Stage One: Travelling + Skin [Script]

* Sound Cue (1): Music: Shoukichi Kina (1980) Hana no Kajimaya: The Best of Shoukichi Kina/Peppermint Tea House (Luaka Bop & Warner Bros. Records, 1994) [2:27]

Actor enters holding seven brightly coloured shopping bags by their string handles, a number in each hand. She looks around uncertainly, then chooses a spot and stands facing across the performance space, looking ahead. Pause. She puts her bags down one by one in a circle around her, stands up looking ahead, sighs, turns her head back the way she came, looking in a wide arc and back again. She stands, looking down at a spot just ahead of her. After a while, she looks up. She picks up the bags, shuffles forward then stands holding bags. Pause. She puts the bags down one by one in a circle around her, faces ahead, sighs, looks around. She looks in one bag, searching through it with swift hand movements, then stands, looking straight ahead. After a while, she lifts her chin, tilting her head slightly to one side. She picks up the bags and holds them up high to her chest, shuffles forward, bows, then moves backwards, placing the bags carefully in two rows right and left as she goes. When she has placed the last bag, she moves to one of the bags and takes out an old Minolta camera. She takes pictures of the bags, moving on her knees between shots. Finally she kneels in the middle of the bags, facing out to the audience. She aims the camera high; she does not press the button, but her mouth slowly drops open.

*End Sound Cue (1). Cue (1’) continues: Music: Ryoji Ikeda (1995) radio-range Document 02 – sine (Melbourne: Dorobo 010) [0:35]

** Overhead Cue (1):

Actor: Can you read me like a book?

* Sound Cue (1’) – continues: Music: Ryoji Ikeda (1995) radio-range Document 02 – sine (Melbourne: Dorobo 010) [0:35]

Actor puts book and camera back into a bag. She picks up each bag one at a time, and arranges them in a semicircle at the back of the space. She returns to the centre of the space, and slowly puts her hands over her eyes.

* Sound Cue (1″) – continues: Music: Ryoji Ikeda (1995) zone 3 Document 02 – sine (Melbourne: Dorobo 010) [2: 53]

Actor removes her hands from her face. Her eyes are closed. She makes her way uncertainly around the space, finding bags and feeling inside them. Eventually she brings out a parcel wrapped in paper. She carries the parcel downstage a little, kneels down and undoes the paper. Inside is more paper, folded into an oblong shape. She lifts up the object, and it falls open – it is a paper kimono. She holds it up, then puts it on. She moves, responding to the ‘feel’ of the kimono and its movement and sound. She goes directly to another of the bags, and pulls out a pair of paper fans. She finds another spot on the stage, and opens the fans together, striking a pose.

* End Sound Cue (1)

** Overhead Cue (2) – at ten second intervals.

* Sound Cue (2)

Man’s Voice (1): Kabuki actors spend a greater percentage of their life onstage than almost any other actors. First put on the stage at age five or six, they appear in two performances a day, twenty-five days a month, month after month, year after year. In essence, the Kabuki actor spends his entire life onstage. As a result, according to Faubion Bowers, older actors sometimes find it difficult to differentiate between their stage personae and their real selves. The actor Utaemon’s normal movements, the distinctive turn of hands or neck, bear striking resemblances to his body language onstage.

* End Sound Cue (2)

Actor snaps the fans closed. She speaks straight out to audience.

Actor: Things to take with you when travelling:

* Sound Cue (3) – bodies and balloons [0:40]

Woman’s Voice (1): What happens to bodies? They are blotting paper and rope. They tear like cling wrap and are obdurate as glass. When you break into them they are ripe plums. The inside oozes right out and yet somehow the whole thing stays round and firm. Not at all like a balloon. That responsive giving surface once broached turns into something quite unlike itself, mass turned into sudden movement. Newton is to apple as Einstein is to balloon.

* End Sound Cue (3)

The actor pauses close to the pool, lifts her foot and just breaks the surface of the water with her toe, drawing it swiftly back. She goes to one of the paper bags, and takes out a tray with a miso bowl and chopsticks. She places the tray on the rostrum, sits and swings herself into a kneeling posture, then opens the bowl and begins as if to eat.

