Philipp Gehmacher / Mumbling Fish
Schottenfeldgasse 60/31, 1070 Wien/A
http://philippgehmacher.net
Jeroen Peeters
Standing, leaning, falling, lying
Shadow Bodies, 2007
1
‘At the heart of my work is a distinct focus on corporeality, combined with a strong belief in physical expression and representation. Or to be more precise: bodies on stage
can, so to speak, choose to tell, show and express, in a strictly physical way, things at
the extremes of the known spectrum of dance styles and genres. They take little notice
of conventions.’ When asked how he would describe his work, the Austrian choreographer Philipp Gehmacher gave this as the first element.1 Extremely concise, but also
quite complex: what exactly does it consist of, this belief in the body’s so-called own
expressiveness? What does it mean? How does it contribute to the tension between
forms and what they express? In which way can bodies’ recalcitrant poses overturn
traditional hierarchies and conventions in dance and theatre? And, even more importantly, how can bodies put their cultural training and standardisation at risk by
means of their idiosyncratic power? The paradoxes latent in this sort of question are
an instrument with which Gehmacher tries to open up specific areas of meaning in his
work. After all, do representation and expression have to be mutually exclusive? And
what about the body’s own expression as opposed to the fact that these bodies are also
always embedded in cultural practices and are thus by nature constructed?
I shall try to indicate the specific connection between all these questions on the basis of the Incubator project. This research project ran for at least a year and between
autumn 2004 and summer 2005 yielded a series of tailor-made performances during
four residences, in Vienna, Berlin, Brussels and Lyon. In each case the starting point
was the location of the theatre and the collective fund of ideas and movement material into which Gehmacher carried out research together with three performers (Clara
Cornil, Sabina Holzer and David Subal), dramaturge Peter Stamer and production
manager Angela Glechner. In the meantime Incubator has developed even further
and is also available as a touring performance. The themes on which Gehmacher and
Co worked were gestures, touch and interaction (social and other). Incubator is also
a provisional climax in Gehmacher’s still young career, in the sense that it combines
motifs from the whole of his oeuvre since In the absence (1999). I am here especially
concerned with three particular elements: the refusal to identify the body with images,
the significance of standing, lying, verticality and horizontality, and listening. The
words of Gehmacher himself provide a supplementary perspective on all these points.
2
The belief that the body, as a medium, has its own strictly physical expressiveness is
in a certain sense diametrically opposed to the reduction of bodies to images. A quick
p. 1/8 Jeroen Peeters – Standing, leaning, falling, lying
Philipp Gehmacher / Mumbling Fish
Schottenfeldgasse 60/31, 1070 Wien/A
http://philippgehmacher.net
look at advertising on TV is enough to realise how dominant this identification of
bodies with images is these days. Whereas bodies once derived their identity from the
continual internalisation of a self-image, nowadays the media manipulate and train us
by bombarding us with ideal bodies. The fact that this craving for a perfect body can
now also literally be satisfied by plastic surgery only serves to reinforce the identification of bodies with images. It is true that the appearance of our body has always been
tied to images, because people fulfil social roles with their body. The visual anthropologist Hans Belting points out the confusion that plays a part in this: the body is always
an image, even before it is pictured, which means that man derives his individuality
from his image. He refers to an analysis by the philosopher Hannah Arendt: ‘To be
alive means to be possessed by an urge toward self-display. Living things make their
appearance like actors on a stage set for them.’ So there is no clear contrast between
body and role or image, being only shows itself by way of appearance. Our real self is
not somewhere behind or below the surface, it is on the contrary our particular appearance that is authentic.2
However, the problem about reducing bodies to images is that they are thereby in
danger of losing their particularity instead of gaining it. If only a limited range of bodily ideals provides the model and standard, the human image we internalise and convey with our bodies by means of social interaction is really very narrow. Body images
can be more authentic in the extent to which they differ and are able to express particularity. This question also applies to theatre, which is after all the setting in which
Philipp Gehmacher talks about bodies and creates his performances. Even today
there are still numerous dance performances that make universalist claims and which
link up to a one-sided exalted body image. Gehmacher’s image of man is a reversal
of this: isn’t a body always mediated by a many-sided and therefore confusing stream
of images, memories, emotions and desires, by culture and technology, by all manner
of connections and social relationships? It is not a normative image that guides the
formation of identity, but the temporary and cultural materiality of bodies, and their
specific history and embedment. But in what way is all this visible or tangible on the
surface, and available to others?
