Moving with ghosts

Abstract

The relationship between artistic research and dramaturgy is marked by a discursive vibrancy. Lois Brown (NL) and Thea Patterson (QC) explore their relationship to research, a way to crack open structures and peer between them; dramaturgy, a way to structure research; and movement, the location of their inquiry. Thea and Lois use the pleasure and pain that identifies their somatic presence to respond to emergence in their hauntology. Does this research and dramaturgy offer a re/solution to personal loss? Can we respond to this together as we move, because we move, in moving? This is not only a lecture, a reading of our script, a sharing of our research, but also a summoning, a connection to the audience witnesses, at times to move, to perform with us, all with dramaturgical implications, liminal possibilities, and their own summoning of ghosts.

On the table, we can see a silver cloth, a dictionary missing its covers, and some wooden tiles. There are other objects, but we can’t quite make out what they are. In the middle is a small pile of fifty index cards. The audience sits in a semicircle about eight feet back from the table: this creates an in-between space. Lois and Thea take their places behind the table. 

THEA

We wanted to start by sharing a bit about our dialogue and methodology.We have been collaborating since about 2010 in various capacities, as makers, dramaturgs, and performers. For this lecture performance, because we live several thousands of kilometres from one another, the process took the form of the written, coming at our topic, Moving with Ghosts, each from particular but intersecting lived experiences. For me, this follows a literal ghosting as I attempt to reconcile the loss of my life partner and collaborator in 2021 through what I call dramaturgies of un-nevering in my new work of the same name, which glimmers in the veil between presence and absence.

LOIS

And for me, after an accident in 2008 that left me with an invisible disability, I continue to reframe the ghosts of past and future bodies, objects, lands, and water through the lens of what I refer to as archipelagic dramaturgies, and informed by a subcategory of crip time (Kafer 2013) – time travel.

THEA

Loosely using the 100-word score of anthropologist Kathleen Stewart and Lauren Berlant (Berlant & Stewart 2019) as a starting point, we took key words from each of our practices, unfurling their ghostly reverberations and moving the text from that place. We then structured the words through a process of intuition and association where we actively resisted the urge to foreground linearity, asking for, or allowing things to emerge in the way the texts collide, and diffract. We are curious what ghosts arrive in the gaps.

LOIS

Here are the words we worked from: Hauntology, Shadow, Spectre, Glimmer, Ghosts, Islandness, Time travel, Invisibility.

Lois picks up a card and reads it.

LOIS

In June 2008, I was in Vancouver to open a play I had directed. At the intersection of Georgia and Jervis, as the walk light came on, I stepped on to a crosswalk. I was knocked down and run over by a charcoal-coloured SUV. Ever since, the other side of the street has seemed further away.

THEA

The news came to me with a knock at the door. The computer I used to write these words in my lap. To even hold this page, or that computer again is to grapple with the cleave of that knock on the door … The news of your leaving, the most embodied sensation I have ever experienced.

Thea carefully picks up the orange jacket from the table. She searches for, then finds a place for it in the in-between space. As she places it, it fills with air. We watch the air slowly leave as the garment settles on the floor. It makes an outline of a body.

LOIS

After my accident, I moved to Montréal and I would freeze on a crosswalk, in the middle of a busy street. Time was, in those moments before I was touched, nudged, pushed, or shouted at, crumpled and vacant. As people rushed ahead of me: time stood still, then rushed forward, then backward, feverishly re-negotiated by my dysregulated nervous system. Suddenly, I am jerked forward at a great velocity, and I find myself on the other side of the street. This specific aspect of crip time are the accelerations, changing velocity – what Ellen Samuels calls the “jerky stops and starts”of time travel (Samuels 2017). I am in the future, moving backwards into the present.

THEA

In 2018 I married my partner, long time artistic collaborator and best friend, Jeremy Gordaneer. Three years later, on August 31, 2021, he was the victim of (a still unsolved) homicide while visiting his mother and sister in Victoria, BC.

