00:00:0000:00:09,326

Myriam Van Imschoot: Today is 25 — no 26 January, speaking to Lisa Nelson in Café Beaubourg.

00:00:09,32600:00:17,140

Can you (reconstruct) what you were saying about survival and concensus (during the conference)?

Survival in the culture.

00:00:17,14000:00:44,054

Lisa Nelson: I don’t know if I can reconstruct it. I was talking about concert dance and the kind of illusion…

that we stand on a certain illusion that we agree to…

00:00:44,05400:01:04,084

I mean, the consensus reality culture offers us, a whole set of behaviours, and a way to compose ourselves to create this illusion of culture.

00:01:04,08400:01:10,956

What I was speaking about, when I was speaking about…

I was trying to articulate this negotiation

00:01:10,95600:01:20,805

that we are constantly making between our reflexive underlying behaviours, movement patterns

00:01:20,80500:01:50,530

to collect information from the environment through each of our senses, that we need,

for feeling safe in any environment and part of the information we need to be safe is a way

to disappear into the cultural norm.

00:01:50,53000:02:01,709

With this simple example of how we have to compose ourselves to have a conversation – that one [example] I use a lot

00:02:01,70900:02:13,735

• to see and to be seen, to appear to be listening at the same time as actually making the effort to be listening,

00:02:13,73500:02:20,943

in the sense that if I want to really listen to you it might be distracting for me to look at you, but

00:02:20,94300:02:35,937

that’s not that acceptable, to not take the choreographic pattern of showing our attention to each other.

00:02:35,93700:02:46,336

And also, that effort, of course I was making it desperately in this conference situation,

00:02:46,33600:03:00,824

the effort to get the thoughts in my head to my tongue, which is a very unnatural…. Somehow my animal is not constructed

00:03:00,82400:03:13,179

that way, through speech in an easy way. I do not express myself easily through speech. So I was offering

00:03:13,17900:03:28,608

the possibility that for me if I really was to be able survive talking in this conference with this pattern of waiting and translating and trying to hold my train of thought I would do

00:03:28,60800:03:45,639

much better to really slow down and move my face a lot, because it really helps me to keep the train of thought, it gets in my body. I was showing that way that would work much better for me, and actually

00:03:45,63900:03:56,919

It really straightened things out. For that sentence, I actually got to the end of that sentence and could remember it if they asked me to repeat it.

00:03:56,91900:04:10,828

But this would not be easy if I used that technique that made me more integrated, in the culture

00:04:10,82800:04:23,213

it would be too distracting for people. So I would go along, I have learn to negotiate that territory,

00:04:23,21300:04:31,889

so that I don’t distract and can go along with the assumptions that the culture offers us

00:04:31,88900:04:39,108

to make some stability and in making that analogy between looking at concert dance

00:04:39,10800:04:49,317

– what are we proposing, where has the dancing gone, and how every dancer has to negotiate

00:04:49,31700:05:01,564

that territory between their motivation to dance and the proposals that are conventionally

00:05:01,56400:05:20,194

created, the proposals stage audience, or observer audience, that are existing in our cultures. In many ways

00:05:20,19400:05:32,134

looking at that consensus as absolutely essential to the survival of

00:05:32,13400:05:43,608

a population and not, and counterproductive for the survival of the individual.

00:05:43,60800:05:59,307

The analogy is the same, we negotiate those things unconsciously all our lives.

00:05:59,30700:06:10,595

Ernst von Glasersfeld, my stepfather, the epistemologist and radical constructivist who

00:06:10,59500:06:32,175

adamantly seems very purist when he refers to how the brain, the person constructs, has to construct some

00:06:32,17500:06:52,382

sense of meaning and organisation out of all of the sensorial array, and he insists that there is nothing out there.

Interviewer: There’s nothing out there as such. Lisa: Right. And so

00:06:52,38200:06:58,692

Being a physical person, living a very physical life in a very physical world, not just the

00:06:58,69200:07:10,771

world out there, but the world inside the body, the existence of matter, like my body is

00:07:10,77100:07:18,069

outside my brain, if I want to look at it that way.

00:07:18,06900:07:29,194

Or my, it is outside my thought, in the sense, in the sense of thinking in language.

00:07:29,19400:07:39,088

To deny that there is matter is very counterproductive to learning how

00:07:39,08800:07:45,781

to survive in the world.

00:07:45,78100:07:51,908

He even uses an example, this might be not true, but this is what I understood,

00:07:51,90800:08:01,286

that we also construct the ground that we walk on, and that it is a cultural consensus

00:08:01,28600:08:08,870

reality, and that without that consensus reality we‘d be stumbling all over the place.

00:08:08,87000:08:14,812

If your foot cannot assume that the ground is there under the next step

00:08:14,81200:08:20,797

than actually we would have to find another way to transport ourselves.

00:08:20,79700:08:32,235

Maybe by way of beams or something. Science fiction beams, we would never walk. We would just transport..

00:08:32,23500:08:40,157

But to the extent that I see that that we trust that the ground will stay underneath us

00:08:40,15700:08:48,705

until we perceive an edge, you know, the beginning of a step in our peripheral vision, that much I go

00:08:48,70500:08:59,634

along with it, from what our senses give us, we establish some stability in the environment, so that…

00:08:59,63400:09:06,407

but the idea that the culture establishes this consensus that the ground is there,

00:09:06,40700:09:11,889

is a bit of a leap for me.