3
Is there any such thing as the body’s own expressiveness? Our body always has been
constructed, always has been mediated by images, but this still does not give us an
answer to Gehmacher’s obstinacy in, in spite of everything, still looking for the physical materiality of bodies. In all his pieces you see bodies stumbling, contracting and
falling, you see torsions, spasms and tics: a language composed around movements
that precisely contradict the idea of language and control. Bodies that have little in
common with the perfect bodies of models, with the bodies of dancers who dwell in
virtuoso choreographic spheres in an everlasting here and now, little even in common
with the upright bodies you see on the street or at work. ‘The body I use is a fragile,
material body, a broken and uncoordinated body: just about everything that makes up
the shadow side of the civil body, the body we wish ourselves and symbolise’, to use
Gehmacher’s words.3 The shadow of our everyday cultivated body, is that where its
own expressiveness lies? And when did it start getting into such a tight corner, did we
lose sight of it?
To find that out we probably have to go back to the beginnings of mankind, the point
at which man started to walk upright and his new posture made cultural development possible. We can only speculate about that moment in time, but several of its
consequences have in the meantime become widely accepted. One aspect was that the
hands were now free and the development of tools became possible – and as an extension of this, gestures, body language and dance too. With the eyes now raised a certain
distance from the ground, the field of view was expanded and visual stimuli became
p. 2/8 Jeroen Peeters – Standing, leaning, falling, lying
Philipp Gehmacher / Mumbling Fish
Schottenfeldgasse 60/31, 1070 Wien/A
http://philippgehmacher.net
dominant in the sensory order. As a result of the new hierarchy of the physique, the
mouth also gained a more prominent place and was able to develop into an organ
of speech. In man, the biological axis which in the animals links the mouth and anus
by way of the alimentary system now became vertical, which meant that it no longer
coincided with the ideological axis that gives the mouth and the eyes a horizon. As a
result, sight and speech also withdrew from their initially strictly biological survival
function, became largely autonomous and were thereby able to perfect their expressive potential. The philosopher Denis Hollier points out the loss of its own expressiveness that nevertheless accompanies this: ‘The more the body becomes the complex
tool of expression and signification, the less expressive it is on its own.’4
It is by no means Gehmacher’s aim to restore the biological body in all its glory, on
the contrary. But what is interesting is the dissociation of the meanings a body produces from those meanings it already embodies, a distinction that ensues from man’s
new uprightness, and which does not apply to animals and babies. The body’s socalled own expressiveness is perhaps most tangible or visible in weak and ill bodies,
in bodies that get out of balance or lose their self-control, whose uprightness is challenged by gravity, bodies which as it were are reminded of their survival instinct: tics
and idiosyncrasies that put the body to the test as a coordinated entity and medium
of cultural expression. Perhaps it is here not so much the conventions of expression
that are at stake, but there is a suggestion of the extremes of what a body can know
and express, and also the extreme limits from which man derives his expressive potential and signification. As the writer Amélie Nothomb said, ‘On n’a conservé aucune
archive du jour où un homme s’est mis debout pour la première fois, ni du jour où un
homme a enfin compris la mort. Les événements les plus fondamentaux de l’humanité
sont passées presque inaperçus.’5 We have to live with this impossibility, and it fundamentally marks every human area of meaning as a boundary and horizon. It also
leads to a specific form of remembering, which is caught choreographically between
two extremes: the upright body of the living and the inert body of the dead, which no
longer puts up any resistance to gravity.