* Sound Cue (4) – travellers’ tales (A) [3:00]

Man’s voice (2): I really didn’t notice that, I’m not really consciously sort of performing my English self, you know, those kinds of things doesn’t really happen consciously, that’s not really a conscious process, but one time one of my – actually that’s a Korean friend – told me, that she liked me when I was speaking in English, because she said when I am speaking English I am more articulate and more logical, and it’s easier for her to communicate. But the moment I speak in Japanese, she says that I become another very ordinary or typical Japanese, who speaks in very sort of suggestive way and not articulate, not logical, and it’s really difficult for her to communicate with me…. I had this experience in Korea, that when I arrived at the airport I just lost myself, because I can’t understand the language. Of course by hearing I don’t comprehend a word in Korean, but, besides that, because Koreans write different letters, I can’t even situate myself…. Yeah, there is a particular expression about being in Korea, it’s called ‘Hanguryoi’, it’s ‘drunken in Hangu letters’ – the Hangu letters are letters that are used in Korean language, so we drunken, we lost ourselves, we are intoxicated by all these letters that have no meaning at all to us.

Woman’s voice (2): Yeah, going to Tokyo, it’s far greater culture shock than coming to Australia. ‘Cause I was just going to Japan, from one area of Japan, and it’s so different. But coming to Australia, I expected it…is different. Everything was different. People talking differently, air was dirty, and the way they thought that’s different. I had to make a lot of adjustments. I don’t know if I did right thing or wrong thing. But I think if I wasn’t born in that small town, I may not have travelled. ‘Cause I can remember, we had well, and we had pond. Now we have running water – that was only thirty years ago I think – no, not thirty, forty years ago, we didn’t have running water, and electricity is the same. But life is so convenient now, but people, the way they think is actually, I still think they have same mentality.

* End Sound Cue (4)

While this is going on, the actor is eating. She picks up grains with the chopsticks and lets them fall – as she takes larger amounts, it becomes clear that it is white sand in the bowl rather than rice. After she has finished, she puts the bowl back in the bag, leaving the tray and chopsticks behind, and kneels with her hands on her knees.

When the woman on the tape finishes speaking, the actor places a second bowl on the tray. She gets down from the rostrum, taking with her a bamboo dipper on a long handle.

* Sound Cue (5) – travellers’ tales (B) [1:30]

Woman’s voice (3): How pleasant it is to travel in the early summer time! There is no need to worry about biting frosts and winds – on the other hand, it is never so hot that one feels stifled for lack of air, or become parched for thirst before one reaches one’s destination. Instead, the air is warm but balmy, and the cool of the early morning and the lengthening evening provides a delicious contrast to the heat of noon.

Of course, it is already important to carry an umbrella, or to wear a broad brimmed hat, as the midday sun does have the power to bite. There is nothing worse than noticing, after having spent a pleasant day out of doors, that one’s nose, neck or forearms have turned an unsightly red. It quite spoils one’s evening relaxation!

Rather than exposing oneself too much to the elements, perhaps it is a better idea to conduct one’s viewing of the countryside from the comfort of one’s coach. A judicious arrangement of curtains or blinds will prevent the sun from entering too rudely, while affording a clear view of whatever there is to delight the eye in natural or human activity as one passes. Best of all, a well-appointed coach provides the perfect haven for pleasant conversation with whatever well-chosen companions have been invited to share the journey.

* End Sound Cue (5)

She goes to the pond, stands, then fills the dipper carefully and takes it back, laying it on the rostrum. While the woman on the tape is speaking, the actor opens a tin box. Inside is an inkstone, a brush, and a piece of paper. She carefully fills a small ceramic container with water, pours some on the inkstone, grinds the ink stick and, taking up the brush, writes the Chinese character ‘to go.’ She looks at it, then turns the paper over and draws a long wavy line. She takes off the paper kimono, and paints wavy lines in several places. Then she puts it back on.