00:09:11,88900:09:24,109

We establish what chairs are for, you know, and in any other culture we establish our seating,

00:09:24,10900:09:36,456

what sitting is, but that there is not anything there, I don’t know what it serves to think that.

00:09:36,45600:09:42,268

Anyway, I cannot quite go that far.

00:09:42,26800:10:00,359

But in terms of human behaviour I can really embrace that thinking that I constructed every second through my experience.

00:10:00,35900:10:09,469

In all of the analogies that come from that in terms of this project in the last two three weeks with

00:10:09,46900:10:26,269

seven people who really came with open minds into a process that - out of the seven only two had an idea

00:10:26,26900:10:36,596

of what this process might lead to. And

00:10:36,59600:10:49,094

part of the journey in looking at one’s own patterns of behaviour in entering a space or

00:10:49,09400:10:58,605

looking at a space, and creating these communication tools, is a breakdown of all your

00:10:58,60500:11:03,484

assumptions about what is there,

00:11:03,48400:11:12,437

your own constructed reality, ‘cause it is making a tiny little microcosm of that in a room, how you

00:11:12,43700:11:21,783

know where you are, establish what’s stable in your environment.

00:11:21,78300:11:30,004

And in actuality what is stable within you, which assumptions you can hold onto

00:11:30,00400:11:38,076

and when, and which are constantly challenged and the rug is pulled up from under you.

00:11:38,07600:11:49,769

Somewhere in the course of starting to understand the idea of tuning and listening, a kind of

00:11:49,76900:12:01,336

consensus starts to emerge, just for survival’s sake and each person navigates that their own way,

00:12:01,33600:12:19,643

either by pushing, testing, testing, pushing the limit, or by a kind of more watchful withdrawal and it’s such a complex

00:12:19,64300:12:30,695

process, everybody is going…reaching into everything they know but also watching themselves and deciding

00:12:30,69500:12:40,586

to risk their own pattern, based on the response to be interrupted in their pattern, because that’s a very

00:12:40,58600:12:47,692

emotional thing at first, but there is a way in which you can tune into it and experience it,

00:12:47,69200:13:03,754

or creating a trusting environment that it is not going to be questioned on a psychological level. That your own laboratory animal…

00:13:03,75400:13:18,240

That there is a kind of decorum that evolves over, in cycles, a decorum where there’s a kind of a… someone makes a big push at

00:13:18,24000:13:34,744

the limits and everybody shuffles in how that changes their reality and then becomes more polite,

00:13:34,74400:13:51,320

a new decorum gets established by conversation, about how each person perceived it or survived it.

00:13:51,32000:14:06,302

It’s very fragile, because this consensus which then becomes a kind of a decorum, a politeness, keeps on being made and destroyed and unmade.

00:14:06,30200:14:21,964

It was really a rich opportunity with that many of people - there were seven of us - and with the language differences in discussion because…

00:14:21,96400:14:36,489

The language, my language is difficult whether it is in English or not, because I really need to be precise and it’s the.. I really need to be precise to come and

00:14:36,48900:14:45,879

define a territory so that it is not a psychological encounter, but we acknowledge that

00:14:45,87900:14:56,091

this is going on also in our reports but we have very specific events that we can unravel.

00:14:56,09100:15:09,932

So it keeps putting the image outside of ourselves and giving some time to kind of process one’s own emotional responses

00:15:09,93200:15:18,754

to one’s own behaviour because that’s what becomes very apparent.

00:15:18,75400:15:28,509

If you have tools that you can use to interrupt the action and also to ask for explanation

00:15:28,50900:15:37,243

and you have to figure out when to use them, and sometimes you use them very naturally,

00:15:37,24300:15:48,620

reflexually, reflexively, and it’s very clear how to use them, but then you also use them because you are making

00:15:48,62000:15:59,769

theatre and so you provoke things to happen that aren’t about caring for the psychology of anything

00:15:59,76900:16:17,605

it’s more about, it could just be visual, a shift into a visual excitement and not be polite about also looking in through

00:16:17,60500:16:19,817

the surfaces.

00:16:19,81700:16:26,278

You are shifting from looking at the surface values into the human being.

00:16:26,27800:16:38,807

All that said, that game is possible to play, but it is very fragile, also. Because…

00:16:38,80700:16:41,697

It is possible because we agreed that it is possible.

00:16:41,69700:16:48,023

That’s really the only reason why it is possible; Oh yes, I can look at you like

00:16:48,02300:17:01,206

a diamond reflecting light, or I could look at you like a piece of , you know, garbage in the corner of the room,

00:17:01,20600:17:08,866

and be stimulated enormously by that.

00:17:08,86600:17:12,403

And if I am going to be that little piece of garbage I could be delighted by that,

00:17:12,40300:17:25,769

it frees me from being me or kind of trapped or paralyzed in the corner.

00:17:25,76900:17:34,597

But if I keep shifting what sense I am looking through when I am inside it gives me a way to act,

00:17:34,59700:17:43,843

it gives me other possibilities of action, if I don’t trap myself in my own image.

00:17:43,84300:17:49,371

So, in that very short time all of that really got activated.

00:17:49,37100:18:18,222

So in the runs, whatever run we would do, they really had a kind of exponential… Nothing was repeated. We never got to the point where we could say this run reminded me of the run we did of a couple of days ago, when this came up, because it just was still so new. The name of the movie was always a different name.

00:18:18,22200:18:23,951

So we hadn’t gotten long enough to create history on that level.

00:18:23,95100:18:35,015

Also we weren’t watching the videos very much at all to be able to corroborate our understandings

00:18:35,01500:18:39,359

of a moment where something might come together.

