Marcus Bell
On Friday 25th of October we gathered in Shoreditch Town Hall for the 25th birthday of Home Live Art. Commissioned by current director Katy Baird and curated by SERAFINE1369, this salon brought together five queer artists and their collaborators to reflect on live art as a practice of gathering, collision and transformation.1 As I entered the dark space, three dancers were already moving, pressing softly into a bed of soil. The laughter and joy of friends and collages reuniting – downstairs on the stone steps, on the landing, clustered around the imposing double doors, in long marble corridors, the deep spaces, and arriving at the bar – this lovely noise melted away into the incandescent pulse of movement. As limbs carving space became entangled with sound, designed by Josh Anio Grigg: the techno-drive and the honeyed voice of the rave. We open into this penetrating darkness, into a looping and durational array of work, by artists keyon gaskin, Liz Rosenfeld, Florence Peake, Adam Christensen and SERAFINE1369.
‘I’ve been looking for things that last’, SERAFINE1369’s voice intones – over the soil and into the bones of bodies, the still moving bodies gathered –, ‘but other than plastics and systems of oppression, I don’t know what there is’.2 The text is a rich score for the dancers’ choreographic tasks, providing a system of entryways and exits, a ‘network of holes’ we can burrow through. I can hear references to Judith Butler (‘if I lose you under these conditions, then I not only mourn the loss but I become inscrutable to myself’)3 and to Anna Tsing’s now perhaps infamous The Mushroom at the End of the World,4 through the invocation of the mycelial and its politics of decomposition. I can hear Christina Sharpe’s voice in the insistence on a radical practice of living that emerges from the terrors of the present, in repeating resonant notes of defiance and the politics of making beauty under conditions of incredible violence, duress and mass death.5
Steph McMann, Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome, and SERAFINE1369 spiral and settle into the soil, slowly moving through syrupy and tensile explorations – an open fourth position in the arms, a glitching loop in one dancer’s chest which pulls them through time, cycling, a pattern in repeat. Spherical-bones in the hip socket breathing to allow for a deeper articulation through the vertical axis, as hands softly trace and hold invisible bodies in the air. Until a dancer, who finds a memory or an impulse, offers a line of flight: a rise or bend through space, sending ripples through the loam, the clay-loam the sandy-loam – through the chorality of our witness. Our bodies – already ecologies of elation, want, and grief – decomposing. I can taste the soil in the back of my throat as they slowly crawl towards the exit. As SERAFINE1369 reminds us ‘here we are consuming plastic and searching for healing’. Florence Peake holds open the rich silence that comes after the applause, and breathes life into absence, tending to its bruised yearning song. It’s blue green emptiness. An introduction to the first of a series of channellings – described as prayers, as incantations, or exorcisms of the current moment – in this, Peake invites us to think about that which lives in in our bodies. An inventory of that which refuses to fade, cumulates as people continue to gather and to fill the space: the remains of the day, the stress of the commute, the tender bruise of a lover’s kiss, vibrations of loneliness, complicity and brutalism. Later in the evening someone will cry out for Palestine, naming the pain which goes unspoken in this moment. These are the conditions of the performance. The murder of over 42,000 people, with over 100,000 people injured, 90% of the population displaced and two-thirds of buildings destroyed in what is now widely recognised as a genocide,6 the continuous use of our public funds to support the ongoing illegal Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and the extermination of its population, the transport of F-35 fighter jets to Israel from a British airport base in Norfolk, memories and plans, perhaps, of attempt at marches, die-ins, at lock-ins to halt this Britain’s seventh genocide, and the rot of Empire, to unspool the web of colonial relations and histories which structure the ongoing violence in Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, Sudan.7
Peake works this into the clay, producing a series of sculptures that will sit on the stage throughout the night: one representing us, one representing them, and one representing the relationship between them and us. The clay leaves grey smudges on her dress. A microphone picks up and translates the squelches of this material body, its wetness, and the sensory qualities of its collapsing, as it spreads or is remoulded against her. Held in the air, dropped onto the floor, and shaped with holes punched through for eyes and a yawning scream – the clay traces the frequencies of the room. We are ready to begin. A low humming ‘M’ sound fills the space, a voicing, emanating from deep within Peake, leads to a series of vibrant collapses. A movement score built from the sonic traces left by the gurgling wetness of the three clay bodies, pulled from the immaterial matrix of room’s breath, the atmosphere, our proximities, our ghosts, and the building’s groan. She journeys towards the sky and lifts from the air a delicate phrase of movement, before falling once again into the earth.
