(Too many notes) on: armouring, smiling, wonder, killjoys, applause, racism, and reciprocity

This is pretty much a mash up of blog posts I’ve drafted and never finished over the last couple of years. Today, I decide they are all related. Today I publish this mix of thoughts, all joined up without the lines, differently dated and side by side. Find what calls to you. Make your own lines and alliances. Jump in and out. Or don’t. I share them for my own pleasure, and warmly invite you to be alongside me if it’s our moment.


smiling [06/19]

I was watching back some video of myself the other day. This is not something I usually do. The video was of me describing something quite painful, an incident that was bound up in racism. I was watching it back – listening, in fact – in order to transcribe my own words to help me prepare for a talk I was about to give. I was transcribing my words in order to understand something of my own language around resistance, invisibility, voicelessness, and my own shadows. But what I noticed most of all as I transcribed this video is that I smile throughout. Not a small smile, but a broad all-teeth smile. The one people often compliment me on. When I look back at it, I see that smile as a grimace, and as armour. It says: here I am, all armour in position, ready to make myself vulnerable at your pleasure. It’s disturbing. Always smiling, always ready to be in agreement, always the one to find a solution, never wanting to disrupt too much. The smile, I realised, is a pre-emptive way of being in the world. It foresees rejection, fear, and difficulty, and is underlined by shame. It offers protection. It says: I am already smiling, so how can you harm me? But the harm is already done.  Smile!


applause [12/17]

I’ve always found the applause of theatre audiences troubling. I dutifully applaude at the end of most shows, but somewhere in me I have always had a feeling that I was in trouble. What I mean by this is that when I have seen a really powerful show, and then it ends, I often don’t feel like applauding, so when I applaude I am following along with a convention that feels fundamentally wrong in that moment. I’m troubled by the idea of what that applause does, and what it stands for. My experience is always that applause comes thick and fast, often moments before a show has finished or a final echo of sound has finished resonating. It is as if audience members want to leave the experience behind as quickly as possible – closing the door on whatever has been opened during the performance, to return to a more familiar terrain. The applause is closely followed by questions about what we all feel about the show we’ve seen. Did you like it? What did you think of it? Did we have a good time?

A few months ago, I was lucky enough to be in the audience for Hannah Gadsby’s show Nanette.* The show was everything I have read about it – funny, devastating, painful, honest. And like many people, I would describe it as one of the best shows I have ever seen. But it also brought something into focus for me, about what it means to be in audience and how that is related to being alive in the world with other people. Because at the end of the show, after a standing ovation and two short bows, many of us in tears, Hannah Gadsby left the stage, and the house lights went up and everyone filed out of the theatre. And it kind of broke my heart that it felt possible for us to walk out of the theatre like that, to move back into sociality so easily, with a round of applause. Because the show had been difficult and confronting, and had opened up something so rare that I feel like it’s barely touched on in most shows I have seen.

And yes it was all the stuff before that led up to this moment, but I realised that this moment always breaks my heart a little. When we sit together and share something like that, something that is about what happens when we are in a theatre, and that is simultaneously about what happens when we look at each other in the world - how we make stories about ourselves and about others, how we cause violence to each other, how we are capable of so much more - when we see something like that, and then we are left sitting in a room together, I want to know that we are not capable of simply walking back out into our lives. I want to know that something like that changes us, that it allows us to relate to each other differently, that maybe we take a moment to see whether another person is okay. I want to know that we could sit together quietly before dispersing.

It told me so much about how we function as a society inside late capitalism [& the performance I saw was at the Sydney Opera House, fully resonant with a violent colonial present] that I had been sitting in a room with hundreds of people, and we had shared an incredibly moving experience, and many of us were weeping, and yet when the house lights went up most people went to the bar and made chat with the people they already knew, or travelled home. Transaction completed. There was no room for processing, no room for quietness or difficulty or awkwardness, no room for messiness, no room for being together across difference. It was almost as if the being together had never happened.