Actor (to audience): HELLO. HELLO. HELLO…. [repeats until sound tape kicks in, then goes to next action sequence below]

* Sound Cue (6) – snake story [1:45] & Cue (6’) music follows

* Second Deck ready Sound Cue (7) – needs to be exact

Woman’s voice (4): I tried so hard, and it was hard. To be a stranger in that land. I was drawn to that hut on that day with its storms, intoxicated by the wet afternoon with its promise of love. Gliding in the wet grass, saw him walking, saw him go in. Drawn by his beauty changed shape to follow. Not like the others I thought. He won’t strike out in fear, he won’t be disgusted.

So we went in. It was raining, wet, he lent his umbrella.

*Sound Deck Sound Cue (7) – Man’s voice (3) (* text below). Watch levels – may need to be pulled back

I didn’t chase him, not that first time. It was he who sought me.

Eager, he was so eager. The way I behaved was perfect, speaking low but clearly, like a lady, with delicate gestures. I knew it was perfect. Was it too perfect? I needed the clear light of his gaze admiring me. If only he would stay, then I could walk on the land through him, I would have a place to be, connections to the people of the place. The same skin, stretching through days and years.

But his ties to them were stronger than his ties to me. Me the stranger, the snake, the evil one.

I tried to learn their ways, I paid such close attention. But no matter what I did, what lengths I went to, they could tell I was a stranger. Oh, how I studied, how I worked to appear whole in the eyes of those he looked to for their endorsement. But there would always be someone, some old man with a sense of order and a disapproving eye, some priest with a furious sense of righteousness about him, determined to unmask me, to turn him against me, to separate me from my love. Is it any wonder I grew desperate? And then when they married him off – to some nobody, some smooth mannered maidservant with certified court connections. Is it any wonder I lost my temper?

* Cue (6’) tape follows on with Music: Ryoji Ikeda (1995) zone 4 Document 02 – sine (Melbourne: Dorobo 010) – watch levels – may need to be pulled back

[* Text for Sound Cue (7): Man’s voice: She was a/ she was a/ she was young and she was beautiful and all that but the thing is/ beauty’s only skin deep and the thing was/ she wasn’t/ human really.

Well, he looked at her and she looked at him. He did the looking, he did do the looking. Long and hard he looked, at the white skin she had and the long hair she had and the soft folds of her. And then of course there was the maid. That was the thing. How could he/ how could he be expected to tell she was a/ that she was a/ when she was all got up like that and the maid well that was the thing/ he was only a simple country boy really/ and what with the long hair and the white skin and that, and the silken robe with the distant view of the misty mountains it looked like class and the maid, well that was the clincher.

So, he should have known. Of course that is the point of the story, he should have known. Well, dear reader, dear listener, he had clues. He had clues just the same clues as the clues I lay before you, laid out just as plain as the nose on your…

The thing is she wasn’t/ normal. And he was/ susceptible. That’s it, susceptible. With his dreamy ways and his uppity dreams and good looking too. Mummy’s boy. All that reading and Chinese writing and priests and carry on and ideas above his station. So no wonder he/ and no wonder/ stands to reason she/ …]

* Second Deck END Sound Cue (7) – ready Cue (8)

While this is going on, the actor picks up the second miso bowl from the rostrum. She takes the dipper and pours water carefully into the bowl. Then she sets down the dipper and takes up a mirror. Looking at herself carefully in the mirror which she is holding with one hand, she dips the fingers of the other hand into the bowl, and draws them across her face, as if putting on makeup. She continues to make up her face with careful, slow gestures. At some point the audience will become aware that her face is being caked with mud.

When she is satisfied, she puts down the mirror, gets down off the rostrum and, holding the dipper, walks slowly towards the pool. When she reaches it, she stands still and fills the dipper with water. She then lifts up the hem of the kimono and gently walks into the pond. She lifts the dipper and pours the water over herself.

