logo

 

 


home

goat island

current

performances

film

technical
information

education /
workshops

publications

writing

links

contact

writing : CVZVLC : Introduction :

download this text in pdf format
download the free acrobat reader

465 Sentences for June, 2001
Goat Island Collaborative Journal Project

Friday, June 1st
1: Mark – 1 sentence


Chicago: Can you feel an earthquake halfway around the world? (00:10, rainstorm, corner of North/Clark – a goodbye).


Saturday, June 2nd
2: Matthew – 2 sentences


Arrival and two white moments: we dangle between the best of all possible alternatives, as in the airport lobby, changing out of brown and into white shoes.
We find our way to the shadowy Jüdenplatz, night has arrived soothing and underappreciated, we walk around Rachel Whiteread’s holocaust memorial, we find it offcentered, surrounded by red candle glasses, two police cars, Orthodox Jews dispersing after an event, we find it white, an inverted library, a landmark, an ending.


Sunday, June 3rd
3: Karen – 3 sentences


At an old café, an extravagant grey-haired career waiter exclaimed “immortal woman.”

The choir boys were not in rows but crowded around.

Because of our state of mind yesterday, today we have only red bell peppers and strawberries (red like the uniforms of the Austrian Airlines flight attendants) to eat with our bread and butter.


Monday, June 4th
4: CJ – 4 sentences


“Let’s just be quiet for a minute.”

Mark woke at 4am, a light fixture exploded with a sound like a gunshot (an event which seemed to confuse the birds), movements occupied space, sounds occupied time, batteries are running low, five lights switched off, then sleep.

“Was that a knocking at the door?”

Six small steps equals two large steps, and your hand extends mathematically.


Tuesday, June 5th
5: Lin – 5 sentences


This day, at noon, was lifted out of light and placed in the tall, black room of The Künstlerhaus Theater.

It took six hours to construct thirty lighting cues for our performance It’s an Earthquake in my Heart. It took six seconds for the computerized lighting board to snatch them away.

In the hour before night, we began again from the beginning.

Scott’s prerecorded, boomed voice stopped diversionary conversations with a “Hey”.


Wednesday, June 6th
6: Bryan – 6 sentences


When I woke up this morning my left hand seemed familiar to me. We put on wet clothes for the photo shoot and a jackhammer disrupts the concentration of the civil war rehearsal. The German nickel metal hydride rechargeable batteries run for 23:19 in our fans with the sound tube attached, but we decide to go with Adrian's suggestion and take Bryan's sound tube out to give it a longer life. Then at 4:00 we began to look forward to performing the work. The Dress rehearsal goes very well and it feels like the premiere for us because Hortensia and Katrin and other Festival staff come to see. Katrin says she would not change a single second.


Thursday, June 7th
7: Bryan – 7 sentences


A short from water left over by cleaning women on our cook top blows the main circuit in our whole floor of our apartment.
We cook pasta on the slow burner and the pot handle breaks and pasta falls to the floor, but Teresa is amazingly calm.
At the Künstlerhaus, the confetti sticks to the floor and Mark, Lin & Scott spend hours cleaning it; there is talk of getting plastic confetti.
After the show we discovered that the over ride switches that keeps the flame fans running if the light burns out were set wrong and that is why our flames were so weak.
We noticed that the audience was still applauding so we went out for another bow.
After the show Adrian said of the audience: “It was like we were trying to slowly fill a bucket with water and someone was drilling a hole in the bottom from the underside.”
Hortensia said she was crying at the end of the show.


Friday, June 8th
8: Lin – 8 sentences


Outside our apartment, in the courtyard, two locust trees are dropping yellow-green seeds without stopping. They fall as the confetti falls in our performance. It gives me solace to know these trees will be throwing their seeds at the same time we are throwing are confetti in front of Viennese audiences.

A zen monk said in response to a devotee’s despair at not being able to calm his mind and keep it from anxious wandering, “Don’t worry. While your mind wanders, the trees and rocks are meditating for you.”

Jim Bauerlein, a man I had not seen for seventeen years, appeared at the theater tonight at 6PM as we were preparing to perform. He was with his partner, Emma and had just returned from Budapest where a day earlier at 1AM, they threw the ashes of Emma’s deceased father into the Danube. He fell to the water, formed a long cloud just above the surface, and floated downstream.


Saturday, June 9th
9: CJ – 9 sentences

You
ask yourself: “are we afraid?” We are always falling, each step a fall, we cut our knees, our elbows, our fingers, blood hardens into scabs on our skin.

Up in the trees, a bird arrives, a branch was waiting for its arrival. If it didn’t happen now, it would happen in the future.

the past is now part of my future
the present is well out of hand

Eyes are vacant and bruised, electrical connections to overhead cables sparkle in the night sky. What were you expecting to find?

The tree follows the bird. This must be the future.


Sunday, June 10th
10: Karen – 10 sentences


Tomorrow they kill the man who bombed the Oklahoma Federal Building. A survivor who’d almost been hit by the axle from the truck bomb says: I will always hear that axle, I’ll always remember that axle whirring toward me.
During our dinner the hard rain began and we went to the window to see it fall in the courtyard. The other head sticking out the window was Mark’s across the way, he took our photograph.
Waiting backstage for the last ever Vienna audience that will half leave in scorn haste and half shout bravo at the end of the show, I listened to the sounds around me: air and water from the bodies of Matthew and Bryan, from the building, circulations of liquid and gas.
The red railing rushes up four flights as I will when this performance is over.
After the show sandwiches and packing. The theatre bartender loved the performance and brought sandwiches to us saying: I love it when people like you come here.
My eyes pressed closed, CJ curled toward me asleep first and clacking his teeth, I try to gentle them. I counted the red shirts in the audience and they press harder and harder until the sound of the rain takes over and I surrender to the chase of dreams.


Monday, June 11th
11: Matthew – 11 sentences


The smallness of Beethoven’s bed surprises us, because his head has always seemed so big.
Three places where I have seen brown and black hooded crows: 1) the Scottish Highlands, 2) here in Vienna a) flying, b) walking in the park, c) perched on the corner of the Music Museum roof, 3) painted 436 years ago in Breugel’s Hunters in the Snow.
“I disagree with my friend about your production; she hated it completely, while I hated it partially.”
“Congratulation: your performance was great, (only the ending was too ‘concrete’ for me – if I’m allowed to say this).”
“It’s like watching a magician who doesn’t know any magic.”
A blackbird sings in the Köstlergasse 5 courtyard every morning at 5:30, every evening at 9:30, and after every rainstorm; a bird that has not given up on Austria.
In the Künstlerhaus café, we discuss replacing the two mechanic dialogues appropriated from the film The Umbrellas of Cherbourg with insurance sales training dialogues appropriated from the film How to Live in the German Federal Republic by Harun Farocki.
At 7:00 Harun Farocki himself sits at the table next to ours, where two journalists interview him on this evening’s premier of his new film Die Schöpfer der Einkaufswelten – he wears a wristwatch with two dials.
We begin our lecture at 8:15 for an attentive audience of thirteen (fourteen if you include the sound technician), and by 9:15 our work at the Vienna festival is finished: es geht so schnell wie ein augenblick.
These doubts I feel, are they mine or Austria’s?
Whether one smuggles a small or large package across a border, one breaks the law.


