Final Performance (Script, Photos, Videos)
SCENE ONE “TITA”
TITA: [frame] if a + b = c, then y r u a w? [end frame]
she flails.
er,
fails.
in flailing, there’s failing?
(tongue that ten times)
when she was a little girl
her heart s(eyed) for
2/3 times, the wolf
didn’t eat the sheep
because
2/3 times
he wasn't there
TONY: He wasn’t there. He was not in the Marcinelle mine disaster, though many believed he was, including his young bride, where two-hundred-and sixty-three lost their lives of which one-hundred-and-thirty-six were Italian migrant workers, the cheapest of cheap labour, but just one of thirty-plus disasters in the dozens upon dozens of Belgium mines, where safety rules were elementary at best and imaginary at worst.
TITA: y d(ear)
do u h(ear)
what u want
to hear?
listen
she was
a w
not a c
she slid down
the alphabet
like it was a slide
caught letters along the way
she relished how
o
had no end
when teacher said, “What are you going to be?”
she said “w”
“w?”
“I like the way it
starts up
and
ends up
Teacher said “no.”
DENIZ: What is the common theme of the numbers: 44, 54, 69,84? No, no – they are not a mathematical series resulting through a function where you feed the result of the last step into the function again. They are institutional numbers. They are the numbers of discipline. They are the numbers of mind control. Imagine a grading system where 5 is the highest mark and 1 is the lowest. 1 fails, 2 passes, 3 is mediocre, 4 is good, 5 is success. In a hundred point scale points between 1-44 equals to 1, 45-54 to 2, 55-69 to 3, 70-84 to 4, 85-100 to 5. 44 fails, 45 passes. 84 is the worst – trust me.
TITA:
little girl flails
card reports "c's"
she takes a red crayon
scribbles
teacher y do u write c
when <3 wants w
teacher s(eyes)
“Your daughter is failing.”
flailing? she awes
“No failing”
but
she liked way fl
tickled her lips
she wanted to flail
into letters
swim in alphabet soup where
o’s loop in her hair
little q’s curl between her toes
MARIA: What do you think of this, he said, and drew on a napkin the parameters of this room. To scale, or at least it seemed to me. I said I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.
TITA: where lang, langu(age), is hers
TONY:
Why the “un” in schooling?
“To have an understanding of unschooling you have to have a pretty clear idea that schoolingand education are not the same thing, they’re not even distantly related, although superficially they look like the same thing. Schooling is submission to the instructions of other people, almost always people you don’t know. Classroom teachers, for example, don’t select what they school you in; they transmit orders. From whom? The principal? No; he takes orders, too. From the superintendent? No; he takes orders, too. From the state department of education? No, absolutely not. They take orders, too. So your first problem really, coming to terms with the variety of things unschooling is, is to come to terms with the fact schooling is a rather mysterious process which virtually no one understands its source or the rationale for doing it… Schooling has some value, it just doesn’t have supreme value… You can be schooled to do a lot of things, but you can’t be educated to take control of your lives.”
SCENE TWO “DENIZ”
DENIZ: You know I fell in love with you on the day Mostar Bridge was exploded. I was left on one side, you on the other. Because it is essential to us you know. We fall in love over exploded bridges. Before the dust settled down we saw each other on each side of the cliff. I recognize you from the shine in your eyes, and the straightness of your gaze. It is as if twin stars have fallen from sky. You are all the unnamed colours of rainbow at once. You are one of those that could not be classified, that could not be written in 1913 Encyclopedia Britannica.
TONY: A tower of knowledge in our living room.
I was in the “I” volume for a reason. I flipped through India-Pakistan, Indictment, Infamy, Infantry, Insect, Instinct, Insurance, Intelligence, Interior Decoration, Internal Combustion Engine, International Court of Justice, Interracial Relations, Iran, Iraq, Ireland, Iron and Steel Industry, Isaac, Islam, Israel, Istanbul, Italy and Italian everything, Italo-Turkish war, and Italian Independence, my destination. But no mention of the massacre of hundreds of thousands of southerners, or Fenestrelle, one of the first concentration camps in modern times, in northern Italy where southern men vanished, now restored and beautified. And I think of the 110 Nobel Prize winners and five American Presidents who have contributed their knowledge to Britannica. While my son shows me his drawing of a cruel ruler who enjoyed surveying his kingdom, and seeing his tiny, puny subjects suffer.
