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Two Parrots and an Answering Machine

Nicholas Ridout
Published online: 06 Aug 2014.

To cite this article: Nicholas Ridout (2002) Two Parrots and an Answering Machine, Performance Research: A Journal of
the Performing Arts, 7:4, 42-47, DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2002.10871889

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 Two Parrots and an
Answering Machine
Some Problems with Knowledge and Memory
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JanuarJ' 2002. Teatro Comandini, Cesena. After
the first performance of C. #0 I - the first episode
of Tragedia Endogonidia by Societas Raffacllo
Sanzio- the audience is invited to join the
company for supper in the room opposite the
performance space. On one wall are black charcoal
markings: a mixture of vertical strokes and letters,
some of them crossed out. These are the traces of a
Performance Research 7141, pp.42-47 © Taylor & Francis Ltd 2002
Nicholas Ridout
much earlier performance, of the company's
Amleto, Ia veemente esterioritd della morte di un
mollusca, that must once have been played in this
room. The Comandini is full of such traces- of
Raffaello Sanzio and of earlier inhabitants.
February 2001. The old football stadium, Bari:
Stadia della Vittoria. As the audience leaves the
space at the end of Amleto, black charcoal markings,
a mixture of vertical strokes and letters, some of
them crossed out, are left on the wall of the
stadium gymnasium. Leaving, the audience seem
shattered, marked, wounded. We carry in our
bodies the registration of hundreds of shocks:
gunshots and explosions have been working on us
constantly, relentlessly throughout the perform-
ance. Later I learn that my journey to Bari allowed
me to see the last ever performance of this piece,
which had been in the company's repertoire since
its creation in 1992. I shall never wince and ache
with those sounds deep in my flesh again. The
glimpse of the writing on the wall in the Comandini
can make me shiver for a moment, with something
approaching pleasure, even, but it can't quite put
me back there in Bari, where it hurt. I wonder
whether the gymnasium wall in Bari still bears
those marks. I imagine that it docs.
February 2002. Teatro Comandini, Cesena. A
performance of Voyage au bout de Ia nuit. On the
black floorcloth that covers the playing area, I notice
42
 spatters of red. Traces, I realize, of C. #OJ, traces of And with the voice, the body. No voices without
"" the stage blood that showered the stage when the bodies.
c
rubber legs turned inside out. Stage blood staged as These traces, dents and scars make their way
QJ a trace of the blood on the street in Genoa, where towards the archive. But not in an orderly fashion.
::t
Carlo Giuliani lay dead, shot by the Italian police. Although there is something unforgettable about
c
<(
Romeo Castellucci characterizes the Tragedia such experiences of performance, there is also
c
Endogonidia project in terms of a 'series of spores'. something about them that resists remembering. It
ru There will never be a complete collection of works, is as though something in the original trauma of the
-o but instead 'an organism that is on the run' (Castel- event has destroyed the cells in which it might be
c
ru lucci 2002), taking new shape in each of its success- coherently recorded and filed away for future recall.
Downloaded by [Washington University in St Louis] at 16:46 30 December 2014

ive transmigrations (from Cesena through The blood on the floor and the writing on the wall
+-
0 participating cities: Avignon, Brussels, Berlin, make themselves available for the archivist's
<--
<-- QJ Rome). A project that already begins to refuse the impulse. But they dissimulate: they offer the
ru c
CL
archive: it will never be seen in its entirety, nor do promise of a return to the experience, but one we
..c we yet know how much each successive episode will already know, deep down, they cannot deliver.
0 u
::t ru remember of its predecessor. So those traces of They play on the impulse, fuel the fever, but they
I - :L
blood- now cleaned up anyway- marked are traces that really lead nowhere. The only traces
something that was always going fast. It feels almost that might lead somewhere are lodged like micro-
self-defeating to try and see each episode. scopic shrapnel fragments, somewhere within me
At the end of Voyage au bout de Ia nuit, the voice that I cannot access.
of Louis-Ferdinand CHine, stammering, yawing,
humming and chewing itsel( A voice that carries in
its own body the ruination to which it has been
subjected by gunfire, factory machinery and the
screams of suffering children. The wood on which
a line of hydraulically operated legs have stamped
out their rhythm lies chipped and dented. The
sequence in which the legs beat out their rhythm
makes the deepest impression: the apotheosis of
mass-production, an assembly-line of cars and
dancers. And CHine's voice, until this moment ven-
triloquised among the four female performers,
appears at this final moment with a silent parrot
perched on a metal hoop. Speech breakdown,
language becoming sound only, about, perhaps, to
become language again, should the parrot speak,
but that would then be language without language,
stripped of meaning and intention. So instead of
language, the recorded squawking of a human
voice, wrecked on the rocks of capitalism, a trace of
language, trace of a life, the voice of a dead man.