* First Deck Cue (6’) music tape – fade down under voice

Actor: There are rules. There are always rules. A traveller may know some of them; a stranger will never know all of them. Here is the list of rules for travellers:

Woman’s voice (2) [speaks in Japanese]: Gaikoku ni … setsunai suru no omoo, settai dekinai ..wo omoimasu.

The actor stands still. The performance is over.

[* in subsequent performances the actor’s recorded voice was used for this text]¹

Going: Stage Two

I am speaking a different language, now. The call-for-papers for Double Dialogues was articulated in the form of a challenge – to present in two equal parts: one in the form of a creative exhibition, the other in the more traditional form of an accompanying paper.

I was excited at having this opportunity to explore the notion of a double dialogue, to present one approach to the sometimes overwhelming task of attempting simultaneous exposition by means of discourse and practice. It seems immediately more authentic, in an existential sense, for me to put my own body into the question.

However, it is not necessarily clear how much this ‘authentication’ will add to the stock of knowledge about performance. Some scholars would question the relevance of my own experience as a performer/creator to the business of exploring the problem. It is no longer the done thing for scientists to dose themselves with radiation or for sociologists to take direct account of their own opinions on poverty or race. On the other hand, feminist and other politically committed scholars have been arguing for the past decade or so that the refusal to take account of one’s own position, rather than guaranteeing the supposed objectivity of the natural or social scientist, can mask a refusal to account for one’s limitations and indeed one’s prejudices.

It is clear that there is a broad horizon along which it is possible to trace lines of force linking the activities of creation and exegesis or creation and analysis.

One, apparently the clearest, is that in which the academic takes the role of commentator on the work of others. I say apparently the clearest. Anyone who has stepped beyond the comfortable scholarly position in which analytic language is an operation upon the work of artists, and has tried to use language as a tool with which to exchange and unpack the worlds of the creative process, its practices and discourses, has inevitably encountered what I call modality warp. Within the imaginary (a terrain which, of course, includes performance, physics, philosophy and dreams), there are odd geographies. Here, concerns, which seem quite straightforward in one mode of communication, appear to mutate almost to the point of unrecognisability as they ricochet out of the field of discourse associated with another mode – or else sink out of sight, never to be seen again.

This difficulty calls for other modes of approach. It is increasingly possible for artists working within a university context, and even in some corners of the field of art practice, to devote a period of research to exploring and commenting upon the processes which have informed their own creative activities. Such research inevitably raises the question of theorising, since it becomes quickly apparent that ‘simple description’ is not simple at all, for the reasons I have outlined above. The artist’s relationship with theory is often an uneasy one. Artists engaged in research are often required to learn an unfamiliar vocabulary, which is itself by no means free of underlying assumptions and ideological slants, as well as to express themselves in it at a level comparable with that employed by others, some of whom have had years of formal academic training.

It is tempting for the artist in this situation to see theory as ‘other,’ essentially outside the central concerns of his or her work. Then there are odd examples of artists who, it seems to me, paradoxically choose to use the language of critical theory as a shield with which to defend the activity of performance against the intrusion of theory, proposing that the thesis of the performance activity is complete sui generis and that the demand for an accompanying exegesis is illegitimate.

I would submit that a more productive way of seeing the problem is to assume that, in attempting to establish models for research in the creative arts, we are always dealing with at least two relatively independent modes of thinking. Each is an important element in the attempt to understand, and communicate understanding about, performance. Each can be creative, but to deal in each at any level of complexity requires not only specific skills, but also an understanding of the points of departure, the concerns, the developed histories, and the weltanschauung of each discipline as it exists for us in our particular cultural moment. Becoming ‘bilingual’ in this way is demanding – especially since neither a competence in any particular artform nor a capacity as a scholar can really be reduced as being equivalent to a single spoken language. The real mark of inhabitants of a culture is not simply that they can speak the language, but that they can behave appropriately in ways convincing to other members of their culture and that they have learnt to perform themselves according to their station.

