Transcript

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

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

Survival in the culture.

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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

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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.

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What I was speaking about, when I was speaking about

I was trying to articulate this negotiation

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

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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

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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

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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.

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

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

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so that I dont distract and can go along with the assumptions that the culture offers us

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

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

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

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

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looking at that consensus as absolutely essential to the survival of

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

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

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

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

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

Interviewer: Theres nothing out there as such. Lisa: Right. And so

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

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

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

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

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

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to survive in the world.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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is a bit of a leap for me.

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

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

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Anyway, I cannot quite go that far.

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

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

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

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of what this process might lead to. And

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part of the journey in looking at ones own patterns of behaviour in entering a space or

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

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assumptions about what is there,

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

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know where you are, establish whats stable in your environment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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to ones own behaviour because thats what becomes very apparent.

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

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

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

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

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

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the surfaces.

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

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

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It is possible because we agreed that it is possible.

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

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

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and be stimulated enormously by that.

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

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

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

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it gives me other possibilities of action, if I dont trap myself in my own image.

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

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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.

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

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

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of a moment where something might come together.

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

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

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

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

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for really not bumping into each other.

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

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

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

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At the end of the second workshop.

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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

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

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

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I dont think we were using a restart call in that group, so we hadnt used it yet.

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

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

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

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

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I was just kind of waiting, you know,

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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

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

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

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It really needed to happen.

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Anyway, everybody recognized it after.

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I thought shit we have to do one more.

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And the last one was beautiful.

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The reason for listening was reaffirmed.

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

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

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I pushed a lot to introduce more things.

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

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

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

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

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

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and its been, you know, really a good fifteen years of practising the score,

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

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but it still was, because of the people there was

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in practice many things were not proven,

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

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people were very brave, thats all I can say, really brave because.

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

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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.

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

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

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trying to understand what communication is.

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Lisa: and speech.

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Interview: thats 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,

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

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

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We talked about this before, didn’t we?

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That was a question yesterday, about invisibility. Anyway

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

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

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

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

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

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were vision and trying to figure out a way how to call speech a sense, the sense of speech. But I cant.

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

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

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

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

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I dont remember staring at things, you know. I dont remember playing with the organization of things,

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I did not know how to look at painting. I didntI dont remember being that visually oriented.

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I lived in my ears and in my body.

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I was musical, I danced.

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

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but she kept that very much in the corner,

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

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She was very visual, but anyway I wasnt.

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

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

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

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culturally because his body was never found,

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

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

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

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Invisible Forms having come through the experience with learning how to

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

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

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

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makes a very clear line all the way through,

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

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

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

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

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

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This invisible thing.

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

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

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and finding out how I could withdraw socially

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

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So I did observe, but I observed behaviour, I didnt observe visually. Thats another way of not being visual.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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for me it certainly was trustworthy.

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

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

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

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

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

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Not that I have no ideas.

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I dont like ideas all that much presented to me in theatre.

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

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And surviving teaching, that was a giant thing.

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Very young I had to teaching.

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

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and find a way to practice making things.

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

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

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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.

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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. Its 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

its just the most remarkable thingbecause, 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

its 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 persons hand is really, you experience a persons 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

Im sure they have a name for this, I dont 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 dont 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, its interesting – it is just a made up thingbut 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 parents life span

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

my mothers 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 mothers 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, its an interesting phase of memory loss.

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

Its gotten so complex and also shes gotten more comfortable with it.

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

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

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

Lisa: Yeah, its 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 thats happened gets recalled in an unpredictable way

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

Interviewer: Very earlyCould 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 nobodys awareness…

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

So the future being implicated.

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

Its 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: Its very helpful because everyone has maybe a sense thats more dominant and my very dominant sense in my life is past.

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

So probably thats why I link this very much to your work.

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

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

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

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

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

Theres 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 presentReverse is a fantastic exercise for seeing how

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

you retain the present while youre moving into the past.

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

We were looking at something togetherI cant say thats a good example, but

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

thats an example of howTheres 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 theres always a looking, a predicting into the future.

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

Theres 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

Its written down, I cant 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

HowCan 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 dont 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

Its not only doubling something as it occurs, you know, but theres something that also seems to open other perspectives in that way.

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

Lisa: Its 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, butI didntit was complicated.

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

Interview: I dont want to stick too much to the word, but theres something constructive in that way too.

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

Its not only reconstructive. Theres 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 its the empowerment of oneself.

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

If you dont like it, change it. You dont like itIts up to you.”

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

But you dont ask somebody else to do it for you.

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

This is another survival thing for me, because I dont like groups.

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

Ive 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 Ive 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 Ive 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 Ive created an illusion for myself that I could make proposals for the sake of having somebody saylets 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 didnt 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

Its so fragile, the difference between tuning something in, to offer oneself to somebody elses 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 sayokay I go along with this for a minute”, but recognize that Im going along with it.

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

You know if someone says to me “pause!”, I know they dont have to pause.

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

How can I create the situation where theyd want to pause, or Id want to pause, because Ive 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 ones, for inhabiting ones 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

Theres 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

Im 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 dont agree with.

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

Theyre doing it in our name.

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

I mean, its trying to find out how to empower oneself, to see the shit thats 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 thats useful and when the mess is a layer, you know, thats really creating an inertia thats 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 whos involved with the human shield action thats being planned or discussed…

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

for going to Iraq.

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

And although thats an action thats being made by many people, thats being discussed and shared by many people, and the risk is really

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

I mean, if youre 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 its 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 dont have to

Interviewer: go there.

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

Yeah, they dont have to go there. Its not right in front of our face that we have to decide about it

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

Somehow thats 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 dont know. I would have to think it through. Its 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

Its 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 its 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 organisationthree 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 didnt 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: Thats a description of a very beautiful scene. Thats a beautiful..

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

Lisa: Thats 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 didnt 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 Im 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: Its incredible.

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

Its like some allegory for it also. You have a group.

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

They formed a group, theres this baby in it, theres this family. Its 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 were 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 thats individually imagined, because you cant 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.