Introduction

Rather than present a performance and then expound on it, or introduce the performance with a theoretical proposition, or even place the performance within a discursive context as a lecture might do, it was decided for this project to embed the theoretical paper within the performance and have it spoken by one of the performers, in this case the writer. As writer of the proposal, performance and paper, I am keenly aware of the continual flux between ‘observer’ and ‘participant’ status at play in this project, with neither state ever free of contamination by the other.

The performance, “Forgetting Schneider: Imagining Another,” was created by Peter Snow with performers Peter Fraser, Michael Coe and Katherine Northey and had original music by Thomas Reiner. A photographer, Jesse Marlow, was invited to take pictures of the performance. The spoken paper, “Imag(in)ing the Inbetween,” was written and delivered as part of the performance by Peter Snow. The project as a whole might be characterised as an exploration of how ‘lines of flight,’ as multiple, relational and open-ended series of imagined and enacted image intensities, could be a means of making and thinking about a performance.

This written paper attempts to accomplish several things. Firstly, it tries to capture some of the diverse kinds of performance writing – proposal, performance, performance text and theory – involved in the project. To that end, the article is divided into the following sections: Section I documents the proposal for the project; Section II gives a short description of the performance; Section III is a record of the spoken paper; and Section IV is a short discussion of intercorporeality and embodiment, the central theoretical investigation of the project. (This theoretical critique expands notions indicated in the proposal which were not able to be dealt with in the spoken paper for ‘performative’ reasons – in particular those of time, rhythm and aesthetic.) In this way there is an attempt to bring out some of the relations between differing modes of writing/performance.

Secondly, the article aims in part to underscore the performative dimensions of the project. To emphasise the dialogic relations between practice and theory that were at play throughout the process, different fonts are used in later sections to distinguish, for example, what was spoken in the performance from what has been added in this re-writing.

Thirdly, the article develops ‘inbetweenness’ as a theorising of the manifold relations at play in a performative arena, and proposes it as a theorising of embodiment in performance. It was hoped in the original planning that this prospect would be shown in the aesthetic of the performance of “Forgetting Schneider” and briefly pointed to in the spoken paper in its performative context.

(I) The Proposal

What follows is the exact text of the proposal which was tendered for this project. Partly this is for readers to see something that practitioners know only too well, namely, how performances modify proposals and how proposals constrain performances and partly it is to bring out some of the relations between these two performance practices.

New performance work. Working title: Forgetting Schneider, Imagining Another

I envisage making a new, short theatre work taking as starting point the figure of the returned WWI German soldier, Schneider, who suffered such intriguing debilities that he could knock on a wall if close enough but not even move his arm if too far away, and kiss if kissed but not experience sexual arousal. I imagine this strand, or trajectory, as a sequence of visual images, some longer, some shorter, all dealing with intensities of Schneider’s lived experiences. If he talks, these patterns will be new texts. This particular part of the work could perhaps be characterised as ‘physical theatre’ and will be performed by Peter Fraser…[brief curriculum vitae at the time follows including “Body Weather” at Lake Mungo].

I would like to make another trajectory, or ‘line of flight,’ to weave in and out of Schneider’s journey, composed largely of songs, of lullabies, of remembered and imagined melodies, of silence. These revolving patterns would be based on sounds, not on texts, and would involve improvised singing on compositional motifs. The performer here would probably be singer Catherine Northey, with the music to be composed by Thomas Reiner of the Department of Music at Monash. There could be well be another pattern to be woven in here, perhaps fragments of recorded text on the metaphysics of lived experience from Kant and/or Peirce, though these could (also) be part of Schneider talking.

These two strands will be counterpointed with a sculpted installation of ‘Home,’ at present conceived as a perspex cube with life-size mannequin figures. It could be that the figures will be made and installed during the performance, and so provide both a soundscape and another ‘line of flight,’ this time of real actions in real time. Maybe there will be more cubes, to be filled as desired. Possibly one will have water with a floating body…? The work overall will investigate, among other things, exile, identity, aloneness, imagining (others), and family…

Theoretical paper. Imag(in)ing the Inbetween.

In this paper, I would like to theorise performance and performing as being processes that take place largely in the ‘in between.’

For performing, I will draw on the model of body as performed in “Body Weather” (a form of Buto originating with the Japanese dancer Min Tanaka) where bodies are seen as multiple, receptive and changing. They are also seen as permeable and unbounded, ‘raw,’ and thus open to the multiple influences of weather where weather is conceived as a multivalent, capricious, cyclic and unpredictable system of forces occurring ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ bodies. Bodies and the world (as weather) therefore are claimed to be interpenetrable, capable of infinite difference and endless change.