* I saw Nanette in the theatre, not in its later Netflix version, and I think these are fundamentally different experiences


wonder [10/17]

A few weeks ago I began a Feminist Killjoys Reading Group on Darug land in Western Sydney. Each day we read a blog post from Sara Ahmed’s feministkilljoys.com and we talked about our own experiences in relation to the ideas in that blog post. On the second day, I introduced the blog post called ‘Feminist Wonder’. In it, Ahmed writes about wonder as something that is not necessarily outside history, or outside politics, but that brings historicity into view as something made. Something that has been made and can therefore be unmade. And then she writes about shattering:

“I am interested in how consciousness of gender (say, as a way of directing human traffic) can be a world consciousness that can leave us shattered. But shattering is also what enables us to become alive to possibility. Becoming feminist can inject life into a world by allowing you to recognise not only that things acquire shape over time, but that this shape is not necessary or inevitable; that possibilities are not always lost, even when we have given them up.”

This is what it felt like to me at the end of Hannah Gadsby’s show, like the world had been exposed as made, in a moment of both horror and wonder. The show left me feeling shattered. I think this is a good word for it. And the theatre, as I have known it, is one of the places where I can experience this shattering feeling without needing to put myself back together too soon. A world made and unmade. Constructed through wonder. In the company of others.

And I ask myself: what do you need in order to feel safe enough to become shattered?


racism [07/18]

I recently published something that had at its centre my own experience of a racist incident. An incident that you might call ‘mildly racist’. But these are the ones that pull at my guts, and I have come to believe that while some racism can cause more immediate harm than other forms of racism, the idea that some racism might be ‘mild’ is misleading. The small things are perhaps the most poisonous. It is in the detail that the violence is rooted.

But you see the thing is that when I published this something, I knew the fallout would be too great, and I left it out. I left the word ‘racist’ out of the writing. Cowardly? Maybe. … because… it was minor / I did not want to deal with the consequences of calling this person out / my life has been filled with these minor incidents of eradication / they seem not worth telling. I am, finally, able to feel them deeply, but I have no idea what to do with them. They do not feel like they warrant attention from a wider audience. And yet, they have shaped me, held my body in place, and taught me to be very quiet for a very long time. And now I want to do something with all those moments, because they are gathering, and they are teaching me that it is not an indulgence but a responsibility to both feel them and share them with others.


feminist killjoys [12/18]

“If we think with and through orientation, we might allow the moments of disorientation to gather, almost as if they were bodies around a different table. We might, in the gathering, face a different way. Queer objects might take us to the very limits of social gathering, even when they still lead us to gather at the table. Indeed, to live out a politics of disorientation might be to sustain wonder about the very forms of social gathering.” – Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology

This is one of my favourite Sara Ahmed quotes. I come back to it again and again, finding myself differently in relation to it. I read it out loud at some of the first sessions of the Feminist Killjoys Reading Group. To set the scene. To say: you are welcome here. To say: we can do this differently. And to say: but it will take work – the work of sustaining wonder about the very forms of social gathering.

How attention is distributed is political. It is the most political thing.

Several years later, the Feminist Killjoys Reading Group continues. Now there is a core group of five who meet regularly and organise monthly events at which anyone is welcome. It is a growing community. And creating this community is one of the ways of saying: it takes work to be a killjoy, and we need each other in order to be able to continue doing this work. In order for this work to exist, part of the work needs to be the work of finding solidarity. And not parcelling each other up in the process.

The other day, I spent time with some of the killjoys reflecting on the work we have done so far. One of the reflections was: We have survived. We took this as celebration. Survival as celebration. We all knew what this meant. To have continued, to have survived, means we are doing the work.


reciprocity [05/19]

I keep having this conversation with friends, peers, people I’m mentoring. I find it is particularly something that comes up around people who have been raised as girls and women, and that it is particularly heightened in racialised bodies. It is an inability to receive. A difficulty in finding oneself worthy of receiving a gift, a kindness, attention, gratitude, or praise. It is an inability to perceive worth in self. But the conversation I keep coming back to is about reciprocity. What it takes to create/allow flow in the world, to create/allow community and conversation and belonging. That it takes both give and receive. The ability to be generous and to take a stand in one’s own body and belong there. They are always linked. To be able to receive what is being offered, to be able to both see and be seen. This work is transformative, and hard, and necessary for survival.   reciprocity

choreography

I want it to stand on its own, and in relationship to your reading as much as anything. But also, I feel I should let you know, in case you want this, that the writing emerges following these two residencies that I have been lucky enough to spend time inside these past two months. It is also written in response to and alongside others, who are acknowledged at the end of this post.