LOIS

I worked at Playwrights’ Workshop Montréal as their Artist in Residence and as an associate dramaturg. Late at night, I watched reruns of Toddlers and Tiaras (2008–2013) till the sun came up. Then, back and forth I went between the stove and the metro, again and again; before, at last, I descended into the hole that would take me to work. I was becoming less substantial. Disappearing, now translucent.

THEA

Can a thing be visible in its barely there-ness? The least possible. The hint of it. I ask myself, can I do less? And what if I could do even less than that? Would you still see me? Not quite taking presence, but not absent either. It travels on the inside of my body. I can feel it even now as I read this. It’s passing across my spine, rolling through my shoulders, catching itself behind my eyes. This visibility, free of a demand to be very visible, is not invisible and yet maybe it is visible invisibility … nothing passes away.

LOIS

I am fascinated by toddlers putting their hands over their eyes and insisting “Now, you can’t see me” … Like this.

Lois looks to Thea. Thea demonstrates.

LOIS

(continuing)

The idea: what I think I conceal from you is you, concealed from me. What is not here for me is not there for you.

THEA

What are the connections in this liminal experience … the presence of absence and the absence of presence? How can we be sustained, as we dance, as we engage in the glimmering emergence of these aesthetic containers or things we make that might look like rituals for living and dying (Cools 2021) and for entering the gap of the still to be imagined, and transforming ourselves, and even the world, in tiny increments of process and practice … Grounded by glimmer … as structures of ghostly relation that pass through embodied states of knowing and across durations of time (Deleuze 1991) … glimmer … A space of wildness … both in the body and in the world and out of the world or in between … glimmer.

LOIS

Put your hands over your eyes. Like this.

Thea places her hands over her eyes.

Lois and Thea wait for the audience to respond to their invitation.

LOIS

(continuing)

Breathe for a few moments. Now, say to yourself, “You cannot see me.” Move your fingers apart just a little. Do things glimmer between your fingers? Do I glimmer to you, as you do to me?

The audience considers the glimmery gaps.

LOIS

(continuing)

Inside that synaptic gap where an impulse signals to its realization, now something entirely else happens. A ghost signals from a past or future – invisible, dry, a barely remembered story, signaling as its only substance. To apprehend this something as glimmer allows me to embrace it as both something and nothing – to value and to enjoy – to be moved as it does between impulse and realization.

THEA

Signaling a spectral presence … an almost and a yes also … as possible and still circling around or stretching its landing into form. Can this stretch make way for other kinds of forms, moving landscapes of emergence and re-worldings (Manning 2013a; Manning 2013b)? Or maybe it’s an instance of seeing in the dark. A flash of not quite long enough to become sedimented? Inklings instead of identities? Here darkness is lovingly tended in a world obsessed with the light (Alessandri 2023).

LOIS

(to Thea)

Can you say that last part again?

THEA

Here darkness is lovingly tended in a world obsessed with the light.

(pause)

LOIS

I received an old 1959 edition of an Oxford Concise dictionary, first published in 1911, as a gift.

(picking up a book from the table)

Its covers were detached, and some pages were falling out. I did not want it. It was left to me by my father who had died of dementia a few months earlier. I wanted something – something more valuable. Not this. This list of words. Many of which we no longer use. I resented watching my Dad forget each word he knew, watching them disappear … And now his words, reappearing in an out-dated dictionary. In alphabetical order, no less … I will look up “haunt” and hope that page isn’t missing. A, B, C, D, E

Lois walks into the in-between, setting the dictionary down on the very edge, near the audience.

THEA

What freedom is this out of body body? This body more expansive than the one that is anchored in language … or in a dictionary … This other body, your dad’s body, Jeremy’s body. Hauntologies (Davis 2005) of vapours, and the spaces between that allow the vibrations of matter to matter their way into being or out of being … A trillion cells. Nothing solid here, as I pass through time and space.

Thea picks up the silver cloth – it lifts and falls. She holds it in front of her, so the audience can’t see her, only a square of silver, blinking at them and undulating slightly. Suddenly a silvery ghost appears.