The transitions between each work bring us deeper into the questions raised by this searching phrase, ‘I’ve been looking for things that last’ – SERAFINE1369’s title and provocation for the night. As we witness each performer fading out of view and sit in the experience of the gap – between one encounter with live art and another. We might turn the words of the question over in our minds, examine the structure and the history of answers made in relation to the actions taking place in the room. We might then also become passengers in flight looking for these things that last.
keyon gaskin’s work emerges in this space of the not-yet, of awaiting. I don’t know how much I can say or how much I can describe here, as gaskin resists dominant modes of rendering the live through documentation, transaction and exchange, acts of capture and fixation: like the bio, or the artist’s summary, like plastic. But if I were to say something, I would try to conjure their wit, the incandescence of those gestural forms repeating, their skill at crumbling, and their care. ‘What is the difference between trembling and movement?’ SERAFINE1369 asks us part way through the fragment of ‘The Way, the Fortune, the Fall’ within which these other works are nestled. gaskin embodies this question in a collision of technique and anarchy. ‘This is not a character’, they tell us repeatedly throughout the night, before inserting an earbud to sing, Stephen Sondheim’s ‘Send in the Clowns’ (1973), before leaving – to rapturous applause.
Liz Rosenfeld places a small projector down gently, uncovering its aperture to reveal circular forms curling across the back wall. They begins to trace the remains of the previous artists’ work, their fingers running over the folds and furrows of the soil. They build a temporary map, of time accreting, before they too – they find a place to sit with their legs out in front of their body and their hands behind them, palms and fingers rooted in the soil – before they too begin to move in concentric circles. Looping, back around, once more they turn the earth. The music’s gentle frequencies playing a network of this again, as they discover and generate spirals emerging through the soil. Lifting the smell of earth by dispersing particles of dirt, we breath the air, and hear repeated: ‘a hole’, ‘a hole’, ‘a hole’, as they move. They release, lower back and sacrum down on to their elbows, the centipedal force bringing them deeper into the ground, mud-coated, releasing hips, back, shoulders into surrender, round and round, before rising up they bring the spiral out into the space. They trace across, all of us, a smaller loop – the scale has shifted: outer space and orbital – down they wind the trajectory of the spiral towards their heart. And Rosenfeld loops us into the broader sense of orbits within which we participate, as we spin. Through the expanse of space, drifting passengers pressed against the endless voidal force of nothing, circling a central solar pulse, as roots break into a patterned cornucopia of turns, and bodies in curvilinear paths of proximity and their leaving slingshot move, like two friends pulled apart by death or thrown into new positions in the random and beautiful sublime of the everchanging. Life’s transformative pulse – its rhythms are all displayed here. It is a cosmic work.
As they leave Adam Christensen brings us crashing back to earth to inscribe a spiral in into the space in full bodied form, by dragging earth around themselves as a recording plays. This calamity moves us from an impleading cry, ‘Can anyone hear me’ through to the noisy eruptions of a body: its coughs, splutters, stutters. Constructing a macabre and gothic fantasy by describing how they’d like to tear apart their friends for the production of a furniture-set from their corpses. We move into the animating force of all that is deathly, insensible and otherwise downright wrong – as someone’s mouth is wished into an ashtray. There is an additional set of tracings offered to us through painting, testimony, reflection, and projection each mobilised toward a burial, and a wake song – a keening. Light glints from the ceiling, bounding off the surface of circular mirror they hold, before the night itself – like the pleats of Christensen’s accordion folds –, begins to collapse and from here the night loops back around and in onto itself.
SERAFINE1369 returns with the next iteration of ‘The Ways, the Fortune, the Fall’ and the dancer’s gloam through the dark in waves of elegiac slow-motion beauty. Peake asks for a volunteer from the audience, asks them to ask a question: ‘How’ they wonder, they’re on the soil, barefoot, holding a mote of clay, ‘How can we rest?’ The response is searching, violent – full of eroticism and surprise. gaskin returns, placing their bag in an audience member’s lap, searching for something lost, desperate, changing into a t-shirt dress to interrogate the existential dread of aging, finding fragments of movement and release. They leave lavender sprigs in the soil bed – encouraging us to reflect on the intersections between the plant’s queer roots and its use in colonial expansion –, they ask us to rethink greivability, attend to necropolitics, to slow death, to the continuing violence of coloniality, to think on this all before they come back round to see us one final time. As Rosenfeld attends to what has changed in the landscape of the soil, sensing the pulse of the previous artists’ work again in the small disturbances and displacements, they begin to spin the room around. Christensen returns to tell us of her dead friends, murdered perhaps. She is laying dead flowers around the spiral’s curving brow. This time she puts on a floating feathered dressing gown and circles the space toward the end of the action; it is a tragedy she cries out.
