Who am I now, without these places I remember?
Without my memories but in my head
And even that’s foggy at times
But now there’s nothing to show for what I know
Because I know what I know
But who else besides me knows it was real?
Cheeraz Gormon, “Who Moved My Memories”[1]
FK Alexander’s performance piece (I Could Go On Singing) Over the Rainbow is a tribute to, repurposing, reenactment, and re-imagining of the final recording Judy Garland made of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” on March 25, 1969. In it, Alexander sings along to the recording, as it is distorted and layered beneath the accompanying sound of the noise band Okishima Island Tourist Association. In each performance, Alexander sings “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” many times over, because in each performance she is singing to and for one audience member at a time. Each person has an opportunity to stand at the front of the performance area to be sung to. Alexander takes the audience member’s hand, and, while keeping hold of it and maintaining unbroken eye contact for the duration of the song, sings “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” directly to them. At the end, Alexander kisses the audience member on the cheek, releases their hand, and readies herself for the next member of the audience, using precisely the same gestures and actions each time. Throughout, Alexander, her fellow performers, and her audience are illuminated by constantly-moving colored—and then strobe—lighting.
The piece is ritualized, intimate, sensorily overwhelming, and intensely beautiful.
It is also a method of doing historical work. It is a way of asking questions about the past, and about ourselves in relation to the past, in so far as we can feel fragments of the lives of earlier humans and non-humans reverberating in us. It is an imitable model for asking historical questions by means of staged, layered, immersive bodily performance.
This is what I mean:
History is to ask.
History is to meet a fragment of past and ask, who are you, what world did you come from, and how did you come to be here with me? And to ask later, who am I, now that I have met you, now that I know your worlds were here beside mine all along?
The answers to these questions are never visible right away. We make them visible as far as we can. Palpable but invisible forces, trajectories, and traces surround the fragment of past and inflect our encounter with it; we feel them and try to bring them gradually closer and closer to our own surfaces.[2] We coax the invisibilia around the fragment into a different state of vibration so that we can see them and see the fragment, too, in its larger self. This is what staged performance can do: it is a practice of making invisible things visible; an attempt to encounter simultaneously large and small, broken and whole.[3] Performance that asks to encounter past fragments, and to know larger worlds, tentatively and searchingly, by means of past fragments, is a type of history; it is also a type of remembering.
Below are four notes on this form of memory theatre.
***
First Note: Layer
We are not re-creating.[4]
We add and amplify.
Why do we amplify? We amplify to measure the space of reverberation between ourselves and this fragment of past. We amplify to make the fragment larger than it is, and nearer.
We amplify to see what emerges.
There are multiple worlds around this fragment, still in part clinging to it, and these worlds must have room, even if they are invisible to us. We will illuminate them if we can.
So many worlds, so many reverberations.
We change and enlarge and obscure and illuminate the fragment to remember that likeness now is not the same as likeness then.
We add to understand this fragment being overcome in time; we add to understand our own being overcome in time.
Second Note: Bathe
We are not blocked by the layers we add. We are awash in them. We are bathed and held up.
The space of the body (José Gil writes) is the skin extending itself into space; it is skin becoming space…. We can perform the following experiment: let’s immerse ourselves completely naked in a deep bathtub, leaving only our heads sticking out of the water; let’s drop onto the surface of the water, near our submerged feet, a spider. We will feel the animal’s contact on the entirety of our skin.[5]
Immersion extends the body. We alter and open the body, now, immersed, to take in reverberations; we intensify the time and space of the body, both being in and dissolving our temporal skins.[6]
Immersion shows us the fragility of skin.
Therefore to bathe is not for the individual: it is to open us into reverberations we cannot otherwise apprehend, nameless resoundings, into which we also will dissolve in time.
Third Note: Bleedthrough
I wept for the duration of the performance.
We make work from bodies. Past comes to us out of broken laughing bodies from other worlds, so we carve work now from our echoing ribcage. We hold our ribcage open to these worlds and our own.
There is never a different excavation.
The world is our body as we sense its movements and harms.[7] In turn our bodies are prostheses for the insides of the world.[8] We are, in ourselves, unthinking, punning, misleading archives of worlds we cannot remember.
What is historical work that is carved from a ribcage held open to the world? It is tiny, absurd, honest. The fragment of past travels through bodies moving, and through bodies aging, which is to say through the insides of bodies.
Our lungs, hearts, and guts are another layer of this fragment.[9]
The fragment of past bleeds through the page and out backwards the other side.
Inside out, we too.
Fourth Note: Remember
The technique is this. To remember what you already know, imagine you are moving through a series of rooms filled with images of what you would like to recall: icons, images, jokes, puns, symbols. As you see them, remember what you know. That is the memory theatre, the right way round.[10]
This too we will run through backwards.
