See Appendix I, p 189.

Philippe Gaulier, principally concerned with the pleasure of the performer, stages his pedagogy as an articulately playful series of layerings and developments of ‘games’ and improvisations that in the first instance hold the performer ‘off’ or away from rushing directly to the performative task. His teaching tactic, and a common ‘rule’ for the performer within an improvisation, is to move around the thing — scene, task — and not go directly to it, to ‘character’ or text, because the character or text is too ‘heavy’ of itself and will ‘kill’ the performer. Gaulier does not ‘explain’ or theorise this strategy, though he sometimes ‘names’ it in setting up a particular improvisation. This is part of his stringent refusal and deprecation of the performer ‘knowing too much’. Reading backwards and forwards via Hillman, it might be possible to say that Gaulier’s assumption could be that the performer’s ‘self/ego’ — that part of their subjectivity that would always ‘stand up’, achieve, succeed and ‘do well’ — too often ‘identifies’ with the task or text, with all of its received associations and traces of ‘normalising’ assumptions and judgements. These carry ‘weight’. The ego literalises, trapped in a conventional ‘reality’, and strives for a kind of ‘knowing’ which in performance often appears heavy and amounts to a kind of banal double-guessing which curtails the ‘play’ of possibilities. Gaulier’s strategy to defy such mass and ‘gravity’ is to invoke, provoke, and address the task first via the pleasure of the performer. This, he says, does not exist in the text itself, nor in the scene, nor in the assumptions and conventions of a particular genre — Naturalism, for example, or even Tragedy. The pleasure of the performer — as distinct from, though not opposed to, the ‘character’ — contains all of the lightness of tactics and game playing. It is, Gaulier intimates, almost a contradiction in terms to be unhappy with your own tactic. It is this lightness and pleasure that is then addressed to text, character, and the ‘choreography’ of a scene.

In devising the Rapture performances, the weight of association and identification was redoubled, partly because I was often working with texts I had written, and partly because the content and materials I had otherwise chosen (already identified with) concerned subjectivity itself. To create ‘distance’, slippage, and ‘play’ between my self as a writer/deviser of the materials and the ‘roles’ and voices I sought to enact, I set up structures that ‘held me off’, or forced me to approach text, or movement, or transitions between episodes indirectly. For example, early in the process of working on ‘Gee-up Horsey’ (see p. 119 above), an episode that appeared in all three solos, I

set physical and imaginal limits and games that would string me between worlds. Physically, I attempted to play a horse with a man’s legs (an inversion of the image of the Centaur) — first four, then two, then mixing it up. My game was to never fully arrive at the ‘gravity’ of one physical world over another. In this, there is a little fight, struggle, a resistance, oscillation, and new and non-habitual rhythms and forms. This was a strategy to participate in an act of transformation, dissolving the solidity of my preconceptions, and defying the sometimes singular weight of my identifications. This ‘singularity’ might otherwise be understood as a ‘tyranny’. I focussed first on the movement and physical tasks, and gradually introduced the speaking of the text. Similarly here, I played first with resisting the influence of the movement — ‘speaking through’ its efforts, strains and dynamics. Gradually I allowed the movement to impact upon my speaking voice, disrupting order, tone, ‘sense’ and the rhythmical flow of the text. I played in and out of these variations, hunting out pleasure and the lightness that could otherwise sustain what was written as a kind of ‘dirge’. In stages, I re-incorporated fragments, qualities, tones and even new words that came out of the improvisations back into much simpler and less ‘dynamic’ (in the sense of locomotion) versions of the scene/episode. I finally played this episode during the performances with a simple rocking and circling motion, and with two distinct voices. One deep and immediate, the other strangely high, lilting and reaching for distance. These decisions derived from another strategy — that of ‘reducing the scale’ of the movement, the voice, space, and scene (see p. 177 below). I was concerned not to imitate or caricature horses, for example, but to ‘contain’, compact and ‘bury’ some of these physical and imaginal worlds, their pleasure, ‘libido’, and play in the performance of the scene.

‘Horses’ make an appearance in a number of the episodes in each of the performances. Some of the physical vocabulary of the ‘inverted Centaur’ I had worked with in the improvisations above found its way into the ‘small dance’ of the ‘Opening’ of Rapture, the ‘Lullaby Dance’ in Rapture II, and ‘A Place Where it Rains’ in Rapture III (see pp. 70, 86, 114 respectively). In this way, I sought to ‘lace’ or ‘seed’ these physical and imaginal worlds throughout each performance — though not necessarily at the site where horses were explicitly mentioned in the texts. Perhaps, in this way, some of the ‘strangeness’, the fictions lurking behind the scene, the unexplained and barely visible ‘engines’ for some of the episodes might be

understood as ‘lies’. I attempted to meet ‘little tyrannies’ (singular identifications, literalisms, egoisations, for example) with ‘bigger lies’: the slippage, playfulness, undecideability and pleasure of physical, fictional and imaginal strategies that might break up the weight, banality and inertia of the ‘tyranny’ in question.

Italo Calvino speaks of “the search for lightness as a reaction to the weight of living”12 _{as an existential project. He situates this project firmly within terrestrial}

limitations, eschews the lightness of ‘frivolity’ (banality) for its own sake, and would draw, if he ventured into these terrains, a comparison between his “sudden agile leap of the poet-philosopher”13 _{and dancers, actors, singers, teachers and directors. His}

‘memo’, image, or desire for the next millennium would be for them to raise themselves “above the weight of the world, showing that with all [their] gravity [they have] the secret of lightness.”14

Monika Pagneux (see Appendix I, p. 189) situates this ‘secret’ close to the conundrum of ‘presence’ and ‘absence’ in performance. Her ‘New Position’, or ‘Up/Down’ — which I have adapted and developed further combining tactical moves from Gaulier and refinements from Anzu Furukawa, now called ‘Mr or Ms New’ (see p. 152 above) — is a detailed combination of physical strategies and positions aimed at transforming physical lightness into imaginal ‘illuminations’. But Pagneux is aware of the ascensional desire in Western dance — most notably represented by ballet — and the downward movement within the position or structure is simultaneously entertained in equal measure with the work of ‘levitation’. The resulting movement vocabulary is radically different from ballet, and even some forms of Modern dance. Imaginally, when this ‘up/down’ movement (conceived as physical ‘work’, and ‘inner attention’) is given a trajectory, locomoted, or ‘thrown’ back up and ‘out’, what was a dynamism in stasis becomes a kind of sine or sound wave in literal and imaginal space. This account may approach something of what Pagneux means when speaking of ‘presence’ as a ‘song inside’ — but it is not her language, and she does not approach her own work in theory in this way.

12 _{Calvino, Six Memos, p. 26.}