Recorded because it is a recording, a registration of
the trauma of a life. A voice which is now nothing
but the scars left by CHine's long scream of pain The questions I am circling around here, in relation
and hatred. Like the wood, the voice is marked. to my own memories of the work of Raffaello
43
 Sanzio, first took shape when I realized that I
couldn't remember anything about Richard
Foreman. From about 1994 I saw performances of
at least five Foreman productions, but without the
aid of such mnemotechnic devices as the published
playscripts and photographs, I was unable to recall
anything that had happened during these perform-
ances. Yet they seemed also to have made a strong
impression on me. How could I reconcile this state
of affairs? Why was I unable to remember anything
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about these performances?
My amnesia as far as Foreman's work was
concerned was far in excess of my forgetting of
other work. It seemed to have a special quality of its
own. It was not about the gradual fading of past
events, the disappearance of performance with
which we are all familiar. It seemed reasonable to
suppose that the forgetfulness was not entirely of
my own making, and that Richard Foreman himself
was playing games with my memory, or, to state it
in less paranoid terms, that something in Foreman's
work functioned with the specific purpose of
encouraging its own forgetting. As it turned out,
some of Foreman's own discussion of his work
seemed to bear out this initially rather peculiar, if
logical, supposition.
Foreman tells a story of how one night as a rela-
tively unknown artist whose work had just started
to receive some New York attention he was excited
that his art world idols Robert Morris and Richard
Serra had come to see one of his plays. Serra and
Morris both walked out and Foreman was crushed.
He recounts that when he got to know them later
'one of them said: "Well, in those days your work
was so abstract and I'm not really interested in
going to the theatre to see abstract art"' (Foreman
1992: 7 5). Perhaps it is the abstraction of Foreman's
work, or more particularly the absence- or not
quite the absence, more probably the determinate
negation- it's perhaps the absence or the negation,
then, of all those things which normally we find
happening on stage, like stories, dramatic conflicts,
powerful and meaningful visual images coordinated
with movement and sound- basically the construc-
tion of affective or intellectable moments- it is the
absence or negation of such moments, memorable
moments, that is, to cherish and fondle, that makes
c.
the experience slippery and easy to forget. We don't 0
c:
have the mental apparatus to arrest the flow and _,..
reorganize it as we perceive it in such a way that we
can incorporate it in existing structures for
meaning- and memory-formation. Foreman talks
about this in relation to a comment once made by
an unnamed critic:
Acritic once told me that his problem with my plays was
that when he was watching them he thought they were
fantastic, but once he'd left the theater they seemed to
vanish from his memory. As if that were bad! My sense,
however, is that it's a very positive quality. It's always
irked me when people say 'I don't know what your play
was about, but wow, that image when she rolled out that
strange umbrella and they all ran away, that really stayed
with me!' Personally, I don't think that's much of a compli-
ment. The image of the Marlboro man riding his horse
and smoking his cigarette has stuck with me for many
years- and so what? It's garbage. It's kitsch. All it means
is that the image seduced me, that it pushed a button that
was ready to be pushed, and I responded.lt didn't widen
my sensibilities, compassion, or intuition. Whereas an art
that affects you in the moment, but which you then find
hard to remember, is straining to bring you to another
level of consciousness. It offers images and ideas from
that other level, that other way of being, which is why you
find them hard to remember. But it has opened you to the
possibility of growing into what you are not yet, which is
exactly what art should do. So I try to make plays as hard
to remember as a vivid dream which, when awake, you
know you've lived with intensity, yet try as you might you
can't remember.
(Foreman 1992: 23)
While dreaming the 'vivid dream' one faces
problems of a slightly mind-fuddling order: like
how to decide what to remember in order to link it
up to something which comes later in the flow; or
alternatively how to know what that thing was you
half remember and suspect may be connected
however vaguely to whatever it is which is
happening right now. It is almost as though the
activation of memory as a constitutive element in
 the construction of the performance by and for me language feels, how crude its registrations of the
CJ'l as a viewer and auditor, in the moment of its microsensational- accompanied by an almost-fear,
c:
performance, erodes or disconnects the circuits a flirtation with an edge, a teetering, then, in the
(JJ through which my memory might later be able to face of something I ought really, if I knew better, to
::<
conduct or retain that particular material, thereby turn away from. Something disgusting, even; a
c:
<(
rendering it almost inaccessible to me in retrospect. repellent life form, something in a state of
c:
I've used up my memory. morbidity, that provokes a vertiginous sense of the
ru The experience of Foreman's theatre is, as I have infinity of things beyond one's own meagre death.