Begin with a fragment from a world you do not know. Around it, build a series of rooms, using whatever materials you can; fill them with layers, reverberations, jokes, guesses, symbols, drawings, failures. Move through these rooms. Listen as the fragment remembers what you cannot imagine.[11]
I mean this literally.
In this way we remember something we do not know.
Inside the rooms of the memory theatre, we step into the path of the speeding fragment and urge it to come at us faster.
***
In Come Home Charley Patton, choreographer Ralph Lemon describes a conversation he had in Bentonia, Mississippi, during the part of his decade-long Geography project that came to be known as the Living Room Dances:
“Why are you here? Tell me again…?” Jimmy asks, as he guides our tour.
Oh you know, research, I say, I might write a book. If I had known him better I might have said this….
I’ve come south, again, this time to research what might be left of the Delta blues and to dance in the living rooms, yards, and available spaces of those surviving friends, children, and grandchildren, along a slice of Mississippi’s back roads, encountering some of the haunted ones (and what to do there?). A personal project, a counter-memorial, a meditation.[12]
To make history through performance is to make rooms that hold afterlives, possibilities, and survivors. We say to these rooms, use our bodies to remember.
That is what I mean.
[1] From Cheeraz Gormon, In the midst of loving (St. Louis: Alchemy 7, 2015), 35. Gormon recites this poem in her childhood neighborhood in “White Flight and Reclaimed Memories,” part of season 3 of the podcast We Live Here, available at: http://www.welivehere.show/posts/2017/10/18/white-flight-and-reclaimed-memories
[2] Here I am much indebted to Seeta Chaganti’s precise and brilliant exploration of medieval and contemporary virtualities and performance, Strange Footing: Poetic Form and Dance in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 45-53.
[3] See, e.g., Peter Brook: “I am calling it the Holy Theatre for short, but it could be called the Theatre of the Invisible-Made-Visible: the notion that the stage is a place where the invisible can appear has a deep hold on our thoughts. We are all aware that most of life escapes our senses: a most powerful explanation of the various arts is that they talk of patterns which we can only begin to recognize when they manifest themselves as rhythms or shapes”: The Empty Space (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1968), 42. On wholeness and brokenness, FK Alexander writes that her work “is concerned with issues of wounds, recovery, aggressive healing, radical wellness, industrialisation, and noise music” https://www.fkalexander.com/about, as of February 10, 2019.
[4] See Chaganti, Strange Footing, 27-36, on reenactment, and Vanessa Agnew, “Introduction: What is Reenactment?” Criticism 46.3 (2004): 327-39, which Chaganti also cites.
[5] Gil, “Paradoxical Body,” TDR: The Drama Review 50.4 (2006): 22, italics in original.
[6] Gil, “Paradoxical Body,” 22: “[the space of the body] is an intensified space, when compared to the habitual tactility of the skin.” See also Svetlana Boym on reflective nostalgia: “It is precisely this defamiliarization and sense of distance that drives [reflective nostalgics] to tell their story, to narrate the relationship between past, present, and future”: “Nostalgia and its Discontents,” Hedgehog Review 9.2 (2007): 16.
[7] See especially Dee Reynolds, “Kinesthetic Empathy and the Dance’s Body: From Emotion to Affect,” in Dee Reynolds and Matthew Reason, Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices (Bristol and Chicago: Intellect, 2012), 121-36, and Rose Parekh-Gaihede, “Breaking the Distance: Empathy and Ethical Awareness in Performance,” 175-92 in the same volume.
[8] Peter Weibel, “Earth’s Gravity and the Orbital Age,” in Lukas Feirass and Michael Najjar, Planetary Echoes: Exploring the Implications of Human Settlement in Outer Space (Leipzig: Spector, 2018), 36-37.
[9] Gil, “Paradoxical Body,” 31-34; see also Tim Ingold, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 1-15, on “knowing from the inside.”
[10] The ancient mnemonic idea, and its medieval and early modern afterlives, was made famous in twentieth-century Anglophone scholarship by Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966).
[11] See Tim Smit’s narrative of purchasing a meteorite in Palm Springs: “… and when you really really think, the hair stands up on the back of your neck and then you wonder, where did my meteorite come from, am I looking at home?” Smit, “Dancing Lessons from God,” in Feireiss and Najjar, Planetary Echoes, 22.
[12] Ralph Lemon, Come Home Charley Patton (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2013), 115-16. See also Katherine Profeta’s description of Lemon’s process in Profeta, “The Geography of Inspiration,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 27.3 (2005): 23-28; and Adrienne Edwards, “The Blues and the Conceptual State,” in On Value, ed. Triple Canopy and Ralph Lemon (New York: Triple Canopy, 2016), 82-92.