00:18:39,35900:18:50,203

So just because I was thinking about this consensus thing, what happened working with 18 or 23 people in Brussels,

00:18:50,20300:19:01,418

which was so horrifying to me because of my fears and inaptitude with groups of people

00:19:01,41800:19:16,337

was instinctually with that size of group, a lot of the animal instincts of surviving the group

00:19:16,33700:19:28,272

were very you know sharp. Certain aspects of listening were just essential for survival

00:19:28,27200:19:31,233

for really not bumping into each other.

00:19:31,23300:19:45,005

So there was an agreement and a consensus reality of being a large group, that kind of supported making

00:19:45,00500:19:53,390

this journey into individuals looking at what we were doing in their own way ….

00:19:53,39000:20:03,482

but also participating, offering their beings or their bodies to be part of this image to each other.

00:20:03,48200:20:08,417

At the end of the second workshop.

00:20:08,41700:20:12,596

I was amazed all the way through that the system was not breaking down,

00:20:12,59600:20:16,648

that the illusion that this communication system could work in a kind of

00:20:16,64800:20:26,981

an artistic practice had not broken down much earlier, ‘cause it was so frightening to me.

00:20:26,98100:20:36,490

And it broke down all at once in one of the showings, the second of three showings. Right, it went total shit,

00:20:36,49000:20:45,484

all the stupid shit that would normally arise during the workshop but that somehow

00:20:45,48400:20:58,511

had been kept back by some other illusion of what we were working on, which was very exciting artistically. The holding back of all that stuff.

00:20:58,51100:21:08,136

But it all came out at once, and everybody was lost at once, you know,

00:21:08,13600:21:13,430

except for the few people who were acting out this you know, this kind of ego-shit,

00:21:13,43000:21:21,928

they had no idea that everybody else was paralyzed of fear.

00:21:21,92800:21:30,473

I don’t think we were using a restart call in that group, so we hadn’t used it yet.

00:21:30,47300:21:37,288

It would have been a very useful thing in that. But anyway, it was, and then, and then we had,

00:21:37,28800:21:50,953

the aftermath of that, which was like a big funeral, everybody was disillusioned, really deflated by that experience.

00:21:50,95300:21:57,408

I was not deflated, I just had no idea what to do,

00:21:57,40800:22:01,901

because I had expected it to have happened along the whole way, and it wasn’t.

00:22:01,90100:22:03,884

I was just kind of waiting, you know,

00:22:03,88400:22:21,473

not even really praying that it would not, for it seemed like it could not not happen. Or if it did happen, it would be back luck that it happened that it did not break down, bad luck for us, we couldn’t acknowledge that

00:22:21,47300:22:30,854

it was very fragile what we were holding up as a group. Interviewer: it would be a very wrong idea.

00:22:30,85400:22:42,522

It would be an unreal idea. Interviewer: if it hadn’t break down. It wouldn’t have been such a good message. Lisa: No, it wouldn’t.

00:22:42,52200:22:46,995

It really needed to happen.

00:22:46,99500:22:51,650

Anyway, everybody recognized it after.

00:22:51,65000:22:56,039

I thought shit we have to do one more.

00:22:56,03900:22:59,731

And the last one was beautiful.

00:22:59,73100:23:05,013

The reason for listening was reaffirmed.

00:23:05,01300:23:19,003

But to really get some really powerful theatre out of that group, you know, pushing the limits would be necessary.

00:23:19,00300:23:30,671

But I could recognize in this smaller group, you see how time-based it is, you cannot push it.

00:23:30,67100:23:37,277

I pushed a lot to introduce more things.

00:23:37,27700:23:47,575

I pushed against my instinct but the learning process …spending more time on one call,

00:23:47,57500:24:00,044

or investigating one call or one situation, yeah, I was just pushing it all the way,

00:24:00,04400:24:06,546

but also because I chose those people feeling like they had a ritual process

00:24:06,54600:24:15,399

and I had no idea, you know, how specific the learning process would be, how time-based

00:24:15,39900:24:19,927

– I always think it is very time-based because I’m still trying to learn it

00:24:19,92700:24:29,667

and it’s been, you know, really a good fifteen years of practising the score,

00:24:29,66700:24:40,290

in its present incarnation, you know, and still feeling like I could go much slower,

00:24:40,29000:24:49,834

but it still was, because of the people there was…

00:24:49,83400:24:53,967

… in practice many things were not proven,

00:24:53,96700:25:01,746

but in extrapolating you know through seeing some of the possibilities,

00:25:01,74600:25:12,009

people were very brave, that’s all I can say, really brave because.

00:25:12,00900:25:24,263

But also that was accepting that there was a performance and everybody knows what they need to do to do that.

00:25:24,26300:25:41,342

Interviewer: The survival thing. Another thing about the survival line. Because I know a little bit a part of your life, I started to see more and more you really had to make this work.

00:25:41,34200:25:57,836

Lisa: The survival, it was completely a survival strategy.

00:25:57,83600:26:03,897

Myriam: Maybe it started with a concern for… I remember that you sometimes refer to yourself like coming from another planet,

00:26:03,89700:26:06,103

trying to understand what communication is.

00:26:06,10300:26:13,394

Lisa: and speech.

00:26:13,39400:26:21,614

Interview: that’s like a third.. the microcosm serves that. But now in your later life you also speak of your concern for losing the gift of memory,

00:26:21,61400:26:29,880

again you can see that the tuning score can be helpful for that too.