DENIZ: You know, before falling in love with you I was burned down in Madimak Hotel in the same year. I fell in love with you through my flames. They were lynchers behind us both. We were two rebels against tradition. (And state. State follows tradition.) We watched each other on the opposing ends of the Mostar Bridge. Dead babies floated under us in the river. We took our time; I find it fascinating that we took our time when we were actually chased by the lynchers. I brought you the 40th day of the dark prison chamber of Ahmet Arif with the lines he wrote for Leyla Erbil: “through my longing for you I have worn out fetters”. [Ahmet Arif was later accused of not being a poet in the “full” sense of the word because he published only one book. He said he was a poet since you can be a prophet with only one book.] Leyla was a city girl you know. Not a mountain wolf like Ahmet. But love has its own ways. And we like epics.
TITA: From this valley, you say you are leaving. We will miss your bright eyes, and sweet smile. For they say you are taking the sunshine.
DENIZ: And East meets East you know.
MARIA: Far from home. Ache. An optional pain, known only for short periods of time. East. Yes it is there, this something-totally-other-that-knows-more-about-me-than-I-know-about-it. I go only to the edge. Admire. Sense the web of others’ understandings. Return to the known.
DENIZ: We live in the universe where the more you go to east the more east you find. The more sun you seek the more sun you find. With the simplicity of impossibility. (We are twin prime numbers.)
I die five times a day.
TITA: How does the medium of poetry act as a vehicle towards the revelatory or the sublime? In The Still Performance: Writing, Self, and Interconnection in Five Postmodern American Poets, James McCorkle frames the beginning of his book with an Adrienne Rich quote: “What kind of beast would turn its life into words?/ What atonement is this all about?/and yet, writing words like these, I’m also living/” (1). Rich’s words here reveal a tension we explored in our project, the concept of representing life and self in words. In writing poetry, the self is scattered, broken down, but is also disseminated and has potential for living elsewhere, outside the body. In our public posts of original created poems/prose-poetry on Scalar, we scattered a bit of ourselves and in doing so, released the potential to control meaning. As we each responded twice to each other’s creations, we picked up the tatters, consumed them, and created new works in response. Creation here begets creation, and layers upon layers of meaning produced a meaning machine that weaved together our mini revelations. In our project, we perform the failure of authoritative intent; in our performance, we find the sublime through the act of extending ourselves and then letting go.
SCENE 3: “MARIA”
MARIA: “Sharper?” he asked, and she stood back and blinked a few times before answering, “Yes.” The man’s sweater was blue.
TITA: Once upon a time [apparently that’s how you start stories] there was a boy in blue. A blue wooly sweater. [Wooly implies wool-like, much unlike 100% wool from fancy stores]. The sweater stretched across his upper body like the sky [this comparison is called a simile]. His chest hair was trapped beneath the sky like grass that has yet to feast on the sun.
MARIA: Its machine-woven fibres glinted in the light.
(I made that up. I don’t remember. But sweaters must have colours and stories must have details.)
The man pointed to the front of the store, to the window, to the November light. Piercing beams bounced from car hoods and windows. There were leaves. Individual leaves.
Until today, had the close-up thing: leaf, not been related to the puffy mass at the top of the tree?
Of course it had. But she had assumed that whatever was up there could not be seen. Now she saw that much less had to be taken on faith.
That much less could.
(There are no leaves in November, at least not in Toronto. At least not in 1971.
TONY: Its memory still embedded in my spine.
MARIA: And yet the scene has leaves, and green ones. In a later draft, it will either be June or the leaves will be yellow. Or maybe no one will notice.)
In Grade Eight, smart children sat with other smart children around pentagonal tables. That was the way groups worked. They did not face the teacher or their classmates, but each other. Who else was there in the class? They didn’t know.
They were Group One. It was each other they had to impress.
Lynn, Hannah and Suzie, (not their real names) sat with Elliott and Ben (also not their real names). Lynn and Suzie were Developed. Not Hannah.
Elliott: astounding! His pallor and insubstantiality. He was the first to answer every question, talked the longest in his broken voice. He sported, Suzie announced, a small but persistent erection which she felt when he tackled her one day in park, rolling downhill with her, his hands everywhere.
DENIZ: Oh no! That’s not how it has happened! It was a small seaside town where everyone knew each other. It was a hot summer night. She wasn’t wearing a bra because she was not Developed. At some point they separated from their little group, went to a darker side of the park. He started kissing her, he put his hand under her tshirt. She let him. She knew so little about her body back then (she still doesn’t know much actually) but she realized her panties were getting sticky and wet unignorably. This scared her but she just went with the flow, she knew there would be no penetration – her precious virginity, source of her family honour would stay untouched. He guided her hand – she got where he was leading her, and went for the bold move. He then came to his pants. For years she didn’t know this was pre-ejaculation. She thought this was male affection.
