Goat Island

'We have discovered a performance by making it' - Goat Island

Akin to Michelangelo's claim that he was merely finding the sculpture within the marble, Goat Island find the performance within the process. The company place as much if not more importance on the process as the performance and their task and response devising strategy means the performance is almost a bi-product of the process. This post will present a review of a Work in Progress performed by Goat Island Performance Group at Chelsea Theatre, London on Friday 8 September 2006 alongside excerpts from an interview with company members Lito Walkey and Karen Christopher. This will form the basis of a research paper entitled The Detail of Worship, The Worship of Detail. Taken from www.goatislandperformance.org

The performance situates between two audiences. Its temporal structure reflects the historical trajectory of Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia, a triple life: church/mosque/museum. We consider these not conflicting theologies, but movements encountered on different planes.

Part 1: A dance in 13 rounds. Each round adds a triad of detailed movement. Through the course of the 39 movements, the performers diverge and reconverge, in accordance with hybrid mathematics, to a regular beat with irregular measures.

Part 2: Not performance, but instructions for performances. The community enters the work as instruction-givers. A micro-performance on a bare stage answers each recited instruction: a universe in simple words, a journey of attention with no destination.

Part 3: A concert begins, a Vaudeville Deluxe, of three-minute acts, a weave of The Last Waltz / The Last Picture Show: how to take a stand; how to spurn a lover; how to look at a building; how to recall “the beginning of the beginning of the end of the beginning”; how to say goodbye.
Interview with Goat Island exploring absence and compositional structure of time and space.

MP Michael Pinchbeck
KC Karen Christopher
LW Lito Walkey

MP I'm fascinated by the way your time and space structures are come upon and how they're balanced.

LW The structure of how we work. That's where balance finds itself. The structure that is directly connected to the content e.g. mathematical pattern. And the structure of how we work. I think that one of the essential things about how we work is based very much on never having enough time. There is this leaving for short periods of time. We are going to answer one question or bring things in to show each other or we're going to redo something we've done before. There's just enough time to touch on something. That structure of never having time to say 'This is our concept and this is our time to achieve that' but instead there are just these little sparks that along the way tell us how to approach the material and how to shape it.

MP And that idea of doing exercises for 55 seconds rather than a minute does this tie in with the idea of never having enough time?

LW I think that comes in connection with 'unfinishedness' - the idea that you're not going to have enough time. So in that state of non-completion comes another kind of specificity. You have to ask yourself other questions when you know that you have to cut yourself short. You detach. You let yourself go. Contrary to that there is this approach of saying what happens when you don't indulge in things taking over because you feel that's where they're going but you think 'This is the border of where I have to go to'. Somehow you cme back to how a very small thing can fill up that time. One of the things we realised is that a tiny fragment can take over a whole structure. Take over a whole hour of what you want to pay attention to.

MP It's the 'gigantic detail'?

KC Also I think originally why it was 55 seconds instead of a minute was that people don't really listen when you say a minute. Because that sounds like a generic time frame. Oh a minute. Oh an hour. Oh a couple of minutes. So if you tell them 55 seconds. When we said 2 minutes we meant 2 minutes but people thought we meant a short piece. What we wanted was for people to be rigid about time. What matters is that they've spent time considering time. When you consider a choice of words. In some cases people don't listen if you just use ordinary words. It's like the flight attendant who says 'I found a brown wallet... I have to tell you some safety instructions...' Especially in the workshop and in rehearsal we use it a lot. I'm not standing here on my own worrying about am I good enough is my idea good enough. I'm standing here with time and the time it takes me to stand here.

MP How do you reconcile the idea of 'unfinished-ness' with 'last-ness'?

LW We’re showing the first and the third section.

KC It’s only a five minute section of the third section. The third section will be longer. We’re in a situation where we have to present something that feels like a piece even though it’s not. Whoever comes to see this this is the show they’re seeing. The first work in progress we did there was a first section and a second section. Now we’re just doing the first section and a short part of the third section. I think that’s why the second section isn’t quite there. It’s problematic. It’s stopped there. It has its own integrity. But it’s not ready. So we do the first and the third section knowing what already happens in the second section.

LW We did have the idea that we would try for the first time to not show the third part ever.

MP So it would exist?

LW So we would work on it but it wouldn’t be in the work in progress. We would only show part one and part two so there would be an unfinished form in it. Now we want to show a part of it to show the energy it has. I like this idea that because Goat Island has used work in progress over the two year process there is a lot of generosity in that. It’s a nice idea to keep something.

KC So we broke our rule about not presenting the section.

MP. There are echoes of End Time Now. Adrian Heathfield describes how Tehching Hsieh paints for 13 years but never presents the results. He only presents the statement ‘I survived’. I’m exploring the notions of absence and presence. Heathfield talks about the images of the same artist punching in and taking self-portraits of himself as part of his One Year Performance

KC It is just stills but when you see them all together. You see his hair grow. You see his face change. And he stands in the same position every time.

MP He talks about this as ‘nowhen’. An absent presence. This moment in between. I wonder how this notion of ‘nowhen’ applies to the shifting structures you have. The gaps you have. The missing beginning. The entering of the void to find it. The way you turn the work inside out. Do you have any thoughts about your work in terms of absence and presence?

