Transductions

On Friday 16th April, at the Nightingale Theatre in Brighton, Jonny Liron and I performed a dance/theatre piece called World of Work as part of the first annual Sussex Poetry Festival.

The score for the piece comprised 62 cards, each measuring 6×4 in., which were created by a range of poets, theatre makers, musicians, visual artists and allied tradespersons, in response to a brief we sent out a couple of weeks earlier:

There are no formal restrictions on what a card might show, except that we do not want to deviate from the 6″x4″ dimensions and we would like the designed element on each card to be on one face only, with the reverse left blank. Cards might show, for example: text to be read, images to be interpreted or recreated, instructions to be followed, notation to be sung / played / performed, found materials to be responded to, any combination of these, or anything else you can think of along these sorts of lines. Any kind of text / graphic / score / stimulus, however proscriptive or indeterminate, is welcome. As well as textual instructions to be printed on a card and followed in performance, you could also send instructions for designing a card or otherwise securing a design — not a card but a meta-card, in other words: this might be useful if, for example, you wanted somehow to leave the precise content of your card partly to chance or a randomized procedure, or if you wanted it to be somehow responsive to the day or place or moment of performance.

 

As the title of the piece suggests, we are inspired particularly in this piece by the notion of the emphatic presentation of performance as a kind of work or labour (which is what we take it to be). Card designs engaging with themes to do with work, labour, occupation, industry, competence, proficiency, output, endurance, value, power relations, the ethics of work and organized labour, work as movement, iterability, ergonomics, time & motion, health & safety, regulation, etc., and the opposites of all of these, are welcome; this list is not exhaustive, and as the performance will itself in any case be signalling in relation to these ideas, we’re also very happy to receive card designs that don’t particularly touch on any of the topics suggested.

Jonny and I looked through the deck of cards the day before the performance, and briefly worked through any that contained instructions which might be too complex to process in media res. Other than that, the only thing we knew about the performance was this: that it would last exactly 43′20″ (the length of our pre-made soundtrack: an edit of Charlemagne Palestine’s Schlongo!!! daLUVdrone [tiny extract here] cumulatively overlaid with the sounds of heavy industry), plus a brief prologue during which Jonny and I would arm-wrestle to determine who would have the privilege of cutting and shuffling the deck of cards. (Jonny won.)

Following my previous post on the wider possibilities for theatre scripts, I thought it might be of interest if I posted here a few of the cards we received and, largely without preparation or rehearsal, performed during the course of the piece. The same question as before applies, I guess: how would you perform these?

Many thanks to all the contributors: not only the 14 represented here but the other 48 who are not (including Transductions contributors Thomas Moore and Kier Cooke Sandvik).

Lucy Cash

Stella Duffy

Jeff Hilson

Mamoru Iriguchi

Elizabeth James

Simon Kane

Michael Kindellan

Dominic Lash

Anthony Paraskeva

Luke Roberts

a smith

John Sparrow

Nikki Tomlinson

Melanie Wilson

my cock is a plug waiting for you a hole squirting while i watch you piss on shit the scars on your finger hurt worse than your new tattoo you wont pay for your credit card and the weed bag is empty shelley has gone to the memory conference and youve gone bard and lord wearing a satin robe and sliming an onyx chair with your prick wet from fresh kill but then i say to you hey master you like it when i call you master i say hey master i will not be a slave anymore and you call me a new name and i jam my fat anvil into your tiny asshole and try to climb you winching you with your arms and slamming you with all the rage of a dying slave until you turn your greater strength against me but for that brief moment you fear i might break away into death the operator of less than the arabic less than an unknot is not a knot if we think of it as an imaginary number it substitutes the productive apathy of western thought that calls militancy what it refines according to the rule of two extremes of greek and chinese philosophy so there is no sign for the middle no operator for the grief of baghdad or the plangeant overgrow you cant take aerosols onto the plane you cant do whippets in the sky and the ornaments of animals eyes and simple moments time worn outside like the gulping of fresh cool water or the touch of your beloved ~ love so simple to call it what to call it when your touch brightens me if i were to cut out that flame and snuff you then what then if i held a bag over your head and clubbed you with my elbows until the sack bled through would we still be in love or would we have to call the world new when the world is the same and the brutal face of it reveals that which is logically true remains empirically false the tantrum of missing and the givenness of eternal loss crosses out the acts of doing sawing fingering whirling pounding eating coming wasting wasting spilling gallons of gunky then watery seed sacrificing nut busting a semenal spirit spit a constant donor of  goo want to excessive together ok 1 2 3 4 color code your fridge and eat cunt beaver pleaser a porpoise with a purpose why dont you die dive not bard i meant barmey my name is barney grummble that is my name dont laugh at me i am tired of people always laughing at me so i plan on dying but not until i reach the bottom of your bottom sweet cheeks i love watching fat ladytits bound as i corn it conshorn it porn it mourn it like tony clifton and swift and old orange porridge the fat gut gleaker a fat fuck a muck why dont you suck my big fat pecker bosom buddy of mine pal otherwise what can we say but boy howdy and whats the weather like in space rainier i betcha hey have you gotten the bends late at night thinking of your aging heart  how much you need to break a sweet smile so you go out a rake and carve up some cutie because this is a) your power and b) how you are immortal by presuming the possibilities that others leave behind them in the words of morality and the gestures of kindness exchanged as though kindess could be exchanged or unformed i put too much conditioner in my hair and now it looks like shit so ill cut it all off with a hedge trimmer and use blood as my pomade featuring thick hips and a pouty bottom lip tits need to be upward pointing and roughly a handful and should boing up in a bounce so when i fuck it it all wobbles i watch it