Back again SERAFINE1369 and McMann and Muñoz-Newsome come to rave in the ruins of the night. The space is rotting, it’s a compost heap. Then again each artists’ work replays and returns and the soil is deeper in me now, in my lungs perhaps, or coating villi down my oesophageal tract. I can feel it underneath my fingernails. I want it in me, more, I want to take of my socks and shoes and press my open mouth into the mud and breath in. I’m waiting for it, the invitation to inhale, when – suddenly, one dancer falls and pulls, by force of gesture and gravitation, the frame of the work which comes crashing down, and all the others land into a corpse-like pose. Now they lie, still, moving but not moving, breathing into the space.
‘What word is there for absence but haunting’ SERAFINE1369 asks and they dispelled the stability of the present. When does, after all, the present begin? These cycles enact and re-enact the many lives of performance, not only in the present but in the past and future as enmeshed by the queer work of tracing, of tracing a vanishing. Gone, is any possibility of announcing the surety of its borders, of policing entry to it or of naming any of us as its living citizens. Instead, what’s stressed here is inter(in)animacy – live arts’ capacity to enliven and deaden, its co-composition of the inanimate, the absent, the speculative and the co-materialities of collective human/non-human living and dying – choreo-assemblages of sweat and breath and reeking. Performance after all is barely live, at best.8
The salon’s insistence on possibility, of this kind, of returning – back again to earth to feed the necropocene to the ground and the soil – develops something beyond the politics of déjà vu or its opposite: the uncanny appearance of that ‘invisible stranger’ the future, in the present.9 The night enacts instead a spiral, excoriating the ontological question of the live (under what conditions does that which is live come to be seen and known as such?) by expanding the anxiety expressed by that attendant existential question: ‘what remains?’ Perhaps this is a re-invocation of the Phelan debate,10 though it seems SERAFINE1369 is asking us to renegotiate the frameworks through which memory is formed, is understood and to ask ourselves seriously what and who re-members. As each artist practices this mode of return and as the traces accumulate in the soil we must, it seems, radically reconsider the kinds of thing that counts as lasting long enough to count, what survives the vanishing horizons of the present, the vanishing gravity of death? From here we can begin to respond to the question contained within the evening’s title. Surely these answers are numerous. These things that last and outlast annihilation. They are suggested again and again by the durational looping set of rituals brought together by the structure of the night.
However, if the intention of the salon, its choreographic strategies of practice-based research were run only for this reason – like an experiment to locate, and name, but these lasting things. Then, there would be something missing, or unaccounted for. And it’s this I think I am after, or in other words: instead of the choreographic structure of the work I am pulled in by the evening’s anachoreographic drives. Not the impulses to control the rate of decomposition which SERAFINE1369 wagers might be the main concern of their (possibly our) generation – ‘where, with who, and how?’ they ask. No, it’s not just control that interests me but instead the generative degeneracy expressed by ‘I’ve been looking’, in its motile poetic configuration of the impulse to fall apart and its development of the potentials of decomposition as a political practice of release. We can name those traces that remain, of course, and that which is capable of outlasting both systems of oppression and plastics – as SERAFINE1369 reminds us after all ‘everything gets eaten one way or another’. And we could paint a picture of the planet after us, after plastics, a post-post-diluvian/post-post-apocalyptic refrain. But I wager that instead, together, these practices of returning back to gestures and traces worked and reworked, point us not toward the value of stability but to the radical power of the transient – to the very sensory ethics of the fall.
This is a radical opening toward transition. Transition as a material politics in which the ineffable and liberatory gesture resides. It is transition which asks us to seek out and act now to find not a rigid liberal new world order which surely we must reject, but instead an ongoing commitment to the fleeting and ephemeral work of ‘the long middle of revolution’ and the liberation of the earth.11 A live art, transition, that requires us to think beyond our current modes of understanding, past even concepts and genres of being human that exist,12 and to discover that the fleeting, and that non-permanence are both orientations toward the present, past, and future made in ongoing waves – radically unresolved.