Tuesday, June 12th
12: Mark – 12 sentences


Today I try and train my eyes to focus in quiet. I have moved from quiet luxury to another brown room where sounds of early morning street vendors and lorries wake me. The french windows have been opened fully since the move and this morning I awoke to brilliant sunshine pouring onto my face.

I took myself to the Applied Arts Museum this afternoon, an opportunity to experience the Viennese arts and crafts movement from previous years, showings of rococo and baroque lace, glass and numerous furniture pieces. My other interest in this space was due to the museum inviting artists such as Jenny Holzer and Barbara Bloom to transform and readapt and recontextualise the historical spaces.

I encountered a retrospective on American artist Dennis Hopper, here I see America once more lifted through graffiti and violence, of America I saw this past Christmas in LA. A raw quality I left behind 12 days ago in zip code 60616.

In the park I sit after this experience to see a group of tourists, a group of fifty or more, I take a photograph of them being photographed. In and amongst the daisies a teenage school party lie in the grass, their teachers unable to control and move them along.

At home now after a day of being outside watching I continue to watch flicking through the channels. I switch to CNN to see the Spanish Prime Minister and George W. Bush giving a joint press conference. The Prime Minster talks of his open disgust towards the death penalty in the United States, George W listens with interpreter in his right ear - an awkward silence.


Wednesday, June 13th
13: Matthew – 12 sentences
14: Bryan – 1 sentence


Yesterday we walked to the double flakturm at Ahrenburg Park.
The flakturm constructions, 1) as quickly built Nazi ammunition storage towers capped with anti-aircraft gun platforms, offer an undisturbed window into history – monumental, utilitarian, primitive with visible poured-concrete mold lines, modernist; 2) since Vienna, with demolition impractical, has mostly decided to ignore them, present an unsurpassed example of architectural blankness; 3) at Radetzky, Apollo, Neulig, and Augustiner appear in the International Directory of Haunted Places.
The poet Paul Celan lived to compose language which fascism would find indigestible.
This morning as we plan workshops (introductory exercise: create and enact an impractical gesture) a repairman interrupts our meeting to inspect our room for water damage, and departs with the polite remark, “Sorry for disturbtion.”
I learned a new word: erdbeeren (strawberries).
I learned it in the market, where, when I bought pistachios, the vender told me he would be asleep tomorrow.
Christine explains this is because tomorrow is a holiday, the Ascension, when businesses close, as they did for Pentecost.
Christine, an Austrian friend of CJ, gives us a guided tour of the Sammlung Essl museum where she works, an impressive Heinz Tesar building, then takes us to a restaurant in Nußdorf where “the rites of Viennese Jause are performed.”
Bryan stood perfectly still for thirty minutes watching a video of a 1998 Hermann Nitsch performance in the gallery devoted to the ritual’s exuviae.
Architektengruppe, who also designed the underground system in Vancouver, have overseen the design of the Vienna U-bahn system since 1971.
With Christine’s guidance, we ride the streetcar back, it is night, we crave this experience as it happens, we try to comprehend it, we have received a generous gesture, we watch the streetcar follow its tracks, it has us inside, it describes a bright line through darkness and foreign territory.
In Bryan’s monologue, his childhood recollection of the rain, through five repetitions, becomes replaced from the end forward by a second monologue, a philosophical description of Pentecost (in Judaism, Shavuot), as an inverted Tower of Babel, wherein a disruption (“disturbtion”) in the fabric of reality sets into motion not chaos but order, and understanding between foreigners.

§

Late at night on the streetcar three Viennese beer drinking men in togas enter and on TV we watch the blues brothers Jake and Elmo speak German.


Thursday, June 14th
15: Mark – 12 sentences
16: CJ – 2 sentences


I begin to think of scrambled language. What if we were to write words on card and cut them out placing them directly into people's ears. I’m wondering what a sentence would look like in different nation’s ears? What words would become shortened, what phrases longer or shorter?

A week after we performed Earthquake the performance space is transformed, Lin, Matthew and I head to the theatre space after a meeting with ‘Vivvy,’ an Argentinean director in the cafe. It has become interesting to speak in one's own language and yet the pattern is broken so that some sort of hybridity occurs. Another language is spoken between people we meet whose first language is not English. I become increasingly concerned that I have not learnt another language.

Before the Argentinean show, Hortensia, the festival curator and Beatrice, director of the theatre company give an unannounced conference. There are no earpieces, a dialogue and translation from Spanish into German, I become increasingly interested by the form of this dialogue. A poor version of the USA/Spain press conference, two leads and two microphones attached to the leads coming out of a karaoke amplified.

What would it be like to do an English/American translation?

§

Most of the shops on Kärntnerstrasse are closed because of today’s holiday, yet the street is bustling with pedestrians as usual. My walk through Vienna is obliquely documented in the background of different video recordings being shot by many of those I pass, as I follow routes now well known, occasionally venturing down other streets after first checking their outcome on my street map.


Friday, June 15th
17: Karen – 12 sentences
18: Matthew – 3 sentences


What’s that? It contains the sound of metal, it contains the sound of wood, it contains the sound of scraping one against the other, a trough. Together, every time we hear it, it interrupts our meeting with a question?
We have been intrigued by the old elevators in this building and by their elegant movement within their cabled chambers: wooden boxes with etched glass windows, suspended within metal cages glide silent and smooth behind latched doors.
Now one of us darts out of the meeting into the hall—we’ve unraveled another mystery over time.
If the elevator is moving now, then the wooden trough we’ve identified as the source of the scraping is in fact housing some kind of kind counter weight or other mechanism for our lovely decorated elegant elevator with the quiet charm. The rustic scraping of weathered wood and hard metal parts hidden on the outside of the wall is heard not during the ride but elsewhere in the building through open windows during meetings and tea or showers or laundry or while trying to get sound from an old television with worn out buttons.
History and patterns console the present. No proper history or pattern can be discerned at the outset of our performance—when a pattern is set it lasts too long or too short, it is smashed or left behind for another. It is the chaos of the marketplace, it is the open air produce market in a foreign land in which no one speaks your language, even the measurements are strange. The first time out you buy the wrong fruit, pay the wrong price, get the wrong amount. You have to look at it for a while before you can see what you are looking at, before you can trust there is something there for you.

