PERFORMANCE AT PLAY, PUBLIC SPACES AND THE VIEW FROM A HAYSTACK

Crawling across the street at night

Some years ago, when I was walking down a street at night with performer Kristian Al Droubi, I asked him if he would crawl naked across the street at a pedestrian crossing. The street itself was empty. It might have been one or two in the morning. If anyone had come by, they’d probably have been drunk and had a good laugh. Novi Sad is a tiny town and exciting things can happen all the time here, because no one would be around to notice or shut it down.

Kristian belongs to the I’ll Do Anything school of performance art and he stripped down and went for it immediately. I got a few blurry shots, because it was too dark and maybe we were also too drunk, or maybe we were sober. This is one of those things we’d both want to do, drunk or sober. I tried, later to use some of those blurry photographs in a video, but really the only thing you could use them for was to catch the shadowy edge of a dream.

This wasn’t work, though our work often looked like this. It was something like putting out feelers, touching the moment, the night, the empty street, the feeling of wilderness that comes over you sometime after midnight. If you were to try and experience a moment by sticking out your tongue and tasting it, it would look like this. 

Most of our work and most of the work I’ve done with performers started from this, a desire to taste the world, to know it intimately, to not colonise it so much as feel it. Most of our image collaborations were made in public spaces. Gathered around a source of childlike awe – this tree! That pile! These stones! This abandoned house!

This tree! That pile!

I met Kristian even more years ago, at a traveling residency called the Art Karavan. The Art Karavan took us across the north of India in trains and buses, stopped off for about a week in different cities and expected its artists to do something everywhere. Production was not insisted on, which was a good thing, as said artists wandered around blearily in the blistering heat, somewhere between starvation and hospitalisation for the last thing they ate, tried to find their work, lost their phones, fought, got lost and slept.

At that time, performer Manola K Gayatri and I were working on a photo-performance video called Sunchaser. In Shantiniketan we found a tree. It was a fallen tree, and a whole world. She climbed, crawled, meditated and sat on it, within it and inside of it. I followed with the camera. It could’ve lasted a lifetime. Maybe it did.

In Calcutta we found large cement pipes on the road while we were looking out of a bus. The next day, we made our way to the approximate location by asking around. Then we made our way to the actual location by asking for the thing we couldn’t name. Big pipes! Cement hoops. Big thing circle gesture with hands. Round things on side of road! Amused locals sent us to approximately the right place. A small family was living in one of them. We picked an empty one and did a quick shoot before making our intricate way back to the guest house.

Some years later, when I was working with performer Katarina Valdivia Bruch, I remembered the tree in Shantiniketan. We had found other trees, but the thing that came closest was actually a metal sculpture in Chitrakala Parishad. It was, also, a whole world. Katerina swung on it, did a precarious tightrope walk along its edges, and very literally played with it. There are not too many works of art in this world that you can play with, though you can always play with a tree. 

These are, possibly, the most joyful explorations you can make of a world. Play as work. Performances of one. Performances of two or more are a crowd. The question of engaging with public spaces then becomes much more complex. The air is fraught with possibility, and very often, with the potential of actual physical injury. 

Performance as procession

When Kristian joined the Karavan, he dragged the rest of us into a performance called Rice. He wanted to find a really public place, and picked on the Patna train station. We were to paint our faces white, hold a spoonful of rice in our mouths, start at the entrance to the train station and make our way to the centre, doing a slow butoh work and not emptying the spoon along the way. At the centre, we would empty our spoons into a tray and say Rice, in an assortment of languages (there were many). This was to be a big group, so even non-performers like me were roped in and ruthlessly painted white, though we really didn’t want to be putting toxic shit on our skin. Students from the art college we were staying at also joined in.

We walked to the train station, because how else would we get there? Not like the karavan had a caravan. So you might say the performance began on the streets. Like all weird processions, we were watched with curiosity but without much interest. What do you make of a stream of painted faces? Nothing but exciting photographs. 