*

Dear So,

                  Your letter* arrives and says to me:              what are you waiting for?

                   Your words begin to articulate my landscapes of

            - what? -

                                      well        many things, one of which is,

    really, a deep deep fail.

failure of imagination. inability to comprehend.

not magic, not beauty, not flow.

And my question: how to write about this in words without describing a kind of success?

**

 

My question, not yours. But perhaps in relation to your:

               Legs being words, in this instance. I forgot how to dance.

and

                       To know that we hold – as our inheritance from our families, our cultures, our relationships, our labour – inside us all that makes us, for each other.

**

In response, I offer my own stories:
                                                                    of language, of forgetting how to dance, and of what makes us, for each other.

The language

an armour

but inside it

an arm.*

 

**

Saturday. I am seated with others around a bonfire. I am brimming with the knowledge that I must speak tonight. I clumsily stand in my power. In front of, say, thirty or forty people. Night time. Gunditjmara land. This, I say, matters. Sorry, I say, for my words will not be articulate. I am speaking, I say, as a woman of colour. Sorry, I say, for the trembling in my voice and the rage and sorrow coursing through my body. Because I have not been trained to speak this way. I have been trained to keep things quiet.

So it is that I speak.*

[Chan Marshall, in the concert hall at the Sydney Opera House, to a wall of over-excited audience:

“There’s a lot more I could say.

        But I’m respecting.

Sorry … over-respecting.

I’m over-respecting.”]

 

and then

Someone else speaks.
A direct attack on my words.
A comment made with all the love and anger and pain of another life, preparing for a different battle.

- and lands

as intended

in my body

which is suddenly twenty years younger, and reeling.

Time, in this moment, does not serve to heal, but jumps backwards to protect.

My greatest protection has been to listen, and not to speak.

**

But this is just the setting / a prelude / to what I brought into the next room. The question.

The question relates to

or

is also

this question:

                             
                                  Is it possible to work with ‘choreography’ the ordering of bodies without making museums of ourselves?

The question lives alongside questions of ambition and voice and career and success. Which means it lives alongside the tantalising feeling of passing and moving smoothly through the world. Alongside the act of viewing and the act of listening. Alongside terms like ‘dialogical’ and ‘engaged’ and ‘interactive’ as segregators.

Alongside my desire to dance, to be danced, to be seen to be dancing.

                                                           Alongside my desire to speak.

**

 

or

To be read.

To read a body onstage.

In my earlier shows, I have faced this as a confrontation.
I have played out vulnerability until it was real. I was very good at this.

But this time, I wanted to see what would happen if I was my inheritance, my families, cultures, relationships, labour.
If I was my queerness and brownness.

I couldn’t. do it.

Not yet.

**

We could have been intimate. And sometimes we were.

We could have been kind. And sometimes we were.

We could have been dancing, and sometimes we were.

**

It was not the solidarity I had imagined. It was harder than that. But it was solidarity, and it was trust. Deepest trust, to continue to show up. To continue to show up in full doubt. To continue to show up in anger and (self) hatred. And to mark it through, in conversations and movements, even if dull, even if far, even if terrifyingly absent.

**

The idea,

       
we wrote,  

             
       is not to make a coherent piece of choreography, but to interrupt, challenge, and contest the assumptions embedded in terms like

 


  ‘choreography’ or

                 ‘innovation’ or

                                                              ‘experimental’.*

[It’s funny. I told a friend before we began the residency that I hoped we might give ourselves permission to make something that felt “abhorrent”. I had no idea that I was going to use that word until it happened. Now I feel my way into it differently. I feel my body trying to shudder away from its own skin. And I think:

The language an armour but inside it an arm.]

