How can performance endure when embodied, co-temporal assembly has become impossible?

This question has haunted many of the practices and events conceived under pandemic conditions. In a provocative and widely circulated opinion piece ‘The Forgotten Art of Assembly Or, Why Theatre Makers Should Stop Making’ published in April 2020, Nicholas Berger made a case against the frenetic drive to ‘keep making’ that characterised the early response of many theatre and performance artists and institutions. Arguing that ‘the singular transcendence of human congregation is irreplaceable’ he called for a hiatus on performance activity.

Rather than simply resurrecting liveness debates, Berger’s article highlights the more troubling side of the performance paradigm itself: the moment in which performance stops being a space for spontaneous emergence as claimed in its quasi–and anti-disciplinary formations, and instead aligns itself with neoliberal-capitalist subjectivity. That is, when performances are arrested into outputs and metrics, when emergence becomes exploitable flexibility, when we can only conceive of ourselves as subjects with value if we continue to be productive, no matter the conditions.

While, as researchers, we have little interest in the auxiliary mode of ‘should’ that features so prominently in Berger’s title, it is an example of the important debate over the (im)possibilities of assembly under pandemic conditions which spans the political and the (inter)personal, the discursive and the affective. Assembly, after all, is fundamental to political dissent and solidarity building, it is a way of collaboratively shaping identities and communities, a space for sharing in live and situated political affects; such as Jill Dolan’s formulation of the utopian performative: that ‘hopeful feeling of what the world might be like if every moment of our lives were… emotionally voluminous, generous, aesthetically striking, and intersubjectively intense’ (2005, 5).

No doubt many will have experienced the predominantly mediated channels for performance at this time—in the form of archival or newly created videos, on streaming platforms or as live feeds—to be laced with yearning for others, their bodies, their expressivity, the intimacies, the erratic atmospheric shifts in a room, the unpredictability of an event becoming greater than the sum of its constituent parts. And yet, in investigating the notion of endurance of performance through the pandemic—specifically by sonic means—this project proposes that even some of its most precarious aspects, such as the experience of assembly, were able to persevere if, inevitably, transformed. It is pertinent to note here the dual meaning of ‘to endure’ as both to suffer and to persist, and its relation also to time such as in ‘duration’. Endurance calls forth notions of hardship and pressure, the transformations which might be wrought by these or which these sensations are a symptom of as well as the subjective, experiential unfolding of this, as in Henri Bergson’s duree. Postulating that assembly may have endured, then means at once acknowledging the painful loss of connection and the potentiality that remained despite of it.

But what kind of assembly then is possible through sound performances, especially given that the majority of pieces created during the pandemic assume a solo listener? Here, we would like to suggest the notion and practice of assemblage as an alternative mode to/of assembly which places less emphasis on synchronicity and is also less anthropocentric in its orientation. We build loosely on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of assemblages as ‘constellations of singularities’ (1989, 406) or multiplicities ‘constituted by heterogeneous terms and which [establish] liaisons, relations between them’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2007, 52) without ultimate synthesis, without collapsing into seamless wholes. It is notable how all of the performers and works we have engaged with here pay attention to their selves as assemblages be that by repositioning pain as a collaborator (Sarah Hopfinger), the queer animacy—or quanimacy—that arises between bodies and intimate technologies such as crutches and wheelchairs (Claire Cunningham with Julia Watts Belser), or the complex interactions between communities and waterways (Amy Sharrocks), and bodies and history (Ashanti Harris).

The possibility of assemblage, however, is not restricted to content alone: the form of mediation also lends itself to this descriptor. It is only through collaboration with technology that a relation between speaker and listener is made possible. Singularities and their interconnectivities assert themselves when the shock of cold water interrupts Sharrock’s speech or when wind blows into Harris’s microphone. Assembly, we may realise as listeners, can unfold across temporal and spatial distance without necessary co-presence. Congregation and emergence remain possible—if more dispersed—under the conditions of physical distancing. It appears prophetic, then, that Deleuze described assemblages in terms of ‘contagions, epidemics, the wind’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2007, 69).

–C.B.

List of References:

Berger, N. (2020) ‘‘The Forgotten Art of Assembly Or, Why Theatre Makers Should Stop Making’. Medium. Available at: https://medium.com/@nicholasberger/the-forgotten-art-of-assembly-a94e164edf0f (Accessed: 17/10/2021)

Dolan, J. (2005) Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater. University of Michigan Press.

Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1989) A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Deleuze, G. and Parnet, C. (2007) Dialogues II. New York: Columbia University Press.