§

Expend minimum effort, internal and external – perform the shadow of an impractical gesture.
Creatures in The Last Judgement triptych by Hieronymous Bosch, alphabetized and rated in order of preference (1=favorite, 15=least favorite):
Bearded head with red hat, clawfeet, lizard tail, wheel ears – 12;
Birdheaded on crutches – 1;
Blacksmith – 14;
Clarinet nose – 3;
Dark head in flower with many legs – 7;
Feather-capped head with feet – 2;
Head with playing card in mouth on insect body – 15;
Helmeted head with legs riding fish – 6;
Legs and face protruding from arrow-pierced egg – 5;
Orange potbellied with blue face roasting human – 4;
Spiny blue insect – 8;
Stove-bellied in shadows – 13;
Swordfish-headed with tambourine – 9;
Walking bowl with head inside – 10;
Walking hollow bottom half of dinosaur with monkey inside – 11.
At the printer shop for shirt signs – red lettering on white cloth to be sewn to my shirt backs – constant reminders of the piece’s structure: PART 1 TUESDAY MORNING; PART 2 53 YEARS EARLIER; PART 3 TUESDAY EVENING; it now seems these three parts concern the limits of memory and religion (PART 1) the limits of imitation and learning (PART 2) and the limits of memory and religion after a crisis (PART 3).


Saturday, June 16th
19: CJ – 12 sentences
20: Lin – 4 sentences


Christine and Bernard were expecting most if not all of Goat Island to come to their apartment at 4.30pm on Saturday June 16 for coffee and cake. Karen and I, however, had understood that Christine and Bernard’s invitation was limited to ourselves. After we arrive, everyone is embarrassed in their own spoken and unspoken ways when the misunderstanding is discussed. The dining table holds enough cake for ten people, and is surrounded by more than four chairs, which is all we need.

Bernard attends to his espresso maker, and delicately places fresh cups of coffee onto the saucers which rest in front of us. Later, Bernard holds an unopened bottle of Austrian wine for a few seconds of quiet contemplation. He smoothly uncorks the bottle, and pours a small quantity into his own glass, which is swirled and smelt and sipped before he announces his satisfaction. When I watch Christine and Bernard, I am reminded of my friends Chris and Lexi who now live on the Welsh borders; how they move through their apartment, prepare food and drink, communicate with each other.

We talk of those who take a different path from that expected by their parents, and I don’t have a story to contribute to that theme.

The trajectories of a life may be summarized as a kind of narrative, but in the experience of one moment to the next do we ever imagine that a story is unfolding?

Earlier, during our morning walk, we made stops to buy organic strawberries, the UK Guardian newspaper, and some small moleskin covered notebooks, and these items which we carried in paper and plastic bags back to our rented apartment were satisfying to us.

Early afternoon, we went to an exhibition of Dennis Hopper’s photographs, paintings, collages and sculptures, each piece like a journal entry, a framed moment revealing place, time, climate; surfaces which overwhelm all thought and which spread out beyond the frames we have constructed for them.

§

Today Matthew, Mark, and I rode the train from Vienna to Melk to see the famed Baroque Abbey that stands on top of the village like an insatiable giant. There is no mention of the war in The Melk Abbey guidebook, only the following: “March 13, 1938 brought new clouds across the monastery’s horizon. Even though the monastic community was pushed together in a small part of the building, the monastery was able to escape dissolution.”


Sunday, June 17th
21: Bryan – 12 sentences
22: Karen – 5 sentences


It’s Sunday 7:00 a.m., young people with the look of the night on their faces are at the Grafin & Savoy cafes having beer for breakfast. Teresa, Jake and I ride the U1 to Spitelau & walk past the Farndarme factory past the university to Franz Joseph bahnhof. From there we take a train going north past countryside with high green wheat fields and grape vines, past Tulln where the conductor calls out the name of Egon Schiele, past Absdorf-Hippersdorf, past mountains to the west, past Kirchberg van wagen, past a garden with an open umbrella in it lying on the ground, past Essdorf/Straff, Hasersdorf am Kamp and Krems an Danau.

At Durnstein, we walk up to the old ruined castle, eat a picnic lunch and look down at the Danube river valley. We stood in the cell that reportedly held King Richard captive until his minstrel Blondel set him free. Down in the village below, church was just letting out and a gang of kids were practicing their kung fu kicks and other fantastic movement. We walk up and down the main street and go for a walk along the river. The kids know how to navigate the street; we see them at one end of the village and then at the other end, enacting an exact rerun of their play each time we see them. The group huddles in close, then breaks out into running flying kicks and disperse into the stream of tourists.

We also repeat our walk back down to the river. Riverboats with more tourists come and go and I think about Mark Twain and the perpetual act of a river flowing. We are tourists and drift down river and off to sleep until a commercial tug barges past going upstream with a huge wake.

§

We found the hidden bookshop only after an infusion of caffeine and sugar in the café Diglas (big wide windows open full to the street, fringed lampshades tickled in the breeze, faded red velvet seats, dark wood, satisfaction). The book shop was special. It was down a lane, in a courtyard: photography, architecture, design.
Images that remind me what I think, access stored thoughts, beliefs, hidden understanding (code breaking, breath-taking, unburying): a line stretches down the highway; views of the ocean; the light as it comes through water, through glass, through leaves, through fringe on a café lampshade just inside the open window.
CJ takes my picture as I write this, we get up and walk out of the courtyard.


Monday, June 18th
23: Lin – 12 sentences
24: Mark – 6 sentences


Once I thought I had to be a one self. Perhaps it was the question posed to me as a child. “What will you be when you grow up, young lady?” The question required one answer like a stationary dot on a map locating one town from another, say Willow Brook from Burr Ridge. It pointed one direction.

“An archeologist,” I replied.

It did not take long for this singular archeologist self to dissolve as I negotiated being my brother’s sister, a waitress, and a major in political science (for a while); dance (for a while); education (for a while); sculpture (for a while); and performance (for a while). Do you really know where Willow Brook ends and Burr Ridge begins?

“It is precisely because definitions of the self have changed that the traditional genres that speak for the self … are being subverted and reinvented to accommodate contemporary experience of being a person – a zone. The sense of independence must now include, where it hasn’t been replaced by, a sense of interdependence,” says poet Lyn Hejinian.

And so I think it is with the performers in It’s an Earthquake in My Heart. They travel through the landscape of the piece and pause between Miss Ritmer, Hijikata, Karen, a wounded soldier, a phantom child, Michael Caine, Matthew, an insurance salesman, Mr. Kopchinsky, a car, Mark, Bryan, Señor Wences.

§

I have decided to answer questions posed to us in the future.
I try and begin to understand where and how we live; it appears important to discuss and respond to what we see around us, of what we try to (not) understand. This may be observation, a memory recall that somehow enters into our world. It feels like we try to recreate the invisible in the everyday - so that we begin to acknowledge and see what is surrounding us. I have now become confused by what I see around me. I have to begin to learn what is placed in(visibly) again.


Tuesday, June 19th
25: Lin – 12 sentences
26: Mark – 7 sentences


Eleven changes to It’s an Earthquake in My Heart made in Vienna for Zagreb.

1. Matthew will wear a shirt in Part 1 that says on the back of the shirt “Part 1. Tuesday Morning”.

1. Matthew will wear a shirt in Part 2 that says on the back of the shirt “Part 2. 53 Years Earlier.”

1. Matthew will wear a shirt in Part 3 that says on the back of the shirt “Part 3. Tuesday Evening.

1. An insurance scene taken from the German film How to Live in the German Federal Republic will replace the first scene from Umbrellas of Cherbourg and interrupt Mark’s driving commands.

