What, then, might it mean to think – and to live with – the promise of performance in spite of these discontinuities?
What sort of identity, what sorts of recognition, what sort of interdependence with other people – what sorts of collaboration, what sorts of fidelity, to others and to ourselves – would that involve?
What about when our bodies are incapable of keeping up with our speech?
Or run ahead of our speech, outstripping our promise?
And then what are the particular ways that a performance enacts its promise, or cracks open into its future?
Someone – it happens to be performer Marco Mazzoni – is still prancing about the space, wearing a fat-suit and nasty nylon trousers, with a tartan rug over his shoulders in the fashion of those followers of some national football team we'd been seeing on the streets those past days, from some country far away from here.
Spectators – if that is what we are – are scattered around the gallery, sat on the floor, leant up against walls, some in conversation with each other, others zoned out, beers in hand, ciggies too, it's late, and everyone is pretty much past caring about health, or safety or the mess on the floor.
Marco meanwhile is still prancing around, pulling poses, like someone who never was, and never will be, a rock star, but is incapable of admitting it.
I'm watching him and I'm thinking I've seen his sort before. I don't mean his sort of character or persona – I don't mean some actual person like that, although I probably have come across such behaviour in my time. What I mean is I have encountered this sort of theatrical or performance figure before. He seems to have been left behind in the room from some other event, or from some previous phase in the whole business when the concern was – how to put this – when the concern was all to do with 'representation.' Specifically, theatrical representation. Look at him now. His tartan rug is a cape and he's running around the room like a six year old tanked up on Spiderman gas. It's like he's survived himself, fetched up in his own after-life, his energies undiminished but functionally redundant.
Back in the days, years ago already, the work – the serious work of theatre-making and theatre-thinking – had been about uncoupling the representational means from the representational function, so that figures, objects and images that were put on stage in front of audiences might re-function somehow, as sources of delight and intrigue and consternation. These things you'd see on stage included objects such as clocks that weren't there to tell the time but to tick indiscriminately; theatre lights that went on and off without illuminating anything in particular; recognisable actions – acts of violence for example – that were presented purely for their form; and expressions, messages, gestures, modes of address that refused any familiarity however familiar they might appear to be. These objects – these images, these acts – were like holes torn in the picture, the exact same shape as the things they were supposed to be pictures of, through which a world of existing things could be glimpsed, a world looking exactly like itself but slightly stranger. He, the performer, is one of those objects, like a left-over of those times, and as such rather vulnerable, rather exposed. Not that he does not belong amongst us, with his sweating, his sniffing, his put-on clumsiness, his heavy way of not quite looking you in the eye. It's just that tonight, and in the company of this crowd for whom he has been refusing to perform whatever has been demanded of him, he seems like someone blatantly chasing down his own likeness, caught up in a future that isn't ready for him yet, or has long had done with him.
This perhaps is why the other performer in the room – Barbara Manzetti, a young woman with a painted on beard who has spent much of the evening sticking post-it notes on the walls of the gallery, and who has been claiming out loud that she knows Marco well – crawls out from amongst the spectators like she does on her hands and knees, going up close to him for a moment or two, as if by getting within range she could return to him a way of appearing that had been leant him and snatched away again before he ever knew what to do with it.
Even later into the night – although the performance still isn't finished yet – Marco and Barbara are way over in some other corner of the gallery, chatting. Their voices are mic'd up and mixed in with the hum of things, the low level music that is partly absorbed by the soft carpet that has been laid throughout the gallery for this evening's event. There is anyway no need to get up, to go and watch, to see what is going on. That doesn't seem to matter anymore. The place of performance – the place we've been showing up every evening these past three nights – has been re-configured, or something has been interfered with. Actions, gestures, messages don't do what they used to do, or else we don't care in the ways we used to. It's like we are a different generation than the one who came in earlier this evening. We don't want the same things, we don't lack the same things maybe that we did before. I remember thinking – or so I made a note at the time – about the performances we make in places like this, the actions we perform, when we perform those actions not just for ourselves but for each other, how these performances might work like a drug against our impermanence, our degeneration, our perpetual falling from ourselves. Not in the form of a cure, I'm not sure anything gets cured by performance, but a messing up of the works that disturbs any promise we might have made or still be about to make. One interference provokes another, and the space – and the life that occupies that space – gets infected.
At one point in the evening, when Marco has wandered off somewhere else in the gallery, swallowed up perhaps by the 'theatre' of it all, Barbara stands in the centre of the room for longer than seems possible. Nothing gets done, nothing gets made, nothing gets represented. Her presence has the effect of pointing out on our behalf the small dents we make in the world just by leaning up against it; the ways too we make the atmosphere delicate in parts with the pressure even of our weakest hopes, our most unlikely and confused desires.