In my present work, 'We need to talk' I spend a lot of time talking. I talk about an event that happened back in 1977, an event I believe speaks profoundly about our desire to project ourselves into the future as much as it exposes our fear of disappearing - of becoming past. I talk about the 'Golden Record', that eclectic compilation of sounds, images and music meant to form a representation of life on planet earth and sent into space on Voyager spacecraft destined for any extraterrestrial life that may encounter it. I talk about my own journey through space and time by re-imagining personal anecdotes, re-shaping and making semi-fictional histories that run parallel to the record’s journey in outer space. I talk to escape and I talk to remain. I tell the epic story of the stranger who is accepted into a community and then later rejected. I talk about death. Alot. I talk about everything but here and now. When I stop talking I dance. My body doesn’t speak or it says everything, I’m not sure. I dance with music and I do Here and Now and pretty much nothing else. It becomes all that matters and we all become implicated in that movement. The present-ness emerges from the cloud of language, from all that meaning and insistence on before and after, like a relief. It is (always) becoming a clear picture or an image of being present.

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?

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.”

Brussels, January 30th, 2006

Dear Simone,

Do you remember the first time we met? It must have been in Zurich in November 2001 when I came to see Meg Stuart & Damaged Goods’ ALIBI, but I don’t recall our actual meeting – if it happened at all. During the following months I have seen ALIBI another four times in different cities, behaving as a modest yet highly enthusiastic fan – up to the extent that you performers started joking about “that one guy in the audience with his glasses”, as I heard afterwards. Somehow this experience of watching and performing must have forged a connection between us, as if the performance not only mediated a temporary alliance of performer and spectator, but elicited a series of other complicities as well, which were yet to be unveiled.
What must have been our second (or was it our first?) meeting I do remember rather clearly. In the summer of 2002 we were both at the ImPulsTanz festival in Vienna, you teaching and performing Disfigure Study, I performing writerly comments right after the shows in a programme called Afterwords. The audience was walking out of the theatre, I was getting ready to start writing on my laptop, connected with a projection screen in the lobby next doors. As you had seen the show as well, you came up to me and kissed me to say hello. I reacted surprised and confused – because it was only the first time we actually met while you acted as if we knew one another since a long time? Because I was unnerved in my concentration? Because I was in fact performing without you realising it? It must have been an awkward moment, a vivid yet unwitnessed memory. As that moment slipped out of the performance (both the one on stage and the one of daily life), it got entangled in a misty zone that resists clear framing, a forever uncharted territory. And truly genuine in its awkwardness – today I’m still not sure if we actually shared that feeling? In that sense, it was an altogether different experience than us re-enacting together with some friends Gilbert and George’s 1972 video performance Gordon’s Makes Us Drunk on a terrace at the Danube…

When I saw Bare Back Lying this anecdote came back to me, as both the confession of unwitnessed memories and the slippery zone in between artistic media are at stake in your performance to (paradoxically) track down the uncharted territory of the real on stage – perhaps ‘true’, ‘genuine’ or ‘sincere’ are the better terms here. Unwitnessed memories, uncharted territories. The employed media are not quite right, the metaphors used slightly out of place; you find yourself performing bareback, exposed to the failure of make believe in front of an audience, joyously flirting with the edge of losing face. Unexpected exposure, shared awkwardness. The issues remind me of a few films I’m obsessed with since a while, so I took the opportunity to view them over again with all this in mind.

