On Ways of Knowing, by Emergency Chorus
by Maddy Costa
1. Predictive text disabled
This text was not predicted. There was no foreknowledge, no anticipation, no planning or preparation for its existence. No signs were noticed, no omens caught. This text relies on memory (frail), memory (fallible), memory (frequently non-functional). Notes were not taken. This text could contain falsehoods.
2. Hurricane warning
1987. Meteorologist Michael Fish assures the Great British Public via the BBC that there is no hurricane coming. The Great Storm of 15 October 1987 was the worst experienced in South East England in three centuries. My family slept through the whole thing and travelled to school/work the next day wondering why the roads were an obstacle course of fallen trees.
On stage, Clara Potter-Sweet wears a raincoat and reads a text about barometers while Ben Kulvichit stands over them with a watering can, enveloping them in misty rain. (There is an obscure and irrelevant reference here for the fleeting pleasure of those who know.) The paper from which they read softens in their hands, begins to collapse. There is such humour in this work, such compassion for the people who have attempted to read the future, to warn, to heed off danger or inconvenience, and at the same time a finely tuned sense of their ridiculousness.
3. Decode the runes (assess the ruins)
Follow the track of the raindrops, trace them like the lines of possibility that crease along the palm of a hand. This way for life, that for death. Observe the leeches, read the cards. Assess the past, seek the source of the ripple effects, those seemingly inconsequential moments, actions, from which the present, the future, is made.
4. The secrets are in the earth
It makes sense that the past, the roots, the work before this work by Emergency Chorus considered and in an abstract way ‘staged’ the writing of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing in The Mushroom at the End of the World. “Indeterminacy, the unplanned nature of time, is frightening,” writes Tsing, “but thinking through precarity makes it evident that indeterminacy also makes life possible.”
There is an interlude during which a cave is constructed. Coal-black boulders, an obstacle course, lighting dense and low. The sound design, by Nat Norland, is phenomenal: a weird bass-heavy rumble that takes the premise of subterraneousness (subterraneity?) and translates it into an abstract music that pulses and growls through every fibre of the venue, through the seats, through our bones, affecting the very rhythm of the heart. To this music Clara and Ben perform a synchronised routine of navigation through the cave, a sequence of abstract movement more detailed and thorough than any they’ve performed before. Choreographer Charlie Ashwell and performer Karen Christopher are credited for outside support, and their presence is ghostly but felt.
It is a dance that considers what it is to be human, what it is to attune your movements to another, to collaborate, to stay connected. And it is a dance that considers what might be enabled and also thwarted by this synchronicity. “Progress is embedded,” writes Tsing, “in widely accepted assumptions about what it means to be human. Even when disguised through other terms, such as ‘agency’, ‘consciousness’, and ‘intention’, we learn over and over that humans are different from the rest of the living world because we look forward – while other species, which live day to day, are thus dependent on us. As long as we imagine that humans are made through progress, nonhumans are stuck within this imaginative framework too.”
Of course we want to get out, stay out of the cave. But who and what are we trapping, suffocating, in the process?
5. Future then, future when
The future arrives despite planning and preparation.
The future is here now, today, shaping, distorting, denying tomorrow.
The future is a horizon that seems ever distant but watch out, it’s also behind you.
6. A kind of magic
When Ben dons a thick brown hooded woollen cloak he looks exactly like the Hermit in the Rider-Waite tarot cards illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith. As described by the authors of the interpretation site Biddy Tarot, the Hermit is a Buddha-like figure of zen enlightenment, one who “has chosen this path of self-discovery and, as a result, has reached a heightened state of awareness.”
Buddhism receives much more credence in today’s world than magical thinking, but there was a time when heightened states of awareness and ‘the very existence of magical beliefs’ were not co-opted by a finely tuned well-being industry as a mechanism for surviving capitalism but feared as ‘a source of social insubordination’. So writes Sylvia Federici in Caliban and the Witch, her study of the transition to capitalism, and the ways in which witchcraft had to be named and eliminated for capitalist progress to proceed unhindered. Magic was ‘a universe of practices, beliefs, and social subjects whose existence was incompatible with the capitalist work discipline’: subjects such as Daniella van Gelz, an artist who embeds tarot into her practice (note the Hermit at the centre of this description of her working day). Van Gelz does not create for the market but communes with the earth, towards healing, towards rewriting this value system that devalues everything except money. In her work, magical thinking becomes poetry becomes a new mode of living.
The Hermit refuses. The Hermit retreats. The Hermit ‘represents the desire to turn away from a consumerist or materialistic society’ and in that he symbolises authority and wisdom.
7. Futures analyst
And then he morphs. The hood slips back and what emerges is a management consultant or a business advisor or a futures analyst – it’s not my world, ok? I have no idea who these awful men are – and what he speaks is a language as fluid and dangerous as mercury. It is brilliant and hilarious and gut-twistingly awful. It is a glimpse of another kind of life in which Ben Kulvichit is not making abstract performances from the under-£15K for however long it takes and count yourself lucky distributed in project grants but earning £15K a week in a suit manoeuvring the stock exchange. Hedge funds and critical investments. I don’t know how to use this language and never want to learn.
Even there, however, there are other possibilities. I’ve written about this man before, a futures analyst I once met who, on retirement, made it his business to support a different future – more creative, more care-full, more compassionate – into being. That future is here now, he says, but we have to walk towards it intentionally, live every day as though it is already here. Because, at a molecular level, at the level of quantum atoms (and no, I don’t know how to use this language either), it already is.
8. Imagine _______
Predictions close down and the joy – a joy – of this show is its openness. It is open to interpretation, open to imagination. Imagination requires unknowing, letting go, moving beyond. “Progress is a forward march, drawing other kinds of time into its rhythms. Without that driving beat, we might notice other temporal patterns. Each living thing remakes the world through seasonal pulses of growth, lifetime reproductive patterns, and geographies of expansion,” writes Tsing. “The curiosity I advocate follows such multiple temporalities, revitalising description and imagination.”
Ways of Knowing is a work of multiple temporalities, of shift and flux, of different parts in juxtaposition making a whole that is unstable and full of promise. As Clara and Ben write in their description of how they work as Emergency Chorus: “We make performances as a way of knowing how to live in the world.” This is the way of knowing that really counts.
Something Other 