**

An interviewer asks Arundhati Roy,

“Do you worry at all about comparison being made between the two books, or are you fully prepared for that?”

Arundhati Roy replies that she does not worry.

The interviewer persists: “Okay let me ask that another way. Do you think this is a better book?”

Arundhati Roy replies

      “There’s no competition.”

She replies

              “It’s not about success.”

She replies

“It’s not about critics or bestseller lists. Because I know – I mean, sorry to say this but this is the truth – that when people read the book, and think they’re judging the book, Anjum and Tilo and the dogs and the vultures are also judging the reader … really truly, I mean … this is the truth.”*

And in that one moment, without agression, I hear an act of decolonisation.

It is not only about your way of reading, she is saying. It is a meeting place.

Do not

(she says to me)   

    make assumptions

    

                      about how meaning and value are constructed.

 
   There              are         always             so                 many           things             happening               at          once.

***

NOTES of various kinds

* image by Alex Tálamo and Rajni Shah

*Since it arrived as if a letter, in my inbox. Since I received it that way. And since it is written on a platform called tinyletter. I receive your words as letters.          - And to the reader of this blog post – know that its writing began as a response to these fine fine words.

*I can’t help thinking about Sara Ahmed, whose words embolden my life. She has written many excellent words about arms and willfulness and feminisms. See here.

* [thank you Andrea Zimmerman for what you said in 2015. I have never forgotten it. you expressed disappointment that I stood on stage and spoke from script after the bananas incident. you urged me to be braver in what I shared, not to be afraid of my own rage. you noticed that I was very good at providing the conditions for others to be vulnerable, but that I did not invite this of myself. and I have carried your words with me, now they are … (funny) … ripe.]

*Thank you is not enough. to Alex Tálamo and Victoria Hunt who were inside that process alongside me. the shell of which lies here: http://performancespace.com.au/2018-experimental-choreographic-residency

* https://www.theguardian.com/books/audio/2017/jun/28/arundhati-roy-on-the-ministry-of-utmost-happiness-books-podcast

Giving up and giving away

                                                                               

I could see you were standing there fierce with something but I didn’t know how to ask you.


A while back, some years ago now, I wrote a long blog post about disappointment. It was around the time that I gave up being what I have come to call a ‘career artist’. And of course, in the process of giving up, of letting go, I found that all kinds of other things emerged and continue to emerge as new structures for life, and as life-giving structures. But I’ve kept thinking about it. We have such narratives of keeping going, especially in the arts, but really everywhere. We encourage each other to keep going, to find a way through, to keep afloat, to stay on board. And it’s problematic, this urge to keep going, keep succeeding, keep producing, keep showing up. Not only because it fails to acknowledge that there is value in stopping, pausing, not being productive – that there is value in creating spaces where people might do those things together, as part of a social rhythm. But also because it’s a plea to not diverge.

There are times when it’s not possible to go on; when it’s not possible to go on in the ways in which we are expected to go on. When ‘progress’, in the narrow definition with which that term is used in western models, is the very thing that is holding us within dis-abling structures. In those moments that are dark and difficult, we might be able to see something more of ourselves and our interactions, if only we were brave enough to look into them for a sustained moment together.


A few months ago now, in February 2016, some people gathered in a small room in London and celebrated endings together. We were an odd bunch, and a small bunch. It was part of a long process of ending something: ending a company, ending a possiblity, and confronting some impossibilities. It was a beautiful moment that felt solemn and light at the same time, that was filled with goodwill and also a kind of refusal to yield. For me, it marked my move away from the UK for a few years, my move away from the idea of building a career as an artist in which I needed to constantly evidence ‘success’, a move away from (professional) relationships based on sustaining a social and operational model that felt immoral and uneasy at best. It was a giving up, a letting go, a giving away. But those three things have very different connotations. To give up is still very much seen as a failure to move forward, and to move forward is too often perceived as the ultimate goal. But giving up is something I have been doing a lot of.


