Monsters and Fossils (2017)

Created and performed by Kristina Johnstone and Thalia Laric

22-23 November, Cape Town: Theatre Arts Admin Collective

Videography by Lindsey Appolis and Thalia Laric

An earlier version of this page appeared as an article in the Ellipses Journal of Creative Research. See: Johnstone, K. Laric, T. & Mudau, G. 2019 – 2020. Monsters and Fossils. Ellipses Journal of Creative Research. 3. Available: http://www.ellipses.org.za/issue/issue-3/. [2020, April 23]

The workings of the dance is like an evolution of thought. We start stacked on top of another in the mind-space of one organism. The score of the dance consists of trying to get all eight limbs in coordination and collaboration with each other. We do this by sharing and pouring weight into each other’s bodies and the floor. This becomes a mechanism to shift the focus from the outline of our own form, imaging our bodies as one creature. By paying attention to the points of connection with the supporting surface of the floor and each other’s bodies, we ask: how does this eight-limbed, two-headed creature stand up? Once standing is achieved, we try to separate. Sometimes we succeed and other times the dance ends without having reached this objective. The progression is glacier-ly slow.

17/10/2017, 14:15 – Thalia Laric: How does one un-smash body and movement?
17/10/2017, 14:16 – Thalia Laric: How does time become elastic?

17/10/2017, 14:15 – Thalia Laric: Martin Keogh talks about ‘dilating time’

The fringe figures of fossil and monster are related. They are connected in the lemniscate as opposite poles, one always inevitably becoming the other. Returning to Derrida’s understanding of hauntology ([1993] 2000): the present exists only with respect to the past. For Mbembe, haunting speaks to temporal experiences and is a key concept in discourses of decolonisation. Perhaps figures like ghosts and phantoms need to be invoked because they have not found their way into a system of classification. This speaks to a practice and an ethics of working in the margins, in the angles we do not see.

SCORE

  1. Start one stacked on top of the other, balancing like rocks, on your side, foetal position. Integrity of bones keeps you stacked, one balancing, one weighed down. Two skeletons, two masses stacked and merging. Pouring into each other. Gravity does the rest. 

2. Skin begins to slide, glacier-ly slow. Any sudden movement is an aberration.  The movement is slow and continuous. Falling down, but not apart, only into and onto. Pressing towards surfaces of skin, of ground of body and bodies. One body, falling slowly into the other.  

3. A many-limbed creature. The other’s legs are your legs, are your arms. Practice being both bodies. Press into and onto your many parts. One many-limbed creature pushing into itself, pressing anything against anything. There is no proper way to place a hand on the ground or body, let it land in any way it lands let any part be anywhere. Stay close, no stretching out. Forget alignment, you have not learned this yet, you only have pushing and pressing. Pain or discomfort inspire movement. 

4. The idea of a direction upward. Try to stand up. Try to organise your many limbs and bits to press and push and function as a holding structure. Eyes are only half open, often closed, you are not an identity, not socialised, only feeling and sensing and discovering how to organise mass. try to stand up. Only when finding a vaguely vertical shape with a skull somewhere above the legs and the feet somewhere below the hips can the pressing and pushing towards the other cease. 

5. Try to separate. It cannot be quick. Subjectivities are so densely bound and pressed into each other. How to come apart from the massive mass of intertwinement. Come to stand. Come to stand separately.