LJ begun to suggest, one of flow, of moments whose 'Images and ideas from that other level, that other
c:
ru unfolding is witnessed with some intensity. Perhaps way of being.' Instead, then, of some form of
this is true to some extent of much performance, archive material that would recall to mind the
Downloaded by [Washington University in St Louis] at 16:46 30 December 2014

+-
0 but it is especially and rather peculiarly true of performance experience, what I am facing here is
'-- (JJ Foreman's, particularly, as I have suggested, in the archive material that I know is there but cannot get
ru c:
a...
absence of certain other non-flow elements usually at. I receive it, and store it. In storing it I seem to
..c:::
u
present in other theatre work. abject it, but I cannot disseminate it .
0
::< ru Foreman's theatre comprises moments whose
I - ::E
meaning at the time of their appearance is perhaps
so closely bound up with the nature of their
unfolding, the complexity of what they unfold
from, both visually and aurally, that they are always
more (or is it less) than isolated moments, always
traces themselves, in the sense that they have a
shifting multiple quality, of this-becoming-this-
becoming-this, in the sense of being moments
which contain at the instant of their perception the
shucked-off skin of that which they are no longer
and the fresh sheen of that which they have already
started to become.
Foreman's work deliberately resists and evades
the operations of memory. By compelling our
attention to the moment-by-moment unravelling of
a flow, where connections have to be made here and
now in the four-dimensional space that is the
present of performance, Foreman seems to prevent
me from remembering anything. All I am left with
is an intuition of a sensation, a recollection of a
particular kind of feeling that went on, that spread
through me. I can't archive this in a visual database
- no Marlboro man images - nor according to In bringing performance back to mind we tend to re-
logical propositions or narrative content; but envision it. It is mainly images that we successfully
although I can't bring it into my body now, I think I retrieve from storage, and it is the reconstitution of
will know the feeling again, were I ever to re- images in the language of description that remains
experience it. I can attempt to describe it but I the dominant mode of performance criticism. We
cannot make myself feel it, however hard I try. It is think of our memory working like a projector, we
f....................... . an exhilaration, a rush, a vibration- how poor the conceptualize it as a visual apparatus, we speak of
45
 our mind's eye, and try to see it all as though it were
yesterday. As writers we try to bring the reader
towards our point of view, seat them where we sat,
looking at what we saw. We tend to leave out the
sound of it. It is in this omission that another
possible explanation for the Foreman amnesia
question may lie. In Foreman's work the sound is a
constant state of managed excitement. Inasmuch as I
can remember it in a manner that permits its
description, it functions as a suffusion of the space.
The sound ofRaffaello Sanzio is similarly dis-
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tinctive, as some of my recollections sampled earlier
have sought to suggest. As in the case of Foreman,
it's not really possible to say how it sounds, only
that it does. Knowing what it sounds like is a
particular kind of knowledge that only seems to be
useful, or even exist, at the time of hearing itself.
During Act II ofRaffaello Sanzio's Genesi,from the
museum of sleep, there is a sound I know very well. I
cannot reproduce or describe it. There is no
notation for it and my human voice cannot even
produce an approximation of it. I don't know
whether this knowledge can exist without the
operation of memory, but I have to admit that
memory is of no use in bringing it back to the
present. It is as though I know it without remem-
bering it. It is not a useful document if it does not,
as Peggy Phelan suggests a performance document
should, work as 'an encouragement of memory to
become present' (Phelan 1993: 146).
Yet the file is not, it turns out, completely irre-
trievable. Once, when picking up my telephone
handset in response to a call, I found that my
answering machine cut in. My phone is one of
those with a cradle in which it charges itself, but
which allows you to move around, wire-free, with
the handset. As I walked into my study to turn off
the answering machine so that I could talk to my
caller without the recorded voice of my outgoing
message (of some weeks ago) some kind offeedback
between the handset and the recording device
suddenly produced that sound from Act II of
Genesi and recorded it. I knew it at once, of course.
What I realized, in this peculiar moment in which a
recording device produced something of its own, is
that the difficulty of remembering sound is, in
effect, so acute, that memory is only activated by
0..
direct re-experiencing. My mind's ear is no good. If 0
Foreman's work is particularly difficult to
remember, perhaps it is because the sensation I
would know but cannot re-feel, in the absence of
the work, is so closely linked to the sound that I can
only remember by re-hearing. The Genesi sound on
my answering machine has gone now, although I
kept it as a saved message for a while. I may know it
again, some day.