1. An insurance scene taken from the German film How to Live in the German Federal Republic will replace the second scene from Umbrellas of Cherbourg and interrupt Mark’s driving commands.

1. Mark will wear glasses in Part 1 and Part 3.

1. Mark will not wear glasses in Part 2.

1. Three lines will be edited from the Phantom Child text.

1. One line will be added to the final Civil War scene. “I know about killing. It should not be so easy”.

1. Mark and Bryan will look at one another after they bump in the car chases – Part 1.

1. Bryan will look at Mark when he does the Puppet Head jump after he says the line “Now let’s talk about something that’s easy to understand”.

§

Vienna, another commentary day of questions posed to us in the future from Zagreb.
We begin to understand what values are inscribed into the body through observation of ritual however small or tiny it may be. I wonder if the structuring of the everyday during childhood has given me the foundation to encounter life/art with. The simplicity of eating meals around a family table 3 times a day. To learning small tasks around the house, of scrubbing and chopping vegetables form the garden during harvestime. The instructions appear to have prepared the mind and body to work within disciplined language, remembering actions and gestures becoming transcribed into the body. To understand dedication.

{On June 19th, Veronica Kaup-Hasler gave us four questions, related to It’s an Earthquake in My Heart, for our journal project.
What is a hand?
What is dance?
What is structure or mathematics and your relation to it?
What is a bow? (in reference to the repeated bent-over posture).}


Wednesday, June 20th
27: Bryan – 12 sentences
28: Karen – 8 sentences


We ride the train south to Zagreb. I talked with a Slovakian microbiologist who said “There is a beast sleeping inside us and we don't know when it will wake up.” The hand is the object that transforms the trees into chairs. The hand proves our intelligence. Perhaps our own mind created or evolved our hand. We conceived of a stone tool or a computer and needed a hand with an opposable thumb to build it. Hundreds of bones and muscles in the hand work with the brain to create a tool that fits into the hand and assists the mind. The scientific reasons are not enough to explain the existence of our hands. At a casual glance they look like hooks or carpenters tools and yet they are living things. These are my hands yet they are not the same hands I had as a child. I once heard that we replace the cells in our bodies every 7 years; so perhaps I could think that this is not my hand, but that I am just using it for a short time. If I were careless with this logic I might think the hand does not belong to me and I would be less responsible with it.

§

The train to Zagreb from Vienna, outside the window the poppies in the fields are red. And there is a red door into the hillside. What lies behind it I can’t say: storage, a shelter? From the train it’s just a red door in the side of a grassy hill I try to make sense of—I imagine opening it to the rich soil under the grass but a deep hole opens up and earthen steps lead down into the ground. It’s so dark that’s all I can see.
No, it’s Slovenia outside, the lampposts look like trees. This isn’t odd, they are trees. What’s odd is that they haven’t been made to look more like posts, stripped of their twists and curves, their small bumps.


Thursday, June 21st
29: CJ – 12 sentences
30: Lin – 9 sentences
Part 1 – What is a hand?

With the right hand pointed away from the body, palm upward, you will squeeze out the negative energy - this is known as ping energy, and is often concentrated in the body’s extremities, the hands and feet. Using the thumb and first finger of your left hand, squeeze your right hand lightly. Apply this pressure at the base of the right palm, and, maintaining this light squeezing pressure, follow the line of each finger from that point to each fingertip in turn. The action is similar to that of squeezing an almost-empty tube of toothpaste. Repeat these instructions for the left hand. This will expel the ping energy, and refresh the body.

Now, look at your right hand: it does not move.

Imagine your hand is a carpenter’s tool, and place it over the head of a small child while it is sleeping: neither the hand nor the child move.

The voices cry out, distracting you, but the hand is steady, and held out as the body drops: the hand does not move.

When the pain is at its mildest, in the early morning, the hand can be used to write your stories: but when you look closely, it does not move.

The hand protects, punishes, nurtures, manipulates.

The hand is a leaf, the body a tree.

§

Today is longest day of the year.
They have opened Stonehenge to revelers.
There is an eclipse in Africa.
It is the first day of our two-day workshop in Zagreb.

Visnja
Irena
Mirsolav
Ivan
Petra
Domagoj
Ana
Slaven
Marija
Vjeran
Ivana
Anna
Mario
Barbara
Yasuo
Tatianna
Mirna
Davor

Tatianna stops by at ten in the morning, to practice on the piano in the theater where we are holding the workshop. She stays and participates in the workshop instead. At three in the afternoon, as we are leaving, we look at the empty stage, and hear piano notes in the air. Tatianna, unseen, has begun to practice offstage.


Friday, June 22nd
31: Karen – 12 sentences
32: Matthew – 10 sentences


After a life of hard work the body no longer straightens. I saw old women in Japan, after years of work in rice fields their backs remained in a bent position, they looked at the ground.
When I dislocate myself to look at we four performers as we slowly traverse the performance space bent at the waist I see us resigned, restricted, resolute, we march taking little space, making few waves or ripples trying hard not to be noticed. But also: People as cars, as machines, as facilitators of tasks, of work. Backs humped like the roofs of cars. A slow game of imitation. This is the way the model cars move on the model highway that cuts through the model forest in the model hills. This is the way GM convinced the city of Los Angeles to do away with the cable car.
The hand controls, protects, advises. The hand is the emissary sent from the main body to explore, to test, to determine, to control. The hand shows, the hand demonstrates, the hand is action. The hand imitates; a mouth displaced.

§

Today commemorates the 1945 liberation of Zagreb, Mario teaches me the salutation “smirt fascismu, sloboda naradu” (death to fascism, liberation to the people), and we watch CJ on the guest sofa of Good Morning, Croatia before we start workshop day #2 with short site performances at the dormitory complex.
Miroslav, Vishnja, and Ivan stage their piece on the vacant café terrace, where their concentration and quietude draw my attention to the hum of the rooftop ventilator fan – “The ventilator in the corridor hums distractingly, but not offensively: I started weeping (almost): ‘If only for the purpose of listening to that ventilator, I want to go on living, but, above all, my friend must live.”
A dry wind accelerates at 4:25, as a #12 streetcar – blue with beige trim, a silver roof, no advertising yet, a lone passenger leaning out a window – glides its metallic glide past the hotel on Savska Street.
Two 13-year-old boys sneak around the gym, whispering, trying to watch our rehearsal (we work the part 1 changes), and eventually they muster the courage to take two seats in the back row.
This sadness I feel, is it mine or Croatia’s?
Unlike this writing project, whose structure sits accidentally at the same table as its substance, our performance has a form which grew from understanding its complex relations – atipodal approaches to morphological fact.
“Hello, Goat Island! You are becoming inhabitants of Zagreb,” it’s Milko the critic; we stop to talk on the streetcar tracks, then over lunch he tells us he has written a play, set in ancient Greece, wherein every one of the 5,000 words spoken by the actors begins with the letter p, “but WITH SENSE!” and the waiter places a plate beside him and says, “Your watermelon, professor.”
After the Macedonian performance, one of the few words of which I understood was “smirt”, we discover ourselves in the theater where we performed How Dear to Me the Hour When Daylight Dies in 1996, then Marin B. introduces himself and greets Mark with the words, in reference to the injury, which Mark has apparently now forgotten, that he (Mark) sustained in a 1999 The Sea & Poison performance, “How is your head?”
Each new language contains new words: at 11:15 pm it rains, I eat a toasted fried-cheese sandwich named Pohani Sir, and if days had names, I would call June 22, 2001 Above All My Friend Must Live.
We worked not knowing where what we did belonged, or whether it belonged anywhere at all.