At the Patna train station, however, we had to split up, load our spoons and walk. Then the world changed. I remember having this moment of absolute claustrophobia, when suddenly every other performer disappeared, and I could see nothing but a crush of faces in front of me, all around me. Each of us was surrounded by a group of curious observers, but surrounded is the wrong word, too spaced out. Each of us was held within a tight, intimate ring of not observers but rhythmic participants that had to match our movements to keep watching, like some kind of intimate, slow group dance.

I started out terrified, but when I realised I could move, and just as slowly as I was supposed to, I started breathing again. I could hear the whispers all around. The performance did not involve speaking or explaining, so people were making up their own explanations. They’re talking about the price of rice, they were saying. I don’t know what the price of rice was, at the time. We weren’t talking at all. This performance was not a protest. It was probably Kristian’s way of saying hello to the landscape of the city. But it was read, through nothing more than the very precious act of moving through a crowded space and not spilling a spoon of rice. The dearness, the delicate hold we have on food, this was communicated, physically, incidentally. 

Be not afraid. Because, if you put your tongue out and taste the air now, you will find it warm. That tight circle is not going to eat you, it is supporting you, it is ensuring that you will make it to the end. After that, we made our way home without too much excitement. When we reached, we met friend and visual artist Gopal, who had declined to join in. He was enraged. It’s dangerous! He screamed. Could’ve become a riot! 

But it didn’t. Grain of rice, seed, holds within it the magic of possibility. It could become anything. It became wonderful. 

It could become anything

Interestingly, Gopal himself made a performance that was an energetic conflict-zone. Gopal has a gift for spectacle too, and the ability to make a thing of beauty in an empty field. He chose an empty field in the university campus we were staying at and made a tree out of a bunch of dead branches. On the tree, he hung condoms filled with water, which looked like, well, balls. There was music playing, Yola dancing and Gopal, lolling under the tree, moving sinuously, every once in awhile reaching out a weary hand and breaking a ball.

We all watched with earnest worry, as we were crushed closer and closer by an angry group of men. I thought many times about what made them so angry. This was another unexplained performance. Just music. A slow dance between two separate entities who did not even consider meeting for a duet, but worked in mute parallels. But the rage in the crowd was electric, and this time there were no words to catch, just mutters and shoves and a seethingexcitement. 

I think about what Gopal was performing. Not femininity. Not even the effeminate. Not a direct attack on manhood, or even masculinity. He petted each ball affectionately before he broke it. I think now that it was a performance of frailty. The delicate nature of manhood, not man, not masculinity. A thing that can be broken. Action is understood before it is comprehended. Most of the men watching seemed to want to break something, and I was really afraid that that thing would be Gopal, or Yola. 

Instead, there was a surprise ending, again. Yola, possibly catching on to the oppressive frustration in the air, popped the last ball before Gopal could reach it. The performance had ended and there was a roar of rage, and we all clutched ourselves or each other. But the focal point of the rage was much more distant. The audience, at this time, was entirely men, apart from the karavan. Men and boys. But they had spotted a group of girls who had gathered on the rooftop of the girls’ hostel to watch the performance from a safe distance.

The roar was directed at them, and the girls, hearing it, turned and ran. Ran from a roof within a building which was walled and gated and locked. That’s how scary it was. The men ran across the field to terrorise them a little further and we picked ourselves up and the remnant of the tree and ran back to our rooms.

When I look back on that performance now, I’m amazed by two things:

1. How easily, how conversely, the acknowledgement, even the holding of physical frailty, produces so much rage.
2. How easily that rage could be redirected towards the most vulnerable target, no matter how distant.

The grain of rice, the seed of possibility, the making of a thing. It could be anything. Private is also public. The more intimately private, the more volatile the public.

Cairns

Much more recently, a couple of years back, we were in lockdown. I was locked down in my parents’ house. Kristian was locked down at a friends farm on the outskirts of the city. Most of the other people I’d worked with were locked down in other countries. We spoke to each other online, like we’d always done, because we’d spent most of the years we’d known each other in different countries. Just not locked down.

I sent writing, yoga videos and music to Kristian and Gayatri. Kristian sent pictures of bugs, animals, himself. Eventually he started sending videos of himself, crawling around the empty fields at night, walking through an often sodden landscape. There was all this restlessness and hunger in the air.