Although fairly unknown, Play it again, Sam (1972) is a remarkable Woody Allen film, initially written as a play and later adapted for the screen. A divorced film critic (performed by Allen himself) tries to get over his depression and date women again with the help of a friendly couple and through phantasmal dialogue with Humphrey Bogart, who feeds him the ‘right’ lines during his conquests. Watching movies (or also advertisement) to rehearse for real life is today an altogether familiar topos; the blunt recycling of romantic Hollywood clichés via the figure of gentleman-macho Bogart not always convincing in what is obviously meant as a parody of Casablanca. What makes Play it again, Sam both particular and peculiar to me is its leap from theatre to film, which stays to some extent unresolved and thereby leaves remarkable traces.
Even for a comedy, Woody Allen’s writing is particularly odd and rambling; moreover it’s theatrical in the sense that some of the writing in Bare Back Lying toys with metaphors that are slightly out of place. Allen’s character is neurotic all the way, protecting himself with a panoply of allegedly ‘normal’ yet ill-fitting self-descriptions that remove him even more from proper social functioning. Similarly, you keep addressing each other with unfit, unflattering and coarse expressions up to embarrassment, not so much due to their content but to the exposure they entail: the exaggerated characterisations don’t stick, so that you performers find yourselves on the spot, as performer and eventually also as a person. Sustaining awkwardness makes the performer’s sincerity surface, and also his or her vulnerability.
How to share this awkwardness with an audience? Does it maybe lead to ‘genuine spectatorship’? Although duration and sustenance can provoke uneasiness in an audience, isn’t the spectator’s role in the theatre clear and comfortable after all? It looks like the ‘in-between-talk’ is a productive way to release confusion in the audience and hence work with that energy. The hierarchies falter, and at least for a moment the dramaturgical safety net seems out of view, which changes perspectives and charges also me as a spectator with a different urgency. Here is another issue: isn’t ‘urgency’ perhaps what our concepts of sincerity thrive upon? It grounds the shared complicity of performer and spectator, maybe even reaches beyond the representational frame of the theatre.
In Play it again, Sam, Allen also explores the relation between awkward behaviour and witnessing. Interestingly, he succeeds in translating the ‘slightly out of place’-feeling of the lines into his physicality as well, which appears as slapstick in the wrong frame. When his friends organise a blind date and come to pick him up at his place, he is literally all over the place. Armed with “a good impression”, sprayed with “Canoe aftershave, Lavoris, Mennen spray deodorant and baby powder”, and oscillating between nervosity and a large dose of relaxation pills he moves about clumsily and frenetically, overthrowing furniture, scratching a record and so on while trying to keep his composure in the presence of his visitors. Afterwards his friends comment that he was trying too hard: “As soon as she came over he went into his act” – theatre persists indeed on several levels. When they go out for dinner in a Chinese restaurant shortly after, things get out of hand when Allen demonstrates the choreography of how to eat a bowl of rice “authentically” with a pair of chopsticks – which is too odd to describe. Transposed to the public area, the presence of other people witnessing the scene and one another pushes embarrassment to a different level – sincere spectatorship through shared awkwardness? Or is the urgency, not to say the ‘reality’ of it, unbearable once outside the closed environment of the living room or the representational frame of the theatre?

To jump from Woody Allen to Federico Fellini and John Cassavetes seems a bit weird at first, but the three films I’m busy with are connected in several ways. An artist (a critic, a theatre director and an actress, to be precise) suffers a depression, which manifests itself in failure on both personal and professional levels. These characters are all three looking for solace by retreating in their own mental world – populated by fantasies and ideals but also clouded by memory –, which collides with their social surroundings and with the artistic frame they’re working in. These people are not able to communicate or share what is most real or urgent to them – nobody believes them, nobody wants to believe them. I sense that they get in the end over it by embracing failure and a process-based artistic approach to develop concepts of sincerity, and thereby renegotiate hard distinctions between truth and illusion. All this seems to connect a mournful energy with a critique of the influential modern, Cartesian illusion that we’re all locked in our own minds, lonely towards one another’s reality and therefore inevitably lost in dishonest communication. (The film scene in the car in Bare Back Lying suddenly comes to my mind: isn’t the car nowadays the ultimate symbol for the safety and sealed nature of our private space – easy to appropriate the world, but sometimes hard to share?) Now, welcome to shared awkwardness and other artistic concepts of sincerity soaked with failure’s urgency!

Federico Fellini’s Otto e mezzo (1963) is one of the first movies that reflects upon the process of film making, and this in relation to productional pressure, stress and failure. Director Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni) suffers at once a director’s block and a midlife crisis, whereby the failures of art and life stand in a metaphorical relation. This allows Fellini to probe notions of truth and lie that are in the end perhaps irreconcilable – unless in a grotesque circus dance that concludes the film. In a resort Anselmi welcomes the producers and complete film crew but hasn’t any clear conceptions of the script yet. While everyone keeps bothering and pressuring him for information or a favour, Anselmi retreats into a mental world. Traumatic childhood recollections that still define his problematic relation to women and sexuality, his dead parents, a banquet with all the women in his life… Otto e mezzo is intercut with Anselmi’s memories and projections, a phantasmal realm – are we witnessing not only Anselmi’s mental wanderings but also the actual film that was never realised?

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.