Saturday, June 23rd
33: Mark – 12 sentences
34: CJ – 11 sentences


I wake from a dream, in Part One of Earthquake, - Tuesday morning ‘rain’ - instead of fans on our hearts we have umbrellas opened out and twirling.
Tonight we have a dress rehearsal in the school gymnasium, before this I take a walk to the old part of town to the 13th century church of St Marks. Here the ceramic mosaic church roof tiles sweltered and melt in the brilliance of sunshine. I stumbled upon a 'just married' couple, here a crowd of people paraded and showered the bride and groom in rose petals. From their hands came a memory of remembrance for the future. I think of our small white circular confetti paper we use in Earthquake, of how we transform and transpose materials from the hand into the air an explosion - slowdown and interrupt an archway of imminent celebration and disaster.
In the town square later in the day a brass band plays. Yesterday was a public holiday for antifascism after World War II, today a crowd gathers surrounding the band on all four sides. Grown elderly men wipe tears from their eyes. On the opposite side 7 elderly women all wearing 1960s plastic framed glasses sang and clapped with their hands merrily. I felt as if I had gone back in time 30 years. I bowed my head and walked away.

§

Part 2 – What is dance?

In Part 2 of the performance It’s an Earthquake in My Heart, with the other performers engaged in different movements, Karen stands still. She bends at the knees, arms held out by her sides as if for balance, slowly lowering her body further and further downwards, until the upper body starts to arch forwards, her knees touch the floor, and soon afterwards her head to one side rests on the floor – arms outstretched in opposite directions, also on the floor, palms upwards. The position is held for what seems like a long time. It is one point of many where the amount of movement taking place in the performance exceeds what we are capable of perceiving; we have to choose, sometimes involuntarily, where to direct our attention. Karen’s movement and position evokes personal prayer, ritual, supplication, prostration, a giving of oneself to a higher power; this individual dedication sits distinctly alongside the other movement in the performance.

You notice that the fingers on the upturned palms are slowly moving, and what seemed to be a static position actually contains movement, and movement which links to Part 1 of the performance, where Matthew, as the instructor of trainee insurance salesmen, discusses how distracting and unnecessary three fingers of his right hand are.

From this observation of Karen’s fingers I made the following notes:

1. dance is a misleading word; movement is better.
2. movement contains our history, traces of activities performed by us or witnessed by us in the past.
3. movement is squeezed out involuntarily.
4. we extract from the body that which has been forgotten, which lies dormant, which is traced in the arc of a hand, the confirmation of a foot.


Sunday, June 24th
35: Matthew – 12 sentences
36: Bryan – 12 sentences


At 11:05 pm after our first Zagreb performance of It’s an Earthquake in My Heart, I attempt to transcribe 5 minutes of conversation at a café with Lin Hixson (director), Scott Gillete (technical director), CJ Mitchell (company manager), Karen Christopher, and Mark Jeffery (members), and the Ghost of Morton Feldman (American composer).
Lin: The audience definitely stayed with it.
CJ: Unless they’re actively smiling or actively groaning, everything in between is really hard to gauge – unlike Vienna where 25% left on average a night – here we had 117 seats and about 20 more people than that in attendance.
Scott: I moved the tech table back to make room because they sat on every available surface, and this one woman, I thought she was looking at me through the whole show, until afterwards when she came over and picked up the Baudrillard book I had on my table – she’d had her eye on it all night.
Lin: Some people left tonight who really couldn’t see, and I went down and apologized to them and told them to try to come back tomorrow.
Mark: How can they say we’re bloody old fashioned?
Scott: A lot of people think the show has to fit into a part of history.
Ghost of Morton Feldman: In fact, identification with a historical position has an irresistable attraction for the artist, in that it offers known goals, the illusion of safety, the temporary knowledge that nothing succeeds in art – like someone else’s success.
Scott: Just put a tv in the show.
Karen: People who are saying that are looking at it but not seeing it.
Lin: They think we’re going to confront them with boredom, like seventies New York performance art – but we’re not putting raw meat on our heads.
Ghost of Morton Feldman: What is imminent, we find, is neither the past nor the future, but simply – the next ten minutes…we can go no further than that, and we need go no further, because if art has its heaven, perhaps this is it.

§

We take a walk past a house that I stayed in several years ago (I notice that it has not received the repairs it needed then) and on up until the cobble stone becomes a dirt trail which leads into the hills north of Zagreb.
When Tatsumi Hijikata became a member of Goat Island after his death (see Matthew Goulish’s book 39 Microlectures in Proximity of Performance, p.10) he taught us how to bow. Some cultures worship the sun but we pay our respects and dance to the clouds. We began this performance by researching cloud formations and sent balloons up to the sky. We looked up and traced a drop of water as it fell down through a cloud and used the levels as a formal structure for our performance . . . a high section of standing; a mid level section of bending over (bowing) which includes Hijikata’s words; and a heavy weighted low section with water on the floor. Tonight we performed It’s an Earthquake in My Heart in Zagreb. In my is heart earthquake is the literal English translation of the title in Croatian (U mom je srcu potres). Visnja said it can be said in other ways as can everything be said in more than one way. The show goes well and the audience is magnificent as they have transformed the gymnasium we are using into a performance space. I spoke too soon at the end of the show and we missed Mark's last line of the Civil War scene which I am sorry about; so I will write it here: “I know about killing. It should not be so easy.”
Lin is always first to meet us back stage after the show and we talk about how it went and then Jake is next to bounce in.


Monday, June 25th
37: Karen – 12 sentences
38: CJ – 12 sentences
39: Bryan – 1 sentences


All these rehearsals, all these imitations: life unceasingly prepares its own disappearance. We suffer in advance of suffering. We anticipate the struggle. We prepare ourselves for the inevitable. We hope: Nothing can ever surprise us.
We were told by a friend it was a holiday, our guide in Zagreb tells us it was a class in the “old system” that she never took or doesn’t remember. She said, it is from the old system, it was something in grade school—it was called: Nothing can ever surprise us.
Will you put me in your performance? Will you be in mine?
It’s an Earthquake in my Heart looks inward, it deals with subject matter you won’t trace to the newspapers. Newspapers don’t report on the poetics of everyday life and the ordinary task of surviving the day in front of you. The disaster will appear in black and white and maybe the follow up but never the rupture on the internal landscape—the landscape of my heart.

§

Part 3 – What is structure?

1. When Part 2 begins, we remember Part 1; when Part 3 begins we remember Parts 1 and 2; throughout Part 3, we remember Parts 1 and 2, and what we have already experienced of Part 3.