4
The everyday body is always the point of reference in Incubator, simply upright, arms
hanging down. By means of gestures it brings its own shadow into the picture, and
symbolises absence, making memory and desire tangible: beyond the simply visible,
beyond the identification of the body with an unambiguous delineated image. In
such performances as In the absence and good enough (2001), the dancers frenetically
explore the empty space around their bodies, as if they wanted to chart memories and
blanks, the fading facets of their identity. The dancers resymbolise the absence that
haunts the body by means of gestures, or literally, on the surface of the body, by for
example marking the hollows of the body. These are bodies that admit to not being
perfect and completely present, in the same way as the timeless, normative body images in the media would like it to be, but by contrast they bear the traces of their past
and their cultural environment, working actively on their identity. Incubator deals with
the same issue, though coagulated into several modest emblematic gestures: stretching out the arms, sideways or upwards, showing or offering them to the front. Sometimes the whole body becomes a gesture, as for example when it bends and twists in
order to become one big hollow – an apt symbol of the melancholy that permeates
Gehmacher’s work.
In Incubator, the performers are enclosed in their own world, even though their gestures contain the initial moves towards touch and encounter. Two performers stand
upright next to each other, even moving briefly in synchronisation. The outstretched
arm is like an open gesture – even a virtual exercise in socialisation – so interaction
with others is also included in what initially looks like self-examination. A few gesp. 3/8 Jeroen Peeters – Standing, leaning, falling, lying
Philipp Gehmacher / Mumbling Fish
Schottenfeldgasse 60/31, 1070 Wien/A
http://philippgehmacher.net
tures are thereby probably too fully interpreted, because their meaning is not absolutely clear: Gehmacher’s dance is driven not by narrative or representation but by
abstraction. However, entirely abstract dance, condensed into gestures or forms, is
equally impossible, precisely because it is always people and bodies that are at issue
and they are always expressive too. In their relative autonomy, Gehmacher’s gestures
exert a sort of physical resistance: in the first place they express themselves, and also
the possibility of expression, as well as giving a reminder of its origins. For this reason, Gehmacher’s work is also a search for a way of giving meaning to the paradoxes
involved in form and expression and image and shadow. How can these rifts, which
somehow derive from the creation of the human body, be made observable?
There is yet a third element in the play between the everyday civilised body and its
shadow, and that is the performer himself, about which Gehmacher says: ‘There is the
movement material, but there is also the performer’s treatment of this material in the
theatre space. This treatment is what the performer tries to make available to the audience, trying to make it accessible as an emotional experience. If one simply executes
the movements and thinks one is thereby coinciding with one’s body, one gets stuck in
representation. But you can also show the instruments and their use, such as repetition, juxtaposition, accumulation, etc.’6 Both the movement material and its treatment
onstage hold a choreographic moment in which all performers have their own responsibility: they go through a specific process and determine their own physical appearance onstage. In this way, by their active contribution, the dancers – or collaborators,
rather – are constantly putting pressure on Gehmacher’s authorship, since they link
his aesthetics and movement material to their personal mental spaces. During each
performance, Incubator itself finds a specific form on the basis of a shared fund of
questions and material. The version performed at the HAU 2 theatre in Berlin (January 2005) was special because of the deliberate choice of working with instant composition, an improvised form that combined felicitously with the uncertainties that
pursue the bodies onstage. The risk of facing both a performance and a set of meanings in danger of falling apart is thereby shared, like it or not, by the viewer. A dramaturgical safety net was replaced by a shared responsibility.