Recently I watched a livestream of a theatre show about a white man’s journey into the Amazon rainforest and his encounter with some of the people who lived there. It was a show about a white man’s journey and it was performed by a white man who already has a good reputation as a theatre-maker. It was performed in theatres across the country. And many people I know loved this show, they thought it was sublime, and exciting, and somehow they found it not to be racist or problematic that this white man was standing on a stage telling this story in big theatres. But I found that no matter how much the man in the show talked about a complex web of presence and authorship, he was writing the end to that story as his story, as the story of him standing on a stage and receiving critical acclaim. He was buying into the myth of authorship and authority and colonialism even as he claimed to disavow and disrupt it. He made that story end with him standing on a stage telling it. Even if I had enjoyed the show itself, I’m not sure I could ever understand why he made the choice for it to be him telling the story, at this moment in time, the choice to place his body on the stage in that way. It baffled me. It could be that this was his way to look into darkness for a sustained moment together. It could be. Maybe it was. But it was also married to his own continued visibility.

I have made a show that was seen in a similar way to this – the way I decribe seeing the show above. I made a show called Glorious where local performers were invited to stand on stage and make music and speak words, and in which I stood, for most of it, in the middle of the stage on a podium inside a sculptured costume. I stood in the costume and sang, and all the other things that happened in the show happened around me. It was, among other things, described as “a vacuous ego trip” by Libby Purves in the only mainstream press review it received.

I have made several shows where I have stood in the middle of a stage, as the ‘centre’ of a piece of theatre. In making those shows, I was always making a choice, and that choice was about having a short-ish brown-skinned shaven-headed body in the middle of the stage, holding the centre whilst embodying western clichés of ‘beauty’ and ‘power’. It was a choice I was making even when I knew it could be read as egotistical. Whether rightly or wrongly, it seemed important to me to make that choice. Even as it engaged with a certain relationship to power, it felt like a place of resistance.

At the end of Glorious, after everyone else had left the stage, I stepped out of the costume and left the stage, and the audience were invited to populate the stage as they exited the theatre. The idea for that show, in a way, is that it could be anybody who stepped into that costume and then out of it again, holding that central place of power for a night so that people could gather around and perform as audience members, speakers, technicians, or musicians. The idea was that all of us were standing in those positions temporarily, each of them as important as the other. But of course it also wasn’t just anyone. On those evenings, it was my body standing in for power. Libby Purves clearly felt that I made the story of Glorious end with me, with my ego, with my body, in a way that negated the other stories for her.


I’m interested in how all of these things sit together, in what it means to give up, what it means to give away, and how power operates in the tiniest details of a seemingly simple structure like the theatre. Quite apart from ‘the work’ itself, I am thinking about the acts of watching and seeing, listening and hearing, and interpreting. I’m thinking about what is held open during a performance, and whether that confronts or conforms to the power dynamics that we may have brought in with us. I’m thinking about what people are ready to notice, what people are ready to say, and what people are prepared to ignore. I’m interested in whether it is possible to give away power and remain visible, or whether it is possible to retain a kind of power while being invisible. The relationship between noticing something, acknowledging something, and understanding something. What it means if giving up and giving away are a kind of giving over of attention. What it means to hold quite still and listen intently and not turn away. What it means to give ground, to enact giving ground, or to not give ground. And how different these are, and how different these all seem, depending on the body that you happen to inhabit that night.


It’s just words, asking.
It’s just words.
It’s words.

It’s words, and you.

Structures of Listening

Last night, I went to a talk. The talk was about the invisibility of women in art – the way that women only become visible (and valuable) after they are dead. The introduction was all about women’s voices, about how we (in the arts) might work differently, about structures that would allow for new ways of thinking and viewing and making and coming together, and about new spaces for visibility and audibility. And yet, there we were, sitting within a traditional power structure, in a room with experts on stage and the usual question and answer session, and it killed my spirit.

And this keeps happening.

