behind this curtain

Empty theatres are never truly empty. Past and future performances lie waiting in the wings, behind this curtain. In every theatre there is always the ‘ghost light’, a bare bulb on a stand left perpetually alight during the non-working hours, through midnights and morning hours, so that one will not trip over the blackness of that vast unoccupied chamber. Across the world, thousands of dim beacons in theatre houses, together form a hidden constellation of dormant worlds past and signal to worlds to come. Before and after, the ghost light looks on, a truly unblinking eye on the spectacle of the stage. Against this, there is the curtain: if the theatre house personifies the seer, and finds its pupil in the ghost light, then the curtain functions as the lid to this all-seeing eye. It is the actor that performs perhaps the most theatrical of roles: the art of revelation and appearance, making the future known.

–from my director’s note to The Waste Land: Or, Pay No Attention to that Man Behind the Curtain (with production photograph)

He has returned to this figure many times over. A fitting obsession for an insomniac, it remains on in the off-hours, light the days when the house is normally “dark” as they say with a theatre’s closure. The ghost light, the remains of all the performances that have died in this theatre, all stripped of their particularity, their texture and coloring. He likes its bare bulb, not even white, but unaffiliated and unfiltered in its raw excavation of the empty stage. He likes how it shows the empty stage without its makeup to be a well-worn visage, no abstract space. There are scuffs and cracks in paint, taped up fixtures and the old folding chair where the fly guy sits in the wings while the scenes play on. He likes how it shows the dark where the stage does not reach; for, sitting still off-center on the forestage, its nimbus always ghosts some outer edge or limit upon which it cannot cast its gaze. And, finally, always, how it shows his shadow circling the walls and floors in elongated steps, how it makes of him, too, a ghost.

French choreographer Xavier Le Roy has been on the East Coast of the United States presenting his pieces More Movements für Lachenmann and Product of Other Circumstances in New York and Philadelphia. I had the pleasure of seeing the former in France some time ago and, inspired by some recent thinking on the question of the concrete in music, decided to return to my initial responses, edited here but still decidedly a rough draft.

In November 2007, as part of the PERFORMA festival in New York, I saw Le Roy present his Sacre du Printemps, a solo dance based on the London Symphony Orchestra’s performance of the Stravinsky piece. Taking the gestures of conductor Sir Georg Solti as the ground for the dance’s physical vocabulary, Le Roy stood centerstage to direct the audience as if it were the orchestra, cueing the center section for the bassoon solo, then calling forth the cellos and basses with a sweep to his right. Speakers situated beneath the audience’s seats replicated this arrangement, so that I sat amidst the brass section and nearly felt compelled to raise trumpet to lips at Le Roy’s command. The piece drew attention to the conductor’s gestures, that dance conventionally left unseen, or at least unacknowledged, by the aesthetics of movement. Le Roy’s study of Solti’s particular style of conducting ultimately became a kind of portrait of the artist, purified to its formal elements and essential vocabulary. It asked us to consider whether the movement inspires the music (as one conventionally assumes the case in the orchestral form) or whether the movement becomes itself as a consequence to the music (after all, Le Roy dances to a recording of the LSO’s interpretation). Which ‘keeps’ time and which expresses it?

With More Movements für Lachenmann Le Roy continues his investigation into the dance of musical production that the Sacre piece began. Here Le Roy takes up German composer Helmut Lachenmann’s concrete music as the terrain on which to pursue the interwoven relationship between music and musician, instrument and action, dancer and dance.

Le Roy did graduate study in medical science and his work combines the clarity of analysis with a poetics of movement. As such, the meticulous structure of the piece is as carefully choreographed as the individual gestures of its performers. You must forgive my awkward attempts at translating the three-part structure of ‘movements’ to the written form:

1) a solo cellist performing a piece of concrete music centerstage – at turns attacking and coaxing to evoke the widest array of sounds from his instrument’s strings, bridge, and body – first in full light, then continuing the same through a blackout, then concluding in light once more.
2) a duet between two guitarists and, simultaneously, a second duet between two dancers. The first pair sit upstage and then the second pair obscures them behind two large black screens before taking seats immediately in front of the screens. As the obscured musicians play through one of Lachenmann’s compositions, the downstage pair proceed to mime the actions of that unseen pair, seeming to hold invisible instruments in their hands. As the piece progresses these actions of strumming and striking variously diverge into more abstract gestures – into a dance – and while the two seen figures generally remain seated throughout, their actions migrate through their body and space, so they are eventually scratching parts of their body instead of their imaginary instruments.
3) an octet between eight musicians (it is now revealed that the two dancers in the previous section are actually guitarists themselves, possess the capacity to make music–a singularly important feature of the performance). They play the score to a longer piece together at first, then four drop out and continue ‘playing’ on invisible instruments, their gestures (like the ‘dancers’ in part 2) becoming increasingly abstracted. Finally these dancing four remain alone onstage, continuing the composition in less and less localized, more and more dispersed, physical terms.