In the ‘practice as research’ debate, the high art essentialist at this point usually invokes the equivalent of a Volk theory. The creative process and the analytic process are not the same; ergo, the creative is a world of its own; ergo, don’t mess with it. Now, if I were an astronomer or a particle physicist, I would regard myself as having a licence to begin to be excited precisely at such a point – something is happening, something is changing in there. And I’m not going to let an astronomer or a particle physicist have all the fun. When it comes to the performance event, we do after all have an advantage. Unlike the world of particle physics, it is possible to enter the world of performance to a certain extent. As a researcher I can perhaps never see exactly what it is, either from within or without – but neither can those who are enmeshed in making it. Rather than accept the finality of the gulf between the event and my capacity to describe it, I, too, want to accept the challenge of transforming my thinking and my modes of practice as far as possible, according to the requirements of the particular cultures in which I am working.

The main cultural difference between the researcher-artist and the artist-researcher is the priority given to the knowledge that can be distilled from the art-making process as opposed to a focus on the art that emerges from it.

What I wanted to do with this presentation was to start both performance and paper from a more or less parallel set of concerns, and, rather than allowing the performance to illustrate the talk, or the talk to explicate the performance, to see what happened when I went through the double process of thinking theatrically and thinking academically about the same questions.

Putting the making of performance and talking about performance together does not by any means guarantee a smooth translation from one mode to the other. Issues of translation, and of the incommensurability of cultures, have been uppermost in my mind. I have therefore become increasingly interested in the problems of travelling between cultures, and the problems of how to go about representing other cultures, as parallels to the problems of doing and talking about performance. There is also the specific question of the extent to which it is possible to translate between one performance culture and another. The performer’s body is the locus of our desire for volatility – it is palpable in its liminality, it is always in at least two worlds at once. We tend to endow the actor with our own fantasies of transcendence, as the performance takes us to imagined places outside our version of the ordinary. Yet claims to universality based on the seduction of the actor’s body as a vehicle by means of which both the actor and you are promised the capacity to transcend differences of time, gender, geography – even to transcend humanity in touching the spirit world – are deeply contingent.

I will now briefly outline some of the questions I was dealing with, and some of the sources for my response.

I want to know what happens to the fragile things, the meanings that become lost in translations. I also want to explore the limits to embodied understanding, what happens in the slide from the unmarked into the marked. One influence was my troubled response to a passage in the Introduction to Eugenio Barba and Nicola Savarese’s A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology. It seems to me that the ideology of their research programme hinges on an unresolved tension. It hinges between the desire to identify fundamental transcultural universals in the art of performance and the desire to create a binary opposition between the idea of the “Oriental” and the “Occidental” performer. In this binary opposition, Occidental performers are undecided “prisoners of arbitrariness and an absence of rules” whereas Oriental performers “pay for their greater liberty with a specialisation which limits their possibilities of going beyond what they know” (Barba & Savarese, 1991: 8). Barba is, of course, deliberately constructing a provocatory paradox, yet contained within it is the dream that if only the Occidental performer got Oriental discipline, if only the Oriental could balance tradition with a more Western sense of enquiry (or more personally, if only the elect of Western theatre can enter the mind of the Orient and bring back its secrets), then what a powerful, transcendental theatre could be ours!

My visceral disbelief in this dichotomy has fuelled some of this performance exploration. It is accompanied by the wish to encounter some of the places where knowing is not enough – where it is no longer possible to be confident that there is something to be brought back, only a set of incomplete experiences to be negotiated. In contrast to this is the other fashionable nostrum of our times, that of flexibility as the actor’s paramount characteristic. Speaking to a contemporary audience, Tadashi Suzuki speaks for many Australian teachers of acting when he says,

