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"THE LASTMAKER" AND GOAT
ISLAND'S FAREWELL AT IN TRANSIT 08, BERLIN
By Sabina Holzer
The playgrounds that we lived among – plays and grounds; games
of rules, thus allegories, and a double world: play to transfigure
figures on an ordinary ground; deliver the players out of, above
even, as to escape and then look back; a ball bounced on the
court, and we heard it a moment later.
Around each circle we drew another circle.
Not getting anywhere other than there.
A certain girl, I forget her name, wanted me tell about – I
remember now, Martha – penguin colonies of Antarctica.
Would love be any different?
At the bell we turned away, and toward some future, echo,
afterimage, play. [1]
The performance "The
Lastmaker" is announced as the last piece of the Chicago-based
collaborative performance group Goat Island. "After we have completed
creating and performing it, the company will end", the program states.
Goat Island started working in 1986.
They created nine performances, which were "theatrical, repeatable and
carefully constructed" [2].
In addition to researching, rehearsing and performing, their activities
expanded into web projects, filmmaking, video documentations, Reading Companion
artists books, teaching workshops and lectures.
They are well known for their tactics
of collaboration which are fundamental for their work and aesthetics. "A
spare performance aesthetic that seems at times so dense and complex that it
trips up your tongue and ties it in knots", as Adrian Heathfield puts it.
And he continues: "The dependency of the aesthetic upon this exploratory
lived practice (performance) contains an ethical dynamic, not simply because of
its use of relation in collaboration and its negotiation of sources through
collective processes, but because the orientation of these processes is towards
the discovery of otherness." [3]
The performance "The
Lastmaker" is accompanied by the collaborative writing project "The
Last Performance", a web project designed by Judd Morrissey. It is a
"constraint-based collaborative writing, archiving and text-visualization
project responding to the theme of lastness in relation to architectural
forms, acts of building, a final performance, and the interruption (that becomes
the promise) of community." [4]
This writing project was presented as an installation during the In Transit
Festival at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin.
Apart from that, a lecture by Lin
Hixson and Matthew Goulish "Every house has a door" took place in the
form of a dialogue reading. A dialogue which traces the history of Goat Island
and gives insights into their aesthetic approaches and values, and reflects a
complex conversation between Hixson and Goulish with striking poetry in words
and a few performed actions.
In this atmosphere of farewell, which shines
through the installation, the dialogue, the performance and the talk with the
performers, there is a big emphasis on the meaning of "last" in terms
of continuing.
"Construct a last
performance in the form of a heavy foot that weighs 2 tons and remains in good
condition."
– Last is a verb in the sense
of continuing in time; surviving; remaining in good condition.
– Lasting is the adjective
that comes from this verb like lasting in the following seven book titles:
- The Thyroid Diet: Manage Your Diet for Lasting Weight Loss
- Thucydides' Theory of International Relations: A Lasting Possession
- Lasting Visions of X – The Haunted Artist
- The Headache RX: A Doctor's Proven Guide to Lasting Headache Relief
- Landscape with Roses: Planting Rose Gardens of Lasting Beauty
– Last is a block or form shaped like
a human foot and used in the making of shoes.
– And last (chiefly British) is a
unit of volume or weight varying for different commodities and in different
districts, equal to about 80 bushels, 640 gallons, or two tons. [5]
At the performance in the Haus der
Kulturen der Welt the audience is invited to sit at both sides of the stage, a
platform raised two feet high with a black dance floor, framed and divided into
three sections by stripes of white tape. The performers come in and line up
facing the audience – four on one side of the platform, one on the other side.
Present but not in the foreground, servants of things to come.
A foot of that weight indeed has to be carefully
constructed to remain in good condition. A foot that weighs 2 tons will leave a
strong imprint. When this foot is put on the ground in order to execute and
affirm the next step, this has to be done with great care for the surroundings
to stay in good condition. How can the surroundings, how can one stay in good
condition if things end, separate, break apart, finish?
An end coming unexpected causes disaster. Slowly
through time, in saying goodbye again and again, it loses its dreadful aspect
and within the goodbyes opens up space for a future to come – unknown as death,
but possible to dream about.
To connect history to a personal
quest
"The
Lastmaker" is a practice of saying goodbye and in doing so, Goat Island
invite the audience to remember and live through little and big goodbyes of
their own again. The group chooses lasting last words to celebrate the function
of memory and how it collects traces to reinforce moments to come.
"We began this
piece with an imagined research trip to the Hagia Sofia in Istanbul. We were
fascinated by the lifespan of a building that had begun as a Byzantine church,
was converted to a mosque, and then converted again to a museum. We wondered
what alterations might have been made to the space to accommodate these
conflicting uses, and we wondered what kind of performances you might make in
response. However, we lacked the funds to travel to Turkey, and instead found
ourselves researching a similar building in Zagreb, Croatia." [6]
To
connect the history of a building like the Hagia Sofia, or the Džamija in Zagreb with the history of saying goodbye or ending
may seem a big bridge to construct, may seem even an impossible task. (This is
what Goat Island set out for from the beginning: "to share an impossible
problem". They exercised this method of relating the personal and the
political right from the start.) What happens in "The Lastmaker" by
doing so is that the emotional impact of letting go and change is always in
relation with politics of change and history. To this end, great personalities
like J.L. Austin, Emily Brontë, Lenny Bruce,
Larry Grayson, Emily Dickinson, Mawlana Jalal-ad-Din Muhammad Rumi and Tom
Waits lend their words and gestures to the performers.
St. Francis is gorgeously combined
with Larry Grayson by Mark Jeffrey. Brian Sanner sings a pop spiritual
accompanied by himself playing a singing saw and conjures the Old Weird America
(and as Greil Marcus says, "The weirdness means the story will always be
new."). Karen Christopher performs a startling female version of Lenny
Bruce. Litó Walkey sings with Nick Drake and with her beautiful clear and
shining presence strikes up a dialogue with an aging artist composing a poem to
say goodbye. And Matthew Goulish passionately recites Rumi and Tom Waits, an
invocation of future spirits.
The multi-layered constructed personalities are
flickering lights. Preachers, stand-up comedians, poets and singers create a
firework of hope and despair, of perseverance and vulnerability.
The physical engagement is stunning. At a certain point, the silent servants we saw in the beginning jump in like wild horses and engage in gestures or positions. In
the course of the piece these vehement entrances and exits undergo a slight
change, progressing into providing actions as if a last wish would have to be
fulfilled now, or otherwise it could be too late.
Despite the high tempo and quick changes of rhythm
all gestures, words and scenes are performed with great attention to detail.
Matter and Memory
The dome structure of Zagreb's Džamija is
translated in a 23 minutes dance which serves as a kind of entrance to the
matters described before. It takes place after the introduction, which ponders
the building of a house, "never putting away childish things", and
constructing the Hagia Sofia "with our little walls here, our words and
bodies". [7] The dance is choreographed in detailed triadic rounds and makes
the performers diverge and reconverge, to a regular
beat with irregular measures. It invites the public into a time of transition.
Gestures are passed from one person
to another, sometimes executed solo, sometimes in duets and trios. A magical
dance following a complex set of undecipherable rules. "A ritual with the
idea of embodying light." [8] A movement changing the space, changing the
perception of time, and changing the condition of the spectator. This time in
transition gains weight through its duration.
When it ends, a chair is brought in
and put in the same place as in the opening scene. Even if the situation now
looks the same as at the beginning, one realizes that this is not at all the
case. Quite imperceptibly, everything has changed. Within the spirals of time and play
gravity has been implanted and the substance of matter and memory has been
given recognition. Goat Island opens relations and offers relations.
They juxtapose multiple materials, fragments of text, sound, images, objects
and gestures.
As a spectator one is invited in the space between
things, to make one's way through these spaces, to travel through the
materials. Meaning is always a set of dynamics.
And yes, there is the possibility of getting lost,
but always care and effort are put into bringing the spectator back – be it by
a gesture, a dance, by a text, a song, or sometimes a particular strangeness of
a situation.
The first phrase in "The Lastmaker" is
"If you want to build a house you have to build a wall". I found a
note saying: "If you want to build a house you have build a memory.
Building construction is the process of adding structure to real property. And
structures have the ability to be many more things than just structures. They
are various extensions through time and matter." Space and wall, memory and event.
A construction is a feat of multitasking and, in
the case of Goat Island a delicious accumulation of operations, which has been
developed through years. In "The Lastmaker" it turns at times into
hilarious playfulness. Until at the end the performers rise from the ground.
This is done with the help of good old wooden planks. It is the child who seeks
and plays with profound joy.
Goat Island has decided to leave the house they
constructed through the door. They do not fly out, they put a foot on the road.
"You road I enter upon and look around, I
believe you are not all that is here, I believe that much unseen is also there.
… You air that serves me with breath to speak! You objects that call from
diffusion my meanings and give them shape! You light that wraps me and all
things in delicate equable showers. … I believe you are latent with unseen
existence, you are so dear to me." [9]
"We end Goat Island in order to make space for
the unknown that will follow" and "our lastness is no more and no
less significant than our studying of buildings." [10]
That's what is said.
To be continued.
www.goatislandperformance.org
Footnotes:
[1] Source Text from "The Last Performance" by Matthew Goulish
[2] St. Bottoms and Matthew Goulish (Editors): Small acts of repair, Routlegde, New York
2007; p. xiv
[3] Adrian Heathfield: "coming undone". Included in Goat Island's Reading
Companion to "It's an Earthquake in My Heart"
[4] www.thelastperformance.com; click project blue print.
[5] St. Bottoms and Matthew Goulish (Editors): Small acts of repair, Routlegde, New York
2007; p. 224
[6] St. Bottoms and Matthew Goulish (Editors): Small acts of repair, Routlegde, New York
2007; p. 222
[7] Quote from "The Lastmaker"
[8] Lin Hixson, director of Goat Island during the Artists Talk at In Transit
[9] Walt
Whitman: "Song of the open road"
[10] St. Bottoms and
Matthew Goulish (Editors): Small acts of repair, Routlegde, New York
2007; p. 223
(July 14, 2008)
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