5
As a theme, observation is also to be found in literal form in several gestures in Incubator. A performer stretches his two arms out sideways, horizontally, to touch another
performer’s shoulder with his fingertips. It is a rather forward, awkward touch; here it
is above all the distance between two people that is being gauged. At other times the
same gesture is made in the air, where it becomes independent and loses its metaphorical meaning, except in the memory. ‘My work is not just about bodies and movement, or about composition in time and space, although I naturally do that too. It is
about theatre as a form of communication,’ says Gehmacher.7 Theatre and dance as
an art form, and also as systems of knowledge and observation, with their own preconditions. Gemacher’s work has been fuelled by a theoretical interest in language, structuralism and semiotics since the beginning: ‘How do form and content exist alongside
one another? How do semantic systems function within the traditional forms and the
conventions of the theatre space, theatre time, the theatrical event? From what do
forms inherit their meaning and how can this be made available rather than visible to
an audience?’8 In the gesture mentioned above lies a possible answer, as Gehmacher
himself indicates: ‘The horizontal writing of choreography and the vertical images
of the theatre sometimes clash and sometimes... That is why I feel something for the
gesture in which an arm becomes an instrument of measurement and then a hand that
touches someone. It is a process of transformation, a way of moving from one world
into another.’9
In a short piece of writing from 1917 Walter Benjamin wrote that there are two possip. 4/8 Jeroen Peeters – Standing, leaning, falling, lying
Philipp Gehmacher / Mumbling Fish
Schottenfeldgasse 60/31, 1070 Wien/A
http://philippgehmacher.net
ble sections through the world, which moreover form the basis for various concepts of
art. The longitudinal section of painting is representational in nature and comprises
objects. The transverse section of graphic art is symbolic and comprises signs. For that
matter, this contrast is intuitively clear through the position of the body: a painting is
hung vertically, analogously to the upright body; by contrast, we draw, write and read
at a table, and a floor mosaic we walk over.0 In the Renaissance the dominance of
the visual in the sensory hierarchy was confirmed by the theory of perspective, which
laid down an ideal relationship between image and viewer in a well-defined spatial
arrangement. The illusion by which the painting coincided with reality, as a ‘window
on the world’, was supported by the fiction of a ‘pure’ visual perception, seemingly
disconnected from the body. Nevertheless, both the technological mediation and the
position of the upright body are preconditions for this ‘detached’ paradigm of representation that has dominated the Western arts and sciences since then – and is under
fire in the artistic avant-gardes and cultural studies.1
In a certain sense, Benjamin’s contrast is also valid for theatre and choreography:
theatre as a world of images related to a proscenium or a virtual fourth wall, choreography as the writing of movement on a dance floor. The history of modern dance can
be written on the basis of the way choreographers and dancers critically approach the
production of sublime images by starting to take account of the dance floor, by hanging up their slippers and dancing in their bare feet, by explicitly negotiating with gravity in horizontal choreography and floor work. Since the body is the mediator between
the two visual paradigms, this tension also includes the possibility of a choreographic
form of critique on representation.2 What about the body that Gehmacher makes fall
or throw itself to the floor in In the absence, the shrinking and collapsing bodies in
Mountains are Mountains (2003): do they drag the vertical plane of representation
with them in their fall? Do the images separate from the body? In Incubator Gehmacher and Co opt definitely for the extremes of standing and lying, as if they wanted
to play two systems off against each other, and observe theatre and choreography
from the other position. This subtle form of observation is expressed tellingly by a
simple gesture: the inclined body, hardly off balance, which both recognises gravity and resists it. The leaning body negotiates and makes the construction of images
and their corporeal embedment tangible as a choreographic event within the specific
physical and symbolic architecture and tradition of theatre.
6
What about the signs Benjamin wrote about? Incubator can barely be described in
terms of images, and the gestures too are organised in a highly idiosyncratic way.
What is more, they do not undergo any development, but gain independence by repetition and juxtaposition. The organisation of the movement material in time and space
is thus also subject to a horizontal logic: Gehmacher and Co describe simple paths in
space, move from point to point, orient themselves in all directions, and in between
times stand still to show a gesture and mark a spot. These actions do not evoke any
perspective sense of depth and there is an accumulation of impressions, memories
and emotions rather than any progression. Incubator’s horizontalisation strategies
elicit a transformation from looking to reading, though this too is met with perplexity.