A more immediate impetus was the aftermath of a conference paper I gave in July 1997 entitled “Acting Oriental.” It was my original intention to explore current theatrical manifestations in Australia of fascination with the Orient, such as the recent interest in butoh and the ongoing influence of Suzuki’s approach to actor training. I ended, however, with a paper on the background to current activity, with a focus on Australian productions in the decade after 1969 which had dealt with Asia or Asian countries, particularly Japan, in one way or another.² Several things struck me. One was that it is obviously very difficult indeed to talk about the meanings to be read in an actor’s body from an observer’s point of view, without taking into account the enculturation and subjectivity of the actors themselves as well as the meanings they may intend. Another was that, when it comes to transcultural manifestations through the body, I am not at all sure that, say, a decade of exposure to a particular culture or culturally encoded technique equals ten years’ worth of added authenticity. I suspect that it does not work like that at all. In fact, the effort to be ‘in’ a culture sets up dynamics which can throw otherwise trivial gaps, lacks and differences into high relief. The question of where one might begin to ‘spot the difference’ between surface and depth in cultural understanding is highlighted in the subtitle of the performance section of this paper, Stage One: Travelling + Skin.

That experience caused a return of the repressed in my own memories, both bodily and intellectually based. I realised I have more than a quarter of a century’s deposit of imaginative, emotional, and visceral contact with Japan and Japanese culture without ever having been there. In an era where all realities threaten to merge into the virtual, it seemed particularly appropriate to use Japan to explore the question of what ‘being there’ might carry with it, both for the notion of enlightenment through travel and in terms of our attempts to theorise the theatrical moment and the space of performance. In the performance text are many traces of my relations with Japan: friends, conversations, past studies, and the results of revisiting Japanese literature in translation, particularly the extraordinary diaries of the literary court ladies of the Heian period – who were, incidentally, tremendous travellers – together with those famous tales of the supernatural, Ueda Akinari’s Ugetsu Monogatari.

In acknowledging the tension between bodily and electronically enhanced experience, I have constructed this piece using ‘lounge room’ technology and an aesthetic of found objects. The ability to ‘find’ things is heavily dependent on available technology. Everything in the piece was made from locally available resources or in my own home, including input from as far away as Tokyo and New York brought to you by telephone, computer and digital storage techniques.

I have made deliberately allusive use of these resources. One of my aims was not to allow the text explanatory force to the point where the ‘sound track’ allowed the watcher to interpret the testament of what was happening to and within my body. I realise that this could create some difficulties for audiences unfamiliar with the original stories and/or with non-linear modes of composition. I intend to pursue the strategy of ‘thicker description’ in later parts of this piece, of which today’s performance was the first and decidedly exploratory episode.

Performances are part of cultures; the actor’s body is deeply enculturated.

ENDNOTES

1. Overhead Projection Images of author/ actor from private collection; of Lynne Bradley courtesy of the artist, Zen Zen Zo Physical Theatre Company; of Stuart Lynch from the collection of Peter Fraser; of Ruth St Denis and Vaslav Nijinsky taken from Jowitt, Deborah (1988) Time and the Dancing Image (Berkeley: University of California Press).

Personal and In Kind Resources: The following businesses and individuals have been most generous with their thoughts, time, voices and possessions in helping me prepare the performance segment: Discurio, Melbourne; Fulbry Garden Supplies, Malvern; Made In Japan, South Melbourne; Paul Monaghan and Jelle Jager of Theatreworks; Anita Barraud, Michael Coe, Peter Eckersall, Peter and Joe Fitzpatrick, Penny and Kiyoshi Inoue, Jessica Richards, Zsuzsi Soboslay, Peter Snow, Howard Stanley, Terry Threadgold, Tadashi Uchino, Jason Whyte – to these people and to those who prefer to remain anonymous, my profound thanks.

2. One of the productions was Yamashita by Roger Pulvers in which Howard Stanley appeared. Another was Netsuke by Murray Copland in which I was one of the actors. I illustrated my talk with overheads, five of which I included in the performance of Going/Not Going (Japan). I wanted to make a point about the way in which each could be read as an instance of a Western fantasy of the East as evidenced through the body of the performer. The bodies in question are my own, those of Ruth St Denis and Vaslav Nijinsky in the early part of the century, and those of contemporary performers Lynne Bradley and Stuart Lynch. As it happened, Lynne Bradley was in the audience and took understandable exception to being characterised as an Orientalist, especially in view of her years in Japan training in butoh and other contemporary techniques.

REFERENCES