That blue was important and that blue became the blue screen for Jorge’s interview proposal that began one beautiful Sunday off when we really didn’t need to be working. The cutting and pasting, the fractional and fragmentary way of forming narrative that arose from those first experiments in front of the camera became a strategy for producing text and a style of storytelling that found form in the work during and after Highway 101. This practice of storytelling required an imaginative pace – mental and verbal acrobatics between anecdotes, memories or thoughts, yet it also involved a sense of surrendering to the language that emerged spontaneously in the moment. So it is, like most of the practices we employed in Damaged Goods, a multi task – a doing of two or more often-opposing things at the same time – real-time editing of one’s language while surrendering to the free association that storytelling might bring. Or to use another example of such dialectics: ‘morphing’ – the emergence of a gesture, emotion and figure that would succumb to and be replaced by another gesture, emotion, and figure before it had even arrived. Perhaps I could say that, the facet that best characterizes my experience of the rehearsal process with Damaged Goods would be the layering, the ‘doublethink’, the multi-tasking and the complex strategies for producing performance material. We never took a straight or simple path.

"My Hosts: Ghosts in the artistic practice" for Corpus 10.2008

There is this propensity to reject the ghosts of past creative practices and constructions. Although in many ways an artistic practice needn’t be defined by any real beginning or end, that is to say it develops into a gamut of habits that are at liberty to shift and mutate as knowledge is produced, forming a continuum of processes that are both conscious and unconscious in manner, I still want to renounce my ghosts and expel them to some phantom junk yard of presences I have deemed inadequate or simply redundant in my creative practice. This expulsion (locking in the closet) is not from an ideology based on the necessary destruction of the old or established for the formation of something fresh but it may have something to do with this feeling that there probably won’t be enough space for everybody – that these ghosts from former patterns of thought will ruin the party of new and exciting ideas that are emerging. And yes, in some ways this does have to do with a capacity to integrate information over time: it’s anyway extremely difficult to identify the exact origin of seemingly contemporary thoughts and methods as so much is of what we intend to do to is a reaction or consequence of what we have already done.
My first three choreographic works all shared explorations in veiling, concealing and revealing a physical presence in image through the medium of video. Something of a ghostly practice in itself! However, recently I have inadvertently ‘banished’ video from my artistic practice with the exception of filming the improvisational sessions for easy retrieval of ‘precious material’. As I am writing this I begin to question how certain approaches to working with image, frame and penetration of presence that became the stable research and language in those early works could have enhanced my practice lately, practice that has been more concerned with group behaviour and strategies as well as a specific written communication method, without necessarily employing video as means of presentation. In other words, I could have introduced my ghosts to my new bunch of friends, creating more connections and the potential for a deeper exploration or multilayered research, not to mention opening a potential for unpredictable connections. Perhaps, the most promising of ‘ghostly meetings’ would be in the dramaturgical questioning and structuring of already developed material as I think this particular process solicits and benefits from a broad scope of perspectives and ways of observing. This kind of ‘cross-pollinating’ of approaches and questioning upon artistic material that exists in entirely different contexts could bring about a transformation of the patterns that haunt us, resulting in a loss of that irksome quality - becoming less scary in their familiarity and more inspiring in their ‘performance’. I must acknowledge that with regard to my approach to artistic practice and construction it is not fear of the unknown but fear of the all too well known that acts upon me. It is a case of negatively anticipating my various phantoms’ performance ability and not allowing them to also develop and transform within my practice. Indeed, I am sure it is quite the opposite for other artists, those whose ghosts become shadows that walk with them along their artistic path and imbue them with confidence and assured strategies for producing work.

With an artistic method and an artistic object being so intimately involved, the object being a kind of response from the method’s questioning it’s probably no great wonder I feel the need to consciously push away the tried methods in an effort to assure the next project doesn’t too closely resemble or become a repetition of the previous work. Still, it is a slightly futile effort as you can’t choose your own ghosts and to rid yourself of their presence would be quite a feat of alteration. On the contrary, to treat one’s ghosts as part of the sum of artistic experience and allow them to remain present in the working environment might also invite the growth and transformation of your ghosts with you – reducing the need for an imposed separation and facilitating a fluid continuum of artistic practice. If we can think of our ghosts as an important part of that which constitutes the working method rather than a neglected other who hangs around unwanted, the integration of artistic method can only become more rich and layered or at the very least less haunted.
In itself the idea of discarding something because ones’ desire or focus is directed towards the development of new experiences is not wholly bad but the benefits of recycling what remains, of repairing and re-using ideas and concepts in new contexts is appealing in contrast to our contemporary culture of consumption and the all too desperate search for the new and original. Maybe there are no new spirits but just the reincarnation of old ones. A challenge would be to improve the ability to recognize and articulate ones’ ghosts - to welcome their presence in the studio or work space allow them to make a little noise from time to time. The notion of having short dialogues with lingering presences during a ‘new’ process could enlighten and develop modes of thinking and go someway to keeping us out of the dark.
In the same way our body is not ‘in space’ so much as inhabiting and haunting space so must the ghostly remains of our actions and thoughts be ever present in the development of new patterns of thought or methods of artistic production. I’m coming to the conclusion that expressing ambivalence towards the remnants of past work can only lead to blockages in communication with our various selves, younger and older. To persistently ignore, or not articulate what has gone before can result in a sense of something missing or lacking. If, however, we offer and invite to invite; to switch the roles so that all ones’ ghosts become hosts in the practice and act as constant reminder of possibilities for both tried and experimental exploration one might feel slightly more at ease in their presence.

"Deception" for the theatre lexicon publication celebrating 100 years of Hebbel-am-Ufer (2008)

Deception suggests something quite ominous to me. It’s not a notion I like to employ in approaching the mechanics of performance with regard to the exchange between audience and performers that transpires there. Perhaps it’s got something to do with the harshness of the term, with its determinacy and intention to manipulate. To be ‘truly’ deceived is frustrating, painful and annoying. This kind of deception happens much more outside the theatre than within its walls or frame. However, engaging in a game of illusion with a specific (and playful) approach to time and circumstance in performance can make potential truths and hidden profundities visible. And this is where it gets exciting.
There exists a kind of implicit agreement when entering a performance event to be overtly deceived as opposed to covertly. Although I think beguiled might be a more appropriate term here. In any case the audience are aware and consciously involved with the trickery: asking on what level is this performer acting now? Or can I read the authentic being beneath the guise? Or what do I recognize and relate to within these layers of sincerity or lack thereof?

The 'trick' is in not assuming the audience are deluded by their sensual, visual or mental perception but endeavouring to make a space available in which the audience can be involved in processing the complexity of the real and the fake in performance and more generally feeling out the mechanics of the act.
Often I like to engage in a process of unpacking the illusion, of finding out where the performer gives something away and then accentuating that. Asking again where the ambiguities lie and on what level one can perceive authenticity or realness beneath. The paradox is that performance deals with a language of truth by in some way employing the means of deception. Agamben writes, «…truth is revealed only by giving space or giving a place to non-truth – that is a taking-place of the false, as an exposure of its innermost impropriety.»

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