00:26:29,88000:26:39,621

Lisa: Right or, oh yeah, but starting with invisible forms.

00:26:39,62100:26:46,552

We talked about this before, didn’t we?

00:26:46,55200:26:54,481

That was a question yesterday, about invisibility. Anyway

00:26:54,48100:27:05,430

in so many ways why I started calling my workshops, my laboratories, they were

00:27:05,43000:27:27,431

I guess from 80, from 1980 onward, I called them, it was called Invisible Forms. My workshops I called invisible forms.

00:27:27,43100:27:37,926

This comes from learning how to see, to use my visual sense through video.

00:27:37,92600:27:45,949

I am not going to go into that story but I just going to refer to it.

00:27:45,94900:28:03,816

But in my… my two least developed senses, the two sense organs that were least developed for me,

00:28:03,81600:28:17,481

were vision and trying to figure out a way how to call speech a sense, the sense of speech. But I can’t.

00:28:17,48100:28:29,527

Two things that were very underdeveloped - hard to say ‘things’ here – were vision and speech Interviewer: (inaudible comment).

00:28:29,52700:28:42,878

Lisa: Well, you know, I was visually oriented in the sense that I think I was alone a lot as a child,

00:28:42,87800:28:56,903

I spent a lot of time with myself and I did not play with myself a lot of visual games.

00:28:56,90300:29:09,778

I didn’t. I didn’t. I drew. I made visual things, but I did not play with my visual sense very much.

00:29:09,77800:29:24,639

I don’t remember staring at things, you know. I don’t remember playing with the organization of things,

00:29:24,63900:29:34,217

I did not know how to look at painting. I didn’t… I don’t remember being that visually oriented.

00:29:34,21700:29:39,285

I lived in my ears and in my body.

00:29:39,28500:29:42,524

I was musical, I danced.

00:29:42,52400:29:49,583

I also drew when I wrote, you know, and my mother was a sculptor,

00:29:49,58300:29:53,832

but she kept that very much in the corner,

00:29:53,83200:30:02,006

but she made things with her hands, I mean, she worked in clay.

00:30:02,00600:30:12,153

She was very visual, but anyway I wasn’t.

00:30:12,15300:30:17,900

I also was not, speaking was a very distant thing.

00:30:17,90000:30:27,757

My father when he died when I was eleven he just disappeared

00:30:27,75700:30:38,705

and besides the literal, the literal invisibility of him suddenly becoming invisible,

00:30:38,70500:30:42,745

culturally because his body was never found,

00:30:42,74500:30:51,650

there was absolutely no other way of make visible his absence, you know, in some way.

00:30:51,65000:31:01,635

I really put a lot of time in, very quietly all alone as a kid does,

00:31:01,63500:31:11,460

to try to make sense of that invisibilization and then when I was thirty and I was naming my work

00:31:11,46000:31:17,752

Invisible Forms having come through the experience with learning how to

00:31:17,75200:31:27,583

I really learned about all my other senses , through doing video, because it was my least dominant,

00:31:27,58300:31:45,416

I really had to learn how to see with my eyes.

00:31:45,41600:31:56,480

That pattern, all the patterns, the survival patterns that I built for dealing with this invisible thing,

00:31:56,48000:31:59,391

makes a very clear line all the way through,

00:31:59,39100:32:11,431

by discovering through video about vision and what is in front of us.

00:32:11,43100:32:20,893

When my father died what was in front of me disappeared, not just his body, but my future.

00:32:20,89300:32:28,834

Because losing one parent, if you are losing the second is so in front of you,

00:32:28,83400:32:35,786

the future is of having no parents and being lost in the world.

00:32:35,78600:32:48,092

So there were a lot of parts in my environment that drew me into the future with a big gap in it.

00:32:48,09200:32:51,831

This invisible thing.

00:32:51,83100:33:02,048

So I would say that I put a lot of time into it, consciously as a child, in this puzzle, because of this

00:33:02,04800:33:11,455

the inner life working out and observing how things were working outside constantly

00:33:11,45500:33:16,432

and finding out how I could withdraw socially

00:33:16,43200:33:22,435

– I was a very shy child. I had a terrible shy problem.

00:33:22,43500:33:36,448

So I did observe, but I observed behaviour, I didn’t observe visually. That’s another way of not being visual.

00:33:36,44800:33:42,984

I would watch people talking and trying to observe the patterns of behaviour,

00:33:42,98400:33:47,828

I could not understand the conversation. What was going on.

00:33:47,82800:34:02,955

So these skills, this building up of skills were kind of leading me towards finally dealing with

00:34:02,95500:34:13,764

the aesthetic questions because of creating work yeah, of creating work that people felt untrustworthy,

00:34:13,76400:34:20,510

because it was not visually repeatable. You know, visually repeatable.

00:34:20,51000:34:30,610

I would do the same dance but it did not have the same movements. People couldn’t, anyway, it was untrustworthy, but

00:34:30,61000:34:37,659

for me it certainly was trustworthy.

00:34:37,65900:34:48,038

It started to make visible to me what was possible to find in a work of that sort, of that sort

00:34:48,03800:35:01,784

which was detailed physical movement, more or less, invisible themes,

00:35:01,78400:35:13,684

but seemed quite imagistic to me, not conceptual at all.

00:35:13,68400:35:21,137

I mean, you know, playing with ideas I could never start from that, but I could frame what I did

00:35:21,13700:35:37,646

to make it more visible, the values more visible, but never starting from or based on an idea.

