ECHO,
traces of an incomplete portrait
ISAK IMMANUEL
Questions below from an audience member
San Francisco - September, 2007
Why did he have a mask on?
In part, I relate to an idea of dance through the mime and even more so the puppet. Puppet shows are basically plays without people; at least the people are unseen, so there is an element of removal, absence and presence. This is similar to a mask worn for dance. The person can become transferred to an absent state with varied transformations similar to the puppet. Absence, vacancy, or simply a question of identity is key to this work. This is a simple dance of a puppet with no face. Maybe a dance with no people.
“The lamps of the city prick my eyes and I can no longer see your face.” -
- Amy Lowell
Why did you show a film on a curtain so the audience couldn't read some of the words?
I work with different ways to address site; here the curtains have so much character to me, they also hold a similar dialog to that of a mask. For theatre, the curtains traditionally play an important role in the framing of an accepted nowhere or anywhere, I comply and I simultaneously refuse to understand. A curtain may hide something that is not to be seen, is secret, or is unkempt. The folds in the curtain take on another role and create a simple beauty when pronounced by the projections of the images and text; as well, there is this question of legibility. The point is to create a play between a staged nowhere or theatrical closet and the memory of an illegible person or nobody.
What was with the hopscotch?
I find a strong relationship of play in children’s games to collective and personal memory, as well, to its discards and to dreams. The origin of hopscotch came from soldiers training for combat; the transformation to a youthful game holds an evocative play of death and amnesia that can be found in many games. I wonder about the underlying landscapes of a person’s body and the hidden layers of their capacity to dream and invent that often remain opaque, shifted, and not completely logical.
A child is a star with little memory
A game made of imitating soldiers
A game of memory
To dance a falling line of recall
What did Auld Lang Syne have to do with anything?
The work for this context was to stem in part from a workshop with a small group of individuals who were homeless or formerly homeless in the San Francisco area. In the time of opening up this process, many people were met. Many quickly defy the common images or associations of homelessness, often people simply living a question of how to redefine or stabilize a sense of domicile. Much of the activity engaged was not in a dance studio and many people met did not cross the threshold of the theater doors. I try to keep track and build a quality line of connection and dialog with individuals from a variety of perspectives. Absence is pervasive. Many half stories here, between common and not so common people. Do I complete an unattended story? What remains with me?
Many lives shattered in this society. Making ‘Art” is sometimes a conflict of interest. Some brokenness is banal, some banality is power. Real people and place. So much opacity. To step away now and just look, the available lens falls out of clear margins, some areas are like a magnet into trashed history books, some areas a cleanly covered distant space. Other lives and half way lives. Sometimes mundane. Empty days. Pages float, cut outs of interaction. On the idea of community, fluid connection, symmetry…this project…I am sorry we can not yet begin because of attendance.
If you meet absence, you look at absence. If you meet opacity, opacity gives you a way of watching. Opacity can be a frustrating barrier to a consumable relationship or it can be a doorway of uncharted potential and a mirror of the conditions and temperament that surround it.
The song Auld Lang Syne is traditionally sung with an accompanying dance at the start of a new year, in memory, and as a communal farewell to people and things of the past year. I use it here simply as a question of memory, the perimeters of “community” and what is, or who is forgotten. I am not a storyteller in the oral sense of theatre; I take images and resonance into the body as dance. At points here, the movement is drawn out as still image, as tableau vivant, and as a flattened access, at other points it is loose, childlike, offbeat and a little drunk, yet at the same time not able to forget, like a snag in a dream.
In one sense, I am only a pantomime that always wishes to forget the story line. Auld Lang Syne. If only… And of only…
Occupied with so many stories of forgotten and silenced people.
In movement, where do I stand?
If I forget everything I become easily thrown by the wind, if I remember everything I become heavy, unable to move; here, I am in between, to remember and forget at the same time.
Why did he take pictures of the audience?
In this section there are photographs of individuals who are living homeless in various locations throughout San Francisco. The images were taken by local photojournalist Robert L. Terrell. They are projected on the closed curtains followed by images that I myself, in returning to the place of each of his images, took of the exact same locations as found, each void of a person. The image of the vacant space is up for triple the time of that of the peopled space. This is a question of location and witness. Absence and lingering presence.
Between an audience and a social ghost.
Between spectator and spectre.
To be caught between.
Who can wear this strange crown of the spectacle?
A disposable plastic camera is used.
Why were there peeing sounds?
The actual sounds you are referring to are in fact the recorded sounds of a small fountain in the garden of a Korean Seon Temple. To me as well, when listened to simply as audio in a removed context, the sound is reminiscent of urination. I find this play of altered perception appealing and useful. The sound relates to nature, functions of the body, and in the theatrical context with the given coinciding movement, a base emasculation, or simply a passing of time.
Cycles of perception and misperception.
To watch an incoherency with such disdain
A currency in an outside frame remains.
Vision like pissing. Vision like water.
Even in an outhouse
Memory flips the pages.
photographs this page: Adam Aufdencamp and stills from video
at CounterPULSE, San Francisco, CA
Artist-in-Residence, September 2007
previous titles:
“illegal echo / untitled echo”
“Three walls and a window”
“Faces”
works:
