Goat Songs
This text is written as a response to the festival Revolve: Flesh in general, and to the piece
Tragedy by Louis Schou-Hansen in particular. However I do mention other pieces shown during
the two days of the festival, yet I do not mention all pieces shown. This is not supposed to be
seen as a judgement, but merely the fact that one needs to make exclusions in favor of writing a
legible text.
I arrive on Friday, just as the festival starts. We are being led on a walk through the small city
center of Uppsala towards Köttinspektionen, by the local performing arts collective Watch me
bake. Instruction being: we can join the dancing during the walk as much or as little we want. I
end up walking slowly behind the train of dancing intervening sleepy city center life, catching up
with a friend, Leah. This seems unengaged at first – two unruly teenagers on a school field trip,
lingering on the edge of activity/passivity – but it reveals itself as something more complex. It is
about slipping in and out of different modes of taking part in, or attending to, an artwork. Not with
a greater intent or a plan, but just because the situation makes you.
A couple of days before going to Revolve I thought about why we have to sit still to watch
dance. Seems like most of my peers do not want to think of dance as a strictly visual medium.
But the configuration of a theater is so visual. It sort of exercises a visual hierarchy on one’s
mind, to borrow a phrasing from J.G. Ballard. Sure, one can say that the time passing in a
theatre marks the ephemeral aspects of dance. But the theatre often makes it feel like the exact
same movements are going to be performed the next night. The theatre has lines of seats and
directions to look in. During the festival, no works are shown in such a space. Audience is being
let into a room – into a situation – with chairs spread out, little mats or pillows on the floor, small
ledges to sit on, walls to lean against. This leaves some space; it creates obstructions of views,
a sense of being very near, or in, the performance space, the feeling that one is free to change
place while watching. I also notice that I always see other audience members. It tells me that
dance is not theatre, nor cinema. Something is left open; there is no clear instruction for how to
watch or attend, for how to behave.
On my way to Uppsala the following Saturday I think about, try to visualize, three hours. It is
much longer than the train ride, actually longer than both the train ride to and from Uppsala
combined. I think about those albums by Natural Snow Buildings, that are so beautiful and
surreal but that I have never managed to listen to in one go. The length and scope is what
makes works like that sublime. It is almost a challenge. Making something three hours long
almost presupposes that the focus or attention of the receiver will drift. It is also such a long time
that afterwards it will seem fragmentary; some memories will drift away or get shuffled around
and mixed up. But that result sort of enters the work. As well as allowing different kinds of
attendance, it allows different ways of making and composing.
The Uppsala art museum lives inside the old castle, on top of a hill overlooking the entire city. In
one of the white exhibition rooms there is a black box of fabrics hanging from the roof, a room
within a room. The museum staff helps you enter by opening up a small gap in the fabric. This
fabric room is the stage for Louis Schou-Hansens work Tragedy. The piece is three hours and
with two performers, Thjerza Balaj and Elise Nohr Nystad. The music is a playlist with mostly
slowed down, instrumental versions of pop-songs, but with some more classical or abstract
pieces. All muddled and distorted, on the verge of recognition. After the piece I overhear a
conversation in which another audience member explains what instruments one of the music
pieces were played on, but the instruments they talk about are really unknown to me. The music
is blasted on speakers that are outside the fabric walls, but they are pointed towards the fabrics,
kind of sending the sound into the fabrics, muffling it slightly.
The performers move in a sort of hazy slow. Some moments are balletish. There are sex
positions. Sometimes they lean their heads against the shoulder or lap of an audience member.
Like with the music, the slowness distorts the movements. It depletes determinacy. It turns
walking a few steps into what seems like a full sequence; on the way to get there, the
destination has passed on. The performers sometimes glitch, like cartoon robots malfunctioning.
It is a small and subtle gesture, but as it is skillfully executed it becomes meaningful and
mysterious.
A black and shiny cell phone becomes a contrasting surface against all the skin, face,
hair and the mixture of clothes. The idea of a black mirror. The idea of a world outside of this
performance, piercing through via a phone call. Us in the audience cannot hear what is being
said on the other end of the line. Only imagine based on the facial expressions of the
performers.
The tragedy, in a formal sense, comes from dramatic theatre and dates back to ancient Greek
times. It is often viewed as a key to, or building block for, western culture. In its original,
Aristotelian conception, a tragedy is a story about a person of, at least some, significance going
through some sort of crisis or downfall. To emphasize the downfall, the tragedy often starts from
a point of happiness or stability. Of importance are also the moments of katharsis, in which the
mind and soul of the audience, through witnessing the tragic downfall, is cleansed in some way.
The dramaturgy of a downfall-to-cleanse is a story you almost know by heart if you have grown
up in a western monoculture. I learn that the word tragedy in itself means “goat song”, or
perhaps “grape harvest song”. Remembering how these ancient forms seen as fundamental
were often vocalizations; spoken words, singing.