00:35:37,64600:35:39,369

Not that I have no ideas.

00:35:39,36900:35:48,831

I don’t like ideas all that much presented to me in theatre.

00:35:48,83100:36:01,625

I never haven been so interested in it, ‘cause I like to discover myself what is there.

00:36:01,62500:36:08,719

And surviving teaching, that was a giant thing.

00:36:08,71900:36:17,530

Very young I had to teaching.

00:36:17,53000:36:27,840

It was very linear actually, in a way it just kept layering how to solve my life problems,

00:36:27,84000:36:34,742

and find a way to practice making things.

00:36:34,74200:36:42,347

Interview: I always think of the story of your father as formative.

00:36:42,34700:36:53,016

I have this in my mind also when thinking you you construct your survival.

00:36:53,01600:37:08,344

When we go to the theater yesterday, we see the sum of survival techniques that came into your life, but this formative moment is, is is

a father that is not there.

00:37:08,34400:37:17,202

Lisa: It was not even that he was not there, but that he disappeared. Interviewer: disappeared. Lisa: Yeah!

00:37:17,20200:37:34,153

Interviewer: What makes me, what sometimes for me becomes emotional: is the irreversibility of time. The irreversibility of time that you see displayed all the time.

00:37:34,15300:37:41,293

Even the reversal calls can only, they make it even more clear, how irreversible it is. It’s like you..

00:37:41,29300:37:52,822

Film can give a little bit the illusion that something can tumble down into real chaos and you can rewind it and then it starts again.

00:37:52,82200:38:02,206

But in our lives we have entropy and entropy is the irreversiblity of time that things cannot…

00:38:02,20600:38:10,541

Lisa: Although, what appears in the attempt or the effort to reverse

00:38:10,54100:38:15,186

– it’s just the most remarkable thing – because, okay,

00:38:15,18600:38:18,480

on that level there is an irreversibility of time.

00:38:18,48000:38:27,407

Things won’t meet, the random synchronicities that happen in life,

00:38:27,40700:38:36,789

in terms of reversibility. Well, there is reversibility and double irreversibility.

00:38:36,78900:38:41,840

You know the building falling down and then falling back up, and meeting again

00:38:41,84000:38:46,050

• all of the meetings happening at one time.

00:38:46,05000:38:58,311

In going backwards reversing physically, the medium, you actually can go back,

00:38:58,31100:39:11,940

it’s just that all the synchronicities have shifted, they shifted, they have gotten out of phase, and then

00:39:11,94000:39:17,793

you are in the present, because you are in your body experiencing the reversal

00:39:17,79300:39:23,318

but the past is suddenly registered like a crystal.

00:39:23,31800:39:29,286

These landmarks will suddenly become visible and also.

00:39:29,28600:39:41,559

perhaps you reverse a handshake with your eyes closed, reverse the handshake and do the same motion as close as you could,

00:39:41,55900:39:52,692

reverse it again, the hands might not meet, but at the point where they would have met,

00:39:52,69200:39:58,137

you experience the other person’s hand is really, you experience a person’s hand in your hand.

00:39:58,13700:40:07,239

And so this is where the imagination gets very rich, and the equation of memory and …

00:40:07,23900:40:15,297

but also you often are bumping into your future when you reverse, because you are in real time

00:40:15,29700:40:23,586

and you are traveling towards a future, any future. What it does is that it makes

00:40:23,58600:40:28,916

– I’m sure they have a name for this, I don’t know what it is –

00:40:28,91600:40:37,971

it is a holographic in a way, that the future in the present moment

00:40:37,97100:40:51,894

and the past are completely in new places they…

(end of side A of cassette)

00:40:51,89400:40:55,494

I don’t know I am thinking of the irreversibility of time.

00:40:55,49400:41:10,969

Let’s say you return to your memory of your childhood and over time the sensorial, the richness of

00:41:10,96900:41:21,512

the sensorial events during that moment have maybe faded away, you cannot quite build the picture

00:41:21,51200:41:26,909

with as many senses as you might have had.

00:41:26,90900:41:34,724

Some faded out completely, but you still have something.

00:41:34,72400:41:53,811

I just realized, it’s interesting – it is just a made up thing – but my father when he disappeared my future as a child, you know, I was absolutely lost,

00:41:53,81100:42:02,865

the fear of the consequence in a real way, but also sometimes the stability of the parents

00:42:02,86500:42:10,923

is what you depend on for your survival and at the other end of my parent’s life span

00:42:10,92300:42:29,523

– my mother’s life span, she is losing her memory, and also with my own experiences of having very bad memory loss a couple of years ago

00:42:29,52300:42:45,971

and having been practicing the score so much over these intervening years, my difficulties with memory show up just as strongly when they are playing the score as they do in my daily life.

00:42:45,97100:42:56,699

And as I watch the totally unpredictable pattern of my mother’s memory loss…

00:42:56,69900:43:00,999

It thrills me; the unpredictability of it.

00:43:00,99900:43:07,059

It doesn’t seem to have any patterns, you know, what she loses and what she regains and then what she remembers.

00:43:07,05900:43:13,259

At this phase, it’s an interesting phase of memory loss.

00:43:13,25900:43:21,409

It’s gotten so complex and also she’s gotten more comfortable with it.

00:43:21,40900:43:25,972

So you know, it becomes more like theatre in the sense that… Interviewer: A theatre of Operations.

00:43:25,97200:43:31,459

Lisa: Yeah, it’s a theatre, a real big theatre of operations.