LW In September Roses there was a specific focus on these missing parts. These moments when we would be still for 55 seconds and then move again. We were missing out words. We were pointing out voids. And if we approach these spaces by letting those absences be there then we’re questioning what happens to the presence. Maybe something that is a little more real that connects directly to the nervous system. The non-presence is there. We had a question that we each asked someone out of the company to answer with five steps. We came back to make a performance that followed these steps. The performance that resulted in these tasks there is the idea of doing these things without representing the body. Instead of making the focus on the body the focus is one the instructions on the body and the traces made by the body in the space. This deals with absence and presence. In contrast to the first section when we are very present in our bodies.

KC I want to say something about the void in September Roses. There was a sense of the idea of repair. How do you represent something that is unfinished, broken or incomplete because everything you show is complete. So some of the stuttering and stopping was an attempt to do that. Also – I feel that people are terrified of nothing. Of that moment when nothing happens. ‘What am I supposed to be doing?’ There’s a line somewhere you can draw between that discomfort and how we deal with this void? This emotional void. There was a connection to the idea that we were responding to the United States reaction to 9/11. We were on tour when it happened and the effects of it were going on in the world. The idea of the void. The response to void. The response to the missing. The response to death. The reflection on existence. The idea was repair being a response to that sort of disaster instead of attack.

MP It’s a much more healthy word than fix.

KC So we looked at Paul Ceylan who set out to repair the German language after the holocaust and part of his method of repair included holes or absences because so was much was missing in the world. We would all have very different ways of explaining the absences within the work.

LW We circle around the same notion without discussing the work.

KC The discussion happens in action. In making the material. That’s the converation.

LW I think the conversations we carry forward are about the happy accidents.

KC I don’t think any of the performances tie something down to the meaning we had when we thought about it. One always hoped there is more than one meaning. It’s interesting to see the effect it has on other people. The mystery.

MP Sometimes the balance happens in the ambiguity. Not defining meaning.

KC It’s one way of avoiding argument. It’s also a way to live in a community.

MP There’s a quote from Stephen Bottoms about ‘negotiatiating community’ – about how you exist as a unit and your unique way of working. Also – you say ‘Memorize to perform, perform to remember.’ I wonder what that means to you?

KC How do you remember anything – there’s an activation of some internal thought process. Something that moves you. Something that makes sense. There now you have a memory. You need these memories to have a fertile thought process. In some ways performance causes this – an alchemical thing – a reaction in your brain – something catalyses – and you all either performer or audience have some intellectual or emotional response – you have a new memory.

MP Are you flirting with that chemical response by reconfigurating material?

LW Then that becomes a sequence of course the path is changed but what we perform becomes a sequence that doesn’t have open ends on a ‘what we do’ level. We make it complex but when we’re performing we always get to similar points. We have our routes.

MP How much freedom do you feel as a performer within these structures? Is there a frustration in working within such a rigid outlline?

LW There’s a frustration that comes with a liberation. There’s a surprise that comes from doing something always in a similar way. An extreme example. It’s 25 minutes long and there’s a beat every second. There’s a movement every beat. I have difficulty breathing. Because I start to lose the movement. That’s where a freedom can take over but it’s a question we’re asking but still we can’t let go of it because we’d lose the beat.

KC We can’t lose ourselves in it because we have to find the movements. Everytime I get to 8 I panic because I can’t remember whether I’ve started over. There’s always a panic that you’ve gone on automatic.

LW This is the difference between meditative and automatic. How I do find it exhilerating is that it becomes very concrete. The epression as the performance of this measured movement is in the urgency of the action. It is not feeling. It is in the doing.

KC I have to remind myself of that everytime I start. Why did I agree to this purgatory? It’s really hard. It’s not difficult to do. It’s difficult to get it right. If you’re looking at it from the point of view of a very structured dance and everybody is doing it the same where uniformity is the idea – then we have freedom – because though we have a structure our movements are radically different. Our personalities imbue the movements with an individual quality.

LW Another point is how Lyn directs us or how Lyn doesn’t direct us. It is never in relation to how we are doing something. Those details are up to us. Very quickly what we do in rehearsal becomes part of that path. That’s another point where we do not have a discussion. The doing is established.

MP You allow yourselves to show.

KC It’s not about personality but there is an individuality. It’s not a phsycology or an emotionality but it is an individuality.

MP I’m making a peformance with an amateur dramatics group and it started with the idea of them as themselves. There’s a sense of self and comfort within that role. Is that sense in your work e.g. Brian’s clockwise lecture in September Roses.

KC It depends. Brian brought that in and performed it as himself and that was that. Then there are times when you imitate someone else. It’s still us. There is no pretend going on. But it’s us showing you how we do this person. There has still got to be an availability in how we do it.

MP What do you mean by availability in the transaction between performer and audience?

KC I don’t know what that means ‘availability’ because it’s more permeable than that. It’s not definitive. Less interior. I don’t think soulless is quite the right word but you have to give something of the performer. Make yourself more available. More permeable. Less like a shield I think. Because it’s important to keep the small connection to people. When we have an actual connection between actual people we care more.

MP Can that connection remain if it’s something that you’ve done before?

KC If I enliven it. But I have to enliven it each time.