Tragedy, the piece, however moves into a different territory. The dramaturgy is more of a
droning, heavy state. A looping and repeating of different scenes. I couldn’t tell if there was a
pattern, but certain scenes and actions do reappear.
Later, a couple of days after the festival, I think about what it is like to perform for three hours. I
think about Thjerza and Elise’s faces wry with sadness for three hours straight. That kind of
headache that comes from tension that covers your whole head like a cap. Weird life-coaches
say ‘smile until you’re happy’, as if the configurations of the face muscles but themselves would
alter the chemistry of the body. When I write it out like that it sounds like a psychosomatic truth.
Maybe it works. I wonder if it works the other way around. But I guess it doesn’t really matter
what they are actually feeling. It is not method acting. What matters is how time becomes
prismatic. Every slow moment is filled by the still lingering previous moment as well as the
anticipation for the coming one. It is because I know the duration of the piece is three hours but I
don't have to stay. I can go, even come back. There is no complete version of this piece.
I think about the facial expressions and gestures of the performers, how they suggest
different scenarios and narratives. But always without language or text. Without ever telling a full
story. There are glimpses of stories and relationships; through the phone mentioned before;
through short interactions with the audience or between the performers. I think about a Swedish
poem called “Neeijjj” (“Noooooo”) by Sonja Åkesson. It consists of lines of drawn out
vocalizations and exclamations. Sometimes the words “nej” and “aj” can be distinguished, but
most of the time it is just sounds. Like a voice teetering on the edge of language, yet still very
expressive. In the same way, Tragedy seems on the edge of storytelling and narrative. It never
tells a story, but the expression is clear, through its choreography of distortion and skewness.
Two weeks later and I am reminiscing about the festival with a friend, Stina. We talk about how
we think Tragedy was different from what it seemed like, seeing the pictures in the advertising
for the festival. How it is refreshing to see a performance that seems to transcend social media
photography. How the most significant moments of the piece seemed circumstantial and
impossible to capture in a photo. An ongoing point of discussion among my group of
friends/peers for the last couple of years has been around how to – or, why even bother to –
post dance and performance works on social media. The question is not if, but how the usage of
social media as the main channel to reach a potential audience shapes the way dance works
are made and also programmed and curated. There were definitely certain moments during
Tragedy during which people took out their phones to film or photograph. But I could rest in the
fact that those were not the most confusing, moving or profound moments.
I thought “Dress Sexy At My Funeral” by Smog/Bill Callahan could have soundtracked the
festival. The subtitle and hence theme for the festival was ‘flesh’, but a mournful sadness strikes
me as another common thread. Or something like ‘ceremonial’, which allows for a wider range
of emotions to be present. And I think there were. I mention the Bill Callahan song because of
its absurdity. While already dead, he is telling his late wife to dress sexy at his own funeral, to
flirt with his brothers and the minister. As if using absurdity and exaggeration, not to create
distance, but to recognize importance and sincerity. It is comedic but far from irony. It is about
taking the ceremonial seriously by defaming it. Aside from Tragedy, speaking and voicing were
very present aspects. Perhaps even present in Tragedy through its lack or negation of narrative
and storytelling.
There is a quote that lingers over the festival, by Alina Popa: “The body is real, but what
we think about it is fiction.” It is written in the program text for Tragedy as well as being read by
the festival curators on the opening day. I think, through this quote, that the point, or the wish, of
this festival and the works presented, is to sink into that body-reality, and to let the fictions about
it lag behind for a while. It is not about rewriting the fictions, because how do we even do that?
Nevertheless in the scope of two days? Popa writes: “Perspective creates reality. To change the
standard perspective is almost impossible. It cannot be done mentally, it needs different
practices – to practice ways to interact with the world that give back reality its multiplicity.”
It is windy everytime i walk out of the castle, as it is on a hill in the otherwise flat landscape. To
get down there are stairs leading down towards the botanical gardens. Wide stairs with gravel
paths in between them. The gardens are geometrical patterns. Seemingly made to be viewed
from afar, from atop the hill, they seem to shape one’s vision while looking at them. The bushes
are shaped like pyramids, in straight lines. The lawns are very green and very smooth. There is
a sculpture, a large face seemingly carved out of an angular rock. It has a ruggedness to it that
contrasts. Another way down from the castle hill is through some winding paths that lead
towards the city center. On the steepest side of the hill, where no humans can walk there is a
small pasture for a pack of goats. They are grey. Their horns are spirals and look fuzzy. The
place always makes itself apparent.
References
Aristotle, Poetics.
J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).
Bill Callahan, “Dress Sexy at My Funeral”, Dongs of Sevotion (2000).
Alina Popa, “Disease as an aesthetic project” (2019).
Sonja Åkesson, “Neeijjj”, Jag bor i Sverige (1966).