LOIS

De-bodied, unsubstantiated substance.

THEA

A few days after, we were at the beach on the island where I grew up, in shock, moving through a fog. My whole memory of that time comes back to me in sensation and flashes of images. Nothing feels real. Fried food. I had no appetite, but somehow bad fried food … well … some kind of comfort, so we ate fries and chicken strips. Sitting on the sand. This is the beach of my childhood. The beach of my high school years where I first knew Jeremy. Ghosts are everywhere. We are joined by a crow. Let me tell you, this crow was messy and bedraggled … unkempt … “It’s Jeremy the hobo-crow” we cried. We gave it a fry and it proceeded to carefully bury it in the sand.

(aside, to Lois)

Jeremy always did want to be a hobo.

LOIS

So, in my father’s dictionary under “haunt” it says, “a den frequented by criminals.” At first a lawless charcoal impulse transgresses my nervous system, making me freeze. Lately though, after a decade of holding that transgression, I hear my daughter cry out to me when she is not there. I hear a heavy beat driving me crazy and wonder where it comes from, then realize it is my own heart.

The smooth wooden tiles seem to slide into Thea’s hands. She stacks them, shifts them. She takes two and balances each against the other, making a triangle, a tent, a connection. She makes another triangle. And another. Sometimes they fall apart.

THEA

The being and beating of the not there there, and here. Always not quite. Not quite being is also being … being in transition, or as memory. Even unremembered memory deeper than that other one and in the body. Sometimes it’s uncanny and feels like recognizing a stranger or … not recognizing a friend. Sometimes it’s a shiver and an … I am not alone. You are here and here and here there. Time continues to phase and curl.

LOIS

What is with me that is invisible is haunting me – hauntology is my exploration of the systems/structures/dramaturgy of that haunting. Through the exploration of the dramaturgy of haunting I can embrace my “invisibilities” and move “as if” with the special powers of a ghost.

“As if” – the magic words for actors and improvisors.

Lois picks up a clear plastic bag. She pulls it towards her, letting it fill with air. She does it again. On the third time she lets the bag float up above her head, and then lets it land so that it covers her head and shoulders.

LOIS

(reading her card, from inside the bag)

When I was a young artist, directing mostly theatre at that time, we would often work til 3am. Sometime after midnight the actors appeared transparent, their spectral crossing of the stage unsettling. It was as if the secrets hidden behind the wings, the secrets they gained from changing in the shadows caused them to glow. I believed as the spectre is carrying its own history of spectres that the spectral glow I saw would be ever so slightly sensed by the audience when they came to see these actors’ performance three or four weeks later.

Lois pulls the bag off, as she walks into the in-between.

She holds the bag in front of her for a moment and then folds it until she can hold it up – it’s a lightsaber bag. She walks the lightsaber bag around the in-between till it flops over. Suddenly, she crumples the bag into a small ball. Thea begins to read, as Lois places the crumpled bag by her Dad’s old dictionary.

THEA

Like something felt at the edges, tickling or brushing the skin … perceptible imperception, a leftover smudge or an affect or energetic thread carrying past and future. What I might carry is already held. Your spectre. Luxuriate in a luminous spectral presence. These auras … in the things that are left behind. A paintbrush or a line on a page, or a dictionary, or a shoe. Objects carry you forward. Objects carry this. I carry the objects. The spectre is carrying its own history of spectres … over-laid in dust and under-laid in everything.

LOIS

A bird flies into my attic as we talk about Jeremy – me in Newfoundland and you in Victoria, both on islands on the edge of our continent. We are nearly as far apart as you can get. We say the bird is Jeremy. The bird has lit on a ladder in the corner. It swoops across the attic disrupting-un-nevering our discussion about death.

THEA

(to Lois)

A rush of cold air. The sound of footsteps. Objects mysteriously moved. Nothing is where it should be. A colleague of mine, Helen, told me to watch for him in birds. These days though, its shiny objects I see on the pavement.