The grammar of the inscriptions is clear in form, but does not reveal its meaning just
like that.
The complex environment the bodies in Incubator breathe is not absolutely tangible
on their surface; the choreography is too simple for this and the dancers’ physical
expression too defiant. The gestures, paths and inscriptions are, rather, a site where
the performers’ and viewers’ mental spaces can meet in the imagination, commuting between memory and projection. Trying to understand Incubator only in terms
of a critique on representation sells the performance short – what area of meaning
p. 5/8 Jeroen Peeters – Standing, leaning, falling, lying
Philipp Gehmacher / Mumbling Fish
Schottenfeldgasse 60/31, 1070 Wien/A
http://philippgehmacher.net
is opened up by the deconstruction of the visual, the visible and the legible? ‘Making
things available to a public for the experience, rather than visible or legible,’ is how
Gehmacher interprets his work. ‘The whole question of text and texture, and of the
linguistic matter of the body, fascinates me. And yet to me availability is connected
more to consciousness and perhaps also to an existential approach, rather than to a
structural or textual approach that is legible.’3
In Incubator the viewer’s mental space is stimulated most by the use of sound and music – perhaps the key to the appreciation of Gehmacher’s poetics of availability lies in
the listening. In contrast to his earlier work, in Incubator Gehmacher does not use an
electro-acoustic soundtrack to back up the whole, just a few songs and sound excerpts
from films, started and stopped by the dancers themselves on a music installation onstage: they charge Incubator’s tense and still world with new meanings and affects. In
this way, the sound is additionally given an autonomous role in the performance and
as opposed to what is visible, which is emphasised by the loudspeakers that lie here
and there like inert objects on the dance mat.
Listening, into which the unseen and invisible can penetrate as voices and noise, into
which beats of time become involved, in which the visible world gains a different
hierarchy and horizon. The blind actress and writer Claire Bartoli set us on the way
to assessing the importance of listening in her essay Le regard intérieur, in which she
describes her moods and thoughts associated with Jean-Luc Godard’s film Nouvelle
vague (1990). Sounds remind us of half-forgotten myths and symbols that have lost
their meaning for modern man, or of the multiplicity of the self, shaped as it is by
encounters with others. Excerpts stir up the memory and drive us past the modern
fiction of autonomy and self-imposed solitude. While the eye is constantly projected
onto the world around us, the ear leads us back into an inner world, from an illusory
reality to that of the imagination. Experience there is not continuous, but abandons a
linear experience of time for an experience composed of scattered pieces of life and
of time, memories which, in us, transform into gestures, ‘Draft for another reality: the
earnestness of life and the imbricated dreams, ephemeral and permanent states, melancholy and imagination. Will this modern man, cut off from the energies of nature
that he only sees as a pleasant décor, stem the current, will he rediscover contact with
the universe around him?’4
7
One of the dancers interrupts his action, goes to the music installation and pushes
the button on the player, after which all four of them stay still for a long time. Listen.
Men singing, then the droning and tooting of cars, voices, hubbub, cheering. A simple
piano melody starts, accompanied by the sound of cars, and ultimately subsides into
the chatter of a larger group of people. The sounds are mixed together and connect
several worlds and impressions that cannot immediately be identified. Its duration
reinforces even more the diffuse nature of the flow of sound, while only the piano
melody provides any unity among the scraps. The unusual thing is that the sound suspends events on stage for a moment, upsets its time-space and releases an alternative
energy and associations. The dancers immediately carry on with their gestures and
paths, but in the meantime they are immersed in emotions and drama.