00:43:31,45900:43:35,279

And, and we can comment on it.

00:43:35,27900:43:37,195

Van Imschoot: Every dysfunction is a new function.

00:43:37,19500:44:02,288

Nelson: Yeah, she goes through the dysfunctional frustration into building new coping mechanisms and it goes on like that and the coping mechanisms are sometimes very creative - I mean they are all very creative, but some are very imaginative in an interesting way.

00:44:02,28800:44:10,078

But anyway, I was seeing this past and future meeting places where they get out of phase.

00:44:10,07800:44:24,567

And sometimes in the working of the score the future is implicated very early on in the score and it gets recalled.

00:44:24,56700:44:26,762

Something that’s happened gets recalled in an unpredictable way…

00:44:26,76200:44:32,536

Interviewer: Very early… Could you be just more specific?

00:44:32,53600:44:36,611

Early when you started doing it or early when you…

00:44:36,61100:44:38,484

Nelson: Like if you‘re working for an hour,

00:44:38,48400:44:54,970

early in the run - to be a smaller example -, earlier in the run something might occur and nobody somehow remarked on or acknowledged within, that somehow everything crystallizes around

00:44:54,97000:45:02,741

that set of relationships at the end, with nobody’s awareness…

00:45:02,74100:45:05,910

So the future being implicated.

00:45:05,91000:45:25,613

It’s the same moment occurs again, but with so many other layers of acknowledgement, whereas nobody noticed it, noticed this event, consciously noticed this event.

00:45:25,61300:45:36,820

This kind of divining, sand painting, aspect of playing with the tuning score materials.

00:45:36,82000:45:48,860

It does seem like a bit of a microcosm of living, of a lifetime.

00:45:48,86000:46:03,651

In experience in working with the score over a long period of time - I just see more and more examples of how time, within our experience -,…

00:46:03,65100:46:27,010

Scott and I worked together a lot and what happens now is that we recall things, situations that arose in the learning process, specific things, about certain calls and how they were interpreted or played out, you know,

00:46:27,01000:46:39,619

ten years ago, in a specific room in a specific instance, and we can even bring them into the space at the moment and we‘ll recognize it.

00:46:39,61900:46:49,897

Interviewer: It’s very helpful because everyone has maybe a sense that’s more dominant and my very dominant sense in my life is past.

00:46:49,89700:46:55,516

So probably that’s why I link this very much to your work.

00:46:55,51600:47:06,592

I see that element very pronounced because I’m already preformed to hold onto that maybe more.

00:47:06,59200:47:25,784

It’s only recent that I started having a much more complex understanding of how the different tenses cooperate in the score and I’m much more thinking about how future is always implicated or activated.

00:47:25,78400:47:29,232

There’s a lot of prediction going on in the score, I mean, you know.

00:47:29,23200:47:36,840

All predictions. Lisa: All predictions.

00:47:36,84000:47:41,658

Interviewer: Time is very different for me as soon as I bring in the other tenses.

00:47:41,65800:47:53,013

When you speak about past meaning future, it gets very, I mean, you know, I kind of lose track.

00:47:53,01300:48:00,838

Lisa: A present… Reverse is a fantastic exercise for seeing how…

00:48:00,83800:48:09,348

you retain the present while you’re moving into the past.

00:48:09,34800:48:12,173

We were looking at something together… I can’t say that’s a good example, but

00:48:12,17300:48:20,498

that’s an example of how… There’s also…

00:48:20,49800:48:26,945

in order to move you have to prepare action - not consciously but the body prepares action.

00:48:26,94500:48:31,763

So there’s always a looking, a predicting into the future.

00:48:31,76300:48:43,722

There’s no way for the body to move without that, without projecting either in imagination and also the body organizing itself.

00:48:43,72200:48:59,024

Interview: It makes me think of some very nice comments on Bonnie Cohen Bainbridge’s, you know, her work with brain-injured children.

00:48:59,02400:49:10,339

Lisa: Yeah, yeah, I think that the scientific measure of that time, the motor pattern getting organized in the brain is 1/100 of a second of reactions.

00:49:10,33900:49:21,036

It’s written down, I can’t remember, but they measured this. They can measure that.

00:49:21,03600:49:37,650

Interview: Overall we‘ve been talking about analogies with survival in life and how that also gives analogies with the work. Imbrications. Euhm.

00:49:37,65000:49:40,390

I have a very practical question.

00:49:40,39000:49:51,605

How… Can I use some of the autobiographical information when I write about

00:49:51,60500:50:07,639

Lisa: Absolutely, absolutely, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, any of it that works to make it apparent.

00:50:07,63900:50:11,098

Interviewer: The second question is, because

00:50:11,09800:50:28,773

we speak about analogies, but also how culture works, how this little microcosm works with similar codings and recodings, and

00:50:28,77300:50:44,922

still I feel that the little microcosm that you establish or present has an utopian aspect which we don’t have in our culture.

00:50:44,92200:50:53,839

I would ask you in what way can we leave the analogy a little bit as it is and see where there is a transformational aspect.

00:50:53,83900:51:07,747

It’s not only doubling something as it occurs, you know, but there’s something that also seems to open other perspectives in that way.

00:51:07,74700:51:20,220

Lisa: It’s funny because Denise Luccioni came up with this comment about utopia.

00:51:20,22000:51:29,524

I asked her to write it down, but… I didn’t… it was complicated.

00:51:29,52400:51:34,222

Interview: I don’t want to stick too much to the word, but there’s something constructive in that way too.