2. Could structure be a question and not a statement?

3. Could structure be a process that we move within?

4. Does structure rely on repetition, on echoes within the performance?

5. We create structure through recollection.

6. A cross section of the head’s structure reveals memory.

7. Interruptions occupy space within sentences: the text of the sentence is a structural foundation.

8. A structure undermines itself and its foundation

9. A structure is comprised of diversions.

10. The boy holds the man,
The eyes vacant and bruised,
Hands are moving clouds.

11. The dancer is exhausted.

12. Two bodies collide in a rainstorm.

§

Petra said: The slow repetition of the rain text is a collection for the unconscious logical cycle of the car rising and the tree falling.


{On June 25th, Natasha Govedic, theatre critic, gave us three questions for our journal project.
Do you find art being a distinct theological discipline, where dedication, vocation, not to mention spirituality is of utmost importance?
Are you concerned in some activist projects outside theatre? I would also like to ask each performer individually, what is her/his attitude of ecology?
How does the group work in terms of hierarchy and some aspects of preparing and rehearsing performance: who is choosing the theme and selecting the material; how often do you meet and rehearse?}


Tuesday, June 26th
40: Matthew – 12 sentences
41: Lin – 12 sentences
42: Mark – 2 sentences


People cannot expect to live an ecological life when they detest insects.
Every morning in Hotel Inter-Continental Zagreb room #1213 Lin hung her nightgown on the bathroom inside doorknob, and after she’d left the room I moved it to the wall hook because things hung on doorknobs disturb me, and she didn’t notice – but yesterday as I repeated the task and looked at the squarish wall hook, a type we do not have in the US, I felt something stir inside me: will this be what it means to miss a place?
The shirt signs evoked a new theatrical experience for me – laughter at my back.
I perform only for the as-yet unborn child of the most attentive audience member at any given moment – this thought came to me during last night’s show, and at times I felt that attentive future presence, and felt connected with it as by the string of a musical instrument, tuned not too taught or slack, helping me focus “beyond the ridiculous husks and boundaries” of my abilities, this audience, this life.
In the morning, we attend an open rehearsal of a dance piece by Bad Company at which I learn the word microphona and the phrase sto je bilo.
Lin said the linear movements and intentions of the dancers evoked presences – a different ghost for each performer.
In response to the first part of the piece, I drew a diagram.

Identifiable Muzak Tunes Heard in the Hotel Inter-Continental Zagreb, alphabetized and rated in order of preference (1=favorite, 15=least favorite):
Can-Can Song – 13;
Cherish – 10;
Close To You – 11;
Day By Day – 8;
Evergreen – 6;
It’s Yesterday Once More – 15;
Love Is All Around – 1;
Love Me Tender – 7;
Man of La Mancha – 14;
People Who Need People – 9;
Sentimental Journey – 2;
Seventy-Six Trombones – 12;
Something Stupid – 5;
‘Till There Was You – 3;
Until It’s Time For You To Go – 4.
Departure: yesterday from the hotel room window I could see the train passing; now from the train window I see the hotel passing.
Lexicon of Croatian Words and Phrases Learned, alphabetized and rated in order of preference (1=favorite, 15=least favorite):
blitva (dalmatian cabbage) – 1;
book (hello/goodbye) – 7;
dovizenja (goodbye) – 15;
izlaz (exit) – 13;
lipanj (June) – 8;
microphona (microphone) – 5;
nije izlaz (not an exit) – 3;
pohani sir (breaded cheese, sometimes in sandwich form) – 10;
ribarska vecer (fisherman’s dinner) – 12;
rucak (lunch) – 6;
sloboda naradu (liberation for the people) – 11;
spivanic (nap) – 2;
sto je bile (what happened) – 14;
ulaz (entrance) – 9;
zajutrak (breakfast) – 4.
Between rising and falling mountains, like a succession of curtains constantly raised and lowered before the eyes, the train compartment with us inside crosses precisely the border between Central and Eastern Europe.
The landscape instinct buries biography.

§

I have some thoughts for Bad Company.

Who is it that hangs like ether alongside your breath as you twist your leg or open your mouth, wide?

Someone once told me she thought a dancing body was a no-body. I had the opposite feeling when watching you.

A hand swung up into the air with a wave sent forth to an unknown time –
A man falling flat to the ground like a plank balanced ever so lightly on its end until
the balance no longer holds

These could only be done by very particular some-bodies.
And I left rehearsal holding a bit of each of you like soil taken from land as a memento.

You evoke worlds otherwise unlocatable as if a map criss-crossed a yard
where my father long dead mowed the lawn
where my mother long dead cut rhubarb
where my uncle long dead leaned over to swat a fly

I have recently become an advocate of understanding less (to become stupefied) in order to
see more.

§

Zagreb 05:45
Does a dance become a body bowed over a train or airplane connecting European landscapes?
1. Years and years of Austrian family Christmasses planted in backyards disappear with a traintrack eye,
2. Silver birch electricity pylons flickering – 30,000 feet in the air – 22:35, hello London.


Wednesday, June 27th
43: Bryan – 12 sentences
44: Mark – 12 sentences
45: Matthew – 3 sentences


This is a terminal event. A rehearsal for dying where the ending is the beginning and we try to learn how to leave some things behind. We get to the end of a line we have been standing in all morning and on the other side is Tom's microphone on a stand unplugged and amplifying silence.
Today there is a live video feed from a camera mounted under the jet. Our shadow on the ground gets smaller as we get higher and the higher we climb in the air the faster our shadow crosses the fields and forests below us. We cross several fields in a second and the farmer is startled by the shadow that flickers darkness over his mower. Then suddenly the live feed video is replaced by an animated colossal airplane flying over a map of the whole world. We follow a dotted line that stretches out in front of us across the ocean, following a long line of our fore fathers and mothers who have made this trip before us.
I think about the color red as the zero moment of consciousness and fear, of stop and blood and stuck and the beginner’s mind.
We near O'Hare and the live video returns but cuts out just before we touch the landing strip of American land. The flight attendant said they turn it off for safety reasons. Perhaps it is so those who have weak constitutions will not be startled at sight of touching the earth.

§

London: I have had to come back to renew my work visa at the US Embassy. I stay with a friend and recent Goat Island film collaborator, Lucy Cash (formerly Lucy Baldwyn). We both have one of those brilliant London days hopping on and off red buses, lots of catching up to be done.
We take ourselves to the Serpentine Gallery to see two exhibits of Rachel Whiteread and Daniel Libeskind. The Whiteread exhibit demands a certain specific time frame I had forgotten about; a clear detail of materials that has counterbalance by the use of the sculptress casting familiar objects – bed, bath, mattress. The evocative nature of this work is by the language of memory, it takes time for it to arrive, a casting of a bed base brings a tear to my eye and I can't say why.
Outside in the garden is a pavilion cafe designed by Libeskind, we take a coffee break. The Chevrolet Goat Island ‘earthquake’ space was partially influenced by the group viewing his Jewish Museum in Berlin. We were sitting contained within a fabric metal structure that looked as if natural forces had pushed the structure out to an angle of 35 degrees. We became immediately aware of his use of the infinite, the skyline, the framing of grass, tree, fence becoming transformed. I imagined performing Earthquake in this outdoor space, wishing everyone else was here. Reminder to myself, bring in Godard’s Band a Parte to rehearsal in the future.