I would like to question whether such an account could extend to other ‘bodies in performance’ and will propose that we need a notion of intercorporeality to deal with this issue of the multiple and changing relations between bodies in performance. To facilitate this, I open a dialogue between the phenomenology of lived experience of Merleau-Ponty, where bodies can be seen as networks of social relations in the world, and the notion of body in Deleuze and Guattari, where bodies are seen rather as flows and intensities and where ‘lines of flight’ are theorised as imagined and actual capacities for action.

For performance I would like to utilise the pragmatics of C.S. Peirce, in particular the metaphysical categories of experience. I will argue that our experiences of performance, both as performers and as spectators, can be theorised using his categories of firstness, secondness and thirdness, allowing us to account for the imaginative processes undertaken in the creation of cultural lives. It is these ‘lines of flight,’ somewhere between the poles of fictionality and materiality, that seem to me to be at the heart of the creative enactment of our culture we call performance.

(II) The Performance

What follows is a necessarily truncated set of descriptions of the performance at Theatreworks or, should I say, of some of the images of the performance as they appeared to me from the stage. This was only the second time the piece had been run, and this précis is undoubtedly affected by my having watched the images develop in rehearsal and by my watching, from the stage, all of them unfold together. I was in the work and, like the audience, could not watch everything.

Forgetting Schneider, Imagining Another

The performance ended up comprising five independent, but simultaneous, trajectories. We could describe these trajectories as lines of action or sequences of image intensities or … even as ‘lines of flight.’

One performer, the sculptor/technician, swept and began to set the space while the audience were entering. After opening the shutters and the side door to let in the natural light, he brought on a chair and placed it off-centre in the spill of light from the open door. He placed a cooking table down-left near the audience, a sculpted figurine of a mother and child up right, and an iron framed cube off-centre up-left. He led in another performer, all in white, and seated him on the chair. This was the soldier/patient Schneider. He left and motioned a third performer to come on and stand up-left near the back wall behind the frame. This was the speaker. He then went to his table, put on his headphones, motioned to the other performers to continue and proceeded to cook a cake; then, interspersed with reading from a text to the nearby spectators, he sang quietly to himself, timing and monitoring the performance.

Throughout the performance, Schneider moved…from the chair to the floor, from the walls to the door. The movements were very varied, some awkward, others lyrical, some sharp and savage, others slow and sustained. Many were layered and occurred simultaneously. Many were repeated. Most stopped abruptly as his attention was diverted to another place and another series of movements began. He marched, saluted, sang, shouted, crept, hid, floated, crawled, smoked, tapped his body, sat, and looked… At one point he sank to the floor like a dog and panted, as the singer had done before him.

The speaker moved very slowly down to the frame, stepped inside it, and remained there for quite some time, moving mouth, legs and torso almost imperceptibly. At one point he left the frame and walked forward to the cooking table to deliver the spoken paper. Rather than speak after the performance about the performance, it was decided to incorporate the paper in the performance and to deliver it accordingly. While he spoke, quickly and quietly, the other performers continued their actions.

The fourth performer, a singer, beginning in the audience, delivered recurring atonal motifs at intervals while moving around the space, from object to object, from performer to performer. Between the sung motifs, again at intervals, were audible breathing patterns. At one point, up centre, after she had passed the mother and child figurine, she sank to the floor and panted vigorously. After inspecting the speaker in the frame and taking tea with the sculptor, she resumed her seat in the audience.

Each of these ‘performances’ was developed independently of the others, mostly through improvisation. Shortly before the performance, the four trajectories, or ‘lines of flight,’ were allowed to run simultaneously. There was no attempt to fix connections between the patterns. On the day of the performance, an invited photographer wandered around at will taking stills of the presentation. His trajectory was unplanned, generating new and unexpected relations.

(III) The Spoken Paper

This record of the spoken paper keeps very close, in form and content, to the text of the spoken paper. Everything in small case, bold type was spoken as part of the performance. The few lines in small case, but not in bold type, have been added for clarity. The lines in italics are selected images of action to underline the continuing performance context.

Schneider

(The way the spoken text is laid out hints at the rhythmic pattern of enunciation, which contrasted sharply with the tempos of the other three performers. The text was articulated quickly, evenly and fairly quietly.)