Jean-Fran<;ois Lyotard suggests that music has
the particular quality of being able to free the mind
from the synthetic operations that constitute
memory. Its uniqueness, which is to be found
beyond the score, in nuance and timbre, seems to
aspire to a 'pure, punctual presence'. Lyotard
acknowledges that this idea of presence 'remains
highly problematic', but insists nonetheless that he
be allowed to posit its possibility, even if it cannot
be 'conceived, or experienced, or felt, at least
according to the forms of our sensibility' (Lyotard
1991: 156 ). Beyond these forms, in the peculiar
time and place of the knowledge-without-memory
that I am trying to suggest here, music, for Lyotard
'aspires to exemption from syntheses, forms,
becomings, intentions and retentions, from repeti-
tion, in a word. Aspires to the unique pinch or that
"pinch" of the unique in which the differentiation
of the one and the multiple would not have place or
time' (Lyotard 1991: 163).
The pinch is pinch of flesh. The knowledge that
escapes memory seems to do so because it enters
not through the mind, but through the body.
Proust's narrator in A Ia recherche du temps perdu-
surely one of the 20th century's most significant
performance critics- is at a concert of works by the
composer Vinteuil, when he hears a phrase not
unlike the famous 'little phrase' ofVinteuil's
sonata, the music that has haunted the writing of
the book, and then 'a phrase of a plaintive kind rose
in answer to it, but so profound, so vague, so
internal, almost so organic and visceral, that one
could not tell at each of its re-entries whether it was
a theme or an attack of neuralgia' (Proust 1989:
46
 262). This idea that sound, even in its highly
= organized form as music, might become indistin-
c
guishable from physical pain offers another way of
QJ thinking about the knowledge in question as
3
something that lies beyond the operations of the
c
<t memory. While the narrator may be able to recall to
c
mind the 'little phrase', and although it plays a
ru recurrent and figurative role in the composition of
., the memory work itself, there exists also the possi-
c
ru bility that another phrase, somewhat like it, or
working in answer to something like it, might not,
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+-
0 when looked back upon, be remembered, but
'-- QJ simply known as that ache in the tooth is known.
ru c
0...
Such, for sure, is the experience of sound in the
..r:::. work ofRaffaello Sanzio. Not simply in the
0 u
REFERENCES
3 ru violence of Amleto's explosions and gunshots, but Castellucci, Romeo (2002) Programme for C#.Ol, Cesena:
I - l:
also in all the processed voices of C. #0 I, or the Societas Raffaello Sanzio.
Dcleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix (1994) What is Phil-
'little phrase' from Genesi my answering machine osophy?, trans. G. Burchell and H. Tomlinson,
once mimicked. It is a pain and a permeation, as London/New York: Verso.
Foreman's is a flow and an exhilaration. In both Foreman, Richard (1992) Unbalam·ing Acts: Foundations
instances, it is a kind of inhabiting of myself, .fi1r a Theater, New York: Theatre Communications
Group.
perhaps because, in a technical as much as in a Lyotard,Jean-Franf,:ois (1991) The Inhuman: Reflections
metaphorical sense, it takes place in me. My body on Time, trans. G. Bennington and R. Bowlby,
resonates with it. If the audience at Raffaello Cambridge: Polity Press.
Sanzio's Amleto is marked, as I have suggested, Phelan, Peggy (1993), Unmarked: The Politits of Per.fiJrm-
ance, London/New York: Routledge.
subjected to the permanent alteration of substance
Proust, Marcel ( 1989) Remembrance of Things Past,
that is memory, then that marking is the impression Volume Three, trans. C. Scott Moncrieff, T. Kilmartin
of sound in a body. A pain that may return, and A. Mayer, London: Penguin.
familiar, not really forgotten, but only remembered
on its return. The only mnemotechnic device that
will work is the thing itself, in its unique repetition.
The parrot at the end of Voyage does not speak.
In Amleto, the toy parrot does. It must contain
some small recording device. First it repeats Paolo
Tonti's words: 'My name is'. Its fluffy beak moves
as the feeble imitation is produced. Then,
discarded, uncannily dead, it attempts to repeat the
sound of the echoing gunshots and explosions. A
squeaky whimper: the best I could offer if asked to
repeat Genesi's 'little phrase'. It is in me, I know it,
but I cannot repeat it from memory. Some other
stuff is required. 'It is not memory that is needed
but a complex material that is found not in memory
but in words and sounds' (Deleuze and Guattari
1994: 168).
47