00:51:34,22200:51:41,084

It’s not only reconstructive. There’s something…

00:51:41,08400:51:51,358

Lisa: As a system of communication in a group, which is a little mini microcosm culture…

00:51:51,35800:52:21,092

The idea that everybody has personal responsibility for their own desire to make it apparent is a ridiculous notion of, a democratic kind of notion, but it’s the empowerment of oneself.

00:52:21,09200:52:27,198

“If you don’t like it, change it. You don’t like it… It’s up to you.”

00:52:27,19800:52:33,514

But you don’t ask somebody else to do it for you.

00:52:33,51400:52:38,669

This is another survival thing for me, because I don’t like groups.

00:52:38,66900:52:44,079

I’ve never been able to be in groups.

00:52:44,07900:52:54,795

And my life has led me to having to be in groups, communes, and, never to my, always with great reluctance.

00:52:54,79500:53:04,490

So I’ve tried to learn how to survive being in groups very painstakingly.

00:53:04,49000:53:10,968

And so this communication system kind of evolved as a way…

00:53:10,96800:53:20,941

also in making performance, making art I’ve never wanted to tell anybody what to do.

00:53:20,94100:53:24,076

And in teaching I never wanted to tell anybody what to do.

00:53:24,07600:53:35,291

So I’ve created an illusion for myself that I could make proposals for the sake of having somebody say “let’s do this“.

00:53:35,29100:53:37,791

Anyway I had to do that to make my living.

00:53:37,79100:53:43,259

I had to find a way to do it where I didn’t feel I was telling people what to do.

00:53:43,25900:53:52,222

And in order to work with a group I had to find a way where everybody was directing.

00:53:52,22200:53:58,747

This just really fell out of this group tuning situation.

00:53:58,74700:54:03,762

Knowing all along that there were two things that were necessary.

00:54:03,76200:54:08,732

The difference between tuning and directing for example.

00:54:08,73200:54:36,143

It’s so fragile, the difference between tuning something in, to offer oneself to somebody else’s vision, aesthetic taste and vision, which has been very hard for me to do ever and to be the subject to compose, to recompose myself.

00:54:36,14300:54:41,948

To be willing to do that, I had to feel depersonalized.

00:54:41,94800:54:53,070

I had to get myself out of the way, in a way that probably other people find very easy, but I find very difficult.

00:54:53,07000:55:01,510

How to serve something else, to serve an image rather than to serve a personal desire.

00:55:01,51000:55:22,095

So to first find out how to co-direct in a way that isn’t directing but is tuning, is asking an individual to become somewhat empty of their selves, of their ego-selves.

00:55:22,09500:55:35,992

and to be willing to be seen and willing to say “okay I go along with this for a minute”, but recognize that I’m going along with it.

00:55:35,99200:55:44,537

You know if someone says to me “pause!”, I know they don’t have to pause.

00:55:44,53700:56:05,412

How can I create the situation where they’d want to pause, or I’d want to pause, because I’ve been given a request, request, suggestion, a clear indication that that would be a good thing to do at this moment.

00:56:05,41200:56:38,280

The fragility of both taking full responsibility for embodying one’s, for inhabiting one’s body, showing oneself at the same time and being seen and being encouraged to be seen more in relation to the whole picture not in relation to oneself necessarily.

00:56:38,28000:56:43,481

There’s a lot of levels of transformation in yourself.

00:56:43,48100:56:45,954

You have to do something.

00:56:45,95400:56:52,328

You have to do a lot of operations to survive that.

00:56:52,32800:56:58,911

It encourages a very awake dialogue with yourself in that situation.

00:56:58,91100:57:04,948

You have to be, to lend yourself to that experiment.

00:57:04,94800:57:14,828

And it also says: I take responsibility for following as well as leading.

00:57:14,82800:57:19,147

All of that is just so idealistic I find.

00:57:19,14700:57:29,607

I’m not talking about utopia, but an idealized way of living in a culture.

00:57:29,60700:57:35,579

Also knowing, taking responsibility to say no.

00:57:35,57900:57:50,463

It brings up all of the things that are impossible to figure out about how to stop our governments from doing the things they are doing that I just absolutely don’t agree with.

00:57:50,46300:57:53,818

They’re doing it in our name.

00:57:53,81800:58:04,952

I mean, it’s trying to find out how to empower oneself, to see the shit that’s on your plate.

00:58:04,95200:58:10,653

And in very local ways, you know, in your own house…

00:58:10,65300:58:36,415

To recognize when the mess is a layer that’s useful and when the mess is a layer, you know, that’s really creating an inertia that’s hurtful, somehow hurtful to your own being at that moment.

00:58:36,41500:58:50,533

And then looking at time, how time flows and how long it takes both for something to become visible for the organization of that shift to become visible so that you can take an action.

00:58:50,53300:58:57,406

And when you have to be impulsive and take a big risk…

00:58:57,40600:59:08,679

I was just talking to Michel who’s involved with the human shield action that’s being planned or discussed…

00:59:08,67900:59:14,322

for going to Iraq.

00:59:14,32200:59:23,586

And although that’s an action that’s being made by many people, that’s being discussed and shared by many people, and the risk is really…

00:59:23,58600:59:30,994

I mean, if you’re looking at it based on past experience, it really is a risk.

00:59:30,99400:59:41,408

I mean that you might get hurt or killed, so it’s a commitment to not knowing consequences.

