How to Write, or How to Return Home

At what point in one’s lifetime does one retire from performance and decide that it might be better to withdraw from the stage, from rehearsals, from choreographing and designing the next piece? Is retiring from a professional career a kind of retreat or simply a relocation? And how would I begin to narrate the changes that affect me, and perhaps all the others that I experienced throughout this life in the theatre and in teaching performance to younger art students?If the following appears to be autobiographical, it is in fact intimately related as well to a reflection on many years of writing about performance. I joined PAJ as a contributing editor in 1985, while teaching theatre studies at Yale University, just prior to taking off for Texas to start directing and choreographing my own version of a media augmented Tanztheater. My initial article for the journal, after I had introduced myself to the editors, was published in PAJ 26/27, a special issue on “The American Theatre Condition,” under the title “Postmodern Performance and Technology.” I cannot remember now what made me write about technology before I had fully grasped all the implications of interactive multimedia design and digital composition, using filmic projection, performing with complicated wearables (which became a focus, later on, for our work in the DAP-Lab ensemble). I may have been trying to imagine a future. My science fiction.At the time I was fascinated by the debates on postmodernism and how they moved from architecture or other fields such as anthropology and literature, to multi-mediated performance, the experimental avant-garde stagings by directors who were invited to the BAM Next Wave Festival, downtown venues in New York or to Avignon, Edinburgh, Munich, Belgrade, and other European hotspots. However, my real passion, since I encountered her work in 1978, was kindled by Pina Bausch and her Wuppertaler Tanztheater.Around the time when I began publishing in PAJ, I was working on my first essay about this new theatrical dance that told strange stories, physically deconstructing all we had seen in ballet and modern dance. Bausch had come to the United States and performed in Los Angeles and at BAM; some American critics were upset about the ugliness of the dance, and for some reason I felt the need to defend her work. Sankai Juku also introduced their stunning Butoh performances to the West at that time, while Eugenio Barba and Jerzy Grotowski traveled in the opposite direction. The confluence of avant-garde theatre (stage works by Meredith Monk, Robert Wilson, The Wooster Group, Richard Foreman, and Mabou Mines had been described by Bonnie Marranca as a “theatre of images” in the 1970s),1 live art, Tanztheater, Butoh, and a performance ethnography of transcultural sources offered a vast, complex spectrum of new cultural, creative ideas. They inspired my own work for the rest of my life, alongside influences one naturally takes on board going to visual art exhibitions, films, music concerts.How to write about this is also a function of reading and studying literature, of playing with critical and poetic modes of writing on performance, with Arthur a grammar and George a vocabulary, as Gertrude Stein invoked it in her strange book How to Write (1931). My learning process, needless to say, was first of all one of transplantation and voluntary exile. Speaking with Gertrude a geography, then, I was born in the German countryside after World War II, growing up in the Catholic Saarland in the 1960s before leaving for university in Trier, the oldest city of my native country, not bombed out but full of scattered archaeological ruins from Roman times. Then in the late 1970s, I migrated to Cambridge, England, and on to New Haven to study theatre and theory. The war and the Holocaust were the deep dark shadows I wanted to flee, seeking for my prospect garden.How to write, to think through and derive new concepts from grasping history and the impact of cultural traces of art, public media, and socio-political processes became as important as rehearsing a new dance theatre piece, concentrating on movement poetry-in-space (as Artaud had imagined). At Yale, one was tempted to read theory as if it were new literature. It would be arrogant to claim I rehearsed literary ideas or exciting theoretical premises taught by Derrida (say, deconstruction). Harold Bloom, another teacher, warned us of the anxiety of influence, though I rather wanted to know more about Shakespeare, Milton, Eliot, and Dickens (and how did they connect to Throbbing Gristle, Bob Dylan, John Coltrane, and Sun Ra?), hear more of the poetry and what affected the lines, successions, transmutations. Reading plays, I admit, was not one of my favorite passions. My Swiss professor in Trier, a Shakespeare expert, in any case, had encouraged me to discover the performative signals in the scripts, the Gestus of the written-to-be-acted. Scripts were scores, gravitating away from the medium-specific, becoming west side stories.I am again hardly surprised to find out, in a current exhibition at Städel Museum Frankfurt, that Käthe Kollwitz, a contemporary of Stein, nourished her socially critical commitment to the working classes by reading literature—for example, Gerhart Hauptmann’s realistic drama Die Weber [The Weavers]—using it as an initial spark for her gripping graphic series staging the rebellion of the downtrodden in a theatrically heightened manner. The convergence of writing and drawing or, in Robert Wilson or Saburo Teshigawara’s case, the drawing-out of stage designs into choreographies for action and lighting, always made sense to me. I looked for examples of such drawings of imagined scenes that could be adopted in new ways for rehearsals and iterative design processes.Répéter is an intellectual, somatic, and