I keep finding myself at events like this where there is no room for thinking, no room for processing, and no consideration given to how this thing might happen. But if we don’t consider how the power structures are operating in the room, then traditional power dynamics emerge. I’m nowhere near the first person to observe this. And yet it keeps happening. I keep finding myself at events where the topic up for discussion is compelling and important, and then there is no way for us, the people in the room, to reach the place we want to discuss. We’re stuck in a place where we perform change but we perform it within structures that are oppressive and non-conducive to the very change that we are discussing.

                                              This change, it happens slowly. It happens over centuries.

Over years, I will keep saying the same thing. I will keep saying that we need to listen better. And what I will mean by that, what I will mean every time I say it or write it or fail to say it, is that we need better structures within which to listen. What I will mean is that this voice you are hearing, it is the voice that is permitted within the structure you have created. And very often there would be a more interesting and more present and more considered voice here if the structure allowed for it. What I will mean is:

What if my voice were invited?

What if I were invited to speak uncertainly, or in a language you can't comprehend? What if there were really space for that? And I don’t mean invited like, “yeah, anyone can speak, anyone is welcome to speak” said from the front of a room in which there is an unspoken hierarchy; but I mean really thinking about how the space invites the words. I mean spaces that have easy exits and different kinds of entrances so that people can find their appropriate way into and out of them. I mean spaces in which the etiquette is clear and transparent. I mean spaces that welcome silence. I mean spaces that welcome silences in which we can hear and understand coercion as well as silences in which we can hear complex thinking that has not yet settled.

What I mean is that every space has a choreography, and to ignore that act of choreography when setting up any kind of event is to ignore a certain politics that holds our conversation. I mean that the aesthetics and the welcome of the space are not an add-on or a frivolity but formative features. How and whether we approach something or someone is entirely determined by what we can see or hear from afar. Politics. Choreography. Aesthetics. It all comes down to the details of how we are invited to be in the room.

But who is it for

First, there is another place that you should go

Right as I was drafting this, as I was drafting it very slowly and occasionally, as is my way, the wonderful Karen Christopher posted this blog on her site, and it says some of the things I might be stumbling towards here, and it says them very eloquently. You might read hers as a parallel to mine. Or, if you’ve only time for one, read hers – it will inspire you. Karen articulates very beautifully many of the things I felt when I was making performance, and her performances are exactly as she describes them -

"I’ve slowed down to look closely and I can do the same for you"

- and I am so glad she is making performance, and writing about performance, and teaching. There is a deep value in work that slows down, that doesn’t assume; and that same thing that is so valuable is what makes the work very difficult to ‘value’, difficult to catch hold of, difficult to write about and to blow into the shape of success. It takes a lot to hold this place, to hold it open. And Karen is doing that work. And in a different way, I hope I am also doing that work. And we are doing some of that work together.

This was a kind of preface. Now to my stumbling struggling words…

The Question

One of the ways in which I use this space of the blog is to work through things that I repeatedly encounter. Things that I have an instinct to be wary of, but I’m not sure why yet. This is a common feeling for me. It’s rare that someone says something and I immediately disagree or have a counter-argument. You could say it’s part of my commitment to listening, that I like to hear what a person has to say before figuring out whether I also have something to say about it. Or you could say something else… (!!*)

There’s a phrase that I’ve come up against several times recently in slightly different guises. Each time I hear it, I find myself putting a guard up, feeling a slight anger, but I can’t quite work out why. It’s the phrase,

“But who is it for?”

as in: but who are you making this work for, or who are you writing this for?

It’s a fair question, you might think. I think it’s fair question, which is why I can’t quite work out this feeling of being so vexed by it.

For example, it was asked of me in my PhD Upgrade exam, in response to a series of dialogues I’ve been conducting, called 'Experiments in Listening'.

“Who is the experiment for?” the examiner said.

I, of course, had no answer. I knew it was a good question, and a fair question in the context, one that was designed to open up conversation and thinking around the project, but I felt and still feel a very peculiar resistance to answering it. I felt it was important not to know the answer.

And then I heard it again at a conference recently, someone asking:

“We must ask: who are we making this work for?”