§

On the return flight we have the exact same seat configuration as on the excursion, a symmetry disrupted only by air, and we think about how much has changed, but wouldn’t swear to the details, were this the time or place for them, since one may reasonably question only that which can give an answer.
The man behind me in the US customs re-entry line with an ID that reads UNMIK (United Nations Mission In Kosovo) tells me, “The more you learn the more you understand how little you know,” appeasing only briefly the irritation born of doubt.
We await more sleep itself awaiting more days.


{On June 27th, Mario Kovac, student of theatre directing at the Academy of Drama Arts in Zagreb, gave us two questions for our journal project.
Regarding the fact that the piece in a way and partially seems to speak of childhood nostalgia and collective memory, I would like to know whether the fact that it is not aware of some motives and specific (almost local) cultural or community codes (but also songs, TV serial etc that the group refers to and that the ordinary American recognizes easily), does somehow “handicap” the Croatian and generally “non-American” audience?
Where does all this energy and will-power (which I sincerely admire) comes from, since Goat Island is not your only work place?}


Thursday, June 28th
46: Mark – 12 sentences
47: Bryan – 12 sentences
48: Karen – 4 sentences


Today I have taken a four hour coach trip north of London to reach my family home. On the bus I ask myself over and over do we create memories of non existent places, places of the imaginary, for my body remembers and yet my mind has forgotten.
On the bus we go through small market towns, (there appears to be silent death in these English towns, retail shops closing down, shops for let), and yet further along the road brand new high streets are being created through vast out-of-town shopping malls. I feel as if my memory collapses back and forth between an America I know, an America I observed through TV screen and the dead high street submerged by what appears to be a lost present. I haven't returned to the UK for nearly a year, do things normally move forward this quickly or have I taken myself back and revisited this place I knew 20 years ago when I was eight years old?
There is a quiet, fields lay empty, vast clumps of crimson poppies bleed and memorialize the fields. There are no animals to be seen, the horror of the foot-and-mouth epidemic is viewed through a glass bus window. I feel compelled to ask questions to people to put on a fake American accent so they won't think I'm stupid. I try to make sense of the quietness. Confusion and memory ignite the body, history of the American civil war of the buried dead in Vicksburg, Mississippi, of a large mass grave in the English countryside. There are numerous scars in this landscape I have never witnessed before.
Down the country lane where my family live we drive through disinfected straw in the car, at the front door to the house is a disinfected mat to wipe your feet on to stop the spread of the disease, welcome home Mark.

§

I wake up at 3:30 am and spend the morning trying to distinguish between trivial and important details and then notice a wart on my left hand ring finger.
An email from Zagreb asks about theological discipline I am not sure that art is, but I think that collaboration is a theological discipline. In the sense that God for me is a community of Humans working together. I think that the viewing of these performance works can be a theological discipline in the sense that in the theater audiences are collaboratively engaged in a meditation of sorts to become a part of the work with their understanding. We are on the edge of failure and misunderstanding and mis-communication and these are the places where God is thought to enter. I think that spiritual events occur when knowledge is gained; where people are allowed to sit quietly and listen until a thought occurs. In Earthquake the textural references to theological biblical literature come from a translation of verses from the book of Acts by Michel Serres, referring to the Pentecostal event of experiencing tongues of fire while meditating as a group. We have found this text to be important enough to include because it refers to a reversal of the disaster of mis-communication between nations. Again, here I believe that approaching God or God-like states begins with a community of Humans. A true community of Humans assumes communication with words, language and actions that accept, understand and even encourage differences. There is also another theological connection which is the commitment and dedication to the use of the human body in our performances because it is through the human body that I think we make our main connection to whatever God is.


{On June 28th, Marin Blasevic, editor of Frakcija, gave us one question for our journal project.
My question goes to the whole group but also to Karen in particular for three "situations", in which she was involved during the first performance of "Earthquake" here in Zagreb, have made me think of your relationship to the audience. The first one was during the opening "scene" and it was, in some way, I suppose, deliberate: the eye contact (while Karen keeps turning around).
Two other cases were accidental: first Karen slightly hit somebody in the first row while running with her wooden "shoes" and in her next run approached to the spectator for a second and apologized (even touched him/her, as far as I can remember... btw, the next day Mark also accidentally hit somebody sitting almost in the same place, but did not interrupt the flow/flux of performance... I do not think he was supposed to do it, but the question would be was he aware of it and did it disturb him in some way, does he remember it? do you/does he think it disturbed the particular spectator? is he/she, the spectator, expected to allow physical contact of that kind, even if it was not meant to happen, and even if it was far away from intentional "aggression"?).
Later, Karen is waiting "backstage" and the loud sound of the car trumpet (sorry, I do not know the correct word) obviously annoyed a little girl who was sitting in the audience. The little girl put her arms on her ears and Karen noticed this. And then, it seemed to me that I saw a sweet smile on Karen's face.
Now, the question would be: what do you think/feel about the communication, or should I better say - interaction, with the audience, whether it is deliberate or accidental, whether it has an effect on your concentration/focus (only?), or effects the whole emotional/mental/intellectual/organic complex of the specific moment while performing, or even does leave traces on the whole performance. Or, is it without any effect? Did you ever think of investigating more direct, physical, verbal etc., contact, communication, interaction with the audience (beside the almost "organic" experience that your performing calls for, at least on the first and the most intensive level of reception, just before that moment of provoking "inner images", and long time before the interpretative and intellectual reflection starts to condense)? If you have already worked on that "border" before "How dear to me..", which was the first performance of yours I have seen, why have you stopped? If you avoid it, why?
Of course, when people leave your performance loudly and slam a door, what kind of "resistance" do you feel? What would happen if some of you would become so irritated that she/he interrupts the performance and shouts: "could you please vanish without so much noise?", or even "could you do it a little bit louder", or, "sorry we did not WALTZ for you"?}

§

In the performance I have a line, I say: There are real children in the world. In the moment of performance the small child got out of her seat and put her hands in the water that my costume was waiting in. I smiled at her, I wanted to engage with her to bring her into the performance, I thought if she were engaged with the performance she would leave my costume alone. I blew the car horn, she put her hands over her ears, she got back into her seat to watch the rest of the show.


Friday, June 29th
49: Lin – 12 sentences
50: Matthew – 12 sentences
51: CJ – 5 sentences


In 1972, I majored for one semester in dance at The University of Oregon and failed. I could not point my toes properly and I could not copy and perform the complicated dance patterns in Belinda Cartwright’s Intermediate Modern Jazz class.

In 1984, I saw Pina Bausch’s company perform in the Olympic Arts Festival in Los Angeles. I was mesmerized by the personal, quirky styles of each performer; the varied physical types; the different ages; the many mother tongues.