Every time we spoke, tried to have an actual conversation, we fought. The one thing we both felt, the one thing we couldn’t communicate, and couldn’t bear to resonate with, was absolute fear. The sight of an ending. You know, as birds know, as spiders know, that there is a storm coming. 

You know, you always know, when you are about to become obsolete. Already become. If we were to just step out of the little bubble of lockdown numbness for a minute, if we were to witness that empty street, we’d know without a doubt, as our bodies were communicating, that our little path in the woods had reached a dead end.

That sounds more exciting than lockdown looks. It’s all gone, you’d say, lockdowns over, it was this and that, now it’s something else. But that’s the thing. The ending doesn’t look like a closed-off road or an empty street. It looks like a world transformed. There was this and that then, now there’s something else. 

The weather that drives you back indoors. The loss of work, the loss of appetite for work. The lack of money. The expense of mobility. The inability to change, to adapt, to perform on Zoom, to feed the zeitgeist. This war, that sky, that rain, this cold, this empty wallet. 

Sometime during a spell of frustration at the farm, Kristian started building cairns. Stones on stones. It started with one or two. Then there was a field full of cairns. They got bigger and bigger. I think about what cairns are. A focal point for energy. A focal point of rage, frustration and fear, if those are your energies of the moment. A thing and an action. A practice and a prayer. A message to the earth and a message to the skies.

Kristian complained to me, a couple of months later, that his lockdownmate dismantled his cairns and removed all the stones, one day, without telling him. I was sympathetic. I was actually in pain. I understood exactly why they were made, and why they were removed.

Public spaces

Now that, technically, public spaces are accessible again, now that, technically, the world is open again, I think about what happens in public spaces.

1. People rush through them as they try to get the fuck out of them and get to work and get home.
2. People huddle at the transformed spaces that they can still access, financially.
3. Genteel protests happen within an acceptable theatre of carefully coded moral right and moral wrong.
4. Another kind of protest happens which is not so much protest as scream of rage, frustration and hunger. At all that was lost, including work, home and food.
5. Floods, unseasonal rains, unseasonal mists, unseasonal cold, unseasonal heat. Into your heart an air that kills and tells you to go home. Stay indoors. Lock your doors. Turn on the lights. Turn up the heat. Turn on the AC. Sleep.

Prayers

A few months back, somewhere in the heart of winter, I asked Kristian what he was making and he said nothing. I asked him to send me something, and sometime later I got a video from him. The video was a thing I’d seen before, and could see again a thousand times. Usually a favourite of photographers and video artists. A bunch of floating shiny balloons.

Kristian walking, on a winter’s night, with a bunch of balloons. It is cold, a snowy night, you can hear his breath rasping and the crunch under his feet as he walks. The balloons are just a glimmer. If life turned itself around, and shadows ruled, and light lived on the edges, on the fringes, then your balloons would look like this.

He ties them to a bush and releases them one by one. He is not a patient person but he is a patient performer. So we wait for the balloons to become invisible, as snow falls and nothing very much is even visible. 

He has added some music. I remember only the hum, now. But I also remember thinking to myself, holy night. The near invisible thing, drifting off into the sky, looking like nothing more and nothing less than a prayer. The focal point of energy. A message from the earth to the skies.

Broken things

A few months back, I met Kristian after more than a year. You’d think this would be a poignant moment of contact where we’d sum up our losses in a state of peaceful non-acceptance. Instead, we talked about the usual things, the weather, ourselves and how annoying we found each other. We did the usual things, going to the market, exclaiming over weird toys and a remarkable collection of definitely used-looking dildos. Walking around. Arguing.

I took a lot more photographs of non-performers that I have done in fifteen years. Since I always asked before I photographed, and there were no spontaneous moments, I treated this as mini-performances. Fuck spontaneity. I have never wanted it. Let everyone know that they are being photographed, all the time, let them engage. Landscape is not meant to be colonised, and neither are people. The performer and photographer, in every public performance, are meant to walk away with a little flag planted right over their hearts.