MARIA: We played with the paradox between the simultaneously inward and outward-facing qualities of literature. We wondered: how is it possible to encounter one another’s texts in a way which does not seek to “tame” them, in the way that Susan Sontag discusses in her essay, “Against Interpretation.” (8) Rather we created an intertextual dialogue.
“Behind words,” writes philosopher and psychologist Vygotsky, “there is the independent grammar of thought, the syntax of word meaning. The simplest utterance, far from reflecting a constant, rigid correspondence between sound and meaning, is really a process.” (222) In annotating one another’s texts we sought to go behind each other’s words and work at the level of this syntax, thus contributing to the process of shared meaning-making. It will be up to the reader to determine what new meanings are created, and we hope our performance will add another dimension to the experience.
SCENE 4: “TONY”
TONY: There is a theory about the public sphere as there is for everything.
There is a theory about education.
It’s about leading out
And not putting in
Should be
But isn’t
There is a theory about television
But it’s getting old
There’s no room for content
Only form
And who’s behind it
There’s a theory about exercise
How it used to be good for you
But now it kills
And sitting - just as bad
There’s a theory about food
It will kill you.
There’s a theory about love
DENIZ: So how does it go, do we fall in love with people who remind us our parents or who do not remind us our parents? (Do we become our parents? – no, that’s a side question.) So how queer are we actually – how hetero (“normal”) are we? Where does the skin and mind align to make you fall in love? How much of it is about evolution? Is it random? Is it because of circumstances? Sexual orientation? Gender? Evolution? Choice? Trauma? Society – status – breeding – not breeding – sexually transmitted diseases? Sex? Passion? Love? The theory of smell – I might be making it up – and probably I am – but I think I have read somewhere that it was actually the smell of people (our most animal, rawest and most uncivilized instinct) that made us fall in love with some significant people. I think back through the smells of my peak crushes. (Crushes that actually crushed me.) Burnt caramel, tobacco, cardamom, cedar. No light smells in that mind shelf, all intense – penetrating smells – the smells that follow me.
TONY: Apart from the million others
All of them right
All of them wrong
There’s a theory about books
How they should be burned
There’s a theory about burning people
Upside down
Or in an oven
There’s a theory about birth control
Mind control
Eugenics
And inbreeding
There’s a theory about abortion
On both sides
There’s a theory about milk
That it’s by cows for cows
There’s a theory about Einstein
And his theory
There’s a theory about electromagnetic fields
And their discrete and continuous structures
Explained in animation
Which I don’t understand
And harm you nonetheless
There’s a theory about Alzheimer’
And the myelin sheath
And astronauts
And the space program
And space stations
And a trip to space
By the super rich
Who leave earth (for good)
For the super poor
There’s a theory about denial
And self-help books
There’s a theory about academics
By academics
In academia
There’s a theory about the internet
And an internet of theories
There’s a theory about pop
And empty bottles
And Gods that are crazy
There’s a theory about God
All of them
There’s a theory about Muslims
Islam
The Koran
Iran
And Pakistan
(pause)
Afghanistan
There’s a theory about sleep
Deprivation
Disorder
TITA: punctuation
punctu ate me
n now
i m
an
!
a
,
a
.
all at once
i m
not
this
not that
then u came
;
u
r
the
.
i m
the
,
together
;
disorder
ordered
TONY: Apnea
Heart attack
And friends who die too soon
There’s a theory (mine) that I know less today
Than I did yesterday
And a theory that I prove it
Every day.
And a dead Molière talks behind my back:
Que diable allait-il faire dans cette galère?
DENIZ: To be able to have a functioning public sphere among us, to be able to work and negotiate as a collective without eroding each other but rather encouraging each other; we needed to start from the very beginning – maybe even with a self-destructive attempt of explaining who “ourselves” were and why we had the significant motivations we had. I believe this is also an experiment on the potentialities of making a platform of discussion among people who desire this discussion but lack the basis of a common background. To establish this communicative action which lies in the center of the public sphere debate in the orthodox Habermasian universe; we first needed to deal with each others’ set of references, taboos, traumas, “ground zeros”, “common senses”, “absolute neutralities” and “normals”. Everything that we took for granted, everything that seemed established should be explained again to each other to set this potential platform of discussion. And if poetry cannot do it, what can?
Date: December 7, 2015
Time: 12.38 - 12.56 pm
Place: Rehearsal Room of Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies Department in University of Toronto
(214 College Street, M5T 2Z9 / Toronto, Ontario, Canada)
PS: We thank Emelie Chhangur for documenting our presentation, all the videos and photos are hers.