creative practice. How to dance, in my view, is not dependent only on dance training or studying movement technique. It is also, for example, an evocative companion to architecture and social rituals, raising ethical questions about how to move with others, how to maneuver and share space. I remember dancing to church music as a child, since my oldest brother, ordained as a priest, would often play Bach, and later teach me how to play piano and organ. I wore costumes for my mother, trying to impress her with my made-up Latin liturgies. I played it out excessively until the whole thing became hallucinatory, my invented Spielformen des Erzählens.2Later I encountered Herbert Blau’s books, which inspired me deeply. Never having seen his productions with KRAKEN, his writing however was an ecstatic mode of Artaudian intellectual madness, not a Steinian ecology of repetitious hymns. I liked the Blau-Artaud-Derrida-Cage landscape, four saints in three acts. My Texas friends alerted me to new music and extended vocal technique; indeed, my rehearsals often got under way by an encounter with theory, writing, or sonic art. While rehearsing, I sketched the rehearsal process, I drew and made notes comparing them with other notes. The earliest dance pieces, premiered in Dallas in 1986–1987, were adaptations of Heiner Müller’s Description of a Picture and Hamletmachine. After that, moving to Houston, I felt ready to “write” and choreograph my own work (Invisible Cities, 1989; Orpheus and Eurydike, 1992; AlienNation, 1993; Lovers Fragments, 1995, etc.), independent of any literary ancestors, even if they of course existed (Calvino, Monteverdi, Barthes), just as Pina Bausch’s Bluebeard had ancestors in the fairy tale and Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape.The first Bausch work I ever saw in fact was a three-hour movement thriller derived from a Shakespeare stage direction: He takes her by the hand and leads her into the castle, the others follow. Her dance shocked me into realizing that most of us grew up with fantastical, grim Beckettian fairy tales and other obsessive historical burdens that continued as simmering subtexts for the geopolitical turmoil that ruled the last decades of the old century, and the fearful struggles we now witness in a war-torn twenty-first century.There is now perhaps very little need to “deconstruct” Wagner, which I tried to do in 1995 just a few years after the Berlin Wall had come down, when I was invited to stage an installation of the Parsifal opera at Festspielhaus Hellerau (Dresden) for a new music festival. I welcomed the opportunity to choreograph three different rooms in the building and collaborate with an East German artist collective RU-IN during a highly stimulating encounter. We did not use any of Wagner’s music. I returned home to East Germany, so to speak, not ever having known the communist part of the divided country. I filmed the disappearing wall, then wrote and edited a video documentary called Border-Land, my bitter Kollwitz moment of prophesying a potentially bad future for the delusional proclamation “Wir sind das Volk!”Gertrude Stein was a transplanted artist, having moved to Paris, and not returning to her native United States until after the publication of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in 1934. It was for the premiere of Four Saints in Three Acts and a year-long lecture tour, and not a return home, since she preferred to be abroad in Paris. I wondered about Everybody’s Autobiography, written years later, or her Geography and Plays, what made her emigrate or seek refuge in distant lands with different tribes. I now sense it is incumbent upon me to reflect on my own re-entry to my native landscape and those ideas that I have recently written about, e.g., kinetic atmospheres, immersive environments, and technologically augmented realities, with Bonnie’s “dramaturgy as an ecology” in mind—essays she had written in the early 1990s and published in Ecologies of Theatre (1996). In the introduction, she suggests:I have always wondered what Gertrude Stein meant when she called a play a landscape. The marvel of her image revealed itself decade by decade as I discovered how essential landscape, field, and geography are in the conceptual vocabulary of American performance, and the extent to which the idea of nature (or the real) was transposed into a description of performance space by avant-garde artists. That this space would also be a spiritual space accounts for the emphasis on mind and perception in American performance whose subject has always been vision, or revelation.First formulated in a 1993 PAJ essay, “Robert Wilson and the Idea of the Archive: Dramaturgy as an Ecology,” her conceptual notion of ecology as performance space and image of course resonates with Stein’s landscape plays, but also Wilson’s, or other directors’ treatments of scenography, voice, music (John Cage’s “mus/ecology”), and body, as well as, in her view, the visionary, spiritual or revelatory dimension of performance. That essay in fact evolves in response to Wilson’s The Forest production at the Freie Volksbühne Berlin in 1988; it fascinates me to observe how Wilson’s “operas” and “plays” (often published as texts and libretti) are interpreted both in a literary and a performative manner as “dispersed” landscapes. With dispersion I recognize the many sources that directors like Wilson (but also Ariane Mnouchkine, Peter Brook, Heiner Müller, Tadashi Suzuki, and the younger generations of auteurs that follow them) utilize for their fusions of themes and levels of aesthetic languages. From Robert Lepage to Milo Rau and Florentina Holzinger, diverse casts and bewildering choreographies rule.Some of their painterly audio-visual compositions provoke associations with landscape, perhaps also Stein’s verbal “geographies,” not