(to Jeremy)

And like you always did; I pick them up.

Thea gives Lois a safety pin with shiny rings – washers – on it. Lois walks with this gift into the in-between. She slowly lets the rings fall off the pin, one by one.

LOIS

Repetition is a comic device (Bergson 1956). And that’s funny – weird, because repetition is a haunting of sorts. And a practice. But when the memory of the bird (Jeremy) comes to mind I smile and eventually, if it persists, as it will; I will laugh.

THEA

It’s been said that as long as an event continues to carry its charge it remains present (Cull & Lagaay 2014) even if the thing, the event, the person is not here now. Maybe this is what un-nevering means?

LOIS

The birds – are they the thing or the portent of the thing? A messenger from Jeremy or was it him. Or my Mother who had passed only five months earlier. I think it was him … or maybe the portent, the haunting, my openness, and the ghost are the same thing.

THEA

It rolls over me in the instance of waking. It walks with me, shadows me though the day. I am learning to become familiar with its ebbs and flows, its moods, and lessons. Dramaturgies for living … Avalanches of sensation moving through me, moving me through. Shadows of absence, cut outs and leftovers yours, and yours and yours. I gather them, I carry them, and they also carry me.

LOIS

I think it was my Mom. No, it was Jeremy. Or Mom.

THEA

Or Jeremy …

LOIS

Or Mom.

Lois and Thea settle behind the table.  Lois picks up a card and reads.

LOIS

Why move with the ghosts? Because they are there, because we ignore too many things that are invisible. To move as if a ghost because I already do. We ignore these spooky and unsubstantiated parts of our ourselves (the more I ignore these confusing invisibilities, the more confused and inevitably dead, stiff, frozen, un-present, inauthentic I become), so this is why I move with, or as if, because the ghosts are an energetic pull that carries past and future, a pull and weight that I – we carry because it is already held. Already here and there. And it glows.

Lois sets the card she has just read down on the table. Thea picks up a card and reads.

THEA

These days the division between my so-called work, in studios and framed as aesthetic practice and my life, becomes ever more blurred. I am moved and moving in my loss most when I am creating. Studios saved my life. And this is not the first time. Haunted suddenly by the affective, somatic muscle memory of every studio that ever held me … remembering of course that this was also sometimes my living room or a field. I wonder … can grief literally be solved by moving?

Thea sets the card she has just read on the table. They continue to pick up a card, read and set them down on the table.

LOIS

My hauntology is my islandness. Visiting an island, people say, is like stepping back in time. Currently because my island is a litmus of climate change (Baldacchino 2004), we are suddenly highly valuable. We, with all our ghosts in tow, are propelled forward in time, relentlessly related to the continent and its blurry, unpredictable, remotely imagined (Ronström 2021) if imagined at all, vision of the island. And in Newfoundland, our present is cocooned in a ghost time, our pre-confederation (with Canada) time zone. This and my anti-capitalist DIY (or attempt at least), my archipelagic way of creating, my disability arts way of thinking delivers a message from my ghosts to me (and to you) to time travel, to go slow, to improvise, to leave early, arrive late, mark the weather, to come and go as I or you need to, to appear as only a part of myself, to dance as I do.

THEA

What is it to be solved by moving? Isn’t to be solved also to never be solved exactly and that is also something? We think our thinking not in terms of arriving at solutions, or solving the problem, but as an ever-opening field of questions towards questions, anchored in our practices … solving is in the moving as an imminent thing or as a continual process, sidestepping equations of causality … which the word “by” solved by, gently gestures towards … maybe I would prefer to say, “solved IN moving”.

LOIS

As I wander through the grey, ghostly mists of Avalon, it’s like walking through a solution of water.

THEA

(interrupting)

I see what you did there … solved: solution, as in liquid …

Thea laughs. Lois smiles back at her.

