sarma

Brussels, May 15, 2025

Dear Lina,

When the writing can no longer be postponed, there is always something else to be done, something more urgent than writing – reading another book, for example, or a walk through the park and a visit to the library. The essay on your work could wait, so yesterday afternoon I went out for a stroll and some more thinking, perhaps hoping for something unexpected to occur. Such peaceful procrastination is one of my rituals that nurtures the work, so I tell myself, but perhaps also a form of writing that never quite makes it to the page.

The park near my home connects different neighborhoods and is normally a popular passageway for pedestrians and cyclists. Due to renovation works on a bridge, circulation is now temporarily interrupted, resulting in separate zones, dead ends, and detours. The spatial setting produces a peculiar situation. Many people now avoid the route; others seem to enjoy the confusion. Sitting on a bench, I started to wonder about other people’s routines and how they deal with their being suspended. Curiously, the rehearsal of a brass band in a house adjoining the park seemed to turn everything into a ready-made performance. It’s not always like this. On other days, nothing seems to be happening. Or it all remains banal and a scattered affair. What do we need to embrace the limbo and the digressions, compose our attention and inhabit our everyday differently?

The situation made me think of your performance Great Expectations – a work I only know through images, video snippets and our conversation. “What happens to preparations if they are not followed by anything? When they themselves become main acts?” You gleaned rituals, gestures and tics from sports and theatre rehearsals, preparations for a main act that never arrives. They provide the material for a group choreography in which these gestures are isolated, abstracted, repeated and recombined, inviting a close reading, like a semiotic exercise. Reframing the everyday is an established artistic genre, which brings up the question of what exactly is brought into focus and why.

On that park bench, I was reading David Foster Wallace’s tennis essays, in which he describes the tics of Federer and Nadal familiar from TV, then goes on to discuss more rituals, the etiquette of warm-ups, etc. Moving from TV to the actual court, he observes that “there happen to be other tics and habits, tiny perks of live viewing.” Media and rituals crank up our expectations and guide our attention. Or, if we follow Foster Wallace’s oblique gaze, they indeed become a frame to value the minor routines, distractions and more elusive aspects of the everyday. Now, musing on a park bench or watching sports on TV is a diversion at best. What interests me in the performing arts, as a collective and live event, is the experimenting with unfamiliar languages and perspectives. How do you prime someone’s attention for more idiosyncratic experiences that are nevertheless shared?

Thinking about commuting between media and perspectives, I remember how you spoke about the “interplay of media” as your method and about you being a “test body that seeks to understand the work from several angles.” Embracing multiple roles – of visual artist, scenographer and performer – entails different ways of inhabiting the work, of negotiating conventions, of material and corporeal thinking, of composing. I imagine spectators walking around and “attending to” Great Expectations, being invited to take up multiple perspectives, they themselves becoming test bodies and, crucially, mutually witnessing how others experiment and falter as they go about it.

For the text I’ll have to address other questions too. The relation between design – scenography, staging, etc. – and its community of users is always a negotiation. The modular stage you designed with a group of scenographers for P14 at the Volksbühne in Berlin – platforms that can be arranged in various ways, including a frontal stage, an arena, a table or a staircase – each time imagines and arranges the audience as a collective body. It struck me that you decided to only show me images of the spaces themselves, leaving their potential use to my imagination. Is that suspense not also a refusal on your part to think of users as mere ghosts?

The video tutorial of VerNein Kralle, developed in collaboration with Noa Schaub, with hens performing the traditional Schuhplattler courtship dance, brings up another issue. It’s a playful analysis, but also a deconstruction of folklore, which is recontextualized and, as you said, “neutralized and recoded.” The ways in which we embody the world and shape communities are indeed full of convention too. I appreciate how this work paves the way for a speculative “fakelore,” including more-than-human and material bodies.

It’s time for me to get to work on the text. How are the preparations of Long Story Short coming along? As this group work will explore the formation of collective gestures in public space, I’m curious as to how your questions and test bodies will fare in that context.

All the best,

Jeroen