in an eco-critical way but tapping into other radical energies (for example, the romantic sublime) manifesting themselves in abstract or virtual spaces rarely seen or heard before, transcending reality, not perceivable in conventional terms of theatre, opera, or dance. Looking at the slowly moving tableaux of Wilson’s early operas and Einstein on the Beach, and their presumed formalist poetic architectures and “dislocations” of the corporeal, my writings in recent years would probe the aesthetic politics of Wilson’s stagecraft to reimagine the perceptional context of the operas and their reception at the time, the political era of Einstein on the Beach’s first production in 1976.3 Critical reflection on reperformances of Einstein (and my growing disillusionment with them) may have helped me to slowly abandon modes of composed theatre, including literary allusions or references to modernist art, and to develop my late work of immersive installations where movement and sonic poetry were attempting to be precise (i.e., not abstract but concrete, responding, for example, to climate catastrophe and environmental degradation by evoking the troubled material, changing, moving turbulences). Stein’s dictum (perhaps adopted by Wilson and his own stage writing, e.g., the CIVIL warS: a tree is best measured when it is down)—namely, that a “landscape does not move nothing really moves in a landscape but things are there and I put into the play the things that were there”—is obviously a poetic conceit, a provocation for Wilson’s extraordinary painterly directorial craft with which he has created the vernacular American sublime of his grand Kabuki fairy tales. The dictum is removed from any dark immanent exposure to the contingent, dynamic, elemental world.The trees were down. My return home, in 2022, happened during the pandemic, and there were storms and floods. It resolved many issues of the virtual for me, the efforts we had made over the past ten to twenty years experimenting with online performance and then with interactive wearables (costumes designed by Michèle Danjoux for our DAP-Lab ensemble). We had imagined that the stage could extend into digital/VR dimensions, while interrogating the computational universe, trying to undermine it. We built hybrid spaces, offering audiences a very tactile, sensorial experience; in one example, asking them to touch the dancers’ costumes or listen closely to the tiny sounds or vibrations emitted from the wearables. They were also given VR headsets to put on and enter into spaces not-there, virtual landscapes like the (digitally rendered) red island of Madagascar, in kimosphere no.4 (2017), the place where lemurs had migrated forty million years ago, floating from the African continent on rafts of vegetation searching for a space without predators.The time of catastrophic climate change invited ritual re-entries into damaged ecospheres. After 2020, exploration of a new commons, and new mediations or different logistics of transmission, became vital. We had been disabled. Though neither “locked down” nor virtualized (online supposedly becoming the new “live normal”), we were distanced from communal offerings of live art and of ways to touch the living. The day of the dead parade canceled too. Choreographer/conceptual artist Ralph Lemon, while working on his Geography Trilogy, asked the right question in a multimedia performance: How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere?I remember what he called his in the late away from stage seeking out in East then and in the American writing for of home to and of In his exhibition Museum and installation an with a and from traveled there to do different with including a of In the in a and or a old on by a in an the scenes a place old but also a a that perhaps as and in for the ruins of as the dance in home where is by a ten of in How Can You Stay in the House All an performance where a did in her the to In her case, one own was neither romantic nor I home to damaged landscapes. The offered a a of a that even from I that was It had always been and of The We were in to and I had spiritual the a I imagined the that on a where one was life was by us to theatre from all over the about their in time with on of the Theatre of the on was I got invited to a performance in 2022, I The of with in working with me in of The question of live performance had been in of the I to work with to from We from home, or in with social theatre, I is a theatre in the of is it a and How do we the storms of and for after the of the built upon it is we have to what is out into landscapes that are and to follow the lines, the and and The in theatre, and is vital. It us of the of which also is or with the of I it in the of my in exploration of in the more at this time when our have been and we need to them to to the of are in the and in we with our social and what of We in our begin to in our over a of not what The their me, me, audiences I them to a on the their questions as for communal such we a kind of of energies and up us in our of and are from and political in the as as the of performance, public How to write about this geography, my landscape play for an next in the I have I up in The a I and me on the lines, I and just at me, with a I begin to the we use for a It down, with on the on for life, I into the view, and I am I to them in my native they in their native I do not know when my next dance performance this and the of the hear the a it into and of the the for video performance my dance to a bitter I had hardly I through the the me down. I cannot return home, as I have been away for in different of and with the that thing with The to the Latin into an I home, the had to I first heard the I the was to my social and retreat into the of The of It be I told my that I would to as as I or until they it.