00:59:41,40800:59:52,844

Those kinds of risks people take all over the world all the time, but many of us don’t have to …

Interviewer: go there.

00:59:52,84400:59:58,939

Yeah, they don’t have to go there. It’s not right in front of our face that we have to decide about it…

00:59:58,93901:00:07,739

Somehow that’s also this kind of practice, performance practice.

01:00:07,73901:00:14,914

I have, you know, an ideal about how I can make these things apparent.

01:00:14,91401:00:17,224

Myriam: Did you ever come close to…?

01:00:17,22401:00:27,058

Lisa: There have been runs that have been incredible, in the studios, that start pulling models.

01:00:27,05801:00:30,611

Myriam: Can you recall some moments?

01:00:30,61101:00:36,451

Or why you felt that it got close?

01:00:36,45101:00:48,421

Lisa: I don’t know. I would have to think it through. It’s very much more that it verges towards that…

01:00:48,42101:00:52,345

Actually there are a lot of small…

01:00:52,34501:01:25,271

It’s again, for me, bringing the small, the peripheral, the unintended, the non-centralized actions. Uncentralized actions, the ones that are not in the center of the attention, to the attention. And that happens in little ways all throughout.

01:01:25,27101:01:29,752

Actually we had a beautiful run yesterday afternoon where I felt that…

01:01:29,75201:01:31,714

I mean it’s also my aesthetic taste.

01:01:31,71401:01:34,001

It matched.

01:01:34,00101:01:43,173

Where the reading of time and attention in the group makes these beautiful dances.

01:01:43,17301:01:53,750

Very weird. And not mechanistic at all, but so beautiful. Oohh my God!

01:01:53,75001:02:20,313

There was a scene that appeared, that got tuned in from all kinds of reverses and replaces, and a lot of replaces, but this scene where three people were standing in a line, parallel to the front of the stage, three people in a line.

01:02:20,31301:02:35,197

It was a series of replaces and it left them there in motion and it was Vera, Nuno, and I think Laurence.

01:02:35,19701:02:49,489

And each of them was doing different kinds of movement, but it was sustained and there was some sound also of this raw…

01:02:49,48901:03:00,890

And the three worlds were just magnificent. Beautifully simple organisation…three worlds…

01:03:00,89001:03:16,866

And then Pascal entered and aaah suddenly Vera took of her shirt, it was slow, you know, it was a normal pace, took off her shirt.

01:03:16,86601:03:26,510

At the same time she was doing that, Pascal had entered from across the way and he didn’t directly go towards her.

01:03:26,51001:03:29,981

She was closest to him.

01:03:29,98101:03:41,258

As she was making, she made a baby bundle, she made a baby bundle, and she was holding the baby, and Pascal suddenly appeared

01:03:41,25801:03:47,028

And she just shifted her weight in a way that made them a couple with a new baby.

01:03:47,02801:03:53,472

Somehow Pascal was interacting with her in some way.

01:03:53,47201:03:57,280

Suddenly she put this baby bundle down.

01:03:57,28001:03:59,440

Nuno was next he was still there.

01:03:59,44001:04:03,700

Everybody stayed where they were.

01:04:03,70001:04:11,050

And Nuno was leaning over and it worked.

01:04:11,05001:04:18,600

It was right there and Vera took a bundle, the baby bundle.

01:04:18,60001:04:35,121

She put it on the table, it was like a table, and she just put it on the table in such a simple way and left the baby there to be with her husband, her lover, Pascal.

01:04:35,12101:04:57,250

Laurence was an instant mother, sightless. It was just exquisite. Anyway it was a long time it just kept evolving, with giant changes that were made with small things.

01:04:57,25001:05:03,113

Interviewer: That’s a description of a very beautiful scene. That’s a beautiful..

01:05:03,11301:05:06,375

Lisa: That’s what I mean. It was just beautiful.

01:05:06,37501:05:09,974

It was something that arose.

01:05:09,97401:05:13,434

Just beautiful.

01:05:13,43401:05:20,841

And that could have happened by just three people going to the space and starting something, but it didn’t happen that way.

01:05:20,84101:05:29,467

It evolved out of a lot of tuning.

01:05:29,46701:05:31,673

Interview: A theatre of co-operation.

01:05:31,67301:05:35,621

Lisa: Co-operations (laughs).

01:05:35,62101:05:46,979

Yeah, so anyway, the contradiction between co-operation and directing and personal responsibility.

01:05:46,97901:05:52,250

In that I’m very idealistic or utopian.

01:05:52,25001:06:05,822

And going from hive mind, you know, the three levels: hive , and then community, and then individuality, is very much, you know, in evidence in the process

01:06:05,82201:06:06,573

Myriam: It’s incredible.

01:06:06,57301:06:10,102

It’s like some allegory for it also. You have a group.

01:06:10,10201:06:18,160

They formed a group, there’s this baby in it, there’s this family. It’s like

01:06:18,16001:06:33,825

Lisa: Like the individual starts to melt away and form this kind of consensus community and all this individuality goes away, because we’re going through a phase trying to unite someway with some common motive.

01:06:33,82501:06:50,010

And then over time the need for action evolves that’s individually imagined, because you can’t do that kind of projection.

01:06:50,01001:07:04,271

Then reading about aboriginal mind and the extraordinary way they communicate through time and space, is a whole other thrilling adventure.

01:07:04,27101:07:21,109

Looking at a very sophisticated development of human communication with very few people in an enormous space, covering thousands and thousands of miles of distance.

01:07:21,109

Myriam: I would call this a very good example.