Page 87 - PIP

The performers’ efforts to control the objects and bring them into a stable arrangement (and to thereby create a final image that would eventually fix what these things signify), fail on every occasion. And the showcasing of the failure of the performers, despite their efforts, brings an almost clown-like humour to the stage. The associations uttered by the performers orbit around the objects and their meanings start to oscillate, they become unstable. Meanwhile the materiality of the objects apparently influences, if not triggers, specific actions and associations on the side of the performers. Layes succeeds in staging language, actions and objects in their permanent interconnectedness. According to quantum physicist and philosopher Karen Barad, the semiotic and the material are always entangled in complex intra- actions2. Sometimes multiple levels of meaning are revealed in the most humble daily objects, other times the meanings of these objects are depleted in actions without a goal, in infinite loops or reiterations. For example, Layes embraces the endless task of drawing a circle with grains of sand while this very circle is constantly erased by someone else – a kind of Sisyphean task. In such scenes, Layes displays activities or work devoid of any result or product. The extended and flattened space of time that emerges from these processual choreographies is characte- rized by wasted, non-teleological time. Boris Groys wrote about time-based contemporary art:
“[...] it thematizes the non-productive, wasted, non- historical, excessive time — a suspended time, ‘stehende Zeit’, to use a Heideggerian notion. It captures and demonstrates activities that take place in time, but do not lead to the creation of any definite product.”3
As an example he mentions the animation Song for Lupita (1998) by Francis Alÿs. “In this work”, he writes, “we find an activity with no beginning and no end, no definite result or product: a woman pouring water
from one vessel to another, and then back. We are confronted with a pure and repetitive ritual of wasting time—a secular ritual beyond any claim of magical power, beyond any religious tradition or cultural convention.” There is a moment in Things that surround us when it is indeed difficult to say who is choreographing whom: the performers the objects or the objects the performers? The performers are continuously confronted with the recalcitrance of things that time after time defy their plans and are not wrapped up in their functions. Hence, the performance calls into question the assumption that agency is exclusively located on the side of the performers. The instability of the objects on stage pertains to their materiality as well as to their semiotic existence. The English denotation “bucket” becomes “Beckett” in its verbal reiterations, the chair leg breaks down, the sheet of paper slips to the floor, the broom falls off the broomhandle and the red feather refuses to fly into the bag – even if the performers try to make it do so. The material recalcitrance of the objects reminds us that things and materials do not necessarily conform to the cultural, social and linguistic constructions and projects of human actors but often appear, as described by Bruno Latour, first of all as troublemakers or disruptive elements. Regarding both humans and non-humans, Latour has stated that actors define themselves first of all as obstacles, as scandals, as those who disrupt suppression and override domination, those who interrupt closure and the constitution of the collective.4
As things are not involved as stable objects but rather as elements of a material structure that has a certain autonomy, 'Things that surround us' proposes to conceive of (theories of) action and movement detached from the ideas of mastery, governance and control. The performance proposes an understanding of choreography as an art of listening and activation rather than as an art of disciplining.
87