The sound extract comes from John Cassavetes’ film A Woman Under the Influence
(1974), in which Nick Longhetti returns home with colleagues and friends to wait for
his wife Mabel, who is coming back after six months in a psychiatric hospital. For
anyone who knows the film, images will of course appear in the mind’s eye and the
sound will also elicit connections with the theme of Incubator. Memories of a woman
who at inappropriate moments urges her guests to sing and dance, who as a result of
a great capacity for social absorption suffers from loss of self, who is constantly urged
to be ‘normal’ by her authoritarian husband because she shows too much doubt and
p. 6/8 Jeroen Peeters – Standing, leaning, falling, lying
Philipp Gehmacher / Mumbling Fish
Schottenfeldgasse 60/31, 1070 Wien/A
http://philippgehmacher.net
uncertainty. After her return from the institution Mabel’s family want her above all to
be ‘herself’ again: she has become unrecognisable and suddenly symbolises a frighteningly dull, meaningless world in which the ‘normal’ governs, where differences and
eccentricity are absolutely forbidden and everyone behaves in the same way, flat as an
unambiguous image.
The stream of sound flows past the surface of the dancers’ bodies, transforming it
into a field of signs and markings and as a location of discourse thereby makes certain
sensitivities available to experience. The horizontal treatment of the choreography
is transported by way of the sound to the dancing body, which otherwise has a highly
restful appearance. However, the sounds do not reveal any deeper truth or essence,
but as a result of an abundance that progresses in every direction, they add even more
fuel precisely to the confusion expressed by the phenomena and everyday sensations.
In Gehmacher’s earlier work this abundance of images and signs at work on the surface of the body were visible as such in frenetic movement material.5 In Incubator this
complexity has been forced back into the space of the sound and the imagination, and
leads a latent existence. The dancers’ gestures are in their simplicity generous, inviting
and receptive, but at the same time poisoned with the resistance of their own expressiveness: they are simple, but not univocal, and they oppose unbridled projection by
the viewer. The gestures here are a location of discourse, a meeting place: Gehmacher is able to leap from physical expression to mental landscapes, and thereby forces to
the extreme his critical relationship with a world of meaning in which a visual regime
dominates bodies.
8
Listen. ‘How was our hike so far?’ ‘Pretty Good.’ Followed by a timid little laugh, then
a pause. ‘I’m leaving.’ After a long silence you hear some clattering and heavy, laborious breathing. Another long silence, the sound of the wind and a motorway, then of
a body stumbling over a rough surface. Here too a piano melody is playing, and the
stumbling gets faster. The passage is restrained, its intensity enormous. The dancers
remain standing upright almost ten minutes long, dignified and subdued, only a few
movements and gestures. The sound extract is from Gus van Sant’s film Gerry (2002),
in which two young men go out walking and get lost in a vast landscape without food
or map. After three days, exhaustion takes its toll, one of the two Gerrys becomes delirious and in the end dies in his friend’s arms in an embrace on the ground. The other
Gerry stumbles away over the salt flats, comes across the motorway and is saved.
As opposed to the symbolic death of a body, which has to converge with a univocal
image in the vertical plane of representation, this excerpt tells of another extreme,
that of physical death, the final surrender to gravity. And in fact the dancers’ dignified vertical pose here does have a different meaning to that of the leaning body that
negotiates with systems of representation. It is a pose of recollection and mourning,
but also of resistance to death, of a refusal to give up entirely to gravity, of resistance
to the total dismantling of the body. Even when Gehmacher goes to the limits of what
we are able to express, he seeks form through the ways life and time encroach upon
the body. In this respect, he had the following to say about good enough: ‘The important thing is the formal idea of composition and how physical textures are created
instantaneously in accordance with a mixture of mental ideas and a sensory interpretation of the moment. When I find myself on all fours on the floor, I work as far as
possible with extending and stretching and twisting the body, to make the pedestrian
upright body into one that may be no more than a heap of body parts scattered here
and there. The horizontality of this lying body is very important because it really is the
counterpart of the conventional, everyday, pedestrian stability of the upright body as
we see it in the social life around us. The lying body is much more vulnerable than the
standing body.’6
p. 7/8 Jeroen Peeters – Standing, leaning, falling, lying
Philipp Gehmacher / Mumbling Fish
Schottenfeldgasse 60/31, 1070 Wien/A
http://philippgehmacher.net
9
Bodies which can, so to speak, choose to tell, show and express things in a strictly
physical way. Bodies which, with their highly individual language of movement, negotiate with current forms of representation and a one-sided image of man and the
body. Bodies marked by doubt, uncertainty and loss of self, by exhaustion, death
and parting. Bodies in which discursive and human dramas are played out, that live
through an awareness of extremes. Bodies which nevertheless remain firmly upright
and make generous gestures. Bodies which, by means of auditory and mental exercises, get around to meeting each other in socialisation, beyond their modern solitude.