In 1999, I gave the four members of Goat Island dance segments on video taken from Pina Bausch’s company. I asked them to copy the movements and bring them to rehearsal.

In 2000, I watched rehearsals for our performance It’s an Earthquake in My Heart. I was mesmerized by the failure of Bryan, Karen, Mark, and Matthew to achieve the filmed version of Bausch’s choreography. Each one seemed to be reaching for a gesture outside of themselves while performing the gesture with themselves – a process of self-quoting and citation from another source, simultaneously. I liked the idea that we would never get these movements right; that we were staging a failure. With the inability to succeed, we were given a stuttering. We were given fragility. We were given unstable possibilities.

§

To resist the violence of dullness, precision; to resist the violence of war, slowness.
Immobility in space becomes immobility in time, motorization becomes forgetting, memory a traffic jam.
Although close, we see it as through a telescope.
There is no joy in leading people to a place where they already are.
Arrange the whole in parts, arrange the parts in sections, arrange the sections in moments, structure the moments, carefully allow appropriate disruptions.
Perfect a frame to contain every accident.
We have two modes of repetition: internal (alignment of intention) and external (alignment of appearance).
The volition of every action leaves an imprint on the mental continuum, where it remains a potentiality until meeting with condition favorable to its maturation, whereupon it awakens and produces an effect compensatory to the original action.
Impose a structure (mathematics) onto a substance which resists it (behavior).
Reveal the dimension of the familiar, a still hand – a benediction.
As when with distance constellations emerge from infinite single points, we leave the year half over, the month of June behind.
Every fraction, a difference.

§

We are in transition, eyelids heavy in the evening.
As night falls, the house turns to darkness.
A walk after dinner with Karen.
Tiredness is in our bones.
Thoughts and conversation come sporadically, we are mostly silent.


{On June 30th, Sergei and Nikolina Pristas, members of the performance group Bad Company, gave us 8 questions for our journal project.
1. Performers of Goat Island give an impression of great dedication and concentration on the material they are performing, as if they are closed within this organism that we call a performance. What is your attitude towards the audience, and on which level does the exchange take place?
2. Do you build the structure of individual scenes (chains, series, complications) according to some extrinsic models or do they spring out of specific characters of the themes, motives your dealing with...
3. How do you specify your roles in the performance? On which level is a role organized and unfolded?
4. There is an impression of “workness” throughout the performance. Your costumes look like working suits, is this fact connected to your approach to your work (performance)?
5.Why, of all choreographers, Pina Bausch? Considering that you present two radically different if not opposite theatre positions, so...
6. How did you approach the choreographic material taken from, as I understood, Pina Bausch's several choreographies? You couldn't have included everything in your performance, so what was the criterion for you, for your choice?
When you choose, how do you treat the material from that point on?
7. It is clear that one of the starting points for your work is always autobiografical and individual, but does it ever happen the other way round, in the sence that the material of the performance starts invading your autobiography and as such maybe enter your next performance?
8. There is an impression of great importance of "chance" during the process of work even though it doesn't show at all in the performance itself, quite on the contrary...}


Saturday, June 30th
52: CJ – 12 sentences
53: Karen – 12 sentences
54: Lin – 6 sentences

Katrina Horne – Tender
Installation at The Spareroom, Chicago

Can I eat quietly?
Can I eat peacefully?
What is happening to the food inside me?

an installation to be viewed one at a time

To be given space for oneself, public space given to one person for a time. It feels like a gentle coercion or provocation. A one to one relationship with the installation, the two spaces of the installation. No one else to relate to, to make a connection with, to locate myself against, to share the experience of the installation with, even by eye contact.

The illumination of the central nervous system, a transparency, a lightness, a fragility is echoed across x-rays, a hazy video projection, rubber balloons, exposed floor structure.

How is it possible to fill space with presence? Candle light suggests a vigil, a memorial. Do x-rays reveal health or illness?

How ill will I be when I’m 50? 60?
Weaknesses will cultivate bacteria, disease.

§

A viewer wonders about the role of the audience in a Goat Island performance and about moments when the performers seem to look at the audience.

In The Sea & Poison I made a specific point of looking at the audience, the moment was about coming eye to eye with witnesses, I had to make eye contact. Other times it is essential not to puncture the membrane that surrounds the performance and maintains its climate.

In It’s an Earthquake in my Heart, with the audience all the way around the performance: 1) The viewer runs the risk of being the object of the look, 2) Being looked at, the audience becomes just as aware of their own reactions as they are of the performance itself.

We are just people in the same room. A small child does not understand the performance in the same way an adult does, and since experiences imprint children so deeply I felt it important to acknowledge her with a small smile. We all see the child – she, along with the rest of the audience, is part of the performance and perhaps we all feel better if the child is not sacrificed to an intolerant performance. The moment in progress is the most important moment. The people who are there are creating that moment and in ways we are never sure of so are people who are not there.

The phone rang in the audience, one woman’s phone rang and she turned it off. Because we are all so close everyone must embrace this event, it cannot be ignored. The next few moments were filled with the movement of many other hands reaching into pockets and bags for phones to turn them off.

§

The evening is warm.
In Chicago, in my neighborhood, people sit on their doorsteps.
Someone is bouncing a basketball over and over.
A constant rhythm like the rhythm I carry from Zagreb when we were waiting in a school gym to perform a late show and a multitude of men bounced basketballs outside, in a cement yard, over and over again.
This is only a recollection.
Like a bird it leaves no trace of its wings in flight.

§§§

Source Notes

2: sentence 1 – Give My Regards to Eighth Street – Collected Writings of Morton Feldman, B. H. Friedman, ed., page 13, Exact Change, Cambridge, 2000.

9 – “the past is now part of my future, the present is well out of hand” - joy Division, “Heart and Soul”, from the album Closer

13: sentence 8 – The Demons, Heimito von Doderer, R. & C. Winston tr., page 160, Sun & Moon Press, Los Angeles, 1993.

13: sentence 10 – Vienna – A guide to recent architecture, Ingerid Helsing Almaas, page 100, Ellipsis, London, 1996.

23 – The Language of Inquiry, Lyn Hejinian, page 235, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2000.

32: sentence 2 – The Language of Inquiry, page 377.

32: sentence 10 – Give My Regards to Eighth Street – Collected Writings of Morton Feldman, page 22

35: sentence 8 – Give My Regards to Eighth Street – Collected Writings of Morton Feldman, page 21.

35: sentence12 – Give My Regards to Eighth Street – Collected Writings of Morton Feldman, page 32.

40: sentence 4 – The Demons, pages 18.

40: sentence 11 – The Demons, pages 547, 583.

40: sentence 12 – The Cold of Poetry, Lyn Hejinian, page 129, Sun & Moon Press, Los Angeles, 1994.

45: sentence 1 – The Cold of Poetry, page 127.

45: sentence 3 – The Cold of Poetry, page 128.

50: sentence 8 – The Noble Eightfold Path – Way to the End of Suffering, Bhikku Bodhi, page 20, Buddhist Publication Society, Seattle, 1994.

download this text in pdf format
download the free acrobat reader

top