 

More Movements für Lachenmann is an essay on the nature of movement and sound so precisely tuned that I hesitate to attempt to carry this offhand translation further. I would that I, too, could play without the instrument in place and still make of its movements some smaller gesticulations that would reveal the relations between my body and my (absent) object of attention. But, alas, I’ve always been a quite terrible dancer. A few words only, then.

Here, as in the Stravinsky/Solti piece, Le Roy plays with the proximity between a gesture of a body and the body of sound. Lachenmann, the composer, gave shape and resonance to the figure of an instrument, its ‘concrete’ embodiment beyond the expected uses towards which it had been constructed. So, too, a dancer explores the human body beyond its utilitarian ends to produce what Giorgio Agamben would call a ‘means without end.’ I’ve written elsewhere of the tendency in philosophy to take up the image of the dancer as a ‘pure index’, setting forth a relation unattached to any particular body. This sits at odds with the realities of the individual dancer, how he or she as particular is always there at the center of these relations, no abstract form pointing without the pointer.  What I found so beautiful about Le Roy’s piece was the way that it brought all our gestures into the register and domain of the musical, so that we could imagine our everyday stutters and tics  playing at great instruments of the air if only we could see so acutely, if only we could attenuate our ears to that particular frequency.

a series of imagined theatres. notes for future performances. impossible performances.

unattributed illustration of focusing hook and cloth.

In half-light, the stage is set with great care by a trio of stage hands: a meticulously realized nineteenth century living room. Lights down as they leave. In the darkness, whispers and then the churning sound of some machine, the shuffling of feet, panting. The sounds cut out suddenly and we are back to half-light, the stage hands return to reset the stage once more, slight adjustments of the furniture, a few new portraits on the walls, replacing the old, perhaps a half-finished meal carefully laid out. Darkness again, this time the sound of lighthearted conversation at several removes, behind another wall or closed door. Again the lights return. Again, the stage hands enter. They clear the table and carry on a large photographic camera complete with black focusing cloth that they place center stage. It faces the audience. They leave. The lights remain on.

a series of imagined theatres. notes for future performances. impossible performances.

At the far edge where the last dune of the last desert gives over. The man speaks, finally:

I wanted to tell you I love you

So I did

Just like that

There didn’t seem much else to do

The best songs were already over

A stairway to a balcony

That looks out to the other mountain

The one I meant to climb

So I kept coming back here

To that fast moving footprint

Like a smudge of lipstick on the bar-top tumbler

Chairs on tables

The jukebox dark yet

Ready to resume that faint blues tune

About a one way train

Cutting across the great plains

photograph of “Phlebas’ Dance” from the Waste Land: Or, Pay No Attention to that Man Behind the Curtain

directed by Daniel Sack (2009)

A map for the placement of actions and objects in the dark. The stage is not a single consistently empty plane, a starless sky, but is lined and limited where sets should be placed, where they will be placed and where future actions will take place. “Spike marks” we call them, as if the free-floating forms were pinned to the ground. The dim glow of these dashes and crosses illuminate the black as constellations recalling and foretelling future navigations, the outlines of mythic bodies and fixtures: this, here, the shoulder of Orion and, that, the outer edge of the couch on which they will soon recline. The point where the spotlight will find you. If only our own futures were marked in such laconic punctuation. If only we could see the expanse of this day in terms of spikes where something presently unknown would soon take place.

For they are also marks of warning. The darkened stage and its unknowable depths are surrounded with possible threats, figures and rooms, forms that may lurch into us. One time, I saw one of my fellow actors collide into the low-hanging corner of a catwalk, painted black and unseen, before the hands had thought to line it with tape. When the lights were brought up in panic, her baseball cap was thick with heavy black blood, and there she was nearly passing out. The unmarked terrain still threatens to gouge us out, as we hurry our preparations for the approaching scene.