In Peake’s final voicing she invited three members of the audience onto the earth. They spent some time working amongst themselves in order to find a final question for a channelling. While clutching a hunk of clay between them, they held breath together and decided collectively to ask ‘how do we find ground, how do we find common ground?’ Through another searching improvisatory response Peake worked until a word began to shape her body, and then she answered ‘this’. ‘This, this, this’ is common ground. It is easy to take the response lightly, and even to be cynical. But since this moment I have been thinking about the stunning ways in which SERAFINE1369’s practice and their curation of the night encouraged us to do precisely that which Peake’s ‘this’ points us to and engage in forms of collective critical reflection and go deeper – by proximity, by alliance, and co-conspiratorial arrangement with the dirt, with waste, excrement and loam, with the orbital politics of falling, falling and falling continuously through space – deeper into decomposition and entropy and release.
We have to take seriously the conditions of the soil on which we stand,13 answer to those buried within it, and find out how their remains through us are rotting and recomposing into new forms. As each of the artists reminds us, there is that which we might say lasts and there are list of lasting things – like petrochemicals, like trauma – but by searching for it what we find instead is the radical unfixed metamorphic power of transition, a strategy through which we make the structures which bind us into the lockstep of ownership and oppression to come undone and fall apart. ‘I’ve been searching for things that last’ brought together five queer artists and their collaborators to reflect on live art as a practice of gathering, collision and transformation. Since then I’ve been searching for ways to describe all of the things I want all of us to tear apart.
Marcus Bell is an Associate Lecturer in Theatre and Performance at Goldsmiths, working on queerness, decolonial politics, tragedy and poetics in dance, choreography, experimental performance form and live art. They have published in several edited collections, a handbook of Classics and Queer Theory, and in the Classical Receptions Journal. They are currently developing a monograph project that emerged from their doctoral thesis on Choreographing Tragedy into the Twenty-First Century and a second project on queerness, choreography and extinction.
Notes:
- A reworking and echo of material from the online description for the night, https://shoreditchtownhall.com/whats-on/ive-been-looking-for-things-that-last ↩
- Thank you to Jamila Johnson-Small who sent me a copy of the text which became the vocal score, I have used it to correct this line, but I have allowed memory to do its work of ‘scramble’ and ‘misremembering’ – as Johnson-Smalls put it in an email to me – with the rest of the text and the rest of the night. I hope this resistance to fix the work speaks to the politics of transition and transformation I believe the work was pointing us toward, and which I work to amplify in this piece. ↩
- Butler, J. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, London: Verso, 2004, 22. ↩
- Tsing, A. L. The Mushroom at the End of The World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015. ↩
- Sharpe, C. Ordinary Notes, London: Daunt Books, 2023. ↩
- See Forensic Architecture ‘A Cartography of Genocide’, along with the UN for additional information, thanks to Phoebe Patey-Furguson for wording here. ↩
- See Curtis, M. ‘Gaza: Britain’s Seventh Genocide’ and ‘F-35 Components Sent to Israel from Royal Air Base’ for Declassified UK https://www.declassifieduk.org/gaza-britains-seventh-genocide/, https://www.declassifieduk.org/f-35-components-sent-to-israel-from-royal-air-force-base/, 23 October and 31 October 2024; See McEvoy, J. ‘UK Exported Parts for Israeli Air Force after Suspending Arms Sales’ for Declassified UK, https://www.declassifieduk.org/britain-exported-parts-for-israeli-air-force-after-suspending-arms-sales/, 13 November 2024. ↩
- Campt, T. M., and S. White ‘In Conversation’, Vimeo, Video, 1:30:12. University of the Arts, https://vimeo.com/430090692?embedded=true&source=video_title&owner=20939174?, 2020 ↩
- Benjamin, W. & Eiland, H. (2006) Berlin childhood around 1900, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 49. ↩
- See, recently Phelan P. ‘Notes on Hope: Revisiting Unmarked 30 Years Later’, TDR: The Drama Review, 68(2):7-10, doi:10.1017/S105420432400011X, 2024. ↩
- Tbakhi, F. ‘Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide’, Protean Magazine, https://proteanmag.com/2023/12/08/notes-on-craft-writing-in-the-hour-of-genocide/, 8 December 2023. ↩
- McKittrick, K. and S. Wynter ‘Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species?: Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations’, McKittrick, K. (ed) (2015) Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, 9–89, Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. ↩
- Latour, B. ‘Is Europe’s soil changing beneath our feet?’, Group d’études géopolitiques, 92-97, https://geopolitique.eu/en/articles/is-europes-soil-changing-beneath-our-feet/, 2022. ↩