On one of our walks, we found a pile of sticks. Dangerous, sharp-looking sticks, but neither of us could resist. Kristian walked in, and I took some photographs of him falling, getting stuck and getting injured. Since we had just been arguing, I felt vindicated and vengefully satisfied. Soon after, I slipped in, got scratched, and we argued our way out. Once upon a time, this would have afforded us hours of mutual abusiveness and we would’ve gone back to the same place many times because it was so cool. A full video would emerge of the finally-acclimatised performer making his way with infinite grace through a clump of dangerous-looking sticks. 

Instead, I have about ten seconds of the head of the performer wincing in pain in a hostile nest of sticks. But this is fine. This is satisfactory. The video is still unmade. But this is more than I hoped for.

I thought I would have a sum total of nothing at all. I had considered leaving my camera behind, before I’d left. I thought our world was broken. Now I realise, have we not always played with broken things? Something has been lost, for sure, but it is not precisely what I thought it was. Our work was collected around fragments, things we found on the way to something else, things we found while we were lost or arguing. Things that might’ve been washed up on the shore. 

Maybe it is our reach that has shrunk. Accessibility. Or something else.

Abundance

I had some sense of it in a moment at a playground with my two-year-old nephew. He had found a thing – a bud or a berry. It was green. He was holding it like a treasure. He showed me the bush where he’d found it, and said so many! Shocked at the wealth of it. I had a pain in my chest when I heard that. 

All these years, I thought of these tiny worlds as an inexhaustible well. A thing you could draw from endlessly. There was a wealth of things to find, to interact with, to play with, to photograph. A wealth of people who would Do Anything. Scarcity was always limited to resources, to money. The world itself was a wealth of possibility. 

We have not run out of things. I looked at the bush my nephew had discovered, and he was right. There was an incredible number of buds or berries or beads, whatever they were. What is missing is the network of threads that collects to make that perfect knot of person, place, thing, camera, moment, capture. For a long time now, I have been making do with one.

Some months back, I agreed to do a rare thing, appear in front of a camera for a friend, simply because the shoot was happening in a public place. When we were meeting for the fifth time at a ghostly skywalk over train tracks, I had a sense of this being the ghost of what I used to do. And maybe Performer Falling Among Sticks was the faintest sliver of the things we used to make. We were always, probably, overreaching ourselves. Overstretched. Now we manage whatever can be done without stretching at all.

Driving

I have now, three unmade videos and a dysfunctional laptop on which I cannot make them. A month ago, in a fit of rage, I considered breaking it because anyway, everything was broken. I told myself that a few times, a little chant, a small mantra, just to make sure that I wasn’t confused about what I was looking at. 

Then I remembered Crowley, in Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s Good Omens. Crowley loses his job as a lower-strata demon, loses his best friend Aziraphale, loses his bearings and decides that the only thing left to do is drive to the last place Aziraphale had showed interest in. He sets off in his car, which has caught fire. This doesn’t matter much to Crowley, who is after all immortal, but he does, did, love his car, and he loves Aziraphale. Somewhere along the road, though, he decides that he might as well go out in style.

He snaps his fingers, materialises a pair of sunglasses, plays some Queen and continues down the highway in his burning car, which is now entirely held together by the tape and spit of imaginative concentration. 

I think not so much about Crowley as the burning car. A mass of molten metal and blazing heat, continuing to appear as a moving car, just because Crowley wanted it to be one. It’s simply a matter of perspective.

Haystacks

Some years back, a man told me something about sitting in haystacks in villages. From this height, you can see your neighbour’s house and you can be alone. The perfect height. A mountain would be too high, too far. From the ground, you can see nothing but your own house.

I think, from a certain height, if you were to just squint a little and blur out the mess in between, you can retain the shape of a car, or the shape of your world. The threads extend much further now, and the points where all things meet are much more spaced out, for sure. 

Take two steps back, or ten. Climb up a haystack. Wait for the sun to set. Let the shadows deepen. From this distance, from this height, I can make out the shape of my world, and nothing has been lost.

Author: Priyadarshini John