And as I examine my response, I know that there are many things that might be problematic or irksome about this type of question, and these are not the things that are bothering me. It contains the idea of duty, that one ought to know in advance the audience for whom one is writing or making, that the work will always (and not just sometimes) be better for this question. It taps into a world of marketing-speak and funding-speak where artists must pre-determine their work and their audiences in order to draw down funding, in order to fit within what many of us consider a flawed structure of evaluation and value within the arts. And yet I don’t think it’s (only) these things that are bothering me when I hear the phrase. I think it’s something about the relationship between selfishness and selflessness, and how these things are perceived.


How generosity is perceived

Maybe it will help to briefly explore another problem I have repeatedly encountered, with people who refuse generosity as a term on which work might be made. Because I’ve noticed that a lot of my peers will say that they only make work for themselves – ultimately, they make work for themselves, not for anyone else, and not in response to anything greater. Like it’s disingenuous to say that we might make work for something other than selfish reasons, when making art is such a luxury.

And it bothers me, because yes, I have made the work for myself in a way, but that can’t be the only reason I make work. And I suppose it comes down to a problem I keep revisiting about the ‘white male genius’ figure of the artist, who only makes work for himself, who follows his instinct and his vision, but everyone gathers around that work because it is brilliant. And I won’t deny it, I have had fantasies about working in this way, about forging a career path that is only about what I want, and keeping on in this path until I receive some kind of recognition for stubborn self-faith. But I have found that in practice I just can’t make work within this model, which assumes knowledge and genius is only held within a person, and that ‘success’ is dished out in accordance with merit. I don’t discover the work or the ideas in solitude. I discover things in the world, in dialogue, in company, in full recognition of all the people in the room. And so yes, I do make work for and with other people.** Often, what I am making is not so much a performance or a product but a structure within which we might encounter something – an excuse to gather around something in order to be in (often quiet, or non-verbal, subtle, complex) dialogues.


The need for answers

“So who is the work for?”

As is so often the case, my biggest problem with the question is that it’s a question that loudly demands an answer, and it demands an answer that clarifies.

And I don’t want to give an answer that clarifies.

I can’t tell you if it’s for you, and I’m not sure if I can tell you if it’s for me. Who is it for reveals itself in who comes, and how they come. And it’s a question that should remain alive in the room. It’s not one that should be set down with an answer. I don’t make the work for someone, and I don’t conduct the experiment for someone. It’s not that the question is irrelevant, maybe it’s a good question, but maybe it just needs to remain live.

And maybe this was embodied in Glorious, where the figure of the artist stood in the middle of a stage on a podium, with people gathering around, a temporary community, all of us listening. There is a lazy reading of this which goes: the artist is elevated and considers herself superior. In this reading, “who is it for?” is answered easily with, “it’s for the artist and for her success.” There is resolution in this position, it makes it easy to read, and it makes it easy to place the responsibility for the work in the realm of the artist. But it’s more complicated than that. There is a responsibility in watching, too. For a start, there is the responsibility for finding that image problematic and understanding why and how this problem is occuring.

Who is it for?

might also be

How are you watching?

or

How are you listening?

or

Where do you position your body in relation to this body?

Performing Glorious never stopped feeling difficult. That act of standing centre-stage, it never stopped feeling problematic. And that difficulty was important. Maybe because it was a difficult thing to read, to accept. Maybe because that very organisation of stage, of visuals, asks the question – “but who is it for?” – and leaves it unresolved. And maybe, whilst difficult, that is also generous. Maybe it's a difficulty that sits between us.

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* I think there’s an easy slip here between being someone who listens and considers and doesn’t pre-judge or predetermine a conversation, and being someone who is not brave enough to speak when speaking needs to happen (even if that speaking might sound inarticulate). It is, maybe, the difference between silence that is an active listening, where one is present, and silence that is a being-silenced, a going-along-with, when really what is needed is some kind of articulation or a demand to be heard. I do both things, though I am slowly trying to weed out the less brave one!

** I'm fully aware that I've made work under my own name, in collaboration with other artists, for which I have largely been the one who is credited, because of my role as director. This is definitely problematic, but a problem for another discussion. I don't think it's as black and white as it seems.