LOIS

Moving between aloneness-es, I think of other islands in my foggy horizons. Of course, I think of Martinique, because of Glissant, where I have never been and imagine the people lifting and falling on my watery horizon. I think of Oiléan Chléire where my experiences of islandness and of art creation collapsed into the phrase “archipelagic thinking”. I think of Newfoundland and some colleagues there … and I think about you, Thea … and Jeremy. And my mother.

THEA

Thea invites the audience to stand.

I wonder how it would feel, to stand up, to slowly and to feel the gentle watery waves of transformation from sitting to standing, as you move ever so slightly into a new space.

Thea picks up her card, she considers reading it, but instead offers her card to Lois.

LOIS

(reading Thea’s card)

I ask myself about pleasure? What does it even mean? When I reflect on it I try to drop into my body and listen. But the question seems to bounce back like an unanswered echo. Everything takes effort. I return to my phone robotically-obsessively. Scrolling nothing, searching for something. Desperately hoping to solve this unsolvable edgy discomfort. What do you want? What would bring you pleasure? Really. I look for some kind of spark, some kind of intentional arc … something that my body can remember, can gather, can open to …

Lois offers her card to Thea to read.

THEA

(reading Lois’s card)

The water around things – the solution between things. Something to ease our loneliness, our separateness, to accept the layers of hauntologies as identities. Does anyone here know me? To come into relation with, not the Other, but an archipelago of otherness.

THEA

I find myself grounded by the ghosting presence of my somatic and dramaturgical practices as forms of tethering to ways of being and doing that continue to ask questions about our work and the world as a way to process and move in practice.

(pause)

I ask myself; can I connect with Jeremy as an embodiment of the impossibility of both presence and absence?

LOIS

To hang out with a ghost, to be as if a ghost is a transgressive idea – imaginative – out of body. As research it is here and not here – there and not there.

THEA

Both concrete and abstract it dances the in-between. Those ways less frequently traveled as intricate webbings of complexity too large to grasp or reduce to the capacity of our daily consciousness … or our major (Manning 2013a; Manning 2013b) arteries to speak. These byways and lesser-known corners.

(teasingly)

And aren’t islands always just a little bit more haunted?

LOIS

Ghosts, then, casually dissolve a lot of principles of research – so we are a relationality (Glissant 1997) of layered visibilities or apprehensions that appear and disappear.

In the silence, Thea invites the audience.

THEA

With your finger, trace a line slowly from your middle finger up to the inside of your arm slowly, notice the sensation … trace your finger along your shoulder and across your chest, rest your hand on your heart, bring the other hand to join it, feel the pressure, the sensation …

(Breathe)

References

Alessandri, Marianna. 2023. Night Vision: Seeing Ourselves through Dark Moods. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Baldacchino, Godfrey. 2004. “The Coming of Age of Island Studies.” Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie 95(3): 272–283.

Bergson, Henri. 1956. “Laughter: An Essay on the meaning of the Comic.” In Comedy, by Henri Bergson, 6–190. New York: Doubleday Anchor Books Doubleday and Co.

Berlant, Lauren Gail, and Kathleen Stewart. 2019. The Hundreds. Durham: Duke University Press.

Cools, Guy. 2021. Performing Mourning: Laments in Contemporary Art. Amsterdam: Valiz.

Cull, Laura, and Alice Lagaay, eds. 2014. Encounters in Performance Philosophy. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Davis, Colin. 2005. “Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms.” French Studies 59(3 July): 373–379.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1991. Bergsonism. Trans: Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone Books.

Glissant, Edouard. 1997. Poetics of Relation. Trans. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press.

Kafer, Alison. 2013. Feminist, Queer, Crip. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Manning, Erin. 2013a. Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance. Durham: Duke University Press.

Manning, Erin. 2013b. The Minor Gesture. Durham. Duke University Press.

Ronström, Owe. 2021. “Remoteness, Islands and Islandness.” Island Studies Journal, 16(2): 270–297.

Samuels, Ellen. 2017. “Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time.” Disability Studies Quarterly 37(3 Summer).

Toddlers and Tiaras. 2008–2013. Various episodes, Season 2, 2008, TLC TV.