Dirt, seats,
goods, circuits,
a confetti of tissue,
were flung from
the fuselage.
So what
if the action
didn’t reach
its destination.
A sullen wreck-
age enhances
the morals of
all.

Elm Street was also the name of the avenue on which they shot Kennedy. I say ‘they’ because even if it was only Oswald that actually did the thing – and it wasn’t – still, in the end, it was the sixties that killed Kennedy. That was as clear as the daylight you could see through his head. I hadn’t been invented then, nor would I come about until two decades later, but the need for me arose in that moment. I was spat up into the air like an aerosol.

Since the foundation, I had bloomed like a bad dream in the back of presidential skulls, palmed off from one administration to another, like the Constitution, so that the bullet, when it struck, only half did the deed. The gore let loose was a genie that had been bottled like a shook-up soda inside of them. And they were glad to get it out. So, when I say the sixties killed Kennedy, I’m not talking about the protesting sixties, whose kids I’d later kill. No, I mean the institutional sixties, the prescribed sixties that oversaw everything, the McNamara sixties, the sixties that gave us Johnson then Nixon at freely held elections, those sixties: they were the ones that blew out Kennedy’s brain so they could set their new motor in motion. His brain was a blockage, you see, a clot in the heart. Although, let me add, just so we’re clear – and I say this with all the authority my rank in hell affords me – the sixties didn’t kill Kennedy to get him out of the way, as if he were ever against them. No, no. On the contrary, they would have loved to have hung on to him, had it been practical to do so, handsome plotter that he was. Ah, we would’ve surely wiped the jungle floor with the gooks had he been around to rally us. But the age was secretly bored by how ruled we all were and wanted to have a wilder way with power than the rusty armour of Camelot could ever supply us.

This was the start of the other sexual revolution, in fact, the really X-rated one, the libidinization of disaster coronated when the bullets we gasped at replaced our commander-in-chief’s haloed head with a crumpled-up crown. Osteoporosis was Kennedy’s confidential cause of death, as can be seen on page XXX of the secret CIA autopsy written in the invisible ink of Johnson’s semen, enclosed in an archival envelope licked personally by Nixon. As for me, I came about in time for the invention of the VCR. I am one of the earliest things many remember about their home entertainment systems. My face, you might recall, has been likened to pizza, which people found was the most companionate meal to consume as they sat in circles before me. It’s likely that Clinton, Bush Jr., Obama have all watched my works and know who I am. Though it would be impolite for them to use the presidential PA system to say so and boogie.

In a similar way, it has never been established for certain in the official mythology whether I am a pedophile or not. I might have fucked kids but if I did so, the sense you got was that it was less for the thrill of it than for the pure perversity such an act would entail. My eyes, from the beginning, were always on the adults.

Twenty years after Kennedy died of old age, my burnt top would be the heir to his fetching one, rotten but returned to form, as many-creviced as Reagan’s palimpsestual face. It blossoms now in the dreams of the young, whose professional parents had spent their own youth, in the sixties, trying as hard as they could to stop the chain of deaths that would travel unimpeded, anyway, from that Elm Street to their one. Their discarded labors left their brats freer, alright, scattered like leaves in a desolate yard, with nothing but my knives left to rake them all up. I came back in dreams to put the adolescent autonomy of their elders in order. I arose to their dereliction of duty

The acid ravaged mask of beauty, its lips worn away like the pockets of an old billiard table, an unframed, uncushioned, encastling wall of hard pimpled gum expressionless but for the querying opened up space of it before us; is it not ashamed to look upon our faces?

People say, or would if they could in fact say anything, that beauty is an umbrella term. I agree but this term is an umbrella held out in a storm, upended, turned inside out, glinted spokes swinging broken and useless, it’s pants pulled right over its head. It is to be thrown in the hallway, curated only by the indifference of hoarders, while we drip sodden with what it couldn’t stop.

Still, something persists. Don’t wallflower there. It’s us, it is always us, who are to blame. We dressed you wrong. Expected too much. What were you for? Don’t look away. A world of resemblances surround you.