What else might one add? Perhaps a third sound extract from Incubator, a lament by
Antony and the Johnsons, pervaded with melancholy and yearning for ecstasy:
Rapture
Eyes are falling
Lips are falling
Hair is falling to the ground
Slowly, softly
Falling, falling
Down in silence to the ground
All the world is falling, falling
All the blue
From me and you
Tear drops falling to the ground
Tear drops
Is this the rapture?�
1 From an interview with Philipp Gehmacher in March 2005, a few weeks before the performance of Incubator at the Kaaitheater in Brussels. Appeared in De Morgen on 8 April 2005. Also available digitally on http://www.sarma.be/text.asp?id=1127
2 See Hans Belting, Bild-Anthropologie. Entwürfe für eine Bildwissenschaft, Munich, 2001, pp. 87-89.
3 From an interview with Philipp Gehmacher in November 2001, shortly after the first night of good enough at Tanzquartier
Wien.
4 Denis Hollier, Against Archtecture. The Writings of Georges Bataille, Cambridge MA/London, 1989, pp. 80-81. In 1930 Sigmund
Freud also speculated on the significance of standing upright in the development of man. See Het onbehagen in de cultuur, in
Sigmund Freud, Cultuur en religie 3, Thomas Graftdijk (ed.), Amsterdam, 1984, pp. 122-124.
5 Amélie Nothomb, Métaphysique des tubes, Paris, 2000, p. 21.
6 Interview with Gehmacher in November 2001.
7 Interview with Gehmacher in March 2005.
8 Interview with Gehmacher in November 2001.
9 Interview with Gehmacher in March 2005.
10 Walter Benjamin, ‘Painting and the Graphic Arts’, in Idem, Selected Writings Volume 1: 1913-1926, Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (eds.), Cambridge MA/London, 1996, p. 82.
11 For an introduction to this issue, see Maaike Bleeker, The Locus of Looking: Dissecting Visuality in the Theatre, Amsterdam,
2002.
12 The passage from Walter Benjamin and the critique of representation it contains has already been commented on extensively
by art theorists. With regard to the painting of Jackson Pollock, see Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Kraus, Formless. A User’s
Guide, New York, 1997, pp. 93-103. In connection with the performance work of Trisha Brown and La Ribot, see André Lepecki,
Exhausting Dance. Performance and the politics of movement, London/New York, 2005, pp. 65-86.
13 Interview with Gehmacher, November 2001.
14 Claire Bartoli, ‘Interior view. Jean-Luc Godard’s Nouvelle Vague’, in Jean-Luc Godard. Nouvelle Vague, CD booklet, Munich,
1997, pp. 76, 87-90.
15 It is not possible within the scope of this article to look extensively at the work of John Cassavetes, but it should be noted
that his poetics also revolve around an appreciation of the surface (of body and screen) and the real confusion of emotions and
behaviour that takes place there, which Mabel Longhetti symbolises. On this, see Ray Carney, The Films of John Cassavetes.
Pragmatism, Modernism and the Movies, Cambridge MA, 1994. For that matter, Carney also examines the meaning of falling and
getting up in A Woman Under the Influence, see pp. 168-170.
16 From a public interview with Philipp Gehmacher in April 2005, immediately after the performance of good enough (Raimund
Hoghe’s reworked version) at CC Maasmechelen.
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